Was this really my life? Michael had gone away and experienced things, but my entire existence was right here. The weekend stretched out ahead of me like it always did, with nothing to look forward to but work and hanging out with MacKenzie.
I should have been happy with that—it was my life—but suddenly all I could see was a kind of unbearable grayness: work that never ended, the utter meaninglessness of cleaning a room one day only to have to do it all over again the next.
Eventually, I gave up and called MacKenzie, asking her to cover my shift. She didn’t ask why, and I didn’t tell her.
* * *
I leaned over the sink and studied my reflection in the mirror, trying to see myself through his eyes. Had I changed? Were the lines around my eyes pretty or depressing? My hair was the same as ever, a boring shade of brown, neither long nor short. Practical and unassuming, like everything else about me. I thought about the women he must have met over the years, how dull I must seem in comparison. I knew nothing about him, but he already knew everything there was to know about me. She’s still here. She hasn’t done anything with her life.
I applied a few quick strokes of mascara. Sprayed perfume onto my wrists and behind my ears. The scent caught in my nose.
Lipstick! MacKenzie had given me one as a gift, but I had never used it. It was far too deep a shade of red, far too exotic for me, but suddenly I wanted to seem mysterious and exciting. I rummaged through my makeup bag, finding most of it old and dried up from lack of use. But the lipstick was still there. Practically new. I followed the contours of my pale, colorless lips and smacked them together, now blood red. I could taste lipstick and expectation. My cheeks flushed, and my eyes glittered with nerves. Wild and exciting.
I even tried applying a little wax to my hair. Messed it up slightly, gave it more volume. My fingers turned sticky.
Then I saw the new version of myself in the mirror. With strange hair and ridiculous red lips. The lipstick distorted the rest of me, like a mocking reflection in a fun-house mirror. A strand of hair clung to my forehead.
Ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous. You’re an idiot. He probably has a girlfriend.
What was I thinking? That we’d had a grand love affair fifteen years ago, and he had finally come back to me? This was Pine Creek, for God’s sake. Grand love stories didn’t happen here. Unplanned pregnancies happened here. Marriages that drove people crazy or to the bottle happened here. We were just two kids who broke up after high school, and now we were ordinary thirtysomethings who didn’t know each other. Suddenly, I could taste lipstick and shame.
I furiously rubbed off the makeup. Splashed my face with cold water. Tried to get rid of the redness on my cheeks and smoothed out my hair. The old Henny stared back at me. What was the point in pretending to be someone else?
I jogged over to the cabin and knocked on the door before I had time to change my mind.
“Henny.” Michael sounded surprised.
I hoped the darkness would hide my burning cheeks. “I thought I would come over and…chat.”
Even his cheeks looked a little red then. “Chat. Sure. Sounds nice.”
He was still standing in the doorway. When he realized he was in the way, his cheeks flushed even darker, and he stepped to one side to let me in.
“Wine!” he said, relieved. “I mean, would you like a glass? Did you eat already? I bought a nice organic wine in Eugene when I passed through. Perfect with salmon, apparently.”
The kitchens in the cabins are small, designed for making simple dishes that could be eaten at the table in the living room. But he managed to pour two glasses of wine without bumping into me too often.
“Did you eat already?”
“No, I…”
“I don’t have any salmon, unfortunately. I meant to do some shopping here, but I got delayed on the way and there wasn’t much choice at the convenience store. Still, I’m sure this wine goes just as well with, uh, hot dogs.”
I laughed. The sound was unfamiliar. Tonight I was someone who didn’t clean rooms or try to pass the time behind a reception desk.
“Dolores will kill you if she finds out you ate hot dogs instead of going to the restaurant,” I said.
“Would you… Would you rather we ate there?”
I quickly shook my head. Took a sip of wine. Tried to make my heart stop beating so fiercely in my chest.
Half an hour later, we were eating hot dog omelettes and drinking his excellent organic wine at the table in the living room. We washed the dishes together afterward. The whole thing was over far too quickly. A saucepan, two forks, two plates. Suddenly, I no longer had any reason to hang around. I drank the last of my wine and washed that glass, too. Carefully dried it and put it neatly in the right place.
Michael followed me back into the living room. While I had been struggling to focus on my job in reception, he had unpacked. There were now four backpacks along the wall, and there was already a pile of rocks in one corner.
“Are those things you need for work?” I asked. I was trying to drag out our time together. I didn’t want to go back to my real life.
“Kind of. I try to see as much as I can of the places where I work. It feels stupid to be staying in these incredible places if I just spend all my time down in a pit. So I’ve got equipment for warm and cold climates. Most of it works for both: lightweight tent, warm sleeping bag, camping stove.”
I nodded to some tools spread out on top of a laminated map on the TV cabinet. “And these?”
“My tools. A rock hammer, for taking rock samples.” He handed me a small, round plastic object, barely bigger than a ring. “Magnifying glass,” he said.
“And a compass?”
“It’s a Brunton compass. It shows you the direction, but also the angle and depth. It makes it easier to follow and document a rock formation.”
