Aftermath

Another scene:

            I woke up in Reno this morning.  The first thing I sensed was being looked at.  The first thing I saw was a pair of enormous, beautiful blue eyes.

            “Daddy,” Alison said.  “You’re home.  Aunt Brittany said you were home, and you are.  Do you know what today is?”

            I shook myself awake internally.  It took me a moment.

            “Do you know what today is, Daddy?”

            “Of course, I do, pumpkin.”  I said with a great big forced smile.  “It’s your birthday.”

            “That’s right, Daddy.”  She said, oh so sincerely.  “It’s my birthday.”  She smiled and shook her head, a spray of blond locks swirling in the light.

            I grabbed her and started pretending to eat her back ribs.  “I’m so hungry I could eat some baby back ribs.”  I said.

            She giggled and threw herself back and forth to avoid my whiskers.  Before long, the two of us were laughing in the middle of my king sized bed.  Eventually, she was done, and subtly let me know that the time for play had passed.  In many ways, Alison was far too old for her three years.

            “You know what, Daddy?”

            “What, honey?”  I asked.

            “I had a dream about mommy last night.”

            “You did?”  I asked.  “How were you sure it was mommy?”

            “Because she looked like Gramma Penny, only really beautiful, and she looked like the picture there.”  She pointed at my picture of Beth on the nightstand.

            I smiled, fortunately Alison couldn’t tell a sad smile from a happy smile.

            “So what did she say?”

            “She was on a hill, and you and her were sitting on the hill looking at the sun over the sand.  She didn’t say anything.  It was sad, Daddy.  I kept asking her why she was sad, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

            “Maybe she can’t.”  I said.  “Maybe she can show you things, but not tell you anything.”

            “Maybe.”  Alison said, somewhat dubiously.  “Why do you think Mommy is sad?”

            “Because she doesn’t get to see her little angel.”  I said.

            “But she can see me.  She comes to my dreams all the time, Daddy.”

            “Maybe she’s sad because she can’t talk to you.”  I said.

            “Maybe.”

            “Where’s your aunt Brittany?”  I asked, changing the topic.

            “She’s making breakfast.  She told me you got home last night and you were here in bed.”

            “Why don’t you go downstairs and see if she’s done with your breakfast, while I get dressed.”  I said.

            She smiled, and the way she wrinkled her nose reminded me of her mother.  I smiled again, a sad, rueful smile.  “Ok,” she said simply.  She gave me a big wet kiss on the cheek, and said, “I love you Daddy.”

            “I love you too, pumpkin.”  I said, as she ran out of the room.

            I dressed casually and relatively quickly, and went downstairs.  Beth’s half-sister, Brittany, was indeed cooking breakfast.

            “Hey,” she said, looking up.  “I heard you get in, but didn’t look up.  What time did you get in last night?”

            “Around one.”  I said.   “Thanks for watching her.”

            “My niece?”  She said, incredulously.  “You’re thanking me for watching the coolest little kid I’ve ever known?”  Alison giggled.

            “What do we have up for today?”  I asked.

            “Penny is picking her up around nine, and she and Little Bit are going to play, while we’re working.  I told Penny you’d be by to pick her up around two.  Does that work for you?”

            “Sure.”  I said.  “Why two?”

            “We have a one o’clock to review the 395 project, it shouldn’t take any more than about forty-five minutes.  Dad wanted you in with me and the crew chiefs on that.”

            “Ok, why nine?”

            “Because we both know where you’ll be as soon as she leaves until eleven.”

            I tried not to think about it.  I’d spent the past three years trying not to think about it.  And even as I knew that trying not to think about it was a waste of time, I tried not to let it show in my eyes, and still a single tear escaped.

            Brittany looked away.

            “Are you back at your place tonight?”  I asked.

            “Only if you want me to be.”  She said.

            “I’m sure Kyle would like to spend some time with you.”  I said.

            “He knows the score, Trey.”  She said.

            “Have him come over for the party.”  I said.  “And you can go home after the party.”

            She smiled, and came over to me and gave me a kiss on the forehead.

            “I miss her too,” she said, gently.  “Go ahead, we both know what you need to do.  Remember, the only thing I need you for today is the meeting at one.  So if you need to be there until then, just be there.”

            I nodded, then went to the table where Alison was eating pancakes and drinking her orange juice.  I looked down at her, mussed her hair up a little and smiled at her.

            “I love you too, Daddy.”  She said. 

            “See you in awhile.  You be nice to Aunt Brittany, and then to Auntie Little Bit.”

            “I will.”  She said.  Then very quietly, she said, “say hi to Mommy for me.”

            I choked back the tears, and nodded.

Meet Trey

Andrew "Trey" Mitzkovicz, III is the narrator of the series Redemption.


This is the first in a series of posts which will introduce you to characters from the series at various points in their lives.  As it progresses, I'm going to add things.  Expect two-four posts per week.  Sometimes they will be vignettes from the lives of the characters, sometimes poems which Trey has written.  At other times they will be diary entries from the diary of Bethany Turner, Trey's doomed love.

I woke up in Detroit with laughter on my lips.  My mother was looking down quizzically at me. 

            “You were laughing in your sleep, Andrew.”  She said.

            I shook the sleep out of my head, still hanging onto the dream, as I always did, as I always would, for as long as I could.

            “It’s Saturday, Mother.”  I said.

