Eighteen

 

Cece checked her phone one more time, rereading the text Gail Tippler had sent her this morning. The Gail Tippler! Author of Like Leaves, Like Ashes! Who was reading tonight at the bookstore, because Cece had lured her to Salish!

How beautiful it is here! The mountains hardly seem earthbound. I keep thinking they’re in mid-launch, headed for the moon. How lucky you are to live here.

The words were even lovelier—chummier—than she remembered. Cece’s heart did a paradiddle. Just having Gail Tippler in her contacts was like, well, an act of God. Cece had been scared to text her back—what if she wrote something stupid?—and so had left the text unanswered, preserving its perfection. Anyway, she didn’t want to disturb the woman while she was driving.

Cece wanted to ask Garrett whether to text back or not, but of course he wasn’t here. He was in the mountains. She respected Garrett’s need for solitude—respected and admired it. Truth be told, she often looked forward to his stints in the field. At least a little bit. She liked the time alone with Lana, liked being able to sleep through the night without wearing earplugs or waking to a tug-of-war for the blanket. Liked focusing on the bookstore without Garrett’s needs and preoccupations man-spreading in her brain. Her life seemed to swing into focus, to fill the viewfinder of her thoughts, as if Garrett had been blocking it somehow. She was surprised, then, by how much she always missed him. That was the weird thing, the paradox of marriage she hadn’t banked on: that he blocked her view of him, of Garrett, as well.

This past week, however, Cece had barely given him a thought. She’d been too distracted by Gail Tippler’s visit. She’d reread Like Leaves, Like Ashes, maybe her favorite novel that wasn’t written by a dead Russian. It opens with—what else?—a dead mother, her twelve-year-old daughter peering into her open casket just as a fly happens to crawl up the mother’s nose. The girl imagines being the fly, entering “the haunted mansion” of her mother’s head. The whole book was like that: an endoscopy into the mind of grief. Cece had written Gail Tippler a fan letter, or email rather, and amazingly—astonishingly—Gail Tippler had written her back. To thank her. And when Cece told her she owned a bookstore, and that this bookstore was in Salish, Montana, Gail Tippler had written back again, mentioning that she was going to a wedding in Missoula in July, her first time visiting Montana. She was flying out from Portland, where she lived. And somehow, against all odds, Cece had convinced her to drive to Salish for a reading, even to have dinner with her afterward at the Trout & Tackle.

And then the lovely text, extolling the beauty of Montana. All morning, running errands for the reading—picking up cheese and crackers, scouring the wine aisle of the IGA for some half-decent prosecco—Cece had seen the town through Gail Tippler’s eyes. How quaint it was! And how majestic, really, was the mackerel sky over the lake! It was the same smoke-free paradise she’d fallen in love with years ago, at the Margolises’ house. Even when she’d run into Tori Wiggins, owner of Huckleberry Gifts, out walking her dog; even when Tori Wiggins had given her advice on how to spruce up the window dressing of the store; even when Tori Wiggins’s Australian shepherd had strained at its leash and she’d told the same joke she’d told for the past five years—“I think someone here needs to check his pee-mail!”—Cece had not been filled with secret despair. She’d laughed politely, even graciously. Indeed, she was lucky to live here.

Cece sniffed her armpits. She was already nervous. Eight years ago, after that terrible night at Big Sky Pizza—the night she’d thrown her tip money at Garrett’s face—Cece had decided she needed to do something: she couldn’t wait for a divine miracle to befall her so she could open a bookstore in LA. And so she’d opened a bookstore here, in Salish. It had taken a long time, but she’d done it. Not just opened one, but convinced her favorite living writer to grace it with her presence. She’d written an intro—labored over it for days, as if she were writing the Gettysburg Address. She worried it was too gushing. What if she embarrassed herself? Got tongue-tied and aphasic? The only thing worse than a bad speech is bad speech. She had an image of herself at the podium she’d borrowed from Salish High, spouting aphorisms.

In the bathroom, Cece rummaged through the medicine cabinet and grabbed Garrett’s beta-blockers, which he used when he had to give a talk at a university or an Ecological Society of America conference, then popped one at the kitchen sink. She immediately felt better. She was smart and capable and charming. At least med school had taught her how to creatively self-medicate.

