The garden is strewn with pine needles after the storm but there's no obvious damage from where I'm standing in the doorway that leads to the back porch. The ground is sodden, soaked to the core after it rained all evening, all night. Now the sky is clear again and everything looks washed clean, the trees heavy with dripping rainwater, the lake surprisingly still. The air is imbued with that fresh smell that comes after a storm. Petrichor. One of Gaby's favorite words springs into my mind. The smell of rain.
"I'm surprised you don't feel worse." Lou hands me a coffee. It's the same mug I had last night. No, this morning. Too early this morning.
"I think the four a.m. coffee and tylenol sorted me out," I say. I expected to wake up with a banging headache, to be confined to my bed for hours until the nausea and the migraine passed, but I feel okay. A bit achey, sure, and my eyes are sensitive to the white of the ten o'clock sky, but I feel like a human instead of a pile of garbage stuffed into a sweater.
"It's a godsend," she agrees. "Any time I drink too much, I take a couple tylenol when I go to bed and so far, so good. I learned the hard way." She rolls her lips together, nodding slowly to herself.
"Wild college days?"
"More like a lot of ill-advised drinking after the whole, you know, becoming a widow thing," she says. "But yes, I was a bit wild in college, too."
I gulp at the word widow. It's so big. So serious. It packs a punch. But Lou drops it so lightly that I have no choice but to roll with it.
She has prepared the breakfast of kings: fried eggs and crispy bacon and thick slices of buttered toast. We eat together at the kitchen table and I have a second cup of coffee. I may not feel too bad, but I will need the caffeine. Give it a couple hours and I will crash, by which point I plan to be back in my hotel where I can charge up my dead phone and sleep for another couple hours before I drag myself to the cafe for a pick-me-up. Last night, when I felt like a loose tooth, wobbly and untethered and at risk of falling, I assumed today was going to be a write-off but it can be redeemed. I doubt I'll be lounging on the beach if I don't want wet sand sticking to my skin and clothes but I can at least try to rediscover some of my old favorite haunts. Like the amusement arcade at the other end of Main Street, where we used to pile into en masse with ten bucks each and the adults would challenge us to see who could make it last the longest, or if any of us could turn a profit. My favorite was the line of coin nudger machines, where I would post dime after dime into one of the slots at the top and attempt to calculate when the moneyload would fall.
"Sorry about last night. I didn't mean to cross a line," I say once I've finished half of my breakfast. Inhaled might be a more accurate term for the speed at which I've demolished my plate.
"You didn't."
"Okay. Good." I take another huge bite of my food, which is filling the hole in my stomach perfectly. Never has a more perfect breakfast been cooked. The bacon is crispy and greasy and salty, the eggs soft and golden, the yolk running down my chin. Lou hands me a paper towel. "My mom likes to joke that I need a crash course in social intercourse."
"Social intercourse. I like that. And don't worry about it, last night was great," she says. "I'm glad you came."
"Even though you had to put me to bed?"
She raises her eyebrows at me, her lips pinched together to stop her grin. "Even then."
"Your friends didn't think it was weird I was there?"
"My friends loved you."
"Even th–"
Lou laughs and says, "God, Charlotte, there are only so many compliments I can give out. My friends loved that you were here; I loved having you, yes, even though I had to put you to bed and yes, even though you asked a lot of questions about my dead husband. You're ... god, I don't know, you're a breath of fresh air, okay? It's been nice having you around."
I wasn't fishing for compliments. I swear it. The barrage of them makes me flush a deep, hot red and my heartbeat wakes up, jumping from sixty to a hundred in nought point five. Lou's words rattle around in my otherwise empty skull: she loves having me here. She thinks I'm a breath of fresh air. I don't know what to say to all that.
"It's been nice being around," I say at last, and I mutter an awkward thank you. That seems to satisfy Lou, who gathers our dishes once I've finished wiping the crust of my toast around my plate for every last salty morsel. I wrap both hands around my coffee and relish in its heat in the unseasonable cold. It's August. It shouldn't be storming but hey, I'm no meteorologist.
Once I'm stoked up with a full stomach and a third coffee — in my defense, the mug Lou gave me is about half the size of the one I favored in my old apartment — and another borrowed outfit — a cozy, well-worn Boise State sweater with long arms that come to my fingertips and a pair of soft cotton shorts — I start the wet drive back to Fisher. I roll the windows all the way down and the fresh air, the breeze in my hair, feels so good that when I get to the end of Ponderosa Way, I turn left instead of right.
The long way round is a very long way round. Thirty minutes as opposed to five. But I'm happy behind the wheel and it's kind of nice to be totally cut off until I get my phone on charge. The cable in my car is like life support: it'll keep my phone going, but it can't bring it back to life so I chuck it on the passenger seat and revel in the petrichor as I sail down the road that circles the lake. I pass the cover and Fisher View and the beach at the northernmost point where the river filters into the lake from the Sawtooth Range. The silent road gets busier as I come down the west side of the lake, occupied by some of the more bougie lake houses, the huge ones with at least three full floors and giant windows that face the water, ten bedrooms and kitchens the size of my entire Austin apartment. They have long driveways, most of them secured by gates that tower over me and security cameras trained on the entrance.
