Jamestown

Everything about the decision made sense but the living of it.

When your children and your grandchild all live within a few minutes of each other, you move wherever that is as well. It doesn’t matter that you left Rhode Island when your last child left for college even though there really wasn’t any “leaving,” because they went to the local university. You felt as though you had done your job, and you were ready to pursue your dream of living in California. Not LA, not a chance, but a town about an hour outside the city that looked like the setting of an old Larry McMurtry novel.

Your husband had died suddenly when your youngest was a junior in high school, and that was when your plan began to take shape. As you grieved him, you began looking up real estate. You posed questions to your kids regarding how they would feel about moving out west. Shockingly, none of them liked the idea. Throughout your entire childhood, all you ever heard people do was criticize the state where they were living. Everyone was supposed to leave home, eventually, weren’t they? And yet, your children had no interest in such a thing. They liked Rhode Island, and, what’s more, they couldn’t see why anybody else wouldn’t. You briefly considered scrapping your plan to stay in the family home in Jamestown forever, but then your therapist told you that you were nuts, despite you believing that therapists were not allowed to use the word “nuts” in reference to their patients.

“You’re nuts,” she said, “If you want to go, go. You’ve done your job. You raised your kids You’ve buried your husband. You’re entitled to do something drastic.”

Nevertheless, you were still on the fence a week later when someone from your therapist’s office called to say that she had passed away suddenly in her sleep even though she was only two years older than you at the time. That seemed like an omen. Within a month, the house was rented out, but not sold. You couldn’t take that big of a leap. Not yet. You rented out the place to a very nice young couple, and when you found out they were expecting, you knocked another two hundred off the rent. You were going to be a terrible landlord, or a wonderful one, depending on how you look at it.

It was not lost on you that your children didn’t throw you a going away party. You knew they were rankled by this grand departure. A mother is an anchor, and you were dropping yourself into a foreign sea. They would not be able to return home if their plans fell through. Instead, they’d have to rely on each other, or come live with you, although that seemed tricky considering you had chosen to purchase a one-bedroom condo in Piperville, the Texas-style town in the middle of California. Even its name sounds Texan. You consider getting cowboy boots only to remember that you often trip while walking in heels, and now that you’re going to be living thousands of miles away from your entire support system, you would have to do better at taking care of yourself.

And so you did.

You did very well for around fifteen years, and then one day, your home is broken into while you’re in the bedroom asleep, and the man who breaks in takes a knife out of the block before one of your neighbors, who suffers from insomnia and is out on a midnight walk, sees the open door and begins, unsure of what else to do, shouting at the top of her lungs. The man, whoever he is, panics and runs right through the sliding glass doors that lead out into your small backyard, and one of the pieces of glass goes right into his wrist and nearly kills him. The crash wakes you up, and when you run into the living room, you feel your entire body shut down from both fear and confusion. The sleepless neighbor has already phoned the police, and the sound of sirens seems to give you permission to lapse into a trance. This could have happened anywhere to anyone, but it happened to you, and when your daughter comes to visit and make sure you’re all right, she does so with the strict condition that you will be returning with her to the safety of an island.

She makes a case that would win over any jury, but still, you fight her. When she leaves after having exhausted her PTO, you’re still not sure what you’re going to do. You love your California life, but suddenly you feel as though the anchor has lost its weight. You are adrift, and perhaps you always have been and just didn’t know it. All this independence had a silent cost that you never realized you were paying. Someone could break into it at any time and rain war down on your peace of mind. Just like her old doctor passing away unexpectedly, she received an email from the couple who’d been renting from her all those years saying that they were going to buy a house in Maine, and that they were so grateful to her for keeping the rent low all those years, thereby allowing them to save up and go somewhere so far off the grid even electricity would be iffy.

That meant the house in Jamestown was available. She was fed an article on her phone from the New Yorker saying that living near your family extends your life even if you never see them. It seemed like an odd thing to do a study on, and the science appeared dubious at best. When you arrive a few weeks later at the house in Jamestown, one of your granddaughters is waiting with a sign that says “Welcome Home, Nana.” You have never been asked to be called Nana. You always wanted to be called Gogo, but your children told you it sounded Russian, and, yes, it’s true, you’re not Russian, so you became Nana, which has never felt right, but that isn’t your granddaughter’s fault, and anyway, the sign is very sweet even if the tails on the “a”s have too much of a flourish.

For the first couple of days, it was a parade of family members checking in as though they thought you’d forgotten how to live in a house by yourself. Some brought food. Others brought concerns. Not for you, or mostly not for you, but for themselves. Concerns of divorce. Concerns of rising college tuition. Of coastal erosion. Of political unrest. All these were assuaged by the water, water everywhere. Go more than one story up anywhere on the island and you were reminded that you had more in common with a lighthouse keeper than a city dweller. Once the initial reorientation had ceased, there was an unmistakable quiet.

You were, once again, alone.

The house was built for a family, but haunted enough for a widow. Each appliance made its own unique noise after sunset, and every floorboard would groan at random intervals throughout the day. Boredom was only kept at bay by crime documentaries on Netflix and watching the handsome divorced father who lived across the street mow his grass with no shirt on. Your daughter suggested that you join a book club. Your son recommended you take up canasta, which you’re sure is Latin for “hospice.” None of the grandchildren make it a point to visit regularly, but you don’t blame them. When did you ever visit your grandmother? Karma is nothing but time and memory. From the top floor of your house, you turn on your cell phone’s flashlight and shine it out into the night.

There’s nothing to see out there, but the mission of a lighthouse isn’t to find something in the dark. It’s to let those who journey know that they’re almost home.