Hidden in the Pages

By Mindy Haig

When his mother unexpectedly died just before Christmas, Jantzen Burke's world fell apart. He lost his father to his grief and the cold grandfather he never knew came to stay. Lonely and afraid Jantzen looked to his grandfather for some comfort, but instead of sympathy he was given a journal with a magical power; the power to find his perfect match.

A decade later, Jantzen's life is in status quo. His time is spent running the company his father signed over to him, finishing his education and maintaining an empty house. His only companion is the stranger who writes back to him in the journal, the person he's promised his heart to though he's never seen her face.

But one day an accidental meeting changes all he thought life had planned for him. Suddenly comfort wasn't enough. A decision had to be made. Would he break the promise he'd made and take a chance on love or was his fate tied to the words in the journal?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mindy Haig
• Release date: Oct 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311943354

Mindy Haig

I am a graduate of Rutgers University in New Brunswick New Jersey. I was born and raised in New Jersey so I am very much a city slicker. I moved to Florida to marry my sweetheart after college and marveled at how little there was to do and how much one had to drive to do it! But due to a job change and an abrupt move, we settled in Austin, Texas where the mottos is 'Keep Austin Weird' and I try my best to uphold it! I am the mother of 2 great kids and though writing has always been a pursuit I was interested in, being a Mommy got in the way for quite a few years. I decided I would give it a fair shake in 2009 and I haven't been able to quit since. I have 4 completed novels and I have 4 additional started novels plus 2 sequels all in various stages of gestation. I have a hard time stopping my ideas and when a seemingly great idea hits me - typically just as I am attempting to fall asleep - I am compelled to start an outline. My 2 great talents are: 1. My remarkable ablilty to remember names - which has served me well. 2. My ability to remember lyrics from every song I ever heard in the 70's and 80's - which has not helped me in the slightest. I have a quirky sense of humor and sometimes TV commercials crack me up. I like the notion of things being 'meant to be' or somehow touched by the unexplainable. I also like the effect music has on one's state of mind and the memories a song can recall.

Book preview

Breakwater Harbor Books

Presents:

HIDDEN IN THE PAGES

By

Mindy Haig

Copyright © 2013 by Mindy Haig

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 9781311943354

Cover Art by Mindy and Delaney Haig

All Rights Reserved

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or redistributed without permission of the author. Unauthorized distribution is a violation of copyright and subject to penalties under the applicable Piracy Laws regarding intellectual property. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Breakwater Harbor Books, Inc.

Scott J. Toney and Cara Goldthorpe, Co-Founders

www.breakwaterharborbooks.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Chapter 1: Jantzen - Under the Bridge

Chapter 2: Jantzen - True Love Only Happens Once

Chapter 3: Patrick - Snow Angels

Chapter 4: Jantzen - The You I Know

Chapter 5: Jantzen - Growing Pains

Chapter 6: Patrick - Guilt

Chapter 7: Jantzen - Mourning Night

Chapter 8: Jantzen - Test of Will, Test of Time

Chapter 9: Patrick - Holiday Lights

Chapter 10: Jantzen - Christmas Cookies

Chapter 11: Jantzen - New Year, Old Story

Chapter 12: Jantzen - What Real Life Feels Like

Chapter 13: Patrick - Awakening

Chapter 14: Jantzen - Starting Over

Chapter 15: Patrick - Old Friends

Chapter 16: Jantzen - Cupid and His Deadly Arrows

Chapter 17: Patrick - A Brave New World

Chapter 18: Jantzen - Loneliness

Chapter 19: Jantzen - Plain Drama

Chapter 20: Patrick - Making Things Right

Chapter 21: Jantzen - A Silent Birthday

Chapter 22: Jantzen - Change

Chapter 23: Patrick - Intricacies and Colors

Chapter 24: Jantzen - Caffeine Cravings

Chapter 25: Jantzen - Formal Attire

Chapter 26: Patrick - Back to Life

Chapter 27: Jantzen - Heaven on Earth

Chapter 28: Patrick - The Last Dance

Chapter 29: Jantzen - Blue Moon

Chapter 30: Jantzen - Burning

Chapter 31: Jantzen - Blue Moon Redux

Chapter 32: Zoie - Dream Come True

Afterward: Patrick

Chapter 1: Jantzen - Under the Bridge

Seriously, Dad, it’s fucking freezing out here. Will you please just drink the coffee?

