My mother is afraid of being left behind. My father walks fast; her concern is not unrealistic. Growing up, I was treated to the story of the time my parents went food shopping and, groceries purchased, my father went to get the car, leaving my mother standing just inside the door with the bags. She watched him jog to the car, start the car, pull out of the parking spot, and then out of the parking lot entirely.
  They’ve done the same to me. On vacation in Colorado with my parents and my friend, Paige, I stood in front of the town post office and watched as my parents drove off down the street with Paige in the back. Laughing about it together later, I learned that Paige blurted, “Jackie!” and my parents assumed she was talking to me.
  “We had a kid in the car,” my father said. “The count was complete.”
  I am not afraid of being left behind. Even standing alone outside the post office I was sure they would come back. And sure enough, down the long block, the car jerked and its brake lights flashed on. I started running down to meet them.
  I am an only child. There are shelves of photo albums dedicated to me. Parents love their children to varying degrees, and express that love even more variously, but I have never been in any doubt. If I need reminding, I watch home videos.
  Here I am crawling to get the mail as it drops through the mail slot. Here I am in my mother’s arms, being danced around the living room to the Sex Pistols’ “Who Killed Bambi?” Here I am in the back yard, explaining that the ball I am holding is, in fact, a “bas-ket-ta-ball.” Here I am playing with Fisher-Price on my bedroom floor. Here I am setting up figurines of the Seven Dwarves at the far end of the kitchen and rolling a plastic ball in their direction. They scatter like bowling pins. Only Sleepy remains upright.
  One parent holds the camera, the other plays with me. When I watch these videos as an adult, after I have been working at a community learning center in Chicago for two years, I blurt out, “You’re narrating!”
  They are. “Is Sleepy still standing?” my father asks. “Did Doc fall down?”
  I scoot over and pick up Doc. “Doc fall down.”
  “Doc fell down.”
  I spend my day writing literacy grants about this. I point at the screen. “How did you know to do that?”
  They say I raised them.

  Together, we go to the cabin in Colorado. We go every year. We go until the pavement ends and keep going. The sage, stretching for the horizon on both sides of the road, is usually a soft brownish-green, but may bloom purple. We watch for cows in the road, and prairie dogs. We start to weave through foothills, along a reedy creek. We begin to climb another mountain. We watch for moose. We follow the signs for the lake where the cabin waits, a steer skull and a benediction hanging above the door: “Mi casa es su casa.”
  There is concreteness to my interactions at the cabin. Relational questions come down to, “You wash, I’ll dry?” or, “Do you need help lifting that?” or, “How much further to the waterfall?” My actions are equally clear. Change clothes once everyone has left the sleeping porch. Put on sunscreen. Use gloves to handle jagged wood. Bring the replacement toilet paper with you next time you go to the outhouse. Breathe; you’re at 9,000 feet.
  Clarence West, or Westy, held the lease to the cabin from 1953 to 1973, when he handed it over to his distant cousins and closest heirs, our friends with whom we now hold the cabin in trust. Westy is the one who stocked the bar and hung festive hats from the ceiling beams. He tacked the bearskin to the eastern wall and installed the modest taxidermy: three deer, one antelope, and one bighorn sheep head, all now matte with dust. He put beds on the screened-in-porch and made it a sleeping porch for his many guests. Since his time, we have made adjustments, sanding over the cabin’s sharper edges to make it more child-friendly, but for the most part it remains a time capsule. We sleep under Westy’s blankets. His photo sits on the mantle.
  The guest book is a stack of thick brown paper sandwiched between wood covers and bound with leather ties. It chronicles the comings and goings of Air France executives (“Merci, Monsieur Westy!”), and old air force buddies (“I woke at dawn to an old and familiar bugle call. Thought for a moment they’d caught up with me”). These men—and they were mostly men, although the occasional wife, the occasional woman from a nearby cabin, made it up for a weekend—drank heavily, but they also worked hard. They spun a bicycle wheel attached to a pie-charted board on the side of the outhouse to assign chores. Most chores involved running a generator to power a pump, drawing water from the lake to a tank on the uphill side of the cabin, or driving into town for more propane to fuel the indoor lights and refrigerator, or chopping wood, or canoeing to the campground for potable water. After the day’s work was done, Westy’s guests would bathe in the lake or shower beneath the propane-heated water tank on the side of the cabin. Then they would dress for cocktails.
  If to love something is to at least make an attempt to understand it, to love the cabin is to try to understand Westy. What kind of man made this place? Whose motions do we repeat over and over when we open the cabin and close it again? Batten down the canvas, chain the boats together, drain the water tanks, flood the outhouse: did he do these things alone sometimes? Or did he always have help?

