Chapter 20
“No Rest” 

As those two weeks passed, I grew more and more nervous.  My classes were given more ‘reading days’ than I’d initially allocated because I needed time to think, to reflect, and to plan.

The Thursday before I was to meet Kyle face to face, Brand and I had a quiet dinner at his apartment.  I cooked this time, though.  I began to feel what my Mom felt whenever she cooked to relieve personal tension and stress.  It was very therapeutic to whip, knead, mix, and stir, to combine things that went together to create what, in anyone else’s hands, would have been culinary artwork.

As we sat at the table in his miniscule dining room, Brand asked if there were anything he could do to help me get ready for Saturday.  After a few off-color joking remarks, I explained to him that this was something I had to do completely by myself.  Reluctantly, he accepted my answer, but he made it clear that he wasn’t very happy about it and that he was as nervous about what would happen as I was.

We went to bed earlier than normal that night.  He needed to get some sleep; I just wanted to be close to him.  He had to work the next morning, but I’d taken a personal day to get everything just right for Saturday.

As we woke around six, Brand climbed from the bed and went into the bathroom.  I looked at him standing there in front of the mirror, shaving as he waited on the water in the shower to reach the temperature he preferred.  This man before me was perfect.  He was my other half; he was the yin to my yang.  We complimented one another perfectly, as if we were made to do so.  When I felt I was going off the deep end; he’d reel me back in.  When he felt like things in his life were going crazy, I would calm him down.  When either of us would have problems with a student (especially Justin), we would send him to the other for solution.  We were a team, and I regretted that I had to exclude him from Saturday’s events.  However, what was upcoming was something that I simply I had to do on my own.

After he finished with his shower, Brand walked out of the bathroom wearing only a towel.  In addition to being perfect in ways that people couldn’t readily see, he was almost perfect physically.  The way his muscles ripped across his body reminded me of something that was pulled straight from the mythology of the ancient world.

“So, I’m gonna wear my lucky trunks today,” he said as he pulled a pair of underwear from the top drawer of his dresser.  With the towel still wrapped around his waist, he pulled them up over his leg until parts unmentionable were covered by the tight, brightly colored fabric of his lucky drawers.

“You planning on getting lucky?” I teased.

“Oh, yeah!  This evening, after school, I’m gonna have a bunch of gay guys from Birmingham up for an orgy,” he sarcastically answered, smiling at me the whole time.

“You wanna know something?” I asked as he grabbed a pair of khaki colored slacks from his closet.

“Shoot,” he said as he pulled them up and buttoned them in the front.

“I’m not sure that I would have made it through these past couple of months without you,” I answered.

“Whatever.  You would have been fine.  If it weren’t me, somebody else would have caught your eye.”

“No.  Before you came into the picture, I was pretty much banking on the fact that Brian would come out of the closet and want to marry me.”

He smiled.  “If he ever did…”

“I’d explain that I have a wonderful man whom I love dearly, and that I couldn’t bear to be without him.”

“You’re full of shit,” Brand said as he pulled a polo over his trim and polished physique.

“I’m not full of shit,” I answered.  “I seriously love you.  That would be the truth.”

“I love you, too,” he said as he walked over and kissed me gently on the lips.

To be completely honest, I wanted to wrap my arms around him, roll him over onto the bed, and just do what grown-ups do in situations like that, but I couldn’t.  We both had very big days ahead of us.

I climbed out of bed as he walked out the door.  After watching him pull from the parking lot, I went back inside and showered quickly, putting on a pair of jeans that I kept over there.  After putting on a shirt, I grabbed a couple of other things and left, locking the door to his apartment before racing down the steps to my car.

I drove down the highway toward home to the tunes pumping from inside my car.  Every single song that played through my iPod was a happy one, making me want dance even as people around me, some of whom I’m sure were students at the high school who knew me, were watching.  When I hit open road, my iPod swapped to a dance remix of Ian Scott’s “What’s Left of Me.”  I sang the song at the top of my lungs, imagining that I was, for a moment the guy from Montevallo who rose to superstardom and then fell, only to find himself climbing to top of the world once more.  He was the singer that was going to be the basis for the main character in the original plan for my thesis.

I arrived home to find my mother in the kitchen, working away on something at the table.

“Hello,” she said as I walked into the kitchen, my bag over my shoulder.

“Hey, Mom.  What are you doing here?”

“Oh.  I took a personal day,” she said with a smile.

“That’s cool.”

“The reason why I took it was because I want you to take this letter to that man tomorrow,” she said as she continued to write, the pen firmly in her right hand.

“Okay.”

