Discovery of the Moment Ch. 08

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Many thanks to all of you who submitted comments in the public comments section of each chapter. I know all of you have been waiting for this story to continue and I am desperately sorry that it took so long. Many changes and events in my own life made it difficult and sometimes impossible to write, but Life is calming down for me now and I am able to focus on my creative endeavors more. I hope that this newest chapter in the DoM series will make up for the lost time and that another will get written soon. I might also suggest that you read from the first chapter up to this point if you're new to the series.

Comments, suggestions and constructive criticisms are always welcome! Please provide your comments to the Public Comments Section so that we may all see them and, perhaps, learn from them!

Thank you and, again, I'm sorry this took so damned long! And now... on with the show...

*

The night in the Italian restaurant when Kelly and I decided to jump ship and leave our old Home behind was the beginning of a painful, arduous process. It wasn't a simple matter of just packing our things up and going to points unknown. Oh, no. We had a Home. We had a history there, a full cache which represented the lives of three people. Some might argue that if I wanted to simply let my late wife Sarah go, to finally put her in my past, I could have just gotten rid of all of her belongings. But it isn't that easy, is it? How can you sterilize a building which has been pock-marked by more than 18 years of someone else's tinkerings? The lattice work on the back porch, the small victory garden in the back yard, the kitchen appliances, 80% of the furniture, the section of roof that she re-shingled on her own just to prove a point ten years ago... great and small things that had been touched by her hands which were absolute fixtures in our home, things that I couldn't just post up at eBay.

Every stick of furniture in the house could be disposed of, but I'd always see the off-lavender paint on our bathroom walls (admittedly, I could always paint over those walls, but I rather liked the color Sarah had chosen and, besides which, I'd always know that lavender paint would be there, just under the surface of the new paint). Or the spackled patches in the hallway where her desk had done wonders to the walls when we tried to bring it into the house five years ago. Or the parquet wood flooring in the dining room, which she picked out and somehow convinced me to put down instead of paying two guys $1,600 to do it for us. Take all of that stuff out, cover it up, replace it- I'd still know it was there or had been there because I could remember those things clearly.

And for that reason alone, I began to hate that house. I couldn't walk ten paces in any direction without being reminded of how Sarah had changed something and made it her own, or our own. Without her there to share those memories with me just quite simply felt like hell. A place I had come to love and feel comfortable in now felt like an alien planet, filled with a foreign past that clearly belonged to Someone Else. My opinions about why moving was so traumatic, in light of these new realizations, had significantly changed. For me, leaving the home I had made with my wife and daughter was about as easy a task as sawing off my right hand with a butter knife- it hurt like a four-alarm bitch and I resented it, despite knowing that it was necessary in order to move forward in Life. My daughter Kelly, however, seemed to weather the storm much more easily. She helped me a great deal, of course, but her youth tended to compensate for the experience by forcing her to look at it like the first step of a Grand Adventure. People in their late teens are already spoiling to get out of the chicken coop. When the hen is gone or unable to keep the chicks inside, the younglings split at their first opportunity; for Kelly, moving was an inevitability that had merely come at an unexpected time. For me, however, it was like digging my wife's coffin out of the ground and then burying it again with nothing but a spoon to do all the hard work.

I swear, though, that I tried my four-square best to hide the turmoil I was going through from my daughter. But I think she had cottoned on to my miserable state when, despite her best efforts to seduce me into the sack (and she applied herself thoroughly and quite capably to the task!), she went largely ignored by yours truly. It wasn't that I wasn't interested or that I didn't appreciate her attention. I just didn't have the spiritual energy for it just then. We snuggled, hugged and even kissed on frequent occasions during the whole Process (when no one was around to catch us, naturally), but there was nothing even remotely sexual about my end of the bargain. My poor daughter gently complained only a few times about the lack of attention, but backed off when I couldn't seem to be cajoled one way or the other. I tried my best to explain things to her, how I felt, by lying through my teeth. "I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm just too tired right now. I mind is willing, but the flesh is weak. Rain check?" And, being the loving daughter that she is, she naturally accepted those rain checks, probably a few dozen of them before it was all over, bless her.

