Progress (The Progress Series) (14 page)

“Charlie! Get your ass back here!” he screamed as she stepped into her car.

She met his eyes for a brief moment through the window and stepped on the gas.

*

Upon arriving home, he picked up his phone and dialed her number
. Charlie, pick up your phone. Pick it up.

“What do you want, Jess? You better talk fast because I don’t have the time for this crap anymore.” She kept her tone even and quiet.

“I’m…damn it. I’ve got a lot on my mind. It was a bad day. I wanted to tell you about it…”

“No. You had plenty of time to tell me about it. I’m not going to do this anymore. You can’t be so hot and cold with me! We’re friends. I thought we had gotten past all the preliminary bullshit. You don’t have to tell me everything, but you really gotta stop treating me like crap. Censor your words, and remember that I’m female. I’m sensitive already, but I also have some
major
emotional issues.” After pausing to take a breath, she continued. “Friends don’t do those things to each other. I don’t trust easily – I’ve told you some really personal things. Too personal. Maybe…” She stopped, sounding uneasy with her next words. “Maybe we should just take some time. You know, not with each other. I’m not…it’s just…I don’t know if I should get any closer to you. Not when you can hurt me like you do.”

Silence.

Stop threatening to leave me.

“Are you there?” she asked, quieter now.

“Yes, I’m still here.”

She sighed. “Well?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. I’ll sit on the phone all night with you not saying a word, just listening to you breathe, if that’s what you want.
Is
that what you want? Tell me.” Jess closed his eyes and waited for her to speak.

She sighed again. “No. Just think about what I said, please. I can’t keep doing this. I’m exhausted. It shouldn’t be this hard.”

“I’m working on it,” he said.

The phone muffled for a moment and then he heard her sigh. “Do you want to talk about your day?”

“No. Just sleep. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

“No Jess. I’m sorry. Tell me.”

“Tomorrow. I promise.”

“Okay. Good night,” she whispered.

“Night.”

He breathed a sigh of relief as he hung up the phone.

I need her tonight. I need someone. Someone to help me sort out the good from the bad. I need her to help me figure out what I want to do with Bree. I just wish Charlie knew everything already – it would make this so much easier. I don’t want to have to tell her. I don’t really even want her to know it all, I just want her to understand. I need someone to understand.

She can’t run away from me. She just can’t. But she will. She will if she knows why I am the way I am. It’s useless. Pointless. You have to speak the words in order for her to get it, otherwise you’re just confusing the hell out of her.

First there’s my obvious issue with trusting people. I think she sees that, although she hasn’t been told all the reasons why. She only has bits and pieces. The stories themselves are hard to tell, and even harder to hear.

Then there’s your bipolar disorder. She probably just thinks you’re a sociopath, as most tend to think. Do you want her to think that? Well, she’s still here. She is still willing to be your friend. Is she just stupid? Maybe that’s the problem here. Maybe I think she’s smarter than she really is. Or maybe, maybe it’s just low self-esteem. I bet that’s it. That would make sense.

I need her, dammit.

I need her now.

Jesse found his keys and ran out his door without shoes on.

Pulling into her driveway, he was careful not to wake anyone with his headlights. The only light in the house was emanating from a small basement window.

Could that be her room?

Jesse crept into the front yard and around the side of the house where a large mulched patch of hostas were planted. He saw the window with the light on and slowly made his way toward it.
He took a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching, but as Charlie lived on one of the busiest streets in Burnsville, he’d have to be quick.

As he inched closer, he saw a bookshelf decorated with mostly framed photos. The floor was carpeted and the walls were painted a muted yellow. A painting of a woman sleeping hung on the wall in yellows and oranges. She had long, brown, wavy hair and was wearing a sheer nightgown, sleeping peacefully. Inching closer to the window, his socked feet squished in the muddy mulch beneath them. A king-sized bed frame came into view along with a hand-quilted blanket lying at the end of it with a bright yellow, round rug lying on the floor. As he approached the window straight on, he had full scope of the room.

There she is.

Charlie was drawing on a large sketchpad propped up onto a wooden easel. Next to it was a small table with pencils, erasers, paints, and other small objects used for sketching. Seated directly in front of the sketchpad on an oak stool, she straddled both sides with her heels propped up on the foot rest. She was wearing a stained white long-sleeved shirt, drawing carefully on the paper in front of her.

Charlie stood to stretch and turned toward her bed. Getting a clearer view of the drawing, Jess could see she was doing a nude female study. Completely realistic, incredibly sexy, and almost pornographic.

As Charlie grabbed a can of soda from across the room, she lifted her arm to sip from it, exposing her midsection and her white bikini underwear. Time slowed as Jesse took her in. Her white shirt, stained with charcoal, paint, and lead, was several sizes too large and hung down just barely enough to cover her backside. He watched, his mouth hung open, as she tore a red bandana from her head to rake her hands through her hair. She continued to behave as though no one could see her, no one was watching her. Standing back from her drawing, she tilted her head to one side, then the other, analyzing her work. Walking back toward the easel, she resumed her position with her pencil.

Jesse looked away quickly, remorseful that he had been lurking, admiring. A car passed on the road and honked its horn. Feeling as though he had insulted her by spying when she was unaware, he jumped back toward the mulch and back to his car again.

Damn it. Put some clothes on, Charlie! I could have been anyone. Close your damn blinds, at least!

