Someone Else's Love Story
Joshilyn Jackson
Dedication
For Bobby Jackson, who married the right girl, and Julie Jackson, a custom job
Epigraph
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
EMILY DICKINSON
Acknowledgments
Huge (and oddly long-standing) thanks to my sharp-eyed, canny editor, Carolyn Marino—I met her when my very first novel was at auction. What an unmitigated pleasure to work with her at last! I have such deep-set gratitude to everyone at William Morrow for the warm response to my work, especially Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, Tavia Kowalchuk, Ben Bruton, Mary Ann Petyak, and Amanda Bergeron. As always, I must thank my wonderful agent, Jacques de Spoelberch.
A few years ago, at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, I heard poet Robin Behn read her glorious and earthy poem “It Is Not Always Possible to Fall in Love in Blackberry Season.” Her poem’s incantatory female voice evokes a pair of lovers, addressing the woman as you.
Rereading it obsessively, I started imagining a man who might speak to a woman in this way. The result was Walcott, a young male poet whose history and personality would let him write comfortably in such lush and visceral terms about his female lover’s sexuality as well as his own. Robin Behn kindly allowed me to put a few lines of the poem that spawned Walcott into Walcott’s mouth, but the poem is absolutely hers, and was first published in the inaugural issue of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics from Chapman University. You can read the piece in its entirety on my website at joshilynjackson.com/behn.
Walcott should write a poem celebrating the patience and kindness of genetic counselor and researcher Dawn Jacob Laney, MS, CGC, CCRC. William would not have been possible without her.
And not just Dawn—this book is full of cops and crime and chemistry and genetics and forensics and Judaism and nuns and many other things outside of my direct experience. The following human beings deserve better poems than I could write for being invaluable fonts of information. Any stupid mistakes are mine.
Science geek Scott Winn; RN Julie Oestreich; Lieutenant Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department; chemist Deawna Echols; memoirist Jessica Handler; Sister Joan Gannon; biologist Kerry Kilburn; college football player Bob Jackson; novelist Susan Rebecca White; family therapist Dr. Michael Brissett; D. P. Lyle, MD, author of Forensics for Dummies and the Dub Walker series; technophile Alison Law; and the so-awesome-you-wish-you-were-on-fire-so-he-could-save-you fireman/paramedic Daniel Jackson. And he would save you, too.
I cannot function as a human, much less as a writer, without the following four posses:
My reader posse: That’s pretty much you, Person Who Bought This Book. You are letting me keep this job I love. Thank you. If you’re one of those passionate and miraculous bookstore hand-sellers or big-mouthed, wonderful readers who recommend my books to other people, then I feel so warmly toward you, we should probably make out a little. You are directly responsible for this book, for good or ill. Thank you doesn’t cover it.
My writer posse: These people have, for years now, consistently and lovingly slapped me into being better and braver, on the page and off. They are each an essential nutrient, so I list them in alphabetical order: Anna Schachner, Caryn Karmatz Rudy, Karen Abbott, Lydia Netzer, Reid Jensen, and Sara Gruen.
My family posse: Scott, Sam, Maisy Jane, Jane, Alison, Bob, Betty, Bobby, Julie, Daniel, and Erin Virginia.
My Jesus posse: First Baptist Church of Decatur, smallgroup, and my slanted sidewalkers. Shalom, y’all.
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Three
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
Also by Joshilyn Jackson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Bullets
“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
EMILY DICKINSON
Chapter 1
I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K. It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had all been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us just as dead as a really nice gun could.
I thought then that I had landed in my own worst dream, not a love story. Love stories start with a kiss or a meet-cute, not with someone getting shot in a gas station minimart. Well, no, two people, because that lady cop took a bullet first.
But there we were, William gone still as a pond rock, me holding a green glass bottle of Coca-Cola and shaking so hard it was like a seizure. Both of us were caught under the black eye of that pistol. And yet, seventeen seconds later, before I so much as knew his name, I’d fallen dizzy-down in love with him.
I’ve never had an angel on my right shoulder; I was born with a pointy-tailed devil, who crept back and forth across my neck to get his whispers into both my ears. I didn’t get a fairy godmother or even a discount-talking cricket-bug to be my conscience. But someone should have told me. That afternoon in the Circle K, I deserved to know, right off, that I had landed bang in the middle of a love story. Especially since it wasn’t—it isn’t—it could never be my own.
At eleven o’clock that same morning, walking into gunfire and someone else’s love story was the last thing on my mind. I was busy dragging a duffel bag full of most of what I owned down the stairs, trying not to cry or, worse, let my happy show. My mother, never one for mixed feelings, had composed herself into the perfect picture of dejection, backlit and framed in the doorway to the kitchen.
