He snatches the Chinese food carton from me and sets it on the table. Then he kneels over me, putting his arms on each side of me so I can’t move. “Where’s the movie, Jade?”
“It’s in the box.”
He smiles. “It’s not in the box. I just looked.”
I smile back. “Maybe under the bed?”
He glances over there. “Nope. Try again.”
“I really can’t remember,” I say innocently.
His hands start tickling my sides. I didn’t think I was ticklish until now. Between the tickling and the howling dog sounds coming from the TV I can’t stop laughing. I’ve never laughed that hard. It’s making my stomach muscles tense up so much that I think I’m getting an ab workout.
“Okay. I’ll tell you.” I can barely get the words out.
He doesn’t stop the tickling. “I’m waiting.”
“The box. I swear.”
“I already looked in there.”
“Just let me up.”
He moves aside. I get up and pick the movie up from behind the box.
“It was sitting on the floor next to the box.” I plop back down on the chair, trying to catch my breath. “Here.” I hand it to him.
“See? Was that so hard? A simple answer would have been so much easier.”
“Yeah. But not as fun.” I smile.
He looks at me, figuring out what that means. But he doesn’t take the bait.
“You want your food back now?” he asks.
“No. I need a minute to breathe. That was a workout.”
The cartoon dogs start howling again. I burst out laughing. That howling is too damn funny.
Garret reaches over me for the remote and turns the TV off. He tosses the remote on the floor and pins me to the chair again. “Jade, are you making fun of my movie?”
“No.” It comes out as a laugh. “I love it.”
He’s working hard to hold back his own laughter. “Jade?”
“Garret?” I say in the same tone.
“You’re a real pain in the ass sometimes.”
“Just sometimes? I’ll have to work on that.”
Our eyes meet and I see that look on his face. He wants to kiss me but won’t because of our strict friend agreement. To hell with the agreement. I can’t take it anymore. I reach up to pull him toward me but he’s already closed the distance between us and moved in for the kiss.
His lips just barely touch mine, waiting for my response. I kiss him back, making it clear that I want this. He shifts his body so that he’s sitting next to me, taking me with him so that I’m on top of him. I straddle him and see a slight smile as he reaches behind my head and brings me in for a kiss. It’s a slow, deep, intense kiss that is quickly moving us out of the friend category. His other hand reaches around my back and presses me into him.
It’s just like that time in the pool. Only this time I won’t let the voices interfere. I can’t. I like this way too much and I won’t let her ruin it for me.
20
After several minutes I wonder why Garret’s not taking this any farther. I love what he’s doing, but I’m dying for more and he won’t even go to second base. I guide his hand under the hem of my shirt and place it at the side of my waist, but he just leaves it there. He doesn’t even attempt to make a move.
Finally I pull away from the kiss. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not saying to go all the way, but we can do more than this.”
“I didn’t think I should after what happened, you know, the last time.”
I look down. “Oh. Well, don’t worry about that. I’m fine.”
His hand moves up to the side of my face, brushing my hair aside. “Something happened that night in the pool and it scared me. I felt like I hurt you or something. You started screaming and kicking me.”
“I wasn’t screaming.” Or was I? I don’t remember screaming. At least not out loud.
“Yes, you were.” He says it softly. “You said that you weren’t me. I didn’t know what it meant, but I assumed you were mad at me for touching you.”
I’m not you. I’ll never be you. I hear the words in my head. They’re the words I say all the time.
“I wasn’t talking to you. Or about you. That’s not what I meant.”
“Then who were you talking to?”
“I can’t say.”
“Then tell me what happened that night. And why it happened again when I found you in my room that morning. You got so freaked out when I joked about leaving the TV on.”
All of a sudden tears are forming and despite my best efforts I can’t make them disappear. My throat gets dry and I get this heavy feeling in my chest. I move off him and sit beside him on the bean bag chair.
“I don’t want to talk about it. It won’t happen again, okay?” A few tears run down my face before I can catch them.
Garret’s watching me and spots the tears. “Shit!” He quickly takes me in his arms and pulls me into his chest. “Jade, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I was just trying to understand.”
The tears come faster no matter what I do to make them stop. I bury my head in his shirt so he can’t see my face.
“Jade, talk to me.”
I can’t speak. If I do, my voice will crack or be shaky and he’ll know that I can’t get this crying under control. And guys hate crying. I hate crying. So the fact that I’m doing this right now is really pissing me off. A few minutes pass and the crying finally stops.
“Are you okay?” He gently lifts my chin up and I notice his shirt is wet from my tears.
“Yes. I’m fine.” I sit up and wipe my face. “Sorry I messed up your shirt.”
“I don’t give a shit about the shirt. And you’re not fine. Now tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.” My sadness turns to anger as I realize that I’ve shown him way too much of myself. “Just forget it.”
“We’re friends, Jade, and I don’t like seeing you like this.”
“Like what? Crying? I’m not allowed to cry?”
