Jessica

by Andrea Johnson

I was peeved, I will admit it, by the gentle knock on the door.

I had only just returned to my spiritual home, Oxford, after more than a year's absence, and was attempting to pick up the threads of my research. The second volume of my book on "Sophia," or "Divine Wisdom" had been long delayed. I could not recall how long I had sat at my desk, lost in Hebrew verbs doubly weak and irregular and iota subscripts, though the ache in my collarbone suggested it had been a goodly amount of time. As I rose to answer the door (and to send the unwelcome intruder away as quickly as possible) I had to push aside a precariously balanced stack of books that rested beside my desk chair. Two books toppled onto the floor as I lifted the stack and a cloud of dust exploded into the air. I cursed mildly and pushed my glasses into my hair.

Again came the gentle knock.

"Sister Mary?" called a familiar voice. "Are you there?"

When I think of the summer of 1918, I remember a six-year-old's spindly arms and legs wrapped tight around me, clinging for dear life as we fell and scrambled down a tree on our way to freedom from her kidnappers. The passing of the years had added height and maturity to her slender frame, but that little girl was still recognizable in the lovely young woman who now stood in my doorway. The woman inspired an older sister's protectiveness in me just as her younger self had. I pushed my irritation aside.

"Come in, Jessie," I said. "What a pleasant surprise. I thought you had planned to visit friends in Hertfordshire this week."

Indeed, she was dressed for a visit to a country estate, wearing a fashionable blue dress and a jauntily tilted hat. Her auburn hair was cut in one of the fashionable shingled styles. I sometimes wished for a shorter hairstyle as well, but Holmes' preference for long hair had thus far prevented me from visiting a hairdresser.

"I... I felt ill and didn't go," Jessica Simpson said, in a tone that convinced me it was a lie.

I noted a faint hint of tremor in her long, slender fingers and quickly guided her towards a chair in front of the fire.

"Come, Jessie, get warm," I said, wondering what had brought her to my rooms in such a state on this chilly day. "You've taken cold."

Jessica set her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering and drew her knees up to her chest. I found a blanket and wrapped it about her shoulders.

"Thank you, Mary," Jessica said and clutched the ends of the blanket tight across her chest. "It is chilly out there."

She looked around my rooms. Her eyes lingered on the papers and books stacked about my desk and the corners of her mouth quirked up in a smile.

"Another Wisdom book?" she asked.

"More materials have come to light that will enable me to expand upon my original argument," I explained, but did not go into great detail. Theology was not Jessica's chief interest and it was clearly not the subject that had brought her to my rooms this day.

I seated myself in a chair beside hers and studied her white, nervous face, waiting for her to reveal the cause of her discomfiture. It must have been grave indeed to induce her to call off a visit to Lady Emily and her very handsome brother.

"Holmes and the children are well?" Jessica said. "You must miss them."

"They are well," I said. "And yes, I miss them, but I will return home in just a few more days. I have also missed my work. It is good to be back in Oxford."

"I found some seashells for Judy when I was last at the shore," Jessica said. "I had a collection when I was small. When I put one to my ear, I thought I was magically hearing the ocean, even though I was nowhere near it."

She smiled wanly. I, too, could hear the ocean waves crashing against the cliffs, even when I was nowhere near the coast. I firmly pushed this thought away.

"I'm sure she will enjoy them whenever you are able to give them to her," I said, envisioning my daughter's untidy, yet creatively arranged, bed chamber with its many artifact collections.

Jessica was staring into the fire, her expression blank and far away.

"What is troubling you, Jessie?" I asked.

"I-I need your help," Jessica whispered at last. The words seemed dragged out of her. "How do you manage, Mary? How do you go on day after day after day, pretending that everything is still the same when nothing is the way it should be??"

I leaned forward and gripped her hands in mine. Her thin shoulders were still shaking, despite the blanket and warmth of the fire.

"Tell me, Jessie," I said.

