But the best thing about our cabin is the porch. I think this was the East Coast bitch’s doing as well because again, it’s more farmhouse than cabin. It’s wide, for one. I’m talking a good fifteen feet from the top step to the front door. There are only three steps leading up to it. Cabins aren’t elevated. This one just sits a little bit on the side of a slightly rolling hill, otherwise there’d only be one step up.
But the steps are super long. Like ten feet long. Like maybe the East-Coast bitch had a little Southern Belle in her too? Because it’s overkill.
You can’t hate anything about this look, though. It all works. So I guess she was more of a genius than a bitch.
The only thing I would change about the cabin is the roof because it’s tin. So is the ceiling inside, but I don’t mind the ceiling. Rain on a tin roof isn’t romantic or atmospheric. It’s loud as fuck.
When I pull the truck up to my parking spot just to the right of the steps, I get an overwhelming sense of dread. I’m talking normie-people kind of dread. The kind that incapacitates them. The kind they call ‘panic’ and then attach the word ‘attack’ at the end.
I am breathing way too fast. Panting, almost. And my heart is hammering inside my chest. I’m shaking, actually. Like I’m cold, but it’s probably about ninety-five degrees outside and I don’t have the AC on in the truck.
My body doesn’t want to go inside but my body isn’t in charge here. My head is.
This is what Chek taught me. How to separate the body from the mind. He said, “Wendy, the way you look, or talk, or act—that’s inconsequential. The only thing that matters is the way you think. Thinking,” he said, tapping my head with a finger, “is the reason we are not animals.”
He told me that a lot. Because I really am an animal. I look human enough and most of the time I act human enough, but still, there’s something really wrong with me.
Really, really wrong with me.
That’s why I had Chek.
So I don’t care that I’m breathing too hard or trembling all over. That’s not important. What’s important is the task. So that’s what I think about. And the task is to get inside the cabin and close the door. And this is my plan:
One. Turn off the truck.
Two. Grab the mail.
Three. Go inside and read it.
This is all I have right now.
This is all I need right now.
Getting inside to read the mail doesn’t have to be the task. Step three is just my reward. That’s what Chek used to call it. I could make the reward something else. Turn off the truck, go inside, take a bubble bath. Or go inside and sleep. Or go inside and read. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. As long as there’s a step three, and it’s a reward, I can get things done.
But I want to read the mail.
Because today I am seventeen years old and Chek has been dead for seventeen days. I have spent the last eleven birthdays with him and these bags of cards, and now he’s gone.
It ends here.
The last of us is in this super-sized trash bag in my hand.
And that’s all very sad, but it’s all I have.
So I do this plan. I get out, I grab the mail, but I’m not even on the top step when the front door opens. And then there’s this split second, this eternal split second when I’m hovering between two realities. One where Chek didn’t die. One where Chek opens the door. One where he and I go back inside our little cabin and we open cards, and read them, and laugh, and eat cake, and we’re happy.
And then there’s the other reality. The real one. Where Chek did die and it’s Nick Tate standing in front of me holding a sunflower in his hand.
Chek is dead.
So it’s Nick. And it’s a sunflower.
We look at each other but we don’t say anything. I have known Nick Tate for as long as I knew Chek. Well, in the literal sense, I knew Chek for about eighteen hours more than Nick. But Nick was there right from the very beginning.
The flower is a symbol for us. Nick Tate has been giving me sunflowers for my birthday since I turned six. It was an accident that first time. We were walking through a market in… fuck, I don’t remember. It wasn’t America. Might’ve been Peru? But then again, it might’ve been Ecuador.
We were tailing someone. Chek was on the other side of the market, and the guy we were sent to kill that day kinda knew we were coming. Well, not me. Back then, they didn’t really get it. They didn’t understand what we were. It’s only been recently that people have figured out how to see us coming. But anyway, Nick and I were walking past a flower booth in the market and he picked up a sunflower and gave it to me. “Hold that,” he said. “Act like a kid and sniff it.”
Sunflowers don’t really smell that great but they are super pretty. So I didn’t complain. I sniffed.
Two hours later that guy was dead and we were heading back to the airstrip to go home and when I got out of the truck, I left the flower behind. But Nick picked it back up, handed it to me, and said, “Happy birthday.”
It was a throwaway comment. Or a joke. I dunno. It didn’t mean anything that year because that was the first time. But when I turned seven, there Nick was again handing me a single sunflower on my birthday. When I turned ten, I was living with him and his daughter Lauren while Chek did other things. I was actually the babysitter because Lauren was just a tiny baby back then. We were at a resort on the beach in South Carolina that day. I remember being unsure if I was happy or not because Nick was sending me back to Chek for work. I guess he was OK with baby Lauren by then and Chek needed me for a job. But I had grown used to being part of Nick’s little family. I liked it because I didn’t have to work, all we did was play.
Nick sent me back to Chek with a little bouquet of sunflowers that year I turned ten, but today, it’s just a single flower.
I’m on autopilot right now. Numb. So I don’t say anything as I push past him and I don’t take the flower. I just go over to the dining table next to the kitchen and dump out my bag filled with birthday cards.
He closes the door and comes over to me, still holding the sunflower. But then he sighs, gets a glass of water, plops the sunflower in it, and sits down across from me and starts opening envelopes.
Because this was my ritual with Chek, and now Chek is dead and all I have left is Nick.
I don’t know a single person who sends me cards but they all come with a picture. Sometimes, maybe, it’s of the person who sent the card. But sometimes it’s a picture of a dog, or a mountain, or a kid, or a balloon. They can send a picture of anything they want, so that’s what they do.
I don’t actually know how Chek did this whole birthday card thing. Like… is there a service out there or something? Some start-up business in someone’s garage where you sign up to get birthday cards delivered and you pay by the dozen? I dunno. But every year, starting at age six, they came. And the people sending them always knew how old I was. They wrote it special just for me. Happy sixth birthday, Wendy. Happy tenth birthday, Wendy. Happy fourteenth birthday, Wendy.
Actually, they all start with ‘Dear Wendy.’
Dear Wendy. Happy seventeenth birthday. I hope you have a lovely day.
I hope your cake is tasty.
I hope you get lots of presents.
I hope, I hope, I hope.