Christy’s voice dropped a little. “Whether or not you move to Missoula is not his decision to make.”
“But I’d still have to ask for permission to move.”
“It’s not asking for permission. You give notice of relocation, and he has a chance to object,” she said, making it sound so simple. “If he does, you both present your case, and a judge has the final word.” She looked down at my application again. I stayed quiet, letting her words wash through my mind. “It’s really rare that they won’t allow mothers to move,” she added. “Especially if they can prove they’ll have better opportunities for education.”
I set my jaw and stared at the floor. Just thinking about going to court again gave me heart palpitations.
“Don’t think of it as asking for permission,” she said. “It’s giving notice.”
“Yeah,” I said, turning my attention to the fibers in the chair cushion.
“So, explain to me how this works?” she said, picking up the application packet.
Another advocate, the one in Port Townsend who had helped me when we were homeless, introduced me to a scholarship for survivors that she called “The Sunshine Ladies,” but I hadn’t qualified for it at the time. If it hadn’t been for that name, I never would have remembered it. Even though it was formally called the Women’s Independence Scholarship Program, an Internet search of “Sunshine Ladies” brought me to the right place.
A scholarship specifically for survivors of domestic violence wasn’t without an overwhelming amount of paperwork and a long list of qualifications. I hadn’t qualified for one major reason when I considered it before—recipients must be out of the abusive relationship for at least one year. But I also needed a sponsor, preferably through a domestic violence program, to handle the money for me. WISP would send the organization the scholarship funds, who then worked with me on the best way to spend them. I suppose this was a way to have some idea of where the scholarship funds went, but the process sounded daunting.
“Ask for five thousand dollars,” Christy suggested as we made our way through the paperwork. “The worst that can happen is you get less.”
“I wonder if I could reach people with my writing,” I said, more to myself than to her.
She nodded and smiled in encouragement. “The University of Montana has a wonderful creative writing department!” she exclaimed, turning to pull up the homepage. “I think it’s one of the top in the nation?”
“I know,” I said. “That was my plan, before I was pregnant.” I tried not to sound too disappointed. But that was before I had a kid to care for. Before I’d needed a steady income and health insurance. Before I had not only my future but a child’s future to think about. “An art degree just isn’t practical,” I said, and Christy nearly laughed, but she saw that I had tears in my eyes.
I didn’t want to hear her encourage me otherwise. Just like I didn’t want to hear her encourage me to visit Missoula. Those dreams seemed too big to pursue. The yearning for it felt similar to the times I sat at our kitchen table to watch Mia eat, drinking coffee instead of feeding myself. My hunger for Missoula was too big, and it was too painful to even dream.
“Imagine how much Mia would appreciate seeing you try,” Christy said in a voice thick with encouragement.
Missoula did not let up. It came up in conversations with anyone I felt even an ounce of kismet with. It had been doing that for years, but now I started paying attention. I allowed myself to feel its nudges and pulls.
Unfortunately, other things had a way of not letting up, too, of not getting better, of continuing their relentless ways when I ached for a break. My new landlord, Alice, proved to be my most difficult client. For weeks, I spent dozens of hours in her house, trying to clean in a way that wouldn’t bring complaints. She’d walk me through the kitchen, pointing out places I’d missed. I used her rags and cleaning supplies but upset her when I left the used rags in her washing machine. “You need to wash those,” she’d said, after calling me on my phone, asking me to come over, so she could point at them in person. “That’s just creating more work for me.” I wanted to tell her how inappropriate and weird this would be under normal circumstances for a client to do this. Instead, I gathered the rags from the machine, carried them over to the garage to wash, dry, and fold before leaving them in a neat pile on her porch.
Alice also started accusing me of lying about the amount of time I’d spent weeding. These things had never happened to me. I’d never received complaints. Not since the Trailer next to the Barefoot Bandit House.
