Journey, The (5 page)

Michelle did not blame Scott for her failure to become a successful author. Yes, he had talked her out of Yale and Oregon. He had also demanded a lot of her time. Scott Richardson had insisted that she attend every company social function, even the inconvenient and irrelevant. But he had encouraged Michelle to develop personal interests and had provided her with a standard of living most women could only dream about. Her decision to give up writing and take up teaching had been hers and hers alone. But that did not keep the regrets at bay.

From the stationery shop, Michelle walked to a fast-food restaurant, where she ordered a fish sandwich and iced tea, and then to a discount apparel store, where she bought two T-shirts, two pairs of shorts, sweatpants, and tennis shoes. If she was going to spend a lot of time walking the streets of this town, she wanted to do so in comfort.

She left the clothing store at two thirty, looked at a classified ad she had torn from the newspaper at the women's shelter, and then walked a few more blocks to an apartment complex. Located on Eighth Avenue South, the city's busiest east-west arterial, the twenty-unit facility was only four blocks from her childhood home. When she learned from the manager that a furnished studio apartment was still available for two hundred dollars a month, she snapped it up.

The place was not fancy. No apartment at that price was fancy. But it was comfortable, well equipped, and, most of all, livable. This was her home now, her new home. Not the palatial, 5,000-square-foot structure on the shores of Lake Washington, but this.

Michelle walked through the tiny domicile, made a list of things to do, and went through an assortment of rags, sponges, and cleaning solutions that she had borrowed from the manager. The place was not spotless. Because management had not expected to rent the unit until the following week, management had not brought the unit up to First World standards.

So the tenant set out to remedy the situation. After changing into a T-shirt and sweats, she took three quick strides from her bedroom to the kitchen and went straight to work. She wiped down counters and cabinets, swept the floor, and dusted the blinds and light fixtures. She cleaned two windows with a solution that smelled like ammonia and looked like green tea.

Michelle smiled each time she finished a task. She hated housework but loved staying busy. She was moving forward and getting things done, just as she had moved forward and gotten things done at the historical society, the DMV, and Unionville High School.

When she finished the windows, she moved to the bathroom. She disinfected the toilet, scrubbed out the sink, and wiped down a shower stall the size of a phone booth. All three bore signs of male habitation.

Michelle returned to the kitchen, rearranged four vinyl chairs that seemed out of place, and sat in the one that faced the range. She pondered her first dinner as an independent woman and the challenges of the coming week. She was ready, she thought, for this strange, new journey.

At four o'clock Michelle Preston Richardson Jennings jumped in the shower and rinsed off the sweat from a brutally long day. She dried off with a borrowed towel and put on some fresh clothes. When she finished, she opened the blinds, walked across the room, and did the one thing she'd left off her list. She sat on her bed, put her head in her hands, and cried.

CHAPTER 9: MICHELLE

Monday, September 3, 1979

Wayne Dennison had found Michelle Jennings' qualifications decidedly sufficient. He had called for the Seattle widow Friday at one and hired her on the spot when she had returned his call at five. He had insisted only that she show up at eight for a Tuesday morning staff meeting and be prepared to work the rest of the day.

Michelle considered Friday's events as she carried two bags of groceries on a ten-block walk from a supermarket on Eighth Avenue South to her four-hundred-square-foot studio. She felt fortunate to have found a job and a means of support. If nothing else, it would buy her time and keep her off the streets – a prospect that chilled her to the bone.

Walking through her old neighborhood, Michelle saw many familiar sites: her grade school, a flower shop, a carhop drive-in that served world-class root beer floats, and a small park with slides, swings, and monkey bars that she had enjoyed often as a girl. She laughed at the sight of a music store that sold LPs and 45s, not CDs and download cards, and advertised a discotheque.

