IX. M. Night Shyamalan Revisited

I've been thinking about signs lately. You know those things that point you in one direction or another? Some are fairly easy to read, such as STOP. Others can be quite dicey. Merge. Yield. Depending on your point of view, those could mean any number of things. Who gets to go first in a merge? How many cars do you yield to? All of them? There are definitely questions.

I thought I'd gotten good at reading the signs in my life. I was learning to pay attention to the precognition, and that helped me be on the watch. So when all the signs said go-ahead-and-buy-that-house, I thought I was doing the right thing. Not so much.

I'd been scouring the real estate sites and driving neighborhoods for a couple years in search of our new home. The Husband wanted a master bedroom downstairs, I needed a better kitchen. We had just about given up the hunt and decided to remodel when I stumbled across something. An ad for a new subdivision just a couple miles from where he worked. It was a sketchy ad with line drawings and a bad map but the houses came with a stand-by generator and Lutron lighting. I was intrigued. We took the Sunday afternoon drive with freshly printed Map Quest directions and high hopes.

We couldn't find it. The maps all showed a golf course where I thought the home sites should be. I remember commenting to the Husband that a golf course was the last place I'd ever live. My Dad golfed, not in the least bit fanatically, and built a lovely house on a golf course in Florida. He paid dues on it for years all the while he sat in a wheel chair unable to pick up a club. I was also mildly steamed during the summer I spent in Florida during the drought. My sister had to haul buckets of water from a fire hydrant down the street to flush her toilets since the wells had all gone dry. Water restriction was in place everywhere. Except, of course, the golf courses. They irrigated daily and driving by those sprinklers used to infuriate me. I'd had a bad taste in my mouth for golf ever since.

So naturally the home site was an old nine hole golf course sold off to developers. We'd be finding golf balls in our yard forever. I had a bad feeling. That was until I turned down the gravel construction road and I caught the edge of the street sign in my eye. Naylor's Blue Court. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Naylor was my maiden name. Not too common. Blue, my Mom's favorite color and the interior color of every home she had. Signs. I called the realtor Monday morning to get more info.

My Dad was so much on my mind in those days. He'd been gone a couple years and I missed him. I was constantly searching for signs from him. I don't see dead people, but I'd wished I could have seen him. A few days later as I poured over floorplans I realized the only one the Husband would approve of was called The Parkside. I didn't really like it but it had the requisite master down. We would think about it. The lots were going fast, especially the larger ones in the cul de sac that I liked, but we had planned a trip to Georgia and we wouldn't be signing anything until we came back. I stopped at my sisters to give her the keys to our house; she was going to look after the dogs for me. This would be my youngest sister, the care giver of my mother, and she was a candy lover. She'd gone to a little candy shop across town, Kathleen's, and brought back a childhood favorite from our hometown: Sponge candy. She handed me a bag for the car trip. When I turned it over to see where it was made my breath caught. Parkside Candies, Hertel Avenue, Buffalo, New York. The candy store at the corner of the street my Dad grew up on. Parkside. Another sign. I emailed the realtor and begged him not to sell my lot until I got back from Georgia.

It was a lot of money but we had enough equity in the house we were in that it might just work. It would be our retirement house, the one we lived in until the end. If the payments were a little high in the beginning it would level out over time. I went to talk numbers with the realtor and decided to give him a small deposit to hold the lot til we made a decision. He handed me the pen to sign the agreement, I glanced over the contract and noticed the address for the first time. The number was both my parents' birthdays. I signed.

I loved the beautiful house we built. But the signs I should have been reading I had ignored. I wasn't content in my marriage or at work and no house was going to fix that. We argued every decision that went into it's construction, right up to closing day when I infuriated him by starting a new job and not being able to help us move. We were drifting farther and farther apart and neither one of us was noticing. We were in the house just two months when the company the Husband worked for decided to close up shop and get out of town. The first step towards our financial devastation. A sign things were changing.

The last time I was in the yard I kicked a little lump of dirt that turned out to be a golf ball. I picked it up and rubbed the grime off on my trouser leg. It was monogrammed with two initials, the Boy's initials. A sign. I would stumble over him forever. I choked back the tears and whipped it as far as I could into the woods. ~Dazzledgirl