by Nelle Davy
Betsy had had no idea what Jess and Julia were up to, until one day Julia ran out of math class crying. She had been dreadfully sick in the washroom and had had to go home. Lavinia sat up as she had heard this—she had remembered this incident. Piper had picked the girl up from school and had nursed her. Julia hadn’t come down to dinner and was quiet the next day. She had dismissed it at the time as nothing out of the ordinary.
After that, Betsy said, Jess got more fidgety and anxious. Now he was chasing Julia in corridors and ignoring Caroline. Julia had been sick again one morning in school but she had insisted on not going to the nurse. When Jess heard, he tried to talk to her but she brushed him off. Then two days later, he broke up with Caroline in the parking lot of the diner near school. And then a week afterward, Julia came into class with a huge smile on her face and, pulling Betsy into the girl’s washroom, had showed her the diamond on her left hand.
“I see,” said Lavinia at the last. “Clever girl.”
“I don’t think she’s been clever. I think she’s been very stupid, hiding all this from everyone until now. Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” cried Daphne, shaking her child. She had thought Lavinia had been talking about her daughter.
“But why Jess?” Lavinia persisted, though it was more to herself, than Betsy. “Of everyone, why him?”
“Because he’s going places,” Betsy said. “And he’ll take Julia with him.”
And that was when Lavinia smiled.
How Julia would tell it, was that when she heard the house was quiet, she came downstairs and got a sandwich. She could track the movements of her family in the house from her bedroom and she knew their routine well enough to know when they would usually be in and out. She had mostly been going down in the middle of the night—three, four in the morning for reserves, but as she had heard her stepmother say goodbye earlier that day, the boys were at school and her father was with her aunt in a business meeting with a new supplier, she decided to risk the venture. Grabbing what she could, she left and went up the stairs just as her stepmother pulled up into the drive.
She was in her room when she heard the front door close, and she heard her stepmother go up the stairs and knock on her room.
“Julia, are you ready to talk yet?” came the muffled voice through the wood. Behind the door Julia gave her stepmother the finger. Then she heard Lavinia go into her bedroom for ten minutes and then she came back out and went down the stairs into the hall. For a few moments there was nothing, but then she heard her muffled voice seep through the walls. At first she said she didn’t listen. She knew she would be talking about her, she was all anyone talked about now except when they were in front of her father, so for a while she didn’t pay much attention, but then she heard something that made her sit up.
“But what shall we do if she finds it?” she heard Lavinia ask. “Maybe we should just be on the safe side and put it in the bank.”
Julia rolled off of her bed and put her ear to the floor.
“I just don’t think it’s wise to leave it here. We’re not always in, she could just grab it at any time and be gone and no one would stop her. You know we have nearly a thousand dollars there. That’d set her up in California for a good while. We should put it in the bank, Cal… I know you want to trust her but she’s clearly not thinking straight at the moment—she’s liable to do anything with that Jess boy. Why wouldn’t she, especially if she has money to do it?”
Julia rolled onto her back and stared at the peach-colored wallpaper. Her parents had talked about keeping a stack of money in the house in case of emergencies before. Why, she did not know—did they think they could just pay the burglars off if they came? But her aunt had said that her father had lived through the crash and the Depression and he was afraid of banks. He liked to have ready reserves in case he needed it. Her stepmother had thought the idea was more likely to encourage burglaries if people knew about it, not prevent them, and had been adamant about it, but evidently her father had gotten his own way. If he could, he would have kept the whole of their money under the mattress, but the compromise apparently was a thousand.
She heard Lavinia finish her conversation and go out into the garden. She looked out from her window and saw her in her pruning gloves and straw hat bent over the azalea bush. Quickly she stole into her father’s bedroom, lifted the mattress and removed the brown paper bag there. Then she went back into her room, checked the window again and then stealthily crept downstairs and called Jess.
The next night while my family slept and my grandfather choked his pillow into his mouth to stop his wife from hearing him sob, Julia crept downstairs, down the drive and to the entrance of the farm, where she found Jess Thorne parked in his T-bird and waiting. In the morning, my grandmother listened carefully at the door of her stepdaughter’s room and then, trying the handle on the pretext of attempting to reason with Julia face-to-face, she found it unlocked and the closet half-empty. My great-aunt half fainted in her chair and my grandfather threw a bottle of scotch, which burst on the wall.
“We’ll never see her again,” he said in despair.
And that was how Julia left home for the first time.
To my knowledge, she’s always believed that it had been all her own idea.
Chapter 7
ON THE PLANE to Iowa I had a dream. I dreamt I was in the big double bed I had shared with my sister Ava in my grandmother’s house after my father died. My grandmother was saying good-night when, uncharacteristically, after she had pulled the covers over us she hesitated and then had asked, “Do you want me to tell you a story?”
Ava had wriggled herself into a semi-sitting position. My grandmother had twisted her wedding ring around her finger and looked from the door to us and back again.
“It’s just…did your— Do you get a bedtime story at night?”
