The Myth of Jake

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America

First Publication, 2013

Editing by Valerie Valentine

To contact the author visit www.kristinerudolph.com.

ISBN 9781483507620

PART ONE

Chapter 1

The lining of my linen slacks clung to my calves. I shifted my weight and discreetly rubbed my legs together, hoping to slough the rayon blend off of me. I failed and resigned myself to the discomfort.

My mother glanced my way. It was at least ninety-five degrees, and yet Mother’s makeup looked fresh and soft. My foundation and mascara had long since given way to a mixture of sweat, humidity, and tears.

Her ability to look fresh in oppressive, nearly fluid-like heat notwithstanding, one of Mother’s greatest talents has always been her uncanny ability to conform her body language and facial expressions to fit the situation at hand. Standing graveside at a miserably hot funeral honoring someone for whom she cared very little, she was nonetheless able to muster a look of tormented grace. In an almost mesmerizing way, my mother can take all the relevant variables into account—the social position of the deceased’s family, the sheer tragedy of a promising young life cut drastically short, the fact that the funeral was teeming with some of the wealthiest and most prominent people from as far away as four counties—and calculate which of her expressions would prove most advantageous. She opted for a mix of brutal sadness and extreme peace. It was something akin to a dying swan. Mother talked, scowled, and even laughed while maintaining this countenance of tortured serenity.

I, on the other hand, wear my emotions on my sleeve, and there was no mistaking what I was feeling. Unlike Mother, who didn’t personally care for the deceased, I cared for him a great deal. I loved him. Jake Goodloe was my very best friend.

So while Mother’s dying-swan face contorted in reaction to the preacher’s spirited graveside remarks, tears spilled from the corners of my eyes. I couldn’t put my head in my hands because, if I did, I would feel the blood vessel that was pulsing on my forehead. I had never known that I had a blood vessel there; now it was working overtime, pumping sadness and anger up to my brain where they could be processed and transported all over my body until the overwhelming sense of loss seized every cell of my being.

I stood behind Emily, Jake’s widow.

“Remember Margaret, Emily is the widow today. Not you,” my mother had warned as we sat at her kitchen table that morning.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Mother?” I asked, my forehead throbbing as I stirred sugar into my coffee.

“First of all, you will not use language like that in my home,” she said sharply. I poured more sugar into my coffee.

“Second of all, Margaret, you know perfectly well what I mean. You have a tendency to insert yourself into a situation and become the center of attention. You did not lose a husband. You did not lose the father of your children. Emily did. Gracious. Jimmy Goodloe should never have asked you to deliver that eulogy. He just fueled the fire.”

“Mother,” I replied, matter-of-factly, “there’s plenty of sadness to go around.”

I stood with the Goodloe family at the graveside service and cried openly, gasping for air. I am sure Mother considered my sobbing an attempt to usurp Emily’s role as the most aggrieved. Mother has always assumed that I give my own emotional display as much prior planning and preparation as she gives her own.

As the preacher asked us to pray one last time, the lining of my pants made its way deep into my butt crack. There was no way to politely work it out, standing as I was with about five hundred people to my back. Again, I resigned myself to physical misery, all the while being thankful for the distraction.

Jake’s oldest child, Virginia, tugged on my pant leg, somewhat dislodging the lining from my butt. I smiled gratefully through my tears. Somehow, she had escaped the vise-like grip of her grandmother and worked her way one row back to me. Virginia was six and had “no business being at a funeral,” according to Mother, whose tirade about appropriate funeral behavior broke the deafening silence in the car from the church to the cemetery. Normally, Mother’s criticisms would have infuriated me, but I was almost relieved to have the icy-cold quiet broken.

Virginia is a raven-haired goddess of a child. She has Emily’s bright blue eyes, her grandmother’s straight black hair, and Jake’s precocious personality. I am her godmother, but only marginally. Initially, Jake had not wanted to baptize her. He told Emily that he thought their children should be free to explore and make up their minds about religion on their own timetables. He did not want to “shove it down their throats,” he said. Three visits from Pastor Morgan and one convincing lunch with Emily’s mother later, Jake gave in to Emily’s wishes and agreed to baptize the baby. His only condition was that I serve as godmother and spiritual counselor.

“God, Mags, you should have seen the look I got!” Jake’s email read the following Monday. “Emily said to me, ‘Margaret can’t be Virginia’s godmother, Jake. She doesn’t go to church really at all, she doesn’t lead a Christ-like life, and she isn’t married.’ So I said, ‘That’s exactly why I want her to be Virginia’s spiritual counselor, Emily—she thinks for herself.’ Didn’t go over so well.”

“So, Jake, are you asking me to be your baby’s godmother, or have I been nixed because I’m not sufficiently Christ-like?” I emailed him back.

