by J. S. Bailey
Stay back, Jerry warned himself. You know you don’t always act so well around children.
In spite of himself, Jerry moved in for a better look, not bothering to conceal himself since the child would be unable to see him.
She appeared about nine years old and wore glasses, faded denim shorts, a hot pink t-shirt, and scuffed white sneakers. Her legs and arms were spotted with bruises of various shades like she’d taken one too many tumbles.
Jerry took one step closer, making no sound. The girl jerked her head up and stared at Jerry in surprise that soon turned to fear. She scrambled off the bench and fled but stumbled to her knees tripping over a tree branch the church maintenance crew hadn’t cleared away after the last storm.
Okay. So she could see him. Stranger things had happened.
“Don’t run away,” Jerry said, hoping she could hear as well. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
In his mind, he saw himself lifting a gun and pointing it at a different child’s head. He banished the thought.
Still on the ground, the girl cast him a suspicious glance as if she’d detected Jerry’s memory of his final days.
She had a black eye in addition to her bruises, and her glasses sat at an odd angle on her face like they’d unsuccessfully been bent back into shape after sustaining damage.
Jerry spread his hands wide to prove he meant no harm. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“That’s a very long name.”
At first she stared at him uncomprehending, but then the tiniest of smiles lit up her face. “I’m Melanie.”
“And I’m Jerry. Are you going to be all right?”
Melanie examined a knee, which she’d skinned during her fall. “I guess.”
Jerry would have given her a hand to help her up if he’d been solid. Not wanting to frighten her even more than he had already, he stepped back from her and asked, “What are you doing here? This doesn’t seem like a very nice place for someone like you to hang out.”
Melanie brushed dirt off her legs and stood, looking uncertain. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.” She squinted toward the parking lot. “Where’s your car?”
“I was…dropped off.” No need to go into detail about that. “Are you hiding from someone?”
“I—I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re afraid, then. Afraid you’ll get into trouble?”
A nod.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about me telling on you for being here. I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
“No one at all?”
“Not anybody.” Jerry felt a pang at his own admission. Fact was, he hadn’t spoken to anybody in years.
Not since the night they killed him.
“That must be sad,” Melanie said.
“I got used to it after a while.”
Melanie rubbed at one of the larger bruises on her leg, looking forlorn. Jerry began to piece together what might be going on in this child’s life. The bruises, the fear, running away from home…
Anger flared inside him. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.
“How long has what been going on?”
“You know.”
Melanie’s eyes narrowed. She said nothing.
Exasperated, Jerry said, “Someone needs to do something about this. About you. You can’t go on putting up with it.”
“Putting up with what?”
Jerry sighed. “You need someone to talk to.”
“Like you?”
Jerry’s laugh came out sounding hollow. “I don’t think so. I’d help you if I could, but I can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m…well…I’m not like other people. I used to be, but not anymore.” His final moments flashed through his mind as they had on so many other occasions, and he sighed again. “If you ever want to just chat, come down here again. I’ll be waiting.”
“Okay.” Melanie glanced toward the parking lot. “I need to get home. For supper.”
It couldn’t have been any later than four-thirty in the afternoon, judging from the sun.
“You’d better get going, then. And be careful.”
Melanie smiled and scampered off toward home. Jerry’s shoulders slumped. Due to the circumstances life had thrown at him he’d been unable to exercise his paternal instincts. Hopefully talking to this girl hadn’t been a mistake.
“I told my dad about you,” Melanie said days later as she and Jerry sat side by side on the stone bench. She kept licking at a dripping lime-green Popsicle she’d brought with her. Sticky wet specks glistened on her shirt.
“You did?” Jerry didn’t have to feign surprise.
“It’s okay.” Melanie shrugged. “He didn’t believe me.”
“What didn’t he believe?”
“That you were here. He said people don’t hang out in graveyards and that I’m too old to have an imaginary friend.”
“Do you think I’m imaginary?”
“You look real to me.” She continued devouring her Popsicle and threw the empty stick on the ground when she’d finished. Jerry didn’t ask about the black eye, which had faded a bit since her last visit. As tragic as it seemed, it really wasn’t any of his business what other parents did or didn’t do with their children.
A quote from somewhere in Jerry’s past flitted into his mind: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Now who had said that? He couldn’t quite remember. It was probably something he’d heard in school.
Jerry was not a good man. He’d known that for a long time now. If he’d been good, he would have passed into bliss at the moment of death.
If he’d been good, he would likely still be alive.
None of this meant he couldn’t do something about another man who wasn’t good.
A plan began to coalesce in his mind.
“Do you have a mother?” Jerry asked.
Melanie picked at a hangnail on her thumb. “I used to, but she died.”
“Recently?”
“Last year. She hugged me goodbye before I got on the school bus and then my dad came and took me home a couple hours later because she got hurt in a car accident. He took me to the hospital to see her, but…” Melanie’s eyes filled with tears. “I miss her so much.”