It smells funny, Jantzen, Patrick complained.

I turned away a little, trying with all I had to stay calm. I ran my numb fingers through my hair. The snow was quickly matting the wavy mop of it to my head and the wetness was making its way beneath my scarf and down my neck. Getting aggravated wasn’t going to help, it never did, I knew that. Arguing with him when he was not on his meds was somewhat like trying to convince a small child that it was bedtime, on his birthday, when he was all sugared up from too much cake and soda. There would be resistance, crying, maybe even a full-blown tantrum.

That’s not the coffee, Dad, it’s the trash heap you’re living under and the fact that you haven’t showered or changed your clothes in three weeks, I answered calmly.

He smiled a little. These clothes are warm.

The weather was so bitter I actually thought about just whacking him on the head, knocking him out and bringing him home, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurt him, it wasn’t his fault he was this way.

As I stood mute, pondering what argument would appeal to today’s Patrick Burke, he suddenly looked at me, lifted the cup and drank it down.

It’s cold. This coffee is cold, he grumbled, frowning at the paper cup.

No kidding? It got cold in the fifteen minutes it took you to decide to drink it? I knew it was stupid to get sarcastic, he wouldn’t understand my attitude, I just couldn’t stop myself.

Next time make sure it’s hot.

I laughed. At that moment, he was a petulant pseudo-kid, but when his meds kicked in, he’d be my father again. He wouldn’t be talking his delusional nonsense about the glowing fairies that visit him at night or the magician who makes the green fires where the little people dance. In ten minutes he’d be the man who ruled the world, the genius and the grieving widower who couldn’t bear the reality of his wife’s death. He’d realize he was hungry and we’d leave. This had become our routine. I didn’t like it. There were plenty of times I just wanted to tell him to suck it up already and move on. I understood that my father couldn’t get over his grief, but that didn’t make accepting his choice to abandon life any easier. I loved him, but I resented him too.

The bridge didn’t provide much shelter from the cold, but at least it kept the snow off me. For that I was momentarily grateful.

My father decided almost six years ago that this bridge was an acceptable place to escape from his memories. Whenever he just couldn’t manage his feelings he’d hide himself under this bridge. For a while it was just for a few hours at a time, but then the hours grew longer and longer. He left all his wealth, comforts and possessions behind and he sat here in the filth daydreaming like a simpleton.

With each passing year it got harder and harder to convince him to come home even to attend to his most basic needs. Sometimes, like this time, I simply didn’t give him any say in the matter. I needed to get him warm and dry. I forced fed him his meds in the coffee. I knew that was a shitty thing to do but someone had to care about his well being, and I was the only one left. I could not leave him to himself when I knew his preference was to die. I knelt down and started grabbing his things, stuffing dirty gloves and filthy extra shirts in the laundry bag, just like I always did. He stood aloof, rambling on about nothing.

I saw a shooting star last night, Jantzen. It was as bright as lightening. It streaked across the sky. The tail glittered and sprinkled stardust down on me...

I nodded. I threw in the occasional ‘uh huh’ and continued the onerous task of removing his trash from the underpass he considered home. There was no shooting star. It had been snowing for a full twenty-four frigid hours. The whole world was buried beneath a ten-inch blanket of dirty whiteness. The night sky was hidden behind a shield of dense gray cloud and the only stardust was the damned snow that was running down my neck.

Be careful with that, Son, he said suddenly, as I picked up a grubby notebook and attempted to shove it in with the clothes.

The voice wasn’t the Patrick who saw a shooting star; it was Patrick, my father.

There was always a feeling of relief when I heard that voice. Hearing it still ignited some small hope that one day he would return to life.

What is it, Dad? I asked holding the book out to him.