  Once, when I was still in middle school, my father forgot to pick me up. It was snowing heavily, and as classmate after classmate climbed into their warm cars and departed, I began to envision him dead in a ditch. When only the principal and assistant principal remained, they brought me inside and asked me to call him at work.
  I dialed the wrong number at first. It rang and rang and I thought he must be dead. Then my mother’s work voicemail picked up. Hope was reborn with her stilted professional voice in my ear. “You’ve reached the office of Anne D. Hedeman. I’m not available right now, but—"
  I tried again. This time, I dialed correctly.
  “Hi Jackie,” said my father. “Don’t you have French today?
  The principals were staring at me. I was torn between relief and embarrassment. “You forgot me!” I wailed.
  He rolled up twenty minutes later in his blue Toyota Tercel, trailing apologies. The principals were charmed—they already liked him—and they stood for a while in their coats, chatting, before we all left. The principals locked the doors and went to their cars while I climbed in to the Tercel and flung my backpack into the backseat.
  I ran my hands along the sides of the cheap, fleecy seat cover. I watched the faded dice hanging from the rear view mirror shiver when my father pulled his door shut. The heater wheezed the same as the day before, but I was noticing everything, cataloguing it for some future where these things were less certain.
  "I didn’t forget you,” said Dad. “I just forgot I was supposed to pick you up.”
  I couldn’t see the difference, but I accepted what he said as the apology he intended. Actual forgetting—actually being forgettable—was a possibility that had never crossed my mind. For years, he narrated my every move so that I could learn them myself.
  It was easier to imagine him dead, and I steered myself quickly away from even considering the possibility. Alive, not skidded fatally into a ditch, my father could no more forget me than he could forget his own name. I was safe. My family knew each other as easily as breathing. Forgetting wouldn’t begin until the end of breath.

  Cabin pranks: the rubber rat in the sugar tin; the bear skin that could be draped over a sawhorse and placed in the yard after dark to scare outhouse-goers; the speakers Westy installed under the outhouse seats, into which he could pipe music on request, or simply yell, “Hey, lady, we’re working down here!”
  The cabin can still sometimes feel like a mirrored funhouse of natural and manmade surprises. One year I came back from a dark and thundery hike to find a mouse writhing on the carpet in front of the fireplace, dying, emitting distressed squeaks. Another year, we went outside after dark to find a collection of handmade stick figure dolls hanging from the fence, wearing clothing labeled with all our names. These were attributed to our friend Laurie, who accepted the blame so that her teenagers would think she was cool. It was only later that we discovered the truth. Laurie had not made the stick dolls. Instead, a friend of the other trustees had crept up the path from the parking lot by the light of the moon, strung up the dolls, keeping an ear on the sound of our laughter inside, and retreated to some bushes, where he crouched, waiting for our reaction.
  As a child, I was afraid of bears and coyotes. I was afraid of spiders. After multiple visits to the cabin down the way from ours, which burned at some point in the 30s, leaving a chimney and always-blooming plastic flowers, I became afraid of ghosts. These days, I’m afraid of men in the bushes, waiting to catch my reaction.
  I’m not sure how much of my fear is justified. I am a woman who usually lives alone and on her own terms, but at the cabin I stare out at the lake and its passing fishermen and I realize there is no escape from people who would seek to find me in this remote place. I am as far out as I can get, beyond the reach of cell towers, 911, and AAA. The only help I can expect out here is the help I allow myself.
  What I want most, and what I go to the cabin to find, is quiet. Solitude that calms my thoughts like the weighted blanket I still haven’t gotten around to buying. Every year, this retreat becomes more audacious. It seems as though I shouldn’t be allowed to be so unreachable, even though I have no one to look after. Nevertheless, there are landlords and bankers and auto insurance people who expect to find me at the end of a phone. There are people who notice my car’s non-motion in the parking lot back home.
  To be unavailable is the height of luxury; to presume that nothing will burn in your absence and that no one will miss you is some other thing.
  When I come back down off the mountain, I am always surprised to find that one of my friends has missed me. The entire premise of our friendship is that we are gone from each other; all of my closest friends live elsewhere; we text and we Skype and sometimes we travel long distances to see one another but we don’t hang out. It strikes me that I am always absent from their lives, but perhaps it doesn’t feel that way to them. Gone is a question of degrees. In graduate school, I removed myself from the world for days at a time, but I was never really gone. There and elsewhere I have tried to replicate the perfect cabin-unplug and never quite succeeded. There is labor involved in distancing. To be gone, I must go.

