Page 56 of Fate Fiction

“She does, in her own way.”

I wanted to beg her for further explanation. My mother and I’s relationship was always tenuous at best. As long as I remembered, my mother had hardly paid attention to whether or not I was conscious, let alone happy. It was so easy for me to disappear for hours running, far later into the evening than a teenager jogging alone should have.

She was not known for warmth and interpersonal communication. When my father died when I was in high school, I didn’t find out until I got home and my mother was waiting at the kitchen table, glass of wine in her hand. The house was dark, a singular lamp in the living room illuminated the bottom floor with a soft amber glow. My father’s car wasn’t in the driveway, and my mother’s seemed to be parked haphazardly at an angle. I could smell the alcohol, it covered the kitchen with thick sticky bubbles.

“Your father’s gone,” she said calmly as I stood dumbfounded by the scene before me.

“Gone where, mom?”

“Danielle. You’re fifteen, you know what I mean by that. He’s dead. He had a heart attack and died this morning.” Her voice slurred as she spoke, but the words were cutting.

She was the only one who called me Danielle, and this particular utterance of my name had a harsher bite to it than normal. Rather than embrace me in comfort as most mothers would, mine ultimately decided to pour herself another glass of Chardonnay and tell me that if I needed to “get anything out of your system” that I needed to do so in my room.

Sue was often the glue that held us together, acting as an intermediary between two countries perpetually at war.

“I don’t know how you put up with her,” I remarked to Sue flatly.

“I knew her before she became what she is now,” she softened a bit, hints of a sisterly instinct shining through. “And I can still get that version of her out sometimes.”

“Must be nice.” I’d dismiss any further conversation relating to her, I’d gone on for a decade hardly thinking about her, I didn’t need to dredge up any feelings that lingered from childhood. Sue had told me time and time again as a child that my mother wasn’t always this way and deep down there was a warm loving person who needed to be brought out, but I never believed her.

I didn’t think I was good enough or worthy enough to make her love me in the way Sue described. And quite frankly, I was tired of trying. I was well into my second decade of living and I was going to continue to survive whether or not my mother had anything to do with it.

Sue stood in for me as a mother figure, even now as an adult. There was a reason why I decided to escape to camp rather than go back to my childhood home. What would I do there, sleep in the bedroom that was now converted into the place where my mother’s hobbies went to die? I had only told her about the breakup because I didn’t want her to panic when my phone dropped off the grid for a week.

“What a way to get over someone, though. Kissing a handsome famous actor!” Sue laughed to herself as she walked back to the house.

I stood alone on the beach, rendered raw by thinking of teenage hurt and coming down from the high of feverish hormones resurfacing.

I felt strange and wild. All the bizarre pieces of me would remain, hidden under a fine painted facade, no matter how much I would try to downplay what just happened. Sue was right, we were adults, we were an odd pairing alone in the wilderness, and we fell into one another. Shit happens.

Evan had disappeared for much of the afternoon, and it was a welcome reprieve. I’d suspected that Randy didn’t only need help with the water tank and he drummed up other projects for Evan to assist with. Evan was likely too polite to decline to help, or too afraid of Randy, who looked like the kind of man who would run screaming out of the woods with a chainsaw in hand in a horror movie.

Through my shower I still remained on edge, like my body was made of TV static. I scrubbed myself clean of everything, Evan’s fan experience, the kiss, the disdain for my mother. I emerged new, dotted with bug bites and pinker from the sun and hot shower. Finally, I’d come down to earth again and settled into my familiar self. I flipped open my notebook and turned to a blank page. My rewrite may have been on pause but my ideas were not.

Stretching my creative muscles, I scribbled down a few observations about the camp surrounding me. Things like the way the dock looked at this hour of day, the haunting sounds of the loon I’d heard last night, and the way you could smell the pine from the surrounding woods.

My rudimentary observations contorted and transformed into a haunted version of the camp itself. Over the years Sue had told an entire anthology of horror stories from the lake. Her fear and descriptions were so convincing that years later I still wasn’t sure what was real or fake. The woods extended for miles, anything could reside in them. Bigfoot, werewolves, aliens, whatever the human imagination could conjure.

Man could be more frightening than beast, and Sue often told the story of the alleged hermit who lived on the other side of the lake. The lake had a sharp curve in the middle and the other side was never visible from this end. It could be paddled to, but the trip would take hours.

There was always an air of mystery of what was over there when I was young. Sue claimed that a man built himself a cabin there after his wife and young daughter were killed. He couldn’t bear the idea of living in the house they died in, and he left society altogether, choosing to build and live in a one room log cabin instead. She speculated enthusiastically that he was the one to kill them himself and he escaped to the woods to evade capture.

Sue recounted this cautionary tale passionately by the fire, the exaggerated shadows on her face making her look like a ghost herself. She may have made up something to keep me from kayaking out too far. Legend said that this hermit was strict about trespassers on his land, and would shoot people on sight if they came too close. She’d pantomimed holding a large shotgun, taking aim right at me. Whenever she reached the climax of the story she’d shout “BANG!” so loudly I’d jump from my seat.

Another evening Sue recalled another tale. A “completely true” story of a plucky young fisherman who would go out further and further on the lake each day until one day he didn’t return. She had called the local game wardens who couldn’t begin their rescue efforts until the morning. A float plane flew in early the following day and spent hours searching the lake.

They found his canoe—right side up and perfectly intact—but there was no sign of the fisherman. Some rescuers swore they saw a tower of smoke coming from deep within the woods, but the more seasoned game wardens told them to ignore it and stay away from shore.

As I grew older I grew hardened and logical, immune to such tales. I was too smart, too brave to fear things like imaginary hermits. But one evening, years later, when I was working at the camp for the summer, a single gunshot echoed from the far end of the lake in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep for days.

I was in the midst of jotting down the pieces of these stories I could remember when footsteps approached. I slammed the notebook upon shut with such force I smashed my thumb into it. After freeing it from the pages I gently rubbed the pain away.

“Randy put you to work, huh?” I smiled through the throbbing.

“I didn’t realize I’d need to earn my keep here.” He walked onto the screened-in porch, taking the chair next to mine. He leaned back and stretched his arms out over his head, sweaty and dirty from whatever work Randy coerced him to do.

Arguably, he was looking the hottest a man could look.