"I cannot bear the secret anymore," she said. "The dreams are driving me mad."

"Tell me about them," I said.

There was another long pause. She turned her face away from mine.

"I'm afraid you'll hate me, but I have to tell you," she whispered.

I waited, letting the silence build between us. It was the therapeutic pause that a psychiatrist had used during her sessions with me. It was more difficult than I expected to sit and wait for the painful confidences of someone I loved, knowing that this was the only help I could offer her.

"I think I killed my mother," Jessica whispered after another long pause. "You see, the doctor told me n-not to give her t-too much medication for the pain. He knew she wanted to die. She begged him to help her. He said he couldn't do what she asked in good conscience. But she was in so much pain, I ached for her! Then she asked me to let her go. I didn't have the courage to help her, either. Finally I just left the pill bottle within her reach on the nightstand, and I kissed her goodnight and said I'd see her in the morning. When I went in at sunrise she had died."

Her face, still turned away from me towards my desk, was stark white with the horror of it. My heart was beating faster in sympathy with her.

'I murdered my brother,' a voice from the past whispered insidiously in my ear.

"I try to forget it," Jessica said in even tones. "I even succeed for months at a time and am happy again. I rationalize it to myself. But I am guilty of murder."

Murder? No, it wouldn't be murder. Some responsibility, yes, but not murder or even manslaughter.

"If only I hadn't left her the pills," Jessica whispered, voice quavering. "If only I had checked on her sooner. God. God. I don't deserve to be happy. How could I?"

She bowed her head.

"I think George will ask me to marry him, but how can I marry him or anybody else when I murdered my own mother?"

I had seen Jessica infrequently during the years since Holmes and I rescued her from her kidnappers. Once, when they were staying in Lucerne, Holmes and I paid a visit to the Simpson family at the American Embassy. At that time they were still flush with prosperity and the Senator from Colorado was rising steadily in importance in the political world. Jessica had been a shyly smiling 10-year-old, still in pigtails and short dresses.

We exchanged letters but did not see her again until fate brought her back to England's shores. In 1929, when financial disaster struck the world's markets, Jessica's family lost most of its fortune. The Senator's involvement in a political scandal that same year was too much for him to bear. He died during a hunting expedition in the North Dakota Badlands, supposedly while cleaning his gun. Jessica's devastated mother returned home with her daughter to the hilly countryside near Aberystwyth and there the two of them tried to heal. But Mrs. Simpson died a scant six months later of terminal breast cancer, or so I had thought.

I felt a stab of anger now at the woman's lack of control, at her selfishness in making an impossible request of her daughter, and at the country doctor who had left the decision in the hands of an adolescent.

At the funeral, an eerily self-possessed 18-year-old Jessie endured the speeches of the blustering country parson and listened to well-meaning condolences from strangers who had known her mother in childhood. Only the expression in her eyes betrayed a trace of bewilderment at her change in status from beloved daughter to orphan. I didn't suspect she was affected by something more sinister than grief and shock. I should have known there was more.

"I have tried to stay happy with my anger, Mary," Jessica told me afterwards, when guests finally left us alone in the echoing house. "But just now I am finding it difficult."

I took her in my arms then and held her, but she remained dry-eyed. The tears had not come for me either, not until years later.

I suppose Jessie reminded me of myself that day as she had so many years ago.

Her parents hadn't considered a university education necessary for a girl. Instead, they wished her to marry well. I, finding in her a quick brain and a thirst for knowledge, encouraged loftier pursuits. Jessie gained admission to Oxford, where she is reading English and history. She has also proven herself popular with both her housemates and their elder brothers. Jessica is right that Lord George Mowbray, the handsome but somewhat uninspired younger son of a duke, plans to propose marriage. One of my friends spotted him selecting the rock at an exclusive jeweler's.

