((A short story of and by Jason Keaton and Jessi Rembrandt.))

Jason lay on his back, trying to sift waking from nightmare. Jessi was still beside him. Her eyes were open as if they always had been. Their startled light was brighter than the slatted sunrise that cut their paired bodies with shadow.
“Another bad dream?” she said.
He answered with his silence. Waited for her to reach out. She didn’t. The anxious circling of birds outside the window troubled the darkness that fell on the bed. Jason rose.
He went to the glass. In their yard, crows whirled and roosted. Jason watched them. Waited to see something in them; he didn’t know what. He waited for Jessi to ask if the nightmares were getting worse or better. Or if he wanted coffee. Or if he was going to town, to practice for football tryouts the next day.
He waited a lot these days. Jessi and he had that in common.
She broke their pattern of the last month by breaking the silence. “I had a dream, too.”
He looked back over his shoulder at her. “Tell me about it.”
“I was in Hathian, by the police station. A lioness came in. She gave birth, right there in the street. Everything started leaking blood.”
Jason was back at her side by the time Jessi finished with her story. His fingers laced her hand and her hair. A silence stood between them like an unearthed grave.
Jason filled it. “Mine wasn’t that bad.” He always said that, whether it was true or not. “I keep thinking of the field. Seaside field. They’ve covered it with concrete, now. I used to stand on the grass and think about all our cleat marks. It felt they’d last forever.”
“Does anything really last forever?”
“Some things.”
“Which things?”
Jason closed the hand that joined with Jessi’s. Made a single fist together. He pushed it against her heart. “Some things.”
She smiled. He didn’t. He watched the traffic of shadow on her skin – the black lanes, the busy wings. On his own skin, black ink marked Jessi’s name within a sacred heart over his chest. Jason wondered if the blue of her eyes were bright enough to see what beat under those bold lines.
Did she see that the concrete in his dream was broken, growing a field of fish-gray corpse hands? That they grasped for him – to be saved or to drag him down with them for killing them? That they had hold of his chest even now?
“Not in this town,” Jessi said. “Not loyalty.”
“Some loyalty.”
“They’re not worth you, baby.”
Jason grit his teeth. Bit back his answer. But his feet found the floor, his hand departed hers, and that was reply enough to sink Jessi into the mattress.
“I hear the new Dean’s making the campus safer,” Jason said, walking to the door, staring at the window, green eyes prowling for the crows. “Buddy system. Police escorts. A lot of ideas I had.”
“I heard that too.”
“From who?”
“Same email you got. I don’t talk to anyone there anymore. Not since Josh and the other Looters started talking shit about you.” Jessi’s pillow rustled. He knew she was hiding her face from the sight of him leaving. “Tryouts are tomorrow.”
Jason opened the door. The hallway of their Craftsman house gaped with many alcoves and many dark corners. It seemed so empty to him. As if they didn’t live there. As if they’d never lived there at all. Its true tenants had been the gray space between them.
She raised her voice. “Are you going to try out?”
Jason opened his mouth but didn’t speak. His words were chained to the thing he’d left unsaid. He shrugged. Left. And in his throat, that silenced reply choked him:
That just as she thought he wasn’t worth his fellow students, his fellow football players, they probably thought the same thing about him. They probably thought he had promised to raise them up to a safe height above the mayhem of Hathian, and had instead slipped into a cave to take cover. He had let go first.
Jason left the door of their bedroom ajar and went looking for his uniform.
* * *
He’d buried it. He knew that much, Jason reminded himself as he shut the last kitchen cabinet. He just didn’t remember where.
He’d searched the trunk in the guest bedroom. The tub on the porch. The bin in the den. Each was just full of clutter and dust. Every one echoed the same message:
There were so many grave sites.
Shutting the cubby under the stairs, Jason paused. A glint inside caught his eye. He reached for its chip of light and drew out his old camera.
The Nikon. He stood and weighed it in his palm. He remembered feeling that weight swinging from his neck the day he’d come into town and gone to cover the Little Looters Charity Drive event at Seaside Youth Center.
He’d brought the camera to catch the treasures that charity could bring a community as desperate and poor as Hathian: The sights of children at play, the cheerleader organizers inspiring them, the great brilliance that even a small gift could bring to a tired, little face.
He’d caught sight of Jessi that day. And she’d caught him until the end of time.
Jason sat inside the cubby, legs in lotus, knee propping the door. He thumbed the camera, thinking on what the film inside would have shown. His other hand idled through the box he’d found it in, picking things out.
In the camera, the unexposed film would hide some band of time before being the captain of the Looter football team took all of his time. Before he’d organized them to fight the gangs threatening the campus. Before he’d killed a banger in that quest. And killed a student. And killed a crooked cop.
He spread out a pair of posters from his dorm room: One was a documentary on refugee children. The other, Ronnie Lott – the Niners’ “Hitman” – at the height of his fame.
“I only wanted to be defense,” Jason told Ronnie. “Just wanted to play Safety.”
The floor above creaked under Jessi’s light steps. Reflex made Jason look up. He stared, as if trying to make sure each one landed right.
He heard the bed groan as she got back into it. His head hung. Had he made her this way? Been too protective, so fascinated by her smooth, tender skin that he didn’t let her toughen enough to survive the world outside? Or had he not protected her enough?
He reached deeper into the box. Pulled out the rest of his dorm room contents: Film cans. Board games. His blankets from his tours in Afghanistan with the Pararescue.
His fingers dredged up papers buried at the bottom. He dumped them on the floor. His brows bunched in surprise.
They were letters. Jessi letters. Dozens of them. Jason sifted through them, touches gentle but driven – the action of a paleontologist’s brush, separating priceless fossils from filth.