One afternoon, Alice called, again, wanting to talk to me at her house. I knew by then what was coming. She said I wasn’t upholding my side of the contract for the barter, that I was failing to clean well enough, that she was canceling the contract.
I nodded, turned, and walked away from her. Back in my apartment, I looked around. It seemed impossible that the rent had just doubled. I stared out the window at the bay in a stunned silence. The inside of my chest seemed to pull into itself and tighten.
“Hey, are you doing okay?” Kurt asked me later that afternoon as we stood outside at the play structure in their yard. “Alice said you looked like you were going to cry after she talked to you.”
“I just got some bad news,” I said, looking down at the ground.
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said, pushing the toddler on the swing. “I get that. Alice’s been stressed because she’s getting laid off.”
My ears started ringing in a sound like television static. I understood now why she’d fired me. It wasn’t my incompetence. She’d fired me because she couldn’t afford the barter anymore, or wanted to do it herself to save money, and tore me down in the process. Alice drove up with the older girls then, who ran to join Mia. I watched them all run to get their bikes, giggling and squealing. I thought about all the legal documents. If I tried to fight to keep the barter, it would possibly result in a legal battle that I couldn’t afford. I’d lose what remained of a friendly relationship that my daughter needed in order to play with her friends. There was no way I could afford to fight.
“I can’t afford my apartment without the scholarship,” I said to Christy at our next appointment, after explaining what had happened.
“You’ll get it,” she said, like they’d already told her I would and she was keeping it a secret from me. The application packet had grown to almost fifty pages. I was still waiting for a few more reference letters. “Have you thought any more about Missoula?”
I had. Quite a bit. Jamie’s behavior had been escalating, which always made me fearful for Mia’s well-being. She spent a week at his house while I finished up classes for spring quarter, and she had returned a couple of pounds lighter. I’d taken her to the doctor for a sinus infection before she’d gone and had to take her back in because she’d gotten worse. Two pounds off her small frame was a lot to lose. She was wetting her pants again, and I couldn’t figure out why. She hadn’t done that in months.
Jamie now lived on his small sailboat, and when Mia visited, she stayed there with him. Neither Mia nor Jamie knew how to swim. I feared Mia falling off the boat or dock without a life vest in the middle of the night. I feared what sort of kid I’d get back after she spent time with him. Whenever I called, I heard several male voices in the background. When I asked, she didn’t know any of their names or where her dad was, just that she was on the boat. Picking her up started to feel like some sort of rescue operation.
I told Christy about this—about my landlord, about the pull of Missoula. School would be busy in the fall, but I had only two summer classes. I still took out a maximum amount of loans to cover my almost doubled living expenses. Mia went to day care while I worked and volunteered whenever I could.
After Alice fired me, I spent two days looking for resources, knowing I wouldn’t have enough to pay bills in June, before my student loans came through for the summer semester. I found an odd grant at school to help pay for part of June’s rent—a “homemaker�
� grant, specifically for women with children to help with housing costs. Even the twenty-dollar gas vouchers from the department that gave out utility grants helped.
I held my breath each time I checked the mail. Day after day, there were bills and advertisements, but nothing from the scholarship committee. The month seemed to creep by ominously. If I didn’t get the scholarship, we’d have to move out of the apartment. But if I did, we’d have more than enough money to stay. To take my mind off the scholarship, I took Mia to beaches and parks. We spent a lot of time with Kurt and the older girls, wandering off to the bay where they’d roll around in mud. When Mia was at her dad’s, I hid in my apartment, reading or doing homework with the doors open to the summer sun.
One weekend, I pulled The Alchemist off my shelf to read. The short book took two whole days to get through, since almost every page had a line that I’d underline, read again, and had to stare out the window to think about for a while. My mom had given me the book after I’d moved back to Washington from Alaska. She explained the theme was about the main character’s journey to find his destiny, only to discover it had been at home all along. I’d grimaced at this. Sure, Northwest Washington felt magical when the sun shone, and there are parts of Highway 20 that wind through Deception Pass where I knew the trees like old friends. But the feeling of home stopped there. I didn’t feel like I belonged there. I wasn’t sure I ever had.
