by Emma Janson
Uncomfortable, Jack suddenly knew that he had to tell his wife the truth. “Jilly, babe, we can’t do that.” He leaned forward to put his face in his hands and sighed.
Jill sat up and leaned over the desk, placing her elbows on a pool of her own tears. She was listening. Intently. “What are you not telling me, Jack Reed? I can feel ya got something up your sleeve.”
He was extremely hesitant, but Jill was patient. Finally, through a sigh that was bigger than the first, he said it out loud, so it would stop screaming through his head. “Buck is in love with Ignacio.” He spoke into his hands with his eyes closed, afraid to see her reaction as he mumbled, There – I said it, several times thereafter.
Her mouth fixed open, locked uncomfortably in that position. She found that she was unable to move. Unable to do anything. When she finally did, it was forced and stiff as she tucked hair behind her ear and then tilted her head to aim it in his direction as if she hadn’t quite heard what he’d just said. There was no need to repeat it, though; she’d heard every word. Her eyes searched the spaces between Jack’s fingers for his eyes, which peered out from the dark. He shook his head up and down without moving his sprawled hands from his face to confirm that what she had heard was correct. His tongue nervously licked his bottom lip under his sweaty palm.
When Jill spoke, she had to stop to clear her throat before beginning again. “Ig – Ignacio? The one who thinks he is his homicidal mother? What happens when her personality comes out? Does he love Juana?”
“I don’t know. He said he sees Juana, though. Like we see Buck.”
Jill hit her palm to her chest so hard that it thumped as she screamed. “I don’t see...Buck! I see my son acting like another person and I – I fucking play along!” Spit had flown out of her mouth as she’d yelled, she was so upset.
“Jesus, you don’t have to scream at me! I know what you mean. But, Jilly, all these years later, don’t you see his alter when you look at him? Not once or even just a little?”
Jill crossed her arms over her heaving chest. She didn’t want to agree, but she had to. There were times when she replaced images of Buck’s face from the photos over her son’s. But they were always the two-dimensional, frozen smiles of a black man she’d never known.
For a second, she trailed off to consider the innocent days when she and her husband had had big dreams in college, and then she came back to the terrible nightmare she was currently living. “This is too much. I can’t fucking deal with this, Jackie! I’m about to lose my shit. I just need to work...I’ll make some phone calls to deal with the gun. Can you give me a moment, darling? Please. I don’t want to call, not in the state I’m in.” She fluttered her manicured nails at the sides of her face to unnecessarily point out the fact that she was frustrated, which was already obvious.
“Fine, Jill. Better do it soon, before Buck comes in.”
A booming voice with a southern accent shook the room then, as well as Jack and Jill Reed. “Buck’s already in. My apologies, ya’ll – I was just locking up. I could give you a few more minutes if you need me to.”
The awkward silence lingered as three sets of eyes from the former Reed family darted around the room and in between each other.
Buck stood with his thumb up like a hitchhiker as he used it to point to the beautiful door behind him. “I think I’ll come back. I have to check the lobby and the smoking room anyway.” He back-stepped, but Jill shot up from her chair and shouted for him to wait. Jack just smacked his forehead and begged his wife to please sit down and let him do his job.
Jill snapped at her husband, then walked over to Buck while she fussed with her business attire to make sure she was presentable. She stopped when she approached his personal space and noticed that he’d jerked his head back to express his discomfort with how close she’d come. “Look at my face. Really look. What do you see?”
Buck leaned left, noticing Mr. Reed in the patient chair rolling his eyes and shrugging before he shook his head and then tucked his mouth under his gently curved fingers to prevent himself from saying something stupid.
“Come on. Look hard,” Jill insisted.
