Chapter Three
The drive to Larkspur Falls takes three and a half hours if you don’t stop, which we never manage, and closer to five with two children and a rest-stop economy that runs almost entirely on the availability of clean bathrooms and the promise of gas-station donuts.
I’d made the drive a hundred times in twenty years, alone, with Rhys, with a car full of expedition gear bound for a training weekend, and never once, until Day Three, with a trunk full of the children’s whole lives packed into suitcases and four hard drives I hadn’t mentioned to anyone riding underneath them.
Wyatt asked, forty minutes in, whether we were moving to Grandpa Wade’s, in the flat, testing voice of a ten-year-old who has learned that adults answer easier questions more honestly than the real one.
“We’re going to stay a while,” I told him, watching the road instead of the rearview mirror, because I have found, across a decade of parenting, that children answer more honestly themselves when you’re not looking directly at them either.
“Long enough to see him properly, and to help fix up the lodge some. Your dad’s got the press tour, so it’s a good window. ”
“Is that why you and Dad were being weird?” This from Birdie, who at seven has a gift for locating the actual question underneath a diversionary one that I’ve come to find both useful and unnerving.
“We’re not being weird,” I said, which even Birdie, from the back seat, in a booster she was two months from outgrowing, did not appear to believe. “We’re figuring some things out. That’s allowed. Grown-ups are allowed to figure things out.”
“Is it about the movie,” Wyatt said, not a question, and I understood, hearing it land flat like that, that my ten-year-old had watched the same four seconds I had, at some point, on somebody’s phone at school, because ten-year-olds do not miss things the way the rest of the world assumes they do.
“Some of it’s about the movie,” I said. “Some of it’s about a lot of things that were already true before the movie.
I’ll tell you more when I understand it better myself, I promise, but right now I mostly need you to trust that I’m handling it.
” It was, I think, the first fully honest sentence I’d managed to either of my children in three days, and it cost me something to say out loud that I still, at that point, only half understood.
We stopped a little past the halfway mark at a gas station I’d used a hundred times over twenty years of this same drive, same faded awning, same handwritten sign about the restroom code that had been taped to the same door since before Wyatt was born.
I filled the tank, checked the tire pressure out of the same reflex that makes me check a rope before I trust it, and bought both kids a donut each, which Birdie ate with the grave, methodical focus she brings to anything involving frosting, and Wyatt mostly disassembled, layer by layer, in a way that would have driven Rhys mildly, fondly crazy — he liked things eaten the way they were built, start to finish, no editorializing — and that I found, that afternoon, exactly the kind of small, specific difference between us I hadn’t let myself notice in years.
A man who wants a thing consumed the way it was made.
A boy who wants to understand it first, in pieces, before he decides whether he agrees with how someone else put it together.
I filed that thought away next to the others I wasn’t ready to look at directly yet, and got both kids buckled back in, and drove.
We crossed into Larkspur Falls county a little before four, past the sign that’s been repainted twice in my lifetime and still says GATEWAY TO THE RANGE in the same optimistic navy blue, past the diner and the hardware store and the church with the crooked steeple nobody’s ever gotten around to fixing, and I felt the town arrive the way you feel altitude — not all at once, but in a series of small, cumulative pressures, each storefront a fact I had a relationship with whether I wanted one or not.
This is not, whatever the postcards at the general store might suggest, a town that hands you a soft landing simply because you were born in it.
Larkspur Falls remembers everything — who left, who came back broke, whose father’s business went under while he was too proud or too sick to say so out loud — and it keeps a ledger nobody can see but everyone somehow knows the balance of.
Dot at the post office would know I was back within the hour.
The Hendersons, who’d run the general store since before I was born, would have an opinion about it by dinner.
I had left this town at twenty-two with a broke climber and a duffel bag, and I had come back at forty-two with two children, a career the town only half understood, and a marriage the whole town was about to have an opinion on whether I wanted it to or not.
I stopped for gas again at the station on Main, closer now than I needed to be, mostly because the kids wanted the bathroom and I wasn’t ready yet for the lodge, and Gary Petrov, who has run that station since I was in high school, came out from behind the register the second the bell over the door rang and said, “Hollis Marsh,” in the tone people in Larkspur Falls have used on me for twenty years — not unkind, exactly, but carrying a story I hadn’t written and couldn’t fully edit.
“Heard you married that climber boy your dad used to train for free. Big documentary fella now, isn’t he.
Saw a poster for it at the multiplex over in Meridian.
” I told him yes, that was the one, and watched him do the math the whole town would eventually do — the girl who left with a broke climber twenty years ago had apparently married someone the multiplex in the next county over knew how to advertise, which around here counts as a kind of fame, and also, in the same breath, as a kind of leaving that never gets fully forgiven.
“Your dad’s proud of you,” Gary said, which I understood was meant kindly, and which also told me, in four words, exactly whose name this town still attached to my accomplishments after twenty years — not mine.
? ? ?
Marsh Basecamp sits fifteen minutes outside town proper, at the end of a gravel spur road my grandfather cut himself with a rented grader in 1961, and the first thing I saw, coming around the last bend, was the sign — MARSH BASECAMP, OUTFITTING & TRAINING SINCE 1961, the same hand-routed cedar sign my father had rehung himself after a windstorm knocked it down the year I turned sixteen — hanging a few degrees off level, one corner sun-bleached almost white, the other still holding a ghost of the forest green it had been painted the last time anyone painted it.
Half the bunkhouse windows were boarded.
The gear shed’s roof had a blue tarp lashed over one corner that had clearly been up through at least two winters, based on how thoroughly the wind had worked its edges loose.
The main lodge itself still stood square and solid — my grandfather built things to outlast opinions about them — but even from the car I could see the porch rail had a lean to it that hadn’t been there at Christmas, and the whole property had the quiet of a place that has stopped expecting anyone.
“It’s smaller than I remember,” Wyatt said, which was, I thought, an almost unbearably precise thing for a ten-year-old to say about a building that hadn’t changed size at all since the last time he’d stood in front of it.
“Everything is, when you’re not seven anymore,” I said, and got out of the car into air that smelled like woodsmoke and river silt and the cold-green scent of a place fifteen hundred feet higher than the one we’d left that morning, and stood there a moment longer than I needed to, doing the thing I do instead of anything else with a feeling too large to name yet: I started an inventory.
Roof, porch, boarded windows, the gear shed’s tarp.
A building doesn’t stop being triaged just because you love it.
I let the kids run the length of the porch while I let myself into the main lodge with the key I’d carried on my ring for twenty years without ever once needing it, and stood in the doorway a moment adjusting to the dim.
The great room still held the same long trestle table my grandfather built from a single fallen cedar, still ringed with the same mismatched chairs, though a fine, undisturbed layer of dust sat over all of it now, the particular dust of a room nobody has eaten in for a long time rather than a room that’s simply been closed up for a season.
The rope wall behind the check-in counter, where three generations of Marsh outfitters had hung coiled lines by length and diameter, held maybe a third of what it used to, the rest presumably sold off or lent out and never returned during the years my father’s attention had been elsewhere, on his own failing knees, on bills he’d apparently stopped opening.
I ran a hand along the counter’s edge, found it still solid under the dust, and felt something close to relief, the plain, unsentimental kind you feel confirming a structure hasn’t rotted through rather than the kind you feel about anything sweet.
The bones were good. Whatever else was wrong here, the bones were still good.