Enlightened (15 page)

Then he watches out the front door for the monster to return for him, and he waits.

I
WOKE
with a start, not sure what had interrupted the strange dream I’d been having, but immediately I was unnerved. Jamie sat up beside me, and when he put his hand on mine, I relaxed.

“Brian, you’re in the tree house. It’s okay. You’re safe,” he reassured me, no doubt remembering the first few nights I had stayed over with him when we were younger. I had screamed loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood, terrifying not only Jamie but his parents as well. Mrs. Mayfield had called Richard and Carolyn, who had immediately come over to calm me. After the first night, Jamie’s mama had told him she didn’t think it was a good idea for me to stay again, but Jamie wouldn’t hear it. He had begged, cajoled, and whined until they let me stay again. Each night after that first one, Jamie had put his arm around me and told me where I was and that I was safe. He did this each and every time, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, his touch had always comforted me.

“I’m sorry,” I told him after a few minutes. “I just woke up a little disoriented.” He scooted closer to me as we sat side by side and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, exactly as he had done when we were younger. Making a conscious effort to slow my breathing from the panicked panting, we sat awkwardly on the inflatable mattress, shivering slightly in the evening air. Jamie grabbed the top of the blanket and pulled it back over us as I gazed out into the pitch black night, feeling unnerved, vulnerable. “Before I came to live with the Schreibers, I never felt safe, ever. There was always another kid who was bigger or an adult who was meaner. Now, one of my biggest fears is that Richard and Carolyn will find out about me,” I lowered my voice instinctively to a whisper, “about us, and they’ll send me back.” Looking up into his blue eyes, I saw my own uneasiness mirrored there.

“They wouldn’t do that,” he replied, but his tone was unconvincing. I nodded, acknowledging his hollow placating. Pulling me down with him so that my face was pressed into the warm hollow of his neck, Jamie lay down, and we held each other until the blissful darkness came over me once again.

“
L
ET
’
S
unload the gear here and walk a few yards upstream,” Mr. Mayfield said as he opened the trunk of their family car. “We have more of a chance catching a few there than farther downstream.” He pulled out three fishing poles and an old tackle box. “Brian, why don’t you grab that cooler there with the bait? Jamie, take this one with the food and such.” Closing the trunk with a snap, Jamie’s father led the way to a beautiful spot about twenty yards away under a giant tree. We laid the coolers back against the base, and Mr. Mayfield set the poles on the ground.

Watching Mr. Mayfield, it was hard to tell that he was related to Jamie. His receding brown hair was thin and straight while Jamie’s blond, wavy hair curled and kinked in the humidity. Where Jamie was thin and wiry, Mr. Mayfield was fleshier in his khaki shorts, looking kind of like an overgrown boy scout. The only similarity between the two was that Jamie had exactly inherited his father’s eyes. Mr. Mayfield’s eyes, now complemented by laugh lines, were the color and shape of Jamie’s. Soon we were sitting on the bank, our lines in the water, and Mr. Mayfield was telling us stories from when he and Mrs. Mayfield used to take Jamie camping when he was a kid. It was great to hear stories about Jamie from before we’d ever met.

“And then, after you and I got up to start breakfast, a raccoon got into the tent where your mama was sleeping,” Mr. Mayfield choked, his laughter getting the better of him for a moment. Jamie and I were laughing too. “She screamed to high heaven and tried to run out of the tent, but she… she got caught… in the flaps. Scared you something fierce ’cause you were just a little thing, but I was cracking up as I finally got her loose. Man, she didn’t talk to me for the rest of the morning for laughing at her.”

“I’m going to grab a Coke from the cooler. You want anything?” Jamie asked me, still chuckling at his father’s story. I told him I’d take a Coke too. “Dad?” He stood up and brushed off the backs of his shorts while I tried very hard not to notice the way his naked arms and his bare chest flexed as he did so. Quickly, I forced my eyes back to the water.

“I’ll take a beer. They’re kind of hidden in the bottom,” Mr. Mayfield replied, his voice a little sheepish. He sounded like a kid who had been caught with his hand in the candy jar. “Just please, don’t tell your mother.” Jamie laughed and came back a minute later with the three cans, which he then distributed. His father sighed and opened his beer.

“You might not believe this, son, but there was a time, before you were born, that your mother would have been happy to join me in a cold one. When we were first married, we’d go out drinking and dancing with your Uncle Glenn and Aunt Peg.” Jamie looked at his father with skepticism. Apparently, he couldn’t believe, much like I couldn’t, that Mrs. Mayfield ever drank or went dancing. The church didn’t allow such things, and she was such a strong-willed woman when it came to following God’s laws. Mr. Mayfield sighed, and he suddenly looked older and tired.

“When she was about seven months pregnant with you, we were coming home from your grandmother’s place upstate and a deer wandered into the road ahead of us. I tried to swerve around it, but I couldn’t, and we hit it head on.” Even now, seventeen years later, Mr. Mayfield paled at the memory. “You and your mama almost died. It was the scariest night of my whole life. But, by the grace of God, you both came out of it alive. That night, your mama decided that Jesus spared the two of you for a reason. She’s been devoted to him ever since.” Jamie’s father shook his head and tossed his empty beer can back toward the cooler. As an afterthought, he added, “It’s not that I mind her finding religion, really; I just miss the woman I married.” He looked up, realizing that he’d said that last bit out loud, maybe going a bit too far. “Jamie, son, can you grab me another beer?”

We sat quietly for a while, taking in his father’s story. I was dying to talk to Jamie alone. He had almost not been born? The thought sent a sliver of ice into my stomach, chilling me through to the bone despite the heat of the afternoon. It wasn’t until Jamie and I both got virtually simultaneous bites on our lines that the melancholy mood that had settled over the afternoon broke. Jamie’s father jumped off of the stump that he had been using as a chair to help us reel in our catches.