Buck, who had played this game before, snapped the ‘D’ ring of keys onto his belt loop and tucked the dangling portion into his pants pocket. He tugged his uniform shirt downward before respectfully crossing his hands over his waist to lean forward. He gave Mrs. Reed a focused and sincere look. His eyes scanned her hair; whiter than anything. Her nose was petite at the bridge, drawing down perfectly into a little ball at the tip that was reminiscent of a more attractive Mrs. Santa Claus. Her face was symmetrical with gently curved laugh lines surrounding her mouth like parenthesis. Her eyes, a beautiful bright green, were the only things that seemed different – other than the natural progression of aging. Their beautiful color was and always would be as vibrant as the day she’d been born. However, the whites of her eyes were dimmed with a hue of pink from the tears she’d shed over the son who didn’t recognize her face. Buck noticed the black mascara she used to cover red eyelashes. It had smeared a little from moisture and settled on her bottom lid like smudged and smoky paint.
“Mom,” Jason said.
Jill’s face lifted and released the tension in her lips and forehead. Her heart literally skipped a beat as she struggled to inhale. She turned to look at Jack, who was still seated with his fingers over his mouth and returning her look with sad, worried eyes. He didn’t have to rain on her parade. Jill smiled with a renewed sense of hope before looking back at her son.
“Ma’am,” Buck repeated. “You are as lovely as the day I started working here. A classic beauty.”
Her face melted as every feature drooped downward in utter heartbreak. “No,” she begged the first time she said it. “Nooo,” she stretched out the vowel the second time.
Buck sighed painfully, as it hurt him to give the wrong answer, which he knew he was doing – no matter what compliment he ever came up with. He called out to Mr. Reed for help as Mrs. Reed begged him to look again. Jack couldn’t help, though, and Buck knew it, but he stood up to retrieve his wife just the same. Suddenly, Buck held his hand up as if he was stopping time to speak. From across the room, he apologized to Mr. Reed for what he was about to do. “I’m sorry. I have to say something.”
Jack shook his head no with wide eyes.
“Yes. I cannot let this go on, ya’ll, this ain’t right.” Buck watched Mr. Reed signal with a mocked slicing motion to his neck, which clearly enough meant that he should cut it out. His dark eyebrows scrunched together in a scolding gesture as the ‘no’ headshake became faster and more jerky.
Jill turned to look at her husband to counteract the cues of a non-verbal conversation, but he suddenly stopped moving and returned to a neutral facial expression.
“I have to,” Buck said to Mr. Reed. “Ma’am, I think you are a beautiful woman, no matter how many times you ask me. But I’ve worked here too long, and I know the rumors about how ya’ll lost your son, and how I remind you of him – especially you, Mrs. Reed. If I can be bold here, ma’am, it makes it uncomfortable for me to work here when you do this, and I can’t keep that a secret anymore.”
His voice was much deeper than her son’s on the recording, and Jill wondered if it was part maturity or self-training from over the years. He had settled into the baritone quite nicely, although she remembered his struggle with it after he’d first introduced himself as Buck.
She looked hard into the details of his face as her eyes began to mist. His beautiful crystal-clear eyes complimented his flawless skin that, as a child, had been blessed with freckles across the bridge of his nose. As an adult, the color had been muted just like the intensity of the red in his hair had, but he was and always would be recognized as a ginger. As she wondered how he did not see his own face in the mirror, she also reflected upon why she could not see the face of his heart.
A wet glassy pool of tears began to coat her eyes as she tried to see the
man he presented to the world. His details began to melt together and blur in a watery blend of color. While she attempted to wipe the tears away, he spoke frankly about how devastating it must be to lose a son. But this unkinked the hose to her waterworks and she cried so much that she could no longer see. “Please, ma’am, I’m only trying to be honest here. Cuz ya’ll know you are like my family, but it’s too much to see you this upset every few months, over all these years. Do you understand? Every few months for over a decade. It breaks my heart.”