The first layer had ghosts of perfume shaking jasmine branches at his nose. He unfolded them and read Jessi’s correspondence with him – an exchange months ago, when she’d first retreated entirely from campus, ditching every class and hiding in their house. Their pages had so many questions to Jessi, and yet there were so many more unasked and unanswered.
The next were her letters to Ava: Her first girl crush. A madwoman. A killer. A key that had opened floodgates of blood, when Ava used her pen-pal bond with Jessi to escape a life sentence and then take so many lives.
Jason mingled those with the other letters, the other unasked questions.
He picked up the last layer. Mystery clenched his brows again. Wonder softened his mouth. The last name on the return addresses was Jessi’s own: Her parents in California.
Jason counted fifteen letters, all unopened. He wouldn’t open them. Didn’t need to. The message they sent was clear: We can’t reach you, but we’re trying. We’re trying to bring you back into our lives, wherever you’ve run off to.
Jason held the stack of sealed envelopes. They weighed about as much as a football. Almost as much as a camera. He stared for a long time. When the bed creaked again above him, he looked up.
It had been a light creak, and Jason figured Jessi was still on the mattress. Rolling, restless. Floating, like a girl on a raft without a sail.
“Never wanted to be a captain,” Jason told Ronnie Lott. “Not on offense. Defense.”
His thumb rifled the envelopes. Made the spaces between slap and speak. It was a laughter of a sort. Like his Looters’ laughter; coarse and empty. The sound after was the noise after a gunshot. After a pulse stops beating. To Jason’s ears, in his hollow house, it was the sound a crowd makes in the instant of an interception.
He remembered what he’d cheer, watching those days at Candlestick when Ronnie had just picked off the ball and reversed the direction of the whole game. “Take it to the house, Ronnie.”
Jason stood up, tossing the sealed letters on top of the others. “Take it all the way home.”
* * *
Jessi’s eyes flew open on the morning of the tryouts. Her heart was beating fast, mind trying to fly from the latest horrible dream. The slashing shadow from the sunrise reflected the nightmare’s images – the trophy Jason had won the Looters running with blood from a hundred wounds; the gory knives in Josh and Mich and Seth’s hands; the campus paths flooded red, students walking them with low heads and sly smiles.
The shadows fell across an absence beside her. Jason was gone.
Jessi looked about, almost as frantic as the crows outside the window. There was no sign of him. Only the flash of an open laptop screen on her desk. Thunder sounded in the distance.
She rolled onto her belly. Her face hid in the pillow. The edge of her eye caught a peek of metal from under Jason’s. He’d left his gun. He’d gone into a town of traitors, unarmed.
The thunder beat louder on the edge of the world. Beat it smaller. Closing in like The Nothing from Never Ending Story. Like nothing, really, lasts forever.
The thought almost sent her back to bed, back to sleep, to sleep until she woke up in someone else’s life.
Instead, Jessi went for the closet. She grabbed her hoodie and slid it on fast. Whatever storm was coming, she wasn’t going to let Jason face it alone. The tryouts were today, and the knives held by the Looters might not be just in her dreams. If the campus was going to flood with red rivers, then let them sweep her and Jason away together.
Rain had broken out by the time she dressed. The crows cried and beat their wings. Jessi pattered downstairs, rushed for the door.
She shoved it open, flowing out, and crashed right into Jason.
Jason rocked back. Jessi toppled. He caught her before she hit the ground, hands around the round of her ribs.
“Going somewhere, kitten?” Jason lifted her to his chest. Secured her there. Crooked a grin.
“I would ask you the same.” Jessi didn’t smile. She rubbed her eyelids on his collarbone to skim the stars from her eyes.
“Yes,” Jason said. Jessi looked up and saw his gaze was lit: Fresh constellations bright in a sky of green – the glowing green that blankets the Pacific after a squall’s passage. “Yes, we are.”
Jason walked hand in hand with Jessi across their yard. The place where the wood pile, carpenter’s frame and tools for his project had stood was now empty. The branches of the pine grove Jessi and Jason entered were empty of crows. The rains had scattered them, washed them away.
He led her to a short path. Carvings gleamed with the recent drizzle in each tree trunk. Every carving was the same: J.R. + J.K. centered within a heart. Jessi counted each, but it was like trying to count sand falling in an hourglass. It was like trying to tally a forever. She lost track and found her smile by the time they came to a clearing.
In the circle of engraved trees, there stood a little chapel of glass and cut wood. Its tall planks had been chopped evenly. Its fine details, shaped with care. Its glass shimmered and its door was waiting, open.
Jason led Jessi to the threshold. Her mouth opened. Her breath spoke with its speed alone, saying all she needed to say as she faced him. It stroked the serenity of Jason’s face like the sunlight on the chapel glass; blazed as he reached for the altar in the chapel and lifted the film can there.
The masking-tape label read, in Jason’s handwriting, OUR LOVE STORY. Jessi’s smile flashed.
“This is the one you showed me on our first theater date!”
“Go on,” he told her. “Take it.”
Jessi took the can and opened it. Inside were a pair of plane tickets. Jessi lifted them and read them.
“Independence Airport, In-nee-oh,” she pronounced. “Where’s Inyo?”
“Near the highest point in California.” Jason’s eyes glanced down, into the heart of the film can. Jessi’s eyes followed. She gasped at what sparkled there.
Jason took a knee. His hands took Jessi’s. Her eyes took a while to escape the shining diamond ring inside the can. The instant they did, they soared into the jade of Jason’s.
“Jessi Rembrandt,” Jason asked, “will you marry me?”
The little chapel he’d built held the moment of quiet. No crows. No crowds. No rain. Only the sound of a perfect catch, as Jason held her hands and Jessi held his answer.