“It’s more than that. It’s something else. There’s something you’re not telling me. Just talk to me. Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t help, Garret. This is just something I have to deal with alone.” I almost cry again saying the word. Alone. It describes how I feel all the time, because I can’t tell anyone about this. And I’m so tired of feeling alone.
He rests my head back on his chest, then grabs a blanket sitting next to the bean bag chair and lays it over us.
We remain there in silence. And I wonder why I have to deal with this alone. Why I can’t just talk to Garret about this. If I had to pick someone to share this with, it would be him over anyone else.
“It was my mother,” I say barely above a whisper.
“What?” He moves my hair off my face. “Did you say something?”
“My mom.” I say it louder. “I was talking to my mom.”
There’s awkward silence. I’m sure he thinks I’m deranged. I shouldn’t have told him.
“Didn’t your mom die?” he asks cautiously.
“Yes, but sometimes I still hear her.”
“You mean like in your head,” he confirms.
“Yes.” Now he’ll definitely think I’m crazy. “It started after she died.”
“I hear my mom in my head sometimes, too. It’s just the memory of her.”
“This is more than a memory. It’s like she’s still alive, screaming at me. Telling me what a horrible person I am and how I’m going to screw everything up, just like she did. And I can’t make it stop.”
“Look at me, Jade.” He waits for me to lift my eyes to his. “You can make it stop. You’re incredibly strong. You’re stronger than anyone I know. Look what you came from and look what you did with your life. You don’t have to listen to her. You can shut her out.”
“I can’t. I’ve tried.”
“Then I’ll work on it with you.
”
“And how are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know. Let me think about it and get back to you.”
His offer makes me smile. His voice has so much sincerity, like he really does believe he can help.
I’m both amazed and confused at how Garret’s responding to this. I thought for sure he would’ve called me a lunatic and kicked me out of his room by now.
“Can I ask you something about your mom?”
I nod.
“Did she hurt you? Like physically hurt you?”
“Sometimes. If I made her mad. So I learned not to make her mad. Or I’d get out of the house when she started to get angry. She got angry a lot.”
“I’m sorry, Jade. I know that doesn’t help, but I don’t know what else to say.”
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. Like you said, I’m strong. I got through the hell of living with her all those years. And I’ll get over whatever’s going on now. I don’t know why I broke down like that. It’s just that I really like you and when you wouldn’t even touch me it was like she was here again, controlling my life. Taking away everything I want. I keep trying to move on and pretend that she never existed, but I guess I need to try harder.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. You’re trying to run from the past when maybe you need to face it.”
“No, thanks. I lived it. I don’t need to remember it.”
“But dealing with the past can help you move forward. At least it did for me.” He stops and I get ready to ask what he means but then he continues. “When my mom died, I refused to accept it. I kept thinking she would just come home one day. I’d wait at school, looking for her car to pick me up. I had dreams that she was still alive. Finally my dad made me see a counselor and after talking to the guy I realized that I couldn’t say goodbye to my mom until I faced the fact that I was so damn pissed at her for leaving me. I hated her for it. And I hated myself for feeling that way. Because it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t want to leave. Eventually I figured out that I wasn’t angry at her at all. I was angry that the plane crash even happened and that everything changed from that point forward. Once I accepted that, I could finally move on.” He stops. “You don’t want to hear this, do you?”
“I do want to hear it. And I’ve been listening to everything you said. But your situation is different than mine.”
“Yeah, but what I’m trying to tell you is that to get past this you can’t keep running from it. You have to deal with it.”
“I’m not running from it! I just don’t want to think about it!”
He lowers his voice. “It was just an idea, Jade. I was just trying to help.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. I’ll think about it, okay?” I run my hand along his shirt trying to smooth the wrinkles I created with my tears. “Garret, will you do something for me?”
“Of course.” He takes my hand off his shirt and holds it in his.
“Don’t treat me differently now that I’ve told you this. I’m not fragile. I’m not going to break. And I need you to promise you won’t tell anyone what I told you tonight. Only you and Ryan know this about me. I haven’t even told Frank.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Good. Now can we watch a movie and eat our cold Chinese food?”
He leans in and kisses my cheek.
“What was that for?”
“For trusting me enough to tell me.” He gets up. “Okay, we’re watching the football movie. I might even make you watch it twice after you hid it like that.”
The rest of the night he acts completely normal, which is just what I wanted. He doesn’t kiss me again and I wonder if he ever will. What I told him probably totally freaked him out. No guy wants to date a girl who still hears her dead mother’s voice in her head. But at least he listened and he seemed to actually care, which is more than I expected.
Surprisingly, things aren’t weird at all between Garret and me after that night. Sunday we go out for our usual breakfast and the rest of the week goes on as normal. He doesn’t bring up what happened and neither do I. But I do think about what he said. Facing the past may be the only way to make the voices go away. Ignoring it sure hasn’t gotten me anywhere. It’s only made it worse.
Friday night I decide it’s time to open the letter that’s been sitting untouched in my desk drawer since my birthday. I’m not afraid of it anymore. Why should I be? Frank said it’s just my mother’s hopes and dreams for me. Coming from her, that should be comical.
