Jessica L. Roberts

The Black Widow & The Brown Recluse | home

Jessica L. Roberts | Kailyn Smith

Jessica L. Roberts is from Kerrville, TX and has lived there for about seven years. She is currently enrolled at Schreiner University as an English major. She aspires to be a writer in the future and hopes to write plays and novels for adults and children. She lives with her family who support her and her current path in life. Jessica is involved in theater and music both in school and the community. She graduated from Tivy High School in 2003 and will graduate from Schreiner around 2008.

Bedtimes and End Times

Lying in the bed of my childhood for the first time in five years, made the memories come back in vicious waves. Lying there, the gray walls and punk rock posters staring down at me through the darkness of the night, I could feel myself on the verge of tears. I could feel the memories getting their guns ready and preparing to attack.

That was when the door opened, slowly at first, and then abruptly my brother Jerry stood in the doorway. He slipped into the room shutting the door quietly, and walked to the bed where he slid onto the mattress beside me. We both just lay there in the dark staring at the dying glow of the five-and-dime-store stars pasted onto the ceiling. After several moments I turned my head to look at him to see his eyes fixed on the ceiling and I smiled.

“How long has it been?” he whispered. I could see that my contagious smile was catching at the corners of his lips.

“Too long to remember the last time.” But I did remember.

The year before Jerry went away to college we had had our last late night discussion in my bed like we had done throughout all of my childhood. I remembered the hate that I could hear in his voice that night as we talked about why he was leaving, and I could see the tears that ran down his face when we addressed the fact that I could not come with him.

I brought myself back to the present very abruptly not wanting to delve to deep into the feelings of the past.

“What’s on your mind, Jerr?”

He was silent as I lay there looking at him in the darkness. His smile had slowly faded and the lines of worry sprouted on his forehead, but I understood. He wasn’t here to talk tonight but just to be here with me. There were always days when things were just too awful to put into words and he was just there to be a comforting presence, a shoulder to cry on; a silent sibling. I shifted onto my back to fix my gaze back at the ceiling.

“Do you think Mom needs to go into a home?” he finally whispered -- his voice seething with pain and sadness.

I sighed loudly. Keeping my gaze fixed on the stars I thought back to the woman I called Mom. “I don’t know really.”

Mom seemed, to me, even more distant than the stars I was looking at or even the stars in the sky beyond the ceiling.

“Nicholas is finally fed up with having to take care of her, and now that perfect Nicholas has proved a traitor to her she’s called in the ones she has neglected all her life to protect her. Typical.” I cringed at the thought that what I just said was bitterly true and that thought hurt.

The pain of a horrible childhood, teenage life, and countless therapy sessions trying to figure out what I did wrong, stung every time I thought of it.

“But do you think she needs it?” he looked at me out of the corner of his eyes, “Do you think she is crazy?”

“She has always been crazy.” I muttered and could feel the stare he gave me in return for that compliment burn the skin on my cheeks.

I sat up quickly trying to stop the conversation from heading into something deep. “What has gotten into you? You never cared about her to ask questions like this before.” Turning to him, forcing him to look me in the eyes, I saw for the first time some semblance of emotion toward Mom beginning to glow behind the green irises. “You left that day five years ago and never looked back, and the first time in years that she is able to find you and ask you to come to her aid you drop everything and run here quicker than I‘ve ever seen you run before.”

“Terry, that is not what happened.” he inched up onto his elbows.

“Isn’t it?” I jumped out of bed to get away from him, “You know, you don’t seem like the big brother I remember. You move to New York and now you’ve gone all soft. You're a pansy.”

“That‘s bull!” he rose fiercely from the bed and crossed over to me, grabbing me by the shoulders and looking me in the eyes, “So now that I finally want to start anew and give her a chance I’m a pansy!”

“Would you shut up!” I said in a callous, hushed voice, “You’ll wake her.”

It was silent then, both of us standing like fools in front of my window, starring each other down. Then I just looked away knowing that for some reason I couldn’t step on his feelings, despite how brainless I thought they were.

