Chapter 6
— Chapter 6 —
Our neighborhood hasn’t changed much. The houses are all on acre plots, set back from the road, so there’s not much to see. The swimming pond is frozen over. There’s a new split rail fence at the O’Rourkes’ house, and enough shiny new mailboxes to suspect some rowdy kids with baseball bats smacked the previous ones into early retirement.
I drive past my old school bus stop and then out to the main road, past the Civil War cemetery and the grand brick Elephant Hotel, which was never a hotel for elephants and eventually became the town hall. Out front, the statue of Old Bet stands high on her granite obelisk, spotlit in the fading light. Crafted from concrete and plywood, she’s simple, like a child’s drawing in three dimensions—her legs are too short, ears too big, eyes wide on her flat face, her trunk curves down over her blunt tusks like a bathtub faucet.
Across the street is Hachaliah Bailey’s cavernous white house. When I was a little kid, it had been left for ruin. Porch spindles rotting, shutters missing, broken windows barricaded by graffiti-covered plywood, shingles so cracked and dirty that the house looked like it had veins. On the school bus we’d hold our breath as we rode past so we wouldn’t inhale haunting spirits.
Now, fully restored, Bailey’s house is the centerpiece of an office park, and the Wells Realty and Development sign on the porch looks freshly painted. On the second floor, the light is on in Charlie Wells’s office, and I can picture my sister’s husband at his desk, pouring himself two fingers of scotch from the carafe his secretary keeps at a respectable three-quarters full. He runs his fingers through his sandy-blond hair when he takes his first sip, smiles as the burn travels down his throat.
I kiss my hand and touch the window. “Sorry, Bet,” I whisper to the elephant, then hold my breath until my chest hurts.
I used to nap in my car at one of the turnouts by the reservoir whenever I needed to sleep off a bad night before facing my mother and Step. But just after 9/11 I read in the newspaper that the county had restricted reservoir access. I don’t know if it’s still that way, and I could get in trouble beyond a parking ticket if cops find me lurking by New York City’s water supply. So, instead, I drive to Jam’s house. It’s on a dead end and I can probably get away with parking there. At least for a few hours to get some rest.
The house looks the same. Maybe smaller than I remembered. There are lights on. A yellow glow from the kitchen, blue from a TV in Jam’s room. Seeing the Olbrichs’ house gives me that warm feeling in my chest I think you’re supposed to have when you think of home. Whenever I get really sad, I crave Jam’s brown leather jacket—always saturated with cigarette smoke and the chemically woodsy scent of Obsession cologne—it felt warm and alive, like it was part of him. I want it to be Jam in that house watching TV, wearing that jacket. I want to hide my head between the side of his body and the satin lining, while he lets me cry into his shirt and holds me until we fall asleep on his little twin bed.
I canceled my pager service as soon as I got to Maine, with a pose of self-righteousness—the idea that I didn’t want to cave and call my mother if she said the right thing into my voicemail. But the true secrets of myself are always more quiet and sad than I want them to be. I was afraid of knowing for sure that my family wouldn’t even try to reach me—that Steena’s message was all I’d get, and the most anyone cared about me was to make sure I felt properly awful.
I intended to call Jam to tell him where I went, and I believed with my whole heart that he tried to call me. So many nights, I dialed most of his number, unable to brave the last digit, worried I’d only get the jokey outgoing message that sounded like Jam answering the phone. I wouldn’t have known what to say. Then too much time passed, and I wanted to hold on to the idea that Jam was still there if I needed him. I was afraid of calling only to learn his number had been disconnected. After ten years, he has to have moved on. Maybe he has a wife. Even kids. Maybe he teaches piano at Juilliard, or he’s the choir director at a private school in Connecticut. Maybe he drives a minivan and people call him Ben. His dad probably doesn’t own the house anymore, and right now some new little boy is playing pirated video games in that bedroom. But I need to at least check. I can’t be in Somers holding out false hope of running into Jam if he’s long gone. That’s too much for my heart to handle. So I get out of the car, close the door quietly, cross the street, and climb the soggy, grassy hill to his house.