She also saw signs that had once helped her keep track of U.S. presidents and now reminded her of Unionville's unimaginative past. As the community had grown from its whistle-stop roots in the 1870s, city leaders had assigned streets east of Main ordinal numbers and those west of Main chief executives. They had found this a practical and politically neutral way to order their town until 1925. No one, it seemed, had wanted to live on Harding Street.

A more meaningful partition could be found a half-mile away, where Broadway and the adjacent Mission River divided Unionville's affluent north from its working-class south. Even in a town of fifteen thousand, money, pedigrees, and prestige mattered.

Almost everything Michelle passed triggered a rush of memories. She ran into something familiar on every block, even cats and dogs. She did not run into many people. Most residents had either locked themselves in or taken the first road out, most likely to nearby campgrounds and lakes to enjoy a sunny Labor Day and the last gasp of summer.

On Sunday afternoon she had twice resisted the temptation to visit the ultimate homecoming attraction, a house just two blocks from where she now stood. Just the thought of standing on the corner of Tenth and Monroe had proved unsettling. Yet temptation, like the sirens of Greek mythology, continued to call and mess with what was left of a very fragile mind.

As she waited for a crosswalk signal, the time traveler thought again of the house up the street and the people who lived there. She scolded herself for being such a coward. What was she afraid of? That Fred Preston might recognize her and start asking questions? That Evelyn Preston might faint at the sight of her sister? That Shelly Preston herself might call the police to report a maternal impostor? There was no harm in taking a look, was there?

Well, maybe. Michelle admitted that the scientific aspects of her situation gave her pause. She remembered a college class where a guest lecturer had said, flat out, that the same matter could not occupy the same place at the same time. Would standing near her younger self blow a hole in the universe? Would shaking a hand? How about a hug? She knew now why she preferred literature to science and even biology to physics. She liked things she understood, not things that made her head spin.

Michelle was about to conclude that the time was not right for a family reunion when she remembered something about a neighbor's property. Collecting herself, she picked up her bags and proceeded south, not east, and walked toward the Preston domain.

When she approached the forbidden intersection a few minutes later, she walked across a well-manicured lawn to a row of hedges that stood four feet high. The living wall formed a barrier that separated a home belonging to Bill and Doris Anderson from a sidewalk, Tenth Avenue, and a modest blue rambler across the way. From one of several gaps in the hedges Michelle could see her house, a car, and two reclining lawn chairs. One was occupied.

Michelle scanned the Anderson lot for signs of life but saw nothing to cause alarm. No cars occupied the driveway, no residents peered out of windows, and no yappy Chihuahua came out to greet her. As amazing as it seemed, she had the yard to herself. Returning to her vantage point, Unionville's newest voyeur settled in and focused on the sunbathing queen.

The girl was hard to ignore. With bronze skin, toned legs, and ebony hair that raced to her waist, she had a look that teenage boys craved. She also had a fashion sense that was probably unmatched on the planet. Wearing an electric green bikini, pink flip-flops and yellow plastic bracelets, she looked like a model testing the limits of Kodachrome film. When she sat up to apply lotion to her arms and legs, Michelle smiled at the best friend she had ever had.

Hi, April.

Michelle lowered her bags to the ground and pushed forward for a better look. The chair to April's left supported what looked like a magazine and can of soda. A pair of flip-flops sat side by side on the footrest. Even from sixty feet away, it was clear that the occupant of the second chair was on temporary leave.

A moment later, Michelle heard a door open and shut. She turned to the right and saw a tall, thin boy with shaggy blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses step out of the residence next door and walk onto his front lawn. He repositioned a garden hose laying in the yard and glanced at April before walking to the far side of his house and moving out of sight.

Hi, Brian.

Michelle had known Brian Johnson since their parents had dropped them in the same playpen as infants. They had attended the same church, schools, and social functions for nearly eighteen years. But when Michelle tried to recall where Brian had gone after high school, she drew a blank. When she had left for Corvallis in the fall of 1980, she had cut a lot of ties to her past, including those to the boy next door.