She walked into the living room, where Lana was streaming something on her laptop. The girl liked to watch things on mute, following along with the closed captioning, because it made her feel like she was “hanging out at the Stagger Inn.” How the hell she knew what it felt like to be at the Stagger Inn, the local dive bar, Cece didn’t ask. She sometimes did strange things when Garrett was out of town. Last month, Charlie had found the girl locked inside his bedroom; this was at the lake house, when Charlie was visiting with his hideous new girlfriend. Lana had sneaked up there on a ladder and couldn’t get down. “Probably a dare,” Charlie had said, though his girlfriend seemed much less understanding about it, looking sternly judgmental of Cece’s parenting, her lips sealed tight to conceal her braces. (The worst of it was on the ride home, when Lana suggested that Cece and Tinsel Teeth looked something alike.)

“What on earth are you watching?” Cece asked now.

“Most Bizarre Plastic Surgeries: Animal Edition.”

“Please don’t watch that.”

“It’s awesome. These crazies try to look like their favorite animals. This one guy’s turning himself into a lizard.”

“Why does he want to be a lizard?”

Lana shrugged. “Why does Dad want to be a wolverine?”

“Did you leave a window open?” Cece asked, watching a carpenter bee bump along the ceiling, where the paint was stained brown and flaking from water damage. The thing was like a honeybee in a fat suit.

“Possibly.”

“I told you not to! Now we’ve got those awful things buzzing around the house.”

“Bombinating,” Lana said.

“What?”

“That’s what bees do. They bombinate.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Cece said. “You father won’t let me call the exterminator.” It was a recurring spat between them. Garrett refused to have the bees dusted, though neither had he come up with any solutions to prevent them from drilling a maze of Lilliputian caves in their house and salting them with eggs. They were destroying the place, the insides of the walls turning to pumice.

“We could get plastic surgery. You know, to look like carpenter bees. Then we could all just share the house, like an intentional community.”

“Actually, Kayla’s on her way over,” Cece said. “To pick me up. She said she’d help me get rid of them—knows some kind of ‘folk remedy.’ ”

“Where are you guys going?”

“To the bookstore! It’s Gail Tippler’s reading tonight. I’ve told you a zillion times.”

“The book club thing?”

“It’s not a book club thing! It’s Gail Tippler!”

“Geez, Mom. Take a breath, okay?”

Cece did as she was told. “I mean, yes, I made the club read her book, because it’s amazing. Also, to make sure we have a good crowd tonight.” She glanced at her watch. “I bought all that prosecco. Oh god. What if Gail Tippler’s an alcoholic?”

Lana regarded her with something. Concern? In any case, she’d paused the lizard man on TV, who was having his tongue surgically forked.

“It’s going to be great, Mom,” Lana said sincerely. “Don’t worry.”

Cece smiled at her, feeling a rogue wave of love for this strange child on her couch. She was a sweet girl, inside the haunted mansion of her brain. Lana unpaused the laptop and resumed her trance. What would you call this trance? It was called growing up in Salish and being bored out of your skull. It was called having brainpower to burn—and then burning it, intentionally, because what else was she going to do? It was dead fuel, along with her acting talent. Because the kid could act! Cece would never forget seeing her do Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade, the one and only time Salish Middle School had done Shakespeare; the other kids mumbled red-faced to themselves, staring at the ceiling as they tried desperately to remember their lines, which clearly made as much sense to them as Swahili, and then Lana came out as Juliet and there was an actual sigh of relief. It wasn’t just that she understood what she was saying; it’s that the words seemed natural in her mouth, chitchatty and alive, as if she spoke that way in real life as well and just happened to stroll onstage midverse. Watching her interact with the boy playing Romeo was startling, almost cruel, like watching Fred Astaire dance with a zombie. But what was her daughter supposed to do with this talent? Star in the kids’ production of Seussical at the Lutheran church? Cece and Garrett didn’t have the money to send her to arts camp out of state. Nurturing her talent wasn’t in the cards; they’d have to wait till college and pray for a scholarship.

