Julia's Daughters

by Colleen Faulkner

  Laney loops her arm through mine. “Do you want Ben to come?”

  I look at her and tug at the zipper of the hooded sweatshirt I borrowed from her. The sun is going down and it’s getting chilly. I’m going to regret having not brought more warm clothes. “No pussyfooting around with you, is there? I’ve been here half an hour and you’re asking life-altering, rip-out-your-heart questions.”

  “Who’s got time for niceties? Or the energy? It seems pretty straightforward to me, Jules.” She talks so matter-of-factly about things that aren’t all that matter-of-fact. “Do you want him to come, meaning do you want to tackle this together, or did you leave Vegas to get away from him?”

  I frown. I’m not sure I want to get into this with Laney right now. I’ve just driven twenty-eight hundred miles. I just want to eat a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone and talk about lizards. “I drove here with Haley because she needed to get away from Vegas,” I tell her.

  Laney scrutinizes me. She’s got these dark, almond-shaped eyes that seem like they can see right into your soul.

  “I guess when we get back—” I walk beside her in silence for a moment, trying to put my thoughts in order. I pull her closer to me, lowering my voice so my girls don’t hear me. “Look, I know Ben and I have problems, but I feel like I can only handle so much. Haley’s what matters right now.”

  “You and Ben matter too. Izzy matters.”

  I groan.

  But Laney won’t let it go. “What if he won’t come?” she asks.

  I shrug. Izzy and Garret have stopped at a storefront, two stores from the ice cream shop. They’re peering in the window. “I guess we’ll deal with it when we get back.”

  “Look, Mom,” Izzy calls. “The fried chicken place closed.” She wrinkles her nose. “Garret didn’t like the chicken either.” She peers in the window, cupping her hands around her face. “We should rent it for our café.”

  “Or we could make it a pet store,” Garret suggests. He’s a cute kid who looks so much like his dad that I smile every time I see his lopsided grin that was Sean’s. “Izzy and Garret’s House of Reptiles.”

  Izzy laughs and punches him in the arm. He punches her back.

  Laney and I stop in front of the vacant store.

  “So Southern fried chicken was a no-go in a New England town?” I ask. I can see chairs stacked on tables and a long counter that had been for orders and pickup.

  Laney peers through the window. “He’s right. It wasn’t good chicken.”

  Haley catches up with us and joins us to look in the window.

  “Your sister thinks we should lease it and sell lizard burgers,” I tell Haley, trying to include her in the conversation.

  Izzy bursts into laughter and she and Garret move down the sidewalk, headed for the ice cream shop.

  “We could sell Ben burgers,” Haley says, thoughtfully. “Do grass-fed beef, local cheese, homemade bread. Other kinds of cool organic sandwiches and wraps.”

  I look at her. “I didn’t know you were interested in working in a restaurant.”

  “I’m not.” She taps on the glass with her palm and walks away. “I’m interested in running one.”

  Laney and I stand side by side and watch Haley walk down the sidewalk.

  “She seems pretty good,” Laney says.

  “You think so?” I look up at her.

  She turns to me, crossing her arms over her chest. “What do you think?”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “I don’t want to think. I don’t want to make any life-altering decisions right now.” I open them. “I just want to eat ice cream. A lot of ice cream.”

  “Fine.” We start walking again. “But you’re going to make one life-altering decision tonight,” Laney tells me. “On the way home, we’re stopping at Thompson’s Drugstore and you’re picking out a box of hair dye, because tomorrow morning, you and I are playing beauty parlor. I can’t stand to look at all that gray hair.”

  I laugh. And it feels good.

  Chapter 37

  Haley

  54 days

  I’m sitting in an Adirondack chair on Laney’s front porch, wrapped in a quilt, listening to her and Mom talk. It’s cold out. We don’t usually come for vacation until school gets out so we’re never here when it’s this chilly. I’m wearing a green polar fleece Laney loaned me. It’s not in my noncolor scheme, but it’s warm.