I'd found a rather decent realtor who was only too happy to get the house sold for us at an almost criminal mark-up. Two million dollars, to be exact. Sarah and I had bought the house in 1988 for $300,000 (and tack on another $50,000 for interest on the mortgage, which got paid off pretty quick, thanks to my job at the radio station). That, my friends, is an important lesson to learn when it comes to real estate. Consider it carefully. I was able to provide quite well for my family, but selling that house had made me richer than I ever expected it would. The realtor kindly took only 2% for her fee, which was generous on someone's part, but I still can't figure out who.

In the meantime, Kelly and I worked like the Devil's own to sell off every scrap of non-essential items in the house through a series of four massive yard sales. In total, we netted just under $8,000 from the yard sales alone. The rest of the stuff was either donated to charity or, yes, sold on eBay (Kelly handled the eBay stuff since I just couldn't bring myself to do it and I was only too happy to let her keep the proceeds). The new home owners were scheduled to start moving in at a fixed date and Kelly and I had managed to clean most of the house out with minimal fuss. We didn't bother to tell any of our friends or my former co-workers at the radio station about the move- we wanted a clean break from our old lives and didn't want anyone to know where we were headed or to start asking questions about why.

Kelly and I had worked this out to the last detail: we were going to do as thorough a job possible of erasing ourselves from the world we knew so that we could start absolutely fresh, complete with new identities (which were amazingly easy to acquire but weren't cheap by any means... and I still don't know exactly how Kelly managed that or who she knew to make it happen, but it was done in less time than it took to find Miss Luther, just under a week). When it was all over, John Baker and his daughter Kelly would merely disappear. In their place were John and Kelly Fuller, a recently married couple (with a scandalous age-gap, of course) from Bakersfield, California. And we had the Works Package, too- credit cards, a bank account in Zürich, birth certificates, social security numbers, college transcripts (Kelly would never need to go to college now, unless she wanted to, of course), driver's licenses and even an authentic-looking marriage license.

Look, I know what you're thinking, okay? And the decision to make us newlyweds was not our idea. Neither of us had asked for it, but when the guy simply known as Poppy had started the work on our new identities, he made it clear that making us newlyweds would be ten times easier for us to hide from the Authorities... or anyone else who might be looking for us. Poppy, a gray-haired hippie with strange habits, did not question us about our motives for getting these new identities, but it was clear that he had a great deal of experience on the subject and we ultimately deferred to his judgment. "You don't have to ACT like newlyweds or even like lovers," he told us crisply, "but if you want your new IDs to work and fool everyone, you want this. They'll be looking for a father and daughter, not an old guy who's robbed the cradle. And, hey, if you want to get a divorce in a few months, once you've settled down wherever it is you're headed, it's no hoo-hoo, man. Old guy, young girl- divorce? Who's gonna question it?" So seventy-five thousand dollars and three weeks later, I had a new name and I was married to my daughter. Life, I tell you, can be a goddamned whirlwind of what-the-fuck sometimes.

My late father had left me some land when he died years ago with no explanation as to how he came to own it. I never did anything with the land, had never even set foot on it, but now was as good a time as any to put it to good use. I had liquidated virtually all of my assets except that small patch of Tennessee grass and, through some tricky paperwork, sold it to John Fuller for a respectable sum of $10,000. I'm sure that whoever the county big-heads might be in that area were probably pissed blind with rage when they got the paperwork on the change in ownership, but it was air-tight legal and I figured that they would manage to lick their wounds in good time. After all, John Fuller had committed himself to building (in writing, of course- we had to keep the two Johns as faceless as possible) on that land in due course. Rich men building new houses could only mean good news to a south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line country town- jobs aplenty and property taxes galore. I had always wanted to have a subterranean home, long before I ever married Sarah. As John Baker, I was never able to afford it and Sarah and I had grown accustomed to our home with Kelly in it, never really seeing any need for change. But as John Fuller, a severely rich man with an unrecorded mass of wealth, I could do pretty much as I damn well pleased. John Baker's liquid assets mounted up to roughly... well, the sum total, quite frankly, left me stunned- a man never really does know what he's worth until he breaks it down to hard, cold cash.

