Chapter 2
Chapter 2
“Hey, you’ll get eaten alive out here.”
I feel warm hands on my shoulders, shaking me. “What? Get off of me.” I’m startled awake and my hammock sways, then pitches to one side before I right it without falling out.
“Whoa, whoa.” The man holds his hands up in the air and backs away. “I come in peace.”
It takes me a few seconds to get my bearings. Then it all rushes back to me in Technicolor. I’ve come to the cabin to recuperate and regroup. Two weeks of blissful nothingness, where I can pretend that the events of the last week were just a bad dream. That no, my ex-husband isn’t getting married to someone other than me.
And no, I wasn’t run down by a cable car.
I pull myself up into a sitting position and stare at the man standing in front of me. He looks vaguely familiar, but in my hazy state, I can’t quite recall who he is. And we’re here . . . alone. The nearest neighbor is a good half mile away.
“Do I know you?”
He tilts his head to the side and looks at me like I’m a little off my rocker before saying, “You hired me to fix your roof.” He glances up at the sky, which is clear and blue. “Winter is coming.” A slight smile plays on his lips when he says it, and I suspect it’s because he’s quoting that famous line from Game of Thrones , which has sort of become a cliché now, but whatever.
There’s also the small issue that I have zero recollection of hiring anyone to fix the roof. Maybe Austin did. Or maybe I’ve lost some of my short-term memory from the impact of the cable car. I did hit my head, after all.
Regardless of who hired him, fixing the roof is a good idea, because in the last rain, we had two leaks. One over the sink in the kitchen, the other in the middle of the primary bedroom. The latter warped and discolored a few of the floorboards. Now, I have to cover the area with a rug to hide the unsightly damage.
“Um, okay,” I say, noting for the first time that he’s a rather large man, tall and broad, which alone should be menacing. But for whatever reason, it’s not, though a person can never be too careful.
I look around for his car, wondering how he drove up without me hearing anything; then I remember I’m in the back of the cabin, away from the driveway.
The hammock is no easy thing to get out of gracefully, but I manage to do it without falling on my ass. He just stands there as if he’s waiting for his marching orders. I walk around the side of the house to find a pickup in the driveway. There’s no roofing company insignia on the vehicle, just a few dings and a ladder strapped to the top of the truck’s utility rack.
I turn around to find that the guy is a few feet behind me.
“What roofing company are you with again?” I ask.
He squints at me, and I can’t tell if it’s from the sun or if he’s confused. Confusion ultimately wins, judging by the way he’s staring at me, perplexed.
“I’ve been doing work around your cabin for the last three years.” He raises his arms in the air. When I don’t say anything, he presses, “A few months back, I installed the new front door.”
I shift my eyes to the cabin’s entrance. One of the reasons I fell in love with the house is the wide front porch. That first year after we bought the place, Austin and I searched high and low for the perfect Adirondack chairs so we could sit out front when the sun’s glare off the lake was too blinding. We wound up buying recycled plastic ones at Costco, of all places, because Austin said they would last longer. To this day, I hate them.
Sure enough, there’s a new red Craftsman door where the old oppressive oak one was.
The man folds his arms across his chest as he watches me take in the door, and I let out a sigh.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” I tell him. “I was in an accident a few days ago, and I’m apparently not myself.” I leave out the part that I was run down by a cable car, because I suspect this guy is starting to think I’m a nutjob, and most people don’t realize just how dangerous those streetcars can be. All anyone associates with them is that they’re iconic San Francisco. Or it reminds them of the annoying Rice-A-Roni jingle or the Tony Bennett song about little cable cars climbing halfway to the stars. When in fact, dozens of people are maimed, even killed, by streetcars a year, if you believe the statistics.
“Sorry to hear that.” He gives me a wary glance, then switches his gaze to the roof. “You still want me to do the work?”
