ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
A Short Story: Part 1
The week I turned eighteen, I lost my virginity. There were so many complications around that story that it was not half the triumph it was supposed to be, and there was no one to tell it too. Isaac Weaver the Man was remarkably unchanged from Isaac Weaver the virgin.
A week later I met Ef. And that was when I began to change.
Efrem was more than content to run my life for me. He was a drama major at the time, and minored in filling my life with terrors, pushing me onto the stage for the first time, bossing me to into choir, daring me to go to Mc.Cleiss University and streak South Quad, forcing me to open mike night. He accepted me, and no one but Jinny had ever done that. But unlike Jinny, he did not accept me remaining what I was when I could be more.
That’s a little sentimental, isn’t it? Remind me to never tell him that.
What I did not know about Ef, and would not learn for a long, time was how patient he could be. I did not know that he was sitting around hatching his plans, like a dragon on a nest of serpent eggs.
Efrem said there was no way I could not know his friends. They came around all the time, the guys he had gone to high school with some of who still lived in town. All I knew was that they were Black, and the night I met them I went to my bedroom and dressed in my hippest clothes, which were not hip at all, and stood in the mirror posing and saying things like, “What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?” over and over again, looking for the right tone, turning this way and that, going, “Sho nuff. “ until Efrem walked in right in the middle of my cool and asked me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m getting ready,” I said, clearing my throat, “to meet your friends.”
“We went to Catholic school and grew up in the Melbourne,” Efrem said. “Not Compton. Come the fuck on and quit being senile.”
It was just Chuck and Shawn, and over the course of the night I began to understand what Efrem meant. They brought up some other friend of theirs: Gene who was going to school down in North Carolina now, and Arlinghton. I began to understand that, though Black people might have closer ties that white people, that didn’t make them all alike or all friends or all feel at home with each other. They really were not Compton, or Friday or even The Cosby Show. Efrem was Catholic and had grown up with white people when most Blacks around here were Baptists and didn’t know anything about whites. Shawn’s mom was white, and so was Chuck’s best friend was. His mom was half Irish.
This meeting was important because I was introduced to a people who really were outcast from an outcast culture and had to find their own way twice over. That made them like me.
Jinny went away to the Dakotas for the summer with her family, and this was when Efrem told me, “Grow a beard. Don’t ask questions. Just do it.”
I did. I thought it looked distinguished. I told Ef this. He said nothing.
One day after the beard had grown a good deal he came into the bookstore and told me, “I need to talk to Mr. Weaver.” A few minutes later he came out from my father’s office and said, “We’re going to the mall.”
We went to Wal-Mart and Target first, buying up clothes left and right. Ef always holding them up against me and nodding clinically. Then, in the mall, he dared to go inside of Abercrombie. Shawn and Chuck were with us, and the three of them marched me through stores buying up clothes and then I said, “What’s going on? Where’s all this money coming from?”
“Your dad,” Efrem said, smiling sweetly.
In one day we went through the malls, then to the eyeglasses in an hour place.
“Stick these on,” Efrem ordered.
I switched glasses.
“Malcolm X glasses,” Chuck said. “You look distinguished as fuck.”
They drove me up south of Melbourne to a place that was very... Black. Efrem rattled on the door. A guy black as night with an afro and a pick sticking out of his head answered.
“Here he is,” Efrem said.
I was a little terrified. It smelled like chicken and grease in the house. The guy murmured something and offered his fist.
“This is Maxwell,” said Efrem. “What he is telling you to do,” Efrem translated as if we were in another country, “is to also make a fist and hit the bottom of your fist to the top of his. Hitting the rock.”
I felt like I was in another country.
“Niggah what’s up!” a wiry guy hopped out a seat as Maxwell sat me down in mine.
“This is Gene,” Efrem told me. “Gene, this is Isaac.”
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“You’re about to look like you should,” Efrem told me.
I watched this Black guy take off all my hair and I did not protest. I had this sort of faith that Black people could make me look good. And I wanted to look good.
“Dude,” Gene said when it was over, “you look like Malcolm X.”
“Only white,” Maxwell said.
“Or Denzel as Malcolm X,” Shawn said. “How you like that? You look like Denzel?”
“Only white,” Maxwell repeated.
I stayed the night at Ef’s. I tried on the clothes by myself and came down the hall from his bathroom to his bedroom, walking awkwardly.
