Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  These were brief moments, half-formed impulses flitting in and out of my consciousness, not something I truly planned to do, but an idea I toyed with: What would it be like? I saw myself there in a heap against a tree, no longer someone anyone was counting on or someone counting on anyone else, just an odd amalgamation of singed clothes and tangled metal. And each time, after I eventually arrived home, healthy, whole, not slammed against a tree or overturned at the bottom of an embankment, I was immensely relieved. I had survived.

  Finally, one afternoon after I had come home to find our power turned off for the third time in just a few months, I drove to David’s office. Together, we sat down in the empty waiting room that should have been full of clients.

  “We have to do something,” I said.

  David slumped against the chair, his head resting against the concrete wall behind him.

  “What?” he asked. “What do you want to do?”

  I hadn’t planned to say it. I hadn’t even known I was thinking it. But the answer was as clear to me as if someone else had spoken it.

  “We have to stop this,” I said. “We have to give up our house.”

  And very, very slowly, David nodded.

  In the days that followed, we told Jeff and Denise, separately—me in a tearful, apologetic email to Denise, David in a private conversation with Jeff. We can’t keep up our house payments, we said. We want to, but we can’t. We’re really, really sorry. It would be the last conversation we would have with our long-time friends. After that, we just stopped making our payments. The house was going to be foreclosed, and everything we read about foreclosure told us that you don’t make payments on a house you know you are going to lose. Instead, you make a calculated play: You run out the clock. You pocket your mortgage payments to pay for your moving expenses, for attorney fees, for rent on another place. In reality, it was the only choice we had.

  I didn’t blame Denise or Jeff for pursuing foreclosure. It was what they had to do under the circumstances, and I knew we had left them in a hard place. Still, I was stung by what felt like their lack of empathy for our situation. Perhaps if Denise and I had had a different kind of friendship, if we had been old college friends or hiking buddies instead of friends through our children, we might have been able to navigate through this difficult time. As it was, she did not contact me again, and I did not contact her. Just the thought of a conversation with Denise exhausted me, drained my last bit of emotional energy. I had apologized. I didn’t know what else to say. I did not even understand my role in all of this myself.

  Thankfully, though, Denise made no effort to contact me. Eventually, I deleted all of our conversations from my email, and I avoided going places in town where I might run into her. In the coming months, I mourned our friendship. We had raised our children together. We had a history together. Something funny would happen, and I would want to tell Denise. Or I would have a question that I knew she could answer, like whether or not to hyphenate a certain word, and I would want to email her and ask her what to do, but I knew she felt I had betrayed her, that we had betrayed them, and I couldn’t bring myself to contact her again.

  By the time David and I started looking for another place to live, Alex and Aaron were in college, but Eli was a rising high school senior. He had one more year at home, and David and I wanted to find a place to live where Eli could have a space of his own. After much discussion, we also decided to let him finish his senior year at the same private school he had attended since sixth grade. His friends were there. His teachers were important mentors and role models, and besides, at this point, a few thousand dollars for tuition wasn’t going to make any difference anyway. He needs stability, we said. It was the very thing we couldn’t give him, yet we said it anyway.

  David and I also had six animals to consider—five dogs and a cat. At this point, most rational people would simply have given their animals away. Then again, rational people would never have had six pets. We spent hours scanning Craigslist for farms and farmhouses that needed tenants but found nothing suitable. Plus, it seemed as if we were talking about something that was going to happen to someone else. Someone else had made a series of bad decisions. Someone else was going to lose her home. Someone else might go to jail.

  One afternoon that spring or early summer, David came to me with a proposition.

  “You’re going to have to be open-minded,” he said.

  We were standing in the kitchen, next to the stove that flashed “F4” for “power failure imminent,” as it had been doing for weeks. It needed to be fixed, but why fix a stove we were going to have to leave behind?

  “How open-minded?” I asked.

  There was a house out in the woods, he said. Well, not exactly a house. More like a cabin, really. It was over a hundred years old, and it belonged to people we knew, the family of one of David’s distant cousins.

  Here were the pros: One, the rent would be nominal, almost nonexistent. Two, we could make any changes we wanted. Three, the cabin was on fifty-three beautiful wooded acres, and we would have full use of all of that land. And, four—and this was a great selling point—just outside the front door was a towering waterfall covered in lush moss and flanked by oaks and hemlocks and flowering rhododendrons. Beneath the falls ran a cool and rocky stream.

  However, there were just a couple of minor drawbacks: The cabin was heated primarily by a wood boiler, which also heated the water. And the spring water ran into the creek before being diverted to the house and was probably safe for drinking, but it was hard to be certain because…

  “Just stop,” I said, holding up one hand. “Stop.” I leaned on the kitchen island, a mug of coffee in my hand.

  “So what do you think?” David asked.

  Light poured through the front door. Just outside, the crepe myrtles were starting to bloom. Their blossoms sagged and fell onto the front porch, creating a brilliant pink doormat. In the pasture across the street, alpacas huddled together, grazing. Listening to David describe this way-more-than-rustic cabin, I wanted to walk out the front door, past the crepe myrtles and the patches of mint and poison ivy in the front flower beds, past the basketball goal with the torn net and the cracked driveway and the pasture where a neighborhood kid liked to camp in his survival gear, past the time when we were we, and into my own, separate life.