In the meantime, Lana spent her days on the couch, doing crosswords on the computer, or hanging at the Swan Creek swimming hole with Riley, her best friend from school, a pimply girl whose evangelical parents wouldn’t let her wear tops without sleeves or go trick-or-treating on Halloween. Cece wished Lana had more friends like Jasper. It had unnerved her at first when they’d become close—not just close, but thick as thieves, long-distance confidants, fusing Cece and Garrett to Charlie and Angeliki in a way that felt slightly perverse. After a while, though, the kids’ friendship came to seem natural to Cece, or at least no stranger than the fact that she’d reconnected with the man she’d married and abandoned a week later. And to be honest, it gave her an excuse to keep in touch with Charlie, to return to the lake house every summer. To play tourist to the life she’d given up.

Maybe it was inevitable that something would restart between them. She couldn’t sightsee forever. Cece explained it as a kind of muscle memory, a postmortem spasm, something that happened once a year when she and Garrett and Lana visited the house. Once she’d bumped into Charlie in the orchard, where she’d gone to pick cherries: they’d clung to each other for five minutes, as if frozen in time. It seemed like a joke—anyone seeing them would have giggled—but it wasn’t. He was deadly serious. They both were. All the crucial moments in life were close to being funny but weren’t funny at all. Another time it was in the cellar, where she’d gone down to use the bathroom; Charlie had surprised her when she’d come out. (Of course, she’d expected it, hoped for it, she hadn’t been surprised at all.) It wasn’t about desire. It was about stillness. Being pulled underwater and staying there, down deep, unable to move or talk or breathe. She and Charlie never discussed these encounters, or why they wanted them to be like this—they just were; it became an expectation, a thrill, because nothing had been talked about, the clutching seemed almost beyond their control. Cece thought of it as a kind of angel lust. She’d learned about this in med school: what they called it when men sometimes got erections after a violent death. Sometimes after these encounters Charlie would email her for a while, using her old med school account—but he always stopped eventually, after a week or three, when Cece didn’t respond.

If only Garrett were so wrapped up in her. No, that wasn’t fair. When he got back from the field, Garrett was everything she could hope for in a partner: horny and loving, worshipful and funny, quite a bit funnier, actually, than Charlie—what joy it was, all her doubts evaporating in a second! But after a couple weeks he’d revert to his usual abstracted self, some black fog seeping between him and the rest of the world. It wasn’t that he took her for granted, exactly; it’s just that his mind tended to drift to other things. To what was happening to the earth, the evil stupidity of people who were letting it happen. It wasn’t that Cece didn’t worry about these things as well or know them to be true—she wasn’t evil or stupid—but dwelling on them did nothing to prevent them from happening. If the world was ending, the last thing Cece wanted to do was talk about it all the time. She wanted, sometimes, to chat about movies. To feel flattered and adored. To be selfish and alive and not give a shit.

She’d thought true love was about being understood: about finding that person who could see the sadness in you, the peep show of crazy you kept from everyone else. But what if it was better to be misunderstood? Not to be reminded all the time, just by looking at your partner’s face, that the peep show was there? What if love wasn’t about sharing yourself completely, about yoking your secret sorrow to another’s, but about finding someone who made you forget yourself?

When she wanted to see herself—the gunk in her soul—she had books. She had Gail Tippler. At least she turned it into beauty.

The doorbell rang. Cece left Lana to her lizard man and went to answer the door. Kayla was there, dressed up for the reading in a flouncy shirt and earrings shaped like miniature books. No: actual books, with pages and everything. Her lipstick was askew, as if it had been kissed onto her by someone else. As usual, she looked like someone who’d just run off on her family and had no regrets.

“Ready to kill some bees?” Kayla asked. In each hand, for some reason, was a tennis racket.

“We’re going to play tennis with them?”

“They’re squash rackets.”

“I don’t care if they’re croquet mallets,” Cece said. “So long as we get rid of the bees. They’re destroying our house.”

Kayla snorted. “A croquet mallet would be next to useless. Carpenter bees are less than half an inch in diameter.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“See these gaps in the strings?” she said, holding up a racket. “Exact diameter of the bees. Strips their wings right off. They drop like pebbles. You couldn’t patent a better weapon.”

