Play & Book Excerpts
A Version of the Truth
(Sunbury Press, Inc.)
© Marsh Rose
Chapter One
“You live in this miserable heap all by yourself.”
—A Strange Man
What would you do if you needed the answer to an unsolvable mystery? Would you drive yourself mad, searching? Would you cling to denial while it paced the edges of your awareness? Or would you get a version you could live with, and live with it? Jack and I were in an intimate relationship for almost forty years. While we never married or shared a home, we spent two nights a week together and talked on the phone almost every day. He saw me through houses, cars, careers, pets, crises, and celebrations. And then, he vanished. When I found him ten days later, he’d had a hemorrhagic stroke. He was incapacitated. He could no longer speak. His memory was lost. And he was living with another woman who called him by a different name.
We met in 1985. I was 35 and he was 40. He turned up at the door of my decrepit rental in the rural Northern California town where I had just moved from Philadelphia. I’d had a bad night. Although I was an urban transplant, I was no stranger to wild animals. Feral cats wandering the streets at night in Philly would awaken me with their shrieks, and we had the occasional rat in our trash, and mouse in the pantry. Once, a bat got into the attic and my father caught it in a pillowcase while Mom and I cowered in a closet. Those creatures were tame compared to the menagerie that circled my country bungalow when the sun went down. I heard scrabbling and qualling from the underbrush, saw eyeshine in the hedges. In the morning I counted tracks in the mud, all sizes and shapes of tracks, any number of toes, something that slithered and something with opposable thumbs that I hoped to hell was a raccoon. A monkey would have sent me over the edge. I was in a state of anxiety-fueled insomnia. Animals made me nervous. You can’t tell what they’re thinking. Fear of animals is an actual thing.
Zoophobia. I learned about it in graduate school when I was working on my degree in clinical psychology. “An intense, irrational, and uncontrollable fear of animals.” So, to scare them away, that night I had turned on every light in the house, inside and out, including a spotlight over the back porch.
Someone rang my doorbell the next morning. There was no peephole for me to see who had come calling, so against my urban instincts, I opened the door. For one brilliant moment, I thought the man standing on my porch was my high school crush, Jimmy Lee Bevins. That shaggy auburn hair, those wide blue eyes, the tattered blue jeans, the cowboy boots. I was in love with Jimmy Lee, and he with . . . well, officially with Joanne Malloy but probably with any of the hardened girls who chewed gum with their mouths open and smoked behind the bleachers. Jimmy Lee never knew I existed: the small, skinny sophomore with frizzy hair and thick glasses. And now, here was his adult doppelganger casting a long shadow over my front porch.
“I seen your lights on all night,” the man said. “What’s the matter?”
The only other residence on this isolated cul-de-sac was a ragged farmhouse. I noted it warily each time I passed. It looked like news images of Barker Ranch where Charles Manson gathered his followers: a one-story frame house, a barn with a collapsing roof, a collection of vehicles, and donkeys or horses or some other large animal in a dusty pasture.
I peered past the man and saw no car in my driveway. Had he too been lurking in the bushes last night? My voice in my ears sounded an octave higher than normal. “Who are you and how did you know my lights were on?”
“Oh, sorry. Name’s Jack.” He held out his right hand. I reflexively shook it, noting the warmth and calluses that felt like sandpaper. “I live up there.” He pointed toward the farmhouse. Having shaken hands, the moment for me to slam the door had passed. “I was worried. Usually, the only reason for lights to be on all night is someone is up sick. And you live in this miserable heap all by yourself.”
What to do? On one hand, he knew I lived alone, and he could be a cult leader. On the other hand, I was in the nostalgic haze of Jimmie Lee. That’s how it began.
“You live in this miserable heap all by yourself.”
—A Strange Man
What would you do if you needed the answer to an unsolvable mystery? Would you drive yourself mad, searching? Would you cling to denial while it paced the edges of your awareness? Or would you get a version you could live with, and live with it? Jack and I were in an intimate relationship for almost forty years. While we never married or shared a home, we spent two nights a week together and talked on the phone almost every day. He saw me through houses, cars, careers, pets, crises, and celebrations. And then, he vanished. When I found him ten days later, he’d had a hemorrhagic stroke. He was incapacitated. He could no longer speak. His memory was lost. And he was living with another woman who called him by a different name.
