Page 13 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
My son uttered that statement in a dreamy tone, while he lay back with his eyes closed, in perfect relaxation and peace, probably his first such moment since his father’s death. So I swallowed my bright burst of pain and said, draining my voice of anything but love for him, “I didn’t leave because I hated Bluster.”
Wyatt lifted his head. “I know. I didn’t hear how that sounded until I said it. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I guess because painful utterances were on my mind, I added, “Did it hurt, hearing me tell Jessie about your dad? I’m sorry if it did.”
He rocked his head back in the universal gesture of ambivalence. “Yes and no—not hurt-feelings hurt. I’m not upset you told her, and you didn’t say anything I didn’t know. It just ... hurts. Like, in general.”
“Yeah.” Some real Mom wisdom right there.
It seemed to satisfy him, though, and we sat quietly together and enjoyed the night. In the cabin behind us was still a lot of work simply to make the place livable for us, not accounting for the likely months of work to get the whole property back into shape. And especially not accounting for all the emotional landmines this cabin still held. But in this moment, on the porch, sitting quietly together while the fog carried the ocean to us, I felt a little of that peace, too. Me and my boy.
Maybe coming back to Bluster was more than an act of desperation.
Maybe I really had come home.
SIX: Settling In
The thought of sleeping in my mother’s bedroom freaked me out completely; there was no way I’d be able to relax in that room so intimately full of her. I spent my second night back in the cabin sleeping on the sectional we’d moved from Arkansas. But I woke up to a day from which the fog was already fading, replaced by clear blue sky. I was rested and motivated to claim this place as my own.
Ergo, as Wyatt and I shared a breakfast of cold Pop-Tarts and hot coffee, I suggested that the first item on our Day Two agenda should be getting our bedrooms arranged to our liking. Wyatt was down with the plan, so we got to work.
We yanked literally everything from my mother’s room, all the way down to the moldering braided area rug that had lain on the floor my entire childhood and apparently nearly twenty years beyond that. Though my first inclination was to burn the whole pile, reason prevailed, and we moved the furniture to the equipment shed and loaded all her personal crap into emptied boxes and dumped it all into the U-Haul. We’d stop at the charity shop and then the dump on the way to return the U-Haul.
Once the room was empty, I sent Wyatt off to turn my old bedroom into his new one, and I got to work scrubbing every damned corner of the bedroom that would now be mine. If I’d thought to pick up some sage, I would have burned it. I meant to exorcise all the demons from that room.
When it was scrubbed enough to sparkle and smelled primarily of cleaning products, I finally felt like I could exist within those walls and began to set up my things.
Wyatt and I had done a lot of downsizing over the past year, had had a lot of unpleasant discussions about howimportant was this thing, really? Or that thing? When your living circumstances change drastically, like moving from a three-thousand-square-foot house to a six-hundred-square-foot apartment, you discover that you’ve collected a whole lot of crap you don’t really need. But you also discover how very painful it can be to hold something in your hands that feels important, something youlove, but no longer has any other purpose but the memories it contains, and to understand that there is no room for that thing in your shrunken life.
About two-thirds of my books were gone. Half the clothes and shoes in my wardrobe. Whole boxes of Wyatt’s video games and comic books. I’d sold the whole set of ‘good’ dishes, all the partyware, all the holiday decorations, literally everything we couldn’t imagine using at least once a week.
As for keepsakes, aside from photos, I’d given each of us a single storage tub. Whatever and as much as could fit in those qualified as worthy of the name. We made a lot of Sophie’s choices.
Virtually all of Micah’s things had been sold, donated, or thrown away, including all of his extensive and expensive outdoor gear. Considering the way we’d lost him, neither Wyatt nor I had any further appetite for ‘adventuring.’ Selling his enormous LP collection had been a much harder loss, but Wyatt had held back a few titles that most reminded him of his dad. Those records and a well-worn leather jacket were all the mementos he had.
I’d been too lost in my rage-wrapped grief and too focused on saving my kid and myself to think about what I might want of Micah. All I’d kept was his wedding ring. It was with my own, in the box the rings had come in, in the bottom of my keepsake tub, under the folder full of Wyatt’s schoolwork.
The result of all those hard decisions and loss was that there wasn’t a lot to unpack. Both Wyatt and I had ourrooms completely set up by just past noon—which worked out perfectly, since the U-Haul was due to be turned in by three that afternoon.
“Do you want to get lunch while we’re out?” I asked him after we got the Golf back on the trailer.
He made hismehface. “The guys are playing online at ... I guess two, our time. I want to be back for that if I can. I’ll just grab some Pop-Tarts or something. I’m sick of restaurants, anyway.”
One thing he hadn’t lost was his friend group. All hail the internet. There was a problem, however. “We don’t have wifi yet. How are you going to play?”
Now he made hisgrownups are so cluelessface. It was not among my favorite of his expressions. “I’ll use my phone as a hotspot, Mom.”
“You have enough battery for that? And signal?”
If his expression got any more pointed, he was going to find his afternoon suddenly very full of chores. “Without the fog, my signal’s okay. And we do have electricity, you know. I can charge. You’re usually smarter than this, Mother.”
“And you’re usually not such a snot,son.” I made a show of slapping him upside the head, but actually barely ruffled his hair. “Come on, let’s get moving. Apparently, you have plans this afternoon. And while you’re playing with your buddies, I’ll go to the market and get some proper food. We’ll make dinner tonight, okay?” I was pretty sick of fast food myself.
He grinned. “Perfect!”
AFTER NEARLY TWO DECADESaway from my hometown, I’d been in Bluster twice within two days. Both those times, I’d felt the pull of the past, but it hadn’t been unpleasant. I’d simply been in my hometown after a long absence, noting all thatchanged and all that had not. The memories rising to the surface had been harmless.
But I’d been with my son both those times, and I suppose having him with me had kept me grounded in the present. The pull of the past had been only a gentle tug, a slight give in a door I’d kept locked for a long time. When I went into town alone that afternoon, headed to the IGA, that gentle tug on the locked door of my past became a battering ram. Alone, driving my little red VW, every familiar landmark was a signpost of a dark memory, a pain I’d felt or caused, an embarrassment, a disappointment, a desperation. And anything new, unfamiliar, was a blast of guilt and loss.
