Sunshine Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "You've had several visitors," she said to Austin. "Did they tell you?"

  He shrugged.

  "And of course old Alastor has been worried."

  That perked him up. "Alastor?"

  She sat in the chair next to the bed and told him all about it. How Alastor had waited at his camp for him to come back, and how they had brought the dog back to town. How he had some aspirin now for his arthritic joints, and a new collar with his name spelled out in bling. And how the Rios boys had spoiled him and how he'd enjoyed rolling on the lawn at their cottage.

  "He's better off now," Austin said solemnly.

  "No. He isn't. He's still waiting for you." She told him about how Alastor would look up expectantly every time someone came in, then deflate when he realized it wasn't his boy.

  "You have a lot of people—and your dog—rooting for you."

  He said a curse word at that, then blushed. "Sorry, Miss," he said.

  "It's not the first time I've heard that," she said mildly.

  He sat back, as if reminded of her "me, too" when he'd told her about his past.

  "Right," he said cynically. "You're just like me." He motioned to the wall mural with its happy beach scene. "You believe this garbage."

  "Believe it?" she said. "What do you mean?"

  He glared at the sunny picture. "You think that junk is real. It's all fake."

  "What's fake about it?"

  "You think it never rains in Pajaro Bay? You think it's always a pretty summer day?"

  "Of course not. People have problems here, too. We're all just muddling through, trying to do our best."

  "You're not muddling," he muttered.

  She laughed out loud. "You think that? You think I have a clue what I'm doing?"

  "It looks easy."

  "Everyone's life looks easy from the outside."

  But he shook his head. He glared at the mural, as if the seashells and sunshine offended him. "It's a lie."

  "What is?"

  "All of it. Life isn't that. It's dark and dirty and ugly. People pretend to care, but they don't. The world is a bad place."

  "You think so?" She used to think so, too. But being here, in Pajaro Bay, she'd seen that beach, seen the sunny smiles from people who truly treated each other decently and wanted the world to be like that. She told Austin so, but he didn't believe her.

  "Nobody cares what happens to anybody else."

  "I care what happens to you."

  "No. You don't. I'm ugly and you know it."

  He was a cute boy. A boy a teen girl like Mena could fall in love with. But there was no use saying that. He wasn't talking about appearance. "You think your true self is so ugly no one could love you as you truly are. But that's not so," she said to him—said it to herself, too. "It's not a scarlet letter, Austin. You can start over no matter what mistakes you've made. No one is beyond redemption."

  He didn't believe that, either.

  "Why not?" she asked.

  "You wouldn't get it."

  "We're back to that?" she said. "I thought we'd already settled that you're not going to shock me."

  "So you can fake it better than the rest of them," he said. It was the scene on the stairs again, him desperately rejecting the lifeguard trying to pull him to shore.

  "I'm not faking anything. I get it. I understand how you try to stay alive. Try to find your way. And you take wrong turns. And the world outside doesn't care. It doesn't matter if you live or die to the big world outside. You're just like—"

  "—like a rat in an alley," he said.

  "Yeah," she said. "And you fight it. You try to figure out how to get by from day to day. You grab onto some thread of survival and you hold on by your fingernails. And then you get tired and you wonder if you should just let go and stop trying. Just stop fighting to stay alive. Just let it all go. It's like you're swimming against the current and you feel it pulling you under and you just think—"

  "—just go ahead and drown," he said. "Then the pain will stop."

  "Yeah. Your low point was two days ago. Mine was four months ago."

  He still looked doubtful.

  So she said it, straight out: "I was a prostitute. My sister turned me out when I was seventeen. There were a lot of men. And I just did it. I had wanted to finish high school. To go on to college, and to do other things with my life. But my family said no. I was a hooker. That was what I was supposed to be. Turn tricks and pay the rent for the family and don't dare to dream of anything else. And I believed the world was that way. I believed it was normal to live like that. That was reality, and any other way of life was a lie."

