Chapter 13 #2
When Jackie smiles at the woman, it doesn’t reach her eyes. Claire could swear, in fact, that her eyes have instead flicked over towards the ottoman where Claire is sitting. But Jackie nods, and together she and the woman disappear through the swinging door towards the bedrooms.
With Jackie gone, there’s no reason for Claire to stay. She leaves the photos where they are, and with one last look towards the door Jackie disappeared through, Claire flees the house back to her own.
~ ~ ~
After the party, Jackie’s car disappears from the driveway for three days.
It’s not the first time Jackie has been gone overnight.
She often has photography gigs in the city, and she’s told Claire that if they go late, she stays with a friend.
Claire now assumes that the friend is Theo.
But it’s a longer absence than usual, so when Claire finally wakes up to see the blue Mustang has returned to its spot, she’s knocking on Jackie’s door almost as soon as Pete’s car turns the corner.
It takes longer than usual for Jackie to answer. Claire can hear movement behind it, shuffling footsteps, and then the door opens to Jackie squinting into the early morning light. She’s dressed in a black turtleneck despite the warm weather, and Claire doesn’t quite stifle her gasp.
Jackie has a shiner. Her left eye is bloodshot, and the skin around it is a lurid, swollen purple. When she gives Claire a weak smile, her half-healed split lip cracks open.
“Jackie!” Claire says, hurrying forward. Her stomach bottoms out when she reaches out instinctively to touch the bruise, and Jackie flinches. “What on earth—what happened?”
“Don’t you like my new look?” Jackie says, closing the door behind Claire. Her voice is a little rougher than usual, like she hasn’t been sleeping well. “I’m going for devil-may-care.”
“You look like you’ve been pummeled,” Claire says.
Jackie chuckles lightly, but then winces, her arm going to her ribs. “That’s not too far from the truth.”
“What happened?” Claire asks again. Horrible scenarios all crowd her mind, a myriad of ways that Jackie could have ended up in this condition, only to land squarely on the worst one. “It wasn’t…Jackie, it wasn’t that man, was it? The married one you used to see?”
Jackie doesn’t seem interested in explaining herself. She notices that her lip is bleeding in the reflective surface of one of her photo frames, and makes a small noise of frustration. “Nothing like that. Can we drop it, please?”
“Have you been to a doctor? Gotten yourself checked out?” Claire says, trailing her towards the living room. “You could have a concussion. Your lip could get infected, or you could—and what’s wrong with your ribs?”
Jackie sighs, sitting gingerly on the couch. Her posture is stiff. “They’re bruised, that’s all. I already went to the hospital. I’m supposed to take it easy for a while.”
Claire sits beside her, careful not to jostle.
The curiosity is burning in her—she can’t conjure a situation in which a woman could end up in this condition if it isn’t by the hand of an angry lover.
However it happened, the idea of anyone hitting Jackie sends a surge of anger through her.
“At least let me look at your lip. Please?”
Jackie is reluctant, but eventually Claire convinces her to grab the small first aid kit in her bathroom and sit still on the couch.
Claire swipes away the blood on Jackie’s lip, cleans it with antiseptic, and dabs some ointment, and then she wraps an ice cube in a clean dish towel to hold against Jackie’s swollen eye.
“I shouldn’t have even opened the door today,” Jackie says, leaning back against the couch cushions as Claire presses the ice to her face.
“I have a key. I would have checked on you eventually,” Claire says. “Jackie, you look like you were in a boxing match.”
“I went to a bar in the city,” Jackie says, after a long silence. “There was an altercation. It’s really nothing to worry about. He only got a few hits in.”
Claire moves the ice away. “He? You got in a fight? With a man?”
Jackie looks disgruntled by the sudden lack of ice, despite all of her complaining earlier. “Less a fight than a beating. I’m not exactly a scrapper.”
The anger rises in Claire again. It’s not like what she feels with Pete, or when the book club ladies speak badly of Jackie—this is deeper.
A fierce need to protect. Claire has never even thought about being in a fight, but if someone threatened Jackie in front of her?
Hit her? Even if it was a man, Claire isn’t sure she’d be able to stand back and watch.
“Who would do this to you?” Claire says, pressing the ice to Jackie’s face again. It’s wet and cold in her hand, but Jackie makes a pleased noise, so there’s no way she’s going to stop doing it. “And why?”
“Claire, please let it go,” Jackie murmurs. Her eyes are closed, but her hands are twisting together.
“How can I let it go? Did you at least call the police?”
“Wasn’t exactly necessary,” Jackie mutters. “Theo is tougher than he looks. He hit them back, and we ran. It’s fine.”
“Them?” Claire had been imagining some drunk man taking a swing at Jackie in an alley, a one-off freak incident caused by a singular idiot lashing out. Not a group beating. “How many were there?”
“A few,” Jackie says tiredly. “It was hard to tell. Everything was spinning.”
