Julia dialed her home phone again, but hung up as soon as the answering machine came on. She briefly considered calling Butch since she had his cell number, but she had no desire to have any kind of conversation with her brother-in-law. She would call him only if she got truly desperate.
Well, she couldn’t sit by the telephone all day waiting. She started the coffee, then returned to her bedroom to get dressed. A nice long walk after breakfast—that was what she needed. She had taken to walking after Matthew’s death, finding it useful for both filling time and easing her mind.
It was almost ten o’clock when she finally set out. She took her cell phone along, though Pamela probably wouldn’t think to try her cell number since Julia so rarely had it turned on—a subject of Pamela’s frequent complaints.
Ivy Dale was a picturesque setting for the stone house. The trees had leafed out early this year, already forming a canopy overhead. Even on the hottest days of summer, the street seemed cool and peaceful, though today there seemed to be something unnatural and ominous about so much shade on a sunny morning.
A car was coming toward Julia, moving slowly as if looking for an address. She felt a weight in the pit of her stomach. She had thought about Carmen all through the night. Every time she woke up, she remembered her words: I don’t know when exactly I can come. But maybe next week. Since today was Saturday, did that mean the week starting tomorrow?
The car passed. The driver was a man, no one Julia knew. She came to the end of Ivy Dale and decided suddenly to take a different route today. She turned right and walked a block to a street named Placid Place, which ran parallel to Ivy Dale. This was the way she went whenever she walked to the campus of Millard-Temple, which wasn’t often.
There were some interesting old houses along Placid Place, though several of them had been divided into student apartments in recent years, which was exactly the reason Julia usually avoided this area. She didn’t like the way the neighborhood had changed from earlier days, and she certainly didn’t want to run into students on the weekend, especially her own students. It was Saturday, though, so most of them were probably still asleep after the usual Friday night partying. Final exams might be starting on Monday, but the average student wasn’t going to let that interfere with his weekend.
Sure enough, there was no sign of activity along Placid Place, at least not current activity. One porch was littered with articles of clothing and beer cans. A lone sneaker hung by its laces from the mailbox, and a Chinese take-out carton sat on the bottom step, its lid open, chopsticks sticking out the top. Julia tried to imagine how the original owner of this once-stately old home would feel if he saw it now.
• • •
SHE picked up her pace. Well rehearsed in not thinking about things she didn’t want to think about, she fell back on an old strategy. She imagined a storage room with dozens of boxes, the kinds of boxes with nice, tight-fitting lids. For now she would put Carmen in a box and close it snugly.
Since she still hadn’t made a list of projects to undertake during her sabbatical, she could start that now as she walked, then write it down later when she got home.
Clean the screened back porch—that was a good place to begin. After months of winter winds and rain, it was always dirty by late spring. After the porch, she would tackle all the closets. Not that any of them were terribly messy, especially not Matthew’s. Though she had cleared out the drawers of his bureau and desk, all of them uncommonly tidy for a man, for anyone really, she had not opened the door of his closet since the day after he died, when she had to choose a suit to bury him in.
She also needed to sort through all the bookshelves and kitchen cupboards and . . . suddenly she felt her cell phone vibrate. She took it out of her pocket and saw that it was from Pamela. Finally.
She flipped it open. “Where have you been?”
“Amazing—you actually have your cell phone on.” Pamela’s voice sounded weak and scratchy.
“Are you sick?” Julia said.
“Why did you call? What’s the matter? You don’t ever call.”
“Do you have a cold?”
“I wish that’s all it was,” Pamela said. “I’ve been sick as a dog.” She broke off to cough, a prolonged crackly cough that sounded like somebody grappling with a large cellophane bag.
“Are you taking something?”
“Yes, I’m taking something. A bunch of things. I’ve been drugged out of my mind for three days. All I’ve been doing is sleeping. But what’s wrong? Why did you call and leave all those messages? Butch said you sounded mad on the answering machine.”
“I wasn’t mad,” Julia said. “I just needed to talk to you. I need to know if you have a phone number for Carmen.”
There was a pause. “Carmen? You mean . . .” Pamela choked on whatever she tried to say next and started coughing again, deep and hacky. Finally she caught her breath. “You mean, as in our brother Jeremiah and that truck stop woman? That Carmen?”
“How many other Carmens do you know?” Julia said.
“What do you want to call her for?”
“I don’t want to, but I need to.” Pamela started to say something, but Julia stopped her. “Don’t talk, just listen.” And she told her about the phone message, every detail she could remember. “So I’ve got to get in touch with her. She can’t come here. That can’t happen. Not now, not ever.” She realized suddenly that she had stopped walking and was waving one hand around. She was standing in front of a three-story house with peeling green paint, where a girl was lounging on a porch swing in what looked like her underwear. She was holding a cup of something in one hand, and she was staring at Julia.
Julia hoped she hadn’t overheard anything. She would hate to have it spread around campus that Dr. Rich was standing on a sidewalk yelling at someone on the telephone. She lowered her voice and resumed walking. “So you’re sure you don’t have a number for her?”
