FIVE Story Time
J essie plopped on the sofa, which was now the beige IKEA sectional we’d carried in from the truck. I handed her a can of Coke and sat down beside her with a weary sigh.
Sitting on the floor before us, Wyatt worked on hooking up his Xbox.
It had taken most of the day, with an hour or so break for a run to the McDonald’s drive-thru for a late lunch, but we accomplished a lot in the main cabin. All the windows were unboarded, the truck was unloaded (and reloaded with crap for the dump) and most of the old furniture that we didn’t want for ourselves but maybe could find a use for was stacked more or less securely in the equipment shed. Having Jessie around had given me the strength to haul out a lot of old shit caked in crusty memories. Even my old bedroom—now Wyatt’s—had gotten an aggressive shoveling-through. My mother’s bedroom, which would become mine, was full of my stuff now, but I wasn’t quite ready to deal with the mental snake pit of cleaning out that woman’s most personal things. It was crowded in there at the moment.
There was still a lot to do before we’d be truly moved in, not to mention the repairs and updates and anything else we needed to do to get the place in actually decent shape, but our stuff was unloaded, and we had beds we could sleep on and furniture to sit on.
Jessie had rolled up her sleeves and been all in from the start.
“Thank you for the help,” I told my friend. Jessie responded with a nod and a lift of her soda can. I knocked it with my own.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Jessie assured me. “After twenty years, I’d’ve expected you to have a lot more shit.”
I shrugged. We’d had a lot more shit. Once. But the last year of our life hadn’t been conducive to having a lot of shit.
Perspicacious Jessie squinted at my non-answer. “Okay. You have got to have a helluva story, Len. I don’t know if you’re ready to tell it, but I’m ready to hear it, so I’m just gonna ask.” She glanced over at the television, where Wyatt worked away on his electronics. “Unless ...”
“Wyatt lived most of it with me,” I said. “He knows the story.”
Of course it didn’t surprise me that Jessie wanted the gigantic blanks filled in. I’d expected it, and I’d spent time rehearsing the story in my head, figuring out which parts needed to be told and how the truth sound best. But I couldn’t imagine laying down the whole, years-long saga in one sitting. Besides, there were things about my early days away I’d feel comfortable telling Jessie but wouldn’t be thrilled for Wyatt to know.
I paused to think through my approach. Jessie let me, watching patiently.
“The whole story will take a lot more time, and probably more potent beverages than Coke. For now, I’ll start at the end.” Seeing Wyatt’s head slightly turned and his body still as he focused on me rather than his project, I asked, “That okay, bud?”
Without turning more toward me, he nodded. “Like you said, I lived it with you.” He went back to work on the electronics.
I kept my attention on my son as I started my story. “So the beginning of the end is a little over a year ago, Wyatt’s dad died.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Jessie turned to Wyatt. “I’m so sorry, Wyatt.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled without looking.
Jessie swung back to me. “What happened?”
“Climbing accident. Micah loved the outdoors. He was an avid climber, hiker, skier, mountain bikes, all that. At least once a month, he and his buddies went off for a weekend to play. The last few years, he took Wyatt with him whenever he could.”
“And you?”
“I went when I could, and when I was invited—sometimes he wanted a guys’ weekend, you know. But usually I was working. I was a teacher, so during the school year I didn’t have any free time.”
Jessie’s big, dark eyes, lined as ever with smoky shadow, popped wide. “A teacher? That’s great! That’s what you wanted.”
I sighed. “Yeah. It was.” My dead career was a later part of the story, so I moved past it now. “Anyway, last year, Micah and his buddies went into the Ozarks for the weekend, to one of their favorite spots, a place they’d climbed at least a dozen times. That last time, he was free-soloing—that’s climbing without safety gear—and missed a handhold. He fell about eighty feet to the rocks below.”
“My god.” Jessie grabbed my hand. “God, Len.” Again, she turned to Wyatt, but when she saw his posture, the way it showed extreme focus on plugging cords in, she said nothing. Jessie understood when to listen and when to speak.
The pain I felt to lose Micah after so many years together had been keen and blazing hot at first, but my travel through the cycle of grief had been forcefully detoured only a couple of weeks after the funeral. Now, fifteen months later, more than a year lived through the turmoil and trouble he’d hurled us into, my mourning wasn’t over, but it had become complicated and ambivalent.
That part of the story was directly relevant to our return to Bluster, so I focused there. “Not long after his funeral, I found out we were effectively broke—and about to be homeless.”
“What?”
“Without talking with me about it—ever—he’d invested heavily in a business venture of one of his buddies. I guess it always struggled, and when his friend needed another big infusion of cash or he’d have to give it up, Micah ... I guess he was worried about losing all that money, so he did the gambler’s thing and doubled down. By borrowing against the house.”
Jessie actually rocked back with shock. “Without telling you? How?”
