by Amy Giles
If all this happened so Mom can finally get the help she needs, then okay. We hit rock bottom and someone’s giving us a ladder to climb out of this rotting, stinking hellhole.
^^^ How Jess expresses optimism and resiliency in the face of adversity.
Lucas
Jess is lying on her belly under the blankets, her hair messy, face flushed, curled up in the nook of my arm. Her chin is propped on that sensitive area, right above the armpit, the point of her chin digging into a ligament. It should hurt, but surprisingly I feel nothing.
My finger traces the freckles that dot along her shoulders, continuing under the blanket, plotting a constellation along her back.
Wait. Is she naked under there?
She’s rambling, one long run-on sentence, not even stopping for a breath. The words are gibberish, but it doesn’t matter because her smile is electric. I squeeze her tighter and tighter against me, trying to become one with her. The arm that’s wrapped around her is falling asleep, but I’m afraid one false move will shut her down.
Finally, she stops talking and gnaws on her lip, looking up at me with these big doe eyes. That did it. This is definitely a dream. Jess doesn’t do that doe-eyed thing. But I let it keep rolling, because, you know, she’s naked and I kind of want to see where this will go.
I pull her up closer to me, so we’re nose to nose. Her body is pressed up next to mine, her skin warm; her eyelashes brush against my cheek.
“Jess, remember at the beach on Thursday?” I nudge my nose against hers, inhaling her breath on my face.
She smiles again but this smile is spooky. Everything about my experience with dreams—my pounding heart, my rapid breathing—tells me this dream is changing, veering far off course from the outcome I was rooting for.
“You said everyone you know is a ghost,” I press on. Why am I picking at that scab?
“None of this is real, Lucas.” Her eyes go flat, dead, like all the characters in The Polar Express that made that movie terrifyingly unwatchable for me as a kid.
“I know . . . this is a dream.”
She continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “We all died that night, Lucas.”
To illustrate her point—because God forbid Jess is ever wrong—the blankets pull back on their own, and Jess’s pale naked body rises up into the air, her arms lifting by her sides. She floats away from me across the room, her toes barely skimming my bed. Shivering from the absence of her warmth, I grab at the empty air to pull her back to me, but I’m also terrified. She’s a ghost. My Jess is a ghost!
She drifts upward toward the ceiling, and then she’s nothing but smoke and vapors. Gone.
My alarm clock on my nightstand reads 12:28 when my phone buzzes. May as well answer it; I’ve been staring at the ceiling where I last saw Dream Jess for the past hour.
I glance at the name on the screen before answering it. “Jess?”
“I’m sorry,” she starts off, almost as if she’s calling to apologize for turning into a ghost and leaving me an hour ago.
“Just tell me: Are you okay?”
“Yeah?”
I swing my feet out of bed and onto the floor and run my hand through my hair. “Jesus, I’ve been so worried. Is your mom okay?”
Her phone is ancient and has the worst reception. Her voice rolls in and out in between crackles.
“Jess . . . we have a bad connection . . . what’d you say?”
“Can you hear me? I said I’m sorry about today . . . wait . . . yesterday . . . God, what time is it?”
“It’s twelve thirty,” I tell her.
“I am the worst girlfriend!” she cries.
“There are worse,” I tease. “Where are you now?”
The connection breaks up again.
“Jess . . . I’m sorry . . . what’d you say?”
“HOME!” she hollers and this time I hear her loud and clear.
“I’m coming over,” I decide.
“Wait . . . what?”
“I’ll be there in half an hour. Keep your window open.”
I hang up, hopping out of bed and reaching for some pants at the same time.
I don’t dare take my car and risk waking my parents. Just my phone, my keys, and my germ-infested sneakers, before slipping out the front door. Tying the laces on the front porch, I take off, running to Jess’s house.
