Jekel Loves Hyde

by Beth Fantaskey

  Chapter 4

  Tristen

  IN HIS REMARKABLE Symphony No. 5 Ludwig van Beethoven required only four notes—three rapid Gs and a long E-flat—to evoke in generations of listeners a sense of impending doom.

  Sitting in a Pennsylvania diner, my father, the preeminent psychoanalyst Dr. Frederick Hyde, managed—of course—to best even the great German composer, with a grim, one-note, growling sigh that caused the blood to run cold in my veins.

  “Rrrrrrrrr . . .” Dad shook his head as he sliced neatly into a thick slab of rare prime rib. “I hardly know what to say, Tristen.”

  “Sorry, sir,” I apologized yet again, picking up a french fry and dredging it through a puddle of ketchup. “I know you’re disappointed.”

  “‘Disappointed’ is hardly the word,” Dad said, glancing up at me. “You pummeled a classmate, Tristen. Sent him to the hospital with a broken arm that will end his football season. I am far, far beyond ‘disappointed.’”

  “Yes, sir.” I slouched lower in the booth. “Sorry.”

  “Sit up, please, Tristen,” my father directed, using his knife to point at the french fry in my fingers. “And use utensils. This may not be The Ivy, but it’s still a step above a kennel. There’s no excuse for eating like an animal.”

  “Sorry,” I said again, straightening my spine and abandoning my food entirely.

  My father dabbed a napkin against his impeccably trimmed, tribute-to-Freud beard, then resumed eating his dinner in a profound silence that managed to speak volumes about me while I stared out the window, watching the people of Supplee Mill as they went about their business on Market Street. A few blocks away Todd Flick was probably just leaving Mercy Hospital with a freshly set bone. I reached up and pressed my fingers against my own bruised face, wincing.

  Dammit.

  Yet things could have turned out much worse. At least Flick was going to be okay.

  Still, the story that had emerged had been unnerving. Apparently it had taken two of Flick’s teammates to subdue me. How could I not remember that?

  My fingers again traced the purple, swollen skin just below my eye.

  “Hurt, Tristen?” Dad asked.

  I looked across the table to see that he’d finished eating and crossed his knife and fork atop the plate. “Yes,” I admitted, dropping my hand. “A little.”

  “Good. Maybe the pain will deter you from fighting in the future.”

  “We can only hope,” I agreed.

  Dad gave me a long level stare that made me regret even the hint of sarcasm.

  Then, when he was sure his point had been delivered, he leaned back in the booth, adjusted his eyeglasses, and began drumming his fingers against the table, head cocked, observing me as if I were one of his patients. A particularly difficult case who showed no signs of progress, in spite of years of intensive treatment.

  “Well, Tristen,” he finally began, “now that we’ve both had a chance to calm down, why don’t you explain—again—what happened at school today.”

  I averted my eyes and fidgeted with my water glass, erasing the condensation. “I tried to tell you in the car. I don’t remember.”

  Daring to check his reaction, I saw a muscle in Dad’s jaw twitch. A warning sign. “Tristen, please don’t start with that again.”

  “It’s true.” I leaned forward. “Can’t you at least give me the benefit of the doubt?”

  “No, Tristen,” Dad said, mouth set in a firm line. “Because if I validate this ‘blackout,’ then I am validating a component of the stories your grandfather filled your head with—”

  I could feel the muscle in my jaw starting to jump. “Grandfather swore they weren’t stories. If you’d just listen—”

  “Tristen, no.” Dad cut me off sharply, leaning in, too, so we were eye-to-eye. “For the last time—the very last time—there is no ‘Hyde curse.’ I will not speak seriously of nonsense!”

  “But—”

  “Your grandfather suffered from dementia in his final days.” Dad overrode me again, actually reaching across the table and clasping my arm. I suppose the gesture was meant to be reassuring, but he held too tightly, and it came off as confining, almost threatening. “Those ‘crimes’ he confessed to—they never happened. There was no ‘evil alter ego.’ No late-night forays that ended in violence. No ‘blackouts,’ for god’s sake.”