“Why would I have her number?” Pamela asked. “I’ve never talked to her in my whole life, not once. How about her mother? Did you try her?”
If Julia needed any proof that she hadn’t been thinking straight, this was it. Even though it was probably a dead-end idea, the thought of trying to get in touch with Lulu hadn’t crossed her mind. She wasn’t going to admit it to Pamela, however. Pamela loved to point out how she might not have a doctoral degree like Julia, but she did have an abundance of common sense—as if a person couldn’t have both.
And it was true that she was very smart, very capable. She did things Julia had to pay people to do—things like painting shutters, planting flowers and shrubs, doing their own taxes. Most of these skills, though, were the result of marrying a sloppy, overweight man like Butch. To be fair, Julia didn’t really know him, had seen him only three times in person and in a few photos. “I can do anything a man can do,” Pamela often said, which Julia interpreted as If I don’t do it, it won’t get done.
“I don’t have Lulu’s number,” Julia said. “I never did. And I don’t know her address either. I didn’t keep any of her letters.”
“Butch can probably track her down on the Internet,” Pamela said. The computer was the one area, the only one, in which Butch was competent.
Julia laughed. “So what’s he going to do—Google ‘Lulu in Wyoming’? She might be living anywhere by now. And we don’t even know her last name. Whenever she wrote me, she just signed her name Lulu. I’m sure she and Jeremiah never married.”
“Well, okay, then, I guess you can just wait and ask Carmen how to get in touch with her when she shows up,” Pamela said.
Julia sighed. “Of course, it’s easy for you to joke about this since you’re not the one whose doorbell she might be ringing any day now.”
“Sorry, Jules. My head feels like a mush melon. I just can’t think right now. I wish I had a . . .” She stopped for another coughing fit, then blew her nose. “Hey, I can’t talk anymore right now, but I’ll call back later. You going to be home tonight? We can figure o
ut something.” Her voice sounded weaker now, only a croaky whisper, though Julia suspected her of putting on.
“No, don’t bother,” Julia said. “Just go back to sleep and get well. Good-bye.” She closed her phone and put it back in her pocket.
Well, so much for that. She suddenly realized how much she had been counting on her sister’s help. Though Pamela’s specialty was disaster prevention, she was also good in an unexpected crisis—for example, sweeping onto the scene after Matthew’s death without waiting to be asked, then supervising and reorganizing Julia’s life for weeks thereafter. And before that, when their parents both died within months of each other, it was Pamela who showed up to help, who made all the final arrangements and cleared out their house. So how could it be that now, faced with a matter of relatively minor importance compared to a death, she had nothing to offer?
• • •
A FEW minutes later Julia came to a street corner. She could turn right and head back home, or turn left toward the college. Or she could continue going straight on Placid Place, which would eventually lead to a new subdivision with a small lake and golf course, where several of the younger Millard-Temple professors lived. She stood there for a moment before deciding to keep going straight.
She hadn’t gone far, however, before regretting her decision. A boy came bounding down the front steps of an old brick house wearing a black T-shirt and jeans with holes in both knees. Julia recognized him at once—he had sat on the back row in her Creative Writing class all semester—and she saw that he recognized her, too. He ran both hands over his hair, which, as usual, was in need of a good combing. Julia wished she had spent more time on her own hair and makeup this morning. She didn’t like her students to see her when she wasn’t put together, not even a student like this one.
Too close to ignore her, the boy bobbed his head and said, “Dr. Rich.” Frowning, he darted a glance at his car by the curb, as if worried that she might waylay him with a lecture about the different types of irony in drama or the rhyme scheme of a ballad, but she had no intention of doing so. He hadn’t appeared the least interested in anything she had said in class all semester, so she had nothing to say to him now.
“Hello, Mr. Vincent,” she said with a curt nod as she continued walking. Seconds later, his car started and she heard the heavy bass thumps of his music as he sped past her.
She kept walking, eventually passing the city limits sign, where the sidewalk ended and Placid Place changed its name to Chapel Road. Beyond a little bridge she stepped onto the bike path and kept going. The road was wider now, the houses scattered farther apart.
Returning to her list of projects to undertake during her sabbatical, she thought of all her teaching materials she was still using from fifteen or twenty years ago. Marcy Kingsley had recently converted all of her class presentations for British Literature to PowerPoint slides and had told Julia she would show her how. “It makes taking notes so much easier for the students,” she had said.
Julia was convinced that too many things were made easier for students these days. If they couldn’t figure out how to take notes from a professor’s lecture, they didn’t belong in college. Besides that, she knew what happened with technology. Something new would come along and PowerPoint would become passé. It probably already had. But she might give it a try anyway. First she would need to retype all her notes and handouts—that would be a good way to take up time.
