Jane's Harmony (Jane's Melody #2)

by Ryan Winfield

  “No way. I’m using you as a handyman too. Don’t forget, you need to fix the bed frame when you get home. The mattress is still on the floor.”

  The bathroom door opened and Sean came out wearing his towel and brushing his teeth. “Tell Dane I said hi.”

  “Did your friend just call me Dane?”

  Caleb laughed. “He knows your name. He’s just got a toothbrush jammed in his mouth. Anyway, they expect us to be on the bus before the sun’s even up, so I better get off the phone. I love you, babe.”

  “I love you too,” Jane said. “You rest up for tomorrow.”

  “If you go to sleep too,” he offered up, “then maybe we can meet in our dreams.”

  “Are you kidding?” she asked. “I’ll be up for hours yet. I’ve got work to do.”

  “What kind of work do you have to do at this hour?”

  “I’ve got to get busy leaving negative comments on Jordyn-with-a-y’s YouTube page. What else?”

  Chapter 9

  Jane’s uniform had certainly shrunk in the wash, so much so that she could hardly walk. It didn’t help, of course, that she was juggling her afternoon latte and a notebook and map while trying to keep up with the fastest-moving woman she’d ever seen outside of the summer Olympics. She finally gave up and tossed her latte in a trash can. Then she ran stiff-legged to catch up with her trainer, who had thankfully stopped to issue a ticket.

  The trainer looked up from her handheld ticket dispenser and eyed Jane. “You should’ve finished your coffee. The four-to-midnight shift’s a grind.”

  “Oh, I’ve had enough,” Jane said, wiggling to readjust her tight uniform shirt.

  The trainer eyed her with a slight smile. “Did you get that uniform in the kids’ section?”

  “No,” Jane said, pulling at it. “It was actually too big, if you can believe it. I washed it in hot water to shrink it.”

  “Looks like maybe you overshot the mark just a bit.”

  “You’re telling me,” Jane said. “I feel like I’m suffocating in this thing.”

  “It’ll loosen up,” the trainer said, printing the ticket and slipping it inside the envelope. “Maybe don’t wear your vest for a day or two until it does.”

  “My vest?” Jane was confused. “What vest?”

  “You didn’t get a stab vest yet?”

  “A stab vest? Really? What would I need that for? All they mentioned was pepper spray.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised, honey. We’re not exactly winning any awards with folks out here. Especially not on night patrol. It might be smart to get some of these swabs to carry in your belt too.”

  She held up a clear plastic tube with a test swab inside.

  “And what’s the swab for?” Jane asked.

  “Spitters.”

  “Spitters?”

  “Yep. I’ve heard of one officer getting hit with feces, but that’s rare.”

  “And spitting’s not rare?” Jane asked.

  “Oh, it’s rare too. Especially since they made it a felony to discharge bodily fluids on a public safety worker. But you need a swab for DNA to prove it.”

  “Oh, great,” Jane said. “Anything else I might need that they didn’t tell me about?”

  The woman laughed. “Just comfortable shoes and maybe a uniform that fits. Here, put this ticket under the wiper there. We’ve got to keep moving.”

  She dragged Jane all over downtown, explaining the ins and outs of enforcing parking. Which streets garnered the most offenders; how to spot an expired meter receipt with just a glance; how to chalk tires on blocks without pay stations. She taught Jane to punch a plate number into the handheld, print a ticket, and slip it under the wiper in less than thirty seconds.

  “You’ve got to serve it fast or you’ll end up holding.”

  “What do you mean, holding?” Jane asked.

  “If you’ve already entered the plate and they drive off before you can serve it, you’re left holding the ticket. Then you have to manually cancel it. You don’t want too many of those. It looks bad. Plus, it wastes time and you need to keep up your pace. The downtown routes see about a hundred tickets a shift. You don’t want to come up short.”

  “But I thought there weren’t any quotas.”

