Plain Jayne (33 page)

When my heart stops thudding from the exercise and risk, I
breathe in through my nose, and close my eyes, and I’m seized by a sense memory
so strong, it brings tears to my eyes. That smell. Smoldering house fire. It’s
distinct. And sad.

I open my eyes and peek through the lattice toward the
house, the entire back of which is exposed to the elements. Luke’s room (or
where it used to be) appears to be the ignition point. Even to my untrained
eye, it’s obvious. There’s nothing left of that area of the house. That’s where
it’s the blackest. The damage radiates from there, becoming less extreme the
further out it goes. But the entire house is still a ruin. Destroyed.

I watched porn in that house.

Yes, unfortunately, that’s the exact thought that comes to
mind first. After that, I think,
I kissed Luke in that house
;
I
finished my book in that house
;
I fell in love in that house
. But
the first thing I think:  
I watched porn in that house
.

What an idiot.

I’m marveling at my idiocy when I hear two car doors and
voices. Oh, fuck. Maybe Deputy Dawg
does
go on periodic foot patrols.
But there were two car doors slamming. And who is he talking to? Maybe the
arson investigators are here. If that’s the case, they won’t come near the
gazebo. And they won’t see me in here. Probably. I lie flat on my belly on the
bench, just in case, and watch through the slats.

I hear a woman’s voice, followed by a laugh that’s familiar
somehow, but I can’t place it. It’s not Paulette or Caroline or anyone else I
associate with this house. Who is it? I can’t see her! The house is still
blocking the arrivals from my view—and vice versa. Now there’s a murmury man’s
voice and more laughter from the semi-familiar female.

Their voices are louder and closer. Shit! They must be walking
around the side of the house, along the side lawn, surveying the damage from a
distance.

“Those crutches are useless! Throw them down and hold my
hand.”

“The grass is too soggy!” the man grouses. Before he comes
into view, I know it’s Luke. I don’t know whether to hide from or run to him. I
decide to sit up and do neither.

“You’re going to kill yourself trying to walk on those
crutches.” Now I see it’s Blanche with him.

“Well, won’t Caroline be overjoyed? I’ll finish the job for
her.”

“Enough of that shit talk,” she scolds.

Chastened, he says, “Okay. Fine. Anyway. This is good
enough. I can see okay from here.” He sounds out of breath. “Holy fuck.” He’s
staring toward his bedroom.

“You can say that again,” Blanche agrees. “Damn. What’d she
do? Start a bonfire on your bedroom floor with gasoline and newspaper?”

“She may as well have,” he answers. “My lawyer says she
purchased a blow torch with her credit card last weekend. I’m guessing she
simply lit my bed on fire. The heat and smoke woke me up.”

“Thank God.”

“Yeah. I guess.” He doesn’t sound very thankful, though. Actually,
he sounds miserable and regretful.

After a long pause, Blanche says quietly, “At the party last
weekend, I suggested Jayne call you while she’s in town.”

He shrugs and loses a crutch. She bends down to get it for
him.

“It’s fine. I don’t expect her to get in touch with me. She
thinks I was somehow in on what went down with the mess about the
autobiographical material, and any contact she had with Arthur on the matter
didn’t suggest otherwise.”

“How could she think that of you?”

He chuckles bitterly. “She’s seen me at my worst. And the
more I tried to convince her that it was the exact opposite, that I tried to
distract Arthur from the truth and lead him in other marketing directions—to
the point that I was completely and obviously overstepping my bounds—the less
she believed me. So I stopped trying.” He snorts disgustedly. “She’d even
started believing that Caroline was part of some complicated scheme to trick
her into sympathizing with me so that I could get close to her and get
information from her or… something. I don’t even know what she thinks, to be
honest. Gus couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me anything.”

“That guy’s a piece of work,” Blanche mutters.

They move even closer to the gazebo. Luke looks a little
surer on his crutches. I know at this distance, if I move, they’ll see me. I
don’t want to be seen yet—if ever—so I remain motionless.

“He’s a good guy. And a loyal friend. I’m glad Jayne has
someone like that who she can count on. And I’m glad he told off Arthur in
front of all those people. Arthur deserved it.”