I wanted to go, but if I met her eyes, I’d bawl like a toddler anyhow. This tidy brick bungalow on the mountainside had been my home for seventeen years now, ever since I was four and my parents split up. But if I cried, she’d cry, too, and then my sweet kid would lose his ever-loving crap. We’d all stand wailing and hugging it out in the den, and Natty and I would never get on the road. I tightened my mouth and looked over her head instead. That’s when I noticed she’d taken down the Praying Hands Jesus who’d been hanging over the sofa for as long as I’d had concrete memory. She’d replaced him with a Good Shepherd version who stopped me dead in the middle of the stairs.
The new Jesus looked exactly like her.
He was super pretty, slim and elegant. He was backlit, too, standing in front of a meadow instead of a kitchen, cradling a lamb instead of a spatula. My mother had never once gone into direct sunlight without a hat and SPF 50, and this Jesus shared her ivory-bloom complexion. I looked more Jewish than he did. They had the same rich brown hair glowing with honey-gold highlights, the same cornflower blue eyes cast sorrowfully upward to watch me struggle a fifty-pound duffel down the stairs. Neither offered to give me a hand.<
br />
Mimmy wasn’t anywhere near ready to let me go, and the thought of having to fight my way out of here made me want to flop down onto my butt and die on the staircase.
“Please don’t make this awful. This is the best thing,” I said, but Mimmy only stood there, radiating lovely sorrow. The pretty my mom has, it’s an unfair amount. Simply ungodly, and it worked on everyone, even me sometimes.
“Maybe for you,” she acknowledged. “But Natty?”
That scored a hit; I was trading Mimmy’s mountain full of trees and deer and sunshine for my dad’s three-bedroom condo, sleek and modern, bang in the middle of the city. But all I said was, “Oh, Mims.”
We’d been having this fight all week. Dad’s condo was ten minutes from the Georgia State campus, and from Mimmy’s, I drove about four hours round-trip. I had to register my classes around Atlanta’s rush hour and make sure they all met either Tuesday/Thursday or Monday/Wednesday/Friday. This was enough to make a simple coffee date an exercise in logistics, and Mimmy didn’t help my social life go easier. She’d been boycotting anything with a Y chromosome for going on seventeen years now. Even her cat was female, and she’d been known to change my shifts at her candy shop if she knew I had a date. I would’ve moved to the condo long before if my stepmother, Bethany, had ever let my father make the offer.
She hadn’t. Not until last week, when the results of Natty’s tests came back. Dad had set them up after Natty taught himself to read. The tests said my kid was rocking an IQ north of 140, which put him firmly in the genius category. My three-year-old could probably apply to freakin’ Mensa.
Bethany—Bethany herself, not Dad—called to tell me I could have the condo. This was unusual. Bethany was the heavy who told me I was getting uninvited from Passover because her entire family was coming and the dining room table only had so many leaves. A few days later, Dad would do something huge and beautiful and thoughtful for me, as if these events were wholly unconnected. But this time, Bethany had wanted to talk to me badly enough to dial Mimmy’s house phone when she missed me on my cell. A risky move. Mimmy and Bethany were matter and antimatter. Contact between them could trigger a blast that would knock the planet clean off its hinges and plummet us all right into the sun.
Luckily, I was the one who picked up. We had the briefest exchange of cool politenesses, and I waited for her to drop whatever awful bomb she’d primed this time. She cleared her throat and delivered what sounded like an overrehearsed monologue:
“So! Given Nathan’s unusual intellect, David wants to help you place him at a more academically focused preschool. We understand how limited the choices are out there in the weeds.”
I swear I could hear the narrow nostrils of Bethany’s long, elegant nose flaring in distaste through the phone as she said that last bit. It was a carefully worded piece of code. Last year, I’d almost killed my Jewish father by sending Natty to preschool at Mimmy’s Baptist church. Natty and I no longer attended synagogue or church, which was better than when I was a kid and had to go to both. Dad offered to pay all tuition if I moved Natty to a “better” school.
“Surely there is more than one close preschool,” he’d said.
“Of course,” I’d told him. “If you prefer, Natty can go to the one run by the Methodists.”
Now Bethany went on, “It means moving to Atlanta. I know that your mother isn’t likely to see this as an opportunity. Country people can be shortsighted, especially when it comes to education. But the benefits . . . I think any decent parent could see them.” She sniffed a little huff of disparaging air and finally came to the heart of it. “You and Natty could stay at the condo. We’d put your own phone line in, and you could decorate the third-floor bedrooms as you please. I’m not sure your father is prepared to suffer the on-call rooms with the residents, so sometimes you’d have him napping in the master. But otherwise, you could think of it as your own place.” There was a pause, and she added, pointedly, “For the year.” Then, in case I hadn’t gotten it, “Until you graduate, I mean.”