“The house was his. He already had it when we met, and he never got around to adding me to the deed.” Shaking those thoughts off, I returned to the story. “Anyway, the accounts were empty, and as a high-school English teacher I didn’t make nearly the income he’d made as a corporate analyst, so I couldn’t make the mortgage—mortgages—and I couldn’t get clear by selling because its value was underwater. When I contacted the bank to ask for help, they initiated foreclosure instead. So before I was anywhere near ready to pack up Micah’s closet, we had to pack up everything.”
Already weary of telling this part of the story, I decided to sum up the rest for now. “We started off renting a little apartment and trying to keep what we had left together on my salary. Then I got fired for teaching a unit I’d taught for years. A unit I’d won awards for. But the cultural climate in Arkansas has changed a lot in the past few years, so the same teaching that won me Teacher of the Year in my district five years ago got me invited to pack up my classroom four months ago.”
Despite his obvious commitment to taking as long as he possibly could, Wyatt had finished hooking up the gaming console, the receiver, speakers, and the rest of it. Now he was sitting quietly, facing the components. His shoulders had slumped.
I’d been wrong to tell the story in front of him. Yes, he’d lived it all with me, but re living it was a different kind of thing. “Anyway, that was the last straw, I guess. I couldn’t teach in Arkansas, I had no idea what kind of work I could do, I was tired and sad and worried about my kid. I knew my mom was gone because the mayor tracked me down about a year before all this and told me, and he sent paperwork to show that she hadn’t had a will, so I’d inherited everything she had. He wanted me to come back and take this place over. But I didn’t want that. So I shoved it aside, expecting to let the place rot until the town could take it over, or until the forest did. I didn’t want anything of hers. But that was before, when I’d had a good life with what I’d thought was a strong foundation. When that life completely blew up, and I had no other options, I finally realized, ‘She’s dead. She’s not there to hurt me. I deserve something good from being her daughter, and maybe there’s still a place for me in Bluster.’ Worst case, I figured I could at least sell this place, even as is, and get enough out of it to stake a new start. So I talked to Wyatt about it, and he was all in right away. When his school year ended, we got busy clearing away what little was left for us in Little Rock, and we headed west.”
I didn’t say it aloud, not with him sitting right there, but I figured he would have jumped at any idea that suggested a direction we could turn, any slightest glimmer of hope.
Jessie sat quietly beside me, studying me. Threaded through the gold rays of her brown eyes was compassion, and sorrow, and perhaps some relief or satisfaction, for having a piece of an answer to a long-open question. I saw all that, understood it, because I knew my friend. Even now, after so many years, after so much life, I knew.
So when Jessie’s next spoken question was, “Why Little Rock, of all places?” shaping her face into a caricature of confusion that would do Carol Burnett proud, I burst into laughter. Jessie always knew when to turn a topic in a new direction, and she always knew when a laugh was a lifeline.
Wyatt whipped around to peer at us, but when he saw my expression, a smile emerged on his face as well. I sent him my love with a look, and he sent his back.
LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER Jessie left and Wyatt and I had taken turns showering away the crust of the cabin’s disuse and decay, we sat on the front porch, each of us wrapped in a fluffy blanket and holding a cup of hot tea in our hands. The fog had rolled in dense and low.
“It smells so good here,” Wyatt sighed, leaning his head back against an Adirondack chair in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint. “What is that smell?”
I leaned back, too, and took a deep whiff. “Redwood, eucalyptus, and salt from the sea spray.”
“Sea spray? But we can’t even see the ocean from here.”
“It comes in with the fog. Also, if we were closer to the ocean, the smell wouldn’t be as good. Up close, you get sea-spray and fish. We’ll take some time for the beach tomorrow, if you want.”
“I want.” He took another big inhale. “I can’t believe anybody would ever want to leave here.”
My son uttered that statement in a dreamy tone, while he lay back with his eyes closed, in perfect relaxation and peace, probably his first such moment since his father’s death. So I swallowed my bright burst of pain and said, draining my voice of anything but love for him, “I didn’t leave because I hated Bluster.”
Wyatt lifted his head. “I know. I didn’t hear how that sounded until I said it. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I guess because painful utterances were on my mind, I added, “Did it hurt, hearing me tell Jessie about your dad? I’m sorry if it did.”
He rocked his head back in the universal gesture of ambivalence. “Yes and no—not hurt-feelings hurt. I’m not upset you told her, and you didn’t say anything I didn’t know. It just ... hurts. Like, in general.”
“Yeah.” Some real Mom wisdom right there.
It seemed to satisfy him, though, and we sat quietly together and enjoyed the night. In the cabin behind us was still a lot of work simply to make the place livable for us, not accounting for the likely months of work to get the whole property back into shape. And especially not accounting for all the emotional landmines this cabin still held. But in this moment, on the porch, sitting quietly together while the fog carried the ocean to us, I felt a little of that peace, too. Me and my boy.
Maybe coming back to Bluster was more than an act of desperation.
Maybe I really had come home.