Jacob listened to her voice, barely above the sound of the crickets in the brush all around them.
“He said it felt good to have a child he could be proud of,” she muttered.
Jacob raised his eyebrows at the sky and turned to look at her, but she was still staring at the grass in her hands with blank eyes. He looked back up, giving her the privacy of his averted gaze. It was another piece to what was rapidly becoming a complicated puzzle of Jenna’s life, and he filed it away in his mind with the others.
He thought about what Al had said to him that night in his office, when Jacob told him the truth about his past.
Jenna’s been through a lot, he had said. She might be more understanding than you think.
The first part was clearly truer than Jacob had ever realized, but what did that mean for the second half of the statement? Was he right? If he let Jenna in – really let her see him for who he was – would she understand?
Then again, Al didn’t know everything. He knew Jacob was a convict, sure, but that could mean a lot of things, and Jacob highly doubted murder was at the top of the list of assumptions Al would have jumped to. Maybe half of the truth was all he would ever be able to share.
“Sorry,” Jenna said, interrupting Jacob’s thoughts.
He looked over to her and she gave him a plastic smile.
“I guess I broke the game,” she teased with a chuckle that didn’t do its job of masking her discomfort.
He wanted to say something, to let her know that it was okay to share that stuff with him. That he wasn’t going anywhere.
But neither of them were very good at the emotional stuff, so he simply said, “Yeah, my dad was a dick, too,” and gave her a reassuring half-smile.
She appraised his expression, and their eyes communicated what their words never could: they were the same. She saw through the purposeful casualty of his words and into the depth of them, and for a brief moment, he felt wholly exposed, truly seen. But to his surprise, it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling.
Once their eyes broke apart, he looked up at the dark sky again. The moon was a thin sliver, barely illuminating the night and glinting off of the pond. He stared at the stars, but he didn’t see them. His mind was overtaken by thoughts of Jenna, trying to piece together the small snippets of her life he had seen to get a full picture, but he always came up blank. His thoughts came inevitably back to the scars on her wrists, and his gut tightened as the picture in his mind shifted to that of his mother’s lifeless body, laying still in a tub of bloody water with her slit arm draped over the edge and dripping red onto the linoleum floor. His stomach turned at the image, and he took in a centering breath to calm the nausea that always followed.
Seeing those two images morph together in his mind, he could feel the panic rising in his chest at the thought of losing someone else in that same gruesome way. His instinct was to flee, to run away from anything that had the potential to cause that kind of harm. But it was too late for running. He was in too deep, now, and no amount of avoidance could remove the way he felt about Jenna.
The last thing he wanted was to make her uncomfortable, to push her away just when she was finally starting to open up to him, but he couldn’t stop himself from saying what was on his mind.
“My mom…,” he trailed off, feeling her eyes on his face again. He swallowed back the emotion and continued. “She killed herself when I was fifteen.”
Jenna stayed silent, waiting.
“I found her in the bathtub. She, um…,” he paused, re-thinking the subject, but it was too late to turn back now. “She had slit her wrists,” he stated, forcing himself to meet her eyes.
Once the words sank in, her face fell, and she turned away from his gaze. In doing so, her view fell on her arms beneath her, and her hands moved to her phantom sleeve, an instinct to cover them, but her jacket was on the ground.
He didn’t say anything, but the silence was deafening. Even the chirping of the crickets had ceased for a brief stretch, as if they knew the intensity of the moment required complete stillness.
Jenna peeked at him, and he was looking at her – no anger or judgment, just waiting.
She took in a breath and let it out slowly. “It was a long time ago,” she muttered at the grass under her fingers as she toyed with the pieces.
Jacob nodded, afraid that speech would burst the fragile bubble of the conversation, and he wanted her to continue.
There was a long silence, and for a minute he thought she wasn’t going to say anything more.
“I… tried once,” she whispered.
Jacob’s heart thumped harder in his chest as his fears were confirmed.
She let out a sigh, her shoulders falling, as if a literal weight had lifted up and disappeared.
He thought about her words, tried to picture them, and then shoved that thought out of his mind. He didn’t want to imagine finding her like that, and his heart ached for whoever had to be the one to live with that image for the rest of their life, because he knew exactly how it felt.
“Who found you?” he asked in a quiet voice.
She peeked up at him again, and he could see the guilt in her eyes as she said it. “My mom.”
He turned back to the stars, focusing on one particularly bright orb in the middle of a cluster of dimmer beauties. The crickets had returned to their loud bellowing, but the rest of the campus was silent. The moment was surreal, fragile, and it felt as if any word would shatter it, sending even the memories floating away with the light, river breeze, into the night.
So, they didn’t say anything. After a while, Jenna flipped over, laying on her back beside him to examine the night sky. She lay further away from him than usual, half a foot of ground separating them, but he felt as if she had never been closer.
In that moment, he knew her. In the deepest levels of her soul, he understood her, and he racked his brain for any indication of the last time he had felt that way about anyone. He came up blank.
The closest example he had was Sarah, but even with her, there was something missing. Their relationship was one-sided: she gave, he took. He needed, she provided.
But with Jenna, in this moment, there was no giving or taking, just understanding. He understood her at her core, and the only thing that put a shadow on the moment was a longing in his gut to be understood in return. And once that ache was acknowledged, it began to fester and grow, pounding in his chest and ears, overflowing until at last, the words fell out of his mouth in a whisper on their own accord, desperate to be said and longing to be heard.
“I killed somebody.”
Silence.
A long silence followed his admission, and the momentary relief of finally saying the words aloud was quickly replaced with panic. She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and he stopped breathing altogether, not daring to look at her expression. But despite the panic, there was something about the mixture of adrenaline coursing through his veins and the desperate need to fill the uncomfortable silence that pushed him to want to share more.
At first, he tried to stifle the instinct, but there was a part of him that ached for the freedom of laying it all on the line, not just to a therapist, but to someone who mattered. And if she was going to hate him for it, the damage was probably already done, so what could be the harm?
“Four people,” he said.
The minute the words were out of his mouth, he wanted to take them back. Even across the distance, he could feel her stiffen beside him. His stomach tied up in knots, and his hands and feet were tingling, screaming at him to run, hide, get out of there. But against his better judgement, he kept talking.