Jill wiped the hot tears from her cheeks and tried to breathe normally as she refocused on the figure in front of her. He was right; it had been over a decade of torture. Her makeup at this point was a sloppy, smeared mess that had bled into the gentle creases of her aged skin. She knew that touching it up wasn’t going to cut it; she would have to wash it off and start over. Thank God it was the end of her day, where she could just retire for the evening with her extremely supportive husband who loved every pruning inch of her.
Obsessively wiping the last of her tears away, she threw her head back to inhale and then exhale through her nose. When she pulled her head forward into the neutral position again, her eyes automatically closed as she steadied her breathing while fidgeting with her wedding band. When the dizziness faded, she could feel two sets of eyes upon her. The men were silent as they watched her rotate her head a few times, relieving stressful sounding pops from the back of her neck, but they didn’t speak or move. When she finished, her eyelids were relaxed and closed. Then she placed her hands together as if she were going to say the Lord ’s Prayer, and brought them to her face. Her two index fingers rested gently on her lips as her thumbs tucked under her chin. She mumbled at first, but cleared her throat to speak a moment later.
“You are right. You’re right. Jason has been gone for years...at some point, I need to accept it and stop grieving.” Her closing words of mourning behind the bazaar tragedy of her son’s disappearance couldn’t go on forever. She felt an agonizing sort of comfort in the way Buck was bold enough to express himself, though, and it seemed as if his very words gave her permission to let go.
She shook her body, letting her arms drop and her neck sway. Her posture sank into itself as she sighed while the weight of the situation spilled out of her pores. A warm sensation calmed her clammy skin and, rather than attempt to stifle it like she normally would have, she let it tickle past the hairs on her arms. It relieved an internal ache that had lain dormant, but ever present. Her face, drooping in heavy sadness, began to retract into a lighter and more pleasant expression. Not smiling, yet happier just the same, she finally felt ready to face the truth.
She let her eyes blink open for a split second, then a full second, and then another as the blurring began to formulate details of Buck’s chocolate skin and naturally curled eyelashes. His smile was warm and contagious. He was very tall, and towered over her tiny frame – which strangely made it seem as if he was a protector of the evil world she lived in. His muscles pushed at the inside of the nurse’s uniform he wore, though it remained professional looking with his pens neatly hung inside of his breast pocket under the embroidered Northern Lights logo. His perfectly shaped lips held just the right hue of pink to make him look healthy and strong. He was a stunning looking man, really. No wonder her son had fallen in love with him.
With her hands relaxed at her sides, she said, “He’s gone...but there are other things to be thankful for. Thanks, Buck. Maybe I just needed you to be honest with me for me to see it. I see it now.” She turned to her husband. “I see it now.”
He smiled while keeping his thin lips together in one of the most sincere, heartfelt moments he had ever shared with his wife, even including the birth of their youngest son, Jason.
Buck, completely unaware of the emotional trauma he had just put Mr. and Mrs. Reed through, rested his hand against Jill’s upper arm. “I really hate upsetting you like this, ma’am. It tugs at my heartstrings.”
Mr. Reed, realizing that everyone needed a break from the thickness in the air, pressed his hands to his knees to help himself stand up. “Let’s go have a puff on the bench, Buck. Mrs. Reed can lock up here and you can clock out early tonight, okay, buddy?” Jack walked over to the two of them and rubbed his wife’s back before kissing her forehead.
Buck nodded to Jack, and then turned and walked to the door of the office to give them a private moment.
Jill was so excited to tell her husband the truth of the situation that she couldn’t wait for the door to completely close behind Buck before she leaned into Jack’s ear. “I see it. I honestly do.”
Jack pressed his face into the beautiful hair that covered her ear to correct her. “You see him.”
