by Jamie Kain
I have never drunk more than a beer, never touched a hard drug. I’ve smoked weed here and there, but never with any enthusiasm, and I stopped completely a few years ago in an effort to not be in any way like my mother.
“I didn’t ask you here to put you on the spot, I promise.”
“Then why?”
“I just wanted to talk as a friend.” She leans forward as she says this, reaches out and places a hand on my forearm, grasping me as she gives me her “I’m serious” look.
“Then as a friend you’ll understand why I’m not going to join the Annika fan club.”
Her lips purse and she looks like she’s going to say something, but then doesn’t.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say.
“May I offer a bit of advice?”
“Sure.”
“Now that your mother is back, let her succeed or fail without any help from you, okay? Just be open to the possibility of change, but know you don’t have to control the outcome.”
She has me there. I look into her faded blue eyes and know she sees my fear—of becoming stuck in my mother’s quicksand-pit of a life again. She will suck me in until I drown.
“Okay,” I say, and stand up to leave.
We hug, say our good-byes, and I go back down the hall to the front courtyard, where the afternoon sun is baking everything in sight.
Let her succeed or fail on her own, I think.
I can do that.
I can resist trying to save her from herself.
At least I hope I can.
* * *
This girl who has sprung up in my life like a weed—like a mysterious unknown flower—is a pleasant distraction from my mother. While I don’t want any ties to this world, I also can’t resist her pull. I have a plan of sorts, which doesn’t include a girl named Nicole who hunts forest animals, but she seems to be making herself at home in my psyche nonetheless.
And she makes me wonder about the future. After the completion of the “tree house of Thoreaulike solitude” experience, after high school, then what? Will there be an escape? A plan of some sort? It’s only a year away and I can feel the restlessness growing in my limbs, the desire to get lost in the world far from here, to get away from everything that has defined me so far in life—my mother, the village, my father, my friends.
I am sure this earth has a million things to teach me that I can’t learn here in the tiny world of the village.
In this way, I differ from my hero Thoreau. But then, his cabin in the woods didn’t hover on the edge of a place that had threatened to swallow up his life.
Maybe part of Nicole’s appeal for me is her otherworldliness, her stark contrast to everything I’ve ever known. She is from another planet than mine, and that must be why I come to her house bearing gifts.
Tokens of peace and goodwill, from my planet to hers.
If I don’t extend a diplomatic hand, she might destroy me with her strange beauty.
I ride my bike along the gravel path and up the hill to the old farmhouse, and there is no one to be seen outside. The car and truck that arrived on the first day are still not anywhere to be seen, and for a moment I wonder if I should have waited until later in the day to come. But it’s not so hot out yet, at nine in the morning. Later in the day would be a miserable trek. So I lean my bike against the side of the barn and walk along the path to the house.
What was once a brick walkway is now a patchwork of weeds and broken red brick. In the not-so-far distance, at the foot of the hill, I see a male turkey followed by three females wander into the clearing and I wonder if any of them will become this family’s dinner.
My first instinct is to rush toward them and shoo them away to safety, but then, who am I to judge? A girl hunting her own food is far nobler than going to the store to buy a factory-farmed turkey, I know.
I have to keep reminding myself of this, because I am so disgusted by the sight of a gun.
I take the two muslin bags off the handlebars of my bike—one containing a handful of flowers gathered in the Sadhana garden by me just a little while ago, and one containing a loaf of rosemary bread baked early this morning by Laurel. This lapse of mine into neighborly hospitality is brought on by the sheer strangeness of having a neighbor, I tell myself. But a deeper voice reminds me that the neighbor is pretty—and ever present in my thoughts since her arrival.
Would I be bringing these peace offerings if it were only her dad who’d arrived, and not her?
Not a chance.
Eight
NICOLE
About a week has passed since Dad left, and I am already sick of this little survival game. I wonder nearly every hour when he’s going to come home. At least Izzy came back home last night, just before eleven, without any explanation of where she’d been or what she’d done.
I’m trying not to care.
I don’t have the energy to worry about it, because everything about this house is falling apart.
But the big problem is still water. Or lack of it running through our pipes, as of last night.
We have plenty of drinking water stocked up in the garage, in gallon jugs lining the bottom shelves. I also know I can go down to the stream and get water to boil for use at home. And if all else fails, I have a supply of tablets for purifying water when it can’t be boiled.
We aren’t going to die or anything.
But after less than a day of no running water in the house, no easy way to water the garden, no easy way to take a bath, or cook, or flush the toilet, or wash my hands, I am starting to see just how spoiled we are in everyday life.
It’s become a bizarrely lucky thing that our grandparents never bothered to get rid of the horrid little outhouse that sits in the backyard, because that’s what we have to use now, spiders, bugs, awful smells, and all, until I sort out the water situation. Izzy and I got into a screaming argument about it at midnight last night, but once she understood how gross it would quickly become to have an unflushed toilet sitting in the house stewing in the heat, she gave in.