There’s a sliver of space between the blind and the windowsill. When I duck to peer through, my feet lose their hold in a mini mudslide, and I fall to my knees, the impact reverberating through my core. It hurts. Cold seeps in quickly. I look up and see Jam lying on the same little bed in the same little room. His head is turned toward the window. He must have heard me fall. I think I see his eyes brighten, so I reach over and slide the window open. It’s unlocked like always and still catches a little at the end of the track.
“—the fuck?” I hear him say as I hunt for the floor with my feet.
It’s way harder to climb in his window than I remember, and my abdomen feels like it’s harboring a bowling ball where my appendix used to be. But I get all the way in. My eyes meet his. I try not to cry.
Jam takes a ragged breath. “Your knees are muddy,” he says, smiling. He’s always prided himself on his ability to underreact.
“So’s your face,” I say, even though it isn’t.
In high school, Jam was a little too lanky and delicate to be handsome, but now, rumpled and filled out and messy-haired, he looks like he could be the hot, distracted professor-dad in an indie film. He lifts the blanket like an invitation. He’s wearing black boxer briefs and a worn-out undershirt—a little pudgy, hairy in places he wasn’t before, but still so familiar. Everything about him makes sense to me. I shed my jacket, kick off my shoes, and drop my pants to the floor, because they’re muddy and because that’s what we always used to do.
“Pants don’t belong in beds,” he’d say. Sometimes we pushed our pants-less hangouts to the very edge of innocence. Mostly we fumbled around the implications of being teenagers with bodies that would fit together if we let them, because we needed our friendship too desperately to risk ruin.
I climb into bed, overwhelmed by the relief of him.
“Holy shit,” Jam says, slipping his arm around me so I can prop my head on his shoulder to see the television.
“Holy shit.” This is a different kind of movie I’m in now. The kind you fall asleep to night after night, and you know all the words and it keeps you from spiraling.
“I thought you disappeared for good.”
“I thought you married an heiress and moved to Burma.”
“I heard you robbed a train in Kathmandu.”
“Definitely. I heard you invented a perpetual motion machine.”
“I tried to find you,” Jam says, dropping his deadpan act. “A few times.”
“You did?” I ask, the threat of a sob growing in my throat.
“More than a few times.”
I watch Sean Connery instead of watching Jam. It’s easier to have this conversation this way.
“Why are you still here?” I ask, while James Bond does a James Bond thing.
“I left for a while,” he says. Then he’s quiet.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, and then I came back.” It’s a terminal sentence.
“I don’t like Sean Connery as Bond,” I say, to let him know we don’t have to talk about it. Who cares where he’s been when he’s here right now?
“You don’t like anyone as Bond,” he says, and I delight in being known.
“All of it is sexist as fuck. But at least David Niven wasn’t rapey.”
“Well, he was old.”
“That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”
Jam shrugs. Bond was his religion as a kid. Watching these movies was the only way his dad spent time with him, so he’s never going to think too hard about any of it.
“Where were you?” he asks.
“Maine.”
“Oh,” he says, as if I was hiding in plain, boring sight this whole time.
“Near Acadia,” I offer, like that makes it better. I could have been tending bar someplace exotic. I could have been doing something real. I only made it to Maine, and I hardly went to the beach. I worked my dead-end job and read my weird old books, and no one cared, and I didn’t either. But Jam’s still lying in this bed in this room. Maybe he hasn’t done anything real in ages.
“Fuck you for leaving, by the way,” he says, hugging me to his chest a little harder, and it’s strange how normal it feels. Nothing in my life has ever been as easy as this.
We fall into watching James Bond rowing around a subterranean reservoir.
“Beer?” Jam asks.
