by Jay Quinn
“Okay that’s fair,” Kai said with a grimace and took a hit off hit off his cigarette. To change the subject away from himself, he said, “You don’t have to put up with her shit, Robin,” and he flicked the remainder of his cigarette out into the parking lot. “You don’t deserve that.”
“Like I said, don’t worry about it,” Robin told him easily. “Look, I got to go. You just take care and have a good day okay? I’ll be there the day after tomorrow and I can’t wait.”
“Promise?” Kai asked huskily.
“I swear,” Robin replied sincerely. “I got to go. I love you. Call me tonight.”
“Okay. I love you too,” Kai told him and hung up. He turned off his cell phone and dropped it into his pants pocket. He was more than a little disconcerted by the fact that Linda had called Robin. “Jealous bitch,” he muttered aloud as he cranked the truck. Linda had long since given up trying to contact him. He’d spoken to her exactly once since she’d been arrested. She had assured him he was safe from the cops and that was all he needed to hear from her. After that, he had tried his best to forget she ever existed. He totally discounted her emotional investment in him. As far as he was concerned, she was done, finished.
Kai had always possessed the ability to write people off completely. If he felt threatened or hurt by someone’s actions, he simply removed himself from that person’s life with a sudden finality that made him appear totally uncaring and cold-hearted. The truth was, Kai lacked the fundamental ability to care about other people’s feelings. He had always taken care of himself first with an instinct for survival that was almost animalistic. Besides his mother, his dogs and now Robin, he basically lived untouched by others’ emotions or needs. That was why Robin’s admission to his limited pantheon of emotional connection was so significant.
As he drove home, he thought about what he would do if Robin did, in fact, refuse to move south to live with him. For the first time, he considered moving back north to live with Robin again in his neat little cottage in Kill Devil Hills. The idea wasn’t unattractive in itself. He had made a firm decision to join his future with Robin’s and he had no intention of going back on it. Making that decision had taken him so long, and was fraught with so much anxiety, that he didn’t want to waste the effort. No. As soon as possible, he intended to get back together with Robin and damn the consequences. He thought about all the familiar faces who would now read him as gay and they seemed far less important than they had previously.
The problem was that he had expended so much energy to move back south. On the way home, Kai looked around the familiar streets and he felt at ease and comfortable. In its own way the great sprawling metropolis that ran through Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade counties was big enough to get lost in as easily as the relative emptiness of the Outer Banks was. Kai really didn’t want to leave South Florida this time. He felt like he was making a positive new start here. His most recent stint of two years up on the Outer Banks, and the mistakes and gifts it had brought, seemed to be far away. He was done with the place as easily as he was done with Linda. The way he saw it, his future was here, in South Florida amid the easy lilting Spanish, the palm trees and the sunshine. He thought of the windswept beach grass and sand of the Outer Banks and saw only desolation there now. He just hoped to God that Robin could fall in love with Sunrise and Broward County the way he had with Kai.
When he returned home, he thought about the long day that was left to run through with no work and no worries. Fortunately, Bill Kellogg’s job had added to his nest egg, and money wasn’t a concern at the moment. All he was left with was time to relax and prepare for Robin’s visit. Heidi even seemed laid back and uninterested in more than a quick pee in the back yard and a prompt return to her spot on the sofa next to the sunny window. As she led him back into the living room, she jumped on the sofa, turned around three times and settled herself into the cushion with an audible sigh and a dismissive look in his direction.
It was as he closed the sliding glass door in the living room that Kai thought of the stash of pills he had hidden in his dresser drawer. A day like that particular Friday was what Kai had in mind, when he’d saved his last hoard of painkillers rather than sensibly flushing them down the toilet. While he was going through days of detox and withdrawal, he’d resisted the call of the little brown bottle by telling himself he’d have some of the precious pills for special occasions, rather than doing them all up greedily and having no promise of a buzz to look forward to. He’d already talked himself out of treating himself while Robin was visiting, even though it was a holiday. He knew he might be able to fool his mother and Matt if he was high around them, but Robin knew him too well. He’d know in an instant if Kai was high and everything would seem like another lie.