I picked up one of the rocks. Honestly, it looked incredibly plain. Just an ordinary stone he had scrawled a few digits onto in marker pen. I looked at Michael, a question on my face. Why this one?
“No reason. It’s just a rock. I’m a geologist. We get depressed if we go a long time without taking a rock sample.”
He could see my skepticism and laughed. “Maybe you’ll like this one better,” he said, holding out a pretty purple-and-violet rock. “An amethyst,” he explained. “From Australia.”
“Did you collect these yourself?”
He nodded.
I smiled happily. “It’s like a photo album of rocks.”
I reached out for another rock. “And this one?” I asked.
He seemed embarrassed and took it from me. “That’s just an ordinary rock.” He picked up two others from beside it and put them back into the bag.
“But where are they from?”
“They’re from here. This is a piece of basalt. It’s everywhere here.”
I was standing so close to him that I could feel the warmth of his body as he held up a beautiful, shimmering green stone. “Serpentinite.”
He hesitated, but eventually handed me a rock that was a deep shade of grayish-blue. “Blueschist,” he said. “Whenever I want to remember Oregon, this is what I think of.”
I weighed the rock in my hand. All of my senses felt heightened, as though I was experiencing everything through a microscope. The rock felt warm and rough against my skin, the colors exploding right before my eyes, swirls of blue and thin streaks of something gray and glittering.
“God, I’m really blabbering,” Michael said. “I always talk about rocks when I get nervous. You must think I’m an idiot.”
But I was amused. I pictured him somewhere far from home, in some exotic place I could barely even imagine, with a tiny piece of Oregon close to him.
“I’d actually prepared what I was going to say to you if you came by after that debacle at check-in.”
I smiled. “You wrote
a list?”
That was what he always used to do.
“Three, actually. Suggested topics of conversation in case we had nothing to talk about. What I wanted to say to you. What I shouldn’t say.”
“That last one sounds the most interesting. But maybe I don’t want to know?”
“I know that nothing has changed,” he said. “I’ll be leaving, and you can’t be happy anywhere else. And it’s probably been too long. We’re so different. We were too different even when we were young, and things are much worse now. You’ve got your own life. Of course.”
“Michael,” I interrupted, but he continued, seemingly unable to stop.
“I just don’t want you to think I expect anything of you. I’m not going to show up out of the blue and think that everything is fine between us and that we can try again just like that. Nothing has changed. I don’t even know why I came back.”
“You think too much,” I said, and then I finally kissed him. I held my hand on his cheek, leaned forward on tiptoe, and gently pressed my lips to his.
It made him stop talking, at the very least.
He would move on and leave me again. I knew that, but to my confused heart, that was just another reason why I should kiss him. While I had the chance.
And then I stopped thinking about anything at all. Michael kissed me back as though he was trying to express fifteen years of longing, or maybe that was just how it felt. He pulled my blouse up and over my head, and I struggled feverishly with his shirt buttons, and then finally felt his warm skin beneath my hands.
His body was just how I remembered it, and completely different at the same time.
Chapter 8
A Lot of Food and Flowers
The history of Pine Creek starts and ends with the forestry industry, and MacKenzie always says that the end came many years ago. We’ve just been in denial ever since.
Before that, the forest was the basis of our existence. The boys who graduated from Pine Creek High School during the seventies never had to worry about getting a college education or taking out student loans. No one moved away. They knew they could get a job that paid twelve dollars and eighty cents an hour, with fantastic benefits.
That isn’t to say that the outside world wasn’t already making a mark. By that time, feminists, hippies, Californians, and Christians had all started moving to Oregon to start collectives and pursue alternative lifestyles. Still, they could be swatted away like flies, swarming at the edge of Pine Creek’s existence—irritating but ultimately harmless.
It was later that things started to go downhill. Across all of Oregon, not just in Pine Creek. A third of the people employed by the forestry industry lost their jobs. A few years after that, another thirty thousand positions went up in smoke. Thousands of others were forced to accept reduced hours, lower wages, or cuts in benefits—or all three. As always, the federal government was very supportive and introduced measures to protect the spotted owl. The spotted owl!
I have to admit, I’ve always loved those owls. I just make sure not to tell anyone. They’re still a sore topic around here. The protection of the spotted owl’s habitat saved millions of acres of trees from being cut down, but it was about more than that, too. We built this country. Literally. But when times got hard and we were struggling, those politicans in DC didn’t give us a helping hand. They slapped us with environmental protections instead. I’m sure it wasn’t the owls’ fault, but people were right about one thing at least: there had been three sawmills in the region during the late seventies. Just twenty years later, they had all closed down.
And yet here we are. MacKenzie says it’s because we’re too stupid to leave, but she’s just kidding.
There are tall pines all around me as I walk into town, and I realize that, in a sense, the forest is still saving us, because a lot of people now make a living from the tourists who come here to hike, hunt, or fish. Some of the men call themselves guides. Fishing guide. Hunting guide. Hiking guide. All you need is a decent jacket, a good pair of boots, and marginally more intelligence than the tourists. Which, as MacKenzie says, isn’t particularly hard.
