Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC)

by Katarina Bivald

  Now with color TV!

  There are three chairs lined up on the walkway outside Camila’s room. Three pairs of shoes on the railing: Camila’s boots, MacKenzie’s worn-out sneakers, Michael’s walking boots. Their faces are illuminated by the glow of the neon lights. None of them can tear their eyes from the sign.

  There is an open six-pack of beer on the ground between them, and the sweet scent of the joint they are passing back and forth mixes with the damp evening air.

  Michael had watched the old sign come down and the new one go up from the edge of the motel lot. He must have seen MacKenzie and Camila standing together, but he didn’t go over to them. He seemed unsure whether they wanted to be alone. This is actually the first time the three of them have hung out since their drunken evening before the funeral. MacKenzie fetched both the beer and Michael once the crowd dispersed, and now they are finally sitting here, next to me.

  Juan Esteban would have liked it.

  They don’t really have anything in common, I think. MacKenzie is wearing a patched denim jacket and a multicolored knitted scarf. Camila is in a dark-red coat, with a stylish, expensive-looking beige scarf wrapped around her neck. Michael is in his usual windbreaker, simple and functional.

  They are looking out at the parking lot and the new sign, but I’m sitting on the railing so that I can study them properly. I can’t get enough of it. They’re back where they are supposed to be. The world feels right now that they’re here, next to one another. They’ve been lonely, but now they are home.

  “The sign’s fantastic,” Michael says, raising his bottle of beer to MacKenzie in a toast. She clinks her own against it.

  “I do my best,” she says bashfully.

  “I’m not sure the rest of town will be so keen on it,” Camila says drily. “A couple of people complained about the old one,” she explains to Michael. “That’s why we changed it.”

  “They’ll be angry no matter what we do,” MacKenzie protests. “But they’ve got their new sign. As promised.”

  “I guess you’ll be changing the name of the motel now?” Michael asks.

  MacKenzie rocks back on her chair and leans against the wall. “Welcome to Pine Away Motel and Cabins,” she says.

  “I like it,” says Michael.

  “It’s so nice sitting here like this,” says Camila.

  I nod in agreement.

  “Like when we were kids,” Michael adds.

  “All our grand theories about life and love and the meaning of it all,” Camila continues. “We thought we knew everything.”

  “Not Henny,” says Michael. “She was always quiet, to the extent that you always had to ask her what she thought.”

  “She was the smartest of all of us, too,” he goes on.

  MacKenzie takes a drag on the joint. “Though that’s not saying much.”

  “Do you remember the time we talked about what we wanted to do when we were older?” Camila asks. “You said you were going to have a pea shooter, MacKenzie, so you could shoot peas at kids. You’d sit on our veranda—because you were sure we’d have a veranda at the motel by then—and mess with all the children who happened to pass by.”

  “I still will.”

  Her plan was to have white curly hair, like some innocent old woman. A sweet old grandmother, that’s what she would look like. She would shoot peas at all the young kids she saw, and when they complained to their parents she could just sit there and innocently widen her eyes. Who? Me? she would say, confusedly waving her knitting. Her plans were incredibly detailed: the knitting would be done with some kind of fluffy, pale-pink yarn for maximum camouflage.

  “I think maybe the parents here know you a little too well for that,” Michael says.

  “How did it go again?” Camila continues. “Michael wanted to have experienced things, MacKenzie wanted to have had fun…”

  “And you wanted to have been yourself,” Michael interjects. “To have lived freely and honestly and bravely.”

  “I guess we actually got pretty close,” Camila says.

  “So we got what we wanted,” MacKenzie says. “I can’t see that it made us very happy.”

  I remember that conversation. For a moment, I can see us the way we used to be. This was after the cabins had been built, after the vote, during our last few months of high school.

  They were so confident in what they wanted, but I was terrified they would ask me. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I had never thought about life that way. Eventually, of course, they did ask. They always did.

  “And Henny said, ‘I don’t think life cares about our plans,’” Michael says. “I still remember that.”

  “Henny was always the fatalist among us,” Camila adds.

  “And then she said, ‘I just want us to sit in a row on our new veranda when we’re old. In matching rocking chairs.’”

  “And here we are.”

  “Not Henny,” MacKenzie points out.

  I smile. I might not have achieved my goal of having a veranda thirty or so years from now, but surely this is pretty close.

  Michael takes the joint from MacKenzie. Takes a drag. Holds his breath. Lets the smoke slowly escape. “We had some good times together, didn’t we?”

  “We managed to get a rainbow flag up on the school, if nothing else,” Camila says.

  “For exactly thirty minutes,” says MacKenzie. “Before it fell down.”

  “Yeah,” Michael agrees. “Duct tape probably wasn’t the best idea.” He takes another drag on the joint and passes it back to Camila. “But I know what Juan Esteban would have done right now.”

  “What?” asks Camila.

  MacKenzie thinks, then she smiles appreciatively. “He would’ve put up a new sign,” she says.

  In unison, both she and Michael say: “Pine Away Motel and Cabins—now with new sign!”

