Beyond the mountains, more mountains.
1
There are always ghosts in the well. I can't call them echoes, because the sounds I hear all were made too long ago.
The splash of coins in the water.
Voices whispering their wishes.
Secrets.
Nobody was supposed to hear them.
But I do.
2
'It's been almost two weeks,' Brenda said, 'and he still hasn't called.'
She butted out a cigarette in the ashtray on the table between them and immediately lit another. Wendy sighed, but didn't say anything about her friend's chain-smoking. If you listened to Brenda, there was always something going wrong in her life, so Wendy had long ago decided that there was no point in getting on her case about yet one more negative aspect of it. Besides, she already knew the argument Brenda would counter with: 'Right, quit smoking and gain twenty pounds. As if I don't already look like a pig.'
Self-esteem wasn't Brenda's strong point. She was an attractive woman, overweight only in the sense that everyone was when compared to all those models who seemed to exist only in the pages of a fashion magazine. But that didn't stop Brenda from constantly worrying over her weight. Wendy never had to read the supermarket tabloids to find out about the latest diet fad— Brenda was sure to tell her about it, often before it appeared in newsprint along with stories of recent Elvis sightings, Bigfoot's genealogy and the like.
Sometimes it all drove Wendy a little crazy. In her unending quest for the perfect dress size, what Brenda seemed to forget was her gorgeous green eyes, the mane of naturally curly red-gold hair and the perfect complexion that people would kill for. She had a good job, she dressed well— perhaps too well, since her credit cards were invariably approaching, if not over, their limit— and when she wasn't beating on herself, she was fun to be around. Except Brenda just didn't see it that way, and so she invariably tried too hard. To be liked. To look better. To get a man.
'Was this the guy you met at the bus stop?' Wendy asked.
Brenda nodded. 'He was so nice. He called me a couple of days later and we went out for dinner and a movie.
'And I suppose you sent him flowers?'
Sending small gifts to men she'd just met was Brenda's thing. Usually it was flowers.
'I just wanted to let Jim know that I had a good time when we went out,' Brenda said, 'so I sent him a half-dozen roses. What's so wrong about that?'
Wendy set down her wine glass. 'Nothing. It's just that you— I think maybe you come on too strong and scare guys off, that's all.'
'I can't help it. I get compulsive.'
'Obsessively so.'
Brenda looked at the end of her cigarette, took a final drag, then ground it out. She dropped the butt on top of the half-dozen others already in the ashtray.
'I just want to be in love,' she said. 'I just want a guy to be in love with
'I know,' Wendy replied, her voice gentle. 'But it's never going to happen if you're always trying too hard.'
'I'm starting to get
'Definitely middle-aged,' Wendy teased.
'That's not funny.'
'No. I guess it's not. It's just—'
'I know. I have stop coming on so strong. Except with the nice guys, it seems like the woman always has to make the first move.'
'This is too true.'
3
Sunday afternoons, I often drive out of town, up Highway 14. Just before I get into the mountains proper, I pull off into the parking lot of a derelict motel called The Wishing Well. The pavement's all frost-buckled and there are weeds growing up through the cracks, refuse everywhere, but I still like the place. Maybe because it's so forsaken. So abandoned. Just the way I feel half the time.
The motel's all boarded up now, though I'm sure the local kids use it for parties. There are empty cans and broken beer bottles all over the place, fighting for space with discarded junk food packaging and used condoms. The rooms are setout in a horseshoe, the ends pointing back into the woods, embracing what's left of the motel's pool. Half the boards have been torn off the windows and all of the units have been broken into, their doors hanging a jar, some torn right off their hinges.
The pool has a little miniature marsh at the bottom of it— mud and stagnant water, cattails and reeds and a scum of algae covering about two feet of water. I've seen minnows in the spring— god knows how they got there— frogs, every kind of water bug you can imagine. And let's not forget the trash. There's even a box spring in the deep end with all the beer cans and broken glass.
The lawn between the pool and the forest has long since been reclaimed by the wilderness. The grass and weeds grow thigh-high and the flowerbeds have mostly been overtaken by dandelions and clover. The forest has sent a carpet of young trees out into the field, from six inches tall to twenty feet. Seen from the air, they would blur the once-distinct boundary between forest and lawn.
The reason I come here is for the motel's namesake. There really is a wishing well, out on the lawn, closer to the forest than the motel itself. The well must have been pretty once, with its fieldstone lip, the shingled roof on wooden supports, the bucket hanging down from its cast iron crank, three wrought-iron benches set facing the well and a flower garden all around.
The shingles have all pretty much blown off now; the bucket's completely disappeared— either bagged by some souvenir-hunter, or it's at the bottom of the well. The garden's rosebushes have taken over everything, twining around the wooden roof supports and covering the benches like Sleeping Beauty's thorn thicket. The first time I wandered out in back of the motel, I didn't even know the well was here, the roses had so completely overgrown it. But I found a way to worm through and by now I've worn a little path. I hardly ever get nicked by a thorn.
The fieldstone sides of the well are crumbling and I suppose they're not very safe, but every time I come, I sit on that short stone wall anyway and look down into the dark shaft below. It's so quiet here. The bulk of the motel blocks the sound of traffic from the highway and there's not another building for at least two miles in either direction.
Usually I sit there a while and just let the quiet settle inside me. Then I take out a penny— a lucky penny that I've found on the street during the week, of course, head side facing up— and I drop it into the darkness.
It takes a long time to hear the tiny splash. I figure dropping a penny in every week or so as I do, I'll be an old lady and I still won't have made a noticeable difference in the water level. But that's not why I'm here. I'm not here to make a wish either. I just need a place to go, I need—
A confessor, I guess. I'm a lapsed Catholic, but I still carry my burdens of worry and guilt. What I've got to talk about, I don't think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get onto the next customer.
Here I don't have to worry about God or Hail Marys or what the invisible face behind the screen is really thinking. Here I get to say it all out loud and not have to feel guilty about bringing down my friends. Here I can