And she probably ought to travel some, even though she had no urge to do so except on a very limited basis. For example, she did want to drive to Milledgeville, Georgia, again to visit Andalusia, the home of Flannery O’Connor—a trip she had taken several times in the past. There was something inspiring about the house and farm, something that reminded her that a plain, confined life could count for something, or rather, that what appeared to be a plain, confined life could in fact be spacious and well furnished if one kept her mind active and open.
She felt the splash of a raindrop on her arm and looked up, startled that she could have been oblivious to the clouds gathering overhead. She wondered if there had been thunder she hadn’t heard. Further, how could she have missed the forecast, something she usually consulted morning and night? More proof that her thoughts were in disarray.
More raindrops were falling, leaving dark splotches on her shirt. She began walking faster. An old chapel stood back from the road just ahead. She could wait out the storm there. The wind suddenly picked up with a fury. If she hadn’t been witnessing it with her own eyes, she never would have believed the sky could burst open so suddenly. By the time she reached the covered entrance of the chapel, actually running the last hundred yards, she was soaked.
Standing against the door, panting, she watched the rain fall in sheets and felt the spray against her face. She had never liked being out in the rain the way some people did, had never really liked rain at all, not even from indoors.
A tired old memory came back to her now, across the span of nearly fifty years. It wasn’t her worst memory, but one of her earliest and most vivid. She was standing with her back against the door of an old brick building, just as she was now. It was the last day of school, so it must have been early June, and her mother had just dropped her off at the front door of the elementary school in Nadine, Alabama. There had been more angry words and tears at the breakfast table, then only the two of them riding silently in the car, neither offering comfort to the other, and now she was late to school again.
It was raining heavily that day, and Julia had stood at the door of the school, first watching her mother drive away and then turning to look at the soggy playground, where flags and markers were set up for races and games. It was a day she had looked forward to for many weeks, barely able to concentrate on anything else, not even on her achievement tests, which, though only in first grade, she understood to be very important to her father. But she had tried to rise above her excitement and do her best, for she knew the test results would be included in her final report card, which the teacher would hand out at the end of school on the last day.
Before that, however, there were prizes to be won during the Field Day activities, an event that had already been rescheduled once for inclement weather. A fast runner, Julia had pinned all her hopes on winning a race and bringing home a blue ribbon. She had imagined a look of pride and approval spreading across her father’s face, a hand laid on her head, maybe a word of praise.
But it was raining and showed no signs of letting up. The sky was gray, the playground full of puddles. And it was the last day of school. Even at the age of six, she knew a lost cause when she saw one. She didn’t know certain words, but she knew the concepts. She knew this meant wholesale cancellation, not postponement. Time had run out. There was no contingency plan, and there would be no prize to take home.
Out on Chapel Road now, cars had slowed. The rain had slacked off some but was still falling steadily. She had no umbrella, of course. She had her cell phone but could think of no one she wanted to call for help. Marcy would come, she knew that, but she didn’t want to hear her cheerful, idle chatter all the way home—“You’re all wet, girlfriend!” and “What in the world were you doing all the way out here?” and all the rest of it.
So she would stay here and watch the rain until it stopped. Then she would slosh her way back home, change out of her wet clothes, and . . . well, she didn’t want to think past that. There was nothing to anticipate at home, nothing good.
But what of it? She had known dreary days before and would certainly know them again. There was no sure way to plan for the unforeseeable, no way to avert misfortune or guarantee shelter in the event of rain. At least this time she had found a small, dry place for refuge.
• chapter 3 •
NOTHING SOLID AND SURE
Days later, as Julia turned onto Ivy Dale after giving an exam, she realized that the phone message from Carmen had completely changed the way she arrived home.
Gone was the sense of breathing more ea
sily as she proceeded down her quiet, shaded street, of slowly shedding the carefully calculated way she conducted herself away from home, of letting her eyes settle on the stone house, dropping whatever worries she had at the time to admire yet again the steep pitch of the roof, the dark red shutters and front door, the way the two ends of the house angled politely toward each other, the stone walkway Matthew had laid, the lamppost by the circular driveway, the ivy-covered mailbox.
She still saw all of these things, but only in an absentminded way. They gave her no sense of well-being. Not even the gnarly trunk of the Japanese maple afforded her much joy, or the irises unfolding daily under her bedroom window.
Now, from the moment she turned onto Ivy Dale, she strained forward, looking for a car parked in her driveway or someone at the front door. All looked safe right now, however, so she pulled into the driveway, not the circular one in front but the original one that shot straight to the garage at the rear of the house.
In the kitchen the red light on the answering machine was blinking again. Carmen’s phone message was having its effect here, too. No more waiting till later. A phone call might require immediate action. She walked directly to the phone. Unlike only days ago, she was now relieved to hear her sister’s voice. Though still hoarse, it sounded better than it had last week.
“Hey there, Jules. Call me. Butch did find Lulu, and you won’t believe it—she’s listed as Lulu Frederickson. So either she really did marry Jeremiah or else she just took his name without bothering, which wouldn’t surprise me.”
Julia called her back at once. Pamela answered after the first ring and began talking as if in the middle of a conversation.
To See the Moon Again Page 3
