by Matt Shaner
The Reserve
By
Matt Shaner
Eternal Press
A division of Damnation Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998
www.eternalpress.biz
The Reserve
by Matt Shaner
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-439-0
Print ISBN: 978-1-61572-440-6
Cover art by: Amanda Kelsey
Edited by: April Duncan
Copyright 2011 Matt Shaner
Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
1st North American, Australian and UK Print Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedicated to:
My son Carter,
I hope you’ll be proud of me.
Prologue
Beginnings
You might recognize me. Then again, you might not. It’s been a long year and we, my family and I, are leaving the spotlight. The networks have stopped calling. The movie options are dropping figure by figure. The news vans disappeared from the driveway last month. We were called a tragedy, a failed experiment, a product of consumer culture. It’s funny how we fight to name the most primal parts of life. Rage. Anger. Love. Hate. Passion. Forgiveness. We’ve worn many labels and, after a while, you grow to accept them.
I don’t know why we turned down so much help. A production team flew out here last week. Just sign, they said, Ed Norton has already agreed to play you. Naomi Watts will play your wife. Valerie, who actually looks like her, enjoyed that choice. They presented me a contract, a ticket to Los Angeles, and a chance to have the whole mess immortalized on the Silver Screen. I turned them down.
The others dealt with worse: reporters, photographers, talk shows, politicians, and the never-ending wave of fame. We met one final time and decided to break away and forget the last year.
Now here I am, on my new porch, writing to make sense of it all. Why we did what we did. Who deserved what they received. What the deep shining spark of truth is at the bottom of the trash. I hope I can find it somewhere underneath it all. Well, enough. Time to start at the best place: the closing.
Chapter One
The Closing
The major casualties of my childhood evolved from a loss of innocence. I was a lonely child fighting to find an identity in the wake of my parents’ divorce. Everything changed after I met my wife, Val, as a kid in high school. We dated through college and moved in together only minutes from my father’s old house and thirty miles outside of Philadelphia. As the days passed, things began to shift. We lived in an apartment that my job at a local investment company could pay for, while Val worked and improved at being a hair stylist. I proposed to her late on a winter’s night. One day, in the supermarket, the first piece of everything fell into our lives.
We were engaged and looking for houses, any way to get out of the city we could find. As we walked through the automatic doors, a large rack of identical pamphlets sat in our path. The top of the rack displayed a modern, beautiful house sitting on a serene lake, while a duck worked his way through the water. “Just minutes from your door,” claimed the words below it. We grabbed a brochure and went home, thinking nothing of another piece to add to our ongoing research. (I’d go into details of our wedding, if you wanted, but I know what you want. You need to know why and how and ask every question we’ve answered a million times.)
After our wedding and more advancement in our jobs, we came into enough income to shop for houses and finally create our own reality. The first brochure on the table was the one from the supermarket. That Saturday morning we decided to go and look, choked up at the thought of our first home buying experience.
I followed the map on the form and, of course, managed to get lost. Val flashed her hazel eyes at me and took a sip of coffee from her thermos.
“What?” I said, “I know where we are headed.”
“Yeah right, master of directions,” she replied. She aimed an air vent directly onto her face and adjusted her sunglasses. “You have five minutes until I call the number.”
My dad always said that all roads lead to some bigger road, an ending. He was right. As I crested a hill, a group of structures rose like the Easter Island statues from the fields surrounding the road. Various construction vehicles manipulated dirt and other materials. One home, the model, stood finished, and a small crowd gathered outside around a woman in a power suit. We pulled the car into the last available spot next to the lonely looking curb, if you could call it a curb, considering it was a single concrete band running from our feet through the field.
“Look at these people,” Val said. She walked around the car and hooked onto my arm.
“I’m sure it will be a good time,” I said.
We walked and sized up the others in the crowd. Four couples stood in a small C shape. One of the couples was pregnant and another had two small boys running circles in the model home parking lot. Their father, Bryan Dean as I would find out later, ran and grabbed them both. They yelled, and he took his place back in the C all in, what seemed like, under thirty seconds.
“Thank you for coming,” the power suit looked at us, “and you are?”
We told her our names. She wrote them into a daily planner she carried in her right hand, studded with a large diamond ring. I pointed it out to Val.
“The independence ring,” I said. She rolled her eyes.
“Shall we get started?” Everyone shared a nod. She continued, “My name is Kelly Thompson from Keystone Realty and welcome to The Reserve.” She swept the ringed hand over the green hillside. “What you see here are acres of prime land and modern, custom homes for the new individual. Towns are over. Row homes are things of the past. Apartments are for old people.”
I looked around. None of us were older than thirty. She could read character.
