“And the town is Painted Horse, Wyoming. I found it on a map. I’ve got her address and phone number. You have a pencil? You think she really married him?”
“Who knows?” Julia said. “I wonder if she moved. Seems like Painted Horse is a name I would remember.”
“Well, anyway, it’s still a trailer,” Pamela said. “Butch found that out in the personal property listings.”
Julia took down the information and told Pamela she would let her know if she got in touch with Lulu. But Pamela wasn’t ready to hang up. Starved for conversation after her long fast, she rushed into a news report about a woman being held up at an ATM. But Julia didn’t let her get far. She had to hang up, she told her. She had a phone call to make. There was no time to waste.
• • •
IT was almost three o’clock, but it would be two hours earlier in Wyoming. She had no idea whether Lulu had a job. Maybe she was still a waitress. More likely she had quit working by now and was on welfare.
She punched in the numbers quickly, and, remarkably, someone answered. At first Julia wondered if she might have called Pamela back by mistake, for it was a woman’s voice, low and husky like Pamela’s sick voice. But it sounded like an older voice, and not a very cordial one.
As there was no one to impress in Painted Horse, Wyoming, Julia didn’t bother with preliminaries. “Hello,” she said in a businesslike tone. “I’m trying to get in touch with someone named Lulu, and I was given this number. Is this Lulu?”
There was no reply at first, then a short laugh, and then, “Nuh-uh, this is Ida. You wanting Lulu? Lulu Frederickson?”
Julia wondered if Lulu was a common name in Painted Horse. “Yes, that Lulu,” she said. She couldn’t make herself put the two names together.
“Who is this? What you wanting Lulu for?”
“I need to contact her daughter. It’s urgent. I was hoping Lulu would give me a phone number for her.”
Another coarse laugh. “Which daughter you talking about?”
This shouldn’t have surprised Julia, but it did. She should have known a woman like Lulu would have several children, probably by several different fathers.
“Carmen,” she said.
“Who is this?” the voice asked again. “Is something the matter with Carmen? You know where she’s at?”
Julia spoke briskly as if to convey the need for answers, not more questions. “My name is Julia Rich. My brother, Jeremiah, was Carmen’s father. I need to talk with Carmen right away.”
“Jerry was your brother?”
“Yes, I’m Jeremiah Frederickson’s sister. One of them. And I need to get in touch with Carmen.” And then, as if someone from Wyoming needed clarification, she added, “I’m Carmen’s aunt.”
“Well, you’re not the only one that wants to talk to her. I do, too. I got a thing or two to tell her.”
Julia’s heart sank. “You don’t know how to reach her?”
“Nobody does.”
“Not even her mother?”
“Lulu’s dead.”
Julia wasn’t sure she had heard right. “But . . . we found a listing for her with this phone number.”
“Folks can die sudden.”
“When . . . did this happen? Does Carmen know?”
“That’s what I just got through saying. Nobody knows where she’s at. Funeral was a week ago.” It struck Julia that the woman didn’t seem particularly sad about any of this, only inconvenienced.
This was bad news, of course. Not because Lulu meant anything to Julia personally but because any hope of contacting Carmen was now dashed. But she couldn’t help being curious. “What happened? Was it an accident of some kind?”
“Well, for sure she didn’t mean to die.” The woman coughed, a smoker’s deep, rolling cough. “She give out sudden. Real bad off. Couldn’t get her breath.”
It struck Julia that this woman sounded more like a native of the Deep South than the West. She could be one of the people routinely interviewed on the local ten o’clock news here in South Carolina: “Yep, we was a’layin’ in the bed sleepin’ when they was a loud boom and ’fore we knowed it we didn’t have no roof.” These people were usually missing at least one front tooth and often had a bad eye.
She said, “Was it . . . heart trouble?”
“Just up and died,” the woman said.
Julia wondered if everyone in Wyoming spoke so cryptically. She heard a sudden high whistling sound in the background. “Water’s boiling,” the woman said. “I got to go tend it.”
