Sample Chapter

It's been awhile. I've been working on a new book. So here's a sample from my latest novel, Air, Depth and Time. Check it out. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know your comments.

Chapter:

Lightening woke me up the next morning around two and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I sometimes wake up right at two and for what ever reason can’t go back to sleep. It’s not like I worry. It’s not like I’ve got some huge master plan off track. It’s not like I’m concerned about money—my insurance covers that. It’s not even that I awake thinking about Jenn or my parents, or any of the--what seems like hundreds--of others that have died around me. I just can’t sleep. So then I have to lie or lay—whatever the hell—in bed and then I think about all that shit. But here’s the messed-up part: none of that shit bothers me. I’m totally cool with everything. I just get pissed that I can’t sleep.

I got out of bed, opened the curtains and watched the storm over the ocean. I was back in Florida, and even though it’s not even the same body of water as the Gulf, I felt at home. I sat in the cold leather chair and stretched my feet on the ottoman.

Like I was saying, I’m totally cool with everything.

Well, almost everything. Jenn’s death has really impacted me—as you well know. And I know I haven’t talked about my parents except but in the beginning, but that was a long time ago. I don’t think I ever mentioned how they died, did I?

My dad was the vigilant FBI agent; my mom the alcoholic artist. My mom loved my dad more than she should have. When my dad was supposed to return from the field, as he called it, my mom would make me dress up in a little suit with a little tie. She’d call me her little G-man. She would spend all day in the kitchen making baked ziti, a pork roast, fresh bread. Then once the table was set, we would sit on the couch waiting for my father to come through the door any minute.

“Baked ziti is your father’s favorite,” she would say. “Your father loves baked Ziti.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I’d say.

“Do you think he can smell it from where he is?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I think he can smell from where he is,” she’d say. “Your father loves baked ziti.”

That part always stayed the same. As time went on the rest of the responses grew as I did from, "I love ziti too, Mommy” to “Yes, ma’am. It’s my favorite too” to “When is dad getting home? I hate this tie.” To “Come on, Mom. Enough with the fricking ziti. Jesus Christ.”

It was in the days before cellular phones, so if there was a time he was delayed, it took a while for us to get the word. But we’d sit on the sofa, music on, TV off, waiting for Dad, glancing out the window from time to time. After an hour or two, I’d get restless and convince my mother to let me go outside and play. More often than not he’d be home by the next day or so, usually with some exciting reason why he was late.

Appearances were important to my mom. As I was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and a power tie, as she liked to call them, she would wear a new dress, almost all her jewelry, and have her hair fixed just right. She’d spray on so much perfume, that on some occasions I had to sit on the far side of the couch. That’s as far as I was aloud to move. “I want your father to see his family together,” she’d say, preventing me from breathing the clean air across the room.
I remember a specific time when she was in her white dress with blue trim, wearing her pearls and a new hair style. She fretted about a small red splash of gravy that jumped out at her while she was stirring.

“Can you see it from there?” she asked.

“No.”

“Come closer,” she said. “How about now?”

Even though I was only eight, I think, I knew better than to tell the truth. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Closer,” she said and held my face against her breasts. “How about now?”

“Mmm mmmph,” I mumbled.

“That’s my little G-man,” she said, smoothing out her dress as she sat.

I could usually hang for an hour or two before I could convince her to set me free, but Mom wouldn’t quit. No matter what, once she sat down on that blue flowered sofa in the living room, she would not move until he returned. A hurricane could be pounding the beach and it wouldn’t have phased her. She never even left to use the bathroom—she just somehow held it in. Because of this, I was accustomed to brushing my teeth and putting myself to bed by the time I was five, I think. Later, I would look forward to it so I could stay up late and watch Letterman on a school night.

But the night my mom and dad died, my dad wasn’t expected home. So I was outside on the beach playing volleyball, pissed at my mom because she wouldn’t let me go surfing. She was in her studio painting, dealing with her own anger. The past few months she had been working on twelve different canvases at once, all at various stages of completion. I’d watch as she would walk around the room with her palette, visiting each piece adding just the right amount of color and texture.

She was in her studio with her hair in a blue bandana, wearing one of my dad’s white shirts when the phone rang. I wasn’t in the house, but I did hear the phone ring. Before cordless phones became so big, my dad had installed an outside ringer so we could hear the phone if we were on the beach. I was just about to serve when I heard that goddamn metallic ringer go off. It rang three times before my mom picked it up, and I could serve again.

Bo and I were working on our set-and-spike with a couple of other kids from the beach, trying to be like the guys on ESPN, though none of us were big enough to even jump and touch the top of the net. We had a pretty good exchange going when I faded to the back to save one from hitting in the corner. I dove, going away from the net and somehow managed to dig it out and pop it up where Bo could put it over. But he instead chose to set me up for a spike. So I scrambled up to my feet, dashed toward the net and leaped in the air as high as I could, all the while watching the ball slowly fall down to me. Then just as I had the feeling of weightlessness at the top of my arc, I made contact with the ball and slammed that fucker in the sand across the net. God, that was beautiful. I felt twenty-feet tall. Okay, so maybe it was more like six-feet tall.

