Jane's Melody

by Ryan Winfield

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m an idiot and I’m sorry and that’s about all I can say.”

  “It’s not you,” Jane said. “I liked it. I liked it a lot.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Jane’s throat swelled with emotion so as she could hardly speak. She just shook her head and softly said:

  “My daughter.”

  “God, I’m so sorry, Jane. I really am stupid. I just felt ... well, I guess I felt really vulnerable and really attracted to you, and I acted on it. I really am a fool. I don’t mind heading back on foot if you don’t want to drop me at the ferry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No.”

  She turned to look at him, and she felt the hint of a smile returning to her face, despite her grief.

  “Who’s going to get rid of these damn blackberries for me if you leave?”

  His eyes flashed with relief. He leaned toward her, and she thought for a moment that he was going to hug her, but he appeared to think better of it and patted her knee instead.

  “Thanks, Jane.”

  “Let’s not be all awkward now,” she said, pulling him to her and wrapping her arms around him. “We’re both adults, and we’ve both been through a lot.”

  It felt good to be in his arms. She reached up and wiped a tear away from her cheek so he wouldn’t see it when she pulled away. Then she took a deep breath and let him go.

  “And tomorrow morning, try not to burn the toast.”

  “Oh, I’m making you breakfast again, am I?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling. “It’s part of the deal.”

  JANE LAY AWAKE in bed that night, thinking.

  She thought about her daughter silently flirting with Caleb. Walking by him every day and passing the silver dollar back and forth like a game. She wondered if it was Caleb her daughter’s post had referred to when she wrote on Facebook about being in love, or maybe it was someone else altogether. She wondered what might have changed if they’d actually spoken. Maybe Melody would have found a reason to live—some hope to lift her up above the fog of depression. She doubted it. But she wished it just the same.

  When she thought about her daughter rotting away in that box, she felt like screaming. She felt like screaming and hurting herself. But after so many years of worry, she had no voice left for grief. And she couldn’t imagine feeling a worse sort of pain.

  At what moment had everything gone wrong?

  At what crossroads had she taken the wrong turn?

  Were there warning signs she had ignored?

  She lay in bed, looking up at the dark ceiling, wishing she could change the past. But the past was locked in the cruel grip of time. The world kept spinning; the clocks kept turning.

  She knew Melody had been born with a certain kind of melancholy in her heart, not unlike other babies might be born with a simple birthmark. She knew also that this propensity for sadness must hide somewhere inside herself as well. It was a kind of genetic curse that had torn daughter and mother apart, a curse that made Jane lie here and remember in the dark.

  In the swirling chaos of these nighttime musings, her mind drifted to Caleb. She couldn’t stop thinking about his kiss—the way he’d just taken charge and gone for it. The strength of his hands, the softness of his lips was an intoxicating mixture, and the thought of it now made her burn to feel him again. She tried to remember what he had said to her. Had he said he loved her? No. He had said the things he liked in Melody he loved in her. And that was different. But she also remembered him saying he spent nights lying awake and thinking about her. She wondered if he was down the hall thinking about her now.

  If he had never even spoken to her daughter, was he still off limits to her? Would she be a bad person for finding a bit of relief in a man’s touch? Who could judge her?

  Jane threw the covers back and got out of bed. Before she knew what she was doing, she was standing in front of Caleb’s door with her hand on the knob. Just do it, she told herself. You’re both adults. Why not? Because Melody had liked him. And that makes it wrong, doesn’t it? Yes. No. Maybe.

  She twisted the knob halfway, hesitated, then gently turned it back and pulled her hand away.

  THE NEXT MORNING, she dressed in her best business suit and packed her suitcase for the week. She found Caleb in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading yesterday’s Sunday paper. When he saw her he set the paper down on the table.

  “What?” Jane asked, pouring herself a mug of coffee.

  “I’ve just never seen you dressed like that.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No,” he said. “I love it.”

  “You do?”

  “You look like an executive or something.”

  “Well,” she chuckled, “I am your boss, so I guess it’s time I started acting like it.”

  She sat down across from him. He didn’t have his hat on, and his hair was hanging partially in his face. He looked a little tired, and she wondered if he had been up thinking about her, just as she had been up thinking about him.

  “Do you have a meeting today?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “No, I’m leaving.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes. I’m going down to Portland for a health insurance convention. I’ll be gone all week.”

  She had never seen a man’s face look so sad so suddenly. He looked down at the paper on the table.

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

  Jane reached into her purse and slid an envelope across the table to him.

  “What’s this?” he asked, picking it up.

  “It’s half your pay. I got it from the bank last week.”

  Caleb slid the envelope back.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “But I am doing it,” she said. “You should only stay on if you really want to. Not because you need to. It isn’t fair for either of us to hold the other hostage.”

  He swallowed and looked away.

  “Do you want me to stay?” he asked.

  “Of course.” She thought she saw him smile slightly, but it disappeared when she added: “I want my yard finished.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Okay then.”

