by Jamie Ott
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Jacko’s real name was John, like his father’s. His sister, Sissy, told him he’d earned the nickname around Halloween time; that when he was a toddler, learning to speak, he loved the way Jacko, from the word Jack o Lantern sounded. After a week of saying the word, repeatedly, Sissy and his mother became fond of it as a nickname, instead of the common name, Junior.
He was happy to go by Jacko, instead of Junior, because he didn’t want to be anything like his father. Jacko remembered, clearly, the night his mother and sister left them, and he remembered his father being the cause of his mother’s grief; it was the grief that was the reason she was dead. Yes, he was quite young when they left, but he remembered, vividly, the pain and awkwardness that followed their absence. He remembered how sick he felt when his father and Anna holed up in his room on the same night they left. They blasted music, and only came out, every so often, to get a beer. Jacko, alone, retched again and again into the toilet, in between tears.
What fueled Jacko’s anger was his sister’s insistence that he not hate his father. After what his father did, he did not understand how she could expect him to feel different. They, as a family, were happy, until Anna came along, so how could she forgive so easily?
There was a period when Jacko was angry with his mother and Sissy, too, for leaving him behind. It hurt to think that Sissy was more loved than he. Why else would his mother choose Sissy, and not him? But, when weeks went by without word from either of them, and his father spent increasingly more time with Anna, he became severely depressed.
It wasn’t more than a month after they moved out that he got the news of his mother’s suicide. He didn’t know all the facts about what happened, except that she’d consumed a large amount of hemlock root that was boiled into a tea – ‘a strange method of suicide,’ noted the cop. The police delivered the shocking news in their living room, one evening. His father was stone faced and stone cold as they told him how Sissy called 9-1-1, but, when they got to their home, she’d gone.
Jacko didn’t know, at first, what happened to Sissy, as she didn’t talk to him for several years. Then, one day, she sent him an email. Immediately, he let go of all his anger toward her, for she was all he had. He was grateful she’d come back to him. She was always a good sister; she was always kind and loving; she never picked on him. It made him sad that she was five years older than he was because, sometimes, he thought, if she were with him, then maybe he could tolerate John and his “friend.”