My sister sighs. “I think you’re being a little ambitious.”
“Come on.”
“I think you’re still in shock.”
“Great,” I say. “Now who’s turning into Mom?” I’m a little scared, though, that she might be right.
“Maybe we’re all turning into Mom.” She doesn’t sound very nice when she says it.
“Stop it. We need to calm down. Let’s take some more pills.” That should fix everything, right?
“I need a break from the pills.” The phone lights again and Katie holds it up close to her face. “David Hadden? Dublin, Ohio?”
“Did you say Hadden?” I feel a pressure in my chest at the mention of the name.
“Yes. David—”
“Answer it,” I whisper. “Answer it.”
Katie presses the button. “Hello? No, this is her sister, Katie…Oh, I’m so…I’m so sorry.” Katie’s eyes look wet and she blinks a few times. “She’s okay. She’s doing okay. She’s actually right here…Let me…No, it’s okay, let me see if she can talk. Just a second.” I can see how hard my sister is trying not to cry as she holds the phone in her lap with both hands. “It’s—” she starts, then she pauses for a second to get herself together. “It’s Josh’s mom. She wants—”
“I’ll talk to her,” I say, and Katie holds the phone out to me. I take a few breaths before I put it to my ear and say hello.
“Jessica, this is Alice Hadden. Josh’s mother.” There’s something to the way she speaks, the timing of her words, that ties her to Josh; hearing her normal-sounding voice beneath the burden of her loss makes me lose it. Katie breaks down too, and she gets to her feet and goes off to my room.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hadden,” I manage to say. I’m sorry.
“Jessica, we are sorry too. For you. And thank you.”
“We were…I was arguing with him right before…I’m so sorry.”
I can’t tell if Alice Hadden is crying; she seems much more composed than I am right now. “We saw the thing about you on the news,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, even though I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“And the investigators who came to talk to us the first time, they knew your name too.”
I squeeze my fist when Josh’s mother mentions this.
“You were very lucky,” she goes on. “Were you hurt badly?”
“I’m more…just shaken? I’m bruised more than anything, I guess.”
“Right away we realized you were the Jessica he told us about. He wrote about you often. In his letters to us.”
“He did?”
“He did. He was a letter writer. Our son hates…he hated e-mail. These letters. I’d like to show some of them to you.”
“I don’t know if I could handle that, Mrs. Hadden.”
“You can call me Alice. And you should see them, when you’re ready. You meant so very much to him, and to his work—”
“Please, Mrs. Hadden, Alice, I can’t, this isn’t the time for me to hear this, I don’t think.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I say. I think I am still in shock. I think I need my sister here.
“Jessica, I need to ask you something. My husband and I, we’d like to ask you to join us at Josh’s funeral service this Saturday. You meant so much to him.”
“I’m sorry but—” Do you tell a grieving woman that you were trying to break up with her son before he was killed? Do you tell it to yourself?
“I know it’s so soon, and you have gone through so much. You might not feel well enough to come.”
“I’m fine, but I don’t know if I can get the flights and everything—”
“We can help with your travel, we can take care of that. My husband works for the airline. And you can stay with Josh’s sister. At our daughter’s house.”
“I could just get a hotel, I wouldn’t want to bother—”
“No, no, please, she’s offered. They have plenty of room. She gave us your number, actually.”
“She did?” Then I remember the times he called her from my apartment. She must have had it in her caller ID.
“I understand if this is too soon, though, if you’re not ready.”
I take a long breath and try not to think. “I’ll come,” I say.
Patrick has been oddly absent through this day of message checking and call returning and general emotional ups and downs. By the time Mom has slipped tonight’s meal into the oven—another casserole, lasagna, I think—he still hasn’t shown up. Mom has made enough for all of us and him too, and she thinks we should call to ask if he’ll join us. Of course she wants him to join us. I want him to join us too.
“I’ll go up,” I say.
“We could just call,” Katie says.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll go up.”
I know he’s up there; I’ve heard his footsteps, and all day I’ve been listening for the thump thump thump of him running down the stairs on his way to see us. But no thumps, no Pat. I’m ready for a solo trip out of my apartment, anyway. I need to tell him about my upcoming trip to Ohio, and the surprising encouragement my mother gave me when I told her I was planning to go. Katie didn’t seem so excited about the idea. I need to tell him a lot, I guess.
It’s a reflex for me to go to my dresser to look for Patrick’s key before going upstairs, and it takes me a moment to remember throwing his key at him, and another moment to feel stupid about it. I’ll ask for it back. Katie seems sulky, looking up from her book and watching me run my hand over the dusty top of the dresser. Maybe I’m imagining it, the sulkiness, but she doesn’t say anything to me when I say “Be right back” and go out my door.
It’s a lot easier, with my back, to climb up steps than to go down them. And as I make it to the top of the stairs, I hear some sort of orchestral, string-heavy music coming from inside Patrick’s apartment. I have to knock twice before he hears me, and he looks surprised when he sees me at the door.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey.” He scoots over to the wine crate where his stack of stereo equipment is perched and turns down the music, and beckons me in with his hand. “What’s up? You want to sit?”
