Dimensions

by Krystyne Price

  Jane’s breath caught in her throat. She’d completely forgotten about the picture dedicated to her mother. It had hung there as long as she could remember, and she’d always wondered who Katherine Marsh was. For it hadn’t been until she’d hit eleven years of age that she’d even learned Mavis Marsh wasn’t her real mother. She leaned back against the wall, eyes glued to the picture, as her past once again haunted her present.

  * * *

  It had been during one of her grandparents’ yearly visits. Their den, added to the back some years after the original house had been built, had in it’s a corner a built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcase. There had always been a thick pink book on the very top shelf that she had asked about a few times, only to be told it was off-limits and that she should never touch it. Always curious, she had never been able to reach it and had never dared to try pulling a chair or anything else over to climb up it for fear of her father’s or stepmother’s wrath.

  But for one reason or another, on a hot and sunny June afternoon she’d gone to the den looking for her grandparents. Not finding them, she turned toward the bookcase, the pink book calling to her as it had so many times. Now that she was a bit taller, Jane decided she was going to take it down and finally have a look at it. She’d climbed on the second shelf up, managed to grab the binding, and had the book in her hands and up to her bedroom before anyone would even notice she’d been downstairs.

  Safely inside her room and sitting cross-legged on her bed, Jane finally turned the book over in her hands. Its cover said BABY BOOK, with a picture of an infant girl posed on the front. She opened it. The first page had a place for name, date of birth, time of birth and weight. It read:

  Jane Eyre Marsh

  March 14, 1982

  3:14 a.m.

  7 lbs. 4 oz.

  “Jane Eyre,” she breathed, turning the page. “Me? It can’t be!” And yet it was. It was her baby book. The next page said her father’s name was Reverend Thomas Frank Marsh. Her mother was…Jane’s jaw had dropped as she’d read the line over and over again in disbelief. Her mother wasn’t Mavis Marsh, but someone named Katherine Jane Marsh. She didn’t understand. And how could she? She’d grown up thinking Mavis was her mother. Yet the book in her hands told a different story, one she wasn’t sure she could believe. The next pages held nothing but a lock of baby hair tied in a loop with a small pink ribbon. But all of the other childhood milestones like first steps, first words and first eating of solid food were left blank. The pages were yellowed and didn’t appear to have been looked at even once.

  She realized at some point that she’d missed where two pages had stuck together at the front. Jane went back and carefully peeled at them. The corner of the second page ripped off, but she managed to keep the rest of the two pages intact. Finally she got them apart and was greeted with a small photograph of a baby with a bit of blonde hair, chubby cheeks and slender fingers raised near her face. She was wrapped in a pink blanket and laying in what had probably been a bassinet in the hospital. She was cute and looked like she’d been awakened to have the picture taken, like she was about to yawn.

  “It’s me,” she whispered reverently, tracing the photo with her fingertips. “It’s me.”

  And right then and there she’d sought her grandmother out, baby book in hand, demanding to know the meaning of what she’d found. Her grandmother’s blank, sad stare had been infuriating. At the time, Jane hadn’t realized it was because the woman was terrified of telling Jane the truth. If Jane’s father and stepmother ever found out, it was quite possible they’d ban her grandparents from seeing her ever again. Still, Grandma could deny her nothing and extracting a promise from the child to keep it a secret, the story had finally been told.

  Her mother had been fit and healthy throughout the pregnancy that would bring her and her husband Tom their first child. By all accounts, Katherine was a fun-loving tomboy who enjoyed children and cats the most. The delivery had gone well, and the first two days after had been smooth. But then Katherine had taken ill. She’d become lethargic and had developed a fever. She slept more than she was awake and began complaining of pain in her abdomen the third day after her daughter’s birth. By the fourth night, Katherine Marsh had become what some called a vegetable – her body was still working, but her brain was dead. She’d succumbed to septicemia and just like that, the new mother was gone.

  Jane’s father had been devastated. A widower at twenty-three, he’d been left with a tiny baby girl and nothing else when he came home from the hospital that day. Unable to face the loss of his soulmate, Tom had moved in with Katherine’s parents and it had been her grandmother who’d raised her from infancy through two years of age. It was during those two years that Mavis Larson had struck. Always admiring Tom from a distance throughout junior college, she’d never been able to catch his eye because Tom had fallen hard for Katherine the moment they’d met. The two had been married after junior college and Tom was halfway through seminary when Katherine died.

  And Mavis had hated Katherine for it. When Jane was but one year of age, she forced herself back into Tom’s life. As a single parent facing the unknown of getting a job as a minister and trying to raise a baby on his own, Tom had welcomed Mavis’ controlling nature. Where Katherine had controlled him for the good, directing his energies and feelings along a positive path, Mavis had controlled him for her own purposes. One year later, the two were married. And that, her grandmother told her, was the beginning of the end of happiness for Jane. Oh, at first Mavis had doted upon the blonde-haired blue-eyed beauty, treating her like a princess. But by the time the toddler had turned three, Mavis’ true nature had been revealed.

