In Another Life

249 Pages·2017·0.7 MB·English

by  Ariel J. Spengler

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University of New Orleans Theses and
Dissertations and Theses
Dissertations
Spring 5-16-2014
IInn AAnnootthheerr LLiiffee
Ariel J. Spengler
University of New Orleans, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td
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Spengler, Ariel J., "In Another Life" (2014). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 1836.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1836
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
“Jessica?” Patty’s voice sounded strained above her. Jessica turned and looked up to the
second story landing where Patty and her messy, dark curls darted out from inside Jessica’s
bedroom. “There you are. You scared me.”
“Sorry,” Jessica said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
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Patty padded down the stairs in her red robe and matching slippers and hooked her arm in
Jessica’s.
“Do you feel all right?”
“Yeah, I feel fine,” Jessica said, though her smile was forced. Her cheeks felt hot under
Patty’s stare.
Patty’s eyes went over Jessica’s forehead, her cheeks, her mouth. Then she frowned.
“You’re so skinny.”
Jessica shrugged. There seemed to be nothing she could do about it.
Patty’s eyes lit up and she smiled. “Happy birthday!”
“Thanks,” Jessica said. February fifteenth was her twenty-first birthday. She remembered
that without having to read about it. It was one fact the family didn’t let her forget.
“Are you hungry? Let me make you something special.”
Patty led her into the open kitchen. It was clean and orderly and white as the snow
outside. Jessica sat on a barstool at the counter and stopped herself from protesting when Patty
draped two quilts around her shoulders. It seemed to make her mother happy to dote on her. And
perhaps it made Jessica happy, too, a few months ago. She couldn’t be sure. She only knew what
she was feeling today. And today the gesture felt uncomfortable. She wished the attention could
be focused on somebody else. Patty moved to the stove and turned a knob on the front; the
bottom left burner glowed red.
“How about some chocolate blueberry pancakes?” Patty set a frying pan atop the heating
burner. Smiling, and lifting her eyebrows as if awaiting a certain response, she hinted, “It’s your
favorite.”
Jessica raised her eyebrows, too, as if catching on. “Yes. Sounds perfect.”
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