“We heard you bought a luxury villa in the Alps. We came to live with you and make peace,” my daughter-in-law declared at my door, pushing her luggage past the threshold.
I didn’t block them. I just stood there, one hand still damp from the stems of wildflowers I’d been arranging in a chipped mason jar, listening to the echo of her words in my mountain sanctuary.
“Make peace,” I repeated silently.
Behind them, the late-model black sedan idled in the gravel driveway, its engine purring with the confidence of money, old Nashville suburb money that had always looked down on my working-class life. The car’s sleek shape looked absurd against the backdrop of the Swiss Alps, all jagged peaks and evergreen forests and a sky so clear it hurt to look at.
I’d been living here for three years now, running Haven Springs Recovery Center out of what had once been a modest lodge. I’d traded the flat gray skies of Ohio and the fluorescent lights of hospital corridors for crystal air and mountain silence. The flag I kept neatly folded in a shadow box in my bedroom, my little piece of home, was one of the few reminders left of the life I’d walked away from.
A few minutes earlier, I’d been alone in the main hall, arranging wild lupines and alpine daisies into a mismatched collection of mason jars and old glass bottles I’d collected from a flea market in Colorado on my last trip home. The afternoon had been peaceful, the kind of quiet you never get in American suburbia anymore, no leaf blowers, no delivery trucks, no sirens. Just the whisper of wind through the pines and the distant rush of a glacier-fed river.
Then I heard the car.
The engine sound rose up through the narrow valley like a blade, sharp and unwelcome. I paused, my hands still gripping the stems of purple lupines, and listened as the vehicle climbed the winding gravel road toward my sanctuary.
No one was expected today.
The women staying at the center had gone down to the small Swiss town below for their weekly therapy session with Dr. Keller, the local psychiatrist who’d become part of our extended community. Saturday afternoons were usually mine, my time to tend the flowers, check supplies, make strong coffee in the battered stainless steel percolator I’d brought from my kitchen in Nashville, and breathe in mountain air without interruption.
At fifty-nine, after thirty-seven years as a nurse in hospitals, from a tiny county emergency room in rural Kentucky to a busy urban trauma center in Denver, I had finally learned the value of solitude.
The engine grew louder. Closer.
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