If she wanted you she wouldn't keep choosing men to put in front of you. Don't be so hopeful.

I heard his words even from inside, carried through the window and into my ears. I wanted to unhear it. Caleb still screwing Lochlan to the wall, making sure to grind it in good so it would hurt the most, going on almost thirty years now. Lochlan doesn't need to be told things he already knows.

* * *

They gave a seventeen-year-old guardianship rights for a twelve-year-old-girl?

Eighteen. I'm eighteen now.

Whatever, kid. I hope you know what you're getting yourself into.

Lochlan turned away from the gruff but kindly house manager and smiled at me with his teenage bravado. It's okay, peanut. Just paperwork. Here, take this change and go get some juice for us.

* * *

We took off for a late bike ride. It was warm and bright out. I held on tight against his back as he raced down the highway, my eyes closed. I can be young again that way, before everything became so complicated. Maybe he does that too. We are putting a lot of miles on this bike together, it seems. We've put a lot of miles on the planet already and far too many on each other.

He is putting gas in the bike while I play with the buttons on the pump.

He's right, you know. You just keep doing it.

I say nothing. I'm not going to have the same argument we always have here. I don't want to be left behind. I shake my head and he turns the key to start the bike. Conversation ends. I can't hear him anyway.

* * *

What do people do when they don't travel anymore?

With the show, you mean?

Yes. I am finishing the salty bits in the bottom of a cup of french fries.

He sits up and stares out to see, squinting slightly. He always looks like he's about to find the flaw in my logic when he has this expression.

I don't know, Bridge. I guess they pick a place they like best and live out the end of their days. We can find a little house we like and we can sit on the back porch watching the sea and trading our favorite memories. When the midway comes to town we'll go and ride the rides and eat cotton candy and have a wonderful day.

I smile into the sun, shaking my head to get my hair out of my eyes.

I need to trim your bangs again, he says and the moment of warmth is over. He is parental again. Worrying too much. We fight. I don't want bangs anymore and it's my hair.

* * *

Why didn't you just stay with me.

I don't answer, since it is less of a question and more of an accusation, a regret. I could point out that he was the one who freaked out and left me, so coldly so he wouldn't have to feel it, knowing I had a place to land, foolishly thinking he was doing the right thing.

You keep..you keep doing this. Just out of reach and I can't hold on to you.

It's been a long day. I dump my wine into the grass and set the glass down on the table. I'm going to head inside.

Just stay here for a few minutes, please, peanut.

I don't want to fight with you, Lochlan.

We won't. Okay? We won't fight. I just like having you to myself.

I look at the moon. He has gone back into subconscious territory, where everything he thinks about comes rushing out to poke at and burn our hearts, turning tingles into stabbing agony and inklings into paroxysms.

Don't listen to Caleb when he talks to you. It serves no purpose.

I could say the same for you. You have to stay away from him.

I can't. I have Henry.

He swears under his breath and settles low into the chair, taking a long drink from his beer. I wish he would put down the beer. I wish he would put down the past.

We got our retirement, didn't we? He chuckles to himself. The expression on his face is the furthest thing from humor that I have ever seen.

What?

Remember when we talked about what we would do when we were too old to travel with the show anymore and I said we would live by the sea and sit in our chairs watching the waves? Well, here we fucking are, peanut. I should have been the fortune teller. This is to the letter. Maybe we made it after all.

Yeah. I can't think anymore. My eyes filled up and drowned out the thoughts in my head.

Only you're bound to someone else. Someone who doesn't even fucking deserve you.

Lochlan, don't. (My mouth moved but no sound came out.)

You belong to me.

I stand up so fast, I knock over my chair.

I know. It wasn't what I meant to say, though and I clapped my hands over my mouth, horrified.

* * *

I hand him a coffee, automatically. I have set out nine different cups out this morning. His is blue. I always pour his first and I don't know why. Oh yeah, he is always closest.

Thank you, gorgeous.

He's in such a good mood. I almost drop the cup on the floor between us.

Loch-

Don't, Bridget. Just leave it. Whether it's true or not, just leave it. Please. It's all I have now. I wanted things to turn out differently, I take too much from you now but please, whatever you do, don't take that sentence back.

What sentence? Ben is behind Lochlan suddenly and I startle and then I do drop my full mug of coffee on the floor.

You need a keeper, little bee.

She has one, Lochlan says, to no one in particular.

I want to tell you my wedding ring is still way too big and crawls off my finger every chance it gets. I have a rough bump where my ring finger meets my palm because of always clenching my fingers to keep it in place. It's a full time job. I should get the ring re-sized but I don't want to leave it anywhere anymore.

If I tell you that, in addition to telling you I refuse to eat prawns with their armor still on and that I can be a skeptic but still miss a nuance a mile wide, then I won't have to tell you that everyone is here today.