“Yes,” I say, though I was hoping for peace and quiet and anticipate that the roof work will cause a good amount of racket. “You’re . . .” I wait for him to say his name, because for the life of me, I can’t remember it, only that his face is starting to register.
He gives me a hard look like he doesn’t believe me and finally says, “Knox.” Just Knox, no last name.
I don’t know why, but I have the sudden urge to say, “Knox, Knox, who’s there?” but don’t. We’re already getting off to a shaky start.
He unfastens the ladder from the utility rack and lifts it up like it weighs nothing, then carries it to the back of the cabin. I consider whether to return to my hammock, but Knox is right. This time of year, the mosquitoes off the lake will eat me alive.
Since there’s little chance of me getting much rest with the noise from the roof, I decide to go to town and stock up on supplies. Knox is strapping on his tool belt when I find him.
“I’m taking off for a while; you don’t need to get in the house, do you?”
“Doubtful. But just in case, is the key still under the flowerpot?”
I wonder if Austin leaves it there, because I don’t remember ever leaving a spare key anywhere. I don’t even remember us having a flowerpot.
“Uh, let’s take a look,” I say, then wait for him to lead the way to this alleged flowerpot.
Sure enough, it’s on the front porch, next to the new door, and there is a shiny copper key underneath it. Knox slides the empty pot back over the key and bobs his head at me as if to say, we’re all good .
“Okay, then.” I shove my hands in my pockets and make a mental note to plant something in the pot. Orange mums or marigolds, maybe. “See you when I get back.”
I’m halfway to my car when I realize I need a jacket. It’s like fifty degrees out, and my cheeks feel chapped from the cold. I run inside the house and grab a fleece, then on second thought, a hat and scarf. October in the mountains is usually milder, somewhere in the sixties or even seventies. Here in Northern California, summer doesn’t start until August and lingers well into mid-November. Not this year, though.
Knox is on the roof. I can hear him banging around up there, confirming that my decision to get out of Dodge was the right one. On my way out, I notice the leaves have turned shades of bright yellow, red, and orange. And the sheer beauty of the trees and the mountains in full fall regalia catches in my throat.
When we bought the lake cabin, it was summer. The house needed work and still does. But it’s about as close to perfection as it comes. It’s nestled in the trees, and it took us forever to find it, especially because our budget was modest, at least by California standards. For months, we toured every house near a body of water, because we’d decided that a lake or a river view was imperative to improving our mental health. It was only our second year of marriage, and our lives had become so immersed in our respective jobs that we didn’t know how to relax anymore. We’d convinced ourselves that if we bought a vacation home, we’d use it to slow down, go kayaking and swimming until our skin turned brown in the hot summer sun, or just read a book by the water. The kind of things normal couples do on their days off.
We were well-intentioned at first, packing up our busy city lives on the days we were here, sleeping in and lazing around the lake. But it didn’t last long. Austin always had a legal motion that needed researching or a needy client who monopolized his time on the phone. I had an entire company to run or a book to write, or a lecture to prepare. Eventually, when we managed to make it up here, the cabin became an extension of our offices.
When it came time to divide everything up in the divorce, we told ourselves the cabin was too good of an investment to sell. But honestly, we knew we’d never find another place like it and decided to share custody, each using the little house in the Sierra foothills on alternate weekends and holidays.
And secretly, I thought we’d work our way back to each other, and the cabin would stand as a symbol of our enduring love.
These are the things I’m thinking about as I take the meandering two-lane highway to town, gazing out at the breathtaking trees and their vibrant autumn colors. I’m still trying to decide whether I ever took the time to just look and take in all that there was to see. The sad truth of the matter is I can’t remember, and I don’t know if it’s because I hit my head when I got run down by the cable car or if the answer is simply no. No, I never took the time to really look, because I was too busy being Chelsea Knight, the brilliant marriage therapist who was too stupid to realize her own marriage was in trouble.
Ghost has a population of 14,000 people, not tiny by any stretch but hardly a sprawling metropolis.
