Circuit of Disclosures
Emily Townsend
The blizzard clings to—no, cracks—the trunks of the Meyer spruce that perimeter the Cryptomeria Resort in Kidder County. Three hours before the electricity cut out, KYFR-TV reporters urged North Dakotans to stay indoors; “the peak gust is expected to reach 60 MPH and snow might reach up to six feet.” Alice had thought Meteorologist Mike Minski was lying. But it had been a day, and her kids are now trapped in Boarding House #2, Echo Echo Echo Estuary, while her brother Bob is incompetently taking care of their ailing mother Fayth in Boarding House #1, PCC Creek. She’d been trying to tell Bob where their mother’s medicine is in that house, how she needs some sort of liquid every other hour, her room has to be an exact 82 degrees at night, but given that she is in Boarding House #3, Wallaby Wilderness, the messages wired through the pneumatic tubes between the four houses seem to keep getting intercepted.
The three-acre resort also holds one more house of boarders—Recondite River—where three (and a half, if you count the New Hampshire maid) guests from New Jersey, New York and New Mexico pace around the tiny kitchen which only one guest considered normal-sized. The snow packs all seventeen residents inside their cabins. Day Two isn’t looking good. The generators slowly lose gas, the pantries cleared out to crumbs, the toilet seats too frozen to properly sit on. Everyone is itching to get out.
/Echo Echo Echo Estuary/ to /Wallaby Wilderness/
Dave and Frank, Alice’s sons only barely into teenagehood, study precocious Craig studying the slip of paper that had come from PCC Creek in Bob’s handwriting, already much too small to decipher. Their uncle is a strange man of pure laziness and adultery. They know Mallory, their mom’s on-again-off-again best friend, secretly hooks up with Bob to spite Alice, since Alice slept with Walter, Mallory’s ex-husband, before they divorced in late ’96. Bob and Alice don’t always get along, and Trent, the Switzerland of teens in this house, even noticed it upon checking in alongside his mother, the New Yorker Sybil. The tension could’ve melted the snow, now piling up to thirty inches. It’s impossible to open doors on the first floor.
“Okay, Bob is wondering ‘how in the hell am I supposed to give Mother a bath if she’s got a cast on her ankle and she sleeps twenty hours a day?’ God. Your uncle is useless,” Craig says after weaving through the note. Though Alice’s sons grew up cracking codes, Craig can translate a message in mere seconds. He found friends in words quicker than in his classmates, as he was several grades above the kids his age.
“He kinda is,” Frank admits. “Forgets our birthdays even though we’ve lived here for eight years.”
“Not that we demand gifts,” Dave says, glowering at his little brother’s gluttony. “But yeah, it’d be nice to have someone pay attention to us. Mom’s always taking care of the guests.”
Craig decides that maybe Bob should scramble up trouble. After hearing about his and Mallory’s affair, possibly incorrectly told by Alice’s sons, he felt sorry for Alice. He scribbles out a code and hands it over to Trent. Trent deposits the slip, pushes the button and watches the canister ferry over.
/Wallaby Wilderness/ to /Recondite River/
Alice worries about her kids. Trent’s eighteen, yeah, but she isn’t sure of his babysitting skills. Carol sneers at how irresponsible she is for letting them play in Boarding House #3 without adult supervision before the storm hit. Trudy barges into the bathroom where the ladies stand at the hopper window.
Grace snatches the sheet before anyone else. “My baby is stuck with three boys he doesn’t even know,” she says. “He may be smart, but he hardly knows how to be social.”
“Trust me, I’m concerned too,” Alice grumbles. It bothers her that Walter is bumbling about the living room, groaning about how the television had gone out. She doesn’t think Mallory possibly knows about their affair. How could she? Walter had arrived at the Cryptomeria Resort as a retreat from the impending divorce, and Alice might have taken the standard Welcome Package a bit too far. He went home long enough to sign the papers and returned as a semi-permanent resident in Wallaby Wilderness. Guests were growing to be a constant at the resort, and Alice hadn’t had the time to develop the benefits with Walter into something public; especially now since Mallory is only a couple hundred feet away. Walter and Alice were hooking up in the closet when Carol squawked a sigh about the snow jamming the doors shut.