In an instant, Kai smiled and strode to his bedroom. He took the bottle from its hiding place and tipped its contents onto his dresser top. Slowly, carefully, he counted the little spill of pills by two’s. There were twenty-three pills left. For just a moment, the torments of withdrawal came back to him. The days of sickness and distracted longing returned, along with a sharp sense of something close to pain. But the feeling passed. He knew if he did a pill today, he wouldn’t do up the rest in the days that followed; he had too much at stake in the week to come. But just now he had hours to kill all to himself before his mother and Matt returned home. Patiently, he dropped the pills one by one back into the bottle all but one. He put the cap back on the bottle and returned it to its hiding place before he picked up the little blue pill, quickly put it in his mouth, and crushed it with his back molars. Immediately, the bitter taste filled his mouth, but he swallowed quickly and knew soon he would be floating.
His three-week and three-day fast was broken now. He refused to feel concerned or disappointed in himself. Instead, he turned and walked to the kitchen and made himself a glass of water with a little bit of lemon juice, a dash of his mom’s Midori from the liquor cabinet, and a lot of ice. With his cigarettes and ashtray thoughtfully arrayed at ten o’clock and his doctored up water at two o’clock, he opened the windows before he sat down and lit a cigarette. By the time it was done and stubbed out, he felt himself relax. All the ringing noise in his head, kept to a mere murmur by the Risperdal, disappeared. As the drug eased him toward the first rush of his buzz, his mind cleared for the first time in weeks and a precious calm stole over him. Kai smiled. All he had to do now was think of something pleasant and his thoughts would take off on their own, floating like a butterfly alighting only on a subject or scene briefly before gliding on wherever it wanted as the day turned from morning to afternoon outside the bay window.
Kai’s eyes locked on the view outside the window, but after a few moments of appreciating the familiar canal and backs of the houses and yards beyond, he saw nothing. He was looking inward with a force and clarity only the drug opened the door to. He stretched his back and felt it crack comfortably. The sense of overall ease was splendid.
“Oh Robin,” he said out loud as his imagination drifted toward the airport on Sunday. Kai could feel himself driving slowly toward the terminal where Robin would be waiting. He could picture Robin standing with his bag, his eyes scanning the oncoming traffic for Kai’s truck. Kai felt a visceral swelling in his chest as he imagined the rush of welcome that was to come. Then, just as swiftly, his mind moved on to another pleasant scene, and another, and another.
All the while, Kai felt blissful. His hiatus from the drug intensified its effects. As innately creative and imaginative as he was, the appeal of an opiate drug for Kai was instinctual. It allowed him to focus intently on the embroidery his mind was capable of. He could summon the most elaborately detailed plans and project himself into complex situations and emotions all originating and ending in the comfort of his own mind. When he was high, his mind became a comforting, secure place, free of the insistent nagging noise that its faulty synapses and broken electrical currents could generate. He felt transcendent and joyous, all the while simply sitting stil
l and listening to the jazz station on the radio, with a glass of something to drink and an unending supply of cigarettes close by.
Rationally, Kai knew how dangerous the drug was. He knew he would stay high all of the time if it were possible. It was a rabbit hole he could easily slip into, as he had for nearly a year prior to that Friday. When he’d been using the most, he’d carefully dosed himself so that he could still work and function, yet always have the bliss at hand. Like most manic-depressive people, Kai’s moods shifted in cycles, only his was a rare rapid cycling form of the disorder. Instead of high and low cycles alternating in weeks or months, Kai’s moods cycled throughout the day. The year he’d spent on painkillers was the most stable he’d ever been in his life. Of course, his relationship with Robin had added the passion and the security that he’d never know with anyone else.