  Maybe I could go to my grandmother’s house in Canton. Already, I was spending at least one night a week there, caring for her. I could settle into the bedroom where, as a child, I had fallen asleep to the sound of a distant train whistle and woken to the smell of bacon. Or I could go to my parents’ house, to the three-story house in the upscale neighborhood where I was raised, where the beds were always made, where the floors were scrubbed clean with vinegar, and neat rows of vacuum prints streaked the carpet, like mower imprints on a lawn. Or perhaps I could go to my brother’s house in Florida, sit by his kidney-shaped pool, soaking in the sun and buying myself some time until I could think of what to do next.

  I knew, though, that none of these options were realistic. I had pets to care for, a son to finish raising. And I had a husband who looked like a man close to his limit, and though I wasn’t even sure what that meant, I had some vague idea of what a man that desperate might do. Maybe, I told myself, maybe I can leave him later, when he is stronger. It was an ignoble thought, but it was the only way out of this mess I could see. In my mind, David was the problem. Or maybe David and I together were the problem, but in any case, if I could just get away, maybe things would be better. At least then I would always know exactly how much money I had. I would know which bills had been paid and which ones had not. I would formulate a plan that I alone would implement. Maybe then I would feel more in control of my life. Maybe things would stop happening to me, and I could start making things happen.

  Some days, I truly believed this was the solution to our problems. Other days, I was torn between wanting to leave
and believing that there might still be hope for my marriage. David and I had been married for more than twenty years. We met at a high school football game when I was just sixteen and he was eighteen. Early one morning a few weeks after we first met, David parked his blue Fiesta just across the hill from the high school. I parked my car in the lower parking lot as usual and strolled down the hallway toward my homeroom. Then, just before the first bell, I ducked out the back door and darted over the bank to where David was waiting. We drove to his grandmother’s house off Haywood Road in West Asheville. David’s grandmother had moved to a nursing home, and he lived here with a roommate, a roommate who was not home that particular day. The floorboards in the house shifted and creaked, and the house was tilted over the bank. When you stood in the kitchen, you felt like you might slide off into the yard below.

  David had worked all night the night before, and while he took a nap, I rummaged through his refrigerator. There was a twelve-pack of Budweiser, a package of hot dogs, and a loaf of Sunbeam bread. I popped open a beer and headed to the living room, where I took out a notebook and pen and began compiling notes for a story I was working on for the school newspaper.

  All morning long, I sat on David’s sofa, drinking beer, editing stories, writing. By midmorning, I had filled a spiral notebook, and I had made a large dent in David’s beer supply. I was starting to feel queasy, light-headed. Maybe I needed something to eat. But when I went into the bedroom to tell David this, he stopped me before I could speak.

  “Come here,” he said, pulling back the covers.

  And the quiet boy I had met at the football game was so confident and strong that I forgot all about how sick I felt. Later, driving me home, he would say how glad he was that I wasn’t drunk the first time we had sex, and I would laugh, amused that he didn’t know, surprised that it mattered.

  David and I dated most of my senior year, then broke up when we both moved away to attend college. There were other guys after that, including Scott, a man I met in college and was married to for a year, but there was never anyone else who understood me, who got my quirky sense of humor, who knew all my flaws and insecurities, like David did.

  Now, part of me wanted to be flexible and open-minded and easy to please—all those things David so clearly needed me to be—but the other part of me was too stunned to be generous, too weary to feign enthusiasm.

  “What do you think?” David asked again. I downed my coffee.

  “Do we have any other options?” I asked him.

  We had been fighting constantly—one endless, circular argument—about who and what was to blame. For years, during tax season, David worked sometimes seventeen, eighteen hours a day. Lately, he had begun to take on a gaunt and haunted look. He was now a specter of the man I had married, the warm, funny boy I had met when we were both teenagers, and I could only assume I looked the same to him, a stranger, an interloper in our lives. Looking at my husband’s bloodshot eyes, I felt very old, not in my early forties anymore but something far beyond forty. David stared intently at a barstool. Teeth marks from one of our puppies surrounded the leg like etchings.

  “Not really,” he said.

  I sank onto another stool and rested my head in my hands. This was not real. This was not happening to us.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “Okay. I’ll go look.”

  • • •

  Later that morning, Hester and I headed out, following David’s directions to the cabin. Turn into the plant nursery and then keep going, past all the “Private Property” signs. The gravel road was filled with potholes and mud. Sagging phone lines scraped my windshield. I passed a series of greenhouses, then piles of all the things needed to run a greenhouse—hundreds of empty plastic pots, bags of fertilizer and soil, immense plastic pipes, empty Sunkist bottles, cigarettes stubs, candy wrappers.

