by Dirk Knight
Jayden’s Revenge
The Tale of an American Family
Copyright© 2012, Dirk Knight. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, places, or events is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Acknowledgements:
A special thanks to my editor, Brandon Beam for his patience.
Cover art created by Stephanie Stephens
Author’s notes following the story
For Vanessa, I don’t know where you got the patience to let me work this project, but I am grateful to have a woman that believes in me. I love you.
“Come on baby, light my fire”
—Jim Morrison
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1.
Jayden gives her feet a rest outside the library, smoking and wasting time until school is out so she can catch the bus home. In front of the library, surrounding the fountain is a ring of hills that provides 360° cover. So, as long as no one walks up on her, she can puff and brood undetected. It is beginning to rain–no surprise to her–and she is prepared with Philip’s hoodie covering her black hair. It doesn’t smell like him anymore; she has worn it too many times and her own fragrance has melded with the jacket.
She has always preferred the taste of Marlboro, her mother’s cigarette brand, but with her gone, she is stuck swiping Pall Mall’s from the old man. She pulls a long draw into her lungs and is comforted by the warming sensation that hits her throat and eventually filters through her entire body. She stuffs the carton of Pall Mall back into the oversized kangaroo pouch–his oversized kangaroo pouch–and lets her rage escape with the exhaled smoke.
When she had first confiscated this hoodie, the pouch had contained a bag of weed and a CD. The weed was long gone and the CD, although she hated it after a single listen, she had ripped to her computer and put it as a playlist–labeled “Philips Stupid Techno Crap’ –on her iPod. She is somehow comforted, just knowing that it is there and that she doesn’t have to listen to it. She misses being able to waste time with Philip, which is why she is out here alone now … with nothing more than a hoodie and a crappy playlist.
All she has now is her alcoholic father, who has become a burden to her as the months have passed. More often than not, she will enter the living room to find him passed out drunk on the couch, sitting upright, fork in hand, plate on the table, and kernels of corn on the floor with a cup of whisky in between his legs. She is forced to watch over him constantly. Pathetic. When she manages to usher him to bed he doesn’t sleep long before he is awakened by his own screams; she will find him once again passed out on the couch when she awakens herself for school the next day. Then she will make him coffee so he can get her to school on time… and away from him for a blessed while.
If the police pick her up again for truancy he will get a fine, so she has to show up and get her name on the books, and then she slips the campus confines and runs across the lot to the hideout she shared with Philip last year. She discovered this library fountain the previous year; her English teacher had walked the class over, when the weather was nicer, and let them sit on the knoll and write poetry about true love, world peace, and democracy–or whatever the hell happy little seventh graders wrote about. Hers talked about death, but she didn’t share it with anyone.
She can’t handle the happy smiling faces that the halls hold. School Spirit? This school is chock-full of a bunch of snobby brats making fun of the other snobby brats who didn’t get an iPad for Christmas. Her dad wouldn’t notice anything in his state and wouldn’t care if he did–unless the cops brought her home again... Last Wednesday was her birthday and he didn’t even notice that. No one had.
Philip is always on her mind. She wishes that things didn’t work out the way they did for him. She pulls her phone out, scrolls through some pictures of the two of them, and stops on the one of their first day of school here (the first day they were Wildcats together). She begins to cry softly; surprised she still can manage tears after everything she saw this fall. He was a few years ahead of her in school and last year was the first time they had walked the halls together since before she was old enough to have an opinion. Today was supposed to be like the good old days, but when she entered the giant double doors, hearing the bustle of hundreds of students echoing off the vaulted ceilings and marble floors, she imagined that she was utterly alone. The only sign of Philip was a picture of him and the rest of the team, in their uniforms, next to last year’s Wildcats’ State Baseball trophy.
Sometimes she would sit at home and just hold his practice bat–a hardwood Louisville Slugger–next to her side, usually while wearing his hoodie. When she thinks about how pathetic she must look, knowing that Philip would have been the first one to poke fun at her for it, she lets out a little chuckle that barely has enough force to escape the weight of her sorrow and weepiness.
She feels as if she is trespassing through his life now, and that he isn’t here to introduce her as his sister, so she has no identity. Everyone already knew who she was anyway. No one spoke to her; her family name had been in the papers and all over the local news… people just stared and gave her a wider berth than the school halls demanded for her slender body. This was supposed to be different, but thanks to her, Philip is gone and all that’s left is this hoodie and that useless Louisville Slugger.
2.
Derrick Weller is uneasy as he arrives home with a brown paper sack in his ample fist, looking over his shoulders for nosey neighbors. The paper is soaked through and offers no support for the weight of the bottle inside; instead, it provides the illusion that onlookers wouldn’t know it held whiskey. Again. It is rainy and cold and the clouds are blocking most of the sun’s glory. Derrick feels as if the weather has been like this forever. The cold front is bringing on a cough as well as the possibility of freezing rain; he hacks up a big chunk of phlegm while fumbling through his key ring, but luckily, he has some of grandpa’s cough syrup in his bag. As he walks over the threshold, he has a sinking feeling that something is not right. The hairs on his neck are standing, but he can’t quite put his finger on what is amiss.
