//4// Send Me Anything But Signals That Are Mixed

The temperature in the office never really regulated the way it should.  We always joked that the air conditioner would get stuck on in the winter and the heater in summer; the temperature was just never quite where any of us liked it to be.  Making matters worse, Taylor was always so damn cold, and Isaac so hot, that I rarely found my happy medium, even when we could get some kind of control over the thermostat.  No matter how many times we called the gas and electric company out, or even an HVAC guy, no one could figure out why it was so hard to reach homeostasis.

With a sigh, I peeled my jacket—which was sticking to me in the heat of the office—from my arms and tossed it haphazardly on to the couch before settling in at my computer.  There were endless e-mails about tour confirmations, radio and TV appearances our management had secured for us, deadlines for merchandise design sign-offs, and a billion and one other things.  My eyes watered as I read through each of the e-mails, making an agenda of what we needed to discuss at our meeting later that afternoon.

Finally, all the e-mails were read, and an agenda was formed.  I put it on Ike’s desk so he could review it in case there were things he or Taylor needed to add to it and walked out of the office, rubbing my face as I yawned.  It had been an early morning; my parents had offered to take the kids for me while I went in to the office, which meant we had to get up an hour earlier than usual so I had time to drive them over before heading in.  I was exhausted, but was enjoying a feeling of something other than emptiness.

As I walked out of the office and in to the hallway, I heard Taylor’s loud laugh, followed by muffled talking.  He was in the engineering booth, and I wandered toward the sound of his voice, wondering if everyone was ready for our meeting.  When I walked in, Taylor was holding his phone to his ear, chatting away to whoever was on the other end.  I tried to look over some of the notes from our engineer and ignore Taylor’s end of his conversation, but it was hard with how boisterous he could be.

“…Yeah, yeah…oh, yeah, that’ll be good.  Well, I mean, whenever is good for you.  I know things aren’t…. Oh yeah, no, we can work that out.  Don’t worry; I’ve got your back.  No problem.  Hey, look I gotta get going.  Yeah, no I’ll call you in a few days and we’ll start putting things in motion.  Yeah, bye.”

He flipped his phone closed and looked up at me, a smile on his face.  “Hey, you ready to get to work?”  I shrugged, toeing the edge of the area rug Taylor now stood on.  “Ike’s going to be late, but he said we could just go ahead and get started without him.  Everyone else is here,” he added nodding toward the conference room.

“Who was on the phone?” I asked, trying to make idle small talk as we walked down the hall.  Taylor’s movements became ever so slightly stilted at the inquiry; anyone else probably wouldn’t have noticed, but spending so much time together had garnered at least one good thing between my brothers and I—we could always tell when one of us was lying, nervous, or trying to hide something.  I narrowed my eyes at him as he pretended not to hear me.  “Tay, who was on the phone?” I asked again, this time with a little more force to my voice.

He cleared his throat as we entered the conference room, pulling a chair out and sitting down slowly.  “Ryland,” he said quickly.  My heart skipped a beat, and then beat twice as hard as it should have at the mention of her name.  “It was about the photo book,” Taylor quickly continued.  “Strictly business.”  Nodding, I sat down in a chair across the table, my heart still pounding incessantly in my chest.

Ryland.

It had been eight months since the last time I saw her, and six since we last spoke.  Save for the occasional dream, it had been a solid six weeks since she had actually crossed my mind of her own volition.  Hearing her name made me feel like a recovering alcoholic being tempted and teased with a perfectly aged wine.  My insides spun, my hands got sweaty, and blood simultaneously drained from my face and rush to my head.  Somewhere behind my thoughts, Leigh was talking about a conflict in the schedule, but I couldn’t focus.  My mind had been overtaken and thrown back in time.

Ryland giggled softly, her green eyes sparkling in the early morning sunlight trickling through the blinds.  “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just stay this way forever?”  Slowly, she reached over and brushed a strand of hair off my forehead, her fingers lingering against my skin, radiating heat through my whole body.

I wanted to tell her that we could; I could leave Kate and be with her.  We could go to bed together every night and wake up together every morning, not having to worry about who might see or say what.  I knew it would only be a lie, as much as I might have wanted it to happen in that moment; Kate was still my wife, still the mother of my children, and deep down, I did still love her.  Finding no words to respond with, I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close to me, pressing our bodies together.  She smelled like vanilla and coconut.  I picked up her gaze, holding it, and she giggled again, fidgeting beneath my grasp.

It was my turn to brush a strand of hair away from her face, tucking it safely behind her ear as I leaned over and pressed my lips against hers.

A loud bang drew my attention back to the present and reality, and I turned my eyes to see Leigh staring at me with her hands perched on top of her clipboard, which I calculated she had just slammed down on the table.  “Sorry,” I mumbled, feeling my face flush.  “I’m actually not feeling all that well today…um, I’m gonna go home…you’ve got this, right Tay?” Before he could respond, I had rushed out of the room and back to the office, gathering my things before exiting the building.