            “The game is at one, all of the boys in your class would give anything to be playing in the Semi-finals today.  You need to be over there by ten-thirty at the latest.  It’s nine.”

            I nodded.  The dream was always so disorienting I always had trouble placing myself when it was over and I was awake.  It always seemed real, more real than my life in the suburban ghetto in which we lived.

            “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”  I said.

            She nodded.

            “Do you want a ride over?”

            I shook my head.  The walk, while it would take a half-hour or so, would let me relive the dream for the length of the walk.  It always seemed like the dreams came when I was the most in need of them, the most stressed out.

            “Well, then you probably ought to hurry.”  She said.

            I chuckled.

            “Food will be ready in five minutes.”

            I nodded.  She had left it to the next to last possible minute to wake me.  I wondered what she would say if I told her about the dreams.

            “What were you laughing about?”  She asked.

            “It was just a really good dream, Mom.”

            She smiled at me.

            “Is it going to be a good game?”

            I laughed.

            “I have no idea, Mom.  Hopefully I won’t screw everything up.”

            “You’ll do fine.”  She said.  “Dad and Gary will be over there in time for the game.”

            “I take it you and Lou-Lou won’t?”

            She smiled.  “I hate watching you play football, I’m always concerned something bad will happen.”

            I waved her away.

            “I’ll be right up.”  I said.

            As soon as she was gone, I took a moment to luxuriate in the afterglow of the dream.  I could still almost taste the strawberry lip gloss she had been wearing in my dream, smell the flowery perfume, and hear the happy sound of her melodic laughter.  She was like nobody I had ever met, but it felt so right, it felt like what I was promised.  Her blonde hair glowed in the reflected sunlight in the dream, her blue eyes sparkled.  All I knew was that she loved me, and every time I woke up on a stressful day having dreamt about her, I had a good day.

            I was fifteen years old, living in suburban Detroit, I was a sophomore in high school, getting ready to play strong safety for the varsity football team in the 1985 Class A Football semi-finals, and I had never been west of Chicago in my life.  I was having dreams about being married to a beautiful blonde woman a half a continent away, in some distant future, in a place I had never been or even seen pictures of, and despite all of that, those moments, that time in the dreams I had of her seemed more real and more right than anything in my life.

            I threw on a plain gray t-shirt and my insulated warm-ups from track.  I ran a brush through my hair, even though it wouldn’t matter in an hour, and went upstairs to eat with my family, pausing on the stairs and licking my lips.  It seemed crazy but I swore I could taste the lip gloss from my dream on my lips.  The rest I could examine on the walk over to the high school, but the taste would be gone as soon as breakfast was eaten.  So I savored the last taste of her from the dream.

Redemption

Redemption:


Someone might ask from time to time, what is the biggest thing going on in your life?


The problem with a question like that is that at any given moment something might seem more important than the next thing.  So you ask 11/14, I would have told you my new son Timothy, who was born at 8pm that day. None of my little kids, Elise (5), Ruben "Ben" (2) or Tim is ever far from the top spot, and of course my wife of 13 years, Jenny is always hovering near the top of the list, as anyone who has ever been married knows.


That said, aside from professional obligations and familial obligations, which would both fill more than one blog post, the series of novels I have been working on in all my spare time for the past eighteen months or so, and been conceptualizing for nearly 15 years would have to be right at the top of the list.


Over a series of posts over the next week or so, I will endeavor to introduce you to the stories and the characters who make up the series.


One of the fascinating parts of the process is this... I always assumed if I wrote what I thought was a kick ass book, I wouldn't have much trouble selling it.  With The Neon Roadhouse, that was a year ago, breaking the novel in half, and going through multiple revisions.  First, it was 180,000 words.  Way too long.  Cut here and there, rewrite the second half, and now what made it beautiful to me was gone.  Break it in half, go to the logical break point, and edit and relocate the end of the second half into the third book, which solves a problem with it.  Then I read the novel as it is, and it seems pretty cool, but it's all character, not enough plot, and definitely not enough of the female voice.


Diary entries are so overdone, right?  How else do you take a first person perspective and add authenticity to a character not the writer?  Put her thoughts in the diary entries, but use them sparsely.  Play that out, relocate one of the more important parts to the beginning, and then tell the tale in a slightly non-linear way over two timelines, and the result, well, I think it's pretty awesome, but there's still a problem...


Take a standard V curve, where the two points are literary and commercial.  I'm in the trough in between.  (Thanks MAG for the apt analogy).


So there's a number of ways I *could* go.  Here's what I'm going to do...


I'm going to introduce the characters in words and images over a span of time, trying to attract a following to take to a publisher and say, literary, commercial?  Who cares.

Introduction

Hey Guys:

I am...wow, where to start.  Realizing that people may attach significance to the order and the slightest thing, bear in mind that as with most of how I view myself, there is no particular order to how I define myself...

I am... a writer, a husband, a father, a son, a brother...

I am... a wanderer, a mystic, and yet despite both, a man firmly anchored in my time and place.

I am... a consultant, a lover of books and music, a fan of good writing and well played music and well executed art.

I am... a former college athlete gone to seed, a poet, expert in a few things, knowledgeable about a lot of varied, almost random things.

I am... interested in politics and the interplay of political and economic theory, intensely partisan, both in politics and in my interests in sports and culture, curious about what might be around the next bend in the highway, literally and figuratively.

Buckle up, it might be bumpy along the way, but if I deign to write about it, I will endeavor to make it interesting should you choose to join me for the ride.