When I Was Jane

by Theresa Mieczkowski

  He exhales resentfully. “Audrey would disagree with that. She didn’t think it was a romantic story, she was ashamed of it. That’s why I invented that church group story. I would tell it to her at night when she was crying. Over and over again. Eventually we started pretending it was real, and when people would ask how we met, that’s what we’d tell them. Even Thomas got that version, though he thinks she moved in with a grandmother because her mother was abusive. He knew her too well not to be able to spot that there was trauma in her past.

  “I’m glad you like the true version, but Audrey would’ve given anything to forget it. That’s all she ever talked about. What a better person she’d be without the bad memories,” he says.

  Are you glad that Dr. Patel is a brain man, Mommy? Daisy’s voice rings in my ears.

  And just like that I finally understand.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper. “You did it all for her, didn’t you?” Jason had spent so much time and energy covering tracks, just so I wouldn’t feel the way she did. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

  He pulls me in close and sighs deeply. I can only imagine the weight that’s just been lifted from his shoulders.

  “Remember in the hospital when you said you’d give her up if it meant we’d be happy?” I ask. “You were talking about Audrey, weren’t you? You’d give up the wife you loved just to give her a chance at a new life.”

  He wipes the tears from my face. “It occurred to me in the hospital that maybe I should let you forget. As long as Daisy had a mother who loved her, I thought I should give Audrey what she always wanted.”

  “I was so wrong about you, Jason. You didn’t keep her away from the other wives at the hospital, did you?” It’s all very clear to me now. Audrey wasn’t able to be around other women.

  “Of course not. I hoped she’d make friends. But she hated being in those groups. Eventually the women would talk about their childhoods or—”

  I put my hand on his face. “You don’t have to explain. I understand. She was ashamed of who she was.”

  “I don’t even know how the rumors got started that I didn’t let her socialize with those women, but I never cared what people said about me. We just let them think whatever they wanted.”

  “You’re a good man. Dottie tried to tell me.” My stomach turns over on itself. “I was so awful to her. I need to call and apologize.”

  Jason tightens his grip around me. “You’ll have time for that later. I’ll help you explain.”

  I hug him back and dry my eyes on his shirt. “Why did you start paying Viki in June?”

  “When that article hit the paper after your accident, I was afraid it would make national news because it was damaging to my father. If she’d gotten wind of it, she would’ve showed up with her hand out. I wanted to be on the offensive.”

  “What are we going to do about her now? She’ll be expecting me to contact her. She thinks we’re going away for a mother-daughter trip. She thinks you’re still paying for her silence.”

  He kisses the top of my head. “Let her wait. There’s nothing she can do to us now.”

  We lie huddled together on the couch. After a while I realize Jason has fallen asleep. I listen to the rhythm of his breathing and try to silence the voice in my mind that wonders just how far Audrey would have gone to forget and what will become of me when she remembers.

  ~26~

  Jason rakes up another pile of leaves as Daisy waits patiently by the side of the house for him to give her the go signal. She’s been jumping in the same pile for an hour. I hear her squeal before she lands and watch as a flurry of leaves flies into the air.

  “Can I do it again, Daddy?” she asks.

  “Of course,” he says with a smile. “I live to rake the same pile of leaves over and over.”

  I sit back on my heels and take a break from my planting to watch their game. “Do I get a turn?” I ask playfully.

  He laughs. “Only if you can do it without another injury.”

  So much has changed since our trip to West Virginia. I understand Jason in ways I never thought I would. Knowing what he went through to create a past I could be proud of instead of the one that shamed Audrey makes me regret so many things I did and said. It fuels my desire to just be without overthinking how to be. Dottie is helping me make friends with some of the women from the hospital, and I’ve been so busy with committees and fundraisers that I don’t have much time to wonder about the missing pieces anymore, though sometimes I still do.

  I drop another sedum in the ground. I feel so alive working with my hands in the dirt. It’s a little late to be planting, but I don’t waste my time on trivial worries like that anymore. It will grow if it wants to grow.