  “There aren’t, technically. But there sure are expectations.”

  “That’s not what they said in my orientation.”

  “Well, they didn’t mention getting a stab vest either, did they? Listen. Forget about human resources and what they said. This is the real deal. You stick with old Kristine here and work real hard for me this week and I promise to give it to you straight. Okay? Now let’s finish these last few blocks before the sun sets, because then we get to go down to Sixth Street and I’ll show you a few reasons you’ll want to get a vest.”

  They were walking a quiet block on the edge of downtown when she stopped in front of an outdated old coin meter, laid her hand on it, and bowed her head as if she might be praying to it. Then she looked up at Jane.

  “This is the end of an era here. But I guess even the best have to be retired sooner or later. We just don’t have any say in the matter.”

  She looked so sad and depressed that Jane didn’t know quite what to say.

  “I had no idea when they assigned me to you that you were retiring,” Jane finally said. “I hope you’re not being forced to leave. I hope it isn’t awkward training me.”

  “Me?” she asked, laughing. “Retiring? No way. I’m moving up to the morning shift and getting a car. That’s right. The only walking these old feet will be doing any longer is my Saturday-morning mall walk with the ladies from church.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said. “I must have misunderstood you.”

  Kristine nodded to the meter that her hand was resting on. “These here are being retired. This little block’s the last stretch of the old guard. These spring-loaded coin meters were all there was when I started. Now they’ve been replaced with the fancy electric pay stations that bring in a million dollars each year. But I’ve been stopping and saying hello to this same meter here every day now for twenty-two years. They’re going to let me have it, you know. When they take them out. My husband says we should make it into a lamp, but I plan to park it right in the living room just as it is.”

  Jane looked at her skeptically. “You stop and say hello to a parking meter?”

  She nodded. “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s not. You’ll see. We all have our thing. Our rituals. Harold takes pictures of lost and abandoned shoes. He’s going to do a series of photo books when he retires. Victoria’s been working mornings on restaurant row for years, and she has a collection of beer bottle caps she glues to her house. You’ll come up with little routines of your own to break up the weeks and pass the time.”

  “Shoot,” Jane said. “Between the stabbings and the spitting, I didn’t think there’d be a dull moment in the day.”

  “Listen, I told you I’d give it to you straight. The job’s boring as hell and everyone hates you for doing it. But it’s thirty-six thousand a year plus benefits. And if you keep at it like I have all these years—meet your expectations, don’t cause any grief—then you might just end up with a morning shift and a car. Then it’s smooth sailing all the way to retirement.”

  “Then what?” Jane asked.

  “What do you mean, then what?”

  “After retirement. Then what?”

  She looked momentarily confused, as if perhaps it had never occurred to her to think about it before. Then she looked at the old parking meter again and laughed.

  “I guess you just park yourself in the living room and watch TV until it’s time for God to come and get you.”

  It was well after midnight when Jane got home.

  She went straight to the shower, turned the water on, tied her hair up on her head, and got in, s
till wearing her uniform. She spun a slow circle, soaking herself front to back. Then she poured hair conditioner into her hands and rubbed it onto the tight fabric at her thighs, hoping it would encourage it to give.

  She thought of that morning when Caleb had barged in on her while she had coconut oil and coffee grounds smeared on her skin. She remembered his grin as he tried desperately not to laugh. She remembered his making her breakfast, and then making love to her in the kitchen before she even had a chance to eat.

  But mostly, she remembered his eyes. She missed those eyes. She missed looking at them when he was sleeping. Watching them move behind his closed lids, wondering what they were seeing in his dreams. And she missed his eyes looking at her when he woke. She missed the desire, the passion. She missed seeing the spark there when he spoke. The joy. The pain when something hurt.

