The History of Jane Doe

by Michael Belanger

  “Only a couple of pumps,” he said, “or else the beer goes everywhere.”

  I wanted to take the spigot and shove it right in Tommy Beddington’s mouth. Instead, I nodded, said my mea culpas, and put out my cup like a child asking for more juice.

  Then Jane walked over.

  “You know Ray, right?” Jane asked as she put her cup under the spigot for a refill.

  “We go way back,” Beddington said. I snorted, a laugh caught too late. I wasn’t going to be a pawn in Beddington’s game.

  I cleared my throat, attempting to recover from my laugh. “We’re part of the lifers.”

  Jane and Beddington looked at me blankly.

  “People who’ve lived in Burgerville their whole life. It’s funny ’cause it’s also the term they use for prison.”

  Classic Jane humor, but she didn’t budge, almost seemed embarrassed by me.

  “How do you guys know each other?” I asked.

  “We have gym together,” Jane said.

  I thought of Jane wearing tight shorts and a tank top and became even more jealous.

  “Gym!” I said loudly, sounding as if I’d solved a mystery. AHA!

  “We’re on the same badminton team,” Tommy said. “Undefeated for the last three classes.” He put his hand up and Jane high-fived him. The only logical explanation, I concluded, was that Jane had been possessed by a demon who loved team sports.

  “Anyway, we’re gonna go on a tour of the house,” Tommy said to me. He gave me a look, the one guys give when they’re practicing some sort of code. Unfortunately for him, no one had ever bothered to teach it to me.

  “Cool,” I said. “Let’s go.” I refilled my beer with two gentle pumps—high on the moment, I think I may have even winked at Tommy—and followed them.

  “We’ve owned this land for over a hundred years,” Tommy said, holding a door open for Jane and me.

  The door opened to a room full of deer heads, a bear, something with tusks, and antique guns scattered throughout, as if the designer had tried to match the animal with their instrument of death.

  Jane walked right up to one of the deer, touched its antlers, and stood in front of it, almost eye-to-eye.

  “It’s like he’s looking back at me.”

  “My grandfather loved to hunt,” Beddington said.

  He also thought a group of mutant cows invaded the town, I added to myself.

  “This way,” Tommy said, motioning to yet another door. “Ladies first,” he added as he waited for Jane and me to pass through the doorway.

  The next room was full of people packed together from wall to wall. I saw Simon in the crowd, examining the party like a scientist studying a new species.

  “Simon!” I yelled.

  His head jerked, trying to find the source of his name. He was standing under a gigantic family portrait of the Beddingtons that looked like it had been lifted from a clothing catalogue. They were all in front of a lighthouse, wearing matching outfits, with draped sweaters over their shoulders. They smiled the kind of phony grin a kindergartner might draw on a stick figure. Not pictured: the toxic waste from the leather factory or enforcers from the mob.

  Simon scanned the crowd, finally stopping when he got to me. He pointed at the portrait and started laughing. I pointed to the real-life Tommy to my right, who wasn’t enjoying the joke nearly as much.

  Simon’s face turned red.

  “My parents made me do it,” Tommy said to me.

  “You all look very . . . warm,” I said, referring to the sweaters.

  By the time Simon made it over to us, Tommy had wandered away to clean puke off his parents’ carpet. Apparently, a drinking game involving How the Grinch Stole Christmas had gotten a little out of hand.

  “So that was awkward,” Simon said. “Why were you standing next to Tommy Beddington, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, still attempting to uncover the truth behind Jane’s friendship with him.

  Jane stayed silent. She sighed and rolled her eyes.

  “What’s with her?” Simon asked.

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “She’s right here,” Jane said.

  “When’d you become friends with Tommy Beddington?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know he’s the devil incarnate, right?” Simon said. “You know about the pudding incident, don’t you?”

  “That was two years ago. He’s actually a really nice guy.”

  “If you mean in the sense that Attila the Hun wasn’t so bad once you got to know him, or Vlad the Impaler was just misunderstood, then yeah, great guy.” Sometimes I could use my powers of history against people.

  “We’re at his house,” Jane said.

  “That’s what people do in high school,” I said. “They use people when it’s convenient for them. You do it too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jane said.

  Someone dressed as Santa walked by and started dancing near Jane. Jane stood still, ignoring the odd spectacle.

  “Now that you’re friends with Tommy Beddington, how much longer are you gonna hang out with Simon and me?”

  Jane’s face went flush.

  A pause in the music. I felt my mouth go dry and the fogginess from the beer dissipate. Why did I say that?

  This is one of the memories that kills me the most when I think about Jane. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t a big deal, but when I saw her face, I wanted to curl up in a ball and disappear.

  “Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus having sex,” I said, hoping to distract Jane from my stupidity with another random image.

  She stormed off, leaving Simon, Santa, and me completely alone.