“Wait, please. I’m very sorry to hear about all this, but are you absolutely sure you don’t have any idea how to reach Carmen? No cell phone? No address? Nothing at all?”
“She used to call Lulu some, but Lulu never did call her. Carmen, she was footloose. Trekked around a lot. She come back here once, just a day, then lit out again. Told Effie she was going to Oregon. Or maybe it was Ohio.” Julia doubted that this woman even knew the two states were in opposite directions from Wyoming.
Julia sighed. “Oh.” Then, though it didn’t matter at all, she asked, “Who’s Effie?”
“Lulu’s sister. Half sister. Lulu was the oldest.” There was a thump in the background, and the whistling sound stopped.
“And you’re . . . their mother?” Julia asked.
“Practically same as.”
Julia decided not to follow up on this. She had a sudden vision of the three women—Lulu, Effie, and . . . had she said Ida?—soft-fleshed, disheveled, and slack-jawed, sitting on a dilapidated sofa in a trailer, engrossed in a soap opera, eating nachos and beef jerky. She knew she was being unfair, assuming the worst about people she had never met, but she also knew she was probably right.
She couldn’t resist one last try. “So you can’t think of anyone at all who might know how to reach Carmen? Or how about a place she might have worked recently? Or maybe Effie would know something?”
There was a sudden frantic yipping in the background, along with loud thuds, as of someone trying to kick down a door. “He’s not allowed in!” the woman shouted. “You let him in, you’ll be the one cleaning up his nasty turds.” She coughed another deep, racking cough. To Julia she said, “Nobody knows where she’s at. Nobody means nobody. Effie can’t help. She’s bad sick, half out of her mind.” There was more barking in the background, then the sound of breaking glass. “Now look what you’ve gone and—” And suddenly the line was dead.
Julia slowly closed her cell phone and stood in her kitchen a long moment, trying to absorb the setback, trying not to think ahead to the eventual, inevitable slam of a car door, the sound of a knock on the door or the chime of the doorbell, the sight of a stranger on her front step.
• • •
WHEN at last she came back to herself, she was still standing in the same spot, staring at the backsplash above the sink. It was something she often found herself doing—studying the rows of small multicolored tiles, looking for but never finding a repeating pattern. The whole length of it was just a random mix, though something Matthew had “designed,” as he had liked to say. In Julia’s opinion, such a design could have been drawn up by a child—a blind one.
She knew there was a parallel here to the course her whole life had taken, except there was no one to claim the role of designer for that sad piece of work. Hers was a life of echoes and shadows. No pattern, nothing solid and sure.
Slowly she walked back toward her bedroom, trying hard to think of something, just one thing, she could latch on to as the dimmest flicker of hope in this whole situation with Carmen. Only one thought presented itself: At least if Carmen did call her back or, worse, did show up in person, Julia could get rid of her by saying her family needed her immediately back in Wyoming. She could hustle her to the airport, buy her a plane ticket, and get her on the next flight out.
In the meantime, she would fill up the next days and weeks with comings and goings, as many as she could think of, until enough time had elapsed that she felt safe again. I
n case Carmen did come sometime soon, Julia was going to try her best not to be at home. And if she did happen to be here, she could always pretend she wasn’t. There was no law that said you had to open your door if someone knocked.
Julia changed out of her teaching clothes into a crisp pink shirt and a pair of tan slacks. As afternoon seemed a particularly likely time for an out-of-town visitor to arrive, she had already devised a plan for the next several hours. She would run by the library and get a couple of books she had put on reserve as well as a movie Marcy had recommended, then go to the mall for a wedding gift for Dean Moorehead’s daughter. She would take her time selecting it and having it gift-wrapped. Then she would stop somewhere to eat, and if she read one of the library books as she ate, the way she saw other people doing in restaurants, she could stretch it out even longer.
