Fairlane Road

by Cody Lakin

  “Yeah. I guess I know that. It just… it’s hard sometimes. It hurts.”

  “It always will. And I’m glad you can admit that. It’s an important step in facing this, and detaching yourself. Healing.”

  “Detaching myself. Yeah. But, like, I still want to be friends with them, if I can. We have some really great memories together, the three of us, but it’s like none of that matters to either of them because they just get so… offended, I guess, when I act any differently than the way they want me to, even if it’s because I’m… you know…” she almost lost her composure, the tears falling quicker than she could wipe them away. But she regained herself with a deep breath, sniffling as she continued. “I know I’ve always been kind of different than everyone, but they’ve just stopped making any effort to make me feel like I’m a part of them. And that hurts, too. It’d just be nice if they could be considerate towards me for a change, instead of making it all about themselves.”

  Andrew rubbed her back, pain in his eyes at seeing her in pain. It would always be hard for him to see her suffer. “Well, as the old story goes, you can’t get angry at the scorpion for stinging. It’s still a scorpion, no matter what you were expecting or hoping.”

  Andrew remembered how sweetly she had smiled at him then, how sincerely she had thanked him, and how they had talked the rest of that morning away, mostly about people and similar experiences. Those had been issues she’d been struggling with for months, losing friends—or people who claimed to be her friends, anyway—and feeling more and more alone. He could remember doing his best to comfort her, using his knowledge and his philosophies to support her.

  He thought about her now, up just before dawn, humming to herself as she cooked in the kitchen. He thought of how much she had grown in the two years since that day out on the back porch, how comfortable she was now in her aloneness, how, in terms reminiscent of Nietzsche, she had become herself. The thought made him smile, and he arose from his bed and left his room, shuffling to the kitchen, still in his long pajamas.

  Jezebel was in the kitchen, cooking herself Eggs Benedict. Andrew took a moment to look at her—to really look at her—and decided that he couldn’t be any prouder than he already was.

  “Morning, Dad,” she said with a smile. “Oh, here, you can have this. I’ll make myself another one.”

  “Ah, Jess. Thank you.” He sat down, and in a moment she brought him a plate.

  She sat across from him with her own plate a couple of minutes later.

  “Didn’t have to wait for me, you know.”

  “Please. How often in his life does a man my age get a morning like this with his daughter?”

  She giggled. “How is it?”

  “Wonderful. I swear, you should teach me how to make things like this, so I can make them for you sometimes. I’m a decent enough cook, I’m just not as motivated as you.”

  “That’s true.” She jabbed her fork in his direction. They finished their meal in silence. The chirping of morning birds could be heard from outside, and it was as if they were the only living things awake in the world—one of the delights of early mornings. “So what’re you doing up so early, Dad?” she asked as she took both of their plates to the sink.

  “Ah, I don’t know. No reason, I don’t think. Busy mind, maybe.”

  “Yeah. Is it everything that’s been going on? Charlie Knox and everything?”

  “Yeah, maybe. I guess so. It got me thinking about the Knox family, the case back in the day. Before your mom left, when everything seemed like it made so much sense. But then again, doesn’t everything in retrospect. The past is just a story.”

  Jezebel sat back down at the table and looked sadly at her father. It wasn’t often that he talked about the past, especially about those days, some eight years ago.

  “I know I’m not really that old,” he went on, “but I feel like I am, sometimes. In fact I was just talking about this with Jimmy when he came over earlier yesterday, right before the Knox thing. About how some things you see or experience can age you, make you older inside. With all this going on, it’s like I can physically feel the weight of all those years.” He shook his head as if he could shake himself out of a trance. “I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going with that, but… it’s just, all this stuff in my head.”

  “It’s okay. It’s better to talk about it than not to talk about it, like with most things.”

  Andrew sighed. “Yeah, I know. It’s astounding you haven’t gotten tired of my rambling yet.”

  “Yet is the key word there, Dad.” She grinned.

  “True. That’s true. But hey, you were up before me this morning. What is it right now… six? Seven?”

  “Quarter to seven or so.”

  “Anything going on?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just couldn’t fall back asleep for some reason.”

  Andrew noticed her eyes lose focus, and he wondered what she was thinking about. “You know, I heard you in the kitchen a few minutes after I woke up, and it got me thinking about when you were nineteen or so, and I woke up early and you were sitting out there on the porch.” He nodded toward the sliding glass door.

  Jezebel smirked. “Oh that’s right… that was the whole thing with Pat and Sierra. Gosh… I haven’t even thought about them in a long time.” She rested her head on one arm and blinked for almost thirty whole seconds, though whether it was out of tiredness, nostalgia, or the memory of emotional pain, Andrew had no idea. “I was such a mess,” she said, “and you used Carl Jung to calm me down.”

  “Yep. My spending so much time with philosophy actually does some good, sometimes.”