  By then it was too late. Tom had buried his first wife more deeply in his soul than she’d been buried in the ground. He was content to let his new wife handle everything at home, including his child. He was blind to what was happening, concentrating instead on his new position at the First Baptist Church of Darvon, on impressing the parishioners and elders of the church. He proudly touted himself, his wife and daughter as the perfect Christian family. And by all appearances, they were. But appearances hid the cruelty that occurred behind closed doors at the parsonage just across the street.

  * * *

  As Jane’s eyes refocused on the picture of the child being walked through the forest, her chest tightened. All of these events had been relegated to the very back of her mind. Of her heart. All things considered, she began to wonder if she weren’t somehow just as bad as her dad. He’d buried his past as surely as she’d buried her own.

  Like father, like daughter.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jane continued walking through the narrow hall, passing the choir room, where she remembered maroon robes with golden sashes had hung in the plain brown armoire. The old piano still sat staunchly against the front wall and metal folding chairs were still lined up in three rows. It was where the choir would dress in preparation for Sunday and other special services, and where they would warm up. She had to admit to herself that she missed singing in the choir. In spite of her anti-religious attitude now, making music had been enjoyable. Even more so on the rare occasions when she’d been given solos to sing in front of everyone. All had liked her voice. All except Mavis.

  Moving further revealed a handful of rooms used for Sunday School. She turned a corner and saw at the end of the second hall the back entry that led outside. To her immediate right was the narrow doorway to the baptismal. She herself had made that trek in blue jeans and a white turtleneck when she was only eleven years of age, for her father to baptize, and therefore “save” her. She had done it only to please him.

  Further down was the narrow back door to the sanctuary dais. Her father had entered from there like an emcee at the Oscars. Next was a hall that led back to the sanctuary, and just before the back door were the steps that led to the church’s finished basement. The same gray carpeting from the foyer covered this floor. Worn and threadbare, she assumed a lack of funds kept them from bu
ying new. Behind her stretched a hall that had contained both her father’s office and rooms used for Sunday School and Vacation Bible School classes, among other things. The wooden double doors at the bottom of the basement stairs called to her like a painful siren song. Pulled forward as though by a force outside herself, Jane moved down the steps, tested the L-shaped knob and found it to be unlocked. As it twisted beneath her hand, her heart thudded dangerously in her chest.

  For here she had also encountered the one she now knew was Vasan.

  She stepped into the large, open basement. To the far right was a gigantic kitchen that covered that entire wall, set behind a serving bar with roll-down covers that were currently closed. Beneath those there were folding tables and folding chairs lined up along that side of the room as well. To her left was another inset room with accordion doors left open. The nursery. Still the same stackable gray cribs, six in the unit. Each with its own small mattress and sheets. Children’s toys and books all neatly picked up and placed in toy boxes and on bookshelves. It had been here that she’d seen him for the last time as a teenager.

  * * *

  She’d been sitting on a small children’s chair looking through a hymnal, picking out her favorite hymns and humming her way through them. Bored one summer’s day Jane did as she often had, wandering around the spacious, empty church picking at the piano and organ. And so there she was, half-singing and half-humming church songs at age eighteen when she’d suddenly gotten the feeling she was being watched. Jumping to her feet and whirling around, she saw him standing in the middle of the basement, arms folded across his chest.

  “Don’t stop,” he had said. She frowned, found herself unable to breathe, unable to believe he was there in the bowels of her father’s church. “The sound pleases me.”

  But her voice would not come, and thirty seconds later he had nodded once before disappearing. It had taken her many long minutes to recover. When at last she had, she’d gone searching the entire church, but could find no sign of him. And though it had been the last time she’d seen him, it hadn’t been the last time she’d thought of him. How he had made her feel that night. How he’d fulfilled her desires, taught her the things her own father and stepmother had refused to speak of. She had decided that it may have been a dream, but it had been a dream she had always clung to. A man she had always wondered about.

  * * *

  Subconsciously, she realized now, she had recreated him as the menacing anti-Christ of her books. She had given him a name; she had given him a complete 3-D existence. Apparently too much of one, if the fact that she was now seeing him again was any indication. It was probably time to do some serious internal cleansing. For all her pretenses of water rolling off a duck’s back, Jane was still deeply affected by her childhood, by her stepmother, her father, her half-brothers. She may have dealt with the ramifications of them on the surface, but deep down she hid feelings long ago pushed to the side. She was seeing Vasan to tell her it was time to get rid of them once and for all.

  Convinced of this reasoning, Jane decided to make a try at seeing the house she’d grown up in. She wondered if the current pastor would let her in and surmised he probably would. What minister turned away a stranger who came knocking at their door? Hadn’t her father always taught that anyone could be Jesus in disguise? She began moving slowly across the floor, remembering the potlucks and Bible studies and a myriad of other events that had taken place in this basement.

  A scent wafted past her nose. She froze dead in her tracks. It grew stronger and stronger and she felt her skin tighten into goose bumps. Stronger yet until at least she could hear someone breathing. She turned around and as her senses had told her, found it was…

  “Vasan,” she breathed.

