by J. S. Bailey
“I don’t see why he wouldn’t be. He acts like he can’t stand being alone.”
Wayne studied her. The clock ticked noisily up on the wall.
She could almost hear the wheels turning in his head as his mind processed what she’d just told him.
“You’ve got to believe me,” she said as a tendril of panic nudged its way inside her. If he were to dismiss her claims as imaginary, she would have no one to confide in, and she would be forced to consider the possibility that she really had gone insane.
He nodded after a beat. “I think I have to.”
Relief lifted a weight off her chest. “Thank goodness for that. I can’t have you sending me off to a padded room when I’ve only just moved in.”
He prodded at his pasta. “This isn’t something to joke about. You don’t know what kind of person he is. Was.” He rubbed his temples with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand. “Don’t think I’m mad at you. I just…” He shook his head and stared at his plate. “Did you tell him he needs to leave?” He twirled another forkful of spaghetti and chewed.
“I told him he needs to move on, but he basically said he’ll go to hell if he does.”
Wayne paused to take a long drink from his glass of ice water.
“He’s probably just scared. I mean, if I died right now, I don’t know where I’d go.”
She laughed. Wayne thought he was going to hell, too? He and Jerry must have both been cut from the cloth of insecurity.
“Why do you people always expect the worst?”
He stabbed at his dinner again, not looking at her. His brow had furrowed. “Isn’t there something nicer we could be talking about?”
“Politics?”
“I said nicer.” He laid his fork down. “Okay. Let’s say I robbed a bank. Where would I be going if I got caught?”
She hoped this wasn’t a trick question. “Jail?”
“Exactly. And God knows everything that I’ve ever done, so no crimes of mine will have gone unnoticed.”
“So you’ll go to jail when you die.”
“Jessica…”
“Sorry. I just think that if you’re sorry for what you did, God will forgive you.”
“I hope so.” His face darkened, and he fell silent.
She sensed it was time to steer the conversation to more pleasant matters. “Yesterday I found out I’m going to be an aunt, and the proud parents are flying in tomorrow for a family reunion nobody bothered to tell me about.”
“Only you could manage to make that sound bad,” he said, “but tell Rachel I said congrats. It’s the Reyes clan having the reunion?”
“Yep. The whole place is going to be swarming with Chicanos.”
“Which place?”
“The one over in Campbell County. Rachel and Eric are staying with Uncle Esteban and Aunt Sharon for the weekend.”
“You should invite them over for dinner tomorrow if their flight lands in time. They’ll make better company than you and Sidney.” He grinned.
“And they’ll make better company than you because they don’t have some weird going-to-hell complex.”
A quick movement in the corner of her eye caught Jessica’s attention. She turned and saw Jerry leaning on the banister at the foot of the stairs, glaring at Wayne with eyes like daggers.
She couldn’t even guess what had caused this reaction in him.
Was it something they had said? Jerry hadn’t looked this enraged any of the times she’d seen him so far, not even when he’d had his fit at Smithfield Park. Jessica gulped. “Uh, Wayne? Does anything in here seem unusual to you?”
“What kind of unusual?”
“You’d know it if you saw it.”
“It’s him, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“What’s he doing?”
“Watching you.” Like he wants to kill you.
His face paled even more. “Is it okay to talk to him?”
“Sure. Just don’t say anything that might be upsetting.”
“Where is he?”
“Right there. By the steps.” She pointed.
Looking uncertain, Wayne stood up and approached the place she’d indicated with the caution of one stepping up to a land mine. “This good?”
“Uh-huh. You’re right in front of him.”
“I don’t like this.” His voice sounded small.
Jerry glanced at Jessica. “Does your friend always act this queer when he gets scared?”
“He’s not queer!” she blurted, rising from her chair and step-ping up to the unlikely pair like a referee about to break up the weirdest fight in the universe.
Wayne’s head snapped around. “Whoa, now. Who isn’t queer?”
“Nobody in here is queer,” she said. “Right?”
Wayne stepped back a little. “There shouldn’t be, unless Jerry is.”
This was possibly the worst thing Wayne could have said, even though Jessica knew he was only teasing. Jerry lunged at him, his face apoplectic. Jessica stepped between them without thinking. “Stop!”
Wayne let out a yelp, lost his balance, and fell over backward.
It felt as though ice suddenly flowed through Jessica’s veins, and fragments of intruding images filled her mind’s eye. Faces of people unknown to her, a yellow house with a For Sale sign posted in the yard, a boy tossing a baseball to another child, a woman hurling dishes out of a cabinet onto the floor…
“What just happened?”
Jessica blinked, feeling disoriented as if the room had turned on its side. A few shakes of her head cleared her of the sensation. “I think he forgot that he isn’t solid. You okay?”
Wayne was struggling to his feet. She held out her hand, and he laced his fingers into hers so she could help him up. His hand was freezing. “I’ll survive.” He paused. “Solid?”
“He tried to attack you,” she said, glancing around the kitchen to see if Jerry was still hanging around. “But he’s gone now.”
