“Sure,” she had said. She was grinning and confident, and he knew that she knew that she held his heart in the palm of her hand at that moment. They took the boat ride and headed back, and he said good-bye and never had the joy of laying eyes on her again.
NOW, AS JED PARKED AND TIED UP HIS BOAT AT THE END of his floating dock, he wondered how in the heck Julia had been talked into coming back here to look after these kids. He wondered what in the world the story of her life was. He did notice the hefty sapphire on her left hand. How could he not look?
Well, at least he’d been able to lay eyes on her again, he thought as he headed back to the cottage to clean and boil the shrimp. And he would be able to cook for her tonight. It was as if an apparition had become flesh and blood. As if a daydream had become real life. It was just for today as he had to head back to work tomorrow and wouldn’t be back out until after Julia’s departure on Saturday. But he had a feeling he would enjoy the next several hours, flea bombs, furniture moving, and all. And he would store this moment up in his mind and in his heart in hopes that it might revive—if but for a few hours—the young boy soul still inside of him, the one the world had not yet frayed and starved with its constant onslaught of disease, grief, and, most acutely felt, loneliness.
CHAPTER 13
Julia
Cleaning the house took all day. Julia managed to find some rubber gloves, scrub brushes, Comet, and Clorox, and she started with the kitchen, then worked her way through the living room. The oven hadn’t been cleaned in eons, and Julia feared if they turned it on the fire alarm would go off. Where was the fire alarm? She hadn’t seen one, but it had to be somewhere.
There were palmetto bug carcasses in the bottoms of the drawers and beneath the major appliances, and even in the kitchen doused in Comet, she could feel the fleas nipping at her scalp and arms. When Julia went into Marney’s room, her parents’ old room, she started with the bathroom. She scrubbed the tub and toilet and sink with a kind of fury and strength she hadn’t mustered in a long time. It felt good in a strange way, good to scrub away filth in someone else’s home, good to see some results.
When she opened the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she was startled to see her dad’s old Dopp kit there. The one her mother had given him many Christmases ago when Julia was a teenager. She lifted it up. It felt full inside, and when she unzipped it, she found a rusting bottle of shaving cream, a couple of plastic razors, his old square-shaped brush with the sharp bristles, and a frayed toothbrush lying next to a tube of toothpaste. She reached in and pulled out the brush. It still had strands of gray, curly hair gathered around the edges and even flecks of dandruff deep within the bristles. Without thinking, she lifted it to her nose. It smelled ever so faintly like him, musky and manly, a combination of spice and rubbing alcohol and whatever thick sweetness made up Charles Bennett. She had never known a scent quite like it; it made her feel comforted and safe.
She blinked back the tears. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. She zipped it up quickly and shoved it back in the cabinet. Deal, deal, deal, she told herself. Don’t open up any old wounds. Just keep cleaning.
After scrubbing the bathroom, she headed to the bedroom, where she dusted, vacuumed, mopped, and stripped the sheets off of the old bed. She did not want to open the large cedar closet her mother had insisted they build back when they spent their summers out there, but she knew she had to in order for the flea bomb to make its way into every nook and cranny.
When Julia finally opened it, she was astonished to find all of her father’s clothes hanging on one side—his suits, his jackets, his oxfords, his fatigues, his shoes all lined up in a row as if he would step back into them at any moment. She recognized most of the clothes. They were the ones he’d worn during her childhood with a few exceptions: the tan overcoat she remembered him wearing once when he came to visit her in New York shortly after graduate school, the white dinner jacket he’d purchased from Berlin’s for Meg’s wedding, a down vest in bright red that didn’t look like anything he’d ever actually wear.
She didn’t want to get too close. If she did, she might smell the fullness of his scent and that would send her over the edge. She was human, after all, and she had her limitations. She only needed to do a quick sweep of the open floor and mark the dresser Jed and Skeeter might want to lift before they set off the bomb.
