Fisher

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“You okay?” Jade asked.

“I’m fine. Why would I be anything else?” I said.

Jade didn’t respond, but I had no doubt that she didn’t believe what I said.

I didn’t even believe what I said.

Because I was anything but fine.

I had resisted looking at those pictures and the rest of the documents, and I had been right to.

One glimpse at the one picture, and I had started to question everything I knew.

Just as Jade had intended.

I glanced at her, wondering how she had pulled it off. I decided to ask.

“How did you know to look there?” I asked.

My voice must have sounded suspicious, had an edge that I hadn’t intended because Jade looked at me and shrugged.

“I told you. It was a hunch. Are you trying to suggest it was something else?” she asked.

“What? Something like you having found something that had been planted there for you to find? Or maybe you’re in league with Patrick?”

“Yeah, something like that,” she said.

We pulled to a stop at a red light and I looked over at her, locked eyes with hers, looking at her intently, deeply.

“No,” I finally said.

The light turned green and I pulled off, but Jade didn’t say anything else. She seemed to accept my word, just as I had accepted hers, and of all the things that had happened today, that was the one I decided to latch onto.

Because at least for that moment I had it, that complete trust, acceptance, something that only came with someone you loved, someone who loved you back.

I risked a quick glance at Jade again, her hands primly folded on her lap, her long, flowing skirt pooling on the floor of the car, that feeling didn’t go away.

It only got deeper, and in that instant I acknowledged something that I had been fighting for far too long.

I loved Jade. And I suspected she loved me too.

That didn’t change anything, couldn’t change anything, but I had that, in that moment I would relish it.

I did so until we arrived back at the house, but once we went inside I knew the time to indulge in my newly found, or newly acknowledged feelings for Jade was over.

She sat in her favorite spot on the couch, tucked her legs in their usual position, and sat that metal box next to her.

I hated to even look at it, hated what it represented for me, but I didn’t dare look away.

“Why aren’t you opening that box?” I asked.

“It’s not mine to open, Fisher,” she said quietly.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means I helped you find it, but it’s not mine to open. It’s yours. You have to open it, and you have to reckon with what’s inside of it,” she said.

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked.

I hated the slight twinge of desperation in my voice, the edge, but if Jade noticed, she didn’t give any indication of it.

“Just open your eyes. Open your mind. Your heart,” she added.

“What does my heart have to do with anything?” I asked.

“Maybe nothing. That’s for you to decide. But look at those pictures, think about what made her hide them away, keep them safe for all these years,” she said.

“She could have been trying to erase all traces of me,” I said.

Jade shrugged. “She could have been. Or maybe she was holding as tightly as she could to the pieces of you that she had left.”

I had considered as much myself. Pushed the thought away.

I had no capacity for it, didn’t want to think about what it meant, and I wouldn’t allow myself to.

“Come sit next to me,” Jade said.

I followed the directive without giving it any thought.

I sat next to her, then looked at her eyes.

“I want you to know I understand how hard this is, I know what you’re going through. You believed one thing your whole life, and accepting the idea that you can’t trust it, or that you’ve been a fool, it’s not an easy one to swallow.”

“You say that like you’re speaking from experience,” I said, having noted the wistfulness in her voice, the way it sounded far too familiar.

“I am,” she responded.

“How?” I asked.

She flinched, then blanched, and I shook my head. “Never mind. It’s not any of my business,” I said.

She shook her head, then reached out and laid her hand atop mine. The motion seemed so natural, like something she had done a million times, and it was something I wanted her to do a million more.

“No. It’s okay. You can ask. I’m sorry for the reaction. It’s just difficult for me,” she said.

I waited, not interjecting, not asking any questions, but torn between being curious and terrified of what Jade might say.

“Yeah, I know how you’re feeling from experience,” she said.

She tilted her head, studied me for a moment.

“What all do you know about me?” she asked.

“Who your friends are. Your profession. But that’s all,” I said.

“You didn’t dig deeper, get into my past?” she asked.

I shook my head. “There was no need to,” I said.

“But if there had been, you would have?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I responded, not wanting to lie to her.

“I understand,” she said.

I sensed that Jade was stalling, trying to decide if she was going to continue or if she was going to stop.

But then, after a moment she nodded.

“Did you know I’m an orphan?” she asked.

I shook my head, sighed. “I had no idea.”

“Yes. My mother and father were killed in a car accident when I was six years old,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I responded, not knowing what to say. I probably should have said nothing, should have resisted the impulse to give her my condolences, knowing that were the roles reversed I would take it as pity.

But Jade didn’t seem to mind, and instead she simply shrugged.

