He held out his hand and Julie took it, following him into her new life.
25
REBA’S DIARY, 1997
It’s hard to believe, now—impossible, even—but of the two of us, Jules used to be the shy one. I remember the first time my mama took her along with us to a Girl Scout meeting. I’d known all of the other Daisies since forever, or at least for as long as I could remember. Jules was the first person I’d ever met who was new to our town, and that made her fascinating. Every little girl wanted to meet her, but when I tried to introduce her, Jules stood behind me and wouldn’t say a word.
For the longest time, I was the only one our age that she would speak to. Which was fine with me, actually, because I preferred her company to any of the other Daisies. To anyone at all, really.
I wanted her to have a nickname, like me. So I renamed her, made her new. We were Rebecca and Julie; we became Reba and Jules.
I was terrified that my new friend, Julie-turned-Jules, would go away again, as quickly as she’d come, so I tried to make sure that she loved Lawrence Mill, that she loved me. I didn’t know then that she didn’t have anywhere else to go. I kept her busy with books I liked, and Barbie dolls, and showing her the field and the forest and the woods. I told her everything there was to know about the town, about how you could get a scoop of ice cream for only fifty cents (I didn’t know if fifty cents was a bargain for ice cream—it was before I understood money—but I knew that the price pleased my parents) at the old-fashioned soda counter at the Thomas Pharmacy and Car Care, how during the summer the Opal Library hosted a summer reading program (we’d just finished it when she arrived in town that year) and you got free pizza if you finished every book on the list, how Lawrence Elementary School was in walking distance from our houses and how when we were a little older we’d probably be able to walk to school instead of riding the bus. I saw the older kids walking all the time.
Those were the things I found important, then. Isn’t that funny?
We still get those fifty-cent ice-cream cones sometimes.
26
Julie wonders if anyone she knows from her childhood still lives in this neighborhood. Not that she’s going to find out. Reba’s and Aunt Molly’s houses both have different occupants now with different stories. Aunt Molly went to the coast, but who knows where Reba’s mother ended up?
Julie thinks of the day that she, herself, left Lawrence Mill. It was a month after graduation, and she can’t believe she lasted that long. She packed one suitcase and left everything else behind. Toby didn’t need persuading to drive her to the airport, a cigarette smashed into the fingers of his left hand as his right hand tapped against the steering wheel. When they arrived, he took Julie’s suitcase from the trunk of the car, set it on the sidewalk, slapped his hand against her shoulder, and muttered “Good riddance” before driving away, his car coughing out gray clouds of smoke from the exhaust pipe. She looked back, only once, toward the highway.
“Good riddance,” she whispered.
And when she boarded that airplane, she really believed that she was leaving the past behind. She thought then that her feet would never again touch Mississippi soil.
• • •
Julie looks at the clock. Shit. She thinks of August at the cemetery, how she has left him there alone for what must be too long now. With one last look at those two houses, she turns the car around and drives.
It’s afternoon now, and she’s forgotten how bad traffic gets when school lets out for the day, even in this tiny little dot-on-a-map town. If people have moved away in droves, like Nell said, you wouldn’t know it by looking at this mess. The elementary school, middle school, and high school all sit side by side at the end of one short driveway. Buses pull in, and cars drive out in a slow stream. Julie sits, stuck, in the line of traffic on the two-lane road.
Lawrence High School is on her left as she idles. Students emerge from various doors of the building and pile into cars in the small parking lot or start the walk home to one of the nearby neighborhoods. Some wait for the yellow buses lining up at the curb. Other students have already made it to their cars and have joined the exit line. A blue Volkswagen Beetle—the old kind, beaten all to hell—creeps along, part of the outgoing traffic. Two teenage girls sit in the front seat, windows down, singing along to music that’s blaring from their speakers. Julie doesn’t know the song.
Even from a distance, these students all look so much younger than Julie felt at that age, when things seemed so innocent and even sex was new and simple and uncomplicated, at least for her. She thinks of all of the times that she and Reba walked together. Reba held her secrets so close, and not once did she part her lips to set them free.
27
REBA’S DIARY, 1997
School started back on a blazing-hot summery day, the kind of day that usually taunts me with images of sipping lemonade or swimming lazy laps in the pool at the Millworkers Association. But not that day. That day, I was excited, buzzing like a bright-yellow bee on a flower as Jules and I walked through the doors of LHS to begin our senior year of high school. Seniors!
I remember giggling at something Jules was saying about Jake, the boy she was sneaking out to see almost regularly. Giggling, but I was nervous all the same, because the minutes were ticking by and we were late on the first day of school.
Jules hadn’t been able to find her perfect first-day shoes, and she had proceeded to wreck her room looking for them. No other shoes would do, and she was convinced that Toby had hidden them on purpose. She’d found them eventually (in her closet), and the leather-strapped sandals did look perfect on her tanned feet. But…we were late.