I also like to believe that Jessica has found a second home with us in Sussex. My children view her as a beloved aunt. From the moment she arrives for a visit, Jack and Judith and the cats and the dog all compete for her attentions. Her cheerful notes about her studies and her friends at Oxford and her occasional Saturday visits uplifted me during the long period of recovery following Jack's birth. Mrs. Hudson has enjoyed having another young lady to tutor in the so-called womanly arts. I dare say Jessica has proven a more apt student of those arts than my daughter or I have. For his part, Holmes has given her free access to his bookshelves and unsolicited career and marital advice.

I have been very proud of my adopted sister, who seemed so much braver and stronger than I have been in the face of as great a loss. Just now she looked as fragile as blown glass. I felt her pain as though it were my own. Guilt and grief and anger are a powerful witch's brew that cloud the rational mind.

As a child, I remember asking my parents for a sister instead of a brother. This was a memory that plagued me after the deaths of my parents and brother. I blamed myself for the motor vehicle accident that took their lives. I regret now that I did not have time to repair my poor relationships with them.

I lost my family when my brother and I had not yet outgrown sibling spats, when my parents were at their most exasperated with my adolescent rebelliousness. The day of the accident my moods were as changeable as that of any other fourteen-year-old. Over the breakfast table that day, I quite rationally discussed with my father the likelihood of America's entering the War. Later that morning I was like a much younger child, pouting because I could not spend the day with my school friends and screaming at my brother for teasing me.

I understand better now that it would not always have been that way. My parents and I would have become friends again when I passed through my teenage years. My brother and I would have laughed at our sibling rivalry and gotten along better as adults. I see the closeness of my husband and his brother Mycroft and I wonder what might have been between my own brother and myself. But the accident froze my parents and brother in my memory at the moment their disappointment and anger with me were at their greatest. Their accusations have lingered and sometimes overshadow the memory of their love for me. I could not even allow myself to be angry with them for leaving me because I had been the cause of their absence.

"Mary, MUST you be so difficult today?" my mother says, even now, in the Dream. This Dream still comes back to torment me when my emotional resistance is low, as it was last year in the black period of mental and physical illness that followed Jack's birth.

"You're always so sulky," she says.

I ignore her and look out the car window at the sparkling waves below us. The sun dances on turquoise blue waters and lacy white ocean froth. I wish that I could be alone with the sea, away from my tedious family. While my back is turned, my nine-year-old brother's small, ink-stained hand surreptitiously touches my hair. He quickly yanks his hand away before I can grab it and smirks at me the way only an annoying little brother can. His expression is all false innocence.

"Stop TOUCHING me, you little beast! Dad, make him stop!" I scream.

"I'm not touching you," my brother protests, but his voice breaks on a laugh.

Dad turns around and gave us a paternal glare.

"If the two of you don't SHUT UP this minute I'm going to..." he growls. He never has the chance to complete his sentence. My mother screams "Look out!" as our car drifts over the center line. The oncoming Tin Lizzie hits us. The car spins around and my door flies open. I am tossed onto the road, against the hard stones, like a broken doll. I see the outline of my brother's head in the back window and hear my mother's thin scream as the car goes over the cliff and then bursts into flames. He's gone. They're gone. My brother, the boy I killed; my brother, the boy I sometimes hated; my brother, the boy genius who would have contributed so much to the world. I could never hope to equal him.

Time and Holmes have helped; the family we have built together has helped. But the completion I have found with Holmes has paradoxically made the guilt stronger. Without their deaths I should never have had Holmes.

From my fifteenth year, Holmes was everything to me, has played so many roles in my life that using one word to describe our relationship seems inadequate. He was almost my substitute father, but not quite, for there were elements of the male-female game in our relationship from the very beginning. Some wiser, instinctual part of me was always aware of his waiting, even when I was at my most innocent and unaware.

He was the teacher and mentor whose praise I relished and whose criticism I dreaded, but also the playmate who played hide and seek with me and delighted in startling me with some new disguise. In time he was my partner in detection, a Victorian man generous and flexible enough to consider a woman his equal.