  My attention focuses in on the subject of memory.
  “Anxiety can make you forget things,” says my friend Tanya. We are both passing through Chicago on our way home for the holidays and have met up for lunch. After lunch we wander through Lincoln Park and down to the Apple Store; Tanya’s phone is broken and she has an appointment to have it repaired. “Like, three different times this semester I’ve forgotten my pin.”
  “Your pin?”
  “Like for the ATM. My PIN. I’ve had the same one for six years, and all of a sudden I couldn’t remember it.” Tanya takes a drag of her cigarette. “I remembered it eventually, but then I forgot it again. I thought I had a brain tumor. I got really freaked out.”
  “But you don’t have a brain tumor,” I ventured.
  “No,” she said. “I figured it out after talking with a friend. I realized that I’d been more or less in a constant anxiety attack all semester.”
  I am relieved, though I make appropriately sympathetic noises. I have been testing my mother’s memory, something I started to do when her own mother’s dementia grew too pronounced to ignore. I note how many times I have to tell my mother the same story, though admittedly sometimes my own memory fails and I can’t remember what I have said and what I have held back. I don’t always read much into these lapses of recollection on her side, since they coincide with an uncharacteristic volume of omission on mine.
  This testing is magical thinking—a watched pot never boils, a watched mind never fails—but it is also practical logic. If I watch, I think, I won’t be caught off guard as my mother and her siblings were caught off guard. Perhaps I will inure myself to inevitability. I will have convinced myself that I am ready to meet it. I will have begun to section off my heart.
  I cling to what Tanya has told me. At home, over break, I mention it to my mother. I phrase it somewhat differently. “Apparently,” I say, “when you’re really stressed out it can be hard to remember things.”
  “Oh!” she says as if this is news she has been waiting for. When I was little, my mother liked it when I called her a Worryfurry. The main symptoms of being a Worryfurry included making lists before bed, poking at one’s less vocally anxiety-prone relatives to delegate or expound on list items, and a growing fear of heights. My mother is constantly busy, constantly writing some paper or chairing some committee.
  It never occurred to me she might be as worried as I am.
  We are in my parents’ bedroom. Downstairs, my father entertains our Christmas guest, our friend Steve who joins us for the holidays every year. We’ve already been upstairs and absent from the festivities too long.
  We are about to go down when my mother says to me, “You have to keep an eye on me, because I’m not going to notice if I start forgetting things. You have to say something.”
  “Yeah,” I say, not quite meeting her eyes. And I will, I tell myself. I will.
  “You have to say something” is not a suggestion. It is not, “You should call your grandmother more often. It cheers her up.” “You have to say something” is imperative. It is the first turn toward the shifting of the scales. It is not inevitable that my mother will begin to forget, but it is inevitable that the current of caregiving will one day reverse itself. Maybe one day soon. What else have I been testing for? I have barely begun to consider caring for my parents, but I always do so with intense awareness that I will be alone for it.
  I have planned a leisurely life for myself. (To call it a plan would be generous.) A partner will come when they come, if they come. I am happy enough in my own company to contemplate a future where that second family never materializes, but when I think about inevitable decline—when I think about financial decisions and nursing decisions and living decisions and life decisions—I am frightened. I don’t know whether I can do it alone.
  I will. I will find a way to do it.
  I don’t let myself think of the next changing of the guard, fifty, sixty years in the future. Who will care for me?
  At the Apple store, the guy at the Genius Bar told Tanya her phone was beyond saving. “But you’re still under warranty,” he said. “We should toss it and get a new one.”

  I should explain the smell of the place. Beetle kill and blow down and fires have brought with them more sun, more heat on the remaining trees. The yard around the cabin smells like warm pine. At night, it smells like nothing. When it rains, I inhale petrichor so sharply I get lightheaded. And the sounds! Wind on the lake or in the aspen. The creak and snap of a dead, falling tree. A boat’s motor coming closer. The faraway rip of airplanes.
  On a hike to the top of a mountain we can see across the lake, my friend, Paige, and I once got ahead of everyone and were the first to reach a landmark meadow. We sat down, tired from the climb, and our conversation dropped off. We waited. A chipmunk hopped up onto my backpack and then startled away. Once it was gone, I noticed that we were sitting in the most profound silence I’d ever experienced.
  I could compare the feeling of stillness that accompanied the silence with the feeling of lowering myself into a warm bath or crying everything out, but what comes most readily to mind is some shrimp I ate once in Sweden, visiting my cousin and his wife. This shrimp had to be peeled. This shrimp was not the rubbery, unseasoned cocktail shrimp of academic receptions. It took only one bite of this shrimp to know I was ruined.
  To some degree, I will be after that stillness for the rest of my life.
  I can come close to approximating it, one thousand feet down. I can stare at that spot on the mountains across the lake for long minutes, not thinking much of anything or else thinking all kinds of things. My dad likes to fish down by the shore for the same reason, I think. Even if he’s not catching anything, he’ll stand there for hours. The one thing the cabin has in common with life in a large city is that it takes a long time to do anything or get anywhere. Time stretches and contracts. We don’t wear watches, so we can’t be sure, but it’s entirely possible that we regularly spend entire mornings sitting over plates covered with smears of syrup where there were once pancakes, catching up or telling stories we’ve told a million times before.