“How do I look?” I asked him.
“Go look at yourself.” Efrem closed his door so I could look into his floor length mirror.
I shook my head.
“It’s you, Isaac,” he said. “It really is you.”
I turned around, running a hand over my scalp, the sides were shaved real low and I liked the way I looked. I actually thought, “This guy is kind of good looking.”
“Can you believe it?” I demanded.
Ef nodded, and spreading himself out across his bed explained, “White people are like Mr. Potato heads. You just change the hair and the glasses and you get a whole other person.”
“Shit” Isaac grunts at the table.
“Here, give it to me,” Efrem sticks out his hand.
Isaac hands him the knotted Saint Christopher medallion and Efrem’s fingers begin working through it.
“You were always better with knots than I am,” Isaac said. “Jinny got me that.”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d gotten it for yourself,” Efrem frowned over the knot. “This is awful. It’s like it’s got a mind of its own.”
“I think it likes to knot up because I’m Jewish.”
“Could be,” Efrem said, and continued unknotting the chain. “Why did Jinny get it for you.”
“I said I wanted one. I don’t know,” Isaac shrugged. “Dad’s middle name is Christopher. Go fig. A Jewish Christopher. But he had a Saint Christopher medallion. A girlfriend got it for him, and he would talk about Saint Christopher a lot, and I was just thinking I want one too. So I told Jinny, and she got me one, and I knot it up all the time. I wish Jews had saints.”
“You could get an Old Testament prophet or something. You all should start making Moses medallions… Ah… Ah!” Efrem looked pleased, and handed back the chain. “There you go.”
Isaac slipped it over his neck, and the medallion fell under his shirt. Now tt was invisible and all you could see was the thick hemp choker he wore all the time with the beads in it.
“I have never been to the cemetery to visit my mother,” Isaac said suddenly. “I didn’t think about that until tonight. You ever go see your dad?”
Efrem shook his head, “I didn’t really want to see him that much when he was alive.”
“Well, I never went to the cemetery to visit my mom.”
“Do you want to?” Efrem added. “I mean, I’ll go with you.”
“I don’t think I want to go,” Isaac said. “She’s dead. She’s not anymore at the cemetery than she is right here. She’s probably more right here in my room, in this house than any place else.”
They were both quiet a while and then Isaac said, “Catholics believe if you kill yourself you go to hell, right?”
Efrem looked at him strangely.
“I mean, don’t they?” said Isaac.
“Catholics don’t know what they believe,” Efrem said. “But yeah, I think that’s what the party line is.”
“Whaddo you believe?”
“Isaac, I’m not dead. I don’t know.”
“But do you think my mom went to hell?... And your dad?”
“What’s hell? Jews don’t even have hell. What does hell mean? What’s the point in talking about going to heaven and hell when no one knows anything about either one? Not much in my view. People in one are sad. People in the other one are happy. God’s in one, and he’s not supposed to be in the other. But I think he’s everywhere and really heaven or hell just depends on how you feel about it.”
Isaac looked up at his friend, as if he were waking up.
“I mean,” Efrem said, warming up, “think about this: Some people love Rhodes. I love that we live right on the beach. We can dip our feet in good old Erie anytime we want to. We can take a boat on the water and look at the stars. I think it’s lovely. Some people say, ‘I hate Rhodes. I hate Saint Anne County. It’s a hell hole.’ It’s the same place but for some people it’s heaven, and for other people it’s hell and if you gave them everything on a silver platter well then they’d still think life was hell, wouldn’t they?”
“I never thought about it like that,” said Isaac.
“Like, there were days when I hated this bookstore. Because I felt alone and cold. And then some days it was my retreat because I was too alone and cold to be anywhere else. But now I’m in it with you, or Jinny or Cile or someone I care about and it’s happy for me. I like being here.”
“Yeah, I think that’s what I mean,” Efrem said.
Isaac sighed heavily. Efrem looked at his friend, his green dragon eyes twinkling and though, if he were smoking the smoke would have rushed out his nostrils right now, like soot from a steamboat.
“I don’t know why I bother talking to you, Mister I Know Everything In The World There is To Know,” Anne said to her cousin.
“I don’t know why you do either,” Jayson Laujinesse said. “Not about stuff like that.”
“The problem with you,” Anne O’Muil told him, as she got up from the kitchen table and navigated Jinny, who was on the phone with Cecile, “is you don’t believe in anything you can’t touch or see.”
