ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON
OCTOBER 8, 2014
THE SUN HAD just set. I turned down the lane to the cottage, arrows of light shooting from clouds on the horizon. The air was warm, with a chill settling at the edges. Tall trees darkened the driveway. I could see the shape of the house but few details. My phone lit the way through the front door and kitchen to the fuse box. I switched the breakers, heard the fridge rattle and an encouraging tick from the water heater, turned on a few lights. Faded notes in my mother’s hand were taped to everything — on light switches and cupboard doors and appliances — explaining how and what to do to revive the place. I read each one, not ready to rely on my memories. Mom had been renting the cottage out to friends and acquaintances for years. But this was my first time back since I was twelve.
As I hauled my bags from the back seat of the car, I heard sputtering chirps echoing in and out like synth beats at a club. Then, realizing the incongruity, I remembered the time a bat the size of my palm had become entangled in my hair one summer evening, just a few feet away, in the garden. I looked up to see them sweeping the air overhead, feasting on the moths and other insects attracted by the porch light. I shuffled up the driveway as fast as I could, luggage raking the gravel.
On my way back for the box of groceries, I noticed a glow among the swaying trees — not the moon, which hadn’t risen yet. A light in an upstairs window at Rookwood, the big old house across the lane. I wasn’t completely alone on the far side of the island.
Weary from the drive and the long ferry ride, I went straight to bed, up the ladder to the loft in the eaves. The ceiling was so low, I crawled to the pallet bed on my knees.
When I was a kid, I could walk upright if I tucked my head. Every night I read until I fell asleep with the lamp on. So Dad started calling it my lighthouse. He could see my windows from down by the shore where he cleaned crab pots or smoked salmon or drank beers with Mom and talked about the things they didn’t want me to hear. When they came back to the cottage, he would climb up the ladder to kiss me good night and turn off the light. I remembered the smell he brought in with him: night, alder smoke, an abalone wetness.
I woke early. Woolly fog wrapped around the small windows, and condensation dripped down the wooden sills, the white paint puckering and peeling away. The ceiling was still blue, with faded golden stars painted all over the slats. Once there had also been paper stars hung from the beams with fishing line. I listened to the muffled lap of the waves against the dock below and guessed that the tide was high.
As I climbed down the ladder as gracefully as I could, creaks sounded out from the rungs that I used to flit up and down like a chickadee. In the morning light, I saw everything I had missed the night before: Grandma Lucia’s lace curtains still hanging in the east windows, a row of agates along each sill, the wool rag rug in the living room — worn to threads in places. The smell of wood smoke was in everything. It had already seeped into my hair, though I hadn’t built a fire. I knew by the note Mom had left on the closet door that there were extra coats, hats, etc. inside, but when I opened it, I took a step back. They were Dad’s coats, boots, vests. A box full of knitted caps, rain hats, work gloves. Some of them had been Grandpa Whit’s first. I closed the door and tore the note down. Then I went around tearing all the notes down.
After the earthquake and Dad’s funeral, it took all the money we had to get to Seattle to Mom’s parents’ place. Mom signed up with a temp agency as soon as we unpacked our things. There were ruins everywhere and plenty of work in reconstruction. She did anything they offered her, directing traffic for utilities crews, sorting salvage at warehouses where people could haul loads of debris. Eventually she worked in the office of a property developer. She supported us with that work, within a few months finding us an apartment, acquiring health insurance, sending me to the parish school, Our Lady of the Lake. And repairing the cottage. Making sure the county didn’t condemn it and tear it down, like so many other buildings rattled by the quake. She used what she learned working for the developer to sidestep occupancy requirements, to get waivers and stays, to hold on to Dad’s childhood home. It hadn’t been ruined, just abandoned. Not abandoned, she had told them, just temporarily vacant. Reconstruction all over the region took years, but it wasn’t long before people wanted to get away from the city and the glassy, haunted look it could have, when everything new just reminded them of what had been there before. Mom started renting out the cottage to pay for taxes and utilities. Occasionally a friend of mine would report that she had slept in my lighthouse room. I would change the subject. I would avoid that friend for a week.
There was a new mirror above the sink; the old medicine cabinet had come off its rusted hinges and crashed in the quake. I had not been tall enough to see most of myself in it then. I was unrecognizable now, eyes cottony with sleep, hair flared up on the pillow side, ponytail askew. I had fallen asleep in long underwear and a wool cardigan with elbow patches. I looked like the morning after a wild L.L. Bean catalog shoot. I had friends in Seattle who cultivated this look. They showed up to work like this — wherever they worked: hair salons, universities, butcher shops, ad agencies. I preferred to look like I had my shit together, even when I didn’t.
Mom sometimes told me I looked like Grandma Lucia, Dad’s mom, with her wavy black hair — she wore hers in a bob — and big brown eyes and high cheeks. I understood this to mean that I looked like my father, too, but that she couldn’t bring herself to mention him. I combed out my hair with my fingers, washed the sleep from my eyes.
I sat in front of the stove on a cedar stump, staring through the dark opening into the cold iron belly. My mother had insisted (House Rule #2: Replenish Supplies) that the fire box always be full, and it was: dry kindling, extra-long strike-anywhere matches, and a Sunday paper from over two years ago, wrinkled and crisp.
A fire needs three things, I told myself. My dad used to say it all the time.
I rifled through the box and pulled out the paper. Seattle headlines: the new socialist mayor, raising the minimum wage, the lawn wars, the first of what would be several years of summertime droughts, the year of the worst wildfires in Washington’s history. It was the year protesters camped out on golf courses and organized the guerrilla gardening of food plants and fruit trees all over the city. I had reported on it for The Stranger. I had followed a group of anarchist gardeners as they planted by night, with work gloves and headlamps, hauling old pillowcases full of homemade compost and worm castings to weedy parking medians and abandoned lots all over the south end of Seattle. In the light of day, their gardens were sloppy but darling; touring the city in the morning, you never knew what you would see, what formerly trash-dotted roadside scab of broken concrete and dirt would suddenly be speckled with squash seedlings and hand-painted signs in rainbow colors with slogans like FOOD NOT LAWNS and OCCUPY THE SOIL.
It hadn’t been my first feature, but it had been my first to lead the region’s media coverage of anything. The paper in my hand had come out a full month after my article. I turned to the inside page and there he was: Matthew Cartwright, the locavore chef and food activist who asked me out over a bucket of homemade fish head fertilizer. His handsome, bearded mug — the same one that led my own story — had sold urban homeowners all over the city on tearing up their lawns and starting worm bins. We had been lovers for over a year after that, and during that time I had stopped reporting on anything related to the movement. I had spent weekends tearing up blacktop, amending soil, digging holes for a public fruit and nut arbor on Beacon Hill, and hours helping him with the onslaught of media that came in the wake of my piece.