The story goes that the town got its name during California’s Gold Rush and from the bloody massacre of the Ramsey family.
James Marshall and John Sutter had just discovered gold in a streambed on the American River in Coloma. Word spread, and prospectors flocked to California from all over the world to seek their fortunes.
Such was the case of Charles Ramsey. Charles, his wife Jane, and their four-year-old son William came from Oregon, down the Siskiyou Trail on a covered wagon to try their luck in the goldfields. But after a year, defeated and exhausted, they were ready to go home. That’s when they got an offer to join a dozen other families from the Pacific Northwest to branch out down the mountain in Bear Creek, where the land was still rough, fertile, and virgin territory. According to prospector legend, the fields near the creek were bursting with gold. But only if you had the grit and fortitude to stake your claim without catching cholera, getting robbed, or killed first.
When the Forty-Niners arrived, they set out to dig deep shafts along streams and riverbeds. They toiled for days in the hot sun, panning for gold in the silt deposits of the riverbed. It was backbreaking and dangerous work, and Charles didn’t know how much longer he could ask his family to put up with the squalor and violence of the camps.
But then one day, it happened. Charles struck gold. At first, it was small flakes that he found at the bottom of his pan. Then, with a pick and shovel, the flakes grew to lumps and eventually nuggets. The others in their group calculated that it was a small fortune, enough to buy land, build a house, and raise livestock. Enough for a good life.
But three days after Charles staked his claim, bandits murdered the couple and little William while the trio slept, and stole their gold.
Deciding that mining was too dangerous, the other twelve families wound up settling in a verdant hamlet in Bear Valley, selling supplies and food to a new influx of prospectors. They called their new town Ramsey to honor their murdered friends. But when the specters of Charles, Jane, and William haunted the prospectors at night as they worked the goldfields, the town simply became known as Ghost.
The name was reaffirmed in 1883, when the gold was depleted and residents abandoned the place for greener pastures, literally making Ghost a ghost town.
It wasn’t until after World War II and California’s housing shortage that a small developer from Sacramento decided Ghost was the next frontier and began building modest homes for returning GIs and an influx of immigrants. Just an hour away from the state capital and rich in agricultural land, Ghost attracted a new fortune seeker.
And the Gold Rush lore of the Ramsey murders has only added to the town’s mystique. Tourists flock here for the sole purpose of coming face-to-face with Charles’s or Jane’s ghost or to hear little William wailing in the middle of the night.
That’s why I’m not surprised that there’s no parking in the lot across from Main Street. Halloween is only a week away, and I suspect visitors want an early start to getting their Ghost on. In the past, Austin and I avoided Ghost around this time of year for this very reason. If we wanted crowds, we could get them in San Francisco.
I find street parking a couple of blocks away and make my way to Main Street, joining the clusters of people window-shopping and eating at the restaurants. Two years ago, the city got a state grant to turn Main into a pedestrian-only street. And while it makes driving through town a bit convoluted, I have to say it’s a nice touch. Now, café tables and market umbrellas spill out onto the street, and in summer, there’s live music on the weekends.
For Halloween, it’s safe to say Ghost goes for broke, judging by all the decorations. I marvel at the jack-o’-lanterns hanging from the streetlights and the orange and black luminarias that line the rooftops. Someone gussied up the communal firepit to look like a witch’s cauldron and replaced the old wooden benches with straw bales.
But my favorite so far has to be the scarecrows that dot Main Street. According to a placard, each of the town’s civic organizations is responsible for creating its own original one. I wander down the street, examining each display.
The Cattleman’s Association did a cowboy. Cute, but not terribly original. The local 4-H club made one completely out of garden vegetables, which seems to defeat the purpose of a scarecrow. But still, clever. The Kiwanis did a ghost, because someone had to. But it’s the Soroptimists for the win. Their Minion scarecrow blows it out of the park and looks just like the animated character from the movie.