“Hello, is anyone here?” he shouts.
I am an idiot and I’m afraid of my own shadow is what sounds in the space between his ears.
A tour of the house gives him some peace of mind, but he still feels uneasy. He finds nothing out of place as he searches his one-level condo room by room. I can’t ever relax– he thinks– How can I after dealing with the torment I have endured this year– as he begins looking under the beds and in the closets, making a second, more thorough, sweep through the house. He pauses when he enters the first room on the left. The room hasn’t been opened in some time and the air tastes older. He doesn’t want to look under this bed but forces himself to.
He came home with every intention of relaxing today–this is the first night he has the house to himself since Brenda–but instead he is scouring the house as if he is involved in a high–-stakes game of hide and seek. He is afraid to be alone, without Jayden, his fourteen-year-old (according to his memory) daughter. She is at a sleepover birthday party with her classmates. He had insisted that she relax and that he would do the same.
Just chill out–he says to himself as he pulls his weight up from the floor in the first bedroom, abandoning his search. This room still makes him uncomfortable; he doesn’t want to spend any more time in here.
He saw the birthday girl’s parents looking at him with sad eyes as he dropped Jayden off and said goodbye. The Weller family’s “situation” has been, and continues to be, the topic of conversation among families in the Hamilton School District. Derrick knows this, b
ut he refuses to speak with the other parents about the events. After being forced to share his misery during the innumerable visits with the court-appointed counselor, he has grown disgusted with having to relive that night.
The conditions that caused his wife and him to finally separate were brutal. Derrick, like many others in his situation, was reluctant to come to the police … until she became a danger to the children. He wouldn’t stand up for himself, partly because he felt responsible, and partly because he has always been chicken—hearted when it came to confrontation. He hated to be alone– better to be mistreated than to be alone –he would think to rationalize the horrifying amalgamation that was their life together.
He and Brenda got married young. They met in high school. She was dark and misunderstood and that intrigued him; other boys were infatuated by her, too, but he was the only one that really got her. Derrick had been raised by a single mom, who had also, of course, been dark and misunderstood. Oedipus complex aside, he was struck by Brenda’s demeanor and had experience in dealing with people (women) who were damaged. There was something so beautiful in her sadness. He had to know her.
3.
Jayden is beginning to worry about her dad, but she is also growing increasingly fatigued by him. He isn’t sleeping anymore, is troubled with nightmares, and is missing work. The way that he found Philip is torturing him. He keeps saying that it was his fault for not doing something sooner, and he keeps apologizing for Philip. Jayden feels as if she is the only adult left in the house, a responsibility she is growing tired of more each day. Her sympathy is turning into apathy, and her pity is fermenting into a cocktail of rage and disappointment. Having already been handed a lifetime of misery from her deranged mother, she was hoping, in light of her freedom from Brenda, for a glimmer of serenity, and instead she is handed an inept waste of a man who was once her father.
She fears that Derrick realizes that all of the misfortune is somehow her fault and that what happened to her mother is a direct result of her being bad at school. She fears this, but he hasn’t said anything. He just drinks and tells her he’s sorry. They both know the apologies are meaningless, but inconsequence has never slowed him.
Brenda was called into the principal’s office to pick her up that day. She and Philip were caught smoking at lunch. Perhaps the two most troublesome students in the history of Hamilton Schools, Philip and Jayden were in constant conflict with the teachers and staff.
She had, of course, blamed Philip and said that the cigarettes were his. She had stolen the cigarettes from Brenda that day before school, as she had done so many times before. She often used Philip as her scapegoat because he was older and willing to take the blame for her. They both knew he would do anything for Jayden, and she used it to her advantage. Jayden was a master manipulator when it came to Philip. She really missed him.
Her behavior hasn’t calmed since the death, but perhaps the level of scrutiny has somewhat abated because she is alone with Derrick, and it appears as if that piece of the world is coming unraveled as well. Teachers don’t razz her for assignments, the old fart on the golf cart doesn’t chase her off campus, and she just kinda wafts through their system, in and out like the smell of a carcass you can’t quite locate.
She is glad to be going to Samantha’s slumber party; she needs to be around kids again. She has spent the summer grieving and watching her father fall into an alcoholic pit.
I hope he is going to be all right— she thought as her father pulled into the cul-de-sac where the Bingham’s live. As the car rolled to a stop, he started to cry; the look on his face was lost, like a cat in a bathtub–scared and looking for a way out.
“Are you going to be ok, Dad?”
“Sure, sweetie, I’m just tired is all.” He paused, and then offered, “Listen kiddo, you don’t need to worry about me, OK? Daddy is going to be just fine. A little relaxing at home, maybe take a long overdue nap and just take it easy. You deserve to have a good time today and enjoy yourself.”
“Alright, Dad, thank you so much!” she squealed as she hugged his neck.
He pressed the unlock button on the panel of his Lincoln as she reached for the door handle.
“Do you have your cell, sweetie?”
“Yeah, Dad, it’s in my bag.”
