by Jay Quinn
After he finished and zipped up, he turned to the sink and roughly washed his face with cold water. Lifting his head, he stared into his red-rimmed eyes and saw the reflection of all the on-coming headlights and red tail lights he’d chased for the past twelve hours. The tiredness in his body was like an ache. He was stiff from sitting in the driver’s seat steering the truck across hundred of miles of highway, but his mind was still racing along just over the speed limit. He looked at his hands. They were curiously still, free of the fine tremor that assailed them when he was medicated. Absently, he tore off a length of paper towel and dried his face and hands.
Kai glanced at himself once more in the mirror as he considered going into the stash of painkillers he’d copped from Linda before she was arrested. He still had many miles to go, but if he treated himself to a pill now, it would go a long way to making the remaining miles more bearable. As alert as he was naturally the little blue pill would only take the edge off his racing thoughts and ease his hurting back. His level gaze in the bathroom’s mirror encouraged him to draw the little bottle from his other pocket and pluck out a pill. Anticipating the mild buzz it would bring, he popped it in his mouth and chewed it with his back molars to nullify the pill’s time-release properties. He smiled at himself as the pill’s bitter taste filled his mouth, and quickly stepped back out into the store.
After he served himself the frozen coffee drink he craved, he strode to the cashier’s counter and offered her three twenties. The woman didn’t even look at him. Sunk in her own orbit, she merely rang up his drink and told him she’d put the balance on his pump. She didn’t have to ask which one he was on; he was the only customer around.
Kai nodded in reply before stepping back out into the dawn. Reaching the side of the truck, he opened the gas flap and twisted free the cap. Before he could think about it, the pump was in place and the cold handle gripped in his hand. He watched the digital counter tick off the gas as it filled his tank. The lighted numbers’ dance seemed more appropriate for a Las Vegas casino than this brightly lit gas station in the middle of nowhere.
Once he’d filled his tank to the limit of the amount he’d prepaid, Kai quickly replaced the gas nozzle and capped the truck’s tank. Heidi stood watching him inside the cab. He sat his frozen drink on the hood of the truck and unlocked the door to let her out. She unfolded from the interior of the cab in a fluid pour of grey hair and muscle. Patiently she waited by his side as he reached into the cab for her leash and snapped it onto her collar. Once he got her leashed, he picked up his drink and ambled along with his dog to the grassy strip alongside the gas station’s pavement.
Heidi nosed her way along the trash-strewn side lot sniffing at pits of paper and discarded cups. Rather quickly she found a spot to relieve herself and took care of business without any coaxing. Kai knew the dog realized this was only a stop along the long way to somewhere else. Without as much as a look back at him, she turned and led him back to the truck. Kai glanced at his watch and stopped behind the pickup to open the door of the camper shell over the bed. He drew out Heidi’s stainless steel bowl after he poured a measure of dry food into it followed by the contents of a bottle of water over the kibble. He sat the bowl on the concrete behind the truck and lit a cigarette to savor while the dog happily munched her breakfast.
While she ate, Kai looked back toward the highway. The traffic seemed to be picking up. In the east, the sky had lightened considerably since he’d stopped. He took a deep hit from his cigarette and followed it with a long pull on the straw in his frozen mochacchino. The languor of the pill’s ease began to steal over him. He stretched and smiled. He knew he had to be careful with these pills. He’d seen how easily it was to get hooked. Linda had been a stone junkie before he’d ever met her. Now she was in jail and going through detox. The thought of it was a caution to him. He’d gone off his psychiatric meds long before he’d started seeing Linda, but seeing her had brought the benefit of enjoying the painkillers when she was in a generous mood.
In a way, Kai was glad Linda had gotten arrested. It saved him from having to break up with her. He’d known since Labor Day that she intended him to move in with her, but he couldn’t see that happening. It would have been easy to fall into her world of partying and pills while playing at being husband and wife, but besides the seduction of trading his psych meds for painkillers, he didn’t want to be anyone’s husband. What he’d been to Robin came closer to being who he actually was and that had scared him too.
