“My fault, my fault,” I hear as I turn to see a man scramble to the ground to pick up my stuff. “I didn’t see you. I wasn’t looking where I was going,” he admits as he rises to his feet and holds out the bag for me, my things shoved indelicately back in.
As he does I catch a look at his face for the very first time, and only then do I remember. I gasp. It’s him. “Liam,” I breathe, taking in that shaggy brown hair and the blue gum-ball eyes, knowing with certainty that he was there in my dream with me. There’s the vaguest recollection of sitting on a sofa beside him, of his hand stroking my hair. It’s a thought that makes me blush as I take a step closer to him. And though I don’t know him, there’s the greatest sense that I do. That we’re already friends. “Liam,” I say again.
But his face only clouds over in confusion. He shakes his head, stares vacantly at me like I’m mistaken. He looks tired. Stubble has all but taken over his face, and his hair stands on end. His bloodshot eyes are even bloodier than they were before, rivers of red running through the white. He shakes his head. “Jackson,” he says. “Jack.” And I find that I’m thrown completely off, feeling out of sorts because he’s not Liam. Of course he’s not Liam. Because Liam was only a dream. This man is a different man completely, though our late-night confessions over coffee were real. That was real, I remind myself, finding it suddenly impossible to remember what’s real and what’s not.
“I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I thought,” and I feel silly all of a sudden. “I should go,” I say, taking the bag abruptly from his hands, excusing myself, trying to sidestep him and leave. But he doesn’t let me leave. Instead he steps in front of me, reaches out his hand and says, “You never told me your name,” and for a second there’s the sense that he doesn’t want me to leave. That he wants me to stay.
His handshake is warm and firm. He holds on a second longer than he needs to.
I reply, “Jessie,” knowing for the first time in a long while that I am. I am Jessie Sloane.
“You’re leaving, Jessie?” he asks, and I say, “No reason to stick around here any longer.”
I don’t have to tell him that Mom is dead, because he already knows. He can see it in my eyes. “Your brother?” I ask, thinking of the motorcycle accident. His brother flying headfirst into a utility pole. “Is he going to be all right?” For a moment Jack—Jackson—is silent, but then he says, “Bit the dust last night,” and my heart breaks for the both of us.
But there’s also a sense of relief because, though we lost the war, the battle is finally through.
“Where are you going?” he asks, and I tell him I’m not sure. Anywhere. That I just have to get out of here, and he says he knows what I mean. His family waits upstairs in his brother’s hospital room for the funeral home to arrive, to carry the body away. That’s the last thing he needs to see. That’s what he tells me. He shuffles from foot to foot, looking antsy and strung out, desperately in need of a good night’s sleep.
I ask him if he wants to go for coffee, and together we leave.
*
That night, at home alone, I find the courage to open the journal. I caress its cover for a good fifteen minutes first, scared to death of what I might find inside. Maybe my father. Maybe not.
I sit on the sofa in Mom’s and my home in Albany Park. Because for now it’s not yet on the market, though I know that soon it will be. I carefully pull the cover back. A flattened leaf slips from its inside and onto my lap—red, with edges that fold up slightly at their edges—as does a photograph, which falls facedown on my thighs. There’s a name etched on the back. Aaron. I know what the picture is before I ever look. The photograph I found as a child. The one Mom hid away in this journal so that I couldn’t find it again.
My heart breaks at the familiar sight of Mom’s handwriting.
My eyes wade through the pages, tears blurring my vision. Making it hard to take in the words. But I do anyway, curled into a ball on the sofa, beneath a blanket Mom and I once shared, listening to her favorite records over and over again on repeat.
Aaron showed me the house today, it reads. I’m in love with it already—a cornflower blue cottage perched on a forty-five-foot cliff that overlooks the bay. Pine floors and whitewashed walls. A screened-in porch. A long wooden staircase that leads down to the dock at the water’s edge where the Realtor promised majestic sunsets and fleets of sailboats floating by...
eden
November 10, 1997 Egg Harbor
When I awoke this morning there was the most unpleasant sense in my stomach, as if I’d swallowed some sort of gastric acid in the middle of the night and there it sat, lost somewhere between my throat and my intestines, not sure which way to go. Up or down. There was an awful taste in my mouth, as if I’d drunk a vat of vinegar before bed, and when I hurried for a glass of water to wash it down, I wound up hurling the water and everything else inside my stomach into the kitchen sink and then stood, clutching the countertop, tasting vomit, trying hard to catch my breath. There was saliva on my chin and tears in my eyes.
What did I eat last night?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t much. I haven’t eaten much for weeks, having subjected myself to a life of seclusion since my brush with that bartender in the back seat of my car. I haven’t left the house other than for the bare necessities, for fear of running into him on the street. My home is my prison. I’ve been too ashamed to go outside.
Ashamed for a whole slew of reasons, my promiscuity only being one of them.
Overnight I had gone from being a respectable human being to a voyeur, a kidnapper, a misfit, a freak. The morning after my encounter with that bartender, I came home to find bruises on my neck from where he sucked my skin raw so that I couldn’t leave the house until they healed, my skin returning to its usual shade of peach. Day and night I stared at those bruises, hating myself. What kind of person was I? What kind of person had I become?
I remembered the feeling of little Olivia’s hand in mine.
Had that really happened, or was it only a dream?
Did I nearly steal another woman’s child?
Two women’s children?
The bartender had taken off with my purse too, snatched it right from the front seat while I lay in the back in a daze, leaving the car door unlatched, the interior lights on so that by morning the battery was completely drained. I walked the three miles home with a swollen ankle, clutching the plackets of my shirt together since the buttons had snapped clear off at his hasty hand. I spent the morning after on the telephone with various credit card companies, reporting the cards stolen, despising myself for getting into this situation in the first place, for letting myself be a floozy and a victim. I avowed to pay off my debt and cut the new cards the credit card company would no doubt send me to shreds.
I would never be a victim again.
I’d never trust anyone again.
I would never leave the house for fear I might try and pilfer someone else’s child.
And so I’ve become a recluse, plunged into a state of depression where I go unshowered for days at a time, oftentimes not getting out of bed from morning until night. I eat only when I need to, when the hunger pangs are more than I can bear. I’ve lost my job, no doubt, though no one told me as much, but one can’t expect to stay employed when they haven’t gone to work for thirty-odd days. I’m drowning in debt, I assume, though I haven’t found the energy to drag myself to the mailbox to retrieve the bills, but I’m certain I must be because just last night when I flipped a light switch on, nothing happened. I jiggled the toggle up and down and when that failed, tried another light switch.
It appeared the electricity had been shut off for nonpayment.
I went back to bed in the dark, planning to stay there for the rest of my life, which would be short as I swore off water and food too.
But then this morning the nausea wrenched me from bed, dragging me to the kitchen sink, where again and again I heaved, wondering what in the world was wrong with me.