She ran a brush through her hair, dabbed on some lipstick, and left the house a few minutes later. As she backed cautiously out of the driveway in her Buick, an ancient pickup truck lurched to a stop at the curb. No clutching at the heart, though, since she recognized it at once as belonging to Gil, her yardman. Gil did a lot more than mow the lawn. A “lawn sculptor”—that’s what he called himself on his business card. A droll little man with a luxuriant mustache, he had a disconcerting habit of blinking constantly whenever he spoke, which thankfully wasn’t often. But he was very fastidious, very dependable, not to mention reasonable in price, so she was willing to allow him any eccentricity.
Though Matthew had made a hobby of puttering in the flower beds himself, he had hired Gil years ago, one of several forward-looking arrangements he had made for upkeep at home when his job started requiring him to travel more. Julia sometimes thought of such arrangements as credits on her husband’s ledger page, though they in no way canceled the long list he had left in the other column after his death. It was a conflicted sort of gratitude she felt even now, colored as it was by the discovery of his many debts, which had become her debts.
She still remembered the day after Matthew’s funeral, when certain financial horrors were beginning to come to light. Pamela had gone through Matthew’s desk and dug out bills, statements, receipts, and one insurance policy, ironically small considering the fact that Matthew was in the insurance business. Pam had sorted through them all and put them in order, then entered everything on a spreadsheet. As Julia stood at the desk and stared at the figures displayed on the computer screen, she heard two things simultaneously: first, Pamela’s voice saying, “I’ll help you get through this, Jules, but I have to tell you it looks like he left you in a mess,” and, second, a lawn mower starting up right outside the window.
Looking out the window that day, Julia had seen Gil in his baggy work pants and red suspenders, his broad-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes, maneuvering the mower around the base of an oak tree. And she remembered Pamela following her eyes to the window, then saying, “At least you don’t have to worry about your yard along with everything else right now—well, except paying him to do it.”
And that wasn’t the end of it. After Pamela finally packed up and left, Julia had found several dozen handwritten IOUs in an old cigar box, all neatly printed, dated, and signed by Matthew—debts to his card-playing friends, totaling over six thousand dollars, all of which she had insisted on settling out of pride.
• • •
JULIA waved to Gil now, but he made no sign of having seen her, though she knew he had. She stopped her car and pulled forward onto the circular drive, then eased out onto Ivy Dale and turned in the direction of the library. She and Gil didn’t converse often, as there was little to talk about. They had a routine, and he stuck to his part. She stuck to hers, too, which was to mail him a check at the beginning of every month.
As she pulled away from the stone house, Julia glanced at Gil in her rearview mirror and thought again about what a colorful character he would make for a story. Tweak him a little, of course, add a limp perhaps, make him more talkative with some quirky speech patterns, maybe give him a more distinctive name, something more obviously foreign, and perhaps a characteristic odor—garlic or cabbage or curry.
She thought, too, of other people in her life who could also be cast as story characters: Marcy Kingsley, Dr. Boyer the French teacher, old Dr. Kohler, even her sister Pamela, and Pamela’s big sloth of a husband, Butch. And Ida from Wyoming. But it would take a better writer than herself, not just someone with a good eye for detecting idiosyncrasies. A real writer had to be able to create, not just imitate and exaggerate.
More than once when mentioning her upcoming sabbatical, Dean Moorehead had said to her in his soft, earnest voice, “We know you’ll enjoy some extra time for writing,” which she had taken to mean, We expect to see you published again.
But publication was another one of those things Julia didn’t want to think about. She tried to push the thought away, but it pushed back this time, then began to settle in. She knew her few scholarly essays and two stories didn’t count for much in academia, especially considering the origin of the stories. No one knew about all that, however, and there was certainly nothing to be gained by allowing herself to dwell on it again.