“Look,” I said, placing a hand over the firm gripped hands on my shoulder, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t push aside these feelings I have had toward her all my life. She caused me a lot pain and I just can’t overlook that. Not that easily.”

His look softened and his grip eased.

“I have forgiven her.”

As I looked into his eyes that night I believed him. He walked back over to the bed and slowly crawled into its recesses, leaving me standing by the window. Strange as it was, I believed that he had come to some kind of point in his life, that I had yet to reach, and could find peace, but I also though he was insane.

“At least at some point in your life she has loved you. You never looked entirely like dad remember.” I reminded him. He continued to stare at the ceiling, the stars had faded entirely away. “Why are you doing this Jerry? You hated her once as much as I did. Now we don’t even share that and I am alone just like when you left.”

He turned his eyes on me, hearing the tears that were beginning to well up behind my eyelids. He sighed and sat up in the bed.

“Do you remember when Dad took us to get ice cream when mom wasn’t feeling good and had to go to the hospital?”

I said nothing; he continued on.

“He told us that night that we needed to be strong together as a family.” A smile touched the sides of his lips. “He told us that night that he loved mom very much and that he was scared for her, he didn’t want to lose her. I don’t either.”

“How can you say something like that? Don’t want to lose her. Do you remember that you left here and never came back, you walked away and turned your back on this family.” I turned my back to him not wanting to look him in the face. He was a traitor to me, someone who sold me out long ago. “If you can even call it a family.”

I heard him sigh and heard the squeaks of the mattress under his weight.

“It was always so much harder for you. On top of looking just like dad you were the middle child, and most of all you were his favorite.” He was silent a moment, “I can’t say that what she did was right, but one day you will have to forgive her and move on with your life. You keep living like this and you’ll become just like her.”

“I’ll never be like her!” I shouted at him.

I looked at him then, in the night lights, and saw the brother that I saw when I was a child, sitting on the edge of the bed staring at me. I felt the anger inside my heart begin to subside.

“I know, Terry, and I love you even more for your persistence against it.” He lay back down and closed his eyes. “It’s getting late.”

I walked over to the bed and stopped when I was close enough to see the utter calm blanketing Jerry’s face.

“You’re not going to leave again, are you?”

“Umm…” his voice seemed to drift away. At the time that seemed like good enough an answer.

The next morning when I woke up Jerry was there beside me, asleep. When I got up from the bed I expected him to wake up but thought nothing of his motionlessness and walked into the bathroom.

I came back to see him still asleep.

“Come on, Jerr, time to get up!” I walked over to his side and pushed him. He didn't wake. “Jerry?”

As I pushed him the final time his hand fell to his side, and I could see that in it he held something. Touching his fingers and pulling the tiny object from his hand, I could feel nothing. No fear, no panic.

In his hand he held an envelope and an empty bottle of Demerol.

I could not feel the tears flowing down my cheeks and I could not feel my mouth open as I screamed at the top of my lungs.

I could not feel his skin as I gripped his lifeless hand. I could not feel the pain that the look on his face caused me as he smiled almost serenely. I could not feel the hate in my heart. I could not feel anything.

At the funeral I did not sit with the family but stood several yards from the whole thing. Mom tried to comfort me but I did not hear her words, and when they tried to pry the envelope from my hands to read it I screamed and told them that it was mine, addressed to me, and that I refused to read it. I hated them; the doctors, my mother, Nicholas and his family who didn’t know who I was, and most of all Jerry. I could not understand why he wanted to end it. I hated the world for making him leave me all alone. Just a nameless person with no one to talk to.

When the funeral was finally over, the dirt was placed back in the 8 foot deep hole, and the people had all left, I walked toward the plot with my hand gripped on the envelope in my pocket. No one saw me as I knelt beside the grave and looked down at the mound of freshly dug dirt, and no one saw me as I lay down beside the grave, as if I was back in my room and things were no different. Staring at the sky I thought of all the words that I wanted to say to him but I could not say. I felt as though they would never reach ears to be heard and that I would be wasting my breath, but I laid there looking at the sky until it turned dark and the stars came out. I stayed there until it changed into the azure blue of daybreak. I never once closed my eyes and I shed no tears. No one came looking for me.

