Jane Two (27 page)

Jane's mother opened the door with her lips moving, but no sound coming out. I touched her hand as I walked past, and I saw Jane on the bed seated Indian-style, looking more beautiful than I could have possibly remembered. And I could hear the bass of my heartbeat just like Kevin could that night in his car, and I could hear hers. Barefoot, pedicured in purple, Jane was seated with perfect posture and an arched back in a graceful lotus position, one hand rested in the other, palms up. Jane's thin frame was wrapped in a winter-white cashmere cowl-neck sweater scooped enough to allow her delicate clavicles to peek out. Gray knit silk warm-up pants covered her long, shapely legs. A black wool beanie cap topped off her long, dark brown hair she still parted in the middle. Purple flip-flops were under her hospital bed. Glittering and gorgeous, Jane looked at me as if she couldn't believe her eyes, soft and green-brown as I'd memorized, and her full lips broke into a wide, welcoming smile.

Then she said it: “Mickey.” And, at that moment, the viscosity of my blood changed and I was locked in place. She not only remembered me, she knew my name. Her hands flew to her mouth just like her mother's had when I walked in, and I saw all the things I ever wanted in her eyes. In that moment, I understood everything that she wanted me to know. I just stood there until she said, “How'd you know I was…?”

“…I just…” I didn't even know how to get from that door to her arms, but that's where I needed to be. Jane's little giggle poured out of her like tiny Christmas tinsel bells, and she held her arms open for me. For me. With tears welling up in her eyes, I slowly approached her and we hugged like we'd never let go. In the window's reflection, I could see Mrs. Bradford standing by the door watching, holding steady a trembling lip.

“Oh my God, Mickey, how did you even find…”

“I just…did.”

“Well, I think I'll go down to the cafeteria and get a juice, let y'all talk. Mickey, it's really wonderful to see you, darlin'.”

I saw her mother slip out of the reflection and we were alone. Jane felt so wonderful in my arms. She wouldn't let go, and neither would I. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to say, but I knew everything I wanted her to know. Jane's lips were touching my ear when she whispered, “Thank you.” Regret wrapped its noose around my throat, and I took far too long to loosen it enough to finally tell her what I wanted her to know. None of the emotional training ground of my youth could prepare me for this moment with Jane. My Grandaddy had always told me to look for truth in behavior, and not words, and everything that I saw in those initial moments gave me all the information that I needed. I knew right then that Jane was where I had always belonged, and she with me.

“I shoulda been here a long time ago,” I whispered back. And then I felt her face hide in my neck as her whole body tightened around mine. I felt her lungs quickly spasm the way mine did when I was a child when my grief from Steve McQueen had given me a heaving, silent sob. I felt a Jane tear follow my neck all the way down my chest, and I knew. I was right—I should have been here a long time ago. “I came in town for a friend's wedding, and I, I just overheard that you might be here.”

Jane glanced into my eyes, and shook her head, then pulled me close again. I knew that what we saw in each other's eyes was that same look of wonder and fear, that maybe as children we had just misinterpreted. I saw a look of wondering endearment in her, and hope, and all the things I had always wanted to see forever. You know, that night I prayed. My God, did I pray.

“I'm glad you came, Mickey. I didn't think you even, I mean.”

“Well I did. I spent my entire fourth grade trying to work up the courage to tell you, and then the next couple years.”

“You…Really?”

“Jane, I remember the exact day I found you bouncing over a fence across from mine, and the exact day you stopped.”

“Oh, Mickey, I used to walk home in front of your house just to try and see you, and I even remember one time you just appeared out of a car trunk, like magic…and I just…I just wanted to…”

“So did I.”

That night Jane and I spoke for hours, and made up for years. I told her all the times I watched her bounce, and that I thought about stealing her
Charlie's Angels
T-shirt from her room while their house was still under construction, and she admitted responsibility for leaving the copy of Yaz's “Only You” on my doorstep that year for my birthday, and that she had gone back and removed it because she thought it might be too weird, but then put it back and prayed that I would like it and
know
, and that she had read all of my school papers that her mother would bring home to grade, and that that bastard who took her to every festivity and even the Gary Numan concert was her cousin David because all the other boys thought she was weird, and that I was the only one David had ever given the “nod” to when he first saw me skimming the pool that evening when they went to her prom, and that she saw me standing in line that Halloween at her haunted pirate ship and jumped behind the Cap'n Bolan barrel so that she could be the one to hold my hand and place it in the bowl of oily grapes while whispering in my ear that they were eyeballs, and that she had felt the scabs on my knuckles that night and had known what they were from, and that she'd watched me ride wheelies in front of her house from the bottom-floor living room window, and I told her that I always looked up at her second-floor window as I rode by to see if she saw, and that I had run to
her
in that yellow dress for my first touchdown, and she told me that she had wanted me to keep on running, and that she watched me cry in my bean tree as her father drove past my house and that she just wanted to give me a kiss, and that she saw me place her 95s in her mailbox and prayed I'd knock, and I told her about the note I left under the insoles, and that I'd wanted to knock—that I
really
wanted to knock, and that I watched her paint, and she told me that bouncing high gave her a better view into my yard, and into me, and that she was angry that she'd missed out on so much of my life, and why the hell didn't we talk to each other sooner?

