Road Markers
A Short Story by
Jason McIntyre
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Published by Jason McIntyre
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010 Jason McIntyre
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.
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My first thought, even before it hit, was that there was no way anyone would survive that.
I was driving back from Comox with my briefcase open on the passenger seat and my head ticking down the clicks until I’d be in my bed, resting my stoned feeling head. The pitch had gone badly. Worse than badly, it had been a downright rip-fucking failure. Why did LeFevre always send me on these fucking goose-egg hunts?
By the time I was twenty minutes into the lunch meeting I knew those guys would eat me whole. They saw that and I should have just shut my trap and ordered a salad, or the cheapest and quickest thing on the menu. These things sell themselves, LeFevre says. They sell themselves and you just have to show up with the plans outlined and then show the models. Oh and wear your nicest gray suit, pressed shirt and double-Windsor tie. You’ll have an order for twenty five before dessert hits the linen table cloth.
Yeah. Absolument, Monsieur LeFevre. Abso-fucking-loo-mon.
By dessert the lead contractors at Long and Shanlan were yawning and bored. They didn’t want pre-packaged smartphone plans from a second-party vendor. Who does? That kind of thing is so easy to manage yourself, even for a company of fifty employees. Why on earth would anyone buy our shit? I needed to get out. At that moment, when I passed around the black binder with the color-photocopies, it hit me. Just like that: I needed to get out. There just isn’t room in a person’s head, in a person’s life, to sell a bunch of shit to people that don’t need it. I had been doing this since I left school. And I’d had enough.
My issues seemed like they had no limitation in number. An ex-wife bent on making me look like a villain whenever a moment presented itself, a step-daughter who barely knew me, and the tail-end of a mortgage not made substantially easier when a good chunk of my earnings came by way of sales commissions. Oh, and did I mention I peddle crap for a living? Crap that no one buys? I thought the only thing I could, the only thing I had...for too long: If I can just hang on for another couple years. Get that damn house paid off. Then I can breathe. Then I can just let out a sigh and lay my head down for a second.
Driving was uncomfortable. The timing chain on my Pontiac was ready to snap—-just like me, you might say. It wanted to come loose and leave me there on the side of the road, that narrow gulch part where the decades-past dynamite had blasted a jagged wall to the right of me and the edge of the road left a nearly indefinable margin of gravel and loose rock to the left.
The sun had fallen an hour ago and even the dim light which followed the set, was now going, going, gone. I could see traces of pink and yellow in the rear view, but they were nearly indiscernible. I might have been making their existence up. This was not a remarkable day.
And that damn timing chain. I should have gotten that fixed before the drive to Comox. But, Christ, nineteen hundred bones. The stupid car needed half its engine taken out to put in a new chain. I should have been a mechanic instead of a sales rep. No travel, no shirt and tie, and no bullshit. You just show up, take things apart, put ‘em together, and go home. Sure, you’ve got grease under your fingernails, but on a night like tonight it feels a far cry better than the lunch date I had at Donovan’s Bistro.
At an incline that descended ahead, I saw the reflectors down the middle of the road—-you know, those little square things that are pasted to the asphalt and kick up a glare when headlights catch them. They ran around a corner and then unseen. Outlines of trees were there and the sky, dark blue, was behind it. It was darker than mud and I caught a sign that said I’d be home in less than forty. Too long.
But I kept chugging. Tomorrow was another day and I had another sale to try and make. This one, thank God, was in town. I could relax a bit, maybe even be home a little early. Watch a flick, call Meghan, avoid her mom—-
In that second though, the car in front of me slammed his brakes. I had to do the same when I saw his reds flash bright in the blackness. All I saw were those white-yellow squarish dots down presumably the middle of the dark road and his three tails in loud red.
It was less than a year before, on this same stretch of road, just up ahead I think, when I first had an inclination to cross the dividers. Back then another sales call, another lunch date, another day, all of that crap seemed like just that: crap. It felt like there was a bitter lump in my throat with every word I tried to utter. And, not in a real sense did I want to end my life, but I certainly pictured passing those little reflective squares and pushing into the opposing lane.
