After Years: Chapter One

Editor's note: This column is part of a fictional weekly serial.

The millisecond before the bathroom’s motion-sensor lights came on allowed enough anonymity and formlessness for Cecilia to noticeably relax. She started to wash her hands but, finding herself in the mirror, shook her head in exasperation and instead pushed open the window on the far wall, leaning her forearms on the sill so that her dripping hands hung out over the street. The honks and smog and gray buildings were a balm, the city beginning to shake her loose from where the last phone call had left her thoughts lodged.

It wasn’t homesickness, or at least that word didn’t quite match what Cecilia was feeling. She wasn’t yearning after a past home, but still, there was a...displacement, a severe and sudden disconnect between her surroundings and the town where she’d grown up. She would gladly have left that town in the past and had successfully done so through four years of college and three years since, until this afternoon.

Coming back after lunch to complete another round of fundraising calls for the generic nonprofit at which she worked, Cecilia found herself talking to Edison. He was 89, but he vaulted his way right up out of her phone with his meandering tales of hikes and rock-climbing in the mountains behind his log cabin that lay nine miles outside of a tiny Idaho town (population 63) and had a new library of which Edison was so proud. He had no email address, but oh the sun had come out, and the fall day was perfect, and had he mentioned that he had fought in World War II and afterward the GI Bill set him free from his father’s expectations. He loved how boaters would take to the river in the high heat of summer and missed the skiing he had done in Oregon as a college student. Cecilia forgot entirely why she had called, lost in a vision of him sitting at the edge of a glacial lake, shelling nuts and watching the mountains age.

The call shouldn’t have been anything more than a pleasant blip in an otherwise depressing day, but it came at such a time that it held special meaning for Cecilia, as all things seem to be omens when we least want them to be. Her maternal grandfather, a man she’d not seen in 20 years and who was by all accounts in perfect health, claimed to be dying and requested that Cecilia and her parents come help him settle his affairs, whatever that meant. Cecilia, as selfish as she felt to think it, had no intention of going — she didn’t have the money or time, and any hope for a relationship was surely long gone. Still, since the conversation with Edison ... She sighed, shutting the window and drying her hands. Edison painted a beautiful picture, but Cecilia was still entirely set against the trip. Well, maybe mostly set against it.

That night water began tumbling through the building’s heating system, tickling the pipes awake after a long summer’s hibernation. The softened glug and gurgle recalled the drainpipe off the porch roof by the window of Cecilia’s childhood bedroom, and the rolling current carried her off to the best night’s sleep she’d had in months.