I head to Flacos for a carne aside burrito. Austin and I didn’t eat out much when we came up on weekends, opting to cook at home. But when we did, we always went to Flacos, a hole-in-the-wall taco shop that makes better burritos than the places in the Mission District, which are famous for their burritos. I think it’s the fact that at Flacos, they don’t put rice in the burritos, which in my opinion overwhelms the rest of the ingredients and adds a texture that doesn’t really need to be there. But I’m hardly a food critic. I’ll pretty much eat anything that’s put in front of me.
As soon as I walk in the door, I’m flooded with memories of Austin. How we used to hold hands as we walked along Main Street. How we used to share a basket of chips, even though every time we went, I would emphatically announce that I was swearing off chips. How we used to laugh at the weird folk dolls on the wall and make up names for them. “That one looks like a Hazel,” Austin would say, to which I would respond, “What does a Hazel look like?” “Like that.” He would point to the doll, and we would bust up laughing.
It wasn’t like any of it was the stuff of romance novels or swoony rom-com movies, but it was us. And I liked us. I loved us.
And yet, I have to wonder if I imagined that we were a better couple than we really were. If maybe there were signs that I somehow wasn’t enough and that Austin had tired of me. Because I certainly hadn’t tired of him. I loved him as much as the day we met, the day my old boss set us up on a blind date. We both laughed about it later, because who goes on blind dates anymore? But there we were at a British-style pub at Fifth and Mission, eating bangers and mash, complaining about our college loans, and planning how we were going to pay them off. By the time he walked me home, I was smitten. By the time he called me the next day, I was hearing wedding bells. And by the time we set a date, I was convinced we’d be the couple to beat all the odds. And look at us. We didn’t even make it to the seven-year itch.
If Lolly was still talking to me, she’d have herself a good, hard laugh. So perhaps it’s for the best that she and I are no longer speaking. But the thing is, I miss my baby sister. I miss her even more than I miss Austin. And that’s a lot.
We used to be two peas in a pod. When we were kids, our late mother even dressed us the same. Even though I’m three years older than my sister, people always mistook us for twins. Not anymore, I’m sure. Now, we live in two different worlds. And the only thing they have in common is that they’re a long way from the modest San Fernando Valley neighborhood where we grew up. Far from the idyllic life we once had before everything blew up.
I take my burrito to go, because I don’t want to eat alone, which is ridiculous, because I eat alone nearly every day. Half the time at my desk at the office, the other half when I’m traveling on a speaking circuit. It’s either a hotel restaurant or room service. Today, it’s in my car.
Afterward, I swing by the grocery store and buy enough food to last the two weeks I’m staying. If I’m forced to eat alone, I’m going to do it in the comfort of my own home.
On the way out of the market, a woman with two youngsters in tow stops to smile at me. “Hey, Chelsea, you up for the weekend?”
I think she’s mistaken me for someone else, because I don’t know her from Adam. Then I remember that she said my name.
I stutter, “Yes, I am” as I try to figure out who she is. I’m positive I’ve never seen her before.
“Well, it’s great to see you.” One of the kids, a boy with a mop of red hair, starts to pull her toward the cereal aisle. “Let’s grab coffee if you have time.” The boy drags her away before I can respond.
My whole way home, I rack my brain to figure out where I know her from, eventually concluding that my lack of recall has got to be short-term memory loss from head trauma. I worry that I may have serious neurological ramifications that weren’t detected by the MRI the night of the accident and make a mental note to book an appointment with a specialist.
I don’t give the exchange another thought as I keep my eyes on the road. The cabin is only ten minutes from town, but today the drive feels longer.
The days are getting shorter, and in a few hours it’ll be dark. I’d like to get everything put away and have a fire going before the sun sets.
My mind shifts to tomorrow, the twenty-fourth anniversary of my parents’ death.
For the first time in a long time, I wonder what Lolly is doing, whether she’s thinking about tomorrow, too.