Goldie and the Three Wisconsin Bears

The sun sets, and the moon rises in front of me as I walk down a path just wide enough for a car. Relief fills me when I finally reach a two-story cabin. Relief and apprehension…

The house isn’t completely terrible; I admit after a few moments of observing it under the moonlight. It’s made of cute little logs and features a gabled front porch with a swing hanging down. It kind of has what I used to call cozy potential back when I would help my friends at Emory decorate their dorm rooms for free.

But other than those cute touches, everything else about the house is stark. Plain front door. No smoke coming out the chimney. No lights inviting weary travelers off the road. No sign whatsoever of who might live here.

The lack of personal effects combined with the cold Wisconsin night makes the cabin seem almost as ominous and forbidding as the sign at the end of its road.

But it’s not like I have a huge selection of places to spend the night.

Taking a deep breath, I walk up the three steps to the door and knock. My heart feels like it’s about to thunder straight out of my chest as I wait for whoever owns the cabin to come to the door….

No answer.

My heart sinks. But I try again, this time knocking a little louder.

Still no response.

I try the knob. Of course, it’s locked.

This is probably somebody’s summer vacation cabin. And unlike me, who left her car unlocked at the side of the road with the keys still inside it, most people aren’t idiots.

This can’t be happening. I barely made it through last night when I was sleeping in my car with a blanket. There’s no way I’ll survive a night in the woods. With whatever animals living out here in the middle of nowhere.

But the slim windows on either side of the door look old. So maybe…

I unzip my hoodie and wrap it around my wrist. Then, with a silent apology to whoever owns this place, I punch my fist through the left side window. It shatters on the first hit. Thank goodness. I carefully stick an arm through the now empty pane to unlock the door.

It’s a latch handle—another reason to send up some thanks. With just a little maneuvering, I’m in.

I find a light switch on the wall, flip it on…and nothing.

This must really be a vacation cabin if the electricity’s turned off. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. No electricity means no current occupants. But save for the shafts of moonlight shining through the windows, the cabin’s pitch black.

I’m not loving the thought of moving around in the complete dark, but the pinching hunger in my stomach reminds me to be brave. I have to find something to eat. For the life growing inside of me.

I touch my way across the room, knocking into what feels like big, heavy furniture and smooth wooden walls until I come to a swinging door.

Thankfully, the kitchen is much brighter than the living room. Its entire back wall seems to be made out of glass, and the moonlight streaming through the windows is enough to guide me to the refrigerator. And this time, I easily avoid the room’s primary piece of furniture, a circular table. It has four chairs situated around it, so maybe this cabin belongs to a family.

It was always just me and my mom growing up in Atlanta, and most of my school friends were in the same single mom boat. But when I went to Emory, I’d encountered girls who did things like meeting up with their families at vacation cabins on the weekends. Cabins that might have looked like this. Who knows, even though we were attending the same school, those nuclear family girls lived in a different world from me.

If they had won the Princess Georgia beauty queen title, that would have been enough. They never would have lowered themselves to stripping to make up the difference between the scholarship money that the pageant provided and their real living expenses. Those nuclear family girls had dads who hadn’t abandoned their mothers. And their mothers weren’t dead.

Those girls were protected and loved. They had choices. None of them would have dated Tommy, much less stayed with him after the first slap….

A familiar mix of regret and shame washes over me. Why did I believe him so easily? Why hadn’t I listened to my best friends, Cynda and Billie, who’d worried from the start that he was too controlling? Why had I insisted on pretending to myself and others that I was living in a fairy tale when it was really a nightmare?

But that’s enough dwelling on the past, I decide. I’ve got to focus on the future for the sake of my baby. So I shake off the many regrets and make my way over to the refrigerator.