Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  “IT IS AT EXACTLY THOSE MOMENTS, WHEN YOU ARE LOCKED IN NO, THAT YOU NEED TO LOOK AROUND FOR A NEW KEY: THE KEY TO YES.”

  – Escape into Great, Theo Hendra

  With the Shack’s finances back on solid ground, and most of the staff complaints falling away, the desire for a place to escape to became a constant in the back of Jeremy’s mind. He began to spend his afternoons sitting in a corner booth with the Shack’s long-suffering laptop, scrolling through online listings for cottages within easy driving distance. If he found one that looked promising, he would arrange to see if the reality matched the photos. It usually did not: every place he saw had a sagging roof or floors that looked ready to give way, or was little more than a sleeper cabin parked within spitting distance of a busy rural highway with only a few thin sickly pine trees in between.

  One realtor showed him a cottage that was being sold off for next to nothing as part of a forced bank sale. It wasn’t even a cottage, but a small house that’d been owned by a young couple who’d lost their jobs and stopped making payments. They’d spent their last days in the house kicking holes in the walls, smashing the bathroom sinks and the toilets, and taking apart the kitchen. It looked like a pack of enraged gorillas had been set loose inside. “It’s not a pretty sight right now,” the realtor admitted. He tried to move Jeremy quickly past a closet door that seemed to have been attacked with a steak knife. “The good thing is the price is so low, you’ve got lots of room to renovate. And it’s the off-season, so right now you could bring in a contractor for next to nothing. I could recommend a few names. Local guys.”

  “How much would it cost me to bring in an exorcist?”

  The realtor, looking confused, offered to show him where the river touched the back of the property.

  It was Dr. Harwood who finally found the ideal place: a cottage owned by two elderly patients of hers who’d first bought it when they were newlyweds, and were now looking to sell. It was a sad story. Their daughter had died in a car accident while driving through a snowstorm outside of Kingston. She was 35 years old and had her two-year-old son in the back, so they lost their only child and their only grandchild in one blow. Her husband, who’d been driving the car, was in a coma for nearly six months before he, too, died. From what they’d told Dr. Harwood, the grieving couple had stopped going to the cottage after that. And now they wanted to be rid of it.

  “And I’m supposed to take it from them? I’d feel like a vulture.”

  “I can’t even imagine what they are going through,” Dr. Harwood said. She spoke very slowly and carefully, and in the same tone she used when telling a patient about a troubling growth, an x-ray with an ominous shadow. “I do know that if I was in that position, I wouldn’t want to go somewhere that reminded me of my grief. And I’d want it to make someone else happy if it could.”

  She added that having access to a place like that might also help with his panic attacks, which were still a problem. The medication she’d finally elected to put him on only created a barrier between him and the worst of their surges. It was as if he could feel them pummelling him while he was safe inside the kind of giant suit men wore when they served as targets at women’s self-defence classes. He noticed, too, that he was more willing to leave the bar earlier in the night while things were still humming. He sometimes slept for eight or nine hours at a time, which he could not remember doing since he was a teenager. It was a blank and dreamless sleep, as if he were literally powering down and being recharged.

  “And you’ve stopped drinking, right?” she asked him.

  “Absolutely,” he lied.

  He invited the elderly couple to the Shack. When they walked in, he wondered if he ought to give them a hug, given all they’d been through. They introduced themselves: she was Rose, he was Dennis. Rose wore glasses with lenses as thick as her thumb and did most of the talking. Dennis seemed preoccupied by the napkin dispenser on the table. He drew out a large clump of napkins, then found it impossible to restore them in proper order: they spilled out like a parachute opened too late. Jeremy told him not to worry about it. Charlene brought out a platter of vegetables and springs rolls from the kitchen, which the couple ignored. Jeremy kept hoping they would take something, as he hadn’t eaten anything all day, and his stomach was starting to protest.

  Rose said that for a few summers in a row, they’d only gone to their cottage twice: once to open it and once to close it, which they did over the Labour Day weekend.

  “I don’t see the point of driving all that way and spending the weekend cleaning it out if we’re not even going to use it. And neither of us really enjoy ourselves up there anymore. It’s too quiet.”

  Most of their friends were too old to think about such a purchase, or had places of their own. Rose didn’t like the thought of their place being taken over by the wrong kind of people, the kind who’d keep everyone else on the lake up at night and drunkenly crash boats into the dock.

  “When Dr. Harwood told us you owned a bar, I have to admit . . .”

  Jeremy laughed in the most non-threatening way he could manage. He wasn’t looking for a place to party, he told them, and he understood completely why they wanted someone who would treat the place with respect. With some reluctance, he brought out the story of the cousin who had broken her neck jumping off the dock, the cousin who wasn’t actually his own, but whom he once again employed for what he felt was a worthy cause. This time, he added a post-funeral epilogue in which the cousin’s family, after a year’s absence, made an emotional return to the cottage with the fatal dock for a final goodbye before selling it altogether. He’d been told that something like that had actually happened at the time.

