by Jay Quinn
While Maura’s parents weren’t wealthy they did love their daughter and little grandson very much. Maura took them up on their offer to subsidize Kai’s parochial school tuition, which allowed her to pay for his after-school care herself.
In the following years Maura perfected the skills of being a practical dreamer. She kept herself to herself and dated rarely. The truth was, she was still in love with Rhett with a persistence that had nothing to do with the facts of his life continuing happily up on the Outer Banks without his wife and son. Instead of investing her energy into a love life, Maura put her efforts into her job at Kellogg, Wise, and Kaplan, the civil engineering firm whose timely job offer had brought her south to Florida to begin with. What she didn’t put into her work at KWK, she gave to Kai.
Kai was a different kind of child. Though he was quite pretty for a little boy and many other children strove to be his friend, he was aloof and given to being a loner. From the time he was a baby he loved to draw. Alone with a pad of blank paper and enough markers, pencils, and crayons to capture all the images he saw in his head, he was content. Maura, alone and often tired, encouraged his solitary pursuits, though she did enjoy being with him a great deal. She was much like him herself. Maura had never been an outgoing personality. While she was perfectly capable of being social, she really preferred her own company. In her son, she saw herself, so she reared him to be self-sufficient. While they were content to simply share the house, they both developed a closeness that was perfectly natural considering their circumstances. Maura, for want of many friends, spoke to the little fellow more as a contemporary and with a great deal of fascination and respect, enjoying his point of view and his perceptions. They got on remarkably well and didn’t feel any deprivation in the small house by the canal in the subdivision way out by the Everglades.
When Kai was still quite young, Maura started noticing that Kai had trouble sleeping. He could be wild at times, dancing or running or otherwise extending himself physically until he would slump in exhaustion. These periods were followed by hollow-eyed hours of staring into nothingness. His emotions were curiously labile, shifting on a dime from a happy voluble toddler to a withdrawn child, chillingly distant and remote.
However, his pediatrician saw nothing to be alarmed about. Physically he was healthy, though he often had dark circles of exhaustion ringing his pale gray eyes. The pediatrician explained that Kai was a very imaginative child with a set of personal circadian rhythms unique to himself. The doctor told Maura not to worry about it; they’d keep an eye on him and later test him to see if he had hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder when he became older. Maura seriously doubted that Kai had ADHD. He had already demonstrated an almost preternatural absorption in whatever task was at hand. He seemed to lose himself in whatever he was doing to the point of being startled when she finally demanded his attention.
Kai had always been a precocious child. He had both walked and talked by the time he was nine months old. If he could be inexplicably irritable or moody, she just chalked it up to the transitory winds of childhood and always, if she watched and waited, he came to himself reasonably. If there was anything remarkable about him, as far as Maura was concerned, it was the degree with which he could learn. Before he was four, he had taught himself to read and Maura counted herself lucky that his most favorite treat was a trip to the public library rather than an array of expensive toys. As long as she kept him in books and drawing materials he seemed happy.
If there was anything that troubled her about Kai as a toddler, it was his extreme reaction to music. Maura herself was not musically gifted, but she loved music. What limited money she had for herself, she spent on albums and then CDs. She loved it all, rock, jazz, soul, even country music spoke to her, though her personal favorites when Kai was small were soul and R&B. Kai responded dramatically to music. On more than one occasion he had been reduced to tears by a particularly sad song of love and loss articulated by some soul diva about complicated adult emotions far from the emotional reach of a four-year-old. Likewise, Kai could be enchanted by a song and learned very early how to make the stereo play his favorite songs over and over.
Now, more than twenty years later, Maura knew all of these things about her son’s uniqueness should have given her pause, but at the time, they hadn’t. She never saw the shadows on the walls of their little house in Sawgrass Estates until they became impossible to ignore. Kai eventually cracked up, badly, around his ninth birthday. There was a big suicide attempt for such a skinny little boy, and ambulances, and doctors following that. Life became defined by shifting diagnoses, each grimmer than the last. Then there were the meds that ravaged her pretty son until he physically changed with each new round of pills.
When the doctors managed to agree, they defined Kai as having a rare, rapid-cycling form of Type II bipolar disorder. After that, Maura’s life, more than ever, became about her son. Alone, she bent herself to shield him from the emotional winds that seemed to come like the hurricanes that threatened them each summer and fall.
Now, Kai had turned twenty-seven and Maura fifty. Two years before, he’d moved back to the Outer Banks to work with his Rhett. Despite his degree in graphic design from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Kai had chosen to become a trim carpenter, and by all accounts, he was a very good one. He specialized in custom cabinetry beyond the usual installation of baseboards and crown molding. Medicated, he was industrious and productive, but off his meds, he dissolved.
