I swear those arguments over buying our first home together were some of the worst we ever had. Looking back, it’s easy to see that there were other tensions at play, deeper stresses about commitment and starting a family. About even being a couple in the first place. My fears over that issue alone were threatening to separate us like the San Andreas Fault. Besides, having kids and settling down is already pretty big stuff when you’re only in your twenties, even if you’re a traditional couple.
Being with Allie scared the crap out of me, all right, because I’d never gone that way before. I’d always been straight as an arrow before him. But I realized even then that love doesn’t bother with those kinds of distinctions. It just falls over you like a mystery, and once it does, you’re gone for life.
By then I understood, too, that I was with Alex Richardson because I couldn’t be anywhere else.
“You missed the exit.”
“What?” I blink, staring ahead of me at the car-clogged freeway in disbelief.
“That was our exit back there.” Our daughter explains the facts to me with the patient condescension of an eight-year-old.
“Damn.”
“Daddy didn’t like you cussing in front of me.”
“No, you’re right, sweetie. He didn’t.”
Your daddy didn’t like a whole lot of my wicked ways, I think, maneuvering into another lane of traffic. Now, thanks to my error, it will be another thirty minutes before we make it home.
Yeah, Memory Lane can be a painful detour, all right. Can take you places you really don’t want to go, and then send you scrambling for hours to recover.
Sometimes you never do.
When someone dies, you’re left with mountains of memories. At first, you rush headlong at all of them, fists opening greedily, desperate to hold onto your loved one, no matter the cost, but over time, particular snapshots come into focus. They’re the ones that surface continually in your dreams and mental drifting, popping up on radar when you least expect them.
For me, I’m haunted by Alex’s last trip to New York City. A random memory, really, but I think about him calling me from there last March. It was lunchtime back east, and I was starting my workday at the studio when my cell phone rang. I flipped it open, and Al greeted me with his warm, booming voice. “Can you hear them?”
“Hear what, baby?” I asked softly, turning away so the other guys wouldn’t eavesdrop.
“Listen, okay?” He laughed, and there was the sound of blaring horns and traffic through the receiver. I could practically smell the exhaust fumes and late winter snow he’d described in an e-mail earlier that morning. But irritation rankled through my system, too, because he’d plowed right into my workday, not even bothering with a decent greeting.
Then I heard them. Chiming bells that rang out in a lovely, melancholy voice. Despite myself, I smiled for a moment. It was such an Alex thing to do, to call me for something like that. Everywhere he went in life he discovered an adventure, found something beautiful to appreciate in the midst of stress and chaos.
But the thing was, I didn’t hear those church bells. Not really. I was too self-conscious that the guys might be listening in, and frustrated with Alex for not asking if I was busy, if I could even talk in the first place. When he came back on the line, a little breathless, he said, “They’re the bells of St. Patrick’s. I’m sitting here on the steps, and I wanted you to hear them, too.”
“Cool,” I mumbled, cautiously watching my boss, a craggy old-school union guy, walk closer. I’d never come out to him about Alex, and I wasn’t about to start right then.
“Tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday,” Alex said. “I think I’m going to try to make a service.”
For a moment, I pictured his freckled forehead, a sooty cross marking the center of it like a bull’s eye. Something about that somber image made me shiver despite the morning heat.
“You sure you want to do that?” I asked, feeling spooked for reasons I couldn’t possibly verbalize, but he only laughed at me, so I rushed to add, “I mean, aren’t they already lining up today like it’s a Stones concert or something?”
“Now, Michael, don’t forget I’m a good Catholic boy,” he teased, knowing that I never darkened a church door. Well, except for our commitment service, which was the one time he ever got me to attend an ecclesiastical ceremony. No wonder we could never agree on getting Andrea baptized.
“Yeah, Father Roberto would be proud of you,” I mumbled, rubbing my palm over my heart. I couldn’t shake the eerie shadow that had fallen over me, the vague sense of dread. “You out of the conference?” I asked, trying to turn the subject in a sunnier direction.
“I’m taking a walk during the lunch break,” he said. Suddenly a passing siren blared loudly through the phone, drowning out his words, until I caught the end of some amputated sentence: “…and that I wish you and Andie were here with me.”
“Yeah, me, too,” I half-whispered into the phone, eyeing my boss, but he was busy at his desk now.