Jane Two
Page 25
The fragrance of Jane’s Nag Champa exploded in my face when I used the Firebird’s key to slit open the cardboard top and look inside. I think you know an important part of me fell out in Jane’s backyard that day as I recognized the box’s contents. My whole body became pressurized as I pulled out a familiar, but partially rusted Charles Chips container that I had last seen the morning of my parents’ yard sale. When I was finally able to bring myself to open the tin, I felt a compression within my chest unlike anything I had ever felt, and a Grunt that would contain nothing. I slowly and carefully lifted the lid and stared into the can. I found inside it everything she had not already said. The box was what made me understand. My dad’s silver stopwatch and its brittle leather thong. Jane’s cobalt blue feather and a 45 of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” with Mickey + Two = Us written in the center in purple Crayola. I reached into the tin, and touched a reel with about a hundred feet of slightly yellowed Bolex-geared film that I immediately knew was of an eight-year-old Jane, intermittently rising above a six-foot wooden barrier—defying gravity just as long as she could—until gravity finally won and called her back down, her hair the last thing to disappear. The box contained all the looks and thoughts and gestures that Jane and I exchanged on the hospital bed. The box completely crushed me. I recognized all of its contents, all but two things: a purple upholstered book with a brass lock and a small canvas painting tucked underneath it. Beneath the Charles Chips can a postage stamp from Mom’s butcher-block drawer in my old kitchen stared back at me, postmarked and condemned, RETURN TO SENDER faded to poltergeist gray. I flipped through the stack of letters I had written when no one was looking, unself-consciously real, recalling stamps I had pilfered from school that were intended for letters destined to some congressman with rallying adolescent cries against fur trapping or oil spills…or whatever. A few of Jane’s letters I had mailed without a stamp. I’d forgotten that. And yet the postman had elected to waste taxpayers’ money and return even those.
Not knowing what was coming out of each envelope, I paused, stepping back before stepping forward. I read my letters, with the bittersweet perspective that Jane’s eyes had graced each and every one. Most of them I had written with a blue ballpoint Dad brought home from his job at GE, a pen I’d had to warm up by drawing circles over and over again, or it stuttered and globbed up. The Write Brothers’ jingle echoed in my mind, “Write on brother, write on, with my nineteen-cent Write Brothers pen.” A few were written in a deeper navy blue, more of a blue-black, a liquid ink that seeped into the paper and, over the years, had bled to unreadable. For those, secretly I had borrowed dad’s Montblanc fountain pen he had won from GE for his sales record. I remembered the heft of that pen; it felt expensive, important, fluid. The paper I had procured for Jane’s letters ranged from the backs of torn envelopes, to a Shakey’s Pizza placemat, to all kinds of random paper that still told me stories of her, but there was nothing ornate. It was whatever was there, whatever was necessary—perforated spiral ring, a report card edge, a Juicy Fruit wrapper. I had considered every inkable surface as a potential vehicle to communicate to Jane. The content of my letters to Jane, too, meandered to every conceivable topic. Some were like old friends, some mundane, and some tormented me. But I remembered the girl to whom I had written all of them. And she was exactly whom I’d thought she was.
I needed that box, and everything in it, only because Jane was gone. Mrs. Bradford was the one who had called to tell me that I was everything to Jane, and always had been, and then Mr. Troy Bradford got on the line with us, saying he had known from the moment he shook my hand on his doorstep on Sandpiper Drive that I was the right one for his daughter. And my soul collapsed on itself. And there was that painfully familiar Grunt from deep within my throat. That sentence from Mr. Bradford was probably the most painful thing I have ever heard. I don’t know why, but hearing him speak of what he knew about his daughter and me hurt so much it made my ears stop working. I just wanted that feeling to go away.
My letters in that box were about that girl. The one that I was right about. The one whose plank I still carry. As I lifted them carefully from the box, the pages of my letters smelled of youth, that magic; sometimes they smelled of regret, like the residue of Baxter’s vomit, that you just cannot shake. Some letters made me laugh aloud and some just really hurt. The child who wrote those letters was so pure, so unself-conscious. They were written to a girl I met long before I heard “I love you” in a small hospital room. And though it was killing me to read my letters, I discovered that I was a kid I liked a whole lot.
* * *
Jane,
I really think your nonsense suits my nonsense.
* * *
Jane,
I don’t like you. I like chocolate. For you it’s bigger.
