A Simple Thing (6 page)

Six months later they were married in city hall, and she found out she was pregnant a month after that. She was nineteen years old, and green-eyed Bill Pavalak loved her, and she was carrying his baby, and, for the first time in her life, the restless yearning that had always driven her was stilled, and she was happy.

Chapter 6

Susannah 2011

Susannah stood in the middle of her new home and tried not to panic. The cottage itself was lovely, with beamed ceilings and white beadboard walls and French doors at one end of the living room that looked out onto a fading garden. The furniture was clean and comfortable, and the place was filled with homey details—bright braided rugs on the floors, handmade quilts on the beds, even a blue earthenware pitcher filled with late dahlias from the garden on the round dining table in the main room. The kitchen, at one end of the big L-shaped living area, held the biggest stove Susannah had ever seen—black cast iron, with brass handles on the many doors and drawers. Susannah could feel its warmth emanate from across the room. But Katie had just pointed out that no matter how impressive the stove might be, the kitchen lacked a refrigerator—
no refrigerator?
—and with each passing moment Susannah was growing more nervous about what she had gotten herself into.

Susannah took a deep breath. “You always tell me your life is totally boring and we never do anything,” she said to Katie, as though the lack of a refrigerator were something not at all unusual. “So here we are; we're doing something.”

“Yeah, we're doing something even more boring and stupid than our real life,” Katie said.

Susannah sighed. “Did you see the bedroom?”

On the other side of the living area, three steps led down into a utility room, with shelves that held everything from canned food to candles. At the back of the utility room was a small bathroom, with a sink, toilet, and stall shower. A bedroom to the right of the steps held twin beds and two dressers. Someone long ago had covered the bedroom walls and the sloping ceiling with wallpaper, with faded yellow roses blooming against a white background. The other bedroom was off the kitchen, and held a double bed in an old-fashioned wooden spool frame.

“You have two choices about bedrooms,” Susannah said. “You can share the room with twin beds with Quinn, or we can move one of the mattresses from there into the utility room, so you can have separate rooms. I talked to Betty and she said that's what Hood and Baker used to do.”

Katie's eyebrows rose. “Are you kidding?”

“It's not a big deal.”

“Oh, please.”

“This is it, sweetheart. Two bedrooms. We have to do the best we can.”

“Why don't you and Quinn share the twin bedroom?” Katie said. “I'll take the one by the kitchen.”

“Because you're the kid,” Susannah said, “and I'm the one paying the rent.”

Tears of frustration welled up in Katie's eyes.

“Come on, Kate,” Susannah said, her voice softening.
This is my beloved child, mine own.
“This is going to be good for us. Give it a chance.”

She thought of all those early years when Katie had been so attached to her that she would scream whenever Susannah left, crying in gulping sobs for hours. It continued into preschool and even kindergarten. That image of Katie was forever burned into Susannah's mind—the skinny, chestnut-haired girl held tightly in a teacher's embrace, reaching out with both arms toward Susannah, howling with loss. She had outgrown it, but slowly. In some ways Susannah had liked knowing that the fierce love she had for Katie was returned equally. They were a part of each other. While she loved both her children with all her heart, Katie was her first, the one who had revealed to Susannah the almost frightening intensity of her own maternal passion. It was hard not to take Katie's rejection now personally—to see it instead for what it was, the natural growth of a young thing yearning to find its own light.

At that moment Hood and Baker appeared outside the French doors in the living room. Hood pressed his forehead against the glass, furrowed his brows into a deep V, and gave Katie a mock stern glance, beckoning her with one finger. She looked at him and smiled, and then ran over and opened the door to join the boys outside.

Two weeks,
Susannah thought, watching as Hood leaned over and whispered something in Katie's ear.
I bet those two are exploring each other in two weeks
. She suddenly saw that all the things that had drawn her to Sounder—unstructured time, freedom from the constant routine of checking in, close relationships with a small circle of people—were fertile ground for an intense teenage love affair. Which wasn't the worst thing that could happen, but for Katie—angry and wounded and mixed-up as she was right now—it wasn't the best thing, either.

Jim walked in, a cardboard box in his arms. “This is the last of it,” he said.

“That's not mine,” Susannah said.

“Yes it is.” He put the box down on the table and took out a bag of coffee beans, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a stick of butter, a carton of orange juice, a bag of sugar, and a Tupperware container holding half a dozen eggs.

“Breakfast,” he said.

Susannah shook her head and smiled at her own folly. “Thank you,” she said. “I'm usually much more organized.”

Betty, who had followed him in the door, said, “You'll get used to planning ahead. Can't run out for a quart of milk at the last minute anymore.” She sat down on the arm of the sofa and unzipped her parka. “Warm enough in here for you? Jim lit the stove before he left for Friday Harbor.”

“Yes,” Susannah said. “It's lovely.”

The worn pine boards squeaked beneath Jim's feet as he walked into the kitchen. She looked at him and thought of Matt, thought of moving into the first place she'd shared with Matt.
It should be Matt standing there. Matt should be here
.

She and Matt had moved into an apartment in Chicago two weeks after they were married. The apartment filled the top floor of an old Victorian house, which meant they had to walk up two long, steep flights of stairs to get to their door. The ceilings sloped down to meet pale yellow walls, and four dormered windows let in light all day long. They slept on a foldout couch in the middle of the main living area. A bathroom with a big claw-foot tub and a large walk-in closet with a leaded window completed the space.

Matt had grown up poor in an affluent suburb west of Chicago, in a town of cobbled streets and grand mansions and towering elms, with dappled sunlight on green, green lawns. His family of five—Matt, his parents, and his two brothers—had lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the basement of the upscale building where his father worked as the apartment manager and his mother worked as a housecleaner. His parents had wanted the best schools for their boys, not understanding what it might mean to be the poorest kid in a rich neighborhood.

