Jane Bites Back jb-1

by Michael Thomas Ford

  “Byron is what happened,” Jane told her.

  “Byron?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Jane. “Suffice it to say we made up.”

  Lucy looked at her, eyes wide. “You didn’t sleep with him?” she said.

  “No!” Jane said. “We just had dinner. Then he walked me home. I hate to admit it, but he was a perfect gentleman. It makes me think he’s up to something.”

  “But why was he there at all?” Lucy asked.

  Jane told her the whole story.

  “Penelope Wentz?” Lucy said when Jane was finished. “Her books are awful.”

  Hearing it gave Jane some satisfaction, for which she immediately felt guilty. “She’s apparently very popular,” she said by way of apology to Byron.

  “Sure she is,” Lucy said. “We sell a ton of her books. His books,” she corrected. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “I confess I don’t always pay attention to what people are buying,” said Jane. “And since you’ve been doing most of the ordering for the past year or so, I’m not entirely up on what people are reading. Frankly, I’m a little tired of the whole thing.”

  “I never get tired of books,” Lucy said as they exited the airport and drove onto the Thruway. “Anyway, tell me more about Byron.”

  “I feel sorry for him,” said Jane. “I know how that sounds, but you should have seen his face when he talked about his friend.”

  “His friend?” said Lucy. “You sound like my mother when she talks about my brother’s boyfriend.”

  “All right, his lover,” Jane said. “In my day we didn’t talk about it at all.”

  “You also rode around in dogcarts,” Lucy reminded her. “But go on.”

  “He was really in love with Ambrose,” said Jane. “To be honest, I never thought he was capable of it.”

  “Sounds like Ambrose’s death killed something in him,” Lucy remarked.

  “I think you’re right,” Jane agreed. She fell into silence, watching the dreary landscape of upstate New York pass by.

  “It made you think about you and Walter, didn’t it?” Lucy said after a few minutes.

  “Yes,” Jane admitted. “I wonder if I haven’t been foolish in that regard.”

  “Maybe it’s time to take a chance,” said Lucy.

  Jane sighed. She had been thinking the same thing. But still part of her was terribly afraid. After all, her change of heart didn’t change any of the realities of the situation. She was still a vampire, and Walter was still human. He was still going to age and die. While she could die at some point, she wouldn’t age, at least not in the same way. It was a situation destined to make one or both of them miserable.

  “You know, my father died when he was thirty-two,” Lucy said.

  Jane turned to her. “But I’ve met him,” she said. “When they visited last year.”

  “Jim is my stepfather,” Lucy said. “I call him Dad, but he isn’t, at least not biologically. He and my mother have been married since I was eleven. My father died from brain cancer. It was horrible, especially for my mother.”

  “I can’t even imagine,” Jane said.

  “She loved him more than anything in the world,” Lucy continued. “When he died, she could have just fallen apart. But she didn’t. She held on to all of the good memories and threw the rest away.”

  Jane understood what Lucy was getting at. Life never offered any guarantees. Anything could happen at any time, and people could be taken from one another without warning. She thought of Walter and Evelyn. But look what that did to him, she reminded herself. He can barely speak about her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Lucy. “Spend the next thousand years being lonely.”

  “You’re really an impudent young lady, do you know that?” Jane said.

  “I’ll tell you another story,” said Lucy, ignoring the reprimand. “When I was on the road with the band, one night in Milwaukee I came out after a gig and saw this dog scrounging through the trash outside the club we were playing at. The bouncer was kicking him to get him to go away. He ran down an alley, and I followed him. He hid under our van and wouldn’t come out. He was terrified. So I got a hamburger from the club and sat there for two hours, coaxing him out. I guess his hunger won out over his fear, because eventually he crawled out and ate.”

  “This is a horrible story,” Jane told her.