With two thump-thumps under my tires, I’d cross them. I thought it out in full, that it would happen too quick, in that instant before reality grabs you by the scruff and yanks you back onto its turf. Reality. That’s a farce. But in that split flash-thought of craziness, I heard the thump-thump, heard it a second time even, as my back tires found a bright square on the dark road. My headlights would find some trees, a patch of oleander shrub, and then that blank space where the guardrail glint didn’t exist—-that spot where it broke to let the rest period have a shallow, narrow path down to the edge of the cliff. I’d pass all of that in my Pontiac, and I’d careen over, through and past the rest stop, maybe clipping the leg post of that Local Attractions map that pointed out things like historical landmarks, the origin of the Goldstream name, who first tramped the trail that has since been paved and repaved to become this island tract of highway.
I saw the dark air even, in that brief flash of un-reality, I saw the darkness of it, with my headlight beams stretching out and finding nothing. They would finally disintegrate into emptiness, and so would I. The Pontiac, me included, would hit rocks, maybe even a big boulder. Would there be an explosion? Maybe the underside of the car, the back end where the fuel tank was, would it grate on some granite or aged shale? The whole thing, a crunching, screaming slide of metal on rock, it would find sparks and it would ignite. Or maybe not. I wouldn’t really know for certain.
But Reality, that bugger reality, that thing that holds us all tighter than we’d like, except when we seem to need it, it did yank me back. It did put me on the right-hand side of the dividing squares. I found my hood driver-side corner roaming a little closer to the squares as the road veered and curved, but I did not hear those two blatant thump-thumps. Not that night.
And that was, like I said, less than a year ago.
Here I was, some time later, the same jaunt, another failure in my hands and on the wheel, no more cells sold than the day before. And that bloody car ahead of me had stomped on his brakes, bleeding red on the moist highway. Unlike that night, less than a year ago, when the sky had dropped to pleasing shades of pink and lavender in my rearview before darkness came on its ass-end, this night didn’t have a damn thing to distinguish it. Even the rain on the road, some that had evidently fallen on this part of the island just before I’d wound my way through the mountainous slopes of the highway to find it, even that rain was empty. It was the same rain as always.
It spattered up on my windshield when the car in front, the only other in view at that moment, both from behind me and ahead, was suddenly too close at my front end. It dithered in the lane, that car, not violently, but enough to notice. I gripped the wheel, and with stiff foot in black leather dress shoe that had thin little black laces, I braced against the brake pedal and fell back from it. The tires, though on a slick black sheen of road, held nicely. The car was in good order...except for the goddamn timing chain. Which, after this trip to Comox, wasn’t any closer to getting fixed.
In the bleary smudge of my windshield—-I still hadn’t found the moment to tap at the wipers and have them clean up the front window’s road-spattered rain water drizzle—-I saw those reds in front of me, all three of them, ease and blink off. The car ahead sped up again, not a lot, but enough to let my tense shoulders and death-grip on the wheel lessen.
I thought I caught movement in the front seat. Dark shadows caught in the shine of my yellow beams, subtle, and perhaps only paranoia, but I thought that’s what I saw.
That car, a Plymouth I think, blue, and about the same age as my Pontiac, had been with me—-give or take—-since Parksville, I believe. It was one of those instances where you’re doing a hundred or so down a road and, in the lulls when the radio signal’s gone and your own thoughts are nothing but muck, you notice the same car ahead of you as you did a hundred klicks back. You’re never sure, no, no, that it’s actually the same vehicle. But you feel like you’ve been driving with that car for a while. And you always feel a momentary nag of sadness when it turns off, when you realize it had no shared business with you.
When you were a kid maybe you imagined a beautiful girl in that car, the same age as you, bored out of her brain too, on some pathetic effort of her father to culture the family during their vacation instead of just going to some theme park and staying in expensive hotel rooms where there was a cheesy three-storey resin plastic waterslide in the pool area.
She, that beautiful girl in the back seat, would have her chin in her hand, semi-tanned legs with white lines where the band of her sandals sat on her pre-summer feet, pulled up on the seat. Dad was in the driver’s seat, middle of the night and pushing on to the next stop despite mom’s protests from the front passenger seat that it was too late to keep going. But dad, no he had an agenda and he was sure there was a rest stop here that he remembered. One with a map on two wooden posts and a garbage can and a widened shoulder with a path that led down to a view of the valley and the glittering Oceana beyond. He was leaning forward over the wheel looking for that path, dear old dad, looking for that rest stop because it was part of the culture, part of the knowledge, part of the life, he was trying to give his daughter. And his wife.