It’s the next product line. Open it. Take a look.

I was still squatting over his pile of junk when I opened his notebook. What I saw made me want to cry. The work was meticulously neat. The figures were all in their perfect columns. The art was so beautiful it was painful to look at. My father was a fucking genius. He and his friend Peter built a technology company that was unlike anything the world had seen before. Peter was a natural born salesman, the ultimate smooth talker, a silver-tongued devil. But my father was the brains, the science, the art and the magic.

It’s a true fact that genius and insanity walk hand in hand. My father was diagnosed bipolar a long time ago, though he didn’t really fit the description. He was depressed, he certainly had unrealistic ideas, but he was never frenzied or psychotic. Still, whatever he was, meds and my mother were the only things that kept him sane. Though sometimes, even when he was way off the deep end, the genius overcame everything else. Clearly it happened here in this filthy, frigid dump, under a downtown overpass. The genius came, drew his vision out along with the magic formula to build it in all its simple elegance. I was holding proof that my father still existed in his head. His mind was still there.

And yet he didn’t come home.

This brilliant man with his fantastic design and meticulous calculations sat exposed in the falling snow. His mansion on the hill, the place he put every bit of his heart and soul into, he flatly refused to return to. I knew it was because of my mother. Her memory was everywhere. I suggested once that we sell the place and move, but he had a fit. He couldn’t part with her memory, he just couldn’t live with it either so he stopped taking his meds and he lived like a beggar under the bridge.

And I was left alone.

What do you think, Jantzen?

It’s beautiful. It’s absolutely perfect.

I am glad you think so. I would like you to present it to the design group and have them start writing the specs. I would like to see this one hit the market in two years. He looked around for a moment as though he were wondering why we were standing out in the bad weather. Let’s go. I’m hungry. You look like you haven’t been eating much yourself, Kid.

And that was that. For the next twelve hours he would be the normal guy I remembered, the guy I wanted him to be, but then he would wake up. The knowledge of where he was would bring on his panic attack. He’d outwit the security code before the system could even protest and he’d be back in his pile of trash in his childish oblivion by dawn.

~ ~

I went to my room that night knowing full well I wouldn’t see my father in the morning. It would be another school day and I wouldn’t be able to check on him until late in the afternoon. I lived in constant terror of the day when I would find him dead, but the fear was so much more intense in the winter.

I lay in my bed for a while wondering if I would suffer the same fate. If his madness was mine too. I couldn’t find peace so I opened the journal.

Are you there? I wrote.

She didn’t answer.

I wondered if there were times when my mother didn’t answer my father’s letters. I wished I could ask him. There were so many things I wished I could ask him. But I could never find the courage to tell him that I had his journal. I was afraid it would be the final straw for him, losing that last piece of her.

Still, there were definitely times I wished I’d never found out about the journal. I wished I’d never seen it, never opened it, never wrote a single word. It was comforting to know that there was someone out in the world who was meant for me, who would love me unconditionally, but my father’s loss was so great when my mother died that he lost himself too. And I lost them both. So while that loneliness, that need to connect to someone was the main reason I took the journal: I always feared finding that great love and losing someone else from my life.

I’m here! Are you still here? I’m sorry it’s so late. I was babysitting.

I’m still here. How was babysitting? I asked. I probably knew, it probably wasn’t much different from my day.

Exhausting! (Yawn.) They are sweet little kids, they just have so much energy, and it’s tough to watch them on a school night. I still have work to finish. (Sigh.)

Well, don’t waste your time writing to me.

Writing to you is my favorite part of the day. I wish I knew where you were. I wish I could hear your voice instead of just reading your words.

"You would be disappointed. My words are the best thing about me," I whispered into the emptiness of my room. I didn’t write that. She would deny it, like she always did, try to convince me it wasn’t true, so I just wrote:

The heavens hear my plea

Angels cry their soft white tears

The ground covered like a downy quilt

I lay there, arms spread wide, legs sweeping

And when I stand, my angel is there in the snow

We are together.

Goodnight Angel.