I nod against his chest and start to pull myself up so he can climb around me to go to the kitchen. Instead, he hugs me back into him, reaches across my body, laughing as he crushes me. It’s on the verge of hurting but also feels like his belly is holding my guts in place. He opens a mini fridge under his bed and grabs two bottles of beer, rights himself and uncaps them with his fist against the headboard.
“Interesting way to notch your bedpost.” I try not to groan as I sit up to take my beer. I’m sad that I can no longer feel the weight of him against me.
“When you’re thirty-one and still live with your father,” he says, “it’s all about the creature comforts, ya know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shit. Yeah.”
I wish there were a way to transmit the details of our time apart directly into Jam’s brain. Then I wouldn’t have to say anything and he’d understand it all.
“There’s a bulb of fennel in the fridge,” I tell him and take a swig of beer.
“Huh?”
“I inherited my parents’ house. They died.”
I can tell that the well-mannered part of him wants to say he’s sorry, but he’s known me long enough to understand that his condolences should be about everything that happened before they died.
“I went to their funeral,” Jam says. “In case…” He looks away, staring down the neck of his beer bottle. We’ve never been able to make eye contact for too long, part of our battle against chemistry. “I didn’t want you to be alone, if you were going to be there.”
“Thanks,” I say, but it comes out more like a squeak than a word.
“I was hoping to see you. And then hoping not to—that you got away scot-free.”
“I didn’t know how to say goodbye to you.”
“Better you didn’t,” Jam says. “I kept being your friend in my head.”
“You were my friend in my head too.” I choke on the words, bury my head in his armpit. I can hear the blood rushing in his veins. Jam’s body has always run so fast. Too hard.
“Steena was a total bitch to me at the funeral,” Jam says. “ Why are you here? ” His Steena voice has always been so good. He gets the injured lilt just right. “Then Steena immediately turns to the person behind me, who was, like, the fucking crossing guard at the Intermediate School. I don’t remember her name, but it’s not like Steena does either. And she says, Oh, thank you so much for coming. It warms my heart to see you .”
I laugh because it’s all so perfectly in character.
“She fucking loved that funeral,” Jam says. “Don’t ever let her guilt you for not going. She loved being the star.”
The thought of running into my sister sends lightning through my stomach. “I’m hoping I won’t see her at all.”
Jam nudges me with his elbow. “This town is like five people on repeat. Of course you’ll see her.”
“Maybe she put that fennel in the fridge,” I say, even though I don’t believe it to be true. It would be more like Steena to never set foot in that house again once she knew I signed the papers.
“Wait, how long have you been back?”
“Two hours maybe?”
“And there’s fennel in the fridge? Like the fridge is on? There’s power?”
I nod. My head swims from the beer and panic.
“Like a lot of fennel?” Jam asks, as if it makes any difference.
“One bulb. And an open can of soda that still had fizz.”
“Fuck. Sleep here.”
“Thanks.” The fennel is a problem, obviously. But even if there was nothing but dust and whatever got left behind, the cold and creaking darkness of the house would have been unbearable. I wonder how many nights I can spend in Jam’s bed before we ruin our friendship.
James is Bonding around on a train now, caught in a fistfight with a blond dude wearing some kind of retractable piano wire bracelet. We slip into following the action again. I know we should have more questions. More things we need to tell each other. But all I care about is the feel of Jam’s ribs pushing into mine with every breath, the warmth of his feet against my cold toes. I watch the movie through half-closed eyes. My blinks get long and lazy.
Next thing I know, the credits are rolling, then the screen goes black. Jam hasn’t moved either. I think it would be easier if we fell asleep this way. But my scar aches, and he rouses when I shift my weight.
“There’s less room on this bed than there used to be,” I say.
“Hey, it’s not all me.” Jam pats my belly.
I try not to wince. “You’re not supposed to say that to a girl.”
“That’s sexist.”
“No, it’s not.”
