My Boyfriend Gave Me A Necklace And Strange Things Have Been Happening Ever Since (Part 3)

Read Part One Here
Read Part Two Here

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For our one-year anniversary, my boyfriend gave me a necklace as a gift. For the two and a half weeks that followed, strange things had been happening to me. I began hearing the disembodied voice of a man saying my name. I also started to see things, just catching movement out of the corner of my eye. Then, there was the night I saw a figure crouching in the corner of the living room as I drank myself to sleep and passed out on the couch (can you blame me?). Things escalated pretty quickly, and I actually ran out of my house in my bathrobe on the day that the voice started singing along to a song I was humming while I was in the shower. Of course, that was before I noticed the name, SAM, written in the steam on the mirror of the medicine cabinet when I tried to confront the presence and ask him who he was.

My boyfriend managed to catch me before I drove off in my frantic state of mind, and convinced me to go back into the house with him while he checked it for an intruder. Of course, he didn’t find anyone and when I tried to explain how I thought it was all connected to the necklace somehow, he dismissed the whole thing. He cleaned me up and calmed me down, then persuaded me to take a nap with him. He promised he would stay with me and be right next to me when I woke up, but that turned out to be a lie.

He broke a lot of promises that night.

The one he broke that hurt the most was the promise of sobriety when he woke me up that night by banging on my front door, completely drunk. He ended up grabbing the necklace and dragging me across the front lawn and into the car with him. He wanted to take a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Chicago with me, to visit the place where he had gotten the necklace and find out more about it.

While we were on the freeway, the radio started playing by itself, and we couldn’t shut the damn thing off. We grew more frantic as the music progressively got louder, and we ended up getting into a car accident and landing ourselves in the hospital, where I woke up two days later and received an unexpected visit from Jesse’s mother. As it turned out, Jesse didn’t buy the necklace at all, he had stolen it from his mother, Mary, who lived in Chicago. Also, the necklace wasn’t just any necklace. It was a memorial necklace, containing some of the ashes of Jesse’s deceased older brother, Sam, who he didn’t even know he had. Apparently, when Jesse’s father died in a car accident before Jesse was even born, he wasn’t alone in the car.

“He wasn’t alone,” Mary repeated, as she walked back over to the chair beside my hospital bed and sat down.

“What happened?” I asked, eager to know the truth.

“I haven’t even told any of this to Jesse,” she cried, grabbing another fist full of tissue out of the box I was holding.

“If I tell you, you have to promise me you won’t tell him. I need him to hear it from me.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “Please, tell me! I need to know what is going on.”

Mary took a deep breath, then put the necklace on and closed her eyes.

“I was 14 years old when David and I discovered I was pregnant with Sam. I had him at 15, and David and I got married.” She wrapped her hand around the necklace and smiled. “He was the center of our whole world.”

I grabbed some tissues and blew my nose. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“It was the night of Sam’s 21st birthday,” Mary continued, “He had come home for that weekend to spend it with us. At the time, I didn’t drink. My husband wanted to take Sam out and celebrate with him. David swore he was only going to have one drink so he wouldn’t be too out of shape to drive home. Well, things got out of hand. They were gone for a long time, and I ended up falling asleep on the couch, waiting for them.”

It was her turn to grab a tissue from the box.

“That night, there was a storm. Nothing spectacular or anything, but the winds were strong enough to bring a tree branch down, right on our power lines. David knew he messed up and drank a bit too much to trust himself behind the wheel, so he and Sam tried to call me from a payphone outside of the bar to come and pick them up. Of course, they couldn’t get through to me because our lines were dead. So, David decided to risk it. He knew he was less intoxicated than Sam so he would be the safer choice behind the wheel.” Mary sighed, then stared longingly at the clock on the wall.

“I wish I could go back in time and stop them from ever leaving the house that night. Of course, I had no way of knowing that neither of them would ever return.”

“And Jesse?”

“Oh, I didn’t even find out I was pregnant with Jesse until a week after the funerals. I thought the nausea and morning sickness were just symptoms of my grief. It was David’s brother, Roy, who suggested I go to the doctor and be tested.” Mary grabbed another fist full of tissue. “I tried so hard. I just didn’t have it in me anymore. I was nearly 37 by the time Jesse was born, and I was so tired. I was exhausted from grieving and the pregnancy. I didn’t plan to have another child. To be honest, had David lived, I’m not sure I would have kept the baby. But with both of them gone, I felt obligated to hold on to the one piece of my family that I had left. David had wanted to name Sam after his childhood best friend, Jesse, who had passed away overseas, but I didn’t like the name at the time. But when Jesse was born, I honored David by naming our second son Jesse David, even though he would never get the chance to meet him.”