And, at long last, he became my lover, a scientific explorer making new discoveries with those long, sensitive fingers that measured and tested the responses of my body in the silence of our breathing. No husband could have been more gentle or more tender with an innocent (and, despite what I told Ronnie, I know now that I was indeed an innocent) wife that first night. The physical pleasure we brought to one another was a revelation. What he could not tell me with words, he always told me with touch: his fingers running through my hair, his arm around me, his lips on my forehead. Now I translate each kiss on the hollow of my jaw, each gentle caress of breast or thigh, as a tactile "I love you. You are mine. I am yours."

I irritate him by whistling through my teeth, by snorting at his more snortworthy statements and, I will admit it, by giving him the sharp side of my tongue. He irritates me, oh how he irritates me, with imperious commands to abandon my research and rush to his side and with that air of insufferable, arrogant omiscience he sometimes assumes. We argue now as often as we did when I was fifteen. Both of us resent intrusions into our private thoughts and private activities, yet we also have learned that the intimacy of marriage requires even greater unity than we had in the beginning.

The needs and demands of children added additional tension to our daily existence, required further adjustments to the loss of privacy and total freedom. We have made the necessary adjustments. My pregnancy with Judith was unplanned, but we found to our great surprise how much we enjoyed her and our new role as parents. Holmes as the father of my children added a new depth to our relationship.

Holmes has applauded my successes and lent me his strength during my weakness, even as I have done those things for him. Our marriage is a bit like the fugue Holmes defined himself as so many years ago. Perhaps "husband" and "wife," the descriptive words we use half in jest as endearments for one another, are after all the best and simplest terms.

I often wish that my daughter will find such a husband. I have also wished it for Jessica. Now her own nightmares threaten her future. Thanks to Holmes I have built my life on a stronger foundation than guilt. Somehow I knew I must help Jessica to do the same.

"Enough, Jessie," I said briskly. "Look at me."

Slowly, reluctantly, she turned her face back to mine. There was apprehension in her eyes. I realized that she feared my reaction.

"Now you know the worst of me," Jessica whispered hoarsely. "You saved my life and this is what I have done with it. Sometimes I think I should go to the police and tell them."

"Good God, Jessie, what good would that do?" I exclaimed impatiently. "I could ring up Inspector Lestrade right now and report... what? More than three years ago your terminally ill mother might have taken more pain medication than was good for her. Did she take them herself or did you force them down her throat?"

Jessica stared at me open-mouthed.

"She made the choice to end her life, because the pain was too great," I said firmly, tightening my grip on her hands. "What remained to her? Days of even greater suffering?"

"But she would have spent them with me," Jessica murmured.

At long last a tear trickled down her cheek.

"Yes," I whispered. "She left you. It is all right to be angry with her for that. It is natural to be angry when the people we love leave us."

"It's irrational," Jessica said in a quivering voice. "I caused it."

"Yes, you assisted a suicide, and that guilt will remain on your conscience. But answer me this, Jessie. Could you have borne watching your mother die in agony, knowing you had the means to stop it? Which would have been the greater crime? Do you deserve punishment for loving your mother?"

She stared down at the floor. After a moment, she shook her head.

"I do love her," she said. "I couldn't have done otherwise. But I still feel so guilty, and I don't know how to move past it."

"Guilt is a poor foundation for a life, Jessie, without something else beside it," I whispered. "Holmes told me that once. Say 'no' to George if you wish. Perhaps he is not the man for you. But do not punish yourself by closing yourself off from life. That is not what your mother would have wanted for you. She would have wanted your happiness."

"Be happy with your anger," Jessie quoted back to me. "And try not to be too afraid. Or too guilty? That is such good advice, but sometimes it is dreadfully hard to follow, Sister Mary."

"I know, but will you try again anyway, dear Jessie?" I asked. "You are so very dear to me."

She gave me a crooked smile. Then she cried, and I held her in my arms as my mother had once held me, as I wanted to hold my brother.

This time I cried with her.