In those moments, I could see how things could be, how they might be one day, sometime later, in the future. But after the sun had set, and David and I headed back into the house, the moment of serenity passed, and the sight of my new kitchen jolted me back to reality. Terrified that the mouse droppings were going to infect us with something deadly, I constantly, obsessively, washed my hands. Of course, this wasn’t entirely rational, since I was washing with nonpotable water—creek water, essentially.
However, my thinking at the time was something along the lines of, if I have to die alone in a secluded wooded holler, I would rather it be of giardia than hantavirus. Though neither disease sounded exactly pleasant, violent, uncontrollable diarrhea somehow sounded more appealing than hemorrhagic fever or pulmonary distress. I would be hard-pressed to justify this position now, but at the time, everything seemed relative. Instead of thinking, What color palette might be most suitable for the kitchen? I thought, Of all the various ways I might die out here, which one is slightly less terrifying, somewhat less excruciating than the others?
Finally, David installed a UV water purifier, which somewhat but not entirely eased my fears about the water. He also wanted to poison the mice, but I read that mice that are poisoned die of thirst. To a former PETA member, this seemed exceedingly cruel.
“No way!” I said. “No!”
So David devised a humane mousetrap. He rigged the trap using an empty toilet paper tube balanced on the end of the kitchen counter, half on, half off. He put peanut butter in the end that hung off the counter, and on the floor beneath the tube, a large white bucket.
The plan, David enthusiastically explained, was that the mouse would step into the toilet paper tube to get the peanut butter and subsequently be gently, humanely catapulted into the bucket where he would then jump and jump and jump—which would be a great cardio workout for him but totally harmless. The next morning, we would find him still trapped in the bucket. He would be exhausted from all that jumping but otherwise perfectly fine.
David set traps all around the house, and then we left for the night. Early the next morning, I stopped by to drop off some boxes. I pushed the front door open with one hand and shielded my eyes with the other hand. The house was utterly silent—except for a high-pitched shrill coming from the wall. At first, I thought the phone was malfunctioning. It had taken the phone company days to find the telephone lines, presumably because the wires were so deeply buried underground, but perhaps the workers didn’t know what they were doing after all.
I pressed my ear close to the wall but not on it, and the sound grew louder. It sounded like a nest of bees, only definitely not bees. I called David at work.
“Something is living in the wall at the cabin,” I said.
“Where? What does it sound like?”
“It sounds like an entire family of mice,” I said. “A big family. But it could also be the phone.”
That night, David pressed his ear to the wall, then went outside to the gas tank.
“What are you doing?” I called from the porch.
“Do you really want to know?” he called back.
And, of course, I didn’t. So I left.
A few days later, David and I stood in the tile aisle at Lowe’s. That afternoon, he had torn out the carpet in the great room downstairs and stripped the floor to the concrete. We were trying to decide what to put over that. We were also arguing about what to do about the mice that had evaded the humane traps and were still leaving droppings all over the counters. David wanted to use conventional traps, ones where the mice wouldn’t end up romping in fields of daisies after we caught them. I didn’t want them to suffer, but I didn’t want mice droppings in my toaster either.
“Look, do you want me to kill the mice or not?” David asked.
I was a hard-core animal lover. For years, I had not eaten red meat, only farm-raised poultry and sustainably sourced seafood. It seemed like bad karma to kill the mice. They had been there before us. In a way, it was as much their house as it was ours. Still, I pictured my utensil drawer, the droppings that covered every single box in the house. Then, as I stood holding a mesa beige sample in one hand and a Sedona slate cedar in the other, something deep in my ethical core snapped. The mice weren’t going to attack us. They weren’t going to stampede out of the cabinets and slaughter the weakest among us for food. Still, on some fundamental level, it felt like it had come down to me or the mice, the mice or my sanity. So I chose me.
“Fine,” I said. “Just kill them. Do whatever you have to do.”
I put the cedar sample back on the shelf, handed the mesa beige tile to David, and headed to the laminate flooring display. I was looking for something to tack down in the extra bedroom, the one where I had moved Alex’s things, carefully transposing her teenage bedroom into this one as if she might walk in, sixteen years old again and in need of all the childhood mementoes she had abandoned when she left for college—boxes of letters and cards and photos and ticket stubs mixed in with well-worn T-shirts and limp socks. What I really wanted was real hardwood flooring to cover the original wood that was warped and torn with jagged edges and large, gaping holes. But real wood was too expensive. So I perused the laminate shelves—oak, chestnut, hickory, walnut—before finally settling on a light shade of pine, on sale for eighty-seven cents per square foot.
I heaved a box over one shoulder and headed to the checkout to meet David. He carried three rolls of duct tape, a gallon of bleach, and a value pack of mousetraps. I met his gaze, then looked guiltily away. He might be a premeditating killer, but I was an accessory before the fact, a stone-cold accomplice, the Bonnie to his Clyde.
