“Hello? Anyone?” I call out again, the interior of the cabin strikingly familiar.
The red and white-checkered curtains still hang at the sides of each window in the kitchen and dinette, and the oven and refrigerator look ancient, though clean. It doesn’t seem anyone has cooked here in quite a while though, the house lacking the smells of habitation. When I open the refrigerator, there’s nothing but a box of baking soda and six-pack of beer that might have been here for years for all I know.
I close the refrigerator and head back through the foyer and into the living room. There is furniture, a mauve colored fabric couch, two chairs covered in a flower design and a simple coffee table in the middle. I can envision my grandparents and even my own parents sitting in these very chairs, gathering to play some board game or checkers, and me laying in my grandma’s lap on this couch that one time I’d managed to get a really bad sunburn at the lake. The fact that everything isn’t covered in several layers of dust and cobwebs and that there’s still electricity means someone has been taking care of the place.
The unknown makes me nervous, but I push on exploring, heading through a small hallway and into the back of the house. When I hear a bang, I swear that my heart crawls right up into my throat, rendering me absolutely immobile. I pause for a moment, hold my hand to my chest and wonder if I’d not just imagined the noise when I hear the same thing over again, even louder this time.
If I were smart, I’d turn and make a run for it, but curiousness and an unwillingness to give up on this place drive me forward and closer to the noise. It’s when I look through the window of the door to the mud room that I feel an immediate relief at seeing several overturned, but empty, garbage bins and a black cat sitting on the mud room window sill, staring right up at me.
“Well, look at you,” I say with relief to the cat through the window. “You gave me a good scare.”
I open the door, and the cat, looking more frightened than I ever was, darts through the half open window of the mud room. I step into the small room and lift the overturned bins and then look out through the back, seeing that the cat has completely disappeared.
“Poor thing,” I say, going down the steps of the rear porch and wondering where he or she came from. There are only one or two other holiday cabins around the lake and at far opposite sides, and just as few and far apart along the road. It’s possible the cat belongs to one of them and has a very big range, but it’s also a possibility he’s feral, having been left behind or just born out here. I’d helped my friend, Elle, in California transport feral cats a few times after they’d been trapped so they could be spayed or neutered. It was a good way to keep the population in check without having to euthanize them. For all I know, there’s an entire herd of wild cats running around the vicinity of the lake in search of food, but I didn’t see any evidence of even a crumb for them at the cabin.
With my arms crossed over my chest, I head toward the water, hoping I might spot the kitty as I do. There are trees back here, more than in front, though much more sparse in this southern part of the state than the forests of central Oregon and Washington. But they are thick enough that they’ve hidden a dock that just comes into view as I near the water’s edge. It stretches out into the lake where the waves lap quietly against the shore. And when the very end of it comes into full focus, there’s a boat tied to the dock and, upon closer inspection, two oars placed in it.
I remember a boat when I was a kid, but it was the motorized kind with a steering wheel and plush seats. I don’t know when this one might have gotten here or who would have brought it.
With the cat still not in sight, I head back the way I’d come, up the rear steps of the cabin and into the mud room. It’s now that I notice a clipboard hanging just outside the door to the main house. I lift it off of the nail it’s been hanging on and begin reading the schedule that’s printed on the paper secured to it. It appears to be a caretaker’s log, noting a monthly visit with all of the tasks checked off in red pen, a space below each month for notes of any repairs made in excess of the list. The last visit was two weeks ago, and it explains why the place has been kept up so well.
I let out a big breath, relieved. It makes sense that my parents wouldn’t allow anything they owned to turn overgrown and cave in on itself. Even if they knew they’d never see it again, it would probably keep them up at night to think anything remotely tied to them wasn’t as perfect as it could be.
The log is just what I need to feel confident that I’ll be able to have a roof over my head for two weeks. It’s probably not enough time to figure my life out, but it’s something. With one of my biggest worries now put at ease, I hang the clipboard back on the nail, stride through the cabin, then out the front door and back to my car.
With a place to live and a job I feel confident I’ll get, I decide to head back into town and spend some of my remaining funds on things that I’ll need in the next couple of weeks. It’s discouraging how little a couple hundred dollars will actually get you, even at the local discount big-box store where I buy a few summer dresses, some casual tops and bottoms, a pair of wedge heels, fresh underclothes and some personal care items. I also give in and buy some makeup because, even though I’m glad to be free of the layers I’ve been used to wearing every day, I’m not sure I want to go around completely bare faced.
I figure I’ll get some groceries on my way back to the cabin, knowing that anything perishable wouldn’t last very long with the hot summer sun beating down on my car. Besides, it’s nearly four, and I don’t want to be late meeting up with Melissa again at the diner.
The diner has a name. The signage out front read’s Al’s Diner, but the “Al’s” is relatively small in comparison to the “Diner” portion, and it’s in a kind of cursive that forces you to focus on the letters to properly make them out. Heading in, I wonder if a guy named Al really owns the place or if someone just thought the name sounded good. The diner is quieter than it had been in the morning, but it’s not anywhere near empty. The customers remain predominantly men, but there are a few older couples that are here for an early dinner or a late lunch. Melissa is at the cash register near the kitchen, seeming to be going over receipts while a younger, attractive woman is on the floor doing waitressing duties.
