Summer Snow

by Nicole Baart

  But Janice bit. “Really?” Her voice was peculiarly soft. “You always were a smart girl...”

  My head jerked up at the unexpected praise, but Janice had a faraway look in her eyes. I exhaled slowly, grateful that the topic was going to be dropped, and self-consciously got up to start clearing the table. I was capping the milk when Janice stopped me in my tracks by asking the question I feared.

  “Why did you drop out, Julia?”

  It shouldn’t have been a difficult thing to say. I mean, Janice had obviously been in my position more than once. And yet, admitting to her that I had made the exact same mistake she had made was somehow excruciating. I couldn’t help feeling that it lessened my ability to be angry with her and gave us something in common that I didn’t want to acknowledge. It stripped me of my identity and reduced me to little more than the object, and now subject, of generational sin—a fallen child of a fallen mother, capable of doing nothing more than what had already been done to me. It was cyclic and shameful. It made me feel unworthy. Small.

  I shrunk, knowing that I would have to tell her.

  Grandma broke in and tried to save me. “Julia is taking a little time off, Janice. She’s working a few things out.” It wasn’t an outright lie, but it wasn’t entirely honest, and I was surprised that my legalistic grandmother was bending the truth to salvage a shred of my dignity. The selfless gesture made me want to lay a kiss on the top of her silver head. It also made me achingly aware that I could not let her compromise any of her values for me. She had already given enough.

  My frustration quickly found a target in Janice and began bringing up years of long-buried anger before I had any opportunity to accept that she wasn’t the only person to blame on this bewildering night. All I could think was that it wasn’t fair for Janice to believe she could march back into our lives and throw everything off the delicate balance we had worked so hard to restore. It wasn’t fair that she sat at our table like a treasured guest instead of the cowardly deserter she was. It wasn’t fair that she waltzed up to our door with my unheard-of half brother and expected to smooth things over without the years of penance and petition she deserved. It wasn’t fair that she had come at all. I had been fine without her. The anger inside me that had been pushed down to make room for the anesthesia I needed to endure the night was rising furiously to the surface—a hot, roiling blast of self-righteous wind. It was time for her to leave my house.

  “Actually, Janice …” I swallowed hard, looking her square in the eye. “I’m taking time off because I’m pregnant.” The words were easier to say than I had expected. I lifted my chin indignantly, an act of defense despite the fact that she hadn’t yet had a chance to respond. I was ready to fight.

  Janice regarded me uncomprehendingly, her eyes blinking rhythmically as though gathering the information bit by tiny bit. Finally she muttered, “Excuse me?” Her mouth was gaping slightly in what seemed to be disbelief. “But are you married? engaged?” It was a blunt thing to ask, though I had expected as much. Her eyes darted to my left hand and registered a slim, bare ring finger. No sparkling solitaire, no simple gold band.

  “Neither were you,” I asserted bitterly. It was liberating to finally confront her, my heart pounding an impossible drumbeat in my throat. I knew I was baiting her. I knew I was being childish and immature, drawing her out systematically and waiting for an opportunity to say the things I had longed to say for years. Ten years to be exact. I was brilliant in my wrath.

  She winced and slid her chair back a little. The legs screeched on the linoleum floor, and she jumped as if someone had struck her. “Julia, I … I’m just surprised, I guess.”

  “What are you basing that on? What on earth do you think you know about me?”

  Grandma was distraught, trying desperately to get my attention, but I ignored her in my fury.

  Janice was still scrambling. “I’m not trying to say anything about you—”

  I rolled my eyes. “There’s nothing you could say. It’s been over ten years. What gives you the right to march in here and accuse me?”

  “I’m not accusing. I just …” Janice trailed off hopelessly, studied her hands in her lap, and then suddenly looked back at me almost pleadingly as though she simply couldn’t help herself. “But the father—”

  “Parker is—the father is gone,” I said acidly, “though you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Dad actually stuck around, tried to take care of—”

  “Julia,” Grandma broke in, catching my hand and holding it tight.

  “Not now,” Janice whispered. Her voice was choked and wretched.