  I go to visit my grandmother. I am with my aunt, and she talks a mile a minute on the drive to the facility where my grandmother lives. She doesn’t pay attention to my replies, just continues to talk. I wonder whether this is out of nerves, or whether she has always been this way. I realize I am testing her.
  At the facility, my grandmother is waiting for us in the garden, beyond the gate. Entering the gate requires a code. So does exiting. Exit without first entering the code and you trigger an alarm. The facility is for people who can no longer remember things like codes. Most of them are no longer mobile. Those who can still get around can’t be trusted on their own.
  My grandmother knows that my aunt is coming to take her to her weekly hair appointment and then on to a lobster roll lunch, because my aunt has called ahead to remind her. She has forgotten I am coming and she tears up when she sees me. “Oh, honey,” she says. After decades in California, she still has something of a New England accent. She drops certain syllables and draws others out like she is squeezing and releasing a half-empty jug of maple syrup. Her accent is cozy and specific and it hasn’t changed.
  She knows me, but she has clearly forgotten my name. “Oh, honey!” she repeats, tearfully excited. I hug her. “I didn’t know you were coming!”
  “Surprise!” I say.
  “Where’s your sweater, Mum?” my aunt asks.
  My grandmother looks around her, but there is no sweater in sight.
  “It’s probably in your room,” says my aunt. “Let’s go look.”
  We move slowly inside and through the facility, and my grandmother gives me a tour. I know from my mother that my grandmother is prone to calling where she lives “this place,” as in, “Why do I have to be in this place?” She must be in a good mood, because not once on the tour does she appear any less than excited to show me around. She introduces me to every staff member we meet. “This is my granddaughter,” she says, unprompted. By the time we get to the dining room with its pass-through window into the kitchen, she has even remembered my name. “This is Jackie,” she says to the cook. “My granddaughter.”
  “Wow,” says the cook. He points between the two of us. “Jackie, Jackie."
  My grandmother is Jackie, too.
  I have asked myself whether my fear for my mother is a fear for myself. If this forgetting is inevitable, might I forget just as easily? It is possible, I suppose, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Between the two Jackies is a buffer.
  “My parents say hi,” I say, as we enter her room. Across one wall is a map of the United States where my aunt has helpfully attached family faces to cardstock and linked them to pins dotting the country with color-coded ribbon. My parents and I, I note, are yellow. The next time we drive out to the cabin, I imagine my aunt pulling the pins from the wall and reinserting them along the way. Does she move me from Columbus to Lawrence first, then move the family en masse to Burlington, Colorado, where we spend the night in a single-story motel with soothingly bland Ikea furniture? Or does she just gather our various pins and bring them together up near the Wyoming border?
  It's only a passing thought. By the time I arrive at the cabin, catch my first view, I've forgotten all of it.