  “You shouldn’t feel stranded here either. There’s a house key in the envelope and some extra money for groceries and cab fare, too. There’s a bicycle in the garage if it’s nice and you’d rather ride to town. I had new tubes put on it last year.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “The conference goes until Friday. But I might stay the weekend; I’m not sure. I’ll be back by Sunday at least.”

  Jane saw the pained look in his eyes, and she wished she could make it disappear. She wished she could reach across the table and take his hand and tell him that everything was okay, that she just needed a little time by herself to think. But there was something between them now, something that wouldn’t allow her the intimacy of even such a small gesture. It was as if they were strangers all over again.

  “I’ll miss having you around here,” he said.

  She forced a smile and nodded.

  She knew she would miss him too, but she wouldn’t allow herself to say it. Instead she looked at her watch and rose.

  “Well, I better get going if I’m going to make the eight o’clock ferry.”

  Caleb rose from the table.

  “I’ll get your suitcase for you.”

  Despite her protests, he carried her suitcase out to the car. He lifted it into the trunk and then turned to say goodbye. She knew he wanted to hug her, so she climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door before he could. Then she started the car and rolled the window down. He leaned his arm on the roof and looked at her. His eyes were sadder than ever.

  “I’m not going to Mars,” she said.

  “I know it,” he replied, sighing. “I just don’t like the way things got all
screwed up between us, is all. It doesn’t feel right to leave it like this.”

  “Things are fine,” she said.

  “Well, they don’t feel fine for me.”

  “Maybe we can talk when I get back.”

  Jane reached up and touched his cheek.

  Caleb grabbed her hand and pressed it to his lips. When he let it go, his smile melted her heart. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to turn off the car and take him back inside and make love to him. She wanted to know what it would feel like to lie naked in his arms, to wake up and look into his green eyes.

  Instead she shifted the car into reverse and backed from the garage. He followed her out to the drive. She sat with her foot on the brake and locked eyes with him through her open window. She felt like she might cry, and she wanted to say something to lighten the mood.

  “If you do make it to town, maybe you could get me some more Doritos. I seem to be out.”

  A momentary smile flashed on his face. She committed it to memory, put the car in drive, and pulled away.

  She looked in the rearview mirror once, and she could see him standing in the driveway, watching her go. He lifted a hand as if to say farewell, then let it drop at his side as he faded away and blurred into the houses and trees in the distance. Jane wiped away a tear and wondered if she’d ever see him again.

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  CALEB HACKED AT THE BLACKBERRIES as if they were somehow responsible for every misfortune that had befallen him in this life. He stood among the thorny vines and yanked them from the ground with his bare hands until his fingers and forearms were sliced and bleeding. The stinging pain came in waves—a welcome distraction, chasing away his sadness over Jane’s leaving. He couldn’t explain why exactly, but his heart had broken the instant she drove away.

  He hated himself for having lied to her, for having let her believe that he knew her daughter when he really didn’t.

  He remembered the first time he saw Jane, sitting in her car in the cemetery. He’d been spooked because she looked so much like her daughter—as if Melody’s ghost were watching him stand over her grave. Wishing to avoid an uncomfortable situation, he’d taken off and hitch-hiked back to the ferry. Then she’d appeared in front of him on the sidewalk near the Devil’s Cup, and it was déjà vu all over again. At first he’d thought she was Melody’s sister. But then when she told him that she was her mother, he was racked with guilt, because although he had had passing feelings for Melody, he felt even more attracted to Jane. It was as if the things he saw and liked in Melody were present in Jane in even higher concentration.

  But he had taken off again. Why? It was the only way he’d ever learned to deal with uncomfortable situations. But when Jane found him in the square and took him home, he thought her offer was too good to be true. He was afraid that if he told her the truth about not really knowing her daughter, she wouldn’t want him to stay on. But now he’d screwed it all up with that little lie. That and his stupid kiss. What had he been thinking, he wondered. And on her daughter’s own bed, too. What an idiot. He knew that any chance he might have had with Jane had disappeared this morning when she pulled away.

  He stood among the blackberries, breathless and bleeding, enclosed in a thorny prison of his own making.

  His chest heaved; his eyes stung with sweat.

  Or were they tears?

  He turned and tore his way through the piles of vines and stormed across the yard to the house. He went to his room and snatched up his guitar and sat down on the bed and played. He played songs he knew well—songs of heartbreak and loss. But then, as his emotions began to settle, he plucked a new tune, something even sadder, the chords laced with remorse. Still he couldn’t help but weave a hint of hope beneath the melody, a wish for a new beginning. Not just for him, but for Jane. He saw too often the torture in her eyes, and he wished he could somehow ease it away. He was afraid he only added to it.

  THE NEXT MORNING his hands were swollen and raw.

  He sat for an hour at the table in front of an uneaten plate of eggs, staring at the envelope of money Jane had left there for him. When he finally lifted his mug, the coffee had gone cold. He rose and dumped it out in the sink. Then he stood looking out the window at the empty drive.

