by Nancy Warren
“Hi.”
“Thanks for coming. The kids are wildly excited.”
“Wildly excited?”
“Sure. It’s one hour they don’t have to listen to me.”
She rose and he held the door for her to go ahead of him.
She walked with him into the classroom and found about thirty kids assembled. They slouched at desks, were skewed around so they could talk to their neighbors, generally seeming less than thrilled to be here.
“Okay, class. Listen up,” Geoff said and the kids immediately straightened, stopped chatting and faced forward. Sign of a good teacher, she thought. He had their respect.
“I want to introduce you to Iris Chance who is with us today because she’s a published author. You’ve all read her short story, “Gingerbread Chess,” so if you have questions I’m sure she’ll answer them.”
They’d read her story? She supposed it made perfect sense but she wished he’d warned her.
“Raise your hands if you have questions. Ms. Chance, the floor is yours.” And he walked to the back of the room and sat down in one of the student desks.
“Thank you for having me,” she said. Already a hand was in the air. She’d planned to talk about short stories and about character development but it seemed they were already at the Q and A portion. “Yes?”
The girl asking the question was a pretty brunette. “Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?”
“What’s your name?”
“Rosalind.”
“Thanks, Rosalind, that’s a good question. No. I don’t think I did. I always liked books and stories. I was an avid reader as I’m sure you all are. I got an idea when I was in college. I wrote it and sent it in to a few magazines. I was really lucky to get published. I wrote some more short stories. Some were accepted for publication and some weren’t.”
She glanced around the room. She felt some interest and a lot of apathy. One kid in the back wore a ball cap over black curly hair. He’d settled back in his seat, slouching, like he was settling in for a nap.
“You write about a woman searching for her adoptive parents. Is it your story?”
She licked her lips. She had not anticipated that Geoff would share her story or that she would be grilled on its content. But she was here. She wasn’t going to lie. “Yes. Yes the story was based on my own experience.”
“Did that really happen? Did you really find out that your adopted mother was a drug addict and that your dad was in jail?” The same girl asked the questions. She didn’t mean to be insensitive, Iris reminded herself. She was young.
Iris took a moment to formulate her answer. “When we write fiction we make things up. That’s why it’s fiction and not non-fiction. However, stories come from somewhere and in some way they are always about us. Or they offer some metaphor for what’s going on with us. So, while the story did come from my own attempt to find my birth parents, the people in the story and the events were made up.”
“What about the emotions?” a kid in back asked without raising his hand.
“What’s your name?”
“Dylan.” He dragged out each syllable turning two into four.
“Well, Dylan, the emotions were pretty real, I’d say. I probably used writing that story as a kind of therapy.”
“It’s really good,” a sunny looking blonde at the front of the class said. And before Iris could ask her name she said, “I’m Bethany.”
“Thanks, Bethany.”
“How does it feel to find out you’re adopted?”
Geoff must have sensed her discomfort. He said, “I’m not sure that’s relevant, Bethany. Ms. Chance is here to talk about writing not her personal life.”
“It’s okay,” she said. And realized it was. “I have an amazing family. Jack and Daphne Chance took kids in and never, ever differentiated between the ones they conceived and the ones they picked up along the way. They left it to us if we wanted to know.”
She thought back. “I wanted to know. I was having a bad time with my mother.” She grinned realizing she’d been the age of the kids in this class. “You know what that’s like, right? I was positive the woman making me crazy wasn’t my mother. At first, when I found out she wasn’t, I was happy. And then I went looking for my birth family.”
She glanced around. “Let’s say I realized I was very lucky to end up where I did. But I think when you find out the people who gave birth to you didn’t want you, it’s always going to be hard.”
A hand went up. Thank God. “Yes?”
“I’m Stefan. I’m adopted too.”
“Are you okay with it?”
“I know who my real mom is and yeah, I’m okay with it.”
“Good. That’s good.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. Noticed a collection of literary action figures and wanted to laugh. “I was going to talk about inventing character but since you’ve read my story you’ve seen how you can take something that happens in your life and write about it. You now know that it’s based on something real, but as an author you still create character. You need conflict, good descriptions.”
“What’s the most important thing if you want to be a writer?”
“You have to write. Writers write.” She felt like a fraud saying those words realizing she’d let that slide in her life. “Someone once asked Sir Edmund Hilary how you learn to climb a mountain. You know what he said?”
Silence and a couple of uh-uhs.
“You know who Sir Edmund Hilary is, right?” she asked, feeling old. She was almost certain the kid in the back with the ball cap rolled his eyes.
“First white man to climb Everest,” the boy named Dylan said.
“Right. He said you learn to climb a mountain by climbing mountains. Writing’s the same. You learn to write by writing. And reading, of course. A lot of people write a journal or you can write fiction.”
She glanced at the clock and realized the hour was speeding past. “Let’s try an exercise. Take a moment in your life. Something that happened that was significant and write about it. Take ten minutes and try to use every sense. Sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch.” She heard the rustle as books were opened, pens unearthed.