“I was so young, and it was so long ago, it’s just…” she trailed off, then looked off into the distance, out the picture window that she loved so much.

A moment later she focused on me.

“It’s hard to explain, but I loved them, and I think that I have some vague recollection of them, but they’re almost abstract. They were real, and I know they existed, but the pain I feel when I think of them is mostly from expectation I think,” she said.

She looked away again, then scoffed.

“You must think I’m a fucking monster. Talking about the death of my parents as an abstraction,” she said.

“I don’t think you’re a monster. I know people cope, and the sad truth of it is you coped. You did what you had to.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”

It didn’t sound like she believed me, but a moment later she sighed again and then turned to look at me.

“Well, after they died, I went to live with my aunt,” she said.

There was something about the way she spoke that last word, sadness and anger threaded through that put me on alert.

“I loved her,” Jade said. “She loved me back. She didn’t have any children of her own, but she treated me like I was. She took me in, opened her home to me, and made it the place I knew my parents would have wanted it to be.”

I stayed quiet, waiting, knowing that the story was just beginning.

“It was just me and her, and at first it was perfect,” Jade said.

Her brows dipped deep, her face twisting with an emotion, hurt, that I hated to see on it.

“It really was perfect. She dropped me off at school, came to pick me up in the afternoon, did my homework with me. She took me to the movies and roller-skating. I had the best seventh birthday party ever thrown by a human,” she said.

I smiled, but didn’t let the expression linger.

“I can remember it now,” she said, her face turned toward me, but her eyes making it clear that she was a million miles away.

“What do you remember so clearly?” I asked.

“How much I loved her. How grateful I was for her. I prayed to God every night that nothing happened to her.”

“And?” I said.

“And nothing did. Nothing happened to her. But I got sick,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I think it was fall. I was seven, maybe eight. I got sick. It was so embarrassing, it happened at school. And I could remember how even under the sickness I felt so embarrassed.”

“You were a kid. You had an accident,” I said, shrugging.

“Yeah. Except they seemed to get worse. I had terrible stomach issues, and then it got worse. I had limb weakness and ended up in a wheelchair,” she said.

“What was wrong?” I asked.

“Depended on who you asked. Multiple sclerosis, irritable bowel syndrome, liver malfunction.”

“Nobody knew?” I asked.

“None of the doctors knew. They’d just bring me in, give me their tests, ship me on to the next specialist,” she said.

Her voice had changed now, taking on a higher-pitched tone, one that skated far too close to hysterical for my tastes.

“And all that time, I was even more grateful for my aunt. I just knew that if anything happened to her I would end up in some state hospital. But with her, everything was perfect. She took care of me, nursed me as best she could. And when I felt up to it, we’d go on so many adventures. Trips and museums and everything you could think of. I was her entire world, just like she was mine,” Jade said.

I was even more certain now that something ominous was going to come out of her story, and I didn’t know if I could stomach it. But I stayed quiet, let Jade finish.

“Then, when I turned about fifteen, I just lost it,” she said.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t dare ask. She was clearly lost in her past, a place I knew instinctively she didn’t share with too many people.

“I told my aunt that I wanted to die. That I was sick of being a burden on her. She got angry with me. She was never angry with me, but when I said that, she held my face, squeezed it tight. I can still feel her fingers against my skin. She looked me in the eye and told me to never say anything like that. That I had value, that I couldn’t lose sight of that.”

Jade looked down, her untamed hair falling into her face. Then she looked back up at me again, her expression now stern. I noticed that her eyes were wet, but no tears had fallen.

“That just made me resolved not to let her down. I promised myself that I would do everything I possibly could to get better. I wouldn’t keep making her suffer because I was weak and sick,” she said.

As she spoke, I again heard that steel in her voice, recognized it from the first time I had met her.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I threw myself into research. I looked, looked again, tried to turn over every rock I could to figure out what was wrong with me and how to fix it,” she said.

“I made a little progress too. I became a vegetarian and then I cut out the carbs and focused my diet entirely around super foods. It worked, too. For a while there, I was making good progress, moving ahead. I got out of the wheelchair, and I tried to get off the rest of the medication I was taking. The doctor said it was miraculous, that whatever I was doing I needed to do more of it,” she said.

Her voice had lowered, taking on an ominous quality that made me shiver.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Everybody was happy for me. But not my aunt,” Jade said.

“Why not?”

“At first, I didn’t know. Thought that maybe she was upset because if I got better she wouldn’t have anything to focus on. She didn’t do well with idle hands as she liked to say, but still, I promised myself I was going to do this and I was dedicated to it.

“Except, I would get better, then get worse. Two steps forward, two steps back, all leaving me in the same place.”

