Chapter 2 "River Side"

From the novel in progress "Lady of The Lake"

Rock Harbor is the first stop on the Cumberland’s sweep through Nashville, Tennessee, before boaters arrive at better known Riverfront Park in downtown Nashville, where all the tourists go to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon, listen to honky tonk, and buy cowboy hats at the obligatory souvenir shops.


Unlike Riverfront, Rock Harbor is a small marina, with a grimy little restaurant on the docks that serves varying chain-type seafood and burger fare, steaks, and tipsy girly mixed drinks. It sits almost directly across from a rock quarry and a smattering of houses that serve as the end to the Charlotte Park neighborhood of Nashville.


Grace lives in one of these houses, a house she was heading back to, now that she had satisfied her curiosity, the black red bottle still clenched tightly in her fist as she ran.


Most of the homes she passed by in the neighborhood were built to house the soldiers of World War II when they came home looking for a blue collar job and a white picket fence. Very few pickets are left, if any. If there are fences around the homes, they are mostly chain link, with a few wooden privacy fences on the most updated homes that sit right on the river, the ones that are actually worth enough to keep in what nobody wants anyone else to have: A dog, a nice car, privacy.


But the vast majority of dwellings were once quite identical. Two bedrooms. One bath. Eagle at the top of the eave above the front door. Asbestos or aluminum siding or brick, sometimes a mix of two. A nice rectangular symbol of what America was all about at the time: Economy, equity, hopes and dreams of becoming someone better.


Nowadays, especially closer to the quarry, those same homes are a little worse for the wear. If the siding is original, it is faded, dirty, and saggy. If it was replaced with vinyl, or was brick to begin with, it stands out as a home of good intentions. Maybe there’s a paved driveway here and there. Maybe some solar panels and a deck attached to the back. But most of these little boxes have been used and abused, passed from one working class family to another, all packed to the half attics full of expectations and missteps, tainted allegiances and bad habits. The histories seep from the outside in and permeate the people who fill them, poisoning the future with the reality of now. There is a silent promise therein: If the exteriors were all cleaned up, repainted, remodeled, the people inside might be able to tidy up their actual lives a bit easier, too.


Lawn ornaments of all sort scatter throughout these the yards: Painted concrete bird baths, old cars on blocks, Christmas lights and wire deer no one bothered to take down, Beware of Dog signs, strollers and tricycles long ago rusted, old tires, beer cans, cigarette butts, a dog chained within an inch of its life to a stake with no water, no food, no shelter. It’s clear with one look that the dogs and the kids in this neighborhood clearly didn’t get a choice in the lottery that leads to their fates. They’re always either running loose or too closely kept. There are few subtleties in Grace’s neighborhood and fewer in the lives of the people who live there.


Homes are literally steps away from the Interstate, their inhabitants sitting out on the sagging front porches smoking, having a beer, talking to neighbors, screaming at the dog, the kids. Just sitting there, watching cars go by, and watching Grace run home. Some are maybe waiting for the integral change in their lives to fall from the sky, and they act as if they’re inside when it happens, just like the ice cream man driving right by unless he sees you, they might miss it.


When Grace passes these dilapidated rectangles of despair, the inhabitants stare at her with what she assumes is resentment. Maybe confusion. What business does she have running down their street? She’s an outsider. No one around here runs, unless they’re being chased by one of the mutts that got off his chain.


The neighborhood of Charlotte Park, in West Nashville, is a lot like blue collar neighborhoods all over the country. There are hit and miss properties. People who work constantly, and people who don’t work at all. Thirty year old cars and newly purchased cars, an American model made up to look like a Bentley even, parked in the front driveways, and on the sides of the streets. There are nice elderly couples and rude young families of eight.


So no matter what type of person you might be, if you don’t have the money to live in a place where there is a hip coffee house and a few vintage shops, maybe a bar or two down the sidewalk lined streets, or where there are usually two nice cars parked invisibly in a three car garage, you live somewhere like the torn edges of Charlotte Park: A decent, fairly safe, blue collar, predominately white neighborhood where the have-somes mix with the have-littles.


It’s a place Grace’s parents called home since she was young. And for a short time, it was a place she had escaped. Now, here she is, back where she started, bringing with her the knowledge that from here, in this neighborhood, it’s a lot harder for lightning to strike twice.


So Grace ran still. Trying to push thoughts of all sorts out with her cold, stinging exhales. Thoughts of failure and defeat. Of completing a lifelong circle of almost and never enough. Of being the victim of her own wild imagination. And the new thoughts. Am I going crazy? What are these pictures in my head? Grace moved as if she could outrun the insanity she was almost sure she was being consumed by, that had found her in the flawed genes of her mother and father. She was back where she started, both in life, and literally, from the beginning of her run. Home.


Reaching her father’s house, Grace walked in through the back door, the sounds of Wheel of Fortune blaring from the living room only steps away.


“Grace, is that you?” Her father’s raspy voice strained over the applause.


“Yes. It is.” She walked in to the TV room to wave hello, tripping over her father’s cane and only just making a recovery before almost falling into the coffee table.


Her dad turned his head for a second, squinted at her, and shook his head. “Still don’t like you running around here. This isn’t Manhattan, you know.”


Grace grabbed a few peanut M&M’s from the dish next to the couch, popped them in her mouth, and shrugged. “It’s not that dangerous. I can take care of myself.”


“From a car coming at you? Grace, even you can’t stop a moving car.” He turned his attention back to his show, rubbing his right knee intermittently.


Grace knew better than to interrupt, and grabbed a few more M&Ms before making her way into her bedroom. She shut the door and pulled the nail polish back out of her sleeve again, suddenly feeling like she was thirteen, hiding stolen cosmetics and getting scolded by her dad all over again.


Grace held the morbid colored paint up to the light, watching as the reds and almost opaque black showed through the glass bottle. It was that color that flashed again over her field of vision, the image of that nail, but this time Grace sensed more of what was attached. The finger, the hand. And she felt now like she had seen a ghost. In her room, with her. She shuddered, focused on an object – the lamp in front of her, and the visions once again receded. But suddenly, the color of the nail polish became more than a varnish to Grace, the liquid in the bottle now eerily resembling a vial of fresh human blood.