  “But—”

  Dad squeezed harder, his fingers surprisingly powerful, given that the only exercise they ever got was turning the pages of his academic texts. “The Case of Jekyll and Hyde was a novel, Tristen,” he said, boring into my eyes. “A work of fiction. A good book, with some admittedly interesting insights into man’s dual nature. But a tall tale. There was no ‘real’ Dr. Jekyll, no ‘formula,’ and no ‘real’ Mr. Hyde. And we are, quite obviously, not descended from a fictional character. It’s ludicrous!”

  I stared at my father’s eyes, which were a peculiar metallic gray. Eyes the color of two padlocks and nearly as impenetrable. I had inherited my mother’s brown eyes. Sometimes when I looked in the mirror, I could almost see her in my reflection. I loved and despised those moments.

  Where was Mom?

  I watched my father’s opaque eyes, searching again.

  When my mother had first disappeared, vanishing in the middle of the night three years before, the police had nosed around Dad, sniffing for signs of foul play. But they’d found nothing. Of course they’d found nothing, I reassured myself.

  My father was imperious and overbearing, but my parents had loved each other, in their own curious way. Mom had understood how to tease out of Dad a gruff, grudging, but genuine affection that I never got to experience now that she was gone.

  No, even if there was a Hyde curse—even if the Hyde men were descended from the evil “Mr. Hyde” and genetically doomed to commit unspeakable acts of violence—surely Dad wouldn’t have harmed Mom.

  Then again, I didn’t believe Dad’s assertion that my mother had abandoned us of her own free will as part of some midlife crisis that she’d snap out of eventually. That was “ludicrous,” to use his own word.

  Someone had harmed her. Killed her. But who?

  I blinked at Dad, utterly confused, and pulled my arm free.

  What did I believe?

  My father seemed to sense that I was struggling inside and seized upon my uncertainty. “Tristen, I am one of the world’s best psychotherapists,” he said with his characteristic, shameless hubris. “I have spent my professional life exploring the workings of the mind. And I am telling you right now, there is nothing wrong with you—aside from the fact that you’ve let your grandfather’s ridiculous stories cloud your thinking.”

  “But my nightmares,” I noted. “My dreams. Even Freud said dreams were important. That they are the subconscious expressing its true desires.”

  And the dreams that I suffered—if they represented my true desires, I wasn’t just sick, or deviant, even. I was a psychopath. The nightmares had started out chaotic, little more than random images of gore. More recently, however, they had begun to coalesce into a narrative dominated by a river, a knife—and a girl’s pale, vulnerable throat.

  “Oh, Tristen.” Dad smiled at his teenage son’s effort to educate the great Dr. Hyde about Freud, of all topics. “You talk as if you’ve never read Jung.” His smile faded. “The images that appear in our dreams are influenced by—complicated by—the dreamer’s history, his circumstances. And the images in your nightmares were placed there by my father. Your subconscious isn’t playing out its hopes. It is expressing your very conscious fears. You don’t secretly want to kill anyone.”

  He did have a point. I didn’t want to kill. If anything, I desperately wanted Grandfather to be wrong. I just wanted to be normal.

  My father sat back, looking out the window and shaking his head. “If I’d had any idea my father would have such a terrible impact on you, I would never have allowed you to visit him so often. I would have forbade it.”

  “No,
don’t say that!” I objected. “Without Grandfather I wouldn’t have studied music. I wouldn’t compose!”

  Dad returned his attention to me. “Nor would you be infected with this foolish notion that you are predisposed to become an insane killing machine.”

  I knew we’d reached the end of the discussion. Or perhaps not quite the end, because he reached out again, taking my wrist more gently this time. “Tristen,” he said, his tone softer, too, “if there was a ‘Hyde curse,’ I would also suffer, wouldn’t I? According to your grandfather’s fables, all the Hyde men go mad, correct?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, looking away, unable to meet his eyes, because, even discounting Mom’s disappearance, there had been times after Grandfather had started talking so freely, so desperately, that I’d looked back on my father’s behavior and wondered if something wasn’t quite right.