What had finally convinced Kai that he was indeed in love with Robin was the persistence and increase of his feelings for him after he had gone through withdrawal from the drug. It took that wrenching week of torment to prove to himself that what he felt for Robin was genuine. If his need for Robin and his preoccupation with him had diminished with the physical addiction to the drug, Robin would have taken his place along with a score of others Kai had merely slept with and moved on beyond over the years. But Robin remained ascendant even as Kai climbed down from his year-long binge on the drug.
Now, Kai was ready to believe he could have a future with someone else. The terrible loneliness and isolation he felt around other was eased by being close to someone he could communicate with nonverbally and in daily conversation. Kai was anxious to continue on that journey with Robin. He wanted to know if the worn familiarity of the coming years would lessen his delight in Robin’s company. He had come to believe it wouldn’t. He had finally made up his mind to be a human being and Robin was the reason. With the same inflexible determination with which he could simply dismiss others, he had decided to embrace Robin. From where he sat in his mother’s kitchen that Friday, the future looked bright indeed.
Chapter Seventeen
THEIR DINNER had been consumed companionably, but quietly. After the weeks they had all spent together in close quarters, Matt, Maura, and Kai had grown comfortable both with each other’s silences and with their garrulous times. Now, the time had come to have the discussion with Kai about moving into Matt’s place in Lighthouse Point. Matt gave Maura a significant glance as she cleared away the dinner dishes. Maura suggested coffee to go with the pricey chocolate cake Matt had brought home from the bakery at Doris’s Italian Market. Kai nodded agreeably and offered to make the coffee, but Maura placed her hand on his shoulder and urged him back into his seat as she set his cigarettes and ashtray on the table. He’d looked up at her with a grateful smile.
It was the smile that tugged at her heart. For all the worry he gave her, she knew Kai never was intentionally difficult. In fact, he had always been very grateful for her support and care. In a way, she felt she was betraying him by suggesting he move out now. He’d been careful to be on his best behavior since he’d appeared back in Sunrise. She knew what effort he’d put into not asking for any undue attention or making demands. She appreciated that effort. But she knew it was in his best interest, as well as in the best interest of her relationship with Matt, for him to move out on his own. And, to be perfectly honest, she felt as if she had fulfilled her maternal obligations. He’d come home in crisis, but he’d recovered sufficiently now to make some sure steps back out into the world.
“Kai, Matt has a proposition for you,” she said as she spooned ground coffee into the coffeemaker’s gold mesh filter. “We’d like you to seriously consider what he has to say.” There, she’d said it. Without waiting for his response, she took the glass carafe to the faucet and filled it with water.
“Sure,” Kai said agreeably. He flicked his cigarette against the side of his ashtray and looked at Matt expectantly.
Matt smiled at him, then earnestly leaned forward with his forearms resting on the table top and began, “You know I own an older house in Lighthouse Point, right?”
“Sure,” Kai repeated. “Are you thinking about fixing it up? Maybe something I can do?”
“In a way,” Matt said carefully. “Let me explain the circumstances, okay?”
Kai nodded innocently and took a hit off his cigarette before meeting Matt’s level look across the table.
“After my divorce became final, I was looking for a place to live that could also serve as an investment. Ideally, I knew I’d want to build my own house in the future, but things were so unsettled in my personal and professional life at the time, I didn’t want to tackle a project that big just then. I heard about this house from my CPA. His father was friends with the owners who were elderly and had decided to move back north to be closer to their daughter and grandkids. Long story short, I drove over and took a look at the place and bought it the next day.”
“Wow,” Kai said admiringly. “I guess it was built back in the sixties, right? Is it on the water?”
Matt’s face had grown serious, but now he smiled. “Yes on both counts. It was built in the first wave of development, on a deep water lot. It has a dock, ocean access, the full deal. Back then it was a dream house. This couple retired early and moved down to live that Florida dream. They spent a little money decorating when they bought it and then didn’t put a dime more than necessary into it for the next forty- odd years. When I bought it, it was like something in a time warp. I had a crew come in and rip out the kitchen, upgrade the electrical system, put in a new air conditioning system, refinish the terrazzo floors and paint it inside. Other than that, I didn’t want to put any money into it because, to be honest, anybody else would buy the place as a teardown and replace it with a McMansion.”
