Tales From Sea Glass Inn

by Karis Walsh

  Aspen rested her palm in the center of Heather’s chest, wishing she could heal whatever frightening things were happening inside Heather’s body. She had a feeling the issues were more mental and emotional than purely physical. She’d seen and heard hints of Heather’s dissatisfaction and aimlessness today. “Did your doctor tell you to work harder on the trip than you do in the office? Seems counterproductive to me.”

  Heather sighed audibly, and Aspen felt the echo reverberate through her palm and into her own body. “I’m being stubborn, I suppose. I didn’t have much choice in the matter, and I thought I’d cross off everything on the list and throw it on his desk when I get back. It started as a silly idea in my head, and has turned into…”

  “Your new goal?” Aspen offered when Heather paused.

  She nodded. “It keeps me busy.” She stepped back, moving up a step, and Aspen’s hand dropped back to her side. “So, are you going to tell everyone what I’m doing here?”

  Aspen shook her head. “I’ll go with my story. You’re scouting the place for another hotel in town and you’re trying to put together the perfect list of tourist attractions for it. You’re stealing Mel’s ideas.”

  Heather laughed and started walking up the stairs again. “She’ll kick me out, and how will I accomplish my goal without her morning scones as fuel?”

  “Get some protein bars,” Aspen suggested. She liked the banter between them. She had a feeling Heather hadn’t told many people—if any at all—about her health concerns. She seemed the type to hold them inside, probably what got her into this mess in the first place. Aspen liked having Heather confide in her, but she felt helpless to stop her from self-destructing either here or at home and in her job.

  Aspen was ready to follow Heather on a whirlwind tour of the cheese factory, whatever Heather needed to do to make herself feel in control again, but Heather surprised her by spending most of their visit standing in front of a huge picture window and watching blocks of cheese move about on conveyor belts. Aspen stayed close to her. She had to admit the repetitive movements of the process were mesmerizing, especially with the workers who moved around as if they’d been choreographed, wearing masks and thick hairnets.

  Heather tapped lightly on the glass with her index finger. “You know, if you really want to continue sculpting without making any money, you should switch media. You probably could make something cool out of these blocks of cheese.”

  Aspen nodded. “I could sculpt the moon. Or carve holes in it and make a Swiss cheese out of cheddar. How ironic would that be?”

  “And you won’t have to worry about the masses buying your sculptures and diminishing your vision somehow, because they’d reek something awful after a few days.”

  “Hey, you’re right,” Aspen said, paying more attention to a smiling and relaxed Heather than to the view through the window. “The pieces would eventually just mold away to nothing. I’d be making a statement about the nature of art.”

  Heather turned toward her, laughing, and her shoulder rubbed against Aspen’s. “And if you get hungry while you’re working, you can eat the scraps.”

  “Another bonus. Plus, it’d be cheaper than buying clay and carving tools. All I’d need would be a cheese knife and a cutting board.”

  “Throw in a baguette and a bottle of wine, and you can have a cocktail party while you’re sculpting.”

  They leaned against the glass while they laughed and kept trying to outdo each other with cheese jokes. When their hilarity died down, Heather gave a sad-sounding sigh and looked around them at all the interactive exhibits.

  “Want to read more about the process of cheesemaking?” Aspen asked. She’d liked having Heather present with her. Teasing and wiping away tears of laughter. Connected to her and the moment, instead of rushing through it. She felt as if Heather was about to slip away again, and she saw the mask of determination settle over her expression, but then Heather shook her head and the façade disappeared.

  “Not even a tiny bit,” she said, pushing away from the glass and grabbing Aspen’s hand. Aspen felt her palm and fingers mold to the shape of Heather’s. She’d never felt such a sense of coming home, except when she held a wire modeling tool and carved something of her own out of a blank lump of clay.

  Heather pulled her back toward the stairs. “Let’s skip the lesson and go directly to those extra-credit ice cream cones.”