  He went outside to work, but even wearing the gloves the pain in his hands was almost unbearable. He worked for an hour before stopping to survey his progress so far. There was a lot more yard than he’d originally thought, and he just couldn’t imagine getting it all cleared without help. Worse, he could see new blackberry vines sprouting up in places he had cleared. He stripped off his gloves and tossed them on the ground.

  In the house he grabbed two plastic garbage bags, doubled them up, and stuffed his worn clothes inside, along with his few possessions. The clothes he’d yet to wear he laid out on the bed with the tags still on so that Jane could return them. Then he closed the guitar up in its case and laid it on the bed next to the clothes. Maybe she could return it, too.

  In the kitchen, he counted the money in the envelope—$3,200 in crisp, new bills. He thumbed out five $100-dollar bills, folded them, and stuffed them in his pocket. Then he slipped the remaining $2,700 back into the envelope and left the envelope on the table. He slung the bag with his belongings over his shoulder, stepped outside, and locked the door. He turned over a rock in the flowerbed and stashed the key. When he stood, he raised one hand and laid his open palm on the closed door, as if blessing the house. He wished her happiness. Then he turned and walked off down the street.

  The road lay gray before him, surrounded by trees, and the late morning sun was drawing a mist off the damp concrete. He heard a car coming, and he stepped aside and jerked out his thumb, but the driver sped past and disappeared over a hill.

  He passed deep ditches rimmed with blackberry vines, as if they were following from Jane’s yard just to taunt him with the unfinished job he was leaving behind. He thought about Jane. He thought about her thick hair and how it stuck up a little on the left side every morning as they drank their coffee together. He thought about the sparkle of humor always burning in her eyes, the touch of sarcasm curled on the edges of her lips. He thought about how she had tasted when he had kissed her, and what he wouldn’t give to have met her some other way.

  A woman’s cry for help jerked him from his thoughts, and he froze on the side of the road and turned his ear to listen.

  The scream came again. But where?

  There. Beyond those trees.

  He was already running across the street by the time his sack of clothes hit the pavement. He scrambled down into the ditch and up the other side, tangling himself in a rusty, barbed-wire fence hidden beneath the brush. He opened a gash in his thigh while freeing himself from the fence, and he felt warm blood running down his leg as he parted the barbed wires and slipped beneath, running in the direction of the scream.

  Soon the trees thinned, and he came upon a small, fenced enclosure in the middle of which stood a solitary goat. Inside the enclosure the ground was barren and muddy, and the goat was collared to a chain that was staked into the dirt. It tossed its head and focused its strange goat eye on Caleb and bawled an almost human scream. It sounded like it was calling, “Help.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Caleb asked, breathing heavily, with his hands resting on his thighs.

  He took in the pathetic scene.

  The goat walked to the end of its chain and nibbled at the useless dirt, as if to plead its case against starvation in the only language it knew. Everything inside the fence was stripped to dirt, but there was a circle of absolute desert that marked the limits of the goat’s leash.

  Caleb stepped closer to the fence.

  “You must be starving in there, fella. How about I move you out here where there’s some grass?”

  The fence was made of old chicken wire stapled to wooden posts that leaned loosely in their holes. Caleb lifted a post out where the fence ends met, parted the wire, and stepped inside.
He had taken several steps toward the stake that held the goat pinned when a flash of black caught his eye, and he looked up just in time to see the goat charging him with its head down. He jogged backwards until he ran into the fence and could retreat no further, and he stood there with his back pressed against the wire, watching the goat rush him with its nubby horns. The goat hit the end of its chain, came clear off the ground, and then fell back on its haunches, bellowing in the dirt just a few feet from where Caleb stood.

  “Ornery old bastard, aren’t you,” Caleb said.

  The goat rose and sifted the dirt at its feet with its nose, as if its falling there might have somehow stirred up something for it to eat. Caleb could see its ribs beneath its patchy coat. He inched along the fencing to the opening and stepped out of the enclosure. Then he walked the perimeter and tore branches and leaves free from shrubs and trees until he had an armful. When he carried his harvest back to the fence, the goat was standing erect at the end of its chain, watching him with a strange mix of wisdom and mischief peculiar to its kind. Caleb made sure to stay out of reach as he hurled the offering into the worn circle. The goat rushed upon it and began eating.

  Caleb could hear the crackle and crunch of branches in its teeth almost all the way back to the road.

  Several miles later, when Caleb reached the terminal at the end of the island road, he heard the blast of a departing horn, and he saw the ferry pulling away. Cars were already lining up for the next boat, which he knew would be along soon. He turned south and walked into the small town. When he entered the hardware store, he found Ralph sitting behind the register, as if he’d never left. The only thing to mark the passage of time was a more recent issue of Guns & Ammo lying on the counter.

  Ralph recognized Caleb immediately and nodded hello.

  “How come every time you come in here you look like you’ve been dancing with a bear?” he asked.

  Caleb looked down at the bloody tear in his pants and the blackberry cuts on his forearms.

  “Good question,” he said. “How come every time I come in here, you’re reading the same magazine?”

  Ralph looked down at the magazine and smiled.