“I’m sorry.”
She glanced up at him. “Why do people say that?”
Jerry opened his mouth to give her some wise reply but came up with nothing. “It’s just what people say.”
“I think it’s dumb.”
“Well, maybe it is. Sorry doesn’t fix anything, after all.”
They sat in silence and watched as a robin hopped about in front of them foraging for worms.
“Tell me about your father,” Jerry said at length. “What’s he like?”
Melanie’s brow furrowed. “He’s tall, thin, has brown hair…”
Her child-mind clearly didn’t understand the scope of his question. “What I mean is how does he act?”
“Act?” She looked at him curiously.
“Yes, like how—”
“Melanie!” a man’s voice bellowed from the lane connecting the church parking lot to the road. “You get back here right this instant!”
Melanie looked Jerry in the eye, hesitated, and hopped up off the bench. “I’d better go,” she said, eyes downcast. Then, before Jerry realized what was happening, the child wrapped her arms around him as if to give him a hug…
And staggered backward in surprise.
“You’re…you’re not…” she stammered, rubbing at her arms where they’d passed through him.
Not knowing how to respond, Jerry said, “I’m sorry.”
Melanie fled.
DAYS passed, maybe weeks—it was hard to tell. It wasn’t like Jerry had a schedule to follow or anywhere to be. He simply sat or wandered without aim, enduring the sun and the wind and the rain that couldn’t t
ouch him.
He wondered what had become of Melanie. He prayed for her safety. If a father could give her a black eye and so many bruises, what else might he do if angry?
If Jerry had known precisely where Melanie lived, he would have considered paying her father a visit.
No sooner had he thought this when a languid whisper filled his head like the sweetest honey. The man’s no worse than you, Jerry. He hasn’t done anything like what you did. Compared to you, her father’s a saint.
Jerry clenched his hands into fists. He still couldn’t stand idly by while a child suffered at the hands of someone she was supposed to trust. Jerry would never have harmed a child of his own. The very thought was unspeakable.
“Jerry?” asked a small voice.
He whirled in surprise to see Melanie standing three or four yards away from him. Dirt smudged one of her cheeks, and she had a fresh black eye and a new pair of glasses.
“You came back,” Jerry said. “Why?”
“I wanted someone to talk to.”
“And you chose me.”
She nodded. Her eye was so swollen it caused Jerry pain just to look at it. “Jerry, are you a…?”
“Yes.”
Melanie blinked frightened eyes and swallowed. “Why can I see you?”
Jerry shrugged. “I imagine it’s because you’re special. You see things other people don’t.”
“If you’re really a…a… What happened?”
Jerry wasn’t about to spell out the grisly details, which even the most unshakable adult would have found profoundly disturbing, so he simply said, “I got hurt.”
“How?”
Oh, the questions of children! “Cruel people did it to me,” he said as delicately as he could. “I almost hate to ask. What year is it now?”
“1991.”
“Five years,” Jerry said, marveling at the number. “That’s how long I’ve been here.” He looked at her earnestly. “If anyone ever tries to hurt you, you’ve got to go to someone for help.”
“Like my dad?”
Jerry winced. “I wouldn’t go to him.”
“But there isn’t anyone else, except you.”
“If you don’t get someone else to help, you’ll end up like me.”
Melanie blanched, and Jerry worried that he’d said the wrong thing. How much did children understand, anyway? It had been so long since he himself was a child that he couldn’t remember how he would have responded if such advice had been imparted to him.
“I’m sorry if I’m scaring you,” Jerry went on. “I just want you to be safe.”
“From what?”
Just look at you! Jerry thought, daring not to utter those words aloud. Don’t you even realize what you’re going through?
“From—” Jerry started to say but was cut off by a man bellowing, “Melanie!”
The tall, thin, brown-haired man who had been described to him tromped into the cemetery, his face red as a beet. He stared through Jerry to regard his daughter. “Melanie, how many times have I told you to stay away from this place?”
“But Dad, I—”
“You get home right now and wash that dirt off your face or you’re—”
The man broke off, eyes wide as if he had detected something “off” in his surroundings.
Jerry saw red. He could imagine this man pulling back his hand and slamming it into the child’s face, and the child crumpling into a sobbing heap. The next thing Jerry knew, he was bearing down upon this abuser of children with every ounce of rage he could muster.
A child screamed, and the man’s ruddy face grew ashen.
“Don’t you ever touch this child again,” Jerry said through clenched teeth as Melanie’s father staggered back a step. “If you do, I will find and kill you like they killed me.”
The power lines connecting to the church hummed as Jerry drew more and more energy from his surroundings to maintain an apparition of himself. Showing himself to ordinary people did not come easy.
Melanie raced to her father’s side, tears streaming down her dirty cheeks. “Jerry, stop! He didn’t do anything!”
The man put a protective arm around her, and Jerry took a step in reverse, confused. Then the man’s gaze darted around in fear, and Jerry realized that his apparition must have vanished during his moment of distraction.