“You think that’s a problem, huh?” said Jayson.
“Well,” said Anne, opening the refrigerator, and taking out the orange juice. “Since you can’t see and can’t touch most things that exist, then yeah--it’s a problem.” she poured herself a glass. “You want some?”
“Sure,” Jayson said. “And you cannot get me to believe that you saw the Headless Woman on the Parkway--”
“She was right outside of Dennis near Mud Brook.,” Anne declared, sitting down and handing him a glass.
“When did you see her?”
“Last Halloween like a told you, nimrod--”
“Anne, would you keep it down,” Jinny said.
Anne nodded to her sister talking on the phone, “I was with Sheila Isherwood and Suzanne Stanley, and all of a sudden we see this woman in a white dress walking across the road. Everything’s so black out there you know. And her dress is so white, from the headlights I guess. Well we didn’t know she was the Headless Woman yet—”
“I would think that the absence of a head might be the first tip--”
“She had a head. Just listen.”
“Cause we thought she lived further out, Or died further out. Existed further out. Whatever dead people do.
“Anyway, we stop the car to let her cross. She’s so pretty,” Anne says, “And she looks at us, and the way some old men tip their hats, that’s when this bitch just rips her head off and sticks it back on.”
“You’re lying.”
“I sure in the shit am not,” Anne swore, and drank down her orange juice.
When Jinny was off the phone, Anne said, “Tell Jayson the story of the Headless Woman on the Parkway.”
“Jayson knows that story,” Jinny said.
“No he doesn’t. Tell him.”
Jinny sighed, sounding much put upon and then she began. “There was this woman—”
“About fifty years ago,” Anne added.
Jinny eyed her sister, and then went on. “And she married this army colonel, and they came and bought a house near what’s the Parkway now. Only then it was just Anderson Road. Anyway this woman got pregnant and had a baby and her husband would never come home, and then one night she got a phone call from her husband. He was at his mistress’s house and he said he wasn’t coming back. Well, he had the car, so she couldn’t drive and the woman was so distracted she picked up her baby and decided to run down the road to the house where her husband was. But she ran out into the road and was killed.”
“That is so sad,” Anne said, softly.
“Splat, like a tomato,” Jayson said.
“You are such an ass,” Anne said.
“It was thump like a guillotine,” Jinny said, unfazed. “Her head was knocked clean off. They say that sometimes you can hear the baby crying.”
There was a knock on the door, and then, without waiting for an answer, Isaac and Efrem came into the house, hands in their pockets, scarves wrapped around their necks, “Happy Halloween, all.” Isaac said.
“Ef, you know about the Headless Woman?” Anne said.
“Um hum,” he nodded. “The baby cries sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen it?” Jayson said.
Efrem shook his head.
“See,” Jayson said.
“So,” Anne said. “Ef’s never seen the Eiffel Tower either. Doesn’t mean it’s not real.
“So I’m supposed to believe this woman lives on the Parkway.”
“Lives or dies or whatever ghosts do,” Anne said, “Hey look, you don’t have to believe. Don’t believe it. Fine with me. I gotta costume to put on,” Anne said, leaving the kitchen.
“So you guys wanna go by the Headless Woman on Anderson Road tonight?” Jinny said.
“No thanks,” Efrem said. “I’m not all about headless people.”
“Ditto here.” Isaac said. “Party tonight at Saint Clare’s. Drink till your head falls off. Skip classes tomorrow. Headless Women are not in my plans at all.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts, Isaac?” said Jayson, immediately sorry when he remembered Isaac’s mother was dead.
Isaac just laughed it off, and Jayson laughed too, both pretending Isaac’s dead mother hadn’t come into both of their minds.
“Lives or dies or whatever ghosts do,” right Anne? Why do ghost always stay in the same place where they died? Because they don’t want to move on? No. Because we haven’t let them. We don’t know how to.
“Lives or dies or whatever ghosts do…”
The same way people are living, ghost are always dying. They’re always in the moment they went. They’re stuck in the past and so are we. The Headless Woman is always taking her head off. You don’t need to tell me.
Sometimes I’m still nine years old. For two years I stayed nine. If I hadn’t have passed my classes so well people would have thought I was retarded because I didn’t talk. And I was retarded. I mean I had slowed. I hadn’t just slowed. I had stopped.
