#this chapter is brought to you by fiona apple and intense anxiety

[saturdaynightghostclub]

Highway Hypnosis

Chapter 4: Janus

I’m settling in. I’m doing well. I’m figuring it out. I say these things to myself, over and over, as I try everything short of witchcraft to rid myself of this jittery, unsettled feeling. Actually, maybe I should try witchcraft; it’s been a month and still the feeling lingers. It’s like a cloud of TV static, or a bluebird circling my head in disconcerting silence. I’m alright.

Magic didn’t get me to this point. I was the one who did that. I managed to get a part-time job with Janie at the coffee shop after realizing in the haze of a mild panic that, though Len left me with plenty of amenities, grocery money wasn’t one of them. I cleaned out the guest room in the cabin, which used to be my domain in the summer but which appears to have been used as overflow for Len’s extensive library in the time since my last visit; it’s now complete with my soft floral linens and sheer curtains, an oscillating fan perched on the windowsill blowing the scent of hydrangeas through the space. I haven’t touched Len’s room, terrified on some level of what will happen to me if I do–it’s a problem for another day, I think. Jasper and Joshy take turns asking me how I’m holding up, which is simultaneously annoying and endearing. I’m doing well. I am doing well.

I’m doing so well, in fact, that I haven’t felt the need to leave my house all weekend. Not when the sun was shining, not when the town’s annual daffodil parade burned slow divots into the streets, not when Joshy called to tell me that he and a couple of the other young people in town were going to spend the day at the river, “if I wanted to join them.” Certainly not now, on the first rainy night in August, which happens to be a deluge of truly Biblical proportion. I could rise above my body, I think, through the roof and above the town, and just stare at the moon reflected in the drenched asphalt of Main Street until the storm passed. I could let it beat against my skin, open my eyes against it, let it hurt if it wanted to. Then maybe, when I floated back into myself, I’d be scrubbed clean of my TV static-grit and free of unease.

Jasper was meant to come over tonight to exchange some books–it’s a routine we’ve sort of stumbled into, these few Sunday nights–it’s our time to revive Len in short bursts of normalcy. I can’t imagine he’ll make it out here, though. Not in this weather, and not at 9:00 at night. So I sit at Len’s–my–kitchen table with a cold cup of tea and hope irrationally that the windows won’t implode, or maybe that they will. It might be nice to get a bit of a cross-breeze going. I’m in shorts and a ratty sweatshirt I found in the dryer. A midwestern girl to my core, and not just because the sweatshirt has “Chicago Bears” emblazoned across the front. It’s hard to move and impossible to stay still, so my body freezes while my mind relays against itself like I’ve had too much caffeine. I work at 7:00 tomorrow morning. I think I could probably sleep here and feel no worse when I wake up than I would have if I’d spent the night in my bed. Shoving my neglected teacup to the middle of the table, I lay my head upon my folded arms to get started.

An hour passes in ten minutes, or maybe just an hour’s worth of thoughts. I’m alright. I’m so small, and this house is so small, and I’m living a small life now. To think that I thought Chicago was restrictive. To my great relief, my eyelids begin to feel heavy and the dense violet shroud of sleep slowly, slowly lays its weight on me. In my half-dream, someone knocks on a door. That must mean something, right? Dream analysis, largely disproven, is more a matter of symbolism than psychology–what’s the symbolism of someone knocking on a door? On an obvious level, whoever it is wants to be let in. Into my subconscious, presumably, given that’s where we are now; so the door must be one of my own creation. Not only is someone asking that I let them in, but I’m actively keeping them out. It’s a harsh analysis, but perhaps fair; I haven’t exactly been easy to reach these past few days. So now all that remains, assuming I want to start being more open, is to find the door. Behind me, somewhere—that probably means something too, now that I think about it—

“Andie?” A voice cuts through the fog of my pseudointellectual nightmare as if from a great distance. Male, on the younger side. “You in there?” Where else would I be, Man? You wouldn’t get it. The owner of the voice knocks again, and some stage manager in the depths of my brain hooks me, pulling me offstage with a fishing hook-cane and into the light. Someone is knocking on my door. The TV static feeling takes me once more as I stand. It’s less that I walk to the door and more that the door just happens upon me; I haven’t been sick in years, but I think this must be what people mean when they talk about fever dreams.

The Man on the other side of my real life brain door is Jasper Stevens. He’s wearing a raincoat, hugging it tightly around his wiry frame. Why doesn’t he just use the zipper? He looks cold, and I’m cold for him. I’m about to step aside and let him enter when he speaks.