This was an amazing number of long-standing, guaranteed fight starters to pack into a single speech. Even a dig at Lumpkin County! Sure, we were rural, but not the kind of rural in Deliverance, and she damn well knew it. If she’d hoped to goad me into turning down the condo I’d been coveting—fat chance. I summoned all my inner sugar and said, hell, oh hell, oh hell-hell yes, and then I got off the phone fast as I could.
Now I dumped my heavy duffel by the front door, next to Natty’s Blue’s Clues suitcase and the stacked laundry baskets full of books and socks and toys. I went to Mimmy and looped my arms around her little waist and put my face in her hair. She smelled like vanilla.
“You’re the best Mimmy in all the world. I don’t know how I would have gotten through Natty’s baby years without you. I couldn’t have, not and gone to college. But I’m twenty-one. Natty and I have to stand on our own at some point. This is a nice step.”
She shook her head. “You and Natty setting up house ought to be exciting. It’s a rite of passage. I ought to sew you curtains and throw a housewarming. But I don’t know how to celebrate you moving into that awful man’s place.”
I let the awful man part go and only said, “I am not moving to the house house.”
Bethany and Dad and my three little stepbrothers lived in a huge stucco and stone McMansion out in Sandy Springs. No way I could ever share a roof with Bethany. I called her my Step-Refrigerator to my mother and much worse things to my best friend, Walcott. She’d earned all her names, though to be fair, I’m pretty sure I’d earned whatever she privately called me.
Mimmy started to speak again, but just then we heard Walcott coming down, his long feet slapping the stairs. He had most of my hanging clothes in a fat fold he held against his chest.
“Why do you have so many dresses?” he asked.
“Because I’m a girl,” I said.
My mother eyed my things and said, “A better question is, why do you dress like a forty-year-old French divorcée?”
“I like vintage,” I said, going to unburden Walcott. It was a huge stack; I found most of my clothes at rummage sales and thrift shops, digging through mounds of acid-washed mom jeans for the one good circle skirt or perfect two-dollar wrap dress.
He waved me off with one hand, arms still clutched tight around my clothes, heading for the front door.
Mimmy said, pinchy-voiced, “You can’t load hanging clothes first. They’ll get smushed and have to be re-ironed.”
Walcott stopped obediently and draped my clothes over the duffel, giving me a Walcott look, wry and mock-martyred. He’d walked over yesterday from his momses’ place to help me pack, as his hundred-millionth proof of best-friendhood. Today he’d help load my car and keep Natty entertained on the drive to the condo. The condo was built in a stack of three small floors. The kitchen and living space were at ground, and Dad’s master suite took up the whole middle. Natty and I were taking the two rooms that shared a bath at the very top. Walcott, being Walcott, would carry the heaviest things up all those stairs, while we toted in pillows and Target bags full of shoes. I didn’t even have to drive him home, just drop him at his girlfriend’s place in Inman Park.
He’d been doing crap like this for me since we were both five, the outsiders at a milk-white elementary school in a so-white-it-was-practically-Wonder-Bread county. I was the only half-a-Jew for miles, and Walcott was the sperm-donated product of a pair of lesbians who left Atlanta to grow organic veggies and run a mountain bed-and-breakfast for like-minded ladies. Walcott’s momses engaged in all manner of suspicious behaviors, including Zen meditation and hydroponics. Where we lived, those words were as foreign as Rosh Hashanah or Pesach Seder, strange rites that got me extra days off school and sent me to my dad’s place in Atlanta, where I no doubt painted the doors with lamb blood and burned up doves.
Me and Walcott, we’d stood back-to-back with our swords up, together surviving the savage playgrounds; yet here was Mimmy, giving him the glare she saved for any poor, male fool who got caught by all her immaculately groomed pretty and tried to ask her out. She knew darn well that Walcott didn’t have a sex-crazed man-genda for helping me move, but every now and then, she remembered he technically belonged to the penis-having half of the human race. She’d flick that suspicious, baleful look at him. She’d done it when he was in kindergarten, even. Back then, he’d showed me his penis on a dare, and it had been an innocent pink speck, clearly incapable of plotting.
“This is the last from upstairs. Let’s pack the car after we eat,” Walcott said.
“As long as we get on the road by two. I don’t want to unload in the dark.”
“I’ll dish up lunch,” my mother said, wilting into acceptance. The wilt was a feint. I caught her sloe-eyed side-peek at me as she rolled away against the doorway on her shoulder and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Hoo! You’re so screwed,” Walcott said, grinning. To an outsider, my mother would seem to be in a state of mild, ladylike displeasure, but mainly at peace with the world and all its denizens. But Walcott and I had grown up together, in and out of each other’s houses all day long our whole lives. He could decode the state of the Once and Future Belle from her lipstick colors and the angle of the tortoiseshell combs in her hair almost as well as I could.
“She’s loaded for bear. And I’m bear,” I said.
