Practical Jean (3 page)

And on the matter of sex, well, if expressions of horror were a badge of identity then Jean and Cheryl belonged to the same anti-sex club. Oral sex:
gross
. Doggy-style sex:
gross
. Putting it in your butt: nobody really did that except in places like New York but, anyway, just
gross
. True, in some part of Jean's mind the thought of Ash Birdy doing some of those things, the first two anyway, didn't seem
so
bad. He was seventeen and had a jutty chin and thick, scrunchable sideburns and Jean could imagine being married to Ash one day and letting him do those things if he wanted to. But that one day was meant to arrive in the future, not suddenly in Dorothy's basement. So when Ash got his fingers under the elastic of her panties and started nudging into her hairs, Jean was so startled she squirmed and pushed his hand away and Ash got mad and left.

He ignored Jean after that, just as if she'd moved away or dropped dead. Which was awful. For a while Jean went over to Cheryl's every day to cry about how rotten Ash was, and Cheryl, like a good friend, always agreed. But about four months after that night in the basement, Cheryl and Jean were alone on Cheryl's porch eating Peek Freans Digestives. And it was strange because Cheryl was acting as if she wasn't hungry. Usually she loved Digestives because even though they were cookies it seemed like they were almost good for you and you could eat as many as you wanted. But Cheryl was just fiddling with the cookie on her plate and crumbling little bits off the edge, and Jean had to ask:

“Cheryl, is something wrong?”

She said nothing, didn't even look up, so Jean knew something
was
wrong and thought maybe Cheryl was mad at her. For what she couldn't imagine, unless it was forgetting to say something nice about the turquoise barrette in Cheryl's hair. That seemed like such a petty thing to be mad about, but Jean thought that was probably it. Cheryl could be a little sensitive sometimes; it was one of the few things about Cheryl that wasn't so great.

“I forgot to say,” began Jean, “that's a really nice—”

Before she could finish Cheryl covered her face with her hands and started sobbing. Sitting across from her Jean was thinking,
Oh, for Heaven's sake. It's just a barrette!
But she leaned over and put her hand on her friend's shoulder and said, “Cheryl, I'm really sorry. It's such a pretty—”

Cheryl lifted her glistening face from her hands and bawled out, “I'm pregnant!”

Jean yanked her hand away as if it had been bitten. Even as she did it she wasn't proud of herself. And immediately Cheryl's sobbing grew and Jean felt ashamed. Her friend was so distraught, smearing her makeup with the edge of her hand, she began to reach out again. “Oh, Cheryl,” she started to say.

“It was Ash!” blurted Cheryl. “Ash did it.”

On the front lawn of the Nunleys' house there was a big weeping willow, which Jean had always considered the most beautiful kind of tree. When she heard what Cheryl said about Ash, the news didn't hit her the way the word
pregnant
had, instead it settled into her, like the feeling of becoming cold. She didn't flinch or gasp, or lash out. She simply stopped reaching for her friend, sort of froze in the moment, and turned her face toward the tree. Cheryl's crying changed from something that made Jean feel bad to something that didn't matter to her at all. It was as if Cheryl had become a strange new person, someone she'd just met. Sitting outside on the porch, staring like a doll at the willow, Jean thought back to all the times Cheryl had been so supportive and commiserated with her when Ash was treating her as if she were dead, and she decided that must have been a different Cheryl. The one beside her, the one with Ash's baby in her belly, that was somebody she didn't know. And when this new Cheryl became inconsolable, apologizing and clutching at Jean as if grasping for forgiveness, Jean stood up and walked away from her, down the steps of the porch and toward the willow. She had always loved to walk through the feathery boughs, letting them brush against her arms, and she did that as she walked toward the road, until Cheryl's crying behind her became too faint to hear.

Jean avoided Cheryl in the halls after that, and within two weeks she was gone. The Nunleys had relatives somewhere south and it was said that Cheryl had gone to live with them. One day a few months later, when there was a foot of snow on the ground and Jean was starting to think that boy Milt Divverton with the checkered shirts was kind of okay, Margy Benn rushed up to Jean after math class. She had news and she delivered it breathlessly.
Did you hear about Cheryl?
That was when Jean learned that Cheryl had had a miscarriage. It was a hard one, apparently, because the fetus was about five months along.
Some girls don't get all the way better when it happens that late
, Margy said.

When Jean got home, her mother was doing paperwork at her desk in the office she kept downstairs. She had taken off her smock and wore an old gray T-shirt, loose at the neck, and playing low on her stereo was a record by Chicago, which was her favorite band because of the horns. So she seemed more approachable than she sometimes did. Jean stood in the doorway of her mother's office waiting for the song that was playing to end, and then in the silence she repeated Margy's exact words and asked if what she'd said was true.

