Christopher Malo
11/17/00

They say that the good die young. That may be true. It’s wonderful to think that some may make it to old age, but others are lucky to make it to middle-age. They also say there are difference between houses and homes. But one thing they have in common are walls. The walls may not be the same but they are what holds up the roof and connects it to the foundation.
On the outside all houses look essentially the same. But what happens inside differs. It’s where babies are conceived, it’s where secrets are made, it’s where hearts are broken, its where we come together and fall apart. Sometimes in the same house. Sometimes all at the same time.
Fall was always one of Travis’ favorite seasons. More than any other time of year autumn had a distinct smell to it, bordering on a taste. He could inhale deeply and all five senses became engaged in the acute awareness that he now existed in the lull between the blaze of summer and the chill of winter. Nothing compared to throwing on an old hoodie, jeans that had been thoroughly broken in, and clutching a coffee in his hands that gave the sensation of being burnt, yet wasn’t painful enough to quite let go.
Lifting the garage door he stood looking down their driveway. They had lived in this house for nearly four years, but Travis still had not sucuumbed to the fact he was no longer in a major urban city. It wasn’t as much as he disliked living in a small town, he simply wasn’t used to it yet. And wasn’t entirely convinced he ever would get used to it.
“Fuck,” he mumbled to himself. He had quit smoking a almost a year and a half ago but days like this were made for a relaxing cigarette to go with his coffee and morning. Funny how he could go so long without the thought of sneaking one, and suddenly he became consumed by it. He was never able to make it to far in the justification process though. Abbey was, supposedly depending on the day/hour/month/mood in recovery, but she he found himself never quite believing her. It seemed like she relapsed more often then she ceebrated and got one of those keyrings. He had never minded until the kids were born.
When they started dating he was into the trainwreck natureof their relationship. Aways drama. And Travis liked playing the good samaritan or superhero role. It was his job to come in, clean them off, save them and have the best version to show off. It never quite worked like this, but it was the guiding theory that he adhered to. Apparently.
When they started dating she liked to party. Shit, they both did. It was no big thing. Smoke some weed, gobble some pills, get drunk, blow lines, fuck like animals. Eventually Abbey began talking like she thought she wasn’t going to be able to stop. Travis paid half attention to her, dismissing her recovery attempts as a phase, just the way partying was. Something they would grow out of. And when Travis got his shit together and began to take on responsibilities and show p for life, it became clearer and clearer that Abey wasn’t going to have the same ease of sliding from one stage of life to the next. And it became obvious.
Like the good boyfriend Travis was though, he hung in there. Mistaking codependance for love, instead of loving her but walking away, he married her. And when that didn’t work, they decided to have their first child eight years ago, Samantha. Samantha was beautiful, but it may not of been the right thing or at least at the right time. When Lucinda came along four years later, it was totally unexpected.
Maybe he would make an excuse to run to the store and buy a pack of smokes. Abbey was inside with the girls making some breakfast. He weighed the likelihood that some gum and the coffee would cover up the smell of tobacco on his breath, but in the end he decided against it. Not for any moral reason, he just didn’t feel like going to the store.
Making amental note to buy a pack and stash it for times liek this, Travis turned around and looked over the inside of their garage. It had been one of the selling points when they purchased the house. Not the kitchen, not the master bedroom, the fucking garage. He and Abbey were both artists and they wanted space set aside for them. The inside of the house would be geared for the kids but the three car garage would be theirs to turn into a studio, which is exactly what they did. One of the advantages of home-schooling was that all four of their lives were not dictated by any schedule other than the one they set for themselves. Each member had come to find their own niche in their own family and one of Abbey’s was to tutor Sam and Lucy.
One of Travis’ responsabilities had been to transform the garage space and he had done so. Not that it was terribly organized, what artist space ever is, but there was some semblance of order within the chaos. The walls had all been painted a grey-blue. There were various work tables pushed against the walls, each with a project, painting, drawing or sculpture in some stage of completion. The only rule had been to not allow anything dangerous beow waist level so that the kids would be able to roam in the studio with relatively little fear that they might find something dangerous. All exacto knives were up high and all the paints and chemicals were stored at adult levels as well.
“Want some pancakes Trav?” The door between the garage and house had swung open nd what looked like a blonde-haired levetating head appeared, begging th question.
“No thanks Ab. Want to try and get some stuff done. There’s a painting I had started a few weeks ago and I had an idea of what I might want to do wih it.
“K…” she said, as her head disappeared. Judging by the clarity in her eyes and her voice, Trav was fairly sure she hadn’t used. By this point he was fairly used to all the signs. She also knew this and would occasionally try and twist him up or keep him off balance by doing something different, but if you know anything about addicts, at the end of the day they are creatures of habit, and those habits tend to die hard. It had been a while since the last time he caught her doing dope, but she had also become fairly good at hiding it. The admissions were something he hated to admit and preferred to deny, but his ability to do so had become difficult when he became a father.
Walking over to the tble he set his coffee down and looked at the canvas. He picked up the brush and begn to add onto what had already been there, with a new sense of direction and purpose. His hands seemed to work independantly of his mind. The brush smeared acrylic over acrylics and over the canvas. His mind began to wander to places that he tried vehemently to ward off, and while sometimes he was successful in doing this, this wasn’t going to be one of those times. He felt himself slipping slowly and painfully into a hole and a place that he would of preferred not to go, stirring up unresolved feelings and emotions.
He just couldn’t fucking stop thinking about her. Anything about her. Everything about her. The way she moved, the way she talked, the way she felt, the way she fucked, the way she thought. If there was anything not to like about her he had yet to find it. It was the best feeling in the world and it was the most painful feeling in the world.
When he heard the scream, he was sure if he had been on the other side of the state it would of still been as loud and piercing. It was not an ordinary scream, but the one that instantly transimits the sense of urgency, one that trancends a typical yell from a child. Surely it was the substance of a program somewhere on the Discovery channel about the ways that young are able to communicate with their birth parents without using actual words. The noise sent Travis racing inside the house.
“What’s wrong Samantha?” Travis yelled as he broke the plane of the doorway, passing from the creative world to the world of immediacy and family.
“She out her hand on the stove Trav. She’s burnt pretty bad.”
“What the fuck Ab? You are supposed to be watching her.”
“Is now really the time for a lecture? We need to get  her to the hospital. Grab Luc, I will drive.”
Staring at her in a direct and firm way, Travis replied a solemn, “I will drive.” Part of living with an addict, recovering or not, is that everything is immediately suspect. Including the idea that “This wouldn’t of happened if you were clean. You say you are clean, but…” These were things that would have to be dealt with later though. Travis hit his knees to survey the burn. Tears were streamig down the face of Samantha. Recently she had bee displaying traits that no mother or father would be proud of, including compulsively lieing and stealing, but the blistering on her little hand was did not lie. Abbey had gone to the freezer and gotten ice cubes and a facecloth to put on the burn. While Abbey attended to Samantha, Travis scooped Lucy from the floor. Before the commotion she had been sitting on the floor with her crayons and markers and drawing on the wall. In most houses this would get someone in trouble, but in the Dwyer household, it was actualy encouraged. By everyone. In fact, it wasn’t just the children that took to the walls as a form of expression. All four of them did and they repainted the walls every six months or so to start over and refresh. They found that was about the amount of time that it took to fill the walls of the house from waist level down for the kids and waist level up for the parents.  Lucy was just beginging to scribble on the walls, and hers was less of a way of communicating and just being creative, as opposed to using it as an outlet as both Travis and Abbey did and were teaching Samntha to. At least when her hands weren’t swollen and blistered.
Little Lucy didn’t know exactly what was going on, but she could surely sense that things were off balance and not right. She had begun to cry too.
“You should of fucking been watching the stove Ab. There’s only one thing you have to do when cooking, absolutely have to do and that’s make sure the fucking kids don;t get burnt.”
“But…” Abbey started.
“No. Really. It’s actually that simple. Wrap a blanket around Sam, putting a jacket on will hurt her hand. I will grab a coat for Lucy and we will go.
 
At the hospital, Samantha was quickly admitted and treated. The burns weren’t as bad as they originally looked. Not that any kind of burn on an 8 year old is a good thing or fun or ok, but in the end it could of been much worse. A point that Travis was going to make sure to drive home to Abbey. It wasn’t the only point to make or question to raise however. He had a sinking suspicion that Abbey was using. After a stop at McDonalds to treat everyone to sundaes, they were back at home trying to restore a sense of normalcy in a day that’s natural equilibrium and balance had been shot, and would remain so, no matter was was done to try and battle or overcome it. It was an effort that was done for the kids, not for themselves. Abbey knew she would find herself in Travis’ crosshairs. She was right.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you aren’t using,” he asked her, barely audible as they stood on the kitchen, both kids on the ground and drawing on the wall.
“I swear. Trav, I swear.” She looked him dead in the eyes, but she had done that and lied plenty of times before. It was as if she wanted him to look in her eyes, but she only wanted to convey what she wanted to convey. Sometimes that meant the truth, but not always. He could never be quite sure which of those times this was.
“I would love to believe you. I looked at you this morning and was sure. But I’m not anymore.”
Spinning on her heels she marched upstairs. The kids sat either not paying attention or pretending not to pay attention as Travis surveyed the kitchen and decided what to do next. Returning a few minutes later, Abbey marched through the kitchen, grabbed the keys to their car and walked out the door without saying a word. Travis just stared at the door for a good minute after she left, considering the myriad of possibilities of what that could mean.
He walked over to Samantha and Lucy.
“Scootch over,” he said as he extended his hand as if shaking someone’s hand, but moving it side to side. “Make room for daddy.” He sat between both his daughters and looked at the wall and tried to make out what was going on. As usual Lucy had been using purple and green markers, her current favorites, to draw different shapes and squiggles. She had gotten much better over the past few months. For a good 18 months it has simply looked like she had thrown the crayons and markers at the wall, but recently they had been taking some shape, showing an increase in the development of her brain. What she drew now had almost a cloudlike result It became an excercise in something he and Abbey used to do all the time when they were younger. Some some weed, and lie on the grass at her parents house and stare at the clouds in the sky and try to decipher what they were and come up with a story to go along with them. It was something cliche but it was also something sweet. The clud really wasn’t a helicopter landing on Jesus or a plane about to fly into a dog’s head. But it kinda looked that way. Lucys drawings kind of happned the same way. Unless she really was drawing a bell falling through a lake or a boat sitting in grass. He kissed her on her head and knowing that she was ok for the moment turned his attention to Samantha.
 
At the hospital, Samantha was quickly admitted and treated. The burns weren’t as bad as they originally looked. Not that any kind of burn on an 8 year old is a good thing or fun or ok, but in the end it could of been much worse. A point that Travis was going to make sure to drive home to Abbey. It wasn’t the only point to make or question to raise however. He had a sinking suspicion that Abbey was using. After a stop at McDonalds to treat everyone to sundaes, they were back at home trying to restore a sense of normalcy in a day that’s natural equilibrium and balance had been shot, and would remain so, no matter was was done to try and battle or overcome it. It was an effort that was done for the kids, not for themselves. Abbey knew she would find herself in Travis’ crosshairs. She was right.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you aren’t using,” he asked her, barely audible as they stood on the kitchen, both kids on the ground and drawing on the wall.
“I swear. Trav, I swear.” She looked him dead in the eyes, but she had done that and lied plenty of times before. It was as if she wanted him to look in her eyes, but she only wanted to convey what she wanted to convey. Sometimes that meant the truth, but not always. He could never be quite sure which of those times this was.
“I would love to believe you. I looked at you this morning and was sure. But I’m not anymore.”
Spinning on her heels she marched upstairs. The kids sat either not paying attention or pretending not to pay attention as Travis surveyed the kitchen and decided what to do next. Returning a few minutes later, Abbey marched through the kitchen, grabbed the keys to their car and walked out the door without saying a word. Travis just stared at the door for a good minute after she left, considering the myriad of possibilities of what that could mean. He hoped she was upset and going to call her sponsor or make a meeting. But he doubted it.
He walked over to Samantha and Lucy.
“Scootch over,” he said as he extended his hand as if shaking someone’s hand, but moving it side to side. “Make room for daddy.” He sat between both his daughters and looked at the wall and tried to make out what was going on. As usual Lucy had been using purple and green markers, her current favorites, to draw different shapes and squiggles. She had gotten much better over the past few months. For a good 18 months it has simply looked like she had thrown the crayons and markers at the wall, but recently they had been taking some shape, showing an increase in the development of her brain. What she drew now had almost a cloudlike result It became an excercise in something he and Abbey used to do all the time when they were younger. Some some weed, and lie on the grass at her parents house and stare at the clouds in the sky and try to decipher what they were and come up with a story to go along with them. It was something cliche but it was also something sweet. The clud really wasn’t a helicopter landing on Jesus or a plane about to fly into a dog’s head. But it kinda looked that way. Lucys drawings kind of happned the same way. Unless she really was drawing a bell falling through a lake or a boat sitting in grass. He kissed her on her head and knowing that she was ok for the moment turned his attention to Samantha.
“How you doing baby girl?” Travis asked, watching as she used her left hand to try and draw something.
“I can’t draw Daddy,” she replied, frustrated with having to use the hand she was not accustomed to drawing with. Travis noted that she didn’t respond to him addressing the status of the hand she had burnt and he took that as a good thing. “I have to use my bad hand.”
“It’s ok, it’s not really a bad hand. It’s a hand that you don’t use as much. Maybe this is a good chance to practice with it. I bet you come up with some things that you couldn’t of with your other hand,” he replied. “Here, I will make a deal with you. I will use my other hand too.” While usually pretty good at executing with his hand what his mind saw, even Samantha could notice the sharp difference in what and how Travis drew with his other hand. “That looks funny Daddy,” she giggled. He tried to draw a cloud raining flowers down on girl’s head, but even with all his years of expereince, it came out more like a pink turd with oddly shaped ballons dropping out of the bottom.
“Samantha, I want to tell you a story.”

