To Know You (9781401688684)

by Ethridge, Shannon (CON)

  Sally had a bright smile for Destiny. “We restocked the fridge. Would you like something?”

  “Champagne,” Destiny said. “We’re celebrating.”

  “Sally is our pilot,” Julia said. “We do our own attending.”

  “Oops.”

  “Hey, I’m up,” Sally said. “Can I grab you something, Julia?”

  “I’m on pain meds,” Julia said. “Water will be fine.”

  Destiny strapped into the recliner, raised the footrest. “Let’s relax and you tell me about Thomas Bryant.”

  “There’s not much more to tell,” Julia said.

  “It’s my story,” Destiny said, “and I’d appreciate hearing it.”

  Glancing out from the galley, Sally caught Julia’s eye. Sally pressed her hands together and bowed her head. Julia launched into the tale of Julia McCord and Thomas Bryant.

  Four

  Boston

  25 Years Earlier, Winter

  Julia McCord had come to Boston to make great art.

  She’d imagined herself in studio classes, cutting stone, molding clay, and slinging paint. On the weekends, she’d kick back and argue with her fellow artists about whether taking graphic art or secondary education as a minor was a sellout or a smart decision for the future.

  They’d ride bikes along the Charles, poke fun at the MIT nerds, and secretly envy the elites at Harvard. They’d stop in for a brew at Kenmore and maybe go to Fenway Park and pretend they were like the other tens of thousands of students who flooded the city every September.

  They would be different because they had vision, and they had come to Boston to marry that vision to revelation and call it art.

  They would go back to their dorms and hunker down with sketchpads and maybe some cheap wine and draw vivid dreams that most of the world wouldn’t dare to consider.

  What she hadn’t expected was spending the second half of her freshman year at Massachusetts College of Art on her knees, chalking streets and sidewalks.

  A news story in January had ripped at her in a way she hadn’t imagined possible.

  Something had gone terribly wrong or—as Julia now believed—miraculously right and a baby had survived a midterm abortion.

  With one feeble leg kicking and a tiny chest struggling for air, the little boy died in a metal basin. Someone had deliberately brought the basin within view of the security cameras, retrieved the tape of what the physician called the results of the procedure, and tipped off the radio talk shows.

  The story had legs until the mainstream press shut it down.

  A matter of privacy between a woman and her doctor, the prochoice people proclaimed, if it had actually happened at all. Who could trust these anti-abortion freaks and their lies? In men’s cruel and manipulative attempts to regain control over women’s bodies, they probably fabricated the whole thing.

  A pro-life group stopped the disposal of the child’s remains within minutes of his death. They had an injunction from a friendly judge that was issued months earlier, as if preparing for this rare event. Another perversion because why didn’t the person who caught it all on camera offer the infant one or two precious puffs of air and perhaps a warm towel to swathe him as he died?

  The state tagged him Baby Doe and stepped in to claim his remains. Caught in a political firestorm, they filed him away in a morgue locker. Julia would lie awake at night and think about his lonely fate.

  The anger at his abandonment smoldered in her chest. What could she do? She wasn’t political, wasn’t connected, wasn’t given to public speaking. The only thing she knew how to do was draw pictures.

  The first night she took to the streets was in February. The razor edge of a Montreal Express shrouded the city in sub-zero temperatures. Her friends were pontificating in useless circles about their art. The lounge stank with self-importance.

  In search of fresh air, she grabbed her backpack and wandered outside. She tried to think about her fabric art class. The cold air clung to her like shrink-wrap and she thought about Baby Doe, kept on ice in some dark compartment because two groups of people fought over his body like dogs over a scrap of carrion.

  The chalk was in her backpack because when her group got wasted enough, they’d riff in color on the chalkboard in Metropolitan Hall. The janitor washed it every morning as if to proclaim that they were just some talented kids with nothing real to say.

  The blue chalk with its dusky hue seemed right. A block from her dorm, Julia bent over the sidewalk, ripped off her mitten, and wrote FREE BABY DOE. She outlined the words in amethyst because of the way the veins on her hand had withered into blue and red threads within minutes.

