Under the Light (8 page)

Eventually we stopped in front a tiny house with a porch swing outside the front window.

“Mom,” Jenny said. “Why are we at Mrs. Morgan’s house?”

There were two cars, tail to nose, in the narrow driveway. One was a white van.

“Why is Dad’s car here?” Jenny asked.

Cathy let the engine idle in the middle of the street for a moment, staring at the lights shining through the curtained windows, then she dug the heel of her hand into the steering wheel, blaring the horn in a savage blast before pulling away.

“Daddy left us for Mrs. Morgan?” Jenny shook her mother’s arm, but Cathy wouldn’t look at her or answer. “Isn’t she your prayer partner?”

Cathy wept, silently steering with one hand, the other pressed to her middle as if she might be sick.

As the car neared Jenny’s driveway, I saw a piece of white paper sticking out of their front door. Cathy pulled into the garage, but as soon as she entered the house, she walked straight to the front door from inside, opened it, and pulled out the note.

“Is that for me?” asked Jenny.

Cathy slammed the door and locked it. “No.” She unfolded the page and gave it a quick glance. I saw, before she crumpled it, that it was a phone number and looked like Billy’s handwriting. “It’s nothing.”

Jenny followed her mother into the kitchen and watched her toss the ball of paper into the sink. I think Jenny might have protested but the mess in the kitchen distracted her.

The sink was splattered with an odd mix of foods. Vegetable drinks, protein powder, and granola. Perhaps Dan’s favorites. The jars and cans still lay open around the drain. The tall rubbish can nearby overflowed with half-empty packages of molasses cookies, seaweed crackers, and power bars. A nearly full jar of fig jam was crammed in the top, upside down, where I assumed Cathy had stuffed it after Dan walked out.

“I didn’t do this, did I?” asked Jenny

When her mother failed to answer, Jenny followed her down the hall.

The dining room and living room were littered with broken glass and bent picture frames. Photos of Jenny’s family had been mutilated so that her father’s image was torn or twisted from each picture. The only one still on the wall was of Jenny as a baby, alone beside a little wading pool.

Cathy kept walking, down the hall and into the office, where many shelves had been emptied. A pile of books—business advice, sports memoirs, and how-to manuals. Two tan rectangles of unfaded paint were left under empty nails on the wall where Dan’s diplomas used to hang.

Cathy stepped around the piles and sat at the desk. She picked up the phone and stared at it for a moment before she began to push numbered buttons—not a word to her daughter. Jenny paused for a moment, took in the new imbalance in what had been a very tidy room.

“Bev?” Cathy said, her voice quavering. “Something’s happened.”

Jenny continued down the hall and into the family room, and I followed, wanting to tell her what had happened that day.

The smoke alarm cover dangled at the top of the doorway; a liquor decanter lay empty on the carpet. The floor was strewn with board games, pink and blue paper money, dice, Scrabble tiles. And there in the far corner, where Jenny used to sit with her parents every morning for Bible study and prayers, where I had to sit with them just yesterday (if that was possible), there the three chairs lay broken and charred atop a huge melted burn mark in the rug. The Bible itself I had saved—it sat on the arm of the sofa—but Jenny saw another book had been torn to shreds and singed. Scraps of burnt pages and the twisted brown binding lay all around the chairs. Could she tell it was her journal? Jenny picked up what was left of the diary she was once forced to keep. The pages were mostly gone. A jagged wing of paper fluttered from the spine as she dropped it back into the ashes.

She looked up—a black cloud hung above this mess, a smoke stain, four feet wide, on the ceiling.

“Jenny.” I spoke her name and she turned, but not to me. She looked at the doorway and her mother appeared, eyes red, arms filled with cleaning supplies.

“We made the mess together, we’ll clean it up together,” said Cathy.

Jenny looked proud. “We did this together?”

Cathy handed her a scrub brush and a spray can of spot remover. “We need to make it right before anyone sees it,” she said, pulling on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and kneeling in the Prayer Corner.

CHAPTER 10

H
IS CHEEKS WERE PINKED FROM
the wind and his hair ruffled. A strand stuck to his forehead in a curl that made my heart ache.