  We each have a chair; I’m on the end with Laney next to me and Mom is closest to the door that leads into the house. Izzy and Garret have gone to bed. I’m trying to give Izzy some time to get to sleep before I go in the bedroom we’re sharing and make things awkward. I haven’t minded sitting out here with Mom and Laney, though. I like listening to them talk. When I was younger, I used to fantasize what it would be like to have Laney for a mom, although Liam swears she can be every bit a bitch as my mother.

  Laney’s telling this funny story about a kid in her third-grade class who keeps bringing her mother’s underwear to school.

  “So is it just the lacy stuff?” Mom asks, giggling. “Or does she bring in granny panties, too?”

  “Oh, she’s an equal opportunity undergarment snatcher.” Laney is cracking herself up.

  They’ve been drinking wine and I think they might both be a little drunk. It’s kind of funny to see Mom like this; I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her tipsy before. If I have, I was too young to realize what was going on.

  Laney takes a sip from her wineglass. “Sometimes it’s a sports bra, sometimes a thong. One day she brought a pair of high-waisted black Spanx.”

  My mom is still laughing. “But why?”

  “I had the same question. I’ve talked to her mom. We think it might be a security thing.”

  “Like Linus’s blanket?” Mom asks.

  “Maybe. But the thing is, she won’t just leave it in her backpack. I wouldn’t care if she brought underwear to school if she just left it in her bag. No, she has to hang it on her coat hook. Over her coat.”

  Mom sniggers.

  I hear a phone ding. Incoming message. Which reminds me how much I miss my phone. It’s so weird to be without it. A week ago, it was my lifeline. But a week seems like a million years ago now. Like another lifetime. I think about the person I was last Friday, locked in Dodge’s bathroom, and it’s kind of disturbing because I don’t feel like that person. I haven’t decided yet if that’s a good or a bad thing, although I’m definitely more stable. I have to give Mom credit. She was right. I needed to get out of our house, out of Vegas. For the first time since Caitlin died, I feel like I can actually take a deep breath. Maybe it’s just the clean Maine air.

  But I still miss my phone.

  I wonder what’s going on in my friends’ lives. I wonder if they’re wondering what the hell happened to me. Did anyone text Todd to ask him if he’d heard from me? Did he bother to text Marissa or Cassie and tell them my mom kidnapped me? And I don’t just miss my iPhone because I miss being connected to my friends, but I miss being able to listen to my own music, too.

  I want to ask Mom if I can use her phone just to access Spotify, but I have a feeling she’s going to say “no way.” Just in case I have any ideas about getting Todd to come to Maine to get me, which I don’t. That loser never even texted me back. He just never showed up. I bet he never even left Vegas. I bet he never left his brother’s couch. He’s probably still sitting in the same place with a stupid game controller in his hand.

  I hear another ding.

  “Don’t look at me,” Laney says to Mom. They’re both wrapped in quilts too. The porch lights on each side of the door are on, casting soft shadows over us. I’m almost in the dark, I’m so far from the lights. Which is fine with me. It’s like I’m here, but I’m not here. Neither of them is bugging me, asking me if I’m okay or expecting me to reveal some deep dark secrets.

  Mom fumbles around on her lap. “I don’t know where it went,” she says. “It’s here somewhere.”

  “I’ll be right back.” Laney gets u
p. “Anyone want anything?”

  I almost tell her she can get me a beer while she’s up, just as a joke, but I decide against it. Laney might laugh, but I’m fairly sure Mom won’t.

  Mom’s still looking for her phone. She knocks over her empty wineglass with her foot. “Aha!” She holds up her phone, rights the glass on the porch floor, and then holds her phone up so she can read her text.

  I sit back in my chair and stare out into the dark. The street is quiet. A man walks by with a black and white dog. He waves. I wave.

  We’ve never had a dog. Dad’s not into them. I think I’d like a dog. A big one, like a lab, but not a black one. A chocolate lab. Laney used to have one, Zeus. But he got old and died.

  My gaze settles on the house next door. The porch light is on there, too, but I know no one’s home. An old man used to live there, but he went to live with his son in Vermont. It’s for sale or rent or something. It’s a cool gray and white house with a two-story porch.