Neither says a word while they stare at the house for a while.
Then Blanche says, “You better be careful who you say stuff like that around.”

“Well, duh.”

“No, really. All it takes is one slip-up, and your career at
Thornfield is done.”

He shakes his head. “You know what, Blanche? I don’t give a
shit at this point.”

“Come on, now.”

“I’m serious.” Taking his eyes off the house for the first
time, he looks at her. “Do you like working for a place that did what it did to
Jayne? I don’t.”

“Yeah, but you can do her more good by working there than
you could if you got fired, and she had
nobody
on the inside on her
side.”

Grudgingly, he agrees but asks, “Why don’t we ever screw
over numb-nuts assholes like Tom Ridgeworthy, though? Why do we have to screw
over good people? Because they’re easy targets? It makes me sick.”

She says nothing to that. Instead, she nods toward the
house. “What’re you going to do with this wreck?”

He sounds tired when he answers, “I don’t know. My first
instinct is to make Malcolm Fucking O’Shea rebuild it for me. But then I think,
why? What’s the point? Maybe it’s better to bulldoze the damn lot, sell the
property, and walk away. I’ve put myself through a lot of grief trying to hold
onto this place.”

“Why is that?” she asks him, bemused.

Shifting his weight against the crutches, he answers, “I
don’t know. At first, it was mostly to spite Caroline. It was the only
bargaining chip I had. Not that I ever had it. But you know what I mean. I
thought I did. I’ve always loved the house, and I thought I deserved to have
one place I could go where she wouldn’t be allowed to bother me. Ironic, in
light of recent events, huh?”

Blanche nods. “Very. You said, ‘at first,’ though, which
implies that’s not why you’ve held on more recently.”

He says nothing at first, but then he finally replies, “I had
good memories in this house. And I wanted to make more. I began to think that I
would, anyway. Foolish hope, as it turns out. But… in a way, letting go of the
house feels like giving up on those hopes.” Impatiently, he adds, “Anyway, it’s
stupid and sentimental. I need to reclaim my inner cynic and get on with life,
apparently.”

“Don’t give up hope yet, alright?” She puts her hand on his
arm. “I could see it the other night; the divorce was news to her. When I told
her about what Caroline’d been putting you through lately, her mind was racing
in a thousand directions. She wanted to call you right then. I recognized that
look in her eye. She had a very itchy dialing finger. She and her friend were
talking a big game and giving me the cold shoulder, but… they both have
terrible poker faces. Give her some time to process what I told her. And surely
she’s heard about the fire by now. Maybe she’s already tried to get in touch.”

“My phone is melted somewhere in there,” he says, pointing
toward the charred rubble with one of his crutches. Then he abruptly laughs and
says, “Oh, fuck.”

“What?”

He looks down at the ground while he continues to laugh.
Eventually, he stops and tells her, “During one of my first meetings with
Jayne, I told her that fires were the biggest clichés in literature. Of course,
at the time, I had no idea her book was based on her life and that the fire in
it wasn’t a random tragedy that she pulled from her imagination. Still… Look at
this. Look at
me
! I’m paying dearly for being such an insensitive
dickhead, aren’t I?”

“Fires
are
cliché,” she defends him. “I can’t believe
you almost died in one. It would have been extremely poor taste.”

“Sticking with the poor-taste theme running through my life
right now.”

She laughs. “Let’s get out of here. It’s cold. And
depressing. Let’s grab some lunch at that tavern in town. I’m jonesing for some
clam chowder.”

He smiles and squints over at her. “I’m not ready to go
yet.”

“I can wait for you in the car, then, while you have a few
minutes alone,” she offers.

Shaking his head, he says, “Nah. You know what? You go on
back to the city. Tom can come get me.”

They argue back and forth for a while, but he eventually
wins when he loses his temper and yells, “I’m trying to tell you nicely that I
want to be alone, okay? Do I need to take out a fucking billboard?”

With her usual irreverence, she backs away, “Message
received, Lukey-pookie. I’ll see you back at the office.”

“Not today,” he corrects her. “I have other things I need to
do. Thanks for bringing me out here, though.”

