Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) (8 page)

S
ettling into a routine was easy for Taryn, despite the excitement of the first few days on the farm. She generally tried to wake up a little bit before dawn so that she could shower, eat a quick breakfast of cold cereal and toast, stop somewhere along the way to grab a cola (she’d start cutting back the next day, she told herself each morning), and then have her easel and paints set up and ready by the time the sun broke through the sky.

It was still cool in the early summer morning air and the fog enveloped the house, cutting out the world around it. The river was only a few miles away and since the farm was located high on a ridge
, the thick mist rose from the valleys to meet the barns and edge of the yard like billowing curtains. As it dissipated late into the morning, she could start making out the subdivisions and signs of town, and that was always a little disheartening. For at least an hour or two, she was able to pretend she was trapped in time, alone in the mid-20
th
century, with the rest of the world blocked out.

When she first set out
, the air was chilly and she’d slip on a cardigan or sweatshirt. By afternoon, though, with the sun high in the sky, it would be humid and sticky and she’d peel off her outer layer and toss it on the ground. Then she’d continue painting in her tank top and cut off shorts with her reddish blonde hair slicked back in a ponytail. Sometimes she even started out with it wet; fresh out of the shower. She never saw anyone out there, not after the first day when Reagan showed her around.

At around 3:00 pm
, she’d stop for the day and load everything back into the car. Sometimes she’d head back to the hotel and grab a nap, and other times she’d find a place to eat first, depending on how hungry she was. She almost always snacked throughout the day on bananas, sandwiches she’d made before she left the hotel, and candy bars she kept in her cooler. She’d never been a huge eater and rarely ate more than one big meal a day, so she let her stomach guide her.

She wasn’t finished working once she arrived back at her hotel
. Although she put her paints up, she had other work to tend to. Taryn was basically a one-woman show and ran a small business that kept her on her toes. Keeping up with her correspondence was important. She was never entirely sure how the people who found her did, but they always seemed to locate her for her services. There were emails from all over the country, from historical societies to museums and private individuals, asking for her work. How much did she charge? How much of an existing structure did she need in order to recreate the entire thing as it once was? These were easy questions to answer, for the most part. She replied and asked for pictures, if they had any.

To others she answered, regretfully
, that no, she could not work pro bono, not at this time. She was not a nonprofit organization. She must eat just like everyone else. Her car also required insurance and there was rent to pay, despite the fact she was hardly ever there.

In an interview with a regional travel magazine last year
, the interviewer asked her how she chose her assignments. Surely, location had something to do with it. And, of course, location did. She loved to travel and going to destinations she’d never been to before (like the crumbling antebellum mansion in Mississippi or the amazing scenery in Montana) had definitely had its perks. Sometimes, too, she liked to stay close to home, so she often took jobs based near her home base of Nashville. But more often than not, she listened to the ones that called to her. That’s really why she requested the pictures. In college, when she was studying Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, even before she began her internship and started her hands-on experience at Belmont Mansion in Nashville, the images of some places called to her before others did. She had more than just an eye for some things—she had an
ear
for them.

Taryn was always keeping her eyes and ears out for the next place. Her feet itched for the next adventure and she didn’t like grass to grow under her feet. Not for long. Her bank
account wouldn’t let it, for one, and although she liked to pop back into Nashville to check on her apartment and make sure everything was still there, she preferred to spend as little time as possible in the cramped quarters. On the road, she had space; freedom to move around. In Nashville, she rented a studio apartment with a kitchenette and a range with one and a half burners that actually worked and a microwave with a short in it and an elevator that smelled like melting cheese.

She’d
owned a house once, with log cabin furniture and handmade quilts and knickknacks that had been picked up at antique stores all over the country and lovingly carted back home with excitement. Those were all in a storage unit and had been locked up for years. She wasn’t sure she could ever look at any of those again.

Answering her correspondence
took up a lot of her time. Catching up with her television shows and reading took up the rest. Her parents, before the plane crash in her teens, taught her that you could never have too many books going at once. She learned the same went with television shows. Taryn didn’t believe in just watching one show, she watched them all. An ex-boyfriend compared watching TV with her to watching a tennis match with a sea otter on speed. She never stayed with anything for very long, but she could follow everything very well. She easily switched from a comedy, a talk show, a murder mystery, and an infomercial within a matter of seconds and instantly know what was going on within all of them with little to no difficulty. It was a skill she proudly developed over time.

She could do the same with books.

Her parents hadn’t been book snobs, and neither was she. This was something that embarrassed Matt to no end. “How can you possibly read that?” he’d mutter with disgust as she’d gleefully delve into a trashy bodice-ripper without any apologies.

“The same way you can read
that
,” she’d point to the leather-bound copy of whatever pretentious classic he was holding. “I tried to read it at least a dozen times and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on.”

“It’s-
,” he’d start to object.

“I know who it is,” she would roll her eyes. “But that’s the problem with literature. So much of it seems to be so esoteric. It’s like it has to be weird for people to think it’s any good. I think
it’s kind of like the emperor’s new clothes and I’m just the one in the middle of the room telling everyone that he’s actually naked.”

Of course, she did like a lot of the classics, but she also liked to mix things up and read a little bit of everything. Mostly, she liked to get
Matt’s goat now and then and keep him on his toes. And he knew that. He’d slip her some Dickens to keep her honest and she’d read him VC Andrews to add some trash to his life and they were able to even out one another in that way. It kept their friendship fresh.