“Can someone just read the thing?” Trudy shouts.
Alice takes the note from Grace’s grasp and reads, “I know what you did with my husband (who’s not my husband anymore but still).”
The shock felt like an icepick burrowing into Alice’s skin. “It’s not addressed to anyone?”
Grace holds it up to the light like a dollar bill. “No. Only the words.”
Alice breathes but loses oxygen when footsteps creak up the stairs. Walter, the ever-handsome man of James Marsden charm, catches Alice’s eyes through the mirror. “What’s going on? Have we gotten a message?”
“Ah, nope.” Alice shoves the paper in her cardigan. “Still waiting for the kids to say something.”
Carol and Grace glance at each other. Trudy announces she has to tinkle. Everyone evacuates the bathroom.
/Recondite River/ to /PCC Creek/
“I am going to lose it if I have to be in here for another day,” New Mexico Peggy shouts in the hallway. “I signed up for a Serene Situation, not a Blizzard Blastard.”
New Jersey Judy sighs and falls back into the chair, her leopard-print, wool-covered spine contoured along the mesh. “I don’t know. Beats being at court. I have a case scheduled tomorrow, and it looks like I’ll miss my flight tonight anyway.”
New York Sybil, leaning over the stair rail that looks down into the living room, nods her head. “Two days straight without my boring-ass son? This is more exciting than any horridly humdrum story Trent’s ever told me.”
Eve, the housekeeper of all four houses, clutters up the kitchen with yet another bag of trash. These ladies sure didn’t know how to ration a pantry. She hears their voices in the loft, faintly reverberating between dividers and twin-sized beds. It isn’t eavesdropping, she tells herself, if she’s a part of the conversation.
“This arrived a while ago, when you were eating lunch,” Eve says, holding out a sheet. None of the ladies reach out. “I don’t know who it’s for, but please take it.”
New Jersey Judy investigates the words, undoubtedly written by a man. New Mexico Peggy asks what it says. “Please don’t blow it. This is a good thing.”
“Ooooh, finally! Drama!” New York Sybil screeches. “I. Must. Know. Everything.”
New Mexico Peggy turns to Eve. “Where did this come from?”
Eve shrugs and lies. “Either PCC Creek or Wallaby Wilderness.” She knows which direction the message shot through, but she needs her own form of entertainment.
“Not Echo Echo Echo Estuary?” Perhaps Trent had finally absorbed the episodes of The View that New York Sybil forced him to watch with her, to see that other people had plenty of crises, and maybe that inspired him to stir a little trouble.
“Notes can only be passed perpendicularly, not parallel,” Eve clarifies. “It’s also almost impossible to get a note to pass through all four houses.”
“How come?” New Jersey Judy locks her eyes on the paper, puzzled on who the recipient should be. Being away from court is a relief, but she’s finding herself challenged to discover the meaning of this place. She knew something was off when she discovered the pneumatic tubes shooting between houses on the second story, popping through specific windows. Perhaps it was for swapping food during common snowstorms.
“The boarders here are coders. Someone’s always changing a message.”
“I thought this was a resort?”
Eve softly smiles. She thinks of Olivia, the director of Cryptomeria Resort, who works completely from her own home in Bismarck, raking in the money without doing much lifting. “For non-coders, Olivia books them in Recondite River. She likes to play with the coders by throwing in people who don’t really know what they’re doing here.”
New York Sybil spots a pen and a tattered journal across the room. “Hand me that,” she says, motioning to New Mexico Peggy’s nightstand. “Let’s play this game.”
/PCC Creek/ to /Recondite River/
The cattle that are barned in the middle of the resort have probably frozen or keeled over from starvation by now, and Fayth will not shut up about it.
“Your father didn’t raise livestock for them to be treated this badly,” she says to Bob.
“Can’t do nothing about them, Mother. If I could I wouldn’t be stuck here taking care of you. Alice shouldn’t have left me in charge. She knows I’m the only one here who can handle them.”
