WILD Nights
Mary Ellen Courtney
Books by this Author
Wild Nights
Spring Moon
(Available in paperback & eBook)
Praise for Wild Nights
2013 Winner Indie Excellence Award for Fiction
2013 Silver Medal Global eBooks Award for Fiction
2013 ForeWord Review Finalist Best New Fiction
“What a page-turner! If you’re looking for a book that is both tremendously entertaining and also insightful, sensitive, and thoughtful, Wild Nights is the ticket.” –– Carol Costello
“I spent all day yesterday wrapped up in Wild Nights and reluctantly finished the last page late last night, Hannah and Jon and the rest of the characters peopling this work still alive and fresh in my mind. This is an extraordinary work.” –– Jack Magnus
“In “Wild Nights” by Mary Ellen Courtney, readers are taken on a journey of personal understanding. From the first page, I found myself totally captivated by “Wild Nights.” Humor is interspersed between intense situations and vividly described scenery. I enjoyed having the opportunity to read a great fictional novel. This is definitely a novel that will be savored by the reader.” –– Paige Lovitt
“Mary Ellen Courtney is a new talent to be reckoned with in the writing industry.” –– Lit Amri
Wild Nights
Copyright ©2013 by Mary Ellen Courtney
All rights reserved
No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by an information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the author.
This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
First edition, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9889536-8-0
Porter Chance Books
Friday Harbor, WA
www.porterchancebooks.com
For my husband Wayne Fitzgerald.
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Acknowledgements
A Note About The Author
ONE
A lit butt flew out of the car window in front of me and bounced red sparks before it disappeared with a last puff into the soft ash by the side of the road. Too late for that, numbskull. The foothills were already smoldering, already burned up. Traffic crawled and I was stuck crawling with it. I shouldn’t have skipped breakfast; it looked like I was going to miss lunch too. I was so hungry the bitter cold smoke that blew in the air conditioner reminded me of butterscotch pudding, well, scorched pudding.
My phone rang. I hit speaker and Mom started right in.
“Where are you, Hannah?” she asked.
“Driving,” I said. “Where are you?”
“We’re at the Anchor, we’re almost done with lunch.”
Her voice was going soft around the edges of her tongue. More like a snack with wine. My sister Bettina, aka Binky, was the designated driver. What a joke. It might be safer if Mom drove.
“Take your time,” I said. “I missed the exit. I’m heading back north now, stuck in fire slowdown. I’m not going anywhere fast.”
A burnt out San Diego back road at 1:00 in the afternoon isn’t green scenic; it’s more over lit moonscape. The Manzanita bushes, their smooth tangled limbs once a lush blood red, looked like ashen spirits with hot feet. They writhed across the charred hills. I imagined their voices as the ululations of distraught Moroccan women.
Fire fighters in day-glo yellow jackets dug at pockets of red-hot embers. They smothered the fire that native plants need to release the seeds that would repopulate the hillside.
Local Indians used to set fires. Their dusty feet moved quietly through the chaparral. No squawking walkie-talkies or whoop whoop warnings, just the sounds of dry rustling leaves and distant birdcalls. The Manzanita only plays dead. They would try again when conditions were more favorable. Memory roots, hidden deep in the earth, will let fly tender new leaves. The leaves will attract game while the fresh cover shelters nesting birds that will take flight and scatter the messages in the seeds. The Indians knew that.
Except for the stray firebug, the new locals don’t set fires intentionally; they fear them. Fire comes anyway and life presses on.
One life that had stopped pressing on was my grandmother’s. She had died a few days before. I was headed to meet Mom, Binky, and Mom’s sister Judith, aka Aunt Asp, at the funeral home to make arrangements for her viewing. Everyone in the family but me lived in San Diego. I had to drive down from the Hollywood Hills to participate in what my mother thought would be a bonding experience. Plus, she had some screwball idea that being a production designer meant I’d know how to set the scene for the viewing. Come on, Mom, I do a lot of research to develop the look of film projects. Except for an occasional winging it, I don’t just make it up as I go along.
Anyway, we were burying someone we knew. Everyone was bound to show up with their own storyline about Grandma already running through their head. The only ones missing from the exercise would be my brother Eric and his wife Anna. They could have driven up from La Jolla, but they were too smart for that.
I hoped the day would come when I could say no. I had a hard time refusing my family. I’d had that conversation with a therapist, many times. I said I couldn’t go home and visit friends without seeing my family; it would hurt their feelings. She said it was my hometown too. I’d said, “No I can’t.” She’d said, “Yes you can.” We bounced that ball back and forth. Every once in a while she’d stick her tongue in her cheek and shake her head like she was thinking, this poor person.
