Plain Jayne (11 page)

Black and white photographs of various sizes
adorn the walls at differing heights. The ones I can see through the paneled
curtains that cover the door's glass panes seem to be abstracts of common beach
items (I think one is the inside of a conch shell and the other is an extreme
close-up of the frayed canvas wrap on an old-fashioned life preserver). Quite
artistic. The wooden furniture is painted in a high gloss to match the
baseboards and molding.

And the bed… Well, it’s a nice bed. Lower than
the one in my room. Platform base with a simple, rectangular headboard. Solid
medium-blue bedspread with wide navy border edging. But I don’t let myself look
at it for too long. It makes me feel squirmy, for reasons that I don’t even
want to explore.

Breathless, I scurry back to the chaise and
snatch my laptop bag. Nearly at a run, I find the closest set of stairs to lead
me down to the backyard, where I try unsuccessfully to catch my breath.

“Ahem.” I clear my throat repeatedly while I
swipe my bangs from my forehead and turn in circles, looking for an escape.
From what, I’m not sure, considering what I want to get away from is in my
head.

Never mind. Gazebo. Yes!

I lurch toward the white gingerbread structure
under the sprawling oak tree and almost trip up its three short steps to the
safety and seclusion it provides.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of coming here
before (especially before I looked through that door). I know it’s wired and
has electrical outlets, because Paulette snuck in while I was napping here yesterday
and plugged in a behemoth antique oscillating fan. It felt heavenly, and the
sound of the crashing waves mere yards away was a natural tranquilizer. I
probably would have slept through dinner and well into the evening if the
mosquitoes hadn’t chased me inside.

Now, I look around as if seeing it for the
first time. Yesterday, it was just a sweet sleep spot, with the wide padded
ledge ringing its inside perimeter and the lattice walls that simultaneously
conceal (although it hadn’t hidden me from Paulette’s view) and provide a fresh
cross-breeze. Today, I see it as more of a workspace, with a generous-sized
rectangular table in front of one side of the octagon’s padded ledges, several
electrical outlets embedded in the wooden floor, and a peekaboo view of the
ocean that should be compelling without being too distracting. Perfect.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I unpack
my laptop and the three-inch stack of paper that is the marked-up hard copy of
my manuscript from Lucas. Once I’m plugged in and booted up, I adopt the new
writing strategy I’ve been developing in my head during my lazy poolside
tanning sessions. It’s always been my habit—with school work, household chores,
and the various jobs I’ve held down to pay the bills while I’ve pounded out
this book—to tackle the toughest part of a job first and then work my way to
the easier, less taxing tasks. While that may make sense when it comes to
cleaning a bathroom, it’s not getting me very far with these revisions. As a
matter of fact, starting with the hardest job—rewriting the fire scene—is
overwhelming and defeating.

So I’ve been toying with the idea of starting
with the easy stuff (the things I would normally leave until the end) and
working my way up to the Herculean task of the fire scene. Starting at the end
works for solving mazes. Why wouldn’t it work on difficult editors’ revisions?
If nothing else, it will give me a feeling of accomplishment, like I’m actually
getting something done, instead of spinning my wheels on one
seemingly-impossible assignment. And then everything will be done but the fire
scene, and I’ll be able to fully focus on it. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even
stumble across some inspiration along the way, and I’ll be eager to do the
re-write.

Probably not, but I have to take my optimism
where I can get it, at this point.

Without further ado, I start on page one and
methodically make the changes Lucas has suggested, nay
demanded,
bookmarking
and skipping over anything that gives me pause or seems complicated and
time-consuming. My goal today is to get stuff done, not sit and agonize and
contemplate. If I notice that familiar feeling of dread slipping in, I move on
to the next comment.

In no time at all, I’ve reached the end of the
manuscript, and I can’t stop myself from grinning and saying out loud, “That’s
what I’m talking about!” even though it makes me feel like a goober. I’m a
happy goober, and that’s all that matters right now.

Quickly, before taking a break, I count how
many of Lucas’s requested changes I skipped (all instances of bland descriptive
prose—another one of my weaknesses) and note with glee that there are far fewer
than it seemed there were when I was going through the copy the first time. I’m
on a roll and don’t want to lose momentum, but I also recognize that I’ll run
out of gas if I don’t refuel with some food and water. I decide I’ll choose one
scene—Rose’s visit to her family’s burial plot upon returning to her hometown
after college graduation—and think about it during lunch. Notepad and pen in
hand and a definite pep in my step, I cross the sunny yard of thick, velvety
grass that only money can grow.

******

It’s not a fun thing to remember, but over my
tuna salad sandwich (the best one I’ve ever eaten, thanks to Paulette), I force
myself to go sense-by-sense through the experience of seeing my family’s
gravesite for the first time. I ordered the headstones in the haze that was the
week following the fire, but I was hundreds of miles away—probably sitting in a
lecture hall, listening to a professor drone on about a subject that I didn’t
care about but was forced to take to fulfill a general education requirement—when
they were placed. I could have taken a trip on any given weekend to visit the
cemetery, but… somehow it was never a priority. It definitely wasn’t something
high on the list of things I wanted to do. Until I was finished with college,
that is. Then, I felt an almost physical need to go there.

It was technically late spring still. But in
Indiana, that meant it was already blazing hot. The scorched grass crunched
under my shoes as I picked my way to the plot where the people I’d been closest
to in the world lay buried in their caskets.

Caskets. An interesting choice I made,
considering they were already partially-cremated in the fire. I don’t even
remember making that decision. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe that was one of the few
things my mom’s sister, Chelsea, did before she went back to her life in
California and never spoke to me again. Or maybe that was one of the things
stipulated in their wills… they didn’t want to be cremated. It’s not something
we ever sat around the dinner table and talked about. It doesn’t matter, I
guess, because the result was that their charred bodies were put in coffins and
tossed into some holes in a depressing cemetery in central Indiana. Done. No
going back.

