Four Weeks

Summers were spent at the lake house. They would wake in the morning, in the cold and misty air. They would drink hot tea, hot cocoa, hot coffee. They would take long walks though the woods, up hillsides, sometimes truly getting lost and not being able to return until they found the main road. They would drive out to Hinkley's and get turkey or Balogna sandwiches, hostess cupcakes or bags of chips, and sodas. Then they would swim in the lake for the rest of the afternoon, until the air became too cool to be wet in. They tracked mud into the house, leaving muddy footprints behind them as they dashed to their rooms, pulling on whatever warm clothing they could find. Evnings they would budle up by the fire outside, burgers on the grill, or else they would huddle indoors and have soup, watching the lights move on the lake, wondering what the day would be like tomorrow.

a sense of proportion

She glanced around the small apartment. There weren't that many people there - maybe six. They all looked relaxed and slightly bored as they munched chips and nuts from the bowls around the room. Most of them had arrived late.

Kelly had shown up at exactly 7:30. She knew it wasn't cool to be the first person at a party, but she just couldn't help herself. Her social calendar was anything but full, and she had, in fact, been counting the days to this affair from the moment she received the invitation (via email) three weeks ago. A week before the party she had already planned her outfit. She purchased new shoes for the occasion, and has scheduled a hair appointment. The night before she sat up late waxing her laegs and doing her nails.

No one else seemed to have gone through half as much effort. They had thrown on a fresh coat of lipstick or changed into a fresh shirt, but that seemed to be it. WHY? She thought. Why do I think these things will be so important?

Henrietta's Box

She knew it had to be a dream.

The label was clearly addressed to her, Marcy Sherman, 44 Gatesman Drive. That was her. This was a package that someone had packed and sent to her. It was the return address that didn't make sense. Henrietta Jones, 68 Maple Street. Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, and once more, wrong. It couldn't be. Someone was playing a joke. They wanted her to believe that Henrietta, her grandmother, had sent her a package. Which wasn't possible. Because her grandmother had been dead for fifteen years.

But the address - 68 Maple Street - that had been their old address. It was where Marcy had lived as a girl, where her grandmother had lived when she had been declared too old to live alone. For years she lived with Marcy's family, until suddenly she became sick and was rushed to the hospital. Three weeks later she was dead. Marcy had been thirteen.

Marcy glanced around her kitchen as if the practical joker would be standing there, pointing and laughing. She ran her fingers across the handwritten post office label. Her wedding ring clicked softly as it hit the cardboard, and she wondered what Henrietta would have thought of David. She would have been thrilled, Marcy knew, about the baby due in four months.

Marcy didn't know if she should open the box or not. She didn't know if she should call the police and report a suspicious package, or wait for David, or if she was just being ridiculous. She didn't know if a camera crew was shooting her reaction through a window and if she would see herself on one of those fool-your-friend TV shows two months from now. What if it was a bomb?

What if it was something else?

A kingdom far away

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess. She was - oh - about thirty or thirty two, something along those lines. But her kingdom had a rule that prohibited marriage of any girl younger than the princess until she herself was wed, so it really wasn't that big of an issue, even though her parents were more than a little irritated at the time it was taking for her to make a decision, and they had started drawing up legal documents as a back-up in the case that she issed her childbearing years completely.

Not surprisingly, she ended up dissapearing into thin air one day. The detective her parents hired didn't come right out and say it, but he insinuated that she had been murdered by someone angered at the inability to get married themselves. Maybe a young girl in her twenties who was tired of waiting around. Or even a young man, who was tired of waiting around.

The moral of the story is, if you try to get other people to live up to your own personal ideals, they will eventually kill you.

moment of clarity

The seat position was all wrong. I was clearly too close to the steering wheel. I hadn't noticed it right away, but after a few minutes on the road I became exceedingly uncomfortable. The mirrors were wrong, the seat was wrong. Somebody had been driving my car.

