Julia's Daughters

by Colleen Faulkner

  I sit down on the edge of the couch next to him. It’s funny, at a time like this, you would think I’d be loud. Accusatory. I’m neither. When I speak, I sound very calm. “Your mom cornered me in the bathroom. In the bathroom, Ben. She walked right in on me.”

  He groans. “I’m sorry. I know she’s not always good with boundaries. She means well. It’s just that she’s worried to death about Haley.”

  I don’t think Linda does mean well, but I don’t say so. I learned a long time ago to pick my fights and that isn’t my fight tonight.

  “She just wants what’s best for Haley,” Ben goes on. “Anything she says, she says—”

  “She said you were having an affair,” I blurt.

  “What?” He grabs the remote off the end table between us, knocking over an empty beer bottle.

  I pick up the beer bottle. He hits the mute button. An enormous dam fills the TV screen, making it brighter in the living room.

  “I am not having an affair, Jules.” He grabs my hand, which surprises me.

  I look into his face, wanting to believe him. The extra pounds aren’t doing anything for his rugged good looks, but when I look into his eyes, I still see the man I fell in love with all those years ago.

  “I swear to God I’m not,” Ben tells me. “What the hell would make her say such a thing?”

  My fingers curl around his. My first impulse is to believe him. Ben has his faults, but he’s not a liar. And he’s not good at lying. Early in our marriage, when he tried to get away with a few things, petty things, we both learned quickly that dishonesty wasn’t going to work for him.

  I exhale. So I believe him, but I don’t want to be stupid about this. There are plenty of wives who see only what they want to see. I don’t want to be that woman. I won’t be. “Why would she say such a thing if there’s no truth to it?” I ask, looking at him.

  I hear him swear under his breath. “She actually told you I was cheating on you?”

  I think about what was said in the bathroom tonight. “No,” I confess. “But she wanted me to think she was saying you were cheating on me, had cheated on me. Something like that. You know your mother. You know that thing she does, insinuating without actually coming out and saying it.”

  “I’m not, Jules.” He holds my gaze. “I’ve never cheated on you. Not in twenty years. I swear.” He frowns. “She was drunk. You know she was drunk.” Now a scowl. “What the hell were you talking about that such a thing even came up?”

  I’m too tired to look away. I want to, though. I don’t want to say it to his face. Admit it to him . . . because then I’ll be admitting it to myself. “The poor state of our marriage. I think it was her idea of a pep talk. She was telling me how your dad cheated on her and they were able to get through it and make the marriage work.”

  “Maybe she just meant we could get through this, you know, losing Caitlin.”

  “Maybe.” I glance at the TV. We both do.

  There’s a commercial with a woman and a man in a convertible looking romantically into each other’s eyes. I wonder why the erectile dysfunction advertisements always feature young women and older men.

  “But why would she even insinuate such a thing, if there was no truth to it?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know, Jules.”

  “Have you been flirting with someone? At work? A client? Maybe someone flirting with you?”

  He’s still shaking his head. “Nothing like that. Me, cheating on you? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I would never do that. You know me, Jules.” He sounds hurt now. “You know I would never do something like that.”

  “It was a lot of information crammed into one bathroom,” I tell him. “She also said that she told you not to marry me. That she warned you our marriage would never last.”

  He groans, closes his eyes, and runs his hand over his face. But he’s still holding on to my hand. And I feel a tiny glimmer of hope. I’ve felt so far removed from Ben, from our marriage, for so long. I’d forgotten what the intimacy of talking together in a dark room could be like. It’s actually kind of funny that the accusation that he’s been cheating on me is what brings this about.

  He lowers his hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. It was her birthday. She had too much to drink. You know she has a mean streak when she has too much to drink.”

  I look at him. We’ve been married long enough for him to know what I’m thinking. We’ve had this discussion about his mother’s drinking before. Many times before. Either he denies she has a drinking problem or he says there’s nothing anyone can do about it until she’s ready to admit she has a problem. Either way, it’s a dead subject between us.

