Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (28 page)

“Hayden, that sure was beautiful. Seriously, brought tears to my eyes,” Colin said, rubbing a fake tear away. “Now, can we watch this already?”

“Hit play,” said Jonathan, though he still seemed lost in thought.

Jonathan wasn’t hiding the fact that he was working out. He’d just been avoiding questions about it. Three weeks after Hayden’s hero story lecture, Jonathan knew, that if his roommates hadn’t suspected it, they were about to.

The beautiful thing about living in an inner city neighborhood was that if you were looking for something, it would likely find you with little effort on your part. Jonathan had been keeping his eyes peeled for a weight set he could set up in the garage. After all, no one in the house was using the space other than Collin for his motorcycle.

Jonathan showed up one day in a truck driven by a stranger he had paid twenty bucks to help him cart the stuff home. It was a good deal, a full weight set, bench, curl bar and the guy had thrown in an eighty pound punching bag just because he was so happy to get the crap out of his garage.

The gear had seen better days. The weights looked like they were from the eighties and the bench padding was being held together with duct tape. Collin and Hayden helped him unpack the truck with a hint of excitement, though they tried to hide it behind sarcasm. Jonathan took it as a good sign, considering he’d never consulted with anyone about turning the garage into a gym. Despite their geek-loving demeanor, they didn’t hate the idea of the three of them pumping iron in the garage.

“Wow, Tibbs,” Collin said, “did you have to go to more than one dumpster to find this stuff?”

After that, he’d stopped any efforts to hide what he was up to from his roommates. He didn’t mention that he’d been working out with a trainer, but he was exceptionally knowledgeable for a guy whom they had never known to do anything but run. He stopped hiding his supplements in his room. He didn’t know if anyone noticed or cared, but every time he got a glass of water to take pills or mix his protein shakes he’d felt like he was hiding a secret. His tubs and containers now had a new home on the refrigerator right next to all the cereal boxes. It didn’t all happen in one day, but it happened fast enough to get Paige worried.

Soon he heard her in his doorway. Jonathan shut the screen of his laptop so she wouldn’t see what he was researching, then turned to speak with her.

Paige wasn’t always so aware of Jonathan’s day to day. She was in her early twenties and had an exciting enough life of her own. This need to act like a protective mother hen had started the day he’d come home from the hospital. He’d noticed it from Collin and Hayden as well, but their mild concerns were easily written off. For Collin and Hayden, if a guy woke up in a puddle of his own blood, they could assume he wasn’t going to be himself for a bit. Just ignore it, give him his space. Paige wasn’t going to leave it at that.

He appreciated the concern, to a degree. At least he appreciated the attention even if there was nothing he could tell her to explain his actions. He wished she would stop asking him why she hadn’t seen him at school. Their majors were similar enough that they tended to frequent the same campus areas quite often. He didn’t want to lie to anyone, but the appearance of sanity required a great deal of omission.

“So when did you start,” she asked, “weightlifting is it?”

“Couple weeks ago,” he casually replied.

“Is that what you’ve been doing?” she asked. “Instead of school?”

He didn’t respond. When she could see he didn’t intend to she shook her head.

“I don’t get it. Why?”

He shrugged, didn’t say anything, the same face he gave Lincoln whenever he asked. She wasn’t as quick to drop the question. She knew him well enough to know he didn’t do things on a whim or without a reason.

“Come on, Jonathan,” she said. “Why? Just try to explain it to me.”

He could see it, he knew her just as well. She had come into his room tonight because she wanted to know that he was okay and she wasn’t going to accept some shrug. She had no interest in being told not to worry. She didn’t want to be put at ease; she wanted to understand.

When he had been putting himself in a coma to avoid dealing with what had happened, that at least had an obvious correlation. It didn’t take a detective to see why a man who’d gone through a traumatic experience might resort to medicating himself to escape the memory of it. Dropping out of school as he headed into his last year of college to become a health nut and watch action movies; that wasn’t making sense.

So, he told a piece of the truth.

“I can’t feel,” he stammered, deciding on different words. “I can’t be that powerless. Never again.”

She nodded, this did seem to make sense to her.

“I can understand that,” she said, making a point of maintaining his eye contact.

There was an uncomfortable pause. He thought perhaps that she wanted him to ask how she could understand, but he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want her to share some intimate detail of her life, not when he knew he couldn’t share anything in return, so he looked away.

“I hear you at night,” she said cautiously.

Jonathan turned red with embarrassment. The nightmares were too frequent to have gone unnoticed. He’d suspected that she’d heard him cry out. He’d avoided thinking about it, as there wasn’t anything he could do, no simple fix. Still, his pride took a blow then, as he realized he couldn’t tell the truth. She would think it was from the attack, the hospitalization, something seemingly insignificant when compared to his reality, to the Ferox that ripped his throat out every night in his dreams, to the little girl who begged to know why he’d let her die.

He closed his eyes and said nothing. At least it had been Paige who told him they knew, not Hayden or Collin. He couldn’t have imagined how awkward that conversation would have been.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?” she asked. “I’ll listen. You don’t have to keep it to yourself.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you. I’ve been having trouble sleeping, bad dreams,” Jonathan said, still red in the face. “I don’t want to take the pills again. The exercise helps. It helps get me tired enough…”

He trailed off and sighed. It was all he could think to say, and he wished he hadn’t said as much as he did.

