There was no way I was getting inside to interview Jenny’s folks directly, but there was nothing stopping me from playing Peeping Tom from the giant oak in the park behind the house.
The top-floor windows were all dark, though whether this was from curtains being drawn or from the lights actually being off, I couldn’t say.
There was some motion on the third floor. A willowy brunette, obviously Jenny’s mom, drifted in and out of rooms, sometimes lingering in a doorway or disappearing into a closet for long minutes.
She’d been a real stiffener once. You could tell. She had a lot of that same buttoned-up charm the girls in Jane Austen books made famous. But that was before. Now she looked like somebody had sucked twenty years of life out of her. Twenty-two, I guess. The whole of her daughter’s life.
At one point she startled me by jumping up from a chair she’d been sitting in and dashing out into the hall only to came back a couple of minutes later carrying a cordless phone. She talked for a few minutes in the window and then disappeared into the hidden parts of the house.
I know I shouldn’t have tried it. It was a total invasion of her privacy to approach the place, much less knock.
It took four hard thumps, but she eventually came to the door. The resemblance between her and her daughter was really striking that close up. It was as if I was looking at Jenny twenty years later.
“Yes?” she said in a voice that told me it really was a mistake intruding on her this way. Of course it was also too late.
The second she opened the door I was committed. I had a stack of questions for her, all about Jenny’s mood and activities up until the moment of her supposed suicide but, looking at her face, I just couldn’t dredge them up.
I stammered something about being a friend of her daughter’s and having just heard the bad news. I just wanted to pay my respects.
She looked at me a little sceptically at first, I mean, I was about as far from her daughter’s usual cronies as a Palestinian is from a card-carrying member of the JDL. But somewhere in my stuttery it’s-awfuls and jeez-that’s-terribles, her expression changed.
“You aren’t,” she started, stopped, and then took another run at it. “You aren’t Jack, by any chance?”
Turns out I wasn’t the secret I’d always thought. Jenny and her mom — Anne — were close. At least they were in Anne’s mind. Jenny hadn’t told her everything about me, not how we’d met or about the lists passing back and forth, but enough. I was Jack, Jenny’s one Low Society friend, made palatable to Mom by the fact that I ran a bookstore that specialized in obscure works.
She thanked me for my sympathy and segued into a rambling account of Jenny’s life, punctuated with silences and occasional tears.
She’d been a problem birth, too many hours of labor, too much work at the start to get her to breathe. She’d spent the first six weeks of her life in an incubator.
Then there were the ailments that took up most of her childhood — asthma, anemia, even a few scary months of leukemia that she’d thankfully managed to kick.
She eventually put the breathing problems away as well, but not before she’d developed what her mother considered an unhealthy fascination with death.
“She kept most of it from me,” said Anne. “She knew I didn’t like all those Mexican skeleton dolls. Now I think maybe all those years being so close to it made her more comfortable with the thought of dying than most people are.”
Made sense to me. Only Jenny hadn’t shown me any of that side of herself either. If not for this chat with Queen Anne, I would never have thought her capable of those kinds of shadows.
“But she seemed so happy,” I said. Trite, I know, but it’s what you say in times like that — especially if you want the other person to keep talking.
“Oh, did you think so?” said Anne, pouring me a little more of their imported French roast. “So did I. She had her music (thank God we pushed her toward the cello) and Chad, of course (such a sweet, sweet boy). Her father and I really thought she’d turned the corner. That she was truly embracing life.”
I nodded and asked if she’d left a note of any kind, any way to explain her suicide. It was difficult reconciling her version of her daughter with mine.
“Yes,” said Anne after thinking about it. Her eyes went flat, as if she was suppressing something and it was taking all her mind to keep it in check. “It was just a few lines of some poem by one of her little-knowns. At least I never heard of it before — before...”
After some tears, she got through the words of the note. After some more, I was at the front door, saying a quiet goodbye.
It wasn’t a poem. It was more song lyrics, this time from a short-lived Irish band called 1916. Their lyrics were strictly modem, mostly political, but their music was traditional all the way. Jenny’s “suicide note” was a snip from the last cut on their Walking to Inish Oisin CD: “Following Johnny” by Fergus Cullen.
I pictured the jacket art — a young girl in a thin white shift, walking across water towards some distant grey island — as Queen Anne’s words stumbled around my mind.
I can’t leave him alone,
I followed him from my home
All the way to Derry dome
We went flying.
That was the note they found in her fingers, written in her hand, when they discovered her at the bottom of those stairs. Of course they assumed she was a jumper.
Of course, her mom figured Jenny was just more nuts than she’d originally guessed. After all those years fighting and then being fascinated with death, there was a kind of symmetry in the idea that she’d finally succumbed to her demons.
It’s nobody’s fault, they would tell themselves. She was just too fragile to stay in the world.
They’d cry about it. Maybe Queen Anne would start up a foundation of some kind in her daughter’s name. Everybody would roll on down the highway until the whole thing was just a distant pothole in the rearview mirror.
Everybody but me.
I might not have known all that doom-and-gloom stuff was in Jenny’s head before she met me, but I knew for a fact it hadn’t been running her anymore.
What I didn’t know about Jenny might fill up the rest of my afternoon. What her family and friends didn’t know would fill up the rest of the year.
Obsessed with death? No. That wasn’t Jenny, not the one I knew. Queen Anne’s Jenny might have been nothing more than a pile of broken china, but mine sparkled. Mine laughed and dashed and dreamed herself out of the strictures of her caste. She was all about music and secrets and hidden moments. She was all about living and I had the proof. I got it about three weeks before she died in the form of one of her more cryptic lists.
Out, L2, R6,1/4 around the Knight, L6, R4, Down 2.
It took me a little while to figure out that this meant I was supposed to walk out of my shop, go left two blocks, right six, walk a little way around the statue of Sir John Milton, go another ten blocks and down two flights of ancient crumbling stairs to find something I never expected to see in life.
Not ten miles from the Metropolitan Hotel, fairly near the heart of Downtown, buried and forgotten under a building that should’ve been pummeled to dust years before, was a dragon.
Black, massive, with wings the length of a city bus and jaws like every nightmare you ever had about sewer gators, this thing was just coiled there, waiting for me, at the bottom of those rickety stairs.
Of course, it wasn’t a live dragon. Not the kind that breathes fire and sits on a cool trillion bucks in coins and jewels while picking the bones of virgins from its teeth. But it was a real dragon just the same.