Page 11 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth
I rinse my mug and turn it upside down on the drying rack. No reason to wash it yet. I’ll probably make another pot of tea tonight. I glance at the clock and have to laugh.
I’ve frittered away more than an hour reading about how Virgil used to make cheese. This is not unusual for me, but it’s still funny. My nephew Douglas, the oldest son of Robert’s eldest sister, is the school psychologist for a sprawling suburban district in Oregon. Doug tells me that if I were a school kid today, I’d be diagnosed with ADHD–Attentive Type and would learn skills and tools to harness and channel my curiosity. I’d probably also be medicated.
But in the late 80s and 90s in a speck of a town in rural Maine, I was just a quiet, flighty girl who couldn’t concentrate on what the teachers wanted me to pay attention to. Off in my own world. Spacey. Flaky. They’d render these judgments on report card after report card. And eventually, I stopped trying to focus and embraced my role as ditzy Lexi Lincoln.
I managed to graduate high school, but with my grades, getting into a four-year college was a pipe dream. Besides, my family didn’t have that kind of money.
I did take some classes at the community college, and I’ve often thought about going back to get a degree. Robert’s all for it. The son of first-generation Chinese immigrants, education is his religion. Maybe I will; we’ll see. He wants me to add it to the bucket list, but the idea’s too daunting to commit to paper just yet.
For now, I have the farm, my online language-learning communities, my virtual sewing circle, the garden, my soap-making hobby, and the vacation rental business to keep me busy while Robert’s away.
Do I get lonely? Sure. Doesn’t everybody, sometimes?
But I tried moving around with Robert from posting to posting, and that, somehow, felt lonelier. Being the new face, having to break into established groups, and, in the back of my mind, always, always, wondering when someone from my past would turn up in one of these new towns. This is better. Safer.
And I keep busy. I spent this morning doing chores around the farm, not taking a break until late morning, when it was time to make my lunch. There’s always something that needs fixing, trimming, or painting when you have a farm. Between the manual labor and the internet research, I barely notice my isolation.
The notification bar at the top of my browser is blinking at me when I settle back in front of the old laptop. For all I know, it was there the entire time I researched the diet of the ancient Romans. When I do focus on something, I get tunnel vision. I’m like a racehorse wearing blinkers. But this notification is one I shouldn’t ignore. The icon with the red numeral ‘1’ popping out is for Stay Your Way, the vacation site where I list the cabin for rental.
I log into my Stay Your Way account. There are other, bigger vacation home sites. There are sites that take a smaller percentage of the booking fees. And there are sites that advertise more widely, bringing in more prospective renters. But this site checks all the important boxes: privacy is their, and my, priority. Guests and prospective guests and the owners communicate solely through the website’s messaging, voice, and texting app. Exchanging personal contact information with a client gets you banned from the site permanently. The listings aren’t indexed, so they don’t show up in Internet search results. And the vacationers don’t get the exact address of the house until forty-eight hours before check-in. It’s not the perfect system, but it’s as close as I can find. And the vacation rentals pay the monthly mortgage for the entire farm, with plenty left over to add to our travel fund. It’s a good source of income with a low likelihood of exposure.
I open the Stay Your Way email client and click on the new message, which is time-stamped just minutes ago:
To: Alex Liu
From: T.C. Rose
Re: Cabin availability ASAP?
* * *
I saw the listing for your quiet cabin and it sounds perfect for my wife. Emily is an author with a deadline coming up and is looking for a place where she can write without distraction. It seems you don’t list your available dates on the Stay Your Way calendar, so I’m reaching out to see when the cabin might be free to rent in the near term. Emily’s schedule is flexible. Any seven-day, six-night stretch would work for her. The sooner, the better.
