Enlightened

by A. L. Waddington

Jenna and I exchanged a knowing look. Her statement was true. It was not in either of their make-up to utter something so immature and thoughtless.

  “Why can’t he act more like them? I don’t see them hanging out with a bunch of idiots trying to be cool. They act more like men than little high school boys,” Caitlyn complained.

  “They are just different, I guess,” I said in a low voice feeling horrible. I could never imagine Kyle behaving with such disrespect, it just wasn’t him. Jackson, on the other hand, was almost twenty-two, and I knew he had behaved similar to Zak and Cody when he was younger. He had told me so himself. However, I seriously doubted if he had ever been so crude to a woman before. That really wasn’t part of his personality.

  “Well, Cody and Zak could certainly learn a lot from them both.” Hilary sat back against the wall beside Caitlyn. “But, you have to make up with him. We’re all going to see the midnight showing of New Moon on Thursday night. We already have the tickets. Do you realize how hard it was for me to convince my mom to let me go on a school night?” She tried to laugh, but we all knew she was serious. She had battled her mom for over a month to be able to go to the midnight showing, and I knew she wasn’t going to let anyone or anything ruin it for her.

  “Oh, we’re still going. Don’t worry about that. But Zak can choke on his ticket as far as I’m concerned. I wouldn’t sit by him now anyway. Besides, he really didn’t want to go. He was only doing it to pacify me.” Caitlyn brushed the tears off her cheeks smearing her make-up across her face.

  I stood up and got some paper towels and wetted them down a bit. I went back over to Caitlyn and tried my best to fix the smeared mascara around her eyes. She gave me a weak smile. “Are you sure you’re ready to get married? I mean, Jackson’s great, don’t get me wrong, but I just can’t imagine being married to Zak and having to put up with his crap forever.”

  “Jackson is nothing like Zak.” I sat down in front of her. “He’s more mature and I love him.” I knew none of them were ever going to understand my decision. They couldn’t see why I didn’t want to wait and I could never explain to them the entire truth. I laughed to myself imagining their facial expressions if I ever spoke of EVE and the truth about why Jackson and I needed to get married.

  Besides, we are getting married next month anyways….in 1878! Wow, they would surely understand that one, I thought sarcastically.

  They all noticed my giggle and gave me an odd look. “What?”

  “What’s so funny?” Jenna asked.

  “Just thinking of something Jackson had said about the assumptions people were going to make about us getting married,” I quickly lied to my three best friends.

  “Yeah, I’ve had people already ask me if you’re pregnant,” Hilary spoke up.

  “Really?” I rolled my eyes at their stupidity.

  “Yeah, me too,” Jenna added, and Caitlyn nodded in agreement.

  “Well, I’m not. I can promise you that,” I laughed, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Haven’t you guys done it yet?” Hilary piped up.

  “No…” I shouldn’t have been surprised by her bluntness, but it caught me off guard.

  “Why not?” Caitlyn asked. “I mean, if you’re getting married in seven months, why wait? It seems silly.”

  I shrugged my shoulders again. I couldn’t have agreed with them more. I wasn’t the one who wanted to wait, Jackson was. But that information wasn’t something I wanted to share with them. I wasn’t sure how they would judge him for it.

  “Well, it’s not that we’re actually going to wait until we’re married,” I lied again. Jackson and I had already decided to only wait until our wedding night in 1878.

  “We’re more or less waiting for the time to be right.” I looked between the three of them to see if they were buying it. “You know how it is, parents or brothers always around. We never get much opportunity to be alone.” It seemed plausible enough of an excuse.

  “Yeah, I do know. My parents are always home and watching us like hawks,” Hilary laughed.

  “It’s hard to be romantic when Ethan keeps walking in on us every five minutes,” I complained.

  “I can sympathize. My parents always seem to find some excuse never to leave Kyle and me alone,” Jenna added.