  The next day a low-pressure front rolled in and the sky pelted rain. The amethyst ran into the blue, the blue ran into the street, bleeding into a smear on the pavement and then—nothing.

  Julia pressed her face to the window of her dorm room and said show me what to do.

  25 Years Earlier, Easter Sunday

  The police finally caught up to the artist the press called the Midnight Chalker on March 26 at 1:46 a.m.

  Julia had chosen Christopher Columbus Park in the North End as her coming-out canvas.

  Since she’d begun the tagging, she’d kept to quiet streets where she could have an hour of solitude or could hunker between parked cars when someone drove by. But Baby Doe’s remains still belonged to Massachusetts instead of God, so she decided it was time to make the message more visible.

  She had advanced from slogans to full images, sketching barren trees or broken cars or earth-quaked villages, spreading from the left corner of her stone canvas into whatever vision of wholeness she embraced in the icy dark.

  And always, in what had become her trademark hues, the sorrowful blue and biting amethyst: FREE BABY DOE.

  It was after midnight, Easter Sunday, when she got caught.

  She labored over a field of wilted lilies when a man yanked her by the collar. She panicked and unleashed a stream of pepper spray. Ten minutes later she sat in a booking room, charged with assaulting a police officer.

  When offered her one phone call, Julia had done what she thus far had avoided. She’d called the overnight desk at Fox25. Her only thought was for someone to film her drawing of Baby Doe rising out of the earth in the rosette of a lily before Public Works hosed it away.

  The film aired on the 6:00 a.m. newscast.

  Two hours later the local pro-life group sent a lawyer to the police station. She told him to pound sand.

  At 9:00 a.m., her roommate, Jeanne Potts, charged into the holding room, her hair still wet from her shower. “You should have told me you were the Midnight Chalker,” she said. “The whole Baby Doe thing has been eating at me too.”

  Julia hugged her. “I don’t want to become a cause,” she said. “I just want the baby at peace.”

  Jeanne called the son of a family friend who was about to graduate from Suffolk Law.

  “He’s smart and driven,” she said as they waited for him to arrive. “He says he can make this about freedom of speech and steer clear of the issues.”

  “So he’s not into politics?”

  “Nah,” Pottsie said with a laugh. “He’s basically into himself.”

  “That’s probably what I need right now. What did you say his name was?”

  “Tom. Thomas Bryant.”

  25 Years Earlier, May

  Two miracles happened in May.

  The state of Massachusetts transferred the remains of Baby Doe to the cloister of the Sisters of Still River. The good sisters promised Julia that he had been buried under a tree that rustled in the wind.

  Thomas Bryant became more into Julia McCord than himself. They were completely incompatible, she of the ripped jeans and wild hair, and he of the white shirts and crimson suspenders. The miracle was that they were a perfect fit.

  “He’s glommed onto you like acrylic,” Jeanne Potts said. “Do you know how many hearts—and bodies—this guy has left strewn in his path?”

&n
bsp; Julia tapped her toes and tried not to grin. “A guy has to grow up sometime.”

  “Seriously. He’s like a kite that flies high and nosedives when the wind changes. This is new for him. Just be careful.”

  Careful melted away like ice cream on hot pavement.

  “Don’t go back home this summer,” Tom said the night she was packing to go home to Oklahoma.

  Julia slipped her hands under his shirt so she could feel the muscles in his back. His skin was cool under her fingers, his scent a subtle musk. “Lucky me, I have a job at Safeway.”

  “You can make good money painting,” he said.

  Julia laughed. “I haven’t found a Medici to be patron to my da Vinci.”

  Tom kissed her forehead. “I mean, paint paint. There’s this guy at work who is going to New York to be an in-house attorney for one of our corporate clients. It was all”—he snapped his fingers—“just like that.”

  He touched his nose to hers, so close that she felt his lashes on her cheeks. His breath smelled like bubblegum. “Anyway, he’s just bought this house in Nahant for a cool mil. A wreck of a mansion, right on the water. He was going to work weekends restoring it and then turn it around for resale next year. Now he’s stuck with it, doesn’t want to sell as is because it’ll be a loss.”

