Page 1 of Jacob

ChapterOne

BEND, OREGON

The rain washed away the tears, but they kept coming. Alex Hethering took a hand off the handlebars of her bike to keep swiping at her face as she pedaled wildly toward the trailer park. She needed to see her best friend, Jake Simpson. Needed to see him like she needed to breathe.

A car passed by her, the left front wheel slipping into a huge pothole and showering her with mud and freezing water. Alex glanced sharply at the driver, a woman. She had wide eyes and a hand clamped over her mouth. Mo Harris, the librarian, who was horrified that she’d splashed water on Alex, today of all days. Mo was slowing down. Probably wanting to pull over, get out and apologize. Offer to drive her home.

No. Alex didn’t need apologies and the muddy freezing water didn’t make her feel worse than she already did. Nothing could. She’d just buried her parents. The freezing cold water was warm compared to how she felt inside.

And home wasn’t home any more, anyway.

Mo had come to a full stop and Alex knew she couldn’t deal with Mo’s apologies, with that soft look of pity. She’d had nothing but gentle pity, warm hugs and low voices whispering condolences these past two days. None of it helped and she didn’t want any more, so she put her head down, long drenched strands of hair hanging in front of her face, and pedaled harder, faster.

Maybe if she pedaled hard enough, she’d leave her sorrows behind.

No, she wouldn’t leave her sorrows behind, nothing could do that. But if she pedaled harder, then she could get to Jake faster, so she didn’t let up. The trailer park was five miles outside of town. She’d only driven by it in her parents’ car, her father pressing on the accelerator a little as they drove by. Everyone did. It had a horrible feel to it, like the air itself was infected. Jake lived there with his father and no mother, and he’d never invited her to his place.

Instead, he spent most afternoons at her house. Except it wasn’t going to be her house for very much longer. The day after her parents died in the crash, with the shades drawn and neighbors quietly coming and going, depositing vast amounts of food on the kitchen counters that she could never eat, not in a million years, Mr. McKenzie from the bank stopped by. He’d been one of those vague adult figures that she’d seen around all her life but had never given a moment’s thought to.

He sat her down with an open laptop, opened her parents’ current account and started talking. She couldn’t understand a word he said. Something about mortgages and foreclosures. She wasn’t too sure what a foreclosure was. Her dad had once talked about it when talking about a colleague and a shudder had gone through him. Alex got the feeling it was something horrible but far off, something that could never affect them. Something like those tropical diseases you got when you went to the Congo and puked your guts out, but you were okay if you didn’t go to the Congo.

Certainly a foreclosure wasn’t anything that could happen to the Hetherings. Her parents were special. Alex knew she should have considered her folks boring and reject them because a lot of her friends rejected their own parents. But her folks were great, really great. Her mom taught English in middle school and her dad taught high school biology and they were fun and understanding and kind. Good people.

Jake told her over and over what good people they were. Jake’s father wasn’t a good person. That much she got.

So yeah, her folks were fantastic, smart and good and solid. So ‘foreclosure’ wasn’t a word that could ever apply to her family.

Except, well, it could.

Because—crazily, it turned out they didn’t own their own home. That had completely escaped her. She knew every inch of her house, of the back yard. She knew the window that got stuck, the doors that creaked, the little damp spot on the ceiling of the living room that never got bigger or smaller. It was herhome. Only, apparently not. It didn’t belong to Mom and Dad, it belonged to the bank.

And the bank wanted it back.

Mom and Dad were gone. She still couldn’t wrap her head around that. They were… gone. She’d buried them not an hour ago, both of them. No open casket because they’d been burned alive. So Alex didn’t see them. It kept occurring to her that the two caskets with the flowers on top, side by side in the funeral home—whatever was inside them had nothing to do with her. Those weren’t her folks inside. Couldn’t be. Any minute now her mom would peep through the window and laugh. Her dad would tap her on the shoulder and saycome on hon, let’s split. This place gives me the creeps.

And they’d all leave because, yeah, the place gave her the creeps, too.

Only, her mom didn’t peep through the window and her dad didn’t tap her on the shoulder. Some guy was droning on and on, and Alex couldn’t figure out what he was saying. Then it was over, and people were crowding around her, saying it was okay for her to cry only she couldn’t, and then someone drove her to the cemetery where two holes waited in the ground and the caskets were lowered in. A colleague of her mom’s told her to throw dirt over the casket and she obediently knelt and scrabbled with her hand. But there was only mud. She threw fistfuls of mud into the two holes and ran.

Ran all the way home. People called after her and she saw one of her mom’s friends driving around looking for her, but Alex knew the town like the back of her hand. She ran home through back streets, grabbed her bike and lit out.

The cold rain beat on her head and shoulders and she shivered. Her teeth were chattering. She wanted Mom or Dad but they weren’t there, and the next best thing was Jake.

Jake. Always there. He’d stopped Dean Morris from bullying her by knocking him out. Dean’s father was a big shot and Jake had been suspended for a week. Alex and her folks had gone to the principal, but he said there was nothing he could do. It was unfair, but then Jake was a lost cause, he said. He’d failed two years and was two years older than the rest of the class. Later, Alex found out that he’d simply stopped going to school the year his mom died and he’d been held back another year.

So she’d made Jake her crusade, coaching him in math and chemistry and English, only he didn’t really need coaching. He understood everything just fine the first time. What he needed was some decent food and a home.

He’d become like a brother to her, only not. She loved him like a brother, counted on him, needed him, but not really like a brother. She couldn’t explain it. She only knew that the one person she had left in the world was him. That she was holding off on breaking down completely until she could be with him because she knew, deep down, that she could let her pain and grief go while she was with him. She could fall because he would catch her. She felt safe with him.

There it was, FAIRFIELD TRAILER PARK. A sad sign in faded letters, half askew, attached to two poles and a cross pole that acted like a gate. The striped bar of wood was permanently up, the gate forever open.

Alex braked just inside the trailer park. There was a dirt road, muddy and pot-holed, right in front of her. Further down the road she could see another road crossing it. Trailers were parked haphazardly, not respecting the lines of stones staking out lots.

Alex had no idea where Jake lived.

Every second of the funeral, she’d been expecting him. The day before, with all the people pouring into her house, she’d expected him. She’d looked up every time the door opened, sure that it would be him, but it never was.

The only thing she could think of was that he was sick. But it was hard to think of Jake as sick. He was so big and strong and tireless. Jake being sick just did not compute. Or that he hadn’t heard about her folks.

---