“Maybe I’d love to feel love again. A partner to witness stuff…That seems like a good idea, like something I want, yes.”
“Yeah, but do you daydream about falling in love?”
“I’m too preoccupied.”
“Come on, you do so daydream.”
“Okay, maybe.”
“But here’s the tricky thing! In your daydreams, are you the age you are now?” When there was no answer, Ammalie continued. “The truest truth about me is this: My daydreams are not about a fifty-five-year-old me. They are about an earlier me. Are we at an age when daydreams need to change tenses?”
Mari coughed and honked her nose. “Explain yourself.”
“When I was twenty, my daydreams featured a twenty-year-old fabulous version of me! In my thirties, I dreamed of me in my thirties! But not now. Now, I have to imagine a previous version of myself. This is the main difficulty of growing old, isn’t it? Suddenly your daydreams become pure fiction!”
“Aw, Ammalie—”
“I am no longer physically the same person I am in my head. That’s a hard thing to reconcile! That’s all. That’s all I want to say. I’m just being real.” Ammalie’s happy energy suddenly twisted as fast as a storm, and tears flurried into her eyes. She could hear the thickness in her voice. “I’ve lost my job. My son doesn’t need me. I’m not married. I no longer attract a gaze. Not that I should have ever needed that. But somehow I did. Who am I relevant to? Huh? Life is more lonely than I thought it would be.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she heard Mari saying over and over, because somehow Mari knew just how badly she’d been hurting.
Ammalie sniffled. “Aw, thanks, friend. I guess I just don’t want to daydream about being a wise woman, a helper, a sage, an elder, a crone. I want to daydream about being thirty and hot. The truthiest truth here is embarrassing. I want a man to notice my competency and adventurous self, and I want a body that is attractive to a man, and I want a man’s arms wrapped around me, and I want a man. Ugh, it’s so horrible to say. I’m such a petty, vain, empty, reliant soul.” She hung her head and looked at her soft, pouchy belly and the stains on her cheap shirt and snarled at them.
Mari chuckled. “I love you. Clichés are clichés for a reason, I guess. They exist because there’s some truth in them. Midlife crises are real. You are not alone in this. Look at the amount of money women spend on youthful serums and surgeries! I’m glad you’re doing this trip, Ammalie. It’s an important time in our lives. I know I kid you about it, but I think there’s something inherently important about what you’re doing.”
“Thanks,” she sniffled.
“Another real-life thing I’ve been wondering, Ammalie. How are you affording this? A cabin in Colorado? Did Vincent’s life insurance stuff get worked out finally? I thought he didn’t have any after all?”
Ammalie watched the horse, now standing and satisfied, and then glanced at Lady, sleeping in the back. “Yeah. He did. Got it worked out. That’s how I’m affording the rental.” She simply could not tell Mari the full truth, which was: She simply wouldn’t do it. Spend money from a man she was going to leave, whom she hadn’t helped in a moment of need. If the money came through, it would go to Powell. And meantime, she would…well, live for free, by breaking into people’s houses.
“Vincent would have wanted you to have it, to enjoy it. Don’t forget, Ammalie. You have lived a good and beautiful life here. Powell. Me. That’s enough of a life. Society tells us it’s not enough, but it is. It’s a friggin’ lot of work. And it’s enough. You have enough. You are enough. But you go do you, Ammalie. Go forth and kick ass,” which is what Mari had said for the last twenty years, and, as woo-woo as it sounded, Ammalie could feel her hug from across the airwaves.
Mari didn’t realize it, but she was Ammalie’s companion, fated to go along on the heroine’s journey. Mari, Lady, her old self—all rooting her on. Those were companions enough.
CHAPTER 6
The rest of the week floated by in what she thought of as an unprecedented series of pools in a river. Her whole adult life she’d been in rapids, but now she meandered, floated, circled around lazily like an aspen leaf caught in a slow eddy. She read three novels she found in the cabin, all set in Colorado, plus the L.L. Bean book on how to hunt and process game, and one book called Great Colorado Bear Stories, which made her feel better about bears, since Colorado’s bears were black, not grizzlies, and shy, and only four people in the entire state of Colorado had been killed by black bears in recent history, and two of those had been feeding them. The main message of the book seemed to be we do not have to be so scared, and she tried to take that to heart.
She stretched and did yoga and planks. She and Lady went for hikes or wanders, as she called them, depending on their speed and length. She saw no signs of the Bad Man, heard no gunshots. She had moments of calm and moments of fear, the latter mainly consisting of thinking of Lady’s owner and his hate-filled cussing, and how remote she was. In defending something that clearly needed defending, she had put herself in danger—which reminded her of all the good people everywhere on earth who had stood up for justice and peace at the expense of their safety and well-being, and that made her anxious too. Perhaps she was hormonal, but it made her want to cry.
But onward! That was her motto. She made a batch of granola, the ingredients for which she had—oats, nuts, seeds, cinnamon, oil, although she forgot the honey and borrowed some from the stocked cupboard, deciding that honey was within her Appropriate Poaching Rules. So far, she’d taken a brush, electricity, and a cup of honey, which were things she’d be happy to give to someone in a similar situation, which made it not really stealing.
Most important in her week was her journaling, and particularly her New Journal One-Third Rule: one-third about understanding the past, one-third about noticing the present, and one-third directing her gaze at the future. The last third was hardest because it was vague. To combat this, she made lists of things she hoped to do with her time left in life, such as see Powell well into adulthood, take a trip to Greece someday, and learn to make something, perhaps jewelry or pottery. Learn Spanish. Learn about the arts.
She didn’t have any professional goals, really. Going back to waitressing wasn’t a dream; it had just been oddly easy and fun, with flexible shifts and good for their savings account, and besides, Burt had been a great boss even when she’d first started as a college student, had taken her under his wing. Altogether, the job was a unique gem that most people spent lifetimes seeking: friendly coworkers, good tips, lots of regulars, and a really truly good boss, and all that was so frigging rare that it had just been hard to leave. Should she have done something that challenged her more? Probably. But life challenged her enough. Parenting was hard! Life kept her busy! But what about her passion goals? Something that gave her life purpose? Until now, she hadn’t thought about it.
Perhaps she’d go back to school?
Work in a fire tower?
Volunteer at a nature preserve or an animal shelter?
Nothing specifically called to her. Her future sounded like old TVs, making that disturbing white noise.
In the afternoons, she began beading bracelets from a kit. Many of the beads were fluorescent plastic, but there were some small silver ones and blue glass and tiny rectangles of pale orange. It appeared that several jewelry-making kits had been tossed together—the cheap kid ones found in box stores plus tiny baggies of beads from elsewhere. There were tools of all sorts—small pliers and wire clips and the hoops needed for making clasps. There were three different manuals, two for kids and one for adults, the kid ones being the most helpful.
By the end of the week, she had a vague understanding of wire wrapping and attaching various types of clasps, and she’d made a dozen bracelets and had come to an understanding of how colors fit together in the way she liked best—not too random and messy-looking, but not too orderly, either. She alternated three blues with one orange and one or two silvers, perhaps an odd bead thrown in, tied together with loops and latches she learned to make from a small booklet. She chose her favorite—the one she’d most like to keep—and left it on top of the bead kit, for someone to mysteriously find someday.
Her days stretched in a way she’d never experienced but always imagined. She watched the aspen leaves begin to fall. Twice the snow spit and once it snowed enough to stick. The days became slightly shorter. She wandered around her life, stopping to do planks or stretching or journaling or just staring out the window.
Nights were hard. Dark came early, and she was limited by her headlamp or flashlight. A dullness sometimes came over her then, and she felt both too lethargic to do much and yet too antsy to sleep. She drank wine and sat in the dark, or she had a beer and stared from her sleeping bag, now unzipped so she could thrash. She grew nostalgic about her youth, about young Powell, about the early years with Vincent, about Levi at the restaurant and how simple her crush had seemed back when she put her simple head on a simple pillow in her simple life to daydream about them kissing. She blinked at the stars from the tub, and they seemed to blink back. These dark hours were the ones she had to sit with, learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
One night, she started a puzzle, headlamp on and flashlight positioned on the table strategically. She worried about how long it would take her to put away if suddenly someone showed up, but threw caution to the wind. She found herself addicted, stayed up late, and dreamed of fitting pieces together. She figured there was something poetic and profound about how her consciousness was trying to piece together presence and absence.
She flipped through her books on the night sky and birds, the names of everything drifting in and out of her brain. She focused on memorizing two from the bird book—she hadn’t actually seen them outside, but she liked the pictures in Sibley’s—the yellow-rumped warbler and the painted redstart. She watched the ravens, who seemed to watch her back and to greet her with a deep croak anytime she went outside.
Each day, she got faster and more efficient at bundling her sleeping bag and putting it in a pile next to her plastic bin of cooking things and her cooler, so that if she ever did see or hear a car coming, she could pack up her stuff and get it out to her car in minutes. Something about the routine of this felt satisfying and calming. She’d also smeared dirt on her license plate, obscuring the R so that it looked more like a K and covering most of one of the 9s. She hoped it looked natural, as if the car had been splattered by mud, and she wasn’t sure how effective it would be, but something about trying to cover up who she was felt good.
Maybe, she realized, she was overdoing this Getaway Business. Maybe she really was going crazy. Maybe she didn’t have a fork in her hair at the moment, but she had the metaphorical equivalent in her soul.
But still, something was working here. She needed to do this. At various moments in the day, she realized she was having fun. She remembered a book she’d read as a kid, something about two kids living in a museum at night, and the way they hoarded coins they’d pulled from the fountain. She forgot why they were in the museum in the first place, but she remembered that, like her, they seemed to want to stay and explore and remain undiscovered.
—
On Sunday afternoon, she did a once-over on the house, using rubbing alcohol to wipe away smudges from every surface, and then packed up the Grey Goose. She was undecided—should she grab her sleeping bag from the car and stay one more free night in the house and leave before dawn? Or put in a few hours’ driving on the next leg of her trip and car-camp somewhere on BLM land? She’d learned BLM meant Bureau of Land Management, not the movement—and this land was free and unrestricted, no national or state park passes or camping registrations required, a gift to Americans by America that she figured most Americans, especially those on the East Coast, didn’t know about.
She was standing outside, considering these two options and being mesmerized by the glimmering gold leaves, when she heard the crunching of tire on gravel.