  She turned the water off and patted her uniform just enough to keep from soaking the floor when she stepped from the shower. Then she went into the living room and began doing lunges across the floor with her arms outstretched. The fabric seemed to be giving a little and she thanked the Internet and Pantene for small miracles. She was on her fourth or fifth pass when she caught her reflection in the window—a middle-aged woman in a too-tight, soaking-wet meter-maid uniform, lunging across her apartment living room like some crazy cougar getting ready to go out on Halloween.

  See the humor of it, Jane. Not the sadness. Not the shame.

  She had started to lunge again when she heard a dog barking outside her window. But then the bark turned to a growl, and she heard a woman scream for help.

  She rushed to the window but she couldn’t see anything except shadows. On the other side of the small garden fence, a terrible noise rose up—a combination bark, snarl, and scream.

  Jane pulled on her shoes, grabbed her purse, and bolted from the apartment. By the time she descended the stairs and burst outside with the safety pin pulled from her pepper spray canister, the barking had ceased. But the woman was still screaming for help.

  She rounded the fence at a run and stopped in her tracks, momentarily at a loss for what to do. The dog was on its back, turning circles on the patch of dead grass, locked in a death match with an enormous raccoon. The neighbor was standing over them and screaming, holding her pink robe closed with one hand and whacking at the raccoon with the slipper she held in the other. The raccoon seemed to either not notice the neighbor hitting it or not care, because it just kept snarling and snapping and slashing the poor pup to shreds.

  “Stand back!” Jane shouted, pointing the pepper spray.

  The neighbor looked up at her and Jane could see that her face was white with fear.

  “Step away,” Jane said as she unleashed a stream of spray, aiming as best she could for the face of the raccoon but hitting them both. The raccoon paused on top of Buttercup and looked up at Jane. For a moment, she thought the spray might not have worked. She was about to hit it again when it lifted its paws into little fists and rubbed at its eyes, looking like some cartoon raccoon just waking up. Then it sneezed and coughed and left Buttercup lying there on the dead grass as it lumbered off, wheezing. The last Jane saw of it was its tail slipping beneath a parked car.

  The neighbor rushed to her dog and knelt beside it. “Oh, Buttercup. My sweet baby. What did he do?”

  “Be careful,” Jane said. “You’ll get pepper spray on you.”

  But she didn’t care. She lifted Buttercup in her arms and stood and turned to Jane, panic written on her face. The dog was so limp and so bloodied that Jane would have sworn it was dead if it hadn’t whimpered and kicked one leg.

  “You have to help me get him to the vet,” the neighbor said. “There’s a twenty-four-hour one in South Austin on Lamar.”

  “Of course,” Jane answered. “We’ll take my car.”

  As Jane drove, the woman sat in the passenger seat with her head bent over her mangled dog, sobbing and saying over and over again, “He was protecting me. My little hero. He was protecting me.”

  Jane hadn’t even parked the car in front of the animal hospital before the neighbor was out and running. She had her dog in her arms and her pink robe was open and flapping behind her as she raced for the door. She disappeared inside the building.

  Jane sat in her car for a moment, wondering what she should do. She knew she couldn’t leave them, but she hadn’t signed up for a night at the animal hospital either. She sighed and turned off the engine.

  It was the brightest lobby Jane had ever seen. Fluorescent lights in white ceilings. White floors, white walls, white chairs. The only color was an orange beanbag in a corner with some children’s books next to it.

  The reception desk was empty and her neighbor was nowhere to be found. Jane thought about going to see where they were, but then she figured she’d done her part and now she’d just be in the way, so she sat on one of the chairs. She instinctively reached for her phone to text Caleb, but she realized that in her rush she had left her purse in her car. All she had were her keys. She was tempted to go back out for it, but the wall clock said it was after midnight, and Jane knew that even with the time difference Caleb would be fast asleep.

  As she sat waiting, she noticed a book lying beside the beanbag. It had a familiar cover and she rose to get it. She stood with it in her hand, smiling at the title. The Little Prince. It had been her favorite growing up. She used to look up at the stars and imagine that wonderful little towheaded prince up there among them, laughing. It was a sweet memory. But memories were a funny thing, and Jane was soon lost in her reminiscing.