  “It gets worse,” said Lucy. “Well, sort of. The short version is that I talked the other girls into letting him stay. He was an ugly little guy, a mutt. He limped, and his fur was all patchy. I named him Spike. Anyway, when we got to Des Moines I took him to the vet to make sure he was okay. And he wasn’t. It turned out he had a bad heart. The vet said he’d likely been starved as a pup and treated badly. His leg had been broken, which is why he limped.”

  Jane glanced back at Jasper, who was still looking out the window, his ears flapping in the breeze. “I don’t think I want to hear the rest of this story,” Jane told Lucy.

  “Well, you’re going to,” Lucy said. “Because there’s a point to it. After what happened with my dad, I didn’t think I could handle watching someone I loved die. The other girls wanted me to have Spike put down, or at least leave him at a shelter. And I almost did. But then I looked at his funny little face, and I knew I couldn’t do it. He’d come into my life for a reason. So I kept him.”

  She got quiet, and Jane thought perhaps she’d come to the end of the story. That wasn’t so bad after all, she thought, relieved.

  “He died three months later,” Lucy said suddenly. There was a hitch in her voice. “We were in Albuquerque. He hadn’t been right for a couple of days, panting a lot, and he didn’t want to eat. I knew something was wrong, so I stayed up one night just holding him and rubbing his ears, telling him what a good boy he was. At some point I looked down and he was gone.”

  Jane felt a catch in her throat. She looked over at Lucy, expecting to see her crying. Instead, she was smiling.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Lucy looked at her. Again Jane was surprised to see that on her face was a look of happiness. “He died knowing that I loved him,” Lucy said. “Dogs live in the moment. However they’re feeling is how they believe they’ve always felt. For those three months Spike thought he was the happiest dog in the world. He forgot all about being abused and scared and alone. And when he had to go, I was there for him.” She paused a moment. “If you ask me, that’s about as good as it gets.”

  “But what about you?” Jane said. “You had to lose him.”

  “But I got to know him for three whole months,” said Lucy. “I got to love him and care for him. If I hadn’t taken that chance, I never would have gotten to experience what I did. And now when I think about him, I only think about all of the good things he brought me.”

  “That’s why you wanted me to go back for Jasper,” said Jane. “You think he’s my Spike.”

  “No,” Lucy said. “I wanted you to go back for Jasper because I knew he was afraid. Walter is your Spike.”

  “That was a horrible trick,” Jane said, sniffling.

  “It’s not a trick,” said Lucy. “It’s the truth.”

  Jane spent the next two hours talking about anything but Walter. When Lucy dropped her off at her house, Jane was relieved to be getting away from her. She took Jasper inside, where the first thing he saw was Tom. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and then Tom tore up the stairs with Jasper behind him, barking like crazy.

  So much for peace and quiet, Jane thought as she left them to work things out and went into the kitchen to go through the mail that had piled up in her absence. As usual, it was nothing but bills, catalogs, and uninteresting junk addressed to Occupant. Nothing personal. No letters or cards. Nothing from anyone who cared about her.

  “You’ve let Lucy get to you,” she told herself as Jasper came trotting into the kitchen. He had a fresh scratch on his nose, and Jane as
sumed he and Tom had come to some kind of understanding. Jane filled his water bowl and set it on the floor. Jasper drank happily, slopping half of the water onto the floor and dipping his ears in the bowl. Jane made a mental note to pick up some more paper towels.

  “You’re not going to die on me, are you?” she asked Jasper. He looked up at her and wagged his little stub.

  “Good,” Jane said.

  She was leaving the kitchen to take her bags upstairs when she noticed that the message light on her machine was blinking. It’s probably Kelly, she thought as she hit the play button.

  “Jane, it’s Walter,” said the familiar voice. “I’m just calling to see how your trip was. I saw you on Comfort and Joy. It was … interesting.” He paused. “You looked nice,” he continued. “Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Give me a call when you get back. If you want to. Bye.”

  Jane erased the message, but the words stuck in her head. Walter did care about her. She knew that. But …

  But what? asked a voice that sounded unnervingly like Lucy’s.

  “But everything,” said Jane with irritation. “Everything, that’s all. It just wouldn’t work.”