“Hey.” He smiled, hands in his pockets.

“Hey.” Jenny moved back, swinging the door wide, and he stepped in.

She had rescued his note from the kitchen sink, where her mother had thrown it, unfolded the page that was covered in running ink, and managed to read his phone number. She called him in secret that night. She told him what time Cathy was planning to meet a friend’s divorce lawyer the next morning. It was understandable that Jenny and Billy wanted to be alone—they may not remember becoming a couple, but they were bound by the union all the same. I had planned on guiding Jenny away from this entanglement, but I couldn’t help having a fondness for Billy even though he was not James. If I didn’t keep them apart, I wasn’t sure he would make Jenny happy for long.

After glancing to see if anyone outside had seen Billy arrive, Jenny closed the door. Perhaps Billy had walked. Mitch didn’t drop him off and the rusty car was not parked outside.

Billy took his hands from his pockets, but didn’t know whether to embrace her. Jenny was blushing.

“I don’t really remember you,” she told him. “I mean, I know who you are from school.”

“Me too.” He shrugged. “It’s weird.”

Not as simple as it looked, this meeting, for most young men and women who begin a courtship do not have a forgotten history between them. They seemed like such children. Her hands were smooth, with rounded fingertips like a little girl’s.

“Are you sure that’s me in that picture?” Jenny asked him. They stood in the foyer.

“I wondered that too,” said Billy. “Why would a girl like you go out with someone like me? But Mitch says it’s you.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” Jenny reached out to touch his arm but never quite got there.

He shrugged. “Okay.”

“Want to see the house?” she asked. “I mean, the rest of the house. You probably remember my bathroom.”

This made him smile.

Jenny and Billy were dressed like opposites, from two sides of the chess board. He wore faded black pants and a dark gray sweatshirt turned wrong side out. She wore light cotton pants rolled up at the ankles and a long white shirt. They were lovely, awkward creatures.

She led him into the kitchen and I followed at a respectable distance.

“It’s really . . . clean,” he said.

Each room reminded me of another problem I had caused: the dining room table where I had pretended to do Jenny’s homework—I had been a shameful student and completely abandoned her studies for a week; in the living room nearly a dozen family photographs had been taken down, which reminded me that I had taken photographs with Jenny’s camera without permission—she had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep her picture-taking a secret. It was sacred territory, and I should not have trespassed.

Billy stopped by the living room sofa, stared at the carpet, the ceiling, in wonder. “It’s huge. You could set up a skateboard pit in here.” Then he homed in on the one unsmashed frame left on the wall. It held a picture of Jenny taken at perhaps one year old. The baby girl was standing beside a rubber wading pool, holding a beach ball, wearing a one-piece daisy bathing suit bulging with built-in lifejacket floats. Her wet hair made her appear nearly bald, and her tiny round ears stuck out like handles. The camera had caught her in a giddy laugh.

I knew exactly what she felt like on that afternoon fourteen years before, though that was impossible, of course. Yet I remembered the squirmy weight of her and the cool damp skin with the warmth of her underneath. The smell of her wet hair. The sound of her smacking lips as she teethed on her own fingers. The way she kept turning her head while I tried to comb her tangled hair.

You’re wrong,
I told myself.
You’re thinking of your own baby.
Perhaps coming back from heaven had rattled my mind—my memories were pieces of two puzzles mixed together.

Billy came up close to the photo, tapped the frame with one finger. “Look at you, you little monkey.”

In the hall there was a Bible quote from Colossians in cross-stitching framed under glass:
Live a life worthy of the Lord.

I was reminded of another of my sins—I had not only ranted at the women in Cathy’s church group (an episode I suspected would stain her reputation in that congregation), but also raged at Cathy, said hurtful and peculiar things—I actually told her that I was not her daughter. But since I was wearing her daughter’s body, she didn’t believe me.

As Jenny led Billy farther down the hall, he paused at the bathroom door and fingered the latch that he had broken the day before. “Sorry,” he told her.

Jenny blushed again, I suppose not knowing what to say.

