Finding Tranquility

by Laura Heffernan

  I slowed to a walk, moving up and down the sidewalks, trying to figure out where I’d wound up. Street signs provided little help since Boston streets liked to tell a person the name of cross streets only, not the name of the street you’re actually walking on. There weren’t any gas stations in this residential area, so I kept going. Boston was a walking city. Even if most people were inside, mourning or glued to their TVs, I’d eventually find another person to give me directions back downtown.

  The sun rose high in the sky before I turned down a random street and spotted a small park at the end of the row of brownstones. The pinprick in my hip grew more obnoxious. The name of the park told me nothing; I wasn’t familiar with this part of the city. Finally, I dropped to a bench to figure out what the heck was poking me and what to do next.

  The backpack contained a ton of pockets. In the largest one, I found only the “new” clothes I’d bought, none of them with tags, sharp angles, or anything in the pockets. I turned my attention to the other zippers. The front pouch was empty. Behind it, I found another zippered compartment. Squeezing the bag, I felt something hard and square near the bottom. No, rectangular. This had to be whatever I kept feeling when the bag jostled.

  The zipper stuck at first, but I eventually coaxed it open enough to stick my fingers inside. They closed against something smooth and hard. Slowly, I pulled the item out until I held a Canadian passport in my hand.

  The book looked brand-new, although it was issued in 1998. The only stamp marring the perfect pages showed the day this person—Christina McCall—entered the U.S., more than a year ago. I wondered what happened to her. If she ditched the bag and the passport on purpose.

  On the main page, Christina stared out at me with dark, serious eyes and lips thinly pressed together. She hadn’t smiled for this photograph. Her hair was about the same color as mine, her skin a few shades lighter. There must not be much sun in her part of Canada. The book said she’d been born in Saskatchewan. I didn’t have a clue where that was.

  Trees rustled in the breeze, pulling my attention away from the book in my hands. White clouds drifted across the sky. Birds twittered in the trees. It was a perfect day to lose yourself. Maybe that’s what this Christina did. Lost herself in the city, changed her name, ditched her passport to become someone new. Having never met this woman, I identified strongly with her fictitious desire to start over.

  Across the park, a guy about my age sat on a blanket, reading. I approached, hoping he’d be able to direct me back toward downtown. Nearly all of my belongings rested on my back, but I wanted to retrieve a picture of Jess left next to the nightstand in the hotel and catch another night of sleep. Figuring out where to go would be a bonus, but whatever. One thing at a time.

  When he told me where we were, I just blinked at him. I’d come further than I thought in my daze. Maybe the long walk back would clear my thoughts.

  Then I spotted something resting against a nearby tree. Something to help me get out of town much faster.

  “Thanks for the directions,” I said. “I’ll give you fifty bucks for your bike.”

  He clapped my back with one hand. “My friend, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  Chapter 3

  Up, down. Up, down. The next morning, the road disappeared beneath the wheels of the bike. The wind rushed past my face, a sensation I hadn’t experienced in years. Another equally-foreign emotion made me want to laugh out loud and sing with the birds. I’d peddled for miles before I recognized it for what it was: relief.

  With no particular destination in mind, I followed my instincts, turning north and west, always moving away from Boston. As my legs worked the pedals, my mind was free to explore the possibilities. Brett Cooper died, I was reborn. Who was I? I could be anyone I wanted.

  While I rode, I thought about the first time I met Jess. It was the week before my freshman year at Lancaster High. Buses in town were slow, unreliable. Not as unreliable as my older brother, Brad, though. After I stupidly wheedled him into giving me a ride, Brad got distracted talking to a couple of pretty girls at the gas station. Next thing I knew, I was late for my first day of football practice. Of course.

  Not the best way to make a good impression on my new teammates. Being a freshman was hard enough without earning a nickname like “Belated Brett” from some asshole. Luckily, most of the fourteen-year-old football players didn’t have a word like “belated” in their vocabulary yet.

