Madeline
Shannon Myers pressed the flat red button on the large screen protruding from the dashboard. She was dangerously close to losing reception and wanted to end the call as soon as possible. The horrification of hanging up mid sentence on her new boss unnerved her. They were close to closing their series B funding for their Artificial Intelligence driven startup that would revolutionize how any normal person could trade stocks.
Over the past few years, Shannon’s life seemed to have changed quickly. After attending Penn State, she started her career on Wall Street and although her paychecks became rather large, it never quite satisfied her. She spent her spare time creating things. It started with doodles and turned into digital design. When she learned about how coding could improve her digital drawings, she learned to code and soon enough she was coding simple programs to help with her work. It was never supposed to amount to anything but when she met a tech millionaire who just sold his company to Microsoft, he liked Shannon’s technical prowess, and they developed the idea together.
What felt like overnight, she quit her Wall Street job and moved to Silicon Valley to work on this passion project. Although it was not the same, being in the Bay Area felt too close to the home she promised she would never return to. She was determined to not let the West Coast back into her newly created East Coast persona. She still wore her Jimmy Choo pumps and Armani pants suits to work every day, but her upbringing tugged at her like a life or death tug-a-war match.
It was not until she heard about her grandmother’s hospitalization, that she realized she could not put going home off any longer. She would need to return to her hometown and face the life she had abandoned. She packed her Louis Vuitton suitcase and pulled her Porsche from the underground garage and headed north past Santa Rosa.
Shannon signaled to merge into the single lane, behind a large truck. She glanced down at the rushing river below and it reminded her of her childhood. In the summers, the temperature would regularly be in the nineties and sometimes in the hundreds, yet they didn’t have air conditioning or a pool. They had the river.
It wasn’t just one river, there were plenty to choose from. There was the shallow one down the street for when no one wanted to take the Myers children to swim. There was one that was easily accessible, with picnic benches and grills, great for a day at the river. But then there was the favorite of the Myers children, at the end of a road that seemed to lead to nowhere. If you crawled down some boulders and through some trees, it opened to a white sandy beach, with a rock on one side for privacy and a rock on the other to jump into the deep cool water.
But gone were the days when Shannon would jump off a rock or wade into a river. It could turn her white Versace bathing suit a funky color, not to mention bathing in fish feces did not appeal to Shannon.
Shannon signaled to pass the truck in front of her. She pressed on the gas pedal and moved back across the yellow broken lines into her own lane. She missed coming into a head-on collision at ninety miles an hour with an F250 by a few feet. But it didn’t feel as dangerous as some trades she had made in her past.
There was roadwork ahead and a man holding a “stop” sign caused Shannon to come to a full stop and the truck she had just passed, risking her life, came to a full stop behind her. There must be roadwork on one lane of traffic on the two-lane highway.
She glanced to the side of the road to a tangle of blackberry bushes. Shannon had not had a blackberry in ages. Not one straight off the vine, anyway. Sure, she would buy a plastic clamshell of them at Whole Foods. But nothing was like picking them directly off the vine.
She thought back to the blackberry cobbler her grandmother would make. First, grandma would send the kids out with a mixing bowl from the kitchen to an unpicked berry patch. Since blackberries were free, they picked all the berry patches around the property. They picked the easy to get berry patches first. Then they would move closer to the road until they were squeezing into the prickly bush every time a car came. Anything they could do for just one more sweet berry, they would do.
“Can you reach that one?” One of the Myer children would ask another. “What if I boosted you up?”
They would then bring their findings to grandma Myer and she would cook up a blackberry cobbler that the children would devour in minutes, not savoring the fruits of their own labor. It was almost as though the picking and the treat were unrelated.
The road workman changed the sign to “slow” and Shannon crawled ahead, the truck chugging behind her.
The Porsche picked up speed and dodged redwoods as she approached a sign for “Camping 1000 FT Ahead” and the memories came flowing back in.
Shannon thought about the weekend during the summer they would leave home. It was not Disneyland or Hawaii. It was never far in fact. They would pack the car with gear and make the hour-long drive to the closest campground. They would pitch a tent, blow up a mattress and throw on some sleeping bags. They filled the days with swimming and fishing in the river. They filled the nights with campfires and s’mores.
It was the yearly trip that Shannon looked forward to every year. This was before Paris, before she ever went to Rome or London. New York Fashion week was not on her radar and Cannes Film Festival would sound like a ferry tale. A vacation in the woods would be too simple for her life now.
As Shannon pulled up the gravel driveway of the Victorian house, she grew up; she took a deep breath. She took in the overgrowth of the front yard and the peeling yellow paint. She was home.
She closed the car door behind her with ease and looked down. The surrounding mud was no match for her outfit. Her Gucci tennis shoes and Fendi velour tracksuit would need to be changed at the first chance she got. To what, she was not sure.
She approached her sister waiting for her patiently on the front porch with a drooling baby on her hip.
“Welcome home,” she said, reaching to embrace her older sister.
“It feels good to be back,” Shannon said, placing her Luis Vuitton duffle bags on the porch to free her arms to embrace her sister.
