Rage's Echo

by J. S. Bailey

  Sidney began to make retching noises. Jessica kicked her in the shin.

  “You can look at my parents all you want,” Jessica said, “but I’m going to keep my distance. I wouldn’t want to upset them by reminding them I exist.” She changed her tone when Wayne gave a derisive eye roll. “To be honest, I really don’t know what I’m going to say to them. It’s been so long.”

  “Say whatever you want,” Sidney said. “As long as it’s nice. Tell your mom you like her outfit or something.”

  Jessica sighed. Suddenly the prospect of seeing her mother and father was more unpleasant than that of digging up Jerry’s remains. They had nothing in common, and most likely if they did strike up a conversation they would end up berating her for losing her job and wasting time with ghosts and whatnot.

  “I’ll just stick with Rachel and Eric as much as I can,” she said. Spending additional time with her sister was bound to be more fun than making awkward small talk with Stephen and Maria.

  “Are we supposed to bring something to eat?” Wayne asked.

  “Probably. I was thinking maybe potato salad.”

  “Who’s going to make it?”

  She cleared her throat. Preparing food that didn’t involve a microwave required rocket science that she wasn’t quite familiar with. “We can get store-bought potato salad. They have all kinds at Eleanor Market.”

  “Way to make an impression on your family,” Sidney said with a smirk.

  “It would be a better impression than if I brought crappy, homemade potato salad.”

  “If it’s going to be this much of an issue,” Wayne said, “I can make it myself.”

  “How about this—we can collaborate on it,” Jessica said. “We could bring some drinks, too. Like more of that Mike’s Hard Lemonade.”

  “Do I look like I’m made of money?”

  “I can buy one six-pack. I’ve got a few dollars left in my bank account.” Very few.

  “What, did you drain it all paying the rent here?”

  Oh, crap. So much for the end of animosity. Jessica quickly looked to Wayne, who was giving his head a slight shake.

  It took Sidney a split second to pick up on their thoughts. “Please tell me you really aren’t living here for free.”

  “I have to,” Jessica said, praying that they wouldn’t end up fighting all over again. “At least until I can find another job.”

  “You can’t be that broke. Where did all your money go?”

  “I bought stuff with it.”

  She blinked. “What kind of stuff? Wait. You blew your savings on your equipment, didn’t you?”

  It was an effort to prevent a defensive tone from entering her voice. Her equipment was some of her most prized possessions, and the way Sidney talked she made it sound like Jessica had spent all of her savings on lottery tickets or some other thing like that. “Some of it I used on that. My thermal imaging camera was about seventeen hundred, and my voice recorders and K2 meter were about sixty bucks a piece.” She didn’t bother mentioning the assorted memory cards and blank CDs and DVDs, which probably totaled up to somewhere around a hundred or so dollars. Or the photo albums, or the photo developing, or the massive quantities of Coke and junk food…

  Sidney curled her lip in disgust. “I can’t believe you blew it all on that junk.”

  Jessica counted to five before speaking. “I had my apartment rent, too. Pretty much all the same expenses you have, except for the tuition.”

  “And to think I don’t even get a family discount.” Sidney folded her arms and glared at Wayne.

  “How about we avoid getting into another argument?” Wayne said as he sat up straighter in the chair. “Sidney, if you were in the same position as Jessica, I’d let you stay here for free, too. Can you accept that?”

  Sidney sighed, but her spiteful expression remained. “I guess.”

  “Good. You’re going to give me ulcers if you two keep bickering like this.”

  “We’re not bickering,” Jessica said.

  “You could have fooled me.” He stood up and wobbled a little. “I know it’s early, but I’m going to bed. With all that digging we did, I’ll be surprised if I can get up without the aid of a forklift in the morning.”

  He left them. Jessica had the sneaking suspicion that he really just wanted to leave her and Sidney to sort out their dispute by themselves.

  “Are you just going to mooch off of people for the rest of your life?” Sidney asked when Wayne’s bedroom door closed overhead.

  “I’m not mooching!” If her blood had been simmering before, it was now reaching full boil. “You think I like things being this way? I’d move out of here in a heartbeat if I had the money!”

  “Have you even been looking for a job?”

  “Yes, but nobody’s hiring.”

  “That’s when you look for work somewhere else. That’s what your parents did.”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t lose their jobs. They just wanted one that paid more. And trust me, I’m not moving to Indianapolis to get a job that pays minimum wage.”

  “You could start taking classes—”

  “I’m broke, remember? No tengo dinero. I probably don’t even have enough to buy a textbook.”

  “Take out a loan.”

  “And what kind of bank is going to lend out money to some one who barely has two cents to her name?” A slight headache began to throb behind her eyes. Keep it friendly, she told herself.

  “Sidney, I really have been trying. Honestly. Now is there anything else you’re going to complain about?”

  “You haven’t done your laundry yet, and it’s cluttering up my room.”

  Jessica couldn’t help but laugh. Maybe Sidney wasn’t as upset as she’d thought. “I’ll get to it. Anything else?”

  “I don’t like you talking in your sleep.”