  “Did you know my dad?” Simon asked incredulously.

  I clung to Grandma’s wrinkled fingers, glared at Janice, tried to ignore Simon. I hated her; oh, I hated her. She was a pathetic excuse for a mother, and she had no right to try to force her way back into my life. And though her eyes were huge and hurting, I was about to tell her exactly that when Simon spoke and stilled my storm with a voice that bordered on ecstatic.

  “Hey, Mom, I think Julia knew Dad!”

  My head throbbed as I shook it. Just like that, I was spent, my rage poured out in some vile offering with nothing left to show for my outburst but the quiet horror in Janice’s eyes and the expectant hope in Simon’s. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Grandma; I knew her disappointment in me would be the hardest to face. I closed my eyes to block them all out. But he was waiting for me to say something. “No, Simon, I’m sorry. I didn’t know your dad,” I said wearily.

  “You didn’t?” he asked, visibly disappointed.

  “No.” I turned to him and tried to make my trembling lips curl in a smile. “It’s just that your mom once knew my dad.”

  The little boy, my half brother, considered me for a moment. “Wow, Julia,” he breathed happily. “That makes you almost like family!”

  The room went still.

  I didn’t look at him when I gathered myself enough to address Janice. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “Me too,” she agreed, slipping out of her chair. “Come, Simon; time to go.” She reached for her son and gripped his shoulder tenderly. “Thank Mrs. DeSmit for the nice meal, please.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. DeSmit,” Simon said, swiveling his head between the women towering over him. Though he didn’t understand it, he knew that something bad had happened, and he kept shooting me looks that implored me to smooth things over before they left and were never invited back again. I turned my attention to the table.

  “You’re welcome, Simon,” Grandma said, and her composure— or utter disbelief of all that had happened under her roof—was evident in the flat line of her voice. She tucked Simon into a brief hug, but I was thankful that she didn’t tack on her usual nicety: You can come to my house anytime.

  A dim flicker of worry for Simon lit up my consciousness, but mostly I was sickened to think of what Grandma would have to say to me when they were gone. And though I tried to hold my hurts like self-righteous badges to my bursting chest, I knew I would deserve whatever castigation she saw fit to share. I had almost seen the lines around Janice’s mouth deepen with my malicious words. It made my skin feel too tight to know that I had done that to a person. Grandma was a gracious hostess and propped the door to the mudroom open so she could fill the chillingly thin air with soothing monologue. I doubted Janice heard any of it. Cleaning the kitchen occupied my hands as my estranged family buttoned up their coats and laced their shoes, and because it hurt to hear her, I ignored the murmur of Grandma’s voice too. Only when Simon poked his head back into the kitchen and waved solemnly at me did I manage a halfhearted good-bye.

  “Bye, Julia,” he called. “It was very nice to meet you.” His voice held little of the energy it had boasted before.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” I parroted. “Have a safe trip back to Illinois.”

  I should have expected it. The natural disaster that was posing as our evening should have alerted me to the fact that t
his was no small thing. This visit—these torturous moments with Janice close enough to touch—was the beginning of something much bigger. And in some ways I knew it the instant I realized who she was on the porch. But instead, it was the split-second pause when Simon should have said thank you that warned me my life would never be the same.

  “Actually, Julia—” akshually—“we’re not going back to Illinois.”

  Strangely, when the world implodes before you, it doesn’t make a sound.

  Surrender

  JANICE AND SIMON LEFT, but nothing went back to the way it had been. I had hoped that some semblance of normalcy could be achieved after a few days of trying to forget that they had ever taken up space in our already overcomplicated home. Pretending was a perfectly acceptable method of dealing as far as I was concerned, and at first I thought Grandma was also willing to leave that night buried somewhere deep and distant—somewhere we would never have to come across it again. But while I first mistook her silence for denial, I soon learned that the stillness behind our walls was actually directed at me.

  My relationship with Grandma had always been exceptionally, almost unnaturally, good. I could count on one hand the times that she had ever been notably angry at me—times when I had willfully and often stupidly done things I had no business doing. It was impossible to forget the frantic, furious look in her eye when she caught me trying to nail a piece of plywood to the old propane tank out back. The monstrous, white-bellied, red-capped cylinder was my ship; I had only wanted to christen it with the appropriate name: the SS Julia.

