Jane Was Here

by Sarah Kernochan

  The poor kid is nervous, Brett thought. Maybe separation anxiety.

  He waited to feel waves of fatherly, if not love, then solicitude. He imagined the waves would start gently, and grow to a pounding surf by the end of the camping trip.

  Except father and son never went camping. For six hours Brett drove north in the rented RV—stocked with backpacks, tent, headlamps, freeze-dried chili—finally pulling up in a southern New Hampshire trailer park near a recommended trailhead.

  He turned the engine off.

  With feigned confidence Brett said, “Let’s hook this sucker up,” something he’d gone to a chat room to find out how to do. There had better be a Wi-Fi hotspot somewhere, as promised by the park’s website. He had to keep up with the office for six weeks somehow.

  Then the kid piped up: “I don’t want to go camping.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  Collin’s response was not to say anything.

  “I was scared my first time too. But after you get through it, you feel really good about yourself.”

  “I’m not scared. I just don’t like it.”

  “How do you know if you’ve never done it?”

  “I can tell I don’t like it.” The boy spoke in the measured tones of an adult pretending patience.

  Brett glanced anxiously at his cell phone. No bars. Maybe camping wasn’t a good plan. “What do you like to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, at least you know what you don’t like. How about kayaking?”

  “No.”

  “We could find a river and ride down the whole way in rubber tubes. That’s awesome.”

  “No.”

  Brett was running dry on ideas. “We could rent some mountain bikes.”

  “No.”

  “What do you do in the summers? Do you swim?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how to swim?”

  “No.”

  “What if I teach you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid of the water maybe?”

  Collin hesitated. Had Brett hit a nerve?

  “I don’t like swimming,” the boy said, his tone final.

  “Do you like sitting here? Because we’re not going anywhere until you can think of something you’d rather do than hike into the wilderness with your dad.” He said it lightly, but maybe ten-year-olds didn’t compute irony. Were those tears glimmering under the long lashes, or the reflection of the setting sun?

  Brett drove to a motel called the Hay Rick. There was one vacancy. The rest of the rooms were engorged with girls in muck boots, gathered for a big horse show.

  Brett brought in a bucket of chicken to share and did his email while Collin watched four hours of TV.

  In the morning, Collin came to a decision. “I like fishing.”

  “What kind of fishing?”

  “I don’t know.” The kid had never done any; Brett hadn’t either. Going online, he looked it up. “There’s fly-fishing, rock-fishing, spinning, deep-sea fishing, trawling…”

  “Deep sea,” said Collin. The boy who didn’t like to swim saw no irony in wanting to fish in deep water.

  It took four hours to drive to the shore, and three more driving along the coast, looking for an affordable room in the fishing villages and beach resorts. The prices were horrendous, and most places were full.

  Toward nightfall, they turned inland, southwest into Massachusetts, aimlessly following a blue-line road through wooded hills until they passed a sign that said “GRAYNIER.”

  Suddenly Brett wilted; his energy seemed to rush away. He could not drive a minute longer.

  The only motel in town was run by the Poonchwallas, an Indian family. The teenage son registered them while the younger girl, Gita, eyed Collin’s exotic hue with interest.

  In the room, Brett fell asleep immediately on the stained bedspread. Collin watched TV.

  After a while he peered between the window curtains. The girl Gita was sitting in an aluminum folding chair beside the sad little pool, bouncing the heels of her plastic clogs on the concrete and watching the door to his room.

  He let himself outside. She jumped to her feet. “I knew you’d come. I was sending you messages in my head.”

  She looked a couple of years older than Collin; compared to him, she knew everything. Abashed, he waited for instructions, a doglike trait he unknowingly shared with his dad.

  “Are you baptized?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then I’ll do it.” Taking his hand, she led him to the pool steps.

  “I can’t swim,” he said. But he followed her down, his pajama bottoms ballooning as his bare feet slipped into the water.

  “I’ll teach you that, too,” she said.

  In the morning Gita boldly announced to Brett that she and Collin were going to play together. He looked at Collin, whose eyes were wholly fixed on his new friend.