  He nodded.

  "Four months ago," she said. "I was in a jail cell. And I saw a girl just like me. I watched her give up. I watched her choose to die. I knew it would happen to me. Soon. I just wouldn't be able to keep going."

  "You're gonna let the water take you down," he whispered.

  "Yeah. I knew I was drowning. I knew it in my gut. I knew I was going to die. It was a sure thing. And what scared me was that I didn't even care."

  "But how did you—?"

  "—End up here?" She smiled. "Someone held out his hand. Offered me a way out. Somebody showed me how that was real." She nodded to the sunny wall painting. "It's not fake, Austin. It's a real world, just a different one."

  She stood up and held out her hand to him.

  He sat there for a long time, looking at her.

  Then he reached out and took her hand.

  Logan watched Teresa walking down the stairs from her office at the end of the workday.

  "So?" she asked when she got to the open doorway of his office. She had her sweater and purse, and was ready to go out to a romantic dinner at Feuille d'automne, just like he'd promised.

  "I've got to cancel tonight," he said quickly. He stood with his arms crossed protectively in front of him.

  She looked startled. His tone of voice must not be neutral enough, so he tried again.

  "My parents called. Need me to do something tonight. Sorry about that."

  "Oh," she said, looking disappointed. "Are they okay?"

  "Sure," he said quickly. "They're fine. Just. You know. Parents."

  He put a hand up on the door frame, leaned casually against it.

  "Another time?" she asked.

  "Sure," he said. "Another time." She still looked confused, but he tried to make his face impassive, neutral.

  He watched her, trying to see it. The truth peeking through her façade.

  She turned to leave, and he was struck again by how pretty she was, by how much he had been attracted to her from the start. How she had charmed him from the moment they'd met. How she had seemed smart, and funny, and with a good heart.

  Like a hooker with a heart of gold. He felt himself almost choke and had to fight the urge to call her a stinking liar to her face.

  He stood in the doorway of his office and listened to the sound of her heels on the polished oak floor as she went down the hall to the front door, let herself out, shut it behind her, left him all alone in the community center.

  He found he was gripping the door frame so hard his fingers were going numb. He went in his office.

  He had kissed her. He had allowed himself to think she was someone special, someone he could fall in love with. He rubbed at his lips, feeling disgust at the thought of how he had brushed his lips over hers.

  She had seemed so nice. So normal.

  The words she'd said in the hospital room echoed in his head. All those things she had done, the horrible world she'd come from. All the secrets she had told Austin, thinking no one else was there, no one else heard her confession.

  She had told the boy everything. All about their shared experience. The things she had seen. The things she had done with men. So many men—no, he couldn't think of that. If he did, and then thought of walking her home and holding her hand like she was the sweet girl he was falling in love with, thought of the thrill he'd felt when he'd looked up at t
he balcony and seen her there in the moonlight like a dream. While all the while she had been faking everything, lying about who she was and where she came from—

  No. He wasn't going to think of it.

  He felt dirty, knowing he had kissed her, knowing how many others had—

  No. He wasn't going to think of it.

  He went over to his cluttered desk. Picked up his coffee cup. He should take it to the kitchen. Should wash it out, dry it, put it back in its spot to be ready when he came to work tomorrow morning.

  He threw it at the fireplace.

  It smashed against the tiles.

  He watched the ceramic pieces scatter across the hearth. Watched the dregs of the coffee drip down the picture of his mother, his perfect, angelic child of a mother, a little girl all in pink in the sunshine of a perfect summer day. Now covered in filth. Dirty with the stain of the dregs.

  He was shaking. He picked up a binder on his desk, thick with plans for expanding the youth center programs.

  He threw that, too. Watched it hit the wood-paneled wall with a thud. Watched the papers break loose from the binding and scatter on the floor.

  His arm swept across the desktop. Taking the stacks of work, plans, hopes, dreams for everything he was trying to do, and throwing them all over the office.

