having just been beaten up by a bully not for my lunch money but for shits and giggles. I thought something was wrong with me, that I must have been a real putz to be picked on and beaten up just for sport. She assured me I wasn’t a putz, that she wouldn’t love a putz like she loved me. That shut off the tears, all right. It was then that I knew she loved me, though her degree of love couldn’t have matched the intensity of my own. But some love was a heck of a lot better than no love at all.
“Jacob is one persistent booger, huh?” Anna had said. “I swear, I should just go out with him once and give him the worst date of his life. Maybe then he’ll leave me alone.”
“You don’t think he’s cute at all?”
“If I did I wouldn’t have turned him down all one-million times. My heart doesn’t belong to that Jacob. Hey, it’s my birthday in a week. What did you get me?” She smiled playfully at me.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait just a damned minute. Walking silently beside Julie, I got a hell of a lot more serious in my remembrance. I sought to replay what Anna had said, slower, and dissected it like a science project. “If I did I wouldn’t have turned him down all one-million times.” This is where I really focused: “My heart doesn’t belong to that Jacob.” She then changed the subject, did she not? Yes, to her approaching birthday. Was that intentional? I wondered. More importantly was the single word she inserted in that ponderous statement: that. My heart doesn’t belong to that Jacob. True some people will say that before a name, such as ‘How about that Jacob? Crazy kid, huh?’ But I’m not so sure she meant it that way. Her heart doesn’t belong to that Jacob, suggesting it might belong to another Jacob. And I didn’t know of any other Jacob’s, unless… unless you considered Jeffrey Jay Jacobs. How did I not pick up on that all those years ago? Oh how frustrating!
Playing around with what if’s will drive you crazy. That doesn’t stop us from doing it, though. What if I had responded differently than, “Yeah, next week you turn sixteen. Any plans?” What if I had said, “Your heart doesn’t belong to that Jacob. Does it belong to this one?” God how I wished I had said that. What is worse is she may have said that purposely, so I might respond how she hoped I’d respond. She gave me an entrance into the topic and I squandered it. More like missed it altogether. Maybe she read into it, put all her eggs in that basket, and when I didn’t capitalize on her ambiguous statement, that could only mean one thing to her: I didn’t feel the same way about her. How wrong she would have been if that was the case! Oh my, how stupid am I? Or was. I’ve grown less stupid over the years with much work. Maybe it took a lot of courage for her to say what she did, being as shy as me, and interpreted my response to her words as rejection, and decided then and there that she’d never approach the subject again.
It was that afternoon that cute little Julie Macintyre (and she really was a cute little bugger) had an oops-a-daisy on her bike. We were still on the bench chatting idly when it happened. We didn’t see it happen, but the crying adolescent came alongside her bicycle into view, pushing it in lieu of riding it, and there was blood running down her shin. Together Anna and I rushed to her aid.
“I remember you,” Julie said in the here-and-now. “I remember you. I was thinking about this dress, about the blood stain, and how that came to be, crashing on my bike. It was you and Anna who came to help me right after it happened.”
That she was thinking of the same thing as me just then didn’t strike me as uncanny or a great coincidence. It was too much of a coincidence for it to be a coincidence. It braced my theory that she didn’t exist, that this wasn’t real, that she was a figment of my imagination, no less than were the two simian things I had recently discerned; no less than was the man in black encroaching ever nearer until he was upon me, shutting out my lights and sending me here—here, which was all in my mind. Maybe it wasn’t hell after all. Or maybe hell is being damned to relive our worst memories, such as missing the cue to ask the girl I love if she loved me too, if that Jacob was this Jacob.
“And Jeffie, you know what else?” She reached around my waist and took my wrist, brought it before her eyes. “So weird…” she breathed. “I don’t know what’s weirder, that you were wearing this same watch that day, or that I remember it so clearly.”
“You do? Are you sure? Because I don’t.”
“I positively do, Jeffie.”
It was a moment for epiphanies, because I just had another one. Two, actually. First, it was a week before Anna’s birthday, and I do recall her birthday—when you are madly in love with someone, there is little you don’t take to heart about them—it was the tenth of November. November 10th was when she was turning sixteen. A week before her birthday was the day we sat there, the day Julie scraped her knee, making that November 3rd, give or take a day or two. My money was on November 3rd precisely. And why do I think that? When Julie released my wrist I depressed the button on the side of my watch and there it was: November 3rd. And although it didn’t show what year it was (the good people at Casio bestowed enough faith in their customers that they should at least know what year it was) I’d bet it would read 1997. Because that’s what year it had been.
The second epiphany was in this being real. Sure as shit, we were walking here, not dreaming it. Julie wasn’t in my head, she was walking beside me in the flesh. She had remembered my watch being worn by me that day, not I. I still don’t recall it, but I trust that she recalls it correctly. If this hell were all inside my head, I wouldn’t be able to produce memories not my own. I suspect I could ask her things I could in no way know, and she’d be able to answer some of them, and answer them accurately. Because she was real, with a mind of her own and memories of her own.
“Why do you keep calling me Jeffie all of a sudden?”