It’s like a scab. And sometimes it’s like this terror that rises and rises and rises like an endless scream and I just cannot get a hold of it. Sometimes I feel frozen and afraid, and I think that I am all alone and completely disconnected. Sometimes I have wanted to die. I remember being just a little kid and thinking about all the ways I could kill myself. I just wanted to stop this suffering. I didn’t even want to feel better. I just didn’t want to feel.
Sometimes I stop in and stare at this room I used to love. This place used to be a general store, and this room used to be a storeroom back when Aramy Street was a dirt road. But by the time my parents lived in it it was just a large bedroom overlooking Aramy. It was the master bedroom and it had beautiful curtains and a bed with soft off white colors, and there was this vanity with all these bottles of perfume and it smelled like my mom. For years it smelled like her after she was gone.
I can still see it. I can still remember waking up from my nap and wondering what was on the floor. Being fascinated and frightened and innocent and watching. Like cough syrup or like sauce as the red trailed out of the bedroom. And me going closer and closer. It was the last time I was okay. I remember walking into that room. Sometimes I can still see... what you couldn’t see. Jesus Christ, she didn’t even have a face. I just backed away. I kept shaking my head and then I went to my room and curled up like a fetus and just trembled until Dad came home. He found Mom before he found me, and he tried to get me to talk. He tried to help but he could hardly help himself in those years.
Sometimes I just want to hold onto somebody and cry. I want to just bawl out everything and get rid of it. I want to ask Ef, “Don’t you feel this way?” I want to confess it to him because he knows about it and for some reason I just want him to take it all away and make it better.
Jayson Laujinesse thinks he knows everything. Anne is right. She’s right when she says watching sunrises will keep you sane. If I watched sunrises and sunsets I’d know when it was time to turn the light on. I wouldn’t be standing here stuck in my head waiting for someone to save me. I don’t have to go to the cemetery to be with my mother. I’ve always known that. That’s why I never go. She’s right here. Her blood and her brains are polished in the floor. And I don’t have to go to Anderson Parkway to meet a ghost, I’ve got my own headless woman right here on 4516 Aramy Street.
The week I turned eighteen, I lost my virginity. There were so many complications around that story that it was not half the triumph it was supposed to be, and there was no one to tell it too. Isaac Weaver the Man was remarkably unchanged from Isaac Weaver the virgin.
A week later I met Ef. And that was when I began to change.
Efrem was more than content to run my life for me. He was a drama major at the time, and minored in filling my life with terrors, pushing me onto the stage for the first time, bossing me to into choir, daring me to go to Mc.Cleiss University and streak South Quad, forcing me to open mike night. He accepted me, and no one but Jinny had ever done that. But unlike Jinny, he did not accept me remaining what I was when I could be more.
That’s a little sentimental, isn’t it? Remind me to never tell him that.
What I did not know about Ef, and would not learn for a long, time was how patient he could be. I did not know that he was sitting around hatching his plans, like a dragon on a nest of serpent eggs.
Efrem said there was no way I could not know his friends. They came around all the time, the guys he had gone to high school with some of who still lived in town. All I knew was that they were Black, and the night I met them I went to my bedroom and dressed in my hippest clothes, which were not hip at all, and stood in the mirror posing and saying things like, “What’s up? What’s up? What’s up?” over and over again, looking for the right tone, turning this way and that, going, “Sho nuff. “ until Efrem walked in right in the middle of my cool and asked me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m getting ready,” I said, clearing my throat, “to meet your friends.”
“We went to Catholic school and grew up in the Melbourne,” Efrem said. “Not Compton. Come the fuck on and quit being senile.”
It was just Chuck and Shawn, and over the course of the night I began to understand what Efrem meant. They brought up some other friend of theirs: Gene who was going to school down in North Carolina now, and Arlinghton. I began to understand that, though Black people might have closer ties that white people, that didn’t make them all alike or all friends or all feel at home with each other. They really were not Compton, or Friday or even The Cosby Show. Efrem was Catholic and had grown up with white people when most Blacks around here were Baptists and didn’t know anything about whites. Shawn’s mom was white, and so was Chuck’s best friend was. His mom was half Irish.
This meeting was important because I was introduced to a people who really were outcast from an outcast culture and had to find their own way twice over. That made them like me.
Jinny went away to the Dakotas for the summer with her family, and this was when Efrem told me, “Grow a beard. Don’t ask questions. Just do it.”