“You’re in, Mags. I told her that if she let me ask you to be Ginny’s godmother, she could renovate the kitchen. You just have to know which buttons to push,” Jake wrote back.

That incident was early in their marriage. Virginia had been born the year after they married. By the time little Ella Grace rolled into the picture a year and a half later, Jake didn’t mount a fight and Emily asked her cousin Melinda to serve as godmother. “Melinda has a master’s degree in Christian education, you know,” Emily was fond of reminding me.

I lifted Virginia into my arms and pecked her rosy little cheek. As she wrinkled her pug nose to give me Eskimo kisses, I was struck by how much she reminded me of Jake. She knowingly wiped the tears from my face with the bottom of her black and white gingham smocked dress that was smeared with grape jelly. I could hardly read the red “VGL” monogram on her chest, it was so besotted with jelly. I smiled as big a smile as I could muster and slung her onto my hip.

Virginia was light in my arms. She looked fragile, like her mother. Emily has always been waifish in both body and spirit. Virginia, on the other hand, has a fiery temper and determined will. That irrepressible will was in evidence during the burial as Virginia struggled to free herself from my grasp. She wriggled down my leg and ran to see her cousin Cole who was with his paternal grandparents three rows behind me.

My moment with Virginia, fleeting as it was, did not impress the dying swan. As I was later informed, I should have discreetly deposited little Virginia on Emily’s lap. “Screw that, Mother,” I replied. “Virginia’s her own person. If she had wanted to be in her mom’s lap, she would have been.”

“Virginia is not your child, Margaret. You are not the one who needs to decide where she belongs at her own father’s burial, now are you?”

“As if Emily even noticed she was gone.”

Chapter 2

As Mother slipped into John’s car after the burial, I had to admit she was strikingly beautiful in her tailored black suit and pearls. My father had given her the pearls on their twenty-fifth anniversary. Mother had asked for an antique emerald and diamond cocktail ring, but Dad fell in love with the pearls on a business trip. He was sure Mother would love them, so he bought them a full eight months before their actual anniversary. She never wore them while Dad was alive. She pulled them out for his funeral, and they have since become part of her official mourning attire.

My brother John slumped behind the wheel of the car. His wife, Mary Carter, sat in the seat behind him with her hand on the back of his head, teasing his hair lovingly. I wished for just a moment that Tom was there to comfort me, but then quickly dismissed that notion. I knew having Tom at Jake’s funeral would have been more of a burden to me than a comfort. He could never have provided me with the emotional support I needed. Tom is brilliant, highly logical, and extremely composed; an excellent complement to my wild irrationality. He remains coolly detached in the midst of conflict, which has served him very well first as an attorney and now as an adjunct law professor. However, it has served him less well in the confines of our tiny Manhattan apartment, where I constantly seek and even demand some semblance of an emotional response from my lover and partner.

Tom never really knew Jake. He met him a few times, but they had never shared more than a beer together. When John called to tell me about the accident, Tom and I were on our way to a Sunday night concert in the park. I wore a backpack filled with a few different cheeses, fruit, and sourdough bread. I carried a bottle of Rioja in my right hand.

“Maggie. It’s John.”

John sounded edgy and tired. I knew something was wrong.

“What’s the matter, John?” Tom looked at his watch and shot me a look.

“It’s Jake. Maggie, where are you? It’s really loud.”

“I’m in the park. What about Jake?”

“Maggie, sit down.”

“Motherfuck, John just tell me what’s going on with Jake.”

“He’s dead, Maggie. He died this morning.”

I fell to the ground, and the bottle in my right hand smashed into a million pieces. Red wine spilled all over my bare calves.

“Be careful, Maggie. You’ll cut yourself,” Tom said and then began to pick up the shards of glass.

“Jake’s dead,” I mouthed to him.

“Oh. Be careful please,” he suggested, as I shifted my weight to remove the backpack from my shoulders.

I looked at him in disbelief. Evidently, my bewildered gaze suggested to him that his response had been less than appropriate. He knelt down and patted my back. “I’m sorry. How did he die?”

Stunned, I pushed his hand away and focused on what John was telling me. Accident. Lake house. Went out on a boat and must have drowned. Jimmy found the body. How awful that must have been. In between the snippets of information John gave me, I let out sob after body-quaking sob. Tom scurried about my crumpled body, picking up glass and putting it in a nearby recycling bin.

After John and I hung up, I stayed on the ground for a few minutes. Although the conversation had lasted more than an hour, it was a blur that had felt more like seconds to me.

“So. Jake’s dead, huh?” Tom asked.

I glared at him. “Yes, apparently so.”

“How did it happen?”