Because she also had ten minutes to kill, she settled herself into Geoff’s desk and pulled out her own pen and paper. She saw, to her secret delight, that he was doing the exercise too.
She wrote about her momentary embarrassment at being grilled by the students on the personal aspects of the story she’d written.
She’d forgotten that feeling of being pulled into the world of words. She struggled for the first minute and then felt the flow. If she hadn’t set the timer on her phone she’d have flown past the time limit.
“Okay,” she said, when her phone beeped, putting down her pen. “How was that?”
A few mutters of fine and okay met her ears.
“Good. Anyone want to share?”
She felt the blank wall hit her. Then Rosalind, the girl who loved the sound of her own voice put up her hand. She read a short piece about getting chewing gum stuck in her hair. That girl was no Thurber but it was mildly amusing.
“I really liked the way you involved all five senses around the piece of gum,” she said. “You had the taste, the smell, the feel of it in your mouth and in your hair, the touch as you tried to pull it out, even the sound of the scissors cutting the gum out of your hair. And of course, the appearance. Nicely done.”
“Thanks.” Rosalind tossed the now gum-free hair over her shoulder, well satisfied with herself.
“Anyone else?”
One boy read a paragraph about a girl he dreamed of. One girl got choked up reading about a cat that died.
Ball-cap boy now definitely had his eyes closed. Maybe she wasn’t a real teacher but she wasn’t having anybody sleeping while she was trying to share her knowledge.
“You, boy in the back with the black curly hair.”
It took a minute before he opened his eyes. He lifted his head. “Yeah?”
“I would like you to read what you wrote.”
He shrank a little in his seat. “I don’t want to.”
“Reading might wake you up.”
He muttered something. Then, in a monotone voice he began:
“Every morning he lifts the thousand pound weight of his head off the pillow. His chest is bare because the tattoo is so fresh it hurts to touch. It stings when his tears run over it in the night. Salt into the wound. He had them carve her name into his chest. It sounded like a dentist’s drill, smelled like a butcher’s. Drops of blood bubbled around each letter like his heart was crying.”
She and Geoff exchanged glances of astonishment. There was dead silence for a moment, as though no one had known that the quiet kid in back had such poetry in him. “That was amazing.” She walked a step forward. “What is your name?”
“Milo.”
“Okay. Apart from the senses, name one technique Milo used brilliantly.” Hell, there were about ten so it shouldn’t be hard to find one.
“It made me feel really sad,” one girl offered.
“Right. He evoked emotion.”
Silence.
“How about metaphor? He uses the tattoo as a metaphor for the way experience carves itself into our memories.”
She was sorry when class ended. The bell cut them off mid question and Geoff rapidly thanked her and the class clapped even as they were packing up and banging and slopping their way out of the room.
“Milo,” she called out before he disappeared.
“Yeah?” He glanced at the floor.
“I—you are really talented.”
He shrugged and looked uncomfortable. Following a spurt of inspiration, she said, “Come and talk to me sometime. I run the Sunflower Tea and Coffee Company. I would love to read more of what you’ve written.”
“Sure, yeah, maybe.” He looked mortified at the idea. Another boy nudged him and muttered something and a few people around laughed. She didn’t need to hear the words to figure it was something rude.
And he shuffled out, all that creativity hidden in a slumping gait and black clothes.
Then the room was empty but for her and Geoff.
“Phew,” she said.
“That went really well,” he said, rising from the student desk and coming forward. “They connected with you.”
“I had fun. Did you know Milo had so much—“
“I had no idea. He always seems like he’s miles away, thinking of somewhere he’d rather be.”
“Who knew that talent was hiding right here.”
Geoff looked at her curiously. His eyes looked ridiculously blue today since he was wearing a blue shirt. “What are you going to do with him at the coffee shop? If he comes.”
“I don't know. It was a spur of the moment offer. If he’s got more writing and he’s serious, I could mentor him.”
“He’s a lucky kid.”
“Plus, what if he didn’t dream up that scenario, what if he’s really struggling with a breakup or depression or something.”
Geoff’s blue, blue eyes narrowed slightly as he scanned her face. “Is he coming to you for mentoring or therapy?”
What was that supposed to mean? “I’d like to help him if I can.”
That night while she was scanning more potential sperm donors, her email chimed.
It was from Geoff. He said:
Thanks again for today. The kids really liked you.
So did I.
You know what I wrote about in my ten minutes?
You.
Chapter Eleven
The weather forecast for the weekend was sunny and unseasonably warm for early April.
It was a Friday afternoon and, on impulse, she called Geoff. They were friends, after all. After she’d made it clear that’s all she wanted, he hadn’t made any attempts to get close to her again.
In fact, apart from seeing him every day when he came in for his morning coffee, and that one day talking to his creative writing class, she hadn’t really seen him at all.
Dosana had the day off as she had an exam and there was no one in Sunflower so on impulse, she called Geoff.
She hated to think of him alone on a sunny weekend.
He picked up right away. “Geoff McLeod.”
“Hi Geoff, it’s Iris,” though of course he knew it was her.