I did. I thought it looked distinguished. I told Ef this. He said nothing.
One day after the beard had grown a good deal he came into the bookstore and told me, “I need to talk to Mr. Weaver.” A few minutes later he came out from my father’s office and said, “We’re going to the mall.”
We went to Wal-Mart and Target first, buying up clothes left and right. Ef always holding them up against me and nodding clinically. Then, in the mall, he dared to go inside of Abercrombie. Shawn and Chuck were with us, and the three of them marched me through stores buying up clothes and then I said, “What’s going on? Where’s all this money coming from?”
“Your dad,” Efrem said, smiling sweetly.
In one day we went through the malls, then to the eyeglasses in an hour place.
“Stick these on,” Efrem ordered.
I switched glasses.
“Malcolm X glasses,” Chuck said. “You look distinguished as fuck.”
They drove me up south of Melbourne to a place that was very... Black. Efrem rattled on the door. A guy black as night with an afro and a pick sticking out of his head answered.
“Here he is,” Efrem said.
I was a little terrified. It smelled like chicken and grease in the house. The guy murmured something and offered his fist.
“This is Maxwell,” said Efrem. “What he is telling you to do,” Efrem translated as if we were in another country, “is to also make a fist and hit the bottom of your fist to the top of his. Hitting the rock.”
I felt like I was in another country.
“Niggah what’s up!” a wiry guy hopped out a seat as Maxwell sat me down in mine.
“This is Gene,” Efrem told me. “Gene, this is Isaac.”
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“You’re about to look like you should,” Efrem told me.
I watched this Black guy take off all my hair and I did not protest. I had this sort of faith that Black people could make me look good. And I wanted to look good.
“Dude,” Gene said when it was over, “you look like Malcolm X.”
“Only white,” Maxwell said.
“Or Denzel as Malcolm X,” Shawn said. “How you like that? You look like Denzel?”
“Only white,” Maxwell repeated.
I stayed the night at Ef’s. I tried on the clothes by myself and came down the hall from his bathroom to his bedroom, walking awkwardly.
“How do I look?” I asked him.
“Go look at yourself.” Efrem closed his door so I could look into his floor length mirror.
I shook my head.
“It’s you, Isaac,” he said. “It really is you.”
I turned around, running a hand over my scalp, the sides were shaved real low and I liked the way I looked. I actually thought, “This guy is kind of good looking.”
“Can you believe it?” I demanded.
Ef nodded, and spreading himself out across his bed explained, “White people are like Mr. Potato heads. You just change the hair and the glasses and you get a whole other person.”
“Shit” Isaac grunts at the table.
“Here, give it to me,” Efrem sticks out his hand.
Isaac hands him the knotted Saint Christopher medallion and Efrem’s fingers begin working through it.
“You were always better with knots than I am,” Isaac said. “Jinny got me that.”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d gotten it for yourself,” Efrem frowned over the knot. “This is awful. It’s like it’s got a mind of its own.”
“I think it likes to knot up because I’m Jewish.”
“Could be,” Efrem said, and continued unknotting the chain. “Why did Jinny get it for you.”
“I said I wanted one. I don’t know,” Isaac shrugged. “Dad’s middle name is Christopher. Go fig. A Jewish Christopher. But he had a Saint Christopher medallion. A girlfriend got it for him, and he would talk about Saint Christopher a lot, and I was just thinking I want one too. So I told Jinny, and she got me one, and I knot it up all the time. I wish Jews had saints.”
“You could get an Old Testament prophet or something. You all should start making Moses medallions… Ah… Ah!” Efrem looked pleased, and handed back the chain. “There you go.”
Isaac slipped it over his neck, and the medallion fell under his shirt. Now tt was invisible and all you could see was the thick hemp choker he wore all the time with the beads in it.
“I have never been to the cemetery to visit my mother,” Isaac said suddenly. “I didn’t think about that until tonight. You ever go see your dad?”
Efrem shook his head, “I didn’t really want to see him that much when he was alive.”
“Well, I never went to the cemetery to visit my mom.”
“Do you want to?” Efrem added. “I mean, I’ll go with you.”
“I don’t think I want to go,” Isaac said. “She’s dead. She’s not anymore at the cemetery than she is right here. She’s probably more right here in my room, in this house than any place else.”