 
Looking up, Travis knew without even having to look. Abbey walked in the door. When Abbey walked in the door, she was high as a kite. Trav jumped up from between the girls to confront her.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked her, grabbing her by the arm and leading her to the hallway, out of earshot and out of view.
“Well if you fucking think I am high, I might as well be high Trav, right? I mean, what’s the point of staying clean if I still fuck up and let Sam burn herself and don;t have he support of my family who think I am high?” Travis stared incredulously at her eyes, both noting the size of her pupils and his own disbelief.
“I am taking the kids and leaving. We will be back later. Oh, and out of curiosity, how much time did you just throw away?”
“Why the fuck should I tell you Travis? It’s not like you would believe me.”
She had a good point.
He wanted to get away but he knew he couldn’t leave the kids with her. This was not the first time they had been down this road and chances are they would be here again. The routine was the same. Abbey relapses, the kids get dropped off at one of the parents house and either Travis or Abbey would be at the house, wondering where the other was, waiting for them to return and neither being in a position to demand or ask or expect any answers. It was a play that had been going on for many seasons. And like any roadway run, at the begining you work out the kinks, then you get in the routine and by the end everyone is fucking up out of boredom and lack of attention.
“Sam. Lucinda. Let’s go.” Both the girls got up. There were a good amount of fresh drawings before them. It had been a rather eventful day so far so he wasn’t that surprised. Travis made a mental note where on the wall the kids had been drawing and to take a look at it later. Sometimes it provided clues or insight into what the kid were thinking, how they were coping, or what was really going on with them when words failed or escaped them.
 
The three of them went upstairs, leaving Abbey downstairs to try and find an outlet for her nervous energy. There was a chance she would be trying to organize something with her boundless and nervous drug induced energy, but most likely she would head for the studio space and try and get some work done. And there was a part of Travis that didn’t mind. While he had been the one who garnered all the art related attention when they were younger, she had always been the one whose work brought in money. Neither one of them had ever had any formal jobs, but had always been able to support themselves, and the kids and buy the house with money they made from their artwork. Abbey came from an affluent background that offered her all the connections and opportunity that money could buy. She took advantage of this and had had a string of successful gallery shows. The problem was that, in her mond, her ability to be creative and produce had always been linked to her chemical consumption. Whether or not that was true did not matter. It was what she believed and how she acted. Since she had all the drugs in her system Travis suspected she would channel them towards producing.
Even though in their household Abbey may be the breadwinner, thy all pitched in. Travis artwork sold, although not as regularly and he wasn’t abl to bring in the same mount dollar for ddollar as his wife, he was a talented and capable artist. What he lacked in execution, he made up for having an ear to the streets and being able to successfully bridge what was happening there, with hs work and with buyers. The girls were involved as well. The household produced so much artwork that they began to seel the things Samantha and Lucy did on Ebay and Etsy, and after getting some media attention as a household that lives off the artwork they create, the buzz seemed to fuel the interest and demend in the girls work as well. Any money the girls brought in however went into special savings accounts for thwne they got older. But essentially all four of them pitched in.
 
Upstairs he went to the room the girls shared. Both girls flopped on their beds. Travis went to their closet and took out a backpack.
“Each of you pick out an outfit. We are going to go to Grammie and Grampies.” Well, he wasn’t sure that was completely true yet. He knew for a fact they were both going to his parents, but he wasn’t certain where he was headed.
“Why Dad?” asked Lucy. This was also a familiar crossroads that Travis found himself at frequently. He had made a vow to himself that he would never lie to his children. He didn;t even like shaving the truth. He felt in the end it only served to fuel kids distrust towards adults and in the end amongst people in general. But telling an 8 year old and a 4 year old that they were headed to their grandparents, again, because mom had found a flimsy excuse to go cop some coke, again, just seemed painfully hollow and unfair.
“They have been asking about you and want to see you. Plus you haven’t seen them in a while.
“Yes we did,” Samantha chimed in. “We were there last weekend.”
Fuck. She was right.
“Just pick out an outfit he told them.”
 
As the girls got busy doing that Travis slipped his cellphone out of his pocket. With a dash of his thumb he unlocked it, opened the address book, and searched the J’s. He saw the number he was looking for, Jeremy Carter, and just stared at the number. Of course it wasn’t Jeremy Carter’s number. In fact, he didn’t even know a Jeremy Carter, but it provided a layer of safety for protecting the identity of whose number it really was. He stared at the number for a minute, not even knowing why. He knew whose number it was, he knew what she looked like, what she smelled like, what she offered. He wasn’t even weighing any pros and cons. He was simply staring at wat the number implied for him. He locked the phone and put it back in his pocket.
 
After Sam and Lucy finished the same backpack stuffing of clothes routine happened in Travis’ room. Travis packed enough for two days.
 
The door closed and Abbey bounded for the front window. She was careful not to disturb the curtains and she kept a low profile so that she wouldn’t be seen. But she wanted to make sure they were gone and she had the house to herself.
“I love you,” she whispered out loud to all three of them. She knew they couldn’t hear but she hoped they could feel it. But deep down, and right on the surface, she knew they couldn’t. She knelt below the window defeated. Waves of guilt that weren’t unfamiliar overwhelmed her. She always seemed to open Oandora’s box once she thought she had sealed it forever, and it was hard to get her demons back into place. Her hand slipped down into the pocket of her jeans and she felt for the small corner of a baggie that had been sealed by a lighter. What looked like a white nugget was actually a powder. She held it up and became instantly hypnotized by it. Heroin addicts often talked about the allure and romance of the needle, but that had never appealed to her. What had always been her downfall was the rows and lines and bumps and rails of cocaine, laid out uniformly -the longer the bette- along a smooth, nonpourus surface. While the coke spoon may of had it’s heyday in the 70’s or 80’s, and paper cuurency was typically used, Abbey had indulged in a gold plated silver cocaine straw with the words “Like an addict I always want more” engraved on the side. It was 500 bucks spent on a purely frivolous and self indulgent gift to herself. In all the rehabs she had gone to and sworn she had gotten rid of all her drugs and paraphenalia, she was never able to part with this. Sure, some would of called it a reservation, but it was a 500 dollar coke straw for christssake.
Baggie in one hand she made the rounds to the doors and made sure they were all locked. Sure, Trav had keys but at least it would slow him down and give her warning. Everyone else it just kept out. Feeling braver and more secure with each door locked and checked Abbey made her way upstairs to their bedroom. First she stopped in the hall to take the framed needlepoint of the Serenity Prayer her mother had given her off the way. Her mother had given it to her as a young child, unaware of the irony that the future held for both the prayer and the gift. Since it was framed with a glass cover, it provided the perfect surface to blow lines off of. The irony wasn’t lost on her, but it beat the options of the mirrors which Travis occasionally checked for residue and framed family photos which would just be too sacriligeous. Cocaine, purse and frame in tow she finally made it to her room. Inside she closed and locked the door. She headed for their bathroom, closed and locked the door.
She sat on the toilet with her purse at her feet and the glass frame across her lap. She took the straw out and set it on top of the glass. She ripped the corner off the corner of the bag and the back of her throat began to water. Dumping the contents of the small glasine bag on the glass created a mini-mountain of powder. It seemed to expand once freed from the constraints of the baggie. Something Abbey did not mind. Next she took her maxed out American Express card from her purse and began to breakdown any chunks in the blow. Chop chop chop. Chop chop chop. She folded the coke over in itself to maek sure that she went through it all with the edge of her credit card, slicing from several different angles. Her brain knew that she was under a minute from getting that devil powder inside her. Chop chop chop. Chop chop chop.
Once satisfied she licked her finger, running it over the edge of the credit card she had used to pulvarize the cocaine, then ran it over her gums on the top front of her mouth numbing them. It wasn’t something that gave a really good high, but it was all aprt of the process. She repeated the same action with the other side of the card and the bottom front gums. Without a second missed she grabbed her gold plated silver coccaine straw, briefly looked skywards, muttered “I’m sorry,”plugged her one nostril putting the straw up the other and ripped the first line of coke. If there had been any doubt that cocaine was the perfect drug, that thoought disappeared and was replaced with “cocaine is the most perfect thing ever.” It wasn’t a concious thought but a more subtle recognition.
The next few minutes became something of a mundane repitition of this ceremony, accompanied by an escalating heartbeat. Abbey wondered how much her heart could take or if it might explode. She doubted it, but was willing to risk it regardless. And suddenly it was gone. All the cocaine was gone. And suddenly all the anticipation and chemical lust was replaced with a crippling sensation of fear and lonliness. It was still not something she regretted. But now she wanted more.
Knowing with no money and no car the chances of being able to score more coke were probably pretty limited. She rocked back and forth on the toilet.
“I know I am a good mother. I fucking no it. So what if I like to party, everyone likes to party. What happened this morning was not my fault. It could happen to anybody. God I love you Samantha, Mommy never meant to hurt you. Those burns look like they hurt. God I am an aweful mommy. I mean who would let something like that happen to their daughter? Maybe Travis is right. Maybe I failed because I should of been watching the stove, I should of been paying closer attention. Why. Why? I hate mysef. I hate myself. I just wish that it would all end. I just wish that I was gone, that I was just gone and it was all over. Sam and Lucy don;t deserve a mother like me and Travis deserves to be happy. He stays because of the kids I just know it. I know it. Why, oh why, oh why me?”
As She began to trail off and her monolouge turned intomore and more incoherant rumblings she began to get up. Avoiding looking at herself in the mirror, Abbey emerged, first from the bathroom, then from her bedroom. Instead of heading to the garage to try and work, she instead went to the girls room and laid down in Samantha’s bed. She reached over the side of the bed and grabbed a handful of markers and began drawing on the wall. The one rule was that words were not allowed. Abbey couldn’t write the word sorry, but instead had to try and figure out how to represent that pictorial. High on cocaine.
Abbey gazed at the walls and there wasn’t much space left on the walls. The girls usually covered these walls first, spending a good amount of time in their room, whether it was supposed to be sleeping or supposed to be doing schoolwork, they naturally ended up there often and by default filled their own wals first. But Abbey got a bright idea, bright at least to her, and decided to move the dresser out of the way. The girls were not strong enough to do something like this on their own and Abbey knew she would find some blank canvas there to work on. High on the drugs she didn’t even take one drawer out, but managed through several tugs and pulls and grunts to slide one of the corners of the long dresser out. She didn’t move both ends, but only one side, essentially creating a V and a nook for her to sit in behind the back of the dresser and between the wall. Sitting there indian style she licked her lips and pressed the tip of the sharpie against the virginal paint.
She wasn’t sure what was going to come out of her, but she rarely did. She started at the baseboard by eeking out what looked like bricks. One on top of another, one next to each other. Stack stack stack. Lost in her high she continued the repetative motion until she had hundreds of bricks stacked about three rows wide and maybe 100 bricks high. They were small bricks, and while she had started by bending down as she sat to draw at the base of the wall, she now needed to extend her torso and look up to continue stacking. When eventualy she could no longer sit and do this, she stood, continuing to draw her brick wall. Stack stack stack. She did the same thing that she had done sitting, continuing to draw until her arms were stretched above her head. When she couldn’t do that anymore successfully, she climbed on top of the dresser and continued the wall. She was almost at the very top, the point where the wall meets the ceiling when she stopped. The space between the top of the bricks and the ceilings was only a few inches. And in that space Abbey drew what looked like herself scaling the wall, going from one side to the other. When she was done she leaned back to survey her work. Even as the artist she wasn’t completely sure if she was running toward one thing or escaping another, but it was clear she was trying to go from one side to another, in the smallest of spaces and things were getting rather tight.
 
He kissed both the girls on their heads.
“I love you Samantha.
“I love you Dad.”
“I love you Lucy.”
“I wuv you dada.”
Travis looked up at his parents who simply and wordlessly started back at him. He gave a virtually inperceptible nod of his head and lwft.
 
He didn’t need to explain to them. They had never liked Abbey and had been pretty vocal in the begining. At first Travis chalked it up to being that they were poor and from the city and Abbey was affluent and from the burbs. In reality it had nothing to do with that. They just knew that Abbey would bleed Travis dry, in ways that had nothing to do with money. And they were right. But being young and thinking you know the world, you don;t tend to listen or realize that your parents were usually right, until you are older, it’s too late, and you are bumping your head for yourself. Those youthful years have to be full of bruises and arrogance to alloww for the sweet and trender surrender that comes later in life.
Travis got in his car, drove a few blocks and pulled over in front of a supermarket. Taking the phone from his pocket, he opened it up and thumbed to Jeremy Carter. After staring at it and weighing things in his brain, he told his brain to stop thinking and he pressed the call button to let whatever was going to happen, happen.
“Travis?”
“Hey. I wasn’t sure you would answer.”
“Of course I would. I don’t know what to say. It’s been a while.”
The kick in Travis’ stomach made him want to vomit. The contradictions and forces pulling him in different directions was palpable. He wanted to cry, he wanted to smile, he wanted to fight, he wanted to fuck. He wanted her.
“Will you meet me?” It was a question he had heard himself asking her in his dreams. On more than one occasion Abbey has roused him from a state in between sleep and awake, asking who I wanted to meet.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea Trav. I just don’t know.” But he gave her the rope and time to hang herself, like he knew she would.
“Where.” It was a statement more than a question.
He wanted to fuck her. Bad. He needed to get it out of his system to be allow room to make love to her like he wanted to too. With some people meeting somewhere in public would insure that things would be kept platonic and lines wouldn’t be crossed, but they had fucked in more than a few bathrooms and alleys to know that being around her in general was dangerous. He had always been up front with her about his situation, but it mattered little what they told each other. They lied to themselves well enough to believe that it could possibly go well and wouldn’t have a tragic ending. In fact before they met in person for the first time, they confessed that they secretly hoped it all went badly and that the sex was horrible. Neither scenario happened and it left them with a predicament that they thought they were willing and able to deal with. Until they had to deal with it. That had been almost a year ago, and a good eight months since the last time they had seen each other.
It would appear that Travis was able to compartamentalize different parts of his life, but he had always thought that people who did that were conveniently selective for the purpose of orchestrating an outcome to their liking. Which on one hand he was probably just as guilty of. Except that when it came down to it he compartamentalized because he was deeply and truely conflicted. And unsure of how to navigate his feelinggs. So putting each thing in their place where they didn’t overlap seemed like the most efficient way of dealing or not dealing with this.
“Meet me at the Low Bar in the city in an hour. Can you make it?”
“I will be there.”
“Thanks.”
Click.
 
