What happened?
Crawling out of bed, Ella staggered to the cabin’s only bathroom (which hadn’t been installed until she was twelve – running water had been another grudging concession to social services) and splashed ice-cold water on her face angrily, as if it could wash away the regret. So much had been left unsaid between Ella Praeger and her grandmother, but it was all too late now. Wasted thoughts and feelings and emotions were left to trickle down the drain, like water from a forgotten faucet.
‘A healthy person never wastes God’s water …’
Peeling off her crumpled funeral dress and black underwear, Ella freed her hair from its disheveled braid and stepped under the cold shower, gasping as the jets pounded into her bare skin like bullets. She had a good figure, toned and athletic with high, round breasts counterbalancing her narrow, boyish hips. Her hair was dirty blonde and unfashionably long, an old style she was oddly reluctant to part with. But it was Ella’s face that really caught people’s attention. Hers was a kooky, love-it-or-hate-it sort of beauty. Her green, wide-set eyes gave her face a look of aloofness when at rest, and her high cheekbones and pointed chin added to the overall feline effect. A childhood fall from an apple tree had left Ella with a permanent kink in the top of her nose, preventing her features from having the sort of perfect symmetry that might have left her looking cartoonishly ‘pretty’. Instead Ella Praeger was what you might call ‘striking’. ‘Sexy’ was another common epithet, among those who liked their women direct, to a degree that others found terrifying.
Pulling on her spare set of clothes – she’d only brought one change with her, a reminder to herself that she wasn’t going to be staying long – Ella made a breakfast of beans and dry cured bacon from leftovers in the pantry, and drank two cups of coffee with powdered milk that she brewed on the stove. Then she found a shady spot on the porch, downed the last of her ibuprofen, which was like trying to put out a brush fire with a water pistol, and sat very still for an hour until her headache receded to something close to bearable.
Mentally, she began running through her to-do list. If she worked hard – ‘a healthy person …’ she hoped to be able to tie things up and head back to the city tomorrow, or the following day at the latest. Before that, Bob had reminded her she still needed to settle up with the crematorium. And then her main job would be to empty out the cabin, packing up any personal or valuable items to take with her, boxing the rest and cleaning the place from top to bottom, so she could lock it up and leave it until she decided what to do.
The strange man in a suit yesterday had all but convinced her to sell. And he probably wasn’t even a real-estate agent! In any case, Ella was confident that sorting through her grandmother’s things wouldn’t take too long. A survivalist to her bones, Mimi Praeger had only owned three dresses (two for church, one for every day) two pairs of pants (winter and summer), a couple of heavily darned sweaters and the overalls she’d been cremated in. The only book in the house was the Bible, and other than her guns, fishing tackle, a chess set and a few pieces of ‘family’ china, there were really no objects for Ella to salvage. The one, precious photograph of Ella’s parents, William and Rachel, on their wedding day, which Mimi used to keep by her bed, Ella had taken long ago and installed in her own apartment in San Francisco.
That picture had been the cause of one of the worst fights she ever had with her grandmother. Ella showed up at the cabin the morning after her college graduation to try and sort things out with Mimi, but the old woman had been hurt and reacted angrily, unreasonably. She wouldn’t talk to Ella, wouldn’t listen. When Ella asked for the photograph, Mimi refused to give it to her.
‘It doesn’t belong to you!’ she’d hissed unkindly, her wizened features twisting into an ugly mask of rage. ‘You can’t simply come here and take things, Ella.’
‘But they were my parents!’ Ella yelled back. ‘It’s the only image I have of them. The only link. You destroyed everything else.’
Mimi rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not still talking about those clothes, are you?’
Ella dug her fingernails into her palms so hard she bled. It was the one thing, as she got older, for which she found she could never forgive her grandmother. The suitcase her mother had packed for her, when she first came to stay at the cabin at four years old, and which had contained some of Ella’s clothes and toys and a blanket that, in Ella’s memory at least, still smelled of her mom, had disappeared from her room one day while she was at school. When Ella asked Mimi where it was, her grandmother replied nonchalantly that she’d ‘got rid of it’ – or rather burned the contents, as Ella later learned – because ‘it’s time to look forward, Ella, not back. What use do you have now for a little girl’s clothes?’ Those clothes, those few items packed with love by a mother who believed she would only be leaving her daughter for a few weeks, were Ella’s last physical link to her parents. And Mimi had taken them and burned them, on a whim. Without permission, without thought, it seemed, for Ella’s feelings. It was almost as if it had been done in anger, although what that anger could possibly have been prompted by, Ella had no idea, either at the time or later.
‘I’m taking the picture.’ Ella glared at her grandmother. ‘I’m taking it and there’s nothing you can do about it!’ Marching into Mimi’s bedroom like an amazon warrior, she snatched the framed photograph from the dresser. Her grandmother followed, frail arms flapping uselessly, shrieking at Ella like a trapped animal as she tried to grab the precious object back out of her hands. To her shame, Ella had physically pushed the old woman aside, years of her own pent-up rage exploding out of her as she stormed to her car and drove back to Berkeley without a backward glance.
The argument was never mentioned again. Nor did anyone apologize. As with Mimi’s burning of the clothes, the entire incident was swept away. Buried. But in Ella’s heart, all these things lived.
Healthy people perform jobs methodically, starting at the beginning and ending at the end. Ella packed and organized and scrubbed and disinfected the cabin from the bottom up, starting with the kitchen, then the living room, the tiny bathroom and her own box bedroom, little more than a single built-in bed, a wooden chair, and a sawn-off plank that had served as a desk. To her surprise she found her mood improving as she worked, the exertion bringing a sort of peaceful satisfaction that drove away insistent memories of loneliness and pain. Lifting the striped rug to beat out the dust, Ella pressed down gently on the loose floorboard, her secret compartment where as a teenager she’d hidden such verboten items as a portable radio (Mimi strictly banned all ‘technology’, whether or not it had been invented in the 1920s), trashy, romantic novels borrowed from the school library (mostly Jackie Collins with all the sexiest parts double-folded at the corners of the page) and a small make-up bag and mirror. Later, Ella had added packets of Yasmin, her contraceptive pill, and miniature bottles of coconut Malibu liqueur that Jacob Lister, whose parents ran the Prospect Road convenience store, traded her in return for an opportunity to touch her bare breasts, an excellent deal in Ella’s opinion: win-win. The board lifted easily, and although its contents were long since gone, Ella still felt a nostalgic thrill that this small act of defiance on her part had remained undetected.
By four o’clock, the entire ground floor was organized and sparkling. A growl from her stomach reminded Ella she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. There was nothing but canned goods left in the pantry, so she opted for a plate of Spam followed by a tin of peaches with condensed milk, all of which tasted oddly delicious. Fortified and delighted by her swift progress – she would definitely be able to lock up and head home tomorrow – Ella climbed the ship’s-ladder staircase to the loft space that had also served as her grandmother’s bedroom.
For the first time all day, she paused. Here, where the smell of Mimi’s skin still lingered on the pillowcase, and her shawl still hung from the back of the chair, the magnitude of what she was doing struck Ella. I’m scrubbing out my childhood. Packing away Mimi’s life, and a huge part of my own. Forever. She waited for the sadness to hit her. The grief that she’d read about and been told about and been waiting for. But instead she felt something else, something terrible. She