It was probably Tina, my daughter. At fifteen she thought she knew how to drive, but I had NEVER given her permission to climb into the driver's seat of my Toyota. This was inexcusible. I was distracted from my discomfort for awhile, thinking of how I was going to punish her... no driving until she was twenty. No dating. No going out with friends. No TV, no phone, she could have KILLED herself!

And then I noticed the bag.

That bag, on the floor of the passenger seat, the one that wasn't mine. It just... well, it wasn't mine. But it was here, in my car. Clearly someone had left it behind. One of Tina's friends. Or even Tina herself. I reached over, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and trying not to take my eyes off the road for more than a second.

The bag was small, like a cosmetics case, but it was stuffed full of something. And it was light. I placed it on my lap and kept driving like that, bag on my lap, afraid of what I would find. Cigarettes? Drugs? Probably pot. But this would be a LOT of pot. I hoped it wasn't pot. I reached down with one hand and unzipped the bag, keeping my eyes on the road until the bag was completely open... I looked down.

Diapers.

Three diapers and a small plastic bag of wipes. That's it.

What the hell was Tina doing with diapers, I wondered. I just couldn't come up with an answer. I flung the bag back into the passanger seat and ran my fingers through my hair. I checked my reflection in the mirror, wondering if I had messed it up too much... and I saw the stuffed animal in the back seat. Stuffed animal?

I looked down. The floor mats were not scuffed with sand and dirt, but there were cracker crumbs. I opened the glove compartment. My snow scraper was gone, but there was a package of fig newtons.

Oh my God, I said. This is not my car.

Flashback

She was sitting on one of the swings, her head leaning on one the the hands gripping the chain. The look on her face was sad and thoughtful, and it reminded him of one of the first times he had actually spoken to her, before the air around them had become so charged with electricity that they couldn't look at each other without drawing attention to themselves.

He had been sixteen, actually, the same age she had been when he caught her dancing. Sixteen, and on his way to becoming a father, although he didn't know it at the time. He had actually been headed to the playground himself, hoping to sit on one of the swings on the edge of the field and think things through. He was wondering if he should break up with Wendy, if maybe things had gotten too serious, but he felt guilty about it because she HAD slept with him, and he didn't want her to think that he didn't appreciate that...

Dana had been on the swings, though. It was 9pm, dark out, and she was twelve, a kid, her hair handing loose in knotty clumps around her shoulders, her knees and elbows dark with dirt. It was chilly but she wasn't wearing a jacket.

Dan had been irritated to find her there. He couldn't ever get away from the crowd of people in his life - in his family, his girlfriend's family, and now this family next door... But Dana turned when she heard his footsteps and smiled at him. "Hey, Dan!" She had said, as though it were perfectly natural for her to be out in a park after dark, as though she met people here all the time. "What's going on?"

Dan had shrugged and sat down on the swing next to her, thinking maybe she would go home, that one of her parants would call her, sticking their heads out of the front door, or maybe one of the windows, and she would jump off the swing, her limbs flailing, sprinting off to get back.

Looking back, Dan realixed she had been avoiding her family. He wondered what was going on there that night, and if her father had been angry with her or if he had just been lashing out at his famly in general. He wondered how Dana had managed to escape that night, if she had been crying, or afraid. But at sixteen, involved with his own problems he wasn't able to look that deeply into her life. If it had been Carla herself, then he would have been all over her, lecturing his sister about the dangers of playing in the park at night, pressuring her for her reasons. If it had been Ben he would have simply understood the need for privacy and respected his wishes to remain silent. But Dana was only Carla's friend. Only Ben's sister. She wasn't a real person, at least not one that was deeply involved with his life. She was just someone who was IN THE WAY a lot of the time, and she had been in the way that night.

They had stayed there on the swings for almost ten minutes, not swinging but more rocking back and forth on the swings, before Dana hopped off. "Bye Dan," She said quietly. "I hope it works out."

"Thanks," he replied, raising his hand in farewell. He didn't know what she was talking about, but then he wondered if he had been speaking aloud, or if she had read his thoughts and knew all about Wendy.