“I know you want to do this, and you need to.  There are things, though, that I need to say to him as well.”

“Understand,” I said as I walked over, bent down, and kissed the crown of her little brown head.  “How long is it?”

“Eight pages so far,” she answered.

“What could you possibly say that could take eight pages?” I jokingly asked her.

“You may never understand it, because you will never give birth through your womanhood to a boy that’s 24.5 inches long and weighs almost 11 pounds.”

“You could have just said ‘give birth’ and left it at that,” I said to my mom as I opened a carton of orange juice and took a sip.

“I could have, but then that would have deprived me of getting to see your face turn such a bright shade of red,” she smiled as she looked to see my blushing cheeks.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, mijo.  And with all that said, I want you to know that I love you more than life.  I will always love you more than life.  I might get pissed at you every now and again, but I will ALWAYS love you!” she said as she reached up, took my right hand in hers and squeezed it a couple of times.

We talked for a few minutes more, until I realized that I really needed to get to work on a couple of things.  I went up to Dad’s office, a place that I knew I could work with a relative amount of privacy.  I opened up the laptop that I’d purchased the weekend before and began copying pictures to a pen drive to transfer to my Dad’s computer.  Using some photo printing software that cost way too much money, I began arranging photos of all my family and friends onto pages.  I could think of something nice to say about every single one of them as I put little text boxes beneath the pictures to give a little explanation of who the people were.  Using pictures already on my Dad’s computer, I made a whole little section of pictures that were just of the nieces.

I lived with the memories of how the two of them had grown from infants into toddlers and children.  There were pictures of me holding Heidi the day she was born.  I was sick the day Chloe was born, so I didn’t get to hold her for a couple of days.  Dad had a picture of Brand and the girls that I didn’t even know existed.  There were also pictures of Parker and Dad as they built the tree house. 

Another section was dedicated to immediately post-attack photos.  Detective Barr, at my request, had forwarded pictures the police had taken of my injuries.  Each picture was blown up so that just the injury could be seen on the page.

Dad also had pictures of Grandmama and Granddaddy, as well as my aunts, Lilly and Deb.  There was one picture of the grandparents taken on the day they were married.  There were pictures of my Parker and Justin as babies, as well as a few of yours truly.  There was a picture from the day that Aunt Deb gave birth to Val.  There were pictures of the day Val gave birth to Victoria.  Pictures from Noelle’s first birthday showed me and Catherine standing right behind her as she blew out the single candle on her tiny cake.

He had a picture of Uelo and Uela from about twenty years before, and a picture of Titi Lourdes with braces.  All of my cousins were in a single picture, a picture that the grandparents had given to Uelo and Uela in the late 80s, well before Justin was born.  The picture, to this day, is proudly displayed on the wall of Uela’s living room.

I began printing page after page of pictures for a scrapbook I was making.  After that was finished, I started printing what was finished of my thesis and a letter that I’d written a few days before to Mr. Kyle Rodgers and his girlfriend.  I began to put the pages of printed pictures into a binder that I’d taken from Dad’s supply closet in the office.

When I was finished almost four hours later, I emerged from the office with the two things in my hand.  I returned to the kitchen and put the work in my bag.

Mom fixed us lunch, and we sat there in relative silence at the island in the kitchen as we munched on the oddest of lunches: turkey sandwiches with Havarti cheese and plantain chips that she’d just fried up and salted.

When we were finished, I went into my room and started gathering clothes to take with me to Tuscaloosa that night.  In the morning, I was planning on wearing a pair of my khaki colored Carhartt pants and a white, button down shirt.  I grabbed a pair of heavy socks and quite possibly the most random thing in my wardrobe, a pair of cowboy boots that I’d purchased years ago, when wearing such things was the chic thing to do at Oneonta High School.  I put them with my clothes, since he might respond well to seeing that I’m just a person, like his dumb ass.

“Justin just called,” Mom stated as she stuck her head in the door.  “He checked himself out of school and said for you not to leave until he got here.”

“Okay,” I responded, looking at the clock.  Fifth period would have just ended and he’d be in PE if he’d stayed at school.

“Is he leaving now?”

“Yeah.  He’ll be here in a few minutes,” Mom said as she excused herself so that I could get ready to leave.

“Okay.”

I rushed to get everything ready.  I put with my things a gift that I’d gotten for Matt.  Earlier in the week, I went to Birmingham and bought him some cigars.  As much as he’d talked about his two favorite brands, Don Pepin Garcia Cuban Classic and Oliveros XL Double Maduro, I knew that it would be a good gift for him.  Sure, spending a few hundred dollars on a couple of boxes of cigars was expensive, but the price was nothing considering this man saved my life.