She picked up all of the shoes, Marney’s and her father’s, and put them on an empty shelf above the hanging clothes. She vacuumed well and also mopped the hardwood floor. Just as she was about to pull the string to shut off the old bare lightbulb in the center of the walk-in, she saw something behind an overcoat: the gilded edge of a familiar frame. She pulled back the jackets and overcoats and found a painting, one of the first she’d ever done, at age five or so, of a sunflower from her mother’s garden with a beetle crawling on a petal toward the flower’s center.
Tears filled her eyes before she could stop them, and she went running out of the closet and out of the bedroom door, which opened up onto the screened porch. She sat down on a rocking chair and wept like a child, barely able to catch her breath. She pulled off the rubber gloves and rubbed her eyes. She had to get out of here. She didn’t know if she could stand this place another day, another minute. How had she gotten herself into this crazy mess? This was not her mess!
She looked down at her left finger, at the sapphire she’d meant to take off before the cleaning began. Simon had resized it and it was a little too snug now. It took a good deal of soap and cold water to get it off when she needed to.
“Good,” Simon had said with a wink. “Let’s keep it that way, Jules.” She needed to call him or e-mail him, but there didn’t seem to be any computer in the house and her phone had no bars out here. Also, she needed to call the Art Institute in Budapest. She had left the professor there a message about a family emergency that was going to delay her a few days, but she was scheduled to give a lecture on American art in the twenty-first century on Friday, and there was no way she was going to make that.
“HEY THERE,” CAME A WARM VOICE ON THE DOCK. IT WAS Jed and he had come by boat to the house. She wiped her eyes more firmly with the back of her hand, but there must have been some Comet on it because it only made the tears worse, and she could feel her eyes puffing up.
Jed walked up to the screened door and opened it. “You all right?”
She shook her head and groaned, and he came over, sat down beside her, and gently handed her a handkerchief.
“Hey, I’m old-fashioned.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “My dad used to carry these around, and you’d be surprised how often I use them. The nurses make me swear to wash them in Clorox after I offer one to a patient. Which I do.”
She took the soft linen cloth with his father’s initials embroidered in the corner and wiped her swelling eyes. So many surprises in twenty-four hours—the least of which was Jed, the first boy she ever kissed, showing up on the doorstep as Marney’s surgeon. The low country was a small, small place.
He looked to her and then back out at the water. “I can’t believe you came to help out. You must have some serious guts.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know how it happened. This is like a nightmare I’ve been promising myself all of my adult life that I’d never have.”
“Most of them are like that, aren’t they? They blindside us, and we certainly wouldn’t choose them.”
He put his large hand gently on her back. It felt warm and comforting—a little light in the freakiness of this dream, like Charlie’s birthmark or Etta’s artwork.
“I’m supposed to be in Budapest on a Fulbright right now, painting and lecturing. Most of all, trying to find a ‘new voice’ for my art.”
He nodded, stayed quiet for a long time, and just kept his hand on her back, then gently removed it and crossed his lanky arms. How nice that he didn’t say anything, Julia thought. She just needed to have a meltdown without any words of advice or wisdom. He must be married to know su
ch a thing. Curiosity overtook her, and she glanced at his left hand. No band.
She twisted the ring on her left finger, a habit she’d formed in the last few months since she’d received it.
“So what’s the story on the fellow who gave you that nice rock?”
She smiled through her tears. “My fiancé.” She shrugged and wiped her nose with the handkerchief. “He’s an art dealer, someone I met in New York, but he’s actually from London.” She looked out over the marsh.
“And what does he think of you being here?”
“He thinks it’s nuts.” She noticed a wasp working its way up the outside screen of the porch. “And I’m sure he’s right.”
Jed followed her gaze toward the wasp and then to the water, which was reflecting the chips of light from the late afternoon sun.
He cleared his throat to say something, but just as he did, the dryer buzzed in the outbuilding next door and Skeeter hollered from the side yard, “Where’re you, Julia? I’ve got the bombs.”