“He was at their lake house with his dad. He went out in the early morning, maybe to fish? Somehow, the boat got rammed, they think, and he was thrown out. Could’ve been another boat? They just don’t know.”

“Have they ruled out suicide?” Tom asked.

“What? No. Of course Jake didn’t kill himself. Are you insane?” I was furious.

“But they have the body?” Tom asked, wisely changing his line of questioning.

“John said Jimmy found it onshore somewhere.”

“That’s good.”

I stared at him, my eyes glazed over with tears. “Good?” I asked. “Did you just say something about this was good?”

Tom backtracked. “I only meant it must be a relief to have found the body. Sometimes in drowning cases they never do.”

“Jake didn’t drown. He was knocked off the boat by somebody who didn’t take the time to stop and see if he was okay.”

“At any rate, it’s lucky that they found his body.”

I sat and sobbed.

“Hey—I think we can still catch the end of the concert if we hurry. Might make you feel better. Take your mind off things. Besides, Kristen and Les are waiting for us.”

“Ohmygod. You can’t be serious.”

He was serious. So, I stood up, stormed home and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening.

I was still not talking to Tom when I left for Tennessee. We had exchanged words—"where did you put the toothpaste?” and “have you seen my blue socks?"—but we weren’t actually speaking to one another. When I left for the airport, late as usual, he told me he loved me and he was sorry my friend died. I cried in the cab the whole way to Newark. Unlike Tom, my cabbie at least offered me a tissue.

Sad, angry, and a little self-absorbed, I wasn’t prepared for how difficult it would be to see my big brother in pain. While I was in New York, I could focus on myself and what I was feeling. But when I got to Tempelton, John’s grief hit me squarely in the face. Jake was the closest thing John had to a brother. Jake followed John to Vanderbilt. From joining the same fraternity to serving in the student government, Jake participated in every activity John did, only more fully. John served as Social Chair of Alpha Sigma Theta. Jake was President. John was a nominee for Homecoming King. Jake won Homecoming King. John was a student government Representative, and Jake was President. When John went to Vanderbilt Law School, Jake decided he too would pursue a career in law. Jake one-upped John again. He went to Harvard.

John even dated Emily before Jake did. Emily Sykes was a freshman when Jake was a junior at Vandy and John was a first-year law student. John actually wanted to date Emily’s older sister Catherine, who was in her second year at the law school. John asked Catherine out, but she turned him down flat. A few weeks later, John ran into Catherine at a popular bar, and she introduced him to her younger sister Emily. They dated for six months or so. John eventually broke it off because Emily wouldn’t sleep with him. “I waited for six goddamn months,” he whined to Jake over a beer. Jake phoned her the following day.

Emily and Jake dated for two years, but he ended the relationship when he left for Harvard. Emily was a junior by that time and had no trouble finding dates. Jake, on the other hand, suffered something of a culture shock when he got to Cambridge. Having been a big man on campus his entire life, he was taken aback by the disdain most of the Harvard Law women showed him. They did not find his Southern drawl as charming as he thought they would.

During his first year at Harvard, Jake visited me regularly in the city. At dinner in Manhattan one weekend, Jake said to me, “Mags, the JGNYs are killing me. I just can’t crack ‘em.”

“Jignies?” I queried.

“Yeah, J-G-N-Y,” he answered.

“What the hell is a J-G-N-Y?” I wondered aloud.

“Jewish Girl from New York,” he flatly answered. “They just don’t take to me like most girls do.”

“Maybe you could start by calling them ‘women’ and not ‘girls,’” I wryly suggested.

“Yeah, whatever,” he smiled. “Anyway, they laugh at how I talk, they make fun of my chewing tobacco, and they ask if I brought my maid to Harvard with me.” He swallowed a big gulp of beer.

“Get over yourself, Jake. You love being the center of attention, and you love hamming it up as the good Southern gentleman. You’re loving this, and don’t try to tell me any different. Besides, since when have you chewed tobacco?” I gulped down a chunk of fried tofu. Its crispy, salty foreignness reminded me once again that I wasn’t in Tennessee anymore. I was eating fantastic Thai food at eleven o’clock at night in the most exciting city in the world, even if I was eating it with Tempelton’s favorite son and not some sexy second-generation Italian.

Jake fell silent. He twirled his chopsticks and then swigged his beer.

“I’m having a Maggie moment, you know,” he smiled.

I grinned and scooped more rice onto my plate.

Jake’s first “Maggie moment” happened when we were sixteen. We were eating lunch in the high school cafeteria. Jake was regaling a table of six cheerleaders (plus me, a definite non-cheerleader) with tales from his Friday night exploits. Jake, Craig Newman, and Tim Messemer had gone “ganking” after the football game on Friday. Ganking involved stealing items of minimal value, like real estate signs or plastic flags, and relocating them to a more ironic location. It was a popular pastime with the boys when I was in high school, namely because there was very little else to do after dark in our small town.

