Page 7 of Love Notes

The workshop had been a major selling point when I’d bought the cabin.It was set a little way back from the edge of the lake and separated from the cabin by a screen of trees.It even had a separate driveway, which branched off from the main one about halfway between the road and the cabin.It was a large space—a lofted double garage with a concrete floor, plenty of power outlets, and it was plumbed.The guy who’d owned the place before me had built boats, so the workshop also had a high ceiling and more room than I’d needed so far.

It was the perfect workshop.As a living space, though, I wasn’t quite as excited by it.I had a camp bed in one corner, a mini fridge, a deep industrial sink set into a countertop that ran alongside one wall, and, tucked away in an area not much bigger than a closet, a toilet.I usually kept the workshop as tidy as I could, but a lot of it was now taken up with boxes of my belongings because Rebecca had wanted my cabin to be “perfect” for her paying guest, which had apparently meant removing any trace of me from it.

“This is not ideal, Becca,” I’d said when she’d brought the last of the boxes over the day she’d kicked me out of my own house.

“What do you mean?It’s great!”

“It’s a camp bed on a cement floor.”

“You have everything you need,” she’d said.“Beggars can’t be choosers, Ryan.”

“Except you’re the beggar in this scenario, not me.I shouldn’t have to be the beggar.It’s my cabin.”

“White chocolate and macadamia cookies,” she’d reminded me, like that was the end of the argument.

And it was, actually, because those cookies were magic.

I was looking forward to breaking into my stash now, as I pulled up outside the workshop.Maybe they were even magical enough to make me feel like less of a dick, although I doubted that.

The soles of my boots crunched over the gravel as I walked from my truck to the workshop.I caught a flash of movement as I approached the door, and an orange tail vanished into the underbrush.

“Hey, cat,” I said.

The cat had first turned up in the winter, skittish and half-starved, and I’d built a shelter for it on my porch and put food out.It had taken her a while to trust me enough to get close, and I’d then ruined it by shoving her in a cage and taking her to the local vet to get fixed.She was only just starting to sneak inside again when I left the cabin door open, and she, like me, had her nose out of joint now that I was sleeping in the workshop instead.I didn’t want a cat, which was the reason I hadn’t given her a name, but I was starting to realize I might have a cat anyway.

I left the workshop door ajar in case she wanted to come in, but she wasn’t a big fan of power tools so I wouldn’t be surprised if she stayed outside.

She wouldn’t like what I was going to do next much, either.

I left my keys and wallet beside the camp bed I’d set up near the front door and crossed through the workshop to the large roller door that took up almost an entire wall of the workshop; the wall closest to the lake.I unlocked it and hit the button to open it, and it rumbled like thunder as it rose, letting in the light and the breeze.If the cat was still hanging around close by, the sound would have sent her skedaddling.

I grabbed a folding chair from inside, as well as a lump of basswood and my whittling knife.

Sam once said that I was an eighty-year-old man trapped in a young man’s body, but that was only because he couldn’t whittle for shit.

Mr.Carver, my high school shop teacher, had got me into whittling as well as general woodworking.He’d recognized that I needed something to engage my hands and my brain to stay out of trouble, and he’d reasoned that whittling was a great way to get an instinctive feel for wood.

I set my chair up under the open roller door where I was both in the shade and the breeze and turned the lump of basswood over in my hands, waiting for it to tell me what was inside it and could be revealed bit by bit with every cut of my knife.

A turtle, I decided, and got to work.The rhythm of the work was meditative; while part of my mind concentrated on the task at hand, another part of it drifted.I thought of Haider and sighed.I knew he’d accept my apology, I just wished I hadn’t behaved in a manner that warranted an apology to begin with.

The creature in the basswood wasn’t a turtle after all.It was an alien.I’d drawn them obsessively as a kid, back when I thought they’d rescue me from my misery and take me on amazing adventures throughout the universe.For a kid who’d never been able to find a friend on this planet, it had made sense to look elsewhere.But then I’d come to Caldwell Crossing and found something even more astonishing than aliens—three kids who actually liked me.

And yeah, I was still afraid of losing that.Of losing them.

I’d been like the cat, too scared to get close in case it was dangerous.Too scared to trust someone when they offered me friendship, in case they laughed and ripped it away again.

The rough shape of an alien appeared under my knife, my thumb following each cut.Basswood was a nice wood to work with.It was soft and fine-grained, which made it ideal for whittling.I mostly liked to carve the animals I saw around the lake and the wider local area, but I’d never quite been able to get rid of the aliens.When I was a kid, I’d believed in them desperately, with a necessity born out of all the pain and grief and anger a twelve-year-old could muster.I’d had so many feelings and no way to properly express them.I’d needed to believe in aliens back then.These days, I sometimes gazed at the stars above the lake at night, and I let myself wonder for a moment, and then I went inside and smiled at the little basswood aliens on my shelves.If there was a crazy thing I wanted to believe in nowadays, maybe it was time travel.I would have liked to go back and tell that kid things really would get better.

The breeze picked up, rustling the leaves in the nearby trees and creating ripples on the surface of the lake.

I’d been working for a while when I first heard sounds of faint splashing.The cat, who had reappeared to stare at me from underneath the nearest clump of yarrow, retreated again, her tail lashing.I set my alien aside and headed for the lake.It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to untangle a duck or another bird from a net or fishing line.Hell, once I’d had to rescue a fawn stuck in mud.So I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting as I stepped through the trees and onto the shore of the lake, but it wasn’t to see some guy struggling in the shallows on his back, limbs flailing.

I launched myself toward him at a run.Could he not swim?The water there was only around knee height, but panic wasn’t rational.Was he having some kind of seizure?I had no idea what was going on, except that I needed to get him out of the water.

I splashed into the lake, pushing through the sudden resistance of the water to get to the guy.I reached out and grabbed him, and two things happened at the same time.First, his eyes flew open, and he screamed, and second, in his sudden panic to get away from me, he tried to sit up, submerging himself instead and dragging me down with him.My boots slipped, and I crashed into the water on top of him.We wrestled for a moment in the water before we both came up for air.I was still holding the guy’s arm because he was having a seizure, and he tried to pull away.

“What the hell?”he shrieked, water plastering his hair to his face.“Let go of me!”

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