The Alchemist’s theme, this Personal Legend, pulled at me. I’d wanted to be a writer for nearly twenty-five years.
“I think I’m ready to visit,” I announced to Christy at our next appointment.
On the way home from day care pickup, Mia and I sang along with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” I smiled whenever she said “empty as a pumpkin” to the lyrics “empty as a pocket.” The album had played regularly in the car for a few weeks—as we drove to and from day care, as we set out for our weekend adventures. Smiling and singing along to the same song might as well have been eating the same ice cream sundae.
I turned the car onto our road, and Mia started asking if she could play with the girls. “Hang on a second,” I said, slowing at the mailbox. I’d been trying to not check as much. It was too much of a disappointment to see it empty.
“Mia!” I said from the mailbox. I held up a large envelope from WISP, Inc. One of those flat-rate pocket envelopes for documents. I opened it and looked at the letter.
Inside the envelope was sunshine confetti that peppered my floor at home. They’d accepted me for the scholarship program! Mia scooped it up with her fingers. WISP had not only granted me $2,000 for the fall, but they’d given me $1,000 for the summer. We not only didn’t have to move again, I’d have enough extra to take a vacation between summer and fall quarters. I could visit Missoula.
A line from The Alchemist flashed through my mind like ticker tape: When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. With the scholarship money, I’d have the means to save my wages, get my car fixed, and drive over two mountain passes to see a city many of my favorite writers wrote love stories about.
27
WE’RE HOME
Somewhere around Spokane, driving east on Interstate 90, the road opened, flat, with nothing ahead, behind, or beside me. The grass, brown and burnt from the sun, twitched from the wind, fighting to stay alive. Farmers wheeled large metal sprinklers across their land in efforts to keep it green for their cattle. On the two-lane divided freeway, a girl in a green Subaru passed me on the left. I could see that she had boxes, laundry baskets, and garbage bags packed in the back seat and wagon of her car. In contrast, I had a couple of old army backpacks full of new tank tops along with my few pairs of shorts.
We both had our whole lives ahead of us, that girl in the Subaru and me. Maybe she was moving to Missoula for college like I would have, if I hadn’t torn up those applications so long ago, but that was where our similarities probably ended. I imagined her as myself, nearly five years before, singing along to whatever played on her stereo. I thought she should have been me.
I brushed the thoughts away and pressed down on the gas pedal, chasing her, chasing my ghost self. Driving to Missoula wasn’t just me pursuing my dreams; it was finding a place for us to call home.
When I arrived, alone in the dark, Missoula’s downtown strip still seemed to pulse with the remains of the hot summer day. When I got out of my car to stand on the curb, looking up and down the street, two girls in their early twenties passed me, nodded, and smiled. One sang. The other played a ukulele. Both had flowing skirts and sandals. They reminded me of girls I’d met at parties in Fairbanks. Hippie types who hadn’t a clue about makeup, knew how to start a fire, and weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty in the garden. I’d missed these people. My people.
On my first morning, I wandered, the early sun already prickling my skin. The grass felt dry and inviting to sit in, so unlike the wetness of Washington. Near campus I read a book in the shade of a huge maple tree. Lying on my back, I stared at the sun through the waving leaves. I stayed like that for most of the day, gazing up at the surrounding hills and mountains, noticing the river flowing under a footbridge. That evening, I discovered a park in the heart of downtown. Food vendors lined the edges of a canopied square. People milled about in the grass or on park benches. A band played on a stage. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so happy, the last time I relaxed and let music fill my chest. I wandered the park with a dizzy smile, then noticed that, oddly, everyone else was smiling, too.