* * *
Jane,
My Grandaddy says that love is a poison that lives inside us. And we gotta give it away to survive.
* * *
Jane,
You’re the common person in my dreams. All of them. My mom says everybody has one.
* * *
And there’s one with a (bad) drawing of Jane’s wooden fence with a little grass at the bottom that read,
* * *
Jane,
I saw you today. My mouth didn’t work, but I was shouting with my eyes. You hesitated for a moment. I liked that.
* * *
Jane,
Big people say that your life will be divided in two by something really important. I think you’re my something.
* * *
Jane,
I think it’s been too long. I try to not think about you. But it’s like trying to not hear a fire engine that’s screaming by.
* * *
And another, written without any quotes or apostrophes when I was nine years old,
* * *
Jane,
I think theres more included in my I love you than in anyone elses.
* * *
Jane,
I’m from somewhere. But we’re from somewhere else.
* * *
Jane,
Where are you going? We’re not supposed to know yet, but if you can tell me I’ll meet you.
* * *
Jane,
Sometimes I have to chase the dreams away with a switch.
* * *
Jane,
Olly olly income free.
* * *
Jane,
It’s not like falling at all. It’s more like floating.
* * *
Jane,
You can have my Bull-Yawn. All of it. Always.
* * *
The last letter at the bottom of the FedEx box was dated my birthday:
* * *
Jane,
My Grandaddy says that the first half of finding happiness for yourself is giving it to someone else. So I just wanted you to know that you’re halfway there.
* * *
Eight days with Jane. Now she was gone.
Miss Jane Bradford
33 Lieu Lieu Lane, Houston, Texas
RETURN TO SENDER ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN stared back at me and I cried like an infant on that trampoline until I remembered it.
* * *
Beneath the stack of letters was the fat upholstered book. It was Jane’s diary, hand-stitched in raw purple silk. I read everything about a girl I had loved for far longer than eight days, and I loved her more with every word. She described finding my can and hoping I had not chosen to sell it, and then concluding that I must not have known, after having seen my film of her, and that she had waited. And waited. For me to reach down. But a shy and insecure boy never did. A photo of Jane slid from the fragrant, spiced pages into my scarred hand. It was chased by a rubbery little insole that flopped into my lap, exposing bled ink on its bottom.
enaJ I made out the first word.
!ti htrow yletinifed er’uoY
But my reality was used to being inverted, and it quickl
y recombined the words in my memory, and I was at the top of The Pole again, and, yes, Jane still was. The note I had stuck under the insole of her 95s the day I tied the laces perfectly and placed them into her mailbox had long since disintegrated along with her sneakers, but the phantom letters remained on the insole, indelibly stating what I had known since the first day I saw her—she was worth it. I continued to read Jane’s most intimate thoughts, hopes, and dreams about a life she had hoped to lead with a boy just beyond two fences and a ditch. A boy whom I know had missed his porthole. The rest is private and I shall keep for myself alone.
Under the purple book, and wrapped in waxed paper, was the completed oil painting on canvas of the field of green that I had once seen Jane painting in her garage and then again in her vacant bedroom on the golf course. There was now a fallen empty lawn chair with yellow and green webbing right in the foreground above those same detailed blades of grass, and a young naive, suited-up boy standing perfectly still under the white H uprights looking straight at me through his facemask, his arms raised and waving to what I knew was his family, the number 24 on his jersey only partially visible behind the football that was glued securely to his chest with Stickum, and an empty field of hash marks stretched out behind him.
Epilogue
Lew’s rain was starting to mask my tears as I climbed into the red Firebird in front of Jane’s old house and I drove away from my past. But it was on that trampoline in her backyard that I first asked for help. I got about thirty yards down her old street when something shook the undercarriage of Kevin’s old car like I had just run over a cinder block, until the back end sort of lurched and pitched the car sideways and I skidded to a stop on the wet street. I climbed out to see what I had run over, and there, in the street, about ten yards behind the car was The Plank. As rain continued to soak me to the bone, I lifted the hood and inspected the radiator. But nothing leaked at all. In Jane’s street by the golf course I realized that that plank had gone through the grille, but never actually pierced the radiator at all. It just dented it in a few inches and lodged itself there, taking all of these years to work its way free on its own.
The car idled perfectly, and none of its lifeblood escaped. I left that plank in the street in front of Jane’s house. And I climbed back in and headed home.