“I’m starting to remember a lot of things,” she said thoughtfully. “Why do you suppose we have these ties into that day?”
“The million dollar question,” I replied. “I have no clue.”
Julie was more like me than I thought. We were on the same wavelength. “Tell me something I don’t know about Anna,” she said.
She was questioning this being a dream as well. She wanted me to provide some kind of proof that I had knowledge independent of her own. “Okay. Did you know she had a boy following her around named Jacob? He was infatuated with her, but she didn’t feel the same way about him.”
“No, I didn’t know that. She never told me, I don’t think. Of course she wouldn’t be infatuated with him: she loved Jeffie. Didn’t she?”
Oh my aching heart. I wished she didn’t just say that. “Please be assuming this and not saying it out of knowledge.”
She studied my expression and grinned a little from it. “I see. It’s like that, is it?”
I nodded.
“You never told her.”
“To my everlasting regret, I did not.”
We strode along for a moment before she came out with it. “If you prefer, I’ll say that I’m assuming it.”
I closed my eyes and muttered, “Damnit. Damnit all.”
“Sorry. I used to tease her about it: Anna and Jeffie sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. You want to marry and make babies with Jeffie, don’t you. She hated that. Because it was true.”
I sighed a great big one. “I’d prefer thinking she didn’t like me.”
“That’s what you get for having a crush on someone and not telling them.”
“It wasn’t a crush. I was in love with her. Madly in love.”
“Then you won’t like hearing this. I remember her wedding.”
“It’s okay, I figured she’d be married by now.”
We had arrived at the locale of the simian things. We were between where they had originated from and where they struggled before the bigger killed the smaller. I scanned the dirt as we crossed it, looking for signs that it was real and not imagined. Foot prints. But there weren’t any, and it didn’t weigh so heavily upon my mind; new things had replaced it. New torments were in the works. It was still hell, only
the demons were now internal instead of external.
Julie gasped sharply. I looked around: there was nothing to alarm over. I then considered it was a gasp of recollection, and it was. Her eyes were wide and penetrating my own. She then looked to the ground before her with a troubled brow, retook my hand in hers and palmed her forehead with the other. I said nothing, let her speak when she was ready.
“Oh no,” she said on the verge of tears. “Oh nooo.”
“What?”
She looked up at me, then returned her vacant gaze at the ground shaking her head. “I prayed to God, I believed in God—believe in God—so why should I be in hell? Was I that bad of a Christian?” She said inwardly.
“So you do think we’re in hell.”
She nodded gravely.
“Great,” I said sarcastically. “Fantastic.”
“That or we’re in heaven.” She looked around. “This isn’t heaven.”
“We’re dead.” It was half question, half statement.
“I remember, Jeffrey. Leading up to here, I now remember.” She emitted an anguished moan and threw her head back. “Why… why did I do it?”
“Do what?”
“Oh my, even the damned bridge was named Devil’s Crossing. How horribly ironic is that?”
“Tell me.”
She was now crying and in no hurry to tell me. But we had a long walk to wherever we were headed, so it would come out eventually. And it didn’t take long.
“My boyfriend’s name is Chris. Oh man… he must be so devastated, feel so guilty. It was his idea.”
“What was?”
“We were at Lake Matthews for the day. Me, Chris, Alex, and Jenn. We hiked up to where the river flowed into the lake. There is a trail that goes alongside it. It starts getting steep, real steep, as you hike up it. The river is between two steep cliffs. There’s a bridge from one side to the other: Devil’s Crossing. Two different paths converge there, and continue on the other side of the bridge. It’s a rickety old thing, bounces when you walk across it. Wooden planks connected by some cable, ropes to hold on to as you go. The river was pretty far down below it, maybe fifty feet. Chris was crossing it on the outside of the bridge, holding on to the rope as he went. He egged me on to do it with him, called me a pussy when I wouldn’t. We had been drinking some beer and I was feeling pretty confident, and didn’t like his calling me a pussy for not doing it. So I went along the outside, too. Alex and Jenn were getting pretty upset with the both of us, urged us to stop.”
“You fell off.”
She looked over at me with wide brooding eyes. “I did. I did fall off. I remember losing my footing and falling, but not impacting. That’s where my memory stops. I’m not sure how deep the water is, I think it’s pretty deep. But there are rocks down there. Lots of them, sticking out of the water.”
“I don’t suppose it matters. We’re here, aren’t we?”
“I want so much for this to be a dream, Jeffrey. I want a re-do. I want to tell Chris to walk across the damned bridge by himself if that’s how he wants to do it. I can’t believe I did it! I can’t believe I did it and what happened because of it! I can’t believe I’m…!”
I put her in my arms and hugged her. She wept on my disgusting tee-shirt. I rested my cheek on the top of her disheveled brown hair. I wondered why we were the only two people here. Probably there were others, many others, somewhere. Pursuing our course seemed pretty irrelevant now.
“What should we do?” She said as she let go of my embrace.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s walk over there.” She pointed to the ridge nearest us, which was a twenty minute walk at least. “I want to see what’s on the other side. Maybe we’ll find others.”
I nodded, took her hand, and together we changed