  “I don’t think anyone stopped crying the whole time we were there. We emptied the place, and had a big campfire where we all just talked about her and told stories. Before we left, my aunt and uncle spent about half an hour looking out at the water. They knew they couldn’t stay there anymore, but they wanted to say goodbye.”

  Jeremy could feel his eyes moistening involuntarily: the story was taking him. Rose and Dennis were listening intently, their expressions full of mixed joy and pain, as if he were speaking to them with the voice of their own dead daughter.

  He said that, whatever decision they made, he would understand.

  He got the call a few days later, the two of them on the line. Rose told him the place was his if he wanted it. Dennis was less eager to sell than his wife, and tried to add some conditions to the purchase, such as that Jeremy had to keep both the interior and the exterior exactly as they were, and that he and his wife could stay there for a weekend at least once a summer. He also wanted Jeremy to sign an agreement not to erect any other building on the property or remove any of the trees. The place had to be left exactly as it was when their daughter was small, and theirs. And alive. Jeremy was just starting to wonder if it might be easier to simply walk away, when Rose spoke up to tell him her husband was being unreasonable.

  “We’ll never see that place again, whether we sell it or not,” she said. “You can do what you want with it. I don’t even like to think about it. In my mind, it’s gone.”

  And by the way, she added, as much for her husband’s sake as for Jeremy’s: he could keep anything he found there. They weren’t driving all that way to pick up old plates and bowls and some rotten curtains. Throw it all away, burn it. She didn’t care if there was a shoebox in the wall with a million dollars in it – she didn’t want to see it or know about it.

  “Tell you what: we’ll split the million-dollar shoebox 50-50.”

  Dennis didn’t come when it was time to receive Jeremy’s cheque and hand over the keys. Rose drove herself to the Shack and hinted that her husband was sulking. She turned down the offer of a glass of sparkling wine to celebrate, saying it would put her to sleep and upset her stomach. She folded the cheque and slipped it into a hidden pocket in her handbag. He had a brief though
t that she might not even cash it, seeing it as insufficient compensation for the loss of her daughter. Instead of getting up after closing the deal, Rose seemed to slump a little in her seat. She sighed and looked out the front window, as if she were on a bus about to take her to a new life. Jeremy decided to wait until she was gone to add the keys to his belt.

  “It’s supposed to be hot this summer, so you’ll be lucky. When Dennis and I were up the last time, it was just all rain. We spent three nights out there, the longest we’ve gone since everything happened, and it rained the whole time. I took that as a hint.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to come out anytime.”

  She sat up quickly and got ready to leave. “Thank you, but you really don’t have to worry about that. We had our time.”

  Jeremy looked to see if she would sit in her car in the parking lot for a while, but she was gone almost before he got to the window. Patty came up behind him to ask how it went. She’d heard the whole story about the crash, and the daughter, and the husband’s strange conditions, and had been lingering nearby.

  “So he didn’t come after all!”

  “I’m glad he didn’t. He never would’ve let go of the keys.”

  “Men can be such babies.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  * * *

  Jeremy found almost nothing in the cottage when he finally took ownership, and was glad for that. His worst fear had been that he would come across a long-lost doll or an album of happy family photos. There were a few scribbles on the walls inside, and one spot where some kind of poetry had been scratched into the wood with a pen in tiny block letters just below a window. Maybe lyrics to a song. The building itself was pale green, like the interior of an old hospital, and the paint was flaking away at each corner. It had one big bedroom, plus a smaller one that wasn’t much bigger than a closet with a tiny window, which he figured the daughter had used. The first time he’d seen the place, with the old couple lingering in their car, unwilling even to come show him around, he’d been a little disappointed, having imagined wide-open rooms and walls that were all glass and opened onto the lake. It was barely possible to even see the lake from the cottage, though the edge of the water was only a few steps away from the front door. Small trees had grown up to block the view. There was a dock on wheels that had to be dragged back up on the rocks in the fall to keep from being squeezed and snapped by the ice. Dennis left at least three messages on his phone about this.

  Jeremy brought Benny out to take a look. As they circled the lot a few times, Benny shook his head. He said it was built solidly enough, but any real changes made would be expensive, given how old the place was. They’d need to do lot of reinforcing inside and outside. And he was worried about the wiring, which had been done a few decades ago and was probably one short-circuit away from lighting the whole place up.

  “Maybe just burn it. I know a guy, if you want, who could come take care of it.”

  “That’d look suspicious, wouldn’t it? To the insurance people?”

  “They’d rather pay you the friggin money than have to send someone out to check, trust me. By this time next year, you could have a whole new place sitting right here.”

