In Another Life
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University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Spring 5-16-2014 In Another Life Ariel J. Spengler University of New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Recommended Citation Spengler, Ariel J., "In Another Life" (2014). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 1836. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1836 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. In Another Life A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Film, Theatre and Communication Arts Creative Writing by Ariel Spengler B.A. James Madison University, 2009 May, 2014 © 2014, Ariel Spengler ii Table of Contents Chapter One 2 Chapter Two 24 Chapter Three 45 Chapter Four 61 Chapter Five 74 Chapter Six 87 Chapter Seven 97 Chapter Eight 118 Chapter Nine 136 Chapter Ten 153 Chapter Eleven 162 Chapter Twelve 176 Chapter Thirteen 183 Chapter Fourteen 193 Chapter Fifteen 209 Chapter Sixteen 220 Chapter Seventeen 229 Vita 245 iii Part One 1 Chapter One Jessica learned to tie her shoes on her twenty-first birthday. Well, technically she had known how; she learned when she was a child, just like everybody else. But not many others were in an accident that caused them to forget almost everything. Before that accident, Jessica was supposedly very smart. That is what she had been told every day since the morning of February sixth when she opened her eyes and woke up. Her birthday was February fifteenth. She woke early, and from the gap in her bed covers, watched snow trickle periodically past her window from the rain gutters on the roof to the walkway below. She liked the contrast between the white snow and the gray clouds beyond it. The alarm clock next to her bed was blinking 12:00. Beside it rested a dog-eared spiral notebook with Read Me scribbled across the cover in messy black ink and a pen wedged into the metal coils. Jessica slid it onto the bed and opened it lazily, reading the pages of handwritten notes until she came to about the seventh page and the writing stopped altogether. So it had snowed another two inches yesterday. That explained the weight on the house. Jessica felt a heavy, claustrophobic feeling in the air. Too much snow on the power lines across the street caused an electrical outage three days ago. She could remember now how there was a day in the past when the clock wasn’t blinking. There probably was a way of correcting the time, but the notebook didn’t give any instructions, so she left it be. 2 According to the first page in the notebook, Jessica had been in a car accident and was kept in the hospital for about six weeks. Now that she was home, Patty and Harris – her mother and father – woke her up at seven o’clock every morning. Patty wasn’t going into work anymore, and on more than one occasion Harris would stay home, too. They would move her to the sofa in front of the television and wrap her in three or four quilts before heading into the kitchen to whip up platefuls of food. They told her she was so skinny and so pale, which meant every bite had to be hot and fatty. “Perfect winter food,” Patty told her yesterday when she delivered a tray of hot chocolate, chicken noodle soup, and mashed potatoes onto her lap and slid a DVD from their movie collection into the DVD player. Jessica stretched her arms out of the covers and over her head, resting her fingers against the backboard of her twin bed and stretching her toes to the footboard. This was her childhood room. The room she’d grown up in. Patty and Harris thought it was the perfect place for her to do some remembering. Patty turned it into a scrapbooking room when Jessica moved away to college, but now that she was back, the room had returned to its original state. The day before Jessica came home from the hospital, Patty removed the heavy boxes from the back of the bedroom closet and unpacked trophy after trophy into the bookshelf over Jessica’s old desk. She arranged the top shelf by sport – softball, tennis, cross-country, track – and the bottom shelf by school club – Debate Team, Mock Trial Club, and a third grade runner-up trophy for the Franklin Elementary School Spelling Bee. On the faded blue walls, Patty hung Jessica’s school photos from every picture day from kindergarten through her senior year of high school. Each one contained the same aged, purple backdrop and stiff over-the-shoulder pose. The pictures started next to the bookshelf and trailed under the window and around the wall above her bed. Jessica followed the transformation of her 3 faces along the wall. From missing front teeth and pigtails to turtlenecks and braces to make-up and contacts, the pictures revolved around her head like an aging merry-go-round. Patty had also reserved a spot on the wall next to her dresser to hang more frames – her high school diploma, her ninth grade art projects, her honorable mention for her second grade science fair project. Dangling from the frames in faded blue and red were her field day ribbons for events like the fifty-yard dash and the group egg toss. Scrawled in shiny silver lettering across the ribbons were phrases like, “Way to go!” and “You did it!” And in a stack on the floor were her high school yearbooks and old photo albums. The notebook told Jessica that she sat up with those books most nights, flipping through the photos of her and some old boyfriend named Ben: smiling at their lockers, waving during homecoming court, exhausted after a track meet. Nothing jogged her memory, but today was only the ninth day since she’d woken up. Getting out of bed, she dug through her dresser drawers looking for socks. She remembered Patty teaching her where everything was located yesterday, but not everything they taught her stuck right away. She found the socks in the left top drawer, and slid a pair of fuzzy pink ones over her cold feet. The air in the house felt stagnant and numb. She wrapped the blue robe that hung from a hook on the door around her shoulders, concealing the too small pair of pajamas, adorned with hunting dogs, that she was wearing. Apparently, these were her middle school pajamas. Patty thought it’d be a good idea for her to wear them as much as possible since they had been her favorites. She’d even stuck an old photo into her bedroom mirror of twelve- year-old Jessica standing in the yard in the hunting dog pajamas, pointing off toward the edge of the picture where two deer were standing at the corner of the yard. Jessica hated the ugly maroon color and the breeze on her ankles as she walked through the house. But she was willing to try anything. 4 She passed the mirror on her way out of her bedroom and was startled by her reflection. The face looking back frightened her. Especially because it looked so different from the girl in all of the pictures on the walls. She didn’t have those rosy cheeks or wide eyes. Her cheekbones jutted out on either side, pulling her pale skin tight around them and her eyes looked set back in her skull, hidden by the dark circles under them. Even her blonde hair, which had grown down to her chin since the accident, was coming in faded and frizzy. Nothing like the shiny, sleek hair of high school Jessica taped next to the mirror. And an ugly, red scar now scratched its way down the side of Jessica’s face, from the tip of her forehead down past her left ear and around under her chin. She pulled and twisted her skin with her fingers, trying to reassemble the face everybody knew. But it wasn’t working. And it made her face hurt. She grabbed her notebook off the bed and left the room. At the bottom of the stairs, Jessica stopped at the front-door window. From the top of the hill, their house overlooked everything. Down the sloped yard at the edge of the property was the corner stop sign, leaning forward slightly, like a man hunched over against the wind. The road had been plowed already and twinkled with road salt every time the sun escaped a loaded cloud. Surrounding the house was a neighborhood of two-story houses, with covered Jacuzzi hot tubs snowed in on the porches and smoke puffing steadily from the rooftop chimneys. Jessica could see mountains off in the distance through the smoke, blue in appearance despite the snowfall, outlined across the sky like the jagged teeth of a hibernating bear.