Meet Me

Meet Me

By Heather Ann Martinez

It had been weeks since the fire swept through the land. It did not discriminate between the homes of the very wealthy and the very poor. No one knew what would remain if anything at all. As the smoke lifted, the residents of this small valley returned to sift through the rubble. Among them was a woman named Dragna. She had been a gypsy of sorts most of her adult life. She carried very little with her but favored one treasure among many. It was a key that had been left behind when she was forced to abandon her vintage RV. Her mother had given her this key before she passed away a few months earlier. Dragna had begun searching for what door this key unlocked. She didn’t know much about her mother or why her mother gave her the key before she passed away. The key was not connected to any pieces of paper. The markings on it were not very clear. Dragna’s mother carried the key with her around her neck. Dragna noticed that she rubbed it often as someone would a charm for luck. It was obvious it had value to her mother.

There were moments when Dragna wanted to abandon the search for answers. She wasn’t sure what she would find behind that locked door. Her mother had been a mystery to her most of Dragna’s life. Dragna’s mother left Dragna to be raised by her younger sisters Willow and Aleen. Dragna’s mother Alva, thought it best for Dragna to be raised in one place. Alva traveled with others who refused to have an address for more than a few days. She had not intended on becoming pregnant. Willow and Aleen were teachers. They stayed with their aging parents until their parents passed away. They raised Dragna as best they could. They knew Dragna would leave them as soon as she was old enough. She wanted to see the world like her mother did, but Dragna followed a different path. She traveled alone. She worked day jobs as needed and eventually saved enough to buy a used RV. Dragna did not trust people very much. She knew there were a lot of dangerous people out in the world. She took a lot of jobs in restaurants and dry cleaners and factories. She didn’t stay anywhere long enough to make friends and rarely revisited the same city. She did stay in contact with her aunts. They didn’t dare ask her to return home to them. They knew she was not meant to have the path they chose.

One night, Dragna called Willow. Dragna told her about the key and about being with her mother in the hospital when she passed away. Willow asked Dragna how they connected. Dragna told Willow Alva had been searching for her when she found out she was dying. They met again in the mountains of California. Alva only told Dragna that there was so much she wished she had the time to tell her. Toward her end, it was as if Alva spoke in riddles. She didn’t make any sense to Dragna. Dragna wrote down some of the words her mother said over and over again like cabin and fishing and ice cream. Alva smiled whenever she said these words and she rubbed the key around her neck often. Dragna asked Willow if she knew what her mother was trying to tell her. Willow speculated that it had something to do with Dragna’s father.

My father, Dragna thought. Her mother never talked to her about her father. It was always obvious that Alva didn’t want to talk about him or who he was. Alva never stayed long enough on visits with Dragna growing up to talk about her past. Dragna always felt as though she were walking on eggshells whenever her mother came to visit. She was careful not to ask her mother too many questions. She knew her mother would leave sooner rather than later if she felt she were being interrogated or held back in any way. Alva was a free spirit living a life without a zip code or forwarding address. She didn’t want to be tied down with responsibilities. Aleen wasn’t at all surprised when she dropped Dragna on her. Aleen took pity on Dragna and vowed to care for her. She knew Alva would not be a good mother to her and would resent her in the end. Aleen and Willow always felt as though they had to clean up after Alva.

When they were younger, Alva wrecked their father’s car. Willow took responsibility and told their father she had been in an accident. Willow was the eldest of the sisters. She was also the closest to their parents. She knew that her father would be more cross with Alva than with her so she took the blame. Willow took a job after school to pay for the car repairs. Alva did what she always did when she should have been held accountable for her actions. She ran.

Years later, she came back with a baby. Then she left again. Alva wasn’t there when her parents died. She grieved their loss in her own way. Willow knew that Alva wasn’t going to change. By the time Alva was twenty-five, she knew most of ten languages and had been to more than forty countries. She wandered the world. She was always looking for love and found herself in the arms of many men she should never have had more than one drink with. She did tell Aleen that Dragna’s father was different from any other man she had met before or after him. Aleen never pressed her for more information beyond that. She loved Alva and always wanted her to come home. She didn’t want to give her reasons to stay away from her family.

Willow suggested that Dragna come home. She said that she had a box of Dragna’s things that might be helpful to her in finding out what the key belongs to. Dragna drove all night to get back to her aunts’ home. She was always grateful they had space for her RV. In the morning, Dragna opened the box. Sitting on top of clothes, photo albums and jewelry was a lockbox that neither Willow or Aleen had seen before. Dragna pulled out the key and turned it into the keyhole of the lockbox and it opened. In it, there was a student identification card for a student at Stanford University. It was of a young man and the school year was shortly before Dragna’s birth. Underneath the ID were letter with stamps that were never mailed out and a photograph of Alva with a man standing behind her by a sign that said “Half Cresent Lake.” On the back of the photograph were the words meet me.

Aleen told Dragna that she had been to that lake as a child with her fifth grade class. She said it was a popular fishing spot. Dragna suspected that the man in the ID was her father and she read through the letters her mother never mailed to him. Her mother said it was the biggest regret of her life leaving him. She knew she didn’t fit in with his friends or family. She met him at a bar when he was a junior at Stanford. She beat him at a game of cards. When her friends were ready to move on to the next town, Alva stayed. She fell in love. For a while, she tried to be happy with him. She said in the letters that her favorite place to go back to in her memories was fishing at half crescent lake with him and eating homemade ice cream.

When Alva was introduced to his parents, they told her all the plans they had for their son. They told her she didn’t fit into those plans. She didn’t come from a family they knew. She wandered around like a nomad. She didn’t have any aspirations, and her goals of seeing more of the world did not appeal to them. They asked her to leave their son quietly. She knew they were right. She knew she couldn’t offer their son much of anything. One night, she took his student ID and the photograph of them that was taken at the lake and she left. It wasn’t until later that she realized he wrote the words meet me on the photograph. When she did go back to the cabin on the lake, he was with someone else. Alva was pregnant and she went home to her sisters after having the baby.

Now that Dragna had his name, she decided to go to the lake. It wasn’t very far from where she had grown up. She drove around the lake looking for the place where the photograph was taken until she found it. She got out of her RV and started looking for a cabin and walked a few feet. The cabin had smoke coming from the chimney. She knew someone was there. She walked a bit further and saw a young man fishing on the dock. Dragna tried to hide behind a tree but he caught a glimpse of her and told her she didn’t need to hide. He saw her. Dragna started walking toward the dock and the man put his fishing rod down and went to meet her. She asked him if he knew Charlie Ryman. He told her Charlie Ryman was his father. She asked him where she could find him. He told her his father passed away a few years earlier. The doctors said he died of a broken heart. He had suffered from depression since college.

Dragna asked him if he ever heard of her mother Alva. The young man said that his father never stopped talking about Alva or how happy his time with her was. His parents were in an arranged marriage to please their families. Charlie kept the cabin and came back to it often always hoping that Alva would some day meet him there. Dragna told him that she was Alva’s daughter and she believed Charlie was her father. At first, the young man was stunned. Then he looked at Dragna more closely and invited her to catch fish with him. He told her there was a lot to catch up on before he introduced her to their other brother and sisters. He told her it was good that she met him first. He was Charlie Jr. He told her that they always thought Alva had a child and their grandparents prevented them from ever seeing each other again. Charlie Jr. told Dragna that his father never gave up hope of meeting her mother on this very spot. He always told his son to welcome her if she ever did come or any child came looking for him. Charlie Jr. told Dragna he had been expecting her to come for a long time.