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When they left, Bram extracted a promise from Wes that they’d meet up soon to discuss all this further and Wes inclined his head. He looked pleased. For someone who’d spent a lot of his life trying to avoid being seen, Zachary was glad that the tides were turning for him.
Of course, as they were leaving, Adam’s daughter, Gus, came running out of the house, eyes huge, Adam on her tail, and said, “That is a motorcycle. So cool!”
Zachary glanced up just in time to see the look of abject fear that crossed Adam’s face and said, “Motorcycles are death traps.”
“What’s a death trap?” Gus asked, eyes even brighter.
“Well, that backfired,” Adam muttered.
“Can I go on the death trap?” Gus asked, pulling at Bram’s hand.
“Sorry, buddy,” he said. “You’ve got to be a lot bigger before you can go on a motorcycle.”
She visibly drooped but brightened when Bram said, “But if you want to see something really cool and scary, you should come to Casper Road for Halloween on Monday night.”
“Can we go, Daddy?”
“Absolutely,” Adam said, and mouthed Thank you to Bram.
“Your friends are nice,” Bram said happily, then waved at them as they sped away.
* * *
Halloween dawned crisp and clear, and Zachary sprang out of bed, ready for the final install. Today, they would complete the transformation of the exterior of his house into the hull of the ghost ship.
The pieces were stacked in a complicated system throughout the living room, and excitement about the install aside, Zachary would be thrilled to have his space back, clean and uncluttered.
Bram opened the door, calling, “Happy Halloween! I come bearing coffee.”
Zachary met him at the door with a grin.
“Babe, it’s the day! Are you so excited?” Bram asked, handing Zachary a mug of coffee.
Zachary nodded enthusiastically. Then, because Bram’s coffee was made of mushrooms and tasted like dirt, he took it into the kitchen and dumped sugar into it.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve made a flow chart of the install. Let me guide you through it.”
He spread the paper on the kitchen table.
“You’re so freaking adorable,” Bram said fondly, and came up behind him. He wrapped his arms around Zachary and kissed the side of his neck. “Okay, show me.”
“Okay, so.”
Zachary had put a lot of thought into the flow chart, estimating time to completion of each phase of the process, and leaving a buffer of two hours for when something inevitably went wrong.
When he finished taking Bram through it, Bram said, “You’re so good at this.”
“I know. I’ve won six years running.”
Bram’s smile was amused.
“Yes, I know. It’s very impressive.” Zachary beamed. “But I meant this. Planning, organizing. Estimating.”
“Well, yeah. It’s part of my job.”
It was essential to understand how the pieces fit together in a design. If you drafted something that worked on paper but couldn’t be reasonably constructed, it was useless. A folly.
“Yeah, I know. I just like to remind you that you have a ton of skills and could totally be in business for yourself.”
Zachary stared at the flow chart.
Ever since he and Bram had reconciled the week before, he’d been thinking about what Bram had said. About his options. About a firm that would appreciate what he actually loved doing, not just the skills he happened to possess.
He’d even poked around a bit to see if anyone was hiring. So far, nothing, but it was a constant awareness in the back of his mind, that little voice that had previously sounded like his parents, then his teachers, later his bosses. For a moment, the voice had even sounded like Bram’s. You can do it, baby!
But over the last few days, as he paged through all the buildings he’d designed and shelved over the previous ten years, and thought, Holy crap, these are really good, the voice had begun to sound, more and more, like his own.
And that voice said: Your work is practical and innovative. Which would you rather be: a junior partner in a firm that designs boxes, or a renegade, like McTeague, who creates things that are inspiring and controversial and move design forward?
And when he put it like that to himself, the answer was clear.
Something else, too, had been happening over the last few days.
He’d started to dream about Sarah. It hadn’t happened in years, and even then they had just been vague impressions of their childhood spun out in dream logic.
These, though, he hadn’t had since the year she disappeared. These were dreams so realistic and vivid that he woke expecting to see her walking past his door into the bathroom or sitting at the kitchen table. Dreams of hanging out the way they used to—coexisting, as she’d always said—and watching movies on opposite sides of the couch, her jabbing a nail-bitten finger at the screen to explicate an effect or call out a clumsy bit of foreshadowing.