  I walk across the yard to get a load of dirt. The wheelbarrow is leaning against the garden shed, unused since the day before Audrey’s accident. I still catch myself measuring my time according to the last thing she did or said. I hope to eventually stop keeping track of how much more time Audrey got to spend with my family than I have. It seems like forever ago that I came home to this house for the first time, yet there are still many firsts to be had. Yesterday Daisy and I picked out her cowgirl costume for Halloween. In a few weeks I’ll cook my first Thanksgiving turkey, and after that, I get to decorate my first Christmas tree.

  I balance the wheelbarrow carefully, walk it over to the pile of dirt we just had delivered, and go back to look for a shovel. The inside of the shed is dark. I feel along the wall for the light switch and accidently knock a stack of recycled boxes to the floor. As I hastily pick them up and toss them back on the shelf, a slip of paper falls from a box and flutters lightly to the floor. I recognize the light yellow lined paper from her journals, a scrap ripped from the bottom of a page with a note scribbled on it.

  Wyatt - 6/1 3pm Radisson, Glennbrook.

  The date noted is June first, three days before my accident. I stuff the note in my pocket along with my mounting unease and quickly walk back into the yard to finish my day.

  Later that evening, Jason carries Daisy upstairs for her bath while I stay downstairs to preheat the oven and make dinner. By the time his footsteps reach the second floor landing, I can no longer stand my curiosity.

  I open the laptop to search for Wyatt Montgomery. There are too many people by that name to choose from, so I pick the most popular social media site and enter the name. Two choices come up and one of them, I can see by the photo and birthdate, is fourteen. I choose the other, an unfortunate profile photo of a hot rod with a bikini-clad woman painted on the hood.

  Scanning his “acquaintance” list with dread, I pray the name isn’t there. But it is, taunting me…Dree Dupree. No photo. I search the name Dree Dupree and scan her list. Only one acquaintance, Wyatt Montgomery. But without her password, I can’t see anything else.

  I try Audrey and Jason’s wedding date, then Deacon Hill, Daisy, and Otis. Nothing works. I try Audrey’s birthday, Jason’s birthday, and Daisy’s birthday. Nothing. Above me, the happy sounds of Daisy’s bath time echo through the house as I pace the kitchen, trying to think of a password. Then it hits me.

  “Audrey, what did you do?” I say out loud. I lunge for the computer and type Hornet’s Nest in the password box.

  The page opens up.

  There’s no information available on her. No photos, no birthday, no work history. I check the private messages and see several between her and Wyatt. Message after message after message. They date back to the February after she lost the baby, four months before the accident.

  Audrey contacted him first after finding him online. She doesn’t mention that she changed her name. She tells him that she’s thinking about starting over somewhere and asks if he still makes fake IDs because the people in her world wouldn’t be able to help her.

  He tells her he moves around a lot, hasn’t been home in fifteen years. He asks if she’s in trouble.

  I am the trouble, she writes.

  They reminisce back and forth about growing up in
Deacon Hill, about the friends they used to know, about whether Audrey should go back. She pours her soul out to this man, leaving out the details of where she lives and who she married. She tells Wyatt about losing the baby months earlier, and he responds by sending her lyrics to Lynyrd Skynard’s “Free Bird” layered over a picture of a mountain in the winter. What a moron.

  They correspond like this for weeks, and I scroll to the most recent messages. Audrey isn’t sure anymore about needing an ID but thanks him for helping her. A month passes before the next message. Wyatt writes that he went back to Deacon Hill to collect the life insurance after his father’s passing and ran into Viki who was “off her ass” drunk in a local bar.

  I asked her about you, he writes. I told her we were talking again.

  She makes things up, Audrey writes. Please don’t talk to her about me.

  I know who you are now, he writes.

  Nothing about him contacting Jason to ask about her. He wouldn’t need to do that since she’d already found him.

  I have the papers, he writes. I’m coming to New York to give them to you.

  Please don’t come here, she writes. Forget you ever knew me. Please don’t come.

