by Cassie Beebe
In the time he had to blink, a hard fist had connected with his jaw with a force strong enough to send him to his knees.
The floor beneath him faded in and out of his vision, and he saw drops of red fall in a pool on the carpet before he even tasted the blood in his mouth. It took him a long moment to remember how to breathe, and when he did, the breath he sucked in stuck in his throat and sent him coughing, spraying more blood on the floor and his hands.
The shock of the hit was still ringing in his ears, and he could already feel his left eye beginning to swell, blocking out more of his vision. He thought he had endured enough pain in his life to face anything, but as he held himself up on his hands and knees, coughing blood and blinking to erase the blackness that threatened to overtake his consciousness, he realized his father had been holding back before. This was new.
“Get up,” the man demanded, nudging Jacob with the toe of his boot.
Jacob slumped over, sitting on the ground with his back against the dresser. He looked up through his one good eye at his father’s indifferent expression and shook his head.
“You don’t even care,” he muttered in disgust, his voice thick with emotion bubbling up to the surface. The tears started to well in his eyes, and as soon as one escaped the pool, all control was lost. He became a blubbering mess of weeping, and through all of the grief, he still managed to feel anger with himself for expecting anything more from his father.
“I care about you getting blood all over my carpet. Now get up,” the man retorted in a calm voice.
Jacob shook his head through his sobs, but he didn’t protest when his father pulled him up by his shoulders, grabbing a t-shirt from the top of the dresser and using it to wipe all of the tears and blood from Jacob’s face.
“Come here, now,” his father said, trying to pull him into his chest, but Jacob cringed at the touch. The man rolled his eyes and huffed a sigh, ever-impatient with his son’s strange phobia of touch. “Come on, now, enough of that,” he said, pulling Jacob in firmly, ignoring his moans of protest.
Jacob didn’t have the energy to object any further, and as much as he hated himself for it, he felt a sense of relief at the embrace. It didn’t matter whose arms were holding him up, so long as they kept him from falling apart. He sank into his father’s shoulder, sobbing into his shirt, crippled by all of his loss and grief.
“That’s it, let it all out,” his father patted him too firmly on the back while he cried. After a moment, he said, “Of course I care. I loved your sister more than you know.”
Jacob cried harder, clinging to the hope that that was somehow true.
“It’s a shame something so tragic had to happen. But she always had her issues, following the rules. She was quite the rebel, that one.”
Jacob’s sobs stuttered to a halt. “What?” he sniffled, the sound muffled by his father’s shirt.
“Well, I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s not her fault she was like that. It’s not like she had any positive female role models around to look up to.”
The tears were gone now. He stepped out of his father’s embrace and looked him in the eye.
“Are you saying… that what happened to Maggie…,” he paused, his head beginning to throb as he tried to wrap his mind around the way his father viewed the world, “was Mom’s fault?”
The man gave him an exasperated look. “Now, Jake, come on. I know you like to remember you mother as a saint, but you and I both know she had her issues.”
The rage began to boil. “Stop,” Jacob said though his teeth. He turned his attention back to gathering his necessary belongings, so he could get out of there.
“What with the drugs and the obvious mental illness she always denied….”
“Stop it.”
Screw the journal, he thought. Just go.
“I mean, she always did her best with you kids, but…”
“Stop talking.”
“… I’m just saying, maybe if she were around, if she hadn’t been so selfish, Mags wouldn’t have –”
“Shut up!”
And he did.
He shut up and stared with wide eyes at the gun pointed at his face.
There was a long moment of necessary silence as Jacob breathed deeply and with purpose.
“Just… stop talking,” he demanded, closing his eyes for a second to calm the intense pounding in his head. His outstretched arm started to shake, so he opened his eyes and placed his other hand firmly underneath the gun, steadying his aim.
His father’s hands were held up in defense, and he looked between the gun and Jacob. “That my gun?” he nodded at it.
Jacob swallowed hard, his breath still shaky.
His father looked impressed. “Didn’t even realize it was missing.”
His nonchalance over the situation only fueled Jacob’s anger, and he tried to shake it off.
The man appraised him and a small smirk spread across his face. “You’re not gonna shoot me, son.”
“Don’t call me that.” He squeezed the gun tighter.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Jake,” he said. He started to take a step forward, and said “I know you’re upset, but –”
BANG.
Jacob flinched at the sound, nearly dropping the weapon. He looked at his father, his hand clutched over his chest as red spilled forth.
The man stared in shock at his open wound for a moment, examining the red sticky substance that now coated his hand.
Jacob was staring, too – wide-eyed and frozen – until the look of blank surprise on his father’s face turned to rage and he took another stumbling step forward.
Jacob shot again, still flinching at the sound and the kickback of the gun.
This time, the man sank to the floor, knees hitting the carpet first before he collapsed onto his stomach by Jacob’s feet.
“That’s when I heard the sirens,” Jacob whispered into his cell phone, staring unseeingly at the desk in front of him.
Jenna was still quiet on the other line.