At least today we were meeting in Vista, halfway. I doubted I’d see any old friends there. I’d already stopped at the rest home and picked up my grandmother’s few belongings. I looked at the small wooden box on the passenger seat. The lid’s design had been wood-burned then painted. It was a spring scene rendered without the burden of perspective. At first glance you’d think it was Chinese crap, but it was an old box, a handmade gift from my father’s mother to my mother’s mother. It sounded so civilized. My ex-husband’s mother and my mother never exchanged gifts; they barely exchanged words.
The box held my grandmother’s dead canary. It was wrapped in an orange silk bag with a red drawstring. I’d left behind an old nap blanket and a few worn nightgowns. Her dentures and wire-rimmed glasses, both of which totally creeped me out, were in the trunk with her burial dress.
The little bird had been an unwilling hero. Grandma said he’d sung quite a bit on his days off. I don’t know why that thought made me so happy. He deserved to ride shotgun.
Grandma had had courage. As a young widow with small children she traveled from Minnesota to North Dakota and bought a coal mine. It was there that she met her second husband, my grandfather. They were still using canaries to warn about any buildup of mine gas. The birds either pass
ed out or died when the gas got too dangerous. Grandma’s bird died, but he saved my grandfather who skedaddled before the mine exploded. He grabbed the birdcage on the way out. Grandpa said we could all use a canary in our lives.
Grandpa always talked about the mine like it was a chancy but generous lover. He used to chuckle that the explosion had been close, but no cigar, like he’d just survived her latest temper tantrum. It was her last. He loved that mine, but she burned underground for a couple of years and, unlike a real lover, it was no use to wait her out. So they packed up and moved to the city.
To show her gratitude for his sacrifice, Grandma had the bird preserved by a taxidermist. She didn’t want him brought back to life, so to speak, with tiny glass eyes and feet wired to a perch. He looked just like what he was, a dead bird. The eyes were squint shut and tiny translucent talons were curled at the ends of scaly legs tucked up close to the body. He felt even lighter than a feather with his life force gone. My grandfather said he got a kick out of the dead bird. He would. Thanks to the bird he was still around to get a kick out of Grandma, which produced two daughters.
The daughters thought preserving the bird was crazy. You’d think they would appreciate his life-giving sacrifice, maybe build an altar and burn some incense like the Vietnamese ladies in my local nail salon. But they took the stuffed bird as further evidence of their mother’s weirdness. For some reason they never mentioned their father being weird.
There were exceptions. In Mother’s world, all roads lead to Mother. When she was feeling especially slushy she said the bird died so she could be born. It wasn’t a story she ran with when her sister was around. My grandmother’s eyes lost focus when her daughter talked like that. Even mothers get sick of listening to their offspring’s bullshit apparently. I thought the bird should be buried with Grandma. I had a vision of them reanimated in a new place, maybe hooking up with my grandfather.
I didn’t know much about my other grandmother, my father’s mother, the wood burner. She was already a widow when I was born and a bit severe. I’d had little contact with her even when my father was alive, almost none after he died. My mother said she never approved of their marriage. I’ve since learned from my cousins that she didn’t approve of any of the spouses her children chose. It was so typical of my mother to leave out that part.
My father died twenty years ago. I remember his mother running out of the viewing room crying, saying that that was not her son in there. It was a shock to see her show emotion, but I could see her point. It didn’t look anything like him. She died soon after my father. The grief hit her rigid back and knocked her down.
My attention snapped back to traffic; it was finally starting to speed up. My Prius was whirring behind the pack while it built up momentum. Sparky is an okay car, but she won’t break any speed records. I listen to the radio on scan. A former boyfriend said I listen to the radio like I’m on speed. Drug runners know those things. He was a drug runner masquerading as an investment banker. He had a great sense of humor. Well the drug runner did; the investment banker could get a little condescending. Leave it to me to find someone for myself, and someone for my mother, in the same man. I ran into him right after I bought Sparky. He couldn’t understand why someone like me, with what he referred to as a zero-to-sixty personality, would drive a Prius. I was reining in my tendency to go too fast.
Traffic slowed down again and Sparky started acting funny. When I braked she lurched forward until I stomped down hard with both feet. She stopped just inches from the fender in front of me. Shit! I inched along giving the guy ahead of me a little more room, but each stop was an adrenalin rush. I looked for a place to pull off. The only thing in any direction was a truck stop with a café and motel.
I turned into the crowded parking lot and parked on the perimeter where the asphalt died into the edge of a field, a soft place to land in case the brakes failed. The diner was a brown-and-orange fifties model with bad maintenance. I could see only slashes between the hulking semi-trucks that surrounded it like behemoths at a watering hole. They’d probably blown past me in their rush to get food poisoning at the place.
I called my mother. They were still at the Anchor, swilling I’m sure.
Binky grabbed the phone from Mom. “Did you get my blanket at Grandma’s?”
“I didn’t know you wanted it, Binky. I left it for one of the residents.”
“I wanted to give it to Amber. Something to remember her great-grandmother by.”
“Remember her by? She never even met her.”