Travis got there early knowing she would be late.
He ordered a Heiniken and nursed it slowly. After 15 minutes he began to consider she might of bailed. He pushed that thought out of his mind, but it wouldn’t completely disappear. She got there about 20 minutes late. Even in the dimly lit dive bar she looked stunning. She looked radiant. She was short, dark haired, eyes that both smiled and hid the pain, a smile that betrayed her and a body to kill for. She called herself a meatball, but he liked them that way. Se had great tits and an even better ass. Unlike most girls these days she didn’t completely shave her pussy or whittle the pubic hair down to a landing strip. She kept it natural but trimmed. Something he never would of guessed he would go for, but with her, it was better than just acceptible for some unexplainable reason.
“Hi,” she said coyly, sliding onto the barstool next to him. Once they were in each other’s company they couldn’t take their eyes off one another. Neither wanted 8 months to go by again. They wanted to soak in every second.
“So let me guess. Did she relapse again?”
Travis hated his own predicability.
“You know you don’t need to make an excuse to see me. Unless you just need a reason to ease your concience.”
Damn. She was coming out strong right out of the box. The last time he disapeared must of really stung. He didn;t want to go in and out of her life. It seemed life just dictated it. And he continued to both fight it and surrender to it.
“I’m sorry. I end things because I have to. Or think I have to. But I can’t stop… You know. Shit sounds so cliche I don’t even want to say it.”
“Then don’t.”
The waiter came over. She ordered a red wine. In a dive bar.
“So why are we here Travis?”
“I don’t even know. I wish I had a better reason, a better explanation.”
He meant it.
“How have you been?” he asked, trying to change the subject, get to some lighter middle ground.
“I have been ok. My dad’s still in the hospital. Still at the same job. Still seeing that guy.”
His baseless jealousy flared. She was seeing someone, he had a wife. She wanted to be with him and would be, but he rejected her for a relationship he didn’t want to be in. Did he stay for the kids? He wished he could bump into girls he could fuck and not fall in love with. Apparently this wasn’t his strong suit.
The continued to drink, they continued to talk. Both danced around the heavy subjects and waited until they were drunk enough to abandon the niceties and start the flirting and sexual innuendos. It didn’t take long before Travis went to go piss and texted her from the bathroom, telling her which stall to come find him in.
At this point there was no talk and no reason to talk. He got her in the stall, locked the door and pinned her to the wall wwall y her neck. He heard her gasp a little and the sound made his cock start to grow. He pressed his mouth up against hers and their tongues began to snake around one anothers. With one hand on her throat, the other worked its way over her body, never quite sure of what it wanted to grab next. It started with grabbing her tits, pinching her nipples before sliding down over her stomach and between her legs. She let out another gasp as he grabbed her by the pussy. Rubbing her box he began to feel her hips start to thrust and gyrate, pressing up against his hand. He undid her button and unzipped her fly, pulled her panties out and slid his fingers through her pubic hair until he reachered her clit. It was already warm and damp and after a few seconds it was wet.
“Take my cock out,” he instructed her. She did as she was told, freeing his hard dick from his jeans. He was already hard, but feeling her warm hands, her warm hands, on the shaft almost put him over the edge.
Grabbing her by the hair and forcing her to her knees there was no mistaking what he wanted and he wasted no time at all guiding his swollen member to her warm mouth. Without regard to what she wanted (because he knew it was what she wanted) he started fucking her face. She knew exactly what to do with him and the wetness and sound of her gagging on it had him pull out before lost it. He pulled her back to her feet, slapped her face for almost making him cum from sucking him off and then pushed her face first against the stall wall. With her pants already undone, a few tugs and he slid her jeans over her ass and pushed them down far enough to let her spead her legs enough to allow him to enter her from behind. Which he did. With much force and little consideration for her. Thrust after thrust he drove his cock deep inside her, all the while in her ear telling her he didn’t want to hear a word from her. Thrust thrust thrust. You like that you dirty bitch? Thrust thrust thrust. Another area of compartimentalization. He didn’t really think she was a dirty slut. Or whore, or nasty bitch. The truth was he loved her. And one of the reasons he loved her is because he got to fuck her like this. And he knew she loved it almost as much as him. Thrust thrust thrust. The build up of the day didn’t deaden the expereince but only served to heighten it and within a few minutes he had her on her knees again, catching every last drop of his ejaculation.
That out of the way, they were back at the bar, in a booth a little more sober, a little less sexual tension, the awkwardness and small talk out of the way.
They sat confessing feelings, ignoring realities and pretending that it could and was going to work out. Every time Travis tried to and almost had the door to this part of his life closed, he always managed to not only open it back up again, but blow it off he hinges.
Why was that?
 
Time sometimes passes and whatever seems like unsurmountable drama at the time inevitably comes to pass. As did Abbey’s coke binge and Travis’ daliances with his former/current flame. Neither one came to a head tat night, or on the same night, but before long Abbey was back in meetings and Travis had called things off with her. There was no way to tell the long term effects, but in a world of such immediacy and instant gratification, neither could guarantee they would be around for the long haul. In whatever form that might take.
In addition, Abbey had somehow managed to find a way to remain productive, while not needing the crutch of a chemical inspiration or fuel. Their family life almost seemed to return to normal, or whatever definition of normal one might conjure. The kids seemed to pick up on this and were excelling in both their schoolwork and their artwork. In addition to paintings, Samantha was finding inspiration at the clay throwing wheel and twice had her creations featured on Etsy. And Lucy was transitioning from those things that looked like clouds to really being able to draw clouds. Travis had returned to his commitment to his wife and had had no contact with the other one for some time now. As good as things were going, everyone in the house seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. All while pretending not to be.
There was little need in their family yo even know what day it was. Noone had traditional jobs or school schedules that demanded and sictated and awareness for such details. There was barely a need for clocks or watches. They ate when hungry, slept when tired. Not that it was a life completely without structure. Travis and Abbey knew that while the kids were young and in their house there wasn’t a demand for such conventions, but they realzied Samantha and Lucinda would not be in their house forber. Nor would they want them to be. So to intriduce them to the idea of time management and responsibility they did have school time every day from around 8am to 3pm. This was understood but also not set in stone. If one of the girls found themselves enthralled or wrapped up in some creative activity, that lalways took presedence over learning what the capitol of Iowa is. Expression trumped convention.
On one of such day, Travis was in the garage preparing some of the family’s latest artwork for pictures. One of Travis resposibilities was to photograph all their artwork and to put them up on eBay, Etsy and the familt website and blog. While they may not go down in any art history books, they were internet savvy and had managed to marry their expertise in this area with the talents they had with pens, pencils and brushes. It worked providing them with the modest yet comfortable lifestyle they were used to.
They drove a Honda Accord, although not the newest model and an Audi station wagon, although not the latest model. They may not of been able to take trips to Paris for week, but they did get away to Maine once a year and South Carolina once a year. The kids dressed stylish, yet comfortable. They shopped at thrift stores and boutiques. They found they could spend roughly the same amount of money and not support companies that churned out cookie-cutter clothes for the season that all the other kids would also be wearing. Travis and Abbey stressed individuality with the girls. They were free to dress themselves however they saw fit. Tran and Abbey realized this was sure to cause problems at some point, all kids were taught to fit in and not be seen as different for fear of getting picked on and ostracized, but the parents felt this way of life and thinking would serve their children better in the long run. It was possible they were right and it was possible they were wrong. They acknowledged this themselves but felt the love and support they offered th girls trumped anything that might be dumped on them. Plus, they happended to both be beautiful and adorable and socirty did dictate that the girls would nt be held to the same stdards as others. Theu would be afforded more leeway. Inevitable the boys would want to kiss or sleep with them and girls would want to keep their enemues close. They certainly would face some ridicule, but not nearly the amount they would if they were ugly. Hey, it’s not right, but it does happen to work that way.
“Trav, you want pancakes honey?” Abbey asked, head flotaing in the door jam.
“Yes please,” responded Travis, eye affixed to the camera viewfinder, trying to keep Samantha’s latest colorful creation of markers and paint mixed media canvas in focus.
Before Abbey could close the door, Lucy snuck through and waddled over to her dad. She reached her little hand up and Travis put a green marker in it.
“Bwoo,” she said. Travis’ hand rummaged though a cigarbox of markers until he found a blue one and silently handed that one to her as well.
“Tank you,” she said with a smile. Travis pretended to go back to taking pictues, assuming the position of bet over with his camera, pretending to fuss with the lend, when in eality he was completely focused on Lucy and what she was working on. Lucy stood, not sat, and went back to work on something she had started the previous night. Mostly it was various shapes, boxes and circles, filled on haphazardly with greens and blues. Two of the shapes almost looked like small globes, with landmasses and oceans. They were repeated over and over maybe a half dozen times. They seemed to move closer and closer and them drift farther and farther apart. It looked as if she was going to picke up tday right where she left off the previous night.
Feeling like he wanted to join hos daughter Travis set down the camer and went back to the cigar box until he found a black marker. He didn’t look for an empty space on the wall, a blank canvas, but instead looked for previous drawings that he might be able to draw and add something, linking things together. He didn’t have a pan, he didn;t have things mapped out, he didn;t know where to begin or end, but he felt driven to link two seperate creations.
There was a place on the wall where Abbey had painted on one of her coke binges. These outburts were always easy to pick out. At least to Travis, they were frentic and unbridaled and lacked the necessary control that someone with true talent posseses. They were sad and a sad reminder of the dark days in the house. But he refused to paint over them until the time came to paint over all the walls. It was important that the portrait painted to the kids was one of the real world. And in the real world there were ups and downs, good and bad, darkness and light, love and lust, addiction and recovery. The duality existed. Ther was no point in denying it or sugesting that it was all one way and not the other.
Next to the barely organized chaos of a draawing Abbey did of a bug of some sort, trying to climb it’s way out of a very, very deep jar, a drawing she had dome with markers and poils paints, was a painting Samantha had done. It was one of animals holding ballons and floating away. It was rudimentary, somewhat crude, and it had helped when she explained it, but it was one of those things when pointed out suddenly seemed so overwhelmingly obvious. It became Travis’ job to connect these two. Both had the idea of flying away on them, tryong to  float on, escape, get away. An insect should have no problem, but it was trapped. A bear should be too heavy but it became weighltees when it held the end of the strng attacjed to the balloon.
 
Sometimes there is a reason and a cause for why things happen. And sometimes they just happen. After almost a year of normalcy, Travis just could tell something was in the air. In the studio working his back was turned when Abbey came in and the mood seemingly changed instantaneously.
“Trav?”
“Yes Ab?”
“Uhm, can I borrow twenty dollars?”
It wasn’t that she asked, it was how she asked that sent his alarm bells off.
“What do you need 20 for? You have money in your account, don;t you? Isn’t there money in your account?”
This seemed to quickly be shifting from a neutral inquiry to an unpleasant inquisition, one that Abbey didn;t want to face scrutiny over or rouse any further susicion. So  she retreated.
“Nevermind, it’s no big deal. I jjst wanted to buy Samantha some new boots for school.”
Clever. Deflection through trying to switch focus to same with a hint of benevolence. Travis smelled this one all the way down the road. But he also played the game and didn’t let on he was now suspicious and Abbey would find herself under a close watch. He didn’t want to tip his hand and if she was up to know good, force her to become even craftie and more secretive. His spidey senses were tingling and he made a mental note to keep track of any valuables he had started leaving out in the open again. A run or normalcy always made him complacent.
Travis didn’t have to wait long however. A few days later he took a call from an unknown number.
“Travis Henderson please.”
“This is he.”
“This is Dr. Bowing down at the hospital. I wanted to inform you that your wife has had an accident and is in our care.”
“What? Is she ok? Can I talk to her?
“I’m sorry Mr. Henderson, but not at this time. We found your information in her purse and wanted to inform you. You should make your way to the hospital as soon as possible.”
The words richocheted off his insides, blowing holes in everything, causing damage, ripping his insides apart. Sam and Lucy were at his parents house, so Travis jumped in the car and took off for the hospital, calling Abbey’s phone repeatedly. There was no answer.
 