“I guess someone must have called the cops when they heard the yelling.”
He gave a humorless scoff. Of course, the one time anyone gives a shit.
“Anyway, I knew I had to keep running. Just when I was leaving the room, though, I saw her journal, sticking out from under the mattress on the top bunk. If I’d seen it a minute sooner….”
Jenna took in a breath, and he listened to her let it out slowly, trying to hear her thoughts through her breath.
“I started running through the woods, just putting as much distance between me and those sirens as possible, and I felt this…,” he stopped. Somehow, after everything, this was the hard part. “Fuck. It sounds terrible.”
He fell back onto his bed and closed his eyes, pretending he was just talking aloud to himself, or Doctor Yang.
“I felt this kind of… high.”
He was hot, his skin sticking to his flannel shirt and jeans, and he felt as if his shame would boil him from the inside out.
“My doctor says it was probably a manic episode. I’d never had one before, and I haven’t felt it since. It was like…,” he breathed in deeply, feeling a faint echo of the mania as he tried to describe it. “It was like everything fell into focus. Like I had a purpose, something tangible I could do to make everything right. My mind was racing with the possibilities, options I had never considered. Every person who had ever wronged me flashed in my mind, and…,” he paused, clearing the emotion from his throat. “For the first time I felt like… like I was in control. Like I could finally take control of my life, and I wasn’t going to let myself be a victim, never again. It was like a drug.
“It wasn’t even a good drug, though. I mean, the high was… well… high. But there was a part of me that was still so anxious, afraid of the crash. But it didn’t matter,” he shook his head, staring up at the popcorn ceiling, water leaking from the outside of his eyes. “It didn’t matter if it was good or bad or… whatever. For the first ti
me since she was gone, I felt something besides grief and pain and loss, and I just…,” his breath caught in his chest.
He tried to steady himself with a breath, but it came out as a sob, so he just pressed on anyway.
“When it faded, I just wanted it back. I just wanted to feel something… anything else. It didn’t even have to be good. Just something else.”
In the dark and silence of his dorm room, he almost forgot Jenna was on the other line, listening to every word he said. He was about to be crying in earnest soon, if he didn’t pull himself together.
In an attempt to do just that, he sat up again, leaning on his knees, clearing his throat and wiping his eyes.
“So, um, anyway… I guess I just… went looking for that feeling again,” he said. “Never did find it.”
There was nothing but silence on the other line, and he wondered if she was doing the math and realizing he had only explained two of the four. He could continue, but if he was honest, he didn’t see the point. It was never really about the people – not from his narrow perspective, anyway. He did the things he did because he was deeply broken inside, and victimizing others gave him a false sense of control over his own life. It took him years of therapy to understand that, and it wasn’t something he was going to be able to adequately explain at 3am in his current state.
“Thank you for telling me,” Jenna finally said, breaking the silence.
He let out sigh of relief at hearing her voice, regardless of how much of her usual warmth seemed to be missing. “Thank you for listening,” he replied.
There was another beat of silence, and he tried to hear her breath again, to read her thoughts, but he couldn’t.
“Goodnight, Jacob.”
“Oh. Um. Goodnight.”
After a brief hesitation, the line went dead.
His head was throbbing before he even opened his eyes. With a groan, he forced his eyelids open, cringing against the light of the sun streaming through the blinds. He turned his head and stared at the clock until the numbers made sense, which took a good minute.
It was 12:24pm and his eyes were crusted with the remnants of his tears. He had an ache in his chest, but he couldn’t remember why it was there. As he stared at the rough pattern of the popcorn ceiling, letting his mind come to full consciousness, the night came back to him and the ache got stronger.
He closed his eyes again, wishing himself back to the land of dreamless sleep, where all of his problems faded into the dark nothingness. A faint ding, accompanied with two soft vibrations, told him his wish was not going to be fulfilled.
With a sigh, he pulled himself up, trying to remember where he had left his phone. He didn’t see it on the desk or the bedside table, so he rifled through the blankets until the bright screen announced its discovery.
As soon as he picked it up, his subconscious reminded him that something was wrong, but he didn’t understand what that was until he flipped it open and looked at the screen.
FOUR MISSED CALLS
THREE VOICEMAILS
The tiny date in the upper right corner of the screen indicated that it was Saturday, and he understood.
“Shit,” he muttered, clicking on the missed calls notification.
There were two from Doctor Summers’ office, one from an unfamiliar number, and one from Officer Millburn. His stomach turned at the sight of that one, and he reluctantly opened his voicemail box and put the phone to his ear.
The first message was a friendly sounding woman who said she was from Doctor Summers’ office, calling to see if Jacob was going to make it to his appointment that morning.
The next was a message from Doctor Summers herself, time stamped an hour after the first.
“Jacob, this is Doctor Breanna Summers. I’ve had Chelsea call you several times, and there hasn’t been any answer. I’m a bit concerned, as you’ve never missed a session before, and we haven’t been able to reach you this morning. Please give me a call back on this number as soon as you get this message, so we know everything is alright.”