Mom insisted that I stay in town for a few days and see a “doctor.” Her name was A.J. Pierce . . . her specialty was psychology. Although she asked me questions about my childhood and how I felt -- the normal questions -- her main goal was to find out why I refused to read Jerry’s last words in the letter addressed to me. I always gave the same answer: I don’t want to.

She did not give up though, and she was always leading my conversations to the letter and my fear of what it might say. I always led them straight back to what I was talking about before she interrupted me. One day she finally dodged the foreplay and asked what was on her mind.

“Tell me about your brother, Jerry.”

“What do you want to know?”

She rubbed her index finger along her bottom lip and then lowered her finger to her chin, “Tell me about how close the two of you were.”

“Well for one, he was Jerry and I was Terry. My father named us. Said he wanted his kids to be alike, like twins. I guess that’s why we were such best friends. More then best friends, we were…“

I couldn’t think of the word I wanted to use and my mind went blank. I could see her lean over her desk toward me reaching for tissues to hand me. I looked up at her showing her that I had not broken down like she expected me to do.

“I don’t know a word that describes us. We were just very close, very good best friends.”

She sat back in her chair, dejected slightly, twiddling her pen between her fingers.

“You said that you two would always have these late night discussions, sometimes about nothing. When did this begin?”

“After I was born.” I laughed slightly at the fact that my first memory was of Jerry and Dad, “My dad encouraged him to lull me to sleep. He believed Jerry had the most beautiful voice and he could see the great singer in him. He told Jerry that by singing to me that he could make a friend and fine tune his instrument at the same time. So Jerr would come in at night when he couldn’t sleep and sing to me in my crib. Then he would talk to me about preschool and kindergarten and my dad would come in and read us stories. And then…”

“Your father died?”

I shook my head in agreement.

“How old were you?”

“Six.” I swallowed the lump that seemed to be making breathing harder. “Jerry was nine. Mom was pregnant with Nicholas.”

“Tell me about your other brother, Nicholas.”

I grumble loudly. “Nicholas is my mother’s favorite. My dad wanted to name him Kerry, to run with the tradition, but when he died my mother scoffed tradition and named him after her patron saint. The patron saint of children and travelers. To my mother, Nicholas was perfect and Jerry and I were not.”

“You always speak of a memory of your family visiting your father’s grave. Tell me about that.”

“I’d thought you’d remember it enough so I wouldn’t have to tell you anymore.” I stood quickly from the tufted chair and began to pace the rug.

She watched me carefully, “Refresh my memory.”

Sighing again I began my trek into my dark childhood, “We’d visit his grave on his birthday and sometimes around Christmas, and it felt like Jerry and I, were the ones who were really mourning the loss. When he died we had no one left but each other; Mom had Nicholas and she didn’t like us anymore.”

“How do you know she didn’t like you?”

“She told us. A few times.” I smiled at her, “She was drunk, but me and Jerry always said ‘the truth comes out when you're drunk’”

“Nicholas has some kids, is that right?”

“Yeah, a girl and a boy.” I could see where she was leading this. “They don’t know who I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“To Nicholas he was an only child. Jerry went away and I was the only one who heard from Jerry, and then I went away -- and I didn’t look back. So he didn’t tell his kids that they had an aunt or an uncle.”

“Now,” the Doctor repositioned herself behind her desk, “you say you didn’t look back, then what are you doing here?”

I looked at her, thrown and angry about her proving me wrong and with myself for returning to the place of my many nightmares. “I don’t know.”

I walked to the chair that I had risen from and stared at it.

“Jerry told you he forgave her,” she stood slowly, “why can’t you?”