Marjorie glanced up at Jean and back to her papers. “Depends on what you mean by
all the way
better,” she said. She pushed back from her desk and went to the stereo, shaking her head as if with disappointment or disgust. It was a terrible idea, completely impractical, she said, for a sixteen-year-old girl to keep a baby. Marjorie flipped the record over and threaded it onto the spindle. As it started spinning again she set the needle down. “Cheryl should have aborted it months ago,” Marjorie said to a splurge of horns. “She should have aborted it when she had the chance.”

Parked in front of 242 Douglas, Jean admired the gorgeous old willow, grateful that successive owners of the Nunleys' house had never cut it down, and thought about her friends coming over on Wednesday night. Louise and Natalie would be there, certainly, and Dorothy too, she hoped; maybe Adele would drive in from the city. She was letting her gaze linger on the tree's long, slack limbs, shivering in the warm breeze that filtered in off the lake, and doing her best to avoid glimpsing the garish pink bench someone had parked beneath it—just a terrible addition—when a wave of swelling melancholy hit her. Oh . . . the sadness flooded in so strong it took her breath away. She felt her face flush and squeezed shut her eyes. All the emotion everyone had been telling her to feel for her mother, it came at Jean now. And she felt it not for her mother, but for
Cheryl
. Because Marjorie had been in awful pain and now she wasn't; what was sad about that? But Cheryl . . . Cheryl had been through something just awful, and as far as Jean knew she was still alive.

She held her hands against her face. She breathed into her palms. That moment . . . walking away . . . she relived it now and felt such shame. She had been a terrible friend to Cheryl. Despicable. In fact, in fact—it came on so full and black, this thought, like a sort of eclipse—what had she ever done for
any
of her friends? Oh . . . behind the wheel of her car Jean squeezed her face and gave a little moan. All she'd done, for years and years, was receive their support and encouragement, accept their appreciation of her art and her pleasant company. She had opened her arms and welcomed what came. She was a
taker
, that's what she was. And in return . . . she handed out thank-you cards.

This new truth, this fresh awareness, this sudden, hard bolus of insight pressed itself into Jean and she breathed slowly as it came. Eventually, and with a sense of resolution, she released her face and gripped the wheel of her car.
Jean Vale Horemarsh
, she said to herself,
you've got to do more
.

Chapter 3

A
n idea, or—what came before an idea?—a
pre
-idea, a vague and smoky intuition, was beginning to form in Jean's mind, gathering and condensing into something potentially powerful, potentially great, like a mob massing before a riot. And she was excited by it, was Jean. Because this advancing storm of perception reminded her of the feeling that unfailingly came over her in the days leading up to some breakthrough in her work, some new and deeper understanding of clay, or tool, or leaf.

She marched into the Kotemee police station, past Melissa at reception, whose wide face first lit up at the sight of her—“Hi there, Jean!”—then collapsed into woe. “I'm so sorry about your mom.”

“Don't be sorry, Melissa,” Jean said as she went. “Be glad, be glad!”

“Oh,” said Melissa. “Sure.”

As Jean continued down the hall she cradled in her hands, and kept at a precise verticality,
Mississippi Spleenwort
—three slender and towering ceramic fronds on a rectangular onyx base, entwined and reaching skyward, each one laddered on two sides by tiny, triangular leaves and looking like the backbone of some prehistoric serpent. It was a piece that she'd done years ago, that had taken seven tries, breaking five times before she'd managed to set it in the kiln, and once in mid-firing. When it was finally finished, when she'd been able to pull it out whole and gleaming, she'd given it to her mother, who had immediately set it on a dresser in the smallest of the guest bedrooms, the one that never had any guests, which had been Jean's room growing up, and left it there. It was as if her mother hadn't accepted
Mississippi Spleenwort
as a gift at all, but was merely keeping it in storage, for Jean.

Now Jean was bringing it to Andrew Jr.

“Hey, Jean!” said Suzy Felter, hanging up the phone at her desk outside of Andrew's office. Her face went long with sympathy and she started to rise, her arms spreading as if she were aiming to give Jean a hug. “How're you doing, hon?”

“Just fine, Suzy.” Jean offered her cheek to Suzy like a shield as she held
Mississippi Spleenwort
out of harm's way. “You know, Mom's not in any pain anymore.”

“That's a good way to look at it. She's at peace.”

“Well, she's dead. I think that's what matters.”

“Okay,” said Suzy, as if she was thinking about that. “By the way, have you thought about grief counseling at all?”

“Why would I think about that?”

“Oh, because grief works in mysterious ways. We in policing understand that better than most people.”

“Hmmm,” said Jean. “But you're a secretary.”

Suzy looked at the ceramic in Jean's arms as if it had appeared just then. “Pretty sculpture!”

“Thanks, it was Mom's and now I'm going to give it to Andrew Jr. Is he in?”