* * *
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Tristan (and Emily) Rose
I leave the message up on the screen and open another browser tab. Mr. Rose is right that I don’t mark available dates on the convenient, integrated calendar that Stay Your Way provides. This undoubtedly costs me some bookings, but it gives me an extra layer of security. Because once I get an inquiry like this one, I do rudimentary research into the prospective guest(s) before I decide whether to let them book the cabin. And it’s much easier to say, ‘sorry, we’re fully booked’ than to find out after the fact—as happened once—that a prominent national reporter has booked the spot and make up a reason to cancel their reservation and refund their deposit.
Stay Your Way provides basic information about guests. You know those reviews of properties/hosts that all the sites publish for everyone to see? Stay Your Way has similar reviews of you, the guest. They’re only visible to the hosts. But if you have a wild party, steal something, fail to take out the trash before you check out and leave it to fester, we know. I read these reviews, of course, but whether you’re a good houseguest isn’t my primary concern.
My background check is more wide-ranging. Do you have a social media footprint? Have you ever been arrested? Do you have a connection of any kind to Windy Rock, Maine? Does anything about your presence in the world set off an alarm bell, no matter how faint?
I search the wife first, since she’s the one who’ll actually be here if I book her. At first, I think Emily Rose must be a pen name because the only information I can find about the woman is related to her books. She’s published four. They all appear to be what I think of as book club fiction. Not quite genre, not quite literary. Those thick women’s fiction books that talk show hosts and movie stars push on their followers. The books that are impossible to check out from the library because the waitlist is endless. I study the covers. I’ve never read any Emily Rose, but a few of these intrigue me. I write the titles on the notepad at my elbow.
There are no photos of Emily Rose on her author social media accounts. She uses book covers as her avatar. As a rule, I don’t trust people who aren’t on social media. It’s a red flag. I realize that’s pretty rich, coming from me. You could scour the web for the rest of eternity and not find a profile for Alex Liu. In any case, I’m inclined to give Emily Rose a pass here. I mean, I’ve seen Misery. Readers can cross the line into stalkers more easily than ever, thanks to the interconnectedness of the Internet. I do find a handful of pictures where she’s been tagged by other authors at signings and conventions. She’s younger than I imagined, but she definitely looks the part of an author. Long light red hair pulled up in a bun, hipster glasses, fringy scarves, flowy kimono-style sweaters. I stare at her freckled face for several moments and decide she looks harmless enough.
I click through to her website. There’s a professional headshot that gives the same vibe as the pictures she’s tagged in. She comes across as dreamy and ethereal. Lithe and long-limbed, I peg her as a yoga devotee. Maybe a Pilates addict. I’m neither. I’m all about functional strength. I can split firewood, haul my oil from the pickup to the basement, and carry a twenty-five-pound bag of rice over each shoulder. With Robert away so much, I need to be self-sufficient and capable. I’m sturdy. Emily Rose, on the other hand, looks like a stiff breeze could blow her over.
I nod my approval and move on to her biography. She grew up in Illinois, attended a small liberal arts college in Hope Falls, Ohio, and resides in Little Sweetwater, Pennsylvania, with her husband—all very far from Maine. No mention of pets, children, or hobbies. But that’s all okay by me.
Time to check out the husband. I search his name. Like his wife, Tristan Charles Rose’s social media footprint is unusually sparse. He does have a BizConnect profile, though. He graduated from a high school in Arizona, went to a university in Kansas where he earned a degree in genetics, and then onto Ohio to get a graduate degree in forensics. He attended a different college than Emily, but their schools are in the same town. That must be where they met. Now, according to his resume, he works for the county crime lab in his hometown.
I open one final tab, plug my address into the map site, and set Little Sweetwater as my destination. It’s a bedroom community five hundred and fifty miles from here, an hour outside Philadelphia. I stare at the route snaking south and west as I ponder. There’s no reason not to take the booking. And there’s not a lot of interest in vacationing in a rustic cabin in the North Carolina mountains in late winter/early spring. It’s either rent to Ms. Rose or let it sit empty. I push down the uneasy feeling that rises in my gut and return to the first tab to type out a reply inviting Tristan to book any six-night span in the next two weeks.
Seven