Fisher is packed. Weirdly so. The roads are full and it takes forever to crawl down the street towards Lake View Hotel, and I see why the moment I get there. My heart plummets to my stomach and any sense of peace is gone, because so is my room. My room, my entire fucking hotel room, is gone. Where it used to be, on the corner of the hotel looking over the parking lot with the slimmest sliver of a view of the lake, is a fallen tree and a gaping hole in the building.
What the fuck.
What the fuck?!
I mount the curb and park on the street because the hotel's parking lot is blocked off by firetrucks and police and I race into the lobby. It's filled with emergency personnel and a handful of people in Shirley's monochromatic uniform and an officer holds up a hand to stop me from coming in any further than the door.
"Excuse me, ma'am, you can't come in. The hotel is closed. Storm damage."
I'm panicking, my arm flailing out in the direction of the stairs. "That's my room. With the tree. All my stuff ... that's my room, oh my god. Oh my god."
"Calm down. Hold on a sec." He turns to speak to the clutch of people behind him and returns with a clipboard. "Charlotte Miller?"
"That's me."
"You've had everyone pretty worried, little lady," he says, and I want to slap that semi-smirk right off his face. Little lady? Who the fuck does he think he is? He checks off my name, the only one yet to receive a tick. "Call off the search," he says into a walkie-talkie. "I've got Miss Miller here." Looking up at me, he says, "You didn't spend the night?"
"I was with a friend."
I don't miss the twitch of his eyebrows as he says, "Lucky you. Storm brought down a tree. You'd be dead if you'd been asleep in your bed."
"Fuck," I whisper. His blunt delivery slaps me in the face. "What am I supposed to do now?"
"The hotel manager will be in touch regarding compensation and alternative arrangements. Though I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you — everywhere else is booked up at this time of year. You might want to get in touch with your friend. See if you can stay a little longer." The condescension drips from his tone in thick globules. "In the meantime, charge your phone."
"How did y—"
"We've had a whole team trying to reach you for hours." He gives me a look, patronizing and laced with disrespect. "The hotel called your emergency contact, who had no idea you were here or why, or where you might have gone. You might want to let Mommy know, kid. She seemed to think you were in Texas."
Oh my god, fuck this fucking guy. I can see the glint in his eyes, he is on such a power trip right now, getting to talk down to me like a little kid. And then it sinks in, what he just said. "You called my mom?"
"The hotel called your emergency contact. You know, the person to contact in case of an emergency." He sweeps his arm out, gesturing to the hotel. "Like when a tree obliterates the room of a guest nobody can locate. Firefighters thought we were looking for a body."
I burn hot with shame and anger and confusion and I let out a meek apology, although how the hell was I supposed to know something like this would happen?
"What about my stuff?" I ask, my voice small.
"Damage is pretty bad. As I'm sure you gathered. Nothing was recoverable from your room."
"Fuck," I say again. I'm sure this guy would love to arrest me for swearing in front of a cop. "Okay. Um."
"You can't be here, kid," he says. "Go call your mom. Let her know you're okay."
I'm numb as I walk away from the hotel. There are throngs of people outside, gaping at the damage; I walk through the middle of the crowd to my car, my hand shaking as I stick the key in the ignition and drive around the block until I find somewhere to park properly. I end up in a space close to Cafe Au Late and my feet carry me inside, up to the counter currently manned by someone who isn't related to Jules.
"Do you have a phone charger I could borrow?" I ask. My voice is quivering. Adrenaline and fear and stress are wreaking havoc inside me right now and all I can think to do is follow the cop's instructions. Charge my phone. Call my mom. Figure shit out.
Except figuring shit out is exactly the kind of responsibility I've been running away from. Now I have no choice. I'm supposed to be in Fisher for another ten days but my hotel room doesn't exist anymore. I could laugh. I could cry. I don't know which I'm leaning more towards.
"Uh, sure. Probably. What kind?" the teen boy asks. I shove my phone at him. He inspects the charging port and twists around, calling out, "Hey, anyone got a USB-C charger?"
Another teenage boy emerges from the back with a charger in hand, passes it to the first guy who gives it to me and asks, "Are you ordering anything?"
"Uh, sure, yeah, I'll get a, god, I don't know, a caramel latte? Iced?" I can't think straight, fumbling in my pockets for my wallet until I remember these aren't my shorts and my wallet is not in my pocket. It's in my tote bag, which is either in my car or in Lou's spare room, and I haven't set up Google Pay on my phone yet, which doesn't even matter considering it's dead as fuck. "Shit, sorry, I don't have my card. Hold on a sec, it's probably in my car. Fuck's sake."
The kid looks at me awkwardly. I think I'm putting him off with my frantic fluster, my bright red face and my mussed-up hair and the fact that my eyes are full of tears. I am not a crier, but this counts as exceptional circumstances. It's shit luck, right, being made homeless twice in a week.
"Uh, don't worry about it," he says after a moment. He nods to a corkboard behind him with slips of paper pinned to it. "I'll take it from the pay it forward board. You seem like you could do with a free drink." He unpins a slip that says one free drink and crumples it into a trash can under the counter, hitting a button on the register that sets the transaction to zero dollars.
I find a free table with an outlet and plug in my phone while I wait for my drink. By the time I have my iced latte in my hand, aware that I am already over caffeinated from my morning with Lou, my battery is up to one percent. I know from past experience that if I try turning it on before it's juiced up to at least five percent, it'll die on me before it can even load my apps.
So I sit. And I wait. And I freak the fuck out.
*
i don't know about you guys but i think if i was in charlie's position i'd be freaking the fuck out too!