Literally, everyone.

Well, except for Cole and for Jacob because they're dead but everyone else is within reach presently and it's not been easy, but maybe that's because Joel is watching me because he can read my face in spite of my ability to charm him into ruin and absent servitude, Nolan is watching me because he cares about us and really he wants to do everything he can to make our lives easier if he can, and Caleb is watching me just because...well, because he covets, and there is no way of sugarcoating that to make it sound like anything else anymore.

Be careful what you wish for was an early tattoo, a reminder that I failed to heed. His favorite quote, not mine, and when I read it my brain says it in his voice and that makes me want to snatch up a dull spoon and scoop out the contents of my mind like pumpkin guts on Halloween Eve. Carve a scary face on the front, light a candle and let's get this night underway.

We took the costumes off. After a while things become so uncomfortable you no longer care to remain in character. We have stopped playing nice. So many years and it feels like yesterday and he left and made a go at life in the hot potato and I got married and got a job at the bank and every chance I got I would take leaves of absence to join the closest show and warm my freak blood under the big top and everyone complained and lowed against that but I did it anyway. I dropped out of university at the age of twenty-one because I don't know what people wanted from me and at the show I knew for certain. Sometimes Lochlan would join me but more often than not I was alone just because once the worst passes you begin at the bottom and you don't have to worry so much about things. They have already happened, the only direction is up.

And I was in harm's way because I don't know how to be anywhere else, clearly. And I'm not anymore but it still feels the same. The sun is warm on my face, the promise of summer is just within reach and I want to pack light and hit the tents now, because I can make a spare few dollars and escape into unreality, where I fit in best.

I suck at real life, Lochie.

You just think you do, Bridge.

Fair traffic control

Ok, this phone just rules everything. Not only for the epic little camera (I have not shared the good pictures with you), but for the easy to personalize interface and all the apps! Just like an iPhone, only I can have all the pink icons and heart-dotted fonts and crazy looking weather skins that I want. There are two things that bother me and they aren't deal-breakers anymore. One is the keyboard. I know it's been just two weeks or less but I'm finding it a slow process to type.

The other is battery life. I did not expect the five, six days I could get out of a Blackberry without batting an eye, but really I think this needs to be plugged in once, preferably twice a day. I can see a solar charger pod in my future for just-in-case.

And yes, I can't get past level four in Angry Birds Easter. The boys are all eye-rollie about that, saying the thrill has passed, but hey, I'm a noob. Let me haz mah flyin' birdies. There were no games like this on my Blackberries.

They think I am funny, because I'm in their faces every ten seconds with HEY! Look, I made my app drawer into a bunny (I want to say bunneh but I'm a grown woman). Or, OMG. MACRO FOR THE WIN.

This is a weird day, or possibly I might be a tiny bit excited. A three-day weekend for everyone looms on today's horizon and I will be there to meet it, waving my arms over my head, showing it where to land.

Nolan is coming up. Joel will be stopping in, since he's in town but for business. Caleb is home from la belle province and in fine form so I may purchase and register a taser and keep it in my pocket and if he gets too close to me I can just erase his memory or knock him down if I'm really lucky.

Codex fell into a permanent place in The Songs That Make Bridget Who She Is (whoever that is) and I added glassblowing to my horrible little private, inadequate, insufficient, reluctant bucket list.

I finished all the alcohol in the house and I gave myself a fucking french manicure with a ten-dollar kit and I swear I can't see the difference between my nails and my neighbor's, though hers have fake length-extensions glued on or something and mine don't. PJ says that means I can wipe my own ass. Har. Perspective AND mean. And questions! We have them.

Here beside the bunneh. Hoppity-hop.

Snort.

Victory. It's mine. Okay a little one only, but that's enough.

As a six-year veteran of gardening in less than ideal conditions, today is a momentous day for me. Behold, I bring you...microlilacs.

Or maybe they are macro-lilacs, since I had to ratchet the camera down to get anything at all and I almost missed them in my travels around the garden, having dismissed this sort of generic looking perennial that I had forgotten the name of over the winter.

I never said I was a conscientious gardener, just a persistent one. I've wanted my own scratch-grown lilacs since forever. Now I got 'em.

Yay.

This is so wholly inadequate as a post, but I don't have time for more.

Three years. That's 1095 days married to Tucker, since we are on a nickname tangent again. Three years of watching perfectly good lip glosses disappear into his giant mouth that could wake the dead (but won't, even by request) with yelling, singing, or a mix of the two (or snoring or laughing, when he really gets going). Ben is only quiet when things aren't good. Boy, is he ever loud these days.

