by Kaya McLaren
“Rae said you’ve had a hard year.” Her hazel eyes were deeply compassionate.
Carly waited to see how specific her great-aunt had been with the guests.
“Six years ago, my daughter had a hard year, too.”
Oh no, Carly thought because she could feel it coming and she knew it was important to be happy around the guests. Oh, no. But it was too late. Kathy could see it.
“Come here, sugar,” she said, opening her arms. “Come here.”
Carly walked into Kathy’s embrace, laid her head on her shoulder, and cried.
“There, there, sugar. It’s all right. It’s all right,” Kathy murmured. “It’s all right now. Your mama’s all right.”
“It’s not that easy,” Carly whispered.
“I know, sugar. Believe me, I know.”
* * *
Later that night, after all the guests had gone to bed, Carly and Great-Aunt Rae sat next to the campfire in their camp chairs.
“I should go to bed,” said Great-Aunt Rae, “but that would mean getting up, and right now I’m too tired to get up.”
Carly laughed. She understood. Not that her day had been exhausting in the same way Great-Aunt Rae’s had, but crying made her sleepy. It had been a long day, one mostly too slow. “I had a stare-down with a coyote today,” she said.
“Yeah? They’re curious animals. So are cougar. Sometimes they just like to watch people.”
“I would poop my pants if I saw a cougar watching me. I don’t even know what I’d do.”
“Sometimes when I go for a hike out and back on some dirt road, I see their tracks in mine and know they’ve been following me, but so far, that’s all they’ve ever done. I don’t know whether that comforts you.”
“No. Not at all. I hadn’t even thought about cougar until a couple minutes ago.”
“My mistake. I’m just saying that I’ve pretty much lived with the cougars for decades and none have eaten me yet. Haven’t eaten any of my dogs yet either,” she said, leaning forward and knocking on a piece of firewood.
They were quiet for a bit, and then Great-Aunt Rae smiled and said, “Sam and I used to sit by the fire like this. Sometimes when I’m alone, I look up and still see him. And in my mind’s eye, I’m still eighteen.”
“Hm,” Carly said with all the understanding she was capable of at this point in her life. She wondered whether life would be kinder to her or whether, like Great-Aunt Rae, she would just get a taste of the good stuff and then have it taken away … or whether someone else would be remembering her the way Great-Aunt Rae was remembering Sam, whether she would die and leave a hole in someone else’s life. She assumed that’s what happened to Sam.
“Pretty risky, flirting with the boss’s son,” Carly said.
“Sure seemed like it at the time,” Great-Aunt Rae agreed. “But when it’s the real thing, you can’t stop it any more than you could stop a freight train coming straight at you. When it happens to you, you’ll see it in his eyes. For a long time, all Sam and I did was catch each other looking at one another across camp. I’d be preparing food while Sam and the other guide helped set up tents and entertained the guests. Eventually, everyone seemed to gather at the fire. Sometimes Sam would help cook—flipping steaks or stirring stew while I tended to something else. After the guests ate, I ate, and then washed all of the dishes. Usually Sam would help me, because you know, up there in grizzly country, it was in everyone’s interest to get the food cleaned up quickly.” Great-Aunt Rae laughed and then continued, “Oh boy, when he rinsed dishes next to me, he sometimes stood very close—close enough to feel the heat radiate off his arm. We’d chitchat about nothing—the dinner, the weather, the rate at which summer was passing—nothing that would be embarrassing or inappropriate if overheard, you know, but really all I could think about was his arm heat.” She laughed at herself.
“Yeah, I had no clue arm heat was a thing.”
“Oh Carly, when you fall in love, you will enjoy yourself some arm heat.”
Carly laughed.
