Bad Things. Michael Marshall

Chapter 8

      Kristina watched through the coffee store window as her mother started walking up Kelly Street back toward her lair. She took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly.

      Children, huh. Again. For God's sake.

      It was actually kind of amazing how her mom kept going on about it – ‘amazing’ in the limited sense of ‘unbelievably annoying’. It was her sole subject matter, apparently. She never pitched in about her daughter not having a husband, or a boyfriend … but a child – that was the only story in town. As if she'd been this perfect Earth Mother figure, a Good Housekeeping bake-and-nurture paragon, and was just dying to see the maternal genius bearing fruit in the next generation. As if the whole of male-kind was a sideshow or distraction, the unending line of women the only thing that ever mattered (because a granddaughter was what her mom wanted, let's face it, not just any flavour of grandchild) – and her own not-much-lamented husband had not been father to someone who'd loved him.

      As if she honestly didn't realize there had been occasions when her own daughter had fervently – though unsuccessfully – wished her dead.

      She ordered more coffee. Might as well. Her shift didn't start until five, so why not while away another Fairtrade, kind-to-all-God's-creatures hot beverage, savouring the rich pageant of a Black Ridge afternoon?

      After a few minutes a car trundled past, its tyres making sticky sounds on the wet surface. A little later, a different car went by in the other direction. Hold the front fucking page.

      Five minutes after that a girl whom she'd known back in school waddled diagonally across the street, toward the hair salon. By the look of it this girl had successfully made it to motherhood, at least six or seven times. Either that or she needed to seriously rein back on the snacks.

      The sight of the salon triggered the thought that Kristina should/could/might as well get her own hair attended to, and so she called and made an appointment for a couple of days' time. Then she put the phone back in her bag, and returned to staring out of the window. A few more minutes passed, as though on their way to somewhere they'd already been told wasn't worth the visit.

      What bugged her most was she didn't even know why she'd come back, and in truth this was probably part of why conversations with her mother tended to start scrappy and go downhill from there. She knew that her mother regarded her return as a moral victory, and Kristina wanted to be able to explain and defend it in some way other than pure laziness or worse. She didn't want to believe it had been inevitable.

      That her mom had won, basically.

      But why do you go back to where you and your parents and their parents and grandparents were born, after a decade away? Friends? Nope – all moved away, either geographically or into the snug dens of parenthood. Father? Dead. Dear mother herself? God, no. There's plenty room in a Christmas card to be reminded of your alleged responsibilities, and/or be given a hard time about the only important thing in life, spawning a child.

      She'd left town less than a week after her eighteenth birthday. Goodbye, thanks for not much, I'm done here. Worked, paid taxes and leased apartments in five different states and three foreign countries, including a whacky six months in Thailand as the weird tall chick tending bar: by all means buy her a drink but please understand it isn't getting you anywhere. Some of it had been interesting, some of it fun, a lot of it day-to-day and hard to remember in detail – even the high times and hair-raising scrapes. She could have kept doing it, though, or things like it. Could have stuck it out in Vermont or Chicago or Barcelona, dug herself a life or just committed properly to the ones she'd tried, rather than leaving a series of men staring bemusedly at brief notes left on kitchen counters.

      Yet here she was, back where she came from, under her own steam and with no one else to blame. And she had been here – she was horrified to realize – almost nine months now. She didn't want to be here.

      And yet (and the words were beginning to feel like a spike in her brain, banged deeper and deeper by a hammer she held in her own hand), here she was.

      She accepted a refill from the server, a girl who – despite nose ring and turquoise hair – was so bovine it made you want to set fire to her (and not just because she so obviously resented her sole customer for being thin: well, sweetie, newsflash – your hips are what happens if you won't eat anything except nut loaf and cheese). She wondered briefly where the girl had caught her counter-culture vibe from. Some two-years-ago crush who'd entranced a teen, flipped her world, and moved on? The uncle who always seemed cooler than Mom and Dad, while quietly tapping them for money on the side? Or the girl's own parents, dragging her hither and yon as a baby, borne on Mom's fleshy hip from festival to protest and back. Not that Kristina was so different, she supposed. You think you're being yourself and then one day you realize you're in beta testing for turning into Mom 2.0, the worst of it being that the observation is so fucking trite you get no points for having hacked your way to it the long way around.

      And had she finally got down to the point? Was she back in town because part of her knew being elsewhere would never make a difference, that these mountains and trees and the scratchy pattern of these streets were where she came from?

      She didn't think so. And yet…

       Oh, fuck it.

      She stood before she could complete the sentence yet again, left a large tip just to fuck with the hippy's head, and went out onto the street.

      It was cold outside. Winter was knocking on the windows, and she knew she basically wouldn't get her shit together now to ship out before Christmas. She'd always liked fall and winter here anyway – the land was made for it, so long as you didn't mind snow and the somewhat oppressive company of trees – so maybe that could serve as an excuse. Perhaps she was proving you could come home again, and then leave for good. She hoped so.

      People came and went up and down the sidewalk, some nodding at her, most not. She walked slowly up the street, in search of something to do until it was time to go to work. It was as if she'd been awake for ten years and then allowed herself to fall asleep again. Or maybe the other way around, she wasn't sure.

      There was nothing for her here. Nothing she wanted, at least.

       And yet here she was.

       Chapter 9

      We touched down a little after three o'clock. Driving up into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains took an hour, and then I turned north off 90 and through thirty miles of trees before reaching the outskirts of Black Ridge itself. It would be easy to imagine the town only has outskirts, on first meeting. Even if you know better, and where to find what counts as the main attractions, driving too fast will still have you out the other side before you know it.

      Black Ridge is a place of small wooden houses on lots through which you can see the next street, and stands at an altitude of about three thousand feet. It stretches twenty disorganized blocks in one direction, twelve in the other, before blending back into the forest which climbs into the mountains toward the two major lakes of the area, Cle Elum and Kachess. There are off-kilter crossroads holding hardware and liquor stores, a few diners where no one's bothering to string up fishing nets or kidding themselves as to the quality of what's on offer, and a couple of car-hire places. Presumably to help people leave. The older part of town – an eighty-yard street at the western end, offers a short run of wooden-fronted buildings holding an antique/junk emporium, a coffee shop/second-hand bookstore, a burger place, a pizza place, a couple of bars, and not a great deal else.

      As I'd driven up into the mountains I'd refined my plan. Finding a motel was the first step. I'd passed up a Super 7 and a couple of tired-looking B & Bs before suddenly finding myself confronted by a place I recognized. I'd known it would be there – I had lived in it for nearly a month – but it remained strange to see this particular motel