“Do you want to tell me about them?” she asked, taking a seat on the edge of his bed.

Jonathan shook his head; he had no intention of opening his dreams to her. The awkward conversation ground to a halt again as she seemed conflicted between the desire to pry or to respect his boundaries.

“Have you told your mother yet?” she asked, changing the subject. “About the attack? About the hospital?”

He folded his arms across his chest. When he looked back at her he shook his head slower this time.

“She’s your mother. She’ll be hurt that you didn’t tell her about this,” she said.

“I don’t see any reason she ever needs to find out,” he said.

“That isn’t what you said at the hospital.”

“I don’t see what good that would do her,” he said growing confrontational, but trying not to raise his voice.

“No one will ever know what happened to me unless, that man, is caught,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Telling my mother the gruesome details about it will just worry her, then her imagination would run away with itself. I’d rather not give her something to keep her awake at night.”

Paige didn’t look swayed by any reasons he’d given, she just looked defiant. He’d have agreed with her, if he had her perspective on things. What was aggravating was that he had serious problems, like fighting off an army, yet still had to deal with things like keeping his mother in the dark.

“Paige, I know you mean well, but please don’t make my life any more difficult than it is. I would consider it a betrayal if you went against my wishes on this.”

Her defiance melted from her face. She seemed shocked, then saddened. She nodded her understanding, then stood and made her way to the door.

“Paige,” he said, and she stopped. “I know how it looks. Just know that what you see me doing, though hard to understand, is the best solution to the problem I can find.”

“You’re right, I don’t understand,” she said, and walked back to her room. He heard her door shutting.

He turned back to his laptop and opened the screen. The web page he had been reading, “How to Survive a Bear Attack” was near useless. He closed the lid in frustration, he hated how hiding the truth had made him come off as such a thankless jerk to his friend whose intentions were genuinely kind. He had trouble imagining a future, should he live to see it, where he hadn’t ended up breaking ties with the very life he was trying to return to.

CHAPTER TWENTY

WEDNESDAY | JULY 18, 2005 | 7:00 PM

“ACTUALLY
, it never goes the way you think it would,” Hayden said.

The garage was cleared out. Collin’s bike moved near the large car door. With some assistance from the hardware store, the punching bag was now anchored to one of the ceiling beams. The bench was set up, and the weights that weren’t on the bar itself rested against the wall behind it. Jonathan had found some foam mats to cover a majority of the oil-stained floor. It made a place for stretching exercises in the room. The doorway between the garage and the house now had a pull up bar that hung from the door trim.

Collin and Hayden had started calling it the man cave the day Jonathan brought the weights home. They all agreed that Paige was more man than any of them, but she seldom came in. Jonathan was pretty sure she was purposely giving him space. There was an alienation between them since he’d forbidden her from intervening with his decision to keep his mother in the dark. He couldn’t blame her, no one liked to be given an ultimatum.

He didn’t mind the company of Collin and Hayden. It meant there was someone around to spot him. He couldn’t push things too hard working out alone. It was too dangerous. He could get stuck under some weight that he was trying to lift or have it fall on him, but with the roommates there to help if he got into trouble, he could push the envelope more. He still had to go to the gym for most of his workouts but this ensured he was always able to use his time effectively, especially when dreams woke him up at five in the morning and he couldn’t get back to sleep.

Collin and Hayden hadn’t done much working out yet themselves. They were timid about it. They mostly stood around Tibbs talking about whatever came to mind while he lifted. That was fine; for them this was just a hobby or a conscious health decision, possibly an interest in looking good naked.

Perhaps it was inevitable, but three guys hanging out next to a motorcycle with an open garage door, lifting weights while talking about comic books attracted Jack almost immediately. Leah seemed to like the free babysitting. Collin let him sit on the motorcycle. The kid loved it.

“More often than not,” Hayden said to Jack, “Batman actually wins in a fight against Superman.”

Jack, who had asked the question, hadn’t realized who he was in the room with. He was now getting a much more long winded answer than he’d initially imagined possible.

“How?” asked Jack. “It should be over in like, one punch, from Superman.”

“Well, you’re right, if it was just a sudden fight that broke out on the street, Superman versus Batman, Superman would clearly win,” he said, “but most of their fights, when they’ve actually happened, have taken place when Batman knew he was going to have to fight a super powerful opponent.”

Jonathan was doing chest presses on the bench. He put the weight back onto the rack and sat up, suddenly interested in the conversation after a half hour of hardly paying attention. Hayden always noticed when he had people’s attention. The man loved to talk.

“You have to remember, Batman is the ultimate strategist. He wins because he always has a plan. You give Batman a week before he has to be in a fight and he’ll be ready. He’ll set the stage, prepare for every contingency, and get his opponent to fight the fight he knows he can win.”

Jonathan straddled the bench; Jack straddled the motorcycle. Both listened intently. If Hayden had been paying better attention, he would have laughed at how they both seemed to look identical, hanging on his words, Jack because anything to do with Superman and Batman was of supreme importance, and Jonathan because Hayden might be making a point that could help him survive.