* * *
You know, I think grief compresses you into a manageable volume so you can operate, be functional while you landscape your emotions. Mine had been clear-cut and strip-mined. But I’m okay. And I hope that she knows that I’m okay, even though it hurts like it was then. Some people in this modern world may question why I talk to you. Well, the reason is simple. It’s because you’ve always been there, subtly nudging my conscience. I could always feel it, even at my worst, like that day on the golf course when I bludgeoned Andy when I was so young. The day the fat man played that song. I wrote down the bits I remembered on my social studies homework from my three-ring binder while leaning against that house on the golf course with those bloody banana leaves at my feet. I still have those homework pages today. I pull them out occasionally just to be sure. September 19, 1975 is scrawled across the top next to my name in the undeveloped handwriting of my youth. The lyrics I wrote down questioned where your love went when fear stretched time. Even then I knew it stayed right where it always was…where it lives. I loved that song. I went to numerous record shops and sang what I remembered but no one recognized it, not even Samir. Two months later, on a date that would eventually house my grief, a ship went down in Lake Superior that would be the impetus for a melody that I’d heard just a bit too soon for logic. But I now know that love doesn’t live in logic. So, when I peer into my mailbox to check, it’s not because I don’t believe. It’s because I do.
I sent 187 letters to Jane and prayed that somehow they would find her, and that she’d know. I wanted her to know everything. One hundred eighty-seven sealed letters were returned to me through the years, undelivered by an angry mailman who missed 187 chances to do the right thing. It was not until after Jane left that I truly understood my flaw. I had prayed and asked to put something in your hands that you’d already put in mine. That’s not how you work, is it? I should never have asked for you to deliver Jane a message that I could’ve simply whispered in her ear: 187 little secrets I wrote when no one was looking, and I could’ve told her each one, 187 little wounds that slowly dug the hole in my chest where Jane’s plank had been.
Windows of opportunity really are portholes, and I had missed mine. I understood, but I knew I had one more letter to write. I needed Jane to know everything that I thought I had more time to convey—how she moved me, how she changed me forever, how the mere recollection of the sight of her will forever be incomparable, how there’s nothing I ever wanted to do without her, how I wanted to hold her and never let her go, but mainly just how I loved her. Oh God, how I loved her. And so I wrote. And I mailed. And I prayed again.
One hundred eighty-eight letters sent to the love of my life. You know it’s modern-age blasphemy to talk to God. Hell, it’s even modern-age blasphemy to believe. But I believe. You’ve always listened. I know it. And I just want to thank you for listening again—and apologize. I asked you for 187 favors for Jane, favors that I could have done for myself. I’m sorry for that. But now I understand, and I just need to patch a hole.
I realize now that I only ever needed your assistance on the 188th. So when I walk out to my mailbox every day and look, it’s not because I doubt, it’s because I don’t. I know it won’t be there. I know that letter will never be returned from 33 Lieu Lieu Lane. It’s been ten years since I stopped writing when no one was looking, and you’ve never let me down. I just wanted to thank you for the delivery…and to thank you, Lord, for Jane.
Amen.
Acknowledgments
To three girls,
I met an invaluable developmental editor on the Internet named Ghia Gabriela Szwed-Truesdale. I needed help. See, I was left a box of almond seeds, and the sun was always there…so was the rain. Thank you, Ghia, for throwing them in the dirt and sprinkling some pabulum. It seems a Boudin Heirloom needs more than just one pair of hands.
* * *
I suppose there’s always an intersection in which an opportunity lies to follow your future. The one that counts. The one that holds it all. The one that not all roads lead to. I’d like to thank a girl named Julie McCullough for pointing a wandering boy in the right direction…to a Happy Ending.
* * *
And to the one who deserves the most…I’ll write nothing. I’ve learned. I’ll simply whisper it in her ear.
—Sean
About the Author
Sean Patrick Flanery is an American actor, born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and raised in and on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. He graduated from John Foster Dulles High School in Sugar Land, Texas, and then attended the University of St. Thomas before penning his first script and heading off to Los Angeles. He has appeared in over one hundred movies and television shows, some of which he hopes you’ve seen, and some of which he hopes you haven’t.
He lives with his family in Los Angeles, California, where he loves his life, works in the entertainment industry, writes, and owns and operates a martial arts academy, Hollywood Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Newsletters
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Sean Patrick Flanery
Cover design by Diane Luger
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.