By Terry Tierney
Outside Diane’s door, I caught the familiar scent of jasmine incense, and a string of small brass bells jingled when she let me in. She reached up for my sweaty neck and pulled my face down for a sisterly kiss. Flickering candles lit her living room, and I heard the subdued voice of Buffy St. Marie on the stereo. No one else had arrived for the party.
I dropped my baggage and joined her on the overstuffed couch behind a glass coffee table. She poured me a cup of ginseng tea, already brewing on a square mosaic platter next to a sand candle burning in the middle of a large, clay ashtray. Rings of color rippled out from the wick. Diane described how she dug the shape in sand, slowly pouring the layers and allowing them to cool. This one was flawed because the layers had bled together, but it looked perfect to me.
We began talking, and time warped around us until it seemed like we were back in her living room on Adak, sharing the excitement of the early weeks of our friendship. She sat perched on the edge of her couch, her eyes shining and a tinge of pink on her cheeks. Her hair was slightly shorter with tighter curls, but she was as vibrant as I remembered. I felt myself blush under her gaze as she filled me in on her great escape with Phil, touring the West from Washington to New Mexico in a Hertz Chevrolet before ending on a friendly note somewhere in the Painted Desert. I didn’t know her husband had transferred to Long Beach about that time, and they had gotten back together for a while. She asked me to roll a joint while she retrieved a snack from the kitchen. I wished I had showered at the truck stop.
She came back carrying two cupcakes with a small candle burning on each one. I asked, “Are you still having a party?”
“It’s a birthday party,” she explained softly, “for my son.”
I didn’t know she had a son. I had noticed a wallet-sized photo of an infant in a silver frame on the coffee table, but I assumed it was a nephew or a friend’s child. She picked up the picture and held it out for me. “He’s cute,” I said, taking the picture. “How old?”
Her eyes glowed with a mother’s pride. “He’s one year old.”
She retrieved a photo album from behind a row of books on a small shelf while I lit the joint. Rays of candlelight and muted colors cast wispy shadows and reflected off her dark hair and her white, beaded T-shirt, making her appear elf‑like. The room itself with the candles and soft guitar music smelled and sounded magical, almost eerie.
Turning the album page by page, she described the events surrounding each picture. She gushed with stories about Billy. The photos were in no chronological order, so I had trouble matching the images to the flow of her stories. In some pictures, he looked older, especially one shot of Billy holding a red and gold rocking horse by its reins. His tow head hair seemed darker in some photos, and his face more drawn. Maybe it was the dim, patchy candlelight or Diane’s Hollywood weed, but some of the images hardly looked like photographs at all, more like clippings.
She flipped the last page and turned, fighting tears, though two or three had already rolled down her cheek. She clutched my arms, burying her face in my chest and crying harder, tears welling up from deep inside. Her pain was so severe that my own throat constricted, and eyes moistened.
Finally, her breathing settled into a normal rhythm, and she gazed up at me, her long lashes wet, teardrops like glitter reflecting the candle flames. She raised her face like she wanted me to kiss her, so I did, and despite the agony of the moment, I enjoyed it, my first real kiss since I set out from Binghamton, a kiss of need, of rescue.
She nestled against my chest while I fumbled on the table for a roach clip and relit the joint, unsure what else to do. I was hitching a ride in her world. We smoked and listened to the stereo. The next album dropped, and Neil Young sang “Helpless.” Diane leaned over and pinched out the birthday candles, which had burned down to the pink frosting.
Breathing deeply to control her voice, she admitted the photos were cut from magazines. She had never seen her son, but she knew what he looked like. Every time she saw a picture that resembled him, she cut it out.
“Do you think that’s strange?” she asked.
“No,” I answered, trying to hide my discomfort. I wanted to believe her, thinking her loss must have focused itself into a vision, an image of the boy she had never seen. “How do you know what he looks like?”