  “That was mean of her to tell me that.” I press my lips together. “I don’t know why she wants to hurt me, Ben.” My voice catches. “Doesn’t she know how much I’m already hurting?” Tears fill my eyes, but, thankfully, they don’t spill over. I don’t want to cry. I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of feeling the way I feel.

  “Come here,” Ben whispers, pulling on my hand.

  I sort of climb into his lap and lay my head on his shoulder. He wraps his arms around me and just holds me. We used to do this all the time; I can’t remember when the last time was.

  “You didn’t have sex with another woman?” I whisper.

  “Think about it logically for a second. With whom? When? You know what kind of hours I work. I know. With Margie,” he teases.

  Margie is one of the women who work in the front office at the Maxton lawn-care business. She’s pushing seventy-five and has a mouth like a dockworker. I can’t bring myself to laugh, but I smile. “Oh, Ben.”

  He kisses my temple. Not exactly a romantic overture, but it’s the most physical we’ve been in a while and it feels good. It makes me feel like I’m still alive. Like I want to be.

  “You’ve lost weight,” he whispers, curling his hand around my hip and down over my butt. “You need to start eating. Keep up your strength.”

  “It’s not like I couldn’t stand to lose a few pounds,” I murmur.

  He sighs and strokes my back. I close my eyes.

  “We still haven’t talked about Haley,” Ben says after a few moments of silence. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do with her.”

  I lie there with my eyes closed, curled up in a ball on his lap. “I know. I just can’t—I don’t—” I take a deep breath. “Whether it’s the best thing for Haley or not, Ben, I . . . I can’t let her go. I can’t send her to Switzerland to school.”

  “Switzerland? What the hell are you talking about?”

  I open my eyes to see him looking down at me. “Izzy’s idea. She wants to go skiing in the Alps.”

  “I still have no idea what we’re talking about.”

  I sigh and close my eyes again, resting my head on his shoulder. I can smell the beer on his breath, but I don’t mind. “I’m not sending Haley to boarding school. There’s no way I can do that, but Linda might be right in suggesting that Haley needs a change of scenery.”

  “What? A vacation?” He sounds ticked. Just like that and the gentleness in his voice is gone. “She gets kicked out of school for drug possession and we’re going to go on a European vacation? I can’t get away from work, Jules. You know this time of year is bad. It’s spring and—”

  “Ben,” I interrupt. “I wasn’t thinking about taking Haley on a vacation.” I sit up. Now I’m a little ticked. We’re never on the same page anymore. Why are we never on the same page? What would make him think I think a vacation is a solution? Does he not know me any better than that? And why does the conversation move so quickly from the serious problem with our daughter to his work and what he can’t do?

  I give myself a second because I know that getting angry with Ben isn’t going to help us come up with a plan on how to help Haley. “I was talking to Laney and . . . she suggested sending Haley to stay with her. I can’t do that. I wouldn’t do that to Laney, but maybe .
. .” I’m thinking out loud now. “Maybe Haley and I should . . . I don’t know. Go see Laney.”

  “What? Fly out for a weekend or something?”

  “I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.” His arms aren’t around me anymore and I feel awkward. I climb clumsily out of his lap and turn to face him. “Probably longer than that. Or . . . we could drive.”

  He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Drive three thousand miles to Maine?”

  “It’s twenty-eight hundred,” I say. “I checked on Google Maps.”

  “You’ve never made a cross-country trip like that. No. I wouldn’t be comfortable with that.” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t sound like a good idea, Jules.” He thinks for a minute. “And what about Izzy? It would take you at least a week to drive cross-country. What would you do with Izzy?”

  “I wouldn’t do anything with Izzy. She’d just stay here with you. Go to school like she does every day.”

  “I can’t be taking her to her tae kwon do lessons and stuff like that. That’s why we agreed you’d only work part-time. So you can do that kind of stuff.”

  I rest my hands on my hips. “It’s not like I’ve done anything for the last two months.”

  He just sits there, looking at me.