All in all, we had caught about half a dozen good-sized fish. Despite my protests, Mr. Mayfield insisted I take half of them home for Richard and Carolyn. I had to say that it was a pretty good day, and I felt more comfortable with Jamie’s father than I had. When I went to church with them or stayed over, it had always seemed that he and Jamie’s mother were on the same page when it came to religion. It helped to know that sometimes he struggled with it too.

A few hours later, they dropped me off with a hand full of fish and a head full of questions.

“Brian, what?” Carolyn asked, a little wary, as I brought my haul into the kitchen and set the fish in the sink. To me, they didn’t look like dinner; they just looked like dead fish in the sink. It was kind of gross, actually.

“Mr. Mayfield insisted that I take them. I didn’t want to be rude,” I told her, watching the dead eyes staring up from their stainless steel tomb.

Carolyn looked a few more times between the fish and my fairly green face and said very calmly, “So, pizza good with you for dinner?”

Chapter 8

N
INE
thirty.

It was just seven minutes later than the last time I had glanced over at my clock. Reclined back on my bed with the John Marshall paperback Jamie had lent me, I tried not to think for the hundredth time that night what they were doing. Jamie was out on a date with Emma for the first time since our intimate night in the tree house. It made me physically sick to think about them together, no matter how fucking necessary it was. Honestly, more than feeling bad for myself, I felt worse for Jamie. He hadn’t wanted me to know about the date at all and had been upset when his mother asked him about it in front of me earlier that day. We had been in the kitchen getting a soda from the fridge when she’d asked him what time he’d need the car.

I never said a word to him about it, even when he tried to reassure me. The pretense of dating her was hard enough without burdening him with my feelings. Before I left, however, he pulled me up to his room and pressed me against the back of the closed door. He held my face in his hands and pressed his lips to mine in long, slow, deep kisses. Never saying a word, he just did everything he could to make me feel his love, to make me feel how special I was to him. It really helped to quell the hot molten jealousy that burned through my veins.

That was, until I was alone with nothing to dam the flood of my own imagination.

As the numbers on my clock had changed, marking the passage of each and every minute they spent together, I tortured myself by living their date in my mind. At seven, I imagined him at her house, making small talk with her father while he waited for her to finish getting ready. Of course, when she came into the room, he would kiss her on the cheek and tell her how pretty her mousy hair looked. He would hold the door for her as they left, assuring her father that he would be a gentleman and have her home on time. I’d love to just slam the door in her face and take him on our own date.

At seven thirty, I thought about them having dinner together at some secluded, dimly lit restaurant where he would hold her hand as they decided between the pasta and the chicken. Of course Jamie and I would have been taken out and beaten for that same handholding. The injustice of it rankled me, and I looked around my room for something to distract me from the mounting anger.

The book managed to hold my attention for about an hour, at which time I imagined they’d be at the movies. Emma would probably pick something sickeningly romantic, or maybe something scary so that Jamie would have to hold and console her.
While he sat in the theater with his arms around her, trying to calm her fears, would she turn her face and kiss him?
Maybe they were making out in the back row, while I sat gripping his paperback tight enough to rip the spine.

When I glanced at the clock again, it was nearly ten. Surely the movie was over.
What would they be doing?
Jamie didn’t have to have Emma home until eleven since school was out. I tried desperately not to imagine them driving out to the bluffs.
The kissing I had learned to tolerate, but what if she talked him into something more?
I could just see her wondering if maybe he didn’t like girls because he didn’t want to feel her up. Nausea made my stomach churn at the thought of her hands under his shirt on his perfect bare chest or of her unzipping his jeans.

Jamie would do anything to protect us, to protect me.

Damn it, it was supposed to be me he was out with, not her. Not her!

I doubted that I would ever really know what happened between them because Jamie would do everything he could to spare my feelings. There was no way I would be able to sleep that night with my mind racing with all of the possible things that… girl had done with my Jamie. Setting my useless paperback book aside, I went down the hall to the bathroom and pulled the allergy medication that Carolyn used from the medicine cabinet. I’d seen her take it enough times to know that it was supposed to make you sleepy. I popped two pills from the foil wrapping and took them with a paper cup of water before returning to my room. I’d never taken anything like that before, but I just couldn’t fucking stand the pictures in my head anymore.

Lying down on my bed, I closed my eyes and dreamed of my own date with Jamie.

“
L
ET
’
S
go out,” I suggested quietly to Jamie as we finished the supper dishes. Tonight was the first time we’d seen each other in a week. He had been spending time with Emma, building the farce and adding to the charade. Their displays of affection continued to irk me, but I kept my feelings to myself; Jamie didn’t need the added stress of my discontent. The imaginary relationship, imaginary to him at least, was taking its toll. He felt deep-seated guilt for lying to her; I could hear it as he slept during our nights together. Tossing and turning, moaning and murmuring in his sleep, it was fairly obvious that his conscience, his soul, was tormented. I didn’t feel the need to add to the torment by asking if he’d felt her up yet, so mostly we avoided talking about her. Deep down, I didn’t really want to know anyway.

“What do you mean?” he asked, setting the plate he had been washing back into the hot soapy water before turning to look at me. It took me a moment to stop imagining those warm suds over his naked hip and stomach. My mind wandered briefly, as it had done so often of late, over what it would be like when we didn’t have to hide anymore. Heaven could be defined simply by taking a long shower with Jamie and not having to worry about parents or anyone else coming between us. His expectant expression caught my eye.