  She tells him she’d only wanted help with papers, but she changed her mind. She gives him a cell phone number so they can discuss it and offers to meet him in New Jersey or Pennsylvania—anywhere besides New York.

  See you in New York, he closes his message. I’ll be in touch.

  So they must have made contact by phone and planned to meet. Now that I know the story of how Audrey was raised, I’m certain there’s no way she could have missed that life—if everything Jason told me is true, that is. She must have been depressed because of the baby and thinking like a crazy person. She was looking to run away.

  Jason calls down the stairs. “Mommy, here comes a very clean and hungry girl.”

  I shut the laptop and quickly shove the fish sticks in the oven.

  Jason plops Daisy down on her stool and looks around the room, realizing that I haven’t made anything yet. He gives me a quizzical smile. “Whatcha been doin’ down here?”

  Finding out you lied to me again. “Sorry. I forgot what I was doing. I’m just reading a few recipes your mom sent over.” I pick up a stack of cards and hold them up for him to see.

  After several serious games of Old Maid and Go Fish, we carry Daisy up to her room half asleep and put her to bed. I stand over her and watch her little lips purse in her sleep and marvel at the way the hair curls around her ears. Was life so bad for Audrey that she would have deserted a child and left her motherless? I can’t imagine it. She’d been confused and reached out to her past, but she changed her mind. She wouldn’t have left her husband and child. The only memory I’ve been able to recall is the one of her bathing Daisy as a baby, and it still resonates so strongly with me that I cry when I think of it. And the reaction I had when I met her in the hospital for the first time tells me Audrey was incredibly connected to her daughter; it seems improbable that she was preparing to leave her. She was just desperate to see if there was an exit.

  Unless…

  Unless she was going to leave because she loved her that much.

  Daddy said if we didn’t have a mommy we would be OK. Daisy’s words ring in my head.

  Not only was Audrey thinking of leaving them, but Jason knew it.

  I touch the side of Daisy’s face before I leave the room and creep silently down the stairs.

  Jason is in the kitchen opening our bottles of wine, red for him and white for me, as he always does the night before his seven-day shift.

  “What’s all this? You aren’t going to work tomorrow, are you?” I ask.

  He smiles. “I just thought it would be nice. It’s getting cold outside; we can build a fire tonight.”

  “Let me change first,” I say, unable to look at him. “I still have dirt all over me from gardening.” I tiptoe up the stairs, pull on yoga pants and a t-shirt, and grab one of Jason’s zip front college sweatshirts from his closet door. I call out to him as I hop down the last few steps to the kitchen. “I hope you don’t mind I borrowed—”

  I stop dead in my tracks when I see him standing in front of the open laptop reading Audrey and Wyatt’s messages.

  “I knew you weren’t reading recipes,” he says quietly.

  “Jason, I—”

  “I thought we said we were going to start over.”

  “We did. But I found this note in the gardening shed.” I feel around for my pockets and remember that I’ve changed my clothes. “It’s upstairs, I can show you. It had Wyatt’s name and a place to meet on it, and I didn’t understand.”

  “I see,” Jason says looking at the floor.

  “Do you want me to get the note?”

  “No. I’ve seen it. I must’ve dropped it in the shed when I was putting away her gardening tools after the accident.”

  “So you found it? You knew that they were planning—”

  “Yes.” He nods towards the laptop. “How’d you know how to access the account?”

  “I just guessed passwords until I got one.”

  Jason sighs. “You’re pretty smart.”

  “You told me he contacted you because Audrey didn’t have social media accounts.”

  “Audrey didn’t have an account. Dree did.”

  “What’s the difference? Other than the fact it gave you a convenient loop hole to lie through,” I say.

  “If I’d told you that Audrey sought out this piece of shit to meet up with him, what would you have thought?”

  I put my arm out to lean on the counter and accidentally knock the bottle of red wine onto the floor. It pours from the bottle, covering the tiles in front of me, and I imagine the blood spilling in my dream. I look up and see a man I don’t recognize coming towards me. I double over, holding my head. “Oh God, what’s happening to me?”