  Jeremy didn’t give the idea much thought. Given the kind of person Benny would get to do the job, the fire fighters who arrived on the scene would likely trip over a charred corpse holding an empty gas can and a partially burned note with Jeremy’s phone number on it. Instead, the two of them cleaned up the place and cut down as much of the foliage growing along the edge of the water as they could to clear a view of the lake. As they sat and ate meatballs and mushrooms that had been cooked in tinfoil right on the fire, Benny told Jeremy about how, when he was a lot younger, he and his brother used to drive out to cottage country with masks, flippers, and snorkels, then spend the day swimming up under people’s docks, stealing the beer and wine that had been stashed in the water to keep cool. People wouldn’t even realize for hours that the booze was gone.

  Jeremy said it was a good trick.

  “Wasn’t a trick,” Benny said. He meant it.

  Jeremy waited until after they were mostly done for the day before bringing out what he’d loaded into the Jeep that morning: the two dragons from the Chinese restaurant that had become the Ice Shack, which had been sitting in his basement for years. He had them wrapped in old blankets, and checked them for chips and cracks after lifting them out of the car. Benny helped him carry them down and set them on either side of the front door, where they could bare their thick teeth at the woodpeckers and the mice.

  “I’ll have egg rolls and rice and those good chicken balls,” Benny said.

  Jeremy didn’t care; he thought they looked as though they were finally at home.

  He’d been told the country air would knock him out, but instead it gave him a kind of charged insomnia. He was sometimes still awake when the birds started up in the morning, and wondered if this might also be a side effect of the medication Dr. Harwood had him on. He finally drove into town one afternoon to buy a small TV and set the thing up on top of an old beer cooler in the corner of the cottage. With it, he watched the news and infomercials and reruns of Star Trek on the one local channel he received. The reception was tenuous at best, and on nights when rain and wind conspired to dissolve the intergalactic future into frantic grey static, he would find himself standing under the wind-twisted tin eave over his door, flanked by his dragons and listening hard for human sounds amid all the noise out there.

  “It’s pretty much silent when I wake up,” he told Charlene as he sat at the bar. “Then some idiot goes racing across the lake on a Jet Ski and ruins it. First thing in the morning on a Jet Ski: why?”

  “It sounds like fun, actually.”

  “Not my speed. If you need something like that to have fun, you’re not doing it right.”

  Charlene said it sounded better than the place she’d been dragged to as a kid, owned by one of her aunts – one whom her mother could not stand, and the feeling was vividly mutual. There was no water anywhere near it, just rocky hills covered in prickly bushes and farmers’ fields that stunk of cow shit. The other place she remembered had belonged to a man whose name she could not recall – her mother must’ve been dating him. His cottage was beautiful, but she had spent the whole time reading in the back of her mother’s car to escape the bugs and the man’s two sons, who didn’t like her at all, yet seemed intent on getting her naked.

  “My place is a stress-free zone,” he said quickly. “I almost want to put a sign over the door that says that.”

  He told her about the tree that loomed over the cottage, which he guessed was at least a hundred years old. He couldn’t put his arms all the way around it. He talked about the chipmunk that lived under his step – he fed it pea­nuts and pumpkin seeds and had already named it Phil, because it looked a bit like Phil. And he told her about the weird stone he’d found under the dock: it was shaped like a valentine heart, and he was convinced it was an old arrowhead. He thought he could maybe donate it to the little local history museum, get it on display with a little card with his name on it just below. His other idea was to take it to the nearest First Nations reserve. He imagined handing it over to the chief, or the elders, or the band council – whoever was in charge – and humbly declining their expressions of thanks and gratitude. It never belonged to me, he would tell them. They would all nod deeply, in total understanding. He ended up not going, just in case they decided to claim the land around his cottage as some kind of sacred hunting ground. The whole thing might end up in court or in the hands of the government, then there’d be no end to the mess. So he put it on top of the TV.

  “It’s an amazing piece of work. Really historical.”

  * * *

  The first person he brought out there with him, other than Benny, was Carla, whom he’d been seeing off and on for a couple of months. It was serious enough that he had not
yet brought her to the Shack since their initial meeting, worried what Glenn or other people might say to her. She worked in the office of a member of provincial parliament whose riding was out in the boonies, and with whom, Jeremy was certain, she was deeply in love. He was a tall man with wings of grey hair on either side of his head and who seemed to be laughing in every photo Jeremy had ever seen of him. Standing onstage: laughing. Holding one end of an oversized cheque: laughing. With the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and one foot on the step of a tractor: laughing.

  “He hates it at his riding,” Carla told him, confidentially. “He grew up there, and couldn’t get away fast enough. Now he’s stuck with it.”

  “Does a good job hiding it,” Jeremy said.

  “Not with me.”

  Carla was constantly running around to get things for her boss, and always preoccupied with what kind of mood he was in that week, and whether his schedule was overcrowded. She had hesitated before accepting the cottage invitation, saying that he sometimes needed her for something over the weekend. Then she insisted on driving there in her own car – in case there was an emergency, she said. Jeremy arrived more than two hours ahead of her, and had already emptied three beers and gone for a quick swim by the time her car pulled up.