Mary started sobbing into her hands.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to say.”

“And the worst part was, the older Jesse got, the more and more he started looking like Sam. I fell into a horrible depression and by the time he was five years old, I couldn’t handle it. I turned to the bottle as a way of trying to cope. But then I couldn’t seem to put it back down. The next seven or eight years are just a blur. I was consumed by the one thing that took my husband and first son away from me. And then, because of it, Jesse was taken away from me, too. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry-“

“Sam was in the car with us that night,” I interrupted.

“What?”

“It was Sam,” I repeated, “Sam fucked with the radio. It was the radio that distracted me from putting on my seatbelt. Sam saved my life, but also caused the collision. I think Jesse saw him in the back seat, through the rearview mirror. That is what distracted him and caused him to lose control of the car.”

“I-I believe you,” Mary cried, “I’ve been seeing Sam for years. For years, and then this necklace came up missing, and he went with it.”

She unfastened the necklace and took it off to examine it, as if seeing it for the first time.

“I scattered the rest of Sam in a lake near our home in Colorado, by his request. His father was buried in the town cemetery. After the accident and finding out I was pregnant, I moved to Chicago to be closer to my own family. This necklace, what’s inside of it, is all I have left of Sam.”

Mary and I sat in silence for a few minutes, just staring at the damn necklace, and trying to understand everything that had been happening. It was a lot to take it. It was then that my mother returned with a bag of takeout under her arm. Mary excused herself when my mother tried to offer her some food and left the room.

Three days later, a nurse came into my room with a wheelchair.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

The nurse smiled and helped me move off of the bed and into the chair.

“It’s Jesse,” she said, “He’s awake, and he asked to see you.”

“HE’S AWAKE? Is he okay?”

The nurse laughed. “He’s been awake for about an hour. He’s a little groggy, but we ran some tests and he appears to be okay. He’s a little loopy from the medication, so don’t be alarmed.”

The nurse wheeled me down the hall, and around the corner to the room at the end. My heart was racing as we entered the room, but nearly stopped when I caught a glimpse of his mother, sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, staring at the floor as if she were in some state of shock. Something was very, very wrong.

The nurse at Jesse’s side smiled at me, “You must be Jesse’s girl!”

My nurse wheeled me to the other side of Jesse’s bed.

Jesse turned his head toward me and smiled weakly. He looked just fine. Highly-medicated, and in a cast, but overall, he looked fine. I eased myself up out of my chair, and leaned over him slowly, attempting to be cautious of my bruised ribs. He stared at me with those bright blue eyes. I took his hand and pulled it toward my mouth and kissed it, no longer able to fight back the tears. I was so glad he was okay. We both just stayed still, staring at each other for a moment. For one stitch in time, everything felt like it was going to be okay.

But then, he spoke.

“Charlieeeeeee,” He whispered, in an eerily familiar voice. A voice that didn’t sound like Jesse at all.

“S-Sam?” I choked.

I quickly pulled my hand away from his and noticed for the first time that he had been holding the necklace.

He grabbed a chunk of my hair and pulled me close to his face.

“You know, I wish… that I had… Jessie’s girl,” he sang softly into my ear.

“LET GO!” I screamed.

“Where can I find a woman like that?”

The nurses ran to my side of the bed and pulled me away from him.

“I’m so sorry sweetheart, he is heavily medicated right now! Maybe you should come back later.”

He winked at me as my nurse helped me back into my wheelchair and quickly wheeled me to the door. I stared in wide-eyed horror as his mother, who was still sitting in the chair and staring at the floor, as I exited the room.

It has been a week since my mother and Jesse’s uncle Roy had me admitted here. I finally got to leave one hospital, only to be hauled off to another one. Of course, this one is for broken minds rather than broken bones.

I guess I finally snapped after Jesse’s mother threw herself off of the roof of the hospital, that day after I went to see Jesse. She knew the truth. She heard the same voice that I did, coming from Jesse. She knew it wasn’t Jesse.

She knew.

I wish she was here with me. She is the only one who understands. My therapist gave me this journal and asked me to write in it. He said I could write about anything I wanted. Well, I figured the truth was a good place to start.

I know they won’t believe me. Nobody believes me.

I don’t even care anymore.

I just wish I could get that fucking song out of my head…