  Leaving the boy with her, Brett drove to the shore, trading in the RV for a compact. He scoped out apartments, boat rentals, fishing tackle. When he returned to Graynier to fetch his son, Collin declared, “I want to stay right here.”

  So Brett found a Victorian house to rent just down the street from the motel: decrepit, no TV, but cheap. Graynier was probably an equal number of hours from the seashore and the inland lakes: freshwater fishing if the deep sea didn’t work out…

  IT’S TWO WEEKS LATER, and they still haven’t been fishing. Collin doesn’t seem remotely interested; he plays every day with Gita. Brett has no idea what they do together, but he’s here to meet Collin’s needs, and Collin needs to play with this strange girl. So Brett spends his days designing his web-sites, strolling through Graynier, wondering why he likes the town so much and cares for his son so little.

  There isn’t much to Graynier. Walking in one direction along Graynier Avenue, also called Route 404, you skirt Put-man Hill where a glass factory once stood, long since torn down. About two miles further is the Graynier Outlet Center. The interstate streams nearby, a single exit emptying customers from all over the state into the mall. Here they can buy overstock from big-city labels: Boss, Nautica, Lauren, Karan. Most of Graynier’s inhabitants work at the mall.

  Walking in the other direction, you return to the heart of Graynier, which is noteworthy because there is no heart. No center. Businesses are scattered among residential neighborhoods, with no attention to zoning. Wandering down the anarchic streets, Brett marvels that there’s no design or reason for anything to be where it is. Why is the body shop next to the beauty shop? Why is the bank between a mobile home on concrete blocks and the bungalow of Madame Bertha, a palmist? Why is the town hall outside of town?

  He finds it poignant somehow. His heart goes out to poor, chockablock Graynier, and it becomes his companion. Otherwise he would fall prey to an intense loneliness.

  Brett has never felt this lonely before. Usually he enjoys working in solitary, one project after another claiming his waking consciousness. His romantic relationships—only two, actually—begin with a girl thinking what she needs is a quiet, unquestioning mate, and end when she decides she doesn’t need a quiet, unquestioning mate, or “doormat” as the last one put it.

  But now he is wracked by the loneliness of living with his son. Collin’s rejection hangs there every day, uncontested, unrebuked, expanding with the heat. Brett takes to working late and sleeping late.

  Collin is all but living at the Poonchwallas’ motel.

  BRETT TUCKS THE MOSQUITO netting under his son’s mattress to close any gaps. Returning to the corridor, he passes the closed door to a bedroom whose fungus smell kept them both from choosing it. He assumes the house’s shabby neglect is due to its owner, a retired Catholic minister who has gone to visit his mother for the summer. Maybe the Reverend has renounced all worldly pursuits like vacuuming, or maybe he reveres all God’s creatures including germs.

  Exhaustion propels Brett into the third bedroom, where he lies down, the a
ncient mattress making a crunchy sound (he suspects it’s filled with straw). He likes this room, despite its sorry thrift-shop furnishings. The carefully handcrafted wood paneling is aged to a deep silky chocolate. The floor’s hand-hewn pine planks were fitted lovingly tongue-into-groove, probably by the same craftsman. Brett discovered the flooring the first night, after a sneezing fit prompted him to roll up the foul braided rug. He also replaced the book on the bed stand, swapping The Book of Common Prayer for The Ultimate Book of Sudoku.

  He’s aware that he’s still clothed, but the lure of sleep is strong. He sinks obediently from beta to theta…

  Not three minutes have passed, when his breath stops. His lungs refuse command, will not inflate. His limbs are iron, mouth gaping, frozen, even his thoughts paralyzed by terror. All he can see is the ceiling, a parabola of light shining on it— from where? He knows he turned the bedside lamp off.

  A man enters his vision, bending over Brett and looking intently into his face. Long gray hair curls over the high stiff collar of the man’s coat; behind rimless spectacles, his eyes are tired.