  She was fifteen again and standing in the waiting room of another hospital, where her father lay dying. She hadn’t been sad then. She hadn’t known what she was supposed to feel. She had hated her dad. She had had reason to. She had hated his abuse and his booze. But mostly, she had hated that he was dying and she had hated the waiting rooms. They were always the same. The fear-infected and sterile hope. The worry. The guilt. The people slumped in chairs, silently praying. The coffee machine. The squeak of the nurses’ shoes. The friendly janitor. There had been more waiting rooms later, after her daughter Melody’s first overdose. The first of many. She had had no idea that Overlake Hospital would become as familiar to her as her living room. But as much as she had hated that waiting room, what wouldn’t she give to be back there now, to be with her daughter? Her daughter sick, but still alive.

  “Why’d you have to die, baby? Why’d you have to die?”

  “No,” she heard a voice say. “He’s not dead yet.”

  Jane looked up through teary eyes and saw her neighbor looking down on her. She glanced around and realized that she had sat down on the beanbag. The book was in her lap and she had been crying.

  “He’s going to be okay?” Jane asked, because she couldn’t think of anything else.

  “They won’t say for sure, but they’re working on him. Vet says he got cut up maybe the worst he’s seen. They’re worried about rabies too. I came out to let you know it’s going to be a long night and that you should go home. Thank you for driving me. And thank you for showing up when you did. For me and for Buttercup.”

  Jane didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded that she understood. Then she started to rise from the beanbag but stopped when she noticed her neighbor’s feet.

  “You’re missing a slipper,” Jane said.

  The neighbor looked down as if just now realizing it. Her hair was wilder than ever and her pink robe was covered in blood. She looked as if she’d been through hell, and Jane guessed that she had.

  “Why don’t I go and get you some shoes and something clean to wear?” Jane asked. “If you’re going to stay.”

  “I wouldn’t want to trouble you,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s no trouble. I’m a night owl anyway. Well, as you know. Since we’re neighbors.”

  The neighbor glanced up from her feet, and Jan
e thought she looked momentarily ashamed. Whether it was because of her appearance or because of the silly little feud they had been having as neighbors, Jane couldn’t say.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all. Really. It’s no trouble.”

  The woman reached into her robe pocket and handed Jane her keys. “There’s a pair of Crocs with socks stuffed in them beside my bed. And if you wouldn’t mind grabbing me the thin coat out of the hall closet too, that would be great. I was just out letting Buttercup pee. I had no idea we’d be here. Well, you didn’t either, I guess.”

  She looked at Jane’s clothes when she said it, and for the first time Jane realized how crazy the two of them must look, her in her damp work uniform and her neighbor in her bloody robe.

  Jane laughed. “Aren’t we a pair? Okay, I’ll go get your things and be right back.”

  Jane’s uniform had stretched quite a bit and was dry by the time she drove home, so she didn’t bother changing. She went upstairs and straight into her neighbor’s fusty apartment instead. It was dim, and it smelled of mothballs and of dog. The layout of the apartment was an exact mirror of her and Caleb’s unit, and she felt as though she had entered some alternate universe where left was right and right was left, some other possible future where she had grown old alone with nothing but the junk she had collected to keep her company.

  When Jane entered the bedroom, she saw that the bed was up against the wall their apartments shared, and she could see in the lamplight the wear marks in the wall’s paint where the neighbor pounded on it when they were too loud. Jane saw the Crocs beside the bed and bent to pick them up. She paused when she noticed the picture frames crowded on the small nightstand—a dozen or more, and all of them of her neighbor when she was younger, smiling in the arms of a handsome man. Jane could only guess that it was her husband and that he had passed away. She left the bedroom carrying the Crocs and stopped at the hall closet to collect the coat.