Ents
Saturday, 9:38 a.m.
Thirty miles south of Fort Bragg, California
Lila Boone, the four-star-rated eBay seller who has the third panel, lives in a low brown prefab house near the water. The fancier properties are on the bluffs, but Lila is close enough to the ocean that salt has eaten into her paint job, speckling the brown siding with white so it resembles a cheetah print.
Her weedy driveway is narrow, a chute between two overgrown juniper hedges, but I back the car up without scratching it.
She opens the door in a baby blue sweat suit, a chocolate Yoplait in her hand.
“I’m sorry we’re a little late,” I say.
“Glad to finally unload the thing.” She sets her yogurt on her porch swing and leads Eric and me around the side of the house. “It’s out back, in the rathole.”
Rathole? Eric mouths, raising his eyebrows in mock alarm.
“She just means the garage is messy,” I say under my breath, stifling another yawn. I’m on zero sleep.
We follow her across the weedy yard, past a rusted-out Camaro, an empty aboveground pool.
“Are you okay?” Eric asks, touching my shoulder.
“Sure, why?”
“You’re limping a little.”
“Oh, these shoes aren’t the best.”
I’m wearing my most broken-in running shoes, so it’s not their fault. My all-night march in sandals last night gave me a silver-dollar-size blister on my right heel.
Lila leads us to a peeling woodshed against a chain-link fence. A handwritten sign on the door says The Dave Cave.
She unlocks the door. “My ex. David Ratskeller. Also known as Ratbastard.”
“Oh.” I follow her inside.
When my sleepy eyes adjust I take in a jumble of objects—a shaggy Nerf basketball net, a dartboard, a Maxwell House can full of golf balls on a dusty workbench, a white-and-green nylon lawn chair. On every wall, stuffed animals. Not the cuddly child’s kind. The killed-and-mounted kind—a stag head, a fish, a snake. What might be a possum; I don’t want to look too closely.
I’ve lured Eric to a house of horrors.
“It’s the storage shed from Silence of the Lambs,” he mutters.
Tired and sore and blistered as I am, I can’t stop smiling to myself.
“So was your ex the...art collector?” he asks Lila. Trying to sound chirpy.
“Collector. Ha!” Lila snorts. “He used to sit out here in that chair and stare at your friend’s taxidermy doohickey for hours while he smoked out. He named the damn things. Frigging pets.”
Serra’s taxidermy doohickey is against the back wall. Panel three is the one in which we’re just floating. Not swimming, and not drowning, either.
One side of the panel is concealed by junk, but what I can see is worse than I feared. The top filmed in yellow grime, much of the front vandalized by white Hi, My Name Is stickers. Glenn has been renamed Geek Boy #3. I’m The Secretary, I guess because of the notebook in my paw.
I work on a sticker corner with my fingernail, but a fuzzy white scar remains.
Maybe Serra would be better off not knowing what happened to her beautiful work. How this piece of her heart was bought by a man who only wanted to laugh at it.
Eric appears by my side and says of the white mark, “We’ll buy some Goo Gone. That stuff’ll clean anything. So what’s the plan here?”
We don’t have much clearance; the bottom corner closest to me is wedged against the wall behind a heavy wooden bench and the other end is half-buried under a jumble of camping gear.
I wish I’d packed work gloves. I wish Lila was offering to clear junk from our path instead of standing in the doorway, silently counting her cash.
“Can you lift it over that stuff?”
He checks it out. “I think so, yeah.”
“Okay, you grab that end and when we’ve got it up, come toward me. I’ll pivot toward the door. Then we’ll set it down there and...regroup. So you can pick it up from the base and get a better grip.” I point with my leg to show Eric how we’ll rest the panel on the ground, perpendicular to its current position, then prep for the trip out the door.
“Regrouping station noted. We’ll regroup and regrip. Roger.”
“Lift on three?” I say. “One, two, three.”
We work together. I’m monitoring Eric’s strained face and he’s focused on mine.
The panel is two feet off the ground and our spines haven’t snapped, then it’s up to three feet. Four. We’re killing it; we could get jobs as professional movers.
We only have to raise it a few more inches so I can swing my end over the bench. No problem. All is well.
Our eyes are locked together, our smallest muscles connected. We couldn’t look away if we wanted to. And for a second, as we study each other, his expression says exactly what I’m thinking—this isn’t so hard.