“He was inside me. I felt him grow, and I talked to him. Sometimes I still feel him inside me, and I think he calls me at night. I’m his mother. I will always be his mother.”
I chugged my cup of tea and asked her where Billy was now. She jumped up like I had just dropped a lit roach on her lap and grabbed the teapot in one motion. Sighing, she patted my shoulder and returned to the kitchen for more hot water.
With fresh tea in our cups, Diane described how empty and guilty she felt after the great escape with Phil evaporated, and she realized she’d deserted her husband. Her return to Los Angeles and all the places she and Daniel used to go – the Santa Monica pier, the observatory, Disneyland – all reminded her of the man he was before his military brainwashing. His hair had trailed halfway down his back. He got high and read books. He was her first real love. She began to associate his change in character with his transfer to Adak. The isle of the damned that turned her freak husband into a lifer.
Daniel was a part of her life, and she wanted her life back. I found it hard to understand how she could want a lifer Jesus freak for a husband, but I flashed back to my own early marriage and how I wished Ronnie and I could recover our days in college and our months living on the beach in Ventura. I understood her impulse if not her love for Daniel. After they got back together, Diane thought she might be pregnant, but Daniel didn’t share her excitement. He knew he wasn’t the father since they had only been sleeping together for two weeks.
She paused, and the corners of her mouth trembled. “I think Daniel was right. Billy doesn’t look like him. Billy has a much fairer complexion and a smaller nose.” She peered at me over her teacup. “Don’t you think he looks like you?”
“Like me?” I jerked back. My knees nearly upset the coffee table. I took a deep breath and tried to absorb her comment. Beside the fact that I was two thousand miles away, still stuck on Adak at the moment of conception, she and I had never slept together. I always thought our relationship was too hot for a casual fling, but I had never projected it this far.
“I knew you would love Billy. You always understood how I felt. Maybe that’s why he looks like you.” Her voice faded into tears. “Looked like you.”
I pulled her close and completed her story in my mind. Daniel forced her to give up the child rather than face him day after day. My mind spun between her loss, the smiling faces, and my surprising role in it all.
“Billy’s in Heaven,” she whispered. She clutched my shirt in her fists and wept.
Stroking the back of her head, I surveyed the room, still alight with candles and ethereal shadows, more of a séance than a party, a ceremony to pacify the dead or ease the loss of the living.
“I can’t believe he made you have an abortion,” I said possessively. “How could he do such a thing?”
“Oh, no,” she whispered. “Daniel would never want that. He doesn’t believe in abortion.” She paused for a breath. “Billy is my spirit child. But I think he would have stayed if Daniel loved him like I do.”
“A spirit child?”
“Billy was a part of me. I could feel him. I think Daniel could feel him too, though he’d never admit it.”
My head was spinning. She hadn’t been pregnant in a physical sense. A spiritual pregnancy? I held her closer and kissed the top of her head, wishing I could stare down into her mind and better understand what was going on there.
She wiped her tears on a birthday napkin and poured us another cup of tea. She handed me a cupcake and urged me to eat it. Angel food with chunks of cherries. At first, I had little appetite, but my road hunger, enhanced by her Hollywood weed, overcame my somber mood.
“It’s okay, Flash. He’s with Jesus.” She told me her plans for Billy, going into detail about the bicycle he would receive at his fifth birthday and how they would ride together.
Her moist eyes glowed in the subdued light of the flickering sand candle, wax pooling and nearly snuffing the wick, throwing soft shadows across her face like tiny hands of her spirit child as if she were cradling him against her breasts, making me more wary of her party mood and how she drew me into her spirit family as the estranged father. I wasn’t prepared to be a spirit father, and I began to question my decision to seek her out.
Sensing my distance, she asked again, “Do you think I’m strange?”