Despite being mid-May, the air was crisp when I walked outside, a stark contrast from the oppressive heat of the office.  I welcomed the light breeze, taking a few deep breaths as I walked to the truck.  Once inside, I rolled the windows down and let the air whip my hair as I drove to my parents to pick up the kids.

**

“Shepherd!” I called over my shoulder.  “You need to brush your teeth!”

From the other room, I heard something fall to the floor, Shepherd giggle, then call out to me:  “Ok, Dad!”

Sighing, I turned back to Junia, who was kicking her legs to fend off my attempts at putting her in to a pair of socks.  “C’mon, Juju Bee,” I coaxed her, finally able to slide her tiny left foot into her sock on.  Victorious, I managed to wrangle her right foot into the other just as she yanked the one off her left foot.  “For fuck’s sake,” I muttered under my breath.  Eventually, both socks were on her feet, and both feet in shoes before she had a chance to take them off again.  I put her down on the floor and grabbed her hand, leading her in to the living room.  “Shep?” I called, poking my head in to his bedroom as I walked down the hall.  Empty.

Water was running in the bathroom, but the door was closed.  I heard Shepherd laughing on the other side of the door.  I knocked before opening the door.  “Shep, what are you….” My voice trailed off as I surveyed the bathroom.  Shepherd was standing on his footstool, a mound of toothpaste slowly dripping from his toothbrush; water was overflowing from the sink and his shirt was soaked.   “What the hell are you doing?!” I shouted, quickly turning the sink off and grabbing a towel.

Shepherd’s giggles had faded when he saw my face in the door, and he didn’t move from the footstool as I mopped water up with a towel.  “…Daddy?” came his tiny voice.

Doing my best to hide any anger on my face, I glanced up at him.  “What, Shep?”

“Are you mad at me?”  His forehead was wrinkled in the kind of worry only a five-year-old could possess.

I shook my head, turning my attention back to the floor.  “No, Shep; I’m not mad at you, buddy.  I’m upset about the mess, but I’m not mad at you.  Brush your teeth—we’re going to be late meeting Mommy.”

By the time we pulled in to the airport, Kate’s flight had already been on ground for twenty minutes.  Barring some hold-up at baggage claim, Kate was probably standing at the pick-up lane, growing angrier by the minute.  Sure enough, Kate was standing with her hand on her hip when I swung the Tacoma in to the loading lane, glaring when she finally spotted the truck.  I hopped out to help her load her bag in to the truck bed, and mumbled a quick apology as we got in to the cab.

It was a silent ride back to the house.  Kate had said hello to the kids, but was absorbed in her phone for the rest of the ride.  When I turned on to the street, an unsettling wave of familiarity rolled over me.  So many times had this exact scenario played out; the kids tucked in the back seat as we came home from one of any number of activities.  As the trees rushed past, familiar neighborhood houses coming and going in a blur beside me, I couldn’t help the way my mind began to wander.

Wind was whipping through our hair, courtesy of the rolled-down windows, as we drove along the dirt road.  It was dark; the sun had set hours ago and the moon, a tiny sliver in the sky, gave off barely any light.  The headlights of my old beat-up Honda bounced in front of us with each bump we rolled over, and if I didn’t have confidence in my mechanic, I’d swear my suspension was about to give out.

Kate leaned forward, reaching for the volume knob on the radio.  She turned it a few clicks to the right, the notes of “Can’t You See” flowing from the speakers.  I smiled, catching Kate rest her hands on the ever-growing baby bump of her stomach from the corner of my eye.  She began to sing, and though it wasn’t perfect, I reveled in the sound of her voice. 

I drove along for another few minutes before pulling off the dirt road and parking the car under a large Sawtooth Oak, the branches swaying slightly in the wind.  Kate gave me a questioning look as I turned to her in my seat.  “Where are we?”

“We,” I paused to get out of the car, rushing to open the door for her.  I helped her out before continuing.  “Are standing in our new front yard,” I beamed.

Kate looked around, obviously confused by the lack of a housing structure.  “What?”

Still holding her hand, I walked away from where I had parked and turned toward the area behind the Oak.  “The house will be over here,” I explained.  “It’ll be five rooms.  One for us, one for this little guy, and then three extra for…whatever,” I smiled.  “We’ll have a huge living room with one of those bay windows and a bench you like so much, and a kitchen my mother would envy.  Our master bath will have a Jacuzzi tub, a huge walk-in-closet, and a garage with enough space for both our cars plus all the toys our kids are going to have.  And,” I paused, turning her a little to the left and gazing out at an expanse of open land that was met by a tight thicket of trees; though it was dark you could still see the darker outlines of the oaks and pins.  “This is our back yard.  It’s six acres of land,” I beamed.