During those first weeks when we were moving, David and I were humbled by many offers of help from friends and family members. They loaned us their pickup trucks to haul furniture, brought us firewood and hot meals, helped us paint walls and tack down laminate over rotting floor boards. I knew we were incredibly lucky to have so many people to help us. I also knew that some families—in fact, some who lived very close to us, in the mountains surrounding Brevard—had always lived this way, had never known anything else. Still, I was stunned, incapable of doing much more than simply going through the motions of daily living.
At the cabin, we had no landline, no cell service, no internet, no cable, nothing to distract us. It was a strange, in-between time. Our bed was at the other house, and I kept it there as a symbol of my lack of commitment to this place. David slept in a sleeping bag on the cabin floor. Meanwhile, I packed and organized our things at the old house, and sometimes I met David at the cabin. We changed into old, paint-stained clothes in the driveway, then opened all the doors and windows and blared bluegrass from a stereo David propped on the top of the refrigerator. We painted and sweated and drank Little Hump from Highland Brewing while our dogs raced up and down the falls and in and out the open doors.
Though Asheville had dozens of breweries, more per capita than any other U.S. city, Highland Brewing was the oldest and our favorite. Named for two grassy knobs on the Appalachian Trail along the North Carolina–Tennessee border, Little Hump was an American pale ale, and it was just one of the seasonal brews on which David and I counted to mark the passage of time. In and around Asheville, beer was more than just a beverage, and we loved it in that mad, fanatical, hormonally crazed way other cities like sports teams. It was an integral part of our culture, so we drank with both wild abandon and snobbish particularity, musing over notes of cardamom and orange, waxing poetically about hints of vanilla and currants, the essence of figs. And though it may seem that beer was a ridiculous indulgence at a time when David and I could not afford to indulge, the topic of beer and all the related topics—the various aspects of brewing, the appropriate beer-food pairings, the myriad festivals and concerts happening to celebrate new releases—constituted common ground, a safe place for the conversation to go, where we were pretty certain that neither one of
us would end up crying or shouting or slamming doors.
Those nights at the cabin, we worked late, past midnight usually, and the feeling was something akin to how I felt after I ran a long distance. I was beyond tired. I was spent, empty. Empty, though, was better than desperate, stunned, shell-shocked. Empty, at this point, was a good thing.
First, I turned my attention to the enclosed front porch. I bleached and scrubbed, then organized the long row of cabinets. I placed medicines in plastic containers labeled according to ailment—cold, upset stomach, etc. I organized bags full of ink pens, Post-it Notes, colored pencils, and regular pencils. I lined stacks of graph paper beside calculators and rulers, organized bath towels according to size and color, arranged blankets according to thickness. This is not me, I thought. I am not the kind of person who puts pens in plastic bags. But I craved order, structure, some outward indication that the universe had not come undone, that my world was not spinning out of control.
And then one afternoon, when I was at the old house, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the front door. Of course, this was not the first time this had happened, but now the deputy had news that was shocking even to me: David had borrowed money—a few thousand dollars—without discussing it with me or even telling me. And since he had failed to repay the loan, he was now being subpoenaed to appear in court.
After the deputy left, I drove to the cabin, where David was working. The door to the house was open. David stood in the unfinished kitchen. He looked up at me, and instantly, he knew I knew. Neither of us said a word. Outside, a steady rain began, then quickly became a downpour. Above us, hail pummeled the tin roof like artillery fire. I did not ask why he had borrowed the money. In fact, I did not even think to ask.
Instead, I said, “I am only coming here for my son.”
David’s khakis and gray T-shirt were covered in dirt and paint. He had lost weight in the last weeks, and his pants hung off his waist.
“That’s okay,” he said. “That’s all I ask. That you give this a try.”
I hadn’t slept well in days. Our other house had boxes everywhere. This house had boxes everywhere, boxes now sprinkled with mouse droppings. I took a beer from the refrigerator and popped it open with the opener on my key chain. David stared at the floor and shriveled into himself.
“I don’t trust you,” I said.
“I know,” he said, shrinking, retracting.
I wanted him to tell me that this would get better, that one day this would all seem a little bit funny—sad, but funny too. I wanted him to tell me I wouldn’t get E. coli from the drinking water or hantavirus from the mice, that the wood boiler wouldn’t spontaneously combust, that he could humanely trap the completely benign yet somehow still terrifying wolf spider from the area just above his desk. Instead, he stared at the floor.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “You don’t get to be the victim. I am the victim here.”
“Okay,” he said, looking up, his eyes the color of clay. “Okay.”
Heavy rain pelted the stone porch and sprayed in the open doorway. Just beyond the porch, the waterfall surged. I grabbed my rain jacket from the counter where I had left it the night before, pulled the hood over my head, and ran for my car. Winding around the dark mountain roads, the car ensconced in thick fog, I shook so violently, I could barely drive. My husband had been hiding things from me. And while at the time that seemed like the overriding and most pressing truth, later I would realize another, simultaneous truth: my husband did not trust me either. If he had, he would have told me about the money. If he had, he would have told me how bad things were sooner. At least he would have tried.
