Cicada Song
Page 50
Chapter 1
October 2006
The cool October breeze could never erase the smell of smoke and fire that burned a hole into Adam Bailey’s memory. As the taxi veered from the highway onto the exit ramp where Adam and his family had been run off the road, he shuddered and tried to exorcise the memory from his mind. It was difficult.
Ten years had passed since that fateful night, almost to the day. He had been an inexperienced driver then, only seventeen, and though his mother suggested that he move out of the truck’s blind spot, Adam thought she was being silly. If only he had listened to his mother, his parents and brothers might have made it home.
They had been visiting Adam’s grandparents, who had moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, a year prior, and it was the first time Adam had ever seen the ocean. They stayed in a condo on Madeira Beach, and he marveled at the sight of dolphins bobbing in and out of the water. The closest he had come to them was when he and his brother Michael were searching for sand dollars. Two dolphins began leaping from the water just as Michael found the first of two decent-sized conchs. It was the sort of vacation that his family had always dreamed of taking, but it quickly devolved from the best week of Adam’s life to the worst.
They checked out of the condo well before sunrise and drove all day. Adam’s father had retired the wheel to Adam after the sun had set, and he was to drive the last leg of the trip. They say that most accidents occur within twenty-five miles of a person’s home. After all those hours of driving, that saying still rang true. They were so close.
His grandparents checked him out of the hospital and they stayed in Anderson while sorting out his family’s things. It was hard being in his home, knowing that his parents would never walk through the front door again, that he couldn’t lean against the kitchen counter with Michael and talk about girls, that he would never be able to wrestle with his youngest brother Peter again. But he wasn’t alone. The whole town of Anderson mourned with him. He moved to St. Petersburg with his grandparents a week later, and it was the last time Adam ever stepped foot in the town of his birth, though he thought of it often.
In the years that followed, Adam attended but dropped out of college and worked odd jobs until finding a second shift janitorial position in a high school outside of St. Petersburg. It wasn’t a luxurious career, but it paid the bills. He stayed there for six years until the position was outsourced, then he struggled to find more work. Since his grandmother had passed away a year prior, he decided to return to St. Petersburg to spend time with his grieving grandfather. Sadly, his stay was short-lived. His grandfather died only two months later, leaving Adam alone once again.
While at his grandfather’s funeral, Adam bumped into Melba Acres, an old friend of his grandmother’s who had come to pay her respects. He hadn’t seen Melba since leaving Anderson, but she loved on him as if he had never left. Without his parents, brothers, or grandparents, he was left without a family to call his own. He had no cousins, aunts, or uncles. He began to feel adrift in an ocean of strangers, but Melba Acres reminded him that whether he ever came back or not, he still had a home in Anderson.
And so, being between jobs and without a place to lay his head, Adam loaded his suitcase and called a taxi. Now, after a short plane ride and two more taxi fares, he was almost home—and that worried him.
He wondered if everyone in Anderson was as loving as he remembered, and he began to question whether this was a good idea or not. Could a place really be home when every turn reminded him of all that he’d lost? His every memory of Anderson was entwined with his family one way or another, and he wasn’t sure if he was ready to face that yet. Was he ready to see his old house again or the school that he and his brothers had attended? Could he walk the trails of the woods surrounding Anderson’s border and not remember when he used to play war with Michael, Peter, and the other neighborhood kids? Then he began to worry in a different way. What if Anderson had changed? Could he handle coming home again and not recognizing it? If Anderson had evolved into something different while he was away, would it be just another death for him to endure, another memory to plague him?
“This place is really outta the way, huh?” the cabbie said.
“Yeah, it’s pretty small. There should be a sign coming up right around this corner.”
Just as Adam remembered, a blue sign stood on the side of the road reading Welcome to Anderson, Friend. It was the same sign from his youth, and that seemed to ease his mind about Anderson’s current state.
“Looks like the lodge is up here somewhere,” the cabbie said, referring to the GPS on the dash. “I’m not seein’ the drive, though... no, wait. There it is.”
They pulled into the parking lot of Annie’s Lodge and Adam felt a returning sense of discomfort. The place had changed. For one, it didn’t used to be called Annie’s Lodge. It used to be Joanne’s Cabin when Adam was a kid; and he remembered Joanne as being a kind, elderly woman. New management likely meant that Joanne had passed away. It was the first sign of Anderson’s inevitable change, but Adam quickly accepted it and paid the cabbie his fare. Adam unstrapped his bicycle from the rack, and the cabbie gave him his luggage before pulling away.
He took a deep breath and studied Annie’s Lodge. This wooden cabin-like motel was going to be his place of residence for the foreseeable future, but it could never be home. Home was where one’s family resided, and Adam had no family. He was fooling himself into believing that returning home would fix anything.
In a moment of youthful stupidity he chose to ignore his mother’s pleas and sentenced his parents and brothers to a fiery death, leaving Adam grief-stricken and alone. People say you should never dwell on past mistakes, but he had never been able to conquer that mentality. His family was dead, and he had no one to blame but himself.