  *

  Heather spent the next day alone, wandering through the downtown shops and galleries. Mel had included a list of local businesses in her welcome packet, and Heather was determined to buy something from each one of them. She’d get all her Christmas shopping done in one afternoon, or maybe she’d send one present to her doctor every day for a month.

  What had started as an obstinate way to symbolically blow a raspberry at her doctor had somehow turned into an amusing game. Heather was actually having fun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this playful. She went out with coworkers regularly, celebrating birthdays and Fridays and promotions. She favored loud bars on those nights when her restless thoughts that there had to be something more to life kept her awake. She’d sit alone for hours, nursing a weak whiskey sour and reading over paperwork at the bar while the strobe lights and booming music keep her thoughts at bay. She even dated once in a while, when she could stir up enough interest in someone to sit in a restaurant and make small talk for an hour or two. But those conversations were usually work related since she tended to meet and socialize with other businesswomen.

  Yesterday had been a turning point for her. She had been sightseeing with a vengeance since she had arrived, and she expected to do the same with Aspen in tow. She had started their afternoon together by taking on the role of older sister or mentor and encouraging Aspen to make different career choices, but soon she had given up her attempts to create distance by lecturing and advising. She had started to recognize her own jealousy over Aspen’s passion and her irritation that Aspen was giving away the chance Heather could only dream of. To work with passion and joy. Aspen’s probing questions had kept Heather from backing away from the self-discovery. She would normally have sought to numb the realizations with more work and with crowded places, but yesterday she had allowed them to surface in her mind. The acknowledgment of her feelings didn’t change them or solve her life issues, but somehow she felt lighter.

  Light enough to play. To joke and tease with Aspen. They had sat in the small café and swapped tastes of ice cream and toppings. Then they had wandered through the gift shop, touching lightly and laughing with an ease Heather hadn’t experienced in ages, with another person or with herself. When it had been time to drive back to the inn for Aspen’s evening art class, Heather had returned to her room and crossed off another two tourist activities with a flourish. Then she had gone downstairs and helped Mel finish the jigsaw puzzle.

  Her good mood had lasted through today, as well. She had hoped to see Aspen last night, to rekindle the laughter and maybe light another spark between them, but Aspen and the others had stayed in the studio until Heather got tired of watching for her and had gone to bed. Miraculously, she had been able to remain lighthearted on her own. After a brief chat with Aspen at breakfast—little more than their plans for the day—Aspen had gone back to sculpting and Heather had hit the town.

  She leaned back on a bench by the sidewalk and pulled her navy pea coat tightly around herself. A few rays of sunlight made it through the thick cloud cover, but they weren’t enough to warm her. At least she wasn’t on the beach stretched out on a yoga mat while goose bumps peppered her skin. She opened a pale pink bakery box and took out a puffy creation called a sand dollar, apparently good enough to rate an asterisk on Mel’s list of musts. Must do, must see, must eat. Heather was still planning to do them all, but now it felt like a lark. She wished Aspen were with her, because she would appreciate Heather’s temporarily changed outlook. Heather would be the same person she had been once she was back at work in Portland, but she co
uld allow herself to be someone else here.

  She bit into the layers of flaky pastry and reached the dark chocolate cream inside. Mel hadn’t steered her wrong. This deserved at least four asterisks. She licked her fingers and leaned forward so the powdered sugar coating sprinkled the ground at her feet and not her dark wool coat. She finished in four bites, resisting the urge to dive back into the pastry box and eat another. Later. Now she had more shopping to do.

  Heather got up and wrapped the handles of her packages around her wrists. She’d been to nearly every place on Mel’s list, including the Beachcomber Bookstore. The owner, a gorgeous but too-perceptive woman, had watched her with a disconcerting intensity. Heather knew what she was seeing. Exactly what Heather had seen this morning when she’d looked in the mirror, as if by acknowledging her mental unrest she had suddenly shifted her perception. She had been denying the doctor’s concerns and her test results, refusing to admit she had moments of low energy and sadness, but this morning the signs had stared back at her from the mirror, and she had seen some of what had worried him. Dark circles under her eyes, too little weight in her face and on her body, and a resigned but defiant frown. The bookstore owner had seemed to absorb Heather’s mood and expression with clarity, too, and then she had brought her three books to buy.