We met in 1985. I was 35 and he was 40. He turned up at the door of my decrepit rental in the rural Northern California town where I had just moved from Philadelphia. I’d had a bad night. Although I was an urban transplant, I was no stranger to wild animals. Feral cats wandering the streets at night in Philly would awaken me with their shrieks, and we had the occasional rat in our trash, and mouse in the pantry. Once, a bat got into the attic and my father caught it in a pillowcase while Mom and I cowered in a closet. Those creatures were tame compared to the menagerie that circled my country bungalow when the sun went down. I heard scrabbling and qualling from the underbrush, saw eyeshine in the hedges. In the morning I counted tracks in the mud, all sizes and shapes of tracks, any number of toes, something that slithered and something with opposable thumbs that I hoped to hell was a raccoon. A monkey would have sent me over the edge. I was in a state of anxiety-fueled insomnia. Animals made me nervous. You can’t tell what they’re thinking. Fear of animals is an actual thing.
Zoophobia. I learned about it in graduate school when I was working on my degree in clinical psychology. “An intense, irrational, and uncontrollable fear of animals.” So, to scare them away, that night I had turned on every light in the house, inside and out, including a spotlight over the back porch.
Someone rang my doorbell the next morning. There was no peephole for me to see who had come calling, so against my urban instincts, I opened the door. For one brilliant moment, I thought the man standing on my porch was my high school crush, Jimmy Lee Bevins. That shaggy auburn hair, those wide blue eyes, the tattered blue jeans, the cowboy boots. I was in love with Jimmy Lee, and he with . . . well, officially with Joanne Malloy but probably with any of the hardened girls who chewed gum with their mouths open and smoked behind the bleachers. Jimmy Lee never knew I existed: the small, skinny sophomore with frizzy hair and thick glasses. And now, here was his adult doppelganger casting a long shadow over my front porch.
“I seen your lights on all night,” the man said. “What’s the matter?”
The only other residence on this isolated cul-de-sac was a ragged farmhouse. I noted it warily each time I passed. It looked like news images of Barker Ranch where Charles Manson gathered his followers: a one-story frame house, a barn with a collapsing roof, a collection of vehicles, and donkeys or horses or some other large animal in a dusty pasture.
I peered past the man and saw no car in my driveway. Had he too been lurking in the bushes last night? My voice in my ears sounded an octave higher than normal. “Who are you and how did you know my lights were on?”
“Oh, sorry. Name’s Jack.” He held out his right hand. I reflexively shook it, noting the warmth and calluses that felt like sandpaper. “I live up there.” He pointed toward the farmhouse. Having shaken hands, the moment for me to slam the door had passed. “I was worried. Usually, the only reason for lights to be on all night is someone is up sick. And you live in this miserable heap all by yourself.”
What to do? On one hand, he knew I lived alone, and he could be a cult leader. On the other hand, I was in the nostalgic haze of Jimmie Lee. That’s how it began.
|
Marsh Rose is an author, freelance writer, and psychotherapist. Her preferred genre is memoir and creative nonfiction, and her short stories and essays have appeared in a variety of publications including Cosmopolitan Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Carve Magazine, among others. Her essay, “False Memory,” won first prize for creative nonfiction from New Millennium Writings in 2018, and she was a winner in Tulip Tree’s “Wild Women” contest, June/July 2025, for her essay “Dinosaur Rock.” She has also authored two novels, Lies and Love in Alaska and Escape Routes.
Marsh began her writing life at the age of 14 as a cub reporter in Massachusetts, changed careers when she became a licensed psychotherapist in 1992, and now divides her time among writing, her on-line psychotherapy practice, and her passion for rescuing racing greyhounds. She lives in the wine country in northern California with her greyhound, Adin. Follow Marsh on:
|
Marsh Rose
Photo Courtesy: Marsh Rose |
