Chapter 13

Trouble in paradise snuck up on Jake from the most unlikely of directions. It all started, innocently enough, with an invitation to a birthday party. The day classes started back up at Stetson Jake received an invitation in the mail for Cindy Sorenson’s eighteenth birthday party. The party was being held on Thursday, September twentieth -- he could do that. The fly in the ointment was the location. The party was being held in New York City. Jake showed the invitation to Melissa.

“You aren’t going, are you?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think I will, unless you don’t want me to,” Jake replied.

“If you want to go, then go,” Melissa said.

Jake, had he not been as dense as an eight lane minefield, should have known instantly that she meant not just ‘no’, but ‘hell no!’.

“Ok, I’ll call Mitzi tomorrow and have her set me up,” Jake said.

“You do that,” she sniffed disdainfully as she stalked off.

Jake scratched his head over that last comment as he headed toward the dining room. He was anxious to see what Senora Lopez had whipped up for grub. She was still trying to fatten him up after his bootcamp stint with United States Army chow.

Jake and Melissa spent the evening studying in what Jake thought was companionable silence. Jake was blissfully unaware that Melissa was hurt and angry. When they went to bed, Jake snuggled up to Melissa’s back and reached over her to cup her breast. She shrugged his arm off her shoulder.

“I don’t feel like that tonight,” she said.

That was a first. Touching was about Melissa’s favorite thing in the world. Sleepy Jake said no problem, rolled over, and went to sleep. Melissa, however, stayed awake. She hated the idea of him going to New York to be with Cindy. The thought of the ravishing blonde having three days to work on her man sent paroxysms of panic through her. That Jake could not see how she felt pissed her off. He was the smartest man she had ever even heard of, yet he was clueless about her feelings. ‘He’s thinking with his dick,’ she thought, and can’t wait to see ‘little miss perfect’. Melissa quietly cried herself to sleep.

It was unseasonable cold in their bedroom the next morning. Melissa barely spoke to him and totally avoided any physical contact. Jake was starting to get irked by her attitude. He had to get to class though, so he did not make an issue out of it. He finally made the connection between Melissa’s attitude and Cindy’s party at lunch. Besides feeling stupid that it had taken him so long to figure it out, Jake was also bemused by Melissa’s attitude. It was not as if he were keeping anything from her. Not to mention that he was fairly certain he would not be sleeping with Cindy anyway. It was certainly curious, seemed to be careening out of control, and another glaring example of how little he really understood women.

That evening Jake received more of the silent treatment. He held his tongue until they went to bed.

“If you don’t want me to go to Cindy’s party, just say so,” he said in exasperation.

Melissa flashed him a hurt look.

“If you really loved me, you would decide on your own not to go,” she replied.

Jake was dumbfounded. She had dug out the old ‘if you really loved me ploy.’ Jake was on more familiar ground now. Actually, this was a terrain he had crawled over and knew very, very well. He had had that game played on him often in his previous life. Susan Jean Jones (Susie Jean the love machine) had elevated it to an art form. He was not going to have that in this lifetime. Jake took Melissa’s hands and sat her down on the edge of the bed.

“Listen, Muffy, if you have doubts about my love for you, something is fundamentally wrong with our relationship. If you want me to be monogamous, I will be. But I’m not going to be friendless, and I’m not going to be manipulated. There is no reason for me not to go to Cindy’s party. So I’m going, but when it’s over I am coming back to be with the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

“Jake, she scares me. She is so beautiful and so intent on having you. It’s a lot for a man to resist. I keep thinking that if she gets you in her grasp, she won’t let go. I think she’s going to use this trip to sink her hooks into you. If that happened, it would kill me as surely as a knife.”

“It’s not going to happen, Honey, I promise. I have a bond with Cindy that is hard to explain, but it’s not like what we have. At first I thought that she was the one for me, then as time went on we just didn’t connect to the depth and intensity that lifemates have to have. At least for me it was that way. Cindy knows how I feel, how she feels is her problem. My heart says you are the woman for me. Got it?”

“But Cindy...” she started to say.

Jake held up his hand.

“You are just going to have to find a way to accept what I am saying at face value. I love you and you are stuck with me until you throw me out, end of story,” Jake said.

Melissa looked like she did not think they were finished talking, so Jake kissed her. Thankfully, she returned the kiss with considerable ardor. Of course, as soon as her lips were no longer covered by his they started moving again.

“I’m going to take you at your word, Baby, but I don’t want you to make love to her. I don’t care if she says it’s a scientific experiment or a one time thing or whatever. I want you to keep Mr. Turner out of her.”

“Yes, Dear,” Jake said.

Jake’s promise made Melissa a little happier. She pulled him back onto the bed and on top of her. She decided to give him plenty of reasons to want to come home over the next two weeks. She would get with Louisa and Erika tomorrow to enlist their aid, hummm, and maybe Tigger, and the Phillips twins, also. By the time he departed for New York, they would have him drained. Then when he returned she would make it even better for him. Melissa started putting her plan in effect that night by relieving him of a few million spermy-wormies. What she missed Wednesday night she had for breakfast Thursday morning. Jake thought her conduct was a great improvement over the bitching and whining.