In the two years since he’d returned to his dad, Kai had been stable, and Maura was at last able to see past him and his needs. On her own for the first time in her life, she flourished. Still in the small house on the canal in Sunrise, she cautiously redecorated and brought her home to a very comfortable and pleasant state. For the first time in her life, she didn’t have to support or supplement Kai’s income so she was able to purchase the contemporary Italian leather sofa and slouchy modern dining room chairs to contrast with a nineteenth-century English breakfast table. She bought the Frette linens in pure white that had tempted her for years in her home design magazines. She replaced her battered Wal-Mart pots and pans with All-Clad, reveling in materialism for once.
Still employed by KWK, the same engineering firm that had brought her to South Florida, Maura had earned a respected and valued place in the upper levels of management. And, to her complete surprise, she found herself once more in love.
One of Maura’s responsibilities with the firm was to be its representative member for the county wide homebuilder’s association. As an allied industry member, the principals at her firm thought that it was important for Maura to participate fully in the activities of the association. For all the catered chicken or fish dinners she endured every month, she came to enjoy her membership not only for its challenges and opportunities to network, but also for its social aspect. Having been single for over twenty years, she was at last able to see herself as others saw her: an attractive career woman who’d kept her figure as assiduously as she’d kept her hair carefully blonded to preserve the girl she’d been on the beach all those years before. Maura got her share of not only second looks but also of propositions. At either she smiled confidently, but never gave anything away.
After many years in the homebuilders’ association, Maura found herself on the legislative committee. This was the lobbying arm of the association and so its committee members tended to be either lawyers or the big players in the real estate development industry. Matt Jenkins was one such player. By the time he met Maura, they were both forty-eight and while she had worked her way up in a civil engineering firm, Matt had parlayed his entrepreneurial start-up home building company into a firm that employed a total of over four hundred workers, administrative and tradesmen. He eventually sold his company to a large national homebuilder with a contract that kept him on as president of the new division his own firm had become. Matt had sold out at just the right time. He made a second fortune when he sold out to the large national h
omebuilder. He had also made and lost a marriage with two teenaged daughters in the process.
Matt told Maura his marriage had been doomed before it began. Matt was a single-minded careerist. His wife was a Venezuelan beauty who also was as spoiled and capricious as a child. She grew into her role as a successful builder’s wife with none of her flaws smoothed by maturity, motherhood, or prestige. She and Matt had divorced before he sold his company. He was not ungenerous with her or his two daughters, but he despaired of them all. Their mother was rearing the girls to be princesses and there was little Matt could do to change things.
Matt and Maura met one bright Wednesday morning in the conference room of a law firm high in an office building in the dead center of Fort Lauderdale. It was Maura’s first morning as a member of the legislative committee and she impressed Matt with her intuitive questions and easy grasp of the nuances of the problems the group was trying to address. He’d seen her at general membership meetings, as Maura had seen him, but they had never spoken. For Maura’s part, she knew who he was and more about his private life than he’d probably had reason to think, but the homebuilder’s association was really a rather small pond and he was a large fish. Maura kept catching his eye all during that first meeting, sitting as she was, across the impressive expanse of oak conference table, but she thought little of it. As far as she was concerned, Matt Jenkins was out of her league. Matt, however, thought very differently.
As the meeting was breaking up, he made it a point to find his way across the conference room to introduce himself to Maura and exchange business cards. Maura was impressed with his ease and with the man himself. Matt wasn’t conventionally handsome. Rather he was striking in his way. His long rangy form had managed to stay raw-boned even into middle age. He had reddish blond hair and warm brown eyes that were lambent behind the stylish glasses he was wearing. At six-three, he stood over Maura’s five-ten and she found herself pleased to look up into his pleasantly weathered face. Matt didn’t have the kind of skin meant for outdoor work in the strong South Florida sun. The harsh light had rewarded him with a fan of wrinkles around his eyes that radiated outward and deepened with his smile.
Matt actually knew as much about Maura as she did him. She was remarkable enough for being such a successful woman in what was an industry dominated by men. Besides that, she was blonde-haired and green-eyed, with a promising hint of ripeness in her trim figure. She smiled and told him she’d be delighted if he’d call.
They found themselves lovers rather quickly. For Maura, it was a sexual awakening that she had longed for but long denied. For Matt, it was an affair that excited him deeply; reawakening an adolescent longing he thought he had long grown past. With Kai recently moved north to be near his father, Maura was in her home improvement phase and Matt stepped into an area in Maura’s life and home that had long been closed off, and left to the cobwebs. Though Matt still lived in an old home in Lighthouse Point he had bought and moved into after his divorce, over the following months he found himself most often at Maura’s. He found himself painting her walls and changing out her kitchen with the time he had planned to redo his place in Lighthouse Point.
What surprised both of them, now, two years down the road, was the depth of their friendship. Neither Maura nor Matt had ever been in a relationship that brought companionability with passion, warm acceptance with hot embraces and an abiding respect with what they thought of as love. They never spoke of marriage. Neither of them wanted to dislodge the warm heart of what they had together with the things marriage had taught them came with the ring and the chapel.
