Jessica Z

by Shawn Klomparens

  I follow her along a short trail through tall grass, and down some more wooden steps to a rocky beach. “The water used to be like, up here when we were kids,” Emily says, making an imaginary level at her waist with her hand. “We never had to build the dock out that far.” There’s a little boy off to our right looking up at us from the miniature mountain of stones he’s been piling up. A plastic orange sand pail sits by the stones. Emily walks over and crouches down next to him.

  “Is that your cottage up there?” She points, and he shakes his head no. “Do you know the people who live there?” He shakes his head again, and Emily stands up and shrugs and laughs a little uncomfortable laugh. I just stand and watch her. Then she sees something pulled up to the top of the beach, and tied to a tree is an old aluminum rowboat, battered and faded green. She points at it.

  “That’s our old boat!” she says, and takes a couple steps toward it. “Josh and I, oh my, we’d go, he rowed me all over the bay in that boat. All day, we’d just talk and talk…”

  Her smile goes; her hand, though, still points at the dented-up boat.

  “I could have…” she says.

  Her hand drops.

  “Why didn’t I…”

  Then she breaks down. Completely. Her palms come to her temples and she presses them there, then she runs her hands back over her hair and she shrieks. The little boy gets up and runs away; his orange pail is left behind.

  “Why didn’t I just listen to him?” She sobs. Emily faces me, her hands closed into clenched and shaking fists. “Why didn’t I listen to what he said?”

  This is something I cannot answer.

  “Why didn’t I?”

  Then she comes to me, into my arms, and I hold her as she shakes and sobs.

  “I can do it. I can,” she finally says.

  “Yes,” I say. “You can do it.”

  “When we get back. I’ll do it when we get back.”

  Emily pushes herself back away from me, and rubs her nose and her eyes.

  “Why didn’t I just listen?” Then she covers her face.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her.

  I could have.

  Why didn’t I.

  “It’s okay,” I say again. “It’s okay.”

  But I don’t really know that it is.

  We drive through Tuesday and spend the night at another nothing hotel, and we get back to Columbus late on Wednesday. The lights are out at Emily’s house. She’s not picking the kids up until after she takes me to the airport tomorrow, so we don’t have to worry about that little detail. Once inside, we find there’s a message on the answering machine from Mrs. Hadden telling us I’m on standby tomorrow at 7:35 in the morning, and, through the miracle of time zones, I should be back at SFO at 10:48 a.m.

  We whisper good night to each other in the kitchen before I go to the guest room to call Patrick and leave him a message with my flight information. There’s a tap at my door just as I’m hanging up, and Emily comes into the dark room and takes my hand.

  “Thank you,” she whispers.

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “I think I can do it.”

  We say good night again, and once I’m in bed I have no trouble falling asleep, then it seems like no time before I hear Emily making coffee and I’m awake again and pulling some clothes from my still-packed bag to get dressed and going.

  It’s just before dawn when we get out the door on our way to the airport, which should give me the required two and a half hours to make my way through security. Emily has loaned me a travel mug for my coffee, and we don’t really say much as she navigates the minivan through the pre–rush hour traffic. We come to the airport and zoom up the ramp to arrivals, departures, pickup, and drop-off, and I put the mug into the van’s drink holder as we pull up outside the Delta counter. A couple of soldiers are talking to each other at the curb.

  “Thank you, Emily,” I say. “Thank you for everything.” When I look at her, though, I see her chin trembling. “What’s wrong?”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can. I know you can.”

  Her face becomes composed again, and she closes her eyes and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No. My boys, they need their daddy. They need a daddy and a mommy.”

  “You need to do what’s right for you, Emily. They aren’t going to be happy if you aren’t.”

  “He’s a good man, he is, really, he loves those boys.”

  “But think about you.”

  “No, you don’t understand. They need a daddy. What could I do? Just a mom for those two boys? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What would they do without their daddy? I don’t think you can understand.”