  The second the rusty old Pontiac Bonneville slowed to a halt, I threw the door open and dashed across the lot, not even bothering to close the door behind me. Brad yelled from the driver’s seat, but I didn’t catch what he was saying.

  I was too busy getting the breath knocked out of me by a blond tornado. A cute blond tornado. She slammed into me so hard, she fell backward and landed on her ass.

  “Oh, shit!” I said. “I’m so sorry!”

  It wasn’t my fault, but when a cute girl falls at your feet, it’s okay to take the blame to get her to talk to you. Brad would’ve been proud of me taking control of the situation.

  For reasons I never quite fathomed, she smiled up at me from the ground. “S’okay. I should’ve been paying attention to where I was going instead of to my friends over there.”

  I reached one hand down to pull her up. “You a cheerleader?”

  “Yeah. I’m Jess.”

  When she stepped on her left foot, she winced.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” she lied. Jess took another step, but her ankle buckled.

  I caught her around the waist and pulled her toward me. Her blue eyes matched the sky. I swallowed, trying to ignore the feeling of her body against mine and instead focus on the situation. Last thing I needed was to show up at football practice with a boner—and late. Was “Boner Brett” a better nickname than “Belated Brett?”

  No. No way.

  “Here. Let me help you across the field,” I said. “I’m Brett.”

  When we got closer to the field, Coach turned and hollered at us. “Cooper! Stop hitting on the pretty—What’s this?”

  He trotted over, muttering under his breath. The cheerleading coach spotted us at the same instant and broke into a run. She fussed over Jess for a moment before picking her up and carrying her toward the bleachers, calling for someone to get her ice. I didn’t see who she was yelling at, but I watched them go, wishing I had the strength—and the guts—to sweep her up like that. That really would’ve made Brad proud.

  Once they were gone, Coach smacked my shoulder. “If you’re done savings damsels in distress, Cooper, are you ready to play some football? Five laps for tardiness. But first, drop and give me twenty.”

  In between push-ups, I glanced at Jess, now with an ice pack on her ankle. She winked and waved, as if she wasn’t hurt at all. I congratulated myself. If you have to accidentally mow someone down on your first day, might as well pick the prettiest girl in school. At least she’d remember my name.

  She certainly did remember my name. Would never forget it now. And if she knew where I was, what I was doing, she’d curse that name until the day I died for real. I deserved her fury, but Jess shouldn’t have to live with that pain.

  I rode and rode, stopping only when my legs threatened to give out, sleeping at rest stops or the occasional motel that accepted cash and didn’t require ID. After about a week, I crossed the state line into Vermont. Despite having lived in New England my whole life, I’d never set foot in Vermont. I didn’t know a soul there, which made it perfect.

  Days on the road took their toll on my body. Before my “rebirth”, I hadn’t been in the best shape. The loathing directed toward my body had nothing to do with size or shape. Attaching large biceps or chiseled abs to a frame I hated, making my body manlier, made little sense to me. As a result, my clothes now hung from my frame. I needed a place to stop, rest for a few days, and come up with a plan. Riding a bike until I ran out of money or winter came and I froze to death wasn’t a pla
n. Not a good one, anyway.

  Another ten miles up the road, I found what I needed. A crooked sign hanging on the battered wooden fence welcomed me to the “Tranquility Cooperative Bed and Breakfast.”

  A long, partially overgrown gravel driveway led up the hill to a ramshackle old house. Pits in the gravel would be hell on a car. For safety, I wheeled my bike up the drive while I further examined the place. Several worn spots on the roof where shingles should have been. A crumbling chimney on one side. Several of the windows on the upper floor were missing screens. When I climbed onto the porch, stepping over a missing slat in the steps, something brushed my face. At first I thought it was a fly strip, but then I realized it was a curl of paint dangling from the ceiling. Part of me worried the whole thing would give way beneath me.

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what made a B&B cooperative. This place looked more like a hostel than a fancy bed and breakfast. But I needed a place to stay, the cash in my wallet was dwindling, and a place this rundown couldn’t cost much.

