by Jessi Kirby
From what I can see, it’s also a lonely life. There are no pictures in frames, no postcards on the refrigerator. No evidence that her existence here and now is anything but solitary. I think of Orion in his café, alone, hiding behind walls of work and art, and it strikes me—the sad, poetic kind of symmetry of each of them without the other. The thought of it is enough to give me the resolve not to leave here without trying to set it right. Because I feel like I’m seeing one of the most tragic things in the world—when two people step away from the paths they’re traveling, and those paths go on to cross later, without them. They crossed again the day I found her journal, leaving me as the point of intersection, and I made a choice to try and bring them back together.
The whistle of the teakettle draws my eyes back to the kitchen where Julianna sets two mugs on the counter and pours steaming water into them. She drops a tea bag into each one, and pauses a moment before picking them up. Then she squares her small shoulders, carries both mugs to the sofa where I’m sitting, and sits opposite me, one leg folded beneath her.
I should say something, I know, but I have no voice. We pick up our cups, quiet, like we’re both trying to find the words to begin. Watching each other. She’s not anything like how I pictured, but she’s stunning just the same. Her high cheekbones are more apparent, the green of her eyes deeper than any of the pictures I’ve seen. Her hair is damp from the rain and hangs wavy and dark over her slight shoulders, which makes the streak of blond in the front leap out. In the open V of her tank top I can see a delicate, necklacelike tattoo over her collarbone. She reaches up to tuck the blond behind her ear with a ringed hand, and I catch a glimpse of a tiny bird inked onto her wrist. It reminds me of Orion with all of his tattoos, and I wonder if maybe they both found some sense of solace in having them done—another parallel they don’t even know about.
I take a sip from my cup and glance at her journal sitting on the coffee table between us. When we’d come into her apartment, she’d set it there and retreated to the kitchen like it was something that could hurt her, which I suppose it is. There’s so much contained in its pages. A whole life she disappeared from. The girl she used to be. A love she left behind. She looks at it now too, and though there are so many things I want to ask her, this moment feels fragile, and so I choose my words carefully.
I clear my throat. “It was in a box I was going through for Mr. Kinney. His senior journal project from ten years ago. From your class. I’m his TA. I was getting them ready to send out.” I take a deep breath and look down into my tea, dreading what I have to say next. “When I got to your name, I was . . . I didn’t know where to send it, and . . .”
In all the times I’d thought of finding her, I’d never anticipated how excruciatingly hard it would be to confess that I’d read her journal—words that were supposed to be hers alone, not meant for anyone else to see. It felt like a terrible trespass at the time, but now it feels far, far worse. Like something that can’t ever be taken back, or forgiven even.
The silence stretches tight between us, and I can feel her waiting for me to break it. “Um, I took it. And then . . .” The three words are heavy in my chest, and I have to force them out. “I read it.”
She takes a breath now, the kind you take in to keep from crying out when something hurts. The sound of it sends guilt coursing through every inch of me.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, looking down. “I never thought there was any possibility that you could still be . . . that you were even alive. I mean, there’s a billboard at the edge of town with your picture on it, and a memorial at Summit Lake, and there’s a scholarship at school that I was supposed to write a speech for, and . . .” I shake my head. “I know I shouldn’t have read it.”
I look back up at her, pleading with my eyes, and try to make her understand with my words. “I was seven when you disappeared, and I remember it like my grandma remembers when JFK got shot, or the way my parents remember that space shuttle exploding. Just like that, I remember how you disappeared, and how everyone went out into the storm looking for you. The whole town remembers.”
I pause, hoping my words aren’t making her feel guilty. I’m trying to keep myself from feeling guilty. “And so when I found your journal, with your words in it, I read it.” I pause and chance a look at Julianna. “I wanted to know who you really were.”
She laughs in a forced way that doesn’t have a trace of happiness to it. “I didn’t know who I was then. When I was writing all of that.” She looks at the journal like she remembers exactly what’s in it. It’s the first time I’ve heard her voice, and it’s so full of sadness I feel a lump in my own throat.
I swallow hard over it. “It seemed like you were just finding out,” I say, timidly. She nods, but I can tell she’s far away right then. Back there, maybe. Maybe thinking about Orion, wondering how it could’ve been different. I want so badly to tell her everything, all in one breath, but I hold it back. It seems important that I let her lead.
Finally, after what seems like forever, she speaks again. This time, she tries to keep her voice calm, but her eyes are full of fear. “How did you find me?”
This is the big moment. This is exactly the question I want to answer, because it’s why I’m here. Orion is why I’m here. The two of them being brought back together is why I’m here.
“Your painting,” I say. “Acquainted with the Night. It’s hanging on the wall of a café back home.” Her eyebrows rise in surprise. I nod. “I know. It seems crazy. That one of your paintings somehow ended up back there.” If she thinks it is, she doesn’t say so. And I realize, as I’m about to go on, that that’s not nearly the craziest thing I’m going to tell her.