  “God rest your soul, good man,” he murmurs. The pads of his fingers touch Brett’s eyelids, drawing them down. Suddenly Brett feels his essence rush through his open mouth and rise to the ceiling, where he can now look down on the scene.

  He sees the source of light: an old-fashioned kerosene lantern on the bed stand. The man in the dark coat is still bending over Brett’s form, obscuring the face. Brett understands, with strange emotionless ease, that the man is a doctor, and that he—Brett—is dead.

  The body’s legs under the sheet seem wasted away: Brett can make out every knob and taper of the bones. As the doctor shifts, Brett sees the upper half of the body in the bed.

  It’s not Brett’s face.

  It belongs to some other man entirely, the flesh withered, no more than a cobweb covering the cranium, the eye sockets cavernous. The sheet drawn up to his bearded chin is flecked with blood.

  Horror floods Brett: all at once he feels himself sucked back to the man’s open mouth, through the bracelet of teeth, filling up this body that is not his.

  With a great jolt, his heart lunges to life. Eyes flying open, he gasps for oxygen, jackknifing upright in the bed.

  He flicks on the bedside lamp. The mirror on the wall opposite shows a rangy young man with his mouth open, frightened out of his wits. Brett is in his own body again.

  Mouth dry, he hauls ass to the bathroom for a drink of water. It calms him slightly. How long was he without oxygen? He knows a little about apnea, a sleep stutter that can cause heart attacks and sudden death. Did he, for a brief moment, die?

  And who were the people he saw in his room?

  They must have been the usual senseless, random personnel of a bad dream, he decides, after another consoling glass of water. There’s nothing to fear; they’ve vanished now. If he can putter around for a bit, maybe he can get back to sleep.

  Remembering he left the dinner plates soaking in the kitchen sink, he goes downstairs to finish cleaning up.

  SEVERAL MOSQUITOES HAVE drowned, nestled in the suds. He pulls up the rubber plug and waits for the cloudy water to drain. His eyes lift to the window.

  In the small backyard stands the figure of a young woman, staring back at him, her face lost in moon shadow.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Brett steps back in surprise, turning to yank the chain on the overhead lamp; the light goes out. With the kitchen gone dark, he can see outside more clearly.

  He surveys the patch of abandoned garden, the scalloped wire border, the single iron chair, the flagstones thrust up at angles by the roots of a lone sycamore.

  The woman is gone.

  Then: a soft rapping on the glass of the front door.

  He walks to the entry, his heart thumping; flips on the porch light. Through the etched daisies on the frosted pane, a shadowy head waits. He could call out, “Who’s there?” but he knows who it is.

  He opens the door.

  The first thing he sees are her eyes: light gray and solemn, full of request. Long muddy-blond hair tangles about her thin face; clam-digger pants and an ill-fitting wrinkled blouse hang on her slim frame. She holds a pink nylon duffel. She’s maybe a few years younger than he, about five-six to his six-three. And she is pale, so pale, as if fed on moonlight.

  She speaks, her voice low and a little husky, as if she has just woken up. “I’m Jane.” She watches him hopefully.

  “Hi. Are you looking for someone?” Warily, he scans the street for a possible accomplice.

  “This is my house.” A simple statement, without accusation.

  Brett shifts awkwardly. “Oh. Well, Father Petrelli’s away. I’m just renting. My lease is ‘til mid-August.” Maybe she’s the owner’s daughter. No, impossible: he’s a Catholic priest. His niece?

  But the girl is shaking her head. “I don’t know him. Nor anyone, truly.” An odd word, “truly.” For a young person, her manner of speaking is strangely prim. “Yet I am sure, this is where I was born, here in this very house.”

  “Did you live here before he moved in?”

  “I must have.” She gazes at the house facade. “It resembles exactly the picture in my mind. Sir, if you please, may I come in?”

  Her presumption is irritating. “It’s after three a.m., do you mind? Come back in the daytime.” He starts to shut the door, but she clings to the knob, panic flaring in her eyes, her cry shocking the silence of the empty street: “Please— please! I have nowhere else to go!”