  “Zak’s folks aren’t that bad. They trust us,” Caitlyn laughed. “Either that or they don’t care.” She shrugged slightly. “But those days are over.” Her head dropped and the tears started back up again.

  Jenna and Hilary patted each of her shoulders softly while I placed my hand on her knee trying to comfort her.

  “It’s not over. You will forgive him, as always. We all know this,” Jenna spoke in a low voice. We all knew she was right. Caitlyn always forgave Zak for his stupid antics in the end.

  “Not this time,” she shook her head. “I’ve had enough. He went too far and has no respect for me at all.”

  “Yes, he does,” Hilary assured her, giving Jenna and me a contradictive look. “He loves you. He was just showing off to his cronies. You know how he and Cody can be…. completely thoughtless and immature. But they really mean nothing by it.”

  “Of course they don’t,” I added, trying to calm her down.

  “Guys act stupid around other guys, Caitlyn. You know that. It’s in their DNA. They can’t help it. They’re prewired for stupidity,” Jenna giggled, attempting to make Caitlyn laugh.

  It worked. Caitlyn giggled and I wiped the tears from her cheeks once more.

  “Better?” I asked.

  Caitlyn grinned and nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Good. Can we go eat now? I’m starving.” Hilary climbed back off the floor.

  The guys were all still seated around the table when we walked back into the cafeteria. There was only ten minutes left for lunch, and I too was starving.

  I took my seat back beside Jackson. He leaned over and whispered, “Is everything okay?”

  I watched Caitlyn sit down in the chair beside Zak and smile softly.

  “I think so,” I whispered back.

  ***

  After a quick bite and a shower after basketball practice, I flipped on the eighties music video marathon on Classic VH1 and flopped myself back down across my bed with my uncle’s journals. I quickly lost myself in his world as the words took hold of my soul and ran away with it.

  My cell rang at eight-thirty, bringing me out of the battle of Gettysburg. I absentmindedly wiped the tears from my face, not even realizing I had been crying, before I reached for the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, darling. How are you?” Jackson’s sweet accent flooded my ears.

  “Fine.” I cleared my throat trying not to sound like I had been crying.

  “I was wondering if you are avoiding me.”

  “Why would you think something like that?” I teased.

  “Normally, you practically live at my place, but for the last couple days you have been going home after practice and disappearing for the entire evening.” He sounded like a hurt child and I knew he was playing with me.

  “Well, if I keep that up then I’m never going to graduate, let alone get into college. I do have to study sometime you know.” Which was very true, and I reminded myself again of how far behind I was falling in my current classes. I was seriously going to have to bury myself in my books sometime soon or my grades were going to slip.

  “I know,” a little laugh escaped from his chest. “I just love giving you a hard time. What are you studying?”

  “History.”

  “I didn’t think you were taking history this semester.” I could hear the intrigue in his voice. He knew I wasn’t studying schoolwork. I should have told him psychology, but since he was in my class and I hadn’t read the current material, I didn’t want him quizzing me.

  “Well, it’s more personal research than anything else.” I hoped he wouldn’t read anything more into it.

  “Let me guess. You’re playing on Ancestry.com. Right?” he laughed. “Trac
ing down your family tree?”

  His words hit me like a bolt of lightning. Yes! That was the answer I couldn’t think of that was staring me straight in the face. It was perfect.

  I jumped off my bed and leapt over to the computer. I quickly wiggled the mouse to bring it back to life and paced impatiently around my room waiting for it to come alive.

  “I’m sorry, Jackson. I have to take care of something real quick. Let me call you back in a little while. I love you.” I closed the cell before he had the chance to respond.

  My mind was rushing in a thousand different directions at once. My monitor finally sprang to life, and I sat down and typed the website into the search engine. I typed in our last name and played around with the dates until I saw the name that I wanted to pop up on my screen: Montgomery Floyd Timmons 1839-1904. I quickly did the math in my head. My uncle was only twenty-two years old when the Civil War had begun.