Which brought me to a more serious sin—I had taken Jenny’s deflowering away from her and exposed her to Billy’s body unprotected. I had no idea how foolish the boy had been in his short past, and neither had James. It was thoughtless and selfish of me to have changed Jenny’s reputation at school, linking her not only with Billy but with my beloved Mr. Brown. That false gossip about an English teacher having taken advantage of a student was buzzing about the high school, and probably the whole community, was appalling. I told Jenny’s parents that it was James—well, Billy—who was my lover and not Mr. Brown, and I think they believed me, but the harm had already been done.

“What happened here?” Billy asked when they got to the family room. The Prayer Corner had been neatened, the burn on the carpet hidden with a throw rug. But the charred ceiling looked like the mouth of hell.

“Sort of a protest thing when my father left.”

“You never said you were a pyromaniac.”

When Jenny opened the door to the master bedroom neither crossed the threshold. “My mother’s room,” she told him.

He peered in with no comment. Next the office, where several boxes of Dan’s belongings cluttered the middle of the floor, awaiting their fate.

“It’s kind of messy in here,” said Jenny.

Billy gave a little laugh. “You should see our place.” Then he caught her eye. “I guess you’ve already seen it.”

“I don’t remember that,” said Jenny.

“Believe me, you’re not missing anything.”

I didn’t expect Jenny to know what had happened while she was away from her body, yet I had secretly hoped I had left some residual haunting, some scent or hue that would give her a sense of me. But she seemed completely unaware of me or James.

Billy squeezed past her into the office and tilted his head as he read the titles of books left on the shelves.
The Christian Wife, The Bible Diet, A Mother/Daughter Walk with God.
“Man, your family is religious. No offense.”

“It’s okay.” She tried to sound lighthearted, but her sigh was weighty.

Finally she led him into her own bedroom and he followed without hesitation. Jenny sat on the bed and watched him study everything in sight: the girlish white dressing table, the orderly closet where the sliding mirrored doors were left half open, the view from the window into the pristine garden. He stopped at the painting of the praying hands.

“How did we get together?” He said it as if it was a rhetorical question.

Jenny didn’t answer him, but instead asked, “What’s the last thing you remember before your memory gap?”

“I was at a park near my house,” he said. “Getting high.”

“So you had a drug blackout?”

“I guess. I was just trying everything that day. Whatever I could get my hands on. Pot, pills, Super Glue.”

“That’s awful,” said Jenny.

But if he hadn’t,
I thought,
I
never would have met James.

“Yeah. That was maybe two or three weeks ago.” Billy leaned on the wall beside her desk like a loiterer. I admired him for not sitting on the bed beside her. “So what kind of amnesia do you have?”

“Unexplained.” Then she frowned. “Do you think we could have done drugs together?”

“Jeez, I hope not.” Billy looked ill for a moment.

I wanted to tell them the story James had told me about his taking over Billy’s body, but I was left out of the conversation.

“No, that can’t be it,” said Jenny. “My missing time is months long, not weeks.”

“When did you wake up?” he asked her. “I mean, when did your blackout stop?”

“Yesterday.”

“Shit,” Billy whispered. “Day before yesterday.”

Now both of them looked unnerved. He pulled out the desk chair and sat.

“That’s really weird,” said Jenny.

“When I came out of it, I was visiting my dad in prison. Mitch was just unloading on him. Having this massive meltdown. I guess that was what woke me up.” Billy shrugged as if apologizing for knowing so little about his own life.

I ached at the core remembering the last time I saw James in Billy’s body, disappearing down the hall at the prison with Mitch. I missed James so badly that the floor creaked under me, but neither of the other two noticed.

“Turns out, right before I woke up, my mother told me my father was moving out,” said Jenny.

“That sucks,” said Billy. “Or not. If it was my dad we would’ve had a party.” He waved his hand in front of her then, as if erasing the last remark. “Sorry. Rewind that.”

“Do you think shock can bring you back from amnesia?” asked Jenny.

“Sure. I guess.” He studied her for a moment, not just her eyes. “It’s hard coming back.”

“Yeah.”

“Yesterday afternoon I felt like I was on the wrong planet.” He thought for a second, seeming haunted, then laughed it off. “I lay in the grass out in our backyard like an idiot, just staring at the sky.”