The following is a draft chapter for a novel tentatively entitled “Jeannie”. It’s a novel about someone falsely accused of murdering someone while they were in high school. They return to the town years later when they receive news that their step-father is dying.
Has anything other than bad news been associated with coffee in a styrofoam
hospital cup, Alex wondered. Sure, hospitals had their share of good news –
babies being born, test results coming back negative, cancers going into remission –
but were those events celebrated with bitter hours – old coffee poured from waiting room urns?
Alex took another harsh sip and tried to focus on the words the doctor was saying.
Not responding to treatment… inoperable… trying to keep him comfortable… The words blurred together like the scripts from countless medical dramas he had watched on t.v. He knew from the programs that this was the part of the prognosis where he was supposed to break down. To express his frustration. Shed a tear. Show some emotion of some kind.
But Alex was beyond any of that.
The man in the hospital bed in the next room was a stranger to him. Related by unfortunate marriage, not by choice. Associated with unwanted memories from his past; memories he had spent fifteen years running from. Memories he could not escape.
He realized the doctor had stopped talking and was waiting for a response of some kind. Alex looked up at him. He looked to be in his late thirties, maybe ten years older than Alex at most. Alex couldn’t place his face. He wondered if he was a native of this town. If he knew what happened all those years ago. If he knew the history of
the man he spoke with and the man he treated.
The doctor looked at Alex with the carefully balanced mixture of compassion and wisdom, an expression all doctors who dealt with the terminally ill cultivated.
Alex raised his eyebrow, indicating he hadn’t heard the question.
“Would you like to see him now?” the doctor asked again.
“Of course,” Alex replied, but he made no move to stand up. Would he like to see him? That was the question Alex still didn’t have an answer for, despite having travelled five hundred miles to be here. Five hundred miles to a town he swore he’d never come back to, to see a man he hated.
A man who had married his mother.
Alex could have pretended he couldn’t remember the exact date his mother had announced her engagement to Henry Main. Yes, he could have pretended to struggle with this date as normal people would, lost in the mass of dates that cloud people’s lives, but that would be a lie.
The truth was, only three dates were important in Alex’s life. Three dates that etched themselves permanently in Alex’s mind, like dates carved on a gravestone. Three dates, all of which had occurred in the year before he turned eighteen. Three dates Alex had been running from ever since.
The date his mother announced she intended to marry Henry Main was the first.
March 17th, 2004.
His seventeenth birthday.
Birthdays had never meant much growing up in the small, one – floor house at
the edge of the equally small town of Irving. Birthdays usually meant bacon and eggs for breakfast, and a small cake baked from scratch, all equally rare treats given his mother’s meager income.
The celebration, such as it was, was always between him and his mother. Alex had a handful of carefully selected friends in high school, but he was reluctant to bring them home, because even though times had been lean in Irving in those years, Alex’s home was leaner than most.
That evening – the evening of March 17th – was cold and rainy. Winter had lingered longer than usual, and the cold snow of February had decomposed into the cold rain of March. Alex tried to sink deeper into the thin layers of his jacket as he walked home, dodging the worst of the mud in his tennis shoes. He had gone to work after school like every other day, putting in his time at Main’s Hardware, earning what he could to help his mother keep the bank at bay.
That’s what she always said, “Keep the bank at bay”. As if it were a hungry wolf, eager to devour them.
Alex pulled his hood farther over his head and worried for the umpteenth time about whether his school books were getting wet in his bag, when he heard the car behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a pair of overly bright car lights barrelling down the gravel road three hundred yards behind him. The road here was narrow,
made even narrower by the rivers of gray mud lining the sides. The car was moving fast, probably too fast given the darkness, the rain, and the quality of the road. Alex stopped walking
and moved as far to the side of the road as he dared, before his feet would slide into the sucking mud.
The car – whoever it was on this usually untraveled stretch of road – had its bright lights on. Surely they could see him.
The car showed no sign of slowing.
Alex scanned the sides of the road, looking for a safe haven, but mud and water filled the shoulders, making them all but impassible. Less than a hundred yards away, the driver of the car had to be able to see him, shouldn’t they?
Over the rain, Alex could hear the engine scream louder, and it burst ahead even faster, like a tired horse being whipped ever onward.
Waving his arms and shouting, Alex gauged the width of the road in his head. Was there enough space? There should be if the car edged to the left even by just a fraction. The car, however, didn’t seem to be budging from its current path.
Like a deer, Alex’s eyes opened wide and his jaw dropped. His legs failed to move as the burning lights of the car sped towards him. Tears flooded down his face, mixing with the rain.
At the last second, he spun out of the way as some primal urge to survive took over. He flew sideways even as the grill of the car impacted with his book bag, sending him sprawling into the mud at the side of the road.
His world turned upside down. When everything stopped spinning, he found himself laying face first in the cold mud and water at the side of the road. His heart beat loudly in his ears, but he managed to push himself to his knees.
“Fuck!” he cursed as he saw the contents of his book bag scattered across the road and shoulder, growing soaked with the rain.
He grimaced, more scared than hurt, as he rose to his feet and gathered his text books and notebooks, wiping the gravel and mud from them. Surveying the damage, he was soaked to the bone and his jacket had a new hole in one of the elbows. His mother would be furious.
“Happy fucking birthday,” he said to himself, shivering in the cold and damp.
Fifteen minutes later, chilled to the bone and nose running like a faucet, Alex rounded the bend to his home. The light was on in the kitchen, where he knew his mother would be waiting for him, probably half drunk, but ready with a simple dinner and whatever small tokens she had managed to buy him. The thought warmed him slightly.
At first he didn’t see the car in the driveway, half hidden beside the house and cloaked in the dark and the rain. A silver Cadillac, spattered with mud. Circling the car, Alex saw wet pages from his math notebook clinging to the grill and hood, as if some scientist was madly calculating the probability of this being the same car that had
pushed him off the road.
The young man peeled one of the pages off, looking at the numbers and figures he had filled it with just da
ys ago and watching them fade as the rain washed over them. A cold rage washed over him, chilling his body even more. He tossed the soaked page to the ground. Clenching his fists, he strode to the front door.
His teenage fury readied him for anything.
Anything except his mother sitting on the lap of a thick bodied man. Drinks in hand, they were laughing and kissing.
The door slipped closed behind him, startling the pair. The two of them regarded him, and Alex could see a smile forming on the man’s face. His mother chose not to say anything about his bedraggled appearance.
She simply said, “Mr. Main will be joining us.”
Alex said nothing in reply.
“We have something to tell you,” his mother went on.
Again, Alex said nothing.
His mother and Henry Main got married three months later.
Less than three months after that, Alex would leave the town of Irving as the primary suspect in a murder investigation.
Now, over fifteen years later, his mother was dead, and he had traveled over five hundred miles to see the main who was technically his step-father on his death bed.