Claudia, who was lying in a single cot bed that had been put in our room, said swiftly, “We’re too old for stories.”
“You’re never too old for stories,” said Ava, conciliatory.
“I was never told stories as a child,” my grandmother said, smoothing the edge of the bed down in order to give her nervous hands something to do. “I used to make them up in my head, and then of course I read books, but no one ever read to me. I remember, though, my father had been a teacher of English. He must have loved stories. Maybe that’s where I get it from—my liking to read. Do you want something to read?”
“No, thank you, Grandma,” said Ava.
“Very well.” She drew herself up and threw an analyzing glance around the room as she prepared to leave.
“You know,” she said as she got to the door, “this is just as much your home as the house you live in. More so—your father was born in this house. He grew up here, he took his first steps, said his first words. This is your home because it had always been his. You don’t have to feel…well, you don’t have to feel out of place. If you want to read, you can read, if you want to be read to, you can just ask. This is your home, no matter what happens outside of it or wherever you go, this will always be home for you.” Her face was half in shadow from the dark of the room and the light of the hall. I thought she would say something else and I raised myself up on my elbow, leaning into Ava to hear, but then she turned away and closed the door.
At Des Moines International Airport I got my bags and then caught a Greyhound at the bus depot. I was exhausted. I seemed to slip in and out of dreams as my body rocked on the twists and turns of the highway. Whenever I did wake and I saw not my beloved Manhattan, with its thin streets and crowds of people toppled by a swarm of buildings that rose and defeated the skyline, but Iowa with the weight of the heavens on the flat square buildings and pockets of trees lining the long caramel-colored roads, I felt sick and curled into myself.
Oh, God, I thought, I’m here, I’m really doing this. Over a decade had gone by and none of it had changed. I could be coming home like any other normal person, ready to see my family, sit down for dinner
, open a bagful of presents and sit in our living room on our couch and remember my childhood and feel at peace. But when I finally got off the bus and went to a taxi stand, my legs could barely walk. Everything seemed to be an assault on the senses. It was too much of home, too much to remember all at once, the smell, the look: I could no longer pretend.
And when the car pulled into the street of the house I had often stayed in as a child, where I watched Cagney and Lacey reruns over a plate of raisin cookies and fruit juice waiting for my mother to pick me up, I thought my head would explode with all that I was feeling.
I got out and paid the driver, and after I took in the rose-and-white clapboard house, I walked up the steps to the screen door and rang the doorbell.
I said a prayer when I pressed the buzzer. I had my eyes closed at the time so when I heard the main door open and saw her behind the screen door staring at me as if I were a ghost she had forgotten could still haunt her, I realized for the first time how difficult this was really going to be.
“Meredith?” she said, her tongue forming the word warily, hesitantly, wondering if her mind and eyes were deceiving her. Half hoping, I thought.
“Jane,” I said. “Is that you?”
“Oh, God,” she said and put her hand up to the screen. “It’s you, it’s really you.”
When I knew Jane, she was in her early fifties, her hair was semi-permed around her head and she always wore primary colors, and never any prints. She met my mother in a grocery store, not long after my father died. I don’t know how exactly, but the two struck up a conversation and through Jane and her friendship, my mother began to create a small but necessary life for herself away from Aurelia. Jane was a widow, too—her husband had died in Vietnam and she had never remarried and never had any children. She worked in the hardware store and loved to hike. I remember how the halls of her house were always cluttered with camping equipment and walking boots that I used to frequently trip over. She was a private woman, kind but she never gave herself away. I used to spend so many afternoons in her house and if you asked me I could tell you what cookies she ate, when she did her grocery shopping, how she liked her coffee, but about her life—aside from these meager facts—I knew nothing. It’s funny, but I realize now how little we really used to interact with people outside Aurelia, outside the family even. We talked, we played, we even made friends with them but nothing concrete, nothing lasting. They were not one of us and we were not one of them. They were black-and-white; we were color.
Though she had aged, and the halls no longer had the remnants of a recent hiking trip lined up against them, in the fundamentals she was still the same. Her eyes were still the clear blue behind the horn-rimmed glasses she was now obliged to wear, her hands, though wrinkled and mottled with brown liver spots, still had those long tapered fingers that were always so deft and capable. And that mouth, on which a smile had always played lingeringly in the corners, now came forward in greeting to my cheek.
“I never thought I’d see you again, Merey,” she said as I came and sat in her kitchen while she watched me.
Shit, no one living has called me that in years. As soon as she said it the hand holding my glass of water trembled. I set it back on its coaster.
“So when did you hear then?” she asked.
“A few weeks ago,” I said, clutching my hands together on the plastic cloth of the table.
“My God, I never thought of everyone that it’d be you who would come down here once they did find out.” She stared at me, her hands running through the gray of her flaxen hair.
“I…they said it’s going to be sold. I thought— I thought I should come down and make sure that it…um…that it goes well and that Mom and Dad’s stuff, that the important stuff doesn’t get mixed up in all of that mess.”