  “I…Just do what you need to do, Emily.”

  I step out of the car and grab my bag, and say good-bye and shut the door.

  29

  My flight from Columbus to Cincinnati is nearly empty, and, from the looks of the gate, this last flight doesn’t seem like it will be very full, either. My seat is toward the back of the plane, so I’m allowed to board early and watch the dazed and tired people find their seats. No one else has come back to my row, but I’ll wait like a good girl until we’re airborne before I slide out of my assigned aisle placement to the window where I can look down on the world.

  A fat woman comes down the aisle, wrestling her bag forward with each step she takes, and as she gets closer I can hear a swishing, crinkling sound like she has some sort of plastic girdle encasing her body beneath her dress. She gets to my row and looks from her ticket to the seat number placard above us, then down to the ticket again.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m in A.”

  She smells vaguely of lilac, like my eighth-grade English teacher.

  But still, I wanted to be alone in the row with my thoughts. Damn her.

  I give her a false smile and get my bag from the floor so I can step out of her way, but she waves her hand at me to stop.

  “Oh, honey, you can tell me no, but, would you be interested in trading places? A window seat can be an awfully uncomfortable place for a big old lady like me.”

  “It’s no problem,” I say, and now I really smile. “I’m happy to.” Well, how about that? I slide over, pulling my bag after me and kicking it forward to make room for my feet. The woman raises the armrest and settles down into her seat.

  “Woo boy,” she says. “Boy. This humidity.” She pulls the safety instruction card from the seat back in front of her and uses it to fan her face. She opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, but just closes her eyes and lays her head back and sighs.

  “Almost home,” she says.

  Yes. Almost home.

  We taxi out, the attendants say the things that they say and the little video plays, then we’re up, up, and Ohio and Kentucky and the river and everything else falls away. I press my forehead against the window and look, and as I do, I fall away from myself.

  There are roads down there. And rivers and cars and houses and baseball diamonds.

  There are roads. And visible demarcations, fields and irrigation systems, different crops. Watered lawns. Green parks and dusty brown cities. Semi trucks and interstates. Maybe Josh saw the world like this all the time.

  His family is down there.

  The fat woman is sleeping with her mouth open, and I turn my face closer to the window frame.

  I’m still down there, I think, covered in roads and boundaries. But I’m up here too, watching myself.

  There are trucks. Recreational vehicles. Rolling slowly.

  Things are built up, and things fall apart.

  Lines are traced. Voyages are planned and taken.

  Fathers and mothers and children.

  There are hills and mountains, and more mountains, and I haven’t moved over the hours. Then we slow, and fall, and I see the bay, and my city. I see my neighborhood, I think. Maybe I see my house
.

  Am I down there too?

  We move out over the ocean, and the plane makes a big, wide turn, and I am looking straight down at the waves underneath me. The mid-morning sun is low and each crest flashes silver, silver, until it crashes into the rocky beach we’re flying over now and turns to foam. The rocks are broken into sand, and each grain of sand, eventually, is broken down further.

  And as each grief crashes into us, we are broken too. We are rendered down and broken apart, like rocks into sand. Maybe some scientist could determine our ages by the size and number of pieces into which we’ve been broken? Maybe she could look at our pieces and measure the weight and impact of every grief and joy and agony.

  Maybe.

  We slow down further; there’s a rush of air over marshes and lights and red spinning radars just beneath us. Then asphalt and a thump and we’re down and home.

  People stand up.

  Rules are made, and abandoned.

  The fat woman thanks me for the seat and leaves.

  I’m the last one on the plane.

  From my bag at my feet, I take the crumpled scrap of yellow legal paper that I’ve used to keep track of all of my flight information. I look at the phone numbers I have written there. Josh’s sister, Emily Channing. Josh’s mother, Alice Hadden.