And in another life, when you were a boy, you’d journey along in the back seat of your own dad’s car. You’d pull up alongside and overtake beautiful back-seat girl and her dad and mum, when your pop came up to the passing lane, a third lane that widened for a brief stretch of a few kilometers. And you’d see her there, with shiny hair caught in some glare of a headlight in the opposite lane, shadows tracing and then falling away from her features. She’d see you and you’d spend the rest of your own holiday with your parents wondering what she was like and if you’d amble up to your hotel room with key in hand (that you’d begged mom to let you carry) to find that she, boyfriend-less and missing her own friends back home, was in the room right next door. And, oh yeah, both rooms had a direct view of, no not something cultural, not something natural or beautiful, but instead the bright blue tub-tubes of resin plastic: the three-storey waterslide.
A magical thought, the other car. The voyage buddy, the companion on the road to another world. It was even, for me now, epicurean to imagine the lives in that other car. They were going the same place as me, caught in the time-warp of a highway between two spots in the night. But likely, they headed there for very different reason. God, I hoped so. Though I was headed back for much needed sleep and that was a good thing, the reason I was driving home at all was because I had left. And the only reason I had left was to try and push a cell phone package on a small contracting company. It was one of those deals where they get a hand full of units and pay a monthly fee to us, then we sublet the charges and they get a handsome minute-fee between co-workers. A cheap version of CB, up-to-date and ready to go with nothing but a signature and a year-long commitment. Should have been an easy sale. LeFevre, the sales manager for this reason, thought so. Assured me of it. But he always assured that. Even the hopeless efforts, which this one turned out to be.
I wanted to make LeFevre, the pompous ass, eat shit for his failings. His failings were mine. They exaggerated themselves and fell down the line. And I was tired of eating his issues, sucking his ass and selling his junk.
But, in honesty, both he and I worked for an asinine company. We both knew it. I just got the shorter end of the already short stick out of the two of us. We both got crapped on, but he just seemed to delight on crapping on me more than his boss did on him. Or maybe I only saw my side. These things sell themselves. Yeah, LeFevre, eat me. They sell themselves. With me sweating on the insides and making every attempt to lie and not have anyone realize it’s the worst purchase decision they’ve ever made if they fall for my sucker-punch tactic. Abso-fucking-loo-mon.
Either case, here on the road, at just past nine and thinking about the girl that might or might not exist in the backseat of the car ahead with the touchy brake-happy dad-driver, I didn’t care about LeFevre’s boss. I wanted to not only get out of my rep job, but shit directly down LeFevre’s throat for fourteen years of sitting, mouth open, under his gaping ass.
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At that moment, I thought again of how easy it would have been to dive off the opposite side of the road. Quick? Yeah, relative to the lengthy crap-ride that life is, that little jaunt would have been a trip just over the nearest rainbow.
It would have a neat little tempo: silence. Under the car, the wheels would part from the asphalt, would spin against nothing but air. How long would I be in mid-jump, without being connected to anything?The thought was exhilarating until reality did its faithful yank, was not frightening until I thought of Meghan. Though, really, would she miss me that much? What have I ever given her expect an excuse for her mother to bash me?
And where was it written, in what book, in whose head, under what quill, that I should not, cross the double thump-thump threshold and dive off the highway? Was it laid down that I wouldn’t do it? And why not? What stops me other than those little squares of reflective plastic? It’s the oldest prison for the modern man, that line down the middle of the road. It’s the cage, representative of many in the day-to-day, but the only one that is entirely imaginary. The only one that you can actually escape...just by turning the steering wheel a little.
So why didn’t I do it?
And why, in God’s name, did I not feel like the idea was overwhelming. Scary. Queezy, stupid. It was none of those things...Yet I didn’t go. That night, just like I intend to do on this night, I just drove home. My head hit the pillow in my empty bedroom, in my empty house. And I slept on, just as I aimed to do this night, until morning. When the sun finally rose again, promising another race towards five. Can I make it to five bells without pissing anyone off, without anyone mentioning how dangerously close to missing my month’s quota I was? Can I slide into my chair and pop a Corona after selling a fifty-unit package to some gardening company in the local Saanich area?
What a bullshit life.
In my head was the flash, not of LeFevre’s anus, but of that sailing arch among trees and past the edge of the asphalt. I was cruising through air into the pit of nothingness. How long would it last? Before the impact? And would I feel it?