  Heather shifted the heavy bag. One of the books was an autobiography of a dancer, the second was a guide to operas and their stories, and the third was about Gothic architecture. Heather wasn’t sure why they had been chosen since she wasn’t an architect, a ballerina, or an operagoer. Each one seemed to remind her of old interests, however, and she had willingly bought all of them. She had taken an opera class in college because she had to add a few fine arts credits to her economics ones in order to graduate, and she had enjoyed every moment, especially when they attended performances. She had never designed a house or building, but she had been drawn to interesting structural shapes and forms and would sometimes wander the city streets for hours at night, searching for new ones to admire. She was a stiff and nonrhythmic dancer, but she loved music.

  Heather would have time to read later. Now she had to finish her shopping spree. She pushed through the door of the Seascape Art Gallery and was surprised to see Pam standing behind the counter, shuffling through a stack of invoices.

  “Heather, what a surprise! I’m glad you caught me here since my hours have been inconsistent lately.”

  “Hi, Pam. I didn’t know you owned a gallery,” Heather said, walking over to the counter. “How do you find time to do this and paint and teach?”

  “I usually have help in here, but after my student hire went back to school, I didn’t hire another clerk. I sort of…well, after the spill, I couldn’t paint for a long time. I’m slowly starting again, but now I don’t have help here, so I’m juggling running the gallery and the seminar with my own painting. I’m not doing a very good job of it right now, but I’ll get there. At least the seminar is inspiring to me. Working around other artists is giving me the push I needed to pick up a brush again.”

  “It must be hard not to be creating,” Heather said, thinking of Aspen and her willingness to sculpt less because she scorned being a professional. Heather wondered if her reluctance had more to do with fear than concern over losing her artistic integrity.

  “It’s a horrible feeling,” Pam said. “And I think it was almost as hard on Mel as on me because she understands how much I need to paint to really comprehend the world around me.”

  Heather understood a little of what Mel must have felt during Pam’s dry spell. She had seen the rapture on Aspen’s face after her morning sculpting. If she had to witness the light being snuffed out, she’d do anything in her power to help Aspen find her passion again. “Are any of your paintings here?” Heather asked. She’d been gradually deepening her appreciation of the storm painting in her room. It had disturbed her at first, maybe because the destruction on the beach reminded her of the turmoil in her mind, but now she was able to glance obliquely at her unfulfilling job and her fear that she had made a bad decision too long ago to rectify. Could the tempest-tossed debris in her mind be cleaned away? Or would she need to return to her old habits of ignoring and anesthetizing? Maybe a souvenir painting of Pam’s would help her remember how she had felt here, as long as the memories weren’t too painful. She’d prefer a memento created by Aspen, though. Something to remind her of yesterday and her revelations and their laughter, like the hazy memory of reality during a lucid dream.

  “I have a couple full-sized ones near the window,” Pam pointed across the gallery. “And in the display case on the back wall there are some miniature oils I’ve done because a lot of our guests want something similar to the mosaics in the rooms. Why don’t you put your bags behind the counter while you look around? I see you’ve been shopping and apparently singlehandedly keeping Cannon Beach merchants safe from bankruptcy.”

  “I’m doing my best,” Heather said, putting her bags down with a sigh of relief. “I’ve been to almost every shop Mel had on the map in my welcome packet.”

  “You do realize those lists are meant to be helpful suggestions for our guests and not mandatory assignments, don’t you?”

  Heather laughed. “Yes, I do. I started working through them as a way to make a statement to someone who isn’t even here, but now it’s turned into a game. I’m having a good vacation in my own goal-oriented, obsessive way.”

  “As long as you’re having fun, we’re happy,” Pam said.

  “Best vacation I’ve had in a long time,” Heather said. It was a completely true statement, especially since she couldn’t remember the last vacation she had taken. She’d been barely old enough to legally drink.