“One night, when there were a lot of dishes and the group of visitors was very tired, Sam and I had been the last two remaining up after everyone else had gone to bed. When the last dish was put away, Sam asked—with a sweet smile I could not resist—whether I might sit by the fire with him for just a few moments before turning in. I was so in love with him that I could not have denied any request he made, so I sat down on a log and to my surprise, he sat right next to me. When he asked whether I was cold, I told him just my back half because my front was warmed by the fire, so he put his arm around me. I never would have guessed that something as simple as an arm on my back would be as thrilling as it was. Electrical thrilling. Driving-too-fast thrilling. Diving-into-an-icy-mountain-lake-with-abandon-despite-knowing-the-end-result thrilling. Oh, Carly, that is the good stuff.” Great-Aunt Rae smiled as she inhaled. “Mm, I breathed in his sexy scent, felt the warmth of the fire on my face, and leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder. I could hear the uneven way he breathed, almost as if his breath was stuttering, and I knew he was feeling it too—the thrill. It was only mid-July. I knew I was in trouble … that the only thing I could do was try to make sure things didn’t move too fast, so I said, ‘I hate for this moment to end, but I should go to sleep,’ all casually, as if my heart wasn’t racing a hundred miles an hour, as if I had a chance of sleeping at all. He held my hand as he walked me to my tent. Hand heat. Oh, Carly. Hand heat with the right person is intoxicating too. Usually I was a bit scared going to my tent at night because it was on the other side of the chuck wagon and in the shadow of the fire, always seemed so dark. Generally, I tried to make sure I was in my tent before it was dark, with my cowbell nearby in case I needed to alert the guides that a bear was nosing around the kitchen. So, anyway, I appreciated him walking me to my tent. And then he asked if he could kiss me.”
“Ooo!”
Great-Aunt Rae smiled broadly. “It was quite a kiss.” She paused and then said, “So I asked for another. And before he kissed me again, he whispered, ‘Girl, you are playing with fire.’” Great-Aunt Rae exhaled. “Wasn’t that the truth! To his credit, he said, ‘Good night, beautiful Rae,’ and as he turned to walk away, he held my hand until the last possible moment, and then let it slip from his. I remember crawling into my tent out of breath and with my heart beating out of my chest and thinking the odds of me being unmarried and pregnant by the end of summer seemed very good, and man, I did not want that.”
How many times, how many thousands of times, had Great-Aunt Rae replayed that night over in her head? Carly wondered. It seemed to her that to recall that level of detail all these decades later, a person would have to retell herself that story at least a couple of times a week.
Great-Aunt Rae shook her head. “Within a month, he was sneaking into my tent, and we’d kiss all night. Sometimes he’d whisper, ‘I’m going to marry you, Rae Zakow,’ but I knew the difference between those words and, ‘Will you marry me?’ One set of words was meant to begin a life together. The other set of words was meant to simply coax the next piece of clothing off a girl. Remember that. I’d wake up in the night so peaceful in Sam’s embrace, but when the American robins started singing, he’d untangle himself from me and sneak out. I hated those birds.
“Before I got up and made breakfast, I’d lay there for a few more minutes, wondering how this all was going to end, or whether in fact it never would. I’m not sure everybody gets to experience that kind of love.”
“Do you think I will?”
“I think it’s inevitable. I think it will happen later for you, though. Right now, no one could get through.”
Unsure of what Great-Aunt Rae meant, Carly looked at her, puzzled.
“You’ve got a lot of armor on. It’s invisible, but still very real. You’ll need to take that off before you can experience the really good stuff in life. The land of the good stuff is a risky place. And sometimes it leaves you utterly devastated … completely destroye
d. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t get into the land of the good stuff with armor on, and I suppose that’s why I’ve never been back. You’ve just got to jump in with your heart wide open. I don’t know that I have it in me to go to the land of the good stuff again, but Carly, I am so glad I went there once. Don’t miss out.” With that, Great-Aunt Rae stood. “I’ve imparted enough wisdom tonight. I’m going to bed. Don’t stay up too long.” She walked off to the outhouse, leaving Carly to wonder how a person takes off invisible armor when it’s welded on.