“Ouch,” Mallory says sarcastically. Fayth lies below a centuries-old blanket in the bottom bunk while Mallory readjusts lying on Bob’s torso in the top bunk. Wendy stands starfished between the bedroom and the hallway. “Make up your mind!” Mallory yells at Wendy. “Either you’re in or out!”
Wendy glares at Mallory. Mallory’s a rude late-twenties-something who will do anything petty to get people to notice her, and Alice is her latest target. Tired of hearing lips smacking, Wendy retreats into the master bedroom, where all of Fayth’s health supplements are stored in tupperware underneath what used to be her and her dead husband’s bed. It hurt too much to smell the last bit of hay in that space, so Fayth relocated to what used to be her kids’ room. Wendy doesn’t mind it. It reminds her of her father before Trudy kicked him out for embezzling Wendy’s college fund. Farmers might have a poor reputation, but Wendy’s father is a lot smarter than most people. He just happened to get caught in the worst moment.
She sits in the alcove and tucks her knees in. The generator that had been running since halfway through Day One is fading out, and her toes are numb beneath three pairs of socks. She misses her mom over in Wallaby Wilderness, regretting her curiosity to poke around in PCC Creek for board games before the storm struck southern North Dakota. Anything was a distraction for Wendy to stop thinking about telling Trudy about her father tinkering with paper statements in their kitchen pantry, the extra zeros faintly lit by the fluorescent light. She had kept asking how much money she’d have for college, kept insisting on seeing the real digits through a tangible form, not on a computer program. One sleep-walking night, she stumbled into the pantry and found him stashing the real report behind cans of vegetables no one ever ate. It was a shame Wendy admired her father so much. She’d never been able to remove him from her Pedestal of Role Models, even though he is still serving time in the North Dakota State Penitentiary. Trudy seems to be handling the situation not all too well, considering she booked a vacation here and plucked her daughter from school, making her miss a week of classes at Cankdeska Cikana Community College. Wendy wishes she was anywhere else right now. Preferably a tropical place.
Across the bank of snow Wendy sees four ladies peering out the glass doors of the balcony, where one woman points to the tube that seems to run into the master’s closet. Pushing through broadcloth cotton dresses and chambray pants—clothes she’d only wear on themed dress-up days in high school—she finds the tube and opens the canister. “Did you hear Bob has gonorrhea?”
With the things she’s seen him and Mallory do last night from the cot pushed against the wall, it’s not entirely unlikely for an STD to be passed between the backstabbing best friend and the indolent-ass brother who doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. For only a few minutes Wendy ponders this, is no longer preoccupied by her own snitching on her father, but then the guilt punches harder than the wind smashing into the wooden walls.
/Recondite River/ to /Wallaby Wilderness/
New York Sybil leaps into the snow on the balcony, retrieves the canister, and leaps back inside. She’s dying for new info. All the VHS tapes of horrendous family movies had reached its end, and she is reminded of silly Saturday mornings when Trent was a toddler, clambering up to the television while Sesame Street or The Clangers blasted its pixels into his wide eyes. The memory is too much to think about. New York Sybil always thought she’d be the cool mom, serving age-inappropriate refreshments to Trent’s friends after school or letting him borrow the car for a football game, but Trent was such a loser that he didn’t have a single friend nor any interest in a real social life. He stayed at home and remained by the television, never complaining about wanting a girlfriend or a boyfriend or even a pal to hang out with. It seems she’s his only buddy, and she doesn’t have time for that.
“Tell my mom I’m sorry.” New York Sybil knows this came from the girl, but she’s wondering who her mom is and where she’s stuck in. It couldn’t have been either outsider in Recondite River—or Eve, maybe.
“Eve?” she shouts by the bookshelf that stands by the door of the balcony. Eve appears with a remote in her hand. “You don’t have a daughter, do you?”
“No, but I am currently one.”
“What?”
“My father is no longer alive, but my mother is nearby.”
“As in, on this property?”
“I suppose.”
