All That We Carried Page 28
Alison and I spent most of our twenties thinking that we were very different people. As it turns out, we’re not so different after all. Somewhere along the way, we each took a step toward the other, and eventually our paths met. We have been enjoying each other’s company on the journey ever since.
Thank you, Alison, for being game to follow me out into the woods. For the companionable silences. For the conversations we probably wouldn’t have had anywhere else. Thank you for never complaining. Thank you for eating disgusting, cold SpaghettiOs on the trail. Thank you for knocking down those insufferable little cairns with me. There is a special kind of contentment I know we both experience when we are far from civilization, ensconced in trees and wind and water and sky. I’m so glad I get to share those blessings with you.
Thank you to my publishing team at Revell for your work on this book. To Kelsey Bowen, Andrea Doering, Jessica English, Michele Misiak, Karen Steele, Gayle Raymer, Mark Rice, and everyone else who has had a part in its journey from concept to contract to completed product. Thank you to WFWA, especially Orly Konig and Jennie Nash for the 2018 writing retreat at Hotel Albuquerque (my home away from home), where the idea for this book went from nebulous to certain. Thank you to my agent, Nephele Tempest, and my husband, Zachary, for reading the manuscript and offering both encouragement and helpful critique.
Most of all, thank you to the God who made this world that I so dearly love, the author of all beauty and wonder, who beckons me to walk the narrow, winding path of life by faith. May you be my compass when I stray, my helper when I stumble, and ever the object of my deepest devotion.
one
THE SUMMER you chopped off all your hair, I asked your dad what the point was of being a novelist. He said it was to tell the truth, which I thought was a pretty terrible answer.
“Nothing you write is real,” I said. “You tell stories about made-up people with made-up problems. You’re a professional liar.”
“Oh, Kendra,” he said. “You know better than that.” Then he started typing again, as if that had settled things. As if telling me I already had the answer was any kind of answer at all.
I don’t know why he assumed I knew anything. I’ve been wrong about so much—especially you.
There is one thing about which I am now certain: I was lying to myself about why I decided to finally return to Hidden Lake. Which makes perfect sense in hindsight. After all, novelists are liars.
“It will be a quiet place to work without distraction,” I told my agent. “No internet, no cell service. Just me and the lake and a landline for emergencies.”
“What about emailing with me and Paula?” Lois said, practicality being one of the reasons I had signed with her three years prior. “I know you need to get down to it if you’re going to meet your deadline. But you need to be reachable.”
“I can go into town every week and use the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop,” I said, sure that this concession would satisfy her.
“And what about the German edition? The translator needs swift responses from you to stay on schedule.”
We emailed back and forth a bit, until Lois could see that I was not to be dissuaded, that if I was going to meet my deadline, I needed to see a lake out my window instead of the rusting roof of my apartment building’s carport.
Of course, that wasn’t the real reason. I see that now.
The email came from your mother in early May, about the time the narcissus were wilting. For her to initiate any kind of communication with me was so bizarre I was sure that something must be wrong even before I read the message.
Kendra,
I’m sorry we didn’t get to your grandfather’s funeral. We’ve been out of state. Anyway, please let me know if you have seen or heard from Cami lately or if she has a new number.
Thanks,
Beth Rainier
It was apparent she didn’t know that you and I hadn’t talked in eight years. That you had never told your mother about the fight we’d had, the things we’d said to each other, the ambiguous state in which we’d left things. And now a woman who only talked to me when necessary was reaching out, wondering if I knew how to get in touch with you. That was the day I started planning my return to the intoxicating place where I had spent every half-naked summer of my youth—because I was sure that in order to find you, I needed to recover us.
THE DRIVE NORTH was like slipping back through time. I skirted fields of early corn, half mesmerized by the knit-and-purl pattern that sped past my windows. Smells of diesel fuel and manure mingled with the dense green fragrance of life rushing to reproduce before another long winter. The miles receded beneath my tires, and the markers of my progress became the familiar billboards for sporting goods stores and ferry lines to Mackinac Island. The farm with the black cows. The one with the quilt block painted on the side of the barn, faded now. The one with the old bus out back of the house. Every structure, each more ramshackle than the last, piled up in my chest until I felt a physical ache that was not entirely unpleasant.
