Julia's Daughters

by Colleen Faulkner

“The signs have all been there for weeks, Ben. We just didn’t see it because . . .” I don’t finish my sentence. I don’t want him to think I think this is his fault because, honestly, it’s more my fault than his. I’m her mother. I’m her mother and I should have seen past my own pain. I should have seen hers. “The problems at school—”

  “The drugs,” he injects.

  “The other self-destructive behavior. We should have seen it for what it was—symptoms of her . . . attempt to deal with Caitlin’s death.”

  He’s still pacing. He reaches the bathroom door, turns, and walks back toward me. “I guess we need to find a psychologist, psychiatrist, something for her? I know the bereavement counselor was a disaster, but maybe . . . I don’t know. Someone else? There’s got to be other people who deal with this sort of thing. Professionals.”

  I exhale, trying to organize my thoughts that are flying in so many directions at the same time. I know the logical answer is to get her professional help immediately, but . . . but I’m not sure that’s the right answer here.

  I understand Haley’s resistance to a doctor . . . or counseling. Her association with the accident makes sense. It’s not enough reason in itself, but I have my own personal experience with counseling when I was a teen. I saw a psychologist, at my stepfather’s insistence, when I was Haley’s age. My stepfather thought there was something wrong with me: I was moody, I resisted his authority, I resented my mother for listening to him, for marrying him. The counseling hadn’t been helpful, in fact it had made me angrier and driven a wedge deeper between my mother and me.

  My instincts, at this moment, tell me that dragging Haley to a counselor she doesn’t know tomorrow morning isn’t going to help her. I’m not opposed to having her see someone, my instincts just tell me that’s not the right thing to do right this minute.

  But what do I do? I have to do something.

  Those couple of minutes I sat on the kitchen floor holding Haley, I felt connected to her. At least to her pain. I need to figure out how to do that again, on a level where we can talk. Where I can help her work through the emotions I know must be overwhelming her. Hell, I’m forty-two and they’re obviously overwhelming me. I’ve been lying in bed for two months staring at a ceiling fan.

  I look up at Ben, who’s come to stand in front of me. He’s obviously upset, but I feel like he’s angry, too. Angry with me for calling him home from work. Or maybe angry with Haley for causing all of this commotion on a Sunday afternoon. I don’t know which. I don’t know if I care right now.

  “She needs to get away from here,” I hear myself say. As I speak the words, my conviction becomes stronger. I stand and look up at him, forcing him to make eye contact with me. We rarely make eye contact anymore. “I’m going to take her to Maine to see Laney. We’re going to drive to Maine.”

  “Is this about you thinking I’m having an affair, Jules? Because if it is—”

  “It’s not about that. I believe you.” And I really do. “This is about Haley. And I think the trip would do her good.”

  He turns away from me, shaking his head. “It’s a bad idea.”

  “Why? Why is it a bad idea? You’ve been worried about the influence her friends are having on her. Obviously we don’t want her near that dope dealer. This would be a good way to get her away from them. And maybe she needs a break from this house, from . . . I don’t know . . . Caitlin.”

  Ben scowls. “So you’re just going to get in the car and drive to Maine? And leave Izzy here?”

  “I can’t take Izzy with me. She has school. And . . .” Now I’m pacing and he’s watching me. “Maybe if we’re alone, Haley and I can use the time in the car to talk.”

  “Talk?” He practically scoffs at me. “When has Haley ever listened to anything we’ve had to say?”

  “I don’t care.” I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter. I have to try.”

  “So you’re going to drive across the country?”

  I don’t answer. I just said that.

  He gazes off into space for a minute and then he looks at me again. “And how are you going to convince her this is a good idea if you can’t convince me?”

  “I’m not giving her a choice.” I go to my closet because I feel like I need to do something with my hands. I pull a duffel bag out of the back, unzip it, and toss it on the bed. I go to my dresser.

  He’s watching me, looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. And maybe I have a little bit. I’m not exactly a spontaneous person. I plan family vacations for six months. I always make a grocery list. I plan my errand trips so I don’t have to backtrack. But I used to be spontaneous, a long time ago, before I became a parent and thought there was no place for impulsiveness as a wife and mother.