I didn't have an answer for her. I had known Jane my entire life, and she wasn't a rattlesnake, either. She was something else—the same
else
that I was. Before she fell asleep, I told her I would send her a box that contained the last twenty-eight years of us inside. I leaned over the pillow that she was dreaming on and kissed her good night at 6:43 a.m., having promised to attend her gallery opening in two weeks, after a brief return to LA. In that hospital I experienced the most intimate moments of my life. I had never felt closer to nature, never felt more comfortable. The gold standard exists, I experienced it, and I nod in appreciation. When I FedExed the 187
RETURN TO SENDER ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN
letters from LA to Jane's hospital room in Houston, all were still sealed. I had never opened them, never reread them. Had I opened them, I somehow felt that it would have let something escape. Keeping them sealed all those years, I guess, was my way of keeping the hope locked inside. And I'm glad I did.

J
ane died on November 10th, eight days after I had seen her. Her mother apologized for not accurately communicating the fragility of her condition, and also the danger of her upcoming procedure. The one that I had thought was just a formality. She said that Jane had received my box of letters, and that she read every one of them. Mrs. Bradford gave me the information for Jane's memorial service, and told me that when I was there, she would give me a package that, she said, Jane had wanted me to have. You know, I was welcomed into this Jesus time-share experience when I got here. And I knew some stays would be shorter than others, but somehow now I felt betrayed. Jane's stay was short, but she drove her point home, straight into my heart. When I returned to Houston for Jane's memorial, the crisp smell of autumn was in the air. The service was a blur of words, just a lot of kind words I could not hear, spoken by people I never knew loved Jane or even knew her. To me it was a continuum of blurred silence—Jane's silence. Jane's silence was mine, and I didn't want to share anything of ours with any of them.

She was gone. And I would live. I would live with her plank shoved straight through my grille. It hurt seeing her mother and father hurting. It hurt when Mr. Troy Bradford came up to me and shook my hand with both of his, the same way he did on his front porch so many years ago when I still had time. “Sunshine Superman,” he murmured, drawing me into a fatherly embrace. It hurt more than I could have ever imagined it could hurt.

After, there was food to be served in the rectory. I couldn't stay. I wanted to go home. But first, I had the cabbie stop by The Pole. And that's where I was. The taxi driver had grown impatient and actually followed me down the long gravel road all the way to that schoolyard flagpole. Although he was only about five feet from me, I did not come out of my dream until the horn honked.

“Hey, you coming or what?” yelled the cabbie.

I was glad he had waited, but now I had to climb back in and tell the cabbie where I really needed to be. I just needed those memories back…at least as many of them that would fit in my pockets. Out the taxi window I stared at Grandaddy's horizon of open fields, cattle, horses, and subdivisions in various stages of construction. Crops were dying, like they had given up and died with Jane. No rain was expected. There was even some water rationing for showers and lawns that was supposed to ensure the harvest would not die, but I couldn't care. I drank some Gatorade in the taxi to nurse my dehydration, and my lifetime with Jane welled as a cloying bitterness like the residue of a pumpkin pie. I choked and spat it down the front of my clean white shirt. And it didn't matter. I felt like I was hungover from grief, like it had poisoned every loving cell in my body.

I told the cabbie to drive by Bentliff Street. In my lap, I hugged the box that Jane's mom had given me, as we passed the Milans'. It was boarded up and overgrown. A mangled aluminum lawn chair stuck a jaundiced elbow through the long grass, a corpse reaching up from the grave to grasp whatever became of happier times. At my old house, my bean tree was the first to greet me, bigger than ever. The dirt of Steve McQueen's grave had long since blended with the untended yard, where our lawn had prospered. Mom and Dad had moved to Galveston after Dad started doing well years ago. It looked like no one was home, so again, I asked the cabbie to wait. I got out and climbed my bean tree still in my suit and sat on the same giant branch where I'd slept after Kevin. I'm not sure how long I sat up in my old tree, nor how long its new owner watched me.

“Hey, what're you doing in my tree?” a kid yelled up at me. He couldn't have been more than eight years old. I wondered if that boy was anything like me, and then I wondered if I had said it out loud, like I did back in the boys' room to Jonathan over Jane's 95s. “What the fuck do you mean, weirdo? You spilled some shit all down your front didn't you? Pig. You better get the fuck out of my tree, mister, or I'm calling the cops. I ain't shittin' you, pal!”