“If you can tell me that I’ve filled out, but I can’t say you have, it implies you don’t deserve the truth, that you need to be handled with kid gloves.”
“It’s not sexist. It’s convention.”
“It’s sexist convention—the idea that you’re supposed to stay sixteen and we can’t talk about the fact that you’re not anymore.” He lifts the blanket. “Because you filled out really nicely.”
“Perv.”
“I didn’t crawl through the window and take my pants off in your room.”
I punch his arm and he grabs my wrist, and it’s so good to be here with him after all the time I’ve spent stuck on a solitary wavelength. My eyes well up. So do his. I press my cheek to his chest, hug hard, and he doesn’t smell like Obsession or cigarette smoke or old leather anymore, but somehow, he smells like Jam on the most basic level, and I can still hear the murmur in his heart.
“What is this?” I ask, watching Jam spoon glop from a Tupperware container into two bowls. He heard my stomach rumble and insisted on feeding me, despite my ardent protests.
“Risotto. You’ll like it.”
“Did your dad cook this?”
“I did,” he says, putting one bowl in the microwave.
“Why?” I ask, feeling oddly unsettled. Jam used to live off hot dogs. He had a special toaster to cook them.
“Because it’s good. I had it at a restaurant and I liked it, so I figured out how to make it.”
He grates Parmesan over the bowl before serving it to me.
It is good. I’ve been trying not to eat too much, in case I get sick again, but I can’t help myself.
Jam watches me eat. “Were you living in the woods with wolves?”
“Basically.”
“You look worn out.”
“I am,” I say, avoiding eye contact. I want to stay in our bubble of normalcy—be the old me with the old Jam—for as long as possible. My wounded belly is an anachronism. I don’t want to talk about it.
There’s a mess of wires, microchips, and pieces of a coffee maker spread across the kitchen table. “What’s this?” I ask.
“My dad’s really into Arduino.”
“Huh?”
“Like these kits you can use to make hardware and software do things for you. He’s trying to hack a coffee maker to control it from his computer.”
“Why?”
“Hobby? Keeps him busy. But he’s been stuck on it for days because he’s got these two crossed.” Jam pokes at the wires with his fork, leaving risotto scum behind.
“Aren’t you going to help him?”
“Nah. He gets pissy when I solve his puzzles. He wants electronics to be his thing, like music is mine, but he never seems to understand that the…” Jam waves his fingers at his head, “math of it all makes sense in my brain. He has to work too hard for this hobby and hates that I don’t. So, I’ve been pretending I’m stumped.”
After we finish dinner, Jam gets me a clean pair of boxers and a t-shirt to sleep in and rummages for a new toothbrush from the hall closet. It has Dr. Dillard’s name and number printed in gold on the handle. He was my dentist too, and his loud, metered breaths always made me uncomfortable. I brush my teeth in Jam’s bathroom, trying not to think about the dark, dense forests in Dr. Dillard’s nostrils.
When Jam goes to brush his teeth, I fish pills from the pocket of my jeans and take two because I forgot the last one and don’t want to keep him awake with my discomfort. I settle into my spot by the edge, not the wall, under the same old sheets that look like spray-painted granite, now worn so thin they feel like silk. There were whole months in high school when I slept in Jam’s bed more than my own. When my parents were fighting and the house felt like it might explode, sneaking out was survival.
Jam comes back, jumping over the footboard to take his place by the wall. He hits play on the VCR, turns out the light. Under the covers, our bare legs touching, he wriggles around trying to get comfortable. “Turn on your side,” he says, “so there’s room.”
“I can’t,” I say and start to cry.
“Okay.” He squishes closer to the wall.
“I had an appendectomy last week.”
“Did it burst?”
“They caught it just before.”
“Good,” he says. “Lucky they caught it.”
It’s funny to think of myself as lucky instead of damned—that it could have been worse, and it wasn’t.