“Andie, holy shit,” he says, so softly I can only just hear him above the rain, “you look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I manage drily. Jasper crosses the threshold without waiting for me to move.

“Are you feeling okay?” He asks, his hand pressed to my forehead before I can protest. I could have saved him the trouble—I’m not sick. Just lost. Seeming dissatisfied with my lack of a temperature, he pivots to another line of questioning. “What about sleep, you been sleeping?”

I’m about to nod, or tell him to fuck off, or something equally unproductive, but for a second he’s my sweet Jasper again and I can’t bring myself to make him leave. “I—no,” I admit, “I’ve been… stressed out.” As if that explains anything. Good going, Andie.

“Come here, come sit down,” Jasper says, one hand between my shoulderblades as he guides me back to the kitchen table, “I’m going to go switch out these books, okay? I’ll be back in ten seconds, don’t move.”

It could be ten seconds or it could be two hours before he returns, but when he does he places a glass of water before me and crosses his arms over his chest, leaning back against the kitchen counter to look at me. At some point he took off his raincoat, leaving his arms bare in a too-big T-shirt. How come he gets to stand there and look at me like that, expectantly, as if I should have anything to say to him? I stand, just to be on somewhat equal footing, and all at once exhaustion hits me. I must be swaying, because he darts forward to steady me by the shoulders.

“Andie…” he says, looking down at me with his brows drawn close together. I don’t know what to say for myself, and he knows it. I’m not sure who moves first, if I lean into him or if he puts his arms around me, but all at once I’m crushed against his chest. He’s holding me so tightly I think for a minute we might become one person, our ribs hooked into each other and my ear forever against his heartbeat. “Tell me,” he says, voice muffled against my hair. I wonder for a moment when he got so sensitive, but then he’s always been this way. When I was nine and sprained my ankle, Jasper winced with my every step as if the injury was his—you can’t take that out of a person, no matter how many cigarettes you give him.

I extract myself from his embrace, not without recognizing the absurdity of being held by such a man. “You want it all?”

Jasper runs a hand through my hair, his brow still furrowed. “I want it all,” he says. I can’t reconcile this interaction with our previous dynamic, one I was certain he would have been happy to maintain. He’s aggressively concerned.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I confess. Deep breaths. “I’ve never even lived on my own before, I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know anyone, which is fine except that you all know each other–I don’t fit here, Jasper.”

“And?”

“And what? I’m done, I’m overwhelmed. I can’t do it,” I say, all at once. I’m actually shocked at myself for admitting it. Here’s a woman who’s never asked for help a day in her life, not even when she was failing introductory statistics and desperately needed a tutor. Here she is, entrusting a man she knows only on the basis of a childhood friendship. “

Jasper nods, thoughtfully. “Can I ask you something?”

I’m taken aback for a moment, but nod. “Sure.”

“Why do you think Len brought you out here?”

I’m surprised at the wording of the question, as if it was Len’s plan to get me back to Evergreen as opposed to a side effect of his death, but I answer it anyway. “He wanted someone to take care of his house, I guess.”

“No, see, that’s not it,” Jasper says, shaking his head like I should know better, “Andie, Len brought you here because he thought you’d enjoy yourself. He thought you’d have fun. He wanted you to be part of the community, he told me himself.”

“He told you? When did he–”

“Later. The point is, we take care of each other here. He knew that, he knew you’d be taken care of if you came here. You’re not alone, Andie, you just need to open up.”

I scoff. I can’t help myself. “You’re one to talk, I think this is the longest conversation we’ve had in a decade.”

Jasper shakes his head, emphatically this time. “I’m a loner, totally,” he says, “but these people–they’re my people, you know? Do you get it? And they’re your people too. We all belong to each other, does that make sense?” He’s starting to sound less confident. “Listen to me,” he says eventually, “you are here for a reason. Okay? That’s what I wanted to say. You’re not here by accident, you’re here because it’s the right place for you.”

“Jasper, I don’t know–”

“Give it another month, please,” he says. His eyes are wide and, if the sun hit them, I think they might be the color of honey. “And we’ll go to the beach and climb trees and I’ll–I’ll organize the library for you, and I’ll fix that step on your front porch. One more month, then you can tell me you hate it.”

I let my shoulders heave as I sigh, allowing myself a moment of drama. How can I possibly refuse him, when this is the most I’ve heard him speak since I arrived? “You get one month,” I concede, and as he takes me back into his arms I feel the chasm between his two personalities growing, and wonder what I can do to bridge the gap and finally understand him.