“Oh, hi, Natalie,” Melissa says, her head bouncing up as I approach her.
“Hey, Melissa.” I give her a half wave.
She stacks the receipts, hits a few buttons on the register, and then stuffs them into the drawer that pops open. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back once you’d had time to consider what it would be like taking care of a belligerent old woman.”
I shrug. “I have some practice.” I don’t mention it’s my own mother who could be downright hostile to me.
“Well, you’ll find out real soon if that practice has prepared you for my mother.” She lifts her purse from a rack, says some parting words to two guys sitting at the counter and then comes around and waves for me to follow. “I’m heading home to introduce Natalie here to your grandmother,” she says to the younger waitress.
The young woman is standing at the end of a booth with two men seated in it, one hand on her hip and the other twirling a few loose tendrils of her light blonde hair that’s pulled back into a loose bun, just like the one Melissa wears.
She barely turns to us, says, “K… whatever,” with a real bitchy edge and then focuses back on the two middle-aged men who seem to be hanging on whatever words come out of her mouth.
“My daughter,” Melissa says with a wince. “You make sure you pay all the customers equal attention now!” she calls to her before pushing through the door and beckoning me to follow.
“Oh, okay… Camille, right?” I say once we’re outside and under the blazing sun.
“The one and only,” she says with a level of distaste in her voice. She pulls a set of keys out from her purse, and we head toward a shiny red car. “You’re more than welcome to ride up with me, or you can take your own car if
you prefer… in case you can’t get away from my mother fast enough.”
“I’ll go with you.” I don’t want to risk losing her on the way over and find myself miserably lost.
“Good. I like the company.”
“It’s a muscle car, a Dodge Charger,” she says of her vehicle after I give it a once over. “It wasn’t cheap, but there are only so many thrills you get in a small town, so I figured why not? Better to spend the money on myself than to keep giving more to Camille who’ll just turn around and blow it anyway.”
“You and your daughter don’t get along very well, do you?” I ask as we drive along the quiet city streets. It seems an obvious question, and I hope I’m not stepping over any lines, but I feel as though I’m fairly well versed in bad mother-daughter relationships.
Turning up a hilly road, Melissa sighs. “I don’t hate the girl if that’s what you think. I’m just disappointed. You saw the way she was flirting at the diner, and that’s just the beginning of it. She’s twenty-six years old, has been through I don’t know how many men, how many jobs and how many schools. If OSU takes her back in the fall, it will be a miracle.” Again, she tells me all of this like I’m a confidant and not just some girl she met this morning.
“You must have been very young when you had her,” I say.
“How’s that?”
“You don’t look old enough to have a twenty-six-year-old daughter is all.” I can’t imagine Melissa being a day over forty.
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she says with a smile before turning up another hilly road. “I’m forty-seven, and I guess you can chalk me looking younger up to good genes because I sure as hell haven’t been spending my life getting spa treatments.”
“Well, I’d have never guessed,” I offer with honest laughter. My father’s clients would pay good money to look that good so close to fifty.
She looks over at me for a moment and raises her brows. “A lot of good it’s done me. Camille’s father ran off when she was just a kid, and being a single mom made romance iffy. But what about you?” she asks, directing our discussion back to me. “That fiancé really so bad that you had to run away from him?”
I think about my wedding dress and white heels stuffed into the hatch of my Subaru, wrinkled and dirty now, a five-thousand-dollar dress that I couldn’t wait to get out of.
“Yes. He really was that bad.”
“Well, then good for you,” she says simply.
Before we can talk any more about Camille or Michael or Melissa’s ex-husband, Melissa heads up the inclined driveway of a 1970s split-level. It’s in a neighborhood with large lots and at the end of a cul-de-sac with an entire forest of trees behind it.
“Here we are,” she says. “Last chance for you to run like hell.”
I laugh. “No, I’m as ready to face your mother as I’ll ever be.”
“Suit yourself,” she says as we both climb out of her car.
The front yard has several retaining walls full of blooming flowers. There are a few weeds here and there, but for the most part it’s well cared for, and I wonder if Melissa does it all by herself. There are two sets of concrete stairways we have to walk up to the front door, and I imagine it must be a real pain after grocery shopping. But it also must make it nearly impossible for Melissa’s disabled mother to ever get out of the house. Whoever designed this place definitely wasn’t thinking about wheelchairs or the prospect of its residents getting old.
When we enter the house, two small dogs—pugs I think—run down a set of stairs toward us.
“The little terrors,” Melissa says, quickly petting both dogs before climbing the stairs and ignoring them.
I follow, simply trying not to trip over the attention-seeking pups.
“It’s about damn time you got home!” It’s the graveled voice of an older woman, and when Melissa and I turn the corner into the house’s living room, I see her.
Her hair is completely white, but her skin, like her daughter’s, makes her look much younger than what I assume her actual age is. There is a scowl on her face, and she’s wearing a flowered, short-sleeved shirt inside out, the back tag displayed underneath her chin.