I’ve camped with Dad before, but I’ve never camped in my own house, and that’s what this is starting to feel like.
I am sitting on the ground next to the well, its cap off, staring down into the darkness of it, when I hear footsteps on the dry grass. I look up, expecting to see Izzy coming toward me with yet another complaint, when I see Wolf instead, and my breath catches in my throat.
His presence is unsettling in ways I don’t quite understand.
“Hi,” he says, his eyes crinkling at the corners with a smile that doesn’t reach his mouth.
He is carrying a couple of fabric bags, one with a bouquet of flowers poking out. For us? I almost laugh, because it’s so far from what I need right now, which is a plumber.
“Hi.”
“I come bearing welcome-to-the-neighborhood gifts,” he says, holding up the bags and then setting them aside on the rear porch steps.
“Wow, thanks.” He’s like one of those military wives from the army post who used to show up bearing cookies in a country-style basket to welcome us to our new neighborhood.
“Did you lose something down there?” Kneeling next to me now, he peers into the hole.
“Not exactly. Our water in the house stopped working, and…” I think of the lie I’ve rehearsed in my head. “My parents went to the Bay Area for a couple of days to pick up some of our stuff we had in storage there.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you know anything about wells?”
“A little,” he says, and my heart skips.
“There’s definitely enough water in here,” I say, picking up a flashlight and shining it down inside to show him. “I just don’t know how to get to it.”
He frowns like he’s pondering the problem. Finally he says, “This house has been sitting vacant for so long, probably your pipes are rusted, and your starting to use them again caused one to burst.”
“So we have to figure out where it broke?”
“You don’t have any leaky spots in the house?”
“No.”
“And you’ve tried all the faucets?”
“None work.”
“Then I would think that might mean your break is between the house and the well, and it looks like it’s an underground system. You’ll probably need to dig to figure out where it is.”
I look down at the ground below me. I am sitting on the space that needs to be dug out, and it’s only a few feet, assuming the pipe goes straight from the closest side of the well to the closest point at the house, which is the kitchen wall where the sink is. This seems probable, and doable. Except the ground is hard as rock after months of no rain.
I sigh, not sure if I should reveal that I’m the one who will have to do the work. In a normal family, a normal situation, the teenage girl would, I guess, call her dad and tell him to come home and solve the problem. And then the dad would do that. Or he would call a plumber.
I don’t want Wolf to know exactly how far from normal we are.
But he seems to guess my dilemma. “Want some help digging?”
I bite my lip and look up at him. “Really?”
“Sure, why not. Looks like you’re on your own here otherwise. Do you have two shovels?”
“In the garage.”
We stand up and head that way, and I wonder for the first time why Wolf is here. I’ve been so caught up in the water dilemma, I forgot to ask.
“I hear your little sister went hitchhiking last night,” he says.
“What? How did you know?”
“She got picked up by my friends.”
“Oh god. She’s an idiot.”
“She’s lucky.”
“Where did they take her?”
“Into town to a burger joint. They all ate together and then they dropped her back off here on their way home.”
“Oh. She didn’t mention. She’s kind of a brat.”
I open the garage door and blink while my eyes adjust to the change from bright to dark. On the nearest wall Dad has installed a series of hooks on which every shovel and garden implement imaginable hangs. I select a spade-shaped shovel, better for digging into hard earth, and hand it to Wolf. Then I grab a second one for myself.
“I don’t know if your sister mentioned it, but we’re having a party tonight at our place. You both are welcome to come.”
“What kind of party?”
“Kind of a weird one, actually. My mom’s throwing it to welcome herself back from rehab.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say, so I look at him to see how he feels about it.
“I have to warn you, my mother is nuts.”
We are walking back toward the well, and I get the urge to tell him exactly how nuts my parents have been lately, too, but I don’t.
“My friends said they already invited your little sister, so I wanted to make sure you got an invite too.”
After my argument with Isabel last night, she vanished into her room and hasn’t spoken to me since. I don’t know what kind of response I was expecting to my acting like Dad, but I am sort of relieved not to have her making demands and complaining about every little thing.
I want to complain, too. I really do.
But who’s going to listen or care?
“Thanks,” I say, trying to imagine going off tonight to a party with a bunch of kids like Wolf.
I know without a doubt that I would not be allowed to go if our parents were here, and Izzy at fourteen would not in a million years be allowed to go. But a party … it’s the sort of thing I sometimes fantasize about, wonder about, maybe even pine for, when I’m thinking about what it would be like to live in a normal family, to have normal rules, to be a normal teenager.
I have heard kids talk at school. I am not interested in getting drunk or using drugs or making out with guys in front of other people. But laughing and having fun? Acting stupid? Falling into swimming pools with my clothes on?
I am ashamed to admit it even to myself, but it sounds kind of great.
I want so badly to feel carefree, it takes my breath away when I allow myself to think about it.
“So does that mean you’ll come?” Wolf says, a half smile on his lips.
We are back at the well, and I put my weight into trying to penetrate the ground with the tip of my shovel. I barely make a dent.