  Or the time I burned the few letters that my father had penned me before he died. “You will regret this for the rest of your life, Julia,” she had said with quiet passion. I was hurting, incensed by the world and burning up inside, and it was a rash act of intention—I wrongfully believed that I could erase him. Her few words extinguished me instantly, and she left me to sob it out, only to return and fold me in her arms just before I began to believe I was hopelessly alone.

  But as far back as I could remember, Grandma had never been upset enough with me to let her disappointment fester for more than a few hours. Until now.

  It wasn’t hard to understand that she thought I had made an enormous, potentially life-altering mistake. For days I allowed my own resentment of Janice to build a wall between Grandma and me. I hardened my heart. And though at first I counted my so-called mother forgotten, it wasn’t long before I realized that I could no sooner forget Janice and Simon than I could ignore the unborn child that crouched at the corners of my every thought, threatening to derail any contemplation or conversation I embarked on. They were a part of us, Simon and Janice, whether we wanted them to be or not. If we couldn’t forget, we would have to forge on.

  “Don’t be mad at me,” I pleaded one day as I drove Grandma to a doctor’s appointment. Her ankle was healing slowly, maybe too slowly, and Dr. Morales had squeezed her in on a Friday morning when the clinic was usually reserved for appointments that had been booked weeks ago and last-minute maladies that could not wait until Monday. Grandma was hunched over in the passenger seat, her wrist on the armrest of the door and her hand laced through the molded plastic handle. She could have been bracing herself for another disappointing diagnosis, but it felt like she was trying to get as far away from me as possible. The very thought made my throat tight.

  I had tried to draw her out many different times over the days since Janice and Simon had walked into, and out of, our lives. But I had always been met with disappointed looks and the sorrowful downturn of her usually smiling and beautiful mouth. Granted, I had never tried to broach the one topic that was the only thing we really had to talk about. Maybe she was waiting for me to say something that mattered.

  At any rate, we seemed to have lost the ability to talk about anything but the most trivial and mundane things. Other than the necessary exchanges of everyday life—Do you want one egg for breakfast or two? What time will you be home tonight? I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow at nine—we had barely said a word to each other. Not that we were necessarily angry or avoiding each other; we were simply too consumed with the effort of remembering to breathe to expend any energy on encouraging the other person to inhale and exhale.

  She prayed a lot. I could tell by the distracted look in her eyes and the almost indiscernible movement of her lips. She also creased the pages of her Bible often, and if she found answers written there, she didn’t share them with me. But then, I didn’t ask.

  Sometimes I wondered if Grandma had lost her point of reference when she gave me her Bible and if she was slowly learning to work with a new compass. To me, the crinkled pages of her treasured book were a seemingly random collection of charts and maps and directions in a language that I was only just beginning to understand. To Grandma, her Bible was as familiar as the lines on the back of her hand. I felt guilty every time I held her sacred book and found myself unable to fully appreciate the power at my fingertips.

  When I spoke in the warm car, she was probably engrossed in a dialogue with God—the God I was fumblingly trying to know and seemingly failing at miserably—and her response was slow in coming and mildly confused. “Mad?” she asked absently, glancing sidelong at me. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “You have to be,” I argued, sounding more despondent than I had hoped to come across. “We’ve hardly spoken in days.”

  She sighed, and I turned my eyes from the road to regard her as she stared out the windshield. We had just entered the outskirts of town, and I was relieved to know that there was no way we would have time for this conversation. I had wanted to bring up the topic with her, but I didn’t feel prepared to resolve it, and I was grateful that she certainly didn’t seem to be jumping at the chance to dive headfirst into the deep end either.

  “There’s a lot to say, Julia,” she said cautiously. “Maybe I don’t know where to begin. Maybe I don’t know how to begin.”

  I bit my lip for a moment. “Fair enough.”

  “Are you ready to talk about it now?” Grandma asked. “Are you ready to at least say her name or even try to process what happened?”