“I do have to work, you know,” Melissa says, setting her purse down on a small table.
“And who the hell is this?” the woman asks once I’ve come into her full view.
“This is Natalie. And Natalie, this is my mother, Barbara. She’s offered to help you, Mom.”
I start to say hello, but I don’t even get the chance.
“I don’t need any god damn help!” Barbara shakes her head and crosses her arms.
“Oh, yes you do!” Melissa shoots back.
It’s now that I smell the faint odor of urine and notice Barbara is sitting on an incontinence pad, her slacks soaked through. Then the pugs start barking, one of them running up and sitting next to Barbara, the other rubbing at my lower leg.
“Will you get off of her!” Melissa snaps to the dog trying to attach itself to me.
“Don’t you talk to my baby like that!” Barbara yells. “And get this girl the hell out. I told you I don’t need any help!”
Melissa closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, then turns to me, shrugs and shakes her head. “We should probably go. I’ll drive you back to your car.”
That’s it?
It feels like an incredibly quick, anti-climactic surrender. Then again, Melissa knows her own mother a lot better than I do, so she must have a good reason for wanting to turn tail and run.
I follow Melissa, descending the stairs while Barbara continues on.
“Get that damn girl out of here! And don’t you dare bring her back!”
Melissa opens the door fast and closes it with a tight click. “Sorry about that,” she says as we begin down the concrete steps to the driveway. “Maybe if she’d had a better day, she wouldn’t have been so verbally abusive. I’m really at my whit’s end.”
“There’s always tomorrow,” I offer, not wanting to give up after one brief meeting. “As long as she doesn’t hit me, I don’t mind being yelled at.”
Melissa’s mouth falls open. “You’d… you’d actually come back after that?”
I’d spent more than half of my money, so yeah I’d come back. I really need this job, even if it’s only for a week or two while I decide on my next move. “Sure. I might be able to make some headway if I spent more time with her, if she got to know me.”
Melissa seems about to ask me how the hell I’m going to do that, but she stops herself. “Okay, well, how about coming to the diner tomorrow morning around nine? I’ll make sure you’re fed, and then I’ll hand you the keys to the house. But I can’t guarantee my mother won’t send you running out screaming again.”
“I guess we’ll see,” I tell her, hoping tomorrow will be a brighter day.
Chapter Four
NATALIE
After being dropped off at my car in the parking lot of the diner by a disappointed Melissa, I’d gone to the grocery store and picked up some essentials. I hadn’t bought as much as I’d planned for in case things with Barbara really didn’t work out, but I’d assured Melissa as I got out of her car that I thought they would. She might have had more faith if I’d clued her in that I was on a pre-med track in college and had changed my focus to occupational therapy in my junior year. I wasn’t interested in being a surgeon or a cardiologist but instead planned on pursuing a master’s program to become an occupational therapist, just the type of therapist that should be working with someone like Barbara.
But mentioning it would have likely pushed expectations too high, and the truth is that all I’ve really done to this point is volunteered at a nursing home near Stanford where I’d spent time with men and women like Barbara, people who’d had strokes or aneurysms or a host of other things. With guidance from professionals, I’d begun to learn about the huge undertaking it was to retrain the brain and the body and how incredibly frustrating it could be for the person you’re trying to
help.
Thinking about Barbara and the techniques I might use to attempt to get through to her tomorrow has kept me from getting too nervous about arriving back at the empty cabin. But when I round the curve just before the lake comes into view, my apprehension finally hits. While I’m grateful for the place to stay, there’s something scary about being alone in the middle of nowhere—I’d seen enough horror movies to know that. And the other thing that’s bothering me is that the place still belongs to my parents, so my growing bid for independence is still hinged on something Mom and Dad own. But it’s the cabin or a string of cheap, dirty motel rooms, and for now, I’m going to have to swallow my pride and stick it out at the cabin.
I park in the rutted driveway this time, then go to the back hatch of my car and pull out the two bags of groceries I’d gotten along with the bags of clothes and personal items I’d purchased at the discount store. Going into the house the second time isn’t quite as scary as the first, and I’m more at ease as I set the bags of clothes at the foot of the staircase and then put the groceries in the fridge and cupboards of the kitchen. It’s strange being here without my parents or my grandparents, without all of the noise that had been in the house, the games of checkers I’d played with my grandma on the small dining room table or the smells of food cooking and the anticipation of getting a Popsicle from the freezer on a really hot day.
Our family had been close then, but Dad’s career and Mom’s growing need to emulate the life from a lifestyle and fashion magazine managed to pull it apart. In that growing distance, I often sought Cynthia out when I wanted the comfort of a parental figure. But my memories of this cabin and the family that had inhabited it remain intact. And for that, I’m thankful.
After squaring everything away in the kitchen, I scoop up the bags at the bottom of the stairs and head up. I take a left at the top of the stairs, walking through the landing area before heading right into the smallest room of the three bedrooms that make up the second floor. It’s the one I’d stayed in as a child and am anxious to see if it’s changed or is much the same as I remember it.
The Light Before Us Page 5