  Chapter 27

  Limits to What Duct Tape Can Do

  The thing I remember most clearly from the time just before the Measure Nine campaign was how gray and meaningless everything was.

  I didn’t know why. Yes, the summer break was over. School had started again. But those things had never been a problem before; I had always liked school. It felt comfortable.

  Suddenly, though, I was filled by a sense of unhappiness.

  The feeling was so new that it took me several weeks to work out what the creeping restlessness was. I found myself getting annoyed on my quiet nights at home with Dad. Nothing ever happened there. And class? What was the point of sitting still while the teachers talked my life away?

  Then I saw Michael in the yard or in the corridors, and everything felt new and exciting again. He was always alone, always in a hurry, always with his arms full of geology books rather than the ones he actually had to read.

  I was sure MacKenzie could hear my heart racing every time he was nearby. Just act normal, I thought, my cheeks turning red.

  Nothing else ever felt as real. I was only alive during those brief, endless moments when I saw him. Or, even better, when MacKenzie got him to stop and chat for a while. She always asked about Derek. Everyone did.

  Maybe that’s why, looking back now, I can’t remember all that much about Measure Nine. Not that early on, anyway.

  I’ve searched my memory for some sign that I was actually worried about all the madness that was going on, but I can’t find anything. It all happened so slowly. It’s hard to realize that everything is going downhill when everyday life goes on the same as ever.

  Measure Nine was the second campaign with that name run by an organization called the Oregon Citizens Alliance, a conservative Christian group which, in the early nineties, decided that homosexuality was the root of all evil. It was led by Lon Mabon and had a number of controversial members. Scott Lively was one of them, known for writing a book called The Pink Swastika, which
argued that the Holocaust and the Nazis were actually the fault of homosexuality.

  In 1992, they managed to force a popular vote on their first proposal. They wanted to amend Oregon’s constitution to forbid “special rights” for LGBT people by adding a provision that said the state recognized “homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism, and masochism as abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse.” It was defeated by a slim majority.

  They were crazy. It should have worried me. The first vote had been before our time, of course, but still. Their second proposal, another Measure Nine, wasn’t much better. In just three months’ time, Oregon’s citizens would be given the opportunity to ban the state’s schools from providing education about, encouraging, or sanctioning homosexuality or bisexuality.

  “Yeah, because that’s what schools here spend their time doing,” MacKenzie muttered. “Constant homo propaganda!”

  She decided to start a No to Measure Nine campaign at school, and she and I spent several days making posters ahead of our first meeting. I wrote the words, and MacKenzie “made them a little funnier” with color, illustrations, and slogans. We put them up all over the school, and then MacKenzie waited eagerly to lead the campaign.

  We had been given permission to use one of the classrooms for our meeting, and somehow it looked different once class was over. Maybe it was just because MacKenzie had moved the furniture around. The desks were all pushed up against the wall, and the chairs were arranged in a circle. She had heard it was good to arrange them like that. It would make the meeting more open and less hierarchical, apparently. But since I was the only other person there, it was hard to tell whether it had worked. We had a rainbow flag stretched across the back of two chairs, and MacKenzie sat down at the teacher’s desk by the board—that definitely made things feel different. She belonged up there. She was the leader, and I was her audience.

  But we were also the only people in the room.

  Until the door opened and Michael came in.

  He just strode inside, dumped his pile of books on the floor, and sat down in the chair next to mine. I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing.

  I forced myself to look at MacKenzie, but from the corner of one eye, I was constantly aware of every slight change in Michael’s expression. I tried to sit up straight so that my posture would be better, and regretted that I wasn’t wearing a cuter top. Or makeup. Anything that would make him look at me.

  I had gone to the meeting for MacKenzie’s sake, but in that moment, I felt almost worryingly grateful for the homophobic proposals that had brought Michael and me together again. It suddenly felt like absolutely anything could happen. The usual classroom smells around me—chalk dust, stuffiness, teenage angst—suddenly felt like the smell of freedom and adventure.

  I was so focused on Michael, but I still looked up when Camila came in. I don’t know who was more surprised to see her there, me or MacKenzie. Though we went to the same school and worked at the same motel, she had always managed to avoid us.

  Until now.

  She glanced at the circle of chairs and then sat down at the far side.

  “The measure is crazy,” she said firmly.

  MacKenzie looked down at her notes. I already knew what she had written there: (1) Open the meeting. (2) The crazy measure.

  “We’re not on that point yet.”

  * * *

  I have to take a break here and go for a walk around the cabin.

  How could I be so self-absorbed? How could I have been so focused on my insignificant infatuation? How could I have been so blind to everything that was at stake?

  I reassured myself that the measure would be defeated, of course. MacKenzie was convinced we would win. And I would work extra hard with Michael by my side. It was great that more people had decided to get involved.

  But looking back now, that doesn’t reassure me. What is it about having a crush that causes such tunnel vision, such an inability to be present in any other parts of our lives? Ultimately, why would anyone want to be infatuated?

  I liked my life before Michael came along. Afterward, he was the only thing that mattered.