No going back. That’s what I kept telling
myself while I walked closer and closer to where I knew their graves were.
That, I remembered. Way in the back, almost against the chain link fence
separating the graveyard from the private property that would probably
eventually be bought by or donated to the cemetery as the population of the
dead continued to grow and outnumber the living population in
my—literally—dying hometown of Longview, sat the graves. Tangled up in the
fence was a small group of honeysuckle bushes. When the wind would gust, the sweet,
cloying aroma would waft my way, confirming that I was heading in the right
direction. Every step I took, I contemplated turning around and running in the
other direction. No going back. By the time I stood in front of the headstones,
I was sweating, and it had less to do with the June heat or the relentless sun
than the fact that I was wrestling with myself. But my fight instinct had my
flight instinct on the mats… barely.

My mind was racing as I stared down at the
names as if they belonged to strangers. The letters didn’t seem to be working
together to form the words. Maybe it was the font in the marble. Maybe it was
the neurons misfiring in my frantic brain. The cicadas in the neighboring field
were deafening. There was a metallic taste in my mouth.

Shannon Lynelle Greer, beloved daughter and
sister; Nicole Gayle Greer, beloved daughter and sister; Gayle Barbara Greer, dear
wife, mother, daughter, and sister; Robert Leonard Greer, devoted husband,
father, and son.

Jayne Ann Greer, cheater of death.

Because that’s what I’d done, hadn’t I?
I
should be here with the rest of them
, I remember thinking miserably. I, too,
should be described as the beloved daughter and sister. And I would have been,
had I not—at my mother’s urging—attended the all-night post-graduation party
hosted by the Longview High School Student Council. It wasn’t really my scene,
but all my friends were going, so I didn’t want to be the only one who wasn’t
there, in case something interesting happened.

Of course, nothing did. Nobody in my
graduating class was even daring enough to spike the punch or smoke a joint in
the bathroom. No, the most exciting thing going on that night, unfortunately
for me, was happening ten miles from where I was at the small town’s civic
center, at my house.

Over the years, I’ve tried to imagine, in
split-screen fashion (like in the movies), what was happening simultaneously at
different points of the night. When I was hanging out on the perimeter of the
makeshift dance floor, scoffing with my friends at the slow-dancing
partnerships while secretly wishing Tanner Kelley would ask me to dance, was
the frayed wiring in our old farmhouse smoldering? By the time we’d moved on to
the video game room, had flames developed in the walls, while my unsuspecting
family members slept? As I participated in the water fight in the wee hours of
the morning, was the fire spreading while the defunct smoke alarms looked on
silently? At what point did the flames race up the stairs from the first floor,
where they originated, to engulf the old wooden staircase, the only means of
escape? During the raffle winner announcements? When I was contemplating
leaving early to go home and catch a few hours of sleep in my own bed, were my
sisters and parents finally waking up to the choking smoke, throwing their legs
over the sides of their beds, only to have the soles of their bare feet scorch
against the white-hot floor?

No. I know it didn’t happen exactly like that.
At least, that’s not what the fire chief told me. He said that something—most
likely carbon monoxide—killed them in their sleep before the fire ever started.
He knows this, because there was no smoke in their lungs. Then the faulty
wiring sparked in the laundry room under the stairs. He said the two events may
not have been related at all. As a matter of fact, he seemed baffled and almost
personally offended that the two things could happen within hours of each
other. After all, carbon monoxide robs the atmosphere of oxygen, and fires need
oxygen to spread. He  mumbled all this under his breath, as if he were thinking
out loud, instead of trying to explain to a bereft family member how something
like this could happen.

But despite all his doubts about the
scientific possibilities, he was my biggest supporter when rumors started to
spread about something more sinister bringing about the deaths of my parents
and sisters. When theories about murder-suicide (and outright murder, involving
yours truly as the killer) crackled in the dry June air, he quickly doused them
with his official ruling that the deaths were an accident and the fire that
followed a bizarre coincidence. That was his professional opinion, and he stuck
by it over and over again, in newspaper articles, reports, affidavits, and
insurance depositions. The inconclusive coroner’s report neither supported nor
refuted his claims.

That’s not how it happens in my book, though.
Rose’s family members aren’t victims of a silent killer in cahoots with a
tangle of wires and a dryer’s full lint filter. Rose’s family fights to escape
the heat and smoke and flames. They die huddled together, comforting each
other, not alone in their beds. I know it’s better that my family didn’t feel
anything. But a part of me blames them for not fighting death, even though I
know they didn’t stand a chance. I want Rose’s family to have the chance mine
never did.

At the light touch on my shoulder, I bungee
back to the present by flinging my half-eaten sandwich into the air.

“Oh, dear,” Paulette says mildly, her eyes
pinned to the food on the patio stones. “Now look what I’ve done. And I only wanted
to see that you were alive.”

More sharply than I mean to, I reply, “Of
course, I’m alive!”

Sheepishly, she explains, “I got an email from
a friend once that told a story about a man who sat dead at his desk at work
for five days before anyone thought it was odd that he wasn’t moving, and they discovered
that he was deceased. I’d hate for that to happen to someone I know.”

I rub my eyes. “You shouldn’t believe
everything you read in emails.”

“No! It was a true story! I’ve been terrified
ever since. I pester Luke by relentlessly checking on him when he’s around.
He’s exactly the sort of person that could happen to.”

Yeah, but only because no one would care if he
dropped dead at his desk…

I blush as if she can hear my thoughts. “Oh.
Well. I’m fine. Just… thinking.”