They were both quiet a while and then Isaac said, “Catholics believe if you kill yourself you go to hell, right?”
Efrem looked at him strangely.
“I mean, don’t they?” said Isaac.
“Catholics don’t know what they believe,” Efrem said. “But yeah, I think that’s what the party line is.”
“Whaddo you believe?”
“Isaac, I’m not dead. I don’t know.”
“But do you think my mom went to hell?... And your dad?”
“What’s hell? Jews don’t even have hell. What does hell mean? What’s the point in talking about going to heaven and hell when no one knows anything about either one? Not much in my view. People in one are sad. People in the other one are happy. God’s in one, and he’s not supposed to be in the other. But I think he’s everywhere and really heaven or hell just depends on how you feel about it.”
Isaac looked up at his friend, as if he were waking up.
“I mean,” Efrem said, warming up, “think about this: Some people love Rhodes. I love that we live right on the beach. We can dip our feet in good old Erie anytime we want to. We can take a boat on the water and look at the stars. I think it’s lovely. Some people say, ‘I hate Rhodes. I hate Saint Anne County. It’s a hell hole.’ It’s the same place but for some people it’s heaven, and for other people it’s hell and if you gave them everything on a silver platter well then they’d still think life was hell, wouldn’t they?”
“I never thought about it like that,” said Isaac.
“Like, there were days when I hated this bookstore. Because I felt alone and cold. And then some days it was my retreat because I was too alone and cold to be anywhere else. But now I’m in it with you, or Jinny or Cile or someone I care about and it’s happy for me. I like being here.”
“Yeah, I think that’s what I mean,” Efrem said.
Isaac sighed heavily. Efrem looked at his friend, his green dragon eyes twinkling and though, if he were smoking the smoke would have rushed out his nostrils right now, like soot from a steamboat.
“I don’t know why I bother talking to you, Mister I Know Everything In The World There is To Know,” Anne said to her cousin.
“I don’t know why you do either,” Jayson Laujinesse said. “Not about stuff like that.”
“The problem with you,” Anne O’Muil told him, as she got up from the kitchen table and navigated Jinny, who was on the phone with Cecile, “is you don’t believe in anything you can’t touch or see.”
“You think that’s a problem, huh?” said Jayson.
“Well,” said Anne, opening the refrigerator, and taking out the orange juice. “Since you can’t see and can’t touch most things that exist, then yeah--it’s a problem.” she poured herself a glass. “You want some?”
“Sure,” Jayson said. “And you cannot get me to believe that you saw the Headless Woman on the Parkway--”
“She was right outside of Dennis near Mud Brook.,” Anne declared, sitting down and handing him a glass.
“When did you see her?”
“Last Halloween like a told you, nimrod--”
“Anne, would you keep it down,” Jinny said.
Anne nodded to her sister talking on the phone, “I was with Sheila Isherwood and Suzanne Stanley, and all of a sudden we see this woman in a white dress walking across the road. Everything’s so black out there you know. And her dress is so white, from the headlights I guess. Well we didn’t know she was the Headless Woman yet—”
“I would think that the absence of a head might be the first tip--”
“She had a head. Just listen.”
“Cause we thought she lived further out, Or died further out. Existed further out. Whatever dead people do.
“Anyway, we stop the car to let her cross. She’s so pretty,” Anne says, “And she looks at us, and the way some old men tip their hats, that’s when this bitch just rips her head off and sticks it back on.”
“You’re lying.”
“I sure in the shit am not,” Anne swore, and drank down her orange juice.
When Jinny was off the phone, Anne said, “Tell Jayson the story of the Headless Woman on the Parkway.”
“Jayson knows that story,” Jinny said.
“No he doesn’t. Tell him.”
Jinny sighed, sounding much put upon and then she began. “There was this woman—”
“About fifty years ago,” Anne added.
Jinny eyed her sister, and then went on. “And she married this army colonel, and they came and bought a house near what’s the Parkway now. Only then it was just Anderson Road. Anyway this woman got pregnant and had a baby and her husband would never come home, and then one night she got a phone call from her husband. He was at his mistress’s house and he said he wasn’t coming back. Well, he had the car, so she couldn’t drive and the woman was so distracted she picked up her baby and decided to run down the road to the house where her husband was. But she ran out into the road and was killed.”
“That is so sad,” Anne said, softly.
“Splat, like a tomato,” Jayson said.