She waves and hikes back to the road, where she gets into
her SUV and drives off with one last horn honk in Luke’s direction. He lifts a
hand in a half-hearted wave, turns, and hops toward me. It’s immediately
apparent that the gazebo is his destination. I brace myself to be discovered.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

He almost doesn’t look surprised to see me. Of course, after
the past couple of days he’s had, maybe nothing does surprise him anymore.

“Hi,” I say simply.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, lowering himself onto
the bench closest to the gazebo steps and propping his crutches next to him. He
rests his casted foot and leg against the floor and coughs like someone who’s
smoked two packs a day for the past ten years. Before I can even think of a
decent answer, he asks, “Are you really here?”

I shoot him an alarmed look. “Yes…”

He shrugs. “I’m on a lot of drugs right now, so… it’s
possible I’m hallucinating. How’d you get past the cop?”

That’s easier to answer than why I’m here, so I say, “I
parked at the public access beach and walked.”

He smiles weakly.

To save him the effort of the tough guy act I can tell he’s
going to try to put on, I walk over to him, sit right next to him, and take his
hand. “I’ve missed you,” I say bluntly. “And when I heard about this, I… I was
so worried. But nobody could tell me anything, and I couldn’t get in touch with
you, so in order to not go crazy in my stupid hotel room while I waited for you
to get your messages from Sally, I drove out here. It’s the only thing I could
think to do.”

He stares down at our hands. Mine still look halfway decent
from the paraffin treatment I got at the hotel before the Thornfield party. His
are scratched and rougher than I remember them. They also look like they’re
sunburned, as does his neck, face, and any other skin I can see. I’m guessing
first-degree burns.

After he doesn’t say anything in response to my emotional
monologue, I ask, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He looks up and smiles bravely, but the broken
blood vessel in his right eye, the cut above his eyebrow, and the various
scratches on the rest of his face tell a different story. “I’m alive, anyway.
And, like I said, I’m on a lot of pain medication, so everything seems okay for
now.” He pulls his hand away from mine and rests it on my knee. “Are
you
okay?
Seeing this,” he points over his shoulder with his thumb toward the house,
“can’t be easy.”

“I’m trying not to think too much about it,” I admit. “The
smell is bothering me, but as long as I don’t stare too long at it or let
myself imagine what it was like when the fire was at its strongest, I’m okay.”
I gulp. “And seeing you makes me feel a whole lot better.”

“Seeing you has vastly improved my day, too,” he states
matter-of-factly.

“Good.”

I want to kiss him. Or at the very least hug him or put my
head on his shoulder or… something. But he looks like it hurts him to breathe,
so I content myself with taking hold of his hand again and squeezing it.

“Is Paulette okay?” I inquire, realizing that as long as I
keep asking questions and dealing with facts, the less I feel like I’m about to
fly apart.

He nods. “She’s fine, physically. She got out right away…
and was smart enough to stay out, unlike yours truly.” He grins
self-deprecatingly.

“Why’d you go back inside?” I wonder, unable to think of a
single thing that would be worth returning to a burning building for. Oh.
Except for my laptop. I’d totally go back inside a burning house for that, I
think with a stab of embarrassment.

Ducking his head, he answers. “Well… for one thing, Caroline
was still in there.”

“So what?!” My heart races, and my elevated blood pressure
makes my eyes bulge. “You should have let her burn.”

“That’s exactly what she wanted, though. And I’d be damned
before I gave her the satisfaction of killing herself in the process of trying
to kill me. And then for me to live and her to die? No way was she going to be
a fucking martyr.” He shakes his head firmly.

“But she’s the one who started the fire!”

“I know. And the authorities know. And she’s going to be put
away for it. She’s already been charged. I’m glad it’s out of my hands. I don’t
have a choice about whether to press charges, so her family can’t try to
pressure me not to, like all the other times.” He sighs. “But that’s not the
only reason I went back inside.” Wincing, he flattens himself so he can reach
into his pocket. He pulls something out that he holds in his closed fist.
“You’re going to be mad at me when I show you this, but… well...”

He opens his hand. On his upturned palm is a flash drive.
While I’m puzzled as to why the tiny plastic device is so important, I’m not
sure why he thinks it would make me angry.