Jessie never fell asleep, exactly, curled up in the hallway above her childhood living room, but she drifted for a while. She heard the sick thumps of flesh on flesh, and the soft cries of a man she’d called Daddy – once upon a time. She heard soft voices, threatening words, and realized that the growling demands Tex made during sex, the kind that were made with his lips half curled into a smile, were used at other times, as well. That was the part where her stomach finally flipped over, but she wasn’t sick.
She pushed herself up to her hands and knees, and then to her feet. Her mother’s small Cape Cod home was arranged so all the living areas were downstairs and the bedrooms were all upstairs. Shortly after she’d moved out, Janis had redecorated Jessie’s room, turning it into a combination of a crafting nook and exercise room. That was the door directly in front of her; another door to her left was kept firmly closed. She hadn’t entered it in fifteen years. But now, it almost called out to her, inviting her to go inside.
The funny thing, she thought, as she twisted the doorknob, is that Danny had barely ever let me in his room when he was alive, too. Being barred from entry after his death shouldn’t have felt like having a door closed on her childhood. But it had. If she’d told her mother that she needed to go in there to say goodbye, she was sure Janis would have let her, but without that…it just wasn’t a conversation she’d been equipped to have, and by the time she’d thought of it, it had been too long, and it didn’t feel the same.
But now, she wanted to see.
She wasn’t sure what she expected. A perfectly preserved room, completely with rock star posters and the baseball he’d had signed the one time they made it to Los Angeles? Or an office where Janis kept her computer and her writing desk?
The door opened instead onto a very different scene. It was her brother’s room, in a very general way, but it was also soulless. It could pass as a guest room, even though it still had the same comforter, the same desk, and the same lamp on the night table. The posters were gone. The mess of books and video games on his desk, the general clutter of teenage-boy that had made the room Danny’s was gone.
It was a strange sort of loss. It was like looking at a family portrait. Everyone was there, all the moving pieces were accounted for, but they were awkwardly posed, too formal, stiff and uncomfortable. There was no soul to the picture. It was documentation, not record. Or something.
She closed the door without stepping into the room. She didn’t entirely know what she was looking for, but whatever it was, it didn’t lie in that room.
Things had gotten quiet downstairs. She dared to creep back down the stairs. She was still furious at Tex for choosing to…to interrogate that man instead of being there for her, but at the same time, she knew it had been an unfair demand. They’d been together for a little more than a week. He’d been chasing his best friend’s killer for more than a decade. He had a lead, and Sergeant Pedroza had said it was crucial. She should have known he would choose that over her. She would have done the same in his place. Hell, she wanted him to. The whole point was trusting his judgment, after all, and his judgment had gotten them this far towards finding out who had killed Danny and getting revenge.
She wasn’t sure where she was going to go once she got downstairs, but it ended up not mattering. As she got close to the bottom of the stairs, she heard quiet voices coming from the kitchen. It only took a moment to identify them as Tex and her mother. She didn’t exactly plan to listen, but, at the same time, it wasn’t like she had her fingers in her ears. It was hard to miss her mother telling Tex that she’d known — there was no word in her mind that fit who he was to her, and she glossed over the space where his name should be as quickly as she could — was in town. Because if Mama had known, and hadn’t told her…that was somehow even worse than Tex telling her he needed to talk to that man, even if it hurt her.
She’d thought she would go into the kitchen, put her arms around Tex’s waist, and let him apologize. Find out what was happening, what he needed her to do. Make a decision about how much of this she could handle.
Instead, she slipped the rest of the way down the staircase, then around the back hallway and out the back door. No one heard her. That was just fine. She didn’t have anything else to say to anyone here. Her phone was in her pocket, and she was going to walk for a while. Get her head sorted out before she tried to tell anyone anything at all.