  “Of course!” She smiled at him, and time seemed to freeze, at least for Andrew Jean. He saw then that Jezebel was tired, but visible on her eyes like tears was also a thinly hidden sadness, one she carried with her at all times but never spoke of. It wasn’t something others noticed, with the exception of Edgar Forgael, because the natural purple hue of her eyes tended to be a distraction. People looked in her eyes and saw the instantly noticeable beauty of them—the surface of them—and never managed to see deeper than that. But Andrew’s mind was slow and contemplative this morning, more so than usual, and he allowed himself to look in her eyes in search of whatever parts of herself she hid, and saw the effects that the weight of existence and her lonely life had had on his independent daughter. He had seen it before, of course, but never so clearly, and never at such a random time.

  He smiled a little sadly at her, remembering in unusual detail how it felt when he had lost friends in his youth, even friends who had been so close to him. He had always known that it was the cost, surely, of growing, of dedication to the betterment of oneself on a spiritual and intellectual level, but it had always hurt.

  “You ever miss them?” he asked.

  Jezebel was quiet for a moment, neither surprised nor discomforted by such an honest, direct question, and then her lips curved with the hint of a smile. “No. Not really. I guess I only miss parts of them. Their friendships. But those are more like moments, or feelings, that I miss. Not the people the feelings came from. We had good memories, but I don’t even miss those very much, really.”

  “Good.” Andrew smiled with his lips at her.

  “Yeah. Life can be a lot simpler than most of us realize, when it comes to dealing with people.” She stood up. “You gonna try and sleep any more?”

  “I might. I don’t know. Might read for awhile. You?”

  “I think I’m gonna take a walk, see what Edgar’s doing.”

  “All right. Just be careful out there.”

  Jezebel smiled. “It’s just down the street.”

  “Yeah I know, but it
’s still where Charlie Knox killed those two boys, just a few houses down.”

  “I know,” she said, and went to her room to grab a sweatshirt for the walk.

  * * *

  Halfway to her destination, her slim sweatshirt hardly a comfort against the lingering cold of early morning, Jezebel was interrupted from the quiet tranquility of her thoughts by Arnie Tracy, when she was walking past his house.

  She did her best not to be angry about the confederate flag flying from the Tracys’ front porch, or the Make America Great Again sign, and was just passing the house when Arnie burst from the front door as if he had been sitting at the window, watching and waiting for Jezebel to walk by, which she knew wasn’t beneath him.

  “Hey Baby!” he called. He had given up genuine attempts at affection towards her a few months ago, resorting now to catcalls which were, she knew, genuine shallow prayers disguised as playful jokes. “Why don’t you come in for awhile? Could make you something, get you out of those clothes.”

  She breathed through her nose, biting her tongue and not even giving him the satisfaction of looking his way.

  “You know you’ll give in eventually, Jezebel! A good fuck might be the only way to shut me up!”

  Anger showed as red in Jezebel’s cheeks but she kept walking, hugging herself, fists clenched.

  “Ahh, c’mon girl!” Arnie called after her once more from his lawn before giving up.

  Jezebel spent the remainder of the walk calming herself down, even laughing as she usually did about another house a little farther down Forest Street which was an almost too perfect polar opposite of the Tracy house, how the car in the driveway was plastered with stickers saying I’m With Her, and Don’t Like Socialism? Get off the highway. She tried taking deep breaths and putting Arnie’s shallow audacity out of her mind. In the past he had made her angry enough to bring tears to her eyes, but today her emotions felt scattered and scarce, spread thin over too many things. And the closer she got to Fairlane Road, the more its radiance affected her, seeping like a pain-numbing, positive-mood-inducing drug into the marrow of her bones.

  The shadow of Fairlane Road loomed over all her other problems, eclipsing even Arnie Tracy, as well as her worries over the reality of there being a psychopathic murderer walking freely through Lamplight.

  Edgar Forgael’s small house sat under a hedge of large trees and was about two hundred feet around the bend from the beginning of Fairlane Road. In the dim morning light, the house looked old and weathered. Jezebel stood still on the edge of Edgar’s lawn once she arrived, a look of deep-seated yearning shading her features as her gaze settled on the forest to the right, and then she brushed a few strands of hair from her face and walked up to the house.

  It being early morning, Edgar wasn’t seated on the front porch the way he often was during the day. Instead she heard him moving around inside the house, probably cleaning or looking for something. She had just set foot on the porch when he appeared behind the screen door, smiling under his straw hat and through his bushy beard.

  “Jezebel! I figured it was you when I heard someone treading across the lawn.” He opened the screen door.

  “You heard me?”

  “I did indeed.” He tapped one ear as he came out to hug her. “One thing that refuses to go is my hearing. Figure it puts me above most folks my age.” He grinned. “You know how senile it can make you seem if you have to ask someone to repeat themselves every time they speak? Luckily I’ve yet to become the subject of anyone’s pity for that reason.”

  She nodded even though she was still puzzled by how he had heard her. “Yeah, luckily. How are you today, Edgar?” They sat down on the porch’s seats.

  “I’m fine. Been tidying up and such. Thinking of taking a foray down our Fairlane Road, soon. It’s been, I don’t know, a couple months or more since I went,” he said.

  Again Jezebel nodded, only this time it was more absent, thoughtful. “I don’t know how you do it, to be honest.”