I looked at her, saw the sadness in her expression and then there was nothing.

“But I didn’t let myself quit. I kept going. I got weak, but I refused to go back into the wheelchair. One day, when I was sure I was going to have to change that, I remember walking into the kitchen.”

She looked away, then looked back at me, her eyes watering even more now.

“My aunt was surprised that I was there, but I was surprised too.”

My stomach dropped, but I kept my thoughts to myself, focused on Jade.

“I asked her what she was doing. She was holding one of my containers with my grilled vegetables in it. Those were my favorite, but she had nothing to do with them,” Jade said. “Anyway, I asked her what she was doing and she said she was just going to make me some lunch.”

She went quiet again, then restarted.

“You know how I found that box, the place it was hidden,” she said.

“Yeah,” I responded.

“I got that same feeling when I was talking to my aunt. I just knew, knew deep down inside that she was lying. She tried to cover, she blustered and pecked and prodded, but nothing she could say was able to convince me. I went back to bed, my mind turning over what I had seen, and then it hit me,” she said.

Her voice had lowered, and I suspected I knew where she was going but I waited for her to confirm it.

“I followed that gut instinct, pulling at that thread until the whole thing unraveled,” Jade said, her voice thick with emotion.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I’ll make a long story short, or more accurately, I guess, make a long story slightly less long. She was poisoning me,” Jade said.

I gave no reaction, but the rage I felt in that moment was intense.

“Wow,” Jade said, one corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. “You look about as pissed as I felt.”

“Yes,” I said, noncommittal, struggling to contain my emotions.

“That was what she had meant. When she said I was valuable. I was. Literally. She was getting three checks for me. One from my mother, one from my father, one for disability. I was valuable to her. And there was no way she was ever going to let me not be,” Jade said.

“She was poisoning you for money?” I asked, incredulous.

“Money. Attention. Favors. I was her little baby cash cow, and it was in her best interest for me to be sick, not sick enough to die, because that would definitely cut off the funds, but sick enough to make her a lot, make people feel sorry for her. That’s all I was to her. A means to an end,” Jade said.

I listened to her, heard something in her voice that alarmed me. “You don’t think it’s your fault, do you?” I asked.

She had looked away, but looked back at me, locking eyes with mine.

“No. I don’t think it’s my fault. It’s her fault. She’s the one who poisoned me. But I was the one who didn’t see through it,” Jade said.

“You were a child.”

“I was.”

The way Jade said that told me that she didn’t believe that was any kind of excuse.

“Is that why you are so cautious about what you eat?” I asked.

“Yeah, an old habit, a really annoying one,” she said, sounding sad.

“Not really, given what you’ve gone through,” I said.

“Yes, exactly, Fisher. What I have gone through. Not what I’m going through. I hated myself for not seeing through my aunt sooner, but even more I hated myself for allowing her to control my life. Everything I do is because of her, because of the fear she put in me, the distrust.”

Her voice broke, and she looked away but she swallowed and then looked at me again.

“It’s been a very long time, and I still haven’t let it go. I still let her control me. And I hate that,” Jade said.

I reached out for her, covered her hand with mine.

“Not your fault, Jade,” I said.

“No. But how I let it run my life is my fault and my responsibility. That’s why I care about Nya so much,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We worked at the same place once, and one day—I’ll remember this for the rest of my life—Nya, after badgering me for weeks, finally convinced me to go have coffee with her. I didn’t have coffee. I just sat there, drinking bottled water and eating a pack of prepackaged crackers. Which are super good for you, by the way,” she said with a grim little smile that made my chest ache.

“Anyway, she said to me, ‘Jade, I don’t know you very well. But I like you.’ I scoffed, laughed directly in her face, but Nya wasn’t deterred. She just told me that she liked me, and she thought we could be friends, but I was gonna have to decide if I wanted to do that or if I wanted to live afraid of my shadow for the rest of my life. It’s the best question anybody has ever asked me.”

“Yeah,” I responded, not elaborating, but knowing full well what Jade meant.

Someone had pulled her out of her own way, and she was trying to do the same thing for me.

Would I let her?

The answer wasn’t a definitive yes, but it wasn’t an absolute no.

I looked at Jade, stared at her, really, trying to see how she so deeply touched me, what about her got to me so.

I didn’t know, but again in that moment I knew that I loved her.

I couldn’t tell her that, knew it wouldn’t be fair. And even more, I resisted, afraid of finding out she didn’t love me back.

But I needed to show her, did so when I pulled her into my arms and kissed her until we were both breathless. I didn’t even bother with the bedroom and instead stripped us and entered her in one stroke, using my body to show the emotion that my words could not.

Prayed that was enough.