Heidi’s nose banging the steel pan along the concrete under their feet brought him back to the present time. He gently patted her head and took the pan away from her and they walked back to the truck. The dog looked up at him expectantly and he said, “Come on girl. Time to get back on the road.” With that, he led her to the truck’s door and opened it for her to jump and scramble back into her place on the bench seat next to him. As she settled herself in and sank with a sigh into a tight ball, Kai climbed back into the truck and placed the cold plastic cup between his legs. He put the key in the ignition and started up the engine before he put on his safety belt and locked it in place.
Kai pulled onto the road and turned the truck toward the highway feeling good. His break from driving, walking the dog and sipping the cold drink had revived him. With a free hand he replaced the CD he’d listened to for the past few hours with a vintage Steely Dan CD he hadn’t listened to in awhile. As the music swelled he merged with the current of traffic heading south into the land of oranges and sunshine. It was going on six in the morning and he still had hours to go, but every hour from now on counted. Soon he’d be home where he felt safe. Soon he’d outrun everything he’d left up on the Outer Banks. Only Robin he regretted and as he switched lanes to pass a long distance rig he wondered if he’d really left him behind at all.
Chapter Three
THE NEXT MORNING dragged as Maura tried to keep her mind on her work at the office. Though she answered her emails and returned calls dutifully all the while she kept trying to imagine where along I-95 Kai might be at the moment. She’d driven the monotonous, straight lanes of the highway that ran in a straight line through Florida’s repetitive landscape until Palm Beach County. It was seven hours of sheer monotony after the hubbub around Jacksonville to Fort Lauderdale. It would be so easy for him to fall asleep, especially if he’d driven through the night.
A low-grade anxiety gnawed at the edges of Maura’s nerves. Cutting through that feeling was an ongoing struggle between anger at Kai for this sudden turning over of his world and hers and her delight at seeing him again after nearly ten months. She had to admit to a certain sad absence in her life when he was living up north.
At eleven-thirty she tentatively dialed her own home phone number thinking he’d pick up the phone if he’d arrived. In reply she only got her own voice mail message encouraging her to leave a message to herself. She replaced the handset in its cradle before the beep prompted any recording. Sighing, she looked at the files on her desk and then stood up abruptly, intending to go see Bill Kellogg, the partner to whom she reported. She had reached the conclusion she was useless at work and would be for the rest of the day.
Maura found Bill on the phone in his office, but he motioned for her to sit. Maura gratefully sank into one of the generous chairs in front of Bill’s desk and idly looked around his familiar office rather than try to pointedly ignore him while he spoke rapidly into the phone. The framed diplomas and state board’s licensure and other various framed documents of his career filled the space over a long row of bookcases lining one wall, while a large abstract canvas dominated the other. All of these things she had seen more times than she could count, so she swiveled the chair away from Bill’s desk and looked out the bank of windows on the wall behind her. Bill enjoyed his view, and as it faced north, he could afford to raise his blinds as high as they could go so he could look out over the tree tops to the sky beyond without a merciless pounding from the hot South Florida sun.
After
working for the man for over twenty years, Maura held him in high esteem. Bill Kellogg was kinder than either of his two partners, so it was to him that most of the staff brought their personal affairs when they conflicted with their office duties or schedules. Maura looked on him as a kind of avuncular uncle rather than as a boss. She could confide in Bill, and being a single mother with a particularly challenging child, she had always found Bill’s forbearance to be as generous as his advice was sound and comforting. Though it was generally known, but never discussed, Bill was gay. He was very circumspect about his personal life, and perhaps because of that trait, he made an excellent confidant as well as being a good manager of people. His careful grooming of Maura’s professional demeanor had made her into a prized employee. Bill’s personal discretion had also allowed Maura to bring her quite human concerns and shortcomings to her boss without fear.
Bill finally said his goodbyes at the conclusion of his phone call and Maura swiveled her chair back to face him. He hung up the phone and brought his arms over his head, arching his back in a long, satisfying stretch. Maura smiled and said, “That sounded like it ended well.”