  “If we did this, Izzy could just skip her lessons. Or get a ride with Ann’s mom. Your mom could help out.” I warn him with a finger. “As long as she lays off the afternoon cocktail.”

  He looks at me, shaking his head. “I don’t know, Jules. When I said we needed to talk about Haley, I was thinking more along the lines of . . . does she need to go to drug rehab? Do we put her right back in school? Get a tutor? What?”

  I exhale. Stare at the floor. He’s in his stocking feet. He’s left his boots in the laundry room, the way he usually does. There’s a hole in his sock. A big one. Big enough so that his toe is sticking out. “I don’t think she has a drug problem, Ben. She might be doing some drugs, but I don’t think that’s her problem.”

  “Based on what?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. My gut instinct? My . . . mom instinct?”

  The look on his face tells me he’s not buying it.

  “I was just thinking that maybe if we spent some time together, away from her friends, away from school, we could . . . talk.” I push my hair back, looking past him. “Maybe it would be good for me, too, Ben. To get away. Because we both know”—I force myself to look at my husband—“we know I can’t go on this way. Our lives can’t go on this way.”

  “And you think driving alone in a car with Haley will help you do what? Deal with Caitlin’s death?”

  I fight the tears. The pain that threatens to swallow me up. “Maybe,” I whisper. “Maybe it will help us . . . maybe we can find our way back.”

  “Find your way back to where?”

  The way he says it makes me feel foolish. Naïve. He’s right. It’s a bad idea. What makes me think Haley would get in a car and ride across the country with me, anyway? It’s all I can do to get her to ride to her grandmother’s. “It’s just something to think about,” I say, feeling a little defeated. “A possibility.”

  I stand there for a minute, looking at him. Him looking at me. The closeness I felt with him a few minutes ago is gone. Or maybe it was never there.

  “I think I’m going to go to bed.” I motion in the direction of our bedroom. “You coming?”

  “Maybe in a little while.” He picks up the remote. “I’m not tired yet. But you go on.” He points the remote toward the TV and the volume begins to come up.

  I stand there for a second, considering begging him to come to bed with me. Not to have sex. Just so I don’t have to be alone. Just to curl up against each other. Hold each other. But if he doesn’t want to hold me, doesn’t want to be with me, that kind of makes me a little pathetic, doesn’t it? To still want him?

  I walk out of the living room, fighting my tears that seem like a different kind tonight.

  Chapter 14

  Haley

  49 days, 13 hours

  I shuffle into the kitchen Sunday morning . . . Sunday afternoon, technically. It’s almost one o’clock. The house is quiet. Dad’s already gone to work; he catches up on paperwork at the office on Sundays, supposedly. I think he just says that so he doesn’t have to hang out with us. Mom’s probably lying in her bed crying because her favorite daughter is gone. I don’t know where the sister brat/girl genius is. Maybe at Mass. She goes with her friend sometimes, which is kind of funny because we’re not Catholic. We’re not anything. Mom’s stepdad was some kind of Holy Roller. After Mom left home, she never went to church again. She never took us to church.

  Which suits me fine.

  I go to the fridge. There’s not much in it, but there’s milk. In the pantry, I find a box of cereal and grab a bowl and a spoon. I carry it all to the breakfast table under the window. There’s a bird in the bush outside looking right at me. It hops from branch to branch, watching me. I wonder what kind of bird it is. If Caitlin was here, she’d google gray bird with pale yellow belly in eastern Mojave Desert. She did silly stuff like that all the time. If she were here right now, she’d figure out what kind of bird it is and then she’d read the Wikipedia description to me while we ate our cereal.

  I actually consider going to her room and getting her iPad and trying to figure out what it is. Then I realize that’s stupid. If Caitlin were here, it would be fun because it would be my little sister Caitlin and she made everything fun. But me sitting here alone? That’s just stupid.

