Tell Jane A Story, Ghost Writer In The Sky [an ebook reader txt] 📗

You know how, months after you stopped smoking or quit drinking or dropped whatever bad habit you had, you’ll be in a situation where it haunts you?

Someone at a party will drop a pack of smokes with a lighter on top just out of your reach on a coffee table. Someone who doesn’t know about your night sweats and the AA meetings will offer you a Scotch while your wife’s out of the room. A pretty young girl will be hitch-hiking on an empty highway and you’re driving all by yourself so how would anyone ever know?

That’s how it felt when I heard Jane’s footsteps on the stairs – like seeing a signpost back to a dangerous world, the pull of a sick temptation.

Not tempting like an extra dessert; more of a hook to your innards, dragging you back to a place it was so hard to leave before.

You don’t want to go back – Jesus, you’d have to be an idiot, wouldn’t you? But it’s so tempting. You had yourself so well fooled there, had so many great justifications that let you do what you wanted.

Tell the truth – it would be a relief to have that cigarette or that drink or that hunting knife in your hand again, even if there is a slide show somewhere in your attic illustrating what it would lead to.

Old habits and situations. Bad or good, the more the old ways were part of you, the bigger the hook and the harder they pull.

So, on one hand, Jane’s footsteps on the stairs scared the crap out of me. Hell, after what she did to me and what I had to do to her, who could blame me for just freezing in my chair?

Same time, though, the idea of resuming our little game – following that signpost of sick temptation back down the path – snapped my brain into the old patterns like a sliding door connecting back into the groove.

I’d never been so sharp, or so frightened, as I was before they put Jane away. Except, maybe, now, as she bounded down the stairs in that thump-thump, thump-thump way she had.

It was one of the things about Jane that reminded me of a kid, and I loved it that Nelly did the same when she was old enough to come down the stairs herself.

But I’d just dropped Nelly off at the new after-school program. I was alone in the house, my wheelchair in front of the computer.

It must have taken more than ten seconds for Jane to get down to ground level, even bouncing down two stairs at a time. But I never moved.

The thoughts and memories jumped back under my skin and my old, sneaky, sharp self came out of some closet and laid itself back on top of me. But, on the outside, I only blinked.

Jane’s athletic legs in white denim shorts came into sight around the landing, maybe 20 feet from me doing my Jekyll and Hyde routine.

But Mr. Hyde had been called in off the bench and he was ready to play – ready to pick up the ball and say, “Okay, 3-2 for me. Want to make it best of seven?” And I was quite happy to stand aside for that previous model of myself.

Does it sound twisted to say that I got a rush out of out-smarting Jane and her demons?

Well, up yours if you’ve never had to deal with a paranoid schizo; a maniac who you also loved and made a beautiful child with and who had a heart like a giant teddy bear, ready to hug the world and make it feel better.

When the meds were working and when she took them.

And if I felt compelled to use this talent I had to ride the ragged edge of her mental disasters, if that made me feel alive and needed and special and strong and daring, and if you want to label it as co-dependent or some psycho-babble bullshit then, as I said, up yours.

Because that’s how it was and it was powerful stuff.

So, there she was, standing at the bottom of the stairs and looking at me so calmly with the dried bloodstains on her hands.

If it wasn’t for that and the fact that you could draw little cartoon pinwheels in her eyes and not make them look many more crazy than they already were, you’d swear she’d just come down from putting Nelly to bed and wanted to talk about the trouble with the car and what we were up to on the weekend.

My first thought wasn’t about how she got out or what she’d done to some poor bastard to get that much blood on her hands.

My first thought was about the loaded .38 revolver I kept in the locked drawer on my side of the bed, with the key hidden where Jane and Nelly would never find it. Especially Jane.

I thought about having that gun now and the edge it would give me against a woman who was nearly my physical match before her neurons lost the thread of the story; a woman with the mad strength to throw a grown man down the stairs and fight off the ambulance attendants and police for ten minutes.

I thought of the gun because of the bloodstains and Jane’s crazy eyes that would have made John Bloody Wayne take a step back in the streets of Dodge.

Mostly, I thought of it because she had the handle of that .38 sticking out of the top of her white shorts like a Mexican bandido.

Sticky-looking blood fingerprints on that curved pistol grip and I looked up as cool as Mr. Hyde ever did to meet the pinwheel eyes with some kind of calm.

“Don’t worry,” said Jane, “I’m back.”

END

Publication Date: 12-29-2009

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