  Finally, I came to a sign marking the property line. There was a lone rock chimney, a bridge of sorts, the remnants of an old barn. And then the road opened into a clearing where there was a rectangular indentation, the remains of an old garden plot. A creek ran the length of the cleared property, and rhododendrons, hemlocks, oaks, and pines covered the steep banks. At the end of the gravel road, just before the house, was an old outhouse, its sides split and rotting. Just beyond that, spanning the whole side of the mountain, was a towering waterfall. The falls were partially obscured by shrubs and brush, and the flow was moderate at best. Still, it was impressive. About 150 feet tall, it cascaded over smooth rocks and moss before emptying into the creek bed.

  I pulled up and opened the door for Hester. She dove into the creek, then headed up the bank toward the waterfall, her pink nose down. Though it was still summer, it was chilly here in the hollow. I zipped my sweatshirt. David stood at the foot of the falls, his hands in his pockets, his back to me. For twenty years, David had worn the same basic outfit he was wearing right now. His uniform, the kids and I called it—khaki pants, a light blue oxford.

  “We could clear all this brush around the waterfall,” he said, “and at the top of the mountain, there are trails and an old road.”

  Just feet from the base of the waterfall, the house was set deep into the opposite bank. It was larger than I had expected—three stories tall. The porch and lower part were rock, and a row of wide windows covered the second story. One window had a long, diagonal slice through it. The tin roof was splotched with rust. Shabby chic, my friends would later call it.

  “Are we going in?” I asked David.

  He hesitated, then headed to the porch. Wasps and yellow jackets swarmed the front door and the eaves, but as we walked inside, David left the door wide open. Immediately, I understood why.

  The house had stood vacant for many years, except for the occasional brief stint by a relative of the family who owned it. It had the stale, musty stench of a house long forgotten, of mold and mildew and decay. In the coming weeks, while we were ripping out carpets and repairing walls, that thick, pungent odor would cling to my hair and permeate my clothes. I would smell it at the oddest times, when I woke in the middle of the night or when I was rounding a bend on my mountain bike. Even long after the house had been patched and scrubbed and Cloroxed, I still smelled it, and I would come to associate that scent with something akin to longing and regret.

  Though the house had some unique and distinguishing features—a front door handmade from poplar planks, a rock fireplace, handcrafted wooden kitchen cabinets, beautiful wooden bookshelves—generally, the interior was, well, collapsing. The carpet downstairs was damp and soiled. Electrical wires covered in spiderwebs dangled from the ceiling. The second floor was covered in orange shag carpet and dark paneling. The third floor had the same orange shag carpet, but it also had green camouflage carpet on the ceiling. I noted all of these things from somewhere outside my body. I was a mouse peering down from the rafters, a tree frog gripping a wooden doorframe. The taxes, the foreclosure, this broken-down cabin—all of these things were part of an elaborate ruse, an extravagant hoax, an intricate and terrible joke. I had been snatched out of my comfortable life and propelled into a world where people put carpet on their ceilings.

  “We can take that off,” David said as I surveyed the camo carpet. “No problem.”

  He watched me carefully, held my gaze for what seemed like hours. He was waiting for me to spook and run, and though I wanted more than anything to bolt out that door and sprint down the gravel drive back to my old life, I knew I couldn’t. My son would soon begin school, and though I didn’t know much right now, I knew that he needed me, and I was determined to be there for him. I had no money, no available credit, not even a decent car. No matter how I felt about this place, I realized that David was right: we had no other options.

  So we headed down to see the one dilapidated bathroom with its sagging light fixtures, rotting cabinets, a cracked sink, a cracked toilet. I was the kind of person who had three bathrooms. I had a vanity with match
ing his and her sinks, an adjacent walk-in closet, real ceramic tile. Or at least I had been that kind of person just moments before. The air pressed in on me, obstructing my breathing. My throat felt filled with mothballs. My eyes watered.

  “Do you want to go on the roof?” David asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  Upstairs, he opened a window at the top of the staircase, and I followed him outside. To the left, the waterfall spilled down the mountain. In our county, Transylvania, there were more than 250 waterfalls, and the water was often rough and tumultuous. Beauty and wildness, danger and majesty, the physical world and the hereafter lived in close harmony, and this paradox was something we locals grew up knowing. We knew how strong the undercurrent in the rivers could be, how the rocks on waterfalls were as slippery as ice, how if you tried to climb the falls, one misstep could send you plunging onto the jagged edges below. Every year, visitors to the area ignored the warning signs about the dangers of walking across the falls with often fatal consequences.

  But the waterfall at the cabin wasn’t like the other, more treacherous falls on public lands. It was narrow and slender and stretched as far as I could see, all the way to the ridge, a gentle series of mossy stair steps and cascading water flanked by rhododendrons, laurel, and ferns. Light shimmered through the pines and cast a glow on the rippling water. It was enchanting, otherworldly, a magical, mystical force. In the coming months, these falls would become the soundtrack of our lives, an ever-present, gentle crooning—a heartbeat—and whenever I was away, the sound of water—of rain spilling into creeks and rivers and oceans and dams—would act like a homing device, pulling me back to this cabin, this place that was not ours yet somehow was. Now, David and I stood side-by-side, gazing up the mountainside. Next to us, hummingbirds hung in midair.