Jake, Son Of Zeus

Not long after Delilah"s funeral, the money from the life insurance policy (which Jake had set up over the internet and paid when the bill came twice a year, just in case) was gone, spent entirely on the funeral and a handful of outstanding bills.

Jake went to commencement alone, and when it was over, he returned to the Marshes" guest bedroom, breathing air poisoned with potpourri.

The summer that followed lasted centuries. Jake worked two jobs to pa.s.s the time and to save up for a car to take to college. He stocked shelves at night, forty hours a week at the only megasupermarket in town, and forty hours a week during the day, he worked the front desk at the country club"s pro shop. He got off work at five o"clock in the evening, went to the Marsh"s house to sleep in the flowery guest bedroom, and woke up at eleven p.m. to start the day again.

Stumbling toward the front door one evening, on his way to bed, Jake heard voices from next door, where he and his mother had lived for so many years. He"d put it up for sale the day after the funeral, hoping that it would sell before college started and at least put a dent in the cost of tuition.

Jake pretended to check the brakes on his bicycle, glancing up as covertly as possible to see the young couple and the ancient real estate agent stepping off the porch onto the walkway.

"It"s a mess in there," the young woman said. "The previous owners must not have taken very good care of the place."

"Was that blood on the dining room ceiling?" the young man asked.

"No, no," the agent said with a short laugh. She took a fast glance at her clipboard. "Spaghetti sauce. And you can rest a.s.sured we"ll have the place cleaned up before you move in, if you decide to take the house. Yes, the last owner was an elderly man. He wasn"t able to take care of himself very well these last years."

Jake couldn"t figure out how that explained the presence of spaghetti sauce on the ceiling, though if he had been in that situation, he doubted he could have come up with a good excuse, either.

"My G.o.d, he didn"t die in there did he?" the young woman said, turning back to look at the house as though she"d just exited a mausoleum.

"No, no," the agent said again. "He"s in a nice retirement community in South Carolina, closer to his children and grandchildren."

Jake snorted, then propped his bike against the side of the house and went inside to bed. It was funny, really, because Jake knew that the agent"s clipboard probably told her that a house prep crew and painters had been in the week before to get the house ready, and Jake had seen their vans parked outside last Tuesday. But the zoo of immortal creatures that still lived behind the stove and in the attic and under the bathroom cabinets and in the light fixtures were not happy that their hosts had left so suddenly, and nothing in the immortal world keeps quiet about being unhappy.

What wasn"t funny was that Jake really was counting on the sale of the house for college money. He lay in bed for an hour, not sleeping even though he had been too exhausted to eat when he"d arrived. Finally, he got up and dressed and went next door, double checking to make sure the real estate agent"s car was gone from the side street before he unlocked the front door and went inside.

Some of them came out when they saw it was him, and he did his best to convince them how much he needed their help. He told them about his mother"s death and his financial difficulties. He asked them to clean the house and behave themselves at least until the new owners moved in.

They didn"t say anything, and Jake eventually left them, not knowing if they had paid attention or whether they cared. He hardly slept that night, and it was a week before the real estate agent returned, no doubt with a little checkmark on her clipboard that a.s.sured her the house was spotless this time. That couple didn"t want the house either. They didn"t say why.

He read Ovid"s Metamorphoses and reread Bulfinch"s Mythology on his lunch breaks, and the few hours he was awake on his days off, he read Theology and everything else the public library had on mythology. The Marshes wouldn"t accept money from him for his time there, and he had no time to spend money hanging out with his friends, so he paid for airless tubes for his bicycle and didn"t spend another cent from May to August.

One week before school started, Jake left his hometown with four thousand dollars in the form of a purplish Volkswagen with so many dents that it looked like a magazine clipping of a Volkswagen that had been crumpled up then uncrumpled and pressed as flat as a crumpled picture can be. Among the dents (which Jake speculated had been caused by hail, minor accidents, and frequent encounters with large, horned animals), places where the paint had chipped revealed the many colors the car had been before: yellow, black, aquamarine, silver, and fuchsia among them.

That week, the house next door, where he"d lived his whole life and where his mother had lived most of hers, burned. Jake hadn"t had the money to pay the house insurance in years. He just stood in the street and watched.

He never went back.

Jake moved into his dorm room (which boasted cement brick walls painted glaring white and a floor with decades of fungus thriving in the s.p.a.ces between the tiles), met his Norwegian roommate, Geir, and walked to his first cla.s.s, Intro to Biology, enjoying the incredible feeling of freedom and newness of being on a college campus with its wide lawns of thick, healthy, collegiate gra.s.s and with ancient trees and with its busyness and purposefulness, of being independent and feeling right for the first time since his mother"s death. He had felt guilty then for feeling free of the burden of taking care of Delilah, but even if she had been alive, he would be here now, and he felt a sense of relief at being back on that track again, following the plan he had laid while she played Tetris and half-listened. Of course, in his mother"s addition to the plan, she had an apartment a mile from the university so that he could visit her every day. He spent his afternoons on those gra.s.sy lawns instead. He read for hours, some homework, some not, and if the warmth of the day or the tedium of the reading made him drowsy, he lay back and napped in the sun while other students, in their own places scattered over the lawn, studied or sunbathed or chatted or wooed girls with their musical skills.

When he thought about her, he missed his mother"s face, her laughter, and her easy way of living. But he didn"t think about her often.

He was here. That was the important part, the amazing part. This was college. This was where life begins. This was where you skipped cla.s.s if you were up too late with friends or went to cla.s.s in pajamas and slippers. This was where there was a coffeehouse and a library that were never closed and never empty. This was where everything that had been your life was gone, and there were a million new things to do and be.

That was the best part. Jake could be whoever he wanted to be here. There were no restrictions, no ties to the past, not even, for him, family members who would show up and share embarra.s.sing stories and childhood nicknames with your suitemates. He was free. He could be someone else. He could even hope that somehow he had left his immortal problem behind him, that maybe it had been his mother and not he who had been attracting the attention of the immortal pests all along.

Jake made friends with the guys in his dorm who had PlayStations. It had been released the previous year, but most people Jake knew still played on Sega Genesis. He even woke up one morning to the unmistakable sound of the original Mario Bros. coming from a Nintendo across the hall. On Sat.u.r.day afternoons, walking through the dorm halls, which had no soundproofing of any kind, was an auditory invasion. Gunshots and the cartoonish sounds of extra lives and defeated enemies punctuated the noise of ten kinds of repet.i.tive, high-pitched music.

To the music, he added his own, humming a medley of Christmas carols.