  “Good.” Pam smiled and went back to her invoices while Heather wandered through the gallery. She looked at Pam’s paintings first, admiring one with gulls circling Haystack Rock and another of a calm sea with a pod of gray whales in the far distance, along the horizon. She admired Pam’s subtle touch with oils and glass, and her subjects that seemed to have meaning beyond their actual beings. When she looked through the display of smaller oils, however, she found the one she wanted to own. It was a smaller section of her storm painting, zeroing in on a segment of the beach with windblown grasses and scattered driftwood. Maybe it would remind her of the moments of doubt and clarity she had found here, even when she returned to her mind-numbing life.

  Heather held the little oil painting as she examined the rest of the gallery’s offerings. A few pieces caught her eye immediately: a blown glass wall hanging that looked like a waterfall in blues and teals, a portrait of a sea captain at the helm of his ship, and a turned wooden sculpture of an abstract figure. She wanted to run her hands over the piece, feeling the grain of the wood and the smoothness of its finish.

  “You remind me of Mel when she first came in here,” Pam said. Heather turned abruptly and found Pam watching her. “She made a beeline for the highest-quality pieces in here, just like you did.”

  “I just picked my favorites,” Heather said with a feeling of heat in her cheeks. Why was she blushing and trying to avoid the compliment?

  “They’re mine, too. If I didn’t need the gallery to make money, I’d have nothing but works like those three.”

  “I agree,” Heather said. “But I can see what you’re offering with the other types of artwork. They’ll keep you in business and satisfy the customers who want to buy a memory.” She gestured toward a few pretty but unremarkable paintings of the ocean. Then she pointed at some more abstract works with vibrant colors and pleasing shapes, but little depth beyond them. “Or the ones who want to buy art because it’ll make them feel good to have something attractive in their house or office even though they don’t know much about what they’re looking at.”

  Pam nodded slowly, watching Heather with an unreadable expression. “You have a good eye,” she said eventually.

  Heather was about to protest again, but she let herself receive the compliment with a quiet
thank you. She paid for Pam’s painting and gathered her bags again.

  “See you back at the inn?” Pam asked.

  “Not until later tonight,” Heather answered, using her elbow to open the gallery door. “Next on the list is a cooking class at the culinary school. I think we’re making salmon.”

  Heather was halfway back to her car before a memory resurfaced that had been nagging at the edge of her mind while she’d been in Pam’s gallery. She’d been maybe ten or eleven and had brought home some papers from her classes. Her parents had been pleased with the A-plus on her science experiment and had chastised her for making spelling errors on a short language arts essay. They hadn’t even mentioned the picture she had drawn for art class, and later that night Heather had found it crumpled in the trash. As if the one memory was a trigger for others, she recalled too many times when her mom or dad had steered her away from beauty and toward more practical pursuits. Music, art, and literature were fine as sideline activities, but not as the focus of her attention. She’d heard phrases like waste of time and not a subject you’ll need to master for your degree too many times to count, and they had insinuated themselves in her mind, making her nervous when Pam praised her for something her parents would have dismissed.

  Heather was under no illusion that she’d have possessed the talent of someone like Aspen or Pam, even if she’d been encouraged to explore her artistic side. Perhaps what she had been missing in her life wasn’t an all-consuming passion and gift in one area, but an appreciation for art and beauty and music in general.

  She wasn’t certain what to do with these revelations she kept uncovering. They were making her nervous and not helping her make a decision about how to inject more life into her career. Instead, they managed to emphasize and magnify her feelings of discontent.

  Heather stowed her bags in the trunk of her car and drove to the small culinary school and catering company. She had been in kitchens before and had no expectation of uncovering a latent talent to be a world-class chef, but she was looking forward to the evening anyway. She thought of Aspen back at the inn, working on her sculpture with the single-minded intensity of a true artist. She had something magnificent to offer the world. What did Heather have to offer? What would be her legacy when she was gone?