In all our enchanted summers together on the lake, there had been more good than bad. Sweet, silent mornings. Long, languid days. Crisp, starry nights. Your brother had thrown it all out of whack, like an invasive species unleashed upon what had been a perfectly balanced ecosystem. But he hadn’t destroyed it. The good was still there, in sheltered pockets of memory I could access if I concentrated.
The first step out of the car when I arrived at the cabin was like Grandpa opening the oven door to check on a pan of brownies—a wave of radiant heat carrying an aroma that promised imminent pleasures. The scent of eighteen summers. A past life, yes, but surely not an irretrievable one.
On the outside, the cabin showed the effects of its recent abandonment—shutters latched tight, roof blanketed by dead pine needles, logs studded with the ghostly cocoons of gypsy moths. Inside, time had stopped suddenly and completely, and the grit of empty years had settled on every surface. The same boxy green-plaid sofa and mismatched chairs sat on the same defeated braided rug around the same coffee table rubbed raw by decades of sandy feet. That creepy stuffed screech owl still stared down from the shelf with unblinking yellow eyes. On tables, windowsills, and mantelpiece sat all of the rocks, shells, feathers, and driftwood I’d gathered with my young hands, now gathering dust. Grandpa had left them there just as I had arranged them, and the weight of memory kept them firmly in place.
Each dust mote, each dead fly beneath the windows, each cobweb whispered the same pointed accusation: You should have been here.
For the next hour I manically erased all evidence of my neglect. Sand blown through invisible cracks, spiderwebs and cicada carapaces, the dried remains of a dead redstart in the fireplace. I gathered it from every forgotten corner in the cabin and dumped it all into the hungry mouth of a black trash bag, leaving the bones of the place bare and beautiful in their simplicity.
Satisfied, I turned on the faucet for a glass of cold water, but nothing happened. Of course. I should have turned on the water main first. I’d never opened the cabin. That was something an adult did before I showed up. And when I went out to the shed to read the instructions Grandpa had written on the bare pine wall decades ago, I found it padlocked.
Desperate to cool down, I pulled on my turquoise bikini and walked barefoot down the hot, sandy trail to the lake. Past Grandpa’s old rowboat. Past the stacked sections of the dock I had only ever seen in the water—yet another task adults did that I never paid any attention to because I could not conceive of being one someday. At the edge of the woods, I hesitated. Beyond the trees I was exposed, and for all I knew your brother was there across the lake, waiting, watching.
I hurried across the sandy beach and through the shallows into deep water, dipped beneath the surface, and held my breath as long as I could, which seemed like much less than when I was a kid. As I came back up and released the stale air from my lungs, I imagined the stress of the past year leaving my body in that long sigh. All of the nervous waiting
before interviews, all of the dread I felt before reading reviews, all of the moments spent worrying whether anyone would show up to a bookstore event. What I couldn’t quite get rid of was my anxiety about The Letter.
Out of all the reviews and emails and tweets that poured in and around me after I’d published my first novel, one stupid letter had worked its way into my psyche like a splinter under my fingernail. I had been obsessing about it for months, poring over every critical word, justifying myself with logical arguments that couldn’t take the sting out of what it said.
Kendra,
Your book, while perhaps thought “brave” in some circles, is anything but. It is the work of a selfish opportunist who was all too ready to monetize the suffering of others. Did you ever consider that antagonists have stories of their own? Or that in someone else’s story you’re the antagonist?
Your problem is that you paid more attention to the people who had done you wrong than the ones who’d done you right. That, and you are obviously completely self-obsessed.
I hope you’re happy with the success you’ve found with this book, because the admiration of strangers is all you’re likely to get from here on out. It certainly won’t win you any new friends. And I’m willing to bet the old ones will steer pretty clear of you from here on out. In fact, some of them you’ll probably never see again.
