No One Could Have Guessed the Weather

by Anne-Marie Casey

  “Darling Lucy,” said Richard affectionately. “Please don’t equate the adoption process with dog rescue.”

  “All I’m saying is, unless I could be handed a child from somewhere, and preferably one of at least five years old, I wouldn’t want another one. Does that sound terrible?”

  “No,” intoned Vaughn. “It sounds eminently sensible.”

  And he downed another triple whiskey with a ruthless, manly efficiency that made the other two men feel soft and inadequate. (Kristian, in particular, made a mental note never to use moisturizer again.)

  So that was that. Christy fell silent. There would be no validation for her reproductive superiority. Lucy changed the subject.

  “Now, who wants to hear about the summer I waitressed in the Aloha Motel in Atlantic City, where I had to wear a grass hula skirt and balance a live parrot on my shoulder?”

  Christy struggled to conceal a yawn. She had no wish to hear the end of this story, which, if Lucy continued true to form, would be that the parrot was now deceased. Fortunately, Lucy’s boys intervened by making loud groaning noises and demanding to watch television.

  “Nonsense,” barked Lucy briskly. “We’ll play charades. Come on, children. Follow me.” And to the other adults’ amazement, they did.

  Vaughn stood up and repaired to a bedroom with another bottle, where he sat on a yoga ball and thought about his life. Richard and Kristian fled the melancholy silence of the kitchen to act out Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows using Julia’s incense sticks as magic wands.

  Now alone, Christy spoke first.

  “I’m sorry, Julia. This isn’t how I wanted to tell you.”

  “Ditto,” replied Julia, but she said nothing more, and neither did Christy. They both knew this was not the right moment for their conversation, but whether there would ever be a right moment they did not know. Something big had happened between them, Christy was sure of it, and, although she should have said that she was delighted for Julia, too, she was gripped by a terrible panic that it was the beginning of the end of their friendship, which would dissolve into three illegible scribbled lines on a holiday card every year. Worst of all, she realized that in the past she would have known, but today she found it impossible to tell what Julia was thinking.

  In fact, what Julia was thinking was that at least with family when they were annoying or deceitful you could shout at them or make incredibly nasty comments in front of or behind their backs or give your siblings Chinese burns and everyone would shrug and accept it. But such behavior was not possible with friends, even when they did not behave like friends. So she turned up “O Holy Night” to squeeze out the silence between them, and Christy walked out into the hallway, where Lucy and Richard were now standing hand in hand, peering into the swirling whiteness and talking about arctic exploration and one Captain Oates from Scott’s tragic expedition who had walked out into a blizzard, announcing, “I’m going out—I may be some time.” Christy hoped no one was getting any ideas from this.

  Lucy demanded they hush and listen to the wind as it whistled and howled around them. Now she started talking about traditional Irish music, in particular a tune that a group of sailors said they had been given by the wind. Richard listened with a kind of awe. To him, Lucy was the most fascinating person he had ever met. As Christy watched them, an overwhelming sadness came upon her.

  She peeped round the door of the den to see all the children rapt in front of The Sound of Music, so she climbed the wooden staircase to find Vaughn. Vaughn was always able to parachute in and out of situations at will, and if anyone could haul himself out of a snowdrift, it was him. In the distance she heard his voice muttering and discovered him in the master bedroom, watching Fox News and shouting at the television.

  When he saw her he calmed his tone, and told her that they were going to have to stay the night, as travel was impossible. She was amazed at his equanimity.

  “I’m tired,” he said, though whether this was a general statement or specific to today she could not tell. Then he turned back to Sean Hannity.

  Christy lay down beside him and absorbed the events of the day so far. Julia. Leaving. New York. Unthinkable. Of all the possible dramatic twists to the plot of Julia’s life, this one had honestly never occurred to her. For the fact was that Christy needed Julia to get through the next stage of her pregnancy. She had planned on them going to the scans together like a glamorous lesbian couple and watching the baby wave at them in black-and-white. Julia might even be present at the birth this time, and would certainly visit Christy on a daily basis as she lay blissful but broken apart in the few weeks after delivery. Such acts were things she would never expect of Vaughn. After all, wasn’t that how most women got through the vicissitudes of new motherhood? It was the daily snatched conversations over neighborhood coffees with other warriors on the front line of maternity that saw you through the battles of sleep deprivation, hormonal fluctuations, and the annihilation of your former self.

  Julia’s presence was vital to Christy’s picture of herself and the new child. Christy had made her decision knowing that her life would change but assuming that everyone else’s would stay the same.

  “You’ll miss Julia when she leaves,” said Vaughn matter-of-factly, switching off the TV, his eyes beginning to close.