Amy
That morning, Amy had woken early, maybe too early, cold and sweaty from hot flashing all night, wondering how sustainable camping was going to be. Campgrounds were much noisier than she remembered. She’d had to wait until quite late before enough people nearby had fallen asleep that she could sleep too. As she had lain awake waiting for sleep to find her, she had savored the sounds of the forest.
The morning was chilly, so she put on a warm hat and set off to the restroom, but later, when she walked out of the stall and to the sink to wash her hands, she saw her reflection in the mirror and panicked. With a hat on, she looked the way she had when she was going through chemo, and for a split second, she forgot that it was today and not a day six months ago. Her heart raced, and she felt as if she were going to cry. Quickly, she whipped off her hat. It’s over now. It’s over. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, she told herself, but her body didn’t quite believe it yet.
Walking outside, she found the cold air on her head as disturbing as the sight of herself in the hat, so she put the hat back on. She loved that hat—she did. Her sister had brought it back from Trinidad, Colorado, where she had gone one weekend to buy Amy some marijuana edibles to help with nausea. The hat was off-white cable knit on the outside so it had matched anything she wore, which she appreciated. Just because she’d had cancer didn’t mean she wanted to look like she was going to make a snowman. But best of all, it had a layer of very soft fleece inside, like short fur but even softer. The first time she had put it on her bald, tender head, she had closed her eyes in a state of pure euphoria. Hats had been such a challenge. Almost all of them had been somewhere between painful and uncomfortable. What had felt soft enough to ordinary people had felt unbearably scratchy to her. They had to be loose enough not to hurt but tight enough not to fall in her eyes. If they were too thick, she would get too hot indoors and the prickling rash on her head would worsen. She remembered one in particular, one she had wanted to wear in front of the woman who had knit it for her to show her appreciation, but she had felt every yarn in every knit cable pressing against her head and it had hurt. And then there had been the ones that were supposed to be funny, and maybe had been funny to other people going through the same thing, but those had hurt Amy—not on her scalp but in her heart, because she was unable to comprehend how her cancer could be funny to anyone, how what she was going through and would go through in the weeks to come could be a big joke to anyone who cared about her. There was nothing funny about going bald. There was nothing funny about being so close to death.
Feeling a hot flash coming on, she took the hat off again. How long would it be before the hot flashes were over and her hair had grown back enough that she wouldn’t need a hat any longer? How long before she really felt and looked like herself again? Would she ever?
Then she looked up at the branches of the trees above her and breathed in the scent of Ohanapecosh deeply. She listened to the river shushing her busy mind and felt the earth give just a little under her boots. It calmed her as she continued to walk down the little path, veering up to the hot springs.
Long ago there had been a bathhouse nearby, but now the springs had been restored to their natural state. One pool near the trail was large enough and cool enough to put her feet in, so she took off her boots, rolled up her pants, and did just that. When she had been going through chemo, the bottoms of her feet had burned, but in recent months they had felt all right, and for that she was grateful. Many people had permanent nerve damage in their feet after chemo. She gripped the sediment on the bottom of the little pool with her toes the way a tree sends down roots, and she simply noticed details in her surroundings. Elk tracks, some large and some very small. The songs of black-capped chickadees waking up. Hot water gently babbling down the hill and into her pool. The smell of sulfur and earth. Tiny rocks under her hands. She noticed her feet again, immersed in this warm water, and stretched them, noticing her right foot was tighter from stepping on the gas and brake pedals so much in the last week. What a discovery it felt like to notice a body part other than her chest and abdomen. What a relief, really. This awareness of all the parts of her body that had not changed this year struck her as revolutionary.
It seemed the whole world slowed down to a speed that was merciful, slow enough that her own life would feel as if it were lasting forever no matter how much or how little time she actually had left. In this state of awareness, she felt like she was living. For the first time in months, she actually felt as if she were truly living … here in this system of living organisms, all of them living together.