After years of living in the absence of friendliness, after the toxicity with my family, losing my friends, the unstable housing and black mold, my invisibility as a maid, I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me. I was hungry in a way I’d never been in my entire life. Missoula brought that out. Suddenly I wanted a community. I wanted friends. And it seemed okay to want that, because, walking around, judging from appearances, I was surrounded by the possibility of those things. Most locals smiled at me from under hats showing the state of Montana’s outline or its 406 area code. One morning at a small café for breakfast, every table filled, I counted sixteen pairs of Chaco sandals, including my own. I saw women with body hair, and most people had tattoos. Men carried babies in cloth backpacks and slings. I ran into old friends from Fairbanks. I’d never been so immediately embraced by a place. And it had only been a day.
Without knowing it, I had chosen one of the best weekends of the summer to visit. As I explored, the River City Roots Festival transformed the town. Main Street shut down. Vendors sold tie-dye shirts, pottery, art, and wooden bears carved with chainsaws. A small sea of people in camping chairs settled next to a stage to listen to music for most of the day. Food trucks lined the side streets, and a beer hut sat in the middle of it all. Missoula loves a good party.
And so it went. I spent each day of my trip exploring the town. I climbed up mountains. I traversed trails, listening to the guttural sound of deer in the thickets. I walked along streams and bloodied my toes on jagged rocks. For a few minutes on the side of a mountain deep in a valley beyond town, sweaty and dehydrated, I couldn’t find the trail I’d been walking on. I was hungry, thirsty, yet full of excitement that I was lost, however momentarily, in the wilds of Montana.
I had fallen in love with Montana. Like Steinbeck. Like Duncan.
“I’m moving to Missoula,” I said in a text to Jamie. “I have to. This place is amazing.” I waited for him to reply, my heart pounding, but he didn’t. I wondered what he’d do to manipulate Mia into not wanting to go. I wondered if he’d threaten to take me to court or possibly try to take her. These were the anxieties that’d kept me from even attempting this trip. But I was no longer asking him; I was telling. As cheesy as it seemed, I thought, somehow, my love for Missoula and wanting a better life for Mia would carry us through. It would get us there.
Jamie let Mia call me the next day. It was midmor
ning, and the phone rang as I sat on a grassy hill by the Clark Fork River. Behind me, a carousel spun in slow circles next to a wooden play structure teeming with children. I’d been reading a book, jotting down thoughts in a journal.
“Hi, Mom,” Mia said. I could hear Jamie’s voice in the background, then her grandma’s. They were urging her to speak. Finally, she blurted out, “I don’t want to move to Montana.”
“Oh, baby,” I said, attempting to form my words like a hug. I imagined the scene, Mia standing in the living room of her grandmother’s house, and Jamie holding the phone to her ear, his face, eyebrows raised, expecting her to repeat the line they’d practiced. “Mia, I’m so sorry you’re going through this,” I said, and then Jamie took the phone from her.
His voice was between a growl and a whisper. “I’m going to tell her you’re moving her away from me so she’ll never see me again,” he said to me. “I hope you realize that. That you’re so selfish you don’t care if she never sees me again. She’ll see. She’ll hate you for it.”
I tried to picture Mia’s big, dark eyes watching him as he spoke. I knew how he looked when he was angry, how white drops of spit gathered on his lips in front of his crooked teeth.
“I want to talk to Mia again,” I said, cutting him off.
When Mia came back to the phone, her voice sounded happy. “Did you get pink cowboy boots for me?” she asked, her chirpy self again.
I smiled. “Yes,” I said. “Just like I promised.” I told her about the store with an entire aisle of pink boots and that I’d found a pair for her, along with a stuffed horse. “And a metal lunch box with a cowboy on it!”
When we talked again a day or two later, she sounded dazed. She wasn’t sure where her dad was, even though I’d called his phone. I could hear older male voices laughing in the background, but Mia said she didn’t know who they were. I regretted not bringing her with me, but if I had, I’m not sure we would have returned. I imagined us finding a floor to crash on and filling out the relocation paperwork at the local courthouse. I imagined us spending the end of summer napping in the grass, exploring the mountains and rivers.
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