“Lost Lake”

By Margo McCall

 LOST LAKE

When the phone rings, Willie says, yes she’ll do it. Three days later she’s steering Hiram’s sputtering GMC down a road leading God knows where. She's towing the travel trailer she and Hiram dragged to lakes when the boys were small. Instead of watching TV with her hair in rollers, perhaps scalding milk for hot chocolate back in McFadden, she’s looking for her way back to Lost Lake.

She’s become unhinged. Like the rickety storm door that slammed open all winter, grating on her as she fed Hiram soup and prepared his injections. During one snowstorm, the pounding got so bad she went out in her robe and slippers and ripped it off the frame.

Willie threw it in a snowbank, and when spring came and the snow melted, the door sank into the mud. Willie having had more pressing matters to attend to, like Hiram’s funeral.

She didn’t tell her sons Walter or Oswald she’d signed up to be a campground host. Or as her sister Delia put it, asked their permission.

“I don’t need their blessing. I changed their diapers,” Willie told Delia, who was pestering her to sell the house, write a will and move into a retirement home.

Everybody telling her what to do, the whole town suddenly interested in her well-being, like now that Hiram was gone she was a loose end that needed to be snipped off.

Willie might have done what they wanted had she not run into her old schoolmate Albert Mason in the hospital waiting room as Hiram endured his last chemo round. Albert’s wife was undergoing hip surgery, which was going to nix their plans to be hosts at Lost Lake.

“That’s where Hiram and I honeymooned,” she said, prompting Albert to suggest she put her name on the list. With Hiram growing feebler and her thoughts racing about what to do next, she made the call without thinking.

And when they phoned her, Willie was just as surprised to hear herself say yes as she is now, looking for a place she last visited forty-odd years ago.

The winding dirt road doesn’t look familiar, but then again, some of the trees slapping the sides of the truck weren’t even seedlings the last time she passed by. She might have taken the wrong turnoff. Her poodles Cleo and Gypsy look worried.

The blue light fades to gray, and the aspens quaver with rising wind. Rogue gusts toss empty drink cups on the floorboards and tease edges of the roadmap flapping in the passenger seat beside the poodles, who whine as the rumbling thunder tracks their curving ascent.

Willie gave up on the map miles ago, tired of the crinkling as she unfolded and refolded it, confining tracts of mountain into squares that bore little relation to the landscape she remembered.

“Useless,” she finally said, not knowing whether the pronouncement was intended for herself or the map.

Willie’s been talking to the dogs, saying things like “Don’t worry Gypsy, we’ll be there soon,” or “You think we’re lost, don’t you, Cleo?”

Willie doesn’t want to admit it, but it seems she’s lost. Life has been a dreamy coagulated mix of past and present since Hiram slipped into eternity. The edges blur, soft as chocolate pudding and twice as rich and oh could she go for some now, even though the doctor says she could lose thirty pounds.

It’s hard keeping then and now apart:  worse than separating the boys to prevent a fistfight when they were little. All part of the same road, no beginning, no end, the turnoffs leading from four-lane divided highways to two-lane blacktop and gravel trails.

Memories of all the trips she and Hiram and the boys took, summer vacations in the Grand Tetons and Rockies, forays to the stock show in Denver. The cab probably still harbors a pouch of Hiram’s chew, or fishing lures that spilled from his tackle box. Willie hasn’t had the heart to clean it out.

Like everything else, the truck is a long list of things to do: fix the

broken side mirror knocked out of joint by a cottonwood branch on their driveway, flush the radiator, rotate the tires.

Time, like the memories, twists in and around itself, morning turning to twilight and then dawn with little separating one day from the next. It seems only minutes ago that she crawled out of the travel trailer in Redstone to begin a new day, and now already darkness is pressing in.

“I don’t know where the time goes,” she says to Gypsy and Cleo, who are looking out the side window in alarm at the wind whipping the trees.

