What We Leave Behind Read online

  Copyright 2011 Rochelle B. Weinstein

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1466236310

  ISBN-13: 9781466236318

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62112-180-0

  For Steven,

  Jordan, and Brandon

  You have taught me the meaning of true love.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  BOOK I: 1972–1988

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  BOOK II: 1994–2001

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  BOOK III: 2001 – 2002

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  BOOK I

  1972–1988

  The heart that truly loves never forgets.

  -Proverb

  And the good-bye makes the journey harder still.

  -Cat Stevens “O Very Young”

  CHAPTER 1

  I always thought if I loved Jonas enough, it would be impossible for him to leave. And if he tried to leave, I was sure he’d feel the beating of my heart against his back when he turned from me, and the thundering sound would make him stop. You think loving someone so completely means you have control over him, but it doesn’t; and it wasn’t that way with Jonas either. On the day he said good-bye, he didn’t just walk. It was a deliberate yank that ripped him from my grasp and sent him sprinting, all the magic surrounding him fading into nothingness. I was wrong about the other stuff too. Jonas didn’t notice a thing. Not the deafening sound of a quickening heart, not the wince fastened across my face, nor the struggle that ensued when my hands reached for him to stay. Instead, I was left in silence, the kind that echoes with emptiness, reeks of abandonment.

  I speak of love and loss, though you might think since I’m only sixteen, I’m too young to know much. The wisdom I boast of was learned early on, and for this, I have my father to thank. Jonas may have been the one, but according to my mother, Dad was the originator of my crushed childhood fantasy when he died on my fourth birthday and left me questioning what being there means. I remember my mother telling someone on the phone, “She’s four, old enough to know him and sense there’s an absence in her life, but too young to understand the magnitude of the loss.” She said, “If the one man who was supposed to love her first and best couldn’t stick around, what do you think that tells her about love? What do you think that tells her about trust?” Had I understood at the time what my mother was saying, I might have put an end to the events that have unfolded this summer, but I didn’t. I was four, and my father’s early absence had already laid the groundwork for the issues that would plague me.

  Two weeks have passed since Jonas said good-bye. I get into bed hoping tonight is the night it won’t hurt anymore, that tonight the pain will stop. The ache he has left in me runs raw and deep, a throbbing so profound, it has taken over my soul and devastated my spirit. Jonas wasn’t supposed to leave. Our kind of love was meant to live on, to conquer the obstacles that have divided us. His departure tore me to pieces; I know of no other sadness. As the blankets warm me and my head hits the pillow, I feel convinced that when someone enters your life as dramatically as Jonas entered mine, he can’t vanish quietly into thin air as though he never happened, but owes his audience an encore performance, an ending worthy of a standing ovation.

  The phone sits by my bedside, and I will it to ring. The silence is an imposter that I’m not quite ready to deal with. I could just as easily pick up the receiver and dial his number, but I have prevailed in my resistance, suppressing the urge to hear his voice. Although Jonas’s leaving left most everything inside of me broken, my defiance remains whole. This lingering stubbornness is the one attribute that has trumped my burgeoning sorrow. I have always been hardheaded, opinionated, stubborn. That is probably what first attracted Jonas to me.

  Let me go back to the beginning.

  “We need to talk about him, Jessie,” said the child psychologist I was sent to when I was in grade school.

  God, I despised when she called me that and not Jessica. Those closest to me called me Jessie. Dr. Norton was not one I considered close.

  “Who?” I’d say, unwilling to share.

  “Your father.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” I’d tell her, sometimes spelling it out for her, “N-O-T-H-I-N-G.” That would really piss her off, and I loved watching her shift her glasses from her nose to the top of her forehead as if through this intentional motion came the heightened ability to decipher what I was subtly trying to say. What she should have done, what anyone else in her right mind might had done, was to have thrown me out of the office.

  “Dr. Norton,” I was told by my mother, “is here to help you feel better.” My mother believed that my behavior was problematic. The school had already disciplined me to the fullest extent and the next step would be expulsion.

  I didn’t know this at the time, not until sweet little Dr. Norton pointed it out to me, but I was apparently “acting out.” “Acting out?” I asked her. “I’m ten years old. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”

  “There are many ways we show the outside world what we are feeling inside,” she said. “Why don’t we talk about the bug you put in Miss Brown’s coffee at the playground?”

  “That was no big deal,” I said.

  “To Miss Brown it was. Why do you think you did that?”

  I shrugged. It was funny at the time.

  “And what about the bathroom incident? You know you can’t enlist other children to hide out in there with you all day. It’s disruptive and against the rules. Why do you think you do that? What do you think you’re hiding from?”

  I didn’t answer. I never did.