  I glance at Mom. She’s texting an entire book.

  “That Dad?” I ask.

  She nods.

  A second later, he texts back. She reads it, stares at the screen for a minute, and texts back just one word.

  Laney comes back out onto the porch, carrying a bag of organic blue corn chips, and walks in front of Mom.

  “He’s coming,” Mom says, pulling the quilt she’s sitting on up tighter around her. She doesn’t look all that happy.

  “Ben?” Laney plops down in her chair and opens the bag. “That’s good, right?” She offers the bag of chips to Mom.

  Mom shakes her head that she doesn’t want any.

  Laney turns to me. “Come on,” she says. “You know you want some.”

  I take a couple of chips because it’s easier than saying no.

  Laney turns to Mom again and munches on a chip. “You didn’t answer my question. It’s a good thing Ben is coming, isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” Mom says so quickly that it doesn’t sound like she really means it. “He needs to come.”

  I sit back in the chair and put my feet up on the railing. I think about going inside so I don’t have to listen to this conversation. I feel bad for Mom. She thinks Dad has let her down. That he should be helping her with me—whatever that means. And I guess he has let her down, in a way. But not really. He’s not been any less a part of our lives since Caitlin died than he was before she died. He started working long hours and not asking how our day was years ago. I guess Mom was too busy with us to notice. I wonder if that makes it her fault too.

  “Jules?” Laney says.

  Mom looks pointedly in my direction.

  “Oh for Pete’s sake, Julia.” Laney sits back in her chair, but is still looking at Mom. “She’s almost eighteen, and after what she’s been through, she’s probably the oldest one sitting on this porch.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Laney.” I nod to her. “Will you be my mother?”

  “I will not,” she tells me firmly. “You have one, a damned good one.” She turns back to my mom. “You were saying?”

  Mom seems to be gathering her thoughts. “I do think Ben should come. He should come,” she repeats. “I’m just not sure I . . . I don’t know. That I want to deal with him right this second. You know?”

  “When’s he coming?” Laney asks.

  “He’s not sure. Midweek.”

  “Good, so we’ll have a few days together. And we’ll have time to do something with your hair. How long’s he staying?”

  “I don’t know that either.” Mom is holding her phone, just staring at the dark screen. “I need to get Izzy home, I guess. She’s missing school.”

  “Izzy could miss the rest of the year and still be ahead of her class next fall,” Laney says. She looks at me. “How about you? You in a hurry to get back to Vegas?”

  “To get in that car again? With that cat?” I shake my head. “No hurry.”

  Laney turns back to Mom. “You’re here now. There’s no need for you to turn around and go right back. You need to rest and regroup. You all do.”

  Mom exhales. “I should call him.”

  “You should,” Laney agrees.

  Mom slowly gets up. I guess she wasn’t really drunk. All that silliness I saw a few minutes ago is gone. Nobody sobers up that fast.

  “I think I’ll get ready for bed.” She looks in my direction. “Need anything?” she asks me.

  I shake my head. I feel bad that she was having a good time and now she’s sad again. Thanks, Dad. Like you couldn’t have waited until tomorrow to rain on her parade?

  Mom smiles at me, but it’s her sad, tired smile. “You’re going to stay here, right? You’re not going to . . . go anywhere?”

  I open my arms. “Where would I go, Mom?”

  She picks up the quilt from her chair. “That’s not an answer.”

  I look out over the porch rail at the streetlights. I like the way they glow and cast light in a circle that gets fainter the farther the light travels. “I’m not going anywhere, Mom.”

  “Good. Because if you do, it will break my heart.” She smiles again. “Love you. Night.”

  A lump rises in my throat. I can’t remember the last time that Mom said that. I mean, I know she loves me, but . . . it’s nice to hear her say it.

  “I’ll be in in a little while,” Laney says. “So don’t hog the blankets. Call Ben. See what’s going on in his head.”

  Mom’s standing in the light, now. She raises her brows as if to say who could possibly know what he’s thinking, but she doesn’t say anything. I watch her go into the house.