And as the words slip into the twilight, she’s twenty five and with two small boys to chase after, and it was on an evening like this that she was hanging wash that should have been done that morning, scrambling to hold pegs in her mouth, keep the white sheets off the muddy ground and her sons close by. Feeling overwhelmed, a young mother then, with a husband gone for days at a time tending cattle, a circumspect man, quiet except when he was slurping his soup.

Oh, she’d loved him. But things got tangled after the boys came, and in forty years neither of them made an effort to set them right.

On that evening a black shape appeared on the horizon. Willie had her sons in the storm cellar seconds before it touched down in a neighbor’s field, and later, as she gazed at a sheet flapping in the crown of a cottonwood, she felt her own strength for the first time.

Clasping the steering wheel now, the white plastic rubbed smooth with oil from Hiram’s hands, that strength seems to have drained out of her. Worn out as the old GMC, rusty from twenty-five Wyoming winters, now struggling to drag the heavy trailer up another rise.

She didn’t have the mechanic check the truck before hooking up the trailer and guiding the GMC down from Laramie and Cheyenne. And if Hiram were around, he’d say, “Isn’t that just like you?” and “Don’t you have a brain in your head?” Making her feel small.

The trip has the feel of a dream, crossing the grassy border into Colorado, moving into the blue shadow of mountains. Eyes too weak for crocheting struggling to follow the gray expanse of road, the asphalt ribbon cut with yellow lines, getting further and further from home.

What was she thinking? Sixty-seven, hard of hearing, an old woman with thick glasses. Not like any campground host she’s heard of. Will she have the strength to clean out toilets and rake campsites? And what if she has a heart attack or her blood pressure medication runs out? Or falls and breaks her hip?

There’s a flash of lightning, growl of thunder, and spatters of rain smear the windshield. The sad truth is: there’s nowhere to go back to. The house where they raised the kids sags into the prairie, the well casings rusting, giving off weak dribbles of reddish water that leave streaks on the sheets.

There’s no turning around now. She’s sure. As the curtain of rain descends, Willie can barely make out the sign, Lost Lake, 2 miles, pointing to a narrow, rutted road lined by tall pines.

Green filtered light. Smell of wet earth. Sound of gentle rain, and water lapping the shore. Then and now, then only now. The lake even glassier than she remembers. It’s odd to no longer be moving.

She feels alone, not like she did on her honeymoon, and not as she did back in McFadden. This kind of alone is different, the alone of being Willie, Wilhomena, born in the starving year of 1934, in Medicine Bow below the Shirley Mountains, daughter of a farmer and his wife, shipped off at sixteen to marry a rancher, bear him two sons, then watch him die.

A while after she crawls into bed in the trailer, the rain stops and she falls into a deep, dreamless slumber.

Waking to the aroma of pine, she’s invigorated enough to go for a swim. The elastic around the legs of her bathing suit is shot. No surprise, the thing must be twenty years old. Her thin beach towel is covered with seashells. Though she’s never seen the ocean, if this summer works out, maybe she can coax the GMC west, follow the dotted lines until they end.

Diving into the cold lake, her heart jumps but doesn’t stop, and afterward, walking through the loop of sleeping campers, Willie shivers more from excitement than cold. After putting up her hummingbird feeder and opening cans of food for the dogs, she sits at the picnic table and makes a sign for the toilet: “Please close lid and door when leaving.” She’s always thought her handwriting loopy and uncertain, but now, examining it in the spreading light of morning, it looks just fine.

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Margo McCall is a Pushcart-nominated Southern California writer whose short stories have appeared in Pacific Review, Howl, Pomona Valley Review, Dash, Toasted Cheese, and other journals. Margo’s nonfiction has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Herizons, Lifeboat, and the Los Angeles Times, and my poetry in Amethyst Review and Umbrella Factory Magazine. A graduate of the M.A. creative writing program at California State University Northridge. Margo writes primarily about the L.A. region and live in the port town of Long Beach. Margo is a member of the Women Who Submit Long Beach chapter. For more information, visit http://www.margomccall.com or follow me on Twitter at @wordly1.