  “Do what?”

  “Not go, all the time. I don’t know how you can stand being here all the time. In comparison, when I think about it, this place—this world—just seems so… dull. So boring. And the way everyone is…” She sighed, thinking of Arnie Tracy. “I don’t know.”

  “Mmm. I could tell you were going through something last you were here, and now I think I’m starting to get a clearer idea of it.” He leaned back in his seat, eyes never leaving her. “What do you mean by all that? All that about this world?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It’s… everything about it. Like… a few days ago, I went out to grab some lunch with my friend, Eli, who I hadn’t seen in a few weeks. And it was great until a group of some of his friends came in and decided to join us. And they were nice and everything, but mostly they would just talk and talk, on and on, only they would never really say anything. It was all smalltalk, commenting on trivial things, talking about pointless details of other people’s lives, all that kind of stuff. You know, talking, staying busy, but really it all just… it all felt so meaningless. You can talk about stuff like that all you want, but it’s an endless pit of pointlessness.” She made a heavy ugh sound, fully aware that she was ranting and possibly overreacting, but hardly caring. “It’s not like it is over there, in the higher world, where everything’s meaningful, sweet, poetic… or even scary. There’s nothing beautiful here, not like over there.” She gestured in the direction of Fairlane Road. “I mean, my dad… I love him, I love spending time with him. And it’s great, because all he ever wants to talk about is real stuff: deep, meaningful, uncomfortable, whether it’s philosophy, the cosmos, or just the deeper nature of anything, really. Just the way he puts so much thought into the kinds of things everyone else never does. That’s what’s so great about him, and you too, Edgar, but…there aren’t really other people out there like that. Or, I mean… I know there’s others—of course there are—it’s just… they’re so rare.”

  “True,” said Edgar, “but that’s what makes people like us special, Jezebel. We’re rare.”

  “I know. But sometimes this place, every little thing about it, drives me crazy.”

  “And this is what you were talking about last time, as you were leaving? About it getting harder to leave the Fairlane World?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so. I wanted to inquire, but figured you’d come back and tell me about it, in your own time.”

  “Yeah… I’m sorry. I don’t mean to just unload all this. It’s just that you’re literally the only person I can talk to about this. Because you’ve been there.”

  “There’s no need to apologize, dear.” He stood up and paced to the edge of the porch, surveying his lawn as if on the lookout for something. “Truth be told, I understand your feelings perfectly. I struggle with them constantly. I always have, believe it or not. Ever since my first time.”

  Jezebel’s eyes lit up. “You’ve felt like this?”

  “I have. It’s a very particular feeling, known only to some. That sense that you don’t belong, and might never belong. That peculiar but unshakable longing for something more, something deeper, something beyond. The curse of feeling like you miss a place that may not exist.”

  Again that light shone in Jezebel’s eyes, brighter, even more hopeful this time. Exactly, she thought.

  Edgar went on in his careful, meticulous voice: “But we have it harder than most, if you haven’t noticed, Jezebel. Others who have such feelings learn to cope with them, build up defenses, maybe give medical or spiritual answers and terms to their feelings. But we have the ailment to those feelings—the true answer. The higher world, and the fulfillment of those empty half-feelings, if you will, is just a stroll away, for us. Yet we are anchored here. Liv
ing in between worlds is no easy or even glamorous way to live. It means to be empty no matter which one you’re in, because there is a place in our hearts that can only be filled by one world or the other. It’s something I’ve struggled and coped with all my life, Jezebel. And as I enter my twilight years, I can do little more than hope to find contentment. To learn to live in the now, if you will.” For a moment he shut his eyes, and in some ways looked younger than she had ever seen him. She knew he was thinking about it, then: the higher world. The place beyond Fairlane Road. “I know it’s not what you may want to hear, but it’s all I have. Although…” He stopped himself.

  “What?”

  “…I’m not sure if it’s right to tell you this, because I don’t know for certain, but I suppose I ought to anyway. You see, even though we can both go to and from the worlds at our leisure, you and I have something fundamentally different about us. Something important, something that may answer a lot of questions you have about yourself. Jezebel, did your father ever tell you how I met him?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Ah… interesting. I’ll start there, then. And I’ll keep it brief.

  “I’ve lived here for nearly sixty years now, but I remember when you and your father moved to the end of Forest Street very clearly. You were… I believe you must’ve been four years old, or maybe five. I went over to meet your family, introduce myself simply as a gesture of goodwill, and thought your mother was kind, if not distrusting, and your father was—and, in fact, still is—one of the more intriguing individuals I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. You were napping, so I didn’t get to meet you. Nor did I get to see the color of your eyes, else I might’ve known sooner that you were special. But I found out anyway, just a few weeks later. I was planting some starlight-blooms from Fairlane World because it was a full moon, and it was nearly midnight, and little you, four or five years old, came strolling down the street, headed right for Fairlane Road. I called, and went over when you didn’t answer.” Edgar smiled. “You were sleepwalking. Your eyes were closed and everything. You even muttered something about how you were going to Eden to dance because you could hear the Fairy’s songs.”