Slipstream
Paul isn’t happy about my sudden decision to stay here through August. He’s hurt and confused and he has every right to be, since I’ve given him no explanation. Just a hasty message a week ago, the day he’d planned to pick me up at Logan. I’d left it at ten a.m. Boston time, when I knew he’d be teaching summer school.
“What’s going on?” he asks quietly. “Just what kind of pack rat was this long-lost aunt of yours?” He tries to laugh, a sad little sound.
“I’m really sorry, Paul. I’ll send you a check for the Cape Cod deposit.”
I wait, the receiver cold against my ear, the crackle of our bad connection as loud as the skids and whacks of the skateboarders doing their tricks outside the phone booth. Two cars pass on the highway before he speaks again.
“A check. Great. You do that. I’ll look forward to receiving your check.” He hangs up—Paul never hangs up first.
Funny. I keep trying to picture him, but it comes out as mental lists. Paul is tall, lean. He plays handball. Paul has blond hair and a silky blondish-red beard. He reads detective novels and his favorite food is shrimp fried rice. Once last year, after our hundredth fight, when I told him I needed space, he left a coffee table book about comets on my doorstep. Paul has blue eyes. But I can’t remember what it feels like to look into them.
I buy a frozen yogurt for my lunch and carry it to the dunes, but it melts into chocolate chip soup, like the custards Willa used to buy only so she could talk to Liam. Liam. Angela’s detective tried to track him down after Willa ran away, but couldn’t. Someone thought he was surfing and teaching English in Bali.
I sit, watching surfers, tourists picnicking, the slow rightward progress of a tanker far off at sea.
“Jackie!” Kauri runs up to me the second I’m through the gate. “We found something important!”
“I found it,” Fiona corrects him. “He was scared of the raccoons.”
Proudly, Kauri waves something like a homemade maraca, releasing a high, bell-like sound, and hands it to me: it’s cold and smooth in my hand. A small mason jar with the lid rusted shut. The smallest of Kate’s jars, the size she used for her strongest relishes and chutneys.
I shake it, rattling the key inside, echoing the music Kauri made.
“It was under the steps of one of the big cabins no one’s using,” Fiona says. She points to the trees flanking the field downhill on our right, on the north side of the property. “There’s a whole raccoon family living under there. A colony. We saw a baby go in...”
I nod and look where she’s pointing, though I don’t need her explanations.
I’m the one who hid the key under the steps of Slipstream cabin. Twenty years ago.
“We thought it might be important,” Kauri says. “Like a key to someone’s safe.”
“It’s too teeny for that,” Fiona says to him. To me: “Do you know what it opens?”
I trace the raised grape design on the smooth glass. “No. But I really appreciate you braving the raccoons and getting it for me. Those raccoons must have known you were people to trust.”
“Can we show you where we found it?” Kauri asks.
“Please.”
I let them lead me. I’ve avoided it, but I’m ready now, and it’ll be easier with these two along.
Into the trees, left at the stump that’s like a giant guitar pick. It doesn’t look like a guitar pick anymore. It’s crumbled, hollowed out in the center.
“Giant’s Cup,” Fiona says as we pass.
So they’ve found their own favorite places here, made up their own fairy-tale names.
At Slipstream, we peer in at the darkness under the porch steps: eight sets of yellow eyes peer back. I make the expected sounds of appreciation, commend them on their bravery for grabbing the key from the raccoon’s compound.
I gaze up at my old cabin. Padlocked. Windows boarded up. The right handrail, the one I was too lazy to nail in place and fixed with gum, is gone now.
“It’s abandoned,” Kauri says with relish. He must not realize that his family’s cabin on the other side of the field looked just as forlorn a few weeks ago, until I unlocked it, pried the boards off with a crowbar from the shed, swept and cleaned.
“Should we go in?” I ask.
“How?” Fiona says.
I reach into my back pocket and pull out my big key chain, shaking it. A rattle of the sticky doorknob, a hip-bump against the thick wood like it’s my disco partner, and we’re in.
No condoms or drug needles on the floor, thankfully. Nothing on the walls but bare pine. I wonder what happened to the Blondie poster I stuck to the door with yet more wads of gum. No more dresser, and the bunches of lavender Angela gave me the first day we talked have been removed from the mirror frame, too, or crumbled to dust. No sign that I was ever here.
But the bed frame is still by the window, covered with a tarp, and as the kids are looking out the window, I feel behind the chunky wooden bed’s legs. Of course there’s nothing. I may have the key now, but I haven’t been able to find what it opens.
So many nights I slept here. At first it had felt unfamiliar, being the only one under this little roof (though eventually Willa had crashed here sometimes after we’d had an evening beach outing). But gradually I’d come to love my solo cabin, surrounded by the sounds and life of so many other families.
And then Colin had come, and he’d joined me on this bed, or I’d joined him in his. Angela and Graham, technically, temporarily, my guardians, had seemed unfazed by how much older he was than me, or what he would tell me. They didn’t care where Willa and I slept or if there was a roof above our heads. I look out the window at Plover—no more sign on that one. How Willa and I had howled when a branch had dipped over it, transforming the name to “lover.” Colin runs a small organic farm in Maine—I saw his ad in a newspaper circular once, and he looked happy.
Fee and Kauri are chattering about what a fine playhouse the cabin would make, about who might have lived here once.
“The giant!” Kauri says.
“It’s too small,” Fiona says.
“Maybe it can be the giant’s dollhouse,” Kauri says, with less conviction.
I’m about to tell him what a good idea this is—Fiona can be so harsh—when she says, “That’s a good idea, Kaur.”
They exchange a look of disappointment when I lock up, but I pretend not to notice.
When we’re back at the main house, drinking lemonade on the porch, I say, “Tell you what. Want to trade keys?” I pull Slipstream’s off the ring and hold it out. “I’ll take the teeny one and you can have this one. Then you can visit any time you want. But promise not to go near those raccoons again, ’kay?”
“Okay!” they chorus. Fiona hands me the jar and they fly down the field back to their giant’s dollhouse.
Shane and Mat come around the corner.
“So the kids showed you their latest discovery,” Mat says. “Kauri’s convinced it’s the key to Thumbelina’s treasure chest.” He’s proud of his son’s imagination.
“Maybe it is,” I say.
Mat laughs, but Shane’s quiet, watchful. As they eat their lunch and talk about the afternoon’s session plans, he keeps glancing over at me, and the jar with the little brass key inside.
In the parlor, with the shades drawn and the door shut, I struggle with the aluminum lid, trying to wrench it open to get at the key. I wrap it in a T-shirt, hitting the top with my hairbrush like it’s a stubborn mustard jar lid. I have red welts on my palm, but the lid is stuck tight.
Do you know what it opens?
No.
It’s been a long time since I lied to kids.