gone.

Wind. And drizzle. A light drizzle like a mist, floating on the wind. Making everything gray and refreshing. So much harder to stay asleep when cold air is blowing cold rain onto your face on a cold morning.
He groaned, just to hear his voice in the air, make certain he was still there. He sat up. Besides being freezing and damp, he was sore as hell. His briefcase wasn’t much of a pillow and his neck hurt, along with his back. He was too used to the warm mattress and blankets of his bed. In college he had always being camping out somewhere. Something of an adventurer, that’s how he described that period of his life now. That somewhat adventurer would have scoffed at the spoiled old man he was now.
He looked up at his tie, hanging on the rafters over his head. The wet had turned it a darker red and it looked dismal and depressed as it blew in the wind. He pulled his knees to his chest and looked around him. A nice neighborhood, the real estate agent had said to them. A great place to raise kids. It looked ever nicer now then when they first saw it. Grass and paved driveways and white fences. They had been basking in that warm glow, giggling with over flowing happiness. A day off from work, in his jeans and new polo shirt, Dianne looking pretty as she laughed in the backyard, sunlight catching brown hair, belly already pushing against the waist of her flowery skirt.
For the first time he wondered who had lived in the house before. They had only dealt with the very convincing agent when they bought the house. He wondered why the family had had to move, if they resented him. He remembered how he had felt when, after his father died, his mother sold their house and he drove past to find it already gone, another one twice the size on its way up. He had wanted to kill them, to tear apart the ugly modern walls for taking away his house.
But this wasn’t like that. This wasn’t the beloved house of somebody’s mother. He didn’t think.
The workers would be putting the bricks of the walls in soon, then the roof. It had been the only place he could think to go.
He opened his sleek briefcase, a birthday present, and pulled out the plastic figure. He fiddled with the arms, bent the shiny red legs. It was supposed to be an it’s all right present. He had gotten it during lunch, thinking of Dianne lying on her back in the room they had painted pink since the new house wouldn’t be ready on time, her hands holding her stomach. That blank look on her face. They had wanted a girl so bad, never even considered it might be a little boy. Her parents had always wanted a boy, had raised her like one and shown nothing but disgust when she preferred pink to blue, dolls to trucks. She wanted a little girl to love and dress and treasure. And he, every time he looked at her stomach all he saw was his little girl on his shoulders, pointing to things and asking him, Daddy what’s that.
The action figure was supposed to tell him as well as Dianne that they could love a little boy just as much, that their baby could still be perfect. He had been going to open a bottle of sparkling cider to toast their son, and they would have looked through the books of boy’s names he had bought.
It was strange that the plastic superhero had been the only thing he had pulled into his briefcase when he ran from his office.
The rain was getting heavier. He could hear it landing on the metal top of a truck the workmen had left behind.
They had been counting on this house. This beautiful house in this beautiful neighborhood. They were building a new life along with this house, far from the tiny one they did not own where they were the oldest by twenty years in an area filled with college kids and the sounds of their parties and shouts.
A new life in a new house, with no fights and crying, no anger and regret. Only happiness filling everything with a calm peace, a love. A new everything, built on the money from his new job, a promotion long in coming.
And now it was gone. The salary and benefits, the office with his name on the door. There was talk of law suits, of crimes he had not committed that were too easy to pin on him.
There would be a new life indeed. One with debt and trials and a sentence. Bitter fights that would fill the ears of their son as he grew up, barely knowing a father that had been taken away. A son who was meant to be a girl, who would know it too, because his mother would cry while she washed his soccer jersey and on quiet days would trace the name Elizabeth on her palm in sharpie.
He wondered what time it was. Dianne would be worried. Not coming home didn’t fit into their new perfect bubble of a life.
He wished that he could end his life, just shut his eyes and it would be over and he wouldn’t have to go home and face his hurt worried wife. But he wouldn’t have to the courage to shoot himself or slice open his arms and he would have to go back home to get any sort of pill.
But there were rafters, framing the outline of a new house that would never be lived in; high enough to sketch out an attic where they would have kept boxes of photographs, books, their sons old toys.
He could climb the rafters and let go and never face any of it. He could see himself, in the dust around the house’s foundations, his tie waving like a warning flag in the rain.
If he climbed up, things would be okay. If he let go, for a second, he would fly.
A son in a tiny house with a broken mother. His father never there, gone, in jail or dead. An unwanted boy that should have been a girl, with a name like Taylor, one that could go both ways so his mother could forget sometimes when she called to him.
A single parent child, father out of the picture. The teachers would talk about it, tell the story with pity. Never really knew his father.
A boy without a dad. A man who disappeared from his child’s life. Dead or in jail. In jail or dead.
Everything. Sunshine and Dianne and happy moments. Fear and fights and consequences. All of it gone.
Gone.