New York Sybil is both tired and intrigued. “Listen. This came from the girl over there. Who’s her mother?”
Eve pulls out the guest list from her pocket. “Trudy, in Wallaby Wilderness. Can I see?” She hands Eve the message. “Hmm. Not sure what she’s apologizing for. Maybe don’t change this? Let the memo go through for once?”
New York Sybil is slightly appalled by this suggestion. If she wants to stay awake, she’ll mess with them. Eve should’ve told her that Olivia is her mother, but what differences does it make to a lowly housekeeper that a snooty fashionista who dislikes her son know about her family tree? Eve longs for Olivia to pay attention to her. She doesn’t know New York Sybil’s son, but she knows she’d be a great mother if she’d allowed herself to be.
/Wallaby Wilderness/ to /Echo Echo Echo Estuary/
Carol, ever the sentimental sixty-two-year-old barren woman, stares out the clerestory window. She’d been watching the boys in Echo Echo Echo Estuary until the powder evening turned into boysenberry dusk, and then moved to the other side of the house facing Recondite River. It’s not that she couldn’t have kids; it’s that no one wanted to have kids with her. In her prime she was the lowest of zeniths—chunky arms, acne scars reddening her cheeks, thighs that didn’t gap. Her laugh, one had said, could “only be handled in small doses.” If she went on a date, she never got called back for a second.
She gave up on having kids in her mid-forties, turning instead to running a daycare in Hazelton, fifty miles away from Cryptomeria Resort. Though many North Dakota schools had spring break two weeks ago, she’s giving herself a break this weekend, allowing the six college interns to take over the place as extra credit, caring for the kids whose parents worked odd hours no matter what day of the week. It’s a hassle caring for children who aren’t your own. Storing love into a child that will be taken away as they age—it’s all pointless.
Air pressure propels the canister from the other house and pops into the wall beside Carol. She claims the message before Alice or Grace could find it. Before unfolding the note, Walter knocks on the door frame.
“You can’t keep hiding these from me,” he says, his shadow growing longer against the wallpaper as he glides forward. Though Carol is at least thirty years his senior, her heart still pitters around him. Walter reminds her of a love she almost had at his age, but her cousin simply put on a navy shift dress that landed much higher than the knee, waltzed by their table at Ground Round Grill & Bar, and her date made an excuse to go to the bathroom and didn’t return.
Carol is compliant around charming men. She hands him the note without hesitance and watches his eyes reflect blankets of snow by the window. “What does it say?”
“I’m having Bob’s baby. The fuck? Who would this even come from?”
“Can’t be one of the ladies over there,” Carol muses, her sight locked on Recondite River. “Gotta be whoever’s left in PCC Creek.”
Walter tries to remember who got stuck in there after the storm exploded. Bob, of course, and his mother. A girl who looks like she should’ve been in college. His ex-wife? Yes, she’s there. She told Walter as she signed their divorce papers that she’ll never find anyone else. It couldn’t have been Mallory. The mental image of a young, bony girl being squashed by a heavyset, middle-aged man made Walter’s esophagus shudder, nearing the point of vomiting. It couldn’t have been her. Could it?
“Here’s hoping the boys won’t mess this up,” he says, shoving a new message into the canister. He walks over to the bathroom and shoots it to the next house.
/Echo Echo Echo Estuary/ to /PCC Creek/
Trent wishes the boys would stop griping about not being able to play on the Nintendo for the past 52 hours. He had suggested to read a book or run a round of hide-and-seek, but these boys were past such childish games. He wonders if his mother misses him as much as he misses her.
Soft sleet slushes the casement window. Candlelight emanates from the living room of Wallaby Wilderness, and inside he sees the women chatting while the man paces behind the couch. No one seems to talk to him. Trent recognizes Alice, who’s sneaking glances at the man through the blank screen of the television. He feels terrible for allowing Craig to pass on an abysmal rumor, even though the rumor is true. Lives shouldn’t be ruined by bored teenaged boys.