“You’re not going to bleed out all over my sheets, are you?” Jam asks, but I can tell from the smile in his voice that he doesn’t care about his sheets.
“I’ll try not to.”
The opening credits roll. It’s Casino Royale .
“David Niven,” he says, and kisses my forehead.
I was a lone wolf by ninth grade. I knew my limitations and didn’t see the point of making friends just to let them down. So at lunch I sat at a table in the corner with a few sophomores who were in Odyssey of the Mind and worked on their team’s competition problem while they ate. I chose that table because Jam was sitting there too. Even though he was a year ahead of me, I recognized him from back in the day when his mom used to drive me and my old best friend, Bee, home from the art center where we had pottery class and Jam took piano lessons. He’d grown strange and serious, always had a look on his face like he was shocked to be wherever he was. But I found it comforting to be near him. He reminded me of the melting crayon smell of the old heaters in the art center building and picking dried bits of clay from my fingers in the back seat of his mom’s blue Volvo, slipping them in my pocket so I wouldn’t get her car dirty.
Mostly I sat at that lunch table, taking tiny bites of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, while I read books that weren’t for English class. Jam was always reading too. One day the OM kids had a field trip, and it was just me and Jam at the table in the corner. He had his back to the wall, feet on a chair, drinking a Diet Pepsi while he turned pages faster than I thought anyone could process words. I wasn’t sure if he remembered me from carpool, but it felt warm to sit there reading together.
When he finished his book, he looked over, gestured to mine. I was a few pages from the end. “Want to swap?” he asked.
I nodded.
He waited for me to turn the last page, then gave me his copy of Contact by Carl Sagan in exchange for my copy of The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough.
“My mom always liked you,” he said.
“I always liked your mom.”
“She said you looked like you had interesting things happening in your head.”
I blushed, remembering how she smelled like incense, always played the same Marianne Faithfull cassette on repeat in the car, and said “Bye, honey” in her sweet, smoky voice every time she dropped me off at my house. Sometimes she’d add, “Don’t forget to make a little trouble,” and my face would flush over the idea of trouble on purpose.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “About…”
Jam flashed a sad smile. “Thanks.”
A few days later, he gave my book back and said, “I never would have read that. But I liked it. So much happened.”
“Yeah.” I dug his copy of Contact from my backpack. “I wouldn’t have picked this one either, and it was beautiful.”
“What should I read next?”
So, we swapped books back and forth and talked about what we liked and didn’t. I learned more from being friends with Jam than I did in English class. Sometimes we got duplicate copies of a book from the library to read at the same time. We read The Odyssey for fun, and one day when I asked Jam how he was doing, he shook his head, pretending to be mournful, and said, “I seem to be caught between Scylla and Charybdis… like a motherfucker.”
When Jam didn’t have to go to the city for piano lessons after school, he’d come over to read with me in my rowboat on Deans Pond. On the nights when he had lessons, I rode my bike to his house and snuck in through the window to read his books in his bed until he got back from the train station. He didn’t care that I never invited him to my house. He didn’t care that my mother hated him.
What Jam needed from me was exactly who I was. And the risk of making my mother angry was worth it, because being with Jam felt like the moment when you plug in a string of Christmas lights and every bulb still works.
I am dead to the world when the bed starts moving, and at first, it’s a part of my dream: the ground shifting beneath my feet, a sinkhole about to swallow me. But then I hear Jam humming under his breath, and the threads of reality sneak in to save me.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Work.” He opens the blinds. His face is still puffy from sleep.
“Where?”
“Butcher counter at Gristedes.” He searches the floor of his bedroom, grabbing one sock, another. “I like the gore,” he says, wiggling his fingers at me.
I laugh, then realize he’s wearing khaki pants and a blue polo shirt with a G embroidered over the pocket. “You can’t be a butcher!” I shout, panicked about the state of Jam if he’s taken a job with such obvious hazards. It makes no sense at all.
