“I don’t know why I bother talking to you, Mister I Know Everything In The World There is To Know,” Anne said to her cousin.
“I don’t know why you do either,” Jayson Laujinesse said. “Not about stuff like that.”
“The problem with you,” Anne O’Muil told him, as she got up from the kitchen table and navigated Jinny, who was on the phone with Cecile, “is you don’t believe in anything you can’t touch or see.”
“You think that’s a problem, huh?” said Jayson.
“Well,” said Anne, opening the refrigerator, and taking out the orange juice. “Since you can’t see and can’t touch most things that exist, then yeah, it’s a problem.”
She poured herself a glass. “You want some?”
“Sure,” Jayson said. “And you cannot get me to believe that you saw the Headless Woman on the Parkway--”
“She was right outside of Dennis near Mud Brook,” Anne declared, sitting down and handing him a glass.
“When did you see her?”
“Last Halloween like I told you, nimrod--”
“Anne, would you keep it down,” Jinny said.
Anne nodded to her sister talking on the phone, “I was with Sheila Isherwood and Suzanne Stanley, and all of a sudden we see this woman in a white dress walking across the road. Everything’s so black out there you know. And her dress is so white, from the headlights I guess. Well we didn’t know she was the Headless Woman yet—”
“I would think that the absence of a head might be the first tip--”
“She had a head. Just listen.”
“Cause we thought she lived further out, Or died further out. Existed further out. Whatever dead people do.
“Anyway, we stop the car to let her cross. She’s so pretty,” Anne says, “And she looks at us, and the way some old men tip their hats? That’s when this bitch just rips her head off and sticks it back on.”
“You’re lying.”
“I sure in the shit am not,” Anne swore, and drank down her orange juice.
When Jinny was off the phone, Anne said, “Tell Jayson the story of the Headless Woman on the Parkway.”
“Jayson knows that story,” Jinny said.
“No he doesn’t. Tell him.”
Jinny sighed, sounding much put upon and then she began. “There was this woman—”
“About fifty years ago,” Anne added.
Jinny eyed her sister, and then went on. “And she married this Army colonel, and they came and bought a house near what’s the Parkway now. Only then it was just Anderson Road. Anyway, this woman got pregnant and had a baby and her husband would never come home, and then one night she got a phone call from her husband. He was at his mistress’s house and he said he wasn’t coming back. Well, he had the car, so she couldn’t drive, and the woman was so distracted she picked up her baby and decided to run down the road to the house where her husband was. But she ran out into the road and was killed.”
“That is so sad,” Anne said, softly.
“Splat, like a tomato,” Jayson said.
“You are suchan ass,” Anne said.
“It was thump like a guillotine,” Jinny said, unfazed. “Her head was knocked clean off. They say that sometimes you can hear the baby crying.”
There was a knock on the door, and then, without waiting for an answer, Isaac and Efrem came into the house, hands in their pockets, scarves wrapped around their necks.
“Happy Halloween, all!” Isaac said.
“Ef, you know about the Headless Woman?” Anne said.
“Um hum,” he nodded. “The baby cries sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen it?” Jayson said.
Efrem shook his head.
“See,” Jayson said.
“So,” Anne said. “Ef’s never seen the Eiffel Tower either. Doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
“So I’m supposed to believe this woman lives on the Parkway.”
“Lives or dies or whatever ghosts do,” Anne said, “Hey look, you don’t have to believe. Don’t believe it. Fine with me. I got a costume to put on,” Anne said, leaving the kitchen.
“So you guys wanna go by the Headless Woman on Anderson Road tonight?” Jinny said.
“No thanks,” Efrem said. “I’m not all about headless people.”
“Ditto here.” Isaac said. “Party tonight at Saint Clare’s. Drink till your head falls off. Skip classes tomorrow. Headless Women are not in my plans at all.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts, Isaac?” said Jayson, immediately sorry when he remembered Isaac’s mother was dead.
Isaac just laughed it off, and Jayson laughed too, pretending Isaac’s dead mother hadn’t come into both of their minds.
If he’d bothered to, Isaac Weaver could have counted on one hand the people for whom he reserved warmth. The last finger went to a very large group, the patronage of the bookstore he ran with his father. His freshman year at Saint Clare’s was a disaster far as Jinny was concerned. He knew it. She didn’t understand him. She thought that he wanted to be fun and have lots of friends. She was having a sort of transformation that Isaac was not entirely sure he liked, and she wanted him to have one too.
He’d resented her for this. He resented her for starting to turn pretty and starting to turn heads because this meant he might have to start playing catch up. When Isaac Weaver looked in the mirror he saw exactly what was there. A brooding boy with longish, lank hair, brass rimmed spectacles, and a baby face. A nerdy face. He dressed out of the Salvation Army, and he wore a wallet chain that came in and out of a pocket popular among the burnouts and disaffects of St. Anne County.
Jinny didn’t understand that he did not want friends. She did not understand that guys were different from girls. They didn’t need to run around in groups sharing their feelings and, anyway, if they did, Isaac had never met such boys.
“I just want you to have a good time,” Jinny told him. “Like I’m having.”
One Saturday she’d asked him to go out with her and Cecile and a few friends.
“I’ve gotta work,” he lied, and then went to tell his father that he would stay in the store.
