Plain Jayne

by Brea Brown

  Laughing, Paulette watches and says, “You were a thousand miles away. Did you say hi to my sister and brother-in-law while you were there?” Soon, when it’s apparent that no amount of towel-blotting is going to help the stain, she holds out her hands, “Alright then. Strip to your knickers. I’ll take that dress; you go upstairs and find something else to wear.”

  It doesn’t feel strange at all to follow her orders since she’s so matter-of-fact about it.

  Her attitude reminds me of the woman in the fitting room of a lingerie store I visited with my mom when I was in high school and needed a special strapless, backless bra to go with my prom dress. She had casually stood by in the dressing room while I took everything off from the waist up, and then she handled my breasts like a couple of melons (fine… more like oranges) in the produce department as she took my measurements.

  When I blushed and stammered, she said curtly, “There’s no need to be embarrassed. I see bare breasts all day long; it’s what I do.” She wrote my specs down on a spiral-bound mini-notebook and tapped my shoulder with her pencil. “Now, hold tight; I’ll be back in a few seconds.” And then she’d left me in there to simultaneously shiver and sweat with my arms crossed over my chest.

  She returned with a bustier that she wrestled me into as I held on for dear life to one of the hooks on the wall next to the changing room mirror. When she was finished, I had an hourglass shape that most supermodels would have been jealous of.

  That’s when Mom barged in, eager to get a look. She blinked back tears and fanned her face. “Oh, Jaynie. You’re going to be stunning! Look at you!”

  At the time, I was supremely annoyed at the crowd around me in my undies, but before we were even home, I’d realized that Mom and I had shared a rare woman-to-woman moment. And while it may not be one of my fondest memories, I do look back on it wistfully, because it’s one of the very few moments like that I ever had the chance to experience with her. I had no idea at the time how precious it was.

  Like the woman in the lingerie shop, Paulette is all business after I hand over my soiled dress. She doesn’t even give me a second glance in my mismatched Target bra and panties but immediately turns and heads in the direction of the laundry room. Only when I’m climbing the stairs in an unfamiliar house in my underwear do I feel self-conscious. And then only a little bit. After all, there’s nobody here to see me.

  Chapter Nine

  Paulette may insist she doesn’t think I’m lazy, but I know I am, so when I’ve changed into clean clothes, I grab my laptop and set off in search of a place where I can concentrate and write.

  There’s a library, complete with dark raised wooden wall paneling, hardwood floors, fusty rugs, and an entire floor-to-ceiling wall of bookshelves, crammed with ostentatious works of Literature with a capital “L.” A leather-topped desk sits in the middle of the room. The only thing on it is a green glass-shaded library lamp. The drawers are empty, except for the thin middle drawer, which contains some pens and blank pads of paper. This is definitely not where the man of the house spends time working. There’s not even a phone in here.

  It should be a perfect, solitary, distraction-free place for me to set up shop. It’s quickly apparent, though, that it’s not. Too quiet. And the stale air-conditioned air makes me feel like I'm standing in a vacuum.

  Back out in the hall, I cross to the door opposite the library and push down on the handle. It doesn’t budge. Hmm… Lucas’s private porn room, I presume? I think with an evil smile. It’s the only locked door I’ve encountered since arriving here. Interesting. I’d ask Paulette, but I don’t want to seem too nosy. Anyway, it's not like it's any of my business, right? Even so, I stare at the door for a while, dying to know what's on the other side. Eventually, I give myself a little shake and blink away the possibilities, making my way through down the hall, through the kitchen, and outside.

  I realize my options are limited out here, too, thanks to the antique I call my laptop, which runs on its backup battery barely long enough for me to get into a writing rhythm and then promptly dies. So I need to have access to an electrical outlet. That means I should be safe anywhere close to the house. I’ve noticed its outer walls are dotted with covered outlets, ostensibly for electrical lawn equipment and other outdoor appliances and conveniences.