Now what?
He emptied the air from his lungs and brought his hands to his head, pulling his hair in anger with himself.
What are you gonna do, call her and tell her you were looking into her bedroom and saw her in her sexy little panties? Oh sweet Jesus. Those legs are so long.
He shook the thought from his head.
Enough, Jess! Call her, maybe? Should I call her and ask her if I can come over, wait a few minutes and knock on her front door? No, I’ll wake her parents.

Great. Now what? What a stupid idea this was.

You can’t go to her now, so you’ll just have to stay here or go home. Whatcha gonna do? It’s after midnight now. Damn.

Stay here. I’ll just stay here. The only thing separating us is a pane of glass. That’s as close as I’m going to get tonight.

Lying there in the car with his legs propped up and over the passenger side seat, he thought about Charlie’s drawing. The curve of her hips, the way the female had her head tilted back in ecstasy, her collarbone…

Morning came too soon. As soon as he shut his eyes, he felt as though the gentle tapping on his windshield made them snap open again. He had been asleep for four hours.

“Can I help you?” a man said, the sun rising on the horizon behind him.

Jess squinted one eye shut and shielded his eyes from the light.

“Oh! No, sir. I…ah. What time is it?” Jess glanced at his clock on the dash.

Clearing his throat, the man replied. “It’s five thirty. And you must be Jesse.”

Her dad knows about me? Oh shit, I owe him money.

“Oh, yes. That’s me. I came by last night to see Charlie… I guess I fell asleep.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little strange? Sleeping in our driveway?” Charlie’s father spoke, raising an eyebrow.

Jesse looked around and remembered what he had seen the night before while peering through Charlie’s window.
Dipping his head down, he tugged at his lip. “Yes. A little.”

“Well, you’ll need to move your vehicle now, you’re parked behind me. Unless you plan to stay, in which case you can park on the street during the day.” He sighed and started walking back toward the garage, shaking his head.

“No, I’ll be leaving now.” Jess shouted out his window. “Thank you.” After starting his car, he cursed the whole ride home.

He walked through the door, went straight to his room, and began reading to distract himself from the past twelve hours’ worth of embarrassment. He grabbed random books from the bookshelf in the living room and pieces of text jumped out from the pages as his mind absorbed them.

“…the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

–Hugo Wolf

“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness.”

–Kay Redfield Jamison

As he didn’t have a shift that day, he entertained a disquieted feeling brewing in his mind.

His episodes had become fewer in recent years, but he had learned to recognize them when they started rearing their faces. He jumped at the opportunity to think clearly, to brainstorm and have the enthusiasm for life and ideas again. He encouraged it, craved it, and wouldn’t let anything stop the rush it gave him. He had to take advantage of the flow when it came. The clarity and focus he was beginning to experience had been sorely missed. This was exactly what he needed to come up with a solution to Bree, if he had been thinking straight enough to exercise his focus on her. Instead, he opted to focus on his illness.

Book after book, articles, newspapers, case studies, and the internet became his devoted pals. He began by reading all of the books that doctors, friends, and family had advised him to read at an earlier time, but he’d never taken them seriously enough to care.

The surge of knowledge was almost overwhelming at first. It was as though these authors had chosen him, specifically, to write books about. They told of his fast ideas and feelings, captivating people with words and gestures, and finding intrigue in uninteresting people. But somewhere in there was the light switch that would go off, without warning. Ideas and feelings would become jumbled as friends became confused and worried. He would stop making sense, to himself and to others, and suddenly become irritable and unmanageable. Eventually he would be lost within his own mind because the information was processed too quickly and there were suddenly too many possibilities.
“Madness carves its own reality.”

And he knew that all too soon it would come crashing down. All of his thoughts, his obsessions, and his temporary interests would vanish and he would have little if no memories of gaining such insight; he’d just resurface on the other side with a general knowledge of it. In Jesse’s case, this might not be such a bad thing. With the decisions he needed to make about his future with Bree, his friendship with Charlie, and whether or not he wanted to be a pizza delivery boy the rest of his life, shutting down seemed like a perfect vacation from his scattered thoughts and lucid nightmares.

But concluding that escapist sabbatical, he would be severely depressed, unable to get up in the morning, allowing himself to crawl towards the darkest place instead of lifting himself out of it.

Why dwell on it? It’s not as if I have a choice in the matter. My mind will do what it wants. No amount of medication will fix it, and if it were a battle between my will and my mind, my mind would win.

Adapt to survive.

This was his reasoning. As partitioned and incomplete the thoughts, he decided to ignore any further scramble about the depression that would follow.

Jesse woke the next day around noon and thumped into the bathroom for a shower. He stared at his face for a very long time, not really looking at it. Just thinking. Resigning not to come to any firm conclusions on his own about Bree, he got an idea.

He walked back to his room and picked up his phone.

“Hey, can I see you today?” he said when a voice answered.

“Sure! What time will you be here?” she asked.

“By two o’clock.”

“Sounds good. See you then!”

“Thanks, Lily.”

*

Jesse and Lily met at her restaurant. He sat down while he waited for her to finish up the dishes from her lunch rush, choosing the same table that Charlie and he had sat at earlier in the year. From that point on, it was his favorite.

“Hey, Jess. Sorry, my last table stayed later than I planned.”

“They always do,” he said, his leg bouncing under the table.

“So, what’s the emergency?” She exhaled and wiped her hands on her apron, signaling her day was done.

“Emergency? No emergency,” he said while glancing just beyond the sunflowers in full bloom outside the window.