Jinny O’Muil did not know everything. Oh she thought she did, because of what the nuns had taught her in Catholic school, and how her dad was a professor. But she didn’t know everything. Like what she really didn’t know, and what he was finding out, was that you couldn’t open up to everyone. You might want to. But it was a two way street. If someone else didn’t want to be loved, didn’t want to be opened up to, it wouldn’t work, and up until this time, Jinny was the only person he’d ever been able to open up to. There was so much in him, a big old grave full of crap, and you couldn’t throw that down on just anybody.
Isaac was sure that there wasn’t anybody to throw his crap on. And why should there be? After all, most of his life was crap. Spending most of his time alone allowed Isaac to understand more about the self than most people were willing to face. Isaac understood, for example, that he was intensely lonely. He knew that Saturday in the bookstore. And he knew that if he was with Jinny and all her fun friends he would feel even lonelier. Sometimes he wanted to crack up and cry, but only Jinny would get that. Not another guy, not another friend. And he had too much in him. He never told everything to Jinny in the way she told Cecile everything. It would have been too much. So he sat in the bookstore.
Having found Jinny at such an early age, the funny thing was he’d assumed for years that he had someone to love. As if there was only one person in all the world meant to be loved by him. But really that was what this loneliness was. He wanted to love someone else.
He wanted to be real with someone. He was real with his customers, and they kept coming back because they felt it. They felt like he was putting all of himself into this really paltry work, and the truth is Isaac Weaver was because when a customer came to Weaver’s and found him in the back of the store, this man or woman might be the only chance he had to love someone beside Jinny in the immediate future.
One day the recipient of all this attention looked worthy of it. Sometimes Isaac stayed away from certain people. Everyone didn’t want to be helped. Some people, it was just like meeting a snake. The whole short process of talking to them was like being bitten.
“Can I help you?” Isaac asked the other young man.
He looked up at Isaac and said, “I really don’t think I’m buying anything. You don’t know how strapped I am,” he laughed. “I think I’m just looking.”
And then, to Isaac’s surprise, the other guy starting talking to him, “Do you ever just look? I mean, since you work here and all?”
“Actually I look anytime I want to,” Isaac said. “My last name’s Weaver.”
“Oh. Then this is yours?””
“It’s my dad’s,” Isaac shrugged. “Ours.”
“You’re Isaac Weaver,” the boy said now.
Isaac seemed a little surprised.
“Well, yeah.”
“You go to Saint Clare’s. You never say anything. You look like you hate people.”
“I do?”
“Well,” Efrem said, “you probably do. No use pretending.”
Isaac gathered up his courage to ask, “Do other people think I hate people?”
Efrem shrugged. “I don’t know. Other people never bring it up. I just think about it because you’re in my art history class, and when Father Keenan turns out the lights and starts running slides, I get time to think about things like that. You know?”
“Yeah,” Isaac said and shrugged again. He was out of practice in the social skills department. “Uh, you read any good books, lately?”
Efrem raised a sharp eyebrow at the turn of the conversation, and then said, “I’m trying to read Faulkner. So that’s not really a good book I’ve read. That’s an author I hoped would be better who I’m still trying to read.”
“You’re an English major, right?”
Efrem nodded, surprised Isaac knew.
“I’m religion-philosophy,” Isaac said, “You should read Basho.”
“Who?”
“This Japanese guy. He wrote journals and poems and all this stuff. Come on over here,” Isaac gestured for Efrem to follow him.
“Now I think this is a dumb place to put all the religion and philosophy, right with Tarot cards and the occult,” Isaac said. “I tried to get my dad to move it to the literature section cause I said good books are like religious experiences, and the Bible and Koran, all that, they’re good books, right? So, Dad just says, ‘If you wanna move it you can move it yourself.’” Isaac was acutely aware of how rapidly he was speaking, of the diarrhea of the mouth suddenly afflicting him. Efrem kept nodding, and Isaac wondered if the other guy just felt sorry for him. But Isaac kept on talking, “Every time I make a suggestion my dad, who’s usually a real nice guy—I mean he’s the best—says something snippy. It’s like, say whatever you want to, but not about my bookstore. You know Dads.”
“Not really,” Efrem said.
“Are your parents divorced?” Isaac got quiet.
“Oh, no,” Efrem went on. “My mother’s widowed. My father had the audacity to blow his brains out on my eleventh birthday. Or was it my twelfth? It gets hazy after a while.”
To Efrem, Isaac looked as if he’d just been slapped, like he was the one with the suicide daddy.
“Are you joking?” Isaac said.
“I’m afraid not,” Efrem told him. “We had to get new carpet and everything. What?” Efrem said. When Isaac still didn’t talk, Efrem said, “I know it sounds cold of me and everything. I’m sorry. I’ll drop it.”
“No,” Isaac said. At first Efrem could hardly hear his voice because Isaac could hardly talk. “No...” he said again. “You see... I never knew someone that it happened to… Too.”
Efrem cocked his head.
“My mom. She killed herself when I was nine. And I don’t ever talk about it to anyone.”
Both boys looked at each other, and out of all the emotions each saw in the other’s face, the one neither brought up for years afterward was the completely inappropriate joy of meeting someone traumatized like himself.
