Tim Meyer - The Switch House

My sister, Anne Naughton, never left The Riv (what we called it when we were kids) and now has kids of her own. She married Robert Davis, her high school honey, and had three little bundles of joy. I called Anne about a week before, asking if it would be okay to stay with them temporarily until I got my feet back on the ground. “We can empty out the basement,” she told me. “Stay with us as long as you like, as long as you can handle a noisy household.” Besides her, Robert, and the three kids, they also had two dogs and two cats. “Things haven’t been quiet around here in a long time,” she said, giggling. Oddly, this seemed to please her. Yes, the teenage girl who locked herself in her room every day so she wouldn’t have to listen to me blast my music, or hear my mother and father argue about things that didn’t matter, now enjoyed a rowdy family life.

Go figure.

I told her the stay would only be temporary until I found a decent job, and was able to afford a place on my own. “No problem,” she said. “Stay as long as you need to. I know how rough things have been lately.”

I didn’t actually explain to Anne how rough my times had been, but I’m sure she got the full scoop from my mother, the gossip queen of whatever town she happens to reside in. Currently, she lives in North Jersey near her sister, in a town where everyone sounds like they belong in a Martin Scorsese picture. I rarely see my mother, with the exception of Christmas, when she’d fly down to visit Lynne and I. Every year I’d promise to return to Jersey during the next holiday, but I never did make good on that promise. I think my mother knew I never would, and honestly, I think she was okay with that. Secretly, I think she liked flying south every year.

There wasn’t any particular reason I hadn’t been home in almost six years. There wasn’t anything I disliked about Jersey. It’s not exactly what reality television has made it out to be. Every place has their fine points and low ones, just as people do. If you asked me why I hadn’t returned home in so long, I couldn’t tell you. All I can tell you is that when I earned my Journalism degree from Rutgers University at the age of twenty-two, I was done with Jersey, and Jersey was done with me.

To this day, I believe a large part of why I never bothered to return home was Lynne. I was twenty-four when I met her, and working at The Georgia Press , in Atlanta. We met at a nightclub—a place I’m not particularly fond of—downtown. The whole club scene isn’t really my thing. The idea of buying expensive drinks and being forced to make an ass out of myself on the dance floor did nothing for me. If it contains loud, obnoxious music in a room full of fist-pumping maniacs (okay, so there is something I hate about New Jersey), then count me out. I preferred a more relaxed atmosphere, like sitting on a barstool, watching whatever game happens to be on that night. In any case, I can’t recall what I was doing there that night. I remember a few of us from the paper went out, maybe because Mark (our editor) wanted to celebrate a big advertising sale, or maybe it was for Tom Riddick’s thirtieth birthday. I don’t remember. I do remember there were four of us, hanging out in the corner, trying to hold a conversation over the blaring music that made the floor beneath us vibrate like an earth tremor. It was from that position I spotted her. Lynne’s long golden hair waved in the air as she mashed her buttocks into the hips of her dancing partner. She was wearing a low-cut shirt, which displayed enough cleavage to make any man salivate. I was the only one out of the four of us to notice her. I stared at her, captivated by her looks and that perfect smile. She seemed like she knew how to have fun.

I don’t know what compelled me to walk over there any more than I know why I avoided my home state for so long. I guess it was the same driving force that made me return to Jersey after a six-year absence. It was probably the same invisible current that offered me that evil camera, forever warping my sense of reality. Whatever this strange current was, it was powerful, and I couldn’t fight it. Hell, I didn’t want to.

“Naughton, what are you doing?” Tom asked, but I barely heard him. I shifted my feet toward Lynne, no longer in control of them. Everything around me drowned. I was focused on one thing, and one thing only.

Lynne Bradley.

Shortly after that night, we began hanging out three or four times a week. When we weren’t together, we were talking on the phone, laughing at each others’ corny, pathetic jokes or discussing which professional quarterback had the team to get to the Big Dance in February. She always took Matt Ryan’s side, of course, being a cheerleader for the hometown team. It was only a part-time gig, but it paid well. When football was in the off-season, she instructed dance classes in Aberdeen, a half-hour south of Atlanta.

Besides being one of the most talented dancers in all of Georgia, and in my opinion, the most beautiful, Lynne was several other things. One of those things was a recovering drug addict (Hi, my name is Ritchie and I’m here for support). She wasn’t clean when I met her, but once we started being “official,” she claimed she wanted to quit for me so we could be happy together for the longest time possible. When an addict says they want to get clean for any reason other than themselves, they’re going to fail ten times out of ten. At least that’s what Lynne’s sponsor told me.

Lynne checked herself into rehab two weeks after the season ended. She relapsed once in our four-year relationship. A mutual friend told me she had been smoking crack with some of the other cheerleaders before a game. I confronted her about it and she told me she hadn’t touched the shit. Swore on her dead mother. Swore on Jesus. Swore on us .

I found the crack pipe buried deep within her closet a week later. She said it was left over from the year prior, before her rehab stint. I called her a liar, along with a bunch of other names I don’t really regret, and then ended things with her. I was pretty upset about having to do it, but it was the only way.

Two weeks after moving out, she showed up on my doorstep, homeless and with no place to go. She swore she went back to rehab and cleaned herself up, that she was done with drugs and didn’t need them anymore. Her hair was scraggly and dark, not the golden color it once was. Huge black bags sat beneath her eyes. It was hardly the look of someone drug-free. But what did I know? Lynne Bradley filled a void in my heart no woman before her could. I couldn’t turn her loose in the streets. They’d eat her alive. Visions of her blowing strangers for crack money filled my head, and I let her in. I told her if she fucked up one more time that I’d have no choice but to shut her out of my life completely.

She agreed. “You’re always so good to me,” she said. “Always believed in me.”

“Still do,” I said. I touched her cheek. We kissed.

I told her she’d have to continue going to meetings and that I’d be happy to attend them for moral support. I went to my fair share of meetings, and met a lot of kind-hearted people. Whenever Lynne asked me to go with her, I never said no. I was always there for her.

She stayed clean for the remainder of our relationship, which ended not so long ago and fueled my trip back to The Riv.

I remember it happened on a Saturday. I had to go into the office early to finish up a few things before the Sunday edition hit the printer. I dropped by Mark’s office a little after eight, right after I hit the break room for coffee and donuts. Mark was thumbing through an article, his trusty red pen hard at work. He didn’t look up to greet me.