Under the Light

  “Sort of a protest thing when my father left.”

  “You never said you were a pyromaniac.”

  When Jenny opened the door to the master bedroom neither crossed the threshold. “My mother’s room,” she told him.

  He peered in with no comment. Next the office, where several boxes of Dan’s belongings cluttered the middle of the floor, awaiting their fate.

  “It’s kind of messy in here,” said Jenny.

  Billy gave a little laugh. “You should see our place.” Then he caught her eye. “I guess you’ve already seen it.”

  “I don’t remember that,” said Jenny.

  “Believe me, you’re not missing anything.”

  I didn’t expect Jenny to know what had happened while she was away from her body, yet I had secretly hoped I had left some residual haunting, some scent or hue that would give her a sense of me. But she seemed completely unaware of me or James.

  Billy squeezed past her into the office and tilted his head as he read the titles of books left on the shelves. The Christian Wife, The Bible Diet, A Mother/Daughter Walk with God. “Man, your family is religious. No offense.”

  “It’s okay.” She tried to sound lighthearted, but her sigh was weighty.

  Finally she led him into her own bedroom and he followed without hesitation. Jenny sat on the bed and watched him study everything in sight: the girlish white dressing table, the orderly closet where the sliding mirrored doors were left half open, the view from the window into the pristine garden. He stopped at the painting of the praying hands.

  “How did we get together?” He said it as if it was a rhetorical question.

  Jenny didn’t answer him, but instead asked, “What’s the last thing you remember before your memory gap?”

  “I was at a park near my house,” he said. “Getting high.”

  “So you had a drug blackout?”

  “I guess. I was just trying everything that day. Whatever I could get my hands on. Pot, pills, Super Glue.”

  “That’s awful,” said Jenny.

  But if he hadn’t, I thought, I never would have met James.

  “Yeah. That was maybe two or three weeks ago.” Billy leaned on the wall beside her desk like a loiterer. I admired him for not sitting on the bed beside her. “So what kind of amnesia do you have?”

  “Unexplained.” Then she frowned. “Do you think we could have done drugs together?”

  “Jeez, I hope not.” Billy looked ill for a moment.

  I wanted to tell them the story James had told me about his taking over Billy’s body, but I was left out of the conversation.

  “No, that can’t be it,” said Jenny. “My missing time is months long, not weeks.”

  “When did you wake up?” he asked her. “I mean, when did your blackout stop?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Shit,” Billy whispered. “Day before yesterday.”

  Now both of them looked unnerved. He pulled out the desk chair and sat.

  “That’s really weird,” said Jenny.

  “When I came out of it, I was visiting my dad in prison. Mitch was just unloading on him. Having this massive meltdown. I guess that was what woke me up.” Billy shrugged as if apologizing for knowing so little about his own life.

  I ached at the core remembering the last time I saw James in Billy’s body, disappearing down the hall at the prison with Mitch. I missed James so badly that the floor creaked under me, but neither of the other two noticed.

  “Turns out, right before I woke up, my mother told me my father was moving out,” said Jenny.

  “That sucks,” said Billy. “Or not. If it was my dad we would’ve had a party.” He waved his hand in front of her then, as if erasing the last remark. “Sorry. Rewind that.”

  “Do you think shock can bring you back from amnesia?” asked Jenny.

  “Sure. I guess.” He studied her for a moment, not just her eyes. “It’s hard coming back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yesterday afternoon I felt like I was on the wrong planet.” He thought for a second, seeming haunted, then laughed it off. “I lay in the grass out in our backyard like an idiot, just staring at the sky.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Helen

  SOME SORROW OR FEAR FLICKERED behind Billy’s eyes again, but he reined it in. “I felt like one of those animals that wakes up in the zoo after the tranquilizer dart wears off. ‘Hey, man, where’s my jungle?’” Billy used a comical voice for the animal, then looked embarrassed. “I mean, I wanted to come back and see Mitch again, but I felt like I’d left something behind somewhere else.”

  “You did lose something,” Jenny said. “You lost time.”

  “Yeah. Missing time and my memory,” said Billy. “Like, I don’t remember what I said or did that made you like me.”

  Jenny’s cheeks and throat burned pink. Billy wasn’t James, but he had his own charm.

  “Bet you don’t either,” he said. “I get the feeling if you got a do-over you wouldn’t hook up with me again.”

  “Why do you say that?” Jenny asked.

  His expression was not unkind. “Maybe I was less geeky during my blackout, and maybe you were temporarily insane while you had amnesia, but girls like you don’t even start conversations with me.”

  Billy would have been shocked to know how appealing James had been in his “Billy” disguise and how mad I truly had been to be with him in my “Jenny” mask.

  “Are you saying I’m stuck-up?” Jenny folded her arms at him, looking a little like Cathy. “If you can’t remember me, how would you know what I’m like?”

  “I said I don’t remember hooking up with you,” he pointed out. “I didn’t say I didn’t remember you. I’ve been going to the same school as you since fourth grade.”

  Jenny dropped her defenses. She tucked her legs up under her on the edge of the bed. “We were never in the same class in elementary school.”

