XI – When Jesse Opened the Notebook (and Beverly Did Not Like Randy)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 11

For the previous installment of this serial novel, visit here.

The blood was a problem. Rachel knew enough to know that, and so she prayed quietly in the bathroom, whispering with her hands clenched tightly and rocking back and forth, doing all she could to stop wondering and worrying and instead think about the words and the God she was saying them to and the baby she was saying them about. 

“Please protect him, Father, please let him be all right, please let him be in there and be okay, please, Lord, please, Father.”

What time was it? Midnight? Brandon would be up earlier than normal. Saturdays were always an early start for him; he went into the church building to help with preparations for the Sunday service. She didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want it to be real. She didn’t want to worry him, and didn’t want to bring someone else into this guilt she was suffocating underneath. This was her baby. Her womb. Her first. She had done something wrong. Been something wrong. 

Years of praying when desperate and the contours those prayers had left on her, these drove her mind back to the words, like rainwater to a creek bed. “You are my Father. Please. Please, in the Name of Jesus let this baby be all right.”

She saw her hands were shaking now. What if this made it worse? What if the stress and anxiety of this somehow made it worse for the baby, and he were already struggling?

“I can’t do this.” the tears came thick and fast now, and she couldn’t keep back the sounds of her sobbing, and Brandon, who thought it was the sound of vomiting, knocked on the door and asked if she was all right.

“No,” Rachel said, unable to say anything else, and when he opened the door and saw her face, he knew it was the truth.

The Silver Handle was a diner not far outside of town. Randy and Jesse decided to have an early dinner there. The would get a room here in Jackson and then drive the hundred miles to St. Marys and try the Pleasants County Sheriff’s Office Jesse’s father had wandered into fifty ears earlier. But now Randy was hungry, and Jesse needed some coffee and a change of setting and focused access to the sounding board Randy had become for him.

It was a long, well-lit white diner with booths running along the length of the whole front side. They were at the booth three from the entrance, Jesse already halfway through his first cup of coffee and grateful that this was one of those places that left you your own pot at the table. He was reading the seventh page of his father’s composition notebook. 

“Something good?” Randy asked, squinting a bit at Jesse, who looked rougher now that they were underneath some bright lights. The circles under his eyes were as purple as a bruise, and they stood out against his pale and clammy skin. 

“It depends on what you mean,” Jesse answered, without looking up. He went back up to the top of the page and started reading out loud. 

“The dream I had last night was like being back there, and I forgot where I was. I was looking at a creek, it was sort of like the one out in our woods, but not all the way like it. And there was a woman standing at the edge of the creek, in between some trees. I could see her because there was a clearing up to the edge, where the trees started up again and then got thicker on the other side.”

He stopped talking as their sixty-something waitress came up to the table and gave a polite half-smile to her only table at what was supposed to be her silverware-rolling hour before leaving the diner to the high school girls for the night shift. Her makeup and perfume were thick in equal measures, and Jesse shook his head a little to clear his senses. 

“Y’all ready to order?”

Randy nodded, knowing what Jesse was going to say. “I’ll have the western omelette and grits.” He flashed his most charming and winsome smile, but Beverly remained stoically uncharmed and unwon. She scribbled Randy’s order down on her pad and then looked over at Jesse. She was startled again, as she had been when they’d first come in, at how restless this handsome young man looked. The grandmother in her wanted to do something for him. 

“Just coffee,” he said, too tired to force even a smirk. 

A wave of sympathy rose up in her irritable soul. “Are you sure, honey? Why don’t you let me just bring you some toast? Or a turkey sandwich?”

“No,” Jesse said said, lifting his left hand from the tabletop in a slight “no thank you” gesture and still unable to smile. Beverly frowned, hurt a little by this sad young man’s indifference to the most compassion she’d offered anyone in a month, and shook her head as she turned to go back to the kitchen. 

“You really could stand to eat something,” Randy said in the big brother voice he was getting good at.

“I was scared of her,” Jesse said, ignoring him and continuing to read his way down the page.

“Yeah, I could tell,” Randy said. “But she’s like a hundred years old, so I think you could take her.”

Beverly dropped Randy’s grits on the table having come up from behind him. He winced.

“Just joking,” he said, and gave her another smile with all the teeth this time. She stared at him, dead behind the eyes, before turning and walking away again. 

“They’re good,” Randy said, shaking it off. 

“I was scared of her,” Jesse said repeating the last line he’d read. 

“Seriously, these grits are good,” Randy said with his mouth full.

“She had on a brown dress, brown almost the same color as the dirt up next to the creek, where grass had stopped growing and the trees threw their shade. And at first I couldn’t figure out why I was scared of her, because her dress was plain and her hair was just straight and light brown and she looked like a normal woman. But then it hit me and I tried to wake up. I tried real hard as she started to walk towards me and I heard some dead leaves and a stick crunch underneath her feet as she took her steps towards me. Because I was still seeing the back of her head. Her head was on backwards.”

Jesse looked up at Randy with his eyebrows raised. Randy had stopped eating his grits, and was holding the spoon mid-air in absolute silence. 

“She kept coming, and I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn’t wake up, even though I think in the dream I shook my head back and forth and pinched myself and told myself to wake up. But then she was right up next to me. Right in front of me. So I asked her who she was, and she turned around, turned her whole body around so that I was looking at her back, at the back of her brown dress and what should have been the back of her head. But her face was there. Only it wasn’t a face. It was nothing but a big mouth. And the teeth were yellow and sharp. And before I could scream I woke up. I couldn’t remember I was here, in Aunt Susan’s house. I wonder what it is back at home. I wonder when I’ll get caught.” 