In the heap of my self-pity, and the image of such a stunt whereby I careened off the roadway like a drunken and maybe suicidal monster, I was still humming along at a good clip with my briefcase open beside me and wishing it contained an aspirin or a Tylenol or, shit, a bottle of something to drink. That instant I caught sight of the edges on that blue Plymouth ahead. The edges, and the tail lights, not red, not at all the bright red of a braking, just quietly sailed off to the center of the road.
I didn’t hear the Plymouth thump with its tires on the divider squares, but the glare of one of them shone briefly through the misty smear of my windshield. The flash came just as the middle of the car passed the invisible cage bar that I had imagined crossing some time before, on a night like this one, but a night in which things seemed more real. A night when the pink and lavender of the sky was actually memorable in the west behind me.
The Plymouth, holy Christ, the thing just glided on past. Past that line it went, in a smooth gesture, not even weaving. It was like a lane change by a driver’s ed. Student who is being overly cautious to impress his instructor. “The object of a good driver, Mr. Warrel, my own driver’s ed instructor said, is to disrupt the flow of traffic as little as possible. Lane changes should be a smooth flowing motion. Think of water from a tap.”
Well, that’s just what the driver of the Plymouth ahead did. He thought of a running tap and just let it flow. He did another lane change, as the road curved slightly to the right and around another wall-edge of rocky mountainous terrain.
It was the rest-stop goddammit. The Plymouth lane-changed like a stream of running water from a faucet right into that rest stop. In silence, but with something that sounded—-in my mind at least—-like a crunch, the Plymouth’s driver side clipped the post of a map sign. In the Plymouth’s headlamp I saw it snap and send splinters of light wood painted dark up into the air. The sign fell but not on the car. The car, still at the same speed, shot past, through that break in the trees where a trail led down to a lower edge way. It kept going, silent, dead, with only the light of its tails visible now. It hung there for a second, or maybe that was a trick in my own head, and then it was gone. Quiet, no trace that it had even existed.
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I careened past that spot, stomping my foot on the brake and listing to the side. It occurred to me after I had already been in mid-screeching halt that I should check behind me for another car, a set of headlights in my rearview. But, ah hell, I’d have seen them already. The night was dark and the beams would have been a shock in the mirror. They’d have added to my headache.
When I stepped on the brakes like that, my briefcase lid fell shut with a dull clamping sound. Papers, my own cell phone, a few pens trying to add to my look of dignified salesmanship, were all concealed for a second in the dark passenger seat. And I heard the squeal of my tires on the wet asphalt.
God! That car! The Plymouth, did it actually go over the edge? Did it really happen or did my mind imagine it? There really was a Plymouth, right? I didn’t make it up?
But it was so quiet. I wanted to believe that the car had not done what I thought it had. I was tired, but the headache pounding in my temples told me I was awake. If this was a dream it was vivid and no dream could be as real as watching those taillights slide past the break in the guard rail. The trees didn’t even shudder. The shrubs looked like they hardly noticed. But the sign. The sign with the map on it that undoubtedly proclaimed, “You Are Here!” with a giant red dot next to it, that sign had been maimed. I pushed open my car door, letting it swing wide into the opposite lane. Not even thinking to put my emergency flashers on, I got out of the car. I felt weak and the cool air hit me unlike the conditioned stuff in the cab.
I ran to the spot where I thought the Plymouth had gone over. It was dark but I thought I saw trails in the sooty, dusty gravel of the rest stop.
And I found the sign, bits and pieces of its leg, shards of splintered wood laying at rest all around. I turned towards the empty void beyond the edge, but saw nothing.
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There was a 7/11 in Mill Bay where the officer took me. I wasn’t a mess, I hadn’t wept or gone off the deep end of panic and overwrought emotion. I hadn’t yelled or screamed or even let a tear go down my face. But I was overcome.
I had made the call on my cell phone, had fetched it from my clamped-shut briefcase on the passenger seat and had stood, agonized, paced, worried, nearly freaked out, while I waited for them to show. Three police cars, two ambulances. A firetruck, I think. Or some kind of emergency vehicle. It was big and yellow, and like all the others it had flashing, whirling lights on top.
The rain started again, just a spattering sparse play of drops in my hair and on my shoulders. The road was still wet from before, and there was a chill in me that I couldn’t fight.