Once there, Travis learned more. But it wasn’t detailed and it wasn’t enough.
“Your wife has suffered cardiac arrest.”
“From what?”
“It’s too early to say conclusively what brought this on. We have some indicators, but nothing we cn say without running more tests.”
Travis had ghis own suspicions as well.
It was hours before they let him in the room and when they did, he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. It was Abbey, but with no life, no soul. It was the saddest shell Travis had ever seen. Every hole in her body had a tube going in or out of it and attached to some beeping machine. It controled or monitored everything from her brain activity to her breathing to her heart rate. It was the last thing that caught the most attention. It was was the sound of the monitor. The steady, rhythmatic noise. The same one he heard in countless TV shows and dozens if not hundreds of movies. Except none of those was keepig his wife alive. But this one was.
He shuffled over to her bedside, somehow numb yet feeling everything.
Running the back of his index finger againsy the back of her hand, in between the small space between her knuckles and where the tape holding the IV inplace stopped.
“Hi baby…” he mumbled, almost trying to sound normal. As if anyone could confuse this scenario as any old day. He repeated the action and the words. Each time, getting more and more faint. His voice begining to give out, and as it did so, the tears began. He did not sob, but the stream of tears falling across the front of his face were seemingly endless.
“I… love… you… I’m so sorry.” He turned to survey the room, but his vision was blurry from the tears and everything was out of focus. Somewhere he knew if he ran his hand across his eyes he would be able to see better, but another part of him knew that whatever he might see was not going to change the reality of what was going on. The doctors had told him that the cardiac arrest was a result of her cocaine use. Her intravenous cocaine use. Travis had no idea that she had been booting the coke. He had no idea how long it had been going on. He knew he should call her parents, he had to, but he had no idea what to tell them. They were certainly aware of her struggles, but they did not know the extent of them. And certainly they had n idea that she must of started using again recently. There had always been an uneasy vibe between him and them, in general and her drug use was the root of it, erroneous as it was. They had always blamed him for Abbey’s getting high, but only because they needed a target. The truth was she had been partying long before they got together, her parents just didn’t know it.
He took a long look at Abbey, ppeaceful because she wasn’t battling any demons fr the moment, and walked into the hallway.
“Jim, it’s Trav. You need to come down to the hospital. It’s Abbey. Yes, but you and Cynthia need to get here. No, no you can’t talk to her. I know. Bye.”
He hung up the phone and his thoughts turned to the girls. He had no idea how to tell them, what to tell them. He called his parents to let them know what was going on.
His mother answered the phone and he broke down to her. He didn;t want to get into all the details, but he let her know what was going on and asked how she thought he should handle it with the girls. They both agreed that seeing their mother in that condition was far too traumatic, no matter how much they tried not to shield Samantha and Lucinda from the truth, this was a situation that called for discretion. They agreed to tell the girls that their mommy was sick and daddy was taking care of her. His father would watch the girls while his mother came to the hospital. She knew  that not only would she have to be there for her son, but that she would have to act as the buffer between him and Abbey’s parents.
“Thank you,” Travis said to his mother, hanging up the phone and heading back into the room.
The initial shock out of the way, he now took a minute to survey the room. It was like most hospital rooms. Dimly lit, save for the flourecent lightbulb running horizontal over the bed, casting off a light that close to the bulb illuminated brightly, but then quickly lost it’s strength and offered barely more than a suggestion of illumination. The floors were the typical square tiles, off-white, with dashes of some brownish color. This was to hide any scuff marks from the moving of beds or wheelshairs and it worked in successfully confusing and covering up any marks. Various machines were attached to the wall with what looked like an infinite amount of information available at the touch of one of the infinite number of buttons and dials. There was another bed that was empty and waiting for someone to suffer from some misfortune. The bed consisted some measure of good luck and bad luck, all in the same place. Bad luck because they ended up in the hospital. Good luck because they weren’t any longer there. Whether it was a result of healing or death, they weren’t any longer confined to the cold, sterile environment of the room. All of any personal touches that had possibly once occupied the space had also been removed. Except for a small card whoever cleaned the rooms must of missed. It was taped to the wall and it had a heart colored in crayon on the outside. He opned the card and inside was scribbled “Get well soon.” Travis wondered if she had.
Pulling up a chair, he sat down and reached over the tube and wiring keeping Abbey alive and softly stroked her hair. He realized that in all those moments of love where anything seems possible, this was one of those moments. No one ever imagines in the moments where it just after making love, looking at the ceiling, trying to catch your breath, not having a care or problem in the world, not wanting to change place with any other human being, feeling confident in the love and the ability to overcome any obstacle life throws at you both, that one of the moments would come in the shape of a hospital room. The most you think you might face is getting behind in bills, or some drunken argument, or the loss of a parent. No one ever imagines love needing to elevate oneself to face impossible odds, impossible realities, impossible powerlessness. The pain bordered on more than he could comprehend. He hated it.
Travis’ mother was first to arrive. She lived on the outskirts of town, and drove like a madwoman. She was invariably very early to wherever she needed to be. Early because she hadn’t been stopped by the police, late because she had.
“How are you Travis? How is she?”
“ OD. They said she was shooting up.” Must mothers her age would of balked at information like that about her son’s wife and the parent of her grandchildren. But she was a tough woman who had grown up in the inner city and been around the block. Sadly, things like this were not unknown in her world. She knew that Abey had struggled, but she also thought she had been clean for  a few months.
“ I’m sorry Trav. But what about you? You never admit or let anyone in on how you are doing, how this is affecting you.” “I’m fine mom. I swear.” She knew this was bullshit but also knew she wasn’t likely to get any further, at least now.
“Thy think she is going to be braindead, if she ever… recovers,” Travis told his mother while his eyes were affixed to Abbey’s quiet face.
“She will be ok,” his mother replied. Travis knew it was bullshit and resented her for even suggesting it. They sat in silence for the next twenty minutes until Abbey’s parents arrived.
Their arrival was about what Travis had expected. The need to point fingers and place blame only a fraction behind inquiring if their daugter was ok and going to be ok. It didn’t dawn on them to see if the girls were k, let alone if he was ok.
“We knew this would happen someday,” chimed in Abbey’s mother while her father looked at him with athe sternest of gazes.
“Well if you knew,” Travis shot back, “then why didn’t you stop it.”
Her father let out a noise of disgust and out of convenience for themselves refused to further acknowledge the contradiction of their statement.
“For your information, the doctors can’t tell us what will happen. And the girls are fine.”
Abbey’s parents said nothing. Travis’ mother once again tried to change the subject, or the line fo fire, but offering her unbased prediction that, “Everything will work out fine.”
 
Weeks went by and Abbey’s condition did not improve, and it didn’t deteriorate. Which while not a bad sign, wasn’t a good sign either. There was the possibility that she could remain in this vegatative state indefinitely. The families had fallen into a routine. The girls stayed at home with the grandparents each coming to stay in multi-day shifts. Travis did not want to disturb their life any more than necessary. But he had begun to allow Samantha and Lucinda to see their mother in the hospital, tubes and all. When it began to become clear that she might be there for an undetermined amount of time, he felt it was only right.
Explainging to them what was ging on was delicate, but he did not want to give any fuel to the runaway magination that he and Abbey had worked so hard to cultivate either.
“Mommy is sick right now. She put things in her body that you shouldn’t put in there, and so now she is very sick,” he told them over a breakfast of waffles he had prepared one morning when it was just the three of them instead of the four, five, six or seven of them that were there at times.
“What did she put in there?” Sam asked, a little older and more curious and demanding of mor detailed explanations.
“Drugs,” Travis answered. It was not a completely foreign subject for the family, one that Travis wished they weren’t forced to understand on such a close and personal level, but wishing it was different makes no difference. “Mom relapsed again, meaning she took drugs again, and ended up in the hospital.”
“When she come home?” asked little Lucy.
“I don’w know,” Travis answered.
“But she wil be back?” Samantha asked, her eyes asking more than her mouth.
“I don;t know that either,” he replied, eyes filling with water. Both of his daughters took their cue from him and they stood in the kitchen clutching each other and sobbing. It occured to him for the first time is that this was what the new version of their family might look like, and it crushed him to the core. Especially for their girls.
The three of them had a good healthy cry. He went back to making breakfast and the girls naturaly went to the wall and picked up  brushs. Space was becoming harder and harder to come by. But they managed to find little spaces here and there and fill it with color. When the space became tight, they often switched to paint, a heavier medium and able to paint over and ignore the edges suggested by anything drawn in pen, pencil, crayon or marker. It was the last medium before it was necessary to repaint the walls all together. Lucy experiemented with different blotches of color. There was no shape to anything, she ignored all rules and put splotches of one color over splotches of another color. There was no rhyme or reason, at least to adults, but she would every so often stop, tilt her precius head and survey what she had done and what she wanted to do next. Samantha having -unfortunately- outgrown this stage almost always painted forms. What was wonderful was that she had not yet resigned herself to the idea that things should be colored or represented as they were in real life. Her imagination still trumoed reality and she had begun painting a forest of blue and yellow trees. Abbey and Travis had been purposeful in ever giving either of the girls any rules in regards to art. There was nothing they should or shouldn’t do. They didn’t have to color in the lines, they didn’t have to make the sky blue, there was no reason that the stars had to be in the sky and not in the house. Everything was a possibility.
Travis wanted them to get a little of the news out of their system, or maybe their system accustomed to the news, so he didn’t exactly rush the cooking of breakfast. He would let them paint, make and eat waffles with them, then go over some schoolwork. For the first few weeks he had not been so vigalent in keeping up their studies with neither he or them being up for it, but as they settled into the limboland of an alternate universe, one where they could be perpetually suspended for an indefinite amount of time, he realized that he could not ut off taking up the teaching responsibilities forever.
The way that Abbey taught the girls was essentially the same manner, the same subjects at the same time. The difference was the level of what was being taught to each of them. It may be a reading day, but Lucy would be learnin letters while Samantha was praticing reading. Or it could be a math day where Samantha was learning simple math, while Lucy was practicing learning to count. Travis learned that in addition to releasing what was going on internally through their various art projects, they could find a small measure of distraction and relief from life in submerging themselves n the schoolwork. Even though they shied away from the denial of the truths surrounding them, it was only human to try and shy away and find relief from pain of any sorts. Travis could not deny that, even if he tried.
 
The new family routine usually was as followed: they would wake up and have breakfast together. At some point in the morning, some of the grandparents would stop by and Travis would head to the hospital alone. The time there was spent mostly in reflection. Abbey never moved, never talked, never communicated, never opened her eyes. These hours were unbearable, but Travis had a new sensation, one that he had never felt before in their relationship. Guilt. Guilt for taking time and energy and love and squandering it, or at least directing it in a place that he maybe shouldn’t of. He spent the days in the hospital consumed with guilt and thoughts of the other woman. It was inevitable and ttook place daily, no matter how much he tried to avoid it. He did not avoid the guilt. In fact he welcomed it. He felt it was his cross to bear for the actions he had cosen. He had always been a big believer in personal responsibility and for reaping what you sow. Even when unpleasant. And as unpleasant as the pangs of guilt were he did not shy away from them. What he did wish he could alter was his mind going back to the times he had spent with the other woman. When it came to this he did not feel guilt as much as he realized the contradiction that was taking place. To have his wife on the cusp of death, regret for robbing her of the exact things he had verbally and in action promised to her, at least at one point, and yet bedside he was consumed by his thoughts and feelings for the exact person that been the recipient of his misdeeds. The onyl relief came when his parents or her parents stopped by with the girls in the afternoon. Tey would stay at the hospital until early evening where they would all return back to one of their houses for dinner, then back to their house for some schoolwork and family time. Some evenings he would drop the girls back off at their grandparents or they would come there and they would watch th girls, and put them to bed when he returned to the hospital. He was usually able to get in or stay after visiting hours ended. They would not allow this if the kids were there or for anyone more than himself, but as a father with two adorable young girls he nurses took pity on him. Plus, he bribed them with the homebaked goods that neighbors were constantly dropping off at their house. There was more than enough to go around and for nurses on the lonely nightshift, a stream of homebaked goods went far in greasing their wheels. While this would suualy rub him the wrong way, he took advantage of this considering the circumstances. Nights were brutal for him. At least in the morning she knew the run away train of thoughts would at some point be detrailed by the appearance of his kids and parents. But at night he became acutely aware of the fact he was more or less stuck in this place until the next day’s late morning or early afternoon.
 
It was only natural that what had started as a small thought grew into a full on obsession. And one night on his way back to the hospital, with her kids at her parents, in a moment of weakness, in an effort to relieve himself of the concuming obsession, he went back to the source of his pain looking for the solution.
 
As much as he knew she hated him after he cut her off, he was also aware that she couldn’t refuse. It was not something that he took satisfaction in or fueled his ego in any sort of way, but he also knew it to be true. And while there was some deep connection between them both, something that far exceeded the amazing, animalistic fucking that they did, he didn’t want to see her for that reason. He needed distraction, he needed pleasure and he knew that there was noone on the planet that could give him what he craved like se could. So maybe in a small way, he was using her after all.
“You selfish fucking pig,” she said when she picked up the phone. He knew he was going to have to eat some shit, and was wiling to do so, allow her to release some of her righreous hostility, before he told her the news. And what he wanted.
“Abbey ODd and is in the hospital. I guess she startd shooting coke. She’s been in a coma for over a month. I just want to see you. Please.” He begged. He would of been relentless if he had to. But she was generous and didn’t make him do it. For all his faults and keeping her on a yo-yo, he had never lied to her, was always up front, and she knew he was a good human being. She had been in his place countless times and knew isolated actions of a person could not define someone, no matter how much they hurt others.
“Where,” she asked.
He told her the parking lot of small shopping center. While they had fucked in public many times, many places  this wasn’t about being risky or dirty, it was convenience. He didn’t want to get a nice hotel, they weren’t going to be there long and he didn’t want to get a sleazy motel, because it wasn’t that kind of fuck either. He wanted to get in and get out. They had never gone to one another’s houses and tonight certainly wasn’t the time to start. Although there was a bond, their homes had been off-limits.
They met in front of the department store in the parking lot. It was a public place, but closed, and people frequently left their cars there for various reasons so two more parked cars wouldn’t look terribly out of place. He slid into the passanger seat of her car and avoided eye contact as much as he was dieing to look at her. The smirk on her face was not one of humor but disgust. At him and at herself, but for different reasons.
“Is she going to be ok?” she asked.
“They have no idea. But it is unlikely she will ever come out of a coma. And if she does she will almost certainly have suffered so much brain damage that she will never be what oor who she was.” The admission, regardless of the audience or setting always felt like a horse had delivered a blow to his midsection. It always made him lose his footing and the next sentence, no matter what he said, always served to highlight how lost he was. It never mattered what he said, it was all in his voice.
“We are doing the best we can.”
“Oh yea? Is that why you are here?” she jabbed. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair. I’m glad you called, you know that I wil always be here for you. Even if I’m not.” It was a contradictory sentence but Travis knew exactly what she meant and realized there really was no contradiction in her words. Only the truth. But Travis mnd had already switched gears to needing to be distracted and not reminded of the truth and he had begun to tune her words out and focus on her body. Images of what happened came over him in anticipation and were quickly swallowed up by making what was about to happen, start to happen. He kissed her open mouth and slid her hand over his growing cock in his jeans. He tilted the seat back as she undid his jeans and took a quick survey of the parking to make sure they were clear before disappearing below the view of the car window.
 
He left her in the parking lot with no promises. No promise to see her again, but not swearing her off either. Instead he kissed her lips and slid out of the car, barely acknowledging the awkwardness of yet another unstated departure, no closure or clue to how things were being left. He slipped back into his own car and less than 45 minutes after having pulled in, was on his way to the hospital.
 
He realized that it made no sense, but that night at the hospital, alone with Abbey, he felt no guilt or remorse or conflict. In fact he felt present for the first time since all this had happened. Free from distraction he climbed into bed with Abbey and talked to her. He gave her the updates on Sam and Luc, bitched about her parents and talked about the upcoming elections. He had no fear of being caught for his earlier rondevouz, not out of false pride and ego that he was above being caught, but the fact was his wife was in the hospital in a coma. As it got close to midnight he climbed out of bed, kissed her forehead and told her he loved her.
And he meant it.
 
