Jennifer Falls

The morning Jennifer packed her car was the morning she stopped counting. She'd been counting everything for eleven months. Days since the divorce papers were filed. Boxes of cereal left in the cabinet. Miles on the treadmill that went nowhere. The number of times her mother called, which was different from the number of times she answered. She stopped counting and started loading. It wasn't much — two duffel bags, a cardboard box of books she hadn't touched in years but couldn't leave, her grandmother's lamp with the green glass shade that had survived three moves and one bad relationship. Her houseplants were dead. She didn't load those. The apartment looked the same as it had the day she moved in, four years ago, full of good intentions and an idea of herself that hadn't held up. Beige carpet. White walls. The water stain above the radiator shaped vaguely like the state of Florida. Jennifer stood in the doorway for a moment. This is the kind of place you live in when you're waiting for your real life to start. She couldn't remember who'd said that to her. A college roommate, maybe. Or her own voice, in a dream, or a bad mood. It didn't matter. What mattered was that she recognized it now as true in a way she hadn't been able to see when she was inside it. She locked the door and put the key in the super's mailbox. The drive north took six hours. Jennifer didn't listen to music. She'd made a playlist — something upbeat, something forward-looking, the kind of playlist a person makes when they're trying to convince themselves — but she turned it off outside the city, when the buildings thinned out and the highway opened up and the sky got bigger than she'd expected. She didn't need the music. She needed to hear herself think. Her sister Carla had offered the lake house for "as long as you need it," which was the kind of sentence that could mean anything from a weekend to a decade, and Jennifer wasn't sure yet which she was taking. Carla didn't ask questions and that, right now, was the only thing Jennifer required from another human being. The lake house came into view just before sunset. Small, cedar-shingled, sitting at the edge of the water like it had grown there. The dock extended into the lake, and the light on the water was doing that thing — that early September thing, low and sideways, making everything look both ordinary and impossibly clear. Jennifer parked and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap. She had no plan. She had never in her adult life had no plan. Even the bad years had been planned bad years, full of goals and timelines and milestones that turned out to be the wrong milestones but at least they were there, running in front of her like a string to follow. Now there was no string. Just the water, and the dock, and the cedar smell coming through the car vent. She got out. The air hit her like something she'd forgotten. Cool and green-smelling, with the faint edge of wood smoke from somewhere far across the lake. She stood on the gravel drive and breathed it and felt, for the first time in eleven months, something that wasn't grief or relief or numbness but something quieter and stranger. Something that might, in a few days, become a beginning. She picked up her bag and walked toward the door. Behind her, without ceremony, without any acknowledgment that anything remarkable had happened, a bird somewhere in the trees started to sing.