That officer had a notepad, a fuckin’ notepad! Just like on TV, he had a notepad and a pen and he was asking questions of me, then writing the answers down in some scribbly shorthand of his own. Did it look like there was a struggle in the car? Did the wheels waver? How fast was the car going?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
He saw I was shaken, suggested coffee, and that’s when he drove me to Mill Bay, just up the road, to the Sev.
We were standing at the register, waiting to pay, and this guy, maybe mid-forties, perhaps just a touch older than me, walks in. He looks like a trucker, a log trucker maybe. He’s wearing a cap, dirty jeans, a dark shirt. He goes to fill up a thermos and then joins us in line. Looking at the officer beside me, he says, “Holy jeesus, man, are you up here for that car that went over the edge?”
“Yes,” the officer said, looking tired. “Did you see it happen?”
“No. Drunk?”
“We don’t know.” The officer looks at me then, as I’m about to pay for my coffee, “We’re up here investigating...”
That clues in the trucker and he looks at me then. “HOl-ee Shiiit. You saw that happen? Christ. Motherfucker is one messed up dude...”
I have nothing to say to him. He irritates me. He treats this whole thing like it’s just a wreck to pass by and glare at out your driver’s window—-
“Shit, man, I’m sure as hell glad he didn’t take anyone with him. If he’s got kids at home, I hope they know what a sick, twisted, messed up fuck their dad was...”
He sounds like he’s goading me, waiting for me to agree. Or disagree. I’m pissed off, then. My anger at the day had gone through the tank, got flushed and came out as wet exhaustion and frustration. And now I was pissed again. I wanted to grab that thermos he was holding, that stainless steel missile, and I wanted to shove the open canister of it down his thrown. Here you want some coffee? Eat it. And the coffee would burn his throat and he’d spit it up all over himself, it would come out in a spray of hot dark liquid down his shirt and onto his face and his neck. You’re the twisted fuck, I wanted to scream as I choked him. You’re the messed up motherfucker. You goddamn beast. Here! Eat it! EAT IT!—
I calmed. I don’t know how but I calmed. I collected my change in my hand and turned to go. The officer was behind me and then we turned when we heard a clang behind us, back at the counter. The trucker had dropped his stainless steel flask. It poured coffee all over the tiled floor of the 7/11.
He was crumpled forward, his hands were at his throat, and his face was cherry red. His eyes were bugging out of his head like they were rotten grapes, white with fungus, and ready to burst. He fell forward as the officer rushed to him. He was gagging, making choking noises, and he finally split his lips and let out a fine mist of liquid. It was a spray that hit the counter and then dribbled its remains down the front of his chin. He let out a gagged yell, low and growly, filled with pain and twisted hurt.
The motherfucker had nearly chocked to death on his fucking coffee? Burned his throat? Was he eating something and that’s what lodged in there? I didn’t know for sure.
And that’s when it hit me. Holy Christ. I didn’t want that car to go over the edge. Shit. Fuck. I saw my car doing the circus tumble. Not the blue Plymouth.
I was tired, and cranky, my head hurt, and I was messed up from what had happened. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t make that happen. I didn’t make the car switch lanes, calm, sure not to disturb the flow of other potential traffic. I was totally insane if I thought I had made that happen.
Just like I was totally insane if I thought I had made that twisted trucker nearly choke at the gas station. Shit, that just made no sense. None of it made any sense.
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I pulled up to my house, a bungalow in South Saanich with my head aching worse than ever. It was a busy street, mine, but not this time of night, creeping up to twelve. It was a two-bedroom with a short sunken driveway from the street that pushed into a basement garage under the front bedroom.
The stucco was gray, the house old, middle sixties maybe. A piece of crap on the outside. But I’d spent the last few years installing new cupboards, new woodwork throughout, light fixtures and switches. I had even taken a week and refinished the hardwoods throughout. It was my one pride left, that house. The car was shit. And my family was in shambles, but that house looked great inside. Sparsely decorated, mind you, but I hate having a lot of clutter. Caroline liked clutter. She had so much lying around you could barely move, barely think. She made a habit of transferring piles to other piles, making bigger piles, splitting piles, and swapping piles.
We should have never been married.