“How did you get tangled in something like that?” Claire says, before it hits her. When she imagines someone like Theo at a bar, with his biting wit, running into the kind of men Pete works with…if he tossed an insult at the wrong person, someone big and drunk and a little rowdy…
“Was this about Theo?” Claire asks haltingly. “Were the men…was it because he’s…”
Claire trails off. They haven’t yet discussed what Theo said that day at the pool, and Jackie’s face now reminds Claire of how it looked then—her lips are pressed tightly together.
Her eyes are open now, and she’s staring straight ahead.
She barely flinches when Claire presses the ice to her face again.
“And if it was?” Jackie says.
Claire pauses. The question feels like more than the sum of its parts, and she considers her words carefully as she lowers the shrinking ice cube.
“Then…I hope Theo got some good punches in.”
Jackie’s face softens. Her eyes shift to meet Claire’s, and it’s as if a wall drops between them. Jackie looks so tired, suddenly. Vulnerable and exhausted. A droplet of water is sliding down her temple, and Claire swipes at it with her finger without thinking.
“I really don’t like the idea of someone hurting you,” Claire says. Her voice won’t seem to rise above a whisper.
Jackie gives a weak smile. “I don’t think anyone has ever cared this much about it before.”
The cloth has fallen out of Claire’s hand, and the ice is melting into the couch cushion. Usually that would make her antsy, but Claire has bigger concerns.
“I care,” Claire says. She traces her finger along the cool, damp skin just at the edge of Jackie’s bruised eye. “I know it’s strange, but I keep wishing I had been there.”
Jackie’s brow furrows. “They just would have hit you, too.”
“Maybe with me there they wouldn’t have,” Claire says.
It feels like a stupid thing to say the moment it leaves her mouth—what could she possibly have done against three grown men?
Attacked them with her vacuum cleaner? But it also feels true.
If she’d been there, she would have tried to protect Jackie, no matter how silly it looked.
“I’ve never hit anyone, but I’m sure I could learn. ”
“See?” Jackie says. Her voice is low, her breath dancing across Claire’s face.
Her pupils are large and dark, just barely distinguishable from the mahogany color of her eyes.
It makes them seem so endlessly deep that Claire could tip forward and fall down them like Alice down the rabbit hole. “I knew there was a lion in here.”
She taps her forefinger against Claire’s chest just over her collarbone, just like the day they smoked together.
And Jackie’s hand doesn’t move away. It lingers, the very tip of her finger pressed against Claire’s skin.
It feels like there’s something moving underneath it, some thrilling feeling coursing through Claire to gather right under the spot Jackie is touching.
Something about this moment feels fragile, and Claire finds herself holding her breath to keep from breaking it.
Suddenly, Jackie jerks away. It comes with a hiss of pain.
Claire retracts her own hand from Jackie’s face so quickly that it sends a jolt up her arm, her heart jumping. “Shoot. I’m sorry—did I press on your bruise?”
“Do you want to learn how to drive?” Jackie says, standing up abruptly. She snatches up the damp towel from the couch, heading towards the kitchen in a rush. The softness is gone from her voice.
Claire is left on the couch, nursing her conversational whiplash. This kind of thing has been happening with Jackie more frequently lately, the moments of closeness and sudden pivots, and she’s not sure why. “What?”
“My eye hurts, and I need a distraction,” Jackie shouts from the kitchen. Claire can hear the sink running. “Have you ever taken lessons?”
“In high school,” Claire says. The spot on her chest that Jackie was touching is still tingling, and she rubs it absently. “You don’t want me to learn in your Mustang, do you?”
“Where else?”
“What if I wreck it? It’s too expensive, Jackie, I couldn’t.” Claire stands up on wobbly legs, meaning to follow Jackie’s voice, but Jackie reappears quickly. Her face is damp and shiny, like she’s splashed it with water.
“I don’t care if you crash it. I only bought it to piss off my mother.”
“That’s one expensive rebellion,” Claire says. “Are you sure?”
Jackie breezes past her, grabbing her keys from the table next to the door. “Come on. We’ll find an empty parking lot.”
Claire has completely forgotten the strangeness of earlier by the time she’s behind the wheel of Jackie’s car in an empty Denny’s parking lot, learning how to shift it into gear.
The vague memory of her school lessons comes back quicker than she expected—after only a few false starts she’s cruising slowly around the lot, pressing down on the gas a little more with each lap under Jackie’s encouragement.
It’s all less complicated than Claire thought it would be, and the sense of freedom she’s felt in the passenger seat is amplified, even if she’s not really doing much besides learning to park.
Even at their slow pace, the wind ruffles Claire’s hair.
The sun warms her face. Jackie is smiling so much that her lip has cracked open again.
For a moment, as she rounds a corner perfectly and Jackie claps in delight, Claire conjures an impossible fantasy.
Cruising down the highway with Jackie, fully in control of her life, with the wind roaring in their ears. Headed off on some grand adventure.
After such a wonderful afternoon, Claire’s kitchen feels stifling when she comes back home.