As days and weeks went on, the family became more and more accustomed to life without their mother around. At first the days passed a minute at a time, aware of the painful and new reality that their mom wasn’t a part of their daily life, even though she remained a part of their daily thought. After about two months of life without her there it became clearl it was time to paint the walls, give them a fresh coat and everyone a fresh start. Usually the four of them took the time to do it, but without Abbey’s help and it being impossible to do with only one adult, Abbey and Travis’ parents both lent their hands to the project.
On the one hand Travis could see the shape and makeup of their family changing in front of his eyes, but part of that change was the grandparents becoming a bigger part of the kids lives, something that was difficult to argue could be a bad thing. Abbey’s parents never cared for him, but they had always been wonderful with Samantha and Lucinda. In fact al four grandparents seemed to strike the right balance between spoiling and teaching responsilbility with theie first grandchildren, It was surely a balancing act, especialy in times like this where it seemed like  it was better to err on the side of giving them a little extra than sparing them, but Travis never felt the need to step in and assert his parental authority as the final word.
Over the course of a week and a half buckets of paint were brought into the house, tarps were laid, outlets were trimmed in tape and the painting took place. They always started in the girl’s room and it was the first time Travis had really notived what Abbey had drawn there during one of her relapses. The dresser still sat askew from the wall and Travis stared at the sharpie wall of bricks that went from baseboard to the ceiling. As trite as he realized it sounded, it said so much. He could tell she had done it while high. Her hand motions changed and became less fluid and more rigid and controlled. She also tended to draw things on a smaller, tighter scale whaen she was fucked up on coke. It wasn’t nearly as lucid as what she created with a clean and clear mind. And he knew when sh was clean she would never draw something like a wall, something to keep things in or keep things out. It was her using addict mentality to guard. Clean, she was a free spirit and wouldn’t allow a subject like this to appear in her work, let alone become the focus. And of course seeing the woman at the top at the precipice, escaping, longing for freedom, was the thinnest of allegories possible. It struck Travis in his heart, and made him deeply sad. Despite the insanity of her disease, despite his infidelities, despite their both satying one thing, doing another, empty promises with the best intentions, and failures to follow through they were each good people that just had some bad faults. He loved her, he cared for her. He may or may not be in love with her, but he knew for sure he loved her and always would. It had nothing to do with the children they had together and everything to do with the early years of their relationship when he never doubyed how in love they were. He constantly went back to that point, struggling to admit the consequences of fcing that maybe what had once been was no longer. But that was a song sung a thousand times the world over. What he really struggled with was trying to find the line between staying committed to her, them, the family versus trying to force something to work that clearly wasn’t. He was old enough to know that relatiosnships have ups and downs and they are nowhere near the faireytales that young girls are sold in the movies. Sometimes it’s saying I love you when you are feeling I hate you. Sometimes it’s saying I hate you knowing you really love them. And regardless fo what is said, or even felt, havong both sides know that the other one isn’t going anywhere. Not because of some sick and unhealthy twisted codependant reason, but because both are committed to each other, the relatioship, the future. Travis just wasn’t sure he was there any longer. In his heart he didn’t think it had anything to do with the other woman, but he also knew it would be suspect to rule that out completely. And he also knew that all new relatiosnhips and all secret relatiosnhips feel and new and shiney and sparking and excitig in the begining. It’s how people get lured and lulled into them in the first place. And things with her certainly had all that. It wasn’t yet one that traded passion for comfortability. Fuck, maybe people weren’t even meant to be in long-term monogamous relatioships. He had yet to to see very many from anyone his age. Sure both his and Abbey’s parents were still together, but were they happily together? He couldn’t really say. And who knew if they had been truely committed for all those years. At their age it may be more resignation than anything else. Fuck he had ecome so poessimistic.
“Girls!” he called out to Sam and Lucy. Both his little munchkins came on the door, hair in pigtails, faces touched with splotches of paint.
“What do you see,” he asked, motioning to the handdrawn wall on the wall.
They stared at the wall and squinted, their little brains taking in the visual and trying to let some narrative develop.
“Wall,” Lucy said first.
“Sam?” I asked.
“A really high wall. With mom at the top.” She had spotted it too.
“Why do you think mom decided to draw that?” Travis asked them both.
Again, a half minute of silence.
“Because she wants to get out,” said Sam.
“Of where,” I asked them.
“The hospital?” asked Lucy.
“She wants to get out of here Lucy. She hates it here…”
“Why?” asked her younger sister.
“Yea Sam, why do you say that?” I chimed back in.
“She always gets sick and is never here.” It was wasy to see why she said that, why she would feel like that. But she was wrong. And any logic or explanation that an adult would understand, an 8 year old probably wouldn’t.
“Well babygirl, mommy is sick. She does things that make her sick and make her leave. But it doesn’t mean she loves you any less. She loves you.”
Travis and Lucy watched as Samantha went and picked up a bunch of markers, walked to the wall and furiusly and wihout any thought or reason began ripping the capps off and ferociously coloring over the walls. It was a senseless and orderless chaos. She asn’t doing it as a form of creativity, but she was certainly expressing herself. Lucy not understand giggled, ran over, picked up some markers and began doing the same as her big sister in the blank area of the wall next to her sister. Travis made no attempt to stop either one of them. What Samantha had said and felt was understandable. But what to do with it?
“Let’s draw what we think about mom,” Travis said, “and what’s going on with her.” He waled over to where both his daughters were and all three of them silently began to draw, his daughters on one side of Abbey’s wall, him on the other. Each of them fell into their own zone, their worlds shrank and self awareness was nonexistatnt as they were sucked into the vaccum of creation. Eyes stayed fixed to what was in front of them, save for a glance to find the right color or proper tip on the marker they wanted to use.
After a long silence, Lucy was the first to speak.
“Mommy and mommy’s heart” she said, pointing to a stick figure in blue, with yellow hair, a set of circlish shapes for eyes and a big heart in fire engine red covering most of her torso. Looking at it like an adult, in ligh of surrent circumstances, you would conclude this was in reference to Abbey’s heart that almost exploded as a result of getting high. Looking at it as a child, it probably represented the love she had for her mother. It was best to leave it that way.
“It’s relly good Luc,” he said. “What about you Sam?” he asked turning to her, waiting and wanting to hear what she came up with.
“It’s a tornado,” she delicately whispered, pointing to the spiraling black line. “There’s Lucy, there’s daddy, there’s me,” taking her small finger and touching the wall to point out each person. “And here’s mommy,” she said sadly, pointing down to a rudimentary drawing of Abbey laying on her back. The cone of the tornado sprouting from the place on her chest, where her heart would be. Clearly their mother’s heart was frfront in their minds.
“What did you draw daddy?” they both asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I didn;t draw anything.
“But you said we had to draw what we think about mommy. What’s going on with her,” Samantha pointed out.
“I know baby. But I did. I didn’t draw nothing, I just drew what I feel.” He knew they couldn’t understand or articulate the idea of emptiness, or feeling nothing towards the person he was supposed to love. But it was painfully and brutally honest. And he had no idea if it was possible, or even if he wanted to, get back on the other side of that wall that had been put up.
 
He began to see the other woman more and more frequently. He suspected his parents knew and kept the affait and their awareness to themselves, but he was sure Abbey’s parents did not have the feintest of ideas. What had once given him a feeling of anxiety, a rush of not getting caught, the secret nature of the relationship eventually changed into a normal pattern. It wasn’t normal however and they still needed to use discretion. The fact that their relationship had to take place in secret, in the dark, did not mean that they became complacent in keeping things underwraps. It had jusy lost the feeling of being naughty. The abmnormal had been flipped upside down and was now normal. It’s a shame when these things happen, but they inevitably do. What was once pushing the envelope, walking the edge, becomes normal and somehow it seems like you are walking on solid ground and that line, that edge, has moved and you aren’t quite so close to it as you once had been.
Just fucking in the parking lot had been replaced by hours in the car, fucking and talking. When they were feeling especially brave they would sometimes travel  quite a ways to be able to grab something to eat out in the open. Even then it was a risk and they chose out of the way places in out of the way towns, and constantly looked over their shoulder. And they both had a well rehearsed cover story ready to go. Getting caught with another lover was one thing, but getting caught cheating while your wife was in the hospital hooked was something else entirely. It was hard to tell if it was more justifiable or just somehow felt more justifiable to them. But they were aware that it would probably matter little to anyone who found them out. On night that they were feeling especially brave or especially needy, they even would spend the night together in a hotel. But they tried to keep these episodes few and far between. They knew they couldn’t take things too far. The reality of a marriage and a hospital always sat somewhere on their shoulder, no matter how amazing the sex or conversations went.
Travis was careful to not let his heart speak too freely. Things were always complicated but nothing is such a complicated mess that it can’t get worse. He tried to be honest with her, he wanted her close, but he knew that there was only so far that things could possibly go. What was he supposed to do? Leave his comatose wife? Follow his heart r follow his family. In moments he was with the other woman he felt sure in his direction, protected by love, protected by feeling that following his heart could never be a bad thing, the wrong decision. But back in reality, it didn’t seem to safe. It didn’t feel as obvious. He tried to sort out the confliction that plagued him. But any time he approached it in his head, he felt as if he was spinning, sick to his stomach and he craved nothing more than something to reach out and hold on to. It didn’t even have to stop the room from spinning, it just had to be something to cling to. He swung his arms madly, but for all the faliling her did, he could never find that thing to latch on to.
She tried to be patient with him.  She was an adult and full aware of the consequences of begining or resuming a relatiosnhip like this. Apparently what she aws not fully aware of was the possibility of where that could lead her. Or leave her. If she had she was not entirely sure she would of moved foeward with things. It was easy to simplify it and look down on it by saying it wasn’t worth it. But only seemed to cheapen the feelings she felt, the love, but it was the only way to acknowledge the pain the relationship caused her. And she wasn’t alone. They had talked about her getting pregnant, but on purpose to set things into motion that were irreversible. But they agreed it seemed terribly irresponsible to do things that way. But the idea and the thought crossed their monds and their lips on a few occasions. In the end though, they relaized they were adults, and could make decisions, and weren’t vitims of life, or death, no matter how much they feelt like it. It seemed terribly unfair that they had to feel this way and live this way. It should be one or the other. Not both.
They avoided conversations about the future, but they were comfortable enough to talk about what was going on today. She was able to accept, at least in part, the realities of his life today, complications and all.
“How is Abbey?” she asked.
“Same. I don;t know if it will ever change,” he said.
“The doctors say anything new?”
“No. They have done all they can at this point. It’s really up to her.”
They both realized the future of any possability of a relationship between the two of them lay in the hands, or heart, of his wife who was currently residing in a hospital bed, comatose from a cocaine overdose. Always the scenario that you dream of as a small child.
“Let’s just run away,” he would say to her. He barely could bring her to acknowledge the sheer impossability of it. The only thing that could match the grandeur of the suggestion was how bad she wanted it to happen. They both wanted more. And they felt desperate. It wasn’t that they wanted to come out of hiding, they just wanted to spend more time and share more of their lives with one another.
“You should go to the hospital,” she said to him as they sat in her car, in the rainy parking lot of the movie theater. They always got in her car. It was smaller and made sex more complicated, but it also bore no trace or reminder of Abbey and the reality they hated, so it also made things less complicated. As if denial makes things easier in the end.
“But I want to be here with you,” he said the way one Samantha or Lucy would protest, ignoring what was obvious to everyone. “You know,” he said starting back up, “This is her fault. It’s her fault she is in tere and that means it’s also her fault we are stuck here in the situation like this.”
“Don;t you blame that woman,” she shot right back. She refused to turn his wife into the bad woman or the problem. Regardless if it was true or not, or it was his excuse or hers, she refused to go there.
“You loved that woman. Abbey is the mother of your two beautiful daughters. You could of left her a million times, before or after the girls were born. It’s not like you never knew she had a drug problem and liked to get high. It’s just now that things are toough you want to leave.”
“That’s bullshit,” he shot right back. “I had never met you, I had no reason to leave.”
“Don;t you fucking dare try and make this my fault Travis.”
“I’m not trying to point fingers, just point out the truth.”
They always came to these impossible passes where somehow it seemed like reality and the truth clashed. By definition they were each true on their own, yet shouldn’t be able to both still be factual when put next to each other. Fuck if they knew how to sort it out or make sense of it. Or how to proceed from here.
“You know I would like to meet both Samantha and Lucinda some day.”
With a look of confusion and slight disgust he asked, “How do you go from talking about how impossible things are, to thinking about at some point in the future and something like that?”
“I’m sorry. It was out of line, but it’s how I feel and it’s something I thk about.
“Well of course I do too, but it doesn’t look like it will happen any time soon.”
Travis couldn't blamer her. He rfelt the same too. Thought the same too. Wanted the same too. He couldn't imagine subjecting Sam and Lucy to anything like that right now though while their mother was in a hospital bed. Even doing it under the guise of “this is daddy's friend” felt creepy and shady. He knew she wasn't asking for this, or even suggesting it, and the whole conversation was something he enjoyed about their relationship. He knew she wasn't asking or suggesting, but really just expressing her thoughts, and he could relate and understand that. There was no threat.
 