Bill brought his arms down to rest on his desk and returned her smile. “We’re working on a new bid. I don’t want to talk about it yet. I don’t want to jinx it. But we need the work and it’s a big project.”
“Sounds exciting,” Maura responded happily. “When do I get involved?”
Bill shook his head and took a sip from his coffee cup. “Not for awhile now. We’re at the talking point still. I’ll let you know when it gets to the part where you can do your magic.” Bill winced at his coffee cup and sat it aside. “What can I do for you this morning?”
“If I get you a fresh cup of coffee, can I take the rest of the day off?” Maura asked teasingly.
“I can get my own coffee,” Bill said ruefully. “But you can tell me why you need the rest of the day off.”
Maura’s smile faded as she looked in her boss’s eyes and said, “I got a call from my ex-husband yesterday warning me Kai is on his way here, to move in again.”
Bill whistled and gave Maura a sympathetic look. “Let me guess, your ex-husband’s call was the first news you’d had about this and you’ve been worried and wondering ever since when Kai is going to show up and why, by the way he’s moving m on you again.
“Pretty much,” Maura told him wryly. “If he drove straight through, which he led Rhett to believe he would, he ought to be getting here by lunch today.”
“Maura, how old is Kai now?” Bill asked as he pushed himself away from his desk and crossed his left leg one over the other.
“Twenty-seven last July,” Maura told him, “and still not grown.”
Bill picked up a pen from his desk and idly turned it end over end for several moments as he looked past Maura out the windows behind her. Finally he looked her in the face and said, “Maura, sooner or later, you’ve got to stop pulling him out of the holes he’s stepped into. What do you intend to do with him once he gets here?”
Maura blinked once and willed herself not to cry. She had sat in this spot and talked to Bill about Kai so many times over the years, and now the frustration threatened to engulf her.
“I suppose I’ll listen to him, find out what’s wrong this time, and then help him work it out. Damn, Bill, that’s a mother’s job. I wish sometimes I’d had a puppy instead of a child. With a dog, you’re on the hook for only about fourteen years. With a kid, you’re obligated for life.”
Bill nodded and without letting his eyes move from her face asked, “What does Matt Jenkins think about it?”
Maura was a bit taken aback. She assumed everyone knew she and Matt were together, but it wasn’t really discussed. Because she never discussed her relationship with Matt at work, the last thing she expected Bill to ask her about was Matt’s feelings on the subject. Still, honestly she replied, “When I told him yesterday, he didn’t make any big deal about it. He told me I had a ‘boomerang kid.’ He kind of didn’t react one way or the other.”
“That’s because he’s a smart man,” Bill told her. “Everyone knows you don’t give unsolicited advice to a mother about her kids. But after all these years, I think you and I are close enough that I can put my two cents in. You have a great thing going with Matt and you deserve it. Don’t let Kai waltz back into your life and interfere with that, Maura.”
Maura nodded. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t already considered. The last thing she wanted was to let Kai move back in and upset the satisfying routine she and Matt had built together. But, Kai was her son. Besides that, there was all the guilt and emotional baggage Kai personified as an indictment against her notions of her motherhood. Even the psychiatrists had told her the genetic reality of her part in Kai’s bipolar disorder. In a way, it went way beyond any pure maternal instinct she had to protect her fledgling offspring. Part of it was genetic debt for which she shouldn’t be blamed, but she’d long assumed that blame.
She looked at Bill, all this considered, and said, “Bill, I like my life as it is right now. Matt and I are good. I love my job. I’m not in debt. For the first time since Kai was born, I finally have my life back. What you’re telling me makes perfect sense, but the fact remains, I have to sort Kai out, again, in order to keep my own life running smoothly.”
“Well, you’re a hell of a woman, and mother, I’ll give you that,” Bill said as he uncrossed his legs and pulled himself up to his desk. “By now, most parents would have told Kai.it was swim or sink time. I’m not sure that isn’t what you should tell him when he gets here. Twenty-seven is far too old to be running home to mommy. But you’re going to do what you think is best, and over all these years, you’ve invariably been right.”