  It was my turn to sigh. “We have to, don’t we?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  I knew what I had to do and I measured my words, weighing each syllable and practicing brief phrases in my mind. “Grandma,” I finally ventured, “I am so sorry. I know I—”

  “You don’t have to apologize to me.” Grandma brought me up abruptly before I could launch into my well-rehearsed appeal for forgiveness. “You have to apologize to Janice. You and I have enough to deal with without throwing unnecessary apologies into the mix.”

  I hadn’t expected that. I wanted her forgiveness, not Janice’s. Besides, Janice needed my forgiveness, not the other way around. I longed to say as much. All at once I found the car stifling, but I resisted the urge to crack my window open and feel the healing breath of icy wind on my face. The storm that had been brewing the night of Janice’s arrival had dropped a mere three inches of snow but plunged temperatures well below freezing. Fresh air was in short supply as it was simply too painful to wrap my lungs around the biting breeze. I ran from my car to Value Foods, back to my car, and home. But suddenly, arctic or not, I yearned to gulp a few splintering mouthfuls.

  Hiding my inability to speak by focusing on making a left turn across traffic into the parking lot of Dr. Morales’s clinic, I was both disappointed and relieved. Now that Grandma and I were finally talking, I didn’t want to interrupt the steady trickle of words that, if left to flow, I was sure would increase into a torrent of all the pent-up things we had wanted to say in the days gone by. And yet they were hard things to say—and even harder to hear. I drove slowly to an empty space near the door and put the car into park, but I didn’t kill the engine. I made no effort to move and neither did she. We were effectively trapped, though the doors were unlocked.

  “What do we have to deal with?” I managed after a broken moment of staring at the b
rown brick exterior of the Mason Medical Clinic.

  Grandma reached out to touch my leg and let her fingers rest above my knee. I liked it that she had bridged the space between us. “Why do you think Janice came?” she asked gently.

  I had asked myself that question dozens, maybe hundreds, of times since Janice and Simon had swept out of our driveway, but I had not yet come up with an answer. Curiosity? Instinct? Sheer stupidity? She had nowhere else to go? Grandma had not seen her ex-daughter-in-law mouth an apology to me across the table, and I didn’t mention it. I couldn’t believe that Janice had come to make amends. I said nothing.

  Grandma changed her tactic. “Where are they now?”

  I had wondered myself. “Simon said they weren’t going back to Illinois.”

  “Janice said they were staying around here for a while,” Grandma confirmed.

  “Why?” I blurted out, shutting off the car with an angry flick of my wrist.

  “I don’t know. But is this the way you want it to end? What if they leave and it’s another ten years before you see them? What if you never see them again? You’ve already lost one parent.”

  My eyebrows arched in disbelief. “I’ve already lost two parents.” I stuck two fingers in the air for emphasis, and though I wasn’t angry at Grandma, she looked taken aback. But I couldn’t stop. “Janice walked out of my life years ago, and her sudden appearance on our doorstep doesn’t automatically make her my mother again. She’s the name on my birth certificate, nothing more.”

  Grandma opened her mouth and then just as quickly closed it. She looked away from me and considered for a moment before she quietly said, “But, Julia, honey, Simon is your brother.”

  It was a loaded word and she knew it. From the time I was old enough to realize that my friends were the proud big brothers and sisters of chubby, babbling siblings, I had wanted one of my own. I had pestered Dad and Janice endlessly, begging for a little addition to our family that I could mother and boss and ignore. And when I was older and began to feel the solitariness of a home where mine was the only young voice, I redoubled my efforts, offering to care for the child as if this imaginary little person were a puppy that I could periodically feed and water and keep out of my parents’ hair. When Janice left and all hope was lost, I took a babysitting class and pretended the neighbors’ kids were not just the pests who lived down the road. Even now, Jacob and Simon, Emily and Maggie were more than friends to me. I couldn’t help smiling wryly when I thought of Simon Walker, the blond-haired, football-loving early teen I had known and loved for years, and the Simon I had just met. One I considered my brother. The other actually was.