Page 82 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
I thought about that a lot in the weeks afterward, especially after the insurance did pay out and we could have moved to the B&B without slowing down the work on the Sea-Mist. With that earnest, emphatic assertion of what he wanted, how he felt about us, especially the way it came hard on the heels of a major upward turn in my financial situation (and thus my independence) and also the same day of my lunchtime chat with Jessie and Erin about the same topic (it had been a really packed day), Roman had essentially made the three of us a family.
We’d already been acting like a family for at least a couple of weeks, but that day we settled in. The Sea-Mist repairs andrenovations would take months, so once we set the B&B option aside, we let the boundary between guest and resident fade away.
The room Wyatt was staying in—Gabriel’s room—became Wyatt’s room. Roman’s bedroom became ‘our room.’ Roman rearranged the third bedroom, which had been Carla’s craft studio, into an office for me, since I had taken on the work of general contractor for the Sea-Mist. Wyatt and I hadn’t arrived in Bluster with a big pile of material possessions, and we’d lost about half of what we had to Manfred’s flood, but what we had, and what we’d acquired, was folded into the house.
We developed a routine. We shared household and parenting responsibilities. We had become a family.
But it was still happening very quickly, so I kept hold of the idea that my plan was to return to the Sea-Mist when it was ready. I could not put all the chips of my life, or Wyatt’s, on the bet that a relationship not three months old was solid and well-formed enough yet to build a future on.
With every day of cozy, contented domesticity, returning to the Sea-Mist to live became less Plan A and more of a contingency. In fact, I’d started doing a lot of research into how to run that business without living there.
Yet underneath the contentment, the love, the growing sense of security, fear still roiled.
ON A WARM, SUNNY AFTERNOONin the middle of October, I parked the Golf on a small gravel lot at the edge of a rolling golden field dotted with gravestones. The Bluster Community Cemetery.
“You want me to come with you?” Jessie asked, sitting in the passenger seat.
I shook my head. “Thank you for coming along, but I think I need to be alone when I get there.”
She nodded. “Okay. I’m going to sit on that bench inside the gate with my sketch pad, and you take all the time you need.”
It had been Jessie’s suggestion that I wouldn’t be able to feel secure in my life, or in the future that was developing around me, I wouldn’t be able to settle into a commitment to Roman, until I reckoned fully with the source of my insecurities.
My mother.
She was right, of course. I’d spent my adulthood trying not to think about her—or when I thought about her, trying to erase her. Even my stubborn attachment to reclaiming the Sea-Mist was about supplanting the woman who’d raised me in it. Rewriting the bad memories with good ones. She still controlled too much of my life; too many of my choices, too many of my reactions, were formed because of or in defiance of how I’d been raised. Erasing her was impossible because she was in so much of me. Until I really dealt with all that, I’d never be free of her.
I needed to be free of her. I needed to be able to embrace what I had with Roman, what I was building in Bluster, without fear of losing it or suspicion that I didn’t deserve it. I needed to learn to trust myself so I could trust the people I loved. I needed my mother’s bitter voice out of my head.
But how does one reckon with a ghost? Or the demons the ghost has left behind?
With a lot of therapy. Which would take a lot of time. Even finding a therapist accepting new clients was going to be a process. So, at least to start, I had to find DIY ways of dealing with my mother. This was my first step.
I’m not really sure why going to the cemetery was the step I’d thought of. I guess I had some things I wanted to say to her, and the cemetery was where she was.
The Bluster cemetery is both humble and historic. It started out before Bluster was a town, as a few graves on a hill, under a big blue oak. Since then, it’s been the primary burial site for most of the people who lived in and around town. Bluster has never grown into much more than a village, so it’s rarely had many people to bury in any given year. Even so, it’s been around for a long time, and there have been a few times of sickness over those long years. Now the cemetery is hundreds of graves scattered over a few hills and the valleys between them, some under blue oaks and others with only the sky as their canopy.
There are no giant markers, no sculptures of angels or family crypts. Just plain stones and crosses, their styles changing slightly over time, but still similar, with names and dates and usually a short sentiment:Beloved wife and motherorHe loved the oceanorDelivered into the Lord’s loving hands.
Though I’d driven or ridden past it thousands of times, I’d never stepped foot in that cemetery until the day I left Jessie sketching on the bench. No one who’d died when I was growing up had been close enough to my mother or to me to warrant her attending their funeral or allowing me to attend.
The first and only funeral I’d ever been to was Micah’s.
I didn’t know where my mother was buried, but I did know that the custom is to bury people chronologically, leaving room for a spouse to be put to rest beside them, if the couple paid for that, but otherwise simply moving along a line until the line reached the cemetery border, and then following the next line in the opposite direction. So finding someone isn’t too difficult if you know when they died.
I came to Carla and Gabriel’s graves first. Side by side. Their markers weren’t ostentatious, but they were among the most elaborate in this part of the cemetery. Rose-colored marble, polished, with flowers etched into the corners. A brass vase forflowers was set in each, and each held a pretty silk arrangement of blue peonies, Carla’s favorite flower.
Carla’s stone readCarla Graciela Mejia Mendoza.Beloved wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend.Beneath her dates (she was forty when she died), was a sentence in Spanish:Cuando hay amor, la vide es eterna.
I remembered enough high-school Spanish to translate: When there is love, life is eternal.
Gabriel’s marker was identical to his mother’s except for the words and the birth date. His readGabriel Ramon Mendoza-Mejia. Adored son. Tu luz brillará por siempre.
Your light will shine forever.
Gabriel had been twelve. He would have been twenty if he’d lived.
There was an empty space on Gabriel’s other side; Roman must have bought that for himself when he bought the plots for his wife and child.