  I fold the paper in half and leave it in the seat back pocket. And then I reach to my bag again and pull out the atlas. The taped-up first page has torn more on this trip; the shock of movement after living for so many years on my bookshelf has left it hanging by barely a staple. I thumb through it, and there’s a flash of yellow color toward the back, at Washington State, that catches my eye. It’s a sticky note in the center of the page, and on it, in a familiar hand, is scrawled:

  I needed to get in to make a copy of your map. Thanks for the key. JH

  I could laugh about this, or cry, but I do neither. Instead I fold the atlas shut and look at my name, and my sister’s name, printed there on the wrinkled cover.

  Then I put it in the seat back too, and leave.

  Walking, again, right now, it’s like nothing. I should still be looking down. Going up the jetway is like floating. And these people, these loud, misshaped people, I could float above them, if I wanted to. I could float above the people, and the strollers; the conveyor belts and the luggage carts, the wheelchairs and the laptop computers. I could float above it all, if I wanted to, looking down at myself.

  But I don’t.

  I stay on the ground and walk; past stairs and security, past the soldiers and their berets, right on by the X-ray machines and the bomb dust sniffer and the opened suitcases. I go past all that, and see him there, standing at the screen announcing arrivals and departures, looking up with his arms crossed and his short hair and his tight tee shirt. He’s rolling his big shoulders and rubbing his chin, looking at the display for my flight and the words “on time.” When he sees the words, and the rush of people, he turns and looks for me. And when he sees me, he lifts his hand and smiles.

  Patrick finds a parking space in front of our building, and carries my bag up the stairs for me. I follow behind, slowly. My back doesn’t hurt so much anymore, and climbing the stairs seems much easier. I just want to take my time. He unlocks the door to my apartment, and stands back for me to enter. The blinds are closed, and it’s warm inside.

  “You want something to eat?” he asks.

  “Not really feeling it,” I say.

  “Want to just sit down for a bit?”

  I nod, and go to my couch. Patrick puts my bag in next to my bed and starts out the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I just figured—”

  “You can sit too,” I say. “If you want.”

  He comes down next to me, and when I hold out my hand, he takes it. Our fingers lace together. And in that feeling, that perfect feeling of our hands and fingers pressed together, I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about Josh, and his sister, Emily. I want to tell him about tall, crazy Gert. I want to tell him about bridges and funerals, and most of all, maps. More than anything else, I want to tell him about myself. I want to tell him that I know what things look like from above now. There’s so much I want to tell him, because I know he’ll understand.

  I look at him, and open my mouth.

  What. What is it, Jess? What?

  I needed to be close to you.

  I knew you’d understand.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Making a book is a mostly solitary venture, but I’m grateful to have received invaluable feedback as I wrote it from Michael Hodes, Carolyn and Bret Winkler, Cynthia Clausen, Jennifer Beastrom, Eve and Geoff Lynes, and Hillary Berry. Amy Fulwyler’s comments over several revisions were especially insightful, and I always looked forward to hearing them. Thanks also to David Renner for his help in a particularly tough spot, as well as to Kendra and Korin Deyarmond, and to Mary and Jim Leversee and everyone at RMR for their support. Thanks too to Jack Scovil, for his great help and confidence in my work. To Kerri Buckley, I am grateful beyond words for your enthusiasm, sharp wit, and general editorial brilliance. It’s a joy to work with you, and this book has benefited immeasurably from your marks.

  Most of all I’m grateful for the love and support of Julie, Birch, and Axel, and only hope I can give the same in return.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SHAWN KLOMPARENS lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his wife and two children. He is currently at work on his next novel.

  Visit www.shawnklomparens.com for more information.

  JESSICA Z.

  A Delta Trade Paperback / July 2008

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2008 by Shawn Klomparens

  Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Klomparens, Shawn.

  Jessica Z. / Shawn Klomparens.

  p. cm.

  1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Fiction. 3. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.L65J47 2008

  813'.6—dc22

  2008006622

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33790-4

  v3.0