I slow down as I turn onto McBride so I don’t alert any neighbors or barking dogs. Last thing I need is to get arrested for sneaking around Jess’s house. I crouch down below the window line, hoping Mrs. Alvarez isn’t one of those old people who can’t sleep.
Jess’s room is dark, except for a lit candle on her dresser and the phone in her hand casting a pale glow on her face. I poke my head in first so I don’t startle her and then pull myself in. She shuts the window behind me and pulls down her shade. The candle is vanilla scented; her bedroom smells like a dessert factory.
One look at her and I know I made the right decision coming here. The stress of the last twenty-four hours is all over her face.
“Hey.” I pull her into my arms. She squishes her face into my chest. I pull her over to the bed and we both sprawl out.
“You okay?” I ask, breathing in the scent of her hair, and then I recognize it. Honeysuckle. I’m hit with a memory of Jason and me plucking its flowers off a shrub in early spring, removing the pistil from the center, and licking its nectar. It was hardly a drop, barely enough for a bee or a hummingbird, but it tasted magical.
“You being here helps, a lot actually. Thank you.”
She reaches behind her, grabbing a pamphlet off her nightstand. She holds it up for me to see.
Complicated Grief Disorder
Recognizing the Signs
She points to the bulleted list of symptoms. “Everything. Every symptom here my mom has.” She takes the flyer from me and shakes it. “When I came home yesterday and found her . . .” Her voice shakes. “She threw up most of the pills. Thank God they made her sick. Otherwise, it could’ve been so much worse. The doctor said she could’ve slipped into a coma if the pills were fully absorbed.”
I close my eyes. The vomit splatters in the bathroom. Her mother tried to commit suicide and Jess found her. It’s so much worse than I thought.
“I spoke to a doctor at the hospital. A psychiatrist. He said my mom’s going to have to do the work but they’ve had some success with a type of psychotherapy with patients who have this kind of grief disorder. He told me what everyone else said, you know, losing a child is the most difficult loss to process. But then he said, ‘But that doesn’t make it any easier on you’—meaning me—‘does it?’”
She reaches over again to grab a card off her nightstand. “I came home with all kinds of goodies.” She hands me the card, pointing to the name on it. “That’s the woman who runs a support group for teens who have lost siblings. She wants me to go.”
I recognize the address. It’s in the same building where I see Dr. Engel.
“Are you going to do it?” I ask, hoping she’ll say yes.
Jess nods. “Yeah. I am. If my mother’s going to put in the work, so am I.” She glances up at me. “Can’t hurt, right?”
I smile down at her. “It helps,” I tell her. “I can come with you if you want. Or not. Up to you.”
She gnaws on her lip. “Let me go to one on my own first. Maybe I don’t want you to know every dark secret inside of me. Could be a real turnoff.” She laughs softly, but there’s a flicker of insecurity in her eyes that tells me that’s something that actually worries her.
“A social worker met with me and Mrs. Alvarez. When she found out about our situation here, she made calls and gave us a list of things to do. Since we own the house, there’s a lot of equity we can tap into. Mom can get a line of credit with the bank to pay off the bills. When she’s ready, she can go back to work to pay it off. And we qualify for Medicaid. So yay, us. We’ll have health insurance too.”
She plucks at my T-shirt but doesn’t look me in the
eye.
“I feel like an asshole,” I admit.
She looks up at me. “You? Why?”
I shake my head. “Jess, I said some stupid things. I didn’t realize how bad things were.”
“That’s because I didn’t tell you everything,” she says, trying to make me feel better.
“I know that. But why didn’t you tell me?”
She takes a breath and runs her hand through her hair. “I didn’t want people to know, to judge us. Especially you. Your family is so perfect—”
“Perfect? My family is so not perfect!”
“Well, they seem pretty perfect to me, okay? I was embarrassed. And I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me.”
I pull her closer. Her knee hooks up over my leg. “Do you know what I see when I look at you?”
She shakes her head against my chest. I push her hair behind her ear.
“One of the strongest people I’ve ever met.”