Three years of defiance in the face of relentless pressure. Three years of awesomely destructive food fights and ridiculous laughter that doesn't cease until someone wets their pants (usually me, fine, okay). Three years of doubts and arguments and enough tears to lift a large vessel and carry it to a far-away land and an effort to build a life that is so fucking normal that castles have been replaced with chalets and fairytales with a gritty, perfect reality swept off the sidewalk that leads to nowhere. He took the crown. He put it up somewhere high. I can't have it back, I am told.

(It's the journey, stupid. Stop waiting).

Three years of growing pains and butting heads. Three years of desperate, legendary love. We're doing just fine if you call living in the garden of good and evil acceptable accommodations. We slay people in our day to day lives with our devotion and our loyalties and we worry them with our mutual infatuation. The need to shelter each other is larger than life and it doesn't erode into the sea because we put in a breakwater and everything is going to be okay. We keep testing but these bonds are holding and we are wrapped up in love, held tight by our friends and our promises to each other. They call them vows, we call them promises and promises are things you don't break.

Three years, and we are no longer newlyweds but we still have a long way to go before we qualify as long-haulers. That's okay, time seems to move quickly when it comes to happy things. We'll be there soon enough.

Ben pointed out, while he was in the shower and I was brushing my teeth, that the third year modern anniversary gift category is glass. I asked him what we should do about that. He said he knew, and he pressed himself, fully naked, up against the glass shower door. He actually put too much pressure on the door and it flew open and the bathroom got soaked. I got soaked. Ben didn't care. He pulled me against his chest and hung on until we almost broke our necks on the slippery floor. After that other things may have happened, and I'll leave those up to your imagination for now, I have a date to get ready for.

Happy Anniversary, big Ben. I love you. Still. Always.

Hot damn.

Ex-Nomads and little mysteries.

I see today with a newsprint fray
My night is colored headache-grey
Don't wake me with so much.
The ocean machine is set to nine
I'll squeeze into heaven and valentine
My bed is pulling me, gravity
Daysleeper.

Duncan is the picture of Kerouac-cool today. He's the only one that didn't venture into the depths of retail hell yesterday in search of jeans that weren't shredded and on life support. Every five to seven years I can get the boys to buy some new goods but it's a tough sell until their wallets, phones and cash start to disappear as they're out and about, thanks to the holes holding up their pockets and revealing all their secrets (no, not those secrets. We don't let it come to that.)

Not Duncan though. He travels light and holds his ground. A pack of Belmonts, an ancient moleskin notebook with the stub of a pencil stuck in the middle and his scratched-up but spotless aviator sunglasses. Matches from restaurants he doesn't look like he can afford but can over most people I have met. Two keys. One for the front door of our house and one for his truck. A black elastic looped around one wrist to tie back his hair when it's necessary to do so. His phone. That's it. I've never seen him with anything else, ever.

I have Carte Blanche to read his notebook whenever I want, since we always seem to be sharing the same page in life anyway. He is a poet by definition and a tech by necessity only he is far more seasoned and useful than Dalton, if we are comparing. Dalton is much more pie-in-the-sky and in awe of the world and doesn't get a lot accomplished, though he tries. To his credit he will drop everything and hit the road just like his big brother and so that's how I wound up playing his unofficial real estate agent for so long and why it made so much sense for him to move into the house when August decided to play musical addresses over the winter.

They are firmly on Team Jacob, if we are keeping score, but we aren't so that's okay too. I met Dalton (we call him TJ, if you want to read more) through Jacob and then later on when they met Ben they defected quickly and wound up on Team Benjamin. But Ben doesn't actually have a team because he's an independent door to door salesman, okay?

And Duncan didn't technically need a job because he's paid his dues and got a little lucky too and he and Andrew discovered they could go around the world with backpacks and knowledge and they did it for a long time and now they have settled down a little more. I think age does that, though Duncan said he has seen the world three times over and now he just wants to be home with us and that makes me really warm when he says it like that and I really enjoy having TJ living here now, it's like yet another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place and at some point here we are finally going to see the Big Picture.

Because I still have no idea what it is.

Hardly interested in your definition of how well-adjusted we are.

This is a silly day. We are having slow wake-ups and long coffees. The dishwasher is droning in my ears, the dryer one floor below thumping along with a quiet hum. I'm a huge fan of dumb things like putting the laundry in at five in the morning and then it's done and away by eight.

Ben is assaulting my ears with the latest Solid Steel podcast. I can't figure this part of him out, after all this time. He is all METALMETALMETAL and then throws in a hint of Techno or whatever it is. He says this is akin to my need to infuse classical music into my metal crushes like sprinkles on a chocolate cupcake. Quirks, we got 'em. We don't have chocolate cupcakes, however. Maybe that can be rectified soon.

