Call Of The Loon
1. Tea
Chapter 1
Tea
When Tea was accepted into the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, she didn’t foresee spending her graduation on the hardwood floor of her empty apartment in Chicago.
She also didn’t expect there to be a global pandemic.
No one did.
She cursed herself for not waiting one more day for that couch pickup.
After she sold off the last of her furniture—“sold” being a loose term, seeing as she gave away her belongings for free on Facebook Marketplace to anyone brave enough to pick them up during a pandemic—she realized that she had nowhere to sleep, or even to sit, as she watched the dean give his commencement speech at a podium in an empty classroom, under flickering fluorescent lights on Zoom.
A bed of her thickest blankets laid out in the middle of the floor was certainly not ideal, but none of her situation was ideal either.
Like the rest of the world, she had to learn how to roll with it when the world went into lockdown in March.
But now, sitting on the oak floor, wearing her old cap and gown from her undergrad graduation two years earlier, Tea concluded that she was very much done rolling with it.
Times are tough, graduates.
We know that the road ahead will not be an easy one.
You are entering a market that is uncertain.
Will we ever sit in an office again?
Will we always have to wear our masks?
Is this officially our new normal?
She sighed. “This is depressing.”
Mom leaned forward, her face filling Tea’s phone screen that was propped up by a plastic DePaul University cup next to her laptop, and blew on the plastic party blower that was dangling from her lips.
Tea sighed again.
Mom removed the party blower, pinching it between her fingers like it was a cigarette.
“Cheer up, my cute little cup of Tea. You graduated business school! Not everyone can say that.”
“But what’s the point if I can’t even find a job?” she grumbled.
“A fancy degree means literally nothing if you don’t have experience.”
“You have a lifetime ahead of you to get experience. Just because your internship was canceled this spring doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities down the road.”
It was the same pep talk she was used to, but in a different shade of blue.
The two of them had engaged in similar versions of the same conversation for months now.
When Tea received the email that the internship program at Bank of America would be put on hold for the foreseeable future, she hyperventilated and called her mom.
She sat in her apartment, alone ever since her roommates left to “ride this thing out” in the suburbs with their parents and never returned, and ugly cried.
Dribbles-of-snot-running-down-her-nose, using-her-forearm-because-she-was-too-distraught-to-grab-tissues kind of ugly crying.
Her mom was patient and warm as she listened despite her clear exhaustion—she’d just finished a grueling nineteen-hour shift at the hospital.
Thirty minutes after that phone call, Tea had been bulldozed by guilt.
There she was, crying over a silly little internship, while her mother spent every possible minute she could muster at Saint Peter’s in New Brunswick, working as hard as she could to prevent people from dying.
But Mom liked to give her these pep talks, and Tea liked hearing her voice.
Seven hundred and ninety miles felt too far, and that distance was only going to grow wider this summer.
Tea pulled at a loose string on her robe as she mumbled, “And a summer spent at Silver Falls is going to get me closer to those opportunities?” She tried to tone down the bitterness in her voice, but it was getting harder with each passing day.
Especially since she hadn’t hugged her mom since Christmas.
“I don’t think anyone is going to question why you have a gap of undeclared time off on your résumé after graduation,” Mom replied.
“I think a lot of résumés are going to look that way after all of this.”
Tea hugged her legs close to her chest, resting a cheek on her knees, her wavy red hair cascading down her legs.
“Yeah. I just hate not knowing what comes next.”
“None of us do,” Mom answered quietly.
The two of them watched the rest of the ceremony in silence, listening as the dean of the business school rattled off all of the names of the MBA students.
When he reached Theresa Richards, Mom blew hard on the party blower.
Enough to make Tea smile.
When the ceremony ended, she closed her laptop, eyeing the apartment she’d called home for the past two years.
“It feels weird to have my entire life packed up in one car,” she admitted.
“None of this seems real.”
“I’m still impressed you were able to get rid of everything,” Mom quipped.
“Think of it this way, you could go anywhere after this. Anywhere. ”
“The only place I want to be is home with you.”
Mom let out a heavy sigh in response.
“You know it wouldn’t be safe. I’m in and out of the hospital all the time—”
“I really wouldn’t mind,” Tea interrupted.
“I’m willing to take the chance.”
“Your grandparents are really… really excited to see you.”
“And I’m excited to see them, but—”
“Go to Minnesota and have a normal summer. Maybe by this fall we’ll have a vaccine and everything will settle down. You can come back to New Jersey and find a job in the city like you wanted, and life will feel a little more normal again.”