  She’d tell my mother I was too smart for my own good, that I was difficult to reach, the therapy wasn’t going, what did she call it, favorably. I know this because Dr. Norton would call our house every Friday night after our sessions to give my mom as much of a recap as she was allowed, and of course I would be listening in on the line downstairs. Not that I ever told her anything private or personal. Sometimes I would just make up stuff from television or from one of my Judy Blume books. She never seemed to notice except for that one time when she asked my mom if I was menstruating at such a young age. Guess she didn’t believe I had the capabilities of one of Blume’s mature heroines, Margaret.

  In the meantime, despite my antics within the classroom that caused me to be sent to Principal Martin’s office on a regular basis, I was a straight A student. This baffled them all because usually the two behaviors worked in opposition of one another. W
ith delinquent behavior, one might expect plunging grades, but not for me. It was very important for me to be very good at the things I was good at; school and misbehavior just happened to be two of those things.

  Then one afternoon she brought him up again. I hated talking about him as much as—and I’d never tell her this—I hated him at times. Somehow, I knew if I told her this deep, dark secret, she’d use it against me with her skillful psychobabble.

  “Jessica, do you remember anything about your father?”

  I stared blankly at her. It was a game for me to see how long our silences would last. One time we stared at each other for the full forty-five minutes without saying a word. Then she looked at her watch and said, “I’ll see you next Friday.”

  “We’re finished so soon?” I’d asked her. “I was just getting warmed up.”

  And she’d snort in this way that totally grossed me out.

  This time, she repeated herself, which was something she rarely did, and I was, quite obviously, intrigued. “Jessica,” she said, with a vigor that I hadn’t heard before, “do you remember anything about your father?”

  And there it was, a flicker of recognition. I didn’t know if it was real or something I’d seen in a picture, but this feeling just rushed through my body as if he was there, close by. It was frightening, really. The need to protect myself was taking over. Dr. Norton moved in closer. I guess with all her fancy degrees, she saw the look that passed across my face. She didn’t say anything, though; she just watched me watching her. I really wasn’t in the mood for another staring contest.

  It was difficult for me in that precise moment to separate myself from what was going on inside my brain and from the power of Dr. Norton’s relentless glare. Then she asked, “Do you miss him, Jessica? Do you ever miss your father?”

  My eyes met hers and I loathed her for asking a question that left me feeling dangerously close to exposed and vulnerable. It was a trigger question, the type that, no matter how hard you try to ignore it, sends a sensory message to your brain that causes a catastrophic spilling over of feelings.

  I would never, not ever, let Dr. Norton see me cry. My mother never saw me cry, my best friend Beth never saw me cry. Instead, I drew a deep breath, conjured up my most convincing smile, and said, “How could I miss something I never even had?”

  My mother always told me I looked exactly like my father. I was tall like him, fair-skinned, hazel eyes, dirty-blonde hair. She said I acted like him too: smart, smartass, daring, confident. I wanted to remember him, but as our time was limited to a brief passage from infancy to preschool, my undeveloped memory capacity couldn’t process it. She’d tell me stories that felt familiar, but they tricked my mind into thinking the memories were mine. And I knew they weren’t. Without owning the memories, they seemed ultimately meaningless.

  She hung only one picture of him in our house. It was their wedding day. It wouldn’t have helped Mom with her successive boyfriends to have a variety of her dead husband’s photos prominently displayed. It was the picture I thought about that afternoon in Dr. Norton’s office, and how Mom looked so happy and beautiful. Her blonde hair was pulled back high on her head, the olive skin was clear and glowing, and her blue eyes sparkled against the fancy lace dress. He was as good-looking as any man I’d seen in the movies, and sometimes I’d pretend he wasn’t really dead, but somewhere posing as a famous actor. When I’d go to the movies, I’d pick out the most handsome man on the screen, the one that closely resembled what he might look like seven years later. At the end, I was always the last to leave the theater—which undoubtedly irritated whoever I was with at the time—because I was busy searching for his name in the credits. The leading man would pass, then the supporting actor, and by the time the key grip was mentioned, the songs that played in the film, and the thank you to whatever city was featured, I’d feel the let-down creep into my heart.

  But back to the photo. They were standing next to each other, close in so many ways, her shoulder tucked into his side, hip touching leg, dress touching jacket. Their individual parts fit together perfectly. They were holding the cake knife, his hand pressed against hers. I bet they were laughing at something, a private joke maybe, because there was a twinkle in her bright blue eyes as she looked up at him, a blush across her face; and the photo became for me the image of ideal, a union that no one could penetrate.