  Laney picks up her wineglass. Mom’s not gone two minutes when she turns to me. “Okay, so tell me what the hell’s going on with you, Haley. Your mother’s worried sick and so am I. Why are you hell-bent on self-destructing and taking your family with you?”

  I just sit there for a second, seriously considering getting up and going inside. Who does she think she is, bombarding me with something like this? Doesn’t she realize how fragile my psyche is right now? Doesn’t she realize that’s why I’m here?

  But I can’t help admiring how ballsy she is, just blurting it out like that. Most people are too scared to ask screwed-up people why they’re so screwed up. Caitlin and I used to joke about how when we grew up, we hoped we had the cojones Aunt Laney has.

  “I’m not trying to ruin everyone’s life,” I say, not even bothering to try to hide my annoyance with her.

  “Okay. So how about your life? Why do you want to ruin yours? Drinking, drugs, dangerous sex, cutting yourself with a razor blade.” She ticks the things off like she’s making a grocery list and puts another corn chip in her mouth.

  I press my lips together, trying to hold on to my annoyance, trying to find some anger to go with it. It’s a lot easier to feel angry than to feel the kind of sorrow that sucks you down into the kind of hole you can’t climb out of.

  “I killed my sister, Aunt Laney,” I say. “I killed the pretty, smart one and I didn’t kill myself.”

  “You caused an accident,” she responds. “Your sister was killed in that accident. It’s not the same thing.”

  “That’s what Mom keeps telling me.” I pull the quilt tighter around my shoulders. It’s not just chilly out here now. It’s freakin’ cold. I expect to see snowflakes fall from the sky any second now.

  We’re quiet for a couple of minutes. Talking about sororicide usually puts a damper on conversations.

  But then Aunt Laney folds up the chip bag and says, “Tell me about that night.”

  “What do you mean?” I turn my head to look at her.

  “Tell me about the night Caitlin died. When I came for the funeral, we didn’t talk about it.”

  I haven’t talked about it with anyone. My friends asked, but I just couldn’t talk about it with them. I wasn’t sure why they wanted to know; it seemed too close to sick gossip. Mom and Dad never asked. What they know is what the cops told them.

  “You both went to a party
that night, right?” Laney presses.

  “No. Is that what people told you?” I stare out into the darkness. “Caitlin went to a party; I dropped her off. I was at a friend’s house. We had a project due in English class that following Monday.” I think about the PowerPoint presentation about women’s rights during Shakespeare’s time that we never finished. It had been really good. Not just the visual look of the presentation, but the information we’d found was interesting, especially about marriage in the sixteenth century. “I told Caitlin it was a bad idea to go. Mom thought she was going to this girl’s house who was on her cheer squad, but the party was actually at that girl’s boyfriend’s house.”

  Laney takes a sip of wine. I have her full attention.

  “They were drinking.”

  “Of course,” Laney says.

  “Of course,” I agree. “But not like just some beers. The girl’s boyfriend was older. His parents were out of town. A college party.” I squeeze my eyes shut. I haven’t thought about this since she died. I just couldn’t. It hadn’t seemed like such a big deal, her going somewhere without Mom’s permission, at the time. I mean, it had. I was really pissed at Caitlin. But she’d just broken up with her boyfriend. Mom and Dad didn’t even know she had been going out with him. And she was upset.

  I press my lips together. “We were supposed to be home at eleven thirty, so I texted Caitlin at ten thirty and told her I’d pick her up at eleven. She texted me back with a different address than where I dropped her off.” I shake my head, remembering. I was so angry with her.

  “Anyway, I get this bad feeling. I call and her voice sounds . . . strange. So I leave right then and when I get there, Caitlin’s the only girl there except for this one slut.” I press my lips together and wonder where my lip balm is. “Caitlin’s with this whole house full of guys and—” I feel myself tearing up. “When I walk in, these two guys are—” I start feeling a little shaky. I look at Aunt Laney. “She was pretty drunk. If I hadn’t gotten there when I did . . . I think they would have . . .” I meet her gaze in the semidarkness. “Let’s just say it wouldn’t have been consensual.”