Sincerely,
A Very Disappointed Reader
Maybe it was because the writer hadn’t had the courage to sign his name—it had to be a him. Maybe it was because it had been mailed directly to me rather than forwarded on from my publisher, which could only mean that the writer either knew me personally or had done a bit of stalking in order to retrieve my address. It hurt to think of any of my friends calling me a “selfish opportunist.” But the thought of a total stranger taking the trouble to track me down in order to upbraid me gave me the absolute creeps.
But really, if I’m honest with myself, the letter ate at me because deep down I knew it had to be someone from the small, private community of Hidden Lake. Who else could have guessed at the relationship between my book and my real life?
Whoever this Very Disappointed Reader was, he had completely undermined my attempts to write my second book. I knew it was silly to let a bad review have power over me. But this wasn’t someone who just didn’t like my writing. This was someone who thought I was the bad guy. He had read my novel and taken the antagonist’s side—your brother’s side.
Now I closed my eyes, lay back, and tried to let the cool, clear water of Hidden Lake wash it all away. But the peaceful moment didn’t last. The humming of an outboard motor signaled the approach of a small fishing boat from the opposite shore. Hope straightened my spine and sent shards of some old energy through my limbs and into my fingers and toes. And even though I knew in my heart that it wouldn’t be you, I still deflated a bit when I saw your father, though in almost any other context I would have been thrilled.
He cut the motor and came to a stop a few yards away. “Kendra, it’s good to finally see you again. I was sorry to hear about your grandpa. We wanted to make it to the funeral, but Beth and I were out of state.”
“Yes, she told me.”
He looked surprised at that, then seemed to remember something. Perhaps he knew about the strange email.
I swam to the boat—not the one I remembered—and held on to the side with one hand, using the other to shade my eyes as I looked up into his still handsome face. I didn’t ask him where you were that day, and he didn’t offer any explanation. More likely than not, he didn’t know.
“Beth’s in Florida now,” he continued. “It’s just been me since Memorial Day. I was hoping to catch your mother up here before she put the place up for sale.”
“It’s not going up for sale.”
“No? Figured she would sell it.”
“It’s mine. Grandpa left it to me.”
“That so?” He glanced at my beach. “I can help you put the dock in tonight, around five? I’d help now, but I’m off to talk to Ike.”
“Ike’s still alive?”
“Far as I know.”
I smiled. “That would be great, thanks. Hey, I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Cami yet? No chance she’ll be coming up this summer?”
He looked away a moment. “Nothing yet. But I’ve seen Scott Masters once or twice this month. And Tyler will be up Friday.”
He waved and headed out across the lake to Ike’s. I tried to separate the thudding of my heart from the loud chugging of the outboard motor that receded into the distance.
Of course Tyler would be there. Every paradise needed a serpent.
Erin Bartels is the award-winning author of We Hope for Better Things—a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, winner of two 2020 Star Awards from the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and a 2019 Christy Award finalist—and The Words between Us, which was a finalist for the 2015 Rising Star Award from WFWA. Her short story “This Elegant Ruin” was a finalist in The Saturday Evening Post 2014 Great American Fiction Contest. Her poems have been published by The Lyric and the East Lansing Poetry Attack. A member of the Capital City Writers Association and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, she is the current director of the annual WFWA Writers Retreat in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Erin lives in Michigan, a land shaped by glaciers and hemmed in by vast inland seas, where one is never more than six miles from a lake, river, or stream. She grew up in the Bay City area, waiting for freighters and sailboats at drawbridges and watching the best Fourth of July fireworks displays in the nation. She spent her college and young married years in Grand Rapids feeling decidedly not-Dutch. She currently lives with her husband and son in Lansing, nestled somewhere between angry protesters on the capitol lawn and couch-burning frat boys at Michigan State University. And yet, she claims it is really quite peaceful.
ErinBartels.com
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Table of Contents
Cover
Endorsements
Also by Erin Bartels
Title Page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park
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Epilogue
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
A Sneak Peek of the Next Story
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
List of Pages
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