  She continued upstairs, where she threw her bags on the bed and began to unpack them. “It’s impossible,” she said, tossing some underthings into the hamper. Even though she hadn’t worn them, Lucy’s comment about the baggage handler had made her suspicious. “For one thing, once he found out about me he wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

  Jasper came into the bedroom and lay down. A moment later Tom poked his head out from under the bed and crept out, cutting a wide berth as he walked around Jasper and pretended not to be looking at him. He jumped onto the bed and settled down on top of Jane’s red silk blouse, which she had just removed from her bag.

  “You know I’m right,” Jane said to Tom and Jasper. “Stop looking at me that way.”

  She took a pair of shoes from the bag and dropped them on the floor. “I mean, who would want to be with someone like me?” she asked. “‘Sorry, dear,’” she said in a mocking imitation of her own voice. “‘I can’t watch television with you tonight. I have to go find someone to bite.’” She shooed Tom off her blouse and shook the hair from it. “I don’t think so,” she said firmly.

  “Not that it wouldn’t be nice,” she remarked as she unpacked the pants she’d intended to wear on television. “It has been a long time. And I do miss some things, like having someone hold my hand, and coming home to someone other than a cat.” She looked at Tom. “Sorry,” she apologized. Then she looked at Jasper. “Not that you aren’t lovely,” she told him. “But it’s not the same.”

  She finished with the first bag and started on the second. It contained mainly toiletries, which she carried to the bathroom in several trips. “Men are so difficult, though,” she said to herself. “One never knows what they’re thinking.” She deposited her makeup bag on the bathroom counter. “Although Walter always says just what he means,” she argued.

  When she’d finished, she put the suitcases back in her closet. Tom and Jasper were still watching her, Tom with a decided air of boredom and Jasper as if at any moment she might announce that it was dinnertime.

  “What are you looking at me for?” Jane demanded of them. “That’s not going to work.” She sighed. “Fine. You win.”

  Going into her office, she picked up the phone and dialed before she could stop herself. Walter picked up on the second ring. Jane forced herself to not hang up.

  “It’s Jane,” she said. “I’m wondering, would you be free for dinner tonight? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  Chapter 31

  “When she finished telling him what she had so long kept hidden, she looked up, her eyes wet with tears. “Can you ever forgive me?” she asked. He knelt and took her hand. “Forgive you?” he replied. “For what? For having a foolish heart? Who among us doesn’t?”

  —Jane Austen, Constance, manuscript

  “It went really well,” Jane told Lucy. It was the next morning, and she was filling Lucy in on her dinner and conversation with Walter the night before. “He was particularly pleased to hear that I’m not really celibate. At least not by choice.”

  “So you told him about the whole, you know … situation?” Lucy asked.

  Jane, who was alphabetizing the mystery section, suddenly became very interested in the cover of an Ellis Peters novel. “It didn’t come up,” she mumbled.

  “Excuse me?” said Lucy. “It sounded like you said you chickened out. Is that right?”

  “I’m going to tell him,” Jane said. “Just not right now.”

  Lucy made a clucking sound with her tongue.

  “Don’t tut-tut me,” Jane warned. “I’ll get to that part eventually. It was difficult enough telling him that I have abandonment issues. When he said he would never leave me, it was all I could do not to have a breakdown on the spot.”

  “Well, you have ten years or so to tell him,” Lucy said. “That’s about when he’ll start wondering why you never gain weight and your hair doesn’t turn gray.”

  “I can always tell him that I’m very well preserved,” Jane suggested.

  Lucy laughed. “At least the two of you are finally an item.”

  “An item,” said Jane. “You make us sound like celebrities.”

  “Well, one of you is,” Lucy reminded her.

  Before Jane could answer her, the phone rang. Jane went into the office and picked it up.

  “Jane, it’s Kelly.” His voice sounded odd—shaky and sniffly

  “What’s the matter?” Jane asked, worried.