“I know, man. And that’s a shame,” Kai offered sincerely. “The whole tear-down thing was going on right as I moved up to the Banks a couple of years ago. Those old places had a lot of style, even though they were only three-bedroom, two-bath places.”
“Well, those deep water lots are worth more than the houses on them,” Maura interjected. “Anybody who’s going to pay upwards from a million dollars for the place is going to want a modern house with a family room and the works.”
“Your mom’s right,” Matt said. “But the thing was, I really just wanted a simple place for myself. I had a boat at the time that my wife didn’t force me to sell in the divorce. I fixed the place up enough so I could live in it and have a dock. My intention all along has been to sell it eventually, but now the market’s gone to shit…”
“But people with that kind of money are always around, aren’t they?” Kai asked.
“It’s not just the cost of the land and the construction of a new house,” Maura said as she placed the chocolate cake on the table and sat down. “There are the taxes and insurance, which have gone through the roof. Matt and I know a couple who bought a teardown in Lighthouse Point, built a lovely new home on the lot and paid cash for everything. Still, they have a six thousand dollar nut every month to cover the taxes and insurance.”
“Ouch,” Kai said in disbelief. “Matt, is that what the place is costing you?”
“Not quite,” Matt told him with a sly grin. “I bought the place before the market got so hot and that helps with taxes. And, since the house isn’t worth what it would cost to rebuild it, I don’t have any more insurance than necessary.”
Kai nodded appreciatively and put out his cigarette. “So why are you telling me this?” he asked.
Maura stood to gather dessert plates and cutlery saying, “Hold on, hear him out, Kai.”
“Well, the point of all this is that now is not a good time for me to get rid of the house in Lighthouse Point,” Matt continued easily. “My life has changed in ways I couldn’t have foreseen when I bought the place, thanks to your mom. When we started seeing each other, she had just gotten into redoing this house and I wanted to help her out. Now, two years down the road, we’ve got
a baby on the way and your mom is happy here…”
“I really don’t want to move right now, Kai,” Maura said as she placed dessert plates and cutlery on the table. “In fact, I won’t really be ready to move for awhile after the baby is born.”
“I can understand that,” Kai said. “But what does this have to do with me?”
“I’m getting to that,” Matt said quietly but firmly. “What I’m proposing is you moving into my house. I don’t like it standing vacant for long periods of time and I really need to be with your mother now. If you were to move into my place, you’d be doing me a favor and you’d have your own space.”
“Wow,” Kai exclaimed, stunned. “That’s a fantastic offer, Matt. But there’s no way I could afford to pay rent on a place in Lighthouse Point.”
“No, you couldn’t,” Matt said pointedly. “But I’m not asking you to. What you can afford is paying the light bill and cable bill. And you could keep the yard up and do some things around the place, like power spray the roof, patio, and drive, routine maintenance things. I wouldn’t charge you rent, but I would ask you for five hundred a month, which I’ll put in savings for you. You agree to stay there for one year and we’ll readdress the situation then. You’ll have six thousand in savings to either get a place of your own, or if we decide to keep the arrangement for another year, you’ll have that much more in savings. Meanwhile, you’ll have your own place. Your mom and I can fix your room up for the baby and everybody’s happy. What do you say?”
“I don’t know what to say,” Kai admitted honestly. He fumbled getting a cigarette from his pack and lit it distractedly as the notion took root in his mind.
Maura poured the coffee and brought their mugs to the table. As she busily got the half-and-half from the refrigerator and located the sweeteners everyone preferred, she said, “Matt and I want you to know, we’re not unhappy having you here, but this seems like a good solution for everyone. It was Matt’s idea, not mine. While I think he’s being unreasonably generous, I agree with him that it’s important for you to get on your feet and into your own place as soon as possible. You know you’ll always have a home as long as I live, but to be fair to yourself, you need to do this.”