The routine kept the days going as quickly and smoothly as
possible, but there still wasn’t a whole lot she could do about the nights. They were a problem. Taryn always had problems with nights. She’d prowled as a child, something her parents were concerned enough about to take her to the doctor for over and over again growing up. A team of medical experts had diagnosed her with everything from sleep paralysis to nightmares and insomnia and later the ambiguous “night terrors.” Some nights she couldn’t sleep at all. She’d lay there and toss and turn and stare at the ceiling, a million thoughts running through her head at once, scrambled through her head like a remote control stuck flipping through all of the channels at high speed. When she’d explained this to one psychiatrist he’d decided she’d had ADD (no ADHD when she was a child) and she’d been put on medication. That made it worse. Some nights she went into an instant sleep and had nightmares so terrible she woke up screaming, grasping at the sheets in anguish and then wouldn’t sleep for days, terrified at the thought of closing her eyes. She wouldn’t dare tell anyone of the images she saw when she closed her eyes. The only one she came close to confiding in was her grandmother on her mother’s side; someone who also has somewhat of an inkling of what she was going through.

When Taryn was
eight, her grandmother pulled her up into her fluffy featherbed on a hot summer night and comforted her into her saggy armpits (that always smelled like baby powder) and whispered words into her ears she couldn’t quite remember these years later but, at the time, were comforting. Taryn had drifted off to sleep in the scent that was a little musty and a little sweet and had slept the first dreamless night she’d had in almost a year. She was only supposed to be there for a weekend, but her parents let her stay for a week and later, for a month. Probably relieved to be away from the drama, they ended up letting her stay there for her fourth grade year and enrolled her in school in the small town of Franklin, Tennessee, convincing themselves it was probably better for her to be out of the big city of Nashville anyway and since they were both out of town so much for research, Taryn ended up spending the rest of her childhood with her grandmother until she passed away eight years later, only a year after Taryn’s parents.

Nobody, not her friends and especially not her boyfriends, knew Taryn continued to sleep with her grandmother until the day she passed away and that, in fact, Taryn had been in bed with her at her time of death.

As an adult, she still found it difficult to sleep alone.

T
aryn was tired when she showed up at the house early the next morning. She stayed up the night before watching some show on the Lifetime Movie Network about a woman who sued another woman for stealing her husband. Taryn wasn’t completely sure why the women were fighting over the man in question, he didn’t seem like that much of a prize, but at two o’clock in the morning, it had seemed like a fine idea to stay up and watch it, and now she was paying for it. When she was this tired it was hard to focus and the world felt off-kilter, just a little bit more unreal.

It rained sometime during the night and the grass was still wet. Her boots were sticking in the ground and clumps of mud stuck to the bottoms with every step she took.
She was glad she’d ditched her usual summer sandals and was wearing something more practical.

The house looked even more
ominous in this light, set against the gray sky, but there were peaks of sunlight trying to squirm through the clouds and there were prickles of heat against her skin telling her it would still be a hot day if given the chance. It would burn off the fog soon enough. Such was Kentucky.

Within a few minutes
, she had set up her easel and paints and started working on the masonry, the hardest part of the house. Since part of the house had fallen down so many years ago, it was hard to imagine what it might have looked like, but the stones were still there and it wasn’t difficult to see their colors and textures. They still shimmered, even in the dense fog and strained light of the early morning mist. Where some people might have seen dark grays and somber tones, she saw jewels and coppers. Each stone had its own personality and she painted each one so that it told its story through her brush.  It was a shame, really, that the wing had collapsed, but it had done so in such a beautiful jumbled mess. She was considering doing an entirely separate painting of it just because it had landed so deliciously intricately, almost like a sculpture or Roman ruins. There were people who lived in mansions who would pay to have such structures intentionally built in front of their houses today in their gardens. She hoped someone would make use of the stones and come and cart them away and they wouldn’t end up in the landfill. Since Reagan was a contractor, she figured he would do something with them or at the very least donate them to the Habitat for Humanity Restore. Most of them were still in very good condition and probably of some historical value.

After several hours of what she thought was pretty good work on her part, she stepped back and admired her own work, gave herself a pat on the back, and took a break. “Well done
, old girl,” she said aloud and then
literally
gave herself a pat on the back because, after all, she believed if you didn’t do it, then nobody else would.

The sun had come out by then and the ground was starting to dry
, but it was still very muddy so she headed to the car and sat on the hood while she ate her lunch—leftover Subway from the night before.

Re
agan had taken the boards off the windows like she had asked, and now that the sun had risen in the sky it caught the upstairs window and the glare made it appear to wink at her. In fact, it seemed to look right at her. Shielding her eyes, she turned away. “Damn it,” she muttered, as she looked at the ground and took another bite. The glare was so bright, however; she couldn’t ignore it.

She had
grown used to the uneasy feeling she’d developed on the first day and thought she might be making friends with the house. It didn’t feel as unwelcoming to her as it did in the beginning and she was almost certain it had even preened a little today while she was painting it, as though it knew it was posing for something that would make it immortal.

Taryn was not a religious person
, and wasn’t even sure she believed in God, or one powerful entity at all, but she did believe in energy and nature and if there was something bigger than herself in the universe, she always felt it outside when she was alone. She never found it inside the walls of a church or listening to someone preach. Sometimes, while she was painting, she’d get so lost in thought and deep into her picture that she even thought she might becoming a part of it, or with the world around her. It was the closest thing she’d ever had to a religious experience and the feeling of euphoria it gave her was similar to the one she’d gotten off some pain pills when she’d had her wisdom teeth removed.