NEW CHAPTER
As time went on, Abbey's condition remained the same. She didn't improve the slightest but she also did not deteriorate either. She remained in a perpetual state of limbo between the living world and the no longer living world. Travis continued his vigil at the hospital. Any suggestion of visiting hours were a thing of the past and as weeks turned to months he began to know not only the night staff's names but the nurses lives.
He liked most of them and became friendlier with some than others. All he felt took good care of Abbey and when he got on good terms with them, he did not let the supply of baked goods and homemmade dinners slip. He got in the rutine of preparing and having the grandparents prepare extra leftovers specifically for that purpose. Soon, it became just as customarry as brushing your teeth before bedtimr.  One nurse he became very friendly with in particular was a male nurse named Carl.
Carl was the best of both worlds. He was sweet and delicate in his caring for Abbey, but he could also tell he was a man's man. He was also in his sixties so it was easy to tell by reading his face and the lines on it that he had a god amount of life under his belt. Travis realized that the nurses clearly had a pecking order, an established hierarchy, and he was concious not to disturb that. He tried to do so by treating all the nurses the same and not giving any any preferential treatment, lest the natural order of things not be upended. He didn;t take any special requests for food, no one got anythign on the side, things like that. But when it came to Carl, Travis felt a special bond that formed. He would occasionally catch Carl sneaking a cigarette outside the hospital's entrance while he was on his way in or out to see Abbey. He would stop and the two would talk. It seemed rather quick, and unforced, that the conversation veered from the typical nurse/patient update, past the “good weather we are having” niceties, into conversations about all sorts of things. At first, details of each other's life growing up bubbled to the surface. Turns out Carl was born in the bowels of a big city on the other side of the state. The image the city wished to portray was one of peace, unity civility, forward thinking and welcome to new people and industry. The reality of course was something not as sterile and charming. Scratch the surface and you find a place steeped in crime. From white collar to blue collar. From white men who do their crimes on paper and ledger sheets to the poor who without the same means of access resort to tradition criminology of vice – be it drugs or women or gambling or bootlegging – all seemed to find a place where Carl was raised.
Travis would think about Carl when he wasn't at the ospital, turning him and their budding relationship over and over in his head. Trying to figure out about the man what he found so endearing. He thought it could be the tone of his voice. There was something melodic about it. Calm, reassuring, confident. Soft, but you knew when he had to let someone know what was what he was more than capable. Whoever might find themselves on the receiving end of Carl's ire would be shocked that the sweet and gentle old man had it in him, but they would not doubt his capabilities or capacity one bit. It was one of those types of voices.
It could be the man's build. Similar to his voice, Carl was somewhat slight, standing in the neighborhood of 5'4” or 5'5”. His skin was livid in and the color of coffee with a some creamer added. He kept his hair very short all the way around but there was enough to tell the hair on his head and on his lip above his mouth and under his nose was gray. Not silver, not salt and pepper. Gray.
While the two men exchanged bits of their lives in the nigt outside, within the confines of the hospital it was a business only atmosphere. They never had to talk about it but the understanding was implied and understood. But outside, time chipped away at the story and the walls between the two. Travis would find out Carl's schedule and work his rendevouz with the other woman around it. Of course he never explained to either the way he was operating, but to himself it what what he used to govern his schedule. It also was a way to keep himself in check, make sure he was at the hospital more than he wasn't at night, because even though Abbey was his wife, the coice between a hospital bed with one woman and a hotel bed with another, the cold and unforgiving reality or the warm and pleasurable fantasy, made it sometimes difficult to do what was “right” by most peoples definition.
Regardless of how or why, the what was Travis and Carl beginning to confide in each other more and more often and on a deeper and deeper level. Travis could tell that he was soon going to have to make a decision on far exactly to let Carl into his world. He realized there was a canyon of truth that seperated the two men, yet somehow that chasm was razor thin. The reality of Travis' life could not be complete or fully told without letting Carl into what was going on right now. Travis realized that not making a decision on whether or not to tell Carl was in actuality a decision in and of itself. If he did not make the decision not to tell Carl, for all intents and purposes he was deciding to tell him. Even with this realization, Travis put off his indecision as long as possible.
Even the girls and his parents had welcomed Carl into their circle. It was hard not to like Carl. He spoiled both Samantha and Lucy with candies as long as they supplied him with a hug. Travis parent's also realized that Carl could be one of the few bright spots in the girls visit to the hospital. Most of the visits were filled with their mother's lifeless body attached to all sorts of beeping machinery, lots of adult talk, a television affixed to the wall that played morning talk shows before noon, news casts at noon, and soaps in the afternoon. No one actualy watched the programs, but people seemed to need it on because the threat of an awkward silence accidentally floating through the air and people accidentally grasping the situation was easy to belay via having some, any, random playing program on the television to refer to in a moment of need.
So while the kids were usually relegated to a plastic chair, the appearance of Carl with a few sweets and some attention made him and his visits a favorite. The kids were equally as bright of a spot in Carl's world as well. Travis had learned that Carl's wife had died early, before he had a chance to have children of his own and he had never remarried. Carl was a man of few regrets, but lack of his own children clearly pained him. There was no doubt in all his years that Samantha and Lucinda were not the first to pass through his world or capture his heart, but for certain they were the current ones. It was hard to tell who lit up more when seeing the other, Carl or the girls. Everyone seemed to appreciate Carl's presence.
 
It was one Thursday at the hospital when it was Travis and his mother when she brought up what had been on everyone's mind, but no one had gathered the courage to ask.
“Travis baby. What are you going to do when Abbey is gone?”
It was the truth that everyone knew, no one said, and Travis acted like it wasn't a possability. He had been living the most fractured of existances. His wife in the hospital, an on going relationship with another woman, wanting to not keep his daughters in the dark, feeling a fatherly desire to protect them, wanting to be free of his current situation but not entirely willing to face and accept what that meant and what came along with it. The doctors had gone from cautious optimism to lack of communication as time went by. The reality was that the longer she stayed as she was, the chances decreased that she would ever regain conciousness, let alone any semblance of her former life. But like any good lawyer, they look for the loophole to not state the obvious. And the loophole was that they could not for a fact say she would not ever regain conciousness. They could not say she could never make a full recovery. They had not seen it, but theoretically, it was possible.
“I don't know mom. I just don't know. To tell you the truth,” he began. “I haven't really thought about it much.”
“Well maybe it's time you start.”
They had wills drawn up when the girls were born but they were simple notarized documents bestowing all their worldly possesins to the girls and any possible future children. They had done it at the recommendation of their parents when Sam was born and then Lucinda, but they never guessed it would be four of the shortest years later that it would possibly be necessary. If anything it should have been four decades. After they had grown up and built a life of their own.
Travis sat in the hospital room chair and looked over his wife at his mother, his face blank with thought or feeling. The only feeling he could muster was numbness as he sought help in her eyes. Not the logistics of how to deal with the details, but how to navigate life when things had become so unexpectedly upside down. He felt like he was athe captain of a ship in rough waters, and gazing at the compass showed the needle spinning violently. Now what to do? Which was was the security or land? Which way should he help. He sought those unspoken answers in his mother's eyes. Instead of answers he was shown unconditional love of a mother that told him whatever way he went, he was not alone. Depite what it felt like. His head dropped to his hands and he bawled.
 
His cell rang at 2:46am. He was with her in some anonymous hotel room by the airport. Nights came and covered him in the lightest of blankets, any disturbance to the atmosphere immediately woke him up. So when the silence and darkness of the middle of the night was ruptured he was immediately up and answering the phone before the second ring had even finished.
“Hey, hello?” he stammered. There was no reason anyone should be calling him at this hour. He was quick to the phone but not awake enough to check the caller ID. The girls were with his parents, his wife was in a hospital. Whatever it was he needed to know what was going on right away.
“Travis. It's Abbey,” said his father. His heart sank.
“She's awake.”
 
The next few seconds were spent with his mind racing and his body doing nothing. He hung up with his father and sat on the edge of his bed. His hands traced his own face as if he was blind and trying to see what he looked like. He was trying to determine of he was really awake. He didn't want to continue in this dream if he really wasn't awake. The touching of his own face wasn't providing enough proof, so he took a quick survey of the room to see if that could possibly provide any proof. A pile of his clothes on the floor, an empty case of beer on the table, a pile of her clothes. The first wave of reality hit him and he looked at the bed and she was there, nude, mostly under the sheet, facing away from him, still asleep. The fission of his life was right there in front of him. But now was not the time to begin adressing it. He wasn't entirely even sure how he felt about his father's phonecall, but he knew one thing for certain and that was that he was needed immediately at the hospital.
Jumping out of bed he dressed himself. He wasn't entirely sure how sober he was, but it was another detail that he didn''t have the luxury of trying to figure out at the moment. He managed to get himself as together as possible, and he sat on the edge of the bed where she lay. Still asleep. They had both been pretty drunk so he wasn't entirely surprised she was still asleep.
“Hey,” he said as he shook her shoulder. A little movement, but no real response. He tried again.
“Hey. Abbey woke up from her coma. I have to go to the hospital.
She gave him a quizzical look as she repeated his earlier steps of verifying if this was reality or a dream. Travis didn't have time to wait though, and he kissed her forehead and headed out the door.
 
Travis headed towards the hospital at a pace that could not be described as break neck. Not to say he took his time, but while he could have been pulled over for a few infractions, speeding was not one of them, although he could not even distinguish to himself if this was out of fear of getting pulled over and a DWI or that his insides were raging with mixed feelings. He was lots of things during his trip from the hotel to the hospital. Slightly inebriated, conflicted, relieved, hopeful, anxious. He had a little drive ahead of him. Enough time for his brain to work him over, up and down, inside and out. In his somewhat drunken state he made a decision to pull off the highway and get a pack of smokes. It was a thought, he quickly weighed the options, and then committed and didn't thik about it again. Until he had gone in, bought a pack of Camels, gotten back in his car, unwrapped the cellophane, tore off the foil, pulled the first one from the fresh pack, placed it between his lips, struck a match, placed the flame to the tip, took a quick pull to start it, quickly exhaling the smoke that also had sulpher from the matchtip, before fully engulfing his lungs with the sweet chemical cancer, exhaling slowly to enjoy it and watching the plume of smoke rise from just below his mouth and seek out the fresher air outside of his car window. And that was that.
 
He got to the hospital almost an hour after his father's call. He lucked out and beat Abbey's folks,  but not his own. His parents had made it their first, leaving the girls with a neighbor, but they were already silently implicit as to their sons whereabouts and made no effort to bring this up. It was not their business and it certainly wasn't the time.
“What the fuck is going on,” half shouted Travis as he saw them standing by the nurses station.
“They don't really know Trav,” his mother said. “What they do know is that around 2:30 her signs began to pick up an she became responsive. Travis, she asked for you and the girls.”
That was all Travis had to hear to make a drunken beeline for his wife's room. He got to the door and threw it open to see a team of doctor's surrounding her bed. The light in the room was soft, save for the one abover her bed, casting her in a bright, strong and radiant light.
For over one hundred and fifty days his world had been void of her existance. A pain had taken her place. A pain that was sometimes sharp, sometimes dull, but everpresent had remained in her place for over 5 months. And now by some as of yet unmmentioned and unexplained reason, she had been returned to them.
“Baby,” he mumbled as he strode towards her. His path was block by a doctor that intervened.
“Mr. Carter,” he began. Travis looked right over his head and swatted his arm away and kept moving towards his Abbey”That's my fucking wife!” he began to yell. Clearly the emotion and drunkeness were about to escalate the beligerance level he was prepared to  take things to. “She asked for me. That's my wife and she asked for me, you have no right and can't stop me from seeing her!” His voice cracked with desperation.
“Mr. Carter, may I talk to you for a minute?” the doctor asked, but the pull of the elbow indicated phrasing it as a question was merely his way of being polite. “Your wife has become unresponsive again and I need a word with you imediately.”
“I will be right back Abbey,” Travis said as he walked away, looking over her shoulder. “Please don;t go anywhere...”
The doctors escorted Travis right outside the door of the room. Carl followed, but continued on back to the nurses station to adress Travis' parents and let them know the limited information he had at the time.
“Please let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Menson. I am the chief heart specialist her at General. I understand that Abbey has been in our care for almost 6 months and Dr. Ribizio has been the primary doctor attending to her care. I have spoken with him and he has filled me in on the pertinent information up to this point. He is on his way in as we speak, but until then I just wanted to get you up to speed.” Travis nodded. His lips were parted and his jaw hung slightly slack. He looked dumbfounded and the doctor had yet to offer any substantial information.
“As you know your wife has been in a coma for the past five months after suffering from complications due to an acute drug intoxification. Her condition has remained stable, but with little to no brain activity. She has been kept on a respirator and on life support with little to no chance of any type of recovery. Around 2:23 this morning we began to see a significant, and unprecidented, spike in activity in all areas. What precipitated this, we are currently unaware. As one of our nurses was checking on Abbey, she apparently asked for you and who I am assuming to be your two young daughters.” Travis immediately knew it must of been Carl in the room.
“We believe that she temporarily trancended the coma, although at this tim we are not sure how or why. We are running tests right now to acertain what happened and why. Unfortunately I can not tell you much because at the moment we don;t know much for certain. What I can tell you is that this is not common. In fact it is extremely rare, which is why I am here. The number of people that return from a comatose state, with the nearly insignificant levels of life activity or function, are nearly nonexistant. We are talking to the attending nurse on duty who was in the room,” Travis glanced down to Carl who was talking to his parents, “and looking over the information our machines record for any insight. Unfortunately, at this time, it looks like the respite was brief and she has slipped back to the condition she was in prior to her brief awakening,” Dr. Menson concluded. “I wish we could tell you more, and we might be able to soon, but I wanted to talk to you myself and let you know that I am personally involved and our full resources are being invested into looking into the cause of this and helping out your wife. I will keep you up to date as soon as we know anything more.”
“So, so, so... What you are saying is that she was better for a minute, but now she is sick again?” Travis asked quizzically.
“Well, I'm not sure if 'better' is the exactly correct word to use, but yes, she did trancend the come and resume normal brain and body functions. Briefly.”
“Wow...” mused Travis.
“I know,” the doctor responded. “Let's see what happens next,” responded the doctor, patting the elbow he had previously grabbed to escort Travis out of the room with his clipboard. It was intended to infer some level of comradere between the two in the same fight to restore Abbey to her previous glory, but Travis picked up on the fact it was an attempt to establish some level of itimacy between the two. As if they both wanted the same thing and were on the same team. We wasn't sure what the doctor wanted but he was certain he had no idea what he wanted himself anymore either.
As the doctor headed back into the room with Abbey, Travis made his way to the nurses station to talk to Carl.
“Carl... What, I mean how... Please tell me everything,” pleaded Travis. Carl looked at Travis and it was clear that he was trying to impress the words he was about to say into Travis' brain.
“Of course,” Carl replied. “I was in the process of doing my rounds, checking beds when I was in Mr. Thomas' room next door. Checking Abbey was next but as I was looking over Mr. Thomas' chart I heard the monitors in the next room starting to sing. I wasn't sure if something was right or if something was wrong, but I knew that whatever it was needed my attention. I immediately went in and saw Abbey moving. She looked drugged and groggy, her arms not so much flailing as just moving about. It was clear that she was pretty confused about what was going on, as any person coming out of a 6 month coma would be. But there was also a beautiful and sterling clearness in her eyes as I got closer. I was trying to divide my attention between her and the machines to check the levels, when I realized that she had grabbed my wrist. Travis, she looked straight at me and asked where you and Sam and Lucy were. Her eyes were perfectly still, but I could tell, no feel, the rest of her being was pretty rattled.”
“Please go on Carl. Any small detail I want to know,” begged Travis.
“Well, to be honest, it wasn't as if she was panicked you weren't there, it was more just that she wanted you and the girls, to know you were ok. I told her you were on your way, that you all loved her and that everything was and was going to be ok. It was about then that it seemed she slipped back out of conciousness and was the time I heard the footsteps of the nurses from the nurses station that would have been alerted of a change in her vitals by the monitors at the station. They had already alerted the doctor on call of the big change in her stats and they arrived shortly after. That's when I called your house and spoke to your mother,” explained Carl. “I am guessing she called you next.”
Even in his somewhat drunken state, it did not escape Travis that the last sentence indicated that Carl was aware he was not at home at 2:30 in the morning. He filed that tidbit of information away for later when it would be a better suited time to figure out what he meant by that.
“Thank you so very, very much Carl,” Travis said, while catching, maintaining and searching Carl's eyes. “I don't know what to do with the girls,” he stated. “Should they come here?” he asked all those standing there. It was decided that someone should go get them, but tell them very little. It would be best for Sam and Lucy to be there, for their sake and their mother's if and when she regained conciousness again. Travis' father agreed to fetch them from the neighbor's while his mother agreed to wait for Abbey's folks arrival and get them up to speed.
In the meantime, Travis wanted to sit in Abbey's room. Doctors or no doctors, awake or asleep, concious or unconcious, he wanted to be there. But first he slipped downstairs and outside to smoke his second cigarette. He had only taken a few drags when Carl appeared from around the corner, unlit Newport 100 perched between his lips. If he was surprised by the sight of Travis smoking, he didn't let on at all.
“Travis,” he began. “I don't know what to say my man. I wish to god it had been you in that room instead of me.”
“I can explain Carl,” Travis responded. While guilt had not guided his actins, it looked as if it was about to take control over his mouth.
“Explain?” asked Carl. “Explain what my brother? You don't need to...”
“Yes. Yes I do. It's true. I have been seeing someone else. On the side. Having an affair. Cheating on my wife. My hospital bed ridden wife. I don;t care if you judge me, no wait, that's not true. Most people I don;t care if they judge me, but for some reason, I do, I do care what you think about me Carl,” the alcohol fueled monolgue beginning to gain momentum and take shape. “I have always felt close to you. I don;t know why, but just some sort of closeness, kinship... I'm not sure what. I felt free and open and accepted. And it was like a drug, something that enticed me and seduced me. And soon, somehow I slipped from being a person that hid nothing because I had nothing to hide from one of the nurses that takes care of my wife, to being a person who had something to hide and needed to hide it because I didn't want, I don;t know Carl. You know what I mean? I didn't want to soil the way you viewed me.”
Carl just slowly shook his head side to side in a way to convey that Travis had gotten it all wrong. They bot smoked in silence. Travis idn't know whether it was his turn to talk or Carl's, but Carl seemed perfectly comfortable oin the silence.
“Listen man, I know it was wrong. It wasn't something planned..” whined Travis, but Carl had given no sign of disappointment or judgement. Guilt was in Travis' driver's seat at the moment. If it had told him he needed to take off his clothes and stand on his head, Travis would of.
“Fuck...” Travis said as he looked down first, then away.
“It's gonna be ok,” Carl finally said, tossing the cigarette butt into the street and walking back towards the hospital door.
Travis wondered why everyone kept saying that.
 