It’s no secret that Jules doesn’t care much about school except for drama club, and she certainly isn’t ever going to be hurried for anything as mundane as class. When we finally reached the classroom for first period, Jules waved me ahead and pointed toward the restroom across the hall. “Go ahead,” she said. “I want to check my hair. I’ll be right behind you.” I nodded without arguing, because how could I stand being any later?
The other students, most of them at least, were already seated, giants in the tiny desks that seem made for first-graders. They all looked up at me as I walked in. All of those eyes made me feel instantly self-conscious, and I could feel my cheeks growing hot. If I wasn’t careful, they’d end up all pink and mottled, the way my daddy’s cheeks look when he gets angry. Stupid unwanted trait. I glanced around the room, desperate to find a seat and get myself in it. I recognized all of the faces in the classroom, every single one.
My eyes were pulled, though, to the warm, dark eyes of the boy I’d met most recently. August sat close to the front, with no one in the seat in front or beside him. He nodded to me, a nod so slight that no one else could possibly catch it. I felt my lips part as though I might speak only to him, even in the crowded room. When I realized that I was just standing there, staring, I quickly chose a desk one row away from him. I didn’t look at August again, didn’t speak a word.
But still, there were unspoken things.
28
Finally, Julie reaches the cemetery. She drives past the ornate sign, through the open metal gate, and along the narrow lane that winds through the memory gardens. She knows where to stop the car, because if there is one thing that time hasn’t dulled in the least, it’s her own memories of the time she spent in this place. She doesn’t want to be here now, empty-handed, without the thing that was supposed to make her feel close to Reba again. Seeing that grave is as fresh and painful as it was a decade ago.
August is sitting on the ground, leaning against Reba’s gravestone with his eyes closed.
“Hey,” Julie says carefully, aware that this is August’s first visit here, that he will feel the weight of it in the way that she does and also in a way that is unique to him, unique to his feelings for Reba. She has an unwelcome urge to touch him, put her arms aro
und him maybe, to offer comfort, but she keeps her hands to herself.
“Hey,” he responds, opening his eyes slowly. She isn’t surprised to see that they are red-rimmed.
“You ready to get out of here?”
“Yeah,” he says, climbing to his feet. Julie eyes the carved marble of the gravestone. Mary Rebecca McLeod. Her father is buried next to her now, a matching gravestone. Heart attack. Julie isn’t sure how Reba would feel about being so close to a man she regarded as half stranger, half adversary.
Julie spent so much time here in the past that she doesn’t feel the need to dwell now, and she is grateful that August is ready to go. She said her good-bye to Reba here, before she had left Lawrence Mill. To be back now, to see it all unchanged—when Reba should have changed, should have grown into an adult the way that Julie had, the way that August had—well, it’s enough to bring back the darkness that Julie has fought for so long. She’s got to get away.
“So…did she have it?” August asks as he slides into the passenger seat, and Julie can tell by his voice that he is both eager and afraid of the answer.
“She did.”
He takes a surprised breath. “So, you’ve got it? Just like that? You’ve got the diary?”
“No.”
“What? Why not?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she has it. I’m ninety-nine percent sure of that. But she told me she didn’t.” She steers the car out of the cemetery gates.
“So she doesn’t have the diary?”
“You’re not listening. She has it. I could tell by the look on her face. She wasn’t surprised when I mentioned it. She knew about the diary already.”
“So maybe she knows about it, but she’s not the one who has it.”
“No. She does. I think she has it, and I think it’s right there in her shop.”
August looks confused. “Then why wouldn’t she give it to you? I thought you trusted her. I thought she trusted you.”
“Me too,” Julie says. “She used to. I think there’s something in that book she doesn’t want us to read.”
“I don’t care,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t care what it says. I need that diary, Jules.”
Julie nods. “I know. Me too.”
“What do we do, then? How do we convince her to give it to us?”
She shrugs. “I’m not sure yet.”
They pass the old Thomas Pharmacy and Car Care, which closed for good in the time Julie has been away. The pharmacy’s big windows are boarded up, and the garage on the side is open, gaping wide like a mouth. Toby worked there for a while after he stopped doing deliveries for Nell.
The old mill is next on Magnolia, and on a whim, Julie swerves into the giant parking lot across the street. The mill and the Baptist church used to share the stretch of asphalt; these days, she assumes only the church crowd uses the space.
August looks up in surprise but doesn’t say anything.
“I know it’s random. I just want to see something… You can wait here, if you want.”
But August opens the car door and follows her. A tall, silvery chain-link fence surrounds what is left of the Lawrence Mill, presumably to keep people out. Julie has never been inside the mill, although now there no longer seems to be a proper “inside.” She had her picture taken in front of it once, along with her entire fourth-grade class when they went on the History of Lawrence Mill field trip. In the photo, she and Reba stand side by side, matching little-girl grins on their faces. They’re as far from the rest of the group as they can get, while still being part of the same photograph. Julie left that photo at Molly’s when she moved away, crammed into some shoe box or packing crate where the mementos of her childhood had been abandoned, at least until Molly moved away, and then her aunt probably tossed it all.
