Free Echo Lake: A Novel by Letitia Trent Page B

could only remember clearly two things: the blue border around the program she had used to input statistics and numbers and the curious ping sound that the program made when she typed something in incorrectly. This was how her days had been filled, and she couldn’t even remember how it felt or exactly what she did. Emily was alone, but not lonely.
    Living as she did in Heartshorne felt like camping. She drove to town every other week for toilet paper and weekly groceries and drove back and loaded up her refrigerator so she wouldn’t have to go to the convenience store and subsist off of hot pockets and chicken strips. She was alone with herself and sometimes so bored that she read books she hadn’t cracked since college: the essays of Montaigne, The Confessions of Nat Turner , and The Catcher in the Rye , which made her miss being young enough to be charmed and not annoyed by Holden Caulfield. The days were long and warm. And her house, not yet cluttered with the things that she would inevitably buy to fill it, was all empty spaces and bare corners. She hoped she’d never fill the space. She practiced being there in all of that empty, in lying down on the living room carpet and staring at the white ceiling until she could memorize the stipples of paint and cracks. So much had passed her by in her previous life. She wouldn’t forget so much now, she decided. She wouldn’t be the kind of person who couldn’t remember what she had done everyday for years or exactly how the places she spent her time had looked.
    She hadn’t met many people in Heartshorne yet, aside from the church meeting. She wasn’t quite sure where people lived. The main roads and highways were all but deserted, dotted only with infrequent houses and convenience stores and churches, but each afternoon a schoolbus full of children passed her. She’d driven her car down the dirt road that went past her house until it branched off in two smaller dirt roads, each labeled with a direction and a number: SW 56, NW 305. She supposed all of the houses were there, but where did they go? Did the roads even out and widen and become pavement again? There were mazes of roads and houses beyond hers, she imagined, but she feared getting tangled up, her car stuck in a muddy ditch miles and miles from a house or phone. Her cell phone didn’t work out here—didn’t work until Keno, where she didn’t much need it anyway, there being nobody to call. She had called Eric once, when she arrived, to let him know where she was. He had said little when she called and she heard the faint sound of music in the background. He asked her how she was, but she could hear the boredom in his voice, so she’d told him that she had a job interview to go to and hung up. But she knew Cheryl at Rod’s Swap Shop, and often visited, making excuses about having to stock up on supplies, though there truthfully wasn’t much there she had any use for. She could only use so many beer cozies and wind chimes and American flag flip-top lighters.
    How do you do it? Emily had asked Cheryl one day when visiting to buy an umbrella and plastic cups. How do you manage to stand here for eight hours a day? You don’t even have a chair!
    Cheryl shrugged. I’m just standing here, she said. It’s not rocket science. I mostly have to keep myself from falling asleep. That’s the hardest part. Cheryl chewed gum when she spoke, a habit that reminded Emily of being a teenager. Chewing gum and sitting in your room, the smell of nail polish and magazine perfume samples, watching television for clues about how to be an adult and worrying deeply about how well a particular boy liked you, a boy who you would probably never see again after high school. They’d all be gone, all of your friends, probably, scattered. Those were the beautiful years before you understood how temporary other people can be.
    Do you know anything about the Free Will Baptist Church? Emily asked. She hadn’t gone back since the