“Thanks, Bill,” Maura said.
“Go on. Get out of here,” Bill said as he picked up the handset of his phone. “Let me know if you need any help.”
“I will,” Maura said as she stood. “But I’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. “
“Good luck,” Bill said as he began pecking at the keypad on his phone.
It didn’t take Maura five minutes to add an “out of office” prompt to her email and change the message on her voice mail saying she’d be out the rest of the day, but back on Tuesday. She gathered her purse and briefcase and without saying goodbye to anyone else, she walked out of the building into a beautiful October morning. On the drive home, she anxiously ticked off the landmarks of her short commute, the same one she’d been making all those years. What she noticed was the change in the light. That was really the only way you could tell autumn had arrived in South Florida. The sun was kinder, more benign than it had been only weeks before. Though it was still eighty degrees, the sky was a fall blue, not the white-hot scald it had been in August.
As she drove, Maura remembered how fall used to look on the Outer Banks. The sea oats on the dunes had turned to gold and everything but the shadows were burnished as well. The shadows reflected the grey-green crash of the waves. It was altogether different from here, so much farther south. As a small child, Kai had hated the long stretches of windy gray up on the Banks. He’d whine, “Mama, make it warm. Mama, make it summer soon.” She imagined him fleeing the impending winter up there for the warm winters he’d known from the time he was six. When he was twelve and wanted to go to live with his father, she’d packed him off as soon as school had let out. By that February, Rhett had loaded him on a plane after calling Maura and telling her Kai hadn’t spoken in weeks or eaten much in the same span of time. Maura had picked him up at Fort Lauderdale International and found him to be a haunted wraith. He had grown by inches in height, but seemed awkwardly out of touch with his own body. He definitely was out of touch with the world. Still, back in the cheerful sunshine of Sunrise, she could almost watch him reclaim himself from the black depression that had hold of him. By the end of March, his psychiatrist had him restabilized on his meds, which Rhett hadn’t bothered to see he took, and Maura had her son back. Those wer
e the lithium and Ascendin years. Kai put on weight to balance his increased height and their life settled back into its comfortable routines. Now, Maura found herself wondering how he would look coming home this time. Not knowing if he was on his meds or not, she had no idea how he’d appear.
At just before eleven, Maura turned into her subdivision. From the first small bridge that passed over the canal that ran behind her house, she could see her back yard and briefly the back of the house. It was empty. But as she turned the corner onto the street that ran in front of her house, she saw Kai’s big blue Ford F-150 pickup in the drive. It sported a new camper shell over the bed, and as she pulled into the drive she noted he had respected the rule of leaving the side of the drive closest to the front door reserved for her car. He was home!
Knowing Kai was home, safe and sound, Maura found the excitement over his arrival she’d been holding back fill her with a visceral rush. She quickly gathered her purse and briefcase, shut off her car and made her way into the house. Before she could put down her purse and keys on the shelf in the bookcase Kai had built many years ago along one wall of the foyer, she was greeted by a large, lean hound who appeared from the hall leading to Kai’s bedroom. The dog stopped abruptly it the nexus of the foyer, hall, and great room and barked at her with enthusiasm.
“Kai?” She called out. “I’m home. Where are you?”
“Hush Heidi!” he said before she saw him. In an instant he appeared next to his dog, who he soothingly stroked on the back of the neck. He lifted his eyes guiltily and with a ghost of a smile on his face said, “Hi, Mom.”
He was taller than she remembered, and his shoulders, leanly muscled, stretched out on either side of the tight white tank undershirt he wore. From his narrow waist, a pair of camouflage cargo shorts hung, revealing a long stretch of thin calve to his slender bare feet. He’d buzzed off most of his hair, except for a short curling bit of ash blond thatch on top of his head. While he didn’t look as emaciated as she expected, he was still on the thin side. But for the slight swell of his stomach under the ribbed T-shirt, he looked much as he had when she’d seen him last Christmas.