  Before I’d convinced myself to go in, the front door opened. A short, smiling black woman with chin-length grey curls and breasts hanging down to her knees enveloped me in a hug. Not knowing what else to do, I patted her back awkwardly. “Hello?”

  She pulled back. “Hello, hello! Welcome to the Tranquility Cooperative B&B! Come in, come in. I’m Henny, and my partner Val’s around here somewhere. What’s your name, dear?”

  I paused, unsure. Brett was dead, after all. My whole reason for being here was to start a new life. But I’d yet to stop and think of a name. I thought of the passport hidden in my backpack, of the person who’d left it behind. Had she once stood in a place like this, given a similar fake name? I couldn’t be this Christina, but I could borrow her name for a few days.

  “Chris,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

  Henny offered to take my backpack, but I waved her away. She bustled me through the front door into the building. The lobby gleamed in stark contrast to the exterior of the house. Polished wood floors glowed in the sunlight: not a speck of dust hovered anywhere, and none of the furniture appeared about to rot out from under the unsuspecting sitter. For the first time in days, the knot in my stomach started to loosen.

  “Now, this is a cooperative bed and breakfast,” Henny said. “That means you work for your keep. As long as you help out with chores, you can stay as long as you like, no charge. There’s always something that needs to be done.”

  Some quick mental calculations told me that, if I stayed until the outside became as welcoming as the inside, I’d be here long after Henny died of old age. But I had nothing to do and nowhere else to go. “I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty.”

  “Excellent! Then just sign your name in this book here, and I’ll take you upstairs to your room.” She chatted as we headed up a staircase as well-maintained as the rest of the interior. “Val does most of the cooking, so you don’t have to worry about that. But there are weeds to be pulled, gardening to do, fences to be mended. We even have a maple grove out back. In the spring, someone’s got to collect the sap, empty the buckets, and make syrup. We always have plenty of work to go around.”

  At the top of the stairs, Henny ducked under a beam, then headed down a long hallway. Only a square of light through an open doorway on the right provided illumination. She never paused to take a breath. “This place was built in the late 1600s, so some of the ceilings are a bit low. Watch your head. Now, the door at the end, that’s me and Val. This open door here is the bathroom, we all share, and we all take turns cleaning it—even if you’re doing other work.”

  “Understood,” I said. Having gone from my mother’s house to the dorms to my place with Jess, I’d never cleaned a bathroom in my life, but I’d figure it out. How hard could it be?

  “Excellent! We’ve got a few other guests at the moment. A lot of people stay one night, do some dishes, gather eggs, and move on. There’s a girl who checked in earlier, she’ll probably be one of those. Two others have been here for a bit. One of them is a few years older than you, quiet, keeps to herself mostly. Val and I think she’s hiding from a bad husband. She may take some time to warm up, but don’t worry. It’s not you. The other is about your age. She’s… pretty much the opposite of her in every way. You’ll see.” Henny paused at a door on the left, just past the bathroom. She opened it with a flourish. “And here’s your room!”

  Light filtered in through dirt caked on the window, but the flick of a switch beside the door turned on a bare bulb swinging in the middle of the room. The tiny rectangular room resembled a college dorm, with its twin bed perched atop wooden drawers. Not fancy, but after sleeping on the ground for the past few nights, the thin mattress looked like heaven.

  A narrow closet occupied the wall next to the window, so shallow, I marveled at how small early Americans must have been. Luckily, none of my new clothes required hanging. Henny hovered in the doorway, her fleshy face nearly swallowing her brown eyes.

  “This looks great, Henny. Thanks.”

  “Wonderful!” She clapped her hands together twice. “It’s just past three-thirty now. Dinner’s served promptly at six. I’d stay out of the kitchen until then if I were you—Val rules with an iron fist, and she won’t let you anywhere near her domain until she gets to know you.”

  I nodded. After days on the road, what I wanted more than anything was to take a shower and then sleep until morning. But this was a cooperative bed and breakfast, and I might as well start earning my keep now so I could go to bed early. “What can I help with?”