Chapter 2: Jantzen - True Love Only Happens Once

"I don’t understand, Grandpa. What’s happening to my dad?"

"He’s showing his true colors, Kid, he answered flippantly as he made himself a sandwich. He’s selfish and he uses his sickness as an excuse to do what ever the hell he wants."

Said the man who moved into our house uninvited and was standing there eating without even offering me any lunch.

"My dad’s not selfish, I answered stubbornly, ignoring the look he gave me. What do you mean he’s sick? Is he going to get sick like Mom?"

"No. Look, Jantzen, you’re old enough to understand that some people are not right in the head, he said tapping his temple as he chewed. He’s screwed up, always has been. Whenever the real world wasn’t to his liking instead of sucking it up and dealing with it, he’d just slip into his mental fantasyland. Your mother, God rest her soul, kept him sane because evidently, he loved her." he finished with a grimace as he shoved the last bite of his sandwich in his mouth.

It was right then that I asked the question that would change everything.

"Yeah, he loved her a lot. But my dad’s a nice guy. He’s still pretty young; he could meet someone else right? I mean, I know he loved Mom, but he could love someone else too, right?"

It seemed like a reasonable question. I wanted my dad to be normal, to be happy again, like he always was. But I remember my grandfather’s snort of derision in reply and the way he looked at me. I remember the shudder that ran through me.

I had just turned eleven. For the first time in my life, my birthday was not a celebration. It passed unnoticed as my grandfather settled into our guest house and my dad began to disappear. As much as I loved and missed my mother, I didn’t understand my father’s grief or this sickness that was suddenly taking over him. I’d never seen my father like that before. My father was the guy who came home from work with flowers and kissed my mother while she made dinner. He was the guy who had cannonball contests with me in the pool and drew pictures on any scrap of paper he got his hands on, even if it was my report card. He was the guy who was always happy.

Until he became this guy who was sitting around, staring into space, seeing things that weren’t there and half of the time he didn’t know who I was.

My world had rapidly fallen apart.

~ ~

The sound of the snowplows grating along the street was a welcome if not somewhat abrasive interruption to my bitter memories. The journal sat on my nightstand as it always did. My solitary connection to the person I could bare my soul to. I’d written to her a thousand times, about the future, but it was the past that tethered us together.

I closed my eyes again, hoping the quiet night would grant me peace, but the memories continued.

~ ~

Christmas.

The house was decorated. The tree was up. My mother was happily doing all of her holiday shopping and planning the holiday party we’d hosted every single year of my life. The weather had that winter bite to it, and the neighborhood was brightly lit with the frills of the season. Even with the stuffy noses and nagging cough, there was not a single reason to think this Christmas was going to be any different. I mean, she said it was just a little cold. She hardly acknowledged that she was sick.

But her little cold was a nasty flu virus that very quickly became pneumonia. It ravaged her. She was gone before we could even process what was happening. Instead of her cheerful Christmas party, we had a house full of mourners.

It was right after her funeral that I first saw what my father was like without his meds.

I was ten years old. I lost my mother. I was losing more of my father every day. And the grandfather I hardly knew was moving in, touching our stuff, and making new rules.

I didn’t like it, not one bit.

It wasn’t long after that when my grandfather told me about the journal.

~ ~

I woke up at last to the sound of my alarm clock. The sun shown weekly into my room, filtered by the patchy gray clouds and the window shades. It didn’t seem like I’d been sleeping though the way my eyes were crusted shut obviously meant I’d shed some tears. Remembering my mother’s death always seemed to transport me back in time. The sickness took her so quickly that I didn’t even get to say goodbye to her, but I could still feel everything associated with that loss: the sadness, the shock and the bitter cold of winter. Especially the bitter cold of winter. I could still hear my father crying and my grandfather’s dispassionate voice telling me I had to be strong. They were not memories from ten years ago; the whole thing was all still going on in my head.

I shoved it all aside like I always did. I had classes to get to and work that was stubbornly not doing itself. Finals were looming and now I was going to have to schedule a meeting with Peter and my design team to present my father’s latest creation. It sucked that I was the only thing he ever made that wasn’t beautiful and brilliant.