“That’s really good of you, Merey,” she said carefully. “That’d mean a lot to them, especially to your mom.”
My mom. The last time I saw her was when she was being lowered into the ground in a coffin. Ava kept telling me to come home, that she was sick, getting sicker. I put it off and off and off, and then one day there was no need to be afraid of the phone ringing anymore.
My throat was suddenly dry. “I was hoping…I mean I know I showed up here unannounced and everything, but I thought if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, if I could just stay one night and then I could get a motel or something—”
She was shaking her head. I sank back in my seat.
“Oh…okay, I—”
“I wouldn’t dream of letting the daughter of Antonia Hathaway stay in a motel on her own while her home and all its contents were dispersed to the winds. You’ll stay with me, child.” She rubbed her hand over mine. “Gracious, are you cold?”
“No.” I withdrew my hand from hers as if I’d been bitten and she leaned away from me.
“You must be tired. Shall I show you to your room? We can talk later about everything. You must have questions.” She leaned her head to the side and I saw her face fall. “Don’t you?”
For a moment I couldn’t speak. “I am quite tired,” I somehow managed to reply.
“Okay, well your room’s upstairs and all ready. The usual one. Do you need to me to show you? Have you forgotten where everything is?”
“No, no, that’s fine,” I said, standing up, and then I stopped.
“What do you mean it’s all ready?”
She looked up at me, and I saw her eyes flicker and then fall to a blank.
“Oh…I—I don’t think that’s something we should get into now.”
“Did—did someone…?” I trailed off but her gaze was unflinching and gave away nothing.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
My uncle Ethan should have been concerned that his sister had run away from home but he wasn’t. In fact he was glad. The house was understandably in an uproar, with all its focus on finding Julia and bringing her back, which suited him just fine, because it meant he could carry on seeing Allie Lomax with no one to suspect as much. Even his brother had left him alone, so overcome was he by the change in their father, who worked until long past dark as their mother stood at the kitchen window staring into the blackness, muttering as to why he wouldn’t come home.
So as he made his way down to the field behind the O’Brians’ farm, swinging his hands along the heads of the sunflowers that had sprung up, he allowed himself an unexpected burst of happiness, because now he could concentrate solely on Allie and know that no one, not his brother, or his mother especially, were watching him. Silently he thanked his sister for the first and most valuable gift she’d ever given him: the chance to be invisible.
That night he made a vow to Allie. As she sat underneath their tree and curled herself into him, her legs entwined with his, he whispered to her that he wanted to marry her.
“Don’t think you should be mentioning that word in your family, not right now.” She chuckled.
“I don’t care. When it comes to my time we’ll do it properly in front of everyone. You’ll see. I’ll make you a good husband, Allie cat. Do you promise you’ll say yes?”
“Do you promise you’ll ask?” she whispered.
“Of course,” he said, delighted. “You have my word.”
In the morning I woke to find Jane at my bedside laying a breakfast tray on the whitewashed table.
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“Hush.” She turned the corner of the tray so that it balanced properly. “Get something down you. I’ll bet you haven’t had decent cooking in a long while.”
“Does take-out count?” I asked ruefully, taking the tray, but looking at the fried eggs, hash browns and curling bacon, I was suddenly both glad and uneasy at the same time.
Later when I was dressed, I came downstairs and found her in her living room in her old rocking chair, listening to the radio. I stopped in the doorway. She looked up and laughed at my expression.
“Hasn’t changed, has it?” she asked, throwing a glance
around the room. And it hadn’t. The chairs were still the same honey-colored flower pattern in the exact same arrangement I would throw myself on after school. The wallpaper was the same, the radio playing jazz and blues softly in the background was still next to the small gray-fringed TV set on top of a clothed table in the corner. She set down her book and said gently, “Why don’t you come here and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself since…” She stopped and then thinking better of it, turned up her lips and then put her book away. “This must be very hard for you, Merey,” she said after a brief pause.
“Yes,” I ventured, feeling my way around the words. “I haven’t been back since Mom died.”
“And had no plans to, I’m sure.”
I frowned.
“That wasn’t a reproach, more like an observation.” She put her hands in her lap.
“You were never coy in my house all the days I knew you—I see no reason why you should start now. Sit down.”
So I sat on the couch opposite her.
“Have you seen it? The farm, I mean?” I asked the floor.
She gave a long sigh. “I have. It’s changed—well, that’s a bit of a lie. It still has the same things, the house, the drive, but to say it’s falling apart is to put it mildly. It’s the same picture but wrong. He really did a number on it.”
“Cal Jr.?” I said, looking up.
She licked the corner of her lip. “He was a sick man—well, you know that. As soon as he got the place, he started to ravage it. He blamed it, he punished it and when your mother died—” I winced “—and your sister finally left, he punished it some more. God knows what was going through his mind when he did the things he did. But I believe he knew what he was doing when he destroyed it. None of us could understand why. You all had your troubles, but your family was the envy of so many.”
