Chapter 74: Houses and Homes, Spouses and Partners

Friday, January 6, 1984

I woke to find the message light on the hotel phone flashing. Jas was still sleeping, so I slipped out of bed, went to the desk, and called their message retrieval system (which was, fortunately, automated — still a new thing in 1984 in many hotels).

The waiting message was very brief, from Angie. It said simply ‘Today’. Hopefully it would go well!

I climbed back into bed and fell asleep after a bit. It felt good to sleep in, and better to sleep snuggled up with Jas.

Jas woke up not long after. When I told her about the call, she was optimistic.

For breakfast, I took her to Kerbey Lane Cafe, an Austin institution that I’d first visited about twelve years from now, give or take a bit. Like we’d agreed yesterday, talking about past events that happened in the future is something that English is poor at, for very understandable reasons. A language created by people like Angie, Laura, and I would likely have some interesting tenses.

Kerbey Lane turned out to be much better than I’d remembered, likely because I remembered them slowly declining during the 2010s. I’m not sure everyone thought they were declining, but me, my ex-wife, and our kids, plus a number of friends, all felt they’d lost something.

Whatever it was, this version had it in spades. The food was good, the servers were terrific, and the prices were reasonable. Their famous gingerbread pancakes were as good as I’d remembered.

Fed and happy, we started out on our sightseeing journey, this time heading a bit west into the hills. We stopped at Mount Bonnell, a local landmark and the highest point in the city. It’s a bit of a climb, but not unreasonable, and we could see for miles. I pointed out landmark after landmark, including places we’d been and places we were heading.

After that, we followed FM 2222 out west to RM 620 (no Austinite would ever say the FM or RM parts — just the numbers). That put us very close to Mansfield Dam, the dam that created Lake Travis. We headed south past the dam at first.

This was a good place for déjà vu. Mansfield Dam was so much the same that it could have been 2021 for all I could tell, looking at it. Looking in the other direction was a stark contrast. Nearly all of the homes, apartments, businesses, and everything else that had been out here were all yet to be built. Only a few were still here.

Had we continued south, we would’ve reached Hippie Hollow, Austin’s semi-official nude beach. Neither of us was at all interested in that in January, though. Some other time? Probably not, but who knows?

Instead, I turned us back north, then east. The entire road was a nonstop narration of ‘this would be here’ and ‘that would be there’ and so forth. Some things were here, but so much was just not built yet.

By the time we reached US 183 — the road we’d taken almost two years ago, when the déjà vu hit — I wasn’t even sure where we were, and US 183 surprised me. There’d been a mall just off to the left of where we were as long as I could remember. Now there was a bunch of trees, and that was it. Nothing much was here at all.

I tried to tell Jasmine what it would be and failed to really convey it, I think. Just trying reminded me that some of these stands of trees were multi-million-dollar properties in the making.

We continued to travel along the small, sleepy road that would, twenty-five years from now, become mostly a toll road until we reached Round Rock, where I’d lived for decades with my ex-wife, and our kids once we adopted them. Round Rock High School was one of the first landmarks we came across, and it looked so very diminished from the school I’d known when the kids went there. Still, it was recognizable, as was the strip center and gas station adjacent to it. The other three gas stations were yet to be built or even imagined.

I’d kept up a running narration the whole way, with Jas asking the occasional question, but I quieted as we passed the school, and she went with it, recognizing the moment.

From here, things changed sharply (or, perhaps, changed is entirely the wrong word). A bit further, then I turned and headed down a street I’d driven hundreds of times. Once we’d gone just a few blocks down, everything was just as I’d remembered it. Oh, the houses might look a little different, and the cars looked quite different, but the neighborhood I’d lived in was just the same. The elementary school had fewer ‘temporary’ buildings, but it had some, and my kids would have hardly noticed the difference from the outside.

Just a few more turns, and I pulled up across the street from a two-story house and parked, then nodded to the window.

“That?” she said, softly. “That’s where you lived?”

I nodded. “Or ... will live? In another universe?”

She chuckled softly. “Or that,” she said, nodding.

“That’s it. The kids climbed that oak tree, and that one, and tried to build a treehouse in that one over there. It didn’t really go that well, but no one was hurt. Those two trees,” I said, pointing, “the kids cut down in the early 2010s because they’d gotten old and were rotting.”

“Wow,” she said, then hesitated.

After a minute or so, she said, “It looks nice.”

“It was nice,” I said. “I have some very unpleasant memories of things that happened inside it, but it’s yelling and screaming and crying, not violence or anything. Just strife and angst and anger and bullshit.”

Until Jasmine’s hand squeezed my arm, I hadn’t realized that I was crying, much less that I was sobbing. I turned to her, and she released her seat belt and was hugging me seconds later.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s really okay, Steve. And ... it’ll always be okay. I promise.”

“I know...” I said, trying to collect myself.

That didn’t go so well the first time, nor the second. After a few minutes, though, the pieces started to go back together, and I was able to blow my nose a couple of times and settle down.

“You’re ... it’s...” she said, hesitating after each word.

“I’m fine,” I said, then shook my head. “Sorry. I’m not ‘fine,’ but I’m not messed up, either. I’m not in that weird déjà vu state, or anything to worry about. It’s just ... it hit me hard.”