  Julia leaned back so she could see his face. Tom’s hair was very dark, almost black. His eyes were on the blue side of gray, could go from merry to gritty in a snap because there was never a neutral moment, not with this man.

  “And he wants someone to paint his house?” she said.

  “Inside and out. Plus wallboarding, crown molding, cosmetic changes. It’s a good gig for me while I study for the bar exam. If I get a crew together, it’s a better deal for him because he won’t have to pay contractor fees. Think of it, baby. Summering at the shore, getting paid for it.”

  Thomas Bryant in July. Ocean breezes, hot sand, clear nights—what an absurdly perfect notion.

  “And where do I live? On the Common, like the guys with their shopping carts and booze in a bag, hon?” She cringed at the hon; she tried hard to wash the Oklahoma out of her speech, just like Tom tried to rinse South Boston out of his.

  “You’re living in the house. With me.”

  25 Years Earlier, Summer

  Six of them lived in the house that summer: two of Tom’s friends from Suffolk Law, Jeanne Potts, her brother Richie, Julia, and Tom. They hammered, painted, papered, sweated, and hung out.

  Nahant was a self-contained village, surrounded by ocean and bay. North of Boston, take a turn through Lynn, known for the old jingle: Lynn Lynn, the city of sin, you never come out the way you go in. Drive through the sketchy downtown, take a right at the Atlantic Ocean, and pass over the causeway, a narrow stretch of highway and beach that connected Nahant to the rest of the world.

  The scenic peninsula was kept pure for the townies with a resident-only parking ban. Boston was only a glance away to the southwest, but it could take an hour to get back there, especially with beach traffic and wending back through you never go out the way you come in.

  Julia felt like a causeway, balancing the girl trying to walk in God’s will and the woman desperate to pour herself into Thomas Bryant. Everything in its season, she told herself, and then forgot to listen.

  The rambling stone-and-shingle house had been abandoned to what little wild there was in Nahant. Vines climbed the massive stone porch, shrouding it with thorns and briars. The gardens were choked with weeds and dead leaves.

  Julia took on the grounds as a personal mission. She needed the fresh salt air and the sun on her shoulders. Oklahoma would have been the wiser option. Distance was all that could cool her off; that and scampering down the rocks and thrusting her head and shoulders into the cold Atlantic.

  She would labor all morning in the gardens, only coming in for their lunch of baloney sandwiches and Diet Coke. Her arms were often scratched from clearing and pruning. Tom would take her aside and tenderly kiss each of her wounds as if he took them personally.

  The house had six bedrooms. The guys roomed in one, Jeanne and Julia in another, while they rotated rooms for restoration. A committed Catholic, Jeanne Potts was Julia’s anchor whenever she wavered. When Tom started talking about the future, the waver became a tilt.

  “Someday I’ll buy you a house like this,” he said, helping her pull weeds from what used to be a glorious bed of peonies. The others had gone to Boston, tickets to a Sox afternoon game.

  “And what would I do with a house like this? Besides clean it all the time.”

  “Fill it with kids.”

  “All by myself?”

  “I’ll help,” he said with that devastating smile. “I’ve already picked out the names.”

  Julia poked his chest, left mud on his sweaty T-shirt. “That’s a girlie thing to do.”

  “Joshua. Ben. Brogan. Michael. Good South Boston kids.”

  “No, no. You’ve got it wrong.”

  “I do, do I?”

  She grinned, rubbed her dirty hand down the back of his shirt. “Devon will be a redhead like your sister. Kelsey will be quiet and studious and grow up to be a college professor. Sophie will have my eyes and be a drummer. And Savannah will be a people-person like you.”

  “Four females?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Doesn’t seem fair to me.” He tapped her on the nose. “So let me plea bargain this and ask—why not have all of them?”

  Julia sat back on her heels and made an exaggerated show of exhaustion. “Eight kids. I’d be too busy for anything else.”

