The Walking People

by Mary Beth Keane

  Greta took the phone out of his hand. "Julia?" she said, and then quickly, "Don't say it's me."

  "Yes?" Julia said. Greta could hear a woman's voice in the background, brought close by the small space inside Julia's car. The woman's voice was low, continuous, despite Julia's being on the phone, as if she was telling someone a long story and couldn't be interrupted. Greta imagined her pointing out the car window, Tom nodding, the muscles around his mouth too tired after the excitement and the long flight to shape any words. Then she heard a male voice say "George Washington Bridge" as clear as day.

  "Are they with you?" Greta asked, and then scolded herself. "Who's there? Just Tom and Johanna?"

  "That's it."

  "Not another man? You didn't pick up anyone else?"

  "Mom, what are you talking about?"

  The voices in the background went silent. "I told you not to say it was me." Greta sensed them listening, heads tilted toward Julia, eyes on the world outside the car windows but taking in every word. "Well, how long do you think it will take?"

  "Forty minutes, I'd guess. Maybe more. It depends on whether they clear this accident. We haven't hit the bridge yet."

  "Julia," Greta said, "I can't believe you kids did this. I just don't understand how you would do something like this without telling me. I can't believe—"

  "Yes," Julia said, laughing lightly. "We're excited too. Can't wait."

  Greta heard a click on the line, took the phone away from her ear and examined it where it sat in her palm. The screen was glowing, but as she watched, it went dark.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  James took it from her and pressed a button. "She hung up," he said.

  "Hung up?"

  "Or got disconnected. The signal here is spotty."

  "James," Greta said, sitting again at the edge of the bed, "are my sister and brother really in that car? Are they really coming here? It's just not possible."

  "What are you talking about? A few years ago two guys circled the whole world in a balloon. Why can't they get on a plane and come to New York?"

  "You think I'm joking?" Greta said, struggling to keep her voice down. "I should give you a good belt, is what I should do. I should get your sister in here and belt her too. And Julia too, when I see her. Mind your business. I thought that's what your father and I always taught you. There are things you know absolutely nothing about. It's just not as easy as buying a ticket and getting on a plane."

  "Well, it is that easy, actually, because that's exactly what they did. And the minute you see them, you're going to be happy they came. I mean, it's silly—whatever this is between you. Is it because you left? Is it because they didn't like Dad? No, don't look at me like that. I'm not really asking. I'm just saying that they seem to be over it, so you should start getting over it too. You've been talking about home all our lives. I don't get it."

  "You're not meant to get it. It's none of your business." Greta stood as tall as she was able. She pointed her finger in her son's face but couldn't think of anything else to say.

  "Okay. I'm done here. I'm going back to the party. Remember the party, Mom?"

  As he left, he pushed the bedroom door open further. "Mrs. Quinn?" he called. "Still looking for my mother?" He turned, stepped aside, and pointed to Greta, who had returned to her perch on the bed. "Right in there. Peek your head in and get her moving. I don't think she realizes it's that time." He looked at his watch and shouted so everyone could hear him, "The guest of honor will be here any minute."

  "Greta?" Maude Quinn said as she entered Greta's bedroom. "Everything looks wonderful. Eavan said you spilled on your good blouse. Isn't that just the way? Well, listen, you look like a million bucks. Now tell me how you did those figs wrapped in bacon, will you?"

  16

  FOR JULIA, THE MORNING at work glided by like a series of floats in a parade. She sat rooted to the desk chair in her bright and cluttered office, halfway between the company's two largest conference rooms, as the familiar pageant played out on the other side of glass walls. Having arrived early, only to find herself completely incapable of making her thoughts focus on the e-mails waiting for her from vendors in Italy, Turkey, Hong Kong, she observed for the first time that the morning rush tipped in only one direction, from the elevators in the south corridor to the row of cubicles and conference room A in the north. The steady current of arrival, clusters of threes and fours, moved from left to right, as did the scurry to morning meetings, the storming forth with files, swatches of fabric, mugs of coffee clutched in fists, laptops tucked under arms. They must circle the whole floor, Julia decided, like runners on a track.

  An hour or so later the pace of the parade slowed to accommodate calm midmorning strolls, everyone finally settled in, elbows resting on cubicle ledges, asses thrust out into the aisles as the assistants whispered about each other, about their bosses, about their accounts. They planned their Friday and Saturday nights.

  The phone on Julia's desk gave two quick blips. Silence. Another two blips. An internal call. Julia reached over and tapped a small red button.

  "You still leaving early today?" David's voice filled the room. His office was three doors farther down the parade route.

  "I've only told you fifty times."

  "I have some things for you to look at before you go. And we have to come up with a plan for next week. If Marshall Field's—"

  Julia picked up the receiver. "Okay, I took you off speaker. Can't we just pretend I'm not here today? I'm leaving at lunch. If I'd taken off or called in sick, you wouldn't need me to look at anything, right? You'd just go ahead and make all these decisions on your own."

  David was silent, and as she waited for him to speak, she recalled their argument of two nights earlier. He was hurt, he'd said, by the way she treated him at work sometimes. "What did I do?" she demanded, taking another sip of the wine he'd opened for her as he breaded the lamb chops he was preparing for their dinner.