  I’m halfway through my bowl of slightly stale Golden Grahams when Izzy comes into the kitchen. My chubby youngest sister is wearing running shorts, a T-shirt, and her gym sneakers and she’s got her frizzy red hair in a high ponytail. Too high. I’ve never seen her dressed like this before. It’s not like she’s athletic or anything. She does take tae kwon do lessons, but I think that’s because she’s still at an age when our parents can force her to do things like play a sport because it’s healthy for preteens. It’s a bunch of bull. Playing a sport when you’re not athletically inclined doesn’t make you healthier; it makes you feel like a bigger loser than you already are. Caitlin was the athlete in the family. I haven’t played a sport or taken a lesson since the seventh grade when I quit club softball because I sucked so bad.

  I think about asking Izzy what she’s doing in the getup, but I decide not to waste my breath. She won’t answer me. She hasn’t spoken to me since Caitlin died. I know she thinks the accident was my fault. Which it totally was. And she thinks that if I hadn’t been driving, Caitlin wouldn’t be dead right now. Which is also probably true. But she doesn’t know the whole story. I wish I could tell her. I wish I could tell someone. Then maybe everyone wouldn’t hate me quite so much. But what would be the point? Caitlin would still be dead. So I might as well let everyone go on thinking she was perfect.

  I stir my cereal with my spoon and watch the little bird outside the window. It’s still flitting around from branch to branch, looking at me. I wonder if it can see through the glass. Or is there a reflection and it’s really interested in itself and not me?

  I can hear Izzy at the refrigerator. She’s getting her orange juice. Dad bought the wrong kind again. When I make the grocery list, I’ll have to write in bold or maybe circle “no pulp” so he won’t screw it up again. Izzy never asks for anything from anyone. He could at least get the right damned juice for her.

  “There’s a bird out here looking at me,” I say. I move my spoon in front of the window, but the bird doesn’t react. It must not be able to see through the glass or it would have flown away. Or it’s a crazy bird and it’s about to fly into the glass and commit hara-kiri. “See it? It’s kind of pretty.”

  I hear Izzy chugging the juice. Guess she doesn’t hate it with pulp too much or she wouldn’t be guzzling it, would she?

  “It’s gray with a little bit of green on its back. And its belly is a really pale yellow.” I don’t look at Izzy because I know if I do, she’ll prob
ably walk away. I don’t want her to go. Even if she won’t talk to me, I just want to hang out in the kitchen with her for a few minutes. I feel like people are always leaving the room I’m in. I mean, who wants to hang out with a sister-killer?

  “I was just thinking,” I say, my voice sounding weird in my ears, “that if Caitlin were here, she’d google what kind of bird it is.” I kind of laugh a little. “You remember how she was always googling weird stuff? Like . . . can you eat an armadillo. Or how many M&Ms are the in a one pound bag of peanut butter M&Ms.” I finally glance at Izzy because I’m beginning to feel pretty dumb talking to the room. She’s writing something on a notepad on the counter.

  I watch her put the pen down and take the jug of juice back to the refrigerator. She goes into the laundry room and out the back door without once looking in my direction.

  So we sit there, the bird and me. I finish my cereal. I’m just getting up from the table when Mom comes into the kitchen. She looks like she just woke up too.

  “Good morning,” she says. Her hair is sticking out all crazy. She looks like she’s already been crying.

  “Morning,” I answer, walking away from the table. I don’t know what I’m going to do today. No homework. Which is a good thing about getting expelled from school, I guess. But now what do I do? I usually do homework on Sundays. Or hang out with my friends. I’m pretty sure I’m grounded. I could go out the window again, I guess, but I’m kind of lying low. Dodge has been calling me and texting me so I blocked him on my phone. Luckily, I never told him where I lived. Who’s the smart one now, Caitlin?

  I take the ball out of the little pocket of my sleep boxers. I bounce it gently, just hard enough so that it pops back into my hand. I’m getting good at it. I know just how much pressure to exert on a particular surface to make it come right back into my hand.

  Mom leans on the counter, a coffee mug in her hand, and reads the note. “Izzy went running?” She glances at the clock on the microwave. “She just left? Since when does she run?”