“No, you're nothing like me, are you?” I heard myself mumble toward the kid.

The kid ran off, stomping his Nikes on my tiny handprints in the top cement step, yelling at the top of his lungs.

“Mom! There's a crazy fucker in my tree!”

He didn't know that Steve McQueen was buried here under that tree. And he didn't have any clue that Steve was a better friend to me than any friend he'd ever have in his entire life. He didn't know that it was my fucking tree.

But it wasn't. It just wasn't anymore. None of it was. I no longer belonged there. I slumped back into the taxi, under the gaze of the driver in the rearview.

“Where to?”

I told the driver around the corner down Sandpiper Drive, and I clutched the box to my chest, trying to slow down my heaving lungs.

“Kid's right, mister. You look like shit.”

He drove to the intersection of Bentliff and headed around toward Sandpiper and stopped at the new red light. We waited. There on the corner was my mailbox. When the taxi turned the corner, I noticed it no longer danced. It looked lame. The old bent-in leg was gone. Shorn off. An amputee that leaned lame, and farther over than ever. And immediately, no Grunt. Just tears.

“Sir?”

“Turn around, can you just turn around?”

He eyeballed me in the rearview and pulled a U-turn and headed away from Jane's. I directed him to The Ditch, where the eight-year-old me had waited so many times for Firefly, and Kevin hid from the world. I asked the driver to wait once again as I got out to see. The waste near my old home was perhaps the only thing that got bigger with time. Under that tiny bridge, where people would at one time dispose of small items and Jack in the Box bags, were now refrigerators, lawn mowers, and even a Ford F-150 truck bed. It was dirty back when a much different me would crawl down in the creek with Steve McQueen searching for crawdads, but now it was a wasteland. I looked under the bridge where Kevin used to hide and saw the same sentences written about girls.
Lilyth
was replaced by
Charlotte
. Rattlesnakes, I guess.

My heaving chest calmed a bit under that bridge. I heard kids playing somewhere. There was life here, but I recognized none.

As we passed the Utotem on the way to the airport, I saw a tiny little record shop with a name that led me to believe I might know the owner. It read
SAMMI-R'S SOUND HOUSE
. So, I asked the driver if he could pull over yet again. I wondered when time had decided to accelerate. And why I hadn't been notified. I was a man. But I was a man who wanted his Grandaddy. Finally, I realized my taxi had stopped in front of the store and the driver was looking concernedly at me in the rearview. I wiped my eyes.

“You okay, buddy?” I saw him looking at me in that rearview with the same emotion that my father had tried not to show the night I held Steve in my arms as he drifted away.

“Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. I'll just be a second, okay.”

“No problem. You can just leave your box on the seat. It's okay.”

Inside the little shop I scanned the two tiny aisles for a familiar face. Seal was on the sound system, and a tan-skinned old guy behind the counter was bent over unpacking merchandise and singing, “in a whirlpool of people only some want the cry”—fucking up the lyrics. The smell of the place was hitting me, as I was about to call the man's name. The smell in that little record shop was a spicy-sweet incense, exactly like Jane's, and it engulfed me. All those years only Jane had smelled of this inexplicable intoxicant.

“What is that smell?”

The guy behind the counter leapt up in surprise from unpacking merchandise. He took one look at me. Suddenly he was upon me, embracing me and laughing and holding my hands. And it was wonderful to see him.

“Mic-mic!” All these years since the Utotem, and Samir had managed to save up and get his own shop. “Your timing to enter my shop is perfect, my friend, what is means ‘whirlpool of people cry'?”

“The song's about dreamers, Samir…and that they're rare. Hey, what's that smell?”

“Smell is Nag Champa, my old friend. Oh the shit, I miss you, Mic-mic! So many songs you must tell me. But, Mic-mic, sister baby-baby my new friend!”

“Are those lyrics, Samir? I've never heard that song.”

“No! Just like you, she is loving the music.”

“Wait…who?”

“Your sister baby-baby. Little Genie…” Samir riffed the song, then explained, “She is reminding me much of little Mic-mic!” Samir told me more about Genie's love of music. He showed me two CDs that Genie had come in and ordered from the UK and asked if I wanted to take them to her.

“Actually, Samir, I don't really…” And I didn't, really. I didn't even sort of. But I knew I should. “Yeah, sure, Samir.”

That little record store felt warm and familiar. And Samir was a wonderful constant in that town of change. Samir wanted to pretend fight me for fun, and serve me tea, and talk about bands that most people had never heard of. But I had to go. I hugged him and took the two CDs. And then I left smelling like Jane and I hoped that scent would never leave.

