The Five Lives of John and Jillian

by Greg Krehbiel

  There she was, plain as day, not 25 feet in front of him.

  John called out, stood quickly and took a step towards her. To everyone else it looked like he got tangled in a root from the old oak, but John swore he tripped on the booted foot of an old man. He hit the ground hard and must have knocked himself out, because the next thing he knew he was coming to in the midst of a small crowd of concerned citizens.

  Several embarrassing minutes later he was on his way back to the office, feeling quite humiliated. When he got to 17th and H, he stopped in his tracks and wondered what had happened to his grandfather’s pipe. It had been in his hand when he fell. After a quick search he found it in his pocket, expertly cleaned, with a small slip of paper curled up in the bowl.

  “This pipe smokes best with Edgeworth,” the note said.

  * * *

  “That had to be embarrassing,” Lisa said with a bit of a laugh.

  Thursday happy hours were supposed to be for everybody from the old firm, and John attended as if it were a religious obligation. There might be six people, or only three, but what John hated most was when there was only him and one other. He preferred it when no one showed at all to when he had to sit and talk to one person.

  Unless that one person was Lisa. They clicked, and could talk for hours. John always felt like he could tell her anything. They had a core of common interests — Star Trek, Agatha Christie, Wilkie Collins, Jasper Fforde, Lost, evolutionary psychology and Lie to Me — and enough disagreements on politics and ethics to keep things interesting. Lisa believed in big government, but John didn’t trust big anything. He didn’t trust anyone with much power.

  Despite their political differences, John and Lisa often traded recommendations on books, movies, TV shows and Youtube videos to mutual benefit, but they parted company on music. It was the age difference.

  “I was mortified,” John said about his little fall in the park, smiling ruefully over a glass of Sam Adams.

  “But you think you were tripped?” Lisa asked

  He was usually pretty good at reading faces, but he couldn’t interpret Lisa’s. Was she implying that he had imagined being tripped?

  “So this is curious to me,” he said. “I tell you that I saw my dead wife standing in Lafayette Park in plain view, and you’re latching on to the idea that an old man tripped me. Isn’t that a little backwards?”

  “Not from where I’m sitting,” she said. “Seeing your wife makes sense. Making up a sadistic, booted old man, when there’s a perfectly logical explanation for why you tripped .... That seems odd.”

  John took a long, slow sip of his beer and thought about that.

  “I didn’t manufacture a booted old man,” he said with conviction a moment later. “I saw one. I’m sure of it.”

  “Who was apparently invisible to eight other people. Explain that, Sherlock.”

  “People notice what they want to notice,” John said.

  “Okay. When people are focused and concentrating on one thing they might miss something obvious. But they weren’t concentrating on you. They were minding their own business, and then, ‘Hey, look at that guy falling down. That’s funny. Oh, wait. Is he okay?’”

  “I admit I can’t explain it,” John said. “But I would like the record to show that I didn’t cross examine all the witnesses, so we’re only speculating on what they did or didn’t see.”

  Lisa shrugged a casual acquiescence, as if unraveling all of John’s crazy ideas didn’t matter much anyway.

  “It doesn’t bother me to believe that I might have tripped when I was buzzed from too much tobacco and distracted by visions of my dead wife,” John said. “Believe it or not, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m a little on edge these days.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Lisa said. “I might say you should see a shrink, but you’re already doing that.”

  “Fat lot of good he does,” John complained, and was about to go on complaining, but Lisa cut him off.

  “No. You need to keep seeing him,” she said, leaning forward and staring intently into his eyes. “You have to talk things through with somebody who has some experience with this kind of stuff.” She leaned back and smiled. “You know you can always talk to me, but I don’t know the right things to say. I’m shooting from the hip.”

  Lisa and John were both quiet for a few minutes while John stared into his beer and Lisa picked at her fries. John could sense her increasing agitation and knew she was building up to something. He waited and watched the bubbles rise through the amber liquid.

  “So be honest, do you think you’ve been seeing your wife?”

  Lisa never mentioned Jillian’s name. Back when Jillian was still alive, John thought her habit of always referring to Jillian as “your wife” was supposed to reinforce “you’re a married man, there’s nothing going on here.”

  “No, of course not,” John said. “I know my Jillian is dead and gone. But ... I keep seeing her, and I know it’s her. I don’t know how to explain it, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  Lisa toyed with her fries again for a moment, then said, “Do you think you might need some medication?”

  John clenched his fist and his jaw, and his eyes narrowed as he looked away. But his eyes softened as he realized that he’d wondered the same thing himself, and that Robbins had threatened it from time to time. As painful as it was to see Jillian again — to wonder why she was haunting his dreams, and showing up in odd places on the street — he also didn’t want to lose that chance of seeing her. Even if he was crazy. Even if it was a delusion that would cause him to lose his mind. Even if Dr. Robbins had him locked up. Seeing Jillian again was worth the risk.

  John looked back at Lisa, held up his beer and said, “I’m self-medicating.”

  Lisa laughed but her eyes said that she wasn’t amused. “I don’t know if that’s helping or hurting.”

  “Neither do I,” John admitted quietly.

