When I Was Jane

by Theresa Mieczkowski

“We talked for a while. She told me she’d been working there for months. Her mother was in debt to the owners for a ‘great sum of money’ and they were letting Audrey work it off washing dishes in the back. But they’d been pressuring her more and more to get out and dance. The night I came in, her boss had come at her in a rage, drunk and high as a kite, demanding that she dance or he’d throw her out and have her mother arrested. He’d been really rough with her.” Jason pauses for a moment, clenching his jaw. “The other dancers had tried to help her by doing her hair and face to make her look older, but before they could finish or find her anything to wear, she was pulled away and thrown into the room with me. She still had the marks on her arms from that bastard.”

  I begin to regret all the insulting things I ever thought about Audrey.

  “After a while, the guys started pounding on the door again, calling me names. Audrey smeared her lipstick across her mouth and tousled her hair. Then she opened the door and said, ‘You boys need to give us some time in here. This may take a while,’ before slamming it in their faces.” He shifts in his chair uncomfortably. “She defended me to elevate my reputation with my friends. And they believed her. They cheered and argued over who would be next. Once she realized what she’d started, she panicked. I wasn’t going to let a single one of them in there with her, of course. I wanted to tell them the truth; I hated for them to think of her like that. But she made them think it. For me.”

  He turns towards the window, lost in his thoughts. “Why would she do that for me?”

  His face is filled with pain, and I can see he’s wrestling with the burden of knowing just how little she thought of herself.

  “We talked about my family, about me applying to medical school,” he says. “She told me her only ambition was to get out of Deacon Hill, but since she didn’t have any skills she didn’t know where to go.” Jason leans back in his chair. “Then her boss started pounding on the door and told her to hurry up because there were paying customers lining up for her outside. He said she was finally about to pay off. I couldn’t stand the thought of it, so I handed him all the money in my wallet—a thousand dollars—and told him she wouldn’t be entertaining any more customers.”

  Jason looks at me. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s a lot of money for a college kid. I’m not trying to look like a hero, and she didn’t want me to be one anyway. She told me to meet her outside. Somehow I got away from my idiot friends who were pouring beer on my head to congratulate me. By the time she came out, she’d taken all that stuff off her face and was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She was even more beautiful than before. She could barely look at me, but she handed me back the money I’d given her boss.”

  “How’d she manage that?” I ask.

  “She had a key to the safe. She did their books because most of them were too stupid to add. While the manager was attempting to control my frat brothers with his dancers, she stole it back. He would’ve killed her if he caught her. But she was fearless.

  “I didn’t want the money back, but she insisted. She told me she wasn’t for sale. I hadn’t meant it that way; I tried to explain, I tried to get her to keep it, but she wouldn’t take it back. And then she said something which took me years to understand. She said my money was too good for a place like that. But what she really meant was my money was too good for her.

  “We heard my friends calling my name. Audrey kissed me on the cheek. ‘Find some new friends. Yours are assholes,’ she said and then ran off into the woods. Right then I knew I wasn’t going to leave that place until I saw her again.”

  “So how did you get her back?” I ask.

  “The guys and I had planned to spend the night in a local motel. I called my father’s campaign manager once my friends passed out and told him I was in trouble. That’s all I needed to say, really. The last thing they want to hear during an election year is the son of their candidate calling from spring break to say he’s in trouble. His aides showed up before dawn with a briefcase full of money and asked only enough questions to assure themselves I wasn’t going to be arrested or in the newspaper or the father of anyone’s illegitimate baby. While my friends slept off their hangovers, they drove me back to the club. The manager lived in a trailer next door, so I went to see him to offer to buy back her freedom.

  “Three thousand dollars. That was it. The ‘great sum of money’ she was paying off by subjecting herself to that horror was only three thousand dollars.” Jason looks away, blinking back tears. “That amount of money was nothing to a kid who grew up like me. With what she was earning, it would’ve taken her a lifetime to pay it off. And even worse, the manager told me Audrey’s mother was in there drinking herself silly every day and adding to the debt. So it would never have been paid. She was a hostage, Jane, and she had no idea. Her mother was into drugs and gambling and was bartering it all off with her daughter. It was only a matter of time before they escalated Audrey’s job description.”

  I’m beginning to see now why he wanted to erase Viki from his life. I’m surprised he let her live this long.

  “So I paid the guy his three-thousand dollars and offered two-thousand more for her address. He threatened to kill me. He said she was in training, that one day she’d be his most valuable asset, so there was a price on her and he wasn’t going to let her go without it.”

  I can’t stop myself from asking. “What was the price?”

  Jason shrugs. “I don’t know. My father’s guys got out of the car and told the man that his business would be investigated with some unfortunate consequences unless he gave me what I wanted. The idiot took one look at their suits and sunglasses and thought they were in the mafia.

  “I told my friends there were some family issues so they’d have to go on without me. Then I rented a car and drove to Audrey’s trailer. She wasn’t exactly happy to see me. She was embarrassed about where she lived, angry at me for coming, for not listening to her the night before. I asked if I could take her out for a burger so we could talk.