She laughs. “Yeah. Right.”
“I mean it. Give yourself some credit. You get up every day and do what you have to do. No one tells you what to do. You just do it.”
She shrugs. “It’s not like I had a choice.”
“You did, but you’re not a quitter, so it never occurred to you to give up.”
She rolls onto her stomach and rests her chin on my armpit. Unlike my dream, it does kind of hurt. I pull her up so she’s on top of me, then wrap my arms behind her lower back.
“I have a confession to make. I broke into your house today.”
“You were here!” she squeals a little saying it.
“I have zero regrets. I was afraid something happened to you and your mom.”
She stares at me for a while, and I can’t really figure out what she’s thinking.
Finally she says, “Thank you,” and kisses my chin.
I shrug. “For breaking and entering?”
She laughs softly and plants her hands on my chest. “For caring. For being here.”
With a deep sigh, she buries her face in my chest and exhales; her breath swoops through me and I can feel it coursing through my body like a current. She folds her hands on my chest and rests her chin on them.
“By the way, I need the address of where you’re fighting on Saturday.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m coming.”
“No . . . Jess . . . you don’t have to. I know you don’t want to see that.”
“You know I don’t take no for an answer. So forget it. I’m coming. Some things, you just don’t do alone, okay? You need people rooting for you. I’m your people. And you’re mine.”
She runs a finger over my eyebrow, then the other. “Did I ever tell you that you have really sexy eyebrows?” she asks.
“Eyebrows?”
“Yeah. Eyebrows can go either way. They can really mess up a person’s face. Yours are perfection. And this thing here.” She kisses my chin. “This butt crack on your chin. It’s hot. Makes you look like a superhero.”
Suspended above me, she pauses, holding my gaze, her lips slightly parted. My hands run down her back.
“What now? My erotic attached earlobes? My sensual deviated septum? If weird is your thing, I have a hitchhiker thumb that’s going to drive you wild!” I hold up my bent thumb.
She bites her lips, watching me.
“What?” I’m desperate to know her thoughts since they’re obviously about me.
Instead, she shows me.
She presses her lips against mine and knots her fingers through my hair, holding me to her. If it were physically possible to fuse with another human being, in this moment, I think Jess and I are damn close to becoming one.
Her other hand slips under my shirt, tracing my stomach, running up my side. Tearing herself away, she sits up and pulls her shirt off and tosses it. The candle stutters in the slight breeze of her shirt flying across the room and her shadow dances along the wall in the flickering light. My hands stop moving, frozen by the sight of Jess half naked on top of me. She reaches behind her to unclasp her bra.
Shit . . . is this . . . Are we . . . tonight?
But what if this is just another way of Jess trying to tune out what’s happened to her in the past twenty-four hours? Jess, queen of mystery and deflection, finding yet another method to repel actual feelings.
“Jess? Maybe we should wait.” The words hurt just coming out of my mouth because I really want this.
Her hands freeze behind her back. She stares back at me, confused.
“Ummm . . . are you saving yourself for marriage or something?”
“No. You can thank Krista Gardner for taking care of that,” I joke. “She dumped me right after.”
“Sorry to hear that,” she says, lying back down on top of me. She folds her hands under her chin to peer up at me. “So . . . if it’s not that . . . what is it? I have you alone in my bedroom and you don’t want to take advantage of this moment with me. I even lit a candle to set the mood.” She giggles, but she’s nervous, I can tell.
I push her hair behind her ear, then trace her forehead with my finger to erase those worried creases.
“Jess . . . I like you . . . a lot. A lot a lot. But if you’re doing this because you don’t want to deal with what’s really going on, then we have to wait.”
She stacks her fists on top of each other like a tower and props her chin on them to be more at eye level with me.
“Lucas, there are very few things I’m entirely certain of. I can’t make a whole lot of sense out of anything going on in my life right now. Except for you.”