My few stock holdings, my cars- everything that could be liquidated and turned into real money was transmuted as quickly as possible, much to the consternation of my former accountant. John Baker, former radio station marketer, had earned an average annual after-expenses-and-bills income of $120,000 per year over a fifteen-year period. Throw in some the inheritance money from my father ($200,000), the life-insurance money from Sarah's death ($400,000) and Sarah's own income for the last few years ($90,000), offset that by the mortgage on the house ($350,000) and we came up with some major fuck-you money. I had just over $4 million in cash. And I didn't waste a minute to anonymously deposit every penny of it to John Fuller's Swiss bank account in Zürich. Within days John Baker was dead broke while John Fuller was now king of some unseen Tennessee hill. For interim lodgings, we decided to book a room in an extended-stay hotel for an indefinite period of time at the outskirts of the town where our new home would be built.

Kelly and I, by the end of the month and two days before the new home owners were set to move in, had just about cleaned out our house entirely. All that was left were some easily-towed personal belongings and some camping equipment so that we could stay the last night in the house without being entirely uncomfortable. I had suggested that we get a decent hotel room, but Kelly wouldn't hear of it. "Everything's gone but us, Dad. We're leaving it pretty much as you and Mom found it. Mom's not here anymore, but I am, and I want to be here until the very end." I didn't argue the matter.

That last night we had set our sleeping bags side-by-side with a bottle of wine between us. The lighting, once the house had been emptied of furniture, was really strange. Everything seemed brighter, our voices echoed strangely and the air was cooler. It was eerie to know that, for one night, my daughter and I would be staying in a place that was truly little more than a shell of what it once had been. And that was the most alien experience of all. In my mind's eye I could look at a corner of the living room where we decided to bed down and see where the sofa was supposed to be. I could easily recall where everything was on that day when Kelly had coaxed me into fulfilling her weird fantasy. I could glance over my shoulder at the walls and know where the paintings and pictures should have been, but no longer were.

Everything was gone, but the memories persisted and I'd never be quit of them until I was good and truly gone from the place, once and for all. Sarah's ghost, it seemed, loomed in every corner and room. She didn't haunt me in the classical sense, really. And, frankly, I don't believe in ghosts in that way. The the ghost of her memory, the experiences of her that I had bottled up in my head, were inescapable. The wine that Kelly and I shared in our private farewell party seemed to only make matters worse. It wasn't even close to time for us to sleep yet, and neither of us were tired, but I was growing more and more morose and sullen with each passing moment. Closing my eyes made me feel like the empty living room was spinning and opening my eyes made seem unfamiliar. The only familiar thing I could focus on was my daughter, and she had me fixed with the most peculiar gaze, one which made me feel quite uncomfortable, like I was being scrutinized in some new way. And, in truth, I was.

I couldn't really bring myself to return her intense gaze, so I just kept glancing about the room and hating myself for doing so. I didn't want to be there, especially not when it was so empty. Not when these memories were haunting me, forcing me to concede the fact that these empty rooms shouldn't be so damned empty. I did briefly glance at her from time to time, gave a small, wan smile, but not much else and sipped my wine casually. While our bodies weren't ready for sleep yet, our minds had been completely wrung with the effort of the last month and a half. There wasn't much to talk about that we hadn't already discussed, not in practical terms anyway. We knew what The Plan was for the next day, where we were going, how we were going to get there (I had bought a rather large pick-up truck with a portion of John Fuller's new-found fortune in cash) and talking about anything else just didn't seem to be worth the effort just then. At least, it wasn't for me.

But teenage girls who are looking forward to a Grand Adventure, on the other hand, are excited just enough to want to talk about damn near anything rather than simply enduring the silence. Dressed in a simple teddy-bear nightie, her legs stuffed into her sleeping bag, Kelly looked at me with a curious stare for several long moments, her plastic wine flute now forgotten. "Are you okay, Dad?" she asked me.