  “I think we should call Dr. Pullman,” Ben says. “I don’t think you should go anywhere until you talk to him. He can have a look at her, you know, her arm.”

  “Her pediatrician? The cuts aren’t infected. It’s not the cuts I’m worried about, Ben. They’ll heal. I’m worried about her—” My voice catches in my throat. I’m worried about what? Her heart? Her soul?

  “Yeah, but Dr. Pullman can tell us who she should see. Who we can take her to.”

  I don’t know how to explain this to Ben, maybe because I don’t understand it myself, but I know, on some fundamental level, that I need to take this trip with Haley. I know I need to get her in my car, far from her home and her friends. Then she’ll have to talk to me, won’t she?

  I grab a handful of underwear and two bras from the top drawer and walk across the bedroom to throw them in the bag. I go back to the dresser and open the next drawer. A couple of T-shirts, long-sleeve and short. All neatly folded. I don’t even look to see which ones they are. I wear the same thing most days: a cotton V-neck shirt in green or blue, jeans, loafers this time of year. By May, I’ll be in shorts and flip-flops. Same T-shirts. My uniform, Caitlin used to call it.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this, Jules. This is . . . it’s—”

  “It’s what?” I drop the shirts in the bag and go to the third drawer. Jeans this time of year for the East. It will still be cold in Maine. Especially at night. I pull out a pair. In the bottom drawer, I grab a green sweater that was once Ben’s favorite. I’ve had it for years. He liked it because it was the same color as my eyes.

  “It’s insane, Jules, that’s what it is. And . . .” He brushes at the hair that’s fallen across his forehead. “And foolish. Dangerous.”

  I hold the sweater to my chest. “Dangerous? How so?”

  “A woman and a teenage girl alone in a car? What if . . . if you break down?”

  Now he’s just being ridiculous. Does he really think I’m incapable of driving twenty-eight hundred miles? “I’ll call triple A,” I say.

  “And where are you going to stay?”

  I struggle not to be a smart-ass. I can’t make this about stuff between the two of us. It has to be about Haley. About our daughter. “At hotels, of course.” I walk around him to add the sweater to the growing pile in the duffel bag.

  He’s just standing there shaking his head.

  “I’ve made up my mind, Ben. I think it would be good for Haley. And it can’t make things worse, can it?”

  He’s frowning. “What if she tries to take off? Because I can tell you, she’s really, really not going to like the idea of this.”

  “I don’t care what she wants. She’s going. We’re going to Maine.”

  “And then what?”

  I sit on the bed and throw up my hands. “I don’t know. We’ll hang out with Laney for a couple of days. We’ll . . . go to that pizza place Haley likes in Portland. Go canoeing. Take walks. Whatever she wants to do. She likes Maine.”

  “And after your vacation you’ll just come home and we’ll go back to our life?”

  I fall back on the bed, my feet still on the floor, and stare at the ceiling fan for a minute. “I don’t know. I guess.” My throat and eyes get scratchy, but I don’t cry. Have my tears
finally dried up?

  He surprises me by sitting down next to me on the bed. I close my eyes for a second and then I sit up. “When Haley and Caitlin were toddlers, we used to talk about moving to Maine and opening a sandwich shop. Remember?” I rest my cheek on his shoulder.

  Ben makes this amazing gooey sandwich that’s a combination grilled cheese and cheeseburger. The girls call it the Ben Burger. It’s morphed over the years as Ben refined his recipe and Caitlin became interested in healthy eating and insisted on using grass-fed beef and organic bread and cheese, but it’s still our favorite family meal.

  “You could sell your share of the lawn business and we could move to Maine,” I say wistfully.

  He doesn’t even hesitate. “That was talk. Dreaming. It’s not the real world, Jules.”

  I sigh. “I know,” I say. I press my hands to the tops of my skinny thighs. “So we’ll leave in the morning.”

  “You’re really going to do this?” He gets to his feet, leaving me on the bed.