  “And I don’t like you being negative all the time. You’re giving me a migraine.”

  “I don’t like your car taking up all the space in the driveway.”

  “And I don’t like how you’ve turned all atheist on me.”

  Sidney squared her shoulders and gave her a penetrating stare. “It’s agnostic, dork. And I can believe whatever I want to, so save your breath and leave me alone.”

  “Ha!” Maybe there was hope for her friend after all. “If you’re agnostic, then there’s that little piece of doubt floating around in there, isn’t there? Part of you still wants to believe, because if you didn’t believe anything, you wouldn’t have anything to live for. Right?”

  A muscle twitched in Sidney’s cheek. “Do I have to live for anything?”

  “You’ve got to live for something.”

  Her eyebrow arched. “Oh yeah? What do you live for?”

  “Lots of things! Spending time with you two dorks, the promise of a more interesting tomorrow…and I guess what I really want to do is make some epic contribution to society that’ll help people out somehow.”

  “Like what?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.” She glanced down at her hands and noticed that some of her fingernails were still caked with dirt from earlier. “I wanted to help people by proving to them there’s an afterlife, but now I don’t see how that’s going to work.” It obviously hadn’t helped Sidney.

  “Okay.” Sidney nodded. “What does God have to do with that?”

  “It’s his will.”

  “It sounds like your will to me.”

  “No, my will would be to become ghost hunter extraordinaire and gorge myself on burritos until I weigh three hundred pounds. God’s will is different than that.”

  “Now that we’re on the subject,” Sidney said, “do you think it’s God’s will that people die of starvation every day in third-world countries?”

  The throbs of pain behind Jessica’s eyes worsened. “I don’t think so. If more people helped out, those poor people wouldn’t have to die at all.”

  “Then your God sure stinks. If he cared that much about poor people, h
e’d send them manna like he did with those people in the desert a million years ago.”

  It didn’t look like this discussion was going to go anywhere but in endless circles. “I think,” Jessica said, “that God works mostly through other people. A person is sick, they pray that they’ll get better, and God sends them a doctor.”

  “Makes me think of Don Corleone having other people do his crap for him.”

  “A bolt of lightning might strike you down for talking like that.”

  “It isn’t storming. And besides, what do I have to worry about?” Sidney flashed a grin and picked herself off the couch. “I’ll be in the shower. If I get struck by lightning, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  PAIN WRACKED most of Jessica’s body as she lay in bed that night, and the stiffness in her cramping limbs made it impossible for her to relax enough to fall asleep.

  Worry gnawed at her. Unexplained pain like this could very well be the onset of something horrible like fibromyalgia, in which case she would have to suffer through unceasing agony for the rest of her life. The Tylenol she took before bed might as well have been sugar pills for all the effect they’d had on her.

  Sidney coughed in her sleep and rolled over. God had evidently decided to spare her after she had spoken so nastily of him, because no lightning struck her down while she showered.

  A short time before, Jessica had heard Wayne get up and adjust the thermostat down in the entryway, so now the room felt as sweltering as a sauna. Jessica kicked off her covers so she wouldn’t melt in her pajamas and run all over the floor like spilled wax, but at least then she might not hurt anymore.

  “Jessica.” Jerry’s voice spoke beside her head. She could not see him.

  “What is it?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Can we talk somewhere?”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “You aren’t asleep. What does it matter?”

  She sighed. “It doesn’t, I guess.” She got up and slipped her bare feet into a pair of Sidney’s fuzzy pink slippers that lay beside the bed. They were about a size and a half too small, so her heels stuck out the backs. “I hope you don’t mind chatting outside. If I stay in here another minute, I’ll die of heatstroke.”

  Jerry made no reply. Jessica tiptoed from the room and out to the deck. The porch light clicked on as soon as she stepped through the doorway. No one visible followed her.

  The outside temperature was cooler than she had anticipated, or perhaps the contrast with the temperature in the house made the air seem colder than it actually was. Her breath formed fleeting clouds of mist every time she exhaled.

  “Where are you?” she asked, hugging her arms close to her chest to warm them.

  A vague haze materialized between her and the door and slowly came into focus. “Sorry…” Jerry said. He faded away for a moment and appeared again as he usually had. Black clothes. No blood. That funny scar with the stitches on the back of his hand.

  “Sometimes this is difficult.” He wringed his hands together and kept glancing around him as if keeping an eye out for someone or something that he didn’t want to see. “I’m so sorry.”

  His evident agitation unnerved her. What in all of God’s creation could frighten someone who was already dead? “What are you sorry about?”

  He seemed to struggle for words. “Have you ever…wanted something so badly…you know it’s wrong, but you have to do it, because if you don’t you know you’ll die?”

  Jessica took a step backward. Did he forget that he couldn’t die again? “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know either.

  The light above the back door shined through him, as if the image of himself he projected was not complete. He looked her right in the eye. “Do you know anyone named Sarah?”

  “Sarah?” What kind of question was that? “Not personally. Why?”

  The light made his eyes seem to glow. “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty darn.”

  He smiled. “I want to kill my wife.”

