Josie and Jack by Kelly Braffet Page A

he’ll die angry because it doesn’t work, just like she did.” His expression now was indifferent. “Just like that asshole Searles, with his wacky ties and his motorcycle boots in the classroom. People like that are incapable of imagining that there might be something they weren’t born knowing.”
    I stared down at my plate. The canned beets on it looked like chunks of raw meat.
    Raeburn took a deep breath and let it out again. “Humanity will not survive as a collective unit, Josephine. It is too deeply infected with stupidity. The only way to survive is to isolate yourself from the diseased cells. Move away from them as soon as possible. Remember that.”
    Wiping his mouth, he stood up and shook the crumbs from his shirt. “Maybe while you’re in town, you can meet Margaret Revolt. She wants to, and I think—” He paused. “She is a very clever young lady.”
    Then he left. Distracted, heedless, he turned the light out as he went.
    I pushed my plate slowly out of the way. Let my head fall to the table, my cheek against the cool wood. Sat like that, in the quiet. In the dark.
     
    That night, around three in the morning, Jack woke me up when he stumbled over my shoes, which were lying in the middle of my floor.
    “Just me,” he said, lifting up my blankets so that he could crawl under them. The burst of cold air made me shiver, and when he pulled the covers back over us I curled up close to his warmth.
    He slid an arm around my stomach and laid his head on the side of my neck. His hair was damp with sweat.
    Still half asleep, I said, “Okay?”
    “Fuck him.” His breathing was heavy and ragged.
    Jack had nightmares. Sometimes they were so bad that he cried out in his sleep and woke up drenched in thick, clammy fear-sweat. Meanwhile, I usually couldn’t sleep at all, and those were the hours that we spent together: when I couldn’t sleep and he was afraid to try. I never needed to ask him what the nightmares were about. Mary had been dead all night and most of a day before a neighbor knocked on the door—a night and a day that Jack had spent sitting next to her, waiting for her to wake up.
    Now his arm was tight around my waist and his face was buried in my hair. I could feel the moistness of his breath and the prickly growth of his beard against my skin.
    “Your dreams are about her,” I said.
    “Josie, everything in this house is about her. Everything that happens.” His face turned, burrowed. “You, me, Raeburn, all of it.”
    His breath was a slight tickle on my neck as he spoke, and his chest swelled against my back as he inhaled. I was waking up now, groggy and unsettled. I nestled closer into the nook of Jack’s body, closed my eyes, and wondered wearily if I would be able to get back to sleep.
    Then I felt Jack’s hand on my hair, smoothing it into a soft pile on the pillow, lifting it from the back of my neck. He kept stroking even when the hair was out of his way.
    It sent shivers over my scalp. I felt my eyes close with contentment and, drowsily, I said, “You never talk about her.”
    “Sure I do.” Now his hand was buried in the pile of my hair, lifting it up and letting the strands fall through his fingers like water.
    “Almost never.”
    “He likes it when I talk about her. It’s his favorite fucking subject.”
    “I like it when you talk about her.”
    “You don’t know the difference. You never had her to lose.”
    But he didn’t say it unkindly. I said, “I have you,” and felt his lips curve against my neck in the darkness. Soon he was asleep.
    I woke up alone, with the bleak winter sunlight streaming through my windows. I listened to the quiet house and heard nothing: no music, no movement, no life.
    I knew if I went to Jack’s room, his bed would be empty and his jacket gone.
    I hated days like this.
     
    Sometimes Jack vanished. He’d be gone for a few hours, or maybe more than a few, and then he’d reappear, usually bearing a bottle of something or a stack of