PAINTING WITH FIRE
The newly replaced florescent lights in the craft room were exceptionally bright as some of the patients of Northern Lights struggled to create their masterpieces. The glare in the wet paint agitated each and every one of the twelve people in the room, too. Their assignment for the two-hour block of time was to create an image of a happy moment in their lives, each of which they would later discuss in group. Ignacio was miserable with this particular task, as he was unaccustomed to sharing in a creative, artistic way. He struggled to dip the brush into the paint without smashing the bristles to the bottom. The pressure he used to load the bristles with color was too intense, always resulting in unintentional blobs on his paper. Despite this, he was not defeated – rather, he was still determined to make his doctors happy, and so he carefully lifted his heavy hand for a better stroke.
Belinda was seated at the same group table, across from Ignacio and his fantastic dimples. Although they were hidden when he was not smiling, she knew exactly where they were. She looked at him after each of her own brush strokes was made, hoping to make him smile so that she could see his natural indentations, but his face was inches from the tip of the handle as he concentrated on his work. As he lifted his head enough to reload his brush, which he absolutely didn’t need to do, she giggled at the sight of him poking his tongue out from the corner of his mouth. A glob of paint fell onto his happy moment, pulling him right out of his concentration.
“Mother FUCKer!” his voice boomed through the hushed atmosphere, making one patient jump enough that he knocked over a cup of colored pencils. Displeased with the sharp break in the room, everyone scowled or rolled their eyes at Ignacio as the pencils awkwardly hit the floor in a muffled clatter; except for Belinda, who smiled.
“You’ve been around Samuel too long. Just dip half of the brush, like this.” She dipped the hairs of her brush into the cheap paint and pulled it out to demonstrate a stroke on her own paper. “Then you can gently pull it or push it to get different types of lines. You see?” She finished her stroke, then watched Ignacio struggle with every step. She returned her eyes to her own paper and swirled the paint. She rather enjoyed watching it blend together to create one final image. The harmony of it soothed her. “Have you seen Maggie?” Ignacio asked, shaking Belinda out of her brushstrokes.
“What do you want with her?” She looked stunned, and then turned her head away to roll her eyes.
He hunched forward to make sure he was quiet. “I saw her eating change in the lobby. Long term residents don’t usually have change – only the open admittance people. She might have something for me, that’s all. We have an arrangement.” He sat back into his chair and then cleared his throat. Then he tried to push and pull the brush like she’d demonstrated – with a concentration that unintentionally pushed his tongue out of his mouth again.
She leaned onto the table to answer him with a gentle smugness. “I know what’s going on. Maggie and I are cool now. You can’t blackmail her anymore, and she owes you nothing because the ring is probably still in your pocket.” She smiled with confidence. When she pulled away to sit back into her chair, she realized that she had placed her ample breasts in a portion of her painting. Now a line of smeared red color spread itself across the m
id-line of her breasts. She tried to wipe off the paint, but only made it worse.
Ignacio shook his head and smiled at her mistake. His dimples finally made their grand appearance, and for a moment, Belinda was seduced by them.
Quietly, he explained, “She said she would do it for the innocent souls I have tortured. That’s her backwards way to be nice. Unlike you, she’s a good person and doesn’t mind-fuck people with her vagina.” Without skipping a beat, he cleaned his brush in a jar of water and loaded a new color on the bristles. “Maybe if you were more like her and a little less whore…”
He’d known from day one that distractions like sex would throw his mission off course. They only got him a longer stay in a renovated mansion, painting happy la la moments to impress doctors. When he thought about it, he began to swell with anger at Belinda because, honestly, she was the one who had started it all. A little piece of him pushed the blame onto her lap for creating chaos in his life.
Belinda cocked her head while she flipped him the middle finger. The tempo of her breathing increased then, as did the intense pink flood to her cheeks. Her mouth was slightly open when she licked the inside of her teeth with her tongue. “You are so damn dumb. I feel bad for you.”
Ignacio never looked up from his painting. “Ah, shut up, Belinda, and just paint your happy picture.”
Her profound disrespect made him livid. She was lucky his grandmother had drilled it into his head not to hit women – otherwise, he would have given her a much-deserved smack across the face that would be hard enough to leave a handprint on her cheek.