I began taking everything into the living room, more so that I could survey what all I had and what all I didn’t have.  As Mom and I were looking over my things, Justin and Carter walked in the door. 

“Hey, guys,” I said to Justin and Carter after Mom greeted them.

“So, Ry...” Justin said.  “We had a little fun with the substitute during writing class.”

“You didn’t?” I asked in disbelief.  There were cheesy smiles on both of their faces.

“Well... when we were in Brand’s class, while he was working on the computer, the guys and I hatched this plan.  I knew that you’d left an assignment for us to have a reading day, but we decided that we wanted to write.”

“So, Justin and I wrote up this letter, claiming to be you.  Brand read it and typed it out for us,” Carter went on.

“Okay…”

“Then we forged your signature to it,” Justin confessed.

“So, what was this assignment that you cooked up?” I asked.

“Well... without giving too much information to the class, we had them create a character based on you.”

“In the letter, we told the sub to send the stuff in an envelope to you by way of me,” Justin went on.

He handed me the legal sized envelope, and I quickly opened the clasp.  The first paper was Nate’s.  There was no name, but I immediately recognized the handwriting.  As I finished one, I handed them to Mom.  Carter’s was the next to last in the pile; Justin’s was last.  In each of them, there were words like ‘strong’ and ‘determined.’  A couple of people used ‘hot’ sparingly, a comment which made me feel a little weird, being that students had written them.

As Mom read Carter’s assignment, she walked over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist.  Justin and I looked at one another.  He’d gotten the hug, meaning that he was as much a part of the family in her opinion as we were.  Carter was beaming with pride as Mom read aloud what he’d written about me.

“Thank you,” I said to my brother as I gave him a hug.

“No problem.  Just as long as we don’t get detention for forging your name.”

“That won’t happen.  In fact, y’all are all getting As on this assignment.”

“And please don’t be mad at Brand for helping us,” Justin pleaded.

“Never…” I said as I reached over and gave Carter a hug as well.

They helped me carry the things to my car.  Before I left, I hugged them all again.  Climbing into my car, I looked at my Mom, who was proudly smiling at me.  It reminded me of the day I left for undergraduate school.

As I pulled onto the highway, I decided that it would be nice to stop and see my Dad before leaving town.  I hoped to return to him in a couple of days a new man, the man that he had helped forge like Vulcan forged iron for the gods.  As I pulled in, I saw that Parker’s truck was also there. 

I walked in to find my brother standing there with my sister in law in the lobby.  Our eyes connected.  He knew that I was about to leave, and walked over to me.  Without a word, he wrapped his arms around my neck and hugged me.  The receptionist must have thought we were all crazy, especially as Laura walked over to me and joined in the embrace.  Dad came out of his office to give her something to do, but he stopped his instructions and walked over to where I was.

Parker and Laura moved away, and my Dad moved in.  Like my mother, I could feel that he was beaming with pride in what I was about to do.  Sure, he probably wanted the guy to die a slow and painful death for what he’d done, but he was proud of me, for making the decision to meet him and get everything off my chest.

“Do you need anything?  Do you need any money?  Are you sure you want to go by yourself?  I would feel better if you at least let Brand go with you.”

“I’m fine, Dad,” I said.

“Okay.  Just keep your phone on, and if you need anything…” he said as his eyes glossed over.

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

“All right,” he commented.  “Get going before everybody that works for me starts to think I’m a softie,” Dad said as he hugged me one more time.

With that, I was off.  I stopped for gas and a Pepsi before hitting the interstate, so that I could drive the rest of the way to Tuscaloosa without stopping.

As I drove past the Mercedes plant, the song “Piscis” by JD Natasha came on.  It’s a song that describes me to a core.  “Nadie dijo que la vida es fácil,” the chorus starts, “Pero déjame vivir / En momentos, me atormento / Necesito morir, paz / escapar realidad.”  The words rang so very true.   “No one ever said that life would be easy, but let me live / In some moments, I torment myself / I need death, peace / to escape reality.”  Perhaps it makes little sense in English, but in that moment it was perfect for me, an outlet to describe the person that I was to myself.

As I got to Tuscaloosa, I made the requisite calls.  Mom was first, followed by Noelle and Armando, both of whom tried to get me to go out with them that evening.

I also called Brand that night, and the two of us talked until later than I should have been up.  It was so nice to hear his voice as the very last thing before I retired.  His voice was like honey, sweet and soothing, natural, full of everything that was innocent and good.

That night, I slept so well.  I don’t know why, but I did.  Perhaps my mind would be able to rest after the coming day, and all its action.

To be continued...