At the time, Jake was the second-string quarterback on the Tempelton High School football team. Craig was a senior and the first-string quarterback. Tim was the junior placekicker phenom. All three guys were stunningly gorgeous, so of course all the females at the table were devouring every detail of Jake’s story. He was providing valuable insight into the private lives of Tempelton’s most desirable teenage boys.

“So Mess is driving, right, and Newman tells us that old man Cooper’s got a birthday coming up.” “Old man Cooper” was Earl Cooper. He was the school’s vice principal, universally loved by all THS students and thus the victim of numerous pranks.

“So we go out and gank like fifty ‘For Sale’ and ‘For Rent’ signs. Man, we went all the way to the Kentucky line getting every sign we could find. It was like two in the morning before we got all the signs.”

I started to get up. I had finished my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wanted to throw away my trash. Besides, ganking stories always made me even more depressed about living in Tempelton. They just reminded me of how boring the place was. Jake wrapped his arm around my shoulder and said, “Mags, you gotta hear this.” He winked. I relented and sat back down.

“So, we get up to Coop’s house. The signs—they’re metal—are banging around in the back of Mess’s truck. We pull up to his house and start putting the signs in the ground.”

Bored by Jake’s account, I scanned the faces of the other girls at the table. They were all mesmerized, or at least appeared to be. Amy Stewart was tittering with delight. She and her best friend Jessica were holding hands with eager anticipation.

“We get all the signs in the yard, and this light comes on in the house,” Jake said, his voice lowered. “Mess tells me not to worry, that Coop’s old lady’s a drunk and she’s probably just sneaking into the bathroom for a vodka fix. But I start sweating.” Jake hunkered down over the table and continued. “So we climb back into the truck and Mess is about to throw her into gear, when we realize that we can totally see into the room with the light on. No curtains or anything. And it’s Miss Cooper, butt naked, standing in front of the window, totally playing with herself.”

“Eeee-yew,” screeched Amy’s friend Jessica. The others yelped with delight.

I rolled my eyes.

The bell rang and all the cheerleaders scurried to art class. Jake and I ambled to Chemistry II, which we both despised.

“Jake,” I started, “Why did you tell that story?”

“What, Mags? Why not tell that story?” he scowled. “You weren’t totally into it?”

I stopped in the hallway and pulled him aside. My voice was low and angry.

“Not only was I not ‘into it,’ Jake, you weren’t ‘into it’ either. That whole tale was a show. A show you put on so that people in this lame-ass high school think you’re the shit. You know as well as—better than I do—that you don’t think a story about Mr. Cooper’s alcoholic wife masturbating is funny. You also know that you don’t think stealing is funny ...”

“... hold on, babe!” Jake interjected.

“I will not hold on,” I replied, “and don’t call me ‘babe.’ I watch you day after day, Jake, playing this role. You pretend to be this good ole boy who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about grades or what’s going on in the world. You pretend to love this shit hole of a town and all these people. You do what your parents want—you say your ‘yes ma’ams’ and ‘no sirs’ and you dress up for church every Sunday. You even talk about Jesus like he lived down the street from you.”

“Maggie,” Jake whined.

“No, Jake, let me finish. You’re living two lives, Jake. The Jake I know reads the New York Times every morning before he leaves for school. My Jake can’t get enough of world news. He thinks about things like racism and class struggle and injustice. He hates this town with a passion because it’s smallminded. He hates the fact that his family owned slaves, to the point that he’s dreamed about changing his last name, and he refuses to go into Goodloe Hall because he knows that money from slave labor helped build it. He doesn’t want to go into the family business, the one his dad and grandfather and four other generations of Goodloes built. He feels trapped by evangelical Christianity so he secretly reads books about Eastern philosophy and Jewish tradition. But that’s my point. That Jake is a secret. No one knows him, maybe me, maybe your brother, but no one else. Instead, everyone sees this bullshit Jake. This, ‘all things to all people’ Jake, who morphs to fit people’s expectations. When they get the Jake that you give them, they can’t help but adore you because you’ve given them exactly what they want and expect.”

“And what’s wrong with that, Margaret Carlton? Just what’s wrong with making other people happy?” Jake was getting angry. His nostrils flared.

“Because you’re not being true to yourself, Jake. You’re not being you. And that will grind you down one day. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow and maybe not twenty years from now. But one day it will be too much for you to take.”

Jake started walking again. He didn’t turn back to look at me as he said, “And if your hypothesis is correct, Maggie, and I’m just a chameleon who changes to fit into his setting, then why do you think, what makes you think you’re so special that you would be the one person out of all the others who knows and sees the real Jake?” He paused. “Are you really that arrogant?”