“This is too much, Zac…even for us,” she whispered.  “How are we going to afford this?”

“Well…the land has been in my family for years, but we just never did anything with it,” I confessed.  “The house won’t cost that much to build.  We’ll have a mortgage; it’s going to be amazing!”

My wife took in a sharp breath, obviously contemplating the landscape before her, hands rubbing over her swollen belly.  “Can I have a garden?” she squeaked.

“Baby, you can have whatever you want,” I assured her, wrapping her in to a hug and pressing my lips to hers. 

“Oh!” she exclaimed, jumping a bit.  I furrowed my eyebrows, and in response she took my hand and placed it on her belly.  “He’s kicking,” she smiled up at me.  “I guess he likes the sound of his new home.”

“Zac?”  I blinked, turning my attention back to Kate.  Her lips were set in a line, but her eyes weren’t as dark as they had been recently.  When she noticed I had given my attention to her, she started talking quickly.  “Thank you for keeping the kids another day.  I’m sorry I sprung it on you…I should have asked you if it was OK, but I just figured you wouldn’t mind since you haven’t been seeing them as much lately.  And thank you for picking me up at the airport.”

It took me a solid thirty seconds to realize Kate had apologized and thanked me in the same breath.  Once the information processed, I let a soft, nervous smile graze my lips.  “Yeah, no problem.  I wouldn’t have said no if you had asked, I just wanted the consideration, you know?”

She returned the smile, placing her hand tentatively on my.  “I know.  Now, will you please help me get these two rugrats in to the house?”

I swallowed around a lump in my throat, turning to the house we had built to accommodate our growing family.  It loomed over me as a taunting reminder of what I had let go.  Kate’s easy smile as she lifted Junia out of her car seat only made more memories, this time not as pleasant, flood back to me.  I tried to push them away as they came, but every time one would be stifled a new memory would pop in its place—Kate and I arguing, the days we’d go without speaking, the desperate phone calls while I was on the road.  It all blurred together in an overwhelming masochistic film noir of my life.

As I walked Shepherd up to the house, carrying his backpack, I stumbled on a broken piece of cobblestone on the front walk.  I cursed, remembering how it broke.

“Zac?”  Kate’s voice called out to me, shaky, as she walked through the halls.

“Down here!” I called from my basement studio, setting my guitar down.  She appeared on the steps, barefoot, a few moments later, Shepherd on her hip. 

“Dinner’s almost ready…” her voice trailed off, and there was something in it that I couldn’t quite place.  She hadn’t come down here to tell me dinner was almost ready, of that I was sure.  I just nodded, my eyebrows raised at her for a moment as she shifted under the weight of our ten month old.  She cleared her throat before stepping on to the carpet at the foot of the stairs, biting her lower lip.  “Um, I noticed you’ve been spending an awful lot of time down here lately.  Is everything OK?”

“Of course everything is OK,” A small laugh escaped my lips without my consent, and I saw Kate visibly stiffen, as if I were laughing at her.

Her bottom lip quivering, Kate nodded and turned to go back up the stairs.  She stopped three steps up and turned again.  “You’d tell me if it wasn’t, right?”

I narrowed my eyes at her.  “Katie, is everything OK with you?”  She straightened herself, nodding, then turned and walked back up the stairs.  I followed, unconvinced, in to the kitchen.  She had set Shepherd down in his pen and was now chopping something on the counter, each stroke slamming the knife harder and harder onto the cutting board.  “Katie?”

She slammed the knife down, which elicited a sharp cry from Shepherd.  “I can’t,” she said, shaking her head.  “I need to just…I have to go.”  She turned from the counter and began to gather her things—shoes, keys, purse—and was halfway out the door when I caught her by the arm.

“What is going on?” I demanded.

She looked down at her feet momentarily, and then turned her dark brown eyes back to mine.  “I’m sorry, Zac,” she whispered.  “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

“Do what? Katie, I am so confused, and you’re scaring me.”  I begged her to tell me what was going on, why she was acting this way, but she just pulled free from my grasp and stormed out the door.    I chased after her, tripping on the cobblestone path as I did so, my knee slamming in to one of the hard rocks with such force it cracked down the center.  Swearing, I stood up and hobbled the rest of the way after her.  She already had her keys in the ignition when I caught the door before she could close it.  “Where are you going?”

“I just need to go for awhile, Zac.  I’ll be back later,” she was crying again.  “Just, make sure Shep is fed and tucked in to bed.”

Her tone was distant, almost as if her mind was elsewhere, and all I could do was back up so she could shut the door and pull out of the driveway, leaving me confused, scared, and angry all at the same time.

My eyes focused back on the front porch, thinking about that day.  It was the first time since the last time that I’d looked to substance to settle my stomach and quiet the fears creeping up in the back of mind.

 

 

 

 

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