Read What We Leave Behind Online
Authors: Rochelle B. Weinstein
What We Leave Behind
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
Reading Group Discussion Questions
1972–1988
The heart that truly loves never forgets.
-Proverb
And the good-bye makes the journey harder still.
-Cat Stevens “O Very Young”
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. With 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.