  Tom wrapped his hand around the back of her head and pulled her in for a kiss. Off-balance, she rolled sideways into the grass. He rolled with her, sliding his arm around her waist. The smell of paint and perspiration intoxicated her.

  “If we’re going for eight someday”—his whisper was hot in her ear—“we’d better start practicing.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Shush. We both know where this is going.”

  “Tom. No.” Julia knew she should pull away.

  But everywhere she moved, Tom was there to meet her.

  24 Years Earlier, Spring

  Last summer seemed an eternity ago. The hurried pairings in hidden places. A bower under the overgrown rhododendron. A section of flat rock between slippery boulders. The long ride to New Hampshire, Tom making her wait until they crested Mount Eisenhower before he took her in his arms and lay her gently on a bed of moss.

  They had protection, did their best to use it. Sometimes in the gaze of the full moon, wrapped in a sleeping bag to keep mosquitoes off, sometimes things got overlooked and what did it matter because they were destined, Tom said. Their fate was to live happily ever after with four girls and five boys; five because he said they needed enough for a basketball team and besides, the girls would rule anyway.

  Julia would dig deeper into his arms and believe him.

  Jeanne Potts figured it out before she did.

  They were back at school, plunging into their studies like they had into the restoration of the Nahant house. The first semester had breezed by with challenging studio work. Tom was buried deep in his books, continuing with the Nahant restoration and studying for the bar.

  One April evening Jeanne came out of the bathroom in shorts and a T-shirt, a towel wrapped around her head. “You do realize—you’re late.”

  Julia looked up from her worktable. She sketched painstakingly in ink, each tiny stroke a struggle. “Is there someplace I was supposed to be?”

  “You haven’t used any of our supplies. Not for a while now.”

  “You count them or something, Pottsie?”

  “Last semester I ran out every month because you’d finish the last of them and forget to replenish the box. And now . . . the past two months, nothing.”

  Annoyed, Julia tried to refocus on her drawing. “You want me to go out and get a box?”

  “Yes.” Jeanne squeezed her hand. “The kind wit
h a pregnancy kit in it.”

  24 Years Earlier, Summer

  “We’ll figure this out,” Tom said, and for a couple more months they didn’t figure out anything because the hormones rolled in waves and Julia desired him more than ever. He went with the flow, seeking a refuge of mindless pleasure as he began his first real job for a Boston law firm. Julia and Jeanne spent another summer in Nahant, making drapes, cleaning windows, and staging the mansion for sale.

  One rainy July day Jeanne asked, “Have you considered adoption?”

  “This baby already has two parents.” Julia ripped off a length of thread to sew the corner of the crimson silk drape. They had rented furniture with straight lines and neutral colors and were making the house pop with accessories, pillows, and drapes. She photographed each room as they completed it and designed the brochure. “We’ll be getting married and I know you’ll laugh when I say this—we plan to live happily ever after.”

  “Just remember,” Jeanne said. “Tom’s ever after is concrete one moment, sand the next. I know him, Jules. He’s a runner.”

  “Not anymore, Pottsie. He’s a keeper now.”

  “Whatever.” Jeanne clumped up a ladder, positioned a length of drape so Julia could check the hem. “I’m here for you . . .”

  The unspoken when he leaves fell heavy on the room. Julia knew to her toes that she and Tom were destined to be, and Jeanne would know that eventually. Maybe not until their third child or tenth anniversary, but she’d forget this shadowed moment and celebrate belatedly.

  In August, Alicia McCord arrived in Boston. To see the sights, she had said. Her mother just wanted to snoop into what was keeping her daughter in the city for the second summer instead of coming home to Oklahoma.

  “I have to tell her about the baby,” Julia said to Tom. “She’ll see the bump.”

  “We’ll tell her we’re going to marry next spring,” he said. “Give you a chance to lose the baby weight and do it right.”

  “Are we?” Julia touched the worry line on his forehead. Tom worked night and day. The bondage of a junior associate, he told her. It’s okay because I’m their rising star.