To her credit, she was a good teacher, a proven teacher, an excellent teacher in fact, perfectly capable and fair in her critique of student writing. No one could deny that she had much to offer in the classroom, whether she ever published again or not. Unfortunately, however, publication carried a great deal of weight with deans and department chairs. She knew they were waiting for her to deliver again. She had told her dean a couple of years ago that she was “working on” a novel. What she didn’t tell him was that the only work she had done on it had taken place in her head. She hadn’t actually written down the first word.
Sitting at a stoplight or eating breakfast or walking across campus, she might think of a perfect opening, but as soon as she picked up a pen or sat down at her computer, doubt set in. She might make several tries but by the end rejected them all as too stilted, too bland, too pretentious, too something. And then an old worry: Maybe she had read those exact words somewhere else and was only recalling them. She had the kind of memory that could do that. And even if she could write her own decent opening, where would she go from there? The thought of advancing beyond the first page was terrifying, like walking to the edge of a chasm and leaping.
Shame and fear—they made a debilitating pair. The closing words of one of her two published stories came to her now: He saw her on the loading dock, waiting for him in the rain, the steam rising about her like an unholy incense. She knew she could recite most of the sentences before that, too, all the way back to the first one. That was how well she knew the story. Backward and forward, as they said.
It was a good story, perfectly balanced between suggestion and revelation, with complex characters and a strong ending. But it wasn’t her own, except for the title.
• chapter 4 •
PRAGMATIC JUSTIFICATIONS
Sitting in her Buick at the public library, Julia studied the towering oak tree near the entrance, the roots of which had heaved the sidewalk upward until it cracked. It had been that way for years. Evidently no one was concerned enough to do anything about it. Library patrons simply skirted that section of the sidewalk. All it would take would be an accident and a lawsuit, and then something would be done.
When Julia had first received the box of Jeremiah’s papers eleven years ago, theft was the furthest thing from her mind. She had never stolen from anyone, but the fact that it was from her own brother made it worse. And it didn’t matter that he was dead and would never know. Somehow that made it worse, too.
She remembered well the shock of Lulu’s long-ago phone call with the news that Jeremiah had been shot and had died instantly. And before Julia could even get her breath to ask about the funeral, Lulu had gone on to tell her that it had happened four days earlier, that he had already been cremated and his ashes scattered somewhere in the Grand Teton National Forest.
; Pamela had been furious. “First of all, she waits four days to tell us? And then she just throws him to the wind?”
By this time, their father had been merely existing for almost two decades, his body refusing to follow where his mind had gone, and their mother was worn out from caring for him night and day. When Julia told her about Jeremiah, she received the news mutely, as if she had lost so much already there were no words left to say, as if this were just the epilogue of the long tragedy called life.
Julia thought she might have dropped the phone from shock. “Are you there, Mother?” she asked after moments of silence.
“Yes.” Barely a whisper.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell . . . him?”
“No.”
This was consistent with the mother Julia had known all her life, always serving, forbearing, shielding. Even now, though her husband’s mind and heart were hollowed out, she wanted to spare him the grief she knew he would feel if he could. For above all else in life, Jeremiah had been his one shining prize, not that he ever put it into words, or showed it in any way.
Julia always wondered if somehow in the black cave of her father’s mind he had sensed a tremor in the earth the day her mother learned of Jeremiah’s death, something that told him all was lost, for within days he took a sudden downward turn and two weeks later Julia received a phone call from her mother. Her father had died in his sleep. Pamela was there to help.
And Pamela was there again two months after that when their mother died. It was one of the saddest things Julia could imagine—that her mother, finally and blessedly relieved after decades as her father’s full-time caregiver, not to mention full-time receiver of his every foul mood and unkind word, was allowed no respite at the end of her life. No time to travel, to redecorate her house, to go shopping, to get up in the morning and plan a whole day of doing exactly what she wanted to do. Julia’s only hope was that if her mother had by chance been assigned a parcel of real estate in the heaven she claimed to believe in, maybe the landlord there would give her nice accommodations with a scenic view and free rent.
To See the Moon Again Page 4