I hurriedly walked past him into the chemistry lab, and class began.

Midway through class Jake tossed a folded note onto my desk. “Mags,” it read, “I hate it when you get me. And you got me out there. Definitely a Maggie moment. JEG.”

I scrawled back, “Is that an apology?”

He looked up after reading my note and smiled a wide, high school jock kind of grin. He nodded sheepishly.

Jake and I had quite a few “Maggie moments” after that initial blowup in the hall at THS. He used the term to describe any situation where he had slipped into his chameleon skin and I called him on it.

Jake once told me that he thought of his marriage as one long Maggie moment. He was drunk, of course. Jake, Emily, and the kids—it was just Virginia and Ella Grace at the time—had rented a condo on the South Carolina coast for two weeks. Jake invited me to join them for the first weekend. I had a great time playing with Virginia in the ocean, collecting seashells, and reading to her. She was five, and I didn’t have any good reading material for the kindergarten set. So I read articles from The New Yorker and Mother Jones aloud, and she listened in rapt attention. Emily was late in her pregnancy with Jaye and was exhausted, so she went to bed when the children did at around seven each evening. That left Jake and me free to spend our evenings guzzling cheap wine and pondering the problems of the universe.

“D’you wanna know what your trouble is, Maggie?” Jake slurred. It was just before midnight on Saturday night, and we’d been drinking bottles of an extremely acidic Cabernet since dinner at five.

“No, I really don’t think I do, Jake,” I replied, my tongue thick and heavy.

He snorted and grabbed the wine bottle. We had long since dispensed with the niceties of glasses. “Your trouble is that you have such high expectations,” he revealed. “You expect people to be so much that they just can’t ever live up to your expectations. They get frustrated and leave, or you get tired of them in their failed state.”

I contemplated what he said for a drunken lifetime and then asked for clarification. “Is this my trouble in general, Jake, or are you thinking about something in particular?”

“Particular. It’s why you can’t settle down with a man.”

“Ohhhh,” I said. “Because I thought that my trouble with you always was that I didn’t have any expectations for you. I just always wanted you to be yourself.”

“Exactly,” he replied, resting his head on my shoulder. We were lying on our backs on the beach with a pair of princess towels that belonged to Virginia and Ella Grace underneath us. The sky was filled with yellow stars that twinkled behind and through the feathery clouds.

“Do you have any idea how tough it is for a person to just be himself?” he sighed.

I thought about his comment for a few minutes and began to cry.

“That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard, Jake.”

He propped himself on his elbow and wiped away my tears.

We were silent for at least fifteen minutes. I was almost asleep when he said, “It’s not easy being married to a woman like Emily and having a best friend like you, Maggie.”

Roused from near slumber, I asked him what he meant by that.

“It’s one long Maggie moment.” He shifted his weight onto one side and continued, “It’s like, I make these decisions about what to do, what to wear, how to conduct myself, and Emily totally approves of them. She’s there by my side every day. She takes care of me and my children, she makes love to me whenever the hell I want, she’s gorgeous and sexy and kind, she believes in Jesus with all her heart ... and sometimes I’m struck by how fucking good my life is and how goddamn wonderful she is.”

“Sounds pretty good, Jake.”

“Then there’s this constant refrain in my head, this nagging voice. And you know what?”

“What?” I prompted him.

“It’s you, Maggie. It’s you in my head. It’s your voice yelling at me in the hallway at Tempelton. It’s like that hammer game at the fair, Maggie. Just when I think things are real, and I’m living the life of the real Jake, the ball gets up too high, rings the Maggie bell, and it tumbles back down to the bottom again.” He sighed. “It’s heartbreaking, it really is.”

We sat in silence again, both thinking about what he had said.

After a few minutes, he continued, “Sometimes I’m just so jealous of Emily. She does what everyone else does, what everyone else thinks she should do. She totally buys everything they tell her at Sunday school. She never challenges what’s accepted. And because of that, she has an answer for everything. And her answers are easy, because they’re the same answers everyone else would give. She’s just blissful, while I live in a constant state of mental anguish.”

“So,” I said, sitting up. “Are you saying you would rather lead an unquestioning life? That you would prefer to just live in perpetual bliss and never challenge your thoughts or motives, never apply logic and your analytical skills to your daily life? Is that what would make you happy, Jake? And by the way, I would like to remind you that you have been known, on occasion, to do what everyone else expects you to do.”

“I know. I totally know that. I don’t disagree with you. My life’s a fucking façade. I don’t believe in it, but I don’t know what else to do—how else to be. I don’t know how I could ever live with myself if I disappointed everybody. Maybe, if I never knew you, Maggie, then maybe I could just be happy and live simply. Maybe, if I didn’t always hear your voice ...” He didn’t complete his sentence.