Jesse looked up. Randy’s mouth was open and he was staring back, speechless. And then Jesse noticed Beverly to his right, holding a pitcher of water to top off Randy’s glass, staring back at him the same way. They looked at each other for a second or two before she snapped out of it and said, “I’ll get you some toast,” and swiftly turned to go back to the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Jesse said with a grim smile. 

“She didn’t refill my water,” Randy said mournfully, looking after her.

“I don’t know this person,” Jesse said, pointing down at the notebook. “The man I grew up around, the man my son calls Grandpa, he didn’t write this.” 

“Why do you say that?” Randy asked, taking up with the grits where he’d left off. 

Jesse made a face as though he’d just taken a sip of what he thought was lemonade only to find out it was bleach. “My father never talked like this. He didn’t say anything about what was going on inside his head. And I never saw him scared.”

Randy shrugged, which irritated Jesse. 

“What?”

“I only saw him the one day, so I certainly don’t know him well. But I can see the guy we spent that night with in the hospital room writing that.”

“What does that mean?”

Randy gave an “I don’t know” look, then swallowed another bite of grits and said, “He wasn’t as much of a locked box that night as it sounds like he was before. He talked about things, remember?”

Jesse didn’t have the energy, not only one cup of coffee in, to start splitting hairs with Randy over whether slightly autobiographical sports and car conversations constituted an argument against his own conception of his father, even if they were capped off by tears and Bible reading and a promise to reveal some lifelong secret. For all Jesse knew, and he truly believed this was plausible, a combination of codeine and Randy’s innate ability to make friends (Beverly Daughtry of The Silver Handle notwithstanding) were responsible for the one-night aberration in Bruce Henderson’s character. And as much as he loved the guy, he wanted to wipe that “I could be right” look off Randy’s handsomely bearded face.

“You have grits in your mustache.”

“I could be right.”

“I could kill you right now.”

“You should eat first.”

Jesse rolled his eyes and looked back at the notebook.

“This is something,” he said staring down thoughtfully. 

“What?”

“Most of this thing so far has been baseball scores and scratch paper for some math work. I’ve been trying to go slow.” Jesse didn’t explain that he was trying to pace himself, to savor the last new communication he’d ever have from his father. “But then there’s this map or something he drew.”

Jesse put the composition book on the table and turned the top towards the wall so that both of them could see it right-side up by turning their heads a bit towards the window. 

It was drawn the long way on the paper, like the sketch of the farm house. And there were circles drawn on either end of the page. In between the circles were lines, one a straighter line with a “hump” towards the middle, the other a wide “u,” dipping south and then coming back up north to the circle on the left. The top one was in dotted lines, the bottom one solid. And the top one had four letters placed along the line in no obvious pattern. Underneath the crude map was a sort of key.

A – Wallet (library card only)

B – Picture (can’t remember if I left it)

C – Pirates Hat

D – Name Carved in Door

“What is this?” Randy asked, mesmerized. 

“I think I know,” Jesse said, already knowing he was right. And already feeling electricity in his head and fingertips. 

“Listen, Hon,” he heard from behind him, and jumped. He turned to see Beverly, somehow equal parts dour and sympathetic. “I want you to take this with you. It’s on the house. Eat it later when you feel hungry. Turkey sandwich and some chips. The chips are good, we just fried them up.” She gently set the styrofoam box on the table and tapped Jesse’s right shoulder two or three times. “I hope you have a better day real soon.”

Jesse couldn’t help being touched, and especially considering the high he was on now that he knew something of what to do next, he smiled slightly but warmly.

Then came the hard rattle of Randy’s omelette-bearing ceramic plate as it smacked the table top. Beverly looked at him, all dourness now. Randy smiled apologetically.

“Hot sauce?”

Beverly bore a hole through him with her grim brown eyes. “We’re out.” She spun slowly back towards the kitchen and walked off. 

“Where were we?”

“I need hot sauce.”

“Do you want some of my turkey sandwich?”

Randy looked back at him, sad and confused about the prospect of eating an omelette without hot sauce.

Jesse winked.

Rachel tried not to fall asleep. Falling asleep would mean she was getting rest, and she didn’t deserve rest, didn’t want rest. All of the worst things we believe about ourselves, the cold lies and the lonely fears and sadness no one outside our own skins can bear with us, they gripped her chest like fingers of ice and twisted until she begged God to make it stop. But not stop with sleep. She couldn’t sleep. 

It was her fault. 

They shouldn’t be in a hospital room like this. It was supposed to be months from now, when they’d hold him and kiss him and name him and watch him and fall in love with his little lovely form and shape. They would have made memories here, first memories, his first pictures and the first time her father held him and the first time Brandon kissed his head the way he did hers, with a tender smile that also looked a little like he was a second away from cracking a joke. Brandon was always a second away from cracking a joke. But now he was down the hall talking to her parents on his cell phone, and there was no Brandon joke to make, and she would never get to hold this baby.

Please make it stop.

But not with sleep. 

The moon was still out there, the morning still an hour or two away. She focused on it for a moment. White and still bright enough to be something you could place your eyes and your mind on for a minute. The same moon that was there yesterday. The same moon from when she was little. She’d had girl baby dolls as a little girl, but not a boy one.

What color would his hair have been? 

The moon was blurry now. Her eyes were heavy and wet. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes. The moon was still out there. It was all still out there. “I’m sorry.”

Outside the room and down the hall, in a little alcove with some chairs and a window that overlooked the cityscape, Brandon hung up with Rachel’s father. And he closed his eyes hard, breathed deep, clenched his left fist. 

He had one more phone call to make.

But Randy didn’t see he had a voice mail until he and Jesse had checked into the hotel that night.