I shrugged with an air of indifference, the sound of my own sleeping bag ruffling with the moving sounding much louder than it actually was. I was naked inside the sleeping bag and could already feel the comfortable warmth of my own body being contained by it. "I guess," I said glumly. "It's just hard to see these walls so... barren. It's like looking at a place where you know something should be, but it isn't. An S.E.P. field has taken over our house," I added with a mirthless grin.

"A what?"

"An S.E.P. field," I repeated. "It's from a series of books by Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. An S.E.P. field is exactly how I just described it- you're looking at it, but it's not visible to you because you're not meant to see it. It's Someone Else's Problem, S-E-P. And since most everyone in Earth prefers to ignore the problems of others, anything that is inside an S.E.P. field goes unseen."

"....and you think our house is in an S.E.P. field?"

"Well, it doesn't really exist, honey. It's just a metaphor. But, yeah, after tomorrow all of this will be in the hands of someone else. We'll never have to see it again."

Kelly frowned at that and looked pensive. "I'm not sure I like that," she said carefully. "You make it sound like we're running away from something."

I looked around the room and waved my arms in a long, sweeping motion for effect. "When you get right down to the brass tacks, sweetheart, we are. Or, at least, I am. Everything about this place just... runs me down, when I think about it. All the memories are like ghosts that do nothing but haunt me here. Frankly, I'd rather just leave them behind."

"But didn't you always tell me that no matter where you go, you carry your troubles with you? You can't just forget about this place, Dad. You can't forget about Mom. I won't." The look on her face now as one of genuine concern. What for all her youth, my daughter has an amazing talent for saying some pretty grown-up things. I remained studiously silent at her remark, but it didn't deter her one iota. "Dad, WHY do you want to forget about Mom? I thought you loved her. You said that she was her best friend, along with everything else."

I looked at my daughter for a long moment in silence and then looked down at my hands, which were empty and offered nothing extraordinary. "Since the day Sarah died I haven't been able to shake the feeling that I could have saved her."

Kelly was quick on the up-take with that. "What, by bringing her into The Fold?" She scooted closer to me, still wrapped up in her sleeping bag. "Dad, I thought we went through this already. There was no way to know what was going to happen. And even if you had taken her into The Fold when... when it started, it was already too late. Her brain was shutting down by then. The damage was already done. There was simply no way to know about it, even beforehand. Even the doctors said as much."

"Dammit, Kelly, I KNOW all that, but it doesn't change how I FEEL. I feel guilty as hell. I have this ability and I couldn't use it to save my own wife. I didn't even TRY. Why didn't I at least try to save her?"

"Because, deep down, you already knew that there was nothing you could do. Believe me, Dad, I played that moment back in my head a thousand times. There was nothing either of us could have done. That clot was there long before it got dislodged, so even if you did take her into The Fold, it still would've been there like a ticking bomb waiting to go off. So you have nothing to feel guilty about," she placed a loving and gentle hand on my knee in an effort to calm me, but I pushed it off.

"I have plenty to feel guilty about," I said through gritted teeth. "I mean, look at me! While my wife was sitting in the hospital with a gunshot wound, what was I doing? I was fucking my own daughter! Oh, and let's not forget our first wondrous adventure where I fucking raped you! What kind of husband, what kind of father am I?"

Kelly's concerned frown shifted quickly into a deep and angry scowl. "Now hold on just a second, Dad!" she snapped hotly. "First of all, Mom was in that hospital for only two days and you were there for both of them. And SHE sent you home to get rest on both those days. As for that rape-thing, I TOLD you that I'd forgiven you completely. I didn't and don't feel violated in any way, not by you. At most I felt angry that you'd taken so long to tell me the truth, but the fact of it wasn't that big of a deal for me, Dad. And I think I made it pretty fucking clear that I already found you attractive before that. Under a completely different set of circumstances I'm willing to bet that we'd still have ended up having sex eventually, so that dog won't hunt either. So what else do you have, huh? What else could you possibly feel guilty about?"