I stood up. I was so tired, and I knew I would have to bite my tongue. I thought about walking back to the condo and just crawling into bed. But I felt a little dizzy, so I steadied myself and then sat cross-legged next to Jake’s propped-up head. I ran my fingers through his thick blond hair and kissed him gently on his forehead.

“Jake. Sweet boy. I didn’t make you curious and brilliant. You just are. And because you’re inquisitive and smart and conscientious, you question accepted norms. It’s not my voice you’re hearing, honey. It’s your voice. It’s you, Jake.”

Jake’s face wrinkled up in disbelief. “Let’s say it is me, then, Maggie. What the hell do I do with it? The damn voice has me questioning everything I am and everything I have. What do I do with that?”

“You listen, Jake. You listen to the voice and let it take you where you’re meant to go,” I said.

“That’s so easy for you to say, Maggie. You’ve always listened to your voice. You got out of Tempelton and into the city. You don’t have children, you don’t have any obligations and expectations to fulfill. You’re not a Goodloe.” Jake dug in the sand with the now empty bottle of wine.

“I haven’t always listened to my voice, Jake,” I laughed. “Don’t forget that I dated Court Edgerton, master of the pulpit at Tempelton First Baptist Church. Mr. ‘I Need To Pray Now Because I Just French Kissed My Girlfriend.’”

Jake laughed. “He always did have issues dealing with his sexuality, didn’t he?”

I laughed too, and we sat in silence again.

“God, it’s getting late,” Jake said, and started picking up the towels and empty wine bottles. “You heading to bed?”

“Nope,” I told him. “I’m going to sit out here awhile longer. I have a story due next Wednesday, and sometimes I process my thoughts better when I’m wasted.”

“Yours is a twisted mind, Maggie Carlton,” he smiled.

“‘Night,” I said.

“‘Night,” he replied.

Chapter 3

By the time we reached the Goodloe home, it was awash with mourners. Now the home of Jimmy and Louise Goodloe, the house at 1772 Elmwood has been in the Goodloe family for four generations. Jake and Emily had planned to move in when Jimmy retired from Tempelton Bank and Trust in a few years. It’s a gorgeous old red brick home that must have been the crown jewel of Tempelton when it was built, before the scads of suburban mansions began to overwhelm the old farms that lay on the town’s outskirts.

Miss Lou Lou’s geraniums peered out bright and lively from her window boxes. I was convinced that if I could only stay focused on those vivid flowers, I wouldn’t be so irritated by the throngs of well-meaning strangers who had gathered to pay their respects.

Tempelton was established in 1797, and Jake’s great-times-five grandfather, James Colewell Goodloe, founded Tempelton Bank and Trust in 1892. Remarkably, the bank has remained in the control of the Goodloe family ever since. TB&T is the only locally owned and operated bank in the city. Large regional and national banks have located branches in the town, but TB&T is the financial institution of choice for most Tempeltonians. Accordingly, the Goodloe family is the wealthiest and most influential in all of Mortimer County.

James Clarke Goodloe IV, Jake’s father Jimmy, served as Mayor of Tempelton for two six-year terms. Jake’s grandfather, James Clarke Goodloe III, had served a single term as mayor in the 1970s. Neither Jimmy nor J.C. Goodloe moved into the official mayoral residence while in office, choosing instead to remain at Elmwood.

Jake’s older brother, James Clarke Goodloe V, known as Jace, was heir apparent to the helm of both TB&T and the mayor’s office. He attended Rhodes College, a small liberal arts school in Memphis where three generations of Goodloe men had received their diplomas.

Midway through his junior year at Rhodes, Jace began calling Jake six to eight times a day. Jake, who was a freshman at Vanderbilt, thought that perhaps his brother was being overly protective of him. Jake assured Jace that he was adjusting well and that Jace shouldn’t worry about him. Jake’s assurances did not keep Jace from calling, and the frequency and urgency of Jace’s calls increased.

The morning of December 2, 1988, Jake called me. He was frantic.

“Hello,” I answered sleepily. It was a Friday morning and I had been up until three the night before writing an article for my school’s underground newspaper.

“Maggie. I don’t know what to do,” Jake said. He sounded tense and fearful.

“‘Hi’ to you too, Jake. Why didn’t you call last night? Or did you? Anyway— what to do about what?”

“Jace,” he said.

“What about Jace? Did he knock somebody up?” I asked with a sleepy giggle-yawn.

“Mags, he’s here. It’s not even seven, and he drove from Memphis to Nashville, and he’s here. I don’t know what’s going on, but something is very wrong with him.”

I heard a loud clanging noise.

“Motherfuck, Jace don’t do that—hold on, Mags.”