“Our homes offer eight designs with their own unique traits and styles,” she said as she started to walk, her heels fumbling on the stones every few steps. “This is Main Street. It will run approximately a half-mile ending at a cul-de-sac for our Grand Estate model. We place one in each of our developments. The Grand Estate will back to those woods.” She pointed, without looking, to a tree line that started after the end of the road. As she talked, I leaned into Val.
“I love the area,” I said.
“I know. Could you imagine? Did you see that model home?” she asked.
The two children in the group were staying with their father. The other couples were lost in their own conversations. Kelly kept talking.
Before we made the wood line, she stopped and turned back. It was time for the payoff, the model home. A breeze had kicked up as the summer sun found its way closer to the hillside horizon. We followed Kelly to the front door of the model. I had forgotten all of the talk from the road. Val, to my surprise, started to chat with a woman from another couple, Sara Lewis. Her husband never turned to acknowledge me. I didn’t blame him.
“This is our base model, the Meadow,” Kelly said, as she opened the door to the house.
We started to file inside. Val walked with her new friend. I waited to let the others go in first. Another guy, Shawn Woods, stayed to the back.
“Impressive,” he said as he glanced up at the front of the place.
“It is,” I said. I also paused to take in the scene.
The model stood three levels high. The front was filled with windows, crossed with a porch, and radiated the style of old Southern comfort. I walked inside after another minute. We entered the great room, and Val came to my side.
“I love it,” she said and gave me the I want it now glance that, after a few years, a guy learns to recognize.
“I know. It can’t be cheap.” I said. She glared and turned back to Kelly. Money was an issue whenever my father’s cheap side emerged in me.
Inside, in the contained atmosphere, I finally started to take inventory of the crowd. All of us would end up being the new residents.
The couple with the two children, the Deans, presented the modern idea of family life. Bryan wore a Tommy Hilfiger polo and dress pants. His wife, Julia, looked younger but still played mom in a blouse under a suit jacket. Her heels matched Kelly’s, and she ignored her family.
Sarah, Val’s new friend, stood with her husband Drew who still didn’t acknowledge me or anyone else. He was busy text messaging on his cell phone.
Shawn, the guy I met outside, seemed to move his wife-to-be, Erica, near us. I didn’t like and don’t like clingers, so this did not win points in my book. We could see they wanted to talk.
A couple, looking younger than us, stood by the stairwell. They couldn’t stop touching each other. I caught him grabbing her, and she laughed, giving him a punch to the ribs. This was Mya and Travis Long. They were young, in shape, and just married.
“Now, why don’t we go onto the second level,” Kelly said.
She started up the stairwell, and we followed. Her legs were trained with too much elliptical time, and it showed. The second floor ran connected by a grand hallway. She continued, “Three bathrooms. Three bedrooms. The master bedroom includes a Jacuzzi tub.” We followed her into it.
Four large windows stood behind the tub. Privacy, it seemed, was not a concern. As we walked out and started to the third floor, I heard a door click behind me. I turned as Mya and Travis sneaked into the bedroom. I heard her giggle. It reminded me of our young love. I grabbed Val’s hand and could see she was enthralled with the house. We walked through upstairs, an office, another bedroom, one more bedroom, storage, and then turned to go back downstairs. As we walked, Sarah and her husband fell into step with us. We turned to the main stairs, and being the last of the group, heard a door pop open and a moan. We all reacted to the sound, turning to catch Mya and Travis in the middle of sex. Sarah laughed; Val poked me; Drew grinned, and I was smart enough to keep walking.
Finally we all gathered in the kitchen for coffee and cookies circled on a silver tray. Kelly talked on her cell phone. Val and I stood in a corner. Travis and Mya snuck down to join us with the familiar glow.
“I think we need to do this. We can’t have a family where we are now,” Val said.
This was true. I worked the accounting in my head. Something Kelly said, “Space is limited,” kept dancing around my ears.
“Should we think about this a little?” I asked as I tried to stall.
“Oh God, you think about everything.” I could see the start of a tear. I finished the mental accounting at that second, ready to start new.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“Really?” She hugged me tight, shaking with excitement. I started making lists in my head of what we would need. We kissed and walked over to Kelly’s table. I signed a paper and spent the largest amount of money in my life on one line. Val wouldn’t let me go. We achieved another mark on our to-do life list.
During the ride home, we made the required phone calls. We found out, before we left, that each couple had bought a lot and that only five houses would be built. We would find out why later. Val exchanged numbers with the women, and I exchanged some grunts and handshakes with the men. Three months later, after many mid-construction visits, the houses were up. Moving day arrived, and the time to say goodbye to our apartment felt so good.