Wayne rubbed the small of his back and shook his head. “Why would he attack me?”
“I think it was just a misunderstanding.”
“Some misunderstanding.” Wayne scowled. “Are you sure he’s gone?”
She shook her head, which had started to hurt. “I don’t mean he’s gone gone. I just don’t see him anymore.”
Wayne straightened his glasses. “I may be stating the obvious, but I think you’ve gotten us into some serious trouble.”
LATER, AFTER the red-haired girl came home and she and Jessica went upstairs to bed, Jerry moved into the living room where Wayne was watching television.
The man had changed out of his office clothes into shorts and a purple t-shirt. His black and blue flame-patterned leg braces lay on the floor beside the couch. He stretched his bare legs out on the recliner’s footrest, looking as relaxed as a vacationer on a beach. Evidently the man had already recovered from his shock. Resilience. An admirable trait.
He glided over to Wayne’s chair and stared coldly down at him. The living man didn’t bat an eye. His face was passive except when something on the television amused him and a brief smile flitted across his features.
What he would give to trade places with the man! Wayne must have been in his late twenties or early thirties and seemed to enjoy life just fine despite his handicap. When Jerry was that age, he’d spent most of his evenings contemplating various ways by which he might bring his miserable life to an end—and he had been as able-bodied as the next person. Did having a broken body make a person appreciate life more? Maybe so.
Look at him, Jerry. Look at what you could have had.
Wayne suddenly sat up straighter, no longer paying attention to the television. “Is somebody there?”
“Nobody of importance,” Jerry murmured. Wayne wouldn’t be able to see or hear him, but something had obviously alerted the man to his presence. A so-called sixth sense? Nah. Wayne knew he was here because Jessica had told him so, and now paranoia was getting the better of
him.
Wayne pulled the recliner into its upright position and muted the television. He cocked his head, listening. “If that’s you,” he said, “I’m sorry that I upset you earlier. But you shouldn’t be here. Move on to wherever you need to go. No one’s stopping you.”
Jerry’s temper flared again. He didn’t attempt to subdue it. These people were fools to assume that he could magically transport himself to paradise with the snap of his fingers. He suffered here on earth because he was meant to suffer. Their pleas for him to leave weren’t going to change that.
“Do you hear me?” Wayne continued. “Heaven awaits you.”
You’re never going to heaven, Jerry. Tell the fool to stop wasting his breath.
Maybe Wayne would shut his mouth if he could feel the pain.
Jerry reached out and touched the younger man with his mind. Feel it. Embrace it.
Wayne made an involuntary jerk, and his face twisted into a grimace. A moan escaped his lips. “Oh, God…” Tears came to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. His hands curled into fists.
“Oh, God…”
Can you tell how much it hurts when you tell me to move on? Jerry thought. It’s like telling a starving beggar to boldly march into a palace to dine at a royal feast he wasn’t invited to.
The man continued to weep.
Satisfied that Wayne had been reduced to a sobbing heap, he withdrew from him. Wayne had had his taste. He’d better have enjoyed it.
WAYNE DIDN’T stick around for long after that. He dried his tears on his sleeve, glanced warily around the room, and turned out the light.
When he was finally alone again, Jerry wandered over to the bookshelves to see what kind of literature these people liked, if only because he had nothing else to do. He’d been into Shakespeare, himself, even though his students had hated that part of the class. He sort of liked Stephen King’s books, too. In fact, The Shining was the last book he’d ever read. How long had that been? Twenty years? Had to be more than that. He had stopped keeping track.
One of Wayne’s shelves contained several works by Poe and Hemingway. Another held novels written by authors whose works he was unfamiliar with, though by the sound of the titles (Whispers, Phantoms, Strangers, etc.) they may have been horror novels or thrillers. A stack of Agatha Christie novels and a large, pink volume lay horizontally across the tops of other books as if they had been stuffed there in haste.
The pink book caught his interest. It was about two inches thick and a foot square. A photo album, no doubt.
He had a sudden, powerful urge to nose around in its pages to learn a bit more about the threesome who lived in this house.
But it isn’t any of my business.
The voice spoke in a soothing tone. Of course it is. You know you want to look.
He did. He really, really did.
It’s rude to spy.
No one will know that you did.
True. One little peek couldn’t hurt anything.
He focused all of his energy into lifting the book off the shelf onto the carpet. The act was as exhausting as a vigorous workout would feel to a living person, so it took him several minutes to get a good grip on the binding and lower the book to the floor without dropping it and alerting the rest of the house to his exploits.
He rested for a while then mustered the strength to turn to the first page.
Inside the front cover someone had written, “The Life of Jessica Mary Roman-Dell, 2004-2006.” The first page showed pictures of a party. Jessica had written:
Fifteenth Birthday! January 1, 2004. Wayne and the Millers came over, and we had a blast! Rachel ate too much cake and almost threw up from laughing while we were playing Apples to Apples. She’ll probably be mad if she finds out I wrote this, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right? Mom actually baked the cake this year. Dad bought me a digital camera so I can finally enter the 21st century like the rest of the planet. I told him that I could use it on ghost hunts, but Mom got mad about that. Oh well, what’s new there? Overall, this birthday was awesome!