We snuggled in last night and watched Hereafter. A fantastic-directed movie, and I have a huge crush on Matt Damon anyway. I thought it would be like What Dreams May Come but it wasn't. It wasn't sad or difficult to watch either, even though I have a preoccupation with death and with sad, too. A good way to spend two hours. I only feel asleep very briefly once. A coup, if you will. Because this morning I saw the trailer for 2012, I was like what's with the spaceship? And the boys were all like Bridge...you slept through it. It's an ark. Don't ask.

And I am not going to draw out the issue of whether or not Lochlan will be permitted to decide Ruth's future so you can stop emailing me about that. I'm sure we'll butt heads on that subject and a zillion others over the next decade.

Ruth will be twelve this summer, a positively bittersweet number and don't think it doesn't bring up a lot of reluctant nostalgia in everyone. Well, three of us, to be sure. And I bet it is frustrating for you to come and read and not understand the gravity of this and not have all the facts and wonder what in the hell transpired but really it's very complicated and I have always tried to structure my writing around my relationships and some total fluff too and leave out pertinent facts because it's my choice to do so.

Just like Lochlan has made his choice to return to my life under less-ideal circumstances because, like my readers seem to feel, some Bridget is better than no Bridget at all.

And now if you'll excuse me, there is a conference call to be navigated and a dishwasher to be unloaded and then the day will be fully underway and free to indulge in anything we want.

The hard way.

The circus is the only ageless delight you can buy for money.
~Ernest Hemingway.

Over lunch Ruth was extolling the virtues of her gymnastics class, bragging rights sewn down when she demonstrated some serious contortionist moves for us in the middle of the kitchen floor.

I pointed out that soon she'd be able to earn her keep with her natural talents, and maybe she should consider joining the circus.

How old do you have to be?

Eighteen.

I have a little time left to prepare, then.

Yes.

A lot has changed in the days since our run. Now there are age minimums, insurance mandates, regular health care, and on-site education. There are cross-country auditions and the Internet, and a whole faction of people who oppose all circuses based on a few bad apples who spoiled what should be a magical event no matter what age you claim as your own (the ones who used wild animals and kept them in tiny cages on the road for endless months straight, to be clear).

And still Lochlan shook his head violently, meeting my eyes over the tops of their heads, accusing me of being impulsive to willingly encourage my daughter to venture in to the land of freakshow-calibre darkness and depravity.

Only it's not an impulse. It's right there, within her blood as it was in mine and I could think of nothing better than to live by one's wits, skipping over formal education and predictable paths, running straight up the centre of foolish, making a left at ridiculous, and then coming to a full stop at impetuous and calling it home.

I'm not going to fight about it now. He can spend the next six years trying to talk her out of it, if he wants. If Ruth is anything like me, she won't listen anyway.

Rhymes with glitch (it's okay, I know the way to hell).

Play it like a cameo, and watch her overflow
She’ll find a way to go down
Run like a candidate, like any minute made
You’ll find a way to go down

I’m sick of the faces, the scene and the light
We’ll be fine when the faces connect with the spine

Sophie called just as I tackled Daniel, ripping the very last gummy tarantula out of his hand and stuffing it in my mouth. My reward is to be flipped onto my back and held down while he lets a long string of spit descend from his mouth until it almost touches my nose and then he sucks it back in. I break into a laughing scream, because Ew! Dancooties! He has the worst ones. Just like his brother, he sees absolutely nothing wrong with sneezing on people or cornering someone to pass gas in their face. Did I mention they throw food as well?

Finally he lets me up and I feign throwing up and take the phone. Yes, my very sophisticated, pulled-together nemesis should be made to feel that much more superior by virtue of my ridiculous immaturity. I live in a frat house. Such is life here and I wouldn't change it for anything.

Hello?

Bridget, hi. Is this a difficult time to talk?

No, why?

I heard lots of...noises.

It's nothing. Why are you calling? (My God, look how fucking smooth I am!)

I wanted to...well, I wanted to see if you needed anything.

I'm guessing Caleb is there and you're discussing the state of my brain.

Well, actually-

Well, actually, Sophie, Caleb is the one who told me Jacob was still alive, and then he back-tracked just enough to make me seem crazy and then he made sure I am aware of what he is capable of doing by having some other very important documents altered. So there is no question in my mind what's wrong in my life. Clearly it's his presence. You might want to think about how knowing him might impact your own life. I would anyway, if I were you. Thankfully, I'm not.

*CLICK*

It felt so fucking good to hang up on her. Almost as good as not getting spit on by Danny.

Not often I indulge in this sort of total nonsense so here.

I am experimenting with the front-facing camera on my Nexus. I think it works well. What do you think? It was about time I got rid of the photo in my profile in which I am hiding behind a Blackberry. A curve 8300, no less. That was like three phones ago! Now I have FIVE mega-pixies! FIVE! I love me some pixies. Please bring me a crowd.

<-----------------Enjoy.

Not often you get to glimpse a real princess, hey?

(Oh, kiss my little arse, PJ.)