When I pulled into the driveway and popped the car into first, then pulled the e-brake, the engine made a clanking noise when it died. That didn’t sound good and I half-heartedly expected to be taking a cab in the morning when I’d find the Pontiac unable to turn over, a dead block in the driveway. I was too tired to think about it. Too tired to think about anything. I needed aspirin and I needed sleep.
The officer had gone to look after the trucker, and I was given a card, left to drive the rest of the way home, with that picture of the Plymouth leaving the highway in my head as I meandered down the wet roadway. I couldn’t believe it, highway patrollers have business cards with their phone numbers? I was told to call him—-we hadn’t finished going through all the details yet. He took my particulars and said he would be in touch.
At home, finally at home, with the engine ticking under a wet hood, I got out of the Pontiac, hazy in the head, and then I saw the light from the living room window.
I went in expecting to see that giant potted fern turned over on the hardwood, water everywhere. I expected to see the cable lying limp on the floor and the TV gone. I expected the glass coffee table to be smashed...I don’t know what I expected. But after this night, anything would not be unexpected.
But inside, the TV was still there, turned on in fact. The house was just as neat as I’d left it. But Meghan, my step-daughter, was curled up on the couch, eyes closed, cute as a button. The volume was down, but it was flashing images from one of those late-night crime shows. She was under my dad’s old army blanket, a government issue from World War II, light green, the softest material, Meg’s fave whenever she was over.
I looked closer at her. She had been crying. Her face was red and lines of mascara, faint and gray, lay on her cheeks. What a seventeen-year old was even wearing mascara for—-
She woke up, scared the living shit out of me, actually. It was like she had sensed me looking at her.
“Dean! Fuck! You scared me—-”
“You scared me. What are you doing here? Where’s yer mom? Is everything okay?”
Meghan rubbed her eyes, stretched a little and yawned. Her back arched and the blanket fell away. She was wearing a tight spaghetti-strap tank top. Her nipples stood out dark and hard against the white fabric. Her eyes were closed but I caught myself looking and turned toward the kitchen, threw my jacket around the back of a chair and set my briefcase gingerly on the hardwood floor near the wall. “She’s fine. Better than fine. She got that job in Seattle. We’re moving. I don’t wanna go Dean—-” That last bit was a borderline whine.
Megs was thirteen when Caroline and I hitched our wagons together but she lived with her real dad until about sixteen and she only stayed with us on odd holidays here and there. I didn’t mind so much. I wasn’t cut out to be a dad and never had the want for it.
“We had a fight. I came here. She knows where I am. It’s okay...Can I stay here?” I pulled my fingers through my greasy-feeling hair, just wanting a shower and a cold beer, feeling worn out and twice my age. I wasn’t in the mood to take her home, or to placate her. I grabbed a bottle of pills from the cupboard over the fridge and swallowed three without water.
“Sure. Fine,” I said. “Whatever. But just tonight. We’ll talk in the morning. I am fuckin’ tired.”
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I guess it started after Meghan’s dad died. Cancer. Fuckin’ indomitable disease took ‘im at only thirty-four. Caroline went south for a year or so, not literally, I mean went south as in nutso. I think Caroline still loved the ex and, of course, me saying that in the heat of battle was the pin in a grenade. Meghan had only been living with us for a few weeks when she took her daughter to Japan for an extended job out there. Caroline worked for this big uppity library and got these internship opportunities every few years. Like an exchange job in another country. She’d turned them down for the first years of our marriage, and I think she began resenting me for that further down the line. But, hell, I’ll admit, there were more problems than that.
A few weeks or so after Caroline and I finally seperated—-it had not been happy for years but neither of us did anything about it for too long—-she took Meghan out of school and left for an internship in Sagami-Ohno, Japan.
I thought it would be for a year, but it turned into three. In that time I forgot how to be married, and certainly any shred of what it was like to be a father figure to someone. Meghan was fourteen when they left and when she came back, after all those years in a private school, she was nearly a grown woman able to speak nearly perfect mandarin. Well, no. It wasn’t so much that she was grown up, but she was definitely grown up looking. She still said ‘like’ a lot, still chewed with her mouth open, and bitched about needing new jeans. But she had breasts, and hips, and curves. She had those pouty lips and big dark eyes. She was a complete stranger to me but one who knew everything about me. She was seventeen and I hadn’t seen her for those years, only in a few pictures, and had only talked to her on the phone. But I missed that period nearly altogether, that period when she grew out of the little girl’s body and snuck into the one with the long legs of perfect skin, the hair that sat on a bare shoulder just perfectly—-
Cripes. I’m such a bastard.