  MacKenzie came out to us during that meeting, but I don’t even remember my reaction to it. I do, at least, remember what she said. Like so much else with MacKenzie, it was unforgettable.

  She said, “I had a much more exciting idea about how to tell you this, but it didn’t work out, so I guess I’ll just tell you.”

  “All right,” we said.

  “I’m gay!”

  “Okay,” said Michael. I nodded. Camila was the only one who seemed interested. She leaned forward in her chair.

  MacKenzie looked unhappy. “I knew the first idea was better. I wanted to write it on a cake, and then Ellen DeGeneres could’ve jumped out waving a rainbow flag. Or maybe she’d have a banner.”

  Camila actually smiled. “But it didn’t work out?”

  “She was busy, unfortunately. But she did write and wish me luck.”

  “That would’ve been interesting,” Michael said.

  “We can pretend it happened like that,” I said. Then I glanced at Michael. Again.

  Michael and Camila’s presence had injected a new energy into the meeting. I wasn’t the only one who felt it. MacKenzie was also invigorated by having new people there. Our conversation mostly revolved around how we could get others involved.

  “We need to do something to make ourselves more visible,” Michael said.

  “We tried putting up posters.” MacKenzie glanced at the rainbow flag. “Maybe we should put the flag up somewhere. Someplace it’ll be really visible.”

  “We’d need a ladder.”

  “The motel has one.”

  I’m not sure whether they had a plan or whether it was more an outlet for their energy, but we went out to Michael’s car in the parking lot. MacKenzie was just happy that something was finally happening. She felt freer outside the classroom. Michael was on board with anything, and Camila and I… Well, we just tagged along. I don’t know what Camila was thinking, but I was just grateful to be near Michael. I wanted the meeting, that evening, to go on forever. We got into the car and suddenly it was summer again, even though it was September. MacKenzie drove, putting on her favorite CD—the one she played constantly back then—and we listened to Indigo Girls’ “Get Out the Map” on repeat.

  “All right, we have our ladder,” MacKenzie said once she had fetched it from the motel. “What else do we need?”

  “Rope? Duct tape? Somewhere to hang it?”

  “I can get duct tape.”

  The drive back to school was frustratingly short. It felt like we had barely turned around before we were there again. Michael jumped straight out of the car. Somewhere along the way, he and MacKenzie had decided to hang the flag on the end of the school building.

  The two of them climbed up the ladder. It was the kind that folded in the middle, which meant they could climb from both sides, raising the flag together.

  It worked. For a while, it was an incredible sight. They had covered each corner of the flag in duct tape, finishing it off with several strips across the middle. They climbed back down, folded up the ladder, and came over to where Camila and I were waiting. We stood in a line, leaning against Michael’s car, and looked up at our rainbow flag on the wall of the school.

  In that moment, I really did think that life was an adventure in which anything could happen. The rainbow flag on the wall of the school was proof of that.

  And then it fell down. Of course it did. Slowly sailed down to the ground.

  “I guess there are limits to what duct tape can do,” MacKenzie muttered.

  Camila laughed. An instinctive, completely open laugh that transformed her face and body and surprised her just as much as us. I think it was the first time I had ever heard her laugh. MacKenzie studied her with far more interest than she ever
had before.

  “Say what you like, but it’s never boring when you’re around, MacKenzie Jones,” Camila said.

  “We just need a bit more tape,” MacKenzie replied.

  Chapter 28

  A New Ronald Reagan

  I know that Camila hopes the new sign will lead to things changing around here. For her, MacKenzie, and the motel. But the biggest changes taking place actually seem to involve Derek.

  I’ve come into town to kill time while the others are working. When I left, Michael was in the restaurant with his computer and phone, in the middle of an incredibly technical conversation with a colleague from British Columbia. MacKenzie and Camila were soldiering on as usual. New sign or not, there are always rooms that need to be cleaned.

  So, I decided to walk into town, and as I passed Sandy’s Café, I noticed Bob Parker’s Cadillac parked outside. That’s where I am now.

  If it was possible for a local politician to be loved, Bob would be wildly popular, but he would be the first to admit that it’s a contradiction in terms. Bob is more like an institution. People can complain all they like, but no one would ever dream of changing him.

  Sally’s Café functions as Bob’s unofficial office, but he doesn’t have any fixed hours there. If his car is outside, you know he’s inside, and if you have any complaints or suggestions, it’s just a matter of taking them in to him. Ditto if you just feel like a coffee.

  It could be a fun way to pass an hour, I think. A bit like reading the letters sent in to the Gazette.

  I have an awful lot of time to kill these days.

  But I’m still not used to the fact that people can no longer see me. I feel awkward the minute I step inside. I even try to smooth out my blouse and stand up straight, pretending I have some reason to be there.

  There are two folding tables against one wall, barely covered by a tiny red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Awaiting any particularly engaged citizens—or hungry passersby—are a huge plate of doughnuts and greasy sandwiches and a couple of thermoses of coffee. There are three men sitting by the wall, each drinking coffee. I can’t work out whether they’re here to see Bob, because he just keeps glancing up at the clock, as though he is waiting for someone else.