  “At lunch, I told her about the deal I made with her boss, and on the way home, I told her about the deal her mother had with him. She didn’t believe me at first. She cried and begged me to stop the car to let her out. She was ashamed that I put money down to help her. She couldn’t understand why I’d do something like that. I told her it was because I was able to and that I wanted to do more if she’d let me. I knew if I left her there, not only I would never see her again, but at some point those lowlifes would break her spirit and whittle her down to nothing. But it was no act of charity. I needed her, too, somehow. I felt alive next to her. More alive than ever before.”

  “And of course she took your help. You were her ticket out of Deacon Hill,” I say.

  Jason looks at me sharply. “It wasn’t like that. She was too proud. She said if I helped her, she’d always be indebted to me, and that wasn’t much different than being indebted to her boss.”

  So Audrey was tougher than I thought.

  “I said it was her choice, and she should only come if she wanted to, not because she felt she owed me anything. I told her she was too good for the world she was living in—an angel, really—and she just laughed and called me a blind little boy who had too pretty of a life to understand what he was getting himself into. But that was just her fear talking. She was worried about what her mother would do to her if she tried to leave.

  “I told her where I’d be staying. That entire night and all the next day I waited in a motel outside town. It was pouring rain, and I took it as a sign that she wasn’t coming. I told myself I was an idiot for asking some girl to run away with me. I tried to convince myself I was better off, that she’d done me a favor by not coming. Because what would I have told my parents? Where would I have taken her? Eventually there was a knock at my door, and I ran to answer it so fast I don’t think my feet ever touched the floor.

  “She had a black eye, and her hair was stuck to her face from the rain. She had a broken suitcase and a back
pack full of essentials in case she never found me and had to hit the road alone. She looked at me and said, ‘A fish and a bird can fall in love, Jason, but where would they build their nest?’ I grabbed her and didn’t let go. I told her how brave she was for making the right decision, and I promised her that nobody would ever hurt her again.

  “She’d been walking and hitching rides in the backs of pick-up trucks, so even the clothes in her suitcase were soaked through. I gave her a t-shirt and a pair of my boxers, and I swear I’d never seen that shirt look so good. There’s something about seeing the girl of your dreams in one of your t-shirts that can really kill a guy. I still have it; I had it framed.”

  I smile at him. “I’ve seen it in your study.”

  “Anyway, she sat on the bed eating pixie sticks from her bag and talking like we were two kids at sleepover. She asked if I believed in happy endings, if people could really change their destinies. I’ll never forget the trusting look in her eyes as she waited for my answers. She told me she hadn’t wanted to come at first because she didn’t want it to seem like she was using me as a way out. But then her mother showed up drunk, calling her names. Viki had heard that some guy bought her daughter away from the club, and she accused her of selling herself to the first yuppie college boy ‘meal ticket’ that drove through town. Then she smacked her and threw her into a dresser.”

  I shake my head in disgust. Viki conveniently left that part out.

  “I think it bothered her more than I understood at the time,” he says. “Her mother said she should wait for a bigger, older, richer fish to swim along, one who could take care of them both. She wanted to know where all the money was. She thought I paid Audrey to leave. That’s what finally made her go. Her mother was more concerned about the money than she was about who her daughter was thinking about running off with or where she was going. She never even asked what my last name was.”

  I put my head in my hands. Poor Audrey. And stupid me for listening to Viki.

  Jason continues. “I think when she said it out loud she realized how bad it was. She cried for hours. When she felt better, we watched old movies and ate vending machine junk food, which she insisted on paying for with a plastic bag full of change. I held on to her all night. By the time the sun came up, I was completely and utterly in love with her and knew I’d never feel right again if she wasn’t next to me.

  “We stayed in that motel for three days. I watched her sleep. She looked peaceful, even with the black eye. Every now and then her face would crumple up like she was having a bad dream, but then she’d open her eyes and smile at me with relief. I never felt like more of a man in all my life than I did when she looked at me like that.”

  He stops his story and looks at me. “Do you know that once a year, Audrey and I still go away together to a cheap motel and spend three days in the room eating junk and watching TV and making out? It was her idea, so we’d never forget the way we fell in love. That’s why I was so blown away on the beach before we went to the inn. As soon as you said we had three days, I knew we had a chance. It was as if Audrey was speaking through you, telling me to embrace the idea of you and me.”

  “So you just brought her home with you?”

  Jason gets up for another beer. “We made it work somehow. She came back to school with me; I only had a month or so left. I put her up in a small apartment off campus and moved in with her as soon as I graduated in May. She washed the bleach out of her hair and went back to being brunette for the first time since she was ten so my fraternity brothers wouldn’t recognize her from the club. And honestly, she looked even better that way.

  “I slept on the couch that entire summer. In the fall, I went to Chapel Hill for medical school and brought her along. We got a place off campus and lived like roommates for a while, sleeping in separate rooms, taking it slow. When I had time off from studying, we got to know one another. We had dates in our pajamas in front of the TV. If things ever started to go too far, she’d just ask me if I could wait. I thought it was because she was shy, or afraid, or maybe not as interested in me as I was in her.