“No, you’re not strange.” I assured her reflexively, crumbling up my cupcake wrapper and looking into her bright eyes, still wet with promise. But the thought of spending more time with her made me feel queasy, and I knew it wasn’t the cupcake. “I’m just surprised. I didn’t know you had gone back with Daniel, and I didn’t know about Billy.” I pinched a crumb and added, “Maybe you need to let go of him.”
She moved away and handed me the canister of weed. “Here, roll another joint.” Our eyes met in a brief impasse, and we stopped talking for several minutes, listening to David Crosby singing, “Deja Vu.”
When the record changed, I wondered what I might say to comfort her and reignite our earlier mood. Then the doorbell rang, and Diane jumped up like it was a drug raid. “It’s Daniel,” she whispered, her eyes wide with fear. “Daniel, my husband.”
“Is he coming for the party?”
“No, he doesn’t know about the party. He wants to borrow my car.” She rolled up the cupcake papers and birthday candles into my napkin and wiped the coffee table, sliding the ashtray into a drawer. She pushed me toward the bedroom and grabbed my backpack with one hand, dragging it across the gray carpet. I caught on to her intent and picked up my suitcase and sleeping bag, carrying them to the bedroom.
“Get under the bed,” she ordered. The bell rang again. “Coming!” she screamed.
“You’re kidding. You really want me to crawl under the bed? You’re not married anymore. We weren’t doing anything wrong.”
“Please get under the bed,” she insisted in a tone a mother might use with a toddler. I squeezed under the bed frame, plowing small balls of dust, and she shoved my sleeping bag, knapsack, and suitcase after me along with Billy’s photo album. With all my luggage and my gangly six-foot frame, it was a tight fit, but once she straightened the blue flowered bed spread, which hung towards the floor with little white tassels, the bedroom could have passed a moral inspection from Grandma Roller back in New York, provided I didn’t cough or scratch. She ran across the hardwood floor and let her husband in.
Hearing Daniel’s exasperated voice, I wondered about his state of mind. I had only met him a few times on Adak. He was about my height with a swarthy complexion and a closely trimmed moustache, reminding me of gangster movies from the fifties: the face of a repressed murderer, despite his Bible-thumping demeanor. I couldn’t imagine how he could be a lifer and a Jesus freak and remain legally sane. By now, he might be psychotic, and his military training had taught him how to handle guns.
I concentrated on remaining quiet, imagining the ocean and the stars, the beach and midnight surf in Ventura. As the pulse in my temples slowed, I began to hear their voices in the living room with greater clarity. They were praying. I recognized the tones and cadence from my months of living above the Rollers. They prayed in loud proclamations, punctuated by several “Alleluias” and “Praise the Lords.”
They signed off, and I heard their footsteps coming in my direction. I tried not to breathe.
Diane retrieved something from the bureau across the room, and they began talking about Jesus like He was sitting in the living room eating a cupcake.
“Jesus says a man and a woman should live together. They are part of the same flesh,” Daniel said as he sat down on the bed with the mattress bulge of his ass pressing against my chest.
“Praise the Lord,” Diane replied in a luscious whisper. “But we aren’t married anymore. Jesus wouldn’t approve of our living together out of wedlock.”
“We lived together before we were reborn in Christ.”
“Yes, but we were living in sin.”
“We were happy.”
“Yes, we were happy. And I still love you.” She walked over to the bed, and Daniel’s weight shifted, allowing me a deep but silent breath.
“Why do we keep teasing ourselves like this? When we both want to be together?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to live with you, Daniel. Jesus says we must make these choices carefully. I’ve prayed and prayed about our relationship, but I still haven’t been called with an answer.” She crawled onto the bed beside him, just above my thighs.
Neither of them spoke for a suspenseful moment, and I suspected the worst, thinking they would make love. I wondered if my injuries would be slow and gradual, beaten into a liquid gelatin like bread dough in a kneading machine or fast and messy like soft metal fed into a punch press.
Finally, Daniel whispered, “Our divorce was only a secular divorce, granted by the lawyers and bureaucrats. Jesus never approved of our divorce.”