I waited for about twelve minutes, but all I could hear were muffled voices arguing. I hung up the phone and called my brother John.

John agreed to go to Jake’s dorm to investigate. He knew Jace well, and figured he was just stoned.

Jake called me back about an hour later. He sounded terrible.

“Maggie, I don’t know what’s going on here. But something is really wrong with Jace.”

“Is John there?”

“Not anymore. He took Jace to his friend Ellen’s. Jace didn’t want to leave me here. He kept yelling something about the Pharisees and how he needed to protect me from them. But John got him in the car. John told me to wait here.”

I waited while Jake cried silently on the other end.

“Jake?” I asked after a few minutes.

“Yeah,” he said. I heard him wiping his nose.

“Have you noticed anything strange about Jace before this? Any changes in him recently? Maybe like over Thanksgiving?”

I asked because I had noticed some strange things about Jace over the holiday. My older sister Annie, who is Jace’s age, had a huge crush on him. On Thanksgiving Day, she begged me to call Jake to find out where Jace would be that night. When I learned he was meeting high school friends at Draught Horse, she told me that I had to go with her to meet them.

We got to Draught Horse at eleven or so, and Jace was already nestled in a corner booth with a couple of other guys. Jake wasn’t there. Annie shoved me in front and told me to head to Jace’s table. I did, and he invited us to join them.

Jace was usually impeccably groomed, but on that night he looked like he’d slept in the clothes he was wearing. He hadn’t shaved in weeks, and his breath was toxic. His buddies didn’t seem to notice, nor did Annie, who hung on his every word.

But when Dirk Conrad played a Led Zeppelin song on the jukebox, Jace lunged at him, screaming. “You trying to fuck with me, Conrad? What the fuck you doin’, man?” He took a few steps away from Dirk and, as if he’d made a new discovery, said, “You’re working for Satan, aren’t you? You’re one of his minions. I see the 666 seared in your soul, Conrad.” Jace climbed into a nearby booth and curled into a fetal position. Dirk and the others were fairly wasted at this point, so I don’t think they thought much of Jace’s behavior. But it struck me as very odd and more than a bit frightening.

Even a drunken, adoring Annie knew something seemed to be off with him.

“Jace looked so dreamy tonight. Don’t you think, Maggie?” she asked as I drove her home. She was fumbling with the radio, and her hand kept falling off onto the gearshift.

“No. I thought he looked dirty,” I replied, grabbing her hand and placing it in her lap.

“Not dirty. Scruffy. God, he is fine. I get so hot just thinking about him,” Annie said.

“Hold it together, Annie,” I chuckled at her. Jace was, in fact, a dream, but Annie was also very drunk.

“He really kinda lost it over that Zeppelin song, didn’t he?” Annie asked as she struggled mightily to focus her gaze on the road ahead.

“He kinda did,” I agreed.

“What do you think that was about?” she wondered. “I mean, Jace is really sensitive and all, so maybe it brought back some memories?”

I knew what Annie was thinking. Hers is not a complex mind. She wanted to know if I knew whether or not Stairway to Heaven was a song that Jace had shared with another woman. Why she thought I would know this was beyond me.

“I have no earthly idea whether Jace ever screwed anyone to Zeppelin, Annie, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She giggled.

“I screwed him once,” she informed me.

“Not that I want to hear about it,” I sang as I pulled into our driveway.

I got to hear about it anyway. It happened in the men’s locker room at THS the summer after they graduated high school. I grew more and more disgusted as she relived the encounter in vivid detail. It was evident that this experience meant tremendously more to Annie than it ever could have to Jace.

“And then, he held my breasts in his hands and rubbed his face against them. I still have that bra. Never washed it,” Annie related. I shuddered at the thought. We were in our house and I was taking off her clothes so I could get her into bed. She grabbed my wrists as she climbed under the covers.

“Do you think he loves me, Maggie? Do you?”

“Annie, go to sleep. Dream of Jace if you will, but go to sleep.”

I told John about Jace’s appearance and outburst the next morning over coffee. Annie was still in bed.

“He was probably stoned, Maggie. Word is he’s gotten into some pretty heavy shit at Rhodes,” John told me.

“Oh. Well, I suppose drugs could be part of the problem,” I replied, but I still thought something else was at play and told John as much. I’d seen plenty of people on drugs before and this seemed different. I thought about Jace the whole flight back to school.

I was curious whether Jake had seen similar behavior over the Thanksgiving holiday, but he didn’t seem to connect the dots like I had. “Well, I mean, he’d stopped shaving and all, but beyond that, he seemed pretty normal to me over Thanksgiving,” Jake answered, still sniffling. “He, you know, argued with us all a lot,” Jake added, “but we just figured he was stressed over finals. You know how much pressure he’s under.”