I spun around, anger seething through every pore, “Because I can’t forgive her for not loving me! For seeing my father every time she looked at me and hating it! For always forgetting my ballet recitals and art competitions but always remembering to go to Nicholas’ t-ball games. All I had was Jerry and for some reason he gave up, left me here to live this through on my own!” For the first time, in weeks, I felt tears run down my cheeks, and I did nothing to stop them. “He always spoke of never giving up. He would tell me that a coward gave up and I was not a coward, and neither was he. But he gave up!”

I fell to the ground and howled words that young children should not be subjected to, tears pouring from my eyes, and Dr. A.J. Pierce’s hand on my shoulder.

“Did you know that Jerry was suffering from AIDS?”

I looked up, into her eyes, hoping that she was not being serious. “What?”

“Jerry has been suffering through the AIDS virus for more than seven years.” She gently wiped at a tear that was making it’s way down my face, “He was hurting, so the doctors say, and that is why we want you to read the letter. We don’t want you to give up, just because he could take the pain no longer.”

“How do you know this? Why didn’t he tell me?”

“After his death, doctors from New York called as if they knew it had all happened. They told us everything we needed to know, and as for why he did not tell you, we’d hoped that the letter would explain that, because no one seems to know.”

I tore my eyes away from hers and looked down at the carpeted floor, thoughts running wildly through my brain, coursing circles and making me dizzy. I reached into my pocket and clutched the letter, still in its envelope, that lay there. Then I stood up, legs stretching out beneath me, supporting me, and I took the letter from my pocket. I knew that the good doctor was watching me as I held it in my palm, staring at it. I lowered it to my side and looked carelessly at my watch.

“Times up, Doc.” I looked up at her and knew she saw how I felt and what was going to happen.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” she smile sadly.

I laid the letter on the coffee table when I returned to an empty house after my session with the doctor, and I simply looked at it as it sat there. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at it but soon the lights grew dimmer in the living room, and the paper of the envelope seemed to be glowing as if the contents themselves were ablaze. I inched toward it, took it in my hands to inspect it, and sure enough the letter was glowing. Slowly I tore the envelope open and dumped it’s contents onto the table; a letter, a key, and a five-and-dime glowing star from my ceiling. Afraid to touch any of the objects, I sat back against the couch and proceeded to stare at it again, only this time my mind was screaming at me, pushing me closer to the table until the letter was in my hand one moment and opened the next. I began to read:

You don’t know how hard this is for me to get out, but there are

some things I have never told you, and this is the hardest way

Terry, I was dying, inside and out, and the pain was terrifying. It's

AIDS and I have been ashamed of it since I found out four years

ago. Afraid of what might happen when I told you, and how you’d

react, I kept it to myself, when I know I should have told you.

You are my best friend and my sister, all I had and all I needed

to get though life, but the pain is too much and I can’t bear to be

driven to tears every time I wake up the wrong way. I know

you are thinking that you could have helped me, and been by my

side, but that was something I did not want, to be waited on and

treated like a sickly old man; I did not live my life to be degraded

I love you, and I have come to find that I love Mom and Nicholas

too. It’s taken me 23 years and AIDS to figure that out, but all the

pain from what they did is nothing compared to the pain that is

inside me. * She is not too far out of reach; the stars are never

The key is to my apartment in New York, which is now yours.

Everything that was mine I want you to have, and you will under-

stand in time why things were as they are.

Do not give up, I love you and know that life is never in vain, even

when it's too much to bear. I’m sorry for abandoning you, I hope

I packed up my things and placed all the bags in my car. I walked inside to see Mom and Nicholas in the kitchen, waiting. I stood there, in front of them, gathering strength and then looked at them.

“I am leaving, and I’m not sure if I’m ever coming back.”

I could hear Mom gasp and could see Nicholas’s disapproving smirk, but I continued.

“All my life, I have been hated by you both and I have come to hate you in return, but I can’t do it anymore. I’ve bottled up all the other emotions I have and refused to love and to be happy, and look where that’s led me. You are my family, the only family I have left regardless if you love me or not and I accept that now. I can not blame you for never letting me see your children, Nicholas, I was never there to be seen but you could have told them about me, instead of ignoring my existence. I cannot blame you for hurting every time you looked at me, Mom, but I couldn’t help the fact that I look like dad. The wounds are deep, the neglect and the countless times you weren’t there, but I love you -- both.”