  “Almost anything.” She laughed. “There’s so much to do around here. The front lawn needs to be mowed. We’ve only got a push mower, but do as much as you can. Val says we need to make this place more welcoming.”

  “I can do that. Want me to pull the weeds, too? Cut back around the path a little?”

  She chuckled. “Sweetheart, I’m joking. You look like you’re about to keel over from exhaustion. Why don’t you take a nap, sleep for a couple of hours, then clean up and join us for dinner? I’ll wheel your bike around the back into the barn in case it rains.”

  It was official: I loved her.

  ∞ ♡ ∞

  What the hell was I doing? It wasn’t too late to turn around, call Jess, and tell her everything. She’d be pissed, sure, especially when I told her that I couldn’t stay married to her anymore. But she’d also be relieved I was alive. Maybe one day she’d understand that I couldn’t be myself and be her husband at the same time.

  These thoughts circled in my head all night: Call Jess, forget Jess, be myself, be Brett Cooper, run away, start a new life. Finally, when the sun peeked over the horizon, I gave up and went to have a smoke. These things would kill me, but a plane already took care of that.

  Early mornings in Vermont carried a bite in the air, especially in mid-September. I dug in my backpack until I found a hooded sweatshirt before grabbing the crumpled pack and padding downstairs.

  “Oh, good! Another early bird! Hold the door!”

  A tall, curvy brunette hurried toward me, cradling a basket of eggs under one arm and carrying a pail of milk in the other. She wore a pink T-shirt with “Tranquility” on the front in white script and gray sweatpants that had seen better days. A lot of better days.

  I groaned. The last thing I wanted was to swap stories with another traveler. I’d missed meeting everyone the night before by oversleeping dinner, then chopping wood until well after the sun went down. Henny had served me reheated casserole when I finally stumbled back into the house, exhausted and bleary-eyed. I never even saw her partner. The longer I could avoid other people, the better.

  “You must be Chris,” she said when she reached me. “I’m Val.”

  The cook and co-owner. I dredged up a smile for the person who was partially responsible for giving me a place to stay. “Chris, yeah. Nice to meet you. I was—”

  She thrust the basket into my arms and headed toward the kitchen, giving me no cho
ice but to follow. “Give me a hand putting this stuff away. I’m sure glad to see someone else up to help me out in the mornings. You’re built like an old farm boy, Chris. Do you know how to milk a cow? Of course you do. Anyone can milk a cow. It’s just like squeezing a tit, and Lord knows, we’re all born knowing how to do that. I bet you’re a natural. Gee, you’re a quiet one, aren’t you?”

  My head spun at the direction the conversation had taken, but we had finally reached the kitchen. I set the eggs where she pointed. “Sorry. Not much of a morning person. I talk better after coffee.”

  Under Val’s direction, I sliced bread, cracked eggs, and set water to boil for coffee. She kept up a steady stream of orders between chatter, hopping from one topic to the next so fast I didn’t try to keep up.

  A bleary-eyed girl with long blond curls stumbled in, making a beeline for the coffee pot on the stove. Val slapped her hand. “Not so fast. You can’t drink it until it’s finished brewing or the whole pot’s ruined.”

  “But, Val—”

  “Bat those big blue eyes somewhere else, sister. You can have the coffee when it’s ready. Meanwhile, make yourself useful. Go set the table.”

  She grumbled before turning toward me. She did have big blue eyes, a couple of shades darker than Jess’s. Her stringy blonde hair hadn’t seen soap in at least a week. She wore a long gray T-shirt that didn’t quite cover the dark blue lace of her panties, which peeked out from underneath the hem.

  “Why, hello, there. I’m Julie.” She tossed her hair over one shoulder, sending a wave of patchouli toward me. “About time we got some testosterone in this henhouse.”

  My spine straightened at her words. For a heartbeat, I wanted to give her a woman’s name, just to see her reaction. Before I could respond, she continued, “You’re Chris, right?”

  She misinterpreted my confusion. “Henny told me to come into the kitchen and find Chris. You’re the only person here besides Val.”