Things might have changed around here, but we’re still a traditional town at heart. We take many things seriously here. God, for example. And death. There are three funeral homes in Pine Creek, and I’ve decided to visit them all.
So here I am the next day, walking into town. Driving a car is only one of many things I can’t do anymore.
There must be a quicker way to move around as a ghost, but I haven’t discovered it yet. Maybe I’m still bound by the laws of nature.
Maybe I just don’t have enough imagination to picture myself hovering above the ground.
Hover, I think, but absolutely nothing happens.
Maybe I could teleport.
I close my eyes and think Elm Street, but I don’t move an inch from the side of the road. Walking it is.
* * *
Unfortunately, funeral homes seem to have been designed specifically so that the recently bereaved won’t stumble onto their unfortunate newly departed. They’re more focused on finding the right coffin than the right body.
By lunchtime I’ve seen more tastefully arranged caskets than I really want to. One of the funeral homes has an entire showroom dedicated to them; the other two let people choose from expensive-looking bound catalogs.
There are white coffins, coffins in polished oak, coffins lined with silk. One section demonstrates how you can personalize your coffin with American flags or photos from the poor dead person’s life. Another section showcases environmentally friendly burials using recycled materals or cardboard. It seems more fitting for Portland than Pine Creek, but perhaps times really are changing.
How can they expect people to choose? I feel suddenly very sorry for Dad. He’ll be overwhelmed by the desperate need to make the right choice. He’ll try to find the most traditional and correct coffin there is, and I’m guessing it will be expensive. MacKenzie would have an easier job with it. Her choice would inevitably be fun and personal and completely irreverent.
I’m beginning to think that is the only reasonable approach to death.
I lurk around a bit in the back of all the funeral homes, walking right through random doors—still a disconcerting experience—and mostly just getting lost. At the third one, I walk through a door only to find myself standing in front of a young couple, both looking stunned and uncomprehending. Worse than crying. It’s like they’re still too shocked to even be shattered by their loss. I back away quickly, automatically mumbling apologies no one can hear.
I retire to the safety of the street.
Any further search will have to wait. I can’t take any more death today.
I pass Dad on my way home. I get there at the same time that he returns from his shopping, carrying two grocery bags. Cheryl is with him, doing her neighborly duty as always.
There’s a strange pile of things outside his door. Dad moves closer to inspect it, and I lean in beside him.
There are a couple of Tupperware containers, neatly marked with the date and their contents. Flowers. Several cards, some simple and handmade, others store-bought. White with sober black edges, crosses, and the words Our Deepest Sympathy.
Dad puts down his shopping bag and glances at the pile as he fumbles for his keys.
They start coming before he even has time to open the door, one by one, a procession of human compassion. Some are embarrassed, some eloquent, others quiet. They hand over dishes of food, an orchid, a bag of canned food, more flowers, a bowl of homemade potato salad. “It’s all we had at home,” the woman who brought it whispers in embarrassment.
Dad’s arms are overflowing as he tries to balance everything. He blinks in confusion.
A woman who lives a few houses down comes over with an apple pie. She puts it down on top of one of the other ovenproof dishes.
Cheryl looks down at all of the food and flowers and cards, and her eyes fill with tears. “Oh, Robert,” she says.
“I wish people would just leave me alone,” Dad mumbles.
Chapter 9
You’re One with Your Body
I think there are certain things you’re not supposed to do alone, and visiting funeral homes is one of them. I could try again on my own, but I decide to wait for Dad. I’m not sure if it’s for his comfort or mine.
I only needed to do a bit of eavesdropping to find out the time for his meeting with them. So here I am.
Cheryl is here, too. I like her better for it. I know it’s easy to imagine her having some sort of ulterior motive for keeping Dad company all the time. He is, after all, a reasonably good-looking and somewhat normal widower. These things happen, I’m sure. But Cheryl is very happily married to a very patient husband, and I know her only reason for being here is to be a good Christian to a friend in need. They’re not members of the same congregation—he’s Methodist, she’s Evangelical—but she’s never let a small detail like that get in her way. She found Jesus late in life, and she seems determined to make up for lost time.
Her T-shirt today reads All I need today is a little coffee and a whole lot of Jesus.
“I wish you were wearing different shoes,” Dad tells Cheryl as they stand before the funeral home.
She’s wearing a pair of turquoise sneakers.
Dad, on the other hand, is wearing a suit jacket. He has a manila folder tucked beneath his arm. The word Funeral is written on the front in his neat handwriting.
Cheryl is Dad’s polar opposite. Dad has always radiated a kind of gloomy resignation, while Cheryl is always surrounded by an air of happy determination. Dad endures life; Cheryl tries to transform it into God’s likeness. But right now, she looks touchingly uncertain. I catch her glancing at the folder under Dad’s arm several times.
Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC) Page 5