“You are such an ass,” Anne said.
“It was thump like a guillotine,” Jinny said, unfazed. “Her head was knocked clean off. They say that sometimes you can hear the baby crying.”
There was a knock on the door, and then, without waiting for an answer, Isaac and Efrem came into the house, hands in their pockets, scarves wrapped around their necks, “Happy Halloween, all.” Isaac said.
“Ef, you know about the Headless Woman?” Anne said.
“Um hum,” he nodded. “The baby cries sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen it?” Jayson said.
Efrem shook his head.
“See,” Jayson said.
“So,” Anne said. “Ef’s never seen the Eiffel Tower either. Doesn’t mean it’s not real.
“So I’m supposed to believe this woman lives on the Parkway.”
“Lives or dies or whatever ghosts do,” Anne said, “Hey look, you don’t have to believe. Don’t believe it. Fine with me. I gotta costume to put on,” Anne said, leaving the kitchen.
“So you guys wanna go by the Headless Woman on Anderson Road tonight?” Jinny said.
“No thanks,” Efrem said. “I’m not all about headless people.”
“Ditto here.” Isaac said. “Party tonight at Saint Clare’s. Drink till your head falls off. Skip classes tomorrow. Headless Women are not in my plans at all.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts, Isaac?” said Jayson, immediately sorry when he remembered Isaac’s mother was dead.
Isaac just laughed it off, and Jayson laughed too, both pretending Isaac’s dead mother hadn’t come into both of their minds.
“Lives or dies or whatever ghosts do,” right Anne? Why do ghost always stay in the same place where they died? Because they don’t want to move on? No. Because we haven’t let them. We don’t know how to.
“Lives or dies or whatever ghosts do…”
The same way people are living, ghost are always dying. They’re always in the moment they went. They’re stuck in the past and so are we. The Headless Woman is always taking her head off. You don’t need to tell me.
Sometimes I’m still nine years old. For two years I stayed nine. If I hadn’t have passed my classes so well people would have thought I was retarded because I didn’t talk. And I was retarded. I mean I had slowed. I hadn’t just slowed. I had stopped.
It’s like a scab. And sometimes it’s like this terror that rises and rises and rises like an endless scream and I just cannot get a hold of it. Sometimes I feel frozen and afraid, and I think that I am all alone and completely disconnected. Sometimes I have wanted to die. I remember being just a little kid and thinking about all the ways I could kill myself. I just wanted to stop this suffering. I didn’t even want to feel better. I just didn’t want to feel.
Sometimes I stop in and stare at this room I used to love. This place used to be a general store, and this room used to be a storeroom back when Aramy Street was a dirt road. But by the time my parents lived in it it was just a large bedroom overlooking Aramy. It was the master bedroom and it had beautiful curtains and a bed with soft off white colors, and there was this vanity with all these bottles of perfume and it smelled like my mom. For years it smelled like her after she was gone.
I can still see it. I can still remember waking up from my nap and wondering what was on the floor. Being fascinated and frightened and innocent and watching. Like cough syrup or like sauce as the red trailed out of the bedroom. And me going closer and closer. It was the last time I was okay. I remember walking into that room. Sometimes I can still see... what you couldn’t see. Jesus Christ, she didn’t even have a face. I just backed away. I kept shaking my head and then I went to my room and curled up like a fetus and just trembled until Dad came home. He found Mom before he found me, and he tried to get me to talk. He tried to help but he could hardly help himself in those years.
Sometimes I just want to hold onto somebody and cry. I want to just bawl out everything and get rid of it. I want to ask Ef, “Don’t you feel this way?” I want to confess it to him because he knows about it and for some reason I just want him to take it all away and make it better.
Jayson Laujinesse thinks he knows everything. Anne is right. She’s right when she says watching sunrises will keep you sane. If I watched sunrises and sunsets I’d know when it was time to turn the light on. I wouldn’t be standing here stuck in my head waiting for someone to save me. I don’t have to go to the cemetery to be with my mother. I’ve always known that. That’s why I never go. She’s right here. Her blood and her brains are polished in the floor. And I don’t have to go to Anderson Parkway to meet a ghost, I’ve got my own headless woman right here on 4516 Aramy Street.
) Great conclusion! I can see the story continuing but if it doesn't it was a good ending. Efrem and Isaac really do love each other and it was sweet to read about that.