  Jessica’s heart beat faster. “Your wife is Sarah?”

  He shook his head. “No. Abigail.”

  She didn’t know anyone named Abigail, either. “Why do you want to kill her?”

  “Because I’d still be alive if she and I had never met.”

  “She’s the one who did this to you?”

  “Not physically, no. If you can imagine the chaos of my final years as a line of dominoes, you could say she pushed the first one that made all the others fall.”

  “What good is killing her going to do?”

  “It will make me very happy.” His smile broadened as if to emphasize that fact. “Don’t you want me to be happy? I know you do, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t hound me about moving on.”

  “But you’ve got to be reasonable!”

  “What does it matter to you if I hurt her? She killed my child. She knew it would hurt me, because it was painful enough when she miscarried our first two. She found out she was pregnant with the third right after we separated, and it was my understanding that we would have joint custody of the child. I was wrong.” His face darkened. “I pray you will never learn how it feels to have all your hopes and dreams ground into dust.”

  The bits of dreams Jessica remembered began to make more sense. “Why did she dislike you so much?”

  “Too many reasons. I didn’t make enough money. Our house wasn’t big enough, and I wouldn’t sell it and buy a larger one. I read stupid books. I snored. I didn’t like her friends. I was too religious. And according to her, I was a control freak.”

  Abigail sounded even nastier than Jessica’s mother, if that was possible. “Why did you marry her in the first place?” She had often thought to ask her father that same question.

  “You’re probably thinking I was a fool, don’t you?” He laughed. “And you’d be right. Abigail was beautiful. I was an awestruck twenty-two-year-old who thought he’d found God’s gift to mankind. But let me tell you something. If there’s one thing I learned from our relationship, it’s this: people can have the body of a monster and the soul of an angel, or they can have the body of an angel and the soul of a monster. There are few who lie in between.”

  Jessica fell silent to process her thoughts. If Jerry had three deceased children, she could use that information to repress his desire to hurt his wife. “Do you think that your kids are going to be happy seeing their daddy down here plotting murder?” she asked.

  “It wouldn’t surprise them.” He winced. “Nothing new…” The manic expression she had seen on his face before returned. “I can’t kill anyone, anyway. It’s not right. Stooping to her level again like a blind idiot…do unto others…but she deserves it… Oh, God, I want to put my hands around her neck and snap her bones one by one by one.”

  He started to fade away again and came back into focus. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. Genuine sadness shined in his eyes. “You’ve been too kind.”

  She realized her teeth were chattering, only partly from the cold. “How so?”

  “You don’t hate me.”

  “Yeah, but you’re scaring the crap out of me right now.”

  “Can’t help that. Being scared is your own choice.” He tilted his head upward. “Look at all those stars.”

  She followed his gaze. Clouds were rolling in from the west, but overhead several twinkling constellations were still visible in the blackness. “What about them?”

  “It’s so easy to forget and start thinking we’re only after-thoughts in the mind of God. It’s so huge out there. We’re smaller than dust. No meaning to our lives. I lied. I doubted, once. My cousin died. So young. A car accident on a snowy highway. I wrote a poem about it for one of my assignments. I named it ‘Christopher,’ after him. I never forgot the words.” He began to recite:

  In those days I knew no sorrow.

  Sun did shine in endless day.

  Only now, and no tomorrow,

 
Not a thought of life’s decay.

  Death came like a thief at nighttime.

  Sly, unwanted phantoms took

  Your hand and led you far away

  To places where we cannot look.

  Eyes stare from a frame that sits in

  Silence on a dusty shelf.

  Your frozen smile cannot deceive

  That force which seeks to claim myself.

  From the picture frame you grin in

  Blissful innocence of youth.

  But in those days, did you know sorrow?

  Or could you see the grimmer truth?

  He was silent for a time. Jessica thought of Marjorie Miller, gone from the world far too soon. Jerry had died even younger than she, his children far younger than that. And what had any of them left behind? Memories as frail as smoke. Nothing more.

  Yes, it was easy to doubt.

  “I got an A on that assignment,” he said at last. “My English teacher told me that I had the makings of a true poet, but I never wrote another. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” He looked at the sky again. “I miss him so much. I miss all of them. It hurts. I can’t stand it. I love them, and they don’t even know where I am.”

  “I could look them up and call them.”

  “And tell them what wonderful shape I’m in? ‘Sorry, Mrs. Madison, but your son isn’t at peace and never will be again.’ You don’t tell people those things. It would crush their hopes.”

  Since he was acting a bit more coherent and less disturbed than he had been only minutes before, Jessica decided to ignore his warning not to pry and continue to glean more information from him. “Who were the Satanists you got mixed up with?”

  His wistful expression morphed into a glare. “You never give up, do you?”

  “Not generally.”

  “Why is it so necessary that you know?”

  “It gives me a better understanding of the situation.”

  “You don’t need to understand it better. Mind your own business for once and let me be.”

  “If you tell me, I’ll stop pestering you about it.” She shivered. The temperature had already dropped a few degrees since she had come outside, and her thin pajama top didn’t do much to protect against the cold.