Without another word, father and daughter rushed out of the graveyard and out of sight.
JERRY sat glumly on the stone bench one sunny day and turned his head at the sound of footsteps rustling through the grass.
It was Melanie.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” Jerry said, turning away from her to stare at nothing in front of him.
“Dad says I’m not supposed to, but I’m not good at listening.” Melanie sat down beside him, leaving a sizeable gap between them. “Why did you get so mad at him?”
“How did you get those black eyes?”
“I like to run. Sometimes I trip over things and hurt myself. The first time I got a black eye, I tripped over the garden hose and hit my face on the picnic table.”
“And the second time?”
“I tried running up the gangplank on the playground at school and slipped. I hit my face sliding back down.”
“You need to be more careful, then.”
Melanie’s lips twisted into a smirk. “Dad yells at me about it because he worries I’ll be in an accident like Mom.”
“Your father never hit you?”
Melanie’s eyes grew round. “Why would he do that?”
“Because that’s what some people do.”
“Not Dad.”
Jerry had nothing to say as shame burned through him. If Melanie’s bruises were simply the result of an energetic nature and her father was being overprotective of what was likely his only child…
“Why were you crying the day I met you?” Jerry asked.
“It was my mom’s birthday. Dad made a little cake so we could remember her. He told me not to go out, but I did anyway. I miss her so much.” Melanie hugged her arms to her chest. “Do you think she’s like you?”
“If you haven’t seen her, I doubt it. For her, that’s a very good thing.”
Melanie stood. “I’d better get home before I get in trouble.”
“Good idea.”
She smiled faintly at him, but behind the smile Jerry could see a fair amount of fear. It must have taken a great deal of courage for her to want to come back.
“What is it?” he asked.
“When you got mad at Dad, I saw.”
“Saw?”
“What you looked like. When they hurt you.” Fresh tears glistened in her lashes. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
“Goodbye, then. I’ll see you later.” As she always did, Melanie ran.
Great job, Jerry said to himself once she’d gone. You’ve probably just ruined her life if that’s what she and Daddy saw. How many nights would Melanie awaken screaming from a nightmare in which he himself took center stage? And what of her father? Would he have to endure nightmares too all because Jerry had made one tremendous mistake?
“I have to stay away from people,” he said aloud. He would continue to await his judgment in solitude as he’d done for the past five years. He couldn’t hurt anyone else that way.
MELANIE stopped by the cemetery a few times after that. Jerry forced himself to stay out of sight despite his yearning for someone to talk to. She looked older and older each time, and the final time he saw her, she’d matured into a young woman accompanied by a red-headed young man wearing glasses, jeans, and a Northern Kentucky University shirt.
Jerry watched the two of them from his refuge behind a headstone.
“I can’t believe you used to hang out here as a kid,” the young man said as they walked along the path. “You’ve never struck me as the creepy type.”
Melanie threw her head back and laughed, her strawberry blonde hair glistening in the sunlight. “I wasn’t a
creepy kid, Alex. I just didn’t know where else to go whenever I felt sad about Mom.”
“Because graveyards are so uplifting.”
Melanie pretended to swat at him, then her expression sobered. “You know, it’s funny. I remember meeting someone out here. Dad said it was my imaginary friend. His name was Jerry.”
“Odd name for an imaginary friend.”
“The thing is, I know he was real. We talked to each other quite a bit, and I saw him here just about every time I came by. Jerry told me…he basically told me he’d been murdered.”
Alex’s face paled a few shades. “That’s some dark stuff.”
“I’m not making it up.”
“Do you think he’s still here somewhere?”
“I don’t know. He stopped showing up after…”
“After what?”
Melanie’s face clouded over. “After a while. I think he felt ashamed.”
The couple halted on the path, and Melanie swept her gaze across the ranks and ranks of mismatched headstones. “I wish I could see him again just to know I wasn’t an over-imaginative child with a sick imagination. I mean, I remember an incident when Dad came out to find me, but he won’t talk about it.” Her shoulders slumped. “I guess it doesn’t matter.”
With a sigh, Jerry emerged from his hiding place and waved. Startled, Melanie jumped backward and then let out a laugh.
“Well then,” she said, smiling back at Jerry. “That answers my question.”
Alex’s round eyes scanned the direction in which Jerry stood. “What happened? What are you looking at?”
“Nothing at all, Alex.” Melanie winked at Jerry, who winked in return. “Now let’s go home.”
THE DAY IS warm as I walk through a green wood, where the air is alive with the sound of songbirds and a breeze caresses my aching body. I have been walking for a long time—too long—and I know that soon I must rest, or I may die.
I was a fool and did not bring enough water to sustain me for the length of my journey. I have been keeping an eye out for a stream, a pond, or even a puddle to slake my increasing thirst, but the summer has been dry and even the animals must forage for water when it should have been abundant.