“She did too. I took her when she was a baby.”
“Amber is ten, Binky.”
“Time flies when you have kids, Hannie. They’re a time suck. You’ll see if you ever get around to having any.”
“Ten years isn’t just a suck, Binky, it’s more like a full-blown warp. You only live thirty minutes away.”
“Don’t scold me, Hannie. I made her the blanket.”
“Oh please, that blanket is ugly as sin, eight feet long, and barely wide enough to cover her body.”
“She loved it. She always mentioned it to Mom.”
What was jaw-lock annoying was that my grandmother never failed to say how nice it was that Bettina had made her a blanket.
“Well call the nursing home then,” I said. “Go get it. You’re right there.”
“You were supposed to be taking care of everything, GG.”
“Well I didn’t take care of that, Bettina.”
“Oooo Bettina. You getting all serious on me, Hannie?”
I couldn’t say Bettina when I was little, so I called her Binky. Binky is too nice in a fight.
“I have to go,” I said. “I need to figure this out.”
“Oh don’t get all stiff neck on me, Hannah,” she hung up. Apparently my family had stopped saying good-bye.
I wondered what a spoiled brat like Amber would say about her great-grandmother’s blanket. About her mother who made it for that matter. That gift could come back to bite Binky in the butt. As far as I could tell Amber didn’t know much about anything. Unlike her brother and sister, she hadn’t carved out a niche in either sports or academics. She was cute, she knew cute, except for her sneer. She could really sit on the sidelines and sneer. She’d sneer at that blanket. We had that in common. I needed to hear a friendly voice so called Steve, the man I was dating.
“I’m stuck in the boondocks with a broken car.”
“Did you call triple A?”
“Not yet. I thought I’d explain it to you and see if you knew what could be wrong.”
I told him how the car was acting. I don’t know why. Steve was a film editor from New York. He didn’t learn to drive until his late twenties when he was forced into it by taking a picture in Los Angeles. For negotiating subways in New York or Paris, he’s your man, but even after ten years of practice, he drove like a beginner. He had no rhythm. It set my teeth on edge.
“I don’t know anything about cars, you know that,” he said. “I know about town cars and triple A. Are you somewhere safe?”
“I’m somewhere, safe remains to be seen.”
“Well hang up and call, lock the doors, then call me back.”
He must have thought boondocks meant the Bronx or South Central L.A. I got out and stretched while I assessed the safe factor. I could smell smoke in the air and in my hair. I sniffed my forearm. All of me smelled like smoke; and it wasn’t that nice flaming marshmallow-on-a-stick campfire smell.
It was a definite Oh Shit situation. My parents didn’t allow profanity when we were growing up, except when things went south. My father enjoyed reading us excerpts from a book of black box recordings. The last words uttered by pilots before hitting terra firma or taking the big plunge; good stuff, Dad. A tiny few said, “Oh Jesus.” My mother always said they were praying, which always made my father laugh. Fewer still said adios to the spouse. Most threw out either “Oh Shit” or “Oh Fuck” to join the Gettysburg Address and “I have a dream” in the ether,
for all time. Unlike Lincoln or King, I doubt it was one of their finest moments. We could say one of those when, for example, the car let us down in the middle of nowhere.
A big green truck with a leaping yellow stag was parked nearby. The cab was tilted up and a guy was so deep in the engine that his legs were hanging in the air over the side. A large German shepherd was guarding a tool chest on the ground. It was broad daylight and the legs guy looked like someone who might know a thing or two about cars. I wasn’t sure about the dog. I took a few steps toward the truck. The dog watched. A few more steps, dog still cool with it. I got all the way to the truck and started to tap the guy’s leg, but the dog stood up. Got it. I just called.
“Hello?” The dog lay back down.
“Yeah?” said a muffled voice at the end of the legs.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“I can hear you, so I suppose you may.”
Oh brother, that was a smart ass at the end of the legs. I decided to go inside and ask around, but his muffled voice came back: “Fire away if you’re still there.”
I imagined firing away at his ass. In his surprise, he’d jerk his head up and gash it on the hood. Then he’d slide to the ground unconscious and bleeding. I’d want to help, but his dog would keep me at bay. Smartass would bleed to a slow gasping death. I’d say, “May I help you?” over his death rattle. An animal control officer would finally arrive and shoot a tranquilizer dart into the snapping beast, while the late-arriving EMTs waited helplessly on the sidelines. Too late, can’t help ya. I’ve probably seen too many movies.
“Is there a car repair place near here?” I asked.
He was quiet under the hood. Then he slid out far enough to look down at me. I envied him his core strength; I’d be a heap on the ground if I tried that. He was a young guy, about my age, dressed in greasy overalls with a bandana covering his hair. The look in his vivid blue eyes said I’d dropped down from Mars. He slid out farther, hitting his head while he was at it. Yes!
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights Page 1