“Smart move.”
MacKenzie leans in to Camila and runs a thumb across her cheek. Then she stops short. She freezes, her hand still right next to Camila’s face.
Camila’s eyes widen. MacKenzie’s gaze keeps being drawn to her lips. The air around them seems to buzz with energy, as though they’re surrounded by their own force field.
MacKenzie looks away first. “Dirt” is the only explanation she gives, taking a step back. She seems determined to put a reassuring distance between them.
Camila blinks in confusion and then heads back up to the office. As she walks, her fingertips brush the spot where the dirt was. MacKenzie watches her leave.
The office looks much better now that the computer is gone. Camila wipes down the rest of the desk, which leaves her with somewhere to work.
She sits down. The old desk chair creaks beneath her as if it’s protesting at being used again after all these years.
“Right,” she says to herself. “What the hell do I do now?”
* * *
MacKenzie is on her way to bed when she notices that the door into Juan Esteban’s office is ajar. Moonlight streams in through the window, painting pale rectangles on the freshly scrubbed floor. The desk looks absurdly big now that it’s empty. For a moment, she imagines she can see Juan Esteban in front of her, standing by the window like he used to, master of all the asphalt and concrete below. Then she spots Camila, who is sitting perfectly still in the middle of the floor.
I don’t know how long she’s been sitting there, but it must have been several hours—the sun set some time ago, but Camila hasn’t bothered to turn on any lights. As I move closer, I can see that she has a book in her lap. I squint down at it, faintly illuminated in the moonlight.
The scrapbook, I think, moving closer. Yes, it is MacKenzie’s old scrapbook that Camila is clutching.
The book is an old photo album someone left behind in one of the rooms. It’s baby pink, with white lacelike patterns around the edges, and there was only one photo inside: a family portrait of a mother and two sons on a horrifying leopard-print sofa. The father is standing to one side, stiff and serious and wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
No one ever got in touch to ask for it back, so MacKenzie started using it herself. She left the picture where it was and made up fantastical stories about the family. She even imagined the adventures the Hawaiian shirt had been on before it found its current owner.
The rest of the album is now full of newspaper cuttings and yellowed leaflets advertising funny, unusual, or cool motels. Some have been neatly cut out, if there happened to be a pair of scissors at hand, but the rest have been torn. On some, parts of the neighboring articles have come along for the ride; on others, half the name of the motel is missing. Long-forgotten contexts and indecipherable half words. “We’ll go here one day,” she always said, but the only place we ever actually visited was Dog Bark Park Inn, and that isn’t even featured in the album.
“Your old scrapbook,” Camila says without looking up. “I remember you working on it the summer we built the cabins.”
MacKenzie hesitantly sits down in front of her. “Why are you reading that old crap?”
“What happened to all the dreams we had?”
“The same thing that always happens with dreams,” MacKenzie tells her. “We managed a few of them and forgot about the rest. People would go crazy if we weren’t so good at repressing things.”
“Did you ever go on your road trip?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I wonder how many of these motels are still open.”
MacKenzie takes the scrapbook from her and turns it over in her hands, with something that almost looks like tenderness. “Who knows,” she eventually says.
“I’ve been thinking about Juan Esteban all day,” Camila says.
MacKenzie nods, urging her on.
“It’s strange, because I never let myself think about him after I left. I didn’t think about anything relating to my teens. I thought I could just move on, but that’s impossible, isn’t it? Sooner or later, things catch up with you.”
“I don’t know,” MacKenzie tells her.
“I wish I could have gotten to know him as an adult. Talked to him about life. Not that we ever talked when I was a kid; he was always too busy with the motel. But he moved all the way from El Salvador to Oregon and bought a motel in the middle of nowhere. I wish I could ask him how he managed to make a new life for himself like that. Didn’t he ever look back?”
“‘There’s no point trying to fight fate. Better to save your energy for dealing with everything fate sends your way,’” MacKenzie quotes.
Juan Esteban was full of sayings like that. He was always eager to share his worldview, and MacKenzie was always eager to learn. Then again, he also said things like “Never work for the whites,” and MacKenzie had to remind him that she was white. “No one’s perfect,” he replied with a wink.
Camila smiles faintly, but her eyes are worryingly glossy. “I…I didn’t feel anything when I found out he’d died. I was happy about that. He was so far away, and I had my own life. And now it’s like I’m grieving for both him and Henny. I should have come back sooner. I should’ve… I don’t know. Cried when he died, I guess.”
“It’s never too late,” MacKenzie tells her. “You grieve when you’re ready. That’s the good thing about grief. It’s always there, waiting for you.”
She doesn’t sound especially grateful.
“I’ve cried more this week than I have in the rest of my life combined. I think maybe it’s because of Henny. I can feel her presence here. Still.” She swallows. “It’s like she’s daring me to feel things. But part of me liked not feeling things. This… MacKenzie, I don’t know whether I like crying.”
MacKenzie had tensed up when Camila mentioned my name, and now her face is irritatingly blank and closed off. But she surprises me by saying: “It’s only because you’ve been crying alone. Cry away. There’s always a shoulder here if you need it.”
