Me at 50's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Years before the airport in Perth, before the Foo Fighters night, I lived in a rented basement suite under a couple who took the upstairs. That summer they brought in tenants for their spare room. A man and a woman, quiet in the wrong way. He wouldn't meet my eye at the mailbox. She smiled too fast. I kept to myself and kept writing. My stories were the good part of that year. I had rebuilt Racum Raccoon and Fawn and Spot into a proper website for the grandkids and any child who wandered in. Years of work. I typed on the tablet at the kitchen table each night, thumb sore, coffee cold. The site had a small following. A teacher in Ontario wrote to say her class read a story every Friday. The first sign was the credit card. Two charges from Walmart I had not made. Then three. I called the bank and cancelled the card. I told myself it was a skimmer at the gas pump. The second sign was worse. I opened my site on the tablet one morning and the home page was gone. In its place: photos I will not describe. My name still at the top. Fawn and Spot buried under filth. I sat at the table and my hands shook so hard I dropped the tablet on the wood. I did not cry. I got angry in a clean, useful way. The loud woman I used to be stood up inside me and took the wheel. I called the police first. A constable came within the hour and took a statement. I told her about the upstairs tenant, the charges, the timing. She wrote it down and said they would speak with him. She told me to change every password from a device he had never touched. I walked to the library that afternoon and used a public computer. I bought a new domain name. Different word, cleaner, mine. I locked the account behind a password he could not guess in ten lifetimes. Then I came home and I built the site again. From nothing. I had the stories in a binder because I never trusted the cloud with the handwritten drafts. I typed the first one back into a blank page on the tablet that night. Racum Raccoon, chapter one. Then chapter two. My neck ached. I kept going. It took me three weeks. The new site went live on a Sunday. I emailed the teacher in Ontario the new address and she wrote back the same day. Upstairs, the couple were gone by then. The police had come a second time and the landlord had asked them to leave. I sat on the back step with the tablet on my knees and refreshed the home page. Fawn. Spot. Racum. My name at the top where it belonged. My hands were steady. I had lost years of work and won something else back. I did not know its name yet, but I could feel it settling in my chest like a returning tenant.