Home From Within (24 page)

Jessica’s truck was fully loaded and Harold’s sandwiches eaten when they got back on the road. Jake followed in his old beater.

“Thanks again for helping,” Jean said. “And I’m taking you out to dinner so don’t protest like I know you’re going to try to do. Ray would be furious with me if we didn’t treat you to a meal after all this work.”

Jessica was in no mood to socialize. All she wanted was to listen to the CD burning a hole in her glove box.

“And I would love for Matt to join us. Let’s give him a call?” Jean added.

Jessica hesitated. “Uh, well, he may be busy. He’s leaving on Monday to take Irene to visit her family in Ireland and . . .”

Before Jessica finished her sentence, Jean was on her cell phone.

“That will be terrific. Ray will be happy he’ll have someone to talk to. So we will see you at six. Bye.”

Jessica pursed her lips together.

“Oh no. Did I step in when I should have kept out?” Jean asked.

“No, it’s all right,” Jessica said. She could feel Jean’s eyes on the side of her face. “Jean,” she said slowly, “please don’t worry about me. We’re fine.”

“You deserve more than ‘fine.’ I hope you know that. Matt’s a good man, and he loves you so much.”

“I know,” Jessica said softly.

Silence was not in Jean’s repertoire.

“Talk to me.”

Jessica could not help but smile. “You don’t give up, do you?” she said, staying focused on the asphalt road that was now burning her eyes from the sun’s reflection.

“Whoa, the sun is blazing,” Jean said, and then fumbled in Jessica’s glove box while asking if there was an extra set of sunglasses. She picked up the CD.

“Purple Rain?”
Jean said as if it were a foreign phrase.

Jessica looked over and tried not to act upset. “Oh, yeah, I used to listen to that in high school. You know, Prince.”

Jean shook her head. “I thought Lodi homeschooled you?”

“In Chicago, you know, before I was . . .”

“Ah yes, banished.”

Jessica took her eyes off the road for a moment and looked wearily at Jean, who was studying the picture and song titles on the back.

“Do you have a favorite?”

She thought about lying, but why? Jean knew everything.

“‘The Beautiful Ones,’” Jessica said carefully.

“Can I put it on? If it makes you uncomfortable, I’ll turn it off.”

It took Jessica a minute to answer. “I think it will be all right.”

Last night, Jessica had watched the movie
Purple Rain
for the first time in seventeen years. “The Beautiful Ones” was something private she shared with Paul. And he was dead. While the memories held up well after all these years, so did the shame.

“Well, that was interesting,” Jean said after it was over. Jessica turned down the next song, thinking it might offend Jean.

“In a good or bad way?”

“I’ve never heard that kind of singing before—especially at the end.”

“The end is what I like best,” Jessica said, feeling more at ease. “When I was sixteen, I used to daydream that two boys liked me. I could only be true to one, so I had to pick. One of the boys decided he would sing that song to me to push the odds in his favor. And it worked, of course.”

“I could see why you’d daydream that. I’m sure it made you feel loved.”

Jessica turned her head, afraid Jean might see her tears.

“What are Jake’s plans this summer?” Jessica decided the best line of defense was a conversation changer. That always worked with Jean.

Jean rambled as Jessica nodded and interjected at the right moments, but all her head was involved in was a tug-of-war over something she could not change—the past.

When Jessica had first arrived at Aunt Lodi’s, she begged for her to call her father and plead for Paul’s life. Aunt Lodi did not have a phone in her home and made all calls from work or the neighbor’s home a few minute’s walk away. When she returned from the neighbor’s, she said that their home phone rang for five minutes but no one answered. Aunt Lodi reassured Jessica that while her father may have some “control” issues, she could not envision him killing Paul because of her pregnancy.

“You think you know him but you don’t. He will kill Paul, trust me,” Jessica blubbered. Jessica had not stopped crying and was rarely without Kleenex or toilet paper balled in the fists of her hands.

Aunt Lodi held Jessica in her arms and talked softly, “Honey, it’s not healthy for the baby to be so upset. I promise I will call your dad again tomorrow. I’m sure everything’s fine and Paul’s safe at his home too.”

After Jessica had been there a few days, Aunt Lodi came home from work, and her face was pale and her lips without a smile. Jessica noticed immediately and asked if she had spoken to her father. Aunt Lodi lowered herself onto the couch with her coat still on and a large bag that displayed Native American beadwork slid off her shoulder. She looked up at Jessica with wide eyes.

“Your father said Paul was dead.”

Jessica shook her head back and forth with so much force that her hair flung into her eyes. This time, her voice was loud and clear. “No, no, NO!”

Jessica ran upstairs and buried herself underneath the covers of her bed. She scrunched into a fetal position and wrapped her arms around her pillows and pulled them tight against her skin. While sobbing, she spoke out loud to Paul.

“I’m so sorry this happened to you. I’m so sorry.” She repeated those words over and over, and did not stop even when Aunt Lodi crawled next to her and gathered her into her arms, shushing her into eventual sleep.

