Paradise Falls (Paradise Falls #1-5)(14)
“She’s not supposed to be here,” Jacob repeated.
The barbell ground on his neck. Fully loaded, the barbell weighed twice as much as a grown man. The last repetition was a shaking, muscle-grinding struggle that ended with the solid clang of steel on steel when the weight settled into the rack.
“I’m getting too close. She asked me out.”
“Where?”
He shook his ponytail loose..“I don’t know. Technically she made a date to make a date with me.”
Faisal quietly laughed.
Jacob eyed him. “Not funny.”
Jacob went back to the weights. When he racked the bar again he set his hands on his hips and breathed, getting his wind back before he spoke. “Where are we on the Freedom of Information Act requests on the bridge repairs?”
“Nothing yet,” Faisal said.
“How are the lawyers doing with the shell companies?”
“It’s slow going. There are a number of limited liability companies, all belonging to one another.”
He shrugged. Jacob ran his fingers through his hair and flexed his left hand. Everywhere he looked, dead ends.
Jacob racked the weight for the final time and headed to the next rack to begin overhead presses. Faisal followed, patiently observing Jacob’s exercises. The weight pressed hard against his bare palms. Gloves were a crutch. Better to toughen the skin, the way his dad did. Dad’s hands were rawhide.
His left hand throbbed. He saw Jennifer again, floating gracefully through her dingy little kitchen, offering him milk she didn’t have.
“What would you do?” Jacob said.
Faisal shrugged. “That is not my place, sir.”
“Yes, it is. I’m asking you, what would you do?”
Faisal shrugged. “I just work here.”
Jacob looked at him at sighed.
“That’s not funny. I’m going to find a way to let her down,” he said. “I can’t involve her in this. When it starts, I don’t want her anywhere near it.”
Jacob sat on a bench, and flexed his throbbing hand. Jennifer stepped out of a dream that morning. If it hadn’t been for the cop, he might’ve killed Elliot right there. Tendons stretched in his shaking left hand, and the scars from the skin grafts covering the reconstructed bones formed an intricate map.
Nine months they held him; first in a stinking hospital bed where the old man tended his wounds. Then they put him in a room and started with the cuts. Remembering a book describing how a Vietnam prisoner of war made it through by playing a new golf course in his mind every day helped him through it.
Jacob survived what they did to his body by making a fortress of his mind. It had walls of stone and steel, but the real protection lay within. One wing of his mind palace was his house. The aging carpeting under his bare feet. The battered table in the kitchen. A whole wall of pictures behind the living room couch
The upstairs was perfectly recreated, too. The office his mother and father shared, their desks nestled side by side. His bedroom, and Candy’s, across the hall. The door was ajar. The frilly pink sheets were rumpled, warmed by slanting rays of light from the window and strewn with the debris of a pre-teen girl’s life. Dolls on the one hand, sparkly makeup on the other.
The fortress had other wings he could visit in his mind. In the very center was a woman. The grief etched the image into his memory and never faded. In a bath robe and pajamas, the angel’s feet bled and left pale red tracks in the snow as she ran to the abyss.
Jacob was seventeen years old when he saw Miss K for the first time and he instantly knew she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Every day he would go to remedial English in Miss Garrison’s room and Miss K would be standing outside, leaning on the lockers, watching the students in the hall with a new teacher’s enthusiasm for the rules and for authority.
He memorized everything about her, from the way she always itched her left ankle with the toe of her sneaker to how she would blow loose strands of hair out of her eyes.
She was perfect. Long, graceful legs with muscles like steel cables, flat stomach, there was even something about her shoulders that he liked, and then there was her hair. She had gorgeous hair, rich and silky.
His chest twisted when he first noticed she was wearing a wedding band. A little voice in his mind chided him for even thinking a woman like her would ever take an interest in him.
Jacob was no stranger to the female body. Breathless explorations with his first girlfriend and the wonders of the Internet left him well acquainted with the female form, but he would have traded all of that for a flash of desire in her stormy eyes, soft auburn hair sliding through his fingers. It was an impossible dream. She was so far out of his league that they weren’t even in leagues.
The night the bridge fell, the school cop dragged her back from the brink and held her down until she regained her senses. The same man dragged Jacob back as he tried to climb down to reach his sister.
Then reality hit. He couldn’t feel the cold anymore by the time he sat shivering and soaked from melted snow in a waiting room. Calvin Carlyle came to tell him they were all dead. His mother, father, and sister would never come home.
His mind snapped to the present. “You can go,” he said to Faisal.
When he was alone, he stood and charged at the heavy bag, disregarding the pain in his hand. The bag swung hard, creaking on its anchor in the ceiling joist. He hit it again and again, each blow punctuating the images flashing in his mind. He spun on his foot and drove his heel into the bag in a savage roundhouse that swung the bag almost to the ceiling before crashing back down and nearly sent him sprawling.