Redirecting her attention to her family's driveway, Michelle took stock of something else that had once been dear to her heart: an orange 1972 Volkswagen Beetle. She had purchased the car with her own money in the spring of her sophomore year, the day after she had obtained an Oregon driver's license, and had driven it anywhere and everywhere for the better part of three years. But it had been one of the first things to go when her college bills had piled up.

Just as she started to get self-conscious about spying on people less than half her age, Michelle saw a petite brunette in a skimpy white bikini pop out the front door with a can of soda and a big bag of chips. Wearing her hair in a ponytail, she walked with the confidence of a runway model. She handed the can to April and sat down in the unoccupied chair.

Michelle smiled as she zeroed in on Number One. A confirmed health food nut, she could not believe she had ever eaten potato chips, much less the really fatty kind in mass quantities. Nor could she believe that she had ever looked that young or that good in a swimsuit. George Bernard Shaw was right, she thought.
Youth
is
wasted on the young.

Realizing that she had probably overstayed her welcome, Michelle withdrew from the shrub just as she heard two piercing screams. A boy laughed in the background.

"Oh, Brian, I'm going to get you for that!" Shelly said.

The boy next door had put his garden hose to good use, spraying his female friends with water that probably felt nice in the 90-degree heat. Michelle looked once more across the street and managed to catch a glimpse of a comic scene. Shelly chased Brian around his front yard with a hose in her hand.

Later that night Michelle recapped the day's events in the first few pages of her diary. She wrote that she had enjoyed watching the exchange from the sidelines. She remembered the water fight at the start of her senior year. She remembered getting Brian Johnson as good as she got.

She did
not
recall seeing a stranger stare at her from across the street, which was probably a good thing. Michelle had not yet made an indelible impression on her new world. But she knew that would change. There was a new girl in town and in the lives of the people she loved, and she was leaving new footprints wherever she went.

CHAPTER 10: MICHELLE

Tuesday, September 4, 1979

Unionville High School was no Buckingham Palace. With a sheer brown-brick exterior and minimal ornamentation, the U-shaped colossus on West Riverside Drive was a monument to Depression Era austerity. But with thirty classrooms, a gym, six restrooms, and more than a dozen offices and meeting spaces, it was the most functional building in town.

Michelle had seen virtually every room in the three-story structure, including the boys' locker room. Accepting the kind of dare no self-respecting Rally Club member could refuse, she and three others had run screaming through a corridor that separated the coaches' offices from eight shower stalls ten minutes after the third football practice of her junior year.

But until today, she had never paid a call on the faculty lounge. Sitting at a small round table with fellow secretary and chief trainer Marsha Zimmerman, Michelle surveyed the twenty-by-thirty-foot staff room and the relatively diverse assembly inside it.

The group included more than a dozen teachers she had known well as a youth, including English instructor Tamara Powell, band director Desmond Miller, and Robert Land, who taught algebra and geometry when he wasn't running athletes ragged on the practice fields. Michelle hated math but had loved sitting in his classes. Land was a man who could be unsparingly harsh on running backs who carried a football like a loaf of bread but uncommonly gentle with students who did not understand the Pythagorean Theorem. Michelle looked longingly at her former instructor but turned away when he returned her attention with a soft stare.

"Welcome," Wayne Dennison said, breaking the monotony. The principal stood at the front of the room near a rectangular table that supported several folders and scattered papers. "I want to welcome all of you to UHS for what I expect will be another great year at our fine school and extend a special welcome to those of you who are with us for the first time."

Dennison reached for a glass of water on the table and took a quick sip before replacing the glass and going through some papers with one hand. He picked up one of the sheets and directed his attention to the back of the room.

"I have a lot of ground to cover this morning, including some benefits changes and a new disciplinary policy adopted by the board in June. But let me start by introducing the newest members of our family. I'd appreciate it if you folks would stand as I call your names. Let's start with Mr. Ramsey. John, where are you?"