  The pool’s too tempting, so I don’t even consider poolside as an option. Too hot, anyway, out there in the direct sun. I scope out the covered balcony outside the bedroom where I’m staying. After climbing the wooden stairs and coming to a shamefully breathless rest next to the railing, I determine that it’s breezy, shady, close to an electrical source, and has some comfortable seating options. Yes. This could work…

  My eyes land on the French doors a few feet away from where I’m standing. I set my laptop on the chaise longue, cross to the doors, look around to make sure nobody’s watching, and peer through the glass at the room inside. It’s a mirror image of my room in layout and a photo negative of it in color scheme. The walls are painted a deep navy blue; the baseboards and moldings are a medium gray. The floor’s kitted in gray wood planks that are designed to look weathered, but I can tell from their sheen that they’re smooth and un-splintered, perfect for skating across on sock-clad feet.

  Black and white photographs of various sizes adorn the walls at differing heights. The ones I can see through the paneled curtains that cover the door's glass panes seem to be abstracts of common beach items (I think one is the inside of a conch shell and the other is an extreme close-up of the frayed canvas wrap on an old-fashioned life preserver). Quite artistic. The wooden furniture is painted in a high gloss to match the baseboards and molding.

  And the bed… Well, it’s a nice bed. Lower than the one in my room. Platform base with a simple, rectangular headboard. Solid medium-blue bedspread with wide navy border edging. But I don’t let myself look at it for too long. It makes me feel squirmy, for reasons that I don’t even want to explore.

  Breathless, I scurry back to the chaise and snatch my laptop bag. Nearly at a run, I find the closest set of stairs to lead me down to the backyard, where I try unsuccessfully to catch my breath.

  “Ahem.” I clear my throat repeatedly while I swipe my bangs from my forehead and turn in circles, looking for an escape. From what, I’m not sure, considering what I want to get away from is in my head.

  Never mind. Gazebo. Yes!

  I lurch toward the white gingerbread structure under the sprawling oak tree and almost trip up its three short steps to the safety and seclusion it provides.

  I don’t know why I didn’t think of coming here before (especially before I looked through that door). I know it’s wired and has electrical outlets, because Paulette snuck in while I was napping here yesterday and plugged in a behemoth antique oscillating fan. It felt heavenly, and the sound of the crashing waves mere yards away was a natural tranquilizer. I probably would have slept through dinner and well into the evening if the mosquitoes hadn’t chased me inside.

  Now, I look around as if seeing it for the first time. Yesterday, it was just a sweet sleep spot, with the wide padded ledge ringing its inside perimeter and the lattice walls that simultaneously conceal (although it hadn’t hidden me from Paulette’s view) and provide a fresh cross-breeze. Today, I see it as more of a workspace, with a generous-sized rectangular table in front of one side of the octagon’s padded ledges, several electrical outlets embedded in the wooden floor, and a peekaboo view of the ocean that should be compelling without being too distracting. Perfect.

  Before I can talk myself out of it, I unpack my laptop and the three-inch stack of paper that is the marked-up hard copy of my manuscript from Lucas. Once I’m plugged in and booted up, I adopt the new writing strategy I’ve been developing in my head during my lazy poolside tanning sessions. It’s always been my habit—with school work, household chores, and the various jobs I’ve held down to pay the bills while I’ve pounded out this book—to tackle the toughest part of a job first and then work my way
to the easier, less taxing tasks. While that may make sense when it comes to cleaning a bathroom, it’s not getting me very far with these revisions. As a matter of fact, starting with the hardest job—rewriting the fire scene—is overwhelming and defeating.

  So I’ve been toying with the idea of starting with the easy stuff (the things I would normally leave until the end) and working my way up to the Herculean task of the fire scene. Starting at the end works for solving mazes. Why wouldn’t it work on difficult editors’ revisions? If nothing else, it will give me a feeling of accomplishment, like I’m actually getting something done, instead of spinning my wheels on one seemingly-impossible assignment. And then everything will be done but the fire scene, and I’ll be able to fully focus on it. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even stumble across some inspiration along the way, and I’ll be eager to do the re-write.