  "Nothing, exactly. It's your tone. It's like—"

  She had felt the alcohol warm in her belly, under her ribs. Just a few sips into her third glass and she could already detect the predictable heat in her cheeks and the pliant muscles of her arms as she set down her glass and folded them across her chest. "My tone? You're reprimanding me for my tone?"

  He placed the lamb chop carefully on a plate. "Well, it's bitchy a lot of the time. And the thing is—"

  "It's bitchy? Did you just call me a bitch?"

  He stared at her in a way that refused the possibility that she had actually misunderstood. Fine, his posture said, you want to go down that road? Fine. "No. I didn't. But since you mention it..."

  She'd gathered her things and was out the door before he could rinse the bread crumbs off his fingers. When she got back to her apartment, she turned the ringer off on her phone.

  They'd known each other for nine months and had been sleeping together for four. There was an office policy that prohibited interoffice relationships between any director-level employees who work closely together, but Julia swore to herself that she'd never let it get out of hand. It began as a cliché: too much to drink, the last two left at the bar, the bright idea to share a cab, both knowing perfectly well the cab would make only one stop. The following Monday she'd arrived at work determined to avoid him, and with the hope that he'd have the common decency to avoid her. She blocked out her calendar, sent her phone straight to voice mail, pulled the blinds on her office's glass walls, took a two-hour lunch, kept her door closed. She made it to four o'clock and then made the mistake of checking the second coffee station on the floor when the first was out.

  "Hey," he'd said, coming up behind her. "Avoiding anyone?" He looked at his watch. "I was going to give you until five, and then I was going to bust down your door."

  "I'm swamped," Julia said, stirring her coffee as she tried to step past him.

  "Friday," he said. "Let's go to dinner."

  She put the stirrer in her mouth as she considered the of
fer. It was not normally how these things turned out, and she wondered if this was his way of avoiding awkwardness around the office. If they pretended they were interested in each other for more than a minute, maybe that first night wouldn't seem so bad. He was handsome, yes, in a well-pressed blond sort of way. He had very white, very straight teeth—a characteristic Julia knew Greta would approve of, since she was always remarking on the teeth of people born and raised in America. Greta had been nudging Julia toward love for a long time now. You have an education, Greta pointed out. You have a career. You have good looks and good sense. Now it was time to find a partner for life. Did Julia want to be lonely? Did she want to go home to an empty apartment at the end of each day? Greta was, as James had once put it, a true believer, and years back, when Julia was shopping for a new therapist, the woman had asked her to list a few of the priorities she'd been taught growing up. Julia listed love for one's family in ten different ways, and the therapist, after taking a few minutes to look at the page, seemed at a complete loss.

  "Look," Greta always said whenever Julia pushed back, tried to change the subject. "A girl has to eat, right? So go for a few dinners. Let someone take you dancing."

  But Greta and Michael had never gone dancing, as far as Julia could tell. They worked and they talked and they slept and they got up each morning and did it all over again. Oh, and they worried. Or at least Greta worried. Would ends meet? Would the kids be able to support themselves? Would the oil tank leak before the winter was out? Would Julia find someone to love her soon (Eavan had found her match, and Greta didn't worry about James; it was different for boys). Was Julia a happy person? There were all these worries, plus the unspoken fear that Julia had been able to detect in Greta ever since that last night in the old apartment. Julia often wondered if Greta still had the old tin cookie box hidden somewhere in the house. It wasn't in her bedroom closet; Julia had spent an afternoon looking for it once when Greta and Michael were at work.

  For a long time Julia had prided herself for what she considered a carefree, take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life. As a teenager, she had decided that she would not be like Greta, bogged down with details of daily existence that she couldn't control or understand. Then she'd discovered the contents of the tin box and realized that she would not have to be—little of Greta was written into her DNA. Julia had been born out of a personality so different from Greta's that she'd never even seen the woman whose blood she'd inherited. Her birth mother's crime was something Greta would have never been capable of, and this knowledge made Julia more interested in her own limits and simultaneously terrified of what she might discover about herself.

  "Julia?" David had asked, waving a hand in front of her face. "Earth to Julia? Dinner Friday?"

  "Sure," Julia said. "Everyone has to eat, right?"

  Now, four months after their first proper date, David wanted to go to the party. He didn't understand why she hadn't invited him. He had never met Eavan, who was often in the city for shows or shopping, or even James, who lived just one stop away from Julia in Brooklyn. She had met his brother one evening when he was in town overnight to meet a client, but it wasn't until halfway through dinner that Julia realized the night was less spontaneous than it had been billed by David. She was being formally presented as the girlfriend, considered and evaluated by a representative from David's faraway family. Julia had not asked to meet anyone in his family—it had barely occurred to her that he had a family—and now here he was expecting to be presented to hers.

  "It's just a thing for my dad," she'd explained more than once. "It's his friends, not mine. You'd be bored." It wasn't that she wasn't interested in him, she insisted, and as she insisted, she realized it was the truth. It wasn't that she was hiding him—or worse, hiding someone else. She'd even agreed with him when he suggested that it might be time to come out at work about their relationship. She just didn't want to bring him to the party, and that was that. At some point, Julia noticed, he seemed to decide that the best thing to do was to act as if he didn't care.