Our bodies are in sync. We will deliver the gift. Have a good time with Serra. Part as friends.
Except.
Except it’s dark in the shed, and Eric’s hands are a bead too sweaty. In my elation or exhaustion I made an error calculating my angles, and tokin’, taxidermy-mad Dave left behind what feels, in the panicked second when my foot makes contact, like a Slip ’N Slide slicked with medical-grade lube and hidden in the shadows purely to sabotage my entire life’s happiness, but which I learn later is only a scrap of Hefty bag.
I slip.
A stab in the back of my thigh as I slam into a corner of the bench, a kidney punch as the piece hits my stomach. But I hold on. There’s a second where we can still recover.
I hear Eric’s oh, shit, the sickening crack of Plexiglas on concrete, but I don’t see him go down.
1:00 p.m.
Of the three accident survivors—me, the panel, Eric—I suffered the least damage. The back of my left thigh is tender, and there’s an interesting star-shaped welt below my belly button.
Panel three’s bottom-right corner chipped off, and it suffered a hairline fracture up the side.
Eric, in sandals, yanked off balance in his cluttered corner of the Dave Cave, stepped into the maw of a manual lawn mower. His foot is mercifully intact but his big toe is gashed from tip to web. He’s soaked Lila’s dish towel scarlet. His second toe juts straight out, like his foot is making a peace sign.
Lila, to her credit, became attentive as a candy striper after our fall. She draped Eric’s arm over her shoulder and escorted him to the convertible, ran for clean rags and ice. Helped me cram our bags in the tiny trunk so we could shove the panel into the back seat. She insisted on giving me back some cash, tossing me a handful of twenties for our trouble. “You deserve some shots after that,” she called.
Meaning whiskey, not tetanus, although the lawn mower blades were so rusty Eric should probably get a booster, too.
At Fort Bragg Emergency Services, Eric got seven stitches and a metal splint on his right toes. He has to wear an ugly blue Velcro boot.
My travel wardrobe, on the other hand, has been pared down.
I have my purse. I have my phone and driver’s license. What I don’t have is the floaty, bias-cut cerulean slip dress I planned to wear to the wedding. Or my wrapping paper for the wedding gift. Or even a change of underwear.
Lila left me a voice mail. “I guess this isn’t exactly going to make your day,” she said.
She found my suitcase by her juniper hedge. My World’s Litest Carry-On! in the Fresh Pine color option.
Green on green, and we were rushing, focused on freeing space in the back of the convertible for panel three and getting Eric’s foot looked at, so we forgot to throw it back in the car. Lila said I can pick it up or she’ll ship it, whatever I want. And she hopes we’re not too banged up.
Eric’s asleep, his left leg on the dash and his right stuck out the window. It’s not safe like that; if the airbag deploys he’s toast.
So I’m driving carefully, under the speed limit. We’re tracing the left edge of the continent, so near the water I can see white stripes of foam on the waves, a rocky island covered in a satiny, wiggling brown carpet of sea lions.
But the beauty of the scenery is lost on me; I want only to get to the wedding hotel. A few more hours of highway until I can eat, sleep. Buy a passable dress for tomorrow morning’s ceremony. Regroup.
My new trip motto: We can still regroup!
I’ve never been this far north, so close to Oregon. I imagine we’re flanked by a fairy-tale landscape. Giant mossy trees emerging from a sea of mist. Maybe those prehistoric redwoods are like the Ents, the kindly tree creatures in The Lord of the Rings. Maybe they’re on my side, helping me on my quest.
Imagining Ents, I drift over the median.
Pop-pop-pop-pop. Heart hammering, jerked alert because the rumble strip sounds exactly like pistol shots, I overcorrect into the shoulder and swerve back into my lane.
Screw the Ents. I’ll blast the AC on my face to wake up.
It’s fine. We’re fine. Regroup and regrip, Becc.
But Eric stirs. “What was that?”
“How’s your foot?” I try to sound peppy, like my Colossal Quad espresso from the drive-through Java Hut thirty miles ago had any effect and I didn’t almost crash us.
He grabs the box to pull himself up so he can examine me. “I think you need to rest. You look sort of...wild.”
“I’m fine. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“How much sleep did you get last night? Tell the truth.”
“Oh. Not my best sleep, but—”
“Becc. Give it up. Let’s find a rest stop or something so you can take a nap.”