Garret is at a house party a few blocks from campus. Halloween is tomorrow so it’s a costume party. Earlier I saw some girls leaving in their costumes, which looked more like lingerie. But apparently if you add a witch’s hat or strap on some angel wings, it’s a costume. Harper wore a sexy bunny costume, pink of course.
I think the entire college went to that party or at least everyone in my building. It’s completely quiet. I don’t even hear footsteps from the floor above. Garret asked me to go with him tonight, but I still have no interest in parties, especially this one, which will be packed with people.
Even though I decided to open the letter, I’ve been avoiding it. Now it’s 9 and I feel like I should just get it over with. I sit on my bed staring at the handwriting on the front, which still freaks me out. It’s like my mother is truly visiting me from the grave.
I tear open the envelope and inside is a full sheet, front and back, of my mother’s handwriting.
Jade, If you’re reading this it means that you’re 19 years old, which doesn’t seem possible as I look at you now, my three-week-old baby girl sleeping soundly in your crib. My little Jade, with your beautiful green eyes. My mother gave me a jade necklace for my 13th birthday and I thought it was the most beautiful stone I’d ever seen. When your little eyes looked up at me for the first time, I knew that Jade would be your name.
I stop to examine the handwriting again. It’s definitely my mother’s but this doesn’t even sound like her. It’s like someone else wrote it. Someone who actually cared about me. I continue reading.
If I still had that necklace, it would be yours now. But I no longer have it. I lost it on the night that I’m going to tell you about. I wish I didn’t have to tell you any of this, but you have to know. Because if you’re reading this, then something bad has happened to me and I’m no longer there to tell you the truth.”
What does she mean by ‘something bad’? It almost sounds like she’s blaming someone else for what happened to her, which isn’t possible. Her overdose was her own doing. I keep reading.
“Last year, when I was still in college, I got a job as an intern for one of the candidates for the presidential nomination. Caucus season was in full swing and I was so excited to be part of it. When I wasn’t in class, I worked day and night with the other interns at the campaign headquarters.
One night we were helping out at a speech and I met a man there—about ten years older than me and very attractive. He worked on the campaign in a different state and was in Des Moines for the speech. We started talking and he asked me to dinner and I said yes. But he never took me to dinner. Instead he drove me outside of town and parked near a cornfield. It was dark and cold and I was so scared because part of me knew what he was about to do. He proceeded to do what I thought he would and when he was done, he left me there on the side of the road in the freezing cold. I was in such bad shape I thought for sure I would die there, but I woke up the next day in the hospital. The police asked me questions and I told them who did this to me. They said that no person matching that name or description worked for the campaign. They said what happened to me was a random crime. But I knew who did this to me and I refused to let him get away with what he’d done.
A friend of mine worked at the newspaper and I told him what happened but he couldn’t run a story about it because there was no evidence to prove it. The next night I got a call from someone telling me that if I repeated my story to anyone that something
bad would happen to my parents. It scared me but I didn’t believe it. That week I began seeing a counselor at my college. I told her what happened. A few days later, there was a gas explosion at my parents’ house, killing both of them. I knew it wasn’t an accident. When I went for my next counseling session, the woman accused me of lying. She said I made the whole story up. And then she refused to see me.
The man who did this to me was determined to silence anyone who knew what really happened. Somehow he was able to silence the police, the hospital staff, my counselor—anyone who knew the truth. But he knew my parents wouldn’t keep his secret so he killed them. I thought for sure he’d kill me, too, but for some reason he left me alone and I don’t know why. Maybe he figured his threats were enough to keep me quiet.
I never spoke of the incident again. But out of that horrible night came the best thing that ever happened to me. You, Jade. I learned I was pregnant with you two months after this happened. I was so devastated after your grandparents died, but then I learned about you and it was like a miracle. I was actually feeling hopeful again. Then he called. Your father. He somehow found out. He ordered me to take care of it saying he would have money sent. I told him I would, but I never did. I dropped out of college and went to live with a friend in a small town just south of here. The past few months I haven’t left the house. I’ve been hiding out until you were born.
Just yesterday, I heard from him again. He knows about you. I told him I’d never tell my story if he agreed to leave us alone. And surprisingly he agreed. I don’t know if he’ll really leave us alone, but I can’t worry about it now because I have to take care of you. You’re all I have, Jade, and I’m being the best mother I can. I’m seeing a counselor at the free mental health clinic downtown. There’s a doctor there and he gave me medication to help with my depression and anxiety. I’m working so hard to get past this, Jade.
I know you want to know who this man is but I can’t tell you. I promised him I never would and I have to keep that promise. I’m only telling you this because someday he might try to contact you. Maybe he’d pretend he just found out about you or tell you he wants to be part of your life. Be a father. I don’t know why he would do that, but there’s always that chance, especially if I’m gone. So I wanted you to know the truth about this man. If he ever shows up, don’t believe anything he says. Stay away from him. He’s dangerous and although I don’t think he would ever harm you, I can’t be sure given what he’s already done. You’re probably living on your own now and I need you to be safe.
Choosing You Page 18