a story

Lee swerved for an oncoming RV sliding over the yellow line, forcing the car to lurch violently, yanking June from her dream. They were in Alma, about thirty minutes from Breckenridge, nine hours and a lifetime from Spriggs.

Their drive had spanned all of Saturday, the precious part of the week June usually devoted to writing. Lately, the only thing that felt like hers. She looked out of the passenger window.

Watching the trees filter past slowly, she oscillated between seeing each trunk and then the forest as one big, orderly conglomerate. Her eyes followed like a yo-yo, each limb letting her into its quiet life: what it does there all day, how it feels to be on the roadside. Is it a prime spot? Do they have capital? She thought about the real estate of trees. Did they feel lucky to have been spared for the road?

If she zoomed out, they all converged, this green and brown smear of a giant tree climbing the mountain. A community of hard-working, no-nonsense trees. Each day they woke up and were trees. They did tree things and life moved on. She figured they didn’t cry, even for their babies.

The departure from routine was Lee’s idea. He had sensed the weight of what had happened hanging over them and figured it was as simple as a change of scenery.

Once he found Allison’s, and the nightly fee was so compelling, he felt he had to book it or else some kind of reverse buyer’s remorse would haunt him. He thought long and hard about how to surprise June with the plans but ended up forgetting altogether, and kept it from her until the morning they were set to drive.

When he told her, she barely made a sound. Lee knew that minuscule, almost undetectable movement in the corner of her eyelid was a nearly bursting seam. He wasn’t in the mood to hear about it. He smiled, rotely. She turned to their room, and went to pack.

“When you drive like that I get a headache,” was the last breath expended in the car before the couple reached 1043 Mountain View Dr.

The gravel parking lot gave way to their arrival. June looked about. The neighboring houses had only one or two cars nestled against their garages. With four SUVs and a camper in front of hers, Allison’s house looked more like a used-car lot. Dummy-proof signs led visitors to the door. A shoe rack on the inside obstructed the front window, and a mop was leaned against the rail to dry.

The porch raised the square house on stilts tall enough for someone to walk under. The undercarriage of the porch was littered with boxes, supplies, materials, all the ugly things Mountain View Dr residents, except Allison, kept hidden away. It was a glorified co-op. Of course Lee had gotten them into something like this.

He read the house code from the app and pressed the worn buttons. They were instructed to take off their shoes immediately upon entering. Several laminated signs leaped out at June, leading guests to their rooms. The couple descended the stairs, following the arrows pointing toward Fiddlehead Suite, deep into the basement.

When they reached the room, the air around them felt stale. Lee opened the door and they both stood at the threshold, staring. Two twin-sized bunks. June scoffed. Lee sighed. So much for a romantic getaway. 

They woke up at dusk a few hours later. For a fleeting moment, the once-in-love birds looked at one another through the large mirror opposite the beds. Last year, they may have even laughed at falling asleep and dozing through the entire afternoon, but today, neither felt the need to say anything as they followed each other up the stairs.

When they reached the first floor, a haze enveloped them. A lilac purple glow emanating from strung fairy lights covered in some kind of tie-dyed tapestry made it difficult to see the various pipes and bongs and buds loosely scattered on the coffee table in the corner of the living room, pushed up against the couch.

The light made the woman on the ground in similar clothing to the carpet nearly invisible, but once June focused enough she registered the rhythmic figure eights the lady was making with her upper torso while seated firmly to the ground, legs crisscrossed, hands on her knees. This must be Allison.

Allison’s eyes were closed. Her face, neutral. June stared at her. She knew that Allison knew she was watching, humans are like birds in that way. We can feel it. Yet her expression hinted at nothing.

Lee and June sat on the bar stools at the kitchen counter, when a sunburnt, bikini-clad woman walked in.

“Oh, ha! Snowboarding,” she said, gesturing at her outfit. “I’m Anna!”

June watched Lee’s reaction from the corner of her eyes. Anna smiled coyly. “I’m sick, so this probably wasn’t the best idea,” she said, referring to her choice of outerwear for the second time. June raised both eyebrows in agreement.

As Anna boiled water for her tea, she continued, “I LOVE that you can snowboard here in JUNE!”

Lee saw an opening. “That’s her name actually, and I’m Lee.” He glanced nervously at his wife, eyes wide, as if to make clear where his gaze could be, but wasn’t.

“OMG your name is so COOL I have such a basic ass white girl name, ANNA, not even short for anything like Annabelle or Arabella. Though I guess, well how would Arabella work? Ha! My boss is always like, Anna are you taking off today again? When the skies are clear cuz he knows I’ll probably play hooky to hit the slopes,” she giggled. 

“What do you do?” June asked.

“I’m a middle school counselor!”

Another eyebrow raise from June.

Anna poured her tea. She was as light as a feather, a little jumpy. All 100lb of her brimming with energy despite a day on the slopes and the illness allegedly coursing through her veins. 

“Well, y’all have a good evening, Allison is great! She’ll make you feel right at home.” And just as she turned to go to her room, she looked at Allison rolling around on the floor, and the smile vanished from her mouth.

It’s possible only June noticed, but before she could give it much thought, Allison’s voice resounded.