  Probably not, but I have to take my optimism where I can get it, at this point.

  Without further ado, I start on page one and methodically make the changes Lucas has suggested, nay demanded, bookmarking and skipping over anything that gives me pause or seems complicated and time-consuming. My goal today is to get stuff done, not sit and agonize and contemplate. If I notice that familiar feeling of dread slipping in, I move on to the next comment.

  In no time at all, I’ve reached the end of the manuscript, and I can’t stop myself from grinning and saying out loud, “That’s what I’m talking about!” even though it makes me feel like a goober. I’m a happy goober, and that’s all that matters right now.

  Quickly, before taking a break, I count how many of Lucas’s requested changes I skipped (all instances of bland descriptive prose—another one of my weaknesses) and note with glee that there are far fewer than it seemed there were when I was going through the copy the first time. I’m on a roll and don’t want to lose momentum, but I also recognize that I’ll run out of gas if I don’t refuel with some food and water. I decide I’ll choose one scene—Rose’s visit to her family’s burial plot upon returning to her hometown after college graduation—and think about it during lunch. Notepad and pen in hand and a definite pep in my step, I cross the sunny yard of thick, velvety grass that only money can grow.

  ******

  It’s not a fun thing to remember, but over my tuna salad sandwich (the best one I’ve ever eaten, thanks to Paulette), I force myself to go sense-by-sense through the experience of seeing my family’s gravesite for the first time. I ordered the headstones in the haze that was the week following the fire, but I was hundreds of miles away—probably sitting in a lecture hall, listening to a professor drone on about a subject that I didn’t care about but was forced to take to fulfill a general education requirement—when they were placed. I could have taken a trip on any given weekend to visit the cemetery, but… somehow it was never a priority. It definitely wasn’t something high on the list of things I wanted to do. Until I was finished with college, that is. Then, I felt an almost physical need to go there.

  It was technically late spring still. But in Indiana, that meant it was already blazing hot. The scorched grass crunched under my shoes as I picked my way to the plot where the people I’d been closest to in the world lay buried in their caskets.

  Caskets. An interesting choice I made, considering they were already partially-cremated in the fire. I don’t even remember making that decision. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe that was one of the few things my mom’s sister, Chelsea, did before she went back to her life in California and never spoke to me again. Or maybe that was one of the things stipulated in their wills… they didn’t want to be cremated. It’s not something we ever sat around the dinner table and talked about. It doesn’t matter, I guess, because the result was that their charred bodies were put in coffins and tossed into some holes in a depressing cemetery in central Indiana. Done. No going back.

  No going back. That’s what I kept telling myself while I walked closer and closer to where I knew their graves were. That, I remembered. Way in the back, almost against the chain link fence separating the graveyard from the private property that would probably eventually be bought by or donated to the cemetery as the population of the dead continued to grow and outnumber the living population in my—literally—dying hometown of Longview, sat the graves. Tangled up in the fence was a small group of honeysuckle bushes. When the wind would gust, the sweet, cloying aroma would waft my way, confirming that I was heading in the right direction. Every step I took, I contemplated turning around and running in the other direction. No going back. By the time I stood in front of the headstones, I was sweating, and it had less to do with the June heat or the relentless sun than the fact that I was wrestling with myself. But my fight instinct had my flight instinct on the mats… barely.

  My mind was racing as I stared down at the names as if they belonged to strangers. The letters didn’t seem to be working together to form the words. Maybe it was the font in the marble. Maybe it was the neurons misfiring in my frantic brain. The cicadas in the neighboring field were deafening. There was a metallic taste in my mouth.

  Shannon Lynelle Greer, beloved daughter and sister; Nicole Gayle Greer, beloved daughter and sister; Gayle Barbara Greer, dear wife, mother, daughter, and sister; Robert Leonard Greer, devoted husband, father, and son.