  “Yes.” Then she whispered to herself, “I didn’t think I’d be doing it on my own.”

  But Vaughn had heard her.

  “You won’t be on your own.”

  And she smiled and snuggled up beside him.

  “You’ll have to get a nanny now. I suggest two,” and he curled onto his side and fell asleep immediately.

  She stared up at the ceiling, which was plaster, and beamed, very cozy, very un-Julia, in fact, and rested her hand on her swelling belly, waiting for the fluttering and gurgling that told her all was well, new life was coming. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she thought about the first Christmas and Mary, nine months pregnant on a donkey, jigging over hills into Bethlehem. What a nightmare! she thought.

  She was awoken about an hour later by the sound of a guitar playing, a soft, plangent series of chords, and then a young boy, his voice high and pure like the angels that appeared to the shepherds that night, began to sing.

  In the bleak midwinter

  Frosty wind made moan.

  She stood up carefully—the nausea of early pregnancy had left her, but sudden movements made her dizzy—and crept out into the hallway.

  Earth stood hard as iron,

  Water like a stone.

  Outside, halfway up the stairs, Julia was waiting for her.

  “It’s our favorite carol,” she said.

  Christy nodded.

  “You’ve got to hand it to Christianity, really,” Julia continued. “The nativity, it’s such a powerful, beautiful story of hope.” She paused. “Of course, the whole God-is-a-child thing is a bit weird.”

  Then she looked at Christy.

  “But the birth of every baby is a miracle.”

  Christy smiled and walked down toward her, and they went into the kitchen and sat in front of the glowing embers of the fire in there, and they delivered their speeches softly to each other.

  Christy was brief and pithy. She described how she had been overcome once again by feelings of entrapment, but this time it was about the years and the girls slipping away from her, the circumstances of her marriage to Vaughn (or rather the state of affairs between them), and the nurse she would inevitably become, dictating her choices. She had decided that there had to be one thing in her life just for her, so she had given Vaughn an ultimatum. The thing she wanted more than anything else was a baby and, knowing that when a woman wants a baby only a baby will do, Vaughn, determined not to lose her, had reluctantly agreed to the defrosting of two of their previous embryos, taking comfort in the extraordinary unlikelihood of the odds and their compromise, which had be
en they would try only once. Yet Christy had become pregnant and, although she had miscarried one of the twins early on, she had clung to the other with all her might. It was a boy. Unto them a son would be born.

  This, finally, had banished Christy’s cabin fever.

  Now it was Julia’s turn, and by contrast she was long-winded and meandering. She started by describing her life as a Venn diagram, with circles and oblongs representing children, work, marriage, and friends, and how increasingly it seemed impossible to make everything coexist in a harmonious pattern and she feared she was slipping back into the kind of behaviors that had sent her out of her mind and into the Wellness Center before. It was just harder to stay up all night glugging Red Bull laced with vodka in Malibu, where eighty-year-olds jogged past you on the beach at six o’clock in the morning and drinking two delicious lychee martinis was viewed with the same horror as shooting up heroin, apart from by the people who were shooting up heroin, of course. But she had already lost Christy by this point, so she started again with herself, Kristian, and the kids stuck in the car park that the Holland Tunnel often became on weekends and holidays.

  The children, tied into the backseat, were moaning loudly about the fact that neither she nor Kristian would allow them to play with what were always contemptuously referred to as “electronic devices,” and Lee almost decapitated himself by craning his neck out of a window to try to watch Up on a screen in the land cruiser in the lane next to them. That day, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, after they had finally given in and handed over their mobile phones switched to game apps, they emerged from the tunnel into horizontal rain lashing against the windscreen like a carwash, Kristian had good-humoredly turned to Julia and, laughing, said, “How d’you feel about Southern California?” and she had said, “You’re right. It’s time.” Kristian had then stalled the car in shock, causing a trumpet of car horns from behind them, which underlined the solemnity of Julia’s statement.

  Romy was already showing distressing signs of creativity and the accompanying emotional fragility, so while Julia continued to encourage her ten-year-old toward a sensible occupation (when Christy asked her what such an occupation might be, Julia replied “cardiac surgeon”), she feared it was too late. Romy was already on the first chapter of a novel called The Fear in Me, was the lead singer in her band, and it was increasingly apparent to Julia that a new stage of family life was upon her—a stage where her daughter needed her not to expend vast amounts of energy obsessing about who was the lead in the school play but just to sit on the end of her bed every night and talk about how it felt to be, well . . . like her.

  Julia had held out hopes that Lee, who was extremely good-looking, sensibly intelligent without being flashy, and brilliant at sports would not require the same level of