  “Oh, dig this,” John said as he fished a slip of paper from his coat pocket and handed it across the table.

  Lisa read it and gave John a bewildered expression.

  “Are pipe manufacturers recommending tobacco brands these days?”

  “Not that I know of, and certainly not that one, in any event. Nobody makes it anymore.”

  He let that sink in for a moment and then continued.

  “After I got up from my fall in the park, I found that slip of paper in the bowl of my pipe, which was in my pocket. I had been smoking, and the last I can remember it was still burning with half a bowl of tobacco. Somebody — not me, unless I’m completely crazy — emptied it out, cleaned it, put that slip of paper inside the bowl, and then put the pipe back in my pocket.”

  “Did you talk to any of the witnesses?”

  John shook his head. “Hardly. I was pretty embarrassed and wanted to get out of there, and I didn’t know any of them. They were just people in the park. And I didn’t get the impression that I was out for long. The whole scene doesn’t make any sense to me. If you see somebody fall in the park, is your first thought to clean out his pipe for him and write him a little note, while everybody else is watching?”

  “This paper reminds me of something. And the printing looks ... old fashioned,” Lisa said, studying the little note in her palm.

  “I’m glad you said that because I thought the same. I’m no expert, but that paper doesn’t look like something you’d put in the copy machine. It looks like good-quality writing paper. And give it a sniff.”

  She did, and shrugged.

  “It smells like tobacco,” she said.

  “Okay, you don’t smoke a pipe. It smells like a particular kind of strong tobacco. Latakia. I rarely smoke that stuff. It’s as if that piece of paper was in somebody else’s tobacco pouch.”

  “You’re thinking it was the old gentleman with the boots?”

  John nodded.

  “He’s my only suspect right now. But I still don’t know how he got my pipe, cleaned i
t, and put it back into my pocket .... Oh. No, that’s easy. He tripped me, grabbed my pipe as I fell, then slipped off to clean out the pipe and insert the note. I didn’t even think about my pipe until I was a block away. He could easily have dropped it back in my pocket.”

  Lisa shook her head. “This is one clever old man. You were sitting and suddenly got up. Somehow he happened to be there right at that moment, which means he was close by and watching you, but you never noticed him. He tripped you — why did he trip you? — at the exact moment that he knew you’d be running off. How did he know that? He was quick enough to grab your pipe without you or anybody else noticing it. And on top of that he’s a pickpocket. In reverse.”

  “And he wears old boots and smokes a blend with lots of Latakia,” John offered with a rueful smile.

  “And uses good writing paper. And probably,” she said as she looked at the paper again, “a fountain pen. So then, it sounds like you have your description ... and your work cut out for you,” Lisa suggested, quite obviously hoping this little mystery would distract John from his obsession with Jillian. “Go get this Edgeworth stuff. Somebody on the Internet has to have a can of it. And start searching Lafayette Park for an old man in boots who smokes a pipe with Lata-whatever.”

  John nodded and smiled. He felt a sudden urge to kiss her, but that was out of bounds. He called for the check.

  Chapter 4: Not His Jillian

  John had arranged to spend the weekend with his mother in Philadelphia to help her with her antique business. He drove up that Friday night immediately after work. Liz had a backlog of antiques she needed to pick up and refinish, so John was moving, reorganizing, stripping, sanding, staining and attaching various bits of hardware to a 2-car garage full of furniture.

  It was a nice distraction, but on the drive back Sunday afternoon he knew he would be sore from all the stooping and bending. When he got home that evening he poured himself a tumbler of whiskey, loaded Pop Pop’s pipe with Oxford blend, and his regular life slowly started to ease back into his consciousness. He sat on the back porch of his town house for half an hour, smoking and thinking.

  How could I be seeing Jillian?

  The multiverse thing was too silly to believe. The rational part of his brain tried to make up a story where the woman he’d been seeing was Jillian’s separated-at-birth twin. But some instinct told him that was nonsense, and that it was her.

  Why am I having these dreams?

  Why now?

  Who is that old man?

  When his pipe was empty he stumbled back inside, gargled as a substitute for brushing, took three aspirin and crashed into bed.

  * * *

  “Do you take anything in your coffee?”

  He was back in Jillian’s cottage. This had never happened to him before — a serial dream, following a story.

  “No, thanks,” he said, and started to rise to get a cup, but she waved him back into his seat.

  “You need to rest a little longer.”

  The dreaming John was slightly perturbed at her air of superiority and control. As if she knew whether he was ready to get up.

  John took the proffered mug of coffee and breathed deeply. The warmth had returned to his body from his time in the cold and wet outside.

  “Are you ready for some soup?” Jillian asked.

  Who are you? You’re not my Jillian.

  The dream became sketchy at that point. There was wine, and a tarot card reading, and a midnight kiss under the stars. When he awoke in the morning John was deliriously happy, and completely confused.

  * * *

  The joy of his time with Jillian was quickly replaced by the aggravation of a pounding headache. The aspirin hadn’t worked. He should have had a glass of water to wash it down.

  Sometimes alcohol and tobacco conspired to give him a bad morning, but this .... This was epic, so he called on all his headache remedies — more aspirin, a long, hot shower, a strong, dark cup of coffee, a banana and a cinnamon roll.