Cece accepted this as a fact, because really that was all you could do with Kayla. She had a solution for everything, one of those competent women who wasn’t averse to flouncy shirts but could split wood and replace an engine filter and maybe even kill something with an arrow. She wove her own snowshoes for the hell of it. Cece admired her greatly. When she wasn’t making her own snowshoes, she worked for a title company, investigating property histories—a lucrative business in Salish. They’d met at the bookstore, after Kayla had wandered in looking for a field guide to edible plants.

Cece took Kayla to the guest room upstairs and popped out the screen before leading her onto the roof of the porch, where carpenter bees bombarded them from all directions. Kayla handed her a racket and began swinging at the air like a lunatic. Sure enough, bees dropped to the roof right and left. They looked fuzzy and companionable without their wings, like little pom-poms. Cece joined in the slaughter, imagining Garrett’s face if he saw her out there swatting bees with a racket. Soon the bombardment had ceased and Kayla and Cece eased into a more discriminate bloodbath, targeting stray bees on opposite ends of the roof, as if they were actually playing tennis. Cece glanced up and saw the youngest Washburn kid watching them from the trampoline next door.

“I feel like I’m always doing these things with you,” Cece said.

“What things?”

“Things that would seem crazy to me if anyone else was doing them.”

“What’s crazy about this?” Kayla asked sincerely. The tiny books danced in the sun.

“I guess it’s no crazier than when we went swimming in December.”

“Was it December?”

“Yes! You talked me into it. The lake was forty degrees.”

Kayla shrugged. “I thought it was January. That’s when the real fun starts.”

Cece rested for a minute, trying to ignore the dead bees scattered at her feet. Some rain clouds had gathered in the distance, over Salish Lake, but it was so hot out the rain sublimed before it reached the water. Garrett called it this, “subliming,” which Cece loved. You could see the wisps of rain dangling halfway to earth. She would have to point this out to Gail Tippler—both the virga themselves and the wonderful verb “sublime.”

“I hope that doesn’t turn into a real storm. I’m counting on a good turnout.” Cece brushed a wing off her shirt. “We’ll have the book club at least.”

Kayla forehanded a bee, conspicuously silent.

“What?”

“Well, I wouldn’t count on them entirely. Brandy’s husband’s sick. So she’s got to watch the twins. And Corrine had to drive to Missoula; her mom’s lost her mind, been digging holes in the front yard.”

“What about Thea?”

“I think her boyfriend’s in town. A surprise visit.”

Cece stared at her. “Wait. None of them are coming?”

“You publicized it, right? I saw all the flyers. I’m sure you’ll get a good crowd.”

Kayla hit a few more shots. Cece felt suddenly tired. Not just tired: totally drained, as if she’d swum a bunch of laps and were trying to hoist herself out of a pool. What if no one came to the reading? What if this was a huge fucking mistake? What if, dear god, she’d dragged Gail Tippler here from Oregon, simply to humiliate her? No, Kayla was right—she’d put up flyers all over town. People had promised her, to her face, that they’d be there.

Just thinking about it—a stream of curious faces, crowding into the bookstore—made Cece smile. She loved the store, even though it was surrounded by cheesy souvenir shops, situated on a pedestrian pier that jutted into the lake. She’d converted it from a gallery selling “Western art,” which seemed to mean a lot of bronze sculptures of Native Americans sternly evoking noble virtues. Cece was happy to see the gallery fail and even happier to convert it into a bookstore with books about urban life, life in LA and New York and Paris, Delhi and Istanbul and Tokyo, bringing the big bad world of “cultural elites” to Salish, Montana. It had not been easy to string together the capital: sucking up to her dad, getting him to cosign the loan, then convincing the SBA office to insure the debt and hand her a 504 on top of it. What high hopes she’d had! The Light at the End of the Dock, she’d called the store, investing six hundred bucks in a neon-green sign, proud of her own wit, the way she’d wedded the literary to the literal, not caring (or pretending not to care) that few people caught the reference. Of course, she’d been sure to devote a section to the American West, eschewing the white-men-who’d-rather-be-fishing club in favor of James Welch and Willa Cather, Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko. (Why were so many novels set in Montana about taciturn ranchers and gambling addicts living in trailers? Most of the Montanans she knew had jobs and families like everyone else. They also talked up a storm.)