  “She got a job waitressing and insisted on paying back the money it cost me to get her out of The Hornet’s Nest. Then one day she handed me all of the rent money for the first apartment. That night she crept into my room wearing the t-shirt and boxers she’d worn in West Virginia and crawled into bed with me. She told me she loved me. If I wasn’t half out of my mind with desire for her, I think I would’ve cried with relief. I didn’t really understand, but afterwards I put it together. She would only sleep with me after she no longer owed me anything. She didn’t want her mother to be right. She thought she had to prove she was worthy of anything I did for her.”

  Jason lowers his eyes. “I couldn’t understand it. In all our years together, I just couldn’t make sense of her feeling so…undeserving.”

  I can’t bear the look on his face. I take his hand and guide him over to the couch to sit down. “I guess it makes sense in a way,” I say gently.

  “Not to me. I got to appreciate so much through her eyes, things I’d always taken for granted. Life was amazing to her, and she was amazing to me. She’d never been out of Deacon Hill, never gone anywhere, never been able to afford anything. When I took her to a museum for the first time, she stood in front of a Van Gogh and cried her eyes out. I’d seen those paintings thousands of times; my family owns an original. It never impressed me until I was with her. She marveled at buildings, inhaled all the books she could get her hands on. The first time she saw the ocean she went berserk just like you did. She sat on the beach and built sandcastles and chased waves for hours like a little kid. She taught me how to appreciate the world around me. I’d become a spoiled, closed off, resentful person after my brother died. She taught me how to love life again.

  “But sometimes she’d wake up crying from a bad dream, the same one for years and years. Even after Daisy was born. She’d dream that she never came to find me in the hotel. She’d cry into my arms and ask what would’ve happened if I never saved her. But the truth was she saved me, too, she could just never see it.

  “She never felt she was good enough. At first I thought it was because she grew up so poor, but it went beyond that. She wanted more than a transformation. She wanted an exorcism.”

  Jason drops his head into his hands and hesitates before continuing. “She dedicated months to erasing her accent by working with speech pathologists at a local community college. She took classes in art history and political science and cultural studies just so she could keep up with things my family talked about. She nearly burned our place down trying to teach herself to cook. Then she legally changed her name to Audrey Pratt, and I got her a new birth certificate through one of my father’s connections. With me, she was friendly and captivating and funny. But when we went out, or if we met up with other people from my program, she would shrink into herself, always so afraid that someone would realize that she wasn’t the right kind of person.

  “What kind of person was that?” I ask, though I think I already know.

  “The kind of person who deserved someone like me.” He looks away and steadies his breath. “She was so broken. She had a terrible upbringing. Viki did nothing for her. Nothing. She stole from her and tormented her and never taught her a thing. Audrey may as well have been raised by wolves.”

  “So she was pretty lucky to end up with Vivienne then,” I say.

  Jason nods. “She was the mother Audrey never had. They had a lot in common. She raised Audrey in her likeness and taught her how to overcome the damage done to her in her childhood. It was working…until we lost the baby.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Audrey believed there was something inherently bad about her. During both pregnancies, she thought her body would hurt the baby. Then when we lost James, she had the proof she needed. It was some kind of pregnancy psychosis or delayed PTSD. I should’ve gotten her help, but I thought I could manage it myself. She went off the de
ep end, and there was no bringing her back.”

  Jason leans back against the couch, looking exhausted and drained. “And that’s what happened. That’s the truth. Everything Viki said to you was a lie.”

  I stare at him for a while, and he waits patiently as I absorb everything. His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy from all the tears he’s cried. Viki hadn’t shed a single tear when she told me she was my mother. She’d been more interested in the negotiations than she was in me.

  “And Wyatt? Can you tell me the truth about him now?” I ask.

  “Her ex-boyfriend. A misogynistic, abusive creep. Son of the man who owned The Hornet’s Nest. Supporter of her having to strip to pay them back. Apparently he’d blown into town between jail stints, and Viki spilled the beans to him during a drinking binge about who Audrey married. He contacted me online looking for her since she wasn’t on social media.”

  “Viki left that part out. I asked her if she knew of him.”

  “I can’t believe I’m about to defend her, but I doubt she remembers. She gets pretty loaded,” he says.

  “What did you do when he contacted you?”

  “I completely ignored him, that’s what I did. He’s a dirtbag drifter who’s probably in a jail cell right now. He’s no threat to my family. If Audrey heard me say his name on the phone when I had him investigated, that would explain why it was on your mind after the accident.”

  I put my head on his shoulder. “Why isn’t there anything of Audrey’s in the house? Photo albums, yearbooks.”

  “Viki burned it all. After a year or so, Audrey started feeling guilty for running off, so we went back and offered her mom money to go to rehab. We found out she’d burned everything Audrey owned in a drunken rage. Audrey didn’t want any of it anyway, but the funny thing is, without any of that stuff as proof, Viki can never convince anyone that her daughter is a Gilbert.”

  Tears sting my eyes. “I believe you, Jason. All of it. It’s such a romantic story. Audrey was lucky to have you.”