“I’m not sure.”
All the true answers I can give sound completely lame. Like, that I’m not allowed to go to parties, that my sister is way too young, that my dad hates hippies and will kill us if he comes home and finds us off partying with a bunch of them.
“If it’s lame, we’ll just go do our own thing,” he says. “I can’t guarantee you’ll have a good time, but I can guarantee it’ll be more fun than trying to dig up ruptured water pipes.”
He grins, and I can’t help but laugh. These past few days have been so completely ridiculous, I don’t know what else to do.
“Good, it’s settled then. You know how to get to the village?”
“No, I don’t hang out in the woods watching people the way you do.”
“You should. It can be illuminating.”
“I bet.”
“You just go down the hill and make a right on the next gravel road before you get to the main road. It’s only about a half mile walk or bike ride, but if you want we could come get you in a friend’s car.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “We can walk. If we decide to go, I mean.”
But the moment the words exit my mouth, I know we’ll go. I can’t really stop Isabel from going anyway, and I might as well be there to make sure she doesn’t get into too much trouble.
Wolf motions me to step back, and I watch as he slams his shovel into the earth, penetrating far better than I could have managed. He has a decent hole dug in a matter of a few minutes, and I start working on making it deeper while he moves a foot closer to the house and continues to dig there.
My chest is tight with nerves, and I realize I don’t feel at all like myself when he’s around. I feel fuzzy headed, confused.
I’m going to have to be on my guard with him. He’s got a certain wily, elusive quality that reminds me of real wolves in the wild.
We dig until we are drenched in sweat. The earth is so hard near the surface that it’s slow going, but about a foot and a half down, the earth starts to get soft and wet, which has me exhilarated with the promise that maybe we’ve found the burst pipe. Wolf digs down another foot or so while I watch, being careful at the end not to dig his shovel too deep and hit pipe. Then we both get down on our knees and dig wet soil out with our hands. We are filthy by the time my hand hits metal, and I’m so hot I feel like I’m going to pass out, but I am grateful to Wolf for helping me. I wouldn’t have figured out what to do without him, and I see that already all the preparation, all Dad’s so-called training, didn’t mean a thing when I faced an actual problem while trying to survive on my own.
I look over at Wolf, watching him as he unearths a rusted-out pipe with water spraying out, and I feel a surge of gratitude, and something else.
A buzzing, magnetic force, urging me to him.
WOLF
I’ve never been a fan of parties, but the thought of Nicole coming to the one at Sadhana makes me feel like celebrating.
Maybe not celebrating the way Annika has in mind, with hand-holding and drums around the fire all night, but just feeling good … having fun.
I think I may have forgotten how to have fun.
I remember reading that Winston Churchill called depression “the black dog,” and that is what I imagine has been following me around recently since my mother’s return. Or maybe it’s more of a storm cloud forever hovering overhead, turning all my thoughts and feelings gray. I never thought of myself as being depressed, but I realize as I ride my bike home from Nicole’s house, my arms and legs and clothes stained with dirt, sweat soaked through my shirt, that I feel alive, really alive, for the first time in a while.
I want to know what happens next, which is not something I have been curious about for a long time.
We weren’t able to fix her broken pipe problem. It’s not like there were spare plumbing tools and pipe lying around. But she said she would call a plumber, and I was glad I could at least help a little. We ate some of the bread I brought over, and drank some water, and then I figured I’d better go, since I hadn’t really been invited in the first place.
I jump into the pond when I get back to the village, let the cool water wash me clean, and then I spend the rest of the day avoiding the adults. They will ask me to do things—gather firewood, chop vegetables, set up tents for the overflow of out-of-town partiers who want to camp out tonight—and I just want to revel in this feeling of being happy for a while.
The rest of the pack, as I have my entire life thought of the kid group at the village, is scattered, some helping with party preparations, some doing their best to hide out and avoid any work.
I slip away to the tree house, where I spend the afternoon nailing on the last of the roof tiles, and by the end of the day I am tired but exhilarated, my head buzzing with images of Nicole sweating, streaked with dirt, and working beside me.
She is even more of a mystery than I first thought when I saw her headed into the woods with the gun. She’s a whole world unto herself, waiting to be explored.
ISABEL
At first I thought the kids from the Sadhana place were weird. Like the homeless kids we saw on the sidewalk in Hollywood once when we went there to see the tourist stuff. But the more I talked to them, the more they seemed like the exact opposite of my sister and my dad, and therefore, the kind of people I can totally hang out with.
Plus that Kiva guy was kind of hot. And I think he liked me.
Then when they were driving me home last night and told me about the party, it felt like my life had finally started making some kind of sense. I almost cried I was so happy. Like seriously—tears of joy and all.
But then of course I returned to harsh reality, a house so disgusting I couldn’t even let them drive me all the way up the hill to drop me off. I told them to stop halfway and I walked up. Seriously. I lied and said I didn’t want anyone to see me catching a ride, that my family thought I’d gone for a hike in the woods.