She would sit on the couch with her legs open, her feet up on the cushions, with pink nail polish shining as she wiggled her toes. She would be wearing only a pair of tight shorts, panties visible underneath, and a t-shirt and I, for the life of me, couldn’t sit next to her without feeling something not entirely appropriate. I was wigged out. It was wrong. And if she knew, fuck, if her mother knew, I’d be castrated. I should be castrated.
Meghan had slept in my bed a couple times during the rough patch before the separation when Caroline and I had a fight...back before Japan. It came off like I looked at her more as an adult than Caroline did, I think, like an equal instead of a kid. But she was all too happy to snuggle in with me when I was in the guest bedroom of our old house in James Bay. She was just a pup then, no big deal.
But after Japan, shit, when she started coming over on some nights to watch movies or cook dinner—-she insisted I needed a woman to cook for me every so often—-she tried the cuddling thing again on the couch. For her, yeah, I know, it was just a looking-up-to-an-old man sort of thing, no father to do that stuff with. And, in my head, I knew that it was too, but when she squirmed against my lap, I nearly lost it. When I was sure she must be feeling something through my pants, I had to get up and go out in the backyard and drink a beer on the deck.
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I was nearly asleep, laying on my back, in the master bedroom, the front one. But my eyes came open when I heard a car—-was it in my head? Or a real one out on the road driving past the house? I saw the flash of those little squares and then the blue car ahead pass them. Thump-thump.
The pills had done their work; the headache was nearly gone, only a minor presence in the back near the base of my skull. But the coffee was keeping me awake. I felt wired.
I let out a breath and then I thought of Meghan. I wanted her to come in. I was wide awake and I felt bad about not listening to her when I got home. She had been crying. I could tell. She had been upset. The fight with Caroline must have been a doozy this time.
I wanted her to come in, pull away the sheets and flop into the bed with me, like before. Like when she was a kid. We could talk and she could tell me what she wanted. Could tell me why she didn’t want to go to Seattle. The car wasn’t going anywhere in the morning, I just knew it, so I could lose a bit of sleep tonight. It was only nearing one. We could chat, she and I. She’d feel better...then I could sleep late and go in to work after lunch. I’d feel better. LeFevre would give me a break—-fucking LeFevre, don’t get me started, Monsieur LeFevre—-when I told him about the accident on the highway.
Yeah, I thought. Meghan should come in.
But she wouldn’t. She was already fast asleep. I knew that. She, like she always had been, was more self-reliant than I ever was. At her age or even now. She was even-keeled, even-tempered, and she saw things for what they were. Even when she whined about the stupid stuff that kids whine about, it was less of a big deal than I thought it should be. She was only seventeen now, and sure, yeah, absolutely, she whined and griped and behaved like a bubble-headed seventeen year old. But underneath that, she was heading towards a maturity. A profound grace. We could, even at thirteen, talk like she was an adult. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t care if she swore, or drank with her friends, or called her mom a bitch—-that was always a good thing in my books—-
The door to my room cracked. Light bled in from the hall, sallow light. No lights were on in here or out there, but the kitchen light must have been on somewhere down the hall because there was some that spilled in and made it obvious that the door had been opened. The door made no sound, no squeak, no creak. It just opened. And I looked towards it where the only light from the streetlamp lay across my step-daughter’s face and torso.
“Deano,” she whispered. “You asleep?”
“No. Come in.” I was whispering too, that response you get when someone whispers to you even though you know there’s no reason to whisper back. “Hey,” I said, as she climbed into bed, wearing that spaghetti tank top and satin panties, “You okay? I’m sorry I was a bum before. I was just tired—-” One of her straps fell down her shoulder and the streetlamp light caught her milky skin. Her eyes were shiny in the dark. “—-I saw an accident on the highway and—-”
“Holy shit, Dean, was anybody hurt?” She was still whispering.
“No,” I said, raising my voice a little but not much. “No, everyone was fine.” I said. “Fender bender. But you know, the police needed to talk to me. I was just so tired when I got home...”
“Want me to let you sleep then?” She had turned on her side to face me. My head was turned to look her. She pulled the sheets up to her throat.
“Nuh. It’s fine. Let’s talk. What’s with yer mom?”