“I’m extremely happy you both made it,”

The words came and went in accordance with her figure eights, as though she were close and then far away and then close again all in a sentence’s time.

“Thank you! Ya, the drive was rougher than I thought it’d be there at the end, but damn, what a beautiful place!” Lee said.

“It feels like a different world, doesn’t it? That’s what everyone always tells me anyway.” Allison’s squinted eyes opened just enough to throw a wink Lee’s way.

“Oh ya?” That was Lee’s flirt phrase. June braced herself. “And it doesn’t feel like another world to you?” he said.

“Everywhere is nowhere until it’s somewhere.”

They let it sit there for a moment. June’s knee-jerk reaction would have been violently ill-mannered; luckily, she withheld. Her first words to Allison were “Like that Neil Young song, ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.’”

“I dig that tune, friend.”

Alright, June thought, friend. I dig that too. God.

“But actually,” Allison continued, “it feels like the only world, the only one that really matters.” She elongated her invisible infinity signs and was now throwing her head back, then forward, hair falling all over her face. She wasn’t brushing it off with each turn, and one piece remained stranded on the wrong side of her nose. Lee was staring.

“Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed themselves to be”—she stopped circling—“endless.”

Allison stopped, and reordered the loose strand.

The couple remained silent. “But the trees,” Allison said, huffing, rising up from the ground and over to the couch, grabbing a pipe on her way, “the trees are forever.” And with that June couldn’t help herself, she let out a snort, then quickly looked at Lee. His eyes squinted angrily and his lips tightened as he spoke to her without speaking. June’s expression readjusted instantly. 

“No, ya, you’re right. It just all sounds so, like, you know, cliche. But no, you’re right. And you’re out here living it, so, honestly, I feel that sincerity.”

June felt herself overcompensating already, the vomit of words filling up the silence. Despite herself, she kept going.

“I really like what you’ve done here and I mean I appreciate that there is cell service because I think it’s such bullshit when a requirement of rest is to be disconnected from other people other cultures in real time. Ya know?”

Allison held at the top of her breath and exhaled slowly, breathing out the words, “People used to think telephone lines looked city,” her voice like styrofoam in June’s ears, “but now they’re as natural as the Rockies in a postcard.”

June was able to replay Allison’s words years later and laugh, the reverberations, the way they shouted at you coming off of the various instruments, the yoga mat in pristine order, the $4,500 geode catching sun from the effortlessly expansive windows facing Breck Mountain, and the fact that Allison’s neighbors all had Mercedes.

But at the moment, at the time, considering the burdensome feeling that wafted over June with each of Allison’s tumbling words, the only thing she could think was what trouble she was in.

June stood facing the wall. She brushed her hair while looking at herself in the large mirror hanging opposite the bunks. Lee was in the shower. June’s PJs felt comforting on her skin. Fleece, Christmas present-themed. With each brushstroke she covered as much of her scalp as possible with the bristles, then gently pulled the brush through the rest of her hair, parting the frizzy locks on either side of her neck. She heard the shower turn off and stopped what she was doing to listen.

Lee had seen the WiFi password earlier in the evening, “Shower Love,” and was thinking about it. He was already fogging up the windows when he realized there was no lock on the bathroom door, and the shower was large enough for two. He was exhausted, too much so to fantasize, but the feeling made him giddy nonetheless. He stayed in the shower longer than he normally would, until steam rose from the cracks edging the unlocked door.

When Lee returned to the room, June was lying in bed. She faced the stone wall, her nose nearly touching it, and traced a rough piece of rock with her fingers until the tip of her index went pleasantly numb. Lee made as little noise as possible while he fished for his pajamas in the suitcase, plugged in his phone, and climbed up to his bunk.

For a moment, as Lee approached the tiny ladder close to her head, June held her breath. A sizable part of that poor woman, as stubborn as she was, wanted him to lay down beside her, push the hair back from her ear, and whisper into it something devastating. Lee mounted the ladder, rung by rung, and before she knew it, he was fast asleep.

She woke up to the door closing. Deft footsteps made no mistakes as they avoided the creaky parts of the floor, straight for her bed. June waited for the groan of the ladder, but instead, felt her mattress shift and tensed her belly so as not to roll. Her eyes were still closed. A hand reached over and held June’s foot on top of the duvet. A thumb traced the sole, applying precise pressure, as if the covers weren’t even there. The hand didn’t fumble as it pursued a course up and up and up. June felt a breath like a woman’s on the back of her neck.

Lee dreamt the eerie sound of soft moans.

“Let’s stop by the Costco in Rightmead on the way back; it’s less crowded than the one near our house.” June stretched, crossing her legs as she perched them on the dash. The 11 o’clock sun pierced through her thick socks, and she smiled to herself.

“Uh huh,” Lee said. He was debating whether to reach for his glasses as the steering wheel gently guided them down Breck Mountain. Not wanting to find the words to ask June, Lee thrust his hand inside the center console, glancing down for a split second to rummage. The steering wheel jerked and Lee swerved. They veered across the bright divide, heading, for a second, towards the trees. He corrected before anything dangerous could occur. “Shit,” he said. “Sorry ‘bout that!”

June’s feet had been thrown like windshield wipers. She took them down from where they didn’t belong, and let her extremities hang in the cold dark of the footwell.