“You moved your furniture.”
“You haven’t been up in a while.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say, and I ease myself down to the couch. “Sorry.”
“No. Don’t say that. What’s up?”
“Mom made dinner,” I say, and Patrick laughs.
“I’m invited?”
“You know she adores you.”
“Well it’s good that somebody does.”
“Shut up,” I say, and I pinch the side of his back above his hip as he sits next to me.
“Ouch! Jess, Jesus, aren’t you supposed to be messed up right now or something?”
“I am messed up. But I mean it when I say shut up. What are you listening to?”
“Gavin Bryars. He’s the composer.”
It’s getting dark in Patrick’s apartment. “It sounds sad,” I say. “The music.”
“It’s called The Sinking of the Titanic.”
“Well, that’s pretty sad, I guess,” I say, and this makes me giggle for no particular reason at all.
“You are messed up, but I forget, were you this weird before the bus thing happened?”
Being teased like this, by Patrick, right now, is the most perfect thing ever. It doesn’t feel forced, or awkward, or wrong. Just perfect.
“I don’t remember any of the bus thing. Maybe it didn’t happen at all.”
“None of it? Really?”
“I saw pictures of myself after, so I guess I was there.”
“One of my guys at work said they mentioned you on CNN the first day, but he didn’t see anything after that. The lucky passenger.”
“CNN left me a few messages. I didn’t call them back.”
“You’re a human interest story. A face on t
he tragedy.”
“I was arguing with Josh. Then I got off the bus and tried to call my sister. Then I was home. Poof.”
“Poof.”
“Yeah.” I trace the pattern on Patrick’s couch with my fingertip, noting how much more comfortable it is than my own.
“You were fighting?”
“I think I broke up with him. I was trying to break up with him, anyway.” I laugh, a little forced “ha!” laugh. “I was trying to break up with him for a while.”
“I know.” I look at him, and he says, “Gretchen told me.”
“Oh, right, your girlfriend the spy.”
“She was never my girlfriend.”
“Uh huh.”
“Did she tell you we were dating? If she did, she was lying.”
“She never…I guess she never said anything.”
“Did you ever ask her?”
“Why would I ask that?”
“Did you?” Patrick has sunk down into the couch with his feet up on his low coffee table. He’s close to me, but not touching.
“I guess I didn’t want to know. I mean, I wanted to ask her, I guess. Sometimes. I wanted to ask how you were doing, how the launch went.”
“It went okay. Better than okay.”
“I tried to ask Danny about it. He wouldn’t tell me anything. Where is Danny, anyway?”
“He had to go to New York,” Patrick says. “He wanted to stay. I promised him I’d take good care of you.” He puts his hands over his eyes, and I think he’s going to say something else.
“What?” I ask, but he keeps his hands on his face and shakes his head. “Okay. I’ll ask something. Did anything ever happen with Gretchen?”
He lets his hands fall away and we look at each other.
“Nope” is all he says.
“Really?”
“Is it important if it did or it didn’t?”
“It’s not my business. I’m sorry.” Then I laugh. “I still want to know, though.”
“If it had been up to her, something would have happened,” he says. “But it wasn’t. And it didn’t. And that’s all I have to say about it.”
The slow dirge music ends, the Titanic is sunk, and it seems really dark in the apartment. But I don’t mind. I can smell Mom’s dinner from downstairs.
“What is she making tonight?” Apparently he smells it too. “Wait, let me guess. Something baked in a casserole dish?”
“You don’t have to come down if you don’t want to. She loves you, though.”
“Do you?”
The question gives me a little jolt. “Do I what?”
“Do you want me to come down?”
“Oh. Yes. I’d like you to.”
“I will, then.”
“We have a few minutes.”
Patrick rubs his eyes again. “I have a question. About not remembering stuff.”
“Seriously, Pat, it’s like a fog.”
“No, I mean, about me not remembering stuff. Those nights you came up here. You were outside my door two times. And the second time you came in.”
I keep a straight face. “You’re making it up,” I say. “You’re having dreams.”
“I saw, like, the shadow of your feet under the door.”
“Your imagination,” I say, even though I’m starting to laugh.
“You did, you came up here, and I opened the door—”
“Dreaming.”
“—and you came in, we walked in here. I was backward—”
“Did not happen.”
“And I was, in my room, you told me to call.”
“Maybe that part happened.”
“Shit, Jess, I felt like an idiot, you told me to call, but I was…”
“You were what?”
“I was scared, Jess.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Of what you’d say.”
“What do you mean?”
Patrick straightens up a little bit. “What if I called and you were like, um, what?”
“You should have just called.”
“I couldn’t just call. I wanted to sleep with you that night.”
“Did you dream that too?”
“Stop it. I’m being serious. But you were with Josh. I couldn’t call. I was just…I was scared. I felt like an idiot.”
“No,” I say. Patrick is quiet; he just slouches down into the couch.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah.” His hands cover his eyes.