  “I know what Santa wants for Christmas,” Santa said.

  “No one asked you,” I said.

  * * *

  • • •

  It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that I saw Jane again. Simon and I were holed up in a corner watching everything built up in the previous few hours implode. The keg went dry. The energetic dancing degenerated into a scene from The Night of the Living Dead, accompanied by the weakening pulse of the music. It felt like we had entered a sort of Twilight Zone, where the longer we stayed, the more difficult it became to leave.

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” Simon said.

  The scene played on a loop in my head, reaching its inevitable conclusion again and again—time travel without the benefit of changing the past. “You’re not helping,” I said. “It’s not like I killed her firstborn child.”

  “When you apologize, I’d lead with that,” Simon said.

  I downed the last of my beer. “I’m going to find Jane.”

  I zigzagged through the crowd, the party slowed to a crawl. It reminded me of one of those nature shows that uses a slow-motion camera to capture the inner workings of something we take for granted, like a bee pollinating a flower or a spider capturing its prey. Up close, it was horrifying.

  I walked through the hunting room, into the shiny kitchen, back to the wall of B-list celebrities, but still couldn’t find her. A feeling of dread hit my stomach. Could she be with Tommy?

  The long and winding staircase beckoned me. Somehow I knew I had to confront whatever lay beyond those stairs. Floating outside of myself again, I watched from above as I ascended the steps, ready to confront Beddington if I had to, a hero on his way to slay the dragon. I thought it might be my last chance to tell Jane how I really felt.

  By the time I reached the upstairs, I discovered another obstacle: a long hallway of closed doors. I slowly marched through the gauntlet, on the lookout for any sign of Jane. Then I saw it. All the way at the end, a door with a sports banner and yellow caution tape strewn across. It had to be Beddington’s room.

  It became clear to me what
I had to do. I walked toward the door and knocked as loud as I could.

  “Go away,” Tommy Beddington’s voice thundered through.

  “Not until I talk to Jane!” I yelled back.

  I jiggled the doorknob and rammed my shoulder into the door. I felt the old lock give as the casing on the door cracked. I had become a one-man demolition team.

  The room flooded with light from the hallway. Beddington sprang out of bed in a fighting stance as his covers flipped back, concealing the person underneath.

  “What the fuck, Ray?” Beddington said.

  Something about the light and Beddington in his boxers—posed in a boxer’s stance—made me reevaluate my original plan. My anger at Beddington dissolved into sadness. The confrontation felt like a punishment.

  I backed out of the room slowly.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled to Beddington. “Jane,” I said, addressing the figure under the blanket, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  I heard Jane’s voice, loud and clear.

  “Sorry for what?” she said from the hallway behind me.

  I turned around. Jane stood there, a confused expression on her face.

  “Then who’s . . .?”

  The covers flipped back. Steven Peters from the choir, shirtless, hair in all directions, squinted into the light. “Is that you, Ray?”

  Beddington took a seat on the bed, glancing back and forth at Jane and me. He had this look on his face, like he was scared, angry, and confused all at the same time. I don’t think I’d ever felt like such an asshole in my entire life.

  “You won’t tell anyone, right?” Beddington said.

  “No,” I said, my adrenaline dissipating. “Sorry about your door,” I added.

  “Just get out!” Tommy yelled. I closed the door behind me as best I could and came face-to-face with Jane.

  “What the hell was that all about?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

  “I . . . uh . . .” I couldn’t quite put my thoughts into words.

  My buzz had worn off the second I walked into Beddington’s room.

  “You can’t just go barging in on people,” she said. She began to walk away from me. I followed her down the stairs, out the front door, and into the cold.

  “I’m sorry,” I called after her.

  Jane stopped in the middle of the lawn. She had her back to me. It was snowing a lot harder than it was when we first got there.

  “I’m sorry about what I said before.”

  “Is that what you think of me?” she said. “That I would use you to get to Beddington?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I can’t believe you’d act like such a jerk. You owe Tommy an apology.”

  “I know. It’s just that . . .” I searched for the right thing to say. “You know how Grandma Irene’s music always puts you in a good mood? That’s how I feel about you. When you’re around, I’m just happy. I guess I was scared I’d lose you, that you’d want to be with someone like him instead of someone like me.”

  Jane turned around to face me. She shook her head. “You’re really smart about history, but you can be a real idiot when it comes to what’s going on right in front of your face.”

  I looked away. I figured I blew it.

  It seemed like she was about to say something else, but instead, she walked over to the Red Rocket and opened the back door. “No one locks their car in the suburbs,” she said. She got in and sat down. Reclined so far back, she was almost completely horizontal. “Are you coming?” she said.