  “So, you remember my name now, little girl?” His eyes were dark. Cold. Colder than she remembered. This Vasan much more resembled the one in her book than he did the one from her teenage bed. “Do you also remember our past now?”

  She gulped and nodded, eyes wide. Jane wasn’t sure whether to be afraid or excited.

  A smile spread across his face, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in danger. “Perhaps we should talk.”

  “A—” Her voice came out as a squeak. She cleared her throat, swallowed and tried again. “About what?”

  “Do you not wonder why I came to you throughout your childhood?” he asked, moving toward the folding chairs in the corner. “Certainly you must.”

  “You were a dream,” she replied, feeling an irresistible urge to follow him. “You are a dream. You’re not real.” She didn’t know who was moving her feet, but was certain it wasn’t her.

  “Oh, really?” he asked, whirling to face her. He closed the short distance between them, his hand outstretched. Before she could react, his fingers had closed around her arm. “This does not feel real?”

  He moved closer. She could smell him. Very nearly taste him. He filled her somehow, like she was an empty pitcher and he was warm…no, hot…liquid. His eyes seemed to look right through her and she gasped softly as one arm circled her waist, the other reaching up to touch her cheek.

  “Cintaku,” he whispered, lips mere inches from hers. “Kekasihku.” Jane could feel the heat of his breath, from his body as it enveloped her. She found her will swaying. She couldn’t stop looking into those eyes, so dark they were very nearly black. Unable to distinguish irises from pupils. Unable to see anything but a great void behind them. “Putri saya,” he rumbled, his voice making her body vibrate. And then he took hold of her chin and their lips met.

  She groaned into the kiss, opening her mouth. It seemed so familiar, as though it had happened yesterday instead of eighteen years before. Her arms snaked around his neck, hands moving along his bald head. It was so smooth. So soft. His tongue probed her mouth deeply. She felt him harden against her and her own reaction made her head spin as he crushed them together. It felt so good. So right. She had been craving his touch all this time. Craving a repeat of the night they had spent together.

  No, she realized as his lips and teeth moved down her jaw to her neck, this is no dream. This was real. He was real.

  Her eyes snapped open. He couldn’t be real! He was a character in her book! She jumped and pushed him away. His eyes widened, startled as she stumbled backwards, wiping his saliva from her mouth and neck. She looked at him wildly, still backing toward the double doors that would lead her up the steps to the front foyer.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “You still want me.”

  “No,” she whispered, shaking her head violently. “You don’t exist! You don’t exist!” She turned, fumbling with the doorknob for a moment before flinging the door open. She heard him laugh softly and turned to make sure he wasn’t following her.

  But when she looked, he was gone.

  “Where’d he go?” she screeched, running back to the center of the basement. “Where the hell did he go?!?”

  It was empty. Yet still her mouth burned where they had kissed. Still her body was on fire. Jane trembled like a leaf in a strong wind as tears filled her eyes. This time, when she turned and ran, she kept going, banging the glass entry door shut behind her. She started up her car and slammed it into gear.

  What were those words he had said? They had sounded like Bahasa Melayu, which she knew from having written the language into two of her three books. Was that what he’d been speaking? Putri saya. He had said that to her in the past and now again, but what did it mean?

  It couldn’t be real. She stomped on the accelerator and took off down Maple Street. It just couldn’t!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Her cell phone rang. It scared the shit out of her. At the end of Maple, dead-ended into the entry to Darvon Park, she hit the brakes, bringing up splatters of mud from the recently rained-on dirt road. She reached over to grab the phone from her purse and looked at the screen. Closing her eyes in a moment of relief, she flipped it open.

  “Hey, Lori.”

  “Hey,
you don’t sound so good. What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” she lied. “You?”

  “I just called because I finished reading your latest. Damn good! I especially like how you left it open for Vasan to return! I’d like to see the Tanners kick the shit out of him once and for all.”

  So would I, Jane thought. Aloud she asked, “So it was good?”

  “Yeah, a couple sticking points. You in a place to go over them?”

  “No, not…I don’t have my laptop on me, it’s in the trunk.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Darvon.”

  “Darvon?”

  “Yeah. I thought I’d see my hometown before this book gets published.”

  “You’re kidding! I didn’t know you were planning on going!”

  “Neither did I, I guess. It was kind of spur of the moment.” Jane relaxed in the front seat. “Maybe when I figure out where I’m staying I can call you back?”

  “Jane, what’s wrong? I know you; your voice isn’t right.”

  What could she say? Oh, yeah, Lori, it’s like this – a phantom guy from my childhood, the one who stole my virginity, well, he’s back and he’s real. Oh and by the way, he’s the bad guy you just read about in my book. Can you say institutionalized? As much as part of her desperately wanted to tell somebody…and as much as that somebody would probably only be Lori anyway…she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  “I guess there are too many memories here,” she finally answered. Not a lie, really. Just leaving out exactly which memories. “I wasn’t prepared to start thinking about my dad.”

  “Mm,” Lori mumbled thoughtfully. “You sure that’s it?”

  “Yeah. And I’m tired. Long flight.”