  “We had the same recess sometimes,” he said. “We took the same bus for a while.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You knew I existed. But you didn’t really notice me.”

  “I did so, but it’s not like I could just walk up to you and start cracking jokes.” When she looked unconvinced, Billy said, “You don’t believe I knew who you were? You sat in the front on the left in Mr. Fancher’s class.”

  I could see that he was right. Jenny looked startled.

  “One day during lunch when they were showing a movie in the library on one of those crappy old TVs, you were walking past the building and you stopped and watched through the window. It was some ballet thing.”

  “The Red Shoes.” Jenny looked curious now. “Where were you?”

  “Detention, in a folding chair outside the principal’s office.”

  She smiled.

  Billy looked determined now to prove her wrong, and it touched me that he had gathered and held so many memories of her.

  “One day in the hall in seventh grade,” he told her, “you looked really sad and you dropped your math book and I almost reached down and got it for you, because you took so long to pick it up yourself, but my friends were with me.”

  “You must’ve noticed lots of girls,” said Jenny.

  “You were different,” he said. “You were mysterious.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I caught you in your lunchtime Bible club, or whatever it’s called, looking at the sky when everyone else had their heads down and their eyes closed. I wondered what you were seeing that they couldn’t see,” said Billy.

  Jenny rubbed her arms as if she was chilled. I felt then like an intruder. But I was compelled to listen to this unfolding of their childhoods.

  “I knew you,” Billy told Jenny. “You’re the one who never noticed me.”

  “I did,” she protested. “I remembered your name, didn’t I?”

  “You know, you don’t have to say hi to me at school, if you don’t want to.”

  Jenny sat up straight. “What are yo
u talking about?”

  “At school people might think we’re going out, but it’s kind of like we’re just meeting for the first time here, so don’t feel like you have to stay friends with me.” Billy held up his hands as if to say there were no strings attached. “Everyone will just assume you dumped me.”

  “Do you want to break up?” she asked.

  He squinted at her, perhaps trying to discern her mood. “Are we still going out?”

  To his apparent surprise, Jenny started laughing.

  “It’s not funny,” he said, but he was smiling.

  “No, it’s really sort of creepy and confusing.” She sighed. “Sorry. It’s just nerves.”

  “I suck at talking to girls,” said Billy.

  I had lived with Mr. Brown as my host for years, which included innumerable college parties, but I couldn’t help wishing Billy spoke with James’s vocabulary.

  “Except for you,” said Billy. “So I’d be okay with you giving me a chance,” he said.

  “Is that because I’m not like a real girl to you?” she asked. “Am I too much like a sister?”

  “Ummm.” He chose his words carefully. “I’ve never had a sister, so it’s not like I have a lot of experience with this, but when I’m around you, I don’t think you could call what I’m feeling brotherly.”

  I started pacing between them. Something worried me about this conversation. I had the queerest wrestling of emotions about Billy Blake. Part of me was not sure he was worthy of her, but I was willing to give him a chance. I wanted to test him—send him on a quest like a knight courting a princess. If he really wanted her, he should fight for her. Come back with a dragon’s head.

  “I think I remember something you did in junior high,” Jenny told him. She was looking into his eyes, but also through him into the past perhaps. “At the Cinco de Mayo fair, when I was in seventh grade, I was standing in line to enter this contest and my mom left me alone while she went to buy tickets for the booths. I’d made this model of a Spanish mission out of clay that I was really proud of. There were these three boys standing nearby and one of them said my mission looked like barfed-up gum and another one of them said no it doesn’t and to leave her alone and then all three started having a fight and knocked over a display.”

  “Actually it was a bake sale table.”

  “See?” She laughed. “I remembered you.”

  I stopped pacing and looked at Billy. Well done, Mr. Blake, I told him.

  “Barfed-up gum?” Billy shook his head. “What a dick.”

  I bristled at this.

  “I know!” said Jenny.

  “I should have kicked his ass.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Well, it was two against one,” said Billy. “I was outnumbered.”

  Good lad, I told him. Language aside, his actions were gallant.

  “Why did you hang around with them?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “They let me. I was kind of a loner. I didn’t have real friends after sixth grade.”

  “I never had close friends either.”

  “What about that crowd of church girls?”

  For a moment Jenny looked tired and thin, with shadowed eyes, but it was just the lighting in the room. A flame lantern would help. And lace curtains. Her room lacked warmth. If I were her mother I would put a quilt on her bed instead of that bloodless white blanket. I knew exactly which one—the blue and green honeycomb pattern. It had snatches of my daughter’s first dresses, the navy gingham and the green stripes, and squares made from my own girlhood clothes, blue roses and a brown plaid faded to bone.

  And she needed books in this room, of course. Now that I was here I would surround her with them, stand them up proudly on every surface.

  And I wasn’t using my dresses anymore. I would hold them up under her hair and choose the one that suited her eyes best. I would pick out the old dry thread and sew them afresh. I would rub lemon juice into the stains on the lace. I would take up the hems for her. Only an inch, for we were so alike, she and I.