And so Camila cries. She buries her face in MacKenzie’s neck and cries.
MacKenzie quietly takes a deep breath.
“It’s all right,” she says softly. “It’s going to be fine. Everything will work out. I swear.”
But I don’t like the look in her eyes as she says it.
She doesn’t think it applies to her.
* * *
I stay with MacKenzie that night. She lies on her back, staring up at the ceiling, and doesn’t get any sleep.
“I can still remember exactly how you looked the first time we met,” I say.
It was the first day of school. The building towered ominously, the enormous yard stretching out in front of it. I couldn’t quite take in how many other children there were, and how terrifyingly confident they all seemed. They were running around, fighting, laughing, and being incredibly loud.
Then there was me, who still hadn’t dared to leave Dad’s side. I glanced up at him and realized, for the first time in my life, that he had no idea what we were meant to do, either.
MacKenzie was wearing jeans that were already dirty, even though the day had just begun, plus a gray T-shirt with holes in it and a coat two sizes too big. The cuffs hung way beyond her fingertips.
I stared at her, fascinated. In my world, clothes were never dirty or torn. I was smartly dressed in my purple leggings and clean sweater, and I stood obediently next to Dad while the others ran around.
MacKenzie walked straight up to us, shook her hand free from her cuff, and held it out to me. “MacKenzie Jones,” she said.
I had never shaken anyone’s hand before. “Henny,” I said.
She shook Dad’s hand, too. “Mr. Henny’s Dad,” she said.
Then she grabbed my arm and dragged me off into the yard. “We’re going to be friends,” she announ
ced. “I can feel it. I can do that sometimes. Feel things. Why isn’t your mom here?”
“She’s dead,” I said, embarrassed.
“I don’t have a mom, either, so we’re a perfect match,” MacKenzie continued. “We’re going to be friends forever.”
And we were. MacKenzie was like a force of nature, sweeping into my life and dragging me with her, whether I was ready for it or not. I was scared of everything, but MacKenzie didn’t fear a thing. Or that’s what I thought, anyway. I was shy and awkward, but MacKenzie could charm anyone. Even Dad liked her. Everything that happened in my life from that point on was, somehow, due to her.
“Sometimes, I think I probably would’ve stayed put at the edge of the yard if it hadn’t been for you,” I tell her now. “That lonely kid in purple leggings, her hair in bunches, while all the others ran toward their new lives. I think you were the engine that drove both our lives forward.”
Aside from Michael, I think now. Michael was all mine.
“And no matter what happened, you could always make me laugh. Your laugh was always so fantastic. Deep and dark, like it started down in your gut and bubbled up out of you. I could listen to your laugh for weeks. It made me braver. You made me braver. Nothing bad could happen to me as long as you could laugh at it.”
But MacKenzie doesn’t laugh. I sigh.
I search for signs that she is starting to look tired. I hope she’ll manage to get at least a few hours’ sleep.
“I know you refuse to believe in any kind of higher plan, and you’d probably hit me if I came out and said that there might even be a meaning to my death. But that’s just because you think that a meaning has to be something positive. You think I’m saying ‘There is a meaning, so it’s a good thing I died.’ But I’m just as pissed off about the whole thing as you. What I’m trying to say is that if I have to be dead, and unfortunately it seems like that’s the case, then…I want my death to mean something. I want it to shake the world to its core. Nothing should be the same afterward. You should be changed.”
MacKenzie suddenly gets up. I do the same, and we stand side by side, each studying our reflection in the window.
“I know what you would say. You’d tell me that that’s already the case. Your world has been shaken up. But that’s precisely my point. Amid all the undeniably horrible things my death has done to you, I want there to be positives, too. One will do. Or maybe two. Right now, I think that the meaning of my death was to bring Camila back to us, so I hope you won’t refuse to see anything positive in that. Because you can’t imagine that anything meaningful or beautiful could come out of something so sad. There. I won’t keep blabbering. Try…try to get some sleep, at least. I’ll sit here until you do.”
* * *
When I leave at dawn, she still hasn’t quite dozed off, but she is at least in bed with her eyes closed. That might be as close as she gets these days.
I’m on my way over to see Michael when I hear a door slam in the Trembling Aspen cabin, and I pause and watch as a weary family with small children heads down to check out.
I stand in the glade around the cabin, thinking about how there used to be trees right here, and how one day, there will be again. We had to cut down so many of them to build the cabins, but nature is stubborn and has more time on its hands. Thin saplings have already started to grow, brushwood, too, plus a lone beech tree that suddenly found itself getting more sunlight once the pines came down.
It was MacKenzie who named the third cabin after the trembling aspen, and I think it was the drama of the colors and the movements that fascinated her. Camila named hers the Pine Cabin. And that was that.
The sun rises above the mountains, its light falling on the aspen trees growing down below. They’re known as trembling aspens because their flat leaves quiver with even the lightest breath of air. Personally, I’ve always thought it looks like they’re singing. There’s something so frivolous about them that makes me think they could be cheerily humming to themselves in the autumn breeze. I think it’s the bright colors. A whistling, burned-yellow sea in front of the sober gray mountains.