  I closed my eyes and breathed it all in. At the time, I was sitting on Dr. Norton’s worn-out couch, but I was somewhere else. I could see them so clearly in my head, their loving faces, the flowers around them, the room. The picture was theirs, a moment captured now long since passed, but I knew, I just knew, I was conceived in love, even when the memory belonged to them, and its impact would swell around all of us for years.

  That's not what got to me in Dr. Norton's office, though. No, not entirely. What passed through my mind while sitting on her frumpy couch started with that picture, but turned into something like this. Every time I passed their wedding picture in the hall, I would recognize the startling truths: I would never be held like that, I would never feel as safe and protected as my mother looked that night, I would never hear my father call me beautiful as he must have exclaimed when he saw his bride-to-be in that dress. And even though I was his daughter, and he my father, we would always be connected, and yet very, very separate.

  I never understood why Dr. Norton stayed with me as long as she did. I was comfortable within the shell I had built around myself and refused to come out. Weeks slipped into months, months into years, and not once did I disclose the truths that flooded my insides.

  “We’re not making sufficient progress,” she told my mother after our two-year anniversary. “She’s bright, articulate, witty, but she won’t let me in. Maybe it’s time to think about a different therapist.”

  I was furious at her for giving up on me just as I was starting to enjoy our afternoons, mostly because I knew I had the key to what she wanted. The more I held onto it, the more amusing our discussions became. So instead of letting her know on our last day together that I was upset she was saying good-bye, I smiled, politely thanked her for her time, and walked out of her office.

  Stopping at the drugstore on the way home that afternoon, I added petty theft to my resume of misdemeanors by stealing my first cassette tape. It was the soundtrack to Grease. I also stole a pack of cigarettes, not that I smoked.

  Beth, my best friend, slept over that night. She never asked me about my therapy sessions, and I didn’t offer up any information. It’s not that I thought it was weird. I happened to understand the whole Freudian thing more than most twelve-year-olds, and having an analyst gave me an added sophistication.

  Beth was the most beautiful girl in our school and probably the most popular. Her hair was a deep shade of brown and fell straight down her back. Her blue eyes were so clear and wide, they gave the impression she was perpetually surprised. High cheekbones, flawless skin, and what many called a button nose were a sharp contrast to my “strong nose,” sprinkling of freckles, and the inches that separated us in height—four, to be exact. I think she became my best friend because she secretly longed to depart from the hullabaloo of the popular circles and join me on my expedition to madness. Unfortunately, she was never good at madness. She was nervous and uptight about getting into trouble, and worried incessantly about upsetting her parents. “Are you sure we should be doing this?” she would ask, and I would roll my eyes at her while toilet papering the neighbor’s tree. She kept watch, trying not to laugh, living vicariously through me, as I would do the same with her—imagining what it would be like to be so sought after and adored by every boy and girl in Tremont Middle.

  We were sitting in my family room watching our usual round of movies that night, music blaring in the background, munching on popcorn, when she came across the items from the drugstore.

  “Whatcha got in the bag?” she asked, remnants of popcorn falling out the sides of her pouty lips.

  “Nothing,” I
answered, shielding my valuable stash.

  “It’s not nothing,” she said, imploring in such a way that I almost wanted to tell her.

  “Just some stuff.”

  “You’re lying, Jessie Parker. You know I can tell when you’re lying.”

  I said, “It’s stuff, private stuff, has to do with my analyst.” Besides, it wasn’t so untrue. That I was pissed at her for dumping me was of no business to Beth.

  “Really?” she asked, engrossed by this discovery. “Can I see it?”

  “No, you can’t see it. It’s private.” But I liked that she was excited about it.

  “I thought we shared everything with each other.”

  “Well, not this,” I answered.

  “Come on, Jess. That has nothing to do with your therapy sessions. Just show me.”

  I was planning on it anyway, but sometimes with Beth you had to build the momentum.

  She took the cassette tape in her hand and asked, “What’s the big deal? It’s a cassette tape.”

  “I stole it.”

  “You did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “That’s so cool,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t mean it.

  “You think?” I asked.

  She nodded, if a slightly undecided tilt of the head can be called a nod.

  “Then check this out,” I said, pulling the pack of Benson & Hedges out of the bag.

  “Why’d you get those?” she asked. “You know how I feel about those things.”

  Everyone knew how Beth felt about things. She was a walking commercial for Hallmark.

  “You’re crazy, Jessie.”

  What I didn’t tell her was that they were the last pack on the shelf and I didn’t want some poor soul to grab them and get lung cancer or contribute to the already toxic levels of pollutants in the air. She wouldn’t have believed my altruism because it clearly might have rivaled her own.

  “Did you finish it yet?” she asked me, changing the subject completely.

  “Finish what?”

  “Come on, Jess, you know.”

  I held off on the enthusiasm. “Yeah, it was good.”