  “Tristen, look at me,” Dad ordered, removing his glasses, as if to eradicate any small barrier that might impede my understanding.

  I forced myself to meet those gray eyes. “Yes?”

  “There is no curse,” he said softly and convincingly. “Let the idea go before you really do harm your psyche.”

  “Fine,” I agreed, primarily so I could end the discussion and unlock my eyes from his. “Whatever you say.”

  However, I wasn’t convinced. Not convinced at all. If only I could have really confided in him, told Dad about that evening I’d been with that girl by the river. And that night in London—the rest of the story about Grandfather and what I suspected . . .

  Of course I couldn’t, though. That last secret—it would have to go with me to my grave.

  Slipping his glasses back onto his narrow nose, my father shifted in the booth, reaching for his wallet. “I need to return to campus,” he said. “Will you be all right?”

  “You’re going to back to work now?” I asked. “It’s nearly eight o’clock.”

  “This fellowship is important,” Dad reminded me. “I didn’t suspend my practice in London—and your education at one of England’s best academies—in order to sit in a rental house in the Pennsylvania countryside. I need to prepare lectures and conduct research that will impress my American colleagues.”

  The suspicion that I kept fighting off crept back yet again. I could understand that the fellowship at the prestigious Severin College of Medicine was a good chance to introduce Dr. Frederick Hyde to an even wider, international audience, but lately his hours had been getting longer and longer. How much research could he do?

  Dad summoned our server with an imperious wave, signaling for the check. As they settled the bill, I again watched out the window. And who should walk into my line of sight but Jill Jekel and Becca Wright, the two unlikeliest of friends.

  One wore a short denim skirt and tight T-shirt, the other a lacy blouse. Not sexy lacy. Virginal, wedding-veil, Victorian lacy.

  One gestured actively with fuchsia-tipped fingers. The other struggled to keep her small pale hands wrapped around a huge artist’s portfolio.

  One sometimes showed up in my nightmares, falling into my arms, feeling the prick of a blade against her skin . . . One was . . .

  “Interested, Tristen?” Dad asked, jerking me back from my reverie.

  I realized that he was watching me as I followed Jill and Becca’s progress down the street. “No.” I shook my head. “Not at all.”

  As the words came out of my mouth, I was certain that I told the truth. Yet I felt, for some reason, like a liar, because both of those girls, they did intrigue me, in very different—sometimes disturbing—ways.

  Chapter 5

  Jill

  BECCA WRIGHT was stretched out on my bed kicking her tanned, pedicured feet in the air as she flipped through Foundations of the Chemical World like it was Star magazine and she was looking at photos of beautiful people, not molecular models.

  I stood in the corner at my easel, adding a bright sun to my canvas but keeping one eye on Becca’s halfhearted attempt at studying, wondering how long she’d keep up the charade.

  After about two more minutes the book slammed shut and Becca sat up, twisting her long legs into a pretzel, the same way we used to sit together on a rug in our kindergarten classroom.

  Why had we stayed friends for so many years, long after Becca had gone on to be popular? Was it just because we still lived on the same block and ended up walking to school together every day? Or did she really just need me even more than like me? That was probably the truth . . .

  Outside, lightning flashed as a late-summer storm blew closer, and no matter how Becca felt about me, I was glad she was there while Mom worked an evening shift.

  “Jilly?” Becca ventured when the thunder faded away. “I was just thinking.”

  “Yes?” I dabbed more chromium yellow on my canvas. “About what?”

  “The stupid way Messerschmidt grades us,” Becca said. “You know, how he only gives two real tests the whole year, so if you flunk one, you’re doomed.”

  “I’ll help you study,” I promised. Like always . . .

  “Yeah, and you’ll end up trying to teach me everything at the last minute,” she said matter-of-factly, like neither one of us had any choice in the matter. “It’ll take hours.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

  “Well . . . what if you just helped me during the test?” Becca asked.

  The suggestion startled me so much that my hand jerked, messing up my painting. But I gave her a wobbly, uncertain smile in case she was joking. “Becca, you don’t really want to . . . cheat?”