  The guest chair. She had sat in that chair. Crossed her legs daintily. Put her hands on the arms. Sat and talked with him about her life. Her fake life, with her father who taught her to read like she was some sweet girl who liked books and didn't sell herself on the street to any ugly person who gave her cold hard cash—

  He kicked the chair, and it went over, its cushion coming off and landing up against the boxes.

  He picked up the chair frame and—

  "How long do you think this will take?" a calm voice said.

  He turned.

  It was Jack Payson.

  He was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, watching with what almost appeared to be amusement.

  Logan lowered the chair back to the floor. "What?"

  "I was just wondering if I have time to do my final rounds and lock all the doors first, or if you'll be ready to start cleaning up in here soon?"

  "I—" Logan said, at a loss.

  "I mean, I would hate to interrupt you in the middle of throwing a temper tantrum. Maybe I should give you another five minutes?"

  Logan covered his face with his hands.

  "You all done, boy?" the old man asked.

  He wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. "Yeah. I'm done. It's passed."

  He looked around at the wreckage he'd caused with his little temper tantrum. "What a mess."

  "Yup," Jack said. "But you didn't break anything irreplaceable."

  Jack picked up the waste basket and began to gather broken items and put them in.

  Logan began picking up the pieces of the smashed coffee mug. Jack handed him a rag and he wiped the coffee off the fireplace tiles.

  His mother's face had a gouge in it where the tile had been cracked by the mug. "I ruined it," he said.

  Jack came over to see the damage. "Not necessarily," he said, running one grimy finger over the tilework. "Perfection is highly overrated."

  "It's one of a kind. And I broke it because I can't keep my temper." He shook his head. "There's no excuse. I'll have to tell the board what I did."

  "Not necessarily," the janitor repeated. "I don't think anyone's seen the fireplace yet, except us. Who's to say it wasn't like that already. I heard the jerk who owned this place broke a bunch of stuff."

  "When he kicked his daughter out and then killed himself," Logan said. "Yeah. That was my grandfather." He ran his finger over the gouge in the tile. "Maybe I take after him."

  "You ain't planning on doing yourself in?" Jack asked.

  "Of course not. But I shouldn't have lost my temper." He stood up straight. "Hand me another rag, will you?"

  He took it and finished wiping off the tile. Then he took the broom and dustpan Jack handed him and bent down to sweep up the remaining smaller pieces of the mug.

  They worked in silence for a while, and Logan concentrated on cleaning, and on not thinking about anything at all.

  Finally they finished putting everything back where it was supposed to be.

  "Looks better than before," Jack pointed out.

  "I guess," Logan said.

  "It's none of my business," Jack said. "But I don't suppose you'd like to tell me what all this is about."

  "It doesn't matter," Logan said.

  Jack looked around the room. "Right. Doesn't matter."

  "The girl I thought I liked turned out to be a whore," he blurted out, then stammered and tried to take it back. "That's not—don't tell anyone—I shouldn't have said—"

  Jack raised an eyebrow at him. "What do you take me for? I wouldn't spread a filthy lie like that around."

  "It's not a lie," Logan said quietly.

  "Whore is a harsh word, and not something you should ever say about a lady."

  "It's the real word," Logan said. "She's a prostitute."

  "Really?" Jack said mildly. "She's turning tricks in the library?"

  "Of course not," Logan said. "I mean, she used to be. She did that before she came here."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because she said so. Not to me. I heard her tell someone else." He confessed, "I was eavesdropping. But I didn't mean to. I was at the clinic, and I overheard her and the boy talking, and so I stopped and listened to what they were saying. It wasn't deliberate eavesdropping."

  "Oh, well, that makes it okay then," Jack said sarcastically. "Why did she tell him that about herself?"

  "Because she was trying to help the boy."

  "The one who OD'd? She was trying to reach him? And so she told him something to make him not feel so alone?"