“You're looking like shit, man, what you are doing to yourselfhood?” Samir's Bollywood accent extracted a wan smile from me, as he inflected syllables where there were none, and arranged their tones like the sound of a calliope.

“You know, I'm not really sure, Samir.” He tipped his head quizzically. “I gotta go, man, take care.”

“Don't forget Samir, Mic-mic. You come back, my friend. My door is always here, is open for you.” Samir stood there hollering and waving.

I went full circle. Across the street from the address that my mother gave me, I asked the cabbie to pull up. It was about four houses down from the Carvel Bridge over Kevin's ditch, where I had just been. And all the kids' voices that I had heard while down there were in my sister's front yard, playing football. The driveway served as an end zone and had a familiar car up on blocks with a For Sale sign in the back window. There were five boys around ten or twelve years old scrambling around the yard, another younger one on the sidewalk, and three girls watching from the porch. Little Genie was obvious. She was a clone of Kevin. Introspective and shy, she sat apart from the other two girls on the porch. I didn't remember her birthday, or even the year she was born, but she looked to be about eight. I watched her watch the game, and then I watched her watch that boy on the sidewalk, until he watched her, and then she watched the game some more. And I knew about them as much as I did not know about myself as a child. They were both separated from groups that I hoped that they would never join. I watched Little Genie for about twenty minutes just sitting across that street parked in that taxicab, and I knew she was different. I could see so many questions in her eyes that had never been in Lilyth's, so many ideas, secrets, and dreams. I couldn't believe that she was Charlotte's daughter—who was Lilyth's daughter.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked as I collected my box.

“You sure you want me to leave you here, mister? An hour ago we were headed to the airport. Shit man, you sure you're all right?”

“Yeah, I'll be all right. I've got a car here. How much do I owe you?”

I walked across the street with my box and Genie's CDs from Samir's as I heard the cab drive away behind me, and I breathed in the same neighborhood that had raised me so many years earlier. I imagined how I would sit on that porch with Genie and watch the game that I had played so many times before, but a cautious little girl stared back at me as I approached.

I took a step back. And then I held up The Verve's
Urban Hymns
and Portishead's
Dummy
and she knew.

She patted the step for me to sit, and I told her everything I knew about porches, and I think she understood. And then I went over to that boy sitting on the sidewalk and introduced myself. He was everything he appeared to be, clearly cut from a different cloth than that neighborhood usually produced. He shook my hand like a gentleman, and looked me in the eyes. Periodically his eyes would flicker over to make sure that Little Genie was still on the porch, and I could tell that he was petrified of her catching him looking. He told me his name was Porter, and even at eight years old he told me that he understood his name's meaning. And although he had never heard of a porthole before, he promised me that if he ever saw one, he'd jump through it immediately.

Then I walked up to the door and knocked. My sister Lilyth was forty pounds heavier and leering at me like a banshee until her eyes focused. I stepped back in the same moment she reached out to embrace me. My sister had been a huge influence on my perception of people: what I want no part of, what I don't want in my life. From the fire truck she rolled into the street when I was a toddler, to the scar on the inside of my elbow and all the other crap for which I was never allowed to physically retaliate, so anger and powerlessness were still there, but so was disgust. Lilyth did not have my back then and, I was willing to wager, probably not now, either. And I was sure Lilyth resented me.

But then my sister opened her arms even wider for me with a smile that I decided to neither trust nor fear. I took another step back.

“Oh, for fuck's sake, Mickey, are you eight years old? Get the hell over here.” I stood there and hoped for the horizon, wishing Grandaddy were there to tell me what to do. “Get over here, I've changed, I've been saved by Jesus Christ our Lord, already, fuckin' A! I'm a nice person now. I'm fine.” Snake-eyed, Lilyth studied me coldly for a reaction. I didn't believe her for a second. If that was her Jesus she was on then, no thanks, I'd take my own. The gleam in her eyes was not fun or playful or even wickedly mischievous, it was disturbingly like that of a sociopath, like the TV interviews with Charles Manson in prison. Reluctantly, I stepped forward to hug my sister and followed her inside, too numb from grief to feel the cold autumn wind that made it hard to close the door whose haunting clunk reminded me of Steve McQueen's tail hitting my bedroom door. But that smell. I walked straight to the back sliding glass door that was just like ours from years before and opened the window to dilute the redolent bouquet of Lilyth's latest perfume disaster that mixed with the bubble gum effluvium on which she gnashed furiously. The rush of cold air caused her pink Bazooka gum bubble to burst, and the brittle membrane enveloped her nose, hiding its booze-enlarged pores. “Fuck!” exclaimed Lilyth. My sister had arranged the kitchen just like our old house. I stared out the window at all the decay as Lilyth and Charlotte sat at the round kitchen table and explained all.