  With the proof glaring at me across the monitor, I plotted preciously what I was going to say to my dad to convince him there was another explanation for the journals. I ran down the stairs to my father’s office where he was buried under a pile of paperwork looking exhausted from an apparently long day.

  “Dad?” I leaned against the doorframe trying not to appear too anxious.

  “Yeah?” He didn’t bother to even look up.

  “Can I show you something real quick?”

  “Not right now, Jocelyn. I’m really busy.” He kept his eyes on his papers.

  “Seriously, it will only take a second. It’s important,” I pleaded.

  “Maybe later.” He finally looked up and gave me a haphazard smile.

  “It’s after nine already. I promise it will only take a second of your time.” I was not against begging at this point.

  “I don’t have time for any wedding things, Jocelyn.” He went back to his papers.

  “It has nothing to do with the wedding,” I explained. “It’s about the journals. I found something. Trust me you really want to see this.”

  His eyes darted back up with intrigue. “All right.” He got up from his desk chair and followed me to the stairs.

  “I did some digging after reading half of the journals because they seemed too authentic to me, and you’re not going to believe what I found.” I could no longer hide my excitement as we ascended the stairs two at a time. I practically danced over to my monitor and pointed to the name and dates behind it.

  “Can you believe that? Uncle Monte must be named after him. According to the dates on our family tree, he was twenty-two years old when the Civil War broke out.” I moved my finger over to point at my other parents’ names followed by my brothers and even my name. “And look, they are mentioned in the journals as well. His brother Patrick, his wife Annabelle, their children, Patrick II, James, Jonathon, William, and check this out, she and I have the same name, Jocelyn Alyssa! Can you believe that?” I tried to act astonished by the discovery.

  My dad stared at the monitor in silence for several minutes. "Well, I’ll be damned,” he said more to himself then to me, rubbing his chin slightly. Then he looked over at me and smiled.

  “Uncle Monte must have somehow come across his namesake’s journals in your parents’ things and they had to have been falling apart by then. He must have just recopied them in their original form. There’s no other explanation for it. They are too authentic, way too real not to be written firsthand. I can’t believe how real they are. It is just like living the war through his eyes and being there with him experiencing all of it.” The words rushed out of me as I tried to get my dad onboard with my train of thought, hoping he would buy the story.

  Yet he just stared at me with a coy smile across his face. Several minutes passed before he went over and sat down on the edge of my bed. “Have a seat, baby.”

  He nodded towards my desk chair. “I suppose your mother and I should have told you all this a long time ago. I’m not sure why we never did to be honest. It’s not like it was some big secret we were trying to keep from you or something.” He paused looking at his hands fidgeting in his lap. “This house was built by my family in the summer of 1860, less than a year before the Civil War started. It stayed in my family, I believe until sometime after the turn of the century when it fell into disarray and was sold because it would have cost too much to update it and make all the necessary repairs. Anyway, I grew up listening to stories of this place and it always intrigued me. So when it went up for sale when your mother was pregnant with you, we bought it. At that time, we did a lot of research on my family history and the history of the house. Your mother thought it was more than a coincidence that we got the house back into our family when she was carrying you and it was built when Annabelle was carrying her only daughter, Jocelyn Alyssa. Therefore, she wanted to name you after her as a kind of tradition. So you actually have a family name,” he laughed. “I wanted to name you Zoe Nichole, but I was overruled.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Zoe Nichole? I don’t look like a Zoe.”

  “No. You don’t. You look like a Jocelyn Alyssa. Your mother was right about that,” he agreed with a loving smile and patted my knee. “Come with me, I want to show you something else you’ll find interesting.” He stood up and walked to my door. I quickly followed him eager to see what else he had to show me. I followed my father down to the basement to the back corner of the room where there was a large storage closet containing all the holiday decorations. He opened the door and flipped on the light. Various boxes and tubs were stacked against the walls and labeled with various topics.