When he got back upstairs Abbey's parents were standing at the nurse's station with his mother. Thankfully they were in the middle of the update as Travis walked by. He gave them a perfunctory nod of  his head, without slowing his gate down at all and headed toward's his wife's hospital room. The room had the same eerie atmosphere and lighting as the first time Travis walked in the room. He wondered what, if anything, had really changed.
The doctors had left the room. They were either running tests, deciphering results, or winding through some suburban development in their recent model Mercedes-Benz, counting the minutes until they could slip back into their 1,000 count thread bedsheets next to the model wife of similar age that they cheated on with the 20 or 30 year younger version of the same woman that still let's him fuck her in the ass. Travis wondered whether he was really all that different then them. He figured he was. But not for those reasons.
That left Travis alone to perform his bedside vigil. And once again he pulled the chair close, took his wife's IV perforated hand in his and began to talk to her. As with Carl, guilt chose the words. He was more selective in what he said though and confessed his guilt without admitting his wrongs or transgressions.
“I have no regrets, but I would do anything to do some things over Abbey. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm so fucking sorry...” He doubted she could hear him. In fact he counted on it. He alternated between being overcome with guilt and apologizing, to begging her to wake up again. From being consumed with self, to trying to wish her back to conciousness. He never stopped petting her hand and occasionally put his hand under hers and moved it to his own face and petting it as if she was awake and consoling him.
“Abbey, baby... I need you. The girls need you. You can't leave us. We will fall apart. I will fall apart. I can't do this alone. I can barely do it with you here. Just, please, don't go yet. I know you struggle but we can get through it. We can. I believe it in my heart. You and me and Samantha and Lucinda. I swear we can. I know it. I don;t care about your using, I don;t care if you were shooting coke. I don't care what has happened in the past. We can get through it. Let's make a deal. Ok? We can make a deal. Whatever has happened in the past happedned in the past and we can leave it there. Promise. Nothing bad has happedned between us from then to now. It's a clean slate. I promise never to mention you getting high. Ok? All you have to do is come back Abbey, please come back... Please.” Travis felt the deepest parts of his gut were literally going to rip out of his being, grab a hold of Abbey and shake her into conciousness. Whatever the feeling in him was, his body was barely able to contain it. And Travis wasn't entirely confident that it was his body's job to contain it. It was screaming to be released, it was searching for the appropriate target and was trying to find the best mode of expression. All this happended simultaneoulsly.
The door opened and Travis' father's head appeared. “Trav, the girls are here. They want to see Ab. What do you want to do?”
Travis glanced at Abbey and stood up. Bending over the bed he kissed her forhead. “Don;t go anywhere, I will be right back.” It was a joke, probably somewhat innappropriate, and to no audience, but he made it anyways. It was the type of joke Abbey would like, and would of rolled her eyes to, feigning indifference. If she had been awake.
Walking to the nurse's station Travis could see the ever expanding group gathered. Doctors, nurses, family. He felt like he was walking down a hallway in the movies. The corridor was long, bright, sterile, virtually quiet. At one end were the people he loved and were closest to. Waiting, watching him. He placed one foot in front of the other, step after step, but never got any closer, never moved and further down the hallway than where he began. It was an exercise in futility. He could see Abbey's father holding a sleepy and snot-nosed Lucinda, roused from her sleep, the sole reason for her not falling back into a nocturnal bliss the prospect of seeing her mother, awake. Samantha, standing next to Abbey's mother, arm extended, her small hand in her grandmother's, gently comforted by the familiarity of family love, a fair amount of known surrounded by an unfamiliar world she couldn't quite understand, with eyes looking and searching her father's for any clue, good or bad, as he tried to make his way down the hall to her. They were on one side of the world, Travis on the other.
When he finally reached them, Travis debated on commenting or questioning the length of time it had taken him to traverse the distance between the room and his family, but in the end he decided against it. He knelt on one knee and scooped both his daughters in his arms, squeezing them harder than he probably should of, but both were so desperate for as much of their father as they could get, neither protested. He kissed them both on the head and realized that no one there could imagine what they were going through.
“What did you tell them?” Travis asked, scanning the faces of the adults.
“Just told them that Mommy woke up and asked for them and went back to sleep,” his father said. “That she may or may not be awake when they got here.”
“Is there somewhere I can talk to the girls alone?” Travis asked the nurses at the desk.
“Of course Travis. Room 211 is open. You can use that one honey,” said one of the nurses with a well practiced smile, aimed at conveying sympathy in a non-condecending manner. It succeeded.
Travis walked down the hall, again, with a daughter on each side of him, each with one of their small fleshy hands in his own. He led them to room 211 and led Sam through the door first, then guided Lucinda, and finally himself last. He closed the door behind him.
“First, I want to tell you that both me and your mother love you both. With all our hearts,” he said, looking each girl directly in the eyes. He could feel their deperation for answers. He hoped he could convey a sense of calm to each of them. Maybe not certainty, but at least a sense of peace. Probably not, but he tried. “So what did Papa explain to you guys?”
“Mommy wants to see us,” said a smiling Lucy.
“Pap said mommy woke up and wants to see us,” Samantha followed up.
“Well, that's true,” Travis began. “Mommy woke up a little while ago and asked for you both and said that she loved you both. And then she went back to sleep again.”
“Can we wake her up?” asked Lucy.
“Well babygirl, it doesn't work like that. I wish we could but it's not sleeping like mommy does at home in bed. It's sleeping because she is sick.”
“Did mommy wake up and take more bad stuff?” Samantha asked, breaking Travis' heart.
“No baby. No. She went back to sleep because she is sick.”
“What did she get sick from again? I want her to come home,” Samantha asked before starting to cry. Little Lucy looked at her big sister, wiped her tears away, then buried her head into her shoulder, pulling her close. It about put Travis over the edge. The same feeling that welled up in him earlier at Abbey's bedside, fueled by guilt was now being fueled by overwhelming sadness for their daughters. He had no idea what to do. He had no idea what to say.
“Mommy is going to stay here for a little while longer. Do you want to go in and see her?” he asked.
“Yes,” they both said at the same time, nodding their heads in unison too.
He led them out of the room the same way they had gone in, hand in hand. They walked down the hallway together, past the grandparents, past the nurses station, past the nurses. They walked down the forever corridor until they got to Abbey's room. They walked in.
“Mommy!” they both yelled and ran over to her bedside. Their eyes worked her over, looking for any sign of difference between now and the last time they saw her. But she was the same, unresponsive, tubes going in and out of her keeping her plugged into the beeping machines. Travis lifted Lucy up and placed her in the bed with her mother, careful to not lay her on any of the tubes or wires. Lucy kept very still, sve for her eyes which crawled over every inch of her mother. Walking around to the other side of the bed, he stood in back of Samantha. “It's ok girls, you can talk to her.” Neither of them said anything. For several minutes they remained. Then Lucy gingerly leaned over and managed to find the small part of her mother's face that was available, uncovered by tubes or tape, and kissed her gently.
“I love you mommy,” she whispered. Then she turned toward Travis, extending both of her arms, indicating that she wanted help getting down. Trav walked around the bed, helped her off, placed her on her feet on the floor, and they both walked around to where Samantha still stood.
“Bye mommy,” she said quietly, waving goodbye. Then once again, the three of them walked out the hospital room hand in hand.
 
As the three of them walked back down the hallway towards the grandparents they passed Carl walking in the opposite direction. Carl stopped as they approached. Travis felt slightly awkward for his earlier confession and not exactly sure what world his relationship with Carl was based in, professional or friendly.
“Travis, would it be ok if I stopped by the house tomorrow?” asked Carl. “I was hoping we could talk.” This didn't give Travis any comfort or clarity. Picking up on this Carl added, “I wanted to talk about what was said while I was in the room with Abbey.” His face and voice was serious, but not cold. After considering it for a moment, Travis told him that would be fine and he could get their address and phone number from the hospital records.
“I am sure I will come back tomorrow. I am going to go home, shower and try and get some sleep and come back in the morning. but if there is no new news I will probably be home in the afternoon. The girls are going to stay at my parents for a few days. If you were free and the afternoon worked...” offered Travis.
“That should work. I will try to give you a call in the early afternoon then. You guys go home and rest,” Carl said, finally smiling as he touched each of the girl's heads. They smiled back at him. It was the first Travis had seen them smile since they had been at the hospital that night.
 
At the nurses station Travis' parents took the girls. His dad offered to drive him home and spend the night, but Travis declined. The seven of them walked out of the hospital together.
 