“What’s up?”
She could hear noise, laughter, music. Voices. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“No. Some of the teachers go out after work on a Friday afternoon is all.”
She heard a female voice with a distinct Texas drawl in the background. Seemed like he wasn’t so lonely after all. But she’d called him for a reason. If they were friends, his dating life was nothing to do with her.
“It’s supposed to be nice Sunday. I was thinking of going on a hike and wondered if you want to come with.”
“Don’t people drink coffee on Sundays?”
“They do but without me serving it to them. It’s my day off.”
“Great. I’d love to. Text me the details.” And he was gone.
Well, seemed like she needn’t have worried about him sitting alone all weekend. She chided herself for being so bitchy. It was good that he was getting out and socializing with his colleagues. And if a certain physics teacher was along, it was nothing to do with Iris. Let Tara Barnes be his transition woman. Iris had made it clear she wasn’t interested in the position.
Sunday dawned as sunny as the weather forecasters had predicted.
Since her dad was coming over to get started on the attic, she knew she had to get out. Jack Chance was funny. If you left him instructions, he wouldn’t deviate from them and he was very good at the things he knew how to do. But if Iris was home, she’d hear the dreaded words, “Honey, can you come up here? I have an idea.” And that would entail listening as he explained why it would be better if the bathroom was over by where she currently planned to put her desk and the closet should be turned into a sauna or something.
Therefore, she’d left him a list, a pot of fresh coffee, a sandwich in the fridge for his lunch and her cell phone number in case he really needed to get hold of her. Since Jack Chance didn’t hold with cell phones she was confident he’d get on with the job at hand and not bother her unless strictly necessary.
She packed her daypack including an extra couple of wicked brownies since she always believed in rewarding herself for a workout. She’d told Geoff she’d pick him up on the way. She double checked she had everything, including her emergency medical kit and whistle and then headed out.
Not only was he ready when she arrived but he sported the well-worn gear of a seasoned hiker. Decent boots, technical fabric pants and layers on top. Two full water bottles sat like guns in a holster in the sides of his pack.
She nodded to herself. He’d do.
He strode up to the driver’s side window. “You want me to drive?”
“Why?” Did he think she couldn’t manage the mountainous roads in her own back yard?
“Because your car is so pretty and shiny and it’s got your bakery logo detailed on it. Mine is an old Jeep that’s already beat up. And it’s got four wheel drive.”
“Okay. Sold.”
He pulled his old four wheel drive out of his spot and she parked in the newly vacated space then grabbed her pack and jumped into his passenger seat.
“Thanks for organizing this,” he said and she watched his gaze scan her up and down, obviously checking that she was properly equipped the same way she had checked him out.
“You’re welcome.”
“I was surprised you asked me,” he said.
“Hidden Falls is named after the very falls I’m taking you to. You can’t live in Hidden Falls, and you certainly can’t teach our children, and not have visited it.”
He hit the main road and turned left. “Ah, I see. So this is a public service you’re performing here.”
“That’s right. I’m doing my civic duty
.”
He sent her a sideways glance that looked brimful of deviltry. “What if I told you the local high school English teacher is really having trouble waking up every morning alone? Going to bed every night alone? What might your civic instincts suggest?”
She couldn’t deny the quick rush of heat even though he was so obviously teasing.
“I’d say take a trip to the local animal shelter and get yourself a pet. Not a dog,” she warned. “Not when you live in an apartment and work all day, but a cat maybe. Or a goldfish.”
“A goldfish.”
“Okay, a cat.”
“I have a part time cat. It’s not helping. I don’t think you’re being as sympathetic to my problem as you could be.”
“You’re going to take the next right turn,” she said, happy that they’d got to the slightly tricky part where she needed to navigate to get him to the trail head.
A wooden post set at the back of a gravel parking area that would fit half a dozen vehicles informed them they were at the trailhead. One car sat in the parking area and a couple of mountain bikes were chained to the wooden post.
The ground was damp from recent rains but there was plenty of springtime in the air. She breathed in the sharp, fresh scents of evergreens and the mossy, earthy scent of the trail as they climbed.
As the trail grew steep they spoke less, but the silence was companionable, in spite of the way she’d been feeling around him ever since that steamy kiss.
When he hiked ahead of her, she watched his easy gait, the determined tread and the enticing broad spread of his shoulders.
When she took the lead, she felt his eyes on her back and felt him watching the sway of her hips as she moved.
It was early enough in the season, or maybe the updated forecast that had threatened a possible shower later in the afternoon had scared potential hikers away, but apart from passing a sole trail runner on his way back down, they had the trail to themselves.
The hidden falls weren’t particularly well hidden. A signpost pointed the way and a well-worn path headed off the main trail. But the falls themselves were a sight worth seeing.
She felt a stab of local pride as Geoff stopped and looked up at the water cascading down, bouncing a few times into a series of pools before hitting the wide creek. Bright green moss adorned the sides of the canyon and the rock had slowly worn away to fantastic shapes. He looked around and said, “Wow. This is really incredible.”