He ignores me, sitting at the foot of the bed to pull on his socks. They don’t match and one of them is definitely not clean. In the daylight, I can see lines like quotation marks in the space between his eyebrows, the slightest bit of slack in his jawline. Last night it was easy to forget how long it’s been, but that doesn’t mean I understand where he is now. I have no right to show up in his life with opinions.
“Sorry,” I say.
He shrugs it off. “You can hang here while I’m gone.”
I shake my head against the pillow. “I have to do something about the fennel situation.”
“It’s a fennel fiasco!” Jam shrieks, clapping his hand to his cheek like a child actor in a cheesy movie, and it makes me laugh despite my roiling nerves. “Wait. Would removing the fennel from the fridge be defenestration?”
“I think only if you throw it out the window,” I tell him, trying my best to play along.
Jam considers this with mock gravitas. “I’m not sure you have the votes.”
“God, I don’t want to deal with this house,” I say, panic spilling over, breaking the joke. The point is to agree and amplify— yes and yes and yes —but I am out of practice with Jam’s brand of banter, and terrified to find out who put that fennel in the fridge.
Instead of chiding me for killing our riff, he says, “Stay. I’m off at four. I’ll go with you.”
“Maybe.” I’m not sure I want him to witness whatever’s waiting for me.
“My dad’s home, but he won’t mind.”
“Did he retire?”
Jam grins. “Works here now. Turned the den into an office. I can hear his sessions through the air vents.”
“No!”
“One of his patients is an actual nymphomaniac. It’s amazing.”
“You can’t listen,” I say, nudging his butt with my foot.
“I can’t not listen,” Jam says, without a whiff of remorse.
After he leaves, I drift in and out of sleep. I don’t mean to, but I’m exhausted and the low chatter from Mr. Olbrich’s office sounds like a TV show playing in the background. I snuggle into the blankets, trying to make out the words echoing through the air vent. Maybe it is just human nature to want to know what the people around you are saying.
“There’s only so many times I can try,” a man whines.
“Have you actually tried?” I recognize Mr. Olbrich’s faded Brooklyn accent, like Larry David run through the wash, consonants fraying.
“Yes, I’ve tried!” The man’s voice rises. “Are you saying I haven’t?”
“Have you?” Mr. Olbrich asks calmly.
“Shit,” the man says. Then he’s quiet. I think he might be crying.
I want to know what will happen next, but my eyes are heavy. Whatever words follow are low and sad. The next thing I know, it’s one-thirty.
When I get up to use the bathroom, Mr. Olbrich walks past me in the hallway like I’m a ghost he can’t see. He has a history of ignoring me. We guessed it was so he wouldn’t feel the need to have “the talk” with Jam.
Even though most of the time I like being ignored, I’ve always seen Mr. Olbrich’s lack of attention as a challenge. So I call out, “Hi, Mr. Olbrich!” And when he still tries to pretend I don’t exist, I wave. “It’s good to see you.”
“Hello, young lady,” he says, averting his eyes even though I’m clothed enough. He’s wrinkled, paunchy, and has a thick gray mustache now. He looks like a character from one of those children’s picture books where a walrus could be a psychiatrist and drive around town in a car made from a pickle.
“It’s me. Freya.”
He gives me the once over, but his face is blank.
“Benjamin’s friend from high school…”
“Oh, Freya ,” he says. “Hello. I hope you’re well. How are your parents doing?”
I stare directly into his eyes, waiting for him to catch himself. But he either doesn’t know about my parents or doesn’t remember me at all. He was drinking a lot when Jam and I were in high school.
“My parents are great,” I say. “They retired to Tampa.”
“Good. Good. May need to do that myself one of these days. Winter is exhausting.”
I flash a smile I’m sure looks fake, halfway hoping he’ll call me out. “Definitely. It’s been good for them. They feel so alive.”
“Well, you send your folks my best, will you?”
“Of course,” I say.