I resisted the urge to go to his room and see if he was there. I knew he wouldn’t be. Instead I went down to the foyer to see if he took his coat and the bag of clean layers I packed for him.

The bag was gone.

He was lucid enough to take his things, but not enough to justify staying in the safety and shelter of his home. I loved my father, but on these mornings when all that mattered to him was escape, I hated him.

And then I felt guilty for hating him.

I went to the kitchen and drank the last of the orange juice. I looked out the back plate glass window at the grand view of the muted gray lake. I stood surrounded by eleven thousand square feet of beautiful emptiness looking out over a cold empty world.

I was alone.

~ ~

My first class was English Lit. I loved the subject, and I had a great professor, but I dreaded this class. There was a girl who spent more time looking at me than taking notes or listening to the topics. I made a very serious effort to avoid looking at her, but from the glimpses I’d gotten, I thought she was pretty which made the whole situation even worse. She had light brown hair and long fingers. I don’t know why the fingers mattered to me. They just seemed delicate, like her touch would be gentle.

I felt like a car wreck whenever I was near her. I felt like I was the horrific scene she couldn’t look away from. I didn’t even know her name, nor did I try to find out. I got out of that room as quickly as I could because every time I dared to glance at her I regretted never meeting her, never trying. I mean, I could have, but what would be the point when my fate was tied to some tattered old book and the girl hiding in its pages.

And what would a girl like that want with me anyway? If awkwardness was an Olympic event, I would be the world record holder. I’d never had a girlfriend. Three months shy of twenty-one and I’d never kissed a woman. Well, there was that one time, at that technology expo, but that wasn’t really kissing, and she definitely was not a girlfriend. She was looking to land a rich guy; she wound up sleeping with a teenage boy.

I wondered if her friends told her. I wondered if they’d had a good laugh about it.

My life sucked.

Anyway, I sat in class hunched over my notebook. She sat where she always sat. I avoided her eyes and sunk a little deeper into my angst. Why was I waiting? I wondered for about the millionth time. I didn’t really wonder. I was just feeling particularly sullen because I was mad at my father and instead of listening to the lecture, my mind wandered back to when I sealed my fate:

"He won’t ever love anyone again, Jantzen, because like a lot of people, he believes true love only happens once."

"Does it?"

"How should I know? my grandfather snapped. Then he recovered himself. Probably. It’s what he thinks so that’s the problem: she was the only one."

"How’d he know she was the one?"

He shushed me with his finger to his lips and led me downstairs to his room. He pulled a worn black leather journal out of his bottom dresser drawer. "With this," he answered, stroking the cover gently and sighing.

"A book? Dad found Mom in a book?" I asked skeptically.

"It’s a journal. And yes, he found her in the pages."

"You’re just messing with me now."

He glared at me for a second then looked down at the book. He didn’t look at me again when he started talking. Everyone supposedly has a perfect match out there somewhere. Somehow, this book knows how to find her. So if you write in here, she’ll answer.

"Wait, me? You think I should write in there? You think there is someone out there for me? I thought you were talking about Dad."

"Your father found his person. There isn’t another one to answer him. Your person is still out there, if you want to know her."

"So everything he wrote to Mom is in that book?"

"No, he answered, flipping the pages open in front of me. You get one day. Whatever you write will be there for one day, then the pages will look just like this again."

"Why? Why does the writing go away?"

My grandfather laughed. "I haven’t a clue, Kid. It’s yours now, if you want it that is."

What kid could resist a magic book? I had to take it.

But I didn’t realize then that it was a cruel trap.

~ ~

My classes were back to back to back, and that meant I had enough time to sulk about my life and be pissed at my father, but not enough time to go check on him. It was not quite eleven o’clock. I hadn’t eaten anything. My father was right; I wasn’t eating enough. It was making my already sharp features even more pronounced in an even less attractive way. Seriously, I could have used a solid twenty pounds on my skeletal frame, but the stress and self-loathing tended to keep my appetite at