“Shouldn’t you guys be asleep by now?” he shouts upstairs. He learned on Night One that the living room is a more peaceful place to rest than the bedroom of two thin-mattressed trundle beds. This resort is more like a military camp, he supposes, with its weird system of secret messages and lack of real luxuries in the kitchen and rooms.
Thumps thunder the ground. “No!”
Trent exhales. The snow has to let up by tomorrow, he thinks. Before coming here, he had assumed the storms in New York were far worse—airports would shut down entirely when Mother Nature decided to swing by, and as Trent recalls one afternoon of him and his mother waiting seventeen hours for a flight to Denver, a pillow lands on his face.
“Come on! Have some fun for once,” Dave calls out. Trent lingers beneath the chenille blanket, suddenly much too warm. Perhaps he could forget himself for a little while.
But first he wants to admit that Craig fabricated a rumor. That would make his mother proud—to show that he takes responsibility for a shameful thing. He sends PCC Creek a slip that read, “We all lied.” He places the canister in the tube by the oven in the kitchen and presses the button to send it off. He didn’t hear that the message didn’t go through as he ascended the stairs, a frown waning into a smile.
/Cryptomeria Resort/ to /Cattle Crossing/
Snowmelt floods the resort and seeps into the doors of all four cabins. In galoshes and puffer coats and pashminas and overalls and long johns and triple layers of secondary layers, the guests spill out of the second-floor walkways of their homes to converge at Cattle Crossing. Carcasses and frostbitten calves will start reeking in a few days. Yearlings huddle dead beneath the last straws of hay. Though the heavy gusts have winded down, the echo of Meyer spruces slapping branches rebound through the property.
No one speaks yet their eyes are saying everything. Walter vacillates staring at Wendy and Mallory, Alice tries not to look at Walter, Bob huffs at Fayth, who had hobbled over the slick path, Dave and Frank and Craig snicker at Trent, Grace holds onto Craig’s shoulders, New Yorker Sybil waits for a fight, New Jersey Judy studies Carol, New Mexico Peggy stands with Eve and gawks at everyone.
Water drips through the roof, sprinkling taps into the wooden planks beneath immobile feet. New York Sybil removes herself from the crowd and searches for a signal. She gasps when a bar picks up. “94 is still closed,” New York Sybil announces, shutting her Motorola. “How are we supposed to get home?”
“Hold on. I have a call coming in from Olivia,” Eve says, excited her mother finally decided to check in. She pushes the red button that blinks behind a stack of hay. Alice and Bob had never noticed this, and they’ve been running Cryptomeria Resort for the past three years. They knew Olivia handled the executive director duties, but they didn’t see how much control she had over the place, considering she never appeared for routine checkups or personally attended to guests’ issues.
Oliva’s voice sounds as watery as the snow liquefying outside, with an edge of robotic static. “Hello, all. I hope your stay was lovely.”
“It wasn’t!” Craig yells. Alice’s sons join in. “It wasn’t! It wasn’t!”
“I didn’t expect this storm to be a massive one. Did you have fun?”
“No!”
“I’m sorry. I hope you leave a good review for Cryptomeria Resort. Please come again.”
Eve is disappointed her mother has no sympathy, though she knew they both knew the resort was going to be disrupted from being locked in for three days. She can imagine Olivia ragging on her for not attending to the other houses when she knew the secret passageway through basements, but she wanted a break for once. It wasn’t fair that Eve had to do all the work while Olivia sat back and diddled with the boarders.
Before New Mexico Peggy could protest for a refund, or before Walter could demand an answer about this supposed baby from Mallory or Wendy, or before Alice could berate Bob for not concentrating on their mother’s illness because it is obvious that she’s wheezing and freezing, or before the boys could ask their mother for hot chocolate, or before Craig gets smothered by Grace, or before New Jersey Judy prays to the Father above that the flood clears up, or before New York Sybil asks Trent if he had started any rumors, or before Carol wonders aloud if she could perhaps swim to her car so she could drive back to Hazelton, Eve slips out of the barn and anticipates the chaos about to erupt among the dead cattle, and she returns to the houses to clean up the messes they all made.
