“Except the forest, when you were eight,” Jimmy interjects.
“I think we can both agree that that was an unusual exception. The point is I should be the most grounded, sane, and stable person you could hope to meet, yet I feel like I’m going crazy, like the stuff in my head’s just swirling around and beating against the side of my skull trying to get out, only it’s the most horrific … the most … it’s evil … and it plays like a movie in my head over and over again … so awful you just want to hug your knees to your chest and cover your ears and close your eyes and just scream.”
Warm water lands on my cheeks and I look up at the ceiling … then realize the source; embarrassed, I brush the tears away.
I really am losing it.
Jimmy’s silent; he’s not even looking at me now, just staring at the table, picking absently at its scuffed corner, pondering. After a long moment, he lifts his chin and studies me. What can he say? There is no brilliant solution to my dilemma, no pill I can take to feel all better. The only solution is to walk away from it all, to just up and quit, but, much as I talk, I’m not ready to do that yet. Even if I did quit, it would take a hundred lifetimes to forget the things I’ve seen.
“What do I do?” I whisper.
“You take that damn black book of yours and you burn it,” Jimmy says without hesitation, pushing forward in his seat. “You burn the pictures and the memories with it; you let the dead go. You let them rest in peace, the peace that you gave them.”
I plop down hard in my chair.
“And then you take the pictures from the white book and you hang them on the wall, hang them where you’ll see them every day, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the hall, so you’ll remember they’re alive because of you. They live and breathe and hug their children because of you. They’re the ones you dwell on.”
He pushes back from the table and looks to the window. “That’s what I do,” he adds in a soft voice. His eyes find mine for the briefest moment. “It helps with the nightmares.”
CHAPTER FOUR
June 18
Jens is standing at the kitchen window, a cup of coffee in his hands, when I emerge from the master bedroom still drying off from a steamy shower. He’s staring at something in the yard to the southwest and it doesn’t take much of a guess to figure out that it’s Ellis.
I smile and walk over to the calendar on the wall next to the fridge. “What’s he wearing?” If Jens was staring out the south-facing window in the den, this might be a loaded question, since Ellis likes to sunbathe nude on the deck outside his bedroom. That’s why we keep the blinds closed on the south side of the den during the summer.
We’ve had a few unfortunate mishaps.
Jens’s face and voice are emotionless when he says, “The deerstalker.”
I look at the box on the calendar for June 18, which has two entries scratched out in blue ink: Jens—AS and Steps—PH. Neither two-letter code matches the one for the deerstalker hat, which is SH. Of course, DS or DH might seem to make more sense when labeling the deerstalker, until you realize it’s the style of hat worn by Sherlock Holmes, hence SH.
We have to use codes so that Ellis doesn’t know we have an ongoing competition to guess which hat he’ll wear on any given day. It’s a ritual for Jens and me, one we’ve grown rather fond of. Even if he did find out, Ellis wouldn’t mind. He’d get a good chortle out of it and run off to buy a couple dozen more hats just to make things difficult.
Ellis already has hundreds of hats in his collection.
Most are highly collectible and displayed with great care in his den. These include Civil War kepis, slouch hats, and Hardee hats, an authentic tricorne from the Revolutionary War period, spiked Prussian helmets, even an assortment of early leather football helmets. Most of his hats are at least a hundred years old, and none of those are handled, let alone worn.
There are thirty-seven much newer hats, however, that Ellis wears on a regular basis. Sometimes he’ll wear two or three different hats in a single day. The AS that Jens guessed is for the tan ascot that Ellis seems to favor over all the rest. I guessed he’d wear the pith helmet (PH), a rigid safari-type hat worn in the tropics in the 1800s.
Jens actually keeps a spreadsheet to track the frequency with which each hat is worn, including the season, day of the week, etc. I just go with my gut. I know that Ellis is full of bluster in the late spring and frequently talks about biggame hunting in Africa—he’s never been—and the pith helmet seemed a good choice.
We were both wrong, but the day is still fresh and full of promise.
Opening the fridge, I rummage through the second shelf looking for a blueberry yogurt. Peach, no; cherry, no; peach, peach, no and no; vanilla—definitely no. I settle for the cherry. “So what was this big question you wanted to ask me?” I push the fridge door closed and peel the aluminum foil off the top of the yogurt.
Jens grimaces—hard. I don’t know if you can really grimace hard, or smile hard or frown hard, for that matter, but when you grimace and it looks like you’re either in pain or constipated, I call that hard. He sets his coffee on the counter with slow deliberation.
“Promise you won’t be mad?”
This doesn’t sound good.
“How can I promise not to be mad when I don’t know what I’m not supposed to be mad about?” I say guardedly.
“It’s just that … well…” He throws his hands up in the air, flustered. “That was a week ago! I told you I needed to talk to you a week ago. Seven days.” He holds up seven indignant fingers—I know they’re indignant because they’re glowering at me. “It was kind of time-sensitive,” Jens adds.
“It was six days ago, and I asked you if it was urgent and you said no.”
“Urgent means I need an answer immediately.”