“I recognized the spiral of the signature from the pages of your journal. You started putting it on them after . . .” We both glance at the composition book on the coffee table and she nods like she knows what I mean without me having to say it. She raises her cup to her lips, and I take a chance. I say it anyway. “After the day you wrote about Orion’s tattoo.”
She freezes at the sound of his name, and I can’t tiptoe around it anymore. I clear my throat. Again.
“It’s his café that your painting is hanging in. His café called Kismet, which is so perfect because it means fated. And he doesn’t even know. He has no idea it’s yours, but I saw it, and I knew.” The words spill out fast, landing haphazardly. Julianna’s not looking at me anymore. I keep going.
“He doesn’t go by Orion anymore, and he barely talks to anyone. He’s been there ever since you—since you disappeared. But he’s kind of a ghost, too. He came back to help look for you, and he’s been there ever since, and after I read your journal and figured out he was who he was, I asked him about you.” Now she looks at me, and when she does, I see something in her eyes besides sadness and regret. She’s gone white, and the teacup, still at her lips, begins to tremble.
I reach out and take it gently from her. Her hands fall to her lap, but she keeps her eyes on mine. “He doesn’t know,” I say quickly. “He doesn’t know you’re here, or that I came to find you, or any of it. I didn’t want to get his hopes up until I knew for sure because—” I stop, realizing that I was wrong seconds ago, thinking it was the big moment. It’s now. It’s what I’m about to say.
“Because?” she whispers.
“Because he still loves you. He’s never gotten over you. He went back hoping to find you, and he’s been there ever since, and he’s sad. He’s alone, and sad, because he’s loved a ghost for the last ten years.”
She lets out a breath and looks down at her hands in her lap. They’re paint speckled, just like she wrote about his being, and I want to point it out to her, how perfect that one thing is. She’s crying now, and I’m sure they’re happy tears, because after what she wrote, and after finding her living the same kind of sad, lonely life, she has a second chance. I’ve just handed it to her.
“It’s why I came,” I say. “So you would know, and you could come back, and the two
of you can be together, because you’re supposed to be. There’s no other reason why it would’ve worked out like this. There are so many pieces that came together just perfectly, and I didn’t think these things actually happened in real life, but they do, and I found you, and now you can go back.”
I stop, out of breath.
And here we are, in the moment I’ve pictured since I saw the painting and realized it was hers. This is where she jumps up, tears of joy streaking her face, and says “Let’s go back.” This is where we leave her apartment without bothering to turn the lights off or blow out the candle because she can only think of getting back to Orion. And this is where we drive through the night and the rain, and we end up in Summit Lakes just as the sun is rising over the razor peaks, splashing warmth and rosy light into the cold granite. This is where the background music rises and swells and we get to Kismet just as Orion is unlocking the door. And he sees her. And she sees him. And it’s perfect. I’m so happy, and so caught up in imagining it all that it takes me a moment to notice.
Julianna’s shoulders are shaking, and the tears that are now rolling down her face don’t look like happy tears. As soon as she brings her green eyes to mine, I see hurt, maybe even anger.
The picture in my mind breaks apart and clatters to the floor of her lonely apartment. “You never should have come here,” she says through tears.
I don’t believe her. And it makes me want to cry because I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all. I try to explain it better. Maybe I got too carried away. “Of course I should’ve come. Don’t you see? The two of you had something—had that thing that everyone hopes for, and then you lost it, but now you have another chance, and . . .” It’s not working, I can tell, but I keep going, pleading now. “You can go back, and he’ll be there, and I know he’ll still feel the same way about you, I know it. It’s not too late. It can still be . . .”
I can tell by the look on her face she doesn’t think so. I don’t finish, and we fall silent. Even the rain outside fades into the silence while I wait for her to say something. And then finally, she does. “I can’t ever go back there.”
She leans in and takes my hands in hers, looks me in the eye, and speaks forcefully. “And nobody can ever know about me. Especially Orion.”
I pull my hands away. “What? WHY?” Now I’m angry. “Don’t you see?”
“Don’t you?” she fires back at me. “Shane died ten years ago, and it was my fault.” She pauses. Makes sure she’s still looking me in the eye for what’s next. “I ran away,” she says. “Like a coward. I let a whole town think I was dead too. There’s no coming back from that.”
I don’t say anything. It’d been there, in me, this worry about what had happened to Shane. First I’d hoped that he had made it out too somehow, that maybe they’d agreed to go their separate ways, start new lives, fresh. But really, I knew that didn’t make any sense. I knew there was probably something else, and I’d pushed that thought away. I’d wanted to find Julianna more than anything, but I wanted to find her as I thought of her before. A perfect, beautiful mystery. And I thought I wanted to know what really happened that night. But now, the way she’s looking at me, I know I don’t. I don’t want her to tell me the rest, because I want her to be innocent.
I want her to stay golden.
28.
“Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And [she] learned of finalities
Besides the grave.”
—“The Hill Wife,” 1916
“We weren’t fighting. Not at the party, like the papers said after. And Shane wasn’t driving when it happened.” She pauses. “I was.”
A bubble bursts in my mind—everything I’d assumed—gone. She’s just rewritten history for me, and I scramble to keep up and reframe it in my memory.