I took a breath and remarkably the silence hung in the air, no one spoke, no snide remarks or retorts claiming I was a liar, just silence. I went on.

“Jerry was dying, and had forgiven you long before I had. I hope that you can forgive him as I have.”

“Dying?” Mom and Nicholas seemed to say in unison.

I simply shook my head yes, nothing more.

“Of what?” Nicholas murmured.

“AIDS.” I said flatly.

I saw his reaction, and it was nothing like I thought it would be, instead it was loving and hurt at once, not ashamed and spiteful. Mom seemed to be falling apart inside but kept herself erect, sitting as stiff as a board in her chair.

“And you leaving?” she whispered, “To go where?”

I stopped as the words “New York” formed on my tongue and instead said, “To start a new life.”

Wringing my hands, I turned slowly to the door, and walked to it. I looked over my shoulder at Nicholas, who had risen from his chair and walked over to me. He stood behind me and when I turned to him, he took me in his arms and embraced me, whispering “I’m sorry” over and over. I felt my own arms encircle him and could hear my own words reassure him that I loved him. When he let me go I walked carefully over to Mom and bent down in front of her, placing a hand on her knee. She looked up at me and I smiled slightly, knowing that was all I could give her. When her eyes looked away from my face like she had done so many times before the last of my hope faded away, I stood and walked out of the house, not looking back but going straight to the car and driving away.

I arrived in New York the next day and found the apartment per directions from Jerry‘s attorney. Abandoning the car to a parking garage, knowing I might not see it again, I walked up the street until I stood outside a run-down apartment building. Bags in hand and head spinning from hours on the road, I walked up the stoop and into the building, and right into a brick wall also known as the tenant manager.

“Who are you?” his deep, husky Brooklyn voice demanded of me as I stood three feet below him.

I merely caught my breath enough to choke out, “Jerry Sterling’s sister.”

Right then his features changed from foreboding mountain giant to seraphic, smiling cherubim. He reached out to me, pulling me into a bone-crushing hug, mumbling that he had been waiting for me to arrive.

I pulled away long enough to question what he meant and got a sad and distant smile that seemed to tell me that he knew what had happened.

“His is on the third floor. Hasn’t been touched since he left, everything’s just as he left it.”

He pushed me into the elevator and pulled down the gate. Before I could ask anymore questions I was on the third floor and my thoughts had processed enough to move me out of the elevator and into the landing of the only door on the floor.

Looking down the hallway I saw that there was only one door and moved toward it slowly. I opened my palm and looked at the key that I had been clutching in my hand. I was scared -- plain and simple. I did not know what was behind that door and in my mind I half expected Jerry to be there waiting, smiling, and saying that it had all been some kind of joke. I knew though that Jerry didn’t have a sense of humor, and laughed quietly to myself. The laugh seemed to boost my confidence enough to get me to place the key in the door and open it.

“Welcome Home, Kid.”

A large hand-painted sign hung over a small table in the middle of the room, and on the table was a small blue box.

I walked slowly to the table, not sure what to make of it, and grabbed the box. I clutched it tightly, afraid it might disappear now that I had touched it. Inside lay a CD and a piece of paper. Grabbing them both and letting the box fall to the ground, I opened the sheet of paper and read it:

To start your new life, I have saved you money and

gotten you a new home, and most importantly have

given you me. My life and my memory. I love you.

And scrawled below it in the postscript was:

And to help you get to sleep…

I turned the CD over in my hand, knowing that it was what he had meant by the postscript. I found a CD player right beside the bed as I walked through the apartment, and gently placed the CD into it. Pressing play I lay down on the bed and heard his voice singing songs to me like he had in my childhood. Laying there, on one half of the bed, I slowly fell asleep for the first time in days.