  I found I was sitting on the bed now, behind Jenny, holding up my hands between the seams of her sleeves with a measuring tape that did not exist. When I realized that I’d forgotten we were a world apart, I withered back from her, ashamed that I had become so muddled.

  Billy’s voice rattled me out of my daze.

  “Maybe we’re not that different,” he was saying. “That’d be freaky.”

  “Were you lonely too?” Jenny asked him.

  He looked uncomfortable. Maybe this wasn’t something young men admitted.

  “Well, here we are, keeping each other company,” said Jenny.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Some things you just can’t do alone.”

  “Like have a conversation,” she said.

  “Or tell knock-knock jokes.”

  “Do you want to tell me a knock-knock joke?” asked Jenny.

  “I’m good for now.” Absently he tilted the chair back on two legs. “What have you always wanted to do but couldn’t do without a friend?”

  Jenny blinked, her shoulders shifted a little. That was all, but both Billy and I could see that she was thinking of something that she did not speak aloud.

  “You thought of something,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she insisted.

  “Come on,” he coaxed her. “What could be weirder than what we’ve already been through?”

  “There’s things I could never do in ballet because you have to have a partner.”

  “I could help,” said Billy.

  I moved to the corner of the room and began to seep into the wall—I was invading their privacy.

  “I don’t dance anymore,” said Jenny. “I quit taking ballet in March.”

  “How come?”

  “I needed more time to study.” Jenny thought for a moment. “My father thought so, anyway.”

  “Bastard.”

  Jenny couldn’t slap a hand over her mouth before the laugh got away from her.

  “Sorry,” said Billy, but he looked pleased. “You were the one who had an indoor bonfire party when he left.”

  “It’s okay.” Jenny folded her hands shyly.

  “So let’s do it.” He let the chair drop to four legs. “You have a partner now.”

  “Really? You dance ballet?”

  “I’ve seen those guys on TV.” Billy stood up and put a foot on the seat of the chair, motioned dramatically to the right. “They just stand there and go Here she is!” He turned to the left as if displaying a piece of art. “And Look at her now, and”—he mimicked catching an invisible bag of flour—“Oops, I better catch her because she just threw herself at me.”

  Jenny laughed and I blessed him for that. It was a sweet sound. “You do not want to dance with me,” said Jenny.

  “Oh yeah?” The mischief in his eyes reminded me of James. He pushed the chair out of the way with his foot. “Go get your tutu.”

  Jenny took her box of ballet things off the closet shelf and opened it slowly, drawing the toe shoes up by their ribbons.

  He watched her sit on the side of the bed and lace them up her ankles, the wide satin ribbons faded and frayed in places, the toes of the shoes fuzzy and nearly worn to the wood. She stood up, hopped onto toe, paused to flex her calves and shake out her knees. Still he watched her. He seemed to have become hypnotized, but a moment later he stepped up to her side as Jenny approached the mirrored closet doors.

  “This is silly,” she said. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “You calling me a quitter?”

  “No music in my room anymore,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Bastard,” he repeated in a whisper, and Jenny smiled, but I could see the truth in it made her a little uneasy. She shifted into position with her feet together and her posture lifted as she spread her arms. She elongated herself, through her spine and limbs—a remembered strength hidden there opened like a blossom. She began to quietly sing a simple melody, perhaps
a favorite ballet theme.

  “And she sings, too,” Billy muttered.

  “Stop it,” she laughed, and looked into his eyes in the reflection. I would have been in the reflected scene, in the wall behind them, if I had been one of the living.

  The energy wavered in Jenny’s arms and she stopped singing. Something in the reflection had startled her. She dropped from her toes to stand flat-footed. Something in the backwards picture of Billy’s face made her stare.

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 12

  Jenny

  HE CRACKED HIS KNUCKLES AND shook out his shoulders like a boxer ready for the first round. My feelings about Billy kept shifting. At first it seemed like a dream, how he broke down the bathroom door to rescue me. But every time I thought about that picture he’d showed me, with our naked shoulders in bed, and about how we’d made love and I didn’t even remember it, my stomach jumped like an electric eel. On the other hand, it was exciting that I had found his phone number and called him behind my mother’s back. Then I was nervous when he first showed up—I acted like an idiot. Finally I started to feel comfortable with him. I’d never liked a boy who liked me back.

  But when I looked at him in the mirror, I had the feeling I was supposed to be somewhere else and with someone else. Maybe it was everything that had happened the day before, crashing in on me. Having lost my memory and going to the hospital. Finding out my father left us. Finding out that Billy and I had been together—that was unbelievable, that I’d missed having my first boyfriend. My head felt light and fuzzy.

  I stared at Billy in the mirror—there I was, standing right next to him, but it was like I’d gotten off a bus at the wrong stop.

  I knew mirrors lied. You always see yourself in a reflection, so you’re used to it. But when you see the face of someone you know in a mirror, it looks backwards. Did I know Billy well enough to think he looked wrong?

  “Just warming up,” he said.

  I liked him and he was paying attention to me—I should be happy. I went up on pointe in second position.

  “Hold my waist to help balance me.” His hands were warm even through my shirt. “Not so tight that I can’t move.”