Distracted by her concern for Kai, Maura heard the phone’s alarming tone meant to remind her to hang up. She stood and replaced the phone in its cradle before she busied herself making two mugs of coffee, one for Matt and one for herself. Then, she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and walked to the living room where she handed Matt his mug of coffee before sitting on the end of the sofa by his chair.
“I take it that was your ex,” Matt said easily.
“Yes, and he had some rather interesting news,” Maura said as she took a sip of her coffee. For the first time in ages she longed for a cigarette. She had only quit when she started going out with Matt.
“What did he say? He didn’t upset you, did he?” Matt asked with no little concern.
“Well, he didn’t upset me, but his news is a little disconcerting,” Maura admitted.
“What’s going on?”
“Evidently my son is in his truck with his dog and all his personal belongings heading south on I-95 on his way home,” Maura said plainly.
“Well, it’ll be nice to meet him finally. He’s a trim carpenter isn’t he?”
“More like a master cabinet maker,” Maura said proudly. “I have pictures somewhere of his high-end work. He really is very good.”
“How long does he plan to visit?” Matt asked cautiously.
“I can’t say, Matt. Maybe six days, six weeks, six months, hell if I know.” Maura said tiredly.
“Oh boy,” Matt said, and sipped his coffee.
After that, they sat quietly for awhile, drinking their coffee and Maura longing for a cigarette. Finally, Matt ventured to ask, “Well, when do you expect him?”
“If he drives straight through, by mid-morning tomorrow,” Maura said and smiled.
“I guess I’d better clear out after breakfast then,” Matt said. “No!”
“Well, I do have to go into the office,” Matt replied calmly.
“I’m sorry, Matt. I didn’t mean to snap at you,” Maura said and took his free hand in her own. “I just don’t want anything to change with us just because he’s here. He’s got to accept there’s a new man around the house.”
“We’ll work it out—don’t freak on me, okay?” Matt told her gently.
Maura squeezed his hand before letting go and pulling her hair back with her hand. She stroked it into place well off her forehead and said, “It’s only one’s kids who feel like they can just barge in and expect life to have stood still while they were away.”
“Mine aren’t that old yet, but I’m definitely seeing the signs,” Matt said and smiled.
Maura searched his face and finding his eyes, she said, “You know, it’s like I’m my own ship… making headway against the currents on a flat calm sea and I look behind myself and there’s this dingy tied up at my stern. It’s just happily riding along tied to me even though it has its own motor and oar. The person who’s supposed to be on that dingy is always coming back to the mothership.”
“I take it this isn’t the first time your son has done this,” Matt said gently.
Maura shook her head. “There was the time he wanted to live with his dad when he was twelve. That was a disaster. There was the time he went to live with his dad after he graduated from high school and then came home two years later to go to the Art Institute. Now, here he is again.
“The boomerang kid, they call it,” Matt said and smiled.
“What?” Maura replied.
“The boomerang kid. No matter how many times you fling them out into the world to make it on their own, they circle back to drop at your feet,” Matt explained gently.
“That’s my Kai,” Maura said as she stood and made her way to the kitchen. She remembered she’d hidden a pack of cigarettes in the freezer in case of an emergency. One like this. She spared a guilty thought for her new baby burrowed deep inside and mumbled an apology as she opened the door to the freezer. She figured one cigarette this early in the game couldn’t hurt. Her own mother had smoked continuously during her own pregnancies and everything had turned out fine for her sister and brothers. If this child was going to be anything like her first born, she’d be back to a pack a day before long.
Chapter Two
THE SKY WAS graying with dawn when Kai pulled off I-95 to gas up an hour south of Jacksonville, Florida. All of South Carolina and Georgia had disappeared under his wheels as he drove through the night. Now his eyes
felt full of sand and Heidi, his Weimaraner, was growing restless in the confines of the truck’s cab. The dark interior of the truck was lit only by the lights on the dash and Kai welcomed the bright fluorescent lights of the gas station as he pulled under the shelter. He was tired, but still filled with an electric energy that drove him on. For the first time in a long while he wished he hadn’t gone off his meds. The charge of his mind wasn’t enough to fuel his body like it had when he was younger. The mania was like an embrace he couldn’t shrug off and now he knew he was tired.
After parking by a gas pump close to the road, Kai reassured Heidi he’d be back as he closed the door on her whimpering. Though the gas station was deserted, he made sure the truck was locked before he strode across the concrete in the harsh glare of greenish-white light to the door of the Mobile Mart. Inside, a bored woman behind the counter looked him over dispassionately as he made his way to the rest room. Once he was inside the stall, he locked the door behind him and drew a folded wad of cash from his jeans pocket. He was carrying the five thousand dollars he’d saved over a summer’s worth of work. He’d closed his savings account in the bank in Kill Devil Hills the Friday before. Carefully he peeled off a few twenties to pay for his gas and another in the series of frozen coffee drinks sold in wayside places like this. He shoved the wad back in his left front pants pocket and stashed the twenties in his back pocket before he stepped to the urinal and relieved himself of the large frozen drink from his last stop hours before.