“He is for sure. Just in a meeting. Here, is that heavy? Do you want me to put it down somewhere while you wait?” She came toward Jean with both hands outstretched.

“No, it's probably better if I hold it.”

While she waited in one of the barely padded chairs set along the wall, next to the filing cabinets, Jean watched Suzy Felter work at her desk, answering calls and attacking her keyboard with a raptor-like efficiency Jean had once disdained, but now admired. With her bronzed hair and professional nails and twin, Eagle Scout sons, Suzy had been one of those practical people that, to Jean, seemed to have life too planned out, too squarely ordered to allow in even the slightest splinter of spontaneity and beauty. She was the sort of person who would say an impossibly difficult-to-achieve ceramic sculpture was “pretty” but would never think to buy one.

But practicality, even of the sort that Suzy represented, was no longer an evil in Jean's mind. She had come to what the French call a
rapprochement
with practicality; she finally understood it. The fact of the matter was that you could not deal with your mother's soiled sheets and bedpans and one particularly gruesome ingrown toenail, every single forsaken day for three months, without drawing upon your own practical resources—resources that you had never known existed within you, resources that you had been told all your life were entirely and shamefully absent, but that were in fact there, hidden and boiling, like something molten in the heart of a mountain that was actually a volcano ready to spew.

So that was one thing. And the other thing, the other awakening for Jean, had to do with death. Not its inevitability, which was certainly no surprise, but its utility. It was one thing as a child to witness death over and over so that it nearly became part of the everyday. It was another to see, with the wisdom of experience, what a difference it could make. The strange thing about sick or aged animals was that by the time Jean saw them they rarely revealed their pain. They were simply quiet, and death made them quieter. But humans who were suffering could express their pain in any number of ways. In the contortions of their face, their body, and their voice, in the panicked pace of their breathing, in the vicious things they could say, about a person being an oddity and a disappointment, about being not loving and not good, when you were doing your best to help them and it wasn't enough. Pain was different for humans, and so was death. Jean had seen this so clearly that last night, standing desolate by her mother's bed; one moment Marjorie was twisted in agony, and the next moment she wasn't. The purity of the effect, the sudden tranquility, was almost heartbreaking.

Suzy's professional nails began to snap and claw at her keyboard. “Jean, he's ready for you now.”

Jean hadn't seen anyone come out Andrew Jr.'s office door. “I thought he was in a meeting.”

“Well, a phone call. That's sort of a meeting.”

Inside the chief's office, which Jean still thought of as her father's and remembered from the days when she would run in as a child and drape herself in the silky flags in the corner and play with the ceremonial Colt 45 mounted on a marble plinth, Andrew Jr., heavy and square as a plinth himself, sat at his imposing chief's desk in his imposing chief's uniform staring at a computer screen. When she approached he began to rise—“Jean,” he said—and reached out his thick hand as if he were going to shake hers, as if she might be a politician or a reporter or just a regular citizen, and not his sister. She ignored it.

“Look what I brought you,” she said.

Andrew Jr. dropped his hand and stared at the sculpture, his head and body at a slight angle, like a tall gravestone dislodged by vandals. “Okay,” he said, slow and uncertain in the manner of someone presented with a dilemma.

“It was Mom's and now it's yours,” said Jean. “It's called
Mississippi Spleenwort
and it's a gift from me to you.”

He considered it at an angle for another second or two, then straightened. “Maybe that's something for Suzy's desk.”

“No, it's for you. Look, there are three fronds, and you can say they represent the three of us. Where should I put it?”

“The three of us?”

“You, me, and Welland. See? We're entwined like a family and reaching upward together.” She smiled at him with her customer smile, the one she kept on whenever and for as long as anyone browsed through her shop. “I want you to appreciate how hard this was to make,” said Jean, “and what a sweet gesture it is on my part to bring it to you as a gift, even though you barely said a word to me at the funeral.”

Andrew Jr.'s meaty face went pink with embarrassment or quiet, incomprehensible rage. “Mom just died, Jean. Not really a time for chit-chat.”

“I
know
she died. I was
there
when she died. In fact I'm
happy
she died.”

Andrew Jr. pinked up even more, if that was possible. “You can't mean that.”

“I do. Not that I didn't love her. Of course I did, but—” Jean closed her eyes and shook her head, a resetting. “You know? We'll just drop it. I don't think you'd understand. I think we'll just find a place for this and leave it at that.” She looked around, toward the wall where hung a framed and matted picture of Drew and Andrew Jr., taken the day her brother joined the force. Full uniforms on, the two men stood shoulder to shoulder, stiff and proud in the sunshine, the beaks of their caps sending hard shadows diving across their unsmiling faces. Jean looked past the picture and in the corner, by the Colt 45, saw that the end of a low bookshelf was unoccupied. She set down the ceramic with great care and admired how sweetly it caught the morning light from the window.