  Jayne Ann Greer, cheater of death.

  Because that’s what I’d done, hadn’t I? I should be here with the rest of them, I remember thinking miserably. I, too, should be described as the beloved daughter and sister. And I would have been, had I not—at my mother’s urging—attended the all-night post-graduation party hosted by the Longview High School Student Council. It wasn’t really my scene, but all my friends were going, so I didn’t want to be the only one who wasn’t there, in case something interesting happened.

  Of course, nothing did. Nobody in my graduating class was even daring enough to spike the punch or smoke a joint in the bathroom. No, the most exciting thing going on that night, unfortunately for me, was happening ten miles from where I was at the small town’s civic center, at my house.

  Over the years, I’ve tried to imagine, in split-screen fashion (like in the movies), what was happening simultaneously at different points of the night. When I was hanging out on the perimeter of the makeshift dance floor, scoffing with my friends at the slow-dancing partnerships while secretly wishing Tanner Kelley would ask me to dance, was the frayed wiring in our old farmhouse smoldering? By the time we’d moved on to the video game room, had flames developed in the walls, while my unsuspecting family members slept? As I participated in the water fight in the wee hours of the morning, was the fire spreading while the defunct smoke alarms looked on silently? At what point did the flames race up the stairs from the first floor, where they originated, to engulf the old wooden staircase, the only means of escape? During the raffle winner announcements? When I was contemplating leaving early to go home and catch a few hours of sleep in my own bed, were my sisters and parents finally waking up to the choking smoke, throwing their legs over the sides of their beds, only to have the soles of their bare feet scorch against the white-hot floor?

  No. I know it didn’t happen exactly like that. At least, that’s not what the fire chief told me. He said that something—most likely carbon monoxide—killed them in their sleep before the fire ever started. He knows this, because there was no smoke in their lungs. Then the faulty wiring sparked in the laundry room under the stairs. He said the two events may not have been related at all. As a matter of fact, he seemed baffled and almost personally offended that the two things could happen within hours of each other. After all, carbon monoxide robs the atmosphere of oxygen, and fires need oxygen to spread. He mumbled all this under his breath, as if he were thinking out loud, instead of trying to explain to a bereft family member how something like this could happen.

  But despite all his doubts about the scientific possibilities, he was my biggest supporter when rumors started to spread about something more sinister bringing about the deaths of my parents and sister
s. When theories about murder-suicide (and outright murder, involving yours truly as the killer) crackled in the dry June air, he quickly doused them with his official ruling that the deaths were an accident and the fire that followed a bizarre coincidence. That was his professional opinion, and he stuck by it over and over again, in newspaper articles, reports, affidavits, and insurance depositions. The inconclusive coroner’s report neither supported nor refuted his claims.

  That’s not how it happens in my book, though. Rose’s family members aren’t victims of a silent killer in cahoots with a tangle of wires and a dryer’s full lint filter. Rose’s family fights to escape the heat and smoke and flames. They die huddled together, comforting each other, not alone in their beds. I know it’s better that my family didn’t feel anything. But a part of me blames them for not fighting death, even though I know they didn’t stand a chance. I want Rose’s family to have the chance mine never did.

  At the light touch on my shoulder, I bungee back to the present by flinging my half-eaten sandwich into the air.

  “Oh, dear,” Paulette says mildly, her eyes pinned to the food on the patio stones. “Now look what I’ve done. And I only wanted to see that you were alive.”

  More sharply than I mean to, I reply, “Of course, I’m alive!”

  Sheepishly, she explains, “I got an email from a friend once that told a story about a man who sat dead at his desk at work for five days before anyone thought it was odd that he wasn’t moving, and they discovered that he was deceased. I’d hate for that to happen to someone I know.”

  I rub my eyes. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read in emails.”

  “No! It was a true story! I’ve been terrified ever since. I pester Luke by relentlessly checking on him when he’s around. He’s exactly the sort of person that could happen to.”