She buries her nose in my shirt and sniffs. “You’re sweaty and a little stinky. I’m convinced you don’t own a brush because you always look like you just came out of a wind tunnel. But you’re the kindest, most beautiful boy I’ve ever met.” She kisses a trail along my jaw. “But the real clincher was tonight. Running over here in the middle of the night to be here with me is probably the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done. Ever.” She starts to slide off of me. “But if you don’t want to . . .”
My hands run up the sides of her neck and cup right below her ears, bringing her down for a kiss.
“You make a compelling argument,” I tell her. “You win.”
Around five thirty, I sneak out of Jess’s window before the sun makes an appearance and jog home. Just me and the garbage truck out on the empty roads. They honk and the guy in the neon-orange vest holding on to the back of the truck flexes his bicep at me and laughs.
The carpeting on the stairs pads my footsteps as I make my way quietly back into my bedroom. By the time I get home, I have just about an hour to sleep before my alarm clock goes off. I strip off my clothes down to my boxers and throw them across the room before pulling the covers over me. When I open my eyes again, Dad is sitting on the edge of my bed giving me the stink eye.
“Hey.” I sit up. My head feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton. “Did I sleep through my alarm?”
The light quality of the room is about right; still liquid gold. I look at the time. It’s only 6:53. I could have slept for another seven minutes. Seven more minutes would have been nice. His eyes have me locked in his angry crosshairs.
“Mind telling me where you went last night?”
My first instinct is to deny everything. But no.
“Jess called. I went over there.”
His internal conflict is written all over his face. Being the father of an eighteen-year-old must be weird. “She asked you to come over in the middle of the night?” He leans closer as if he didn’t hear me correctly.
“No! God no. I offered. She was upset. Her mom’s in the hospital,” I answer.
“Yeah, your mother told me.” He breathes in deeply through his nose, those enormous nostrils being put to good use to vacuum the stale air in my room. They even have built-in HEPA filters. “Still . . . you can’t go sneaking around in the middle of the night.”
I nod to be agreeable, but then I stop.
; “Dad. She . . . uh . . . I really like her, you know? And I can’t promise I won’t go to her if she needs me.” I scratch the back of my head. Something about the gesture makes him both wince and smile. He’s got that melancholy look on his face like when we bust out the old home movies.
“You’ve been doing that since you were a little kid. Anytime you got nervous or stressed, the hand went up to the head.” He reaches over and tousles my hair. With a resigned sigh, he drops his hands between his legs. “You’re eighteen, Lucas. I can’t . . . I know I have to start letting go. You’ve never done anything to make me doubt your judgment.”
Shit. Now I feel really guilty about the fight on Saturday.
“Just . . . text me, at least, if you do that again, so I know. So I don’t worry. It won’t matter if you’re forty-eight; I’ll still worry.”
Maybe for the first time I’m getting a glimpse of a relationship my dad and I may have a few years from now.
“Does Mom know?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No . . . but I can’t keep running interference. She’s your mother. You need to start talking to her.”
“I talk to her!” I say, hearing the defensive whine in my voice.
“You talk. But you don’t talk. Anytime there’s a problem, you ask me to fix it,” he says. “It’s not just you. Both of you are dancing around it.” He juts his hand out to me. “She was really happy yesterday. That you talked to her about Jess.”
Up until yesterday, even the thought of Mom and me having a feelings conversation filled me with dull anxiety. It’s one thing for me to talk to Dr. Engel. I know my words can’t do any harm there. But I’ve been afraid of saying the wrong thing and hurting my mom. But yesterday was okay. Mom did cry, but she didn’t fall apart. Neither did I.
“How’d you know I was out, anyway?” I squint as the morning sun angles through the blinds directly into my eyes.
“What? And give away my secrets? No way.” He picks up a dirty shirt off the floor and throws it at my face. “Clean up your room. And good luck getting through the day. You look like hell.”
He laughs and shuts the door behind him. My alarm goes off a minute later.