“Of course,” she said, still hugging me.

“It’s been ... three and a half years for me, I guess,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It feels like yesterday and like a lifetime, and both are maybe correct.”

She nodded, not saying anything.

“I closed the door, locked it, handed the key to the realtor, and ... that was it. I cursed the place in my head, and swore I would never go back, not once, not for a look, not out of curiosity, never again as long as I lived. And ... I didn’t. I’m not that person, and it’s not that lifetime, and here it’s just a house that looks like a house I lived in. It’s not that house. I’ve never set foot inside of it, and I almost certainly never will.”

“But it is, too,” she said. “You can’t dismiss it that easily, not feeling how you felt.”

I slowly nodded. “It’s always been ... both. The thing I hated the most was that the good memories, and there were so many good memories, were irrevocably mixed up with the awful memories. I couldn’t look at it and say ‘That’s where my son skinned his knee,’ or ‘that’s where he hid his bike,’ or ‘that’s where my daughter carved her initials into the tree,’ without also thinking ‘that’s where she threatened to kill me in my sleep’ or ‘That’s where I was standing when she drove off the day she turned threatening to leave into actually leaving.’ Now ... I can. It matters that those things didn’t happen to me, even if I can remember them happening. It matters because I’m seventeen and none of it is going to happen.”

“The good things won’t happen, either,” she said, softly.

I sighed. “Yes, but that doesn’t bother me. It really doesn’t. The kids will be adopted. Heck, maybe we could adopt them, but as of today I think that would be an enormous mistake.”

“Because they won’t mesh with kids that we had? Or something else?”

“Because I’m too close to them. Because I know all of the trouble they got into, all the secrets, and so forth. Oh, much would be different, but some wouldn’t. And I’d be endlessly trapped between trying to fix things that weren’t broken and trying not to change anything even though there’s no possible way they could be the same with both parents totally different people. I’d over-parent and under-parent and just be a mess. As for the rest, no, I don’t think there’d be any problem, or that I’d love a biological child different from an adopted one. Well ... I hope there wouldn’t be any problem, but I knew families with both, and as far as I could tell, it worked fine.”

“I think I agree about you being too close,” she said. “We’ll talk about it more, but I see all of the problems.”

“If I can figure out some non-creepy way to know they’re okay, I’d like that, but it’s a super-difficult problem. Why in the world would I be interested in two specific orphans with no connection to me at all?”

“Yeah. I get that.”

I sighed, but smiled, too, then waved at the window. “It really is just a house. It’s also not, you’re right. I’d never want to live in this neighborhood, even though I really liked living here, but we don’t have to and would probably never want to.”

She nodded. “I think you needed to visit, though.”

“Me, too. I...”, I said, then stopped.

“What?”

“I was going to say that I really don’t think I’m ‘damaged,’ but maybe this means I still am, just maybe a lot less.”

She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure I’d know if you were ‘damaged’ that way. You’re clearly not scared of commitment, but you’re not scared of being alone, either. You want kids, but at a sensible time. I think we can safely say that you don’t seem to have much in the way of trust issues, considering. One of the things I had to convince myself of, back when I went on that walk in Evanston, was that you’re not manipulative or controlling. That would’ve been easy. Instead, you’ve constantly gone out of your way to make sure the people around you are strong and capable and can stand up for themselves, particularly me. Once I got over my snit last year...”

I started to take issue with ‘snit’, but she put a finger over my lips.

“It was a snit. Shush. Anyway, once I got over it, I’d have done anything to make it up to you, and you made sure I didn’t. I could see you doing everything in your power to make sure no one yells at you again, and ... I really don’t want to yell at you,” she said, giggling just a bit, “but if I got pissed off and yelled, we’d kiss and make up and you wouldn’t flash back to ... there,” she said, nodding to the house.

“Yeah. I feel like that’s right.”

“I know it’s right! We’re a team. We’ll make allowances for each other being stupid or being in a mood — and it’ll happen — but that’s it.”

“I love you, Jasmine Nguyen,” I said, hugging her.

“And I love you, Steve Marshall,” she said, hugging right back.

After a few minutes, I was ready to move on. The house was, as we’d both said, just a house. It also wasn’t, but it wouldn’t do this to me again, if I should for some reason come back here. I might, too. Angie should perhaps see it one day. It meant something to her, too, if only through me.

From there on, the rest of the trip was anticlimactic, which was good. I hadn’t planned on that much ... feeling. It was hard to get worked up over the building where I’d worked for a while at a computer company that wouldn’t even be founded for a decade, or the fields where Dell’s corporate headquarters would one day appear, or the densely forested lot that would become shops and apartments and the hotel where my kids’ proms had been held.

None of that mattered. The house? That had mattered, but its ghosts were mostly exorcised. Not entirely, and they might never truly leave, not while I could remember it and my kids and my ex-wife, but...

And that got me to pull off the freeway and stop on the shoulder of the frontage road.

Jasmine looked over as I pulled off the freeway. “Okay, what are we seeing here?” she said. “It looks ... empty.”

“It is. That’s not why I stopped.”

“What? Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just one of those really weird thoughts that I think only Angie and I, and Laura, can have.”