Dana had headed back to her house, which was mostly quiet. He had watched her from the swings as she crossed the deserted street and quietly opened the front door to the house next to his.

the garden

Everything in this place is gray and hard. The sky is turning dark, but more than that the very air is getting thicker and harder to see through. The lights on the street and in the windows slowly become brighter and brighter until they are what enables the seer to see.

I can't really breathe here. I never really could. As a kid I would ride the elevator to my dad's office, smiling past the receptionist, and bustle my way into the staff kitchen. I would heat up a mug of hot cocoa in the the microwave and do my homework in the waiting room among people waiting to get their teeth cleaned. Then they would step out into the hard gray air while I was still here in the filtered air, smelling the smell of teeth and cleaning agents. Then my dad would finish up and we would walk home, or take the bus.

My bedroom faced an ally where I could hear car alarms and cats. The sun wouldn't stream in through the window because there was a wall ten feet away that went up as high as the sky itself. The room was lit by a light fixture and a bedside lamp and the lights to my little stereo.

I moved away at twelve, when my parents got their divorce. My mother took me to the country, far far away, to live with her father and her sister. It wasn't really country, more a suburb, but it seemed like country to me. There was a brook. There were trees. By 8pm the whole street was dark - well, except for the one streetlamp. No hoards of people streamed the streets. No constant traffic noice, only the occasional passerby after dark.

And grass. There was a yard. A garden. My garden. The one I made and planted and grew with my wn two hands, to the amazement of my mother and the amusement of my grandfather. The one that awakened the interest in horticulture and agriculture.

bookshelf

You can tell a lot about someone from the books they read. She had heard this somewhere, and so she started keeping a running list of all the books she actually read, from cover to cover. Not just the books on her shelves, which included unfinished autobiographies, textbooks and required reading from her school days, and a few older books she just thought would look good in her small living area.

Over the past year she had read constantly, adding each new book to her list with a sense of accomplishment. Now, more than fifty books were on the list. She should feel proud. But instead she glanced at the titles and felt small. Most of these books were vampire books. Trash, really, or at least Mrs. Andrews would have called it trash. Fantasy books - the kind with dragons and mythical beasts. Horror books, with serial killers and sometimes even monsters. Light reading with flaky heroines and a closet full of supporting cast characters that entertained the reader while teaching absolutely nothing. There were no classics. Nothing enduring or thought provoking.

She slowly tore the page out of her notebook and held it in her hand. She couldn't leave it in there for people to see after she died. They would know. They would know how truly shallow she was. In life she was tolerated, but if these lists were found she would be discraced in death.

something different

She drove slowly, carefully, glancing at her father in the seat next to her for clues. Yes, she knew where she was going, but she wasn't really sure it was the right place anymore. Something was always changing, and you never knew what it was going to be. If roads had changed during her absence, or if her father had moved again, she wanted to catch it from her father's look before she got too lost and had to find an explanation.

Each time she flew on a plane this happened. The changes. One or two things, usually, sometimes more. They could be big things, like Mike, or the could be small. The color of her bedroom walls. The name of her goldfish. Sometimes it was how streets fit together. Once, when she was a kid and just figuring it out, she went bike riding and got completely lost, lost in her hometown, where she had been bike riding millions and millions of times before. All because one road had become a dead end, and the other road she chose had a house where the next street should be.

But the trip went smoothly. Her father didn't get upset or confused at any of the turns she made, and when they finally pulled into the house she let out breath she didn't know she'd been holding. Of course there would be something different. There always was. It would be the last thing she expected. She tried to stop wondering about it, knowing it wouldn't change anything.

miss you

She closed her eyes and felt the grass on her cheek, breathing in the green of it. It was like his perfume. She could remember them both together, stretched out in the grass, smoking Camels, closing their eyes to the sun that bathed their faces. He would run his fingers through the grass, laughing about the world, not caring about the world, about the classes they were cutting, about the papers they had due.

And now he was gone. He had left her, and then left the whole world, jumped off of it like a moving train, into the blurr of death. And she was here. She was still here, years later, her life plodding on as usual, nothing outstanding, nothing spectacular...

She missed him.