The trouble was, she hadn’t sold any books. Baldwin languished on the shelf, as did Woolf, Wolfe, and Wolff. In fact, the only books that sold, infuriatingly, were the ones Garrett had curated: the hiking guides for Glacier and Jewel Basin, or sometimes the ones with endangered animals on the cover. Things had gotten so financially dire that Cece had revamped the whole store two years ago, paring the Literature offerings down to a few classics (Anna Karenina, semper fi!) and dicing the stacks into a Zeno’s paradox of more and more sections: Cookbooks, True Crime, Thrillers, Romance, Pets, and the dreaded Self-Help & Relationships. “At least I don’t have a Wedding section,” she told Garrett, before adding a Wedding section. One day, after selling two mysteries in a row that featured a cat detective named Fussypants, Cece got so depressed that she closed the store for the rest of the afternoon. When the pandemic hit, she had no choice but to shut the store down completely; she never would have survived if her landlord, Wayne—a widower with a bit of a crush on her, or so Cece suspected—hadn’t given her so much rent relief. Anyway, it was an effective wake-up call. What had she been smoking, opening a bookstore like this in Salish? Thinking Tove Jansson would fly off the shelves? Cece came very close to pulling the plug on it for good.

Instead, she started thinking of herself as an entrepreneur, not an evangelist, which washed her immediately with relief. (“An evangelist for what?” Paige had asked, and in fact Cece had no answer.) She’d invested her life savings into the store—or at least the small inheritance her grandmother had left her—and she couldn’t bear to see it go up in smoke. Anyway, she enjoyed running her own business, even if it sold cat mysteries. Certainly it was a million times better than waiting tables. She discussed business models with Paige, who helped her come up with some “R & D strategies” to improve her “product-market fit,” and focused on catering to local bibliophiles, or at least to readers, or at least to souvenir shoppers on Main Street who wanted “a quick read for the plane.” If she managed to hand-sell a Jansson novel occasionally, that was icing on the cake.

At least she’d move some Gail Tippler novels. So long as it didn’t rain. Sublime! Cece yelled at the rain, threatening it. Well, she did this in her head, not out loud, though she was so tired she could barely think. Something was wrong with her. Her legs felt like noodles. A carpenter bee flew into her shoulder. Probably it was looking for its dead friends. It blimped around, wondering where the party had gone to.

She swung her racket at the bee, which screamed. Cece heard it quite clearly. An awful sound, like someone being tortured. The wounded bee stared up at her from the asphalt. It had the face of an actual carpenter. Specifically: Jesus. “Your ass is grass,” it said to her, quite clearly.

“What’s wrong?” Kayla said.

Cece shook her head. She should have hired an exterminator, outsourced the genocide to a professional. Kayla helped her back through the window. She wobbled at the top of the stairs, and Kayla grabbed her arm. My god, was she dreaming? She could barely walk. She felt like she was on another planet, a humongous one, where the gravity was off the charts. In the kitchen, Lana seemed to be having a staring contest with the refrigerator, whose door alarm had started to beep. Cece dropped her racket on the breakfast table and slumped into a chair.

“Who won?” Lana asked.

“Your mom’s not feeling well,” Kayla said. “I wonder if it’s the heat.”

She brought Cece a glass of water, which Cece contemplated at length. How strange, the idea of pouring this into her stomach, a part of her body she’d never seen. She had no proof it even existed.

“Did you take one of these at lunch?”

“Take what?”

“A zolpidem.” Kayla held up Garrett’s bottle of pills.

Cece laughed. “Those are beta-blockers.”

“No, Mom, they’re Ambien,” Lana said, looking at the label. “The generic kind.”

Cece felt sick. Oh god, had she grabbed the wrong pills? Was she looped on Ambien? She was supposed to be at the bookstore in an hour. Gail Tippler, winner of the Djuna Barnes Award, was meeting her there. She was introducing her, for fuck’s sake. She thought about canceling—she could avert disaster while simultaneously taking a nap—but worried that Gail Tippler would never forgive her. She’d come all this way, just for Cece. It meant something to Cece, the reading, that she couldn’t fully explain.

“Maybe you should lie down,” Kayla said gently.

“Yeah, Mom. You look like the walking dead.”

“Like a zombie?” Cece murmured.

“No. Like a dead person, except you’re still moving for some reason.”

“I can’t lie down! Are you out of your minds?”