  “Should I get Simon?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  I gulped, not sure if she was about to kill me or kiss me. But nothing was going to stop me from finding out which. I joined her in the van and tilted my seat to be even with hers. It felt like we were lying down in bed together. Snow was collecting on the roof, but I could still make out the clouds moving across the sky, the moon lighting up the edges. I slid the door shut.

  “How would you tell our story?” Jane asked.

  “Our story’s not over,” I said. “At least I hope it’s not. Historians need perspective.”

  “But if you had to . . .”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled. A cloud of vapor swirled around me. “I’d talk about the joke you made on your first day in Mr. Parker’s class. About the presidents on Mount Rushmore. How that’s when I knew how funny you are.”

  “What else?”

  “The night you came over to my house and we played Never Have I Ever. How you covered your eyes during The Butcher.” I smiled just thinking about it. “You let your guard down. And I knew I’d fight the Butcher to protect you, even if it meant ending up in one of his soups.”

  Jane laughed. “Keep going.”

  “I don’t know, all the little moments. The times I realized how much there was to you . . . to us.” I glanced at her. It was the first time I’d ever spoken about us as an us. She was looking up at the sky, but I could tell she was smiling. “Roger Lutz says the problem with studying history is that there’s too much of it. That’s how I feel about you.”

  “That there’s too much of me? You were doing so well . . .”

  “That didn’t come out right. I mean there’s too many great moments to choose from.”

  “Better.” She scooched off her seat and made her way toward me. “Is there room for me?” she said. I tried to speak, but no sound came out. She sat on my lap and wrapped her arms around me. Our breath mixed into a single cloud. The snow continued to collect on the roof; it felt like the world was burying us in this moment. Jane leaned forward and her hair brushed against my face. Then she kissed me, and I couldn’t help but think that I had just been wandering around trying to make my way to this.

  When she pulled back, her eyes were still closed.

  I thought back to our pact about telling each other when and if our wishes came true. “Delaney’s one for three,” I said.

  “You mean?”

  I nodded.

  Before I could say anything else, she leaned forward once again.

  We kept kissing until the lights in the van turned on and we heard a knock from outside. Simon stood there, a look of disappointment on his face.

  “Sorry,” Jane and I said together, sitting up. Simon nonchalantly got in the front seat and closed the door.

  “It was unlocked,” I said.

  “Am I just a chauffeur to you now?”

  “The chauffer,” Jane said.

  “I’m supposed to be the first one to make out in my mom’s minivan,” he said with a sigh. Then he started the Red Rocket and we headed home.

  208 DAYS AFTER

  MAKE-BELIEVE

  It’s Christmas Eve. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since that night at Beddington’s.

  I can hear my mom and Tim downstairs, decorating the Christmas tree. At first, my mom tried to keep our life separate from her relationship with Tim, but now it feels like we took in a stray dog who won’t leave us alone. Tim’s been coming over more and more. Eating dinner, watching TV, checking up on me if my mom has to work late. Tim the superhero, the rescuer, or even worse, the role model, as my mom once called him.

  “Ray,” she yells up the stairs, “we’re about to light the Christmas tree.”

  “I’ll be right down,” I say, with no intention of actually leaving my room. Then the scent of cookies wafts into my bedroom from the vent that connects to the kitchen, and I immediately change my mind.

  “Hey, Bud,” Tim says when I walk down the stairs. Tim’s new nickname for me. I am now a Bud.

  “What do you say, Ray?” my mom says as if I’m a five-year-old learning to say please and thank you.

  “Hi, Tim.”

  My mom looks back and forth at Tim and me, waiting for a conversation to begin.

&
nbsp; “It’s been cold,” I say. Rich would at least want me to try.

  Tim nods. “The weatherman says we’re due for more snow.”

  Fascinating, I think. Somebody please write this conversation down. This must be preserved for future generations!

  “What’s Simon up to?” my mom asks after realizing the conversation has reached its disappointing crescendo.

  “I don’t know.” It’s true. We’ve been hanging out less and less. We didn’t have a big fight or anything, just a bunch of little steps away from each other. “Where are the cookies?”

  “In the kitchen. But first you’re gonna watch the tree light up.”

  “Now I’m being ordered to participate in Christmas?”

  She plugs in the lights. Only a few of the bulbs come to life. Brand-new ornaments are hung around the tree, all the references to my dad mysteriously missing.

  The star shines brightly, then makes a buzzing noise and goes out.

  “Well, that was anticlimactic,” I say.

  Tim turns off the lamp in the family room, letting the few bulbs that work paint the room in a dim rainbow. “It’s just enough,” he says.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see my mom reach out and touch his hand. Regardless of how I feel about it, my mom is happy.

  “Can I go now?” I ask.

  “I know it’s early,” Tim says, “but . . .”

  He grabs a wrapped present from under the tree.

  I think he expects me to open it, but I don’t have it in me to rip off the paper like a little kid, and say thanks to the camera and how it’s exactly what I wanted.