“Our divorce was in our hearts,” Diane replied, remaining firm. I heard some wet sucking sounds, and then another moment of relative silence. “Daniel, I really can’t tonight.” She rolled off the bed.
I was saved.
He followed her across the room and pleaded with her again before finally giving up.
The front door creaked open, and Daniel thanked Diane for loaning him some money. He reminded her to meet him at five tomorrow, when his car repair should be done.
I dragged my stuff back out to the living room. Diane sat on the couch stunned like she had just survived a car accident, a close call. I felt just as worn with dust bunnies clinging to my damp jeans and shirt. I needed a thorough cleaning, inside and out.
“I didn’t know he was coming,” she said in apology. “And thank you for crawling under the bed.” She picked a clump of lint from my shirt sleeve.
“That’s all right.” I forced a grin. “But I still don’t understand why you wanted me to hide.”
“It wasn’t you. It was Billy.”
“Billy?” I decided not to question her logic. “I left his album under the bed.”
“It means a lot to me that you love Billy.” She clutched me around the waist and tucked her head into my chest.
I dropped my bags even though I was ready to leave. I wanted to be polite because I was still hitching a ride in her world, but now I was looking for an exit. She broke her grasp, motioned me toward the couch, and retrieved her canister of weed.
I looked into her eyes, recalling again all the secrets we had shared, and I decided to stay for one number. We recovered by talking about how long ago Adak seemed, a few years extending to several light years of displacement. Her living room felt that much smaller, collapsed by the weight of the past and the lingering presence of her unborn son and her husband, memories in spirit and flesh, even though we avoided talking about them. They seemed less important now that they had made their appearances and left Diane and me to ourselves.
She brought out another plate of cupcakes, but my appetite had vanished. The cupcakes now sat like relics, along with her smile and the stack of records she restarted after Daniel left. Like my presence on her worn couch.
I relit the joint as she studied me closely, and I tried to understand how her needs had given birth to Billy and kept her tethered to Daniel. She wanted to help them like she wanted to help me, though she was unsure what any of us needed.
Catching my eye, she asked, “Have you thought about accepting Jesus into your life?”
I coughed on my hit. “Well, this morning a guy named Bud in a lowered pickup showed me a Jesus tattoo on his knuckles.”
“I understand how he put you off, but you should think about it. Jesus could help you.”
“I think Mick Jagger could help me more.”
“What?” She looked astonished and offended.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I used to believe in God, but I guess I grew out of it.”
She eyed me sympathetically, convinced I really needed saving. “I can help you find Jesus,” she whispered.
I studied her expectant stare, wishing she had not brought Jesus into our discussion. But if I were going to pray with someone, I’d rather pray with her than Bud. “Diane, I’m not ready. You have to be ready for Jesus, and I’m not ready.” She ran her fingers through my hair and stroked my neck, sending tingles down my back. “Especially now, with my separation and everything, I’m feeling too vulnerable. Now isn’t the time to be born again. In any religion.”
“It’s the best time.”
“Not for me.” We held our stare for a long moment, her offer and my refusal hanging in the air between us like a thick cloud.
I finally excused myself, saying I had to be in Ventura by morning. Jack was expecting me. I gave her his phone number and promised to call her again the next time I was in LA. I didn’t say I’d be more likely to call if I knew Jesus had moved out and taken a couple of ghosts with Him.
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Terry Tierney is the author of a poetry collection, The Poet’s Garage, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and two novels, Lucky Ride, which was published in December 2021, and The Bridge on Beer River, scheduled for 2023, both by Unsolicited Press. His stories and poems have recently appeared in Ghost Parachute, Flash Fiction Magazine, Rust and Moth, Typishly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Lake and other publications. After earning a PhD in nineteenth-century literature and teaching college composition and creative writing, he survived several Silicon Valley startups as a software engineering manager. Visit his website at https://terrytierney.com.
