Page 47 of Rainshadow

She ran back into the hotel lobby.

“I’ve been robbed,” she cried, breathless. “Call the police!”

“Robbed?”

“My car was broken into!”

“Oh, in the parking lot?” The lobby attendant, a different one from the day before, was a woman with frizzy gray hair and a pair of yellow cat-eye glasses.

“Yes, in the parking lot,” Flora cried.

“I can call the police, but they’re not going to do anything,” the woman said. “Except for take a report.”

Flora stared at the desk attendant, chewing her lip, frantic and not knowing what to do, what to say. “Ok,” she finally said.

“Just go to an auto body shop, there’s one not too far from here, they can fix it in a few hours.”

Flora nodded, felt her jaw tightening. She wished somebody, anybody, would help her.

She calmed down enough to get directions, then drove there slowly, broken window wide open, glass in the passenger seat.

At the auto shop, a man saw her pulling in with her busted window and laughed, shaking his head.

“How’d a girl like you end up with a Corvette?” he asked, poking around in the car a little while later.

A girl like her? Flora didn’t know what he meant exactly, but she could assume. She was mousy, plain, rural, poor, and it was obvious she was out of her depth. She wanted to cry.

“We don’t keep windows for this car in stock. They’re hard to get and expensive. It’ll be a few days.”

“I don’t live around here, though,” she said, her voice small.

“Oh, well.” He looked at the car. “Do you want me to tape a trash bag over it and you can drive it home, get it fixed there?”

“I don’t—” Flora sucked in a breath. “I don’t know where home is going to be…?” She said it as a question. “I, uh, I’m moving, and I don’t know where I’ll end up…?”

The mechanic looked at her, not knowing what to say. She realized that she wanted him to tell her what to do, give her a plan. He just stared at her. “Do you want me to fix it or not?”

“I don’t know,” Flora said.

The man grew visibly frustrated. “Look, I don’t care what you do, but?—”

“Just give me a trash bag,” she said, “and tape. I’ll tape it up.”

Flora drove to the library with the trash bag fluttering. She wished she could turn on the radio, but there was only a gaping hole where it had been. She found the Seattle Public Library, parked on the street, and hauled her bag full of money, jewelry, and clothing in with her. She felt tired like she never had before, like making choices and trying to decide what to do was exhausting.

She hated Maureen then for never teaching her to be self-sufficient, never modeling it. She couldn’t help that she was helpless, and it made furious with bitterness at her circumstances. It was all her mother’s fault, and then Sylvia’s fault, two women who never worked for anything, didn’t deserve anything they had. The unfairness of it made her stomach sour. She wanted to call Ethan and ask him what to do. She knew he would be there, would help her, but she couldn’t stand to share him. She knew that now.

She swallowed her anger and sat at a desk, poring over classified ads for jobs, houses, apartments, and rooms to rent. She stood in a phone booth on the street, called numbers, and had stilted conversations, none of which led anywhere. She sat in her car and cried, not knowing what to do next. She had more money than she had ever had, but she had no idea what to do, or how to take care of herself. Finally, she started the car and began driving again, trash bag fluttering. She drove out of the city, toward the looming mountains in the distance, unsure of what she was looking for.

Whatever it was, she wouldn’t find it in Seattle.

23

Two weeks later, Flora woke in a quiet bedroom that smelled like cedar wood and lavender under a quilt so worn and soft the cotton fabric might have been silk. She rose at dawn and started her work on the ranch where she had somehow, inexplicably, ended up.

She’d driven until she couldn’t stay awake, then pulled into a highway hotel so obscured in the dark she couldn’t have described it. She stumbled in, paid for a night, then slept for almost ten hours.

In the morning, something was different. The air was dry and cool, and the mountains rose up on the horizon like sentinels. She barely remembered driving through the mountain passes to get over them, to the other side, where farms and ranches sprawled across Eastern Washington like an endless promise.

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