He'd attended college on scholarship, sharing a dorm room with two guys. After college, he'd lived in an apartment with five friends, the six of them sharing two bedrooms and two baths. Matt had never, Susannah realized, had his own private space. So she decided to create one for him.

While he worked late nights at the library on his dissertation, she emptied out the walk-in closet and painted it a warm, deep orange. She scoured flea markets and pawnshops and antique stores and found a leather armchair and ottoman and an old Oriental rug in turquoise and orange and brown—all the perfect size. She mended the tears in the leather and sewed throw pillows and painted the scratched base of an old standing lamp and bought a new shade for it. Finally, she did a painting of the lake in the woods in northern Michigan where they had met and framed it and hung it on the wall.

She had told him she had his Christmas present hidden in the closest to keep him away. On Christmas Eve, she had opened the door with a flourish and turned to him. “Ta da! Your private study, my lord. I promise not to tidy it or nag you about keeping it clean or enter without knocking. You can hang paintings of dogs playing poker on the walls if it makes you happy. Or naked women.” She frowned. “Okay, on second thought, maybe not naked women. But I wanted you to have your own private space, for once.” She looked at him eagerly.

He had been speechless for a few minutes. He stepped inside and ran his hand over the leather arm of the chair, studied the painting she'd done on the wall, turned on the lamp. “I don't know what to say. I mean, I love it. I can't believe you did this.”

Her thanks came over the next few months, as Matt piled books on the floor in his “study,” spent hours in the armchair reading, often with the door open so he could talk to her as she cooked dinner, and tacked photos and articles and postcards to the walls. He loved it. He was happy.
They
were happy.

“So, a few things you'll need to know,” Jim said, interrupting her reverie. “First, maybe you noticed there's no refrigerator.”

Of course Susannah
hadn't
noticed, until Katie pointed it out, but then she'd also forgotten to stock up on food, which meant she clearly was not made of the same stuff as Ernest Shackleton or even Laura Ingalls Wilder.

“The electricity here runs on a renewable energy system. The energy comes from wind generators and solar panels. It's enough for running lights inside the house, plus a computer and one or two small appliances.” Jim smiled. “And to us,
small appliances
means appliances with a purpose—power drills or electric goat shears, not hair dryers.”

“So you're telling me I need to learn to style my hair with electric goat shears.”

Jim laughed. “That's not as crazy as you might think. Fiona whips up homemade mayonnaise with the power drill. Works pretty well.”

Susannah hoped her expression didn't convey her sudden, gut-wrenching fear. She had no idea how to make mayonnaise from scratch, let alone operate a power drill.

“But, as I was saying, refrigerators suck way too much energy, so there's a cold cellar out back.” Jim walked across the kitchen and opened the back door, a wood frame door with a six-paned window across the top to let in the light. Susannah followed him out onto a small covered porch. Faded gray paint covered the railing and floor, and two wooden rockers faced the view of the bay through the trees.

Jim pointed to a pair of wooden storm cellar doors with black hinges, set into the ground at the back of the house. “There's a small cold cellar down there. It'll keep most things pretty cool. And over there”—Jim pointed to a grove of small trees and brush about ten yards behind the house—“that's where you throw kitchen waste. We feed the chickens from the scraps. See that little peach tree? Sprouted from a pit Baker threw out there a couple summers ago.”

“I see.”

“You
really
have to reuse and recycle here. It may be a slogan for the rest of the world, but it's reality for us. The only way to get garbage off the island is to haul it to the dock, take it out by boat, and pay good money to dump it someplace else.”

He walked her back inside and showed her the box in the utility room that controlled and distributed the energy from the solar panels and wind generators, and explained the solar water heating system (“no long showers”). Susannah's head began to ache, and she felt a tiny, ice-cold kernel of terror in the pit of her stomach.

“We use a lot of twelve-volt LED clusters,” Jim was saying as they walked back into the living room, “but we find them too dull for lighting a whole room, so we use eight-watt 2D units, which give a nice light with a good color, and small eight-watt strip lights above work areas, like the kitchen counter.”

“Oh for Christ's sake, Jim, don't talk her to death,” Betty said. “You're scaring the hell out of her, can't you see? She just wants to know how to turn the lights on and off. She doesn't need your whole Al Gore lecture.”

Susannah smiled. “Of course, the most important things to the kids are the computer and the cell phone.”

“The electricity you have here is enough to charge your cell phones and your computer.” Jim raised his thick brows and looked at her over the frames of his glasses. “I'm assuming you have a laptop computer? Most laptops use just fifteen to forty-five watts, versus up to two hundred and fifty for a desktop computer.”

Betty rolled her eyes. “Just tell her where to plug the damn thing in.”

“I'm getting to that.” Jim pointed at the electrical outlets along the baseboard in the living area. “You can plug it in to any outlet. We have a router and Wi-Fi connection at our place. The Wi-Fi works here, so you should be able to access the Internet very easily. I will warn you, our connection for the Internet and cell phones depends on the reception we get from a satellite dish we put up in a Doug fir by our cabin. Sometimes if it's raining hard, or blowing, we don't get reception.”

He grinned. “And you can't call the cable guy if it doesn't work. Just have to wait it out.”

Susannah's cell phone rang, as if on cue. The noise seemed loud and out of place, and she jumped, startled.

“We'll get out of your way now,” Betty said. She stood up. “Dinner's at seven thirty. But you come on down whenever you feel like it.”

“
Thank you,
” Susannah said, in as heartfelt a voice as she could muster.

She flipped open her phone as the screen door slammed behind them.