  He abandoned all hope of catching his regular train and took his time over another cinnamon roll and kippers, wondering if he was catching a head cold, and if that might explain the pounding in his temples.

  Then he remembered his dreams, and realized that his jaw muscles were a little tight. He must have been clenching his teeth in his sleep.

  Damn these visions, he thought, but then .... He had to admit it was all worth it. He’d gladly suffer through this kind of a morning every day if it meant seeing Jillian every night — even if she was some weird pagan and not the Jillian he had loved for so many years. He could do that, he thought. He’d struggle through the days to live while he slept.

  He glanced at the clock and hurried through his after-breakfast ritual, cleaning his teeth, selecting a tie and pouring himself a second cup of coffee. He listened to an Agatha Christie recording during his short drive to the train station, and then waited on the platform for the 8:14.

  * * *

  Susan might be the perfect resource, John thought as he stowed his bag lunch in the office refrigerator. His vivid dream about Jillian stuck with him all that morning and it raised a lot of questions in his mind. He was particularly interested in learning more about tarot cards, and Susan was the New Agey “spiritual person” in the office.

  “Hey, Susan,” he called out when she came into the kitchen. “Do you know anything about tarot cards?”

  Susan fingered the pentagram medallion hanging around her neck, as if searching for inspiration, then said, “What makes you think I know anything about tarot cards?”

  Because you’re the office flake, he wanted to say, but then he was momentarily distracted by a vision from his dream. He suddenly noticed a superficial resemblance between Susan and Jillian. Something he’d never noticed before. Perhaps he’d seen something about Jillian in his dreams — or, more likely, since the Jillian in his dreams was a pagan, and Susan was the only pagan he knew in real life, perhaps his mind had connected them in some odd way.

  He took a moment and tried to be objective about it. They were both brunette. Susan was slightly shorter and slightly more athletic than Jillian, but they were built on similar frames, and their faces had some common characteristics.

  Susan completely misinterpreted John’s gaze.

  “So what’s got in to you today?” she asked with a flirty smile.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head as if waking from a daydream. “I just noticed how much you look like a friend of mine.”

  “And she’s got you interested in tarot cards?” she asked, her smile widening.

  “Almost,” John admitted. “But that’s a bit of a story. So — sorry to be rude, but what can you tell me?”

  “Nearly nothing,” Susan said, suddenly serious. “I’m not into the card thing. I have some friends who are. If you have a specific question, maybe I can ask them?”

  John nodded noncommittally.

  “It’s not a big thing. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Sure. Any time. Like maybe lunch,” she said with a wink.

  John smiled and shook his head, trying his best to seem amused but neither encouraging or discouraging.

  “I packed my lunch today,” he said, gesturing towards the frig. “But,” he thought he might still be able to learn something from her, and he also felt a sudden need for companionship. “What would you think of taking lunch with me in the park later this week?”

  Today he was going to the local book store to do some research on tarot cards, but it had been too long since he’d spent time with anybody — other than his happy hour friends. He needed human company. Even with Susan. Or maybe especially with Susan. He was confused about that, and not particularly interested in sorting it out.

  “Sure,” she said. “How’s Thursday?”

  John agreed and headed back to his office, wondering if he’d done the right thing. He hadn’t dated seriously since Jillian’s death, and he didn’t want Susan to get the wrong idea. Or did he?<
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  In John’s mind there were different categories of women. There were those you treated politely but kept at a distance. There were the women you’d like to spend an evening or a weekend with, but no more. There were the women you might want to spend a summer with, who could get you all tied in knots and break your heart. And then there were the few — or maybe only the one — you could really love and devote yourself to for the rest of your life.

  He wasn’t sure if Susan was a weekend or a summer girl, but he was quite sure he would never buy her a ring.

  Besides, all things considered, he wasn’t that kind of guy. John recognized that some deep part of his brain divided women into these categories, and that was what tempted him to flirt. Something inside of him wanted to believe that he could pull off the weekend romance, or the summer fling. But the conscious John — the driver in that mythical seat of reason that the psychologists have been so anxious to find — had only two categories. There was Jillian, and there was everybody else.

  Or maybe now there were three? Jillian, the dream Jillian, and everybody else.

  By the time he got back to his office he had started through his daily checklist. When he logged in he noticed the sticky note on the monitor.

  “Edgeworth.”

  He spent a few minutes researching the brand. It had been commonplace in drug stores for years, and he had a vague recollection of seeing it at Peoples Drug when he was a kid, but it had been out of production for a while. Pipe tobacco simply didn’t attract the popular following it once had.

  After a few short searches he found someone with 3/4 of a can who was willing to trade. He made an offer, then started wondering what was so special about this particular brand of tobacco.

  Maybe Edgeworth tobacco was the key to his visions and dreams. If it was the pipe that had started them, perhaps — and he felt silly even thinking it — perhaps this particular pipe and that particular tobacco combined to make the complete effect.

  Complete was the right word. He felt that he’d been given half an answer. A glance, but no knowledge or confidence. No satisfaction. Just a taste.