Epilogue
It wasn't until a few months later that I noticed they were gone.
My sister was moving in with Jon, Mike and I, and I needed to free up the "extra" room so Jenny had a place to put all her stuff. I had the futon in my office, so I figured I'd just pack up the bed and the bookshelf in my bedroom and put it into storage.
There wasn't much wrong with the bed. The sheets were there, as were the pillows, mattress, box spring and frame. But there was something seriously wrong with the bookshelf. Well, not the bookshelf itself, mind you. Just the stuff that was on it - or rather, that used to be on it. Now, it had been a while since I'd looked at the bottom shelf on that bookcase, as I'd moved up to the 2nd shelf for storing journals and notebooks and whatnot - but it struck me as curious just then that what used to be four stacks of notebooks and journals had suddenly become three and a quarter stacks.
I looked at the gap in the piles for several minutes, trying to mentally place where I'd put the stupid things. Sometimes, I'd take a stack out and re-read them, tracing through the moments of my life that I'd felt were noteworthy - could I have left them in the office? No, probably not... Maybe Mike or Jon took them? No, they're good guys. They stayed out of my business...
Oh, that's right... Jessica slept here that one night. And she had a suitcase with her. And plenty of motivation.
Now, I really really wanted those journals back... But to be honest, it was worth losing nearly 3 years of my life's scribblings to never, ever hear from her again. There's no telling what it would have sparked - who knows, maybe she took them just so I'd call her. If so, she'd get no such satisfaction from me. And if she stole them just to read through my life, well... If she'd just waited a few years, she could have fired up her web browser and done it without the expense of a plane ticket to Atlanta.
So naturally, you could have knocked me over with a can of compressed air when they mysteriously showed up one cold January morning in 2008. I came home with the day's mail, cracked open a box, and there they were. Of course, my wife asked what was in the box, so I had to tell her. And I had to tell her where they came from, and how they came to be in her possession, and how I met her, etcetera. She'd heard bits of the story before, but never the whole thing in one sitting. It took the entire afternoon.
"So Jessica stole these?" Andrea asked as she shuffled through the box of journals that sat on our dining room table. It had arrived to my PO Box that morning and had no return address.
"Looks that way," I replied.
"Wow..." My wife sat there, stunned.
"Yeah," I said. "Kinda fucked up, huh?"
"That's just... I mean... Wow," she said. "Just... Wow."
"I know, right?" I said, pulling the last three of the notebooks out of a styrofoam-peanut-filled box. There was no letter. There was no rhyme or reason for them to just suddenly appear. "I just don't know, like... Why now?"
"What do you mean?" Andrea asked.
"Well, it's been over ten years, you know? No calls, no letters, no nothing. She left me alone all this time... Why send these to me now? Why not, like, the next month or the next year or 2002 or something? Why 2008?"
"I dunno," Andrea said.
We both sat there for a moment, considering the situation. I wanted to get up and just get on with my day, but I couldn't. This was just so inexplicable and unexpected. It took me by surprise and forced me to revisit a story I'd not only forgotten about, but had CHOSEN to forget about.
Finally, my wife spoke up. "Maybe..."
"Yeah?" I said with a glimmer of hope for some sort of answer.
"Well, you're all over Google... Maybe she looked you up and found your site? And maybe she feels like the stuff in those notebooks isn't as special now that it's out on the net?"
"Huh?" I asked after a lengthy pause.
"Well, look at it," she said. "This is all stuff from when you were in high school, and you've written about a lot of it... Now everyone knows about the puke-job and that girl Amanda and the student teacher..."
"Huh..." I said. Same word, different inflection. Makes all the difference, I guess.
"I don't know," she finally added, "But I do know that if she ever does show up again, I'm going to give up my stance against guns and learn to use your dad's 12 gauge."
I laughed as she stood up to leave. "You're cute," I said.
"I'm serious," she answered. "That shit's scary... I don't know how the hell you got mixed up with it in the first place..."
"I just told you," I said.
"Yeah, and I heard you, and I still don't understand it."
"Well," I replied, "I doubt you have to worry about it. It doesn't seem she's interested in me anymore."
"Let's hope not," Andrea replied as she marched up the stairs, "For her sake."
I smirked. I knew she was serious, but part of me couldn't help but love to see her defensive of me. With a certain sense of bewilderment and satisfaction, I marched the box o' journals upstairs and reshuffled my storage bookshelf to make room for them with the other notebooks, right where they belong.
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