  “Bryce is having an affair,” Kelly sobbed. Jane could hear him hiccuping as he burst into tears.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” Kelly said. “Besides, I confronted him and he told me.”

  “Oh, Kelly,” said Jane. “I’m so sorry.”

  “The worst part is, he met the guy when we were in Chicago.”

  “How did he have time?” Jane asked, realizing as soon as the words were out that it was probably not the right thing to say.

  “They met in the gym at the hotel,” Kelly explained. “In the sauna, of course. I knew I should have gone with him instead of watching pay-per-view”

  “If they just met that one time, it can’t be much of an affair,” Jane said.

  “That’s the best part,” said Kelly. “The guy was a guest at the hotel. He actually lives here in New York, at least part of the time. Bryce has already seen him once. He lied and told me he was at his bowling league.”

  “I’m truly sorry,” Jane said. She’d run out of things to say that wouldn’t sound forced.

  “He says he doesn’t know what he wants,” said Kelly, ignoring her. “He says he needs to sort things out. Well, let him sort them out at Grayson’s place.”

  “Grayson?” Jane said.

  “That’s his name,” said Kelly. “Grayson? How am I supposed to compete with that?” Jane heard a muted trumpeting sound as Kelly apparently blew his nose. Then he was back on the line. “Oh, and your book is going to be number one on the Times list on Sunday.”

  “That’s too—” Jane started to say. “Excuse me?”

  “Your book. The Times list. Number one. Congratulations. I’m sorry, I should be more up. Congratulations!”

  “Number one,” Jane repeated, letting the news sink in. “My book. Number one.”

  “You debuted ahead of the new Rebecca Ingstrom,” Kelly said. “I hear she’s furious. It’s the first time she hasn’t had the number one spot her first week out.”

  Jane wasn’t listening. Her book—her book—was number one on the most important bestseller list in the world. She could barely breathe.

  “Do you think Bryce loves him?” Kelly asked.

  “Loves who?” Jane asked, confused by the question.

  “Grayson,” said Kelly.

  “Oh,” Jane replied. “I don’t know. That sort of thing
is difficult to tell.” They really do all think only of themselves, don’t they? she thought. It doesn’t matter which sex they favor.

  “I need to get away,” Kelly announced. “Take a break from all this drama. I wonder if I have enough frequent flyer points to get to Paris.”

  “Why not come here?” Jane heard herself say.

  “There?” Kelly said, his tone suggesting that he couldn’t imagine any possible reason for doing such a thing.

  “Yes, here,” said Jane. “If you get on the train, you can be here in time for supper. You can stay with me. It’s lovely here, and there’s absolutely nothing to do. We can talk all night long and figure out what to do about your situation.”

  Kelly was silent for a long moment. “You know what? I think I will,” he said. “A few days in the country is exactly what I need.”

  “Well, it’s not exactly the country,” said Jane. “We do have electricity and running water.”

  Kelly ignored her joke. She heard him typing. “I’m looking at the schedule online now,” he said. “If I hurry, I can catch the eleven o’clock,” he said. “It gets in at five. Can you pick me up at the station?”

  “Absolutely,” Jane answered. “Assuming I can get the team harnessed to the wagon by then. You know how mules are.”

  Again Kelly ignored her jest. “I’ll see you then,” he said. “And thank you, Jane. I knew you’d make me feel better.”

  Kelly rang off, and Jane left the office. “Anything exciting?” Lucy asked her.

  “I’m having a visitor,” said Jane. “And my book seems to be number one.”

  Lucy’s shrieking startled her. She was further disarranged when Lucy picked her up and spun her around, continuing to squeal joyfully. “You’re number one!” she shouted as she set Jane down. “Number freaking one!”

  Jane looked at Lucy’s face. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m number freaking one!”

  Their combined shrieking was deafening.

  At seventeen minutes past five, Amtrak train number 281 pulled into the Brakeston station. Approximately two dozen passengers emerged onto the platform, among them the unmistakable figure of Kelly Littlejohn. Jane waved to him, and he greeted her with a kiss on the cheek.