I could see the problems. I just could not see a way to fix them, so I did the only thing I knew to do, the same thing I had done years before when I had left Scott: I simply kept going. I focused on the tasks at hand, on grading papers and teaching my classes at the college, on packing and dropping off boxes of old toys and games at Goodwill, on making sure Eli was fed and rested, on maintaining a cheery tone when I talked with my older two children on the phone. Only my two closest friends knew how devastated I was, how very close I came to walking away from David and never going back. This was not all his fault, of course. I shared some of the blame. Still, I could not see around this problem or through it, could not envision a way to repair the damage to our relationship, could not imagine an us after this.
Taco Soup
•1 pound ground turkey
•1 small onion, chopped
•2 cloves garlic, minced
•1 1/2 cups water or chicken broth
•3 (16-ounce) cans beans—a combination of black, pinto, kidney, navy, and/or great northern beans, drained and rinsed
•3 (14 1/2-ounce) cans canned tomatoes, diced, stewed, pureed, or fire-roasted
•1 (15 1/2-ounce) can hominy, drained, or 1 cup fresh or frozen corn
•1 (4-ounce) can chopped green chilies
•1 package taco seasoning
•Salt and pepper to taste
•Grated cheese (cheddar or Monterey Jack)
•Sour cream
•Tabasco or chipotle sauce
Sauté the turkey, chopped onion, and garlic in a large soup pot. Drain fat, if necessary. Add chicken broth, beans, tomatoes, corn, chilies, and taco seasoning. Simmer for at least an hour. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with grated cheese, sour cream, and plenty of hot sauce. Since hot foods increase your endorphin levels, the more distressed you are, the more hot sauce you will need.
Chapter Five
One evening in August, David and I sat on the front porch drinking Gaelic Ale from Highland Brewing and watching Eli clear the brush along the waterfall. Slender, dark-eyed, and introverted, Eli reminded me more of the men in my family than the men in David’s family. Wearing long pants and boots and wielding a large swordlike tool, Eli whacked at the bushes obscuring our view of the waterfall. Every now and then, I called to him to be careful, but he couldn’t hear me over the falls, so finally, I stopped shouting and just watched.
Since I had first told him about our move, explaining as best I could about the foreclosure, he had said very little about it other than to ask practical questions—Should I take this or that? Which bedroom will be mine? Ultimately, he claimed the top floor of the cabin—the space with two bedrooms, a beautiful view of the waterfall, and access to the roof. In his free time, when he wasn’t at school or working his part-time job at the movie theater or hanging out with his girlfriend, he was into making movies—writing scripts, filming, editing, making props, and so on—and since I had told him about the move, he had been working to convert the spare bedroom upstairs into a makeshift studio. He painted the walls bright mauve, a cheery, optimistic shade, and he added a green screen and editing and sound equipment. He was doing what we all were doing, groping at what was familiar, trying to make this run-down cabin feel like home.
Watching him slash the brush, I thought of the boy he had been just moments before, all wide-eyed and creative and mischievous, and I wondered how he might remember this moment when he was grown. Would he think back and realize that David and I had done our best, that we had made mistakes but that we had loved our children as hard as we could? Or would he judge us more harshly and wonder how his parents had become so hopelessly lost, so utterly fucked up? I simply had no idea. David and I hadn’t done a lot of talking lately, and we weren’t really talking now. Still, we were here together, on the porch.
“Where is the top?” I asked David. “The very top?”
He pointed to the peak of the mountain, where, through the bushes, at the very top of the ridge, as far up as I could see, the water spilled down the mountainside.
“Let’s climb it,” I said.
“The waterfall?”
“Yes.”
David looked at me hard for a minute. He knew this was a concession on my part, though
what I was conceding would have been hard to say. His T-shirt and jeans were covered in paint and sweat. I was dressed for my book club meeting later that evening—Chacos, corduroys, a better-than-usual shirt.
“Okay,” he said.
Though “The Land of Waterfalls” is our county’s official motto, locals have a twist on the saying: “The Land Where the Water Falls.” It is our own inside joke, our way of acknowledging one of the few constants in our lives—water. It rains a lot here, especially in the summer months when thick thunderclouds roll over the mountains, bringing us almost daily deluges of hail and rain and strong winds. Transylvania County between seventy and ninety inches of rain per year, far above the national average.
One would hardly think that this sort of weather would attract tourists, but in fact, our waterfalls are frequent tourist destinations. People flock to the most popular spots to photograph the falls and to swim. Looking Glass Falls, Rainbow Falls, and Turtleback Falls in Pisgah National Forest and Triple Falls, High Falls, Hooker Falls, Bridal Veil Falls in DuPont State Forest are among the most popular spots. Parts of The Last of the Mohicans and The Hunger Games were filmed in DuPont, and tourists can now pay to ride into the forest on buses and see the site where Katniss, all ablaze, plunged into the icy water near Bridal Veil Falls. The more adventurous tourists strap cameras to their heads and tear down Ridgeline Trail on mountain bikes at breakneck speeds. Sometimes, they do it at night—with headlamps, GoPros, and a strong dose of courage or recklessness, depending on how you look at it.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 6