* * *
Packwood, Washington, was a town that just wanted to be left alone. On the outside it had changed a little bit since her teen years, the peak of the spotted owl controversy, when signs could be seen in the front yards of loggers and others who depended on the logging industry—signs that read, “Save a tree. Wipe your ass with a spotted owl,” and, “PNW loggers: an endangered species.” Families who had logged for four or even five generations just wanted to peacefully cut trees in the rain five days a week and hunt and fish on the other two. Despite the welcome signs outside motels, Amy could feel it, this internal war Packwood had been having with the outside world since the eighties. She could feel the energy of prickly annoyance and residual anger.
It was not the kind of community where an average woman went out and got a pixie cut. For starters, they weren’t practical. They didn’t offer enough warmth in the cold rain. Pixies were more of an urban phenomenon. They weren’t considered feminine here. She knew Packwood well enough to know this. Some locals felt kicked around by liberal environmentalists and were looking for an opportunity to kick a liberal back.
So, when she was filling up at the gas station and a large pickup with two men in front and two motorcycles in the back pulled up, followed by another pickup truck with one younger man and one motorcycle, Amy felt nervous. She looked at herself, in jeans, running shoes, and a green fleece shirt. Since she was hiking and camping, she wasn’t wearing makeup or earrings. In her mind, she ran through how she would protect herself if it came to it, since she was still recovering from surgery and too weak to actually fight. She decided she would lift up her shirt and yell, I’m recovering from breast cancer, you stupid a-holes!
It wasn’t a completely unwarranted thought. Her college friend Viviane, who had been through breast cancer a year before Amy went through it, had contacted her after Amy had first been diagnosed. She gave her all kinds of reassurance, practical advice, and information about what she might expect, with the disclaimer that every woman’s experience was unique to her. When the topic of hair came up, she said, “Yesterday I went to the gym for the second time since all of this happened, and afterward I stopped by the grocery store. When I was in the produce section, I noticed this little old lady giving me the stink eye, but I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually, she came up to me, wagged her finger in my face, and said, ‘I don’t approve of your lifestyle!’ Now I realize that, yeah, I was wearing my gym clothes and my hair is just beginning to come back.… I was so proud of it, you know? Just to have hair again.…”
“That’s horrible!” Amy said. “What did you do?”
“I was so stunned, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t speak. She stormed away, and some other shoppers said supportive things to me, but I just had to go. I left my cart there, went to my car, and cried.”
Since hearing that story, Amy had played it out
a hundred times in her head with all of the things she would have liked to say in order to make that mean old lady feel as small and stupid as possible. So, she supposed she had been expecting to have her moment of being on the receiving end of bigotry.
But the rednecks fueled up without paying her much attention at all. She didn’t know whether they thought she was a man or a woman. She didn’t know whether any of them had had a mother, a sister, a wife, or a friend who had been through the very same thing she had and perhaps recognized what they were seeing. And in that moment when she no longer felt threatened, she realized it was she who had been judgmental. She wondered how many times she had misjudged someone—assumed someone in the very same shoes she was in now was gay (even if she didn’t have a negative judgment of that), assumed someone who was skinny was anorexic instead of recovering from an illness, assumed someone had a boob job instead of reconstruction, assumed to know anything about anyone, really.
It was easy to forgive herself for the kind of judgment that stemmed from survival or safety concerns, but harder to forgive herself for the other misjudgments she had surely made. Well, now, she knew. From now on, she would do better.
She wished it were as easy to let go of the vulnerability she still felt in the world, but it wasn’t. She still felt so weary and so vulnerable.
* * *
Since it was Friday night and Ohanapecosh was full, Amy returned to the forest service campground where she had stayed two nights ago and pulled into the same slot. Familiarity was what she needed tonight. As she unpacked her stove and box of chicken-rice soup, she noticed an older couple sitting in lawn chairs outside their RV, their little dog at their feet.
Later, when she took her trash to the bear-proof dumpster, she crossed paths with the couple as they walked their dog.