  I think for a second, and then nod. “I’m really going to do it. I’m going to pack a few things, I’m going to call Laney, I’m going to write a letter of resignation.”

  “You’re resigning from your job? You’re not going back?”

  “The only reason Robert hasn’t fired me is because that would be in bad taste, firing a woman who took too much time to grieve for her dead daughter. I didn’t really like it anyway. I guess I’ll find a new job when I get back. It’s not like we really need the money.”

  “I thought you loved your job. You’ve been there almost three years.”

  Does anyone love doing accounting for a florist? “I never said I loved my job,” I tell him. He’s at the door now. On his way out. My guess is that he won’t stay here and help me break the news to Haley. I give him five minutes to be out the door. “I liked getting out of the house, Ben. I liked not spending my day cleaning the humidifier, organizing the hall closet, and waiting to pick up someone after school to take them to the orthodontist.”

  He rests his hand on the doorknob. “I never knew you didn’t like it.”

  “Not your fault. Mine.”

  He just stands there looking at me.

  “You going?” I finally ask, getting up and walking back to my dresser.

  “Um, yeah. I’ll be home after dinner at Mom’s.”

  “You . . . don’t think maybe you should come home?”

  “I already told Mom I’d be there. Izzy said she wasn’t going. Too much Nana for one weekend.”

  I don’t know which one of us turns away first.

  Chapter 17

  Haley

  49 days, 19 hours

  It’s after six o’clock when Mom taps on my door. I’ve been waiting for it, that knock that I know will be tentative. She won’t bang on my door, just like she won’t yell at me, because she feels sorry for me. Pities me.

  I wish she would bang on my door. I wish she’d kick it in.

  I’ve been sitting on the edge of my bed staring at my arm for a long time. I took the gauze pads off and it started bleeding because I pulled some of the scabs off with it. And now there are red welts where the tape was. The packing tape was probably a stupid idea. But it’s just one stupid thing I’ve done in a whole lifetime of stupid things.

  I haven’t been able to stop looking at my arm.

  I keep thinking, what the hell is wrong with me? Why would I do this to myself? Why would I keep doing it?

  I’m afraid I’m going crazy, that I’m becoming schizophrenic or something. We learned about schizophrenia in my psychology class last semester. It doesn’t usually hit people until their teenage or young adult years; I’m the right age to go skitzo. Of course, cutting’s not really a skitzo thing. Cutting’s about control when things are out of control. I googled it, in honor of Caitlin. According to WebMD or some other bullshit site, I’m cutting myself because I’m in so much pain. Which sounds counterproductive, even to me, and I’m the one doing it.

  I first started it in the ER after Caitlin died. Not the cutting. That came later. But that night, I kept pinching myself: my arm, my thigh. I was trying to wake myself up because, in those first few hours, I just knew it wasn’t real. I knew what was happening was a nightmare.

  If someone was going to die in that crash, it should have been me. For a hundred reasons. I remember that at one point while I was lying on a hospital gurney waiting for an X-ray that it actually crossed my mind that maybe I was the dead one and that the feeling that my heart was tearing into bits was part of some kind of purgatory or something. Not that I believe in that sort of crap, but I was definitely a little crazy in those first few hours, so nothing I thought surprises me.

  When pinching myself didn’t wake me up from the dream, I scratched myself with my fingernails. That was the day after she died. Or maybe the day after that. It didn’t work; I still didn’t wake up. And other people started bumping into my nightmare, forcing me to realize it wasn’t a dream, it was reality: Mom crying, funeral arrangements, Mom crying. People calling and coming to the house, all crying. Mom crying.

  Sometime that first week when I didn’t have Caitlin anymore, I realized that if I pinched myself or scratched myself really hard I felt . . . I don’t know. Better. The cutting kind of came out of that. Pinching and scratching made me feel better. Cutting made me feel even better. I stole a couple of Dad’s razor blades from the little cardboard pack in his bathroom. He uses an old-fashioned razor and a brush and soap. The razor blade makes a sharp, sweet pain and then the blood bubbles up. Somehow, somewhere in that burning sting, I can breathe again.