Tea exhaled, a piece of her hair falling across her face.
“Do you really think things could be over by then?”
Mom was silent for a beat too long.
It made her stomach curl.
“I don’t know what to think,” she finally answered.
“But we’ll figure it out, okay? We take this one day at a time.”
“Okay,” Tea said, more of a reassurance for her mother than herself.
Because right now, with all her belongings stuffed into her back seat and no life plan to count on, Tea certainly did not feel okay.
After she hung up, Tea did one last scan of the apartment.
When she first made the move, it didn’t take long to conclude that Chicago would not be forever.
Two years of study, then she would head back home to New Jersey.
To her mom. To the little life they created after everything fell apart.
The idea of leaving Mom alone out there left tight knots in her stomach.
She stopped in the kitchen, pressing her hands into the cool counter, and took a deep breath.
One day at a time, she reminded herself.
We take this one day at a time.
Her roommates had collected all of their things weeks earlier, informing Tea that they would be giving up the lease in July.
Tea expected as much; they were nice, but their interactions were always cordial, business-like.
She’d been the third last-minute roommate they found on Craigslist, someone to pay for the tiny room with the sliding door next to the kitchen.
She didn’t care. She was there to get her degree and get out.
Her room was merely a place for her to fit a cheap twin bed so she could sleep.
It wasn’t the kind of space she planned on inviting a guy into.
With everything she and Mom had been through over the last eight years, inviting men into her bedroom was a very rare occurrence.
Her phone pinged on the counter.
Nan
Let us know when you’re on the road!
Panic trickled up her neck.
She rubbed the back of it as she closed out of her texts and opened up Google Maps, typing in the address for Wild Pines Resort.
She expected traffic getting out of the city, but her itinerary was still the same.
Eight hours and forty-seven minutes of traffic-free roads.
No rush hour or construction or any other holdup that typically occurred during a drive up to the lake.
Everyone was at home, still hunkered down, maybe out enjoying some of the warm June sunshine at a respectable social distance of six feet.
She curled her hands into fists as she stared at her destination on the tiny screen.
Silver Falls, Minnesota.
It used to be her favorite place in the whole world.
She could still taste her palpable excitement when she thought about climbing into a fully packed SUV on the last day of school.
Kayaks and paddleboards strapped to the hood as the three of them endured the twenty plus–hour road trip up to Minnesota.
But when three suddenly became two, summers at the lake no longer had that same air of shiny hope.
They lingered as haunted memories, reminders of everything good she’d had and quickly lost. When Gareth Richards died, Tea and her mom never went back.
Instead of spending summers paddleboarding in the lake or eating Nan’s spinach artichoke dip, Mom downsized their house in Morristown to a smaller apartment in New Brunswick.
Tea attended Rutgers close by, and the two spent their summers in between semesters traveling into Manhattan.
They saw every Broadway show, ate greasy slices of pizza, and enjoyed lazy afternoons reading under the shade of the great American elms in Central Park.
Those summers in the city were vastly different from any other summer Tea could remember, and she was thankful for it.
Thankful to create new memories and not have to face her old ones.
Until this summer. Until she had nowhere else to go.
Mom was the one who suggested it at first. A summer in Silver Falls wouldn’t be so bad , she’d explained.
Timidly, like she was approaching a bear in hibernation and contemplating poking it awake.
Think about it. Open air, lots of space, Nan’s casseroles, fishing with Pop.
Sailing. You used to love sailing .
I only loved it because of who I was with , Tea had snipped back.
She knew she was being cruel with the way she was digging it in.
But maybe being cruel would make Mom change her mind.
Make her concede, and finally tell her she could go back home to Jersey.
But she never did, and now she was looking at a nine-hour road trip—with nothing but her three bulging suitcases and a snake plant to keep her alert.
The time on her phone said 10:13.
Thankfully an early graduation ceremony meant an early start on the road, and a chance to catch her first Minnesota sunset in over eight years.
The last time she saw the sun set over the lake, she was with all of her friends—the ones she hadn’t spoken to since everything happened with her father.
Riley. Quentin. Deanna.
Austin.
Archer.
She picked up her phone and tapped out a message, not letting the onslaught of familiar nerves convince her to recalibrate the destination on her phone and drive back east.
Tea
Leaving now!
Hoping to get there by sunset.
:)
She shrugged off her graduation gown, shoved it in her tote bag, and walked out the front door.
As she hopped into her 2005 Chevy Classic and turned the ignition, giving the dashboard a love tap when the old thing revved to life, she did her best not to think about the last time she saw Archer Vincent.