  Jason quickly cleans up the wine and grabs my arm to lead me down to the solarium.

  “My head is killing me,” I say. “What’s going on?”

  He chews the inside of his mouth, as if considering what to say.

  “You knew she was back in touch with Wyatt?” I ask.

  Jason sighs and pours himself a large glass of wine. “Yeah.”

  “And that they were planning to meet?”

  He takes a long gulp. “Yup.”

  “And you read her messages? I’m surprised she saved them.”

  “She didn’t know that even if you delete messages on your phone, they still show up on your home computer.”

  “How did you know she even had the account?”

  “Because she was acting like a lunatic. I didn’t know what to do, so I was keeping tabs on her phone. I could see what she did and where she went. I could see the sites that she logged into.”

  A sharp pain spreads across my forehead. “What happened when she met him?”

  “I think you need to hear that from her, not me.”

  Jason walks to the bar and slides open one of the wooden panels. A fake front. He pulls out a journal. “She wrote everything down. And I mean everything. A therapist she went to a long time ago taught her creative writing as a cathartic outlet. She filled hundreds of these books.”

  “I saw some with the pages ripped out under the bed. But the next time I went to find them they were gone,” I say.

  “Audrey would rip the pages out of the journals if there was anything she didn’t want to look at again. She was worried that Daisy might stumble upon them one day, so she’d write to get things off her chest and then rip up the pages she wouldn’t want anyone to see.”

  “That doesn’t explain how they disappeared from under the bed.”

  He shrugs. “I’d forgotten they were there. After you started going up to the third floor, I realized I should move them in case you saw them and got the wrong idea. I kept them, though. Some of it was really special to her, and I knew someday Daisy would be able to read about how much Audrey loved her.”


  “Have you read them?”

  “Only the ones she showed me. And this one, which I found in the garden shed the morning after the accident. You should read it, too. It’s better for you to hear things straight from Audrey.”

  I open the journal and look at the writing on the pages. “Wow. It looks like she was writing a book.”

  “That’s how she did it. You should get comfortable.”

  I settle into the sofa with an uneasy feeling. It seems wrong to read another woman’s private thoughts, even though I know they were once my own.

  June 1st

  Wyatt texted the room number as I pulled into the parking lot. I walked through the lobby feeling eyes on me, wondering if the people at the desk thought I was a call girl, hired for some businessman’s lunch hour. My heart pounded in my ears. Jason used to say our hearts were connected. If that were true, then surely he could feel mine breaking open. I had no idea what I was doing.

  I was in front of Wyatt’s door before I knew what was happening. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely knock. I don’t remember walking in. He looked the same as always, tall and wiry, dark red hair and a rough goatee. Black angry eyes. I paced around the room, feeling numb. Dead inside.

  Wyatt grabbed my face and kissed me harshly. I pushed him away and told him that wasn’t the reason I came, but he laughed and said I was kidding myself. I tried to pretend that he was wrong, that I’d been unaware of what he wanted. But I knew him. I knew the kind of person he was, what he always expected from me. He pinned me against the wall, one of his rough, gigantic hands at my throat. I tried to reason with him between breaths, turning my head away from his mouth, but he only laughed and said, “Payment up front.”

  The next thing I knew I was on the floor. He pulled my dress up over my waist. He was on top of me, crushing me. He forced his knees between my thighs, pushing them apart. I couldn’t take a deep breath; it’s been happening to me more and more, the feeling that my lungs are going to close up. I prayed they would. Once and for all.

  I could have punched him, I suppose. I could have screamed. But I didn’t, just like always. I closed my eyes and drifted away, deep inside myself. Above me, Wyatt moaned and mumbled disgusting, degrading words about my body and what we were doing. Words that Jason would never use, let alone to a woman. Everything hurt. My thighs were numb where his knees pressed into them, and my shoulders ached from being clenched in his grip. His body was bearing down on mine so forcefully I struggled to breathe, and I heard myself cry out.