  I’m definitely crazy.

  Mom taps on the door again. It’s a sound that reminds me of a rodent scratching in the wall, somewhere.

  “Come in already!” I say loud and meaner.

  The door swings open. I don’t pull my sleeve down. What’s the point? She’s already seen it.

  “Hey,” she says.

  I sigh loudly.

  She comes over and sits beside me, not touching me, but so close I can smell her mom smell. It makes me feel better, which makes me angry and I don’t even know why. Now I feel like I’m going to cry, which in turn makes me even angrier.

  “Your dad and I have been talking,” she says. Her voice is gentle and controlled. I don’t know how she’s so calm. If I were my kid, I’d be losing my shit about now.

  I don’t say anything. I just sit there anticipating the whole counseling conversation: psychologist, psychiatrist. I’m so batshit crazy, maybe they want to hire both. In another state, if Dad has his way.

  He and Linda were whispering last night; only she was so drunk that her whispering was louder than Mom’s version of hollering. Linda wants Dad to send me to boarding school somewhere. She even had brochures for him that she left on his desk at work. She said she’d pay. I think she’d pay a lot to get rid of me. I wouldn’t even put it past her to hire a hit man to kill me, I’m making such a mess of her family.

  Mom looks at my arm and a sadness passes over her face that makes me sad. It makes me wish I wasn’t being such a jerk and had pulled my sleeve over my ugliness.

  “We’ve been talking,” she says, “and—”

  “You said that,” I interrupt.

  She looks down at her bare feet, then at me. “And I think you need to get away from here.”

  “I’m not going to any freakin’ boarding school.” I spring off my bed.

  I was talking to my old boyfriend, Todd, earlier. After the kitchen fiasco. He’s a total dickhead, but we kind of hooked up again after Caitlin died. Not because I like him any better, but just because he doesn’t act any different around me now than he did pre-dead sister. And he knows I cut myself so I don’t have to hide it the way I have to with Marissa or Cassie. He’s been telling me for weeks that we ought to take off, him and me and leave this shit show called our lives behind. He has a brother who works on the Alaska pipeline. He said we could probably stay with him for a few weeks. T
odd was thinking about going anyway. He said he wasn’t feeling the whole community-college thing. We actually talked about opening a coffee shop in Alaska. We’ve talked about it before. But Todd doesn’t know exactly where his brother lives so I don’t know how feasible that plan would be. Especially since Todd is probably the laziest person I’ve ever known in my life.

  But if Mom and Dad are sending me to boarding school, Todd and I are hitting the road for sure.

  “I’m not talking about boarding school, Haley.” Mom looks at me like she’s afraid to say what she’s going to say. “We’ve decided that you and I are going to take a trip. A road trip.”

  I look at her like she’s lost her mind, mostly because I think maybe she has. But also because that’s kind of what’s expected of me, the crazy girl who cuts herself. A girl like me, angry, defiant.

  “We’re going to drive to Maine,” Mom says.

  “I’m not going to Maine in a car with you.” I shove down the sleeve of my T-shirt. “No way.”

  She gets up off my bed. “Actually, you are going, Haley. Your father and I decided.”

  I make a face of disdain. (Disdain is a word Caitlin would have liked.) “Dad decided? I didn’t know Dad decided anything except for whose lawn gets mowed when.”

  Mom walks toward the door. “I’m not going to argue with you, Haley. You need to get out of here for a little while and I think I do too. So we’re doing it together. It’s not up for discussion.”

  I rub the bumps on my arm. It hurts, but I need the pain. I’m not going with her. There’s no way I’m going to get locked up in a car with my mother for days. I can’t stand listening to her cry for five minutes. A couple of days and I’ll be wanting to throw myself out of the moving car.

  “I’m not going, Mom.” I rub the cuts hard enough to make them hurt. I feel warm blood under my thumb. “You can’t make me go.” I take a step back from her, feeling panicky.

  “Actually, I can make you go.” She surprises me with the firmness in her voice. I keep expecting her to burst into tears, but so far, she hasn’t. So far, I’ve been the one crying today.