The Lawrence Mill opened in 1901. On the day it closed its doors for good, the mill was one hundred and three years old. That was nearly four full years ago—Molly had mailed Julie the newspaper clipping. Monumental, the attached sticky note had said. The end of the town as we know it. In its prime, the mill and the Opal Lumberyard were the largest employers in a fifty-mile radius. Thirty-two hundred people once worked within the mill’s dark-brick walls, amid the heat and the noise, in the mornings and through the afternoons and on through the night. Like Times Square, the mill never closed.
Until it did.
Most of the buildings are still standing, at least partially, but with walls missing so that Julie can see the overturned tables and chairs. The heavy machinery is gone, maybe moved out when the mill first closed. But there are metal scraps and shards all over, left-behind parts to unfamiliar machines.
Even in the graduating class of 1998, she had classmates with jobs waiting at the mill, mostly men (although many women had worked there too, especially during the wars and then again during the seventies and eighties), lured by a paying job instead of the supposed rigors of college. They’d bought bright, shiny new cars before Julie had even left for New York, but she imagined that they were still working in that mill until the day it shut its doors, stuck like so many of the men who’d started working at the Lawrence Mill when they were young (like Mr. McLeod) and had grown old, their bodies betraying them in the heat of the building, with the physical nature of the job.
Julie walks around the perimeter of the fence until she isn’t visible from the street. She is dimly aware of August behind her. She slides her hand along the cool metal of the fence and wraps her fingers through the diamond patchwork of the links. Then she hoists herself up and up, her black sandals pressing against the metal, and finally over the fence.
“Jules, what the… What are you doing?”
“I want to take a look,” she says. August doesn’t follow her over the fence, just waits and watches as she drops lightly to her feet. The view isn’t much different from inside, but Julie moves around anyway, glancing frequently at the ground to avoid debris. She’d always been curious about what went on behind these walls, back when the walls were intact. Now, staring at the skeleton of what was once such an imposing structure, she finds herself thinking of things that end, of the way things fall apart.
With the trees surrounding the mill turned prematurely green and the weeds growing through broken concrete beneath the cloud-crowded sky, she finds herself thinking of Evan.
• • •
Evan was a colossal accident. She didn’t mean to fall in love with him, hadn’t meant to fall in love with anyone. She actually believed herself incapable of it then.
She met him in college, on the first day of the spring semester. It was her second year, the first having spun by in what seemed to be a strange blur of motion. She was late for a drama class, and she was walking as fast as she could without actually breaking into a run.
It wasn’t that she intentionally sabotaged herself in college—or at least, that’s what she told herself. She knew how lucky she was. Her most desperate wish had been to leave Lawrence Mill, and that wish had come true. There had been stacks of paperwork for scholarships and loans and a whirlwind of favors called in by Ms. Madrie to her friends at NYU, her alma mater. Julie loved it there, truly, loved to look out her tiny dorm window as snow wandered down from the sky and into fluffy wet layers on the ground in wintertime. She could remember snow falling only once in Mississippi (real snow, at least, and not the gentle tease of flurries), and even then it had been cold and icy and rock hard. She and Reba had managed snow angels, but it had been too difficult and the cold too piercing for snowmen.
As for academics, Julie turned out to be fairly intelligent, despite what she thought back in high school. But she still felt so restless, so haunted. She didn’t belong there, in New York, while Reba was in some hole in the ground, and if Julie wasn’t such a coward, she would have confessed to everyone that it was all her fault. She couldn’t sleep at night. While her roommate snored softly, Julie w
ould sit in the dark room, not even bothering to lie down.
She tortured herself by replaying everything in her head. Everything she could remember, at least. When her eyes finally closed, she dreamed of bridges and heard screaming. When she opened her eyes again, her alarm clock was screeching and her roommate had a pillow covering her head and was shouting at Julie to turn the damned thing off. And Julie would slowly climb from the bed and dress, all the while watching the clock. The hands seemed to tick faster and faster until she knew that class would be starting, but she couldn’t make herself leave the room.
By the time she finally forced herself out of the door, class had usually already begun. Even when she walked as fast as she could, she was rarely less than fifteen minutes late.
That day, it was twenty. The hallways were almost empty, and the closed door to Room 242 seemed menacing. She looked through the glass panel of the door to see the group of attentive faces, and that door felt like a divide between her own world—her sullen, solitary place—and the happy, ordinary world of others.
Evan was sitting in the front row, but she could tell by looking that he wasn’t really listening, wasn’t attentive like the others. She wondered where it was he would rather be. His hair was blond, messy, and his eyes were so blue that she could see them clearly from where she stood. She watched him, fascinated, her face too close to the glass window.
It took her a moment to realize that he was looking back, not lost in his own thoughts anymore, but staring directly at her. She stepped back, hand still pressed to the cool metal of the doorknob. She turned around to leave, but then thought of her English class the previous semester, how she’d missed the first day. The teacher, old and strict and unnervingly overeducated, had very nearly refused to let her join the class at all. It’s a rigorous course, he told her. There’s no room here for slackers. And she’d had to plead with him, beg, right there in front of the entire class.
Secrets of Southern Girls Page 10