“Ok… well, call me if you need me, and I will be here in a flash, but don’t call because you are worried about your old man…. Just go be a kid tonight, okay, Sugar?”
She nodded in agreement and wiped the tear that had formed on her cheek. “Have fun, J.J., and don’t forget to grab Sam’s gift out of the trunk”
“Okay, Dad, see you tomorrow.” She says, and then adds cautiously, “Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah –”
“Maybe don’t drink tonight, okay?”
“Okay, honey, I’ll take it easy…. I love you.”
“Love you, too, Dad!”
She walked to the door and turned to give him a wave, which he reciprocated while beginning to pull away from the curb. She felt a blanket of relief once she could not read the license plate on their car. It hadn’t occurred to her that she may never see him smile again, but in that moment she was just glad to out from under his melancholy shadow.
4.
“Samantha is no longer allowed at your home,” Derrick recalls as the last thing Cynthia Bingham had said to him before Brenda was sent away. Jayden and Sam were close growing up, had been inseparable during the summers in fact, but once Jayden started to run with Philip she became more and more like him … and like her aggressively spirited mother. The Bingham family, she stated, did not like to associate themselves with such “run-of-the-mill trash” and therefore she and Sam were no longer allowed to associate.
In light of the tragedy and the Bingham’s publicly Christian reputation, Cynthia eventually changed her tune and reached out to Derrick to offer support. His daughter was suddenly welcomed back into their pretentious little home with their whiney little yapper dogs.
He waves to Jayden and sees Cynthia Bingham looking out the window. They lock eyes for a short moment, but in that brief exchange, her eyes say more than enough. She feels sorry for us he thinks angrily. She clearly dislikes him, but is being “Christian” and allowing his daughter a chance to pretend she is normal; the disdain is still in Cynthia’s face.
He hates accepting her pity. He is more than a little suspicious of her motive, but, then again, tonight he doesn’t really care what the motivation is; his daughter needs to be with kids. He is sucking the life out of her, and he knows it. He cannot help himself. She is becoming a replica of the woman he has loved and lost. He wants to keep her safe and, hopefully, not let her become the monster that he fears she will.
Her mother’s condition wasn’t diagnosed until she was in her mid—twenties. She and Derrick already had two children by the time Brenda was old enough to legally buy alcohol. They did the best they could.
Derrick’s mother was in and out of prison, offering him no stability, nor a mother to turn to for support. He decided to go live with his father permanently at age fifteen, when she was sentenced to jail for forging checks. Again. His father was a drunk and absentee, but at least he managed to stay out of jail and Derrick didn’t have to worry about whether the lights would come on when he flipped the switch. Brenda had become the only woman, the only real person, in his life by the summer of ’95.
When her father died just before Christmas of that same year, she moved in with Derrick and Mr. Weller. Her mother has also been absent most of her life. She should, by all rights, have become a “Ward of the State,” but she was able to slip through the cracks when Derrick took over her father’s role as caregiver. Derrick had given up on college— not like he had a promising future to sacrifice— to be with Brenda.
The trauma of losing her father had put her into a destructive state of mind. Derrick and Brenda started smoking meth together when they were sixteen. Derrick always swore he would never do it; swore not to be like his mother, but
women have a powerful effect on men. It isn’t often that he reminisced about doing dope or the beginning of his life with Brenda, but today he can’t get her (or it) out of his mind.
The feeling that you are invincible, that you are smarter and funnier comes almost at once when you stand up from the glass table holding your nostrils closed and feeling the deep burn in your sinuses. Neurons fire and out of nowhere you understand things; you can put the pieces of the puzzle together… until you have been up for eight days with no sleep, living off bananas and Red Bull. Smoking so many menthol cigarettes that your teeth feel like alien creatures that have sprung from your jaw since the last time you passed a mirror. Nothing makes sense at that point. You want the train to stop, but there is ice on the tracks.
He told Brenda that he wanted to stop the dope; she argued with him, tried to bribe him with sex and promises that they would cut back. Derrick, in a fit of heightened emotion and sleep deprived sensibilities, snatched the last couple of grams from her and threw the baggies in the commode. She struggled with him but he kept her at bay with his free hand as he depressed the lever to flush. She grabbed his keys and left in a rage–undoubtedly heading to his mother’s trailer to get fronted again–before he could stop her.
Brenda was arrested after rolling Derricks truck on a poorly lit back road that night. Although she was not seriously injured in the wreck, she was escorted by police to a local Baptist Hospital for testing and monitoring. The tests revealed that she was in fact intoxicated on methamphetamine, and that she was carrying a child. She was sentenced to juvenile detention and forced to attend a state program for drug addiction.
Derrick did the best he could to be a provider and a family man. He loved the idea of a child, and got a job telemarketing. It wasn’t much, but he was good on the phones. He made enough for a small apartment. He also sold pot to his dad and some of their friends in order to cover the shortfall. By the time Jayden was born, he was making a steady income on the phones and no longer slinging weed to get by. Although he was not of the legal drinking age, he and Brenda had developed quite the drinking problem.
