Page 54 of Best Offer Wins
I head around back. The air smells like pine needles and the subtle rottenness of damp woods. A set of rickety stairs leads up to a deck littered with more stuff, and another door. I knock on it and wait a minute. Then I pound harder. Not a footstep from inside.
There’s nothing else here, just a narrow strip of weedy grass that dead-ends into a wall of thick trees. Could Dottie really have some connection to this place? Or did she give a fake address? I can feel the beginnings of a freak-out kicking around in my gut, the panic starting to tighten around my chest—
No.
Stop it, Margo. There is no time to think like that.
Dottie has to be here somewhere. I’ll just come back tomorrow morning at ten, and I’m sure everything will make perfect sense then. I could use a good night’s rest before I meet her, anyway.
Back in the Prius, I open my email for the first time since leaving Berkeley Springs, expecting to find a confirmation from the Airbnb host. But I don’t have any new messages. Is that even possible? I swipe down, trying to get my inbox to refresh. The wheel endlessly spins.
My eyes flit to the upper right corner of the screen, and I can no longer hold it off—the avalanche of ice-cold panic descends. No bars. Just a tiny, terrifying “SOS.”
Only the GPS must’ve been working. I don’t have cell service here. I don’t really even know where “here” is.
Okay, so maybe I will actually die out here in the deep-red West Virginia wilderness, trying furiously to turn my dream life into a reality. But you know what? Fucking fine. That would still be better than never having tried at all. During the brief period when I did go to therapy, I at least figured out that much.
I started a few weeks after we got back from that first Christmas at Ian’s parents’ house. I’d been depressed since we’d come home—not sleeping, dissolving into tears at random times for no reason. Clearly, the visit had stirred something up. Ian was worried—I wasn’t as good at hiding things from him back then—and a colleague at the law firm gave him Dr. Clancy’s name. She took my insurance, so I figured why not?
I certainly didn’t need a shrink to point out that my childhood wasn’t ideal. But it’s true I’d never really allowed myself to unpack it.
Until I was thirteen, the four of us—my mom, my dad, Mitch, and I—lived in our shitty townhouse south of Seattle, near the airport. Since I was younger than my brother, I got stuck with the third “bedroom,” which didn’t have a closet or a window. But according to my dad (an “entrepreneur” in the same way that my “bedroom” was a bedroom), he was always on the cusp of some breakthrough business venture that would finally get us out of there. It’s why he refused to sign anything more than a month-to-month lease, even though a longer commitment would’ve come with a discount on the rent.
My mom met him when she was still in college at Washington State. He was a few years older and, at the time, riding high on an idea having to do with customized scented candles (yes, she’d admit now, it was every bit as asinine as it sounds). But back then, she was naive and twenty-one, and he was nothing if not a convincing salesman. So convincing, in fact, that she wound up pregnant with my brother before she could graduate. A month after the shotgun wedding, my dad went bankrupt.
He’d been working on his comeback ever since, bouncing from one brilliant idea to another, sneaking off to the racetrack between the shifts that my uncle gave him out of pity at his hardware store. At home, he was what you’d expect—the predictable loser cliché haranguing my mom for spending too much on groceries or stuff for me and Mitch, saying anything he could think of to make her feel small.
I fucking hated him. I still do, wherever he is.
But in ’97, at the dawn of the internet, things started to turn around for us. One of Dad’s friends was launching an e-greeting card company (yes, also ridiculous) and he asked Dad to be his partner. There was enough dumb money swirling around dot-coms back then that those two morons managed to find real investors. I could hardly believe it, but within a year my mom quit her job at the airport hotel and we were packing up the townhouse.
My parents became the proud owners of a buttery-yellow new build with a “Tuscan”-style kitchen on the outskirts of Bellevue, one of the nicest Seattle suburbs. By then, I was too old to inquire about installing a tire swing, though there were plenty of other reasons for a thirteen-year-old to get excited. Namely, my room had a walk-in closet and two windows, and was on an entirely different floor than my parents’.
But whatever thrill I felt living there—and surely, I must’ve been elated for a while—has been demolished in my memory by the utter humiliation of losing it all when that stupid business inevitably tanked.
We barely made it two years in that house before the bank took everything away.
All four of us moved into an apartment, still in Bellevue so Mitch and I wouldn’t have to change schools again. My mom thought she was doing us a favor, but we became the only two losers in the whole place who didn’t live in a neighborhood where every other house had a tennis court. Being Asian only made it worse. The other Japanese-American kids had parents who were CPAs and dentists and Microsoft millionaires—quintessential model minorities. Overnight, the cunts who had been my best friends decided I was nothing. You can still find four faint crescent moons on the back of my left arm where one of them broke the skin with her acrylic nails while she held me against my locker and whispered in my ear that I was trash.
That was about when I started to feel angry all the time. The tight mound of rage simply took up residence one day, like a pet that’s never left. Mostly, it stays quiet and still enough to ignore. But it’s always accessible. And even now that I’m an adult, the right trigger can mutate it into an all-consuming thing. As I explained to Dr. Clancy, it’s almost a comfort to feel anchored by something so constant.
We finally left Bellevue the summer before my junior year. When my mom told me we were moving to Spokane to live with my grandparents, I broke down crying. She thought I was upset that she was divorcing my dad, but really, I was just so intensely relieved to go someplace where nobody would know who I was. Mitch had graduated by then and found a job in construction. I finished the rest of high school in blissful anonymity.
All of this was a gold mine for Dr. Clancy. She must’ve had a blast, but for me, reliving this shit was agony. Fortunately, it only took four sessions to land on the obvious: “Margo,” she said, tapping the end of her pen against her notebook, “do you suppose experiencing where Ian came from has finally allowed you to grieve the life that you always wanted, but never had?”
I did, in fact, suppose that.
But where Dr. Clancy and I diverged was on what I should do next. It seemed to me that rather than sit around and grieve that life for fifty minutes each week, I would be much better off using the time to get to work building it for myself.
19
A sharp knock on the driver’s-side window yanks a scream from the deepest, most primal part of my core. My head snaps up from my useless phone, adrenaline overtaking me. A woman, sixtyish and sturdy, in a fleece jacket and knit beanie, is outside the Prius, holding up her hands, looking stunned.
“Sorry,” she says through the glass. “Didn’t mean to give you such a scare.”
I release a whoosh of breath, my heart rate evening out, as I roll down the window.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay,” the woman continues. “We came back after dinner to do some tidying up, didn’t expect to find a car in the lot.”