That night Travis was left to his own devices. By the time he got home it was almost 6 in the morning. The girls were at their grandparents. The sun was coming up and the house was too quiet and too still for him to fall asleep. It wasn't the quiet and still that could be combated by simply turning on a TV or radio. Yet it also wasn't an internal peace and calm either. Far from it. Both the beer and the meloncholy had long ago worn off and Travis found himself exhausted but wired. It was as if his body functions were racing at breakneck speeds at either end of the spectum, simultaneously.
He fixed himself a cup of coffee and thought, “fuck it” to himself. If he was going to be half awake he might as well try for fully awake. Not that the coffee would really wake him up, but the speedy cafeinne effect would at least give him some energy.
After drinking the first cup and fixing his second, Travis mosied in the direction of the garage. He began doing laps, sizing up the ongoing projects and the various stages they were in taking mental notes. He found doing this to be relaxing. It was distracting, yet productive, whereas most of the distraction he had been partaking in as of late was more of the destructive kind. So despite not being consumed with Abbey, the girls or their future, he allowed himself this small reprive in the morning hours.
After surveying things, he thought that they were in pretty good shape financially.Abbey had had a solo gallery show the previous winter and they had made a pretty good amount off of that. In addition, Travis and the girls had been adding to what they had in the bank as well. It wasn't the same amount that Abbey had always contributed, but it was a steady amount none the less. And the three of them stayed producing with a consistancy that Abbey lacked. In any area of her life. Plus, it seemed that there were several projects in their final stages that with some more prep work and elbow grease, a little commitment to see the things through, they would be able to seel and turn a profit within a short amount of time. Not that money was the answer or solution to any of the problems they were currently facing, but it was one thing that didn't look like was going to cause any additiotnal stress in the near future. And Travis would take good news wherever he could get it.
He opened a plastic toolbox that they frequently used to house their art supplies. There were various mugs, toolboxes, tackle boxes and shoeboxes that at one point had the semblance of being organized according to the type of supplies they held: markers, brushes, pencils, erasers, xacto knoves, glues and adhesives, thinners, epoxies, tapes, etc. But after enough mixed media projects and the hands of two kids rummaging through them, they had long ago abandoned any mehod to their madness. Open a box and you could find any one, two, three different mediums and/or an old sock or animal crackers. Finding what you were looking for became an art in and of itself. After sifting through a few boxes Travis managed to assemble a pretty good team of Primsa markers. He liked them for the way he could shade whatever he was coloring. They layered nicely and he had stolen and used them extensively during the blackbook days of his graffiti filled and fueled youth. He managed to find about 10 that weren't dried out, the colors he ws looking for, and scooped them and dragged his chair over to a vacant spot of garage wall. He went to the laptop hooked up to some cheap speakers and opened up his iTunes. After picking out CocoRosie's La Maison de mon Reve album and hitting play he walked back to the place in front of the wall, set his coffee and the markers on the edge of the desk and got comfortable in his seat.
His hand and his mind began to wander, but not in unison. His mind began to trace over the bullet-point facts of the last 24 hours. Waking, girls, hospital, girls, parents, hotel, fucking, phonecall, news, hospital, more news, no news, home. It seemed like a blur, it seemed like someone else's life, it couldn't seem more like his own life. It couldn't be but it was. He felt the strangest of detachment with his own life. It wasn't as if he was numb, he certain felt the highs and lows, but there seemed to be distance between himself and the awareness that it was his life. He was here, right here, going through these things, doing these things, feeling these things, the entire fucking gamet of thoughts and emotions, yet somehow he could see his life going on over there as if he was having an out of body experience and observing it from above. He bgan to not only think about the details of the day, weighing any meanings appropriate, but also considering the idea of how he viewed himself and his own life and the people that lived and existed within that sphere. It scared the shit out of him.
Meanwhile while he mulled this over, his hand was carrying out it's own agenda. It began with various browns and began filling in the shading of a face. First the eyes were rounded out, the suggestion of a nose and whisps for the ears. Lips were added and the shading went from the brown skin to the hint of red. The eyes were easy. Not to draw, but in the feeling they gave off. They squinted ever so slightly, almost smiling. The pupils were added looking down and away as if somethig was being betrayed even though it wasn't supposed to be. Something was slipping out. The mouth was not smiling, but the lips were parted just enough to show off the ends of teeth that peered through the slit between the lower and upper lip.It looked as if it was in between the act of talking and shutting up. As the basic features were roughed out Trvis went back in to begin adding the finer details. The eyebrows, the wrinkles in the skin, hair on the upper lip, the short hair protruding from the top of the man's head. Travis began working on the delicate neck, an adam's apple and shoulders that sloped and slipped into the scrubs the man was wearing. It wasn't until then that his hand and head united and Travis saw the man he had been sketching was Carl. He had not tried to draw the man who had been at his wife's bedside when she had trancended her coma briefly, returning to this erth for a brief moment, when for the smallest sloiver of time she returned to the cold, sterile environment to not find her family, but a complete stranger at her bedside. Travis tried to imagine what this could have been like for her. He tried, but couldn't and wasn't even sure he really wanted to.
Taking a break from drawing, Travis sipped from his coffee, took out and lit a cigarette and looked over what the picture. It wasn't bad. He had managed to capture a certain glow that Carl had radiated, something that coouldn't be described, but it could be felt. He felt it when he was around Carl. Samantha and Lucinda had felt it when they were around Carl. He could only hope Abbey could feel it too.
He finsihed smoking the cigarette, finished drinking his coffee and went inside. Dragging himself upstairs to their bed, he collapsed into it fully clothed and tried to fall asleep, but sleep escaped him. Instead of letting his mind wander and roam he had stared intently at the digital clock on the nightstand by the side of the bed. Her side of the bed.
His parents called around 10:30. The girls slept in after having got up in the middle of the night and getting back to sleep so late. Travis got up and took a shower. First he washed himself in the hottest water his skin could tolerate, and then he finished it off with the coldest water the pipes could summon.
He dressed in the solemn silence of the house, not wanting or being able to tolerate any type of noise to distract him. He felt what could have been the worst hangover he had ever experinced. It wasn't the beer alone, but that coupled with the emotional hangover was crippling his morning. Except there was no hair of the dog to help him through this one.
The drive over to his folks was also quiet. Radioless and thankfully void of any thoghts. He made his way there on autopilot and let himself in the garage door. He slipped in the door and found himself in a kitchen buzzing with activity. Breakfast was in motion, with both girls at the table eating pancakes, his father entertaining the two of them, and his mother fussing with the food and drinks, constantly adding or removing from the stove, clearing plates and filling glasses.
He ruffled each girls hair, then kissed their head and sat at the table opposite his father.
“Any more news?” his father asked.
“No. I didn't call them yet, but I am assuming if there was any change or any news they or Carl  would of called,” Travis followed up.
“You get any sleep son?” his father inquired.
“A little,” Travis said. “After breakfast I am going to head back up to the hospital and see what's going on. Do you guys mind watching the girls for a little while while I see what's going on?”
His mother responded at the rediculous question. “Of course not.”
“Daddy, is mom awake again?” Samantha asked Travis, looking up at him, with an oversized fork and oversized chunk of pancake in her hand.
“I'm not sure pumpkin. I'm going to go see,” Travis replied.
The update at the hospital was more of the same. Hurry up and wait. The news is that there is no news. We ran test and came to no conclusion. Travis went from nurse to nurse, doctor to doctor, lookig for any bit any crumb of information to feed off of. It didn’t matter if it was “good” news or “bad” news. He craved some new piece of the puzzle for his brain to work into the unsolvable equation. He knew he was powerless regardeless of anything a doctor could tell him, but he neede something new to factor in. Even Carl could offer nothing new. After several hours, he decided hi was going to head home. There was nothing new he was going to find out here. On his way out, he passed the nurses station. As sual they smiled at Travis, he knew they were genuine yet hollow smiles. They put on an optimistic front as if wanting to suggest that things would work out, tafter all these months they actually might care about Travis, his wife Abbey, their two children Samantha and Lucinda and their future, their pursuit of happiness, but since everyone knew the truth, they couldn’t pull it off and be as convincing as they wished they coud. And didn’t even find it necessary to patronize Travis with a blindingly empty smile. They mustered what they could and he was appreciative of that. He met each of their gazes and returned their smile. He saw Carl attending to an elderly woman in a wheelchair on the opposite hall. Travis pointed to the door and nodded his head to let Carl know he was leaving. Then he used the universal signal for a phone by extending his thumb to his ear and his pinky to his mouth and mouthed “call me” like every cliched cliche businessman, before pushing the bar on the double door with his butt and sliding out of the hospital backwards.
Once home, Travis opended the fridge, a knawing hunger testing his insides, but not able to put his finger on anything that sounded like it might take care of his appetite. He did what he reprimanded Samantha for on many occasions. Opening the refrigerator, standing there with the door open, looking at the insides, surveying, looking at each item and imagining himself consuming it and weighing whether it was likely to do the trick or not. Pickles? No. Milk? No. Cheese? No. Lettuce? No. Butter? No. Potatoe salad? Maybe… No. He closed the fridge door, made a lap around the kitchen, slowly, and ended up I front of the refridgerator again. Maybe this time something in there would sound good. Maybe he missed something last time. Pickles? No. Milk? No. Cheese? No. Lettuce? No. Butter? No. Potatoe salad? Maybe… No. Damn. He wished he knew what would work. If he had the slightest clue he would just go get it. He felt his cell vibrate twice quickly in his jeans and knew he had a text.
Jeremy Carter: “you ok? how are things?”
Funny how one minute he can be completely consumed, oblivious to th world, and in the blink of the eye he doesn’t remember that he was obsessed, let alone whatever the object of his obsession was.
“things are ok. cant talk now,” he typed back to her. He didn’t have the energy to entertain that corner of his fantasy life right now. She wouldn’t be happy with that response but she would have to deal. He knew she genuinely cared, but right now wasn’t the time. Still hungry, he decided to make some coffee. And smoke some cigarettes. And head to the studio. He hadn’t lived on a diet like this since he was in his late teens. Lack of sleep, lots of sex, little food, drinking coffee, chain smoking cigarettes, making art or some shit. He poured himself a cup of thick, black, strong coffee, winced at the first sip, and headed to the garage. He turned on the computer and put on some music. He wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to hear so he just set it on random. Instead of looking over what had been done and what needed to be done, he walked over to the garage door, turned and sat on the floor, resting against it. He took out his cigarettes, removed one and set the pack on the floor. He lit it, took a sip of coffee and his head seemed to roll back until it was resting on the door and his eyes were pointed upwards. He thought it was somehow contradictory that when he was surrounded by people he just wanted to be alone, even though he felt alone. Then when he was by himself, he didn’t like the feeling of not having someone there, yet he didn’t want anyone else around. He wondered if he would ever be satisfied or content. When he was younger it seemed like a question that didn’t even have to be considered until much later in life, if at all. And when he was young and naive his ego never considered the possability of it all being a possibility. And here he was. Various thougts, images, women and relationships rolled through his head and past his eyes. He was comfortable with himself, so he thought, flaws and all. Despita the odds being stacked against him he had fared pretty well. And while overall he was comfortable with his position in the world, there was an underlieing uneasiess and uncomfortability he felt running through him, and a part of him that just felt hopless. For all Abbey’s flaws, for the depths she could find, for the ways she hurt and betrayed him and their family, she had an undieing, unyielding, unrelenting faith in him. It made him sad and it made him happy.
Who would of thought that when they met 9 years ago, in the basement of a Polish social club, that a night of drug and alcohol fueled sweating and dancing and fucking would end them up here today. How the two became one and then four did not have the sweetest of faireytale beginings. There was a monthly party in the city that became pretty epic. Before it got so big that it was about to become the antithesis of what and for what the party’s roots began as, almost eating itself, it was the party to go to. It had the best music, the best drugs, the most beautiful people from all different backgrounds and cliques coming togeter to show off their flyest clothes, the most underground of all underground, where the difference between being in the know and not in the know was actually how few people “knew.” It was that type of crowd and that type of party. Travis had been there since the beging. The DJ that had started the party was a childhood friend of his. They went to school together, got kicked out togther. Ilyas was the first person to get him stoned. He had stolen some weed from his father when they were 11 and they had rolled their first joint. It was horrible and didn’t do the trick. But several pinches of Ily’s dad’s weed later, they perfected the process. They used to bomb the city together, staying up through the night writing their name in paint on any and every surface. They managed to get themselves in and out of some hairy situations. When Travis got bagged one time, it was Ilyas who put up the bail money. It wasn’t much, $500 for bail, but nobody else was going to do it and Ilyas did. It wasn’t a one way street though. Shit was pretty bad in Ilyas’ home, and when things got real bad, he always landed at Travis’. Travis mom was like Ilyas’ second mother and Ilyas was like her second son.
They both did a little hustlin together. Nothing major. Maybe a stolen car here or there, small time thefts and shoplifting, selling some weed, but mostly just to their friends and not for profit as much as to get free weed and be looked at favorably in the eyes of their friends and girls. Not that they needed any help, but why not take what you can get right? After one of their friends got shot and killed during a robbery when some dudes kicked in the door looking for the drugs and he cash, Travis and Ilyas decided to move away from their life of crime. At least in the peddling of illegal or ill-gotten products. They each managed to stash a little cash from their last re-up. Travis bought a little beater car, and enough art supplies to stock a high-school art department and Ilyas bought himself turntables a mixer, and a gang of records. They put their creative energy in their newly rechanneleed directions and each of them began to excel, making a little name for themselves in the city. They left the drug and stolen goods behind, but every once in a while, for old times sake, they would get drunk and walk around the city with cans, scrawling their names all over shit.
Whenever Travis had a show, Ilya was always there, supporting. Usually with a brownbag of maltliquor and a few girls in tow. And whenever Ilyas was spinning at a party Travis was part of the entourage. Trav paid his dues in the early years by driving Ilyas to the parties and helping him carry the crates of records in and out. It was a labor of love with no real payoff except Ily’s gratitude and free entrance to the parties. Maybe a few cups of some warm beer. In the early years. As Ilyas blew up and actual vinyl became a thing of the past, replaced by computers, Travis didn’t need to shelp or chauffer and instead was always on Ilyas’ guestlist. It all worked out for them in the end. At least as faras that was concerned.
So at one of the aforementioned parties that Ilyas threw and Travis frequented, Travis would meet a girl. Not at the bar, not on the dancefloor, but in the bathroom. Stall. Hunched over the toilet. Not puking. Snorting. The music and bass was muffled in the bathroom, but still too loud to talk or think clearly. And the bathrooms were not divided between boys and girls. They were unisex. And full of hookups and drug consumption. Travis went to take a piss of what was likely high concentration, high grade, liquor. When he opened the first unlocked stall he saw a short girl with Nike SB Dunks, ripped skintight blue jeans looking as if they were painted on her thin legs, a ripped slayer t-shirt covering her perfectly not too big and not too small tits, and big hoop earings poking out from her blond hair and framing her sweet, sweaty face. Her tattoo sleeved arms held a rolled up hundred dollar bill in one hand and an empty baggie in the other. Travis was pretty fucked up to begin with, but he decided this was either a dream and he could do what he wanted, or it wasn’t but everyone was so fucked up he could do what he wanted anyway. He closed, and locked, the stall door behind him before reaching in his own pocket. He came out with a baggie of his own white powder. HE didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He moved her to the side, tore the corner off the bag and dumped the entire contents on the back of the toilet. He didn’t care about saving any. She looked like she was worth it and besides, Ilyas always had more than enough. People trying to get in his good graces frequently just gave him baggies of drugs. Normally he would worry if it was clean or wet, but clearly she had already taken care of all that. He took his drivers license out and began working the powder over quickly, chopping it up, getting rid of any lumps. Once satisfied with that he began to divy the drugs up into seprate, but equal lines before he licked his finger, ran it over the edges of his license on the side he used to chop up, and then ran his fingertip over his gums. Still having not exchanged a word, he motioned for her to go first and take the first rail. She smiled at Travis, and put the rolled currency to her nose as she bent over, plugging her other nostril and inhaling the powder quickly.
“Damn. Coke?” she asked standing back up, sniffling to make sure it all got up and in her nostril.
“Yea,” Travis said. “Why?”
“I was snorting dope. Thought you had Oxys or dope or something. I wasn’t expecting that,” she shouted loud enough to clear the music.
Great. His first interation with her and already a mix up. He thought she was doing blow and she was looking for opiates. He watched her bend down and do her half in three straight shots. Again she straightened up, and while blotting her nostrils with the fingers from one hand, she extended the other to him, holding out the rolled up hundred for Travis to use. Travis shrugged and took it from her. He bent over and took the remaining bumps one after the other. He stood and turned to talk to her and instead was greeted by an open stll door with a couple standing there, looking in at him.
“You done in there?” she asked Travis, clearly waiting for her and her man to have some privacy.
“Yea,” Travis said, walking past them still holding the rolled up Benjamin.
This could be the part where Travis spends the rest of the party looking for Cindarella, but she escaped before the stroke of midnight in a pumpkin, leaving behind her glass slipper. Or in this case a hundred dollar bill drenched in various illegal chemical residues. But this wasn’t a fairytale. At least not one like that. Travis found her at the bar, they talked, they flirted, they danced, they kissed, they went back to his place after the sun came up and fucked until the early afternoon before collapsing and falling out. That was the first time Travis has met his future wife and mother of their two children.