  "When you put it that way…." Logan said, feeling ashamed.

  "I put it the way it is." Jack gathered up the dirty rags and set them in the hall outside the door. "The point is, you overheard something you had no right to listen to."

  "I know. But I'm glad I found out."

  "Glad." Jack looked at the over-filled trash can and pile of dirty rags. "Yeah. It was a good thing."

  "Yes. It's a good thing. I needed to know that she's not the girl for me before I fell for her. You're right. I shouldn't have reacted the way I did. She was trying to help him. And her past doesn't mean she shouldn't work here or anything. So don't tell anyone. It doesn't affect her ability to do her job."

  "Right," Jack said blandly.

  "But of course it's over between us." He ran his hand through his hair. He would have to eventually face her, but any personal relationship was over. That was clear.

  "Do you know why?" Jack asked.

  "Why it's over between us? Are you joking?"

  "Why she was a prostitute."

  "I didn't stay to ask. What difference does it make?"

  Jack picked up the trash can and took it out to place it next to the pile of rags in the hall. "Must be nice," he said.

  "What?"

  "Being perfect. Being judge and jury of other people. Maybe you should go sit up top in that tower and look down on the whole town if you're so much better than the rest of us."

  That's what Teri had said to him when he had been disgusted after Austin's confession. She was compassionate and patient with the boy because she knew there was a story. There's always a story, she had said. Nobody does things for no reason.

  "She must have a story, too," Jack pointed out when he told him what Teri had said. "She must have reasons for her choices, too."

  "How did you get so smart?" he asked the old man.

  "I'm not smart," he said. "I've just had more time to make mistakes."

  "And learn from them."

  "Maybe." He looked around. "It looks pretty good. I'm knocking off now. Unless you want to smash something else?"

  Logan chuckled. "No. I'm done wrecking things for the day."

  "Go
od." Jack headed for the door. "Son, don't ever throw away anything you might later wish you'd held onto."

  Chapter Sixteen

  The fog was thick by the time Teresa walked home. This wouldn't be a night to go out to the cliff to watch the sunset. She'd be lucky to find her apartment in the mist.

  Logan had acted so strange. She wondered if there was a problem at home. Everything had seemed fine last night, but maybe one of the boys was sick. She had forgotten to ask him how Alastor was doing. Maybe the dog was being difficult. She'd better volunteer to take him off their hands in the morning.

  The streets were quiet, and her footsteps seemed muffled by the fog. Most people passing her were bundled up and rushing home, with dew glistening in their hair and their hands thrust into their jacket pockets to keep warm as they hurried past.

  She was bundled up, too. She had her blue-and-white striped sweater buttoned up to her neck, ignoring how it clashed with her flowered dress, but it still wasn't warm enough. She was going to need to buy a parka if the winter in Pajaro Bay was like this.

  The three old men had long since left the bench in front of Santos' by the time she got there. She had leftover sopa de peixe in her little fridge, so she didn't need to stop in to buy anything.

  She paused on the first step up to her apartment. She recognized the shivering figure heading down the street in her direction.

  "Mena," she called out.

  The girl came over to her. "Hi," she said, a bit reluctantly. Her little pixie haircut was even cuter wet from the fog. It had turned curly, and the damp tendrils all around her face gave her even more of an elfin look.

  "Have you been to the clinic?" Teresa asked. "Did you see Austin?"

  Her face lit up. "He played his guitar for me." She was glowing, even with her nose getting a bit red from the chill. "He's going to live. Really."

  Unless he relapses, she thought. But didn't say it. Let the kid have hope.

  But she wasn't that naive after all. "He had a sobriety meeting with the doctor. Said he's going to try."

  "That's such good news," Teresa said.

  "Austin said you told him to take hands when they're offered to him. So Dr. Nico offered him a hand."

  "Good for him."

  Mena started to walk away, but Teresa asked, "What about you, Mena? Are you all right?"