“There,” she said. “And if you ever want that moved, you be sure to call me and I'll come and do it. If you try I expect it would just disintegrate.”

For a moment Jean stood opposite Andrew Jr. in the middle of his office and adjusted the sleeves of her short linen jacket. They came just past her elbows and seemed to accentuate the thickness of her arms and she wished now that she had worn something else. Something more flattering. Andrew Jr. was so imposing, the way he just stood there saying nothing, just embodying a great, hulking, tree-like masculinity that he was probably proud of but that was really just a shell to keep out anything true and real and meaningful. Any other brother would have hugged his sister just then, to express their shared sense of loss, or to thank her for such a lovely gift, but he just stood there. Hulking and rooted. Like a great, giant, pink-faced redwood.

“Actually, there was one thing I was hoping you could do for me,” said Jean. She fairly flung her hands to her sides in an effort to leave her sleeves alone. “I was hoping that you could track down Cheryl Nunley for me. She wasn't at the funeral and I haven't heard from her in years and years.”

Andrew Jr. started to move toward his desk. “Who's Cheryl Nunley?”

“Cheryl Nunley,” Jean repeated. “My very best friend from high school.” She smoothed the fabric of her skirt around her hips. “You once tried to spy on her when she was going to the bathroom.”

Andrew Jr. dropped his bulk into his leather chief's chair. “I never did any such thing,” he said. “And that's a lock!” He started to roll away from her, in the direction of his computer screen. “Anyway, how and why should I be trying to track this woman down?”

“You're the chief of police!” exclaimed Jean. “I'm your sister! Add it up!”

He hunched over his keyboard and began to type single-fingered, punching down on the letters like a hydraulic press. “I can't use official police resources for personal business.”

Jean gripped the sides of her head. “I have never once asked for a favor from you. I took care of Mother for three months with no word of thanks. And now I ask for one small thing and you say no. What is the point of enduring life in a family of policemen if you can't, one day, have somebody found when you need to?”

Perhaps it was the note of torment in her voice, perhaps the mention of their mother and all Jean had done for her, but Andrew Jr. paused in his key punching and half turned. “I said I couldn't do it. I didn't say it wasn't doable. Go ask Welland. I'm sure he'd jump at the opportunity.”

“Welland,” said Jean, because that was all that really needed to be said.

“He's always pestering me for some real police work. Tell him I assigned him to this.” Andrew Jr. grinned. “Tell him I ‘put him on the case.'”

“Can he use the equipment?”

“What equipment?”

“I don't know!” exclaimed Jean. “I just assumed there'd be equipment involved. Welland will want to be able to use the equipment . . . What?”

At his keyboard, Andrew Jr. was staring at the ceiling and shaking his head. “I'm trying to imagine what sort of equipment that would be.”

“You know . . .” Jean began, her voice quivering.

“The ‘Person-Finding equipment'?”

“Just never mind.” She wheeled, marched to the bookshelf, and carefully picked up
Mississippi Spleenwort
.

“This goes to Welland,” she said.

Welland's office resided on the other side of the police station, where his single window faced Tucker's Car Wash and the scrub brush beyond. He had no secretary, and no flags, and the picture on his wall showed a uniformed Welland on his first day, standing and smiling next to the staff sergeant; Chief Horemarsh had been otherwise engaged. Welland was taller than Andrew Jr. and not as bulky, and since he had been in the force practically as long as his brother it might have been assumed that he would be just as advanced in his policing career. But although Welland possessed a handsome approachability that made him good for charity calendars and traffic safety presentations, it was plain to anyone who knew both Horemarsh brothers which one was better suited to the hard knuckle work.

“Really?” said Welland.

“He said, ‘Tell him he's in charge of the case, and tell him I said so.'”

When Jean had walked in, Welland had been busy calling local musical groups to see if he could interest one in performing at the annual Police-Fire-Library Picnic to be held in three weeks in Corkin Park. He had no budget to pay them, he said, but he had managed to negotiate the loan of a flatbed trailer they could use as a stage. So far so good; the stumbling block seemed to be that the group needed to supply its own generator for the power, and most groups appeared not to own one. Until Jean had walked in, Welland told her, his biggest concern had been where to track down a fairgrounds band that could play Carrie Underwood, Garth Brooks, and a little Elvis Presley, and also happened to have in their back pocket a six-horsepower, three-thousand-watt, diesel Briggs & Stratton.

But now Welland was up and pacing in a tight space defined by his desk, the wall behind, the filing cabinet he had within reach of his chair, and the coat stand in the corner near the door. As he paced, he shoved a hand down his back, inside the collar of his blue policeman's shirt, scratching and clawing at God knew what.