  She untwisted her legs and hopped to the edge of the bed. “Just think about it, Jill,” she said in a way that told me she wasn’t kidding. “You practically give me all the answers anyway. What does it matter if I memorize them right before the test or if you text me under the table during the exam?”

  I shook my head, not believing that Becca was honestly suggesting that we should cheat. “We could get caught,” I reminded her. “It would go on our records! And we’d probably get in-school suspension!”

  Not to mention the embarrassment . . . Not to mention that cheating was WRONG.

  “No,” I said more firmly. “I couldn’t do it.”

  Outside, rain began to fall, and I dabbed a new brush into azure, convinced that the talk of cheating was done.

  “Hey, Jill?”

  I glanced up to see my friend staring at my feet, and I looked down, thinking I must have dropped paint on my ballet flats. “What?”

  “Don’t those goody two-shoes ever feel a little tight?”

  My cheeks flamed. “Becca . . . I’m just afraid . . .”

  “Oh, just forget it,” she muttered, standing up and walking to the window. “I’ll just fail.”

  I dragged my brush against the canvas, trying to fix my mistake and wondering if Becca had any idea how unfair that comment was. She was smart enough to do the work on her own . . . but pretty enough that she’d never really had to do anything for herself.

  “I should get going,” she said, “but this storm is awful.”

  “Just hang out until it’s over,” I urged, wincing as lightning struck close by.

  Okay, so I was definitely using her a little, too. “Look.” I sighed. “I’ll help you with the test somehow, okay? I’ll make sure you pass.”

  Becca turned to me, smiling again, like she’d already gotten what she wanted. “Thanks, Jilly.”

  But I wouldn’t cheat.

  As I put more blue on my brush, Becca started to wander around my room, absently picking up the stuff on my dresser, then setting things back down, obviously bored. “You wanna do something?”

  “We could keep studying,” I suggested.

  “Or better yet, we could pierce your ears,” Becca announced like she’d been struck by a brilliant idea. “That would be fun!”

  “What?” I looked up to see her staring at my naked earlobes. “You’re not serious,” I said, picturing blood, and infection, and my mom’s expression
when she saw that I’d violated her rule against piercing anything before I was eighteen.

  “Why not?” she asked, grinning more broadly. “I did Angela Sloan’s last summer, and she didn’t even cry. The ice—and the vodka—numbed everything.”

  “Vodka?” I kind of yelped. I knew Becca partied but . . . vodka? And needles going through flesh? “I don’t think so,” I said, dipping my blue brush into a waiting jar of turpentine. The liquid swirled greenish black, like pus from an infected ear. “No!”

  Becca sighed—a “you’re so boring” sigh—and plopped down at my desk, shaking the mouse to bring my laptop’s screen to life. Opening the Internet, she started typing, and I watched warily, hoping that she wasn’t going to call up sites I wasn’t supposed to visit.

  Cheating, piercing, porn . . . it would be too much for one night. And if Mom came home early and walked in . . . “What are you looking for?” I asked, wiping my paint-spattered hands with a rag.

  “I’m going on my MySpace,” Becca said.

  I felt a moment of relief—until she added, “I’m checking out Tristen Hyde’s page.”

  I didn’t know why I wanted to object to that, too. Why I didn’t want to look at Tristen . . . especially not with Becca.

  But even on a computer, Becca was socially adept, and of course it took her only a second to get to Tristen’s page, and before I could say anything to stop her, she announced, with triumph in her voice, “Well, well, well . . . here’s something interesting about the mysterious Mr. Hyde!”

  Chapter 6

  Jill

  “TRISTEN IS, LIKE, A COMPOSER,” Becca said, sounding impressed. “He writes classical music.”

  I left my easel and sank down on my bed, surprised and maybe skeptical about a MySpace boast. “Really?”

  “He has audio links,” Becca confirmed. She clicked a lacquered nail against the mouse, and my bedroom filled with the sound of a piano. “He says it’s his stuff.”

  I wasn’t sure what I expected to hear as the file opened. Maybe something that was so good that I’d know Tristen hadn’t really written it, and was, like most people, exaggerating online. Or maybe a simple, decent song like a teenage guy might actually write.