“Anything else?”
“No. Yes. Work, just work. My boss has asked me to lead a new development team….” He keeps rubbing his eyes as his voice trails off.
“That sounds like a good thing, though.”
“Yeah, well, I guess. We’ll see.” He takes his hands from his face and looks at me again. “So, just what happened with Josh?”
“Pat, please. Didn’t you ask Gretchen?”
“Maybe I didn’t want to know, either.”
I suddenly feel very sad. The feeling sneaks up on me, like it has, off and on, all day. I don’t want to cry in front of Patrick, not now, not when being next to him feels so normal and ordinary. I need normal and ordinary. I don’t want to ruin it. But I think I’m going to cry anyway.
“I thought I loved him. I mean, there were times I thought that. I never, I never said it, though. I don’t think I ever really felt it.”
“Don’t feel guilty about that.”
“He never listened to me. It was like, he was so wrapped up in his art, or his opinions, or politics, or whatever…”
“He was that way, wasn’t he.”
“And now, now I’m terrified that…”
“That what?”
“What if he did it, Pat?” I whisper.
“Did it, you mean…did the bus? Like he did that?”
I nod.
“Oh, come on, no…there’s no way, Jess, no way. No. Just, no.”
“But what if he did?”
“Jess, I knew him. That just, he couldn’t have…that wasn’t in him. He didn’t do that. He couldn’t have done that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I just don’t think…He had his art, Jess. He had his convictions. I don’t think killing people was in him. That wouldn’t have been art. He had his facts. Art. Opinions. He was certain about things.”
“Yes, he was certain,” I say. “He was so sure of what he thought, the way he saw things, he never really expected anyone to disagree with him. And if they did, if I did, you know, he never listened.” Now I’m crying. “I hated it. It made me hate him.”
“You’re allowed to hate people, Jess. Even people who die.”
I just cry for a while, feeling stupid, and Patrick carefully puts his arm over my shoulders. I want to lean into him, but the pain in my back keeps me sitting up straight and I hope he doesn’t read it as me being distant. I think he understands.
“I’m going to his funeral,” I say. “In Ohio. I’m flying there on Friday.”
“That’s…Jesus. Are you ready for that?”
“Is anybody ready for anything, really?”
“Good question,” Patrick says. “Do you still hate him?”
I think about this for a moment. “Maybe. But I respect him. And I want to meet his mom and dad. And his sister. I think she hated him. I’m staying at her house.”
“You are messed up,” Patrick says, and the lightness of the way he says it makes the sad feeling dissipate.
“I know,” I say, and now I smile. “Mom is taking us to the airport Friday. Katie leaves for New Zealand then too. Can you pick me up Monday afternoon?”
“I’m sure I can borrow Danny’s car.”
“Thank you. Can I ask you something?”
“Hmm?”
“Can I have my key back?”
Patrick frowns when I ask this. “What, the key I have to your place?”
“No, no, my key to your place,” I say, and even in the dark I can see he’s relieved.
He ta
kes his keys from his pants pocket, jangles them, and then works one deliberately from the ring.
“You sure you want it?”
“Yes,” I say, and he places it in my hand. “Thank you. Hey, wait, how did you get a new key to my place?”
“There was a spare one in your pants. I found it when I helped you change.”
This makes me feel sick to my stomach. “Josh made that key,” I say. “He made it without asking me.”
I feel like I’m going to cry again; this damn feeling comes and goes like waves and I grab Patrick’s hand to try to hold the feeling off.
“God, Pat, you knew him too—”
“We weren’t super close. He knew Joe from way back, though.”
“Joe, what happened to Joe? I saw the sign, did he get kicked out?”
“Joe got his shit together and went back to work. He’s in Sacramento.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“I’m not.”
“Josh didn’t really blow up the bus, did he?”
“I just don’t think he could have.”
“Okay,” I say, and I take a deep breath. “Can I tell you something, Pat?”
There’s a knock on the door and we both jump as my sister’s muffled voice says, “Are you guys coming down? Mom just took dinner out of the oven.” Neither of us heard her coming.
Patrick stands up, and takes my hand to help me to my feet. “Not now,” he says. “Don’t tell me anything now. Tell me when you get back.”
26
Patrick leaves early Friday morning to run—literally—to his company’s satellite office here in the city to pick up Mom’s car. They have a parking garage, and Patrick worked some deal with one of the attendants—probably involving the exchange of soft drugs or expensive wines—to let him park it there for the week.
Katie’s flight for Auckland leaves just before ten, and my own flight is something like an hour and a half after that. We’re going to the cellular store to get me a replacement phone, then Mom will take us to the airport, wave good-bye, and drive back to Seattle as one of her daughters flies far west, and the other goes not so far to the east. And she’ll be happy about it. This is my prediction.
Katie seems to have turned back into herself after being sulky over my walk with Mom. I’d say I’ve turned back into myself too, but I don’t feel like I can exactly put a finger on just what “myself” is. But things feel normal, at least, with the two of us.
Jessica Z Page 25