One photograph showed Jessica blowing out the candles on a cake coated in pink and purple frosting. A handful of others were pictures of Wayne and Sidney and some red-haired people whom he didn’t know.
He paused to think. If Jessica was fifteen years old in 2004, then the present year must have been 2009 or 2010. Lord! He’d been gone for nearly a quarter of a century.
Jessica had mounted photographs from school on other pages. Jerry had to smile at some of the clothes the students sported in her candid snapshots. At least the perms and feathered cuts seemed to have become as extinct as the go-go boot.
He grew weaker as he progressed toward the end of the album. The strain of turning the pages with his thoughts was proving to be too much. The pictures were nice, though. Jessica had taken hundreds of pictures of everything from flowers to old houses, and some of them were good enough that she probably could have made a decent living at still-life photography and stopped complaining about not having a job.
A picture on the final page—scenes from Christmas Eve 2006—made him freeze. Was it really? Yes, it had to be. It confirmed the suspicions he’d had since the night before. The odds of this happening had to have been one in a million, unless fate had had a hand in it all.
Funny, how fate could simultaneously curse and bless a man.
Thank you for this.
Anytime, Jerry. Anytime.
He smiled and replaced the album on the shelf, expending every last bit of energy he could muster. Now all he needed to do was determine how to use the situation fate had dealt him to his advantage.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” Wayne sat on the edge of his bed, pinching the black beads of his rosary between his fingers. He had a hard time preventing his hands from shaking.
It had been a year or two since he had last prayed the rosary. He’d had to get out a prayer book to remember the words of the Apostle’s Creed and the mysteries he was to reflect on during each decade of prayers to the Blessed Mother. For Wednesdays it was customary to use the glorious mysteries of faith—the resurrection, the ascension, the descent of the Holy Spirit, the assumption, and the coronation.
It was difficult to focus on both praying and reflecting on the resurrection, especially considering what had just happened down in the living room.
He shuddered, remembering the sensation that had gripped him. Like being buried in a pit with his own filth. Only it hadn’t really been his, had it? Jerry had shared something with him either for some kind of bizarre bonding experience or to make a point—but whatever it was, its meaning was lost on Wayne.
He cursed himself for allowing his mind to wander and resumed his prayers. “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
He reflected briefly on the resurrection. Jesus had sacrificed himself and risen again so that all the sinners of the world might find eternal life. That included Wayne, who would never deserve the reward even if he devoted the remainder of his days to serving the Maker.
It also included Jerry.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is—” A tap on the door startled him.
Had Jerry come to assault him a third time?
He waited, and when the tapping sounded again, he said, “Who’s there?”
“It’s me,” Jessica said. “Can I come in?”
He let out a relieved breath of air. “Just a minute.” He slipped his t-shirt back on so she wouldn’t see the marks on his back and hobbled over to the door. “What’s up?”
Jessica’s hair was tousled, and her eyelids were heavy. She wore only a pair of old shorts and a baggy Class of 2007 t-shirt. Her toenails were painted red.
The room suddenly felt much warmer than it had just a few minutes ago.
“I can’t sleep,” she said.
“Must be contagious.” His heart rate sped
up.
She looked past him as she scanned his bedroom. “You know, I’ve never actually been in here before. What’s with the rosary?”
He shrugged. “Just the usual, praying for the dearly departed so they may find everlasting joy that isn’t in my house.”
She cast her gaze to the floor. “I hope you’re not mad at me.”
“I told you I’m not mad at you.” Maybe a little frustrated, though she didn’t need to know that.
“It’s my fault he’s here.”
“Did you tell him to come with you?”
She smirked a little. “I’m not that stupid. I just feel bad for him. It can’t be any fun for him to be here when he can’t interact with us like a normal person.” To his surprise, she went over and sat on the end of the bed and rested her chin on her hand, staring glumly at the floor. Now that she wasn’t wearing her usual sweatshirt and blue jeans, he realized she had lost some weight. He’d guessed her at about 140 pounds before. Now her arms and legs were like sticks. Wasn’t she eating anymore?
“Did you really just come over here to tell me you couldn’t sleep?” he asked, resisting the urge to go join her.
She shook her head. “I just want someone to talk to. I tried to tell Sidney what’s going on, but she got kind of nasty with me.”
He sat down beside her anyway. So much for resisting urges. “She’s just been depressed again this week,” he said. “Don’t be too hard on her.”
Jessica looked more surprised than he’d expected. “I thought she was doing a lot better than she had been.”
“She’s not.” A blind person could have seen that.
She sighed. “She just acts mad whenever I’m around her. And worried. I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you talk to each other anymore?”
“Not like we used to. She’s so distant lately.”
Had Jessica recently taken a look in a mirror? “She’s not the one who’s constantly shutting herself in people’s houses all by herself.”
Hurt shined in her eyes. “I always invite her to go with me.”
“Has it occurred to you that maybe she has good reasons for not wanting to go?”