The House on Seaside Lane

Part 1

When they pulled into town, the temperature was 72 degrees and the sky was perfect blue. It was a typical languid Friday afternoon along the Crystal Coast; the middle of April, everything blooming again, the evergreens standing tall and stately, swaying in the offshore breeze, the gulls floating effortlessly on the air.

She looked over at him from the passenger side. “Remind me again. Why don’t we live here?”

He smiled. Ruefully. It was a little game they played with each other every time they came back. It was a rhetorical question; they already knew the answer. But just to play along, he answered out loud.

“You know why. I have to finish out up in DC.”

Driving down 70 east, they passed the old neighborhood where they’d lived their first tour here. It looked the same, even better. The lush gardens seemed to glow in the light from the setting sun.

“You want to go by the house? Just to see what they’ve done with it?”

He pondered it.

She flew out from San Diego alone back in early 2008, when they first got word that he would be getting orders to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

How was it possible that it was 15 years ago now?

The location they would be moving to was three hours east of Raleigh, which was as far east as they’d ever been in North Carolina. It was truly going to be a new adventure, to a new place, with a tabula rasa; a blank canvas upon which they would paint new memories.

They always had a general idea of what they wanted, even if they would only know it once they saw it. He trusted her judgment, and besides, she had a better knack for spotting it. She knew him better than he knew himself sometimes, as he did her, especially when it came to where they should live and what kind of house he would like.

The neighborhood where she found the house was on the west side of the town. The development was densely populated with loblolly pines, crape myrtles, dogwoods, live oaks, and seagrass, and a golf course wound throughout the homes like some vast river of green, none of the holes every doubling back beside another.

The house sat at the end of Seaside Lane, a single-story brick prairie-style home, encircled by landscaped gardens and tall loblollies, and a few palm trees. The backyard was similarly screened and protected. It was the first house they’d been able to afford after living the first twelve years of their marriage in rental homes or military housing.

After they moved in, they designed and painstakingly built a low, covered deck out back that opened onto a patio that was bordered at the long end with a fireplace, both of which had been cut from the same stone.

They planted magnolias, wax myrtle, pampas grass, and Yoshino cherry trees around the property. They resodded the entire front, side, and back yards by hand. They invested a little blood and a lot of sweat, if not many tears making it exactly the way they wanted it.

It had taken the better part of that first year to get it almost perfect.

Once they had finished their work, they spent countless hours out back, on the deck, on the patio, next to the fireplace, having a drink, sitting, or just hanging out. It was their Fortress of Solitude.

And just when they thought they’d found the place they would never leave, he had to deploy.

By the time he got back home, it had already been two years. The powers that be were already calling, asking if he wanted to take a new job, in a place they had lived before and never liked.

But the organization did a real good job of selling it.

They still wondered all these years later what it was about the selling game that had convinced them to move away.

That’s the way it was in the military.

They found the small group of very good officers and then exploited the hell out of them, like valuable assets. The others would never really understand it. There was a school of thought that most people in the organization were essentially interchangeable. They could accomplish the mission.

And there were the assets, who one could count on maybe two hands. Specialists with a certain skill set, called on in emergency situations. Firejumpers.

But being one of these specialists came with costs, sometimes, costs without measure.

And so, the powers that be back then had successfully sold it to him.

And they convinced themselves that it was time to move once more, to pick up again and move the boys back to that place that was — if not the worst place in the world — the worst place in America; it really was when you actually sat down and thought deeply about the matter. Its brilliant, bleached white exteriors that gleamed in the sunlight masked a dark and rotten interior. Anyone who had spent any time living there knew it, if they were really, truly honest with themselves.

With the hindsight that life events and time provides, it had not been a good decision — the decision to leave, back in 2011.

Years later, the house on Seaside Lane now stood in their memories as the last place they had lived together as a family that had been what they always dreamed a happy family life could be, if they could just find the right place. And they had found it. And then they left it behind.

And knowing all of this, and realizing that now, fifteen years after he had first seen it back in the summer of 2008, they had never been able to come close to recapturing it, he said, “I don’t think so. I can’t really bear to drive back by that house.”

To be continued.

Glen Hines is the author of five books, including the recently published Of Time and Rivers, and the highly-regarded Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. He is the writer and producer of the book and podcast Welcome to the Machine, available on most podcast platforms. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.