Ammalie turned off her phone and stared at the bug-splattered windshield. Calling Powell would be a mistake, she knew, but the low ache in her heart was unmistakably called missing someone. She missed him terribly. And yet she also knew that the best way to get him back in her life was to leave him temporarily alone. Not totally alone, but she’d back off, which is what he’d clearly asked for. Indeed, he could not have been more clear. So she started the car and drove on.
She was soon at the turn she needed, a county road that darted its way into the mountains. Before making the actual turn, she steered into a gravel pullout. Several cars gunned past her and one driver flipped her off and she realized they’d been behind her for some time—she’d zoned out and forgotten the cardinal rule of being a polite driver and letting faster drivers pass you whenever possible. She hated drivers like that.
Her heart started thumping like a rabbit’s foot. “Hey, Thumper. Chill,” she murmured, which is what she said when it got like this. Before real panic could hit, she gunned the Grey Goose, took the turn, and drove straight into the mountains. She just had to keep going. She drove by a little cluster of cabins, then past the stretch of forest service lands, and then there were long stretches with very few signs of human life, save the barbed-wire fences. The road turned to gravel, and then bumpy gravel, and then really rutted gravel. She remembered all this on the edges of her memory. Soon she’d see the blue sign of a dancing Kokopelli that would signal the turn.
She started to cry. She supposed it was the memory of this place, coming with Vincent, or maybe the relief of having made it this far, or maybe just stupid perimenopause or whatever the fluctuating hell her body was gallivanting around with. She swiped the tears from her face harshly; she had to drive, after all. Night was not far from descending now, it was full dusk, the blue hour, l’heure bleue, and yeah, she should’ve fucking taken French courses and become a chef or a lawyer or anything but she hadn’t and now snow was spinning right at her into the windshield. To the sides, aspens were white-barked and staring at her with their dark eyes. Change your daydreams, change your actual life, they seemed to be saying to her. Otherwise you’ll end up breathing bitterness in that last sacred breath of yours.
CHAPTER 2
The key didn’t work. She stared at it, tried again, jiggled it, reversed it, tried the bolt, and then started all over again. It. just. didn’t. work.
She had to pee and couldn’t think with pressure in her bladder, so she went in the pine-needle-strewn driveway in the near-dark, one hand on the cold Grey Goose for balance. In the twilight, she scanned the dark shape of the fancy wood-and-stone cabin. No flowerpots, no stumps of wood, no decorative rocks.
Where would she put a key?
Think think think think please think.
She smelled the rank sweet stench from her crotch. Gross. Another night in the car? Or should she drive hours into a town and rent a room? Why had she thought a key ten years old would work? On the other hand, why not? She hadn’t changed her lock back home in Chicago in ten years. She pulled up her yoga pants, walked to the door, and put her hand above the doorframe. No key. She picked up some snow-covered decorative rocks and squinted in the last of the light. No key. Maybe it was on the corbel of the porch—is that what those slants were called?—but to check, she’d need more height. She got the cooler out of the car and stepped onto it and stretched up and moved her fingers along the wood.
Key. Yes, key.
Cold and smooth. She pulled it into her palm as she stepped down. Ha-ha! She loved humans; they were, in fact, incredibly predictable. She turned the key and let herself in, stood in the doorway looking at the silent home, then dug out her headlamp from her backpack and moved quietly around. It was much as she had remembered. She glanced at the fireplace longingly, but she wouldn’t build a fire. No light and no fire smoke, nothing that could be seen from a distance. She did turn up the thermostat, though; the electrical bill wouldn’t reflect a small surge for another month, and there was no way she could sleep for another night being so cold. She would not turn on any lights, or do anything visible from afar, and she’d move her car around back, but the house was isolated enough that no one would notice a headlamp or a candle, of that she was certain.
She was only going to do things that were invisible. She was going to embrace the invisible part of being a middle-aged woman, by god. If that’s what life and culture was going to throw at her, well, fuck. She was going to take it to the extreme.
She warmed a can of soup on Dude—dangerous, she knew, but it was a roomy house—and then ate and then felt bad about cooking inside, putting another person’s home in danger. But she moved on, put everything away in its plastic tub and her sleeping bag on the couch, and then took another wander through the rooms, paneled in beautiful beetle kill wood. She whispered aloud her excuse, so that it would be at the ready, already voiced, natural-sounding: It was an emergency. The cell phone died, she’d started feeling woozy on a hike, she remembered this house. She had stayed here once with her husband—he was dead of a stroke, yes, it was so sad. She was so sorry. She just wasn’t herself, wasn’t feeling herself, this was so unlike her.