She provided her personal cell number, which matched the unfamiliar number in his missed calls list.
The line made a beeping noise and a new voice spoke.
“Oh, uh, Jacob? This is April, from Officer Millburn’s office. You didn’t make it to your appointment today… um… so, please call us back as soon as possible to schedule a make-up meeting. Thanks.”
Even she sounded scared, and that did nothing to calm Jacob’s nerves. He decided to call Doctor Summers first, to put off the inevitable a bit longer.
He clicked the “call back” button next to her cell number, and she answered on the second ring.
“Jacob?” she asked, her voice laced with obvious concern.
“Hey. I’m sorry, I overslept,” he explained quickly.
She let out a breath. “That’s alright. It happens. I was just worried about you. You’ve never missed a session before, and you’re usually quick to answer your phone.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said groggily, still trying to wipe the crusty flakes out of his eyelashes. “Sorry.”
“Are you alright?” she asked with concern. “You sound….”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, letting his head fall forward into his hands.
With a breath, he said, “I told Jenna.”
It was silent for a moment as the doctor made sense of the words.
“Everything,” he said, for clarity’s sake. “I told her everything.”
He was waiting for her to ask him how that went, but apparently his voice said all she needed to hear, because she simply replied, “I see.”
“We were, uh,” he cleared his throat, trying to sound more awake than he felt. “We were up pretty late, talking, and after that I just crashed. I completely forgot about today.”
“Does that mean you also missed your parole meeting?” she asked.
He cringed at the reminder. “Yeah. I have to call him back after this and try to explain.”
“Okay,” she sighed again. “Well, why don’t you go ahead and do that, and I would like to see you tomorrow. Would that be alright? 9am, as usual?”
He nodded. “Yeah, that sounds good. Sorry, again.”
“It’s alright, Jacob. I’m just glad to know you’re alright. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Yeah, see ya then.”
He hung up the phone, and before he could talk himself into any more procrastination, he called Officer Millburn’s office.
The call was easier than he anticipated, mostly because he didn’t have to speak to the officer himself. He explained to the receptionist that he overslept and forgot to set his alarm, and she scheduled him a new appointment for the following morning, after his make-up session with Doctor Summers. He shuddered at the thought.
Once his mind was fully alert and he had gotten his bearings on what day of the week it was, he went over his mental calendar for the rest of the day. He remembered that he had agreed to work a long shift at the diner that day, to make up for Al giving him the night off for the bonfire. With another glance at the clock, he headed for the bathroom to take his medication and brush his teeth before work.
He was still dressed from the night before, so he shed his flannel shirt to the floor, taking a whiff of his black t-shirt to ensure it was fresh enough for a second use. It was not.
He headed for the dresser, grabbing a new t-shirt and tossing the old, sweaty one in the pile forming on his bathroom floor. If he was going to make it to work on time, he had to leave right away, so he grabbed another bland granola bar from his backpack, shoving it in his pocket and vowing to eat a burger at the diner on his break.
He was only ten minutes late by the time he made it to the diner. Iris greeted him with her usual wide smile as she carried a tray of various breakfast dishes to a nearby table. Jacob tried to smile in return, but he had a feeling it looked about as unnatural as it felt.
Knocking on the office door as he stepped inside, he said, “Sorr
y I’m late.”
Al looked up from his desk, his round face as cheery as always. “Oh, that’s not a problem, son,” he said with a grin. “I was just getting together a list of duties for you today.”
He passed Jacob a handwritten list, mostly consisting of cleaning tasks, the heavy-duty stuff that only got done once every few months. Looking over the list of tasks, it was clear that Al didn’t really need him to be there that day, but he knew that Jacob needed the money, so he always came up with something for him to do.
“Sounds good,” Jacob said, putting the list in his pocket and heading for the door to get started.
“You alright there, son?” Al asked, taking note of his somber mood.
Jacob paused in the doorway, unsure of how to answer that question. “Yeah,” he decided. “Just a little tired, I guess.”
Al chuckled and shook his head. “Those parties you kids have. I’ll tell ya, I don’t know how you keep up with your studies on such little sleep.”
Jacob gave him an agreeable “Mmm” with a nod.
He went to work on his tasks for the day, starting with cleaning out the deep fryers that weren’t currently being used. With each item he checked off of his to-do list, he huffed out a sigh. He had been hoping for a more mentally stimulating day, to have something to keep his mind off of wondering what Jenna might be thinking about him. Cleaning out grills and ovens and scrubbing tile floors didn’t exactly take a lot of mental attention, which left his mind free to worry and stress and wallow in self-pity.
By the end of the day, he had fully convinced himself that Jenna would never speak to him again and he had to move on. But that was easier said than done, especially when he worked for her uncle.
As he was clocking out for the night, Al called out to him from his office, “Hey, tell Jenny to come by and see us again soon, will ya?” and Jacob just had to stammer out some fake platitude to placate him.
He settled on “will do,” with a phony smile and a wave as he walked out the door.