Chapter Two
Moving In
It was sunny, that first day, week, month was always sunny. We tapped Val’s father and brother and my father with their trucks for help. The actual moving process spanned over a weekend. On Sunday afternoon we decided to have a get-together. I set up the grill on the back deck. The final layout of The Reserve sat as follows: Main Street was flanked with two houses on the left, two on the right, and the Grand Estate on the end.
Our house faced Shawn and Erica. Sarah and Drew were next to us. Mya and Travis were next to Shawn and Erica. The estate belonged to the Dean family. After dinner, I looked out our front window and saw the three other guys standing in the street. I walked out to join them.
We all shook hands as I noticed Bryan making his way down the road. He had a longer walk from the estate.
“How was moving?” I threw the question out there.
“Fine.”
“Hectic.”
“Glad to be over with.” Everyone nodded. Finally Bryan joined us.
We stood in a circle. Five guys surrounded by their five houses. The sun had dropped below the horizon, and the surreal minutes before total darkness gave the atmosphere a staged feeling.
“Hey,” Travis said, “When did they decide to put up a gate?”
We all looked to the entrance. The new stonewall that bordered the development now, where once was just a space, had a black iron fence crossing over the entryway. A small box stood on the left side.
“Didn’t you get the paper?” Shawn asked.
“What paper?”
“When I came home from the store, one was in the mailbox. It said we would all get key cards, and the gate would be automatic. Better security and a break on home owner’s insurance.” We all considered the statement and let it pass. He had a point.
“So, Bryan, how is the Grand Palace?” I asked, adding accent to the last word to give it an exotic flair.
“Oh. Oh, it’s great. The boys have a ton of room. We’ll have everyone over some night. Play some cards; shoot some pool.” He finished, looking for approval. It seemed more like a statement then an invitation. Darkness started to drape over us, and the few lights illuminated us in the street, casting shadows on the new paving. A soft buzzing sounded. Travis pulled a phone out of his pocket.
“Sorry guys gotta go. The wife needs me.” He turned and jogged to his house.
“Yeah I bet she does.” Drew said. We all laughed. I noticed that when he reached his door, a hand shut their curtain. We were being watched.
I remembered a project that was waiting at work for me the next morning and took the exit as my out. We all acknowledged that we would meet again, and I walked back to the house. The other guys stayed on the street. Val was watching Extreme Makeover Home Edition on television, and they had hit the reveal. She turned to me.
“I like our house better,” she said. We hugged, and I went to make coffee to unwind for a precious few minutes before the start of a new week. I packed a small lunch for Val and for me. That night we lay in our new bedroom and looked up at the ceiling. We felt the space; looked at what we had; talked for a while about the past, present, and future; made love like we were back in high school again; and fell asleep.
For one of those rare moments, all seemed right with the universe.
Chapter Three
Guys’ Night
A few weeks passed, and the steady heat of the summer settled on The Reserve. Lawns made it a blanket of green that we all tried hard to keep up to magazine quality shape. One night driving home from work, I noticed one of those nondescript white construction vans parked on
the right side of the road directly across from the gate. A large guy in an orange vest was bending, with some effort, to look through a surveying scope at his partner who was stationed about twenty yards into the field. They talked through a hand held walkie-talkie. I turned to the gate, scanned our pass card, and made my way to the driveway.
After I came in and successfully moved into relaxation mode, I walked to the kitchen and noticed a note on the counter. It was from Val. Her looping handwriting said that she had gone jogging with Sarah and to see the paper on the fridge that was sitting under a Welcome to The Reserve magnet. After you spend enough money, the least they can do is give you a magnet. I pulled the paper out and started to read.
On the single sheet of letterhead, with a Keystone Realty logo embossed on the top, it stated that hopefully we were doing well in our new homes, and it had exciting news. Because of the success of The Reserve, (how five houses was a success, I’ll never know) the company had decided to place another similar development across the street. We would have to deal with the usual construction issues of diverted traffic, noise, and lights, but should not worry, more houses would increase our property value and our exclusive location would not be threatened. At that point, I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed the word exclusive.
That night, after we had dinner and were watching television, the phone rang. It was Bryan. Each house held a sheet with the phone numbers of every resident in The Reserve for security purposes, or at least that’s what the sheet told us. I picked up the receiver.
“Hey man, how’s it going?” He was excited.
“Not too bad.” Before I could get into anything, words flowed out of the phone in one stream.
“The wife and the kids are out to a movie. What would you think about a guys’ night tonight? The others are on their way. I think we have something to talk about. Did you see that paper? Can you believe it?” He stopped, waiting for an answer.