“He’d been drinking, and I wasn’t, so I drove when we left, straight out into that storm. And it was the most scared I’d ever been driving in the snow. It was coming straight at the windshield, so hard and fast that the only things I could see in the headlights were the trails of white stretched out in front of us. I couldn’t even see the road.”
I nod. I know exactly what she’s talking about. My mom avoided driving in storms as much as she could, but the few times we had, the view out the window had reminded me of Star Wars, when they shift into light-speed and all that’s visible are the stars stretched out blurry in front of them.
“I should’ve just driven him home. I tried to. His parents would’ve let me stay the night in the guest room. I would’ve gone home in the morning, everything could’ve been different.” As she says it, I wonder how many times she’s thought those things. How many times she’s thought of all the ways it could’ve been different. I don’t say anything though, and she keeps going.
“I decided that morning, before graduation, that I couldn’t go another day without telling him that something had changed with me, and that I didn’t know if it was something that could change back.” Regret washes over her face as she looks at me. “I loved Shane, more than anything, and we’d daydreamed a future together, and it was a perfect one. One I should’ve wanted, you know? And then I met Orion, and that daydream seemed so much smaller somehow, and it started to feel like it didn’t fit right anymore. Because I fell in love with him, too.”
She glances down at her hands again, maybe afraid of what I think, but I’m not judging. I’m just listening. It’s strange to actually hear her talk about it all, because in my head it was so much different.
“So I told Shane, once we left the party and we were in the car,” she continues. “Not everything. Just that I thought I might need some time to think, that maybe we needed a break to make sure that we were really what we wanted.” Her eyes well up again. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was trying to do the right thing after doing the wrong thing with Orion. But I did hurt him. So much.
“He didn’t say anything at first. He just went silent, and it scared me because he’d never done that before. We’d had arguments, but this was different. There was only the sound of the wipers going, and the wind all around the car, and him not saying anything. And the only thing I wanted was to take it back. I still would, in a second.”
She shifts her weight and unfolds her leg from beneath her, and I wonder if she had somehow taken it back, been able to smooth it over, how different her life would be. If Shane really would’ve been the choice she’d made. I can’t see it. Not after knowing what I do about her and Orion.
“After that, he got mad. It was hurt coming out as anger, and I could tell it was a bad idea to try and talk about it with him so upset. I tried to take him home, but he kept telling me to just drive. That we couldn’t go back until we figured things out. And I was crying, and driving, and he kept asking me what I wanted and what I meant, and I couldn’t tell him because I was scared of what I might say.”
She pauses to wipe away another tear.
“So I said I didn’t know, and that made him more angry than anything, because he said he did know what he wanted, that he always had, and that it was me. When he said that, I felt like the lowest person in the world. Like I was throwing away everything that meant anything to me. I hit the brakes. I wasn’t thinking, I just wanted to stop and tell him I was wrong, and that I was sorry. That I took it all back. But the back of the car swerved over the ice, and then we were spinning. I panicked. He grabbed the wheel. We couldn’t fix it.
“And then we were falling.”
She looks at me with somber eyes, and it feels like forever before she speaks again. When she finally does, she says, “I thought I was dead when we finally stopped at the bottom. We’d tumbled down the side of the ravine, and the noise was deafening all the way down. Metal crunching and glass shattering, and me. Screaming. And then finally we were still, and it was so quiet, I thought I had to be dead. The headlights were still on, and down at the bottom where we were, there was no wind. The snow was still falling, but it
was just drifting down in the lights, like feathers after a pillow fight. For a few seconds it was the most peace I’d felt in my life. I closed my eyes, accepted that was the end, and almost felt relief.”
I picture her there, inside the Jeep on its side at the edge of the river, the canyon lit up glowing and white with their headlights, and snow falling silent in the night. Thinking that was it. How horrible.
“But then the cold started to seep in,” she says. “It was water, from the river, and it stung enough to wake me up, or bring me back, and when it did, the first thing I did was reach my hand out for Shane, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the car anymore.
“I panicked all over again. I fought with my seat belt, and when I got it open, I climbed out his window. It was broken, and it cut my hands when I did.” She shows me the palms of her hands, both crisscrossed with deep scars. “I was so numb with cold and shock, I couldn’t feel anything, but I knew I needed to find Shane and make sure he was okay.”
Her voice hitches and she has to stop there. Tucks both knees to her chest and buries her head in her arms and cries softly. I say nothing, but I see it in my mind: the snow and wind, words she couldn’t take back, the bottom of the ravine. The empty Jeep. I wipe at my own eyes, and wait until she lifts her head.
“I found him because of the blood. It was dark on the snow, like someone had spilled paint all over a canvas, and I followed it to the edge of the river. And then I saw him and”—she pauses to take a breath—“he was on the other side, wedged against a tree branch that bent down into the water. It was holding him there, and the river was moving fast around his legs. His arms were just drifting, and he was so white already. I ran in, and I couldn’t feel my hands or my feet, but I had to swim because it was deep where he was.” She stops, presses her lips together, and I can see she’s reliving every moment as she tells it.