CHAPTER 14
Julia
Julia left the men to move furniture and set off the foggers, and she went over the bridge to the library in Hollywood, the first little town off of the island, where she was able to e-mail Budapest and call Simon from the two bars she found in the far end of the parking lot by the Dumpster. She only got his voice mail so she texted him and he texted back. Middle of big deal dinner mtg with Tate director. Call u when?
Try u tomorrow, she texted back. He’d been after the Tate Museum in London for almost a year to add Hockney to their permanent collection of twentieth-century painters, and maybe that was coming together. If so, it would be enormous for Simon’s career. Then, if her muse never came back, and if she was beat out of the department chair job, she could just resign, set up house anywhere they wanted in the world, and start that family she’d been wanting. Maybe Lerici, maybe Corsica. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it? Nesting on the Mediterranean. Painting when she felt like it. Raising a child.
She spotted the tail of a raccoon that had darted from the Dumpster and into the bushes of a double-wide on cinder blocks next to the library. Then, as a woman came out of the double-wide and yelled, “Scat!” he scurried into the little creek that ran behind the trailer.
Julia could hear the plunk and then see the marsh grass parting on the other side of the bank. The sun and humidity were baking her by this point in the afternoon, but she was thankful for the little glimpse of wildlife. There one moment, gone the next. She couldn’t remember the last time she had stopped and watched the natural world. Taken the time to simply observe, to take in the moment before it passed. Somehow she had forgotten that the moment was always irretrievable. She leaned against the hood of her hot rental car and allowed an old memory of her father to surface.
“NO MINUTE IS QUITE LIKE THE ONE BEFORE IT,” HE HAD told her when she was ten and he was teaching her how to paint the sunset. “Watch carefully. And keep watching, Julia. And then you’ll be able to capture it.” She had let her mind wander for a moment, daydreaming about something else—who knows—maybe a friend at school or the reddish fox she’d seen slinking along the dirt road the day before. Then when she came back to the vista, it had changed. It was too dark to capture the tops of the trees or the cloud formations above them or the last light—capturing the last light was everything to an end-of-the-day painting. She could remember blinking hard, holding the brush loosely in her hand, and then looking over to where her father had been able to get it down, at least the outline of it, and he was going to have a stunning work. “I think I missed it again,” she told him, and he had turned and looked at her with those deep brown eyes he’d passed along to his son. His eyebrows had softened and he laid his brush on the easel and reached over to squeeze her knobby little shoulder. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
JULIA’S PHONE BUZZED, WAKING HER FROM THE REMEMBERING. It was her mother, who must have gotten wind of her whereabouts and had already left her four messages.
“Hi, Mama.”
“Oh, Julia!” she said. “My stomach has been all in knots. Are you okay out there?”
“I’m fine.” She chuckled at the truth of it. She was totally fine. “I’ll be out of here within the week. It’s going to be okay.”
She could hear her mother holding back a cry on the other end. “Yes, it will. You’ll be fine and on your way in no time. But when can I see you?”
“Maybe tomorrow or the next day? I’ll call you as soon as there is a window. You know, I’m in charge of these children and I don’t know exactly when I can get away.”
She heard her mother swallow hard. “Well, you can bring them too, darlin’. I won’t bite them, I promise. But I do want to see my daughter in the flesh from time to time, especially when she’s less than fifty miles away.”
That would be awfully interesting and potentially hazardous. Taking her daddy’s second family into her mama’s home for a visit. Of course, her mother would be the ever-gracious hostess as usual, but it would be painful for her.
Julia sighed. How was she going to figure this one out? “I’ll make sure I see you before I leave, Mama. I promise.”
“Okay, sweetheart.” Her mother’s voice seemed to rise slightly with a controlled expectation. “Just call back when you can. And let me know if you need anything.”
WHEN JULIA ARRIVED BACK ON EDISTO, THE HOUSE WAS off limits and the children were at Glenda and Skeeter’s. Skeeter had a satellite he’d installed himself, which offered three hundred channels, so Charlie was glued to a television show while Skeeter played a game of crazy eights with the girls on the deck.
