Providence (27 page)

Like a corridor of heavy metal doors in a sci-fi movie, my mind was closing down, systematically shutting off reason and rationality. I was locking myself away from Jenny.

“Why can’t I get through to you?” She raised her voice. “Nothing you do is going to bring Mitchell back, but if you leave here like this,
you
might not come back.”

I rose to my feet. “You’d better go, Jenny.”

“I don’t want to go, Jack. I want you to come with me,” she said, fighting for me when I didn’t want to be fought for.

“Why don’t you stay out of my life?” I said, turning my back.

“Why are you trying so hard to hurt me? I
care
about you.”

“Maybe you’re getting the picture of who I really am. I don’t want you. I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to live with you. What I want is for you to get out of here!”

“You may think you’re proving something here, but you’re …” Jenny gasped, sobbing uncontrollably. Something inside her clicked. “You
don’t
care about me. Why can’t I get that? You don’t want me, and you don’t care what happens to us.” She said this epiphany to herself, not to me. “Why do I keep trying to make you love me when it’s clear that’s not what you want?”

Jenny wiped hot tears from her cheeks. It was my turn to say something if I wanted any chance of fixing things. But I stood there, stoic, a hardened soldier waging a battle on another front.

Jenny squeezed her eyes shut, as if trying to force the reality away, wringing down more tears. For all my lostness, I still didn’t want to see her this low. I tried to hug her.

“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “You had a chance to do something good with your life, with school, and with me. But instead, you’re throwing it all away.”

She wanted to make another point, then shook it off, going back into the house. A few minutes later, I looked up to see her walking away, suitcases in hand. She gave no last glance. She was done with me. Not over me—that would come later, but she was finished investing herself in me. Leaving would be one of the most difficult things Jenny would do, but she would do it because she was nobody’s fool. She climbed into her car.

“Jenny, I’m sorry,” I yelled to her.

She shifted the car into reverse and began backing down the driveway. I ran beside the car.

“Jenny!” I shouted, knocking on the window, “Jenny …”

She stopped the car.

“You may not know who I am to you, Jack. You may not know the tears I’ve cried over you, or the prayers I’ve prayed. But you are going to know the loss, because no one will
ever
love you as deeply as I’ve loved you.” Sadness returned to her face, her eyes bleeding tears, her mouth quivering. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but the wind stole my words. She turned the car around in the grass and was gone.

In the blink of an eye (or was it months later?), I was somewhere in New Mexico, lying under the stars, trying to sort out my life. Somewhere in Indiana slept a woman who had figured it all out in our first kiss. I wrote her a letter by the light of the campfire.

Dear Jenny,

I’m deeply sorry for how I’ve hurt you. You’re precious to me, and the thought of life without you is unfathomable. You deserve to be loved and cared for. I have been so stupid. So selfish.

Jenny, I’m lost here where I am. I need you.

Jack

What would it mean if I had truly lost Jenny? I lost more of myself in each mile that passed. I was tired of riding, tired of being. I closed my eyes.

Lord, I wish you’d show me what’s real.

I prayed for a moment of clarity, a vision in the desert. My burning bush would arrive in the person of Carlos Hernandez, a local I’d met in the Desert Rose Cantina. I made the mistake of telling him where I was camped. While I lay in the dark praying that God would change my life, Carlos Hernandez was drinking shots of tequila in town. As he sat there drinking, a plan was forming in his mind.

The next morning I awoke to the sound of a pistol’s hammer clicking in my right ear. I opened my eyes to see Carlos Hernandez and another man standing over me with guns drawn. There wasn’t a lot of talk like you see in the movies. The shadowy figure standing in front of the rising sun pointed his pistol into my chest and pulled the trigger. I felt like I’d been hit with a sledgehammer. My breath left me as adrenaline flooded panic into my brain.

The one without a name yelled, “What are you doing? You weren’t supposed to kill him!”

“Shut up,” Hernandez said, indifferent to both the living and the dead. He rifled through the pockets of my jean jacket and pulled out my keys.

“Someone’s coming,” the other man shouted. His eyes darted back and forth from the mesa to the highway.

“Not done yet.”

I looked down at my shirt filling with red blood. Hernandez kicked sand on the fire pit, stuck the key in the Harley, and gave the starter a kick.