And then it’s as though I catch the scent of fresh timber and sun-warmed grass. This is exactly where we were sitting, I think.
* * *
The work we did for Juan Esteban that summer was sporadic and irregular, but we didn’t care. We carried the things he told us to carry; we kept out of the way if one of the adults told us to keep out of the way and spent the time in between chatting and eating.
Dolores sent out a never-ending stream of food: thick sandwiches full of ham and tomatoes and mayonnaise, fries, mountains of glossy red apples that only MacKenzie ever ate, coffee, lemonade, iced tea.
MacKenzie and I were sitting on the grass, waiting for something to do. The sun was beating down on us. MacKenzie picked blades of grass and tried to whistle with them, and Camila kept to herself. I still hadn’t come up with a way to get closer to her, and MacKenzie didn’t even try. Dolores was busy bringing the barbecue outside, so she could cook burgers in the middle of all the sawing and hammering, and Michael was standing next to Derek.
I couldn’t stop myself from stealing glances at him. I was convinced everyone knew how I felt, but I still couldn’t help it. I was unhappy when he wasn’t nearby, and painfully nervous whenever he was. I wanted him to come over to us; I wished he had never shown up.
The sudden groundswell worried me. Too many people, I thought. It was easier when it was just MacKenzie and me.
When Derek started doing push-ups, Michael came over to me.
“Come with me, Henny,” he said. “I feel like doing some work. We can carry a few planks of wood before lunch.”
So, Michael and I started moving wood together, two planks at a time. The others had started to gather around the barbecue, leaving us alone by the foundations of one of the cabins. They would be named after types of trees, and Juan Esteban had promised that MacKenzie, Camila, and I could each name one. This was my cabin.
“Do you think you’ll live here forever?” Michael asked. He looked at me as if he wanted to know everything I had ever thought.
“Yeah.”
“There’s nothing out there you want to see? Or, I don’t know, achieve? It’s a big world.”
The planks were warm from the sun, and I carefully lowered my end to the ground. I didn’t want it to get dirty.
“Do you know what I’m going to do after high school?” Michael asked.
I shook my head.
“I’m going to study geology. And then I’m going to travel. I’m going to explore the history of the world. I’m going to see rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old.”
Michael made no move to head back to the others.
“Most people spend their whole lives in the place they were born,” he said. “Like someone built invisible walls around their town or city. But the worst part is that there aren’t any walls. There’s nothing stopping us. We put up our own barriers.”
“Are things always better somewhere else?” I asked.
“For some people here, they could hardly be any worse. But that’s not the point. The point is that we don’t know. Because we don’t have the nerve to find out. Just look at all these men. Their hours at the sawmill have been cut back, but they’re still here. They get fired, but they stay here. They get divorced, drink, suffer—and stay here.”
The hamburgers were ready. The men always did everything with a hammer in one hand and a burger in the other. When Juan Esteban wasn’t looking, they passed Derek a beer with a conspiratorial wink. “Just don’t tell Coach Stevenson.” I could hear them, but it felt like they were miles away.
“Not Derek, though,” Michael continued. “He’s going places. He starts preseason training in a few weeks, and then he’ll be able to escape this town. College is only the beginning. He’ll get to see the country. Experien
ce things. Me too. I might not have football, but I’m going to get out of here. I want to see the world, Henny. I was born in Pine Creek, but no one is forcing me to stay put. I’m not going to serve a life sentence here.”
I looked at him in surprise. “It’s not a prison, Michael.”
“Just look at the people here. It may as well be.”
The air smelled like sawdust and dry grass, smoke from the barbecue and fresh timber, and I had no idea what he was talking about.
He can’t mean it, I thought. Not really. We had the river and the mountains behind us, and no one could look at all that and still want to leave.
I gestured toward the half-finished cabin.
“I’m going to call it the Redwood Cabin,” I said. No one else knew that, not even MacKenzie. “Do you know how redwood trees grow?”
“No.”
“They can be over three hundred feet tall, almost thirty feet wide, and live for thousands of years.”
“That much I do know,” he said. Amused. He hit his hands against his thighs. Neither of us seemed to want to join the others. I tried to wipe my forehead on my arm when he wasn’t looking.
“But they need very specific conditions to be able to grow,” I said. “You only find them along the coast, and they prefer to grow in valleys. Their roots are surprisingly shallow for such big trees, but they also interlink with other trees’ roots. That’s how they’re able to withstand the weather.”
I glanced at him to see whether he had understood what I meant. I couldn’t read anything from his face; he could have been either skeptical or amused.
“They survive because they stick together,” I explained. “I think people are the same. We can cope with a lot, but we’re also surprisingly fragile. The only way to survive is to let your roots grow around other people’s. Find a nice, sheltered valley and some other people to hunker down with. Why would that be any easier someplace else?”
“So you want to stay here because it’s safe?”
I shook my head. That wasn’t what I said. Not because it was safe, but because that was what we needed to grow and develop. We needed one another to be able to achieve things.
Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC) Page 16