As it turned out, Jace was not just stressed out over his exams. An hour after Jake and I hung up, my brother John called me.

“I’m at the ER with Jace,” he said. I interrupted him before he could continue.

“The ER? As in the hospital? What for? I thought he was stoned?” I asked, frantically chomping on my cinnamon raisin bagel. My plate was smeared with cream cheese, so I had to keep the bagel in my left hand while I held the phone with my right.

“I took him over to my friend Ellen’s house after I dragged him from Jake’s dorm. He kept screaming to me about how he had to protect Jake from the Pharisees, and that if I wasn’t careful, Pontius Pilate would get me, too.”

“Pontius Pilate, as in the Bible?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” John said. “Anyway, I took him to Ellen’s ...”

“Who’s Ellen?”

“Ellen Shimanski. Last semester I wanted to earn some extra cash, so I participated in this study that Ellen was doing. She’s a resident in psychiatry at Vanderbilt,” John explained.

“You went to see a shrink, John? How enlightened of you!” I teased, vainly hoping that if John joked back, then the situation with Jace would somehow be less serious than it actually was.

“Maggie, be serious. It was some behavioral thing. Anyway, Ellen and I got to be friends after the study ended and went out a couple of times. After I talked to you, I called her and asked if I could bring Jace over. She gave me some pointers on how to handle him, and I took him to her place. She’s here with me now.”

“Why did she make you take him to the hospital? What does she think it is?” I had set my bagel down on top of the microwave and, fully realizing the potential gravity of the situation, sat down on my bed.

“She’s being very careful not to make a quick diagnosis. She’s just a resident and needs an attending to see him. But Maggie, she thinks it’s very serious,” John said, gravely.

“What are we talking here, John? Is Jace crazy?”

“Ellen thinks, and don’t go spreading this around until we get some facts, but Ellen thinks that Jace is schizophrenic. She thinks he has paranoid schizophrenia.”

I was dumbfounded.

“But, Jake,” was all I managed to get out of my mouth.

“I know. I called him before I called you. He’s on his way. So are Jimmy, Lou Lou, and Eleanor. I called them too. Jake was too upset to call them, and Jace is certainly in no condition to use the phone. They sedated him.”

“Okay.” I was still stunned.

“Listen, Mags, Jake just walked in the door. I’ll call you later.” He hung up and I sat and stared at the phone, crying for at least fifteen minutes.

“Maggie, are you okay?” My roommate Claire had just entered our dorm room. She had spent the night at her boyfriend Diego’s apartment. Diego was about five steps behind Claire. His hair looked like it hadn’t been washed since April.

I didn’t reply.

“Maggie, seriously honey, is something wrong?”

“Claire, I have to go to Tennessee.”

“When, sweetie?” Claire asked.

“Right now.”

“Is something wrong with your mom? Is she okay?”

“Mother’s fine. I guess. It’s not her. It’s Jake.”

“What about Jake?” Claire asked. Her hazel eyes were fixed on my brown ones.

“His brother, Jace. He’s sick.”

“What does he have?”

“He’s schizophrenic, Claire. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic.”

I told Claire about the weird scene he made over the Led Zeppelin song during Thanksgiving, and how he was convinced that the Pharisees were after Jake.

“That’s some heavy shit,” piped Diego, who looked halfway to stoned himself.

“What’s a Pharisee?” Claire was raised in northern California by two hippies. She figured her real name, Clarity, would be troublesome during sorority rush, so she dubbed herself “Claire.” Her freethinking parents did not drag her to Sunday school each week, so Claire had honestly never heard of a Pharisee.

“Legalists,” I explained. “They focused on the letter of the law. In the New Testament, Paul contrasted them with Jesus, who was focused on love.” I was surprised at myself for having an answer and realized that my Sunday school lessons must have affected me more than I realized. “But that’s not important. What is important is that Jake’s whole world is in shambles, and I’m almost eight hundred miles away.”

“Not to be critical, Maggie, but is there really anything you can do for Jake? He has his family, doesn’t he?” Claire was always saying, “not to be critical.” It was a good hint she was about to be critical. I appreciated the warning.

“I’m Jake’s closest friend. When he hurts, I hurt,” I explained.

“Right. So you’re going to Tennessee to make you feel better—to make you feel useful—not to help Jake,” she countered.

Sometimes I hated Claire.

I didn’t go to Tennessee to be with Jake. I finished finals and drove home for Christmas. By the time I pulled into Tempelton, Jace had been admitted to a “facility” and the Goodloes were celebrating Christmas as if he had never existed. At their annual Christmas party, Jace’s name was never mentioned. All family photos of him had been removed, and his bedroom door was locked. Overnight, Jake had become the new heir apparent to the Goodloe legacy.