I was about to serve again, when another noise stopped me. This time it wasn’t the phone. I recognized it as the small thirty-eight my dad had given my mom for protection. We had taken it to the range a thousand times, so the sound was familiar. All I remember was running through the sand, feeling like my feet were sliding backwards, like I was running on ice. I was getting nowhere. When I finally reached the steps, I tripped and fell trying to get up. I was on my stomach, the bridge of my nose creased by the step, and I couldn’t move. I remember someone lifting me up by the waist of by bathing suit and helping me to my feet, pushing me along.

Bo beat me to the sliding glass door. “Wait here,” he said, pulling it open. “I’ll check it out.”
“Fuck that,” I said and burst through the door.

We darted inside. “Mom!” I screamed. “Mom! You all right?”

“Mrs. Z? Where are you?”

Bo bounded upstairs toward the studio. “You check downstairs,” he said.

The downstairs was empty. The garage was clear. No one was here. I bolted upstairs. I was just making the turn on the stairs when I saw Bo coming out of my mom’s studio. He wasn’t upset. He wasn’t…anything.

“Don’t go in there,” he told me.

“What?” I said. “What’s wrong? Where is—,”

He opened his arms and put them around me and drew me in tight. I began to cry like I was two. I knew what had happened.

“Don’t go in there,” he whispered.

He walked me to the blue flowered couch and sat me down. “Sit here,” he said. “I have to call the police.”

“I have to call my dad,” I said.

“I’ll take care of that,” Bo said.

Bo called the police. While we waited for the police to arrive, I gave him the number my father had left in case of emergencies. He left the room to make the call.

Ten minutes later the police arrived and Bo led them upstairs. Five minutes later a woman social worker arrived and sat next to me on the couch.

I asked if they had gotten in touch with my dad.

They had.

Then she started lying to me. There was no way my father was dead too. He was still alive. She was mistaken. It was my mom that had died. Not my father. There’s no fucking way they could both be dead. It just couldn’t happen. They’ve got to be mistaken, or lying or something, because there’s no way they could both be dead. My dad was going to be home tomorrow. My mom had already bought the ziti and pork roast. She had even gone to the farmer’s market and picked up the tomatoes for the gravy. I pointed to them in the windowsill. “Look.” He had to be coming home. My mom had just died. He had to be there. He had to come through that door. I was on the couch. He had to show up. He had to come home. I was only eleven. Who was going to take care of me? What happened to my dad? Why my mom? This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. I never got to say goodbye to them. I never got to give them one last hug. I was mad at my mom an hour ago because she told me I couldn’t go surfing at the pier. Maybe if I hadn’t have yelled at her, she wouldn’t have felt compelled to paint. Maybe if she hadn’t have painted, she might not have shot herself. What if I had answered the phone? I could’ve spared her. I could’ve broken it to her. I could’ve been with her. If could’ve saved her.

For the next few weeks I stayed with Bo and his dad. I never did go into that room where my mom lay. But I did hear what exactly had happened. After she received the call about my dad, she set down her palette, got a clean brush and dipped it into red paint. On the bottom of a fresh canvas, in four inch letters, she wrote LOVE. While that was drying, she got the gun from the nightstand and returned to her studio. She put her ear against the center of her new canvas, put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

A couple of months later, I returned to the house for the last time for what would be twelve years. Bo’s father had everything cleaned, leaving no trace of what had happened. I never saw the LOVE canvas, nor was it ever mentioned again. But Bo’s dad did store the twelve pieces my mom was working on, and when I moved back into the house after college, I took them out and looked at them.

Something was interesting about them. Something that I had never seen before, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. I examined each one. Each piece looked like just a blob of colors with no pattern, no definition, no subject. As I was setting one down, I noticed it was numbered on the back. I checked the others, and they were numbered too.

Since moving back into the house, I had no furniture, so I lay the paintings on the floor in order from left to right.

Nothing.

Top to bottom.

Nothing.

Three rows of four across.

Nope.

Finally, four rows of three.

Nothing.

I gave up and walked upstairs to my new room—my parents old room. I was trying to decide where to put what. The only piece of furniture I had was a lamp and I wanted to find the right spot for it.

Then as I was walking back toward the stairs, I looked down at the living room floor at the paintings. And that’s when I saw it. I began to tear up. I sat on the top step and began to weep uncontrollably. It was the first time I had really cried since that night.

Through my tears, I could see the image my mom had been working on every day for the last three months of her life. Hopefully it was the image she last saw.

From afar, the twelve paintings blended together to form the blurred image of the three of us sitting on the flowered blue couch as if it’s the moment after my father had returned from the field.

Those pictures still hang over my mantle. Every time I look at it, I can smell the ziti baking in the oven, I can smell my mom’s perfume. I can hear the sound of the door opening, and I can hear love in my mom’s voice as she races to the door.