For a week, Jessica rarely left her bed. She cried and prayed. She prayed for Paul, for her unborn child, and for forgiveness because she knew the risks of getting into a relationship but she rationalized them away. And now Paul was dead . . . because of her.

Aunt Lodi stayed home from work and tried to get Jessica to eat, but it was to no avail. Finally she used guilt around the baby’s health as a way to coax Jessica out of a steady stream of tears to only a trickle and eventually, none. But Jessica remained in a state of slow motion. She did not say Paul’s name out loud again, and never mentioned her father’s.

One day, despite a headache that would not go away, Jessica was working on trigonometry that Aunt Lodi had purchased from a homeschooling program, when she found a newspaper clipping from Chicago. It was stuck to her workbook with something that looked like coffee. While she could not read all the print because the stain blotted out some of the words, she started to recognize names. Those names made her hands shake and her heart pound fiercely. It was a short notice about a missing boy named Paul Peterson. His mother, Dee Dee, had asked for anyone with information about his whereabouts to contact her or the police.

Jessica threw up in the kitchen sink. As she gripped the kitchen counter with her swollen hands, her throat constricted because she actually started to think she should call the police on her father. But then she remembered his words:
“You ever have any boys outside your window again, they will be filled with bullets from these two guns. I will tell my cop friends that they were trying to break in. I will be completely absolved of any wrongdoing.”

Her father had many police friends, not only from serving time together in Vietnam, but also his private security company trained many of the special units on the police force. Jessica was convinced her father would lie and that her mother would protect him with an alibi. Without Paul’s body, or physical evidence, she believed her father’s words played true; he would be completely absolved of any wrongdoing.

When Aunt Lodi returned home from work that evening, Jessica told her that she had found the newspaper clipping about Paul. Aunt Lodi grabbed Jessica’s hands into hers and told her that she was going to contact someone in Chicago about the situation, and that Jessica will have to tell her version of events, and possibly testify against her father.

“It’s no use to fight against him. He will never be convicted. He has too many police friends,” Jessica whispered because she struggled to find her breath. Suddenly, she toppled to the floor. Aunt Lodi tried to wake her and when that did not work, ran to the neighbor’s home and phoned for an ambulance. Jessica had developed preeclampsia, and when she returned home from her three-day hospital stay, she had to go on bed rest while being treated with medication. Her condition was closely monitored by a doctor, but Aunt Lodi believed that her high blood pressure was linked to the stress in her life. And so, to protect Jessica and her baby from further harm, Aunt Lodi stopped talking about Paul and prosecuting her father.

After many months on bed rest due to her high-risk pregnancy, Jessica finally gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Shortly after giving birth, Jessica learned that her father was in the hospital. She was so stressed at the news of her father’s arrival that the nurse had given her extra medicine to reduce her high blood pressure. Aunt Lodi brought him to the nursery where he held his granddaughter, then left at Aunt Lodi’s request, protecting Jessica’s fragile being. A few weeks after the birth, her father showed up, unannounced, on Aunt Lodi’s doorstep. Jessica ran upstairs with her daughter in tow while Aunt Lodi stepped onto the front porch, not allowing him in. Jessica stood at the window, clinging to her baby as if that would offer protection, and listened to Aunt Lodi’s raised voice.

“I told you to not come here. You’re harming Jessica’s well-being.”

“She’s my daughter, and now I have a granddaughter. I’m not staying away.”

“You killed her boyfriend, your granddaughter’s father. That’s sick, Jim, just plain sick.”

“My job is to protect Jessica, and my granddaughter. Do you know he was a drug dealer?”

“You are not God, Jim. You don’t have the right to choose who lives and who dies!”

“When it comes to my family, I do,” Jim said. “And you should know that well, Lodi.”

Despite Aunt Lodi’s plea, Jessica’s father showed up every couple of weeks. At first, he stayed on the front porch because he was denied admission into the home, sitting on a lawn chair for hours despite the weather. Jessica was not sure why, but seeing her father remain steadfast on the porch in the brutal winter and the gloom of spring was something she wanted to last. After many months of sneaking peeks at her father from a distance, Jessica gave Aunt Lodi permission to show him pictures of his granddaughter, Paulina. On Paulina’s first birthday, he was granted entrance into Aunt Lodi’s home. Jessica had not considered how her body would feel being so close to his presence. Jessica could not bring her eyes to meet his so she left the living room and hid upstairs, tucking herself into her bed and shaking underneath the covers.

Her father continued to visit monthly unless he was on a business trip, developing a relationship with Paulina, and trying to salvage one with Jessica. Eventually, her father’s presence brought a little light to her darkened heart, but she placed an invisible boundary around herself, not allowing her father into her physical space, never wanting him to think that he could get closer. She rarely said one word to him, but his continual attempts to be a good grandfather eased some of her pain. Paulina ran to him for a big hello hug or a loud kiss on the cheek, and he would lift her up high. He always had a treat in the front pocket of his T-shirt, and she would reach in and pull out a lollipop, or a sticker, or a quarter.