  I go to the cabin and I struggle under the weight of the water jugs we fill at the closest campground. I think, “I should lift weights.” The thoughts I have at the cabin bear a strong resemblance to my thoughts about the apocalypse: “I should lift weights. I should have eye surgery. I should stock up on sunscreen. I should marry a man.” Or not necessarily a man, I editorialize. Just a partner who is strong and handy. Who knows how to hang a door. Who could take an intruder in a fistfight.
  These are the things I have convinced myself I need.
  Of my friends who have visited the cabin, only two have loved it, my childhood friend, Paige, and my cousin, Rachel, (green on my grandmother’s map). Every summer I wonder anew which of them is more likely to help me open and close the cabin when my parents are no longer able. Every summer I start to take notes on how the propane tank is connected to the side of the cabin, or how much Decon gets laid down for winter, but at some point I stop. I am distracted, or I assume it is easily remembered. The next year I have forgotten the tasks I’ve never performed, only observed. What I know about the propane tank is how quickly my dad runs into Corkle’s Oil when we’re in town, eager to drop it off so that we can all go get milkshakes.
  I know I will rise to the challenge, but I am unsure of myself and the work. I have no model for what that will look like, nothing but my imaginings of Westy going it alone.
  Though, I will not be entirely alone.
  We hold the cabin in trust with the family who once solely held the lease. There are almost twenty members of this family, all told. The many children have begun to have many children.
  These people are fun and thoughtful, perfect cabin stewards, but for a long time when our paths crossed I felt half snapped back into civilization. I go to the cabin to remove myself from the world, but there is no way to remove myself from what I bring with me. Confronted by this other family, whom I have known since birth, I would often become a zoomed-in version of myself: twice as intrepid, twice as hardy, twice as solitary, twice as uncomfortable when outnumbered by a preexisting community of people. The cabin was all theirs before it was part-ours, and although they are kind and generous people, around them I often struggled to locate myself in our shared paradise.
  As adults, we have all become more generous. Now, I think of the day I will go up to the cabin by myself, and I am grateful for them. With every year I get to know them better. I know now which of them I can rely on to lift the water jug, which will help clean the outhouse, which will plan meals. I can mix drinks. I can document our days. I can fish and shop for our meals. I can drive the canoe with its tiny motor across the lake to greet more of our guests.

  My pin with its yellow ribbon is back in Columbus and I am back in grad school when my grandmother dies. I get the news in a text or I get the news in phone call; I can't remember which. I am only just awake, holding my night guard in one hand and the phone in the other. "How are you?" I ask my dad or I ask my mom; I can't remember which. I hang up. I start crying.
  The crying catches me completely by surprise. Two other grandparents went without a tear. I was upset, but both in the case of her husband, my grandfather, and in the case of my grandmother on the other side, there was an element of relief, an end to prolonged, painful dying.
  All of this is also true when my grandmother dies, but at the same time I can’t stop thinking of the way she said “honey.”
  I sob for maybe thirty straight minutes, then I drive downtown and buy the most terrible lobster roll I have ever eaten. In the car, I cry again. Everything is new and strange. I had never cried over a death before, just experienced a numb and unproductive guilt that I should be crying. That or composing odes. Doing something. All the crying I do when my grandmother dies feels very productive. It feels acceptable. The Facebook post I make memorializing her also feels acceptable, if not particularly inspired.
  This world does not stop for this crying. There are work-related emails I have to send, though I have the luxury of sending these emails from home. I send a terse e-mail, then cry. Take a walk, then cry. By late afternoon I am all cried out.
  I lie on my red futon and wonder if all of this will usher in a new age of crying. It would be helpful, if slightly impractical, to be able to regularly purge myself of feeling like this, instead of carrying it around in my chest and upper throat. I wonder, too, what exactly I am crying about. I miss my grandmother, I miss her gentle voice, but–
  My mother calls. She has seen the Facebook post. "I love you," she says, and my chest fills with air.

  The summer before my grandmother died, the forest around the cabin caught fire and we were unable to make the trip. I spent that summer feeling as though I had swallowed a small whiffle ball. I couldn't breathe and I couldn't choke. In hindsight, it's easy to see that I was grieving, albeit prematurely. If the cabin went, my heart would flame with it and break. I have a need for such places, where existence is tenuous and subject to chance, and where the fundamentals of who I am get thrown more sharply into focus. I imagine my way around the place and I sense everyone who has been there before me. I imagine myself alongside them by the lake, in the woods, alone with it all.
  Or: not quite alone. It was a comfort, during the weeks of daily reports and calls to the sheriff, to imagine everyone there as though nothing was wrong. We would chop wood, bathe in the lake, make margaritas, climb through the thin air.
  Down the lake from the cabin, there is a small open-air chapel: wooden cross, wooden benches, upright stone pulpit. There used to be camper-led Sunday services in the 90s, but the practice died out. Now, we sometimes go sit there if we have someone to remember.
  The summer after my grandmother dies is the first summer we come back after the fire, and I forget to think about her there, just as I always forgot to think about her. But there is still something of her in the way I sit on a wooden bench, look at the cross with the lake beyond, and hum "How Great Thou Art" with my eyes all matted over.
  If Westy is the Patron Saint of West’s Guests, an invisible man, a force like fire, whose existence is a moving target, snuffed out through neglect or ignited with unpredictable sparks, then maybe my grandmother can be with me in the same way. Maybe anyone can. Imagining the cabin the summer of the fire, I imagined all of us like him. Invulnerable in our nonexistence, we will remain with each other, together, remembered even if the entire forest and the cabin with it burns to the ground.

Jackie Hedeman is a tea drinker and a Midwesterner. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Autostraddle, Entropy, The Offing, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @JackieHedeman.