Jake walked through the door, home from classes at four o’clock, that same afternoon. He arrived just in time to take a phone call from Mitzi Walker. Mitzi relayed a name and number of a doctor who had received one of the Coma Recovery Research Center’s flyers. Jake immediately returned the call. He dug out one of the questionnaires they had developed and ran down it with the doctor he spoke with. Jake hung up the phone, sat back in his chair, and studied the questionnaire. The pattern fit. It was their first creditable lead in the fifteen months since he and Nina created the CRRC. The patient was a ten year old girl from Newburg, New York.

Jake dug his Day Timer out of his book bag and looked up Doctor Christopher Douglas’ phone number. Doctor Douglas had been Nina’s neurosurgeon when she woke up in Regina’s body. Douglas was also a friend of the family now, and a consultant for the CRRC. Jake repeated the information he had garnered from the other doctor to Douglas, along with the phone number. Dr. Douglas said he would call Jake back as soon as he talked to his colleague in New York.

Dr. Douglas called Jake back twenty minutes later. He confirmed what Jake already suspected. Having Douglas call the doctor in New York was a way to establish the bona fides of the CRRC. Jake called the hospital in Newburg again and gathered as much personal information about the girl as he could. A call to Jim Peters started a background search on the girl. A call to Nina set in motion a plan to make contact with her. Lastly, Jake called Maria Thornton, Attorney at Law. Maria said she had contacts in Poughkeepsie, New York, that could find them a local attorney. Poughkeepsie was about over thirty miles from Newburg but it was the best she could do.

Jake was having trouble suppressing his excitement. Jake told Melissa the news when he got off the phone. She did not understand why finding the girl got Jake so excited, but if it made him happy, she was all for it. She was also vastly relieved that the girl was only ten years old. The last thing they needed was another nubile horny woman in Jake’s life.

Saturday, September the eighth, Nina and Jake flew up to Newburg. Dave Larson flew them in the larger Cessna. A lawyer and a private investigator met them at Stewart Airport, a former Air Force base now owned by the state of New York. The investigator drove them to the hospital, going over what he knew so far.

This is what he told them:

The subject/patient was a ten year old girl named Leslie Solomon. She was the orphaned daughter of a wealthy couple from White Plains. Her Jewish father had been an executive at PepsiCo, her mother was black and worked at IBM’s world headquarters. The parents had been counter culture peaceniks and civil rights activists. Jake noticed the investigator’s look of disdain as he said that. The subject had surviving grandparents on her father’s side of the family, but they refused to accept any responsibility for the girl. They had been estranged from their son for over fifteen years, and the strained blood ties did not stretch to include a ten-year-old they had never seen. The girl’s mother had been herself an orphan with no known family.

Jake nodded and turned to the lawyer.

The lawyer then gave his story. Leslie’s family, including two siblings, were killed when the father’s car was side-swiped on the Bear Mountain Bridge at the northern terminus of the Palisades Parkway. The top-heavy station wagon he was driving climbed the guard rail and plunged over two hundred feet down and into the Hudson River. Leslie’s life was miraculously spared because she was ejected from the car. The accident happened in front of gravel laden barge headed down river. The tugboats captain was able to slow the barge and a crewman went over the side with a rubber boat and retrieved the apparently lifeless girl. A helicopter from the Military Academy at West Point picked her up off the tug. She was successfully resuscitated at the West Point hospital and taken to the closest civilian hospital, which was in Newburg.

Jake and company arrived at the hospital at four in the afternoon. Jake and Nina went in to see Leslie after a brief visit with her doctor. Jake made it clear to the doctor that the CRRC would take care of her hospital bill. He also let the doctor know that he had retained a lawyer for Leslie and that warehousing her at some institution was not going to happen.

Leslie regarded the two young people who entered her room with interest. She immediately realized they were not medical personnel and she doubted if they were from social services.

Jake was amazed at the serenity of the young girl. Her demeanor was nothing like the panicked Nina he had encountered last year.

“Hello, Leslie, my name is Jake Turner, this is my friend, Nina Mallory. Like you, we both woke up from comas without a memory of who we were.”

“Really,” was all Leslie said.

“Really,” Jake echoed, “but we did wake up with memories. We thought it might be the same for you.”

“It might be,” Leslie said.

She turned toward Nina.

“What do you know about George Bush?” she asked casually.

“Senior or Junior?”

Jake could not get over the girls composure and nimble mind. She had established his and Nina’s status in less than two minutes. Leslie told them her story. Her name, until she woke up in Leslie’s body, had been Thelma Higgins. Thelma was a social worker in New York City. The daughter of share-croppers in rural Alabama, she and her husband had migrated to Harlem in the fifties. Thelma worked her way through Fordham University, taught school by day, and attended graduate school in the evenings. It took her seven years to earn her masters in social work. She had retired in 1996. Her husband died in ‘98.