“How was the visit?” Julia asked Glenda, who was peeling the skin off of some hard-boiled eggs at the kitchen sink.
Glenda looked to Julia and then back down to her colander of eggs. “Marney looked good, and she was so glad to see those children.” She nodded and cut her eyes at Julia. “Makes her almost seem human when you see her arounsd them, you know?”
Julia shook her head. She did not know.
Glenda shrugged her shoulders and continued, “And as for Dot, she was her usual talkative self, sending you her thanks and regards, though she didn’t have the best coloring . . .” Glenda chuckled as she looked out of her kitchen window. “That is, she didn’t until I showed her the half a caramel cake I’d brought her.” She turned to Julia, winked, and leaned in. “Dot does love her sweets, you know?”
“Yes, she does.” Julia could remember Dot’s little crystal candy dish in her house—always full with Brach’s candies and butterscotch—and how she’d let you have two or three pieces whenever you went to visit. And her freezer was full of ice cream and frozen cookies and pies. She never went anywhere empty-handed, and dessert was a must at the end of each meal.
“Good news for you, though, child.” Julia hadn’t been called child in a long, long time. She twisted her graying hair into a knot at the back of her neck and chuckled.
“What’s that, Glenda?”
“Marney was finally able to get ahold of an old babysitter.” Glenda raised her eyebrows and nodded toward the road. “The Lindsay child who grew up on Red House Road—Brooke?” The woman gently cracked an egg on the side of the sink and began to peel back the shell. “She’s in college now up in the mountains, but she was looking for summer work, so Marney has hired her to watch the kids all the way through August while she gets her strength back. She says she can be here by Saturday.”
“Great.” Julia took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “That sounds like a terrific plan.”
“’Course, I don’t know how Marney can afford a full-time sitter all summer.” Glenda shook her head. “She’s never been one to hold down a job, and you know . . .” Glenda turned to face Julia headon. “She’s sold off your daddy’s paintings one right after the next to survive.”
The thought hadn’t crossed Julia’s mind yet. Where were her father’s paintings? She had seen a few prints on the walls but not any origin
als. Glenda read her mind. “They’re all gone, Julia. She let them go to keep the place afloat. He didn’t have much in the way of savings or life insurance. But the paintings did go up a good bit in value since he passed, and the Gibbes Museum even bought a few.”
Of course, nothing surprised Julia about her father or Marney. She didn’t expect Marney to be set for life, as she knew her father’s law firm went under years ago. And she was half-surprised Marney hadn’t sold the house. She knew Meg was chomping at the bit to get that property, and she seemed to remember there was some drama surrounding that after her father’s passing. Meg had asked Julia if she could buy her out of her share—which her father had willed evenly between Meg, Marney, and Julia—but not until the last of Marney’s children reached eighteen. Julia said she’d be glad to sell hers anytime. She had no plans to use it. In fact, it had been her mission in life to never return to Edisto Island. So much for that. Well, that was for Marney and Meg to sort out. She would be long gone in less than a week.
Julia bit her lip. “I’ll help if she needs help . . . with the babysitter . . . I can certainly contribute.” She couldn’t think of a better cause to give money to at the moment.
“That’s nice of ya, sweetheart,” Glenda said. “Dot will pitch in, I’m sure, and we can too. This isn’t your problem, heaven knows.”
“I’d like to contribute, though.” Julia was suddenly overcome with the desire to peel eggs, so she jumped in beside Glenda and started cracking one against the side of the sink. She used to do this with her mama all the time, and she loved to peel back the jagged edges. One egg never broke the same as the next, but they all had that beautiful, smooth oval beneath the outer skin—white and dense and exquisite to behold. She held her first cleaned egg under the faucet and then held it up to the late afternoon light. Then she turned to Glenda. “And I’m going to do all I can to get the house in order before Marney gets back.”
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