“She’s gone nutso again.” Meg looked at the ceiling and pushed some of her hair from her eyes. Then she looked back at me. “She’s marrying Heath...”
Heath. What kind of a fuckin’ name is Heath? A middle aged man who owns a four-store chain of vitamin stores...and he’s named Heath. “Yeah.” I say to Meghan, not really as a question but more as a confirmation. It was only a matter of time.
“Yeah,” Meg agreed.
“And I don’t want to live with them. Not in Seattle. I’ve just started making friends here. And there’s Derek—-” Meg’s new boyfriend, or, I suppose, wannabe boyfriend. “—-We went to Gonzales Beach today, me an’ Derek, a bunch of us, after school. We were having so much fun with everyone and then it started raining. He dropped me off and that’s when Mom told me about Heath and the wedding. What a load of crap, Dad.”
Yeah, I know, I wanted to say. But didn’t. I suppose me letting on that I was pissed off and bitter about Caroline marrying Heath, getting on with her life, while mine was in the dumper, probably wasn’t a good thing to share right now.
Meg fell silent. She turned on her back, and her bare leg bent so it was resting against my hip. It was warm.
She crossed her arms in front of her, and the blanket fell away, down to her waist. Her top was pushed up and I saw the bare skin of her stomach, nearly all the way up to her breast. Her shoulders and arms were tanned.
It was hot that night, the curtains blew around a little in the breeze from the open window in my room and that made the light dance nicely beyond Meg on the wall.
She was sullen now, sulky. And I wanted to say something about Heath and mom that would make things seem okay again. But that’s just it, I couldn’t think of anything. There was nothing to be said.
We talked a bit more, trivial things mostly, and both of us got really tired. She yawned and turned on her side. My eyes finally fell shut. The day took its toll and I was dead to the world.
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It was not light yet when I felt Meghan stir beside me. My eyes had that tight feel, like I’d had them clamped against something horrific as I slept. I let them come open as I felt Meg’s warm body against mine. She was looking at me and her face was right next to mine. When her lips touched mine, I didn’t pull back.
My hands, like an instinct, went to her shoulders. In my memory, they felt like her mothers. And we were moving together, pressing together, like her mother and I had done years before...I felt dreary, worn, like it wasn’t really happening, like it didn’t matter if my hands were on her, all over her, groping her as my chest pressed against hers, because it couldn’t be real. How could it be real?
She rolled closer and I felt every inch of her against every inch of me. She eased on top of me, then sat upright, straddling me at the waist, and her hands went to the bottom hem of her tank top. She pulled it up and over her head, and looked down at me, a curving dark silhouette of lines and shapes and pinpoint whites in her eyes. As she leaned down to me, I thought:
This is--
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--so wrong.
On the passenger seat beside me, my open briefcase fell shut with a whump.
Reality, that bugger reality, that thing that holds us all tighter than we’d like, except when we seem to need it, it yanked me back. There was no darkened room, no twisted bedsheets, no tank top lifted in an intimate reveal. Now I only saw the roadway disappear through the stone-chipped windshield of the Pontiac up near Comox where the bluffs meet the highway. It became a curving arc disappearing to the right beyond the windshield.
This was Reality: The blue car in front, leading by a hundred feet, left my sight. But it stayed within the lines. It was dark and my headlight beams caught the perimeter edge of gravel and trees. Thump-thump! The front tires rumbled over a reflective square on the dark, damp roadway.
And then, thump-thump! again. The back tires hit a square too. My hands were clutched on the Pontiac’s steering wheel, holding it as it was, but I couldn’t, didn’t want to turn it back.
The sign, the big wooden one, You Are Here, light wood painted dark, was in view. It’s leg exploded across the hood when I clipped it and then I passed through the edging of dark outlines–-the trees. I was floating. I was in mid air, and I could nearly feel the tires spinning silently against nothing at the undercarriage.
My fingers relaxed on the wheel. I stared at nothingness.
I didn’t even feel the descent.
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About The Author // Jason McIntyre
Born on the prairies, Jason McIntyre eventually lived and worked on Vancouver Island where the vibrant characters and vivid surroundings stayed with him and coalesced into what would become his novel, "On The Gathering Storm". Before his time as an editor, writer and communications professional, he spent several years as a graphic designer and commercial artist. His novel,"On The Gathering Storm" is available now.
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