  "Who are you picking up?" he asked now. "I know you told me, but—"

  "An aunt and an uncle. My mother's brother and sister."

  "It's been years, right?"

  "It's been forever. I've never met them."

  "Really? How will you know each other? Maybe you should make a sign for when they come through customs."

  "I think I'll just look around to see if anyone else is looking around. Anyone else who looks a lot like me. Or my mother."

  "Family resemblance is tricky, Jules. I have an uncle who looks Arab. I swear to God. He gets stopped for random checks at La Guardia just about every—"

  Julia sighed.

  "Okay, okay," David said. "I'm just making conversation, you know? Call me over the weekend. It's supposed to rain, but if today's weather holds and if you want a day at the beach..."

  I'm almost forty-three years old, Julia thought. Then, annoyed with herself as well as with David, she wondered what that had to do with anything. She'd been thinking about her age more and more, ever since James had come over to her place one Saturday morning to tell her about the idea he and Eavan had cooked up. "Wouldn't it be great?" he asked. "After all this time, for them to see each other again?" Julia had never told anyone what she'd discovered that last night in the apartment. Not Eavan. Not James. None of her girlfriends. Not a single boyfriend. Not even Donald MacEwan, who she was eight weeks away from marrying once.

  Julia was resistant to the idea at first. It's not our business, she told her two younger siblings. We shouldn't stir the pot. "But wouldn't you love to meet them?" Eavan had asked, and Julia had immediately felt her resistance cracking. She finally agreed it would be perfectly great, and she agreed again two weeks later when Eavan reported that Johanna had written back. At almost forty-three years old, she told herself, she should be ready. She'd done all the growing up she was going to do. She wished it would stop occurring to her whenever the three of them were together that neither Eavan nor James would ever reach into a box one day and discover that they were not the people they'd always been told they were.

  When the digital numbers on the screen of Julia's office phone read 12130, she set her e-mail to an automated reply and picked up her bag. She dialed the garage downstairs and told the attendant she'd be down in ten minutes. She pressed the code on her phone that sent messages directly to voice mail. She pushed the papers on her desk into a neat pile. She walked out into the hall, pulled her office door closed after her, and, like everyone else, turned north. Thankfully, David's office was empty when she passed.

  "I'm out of here," she whispered to her assistant, who was on a call. Rebecca nodded, waved her away, mouthed the words "Have fun." Julia continued north along the corridor, turned left, left again, and left once more, until she'd completed a lap and found herself at the bank of elevators.

  "Going down," she said to the crowd pressed inside the first elevator that opened, and determined to find room where there wasn't any, she maneuvered herself inside.

  Coming from her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, Julia usually took the subway to work. Two subways, in fact. She had to transfer at Union Square. So, on a day when she already felt a little peculiar—as if her mind were tethered on a short leash and trailing slightly behind her body—taking the elevator straight to the basement of her office building and getting into her car was just one more aberrant drumbeat in an arrangement that was already out of tune.

  It was the warmest Friday New York had seen in months, and for this reason she expected a lot of traffic leaving the city, pasty-faced apartment dwellers heading full speed for the sandy beaches of Long Island and New Jersey. Instead, she shot out onto empty highway, open road. Foot pressed to the gas pedal, she reached over to dig the E-ZPass tag out of the glove compartment and sailed through the tollgate. Up and down exit ramps she flew, barely tapping the brake, hurtling along the Grand Central, the Van Wyck, the car washes, dance clubs, and low-slung houses of Queens all
standing at attention, all shifting in their foundations a little to twist from left to right as she passed.

  She arrived at JFK an hour and twenty minutes before the flight was due to land. Alone, holding her purse close to her body, she sat at a table in the Euro Café and ordered a glass of white wine. Not ten seconds later she got up, tapped her waitress on the shoulder, and changed the order to a vodka tonic. By the time she returned to her seat, the notice on the arrivals monitor said that Aer Lingus Flight 107 was running forty minutes late.

  After her second vodka tonic—which she rationalized by figuring the flight would be further delayed, and counteracted by also ordering a cheese plate — she asked herself, for perhaps the thousandth time that week, the millionth time since that last night in the old apartment in 1986, why she'd never gone to Ireland. There had been chances. A bike tour organized by a friend in 1994, cheap flights advertised in full-page ads in the New York Times every winter. She'd been to France, to Spain, to Italy. She'd been to London more than a dozen times for work. On one of the more recent London trips, on a walk through Hyde Park with Francis Brown, a British colleague who liked to talk about the kingdom past and present and never once mentioned his wife or young child, she learned that there was a bus that went from Victoria Station to Galway City.

  "A bus?" Julia had asked at the time, checking her knowledge of geography. "Isn't there a little thing called the Irish Sea?"

  He'd laughed, touched her arm. "It travels up to Liverpool and drives right onto the ferry. On the Irish side it stops in Dublin and Galway City. It's a long journey, all told. Twelve, thirteen hours."