  “Shh!” Worried about his son upstairs, he steps forward to warn her away, leaving the doorway open. She flits past him into the house.

  By the time he recovers, she’s halfway down the hallway. Eagerly she assesses the walls and floor and fixtures, as if she’s considering buying the property.

  “Hey! You can’t just barge in.” He helplessly follows her into the front parlor, where she is already setting her pink duffel on the sofa.

  “Here is where I belong,” she declares, surveying the room. “I confess I see nothing familiar. Except…” She is peering over the cheap plaid sofa at a peculiar wooden box wedged in the corner. “It’s possible I remember that.”

  He folds his arms testily. “Okay, what is it?”

  She turns wondering eyes to him. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “The name is Brett. And it’s very late for games, so, sorry, but you’ll have to leave.”

  “But…I live here.”

  “No, you don’t. Not anymore. I have a lease.”

  “But I am so tired.” She sits on the sofa before he can protest. “I have walked a long way.”

  His curiosity gets the better of him. “From where?”

  “That’s of no consequence. I won’t be going back there ever again.” Removing her shoes, she rubs her feet. The skin curls away from the pink sheen of a blister.

  “Is there someone I can call who can pick you up? Don’t you have family?”

  “Perhaps I did have, once.” She swings her feet up, tucking them under her. “I imagine we sat in this room after supper.” She nods to the bay window overlooking the street. “It’s an agreeable place to watch the people walk by.”

  Brett has a sudden thought: she’s adopted, come in search of her real family. He gentles his tone: “Jane, are you looking for your birth parents?”

  She makes a dismissive gesture. “You refer, I presume, to the two people who conceived me? I know where they are living, and want nothing to do with them. No.” She fixes her earnest gaze on Brett. “Truly, I am looking for myself.”

  Brett sighs. He’s arguing with an amnesiac, a mental patient, someone having a breakdown, or a stoner. Whichever she is, short of carrying her bodily to the door and dumping her back into the night, there seems no way to get rid of her.

  Curling up on her side, she settles her head on her pink duffel, her eyelids drooping.

  He tries another tack. “Can I get you some water?”

  “Y
es, thank you,” she murmurs.

  Brett retreats to the kitchen, crossing to the wall-mounted phone. His hand pauses on the receiver. If he calls the police, they will hold her in custody, contact her family or whatever home she walked away from. Maybe he would be returning her to some dire situation, abuse: some peril that prompted her to flee.

  He needs to know more before he decides her fate. Filling a glass with water, he returns to the parlor.

  She has fallen asleep, knees drawn up, her shallow breath muffled in the folds of the duffel.

  If he can remove the bag without waking her, there might be an ID inside. Setting down the glass, he kneels beside her.

  “Jane,” he says in a normal voice, testing. She’s too deep in slumber to respond.

  Up close, he can see the lavender halo of fatigue around her eyes, the delicate lashes shivering imperceptibly as she dreams, her lips slightly puckered, like an infant’s seeking milk. Gently he takes hold of the duffel’s strap, his other hand reaching to lift her head and slide the bag out.

  Without warning her fingers uncurl, blindly seeking, and wrap around his wrist, dragging his hand to her cheek. Her eyes open, glimpsing him briefly through the clouded film of sleep.

  Brett remains paralyzed, even after her lids droop closed again. His hand stays pressed to the softness of her white cheek. Suddenly, unaccountably, he is drenched in tenderness.

  Every cell’s invaded: he loves her as if he already has loved her, as if he started loving her long before he opened the door.

  MANY DAYS FORWARD, he will wonder about this moment, when he questions once again why he let her stay on in the house. He will tell himself: it’s like that moment when you’re walking along and a little stray dog crosses your path. It was abandoned long ago, and years of dumb suffering have taught it that there is no rest anywhere, and yet it casts one sidelong look your way, a feeble spasm of hope.

  The second your eyes lock, you know that from now on this animal belongs to you. Its need puts the flame to your love. And you stick your hand out, offering an end to its wretched wanderings.

  Come. You are already thinking of what name to call it. My Jane.