  “Wait just a sec. It’s kind of crowded in here.” He squeezed his way to the back of the little room and began tugging on something large, trying to maneuver it through the little maze of stuff packed in there.

  “Here we go.” He reappeared with a very old, extremely large, ancient looking trunk. “This was given to me when Monte passed away. I had never gone through it until the other day. I never could bring myself to sort through his things, but this is where I found the journals. There are some really fascinating things in here. A lot of family history stuff that I never knew existed that must have been passed down through the family. He must have gotten it from your grandparents when they passed away. But I can’t figure out why I’d never seen any of this stuff before. Neither Monte nor my parents ever mentioned to me that there were so many artifacts left from our family.”

  He rambled on absentmindedly as he unlocked the trunk and started to pull out various papers and items that were obviously old and fragile. I waited impatiently yet, scared to my very core of what I was about to discover. I could almost hear Jackson, Emily and Robert’s voices ordering me to return to my room, not to look at any of it—the dangers of knowing too much about a world that I was only starting to discover. I pushed their voices aside and plopped down beside my dad. The curiosity was too great and there was no way I could stop myself. I wanted to know everything. I had to know!

  “You know, I think you might be right about the journals. My brother must have seen how fragile they were, if they were anything like this other stuff, and recopied them. It certainly seems like something he would do. Family history was always something that intrigued him a great deal so it didn’t surprise me much to discover the contents of this trunk and that it was left in his possession,” he shrugged casually and handed me a faded white binder.

  I held it in my hand shaking slightly. The butterflies were dancing around in my stomach and I struggled to calm my breathing. I didn’t want him to notice anything peculiar.

  “Look, pumpkin, I wish I could sit down here with you and sort through all this stuff, but I really have to get this presentation done for a meeting I have first thing tomorrow morning.” My dad rose back to his feet. “Don’t worry about putting the trunk back in the closet tonight. When you’re done looking through this stuff, just close the trunk and leave it here. I’ll put it away tomorrow,” he patted me on the head. “Have fun and don’t stay up too late.”

&
nbsp; “All right, thanks, Daddy,” I managed to squeak out before he disappeared.

  I sat with my legs crossed in front of me and the album across my lap, surrounded with all of the answers I ever wanted to know about my life there. Before and after. I closed my eyes trying to steady my accelerating heart rate and the uncontrollable shaking in my hands. A part of me knew I shouldn’t be doing this, but I truly couldn’t help myself. This was for me. It was far beyond time that I knew the truth—the whole truth.

  I slowly turned back the cover of the album. It crackled with age and the black pages felt like they were about to crumble under my light touch. There on the front page was a faded black and white photograph of my Uncle Monte in his Union uniform. There was no smile across his face, just an intensity and fear of what was to come. I closely studied his features. They were so like my father Shane’s. Yet, I could also see a trace of Patrick in his eyes and around his lips. It was so weird to comprehend how they were so intertwined with one another.

  I turned the page slowly. On the backside of the front page was a photograph of my uncle again in his military uniform but beside him was Vivian in a wedding gown. She held a slight smile across her lips, as did he. Even though I already knew that he survived the war, it was so incredible to see him with his true love. The way he spoke of her in his journals, his decision to leave this plane of existence behind and live solely with her no longer surprised me in the slightest. His love for her was intense and true.

  My eyes drifted over to the page opposite and my breath caught in my chest. There I was, standing beside the happy couple on their wedding day. I was wearing a very frilly, old-fashioned dress with little white gloves and my hair adorned in curls around my face. Even though I looked totally different than any other photo of me at this age, there was no mistaking it was me. The smile across my lips was slightly wider than the bride and groom’s. I looked very happy, delicate, and so beautiful. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the image of myself. Somehow, even with all the episodes, glimpses, and visions, this was the first time EVE had felt so amazingly real to me.