Thelma was tragically infertile, so she lavished her love on the children she worked with. It was ironic that the crack-head who took her life was a child she had rescued. Thelma was deeply religious, and her serenity was a result of her faith. She was convinced that God had brought her back so that she could do more good and perhaps raise a family of her own. In that context, Jake and Nina were simply agents doing God’s work as well. Thelma’s years of social work had tempered her reactions to her recycling also. She knew that she would be warehoused in a mental facility if she tried to tell anyone else her story. However, Thelma did know the system; consequently, she also knew how to get out of her predicament. Jake listened closely as she outlined her plan.

Jake and Nina kissed Leslie on the cheek and told her they would see her the next evening. Jake tracked down the lawyer and set him to work on the paperwork they would need tomorrow. Jake had the PI drive him and Nina to their motel rooms then dismissed him. That night for the first time in almost a month, Jake slept alone.

The lawyer picked them up at ten the next morning and drove them to the home of Isaac and Ruth Solomon, Leslie’s grandparents. The Solomons lived in Scarsdale, a rich bedroom community in Westchester County, just north of New York City. The Solomons agreed to Nina being appointed Leslie’s guardian. Jake tried to get them to be involved in some way in Leslie’s life. The strict couple steadfastly refused. They grieved for their son, not the man who died, but the boy for whom they once had such high hopes.

Jake and Nina went back and gave Leslie the news. She was thrilled at the chance to live her life again. She was a thousand percent behind Jake’s plan to change things and was eager to get started. Jake told her the lawyer would file the paperwork the next day. The man was confident that he could have the custody motion expedited and Leslie released to them by the end of the next week. Jake tentatively made plans to pick up Leslie after Cindy’s birthday bash and flew back to Palmdale.

Jake boarded a Delta jet at Daytona International at eight-fifteen on the morning of September 20, 1973. Mitzi’s secretary had fixed him up with a first class ticket. The flight was direct to LaGuardia, scheduled to arrive at eleven-fifty. It was an enjoyable flight, Jake had first class mostly to himself, and the stewardess was pretty and flirtatious. Jake deplaned in New York, he got a kiss from the stewardess as she slipped him her phone number. She had a three day layover in the city and offered to show Jake the local sights.

A liveried limousine driver was waiting at the end of the Jetway holding a sign reading Jake Turner. Jake introduced himself and the man led Jake to the baggage claim area. The man grabbed Jake’s suitcase and garment bag before leading him to the stretch limo parked directly in front of the baggage claim area doors. The Puerto Rican driver was most impressed with Jake’s excellent Spanish, they were yakking like old friends by the time they hit midtown. Cindy’s party was being held in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel so Mitzi’s secretary had booked him a room at the Plaza. Jake learned from the driver that the car was at his disposal for the duration of his stay. Jake was impressed, it was his first opportunity to experience what very rich folks took for granted.

Jake was even more impressed when he checked in. As soon as the woman at the check-in desk associated his name with a room, her already friendly demeanor got even brighter. She called a bellman who led Jake to his room. Only it was not a room, it was a palatial three-room suite on the nineteenth floor, overlooking Central Park. The bellman told Jake it was the Vanderbilt Suite, the finest in the hotel. Melissa, it seemed to Jake, was going overboard to make up for their little tiff. Jake unpacked, called the concierge desk to have his tuxedo pressed for the evening, and then took a nap.

Jake woke up at five-fifteen refreshed and ready for the evening. The party was not going start until seven so he watched the local evening news. At six, he called Melanie Stevens, the stewardess from his flight, and asked if she would show him the city tomorrow. Melanie was most happy with the idea, so Jake got the address of the hotel where she was staying and said he would pick her up at eleven. Jake headed for the shower to get ready for his first celebrity party. He doubted if he would have that much fun, but it was going to be great to see Cindy and Laurie again.

Jake walked down to the ballroom at five after seven. He picked up a club soda at one of the bars and settled against the wall to people watch. The party was almost exactly as Jake envisioned, as pretentious assholes strutted around trying to one-up each other. At eight, Laurie walked into the room and scanned the crowd. She spotted Jake and motioned him over. Jake walked with her to an anteroom where Cindy was waiting to make her entrance. Cindy was so stunningly beautiful it took Jake’s breath away. Cindy gave Jake a light hug.

“I’ll greet you properly as soon as we have a minute, Jacob. Right now I need to be unmussed when I make my big entrance,” Cindy said.

Cindy took Jake’s arm and he escorted her into the ballroom. Conversation stopped as Cindy walked in, the band broke into an electronic rendition of Happy Birthday to You, and the crowd broke into applause. Jake was a hot commodity that night, the oft-mentioned boy from home. Cindy’s fellow models were impressed with her guy. He was not very cosmopolitan, but he was sure big and handsome. Jake made nice to everyone. He was always unfailingly polite, something that was a rarity to the jaded New Yorkers.