All of it was true, except the cell phone part. She paused at a bookshelf and stared at the Scrabble game caught in the beam from her headlamp and felt an old familiar pain—familiar from the last year and a half, at least—move across her chest. It felt like an actual creature—which is why she called it the Sea Creature—that moved around and occasionally pressed against her heart. She supposed it was just that no one was here to play Scrabble with, although, to be honest, had there been, she might not have played anyway, and would have wished that she was alone.
To distract herself from the shelf of two-player games, she reached for one of the old books, Hunting-Fishing and Camping by L.L. Bean, who she hadn’t realized was an actual person, not just a catalog from which to see pictures of nice flannel shirts. She flipped through it and found a line about how traveling into the open spaces and challenging oneself teaches people to forget the mean and petty things of life.
Exactly, she thought. That was the plan.
Only when she had put everything back exactly as she’d found it, and her own stuff was nicely consolidated next to Fluffiest Red, her sleeping bag, did she allow herself the hot bath. She ran the water and undressed and climbed into the tub and sighed. This was no ordinary tub. In fact, the tub was the whole reason she had picked this place. It had stayed in her memory as heaven, not because the tub was so fancy, although it was one of the extra-deep ones, but because of how it was positioned: next to enormous windows, a whole wall of windows, with moonlit pines and aspen and stars, so many stars, stars and stars and stars.
Surely this was the best way to stargaze—warm, floating in hot water, looking out glass.
She sank deeper in the warm water and kept her eyes on the stars. She was safe.
The particular beauty of this cabin was its bathtub and its isolation. Not a single neighbor, which was the opposite of her entire life experience. Indeed, it had been advertised as being on a hundred acres of mountain land, and she felt like she needed all hundred of those acres.
After some time, she put her distance glasses on and really considered the nighttime sky. Orion’s Belt was easy, and his shoulders, and his bow, and Cassiopeia’s W, and of course she could find Venus, because Venus was always near the horizon, never in the center of the sky, because it went wherever the sun went, like a partner who wouldn’t let his lover out of sight. She didn’t know the lesser-known constellations and determined to learn such things now. There was something so settling about them, because who cared too much about small infractions and wrongs when one realized what a small blip in time we all were?
She had the vague notion that she could make herself have an orgasm, which would be the first in more than a year and a half, her last being with Vincent one lovemaking Saturday morning, but that seemed too blasphemous to even wonder about. But also, the sad, honest truth was that it was equally blasphemous to have her body atrophy more fully into menopause and away from something she had liked about herself. She had loved sex. She had loved being sexual. And she and Vincent had really had a pretty good sex life, and she’d never considered how it would feel without sex for more than a year. She really missed it; there was a dead, heavy sorrow sitting in her pelvic region, probably right in her stupid fluctuating uterus, probably the same creature that sometimes moved up to her heart was floating there. “Sea Creature,” she said, “I don’t want you in my heart or pelvis—fuck off. Go somewhere else. Big toe, maybe.”
She couldn’t masturbate, though, she was too tired and too sad, and so after a half hour of soaking and staring at stars, she climbed out of the tub and dried her body—so pudgy!—with her travel towel and brushed her teeth, put on face cream, and put the items right back in her backpack so that if she had to leave fast, she could, and without a trace. At the last moment, she opened the drawers and found a hairbrush in the third one down. A clean, new-looking brush! A miracle. As she ran it through her wet hair, she focused on the pull on her scalp, how it was so much better than a fork, so much better than fingers. What a fine invention! She decided to steal it. After all, if someone had appeared in her life so in need of a brush, she would have happily handed one over. She’d only steal what she herself would have happily given, had someone asked. She had to assume people would be willing to part with little things, such as if someone stayed in your house and used a bit of electricity, because, well, she simply had to believe that humans would give that much, because she would give that much.
Appropriate Poaching, she decided to call it. And in each instance of poaching, she’d do something to right her karma. Offer some gift.
When she was truly bed-ready, clean and warm and relaxed—the first time in days—she looked again in the mirror. She touched the little scar on her temple, now a white thin curl, and then ran her fingers over her thinning eyebrows and pushed back her walnut-colored hair—or what used to be walnut-colored hair but was now being overtaken in haphazard ways with gray and also a lighter color that was the remnants of dye from months ago. It felt nice to be touched, even by her own fingertips. She considered her face and her almost-masculine jawbone and her green-and-brown-flecked eyes, breathed in, and said aloud, “It’s been a tough year or two or lifetime on you, kid, but not really, let’s face it; but also, you’re going to be okay.”
She climbed into Fluffiest Red on the couch, and as she quieted her mind and hoped for sleep, she thought of Vincent. Of being here with him. They’d rented this place on a “Grand Road Trip”—something they’d tried to do every third year. The in-between years were reserved for “Bland Road Trips,” which weren’t really bland, but it rhymed with Grand, and those trips were the ones they stayed local to save money. It was the third-year trips that were much anticipated and much planned. This trip, they’d come the last year her mother was alive, so young Powell was with her for two weeks, and they’d had the luxury of a vacation of two adults sans kid. It had been glorious, frankly, because sometimes parenting was overrated. Exploring Colorado, hiking sand dunes and blue peaks, talking uninterrupted in the car. When they’d left, she’d accidentally had the key still on her key chain, and somehow, year after year had passed and it was still there.
She had even joked with Vincent in the years after: I could go back and just let myself in. She preferred that phrase, letting oneself in.
He would smile at this old joke, and eventually, his smile was automatic—the result of its being said too many times, the result of them being too many years together. In response, he would usually bring up their next adventure—planning trips was one of his great obsessions and joys.
She’d made a good choice, coming here. Well done, you, well done, she thought as she stared up at the pitched ceiling. This cabin was perfect, being situated rather far back in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but more important, she had some assurance it would be empty. She’d contacted the owner about renting it, but he’d told her it was no longer on Airbnb, that his family had become sprawling enough—with grandkids and kids and so on—that he kept it solely for them. And then she emailed him a chatty message inquiring after his family and he had responded with an I’m just out the door now, in fact, we’re all going to Mexico on October first—a big family affair to celebrate my Big 75! and she knew enough about him to know he meant a private jet, a private house, that he had that amount of money, and so she’d written back, How nice, how lovely, have a really grand adventure, please.
When she closed down her email that night, she sat in her empty, still house and felt her empty, still life. She’d had a big fight with Powell in which he’d said she was boring and he hated her; then she’d had a boring phone call with her sister about the most mundane of all mundane things and couldn’t tell her about the fight because they just didn’t discuss real things; and she’d been unable to stop the loop of a daydream of kissing Levi, the regular at the restaurant who felt anything but regular in her heart for literally no reason. Plus, another Chicago winter was coming. Three days later, she found herself on the road.
Now she had to admit, she did feel…happy. Sure, she was invisible, irrelevant, and a criminal to boot, and she could maybe end up in jail, but her previous life felt like a jail too, and this felt like, well, youth. The curious and slightly naughty and fun-loving Ammalie still resided within.
Three months, three keys, three adventures involving breaking into some truer version of herself. Already, she knew it was going to be far harder than she’d guessed to find a certain clean crispness of body and soul. But at least she knew what she was running from, knew what she was after, and, to top it off, she was washed and warm and had a home to stay in. It was a start.
CHAPTER 3
She woke in the last moments of dark to a creak in the house which she determined to be only a creak. Mumbled “Good morning, honey bird” to herself, and dozed as she watched the sun brighten the snowy mountainside in the distance before she got up to make pour-over coffee using the actual stove in the cabin because she was going through the fuel canisters faster than she’d anticipated.
Her legs were achy, and she realized it was not so much from the drive or the hike yesterday, but rather from being bound in the sleeping bag; she needed to move around more than the bag would allow, and she vowed to unzip it from now on. Perhaps even move to the bed, though she liked being in the main room, where she could see someone pulling up.
But the real question was not the couch or the bed—it was whether or not to stay at all. Was this crazy? She looked out the front door window at the dusting of snow, meaning any tracks she’d left yesterday as she pulled the car to the back would be hidden, and any tracks of someone new would be seen. There was no trace of anyone, including her.
Stay? Or go?
The answer: She’d get in shape. She did a plank to the count of ten and then five sit-ups, and stretched. This day, this very day, was the beginning of a new her. A really really new her.
She got dressed and put on a coat and went outside and sat on a flat rock covered with lime-green lichen and leaned back against the brown-orange bark of a ponderosa and raised her face to the sun. The snow on the trees was unfolding itself into water, dripping in the quiet. That was beautiful, like a little chime. She considered the low-growing sage and pine cones and small rocks and dried grasses at her feet and sipped her coffee. The whole scene emitted what she could only describe as mountain smell, sagy and piney and fresh. Different from restaurant smell. Or house smell. Or Grey Goose smell. Certainly better than any of them, especially when mixed with the smell of her coffee.