“You just gonna leave him here?”

Carlos Hernandez didn’t say a word. He walked back to me, lowered his face over mine, burning it into my memory. His eyes were unflinching. He pressed the steel barrel of the gun to the center of my forehead, looked into my eyes, and for a second time that morning, pulled the trigger.

The next few hours or days were captured only in snapshots. Snippets of memories interrupted by blank spaces.

Being dragged by my feet.

An arm over my shoulder.

A thin woman, black hair. Bald man, older.

“It’s all right, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Sorry.” My voice, but it was unrecognizable.

Feeling sick. Immobilized.

Panic.

A woman peering back at me.
I’m in a car?

“Jim, his eyes are open! Go faster!”

“You may not know who I am … You may not know the tears I’ve cried.”

A white room. Bright lights.

“Or the prayers I’ve prayed.”

“Can you hear me?”

Eyes closed.

ER commands … skilled responses … background questions.

“What’s your name?”

“Who was driving the car?”

“He came in without identification. Single GSW to the chest …”

“No one will ever love you as much as I’ve loved you …”

“Two pints of O positive. Chest X-ray. Get him prepped for surgery.”

“Do you remember that football, Mitch?”

“Page the OR. We’re taking him up right now!”

“It’s all right, Mitch. We’re almost home.”

“Code Red! Lost the pulse! Get him on the table, now!”

“Time.”

~
T
HIRTY-ONE
~

If you’re lost you can look and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you, I’ll be waiting
Time after time.

—Cyndi Lauper

“Time after Time”

“Well, hello there. It’s good to see those eyes open. Can you tell me how you’re feeling today? You had us all worried for a while.”

“Your heart is beating better, but I’m going to need you to start talking pretty soon, or I’m not going to know what to call you. Can you tell me your name?”

No talk. Tired.

“The doctor will be in to see you later this morning. I’m going to open this shade and let a little sunlight in. Maybe this will help.”

“And here he is again. I told you his eyes opened this morning. How are you doing? We know you can get lots of sleep, but we need you to show us you can wake up and talk. Can you do that? You don’t want us to have to make up your name, do ya?”

“Where am I?” I asked. My voice crackled.

“He speaks! You’re in the Albuquerque Medical Center in New Mexico. I don’t suppose you know how you got here, do you?” They waited for an answer, but I wasn’t fast enough. “Can you tell us your name?”

“Jack. I’m Jack Clayton.”

“Welcome to Albuquerque, Jack. We were hoping you’d join us. I’m going to sit you up in bed and let you talk to us a little bit.”

Two nurses raised my bed and pulled me upright by my armpits. It felt like they were tearing muscles away from my bones. They ignored my cries, puffing pillows, propping me up.

“That’s better.”

“I was shot,” I said.

“Yes, that’s right. You were brought in a week ago. You were lucky the bullet missed your heart. You might not be here right now.”

“How did I get here?”

“Somebody saw you lying on the side of the road. A couple on vacation. Apparently you crawled to the highway. You lost a lot of blood out there.”

I raised my hand to touch my neck and felt a neck brace. “Your neck was sprained, but it’s not broken. You’re going to have to wear the brace for a while. Somebody must have been pretty upset with you.”

The bullet missed my heart.

After two weeks I was released. In what some of the hospital staff referred to as a miraculous feat, I walked out the front door of the hospital on foot. The bus terminal was four blocks away. As I lowered myself slowly onto the vinyl bus seat, I started to think about what had happened. My bike was gone, my wallet was gone, a Timex watch I’d had since I was twelve was gone, and so was a gold cross necklace Jenny had given me for Christmas.

The Albuquerque police department had interviewed me in the hospital and asked for a description of the men, but I was of little help. I described a face, a name the police thought was fake, and where I’d been camping in the desert as near as I could recall. I told them about the gun being pressed against my head, how I’d heard the cylinder turn and click. The luck of an empty chamber.

Marianne wired money to the hospital, not for my medical bills, which were astronomical, but for a bus ticket back to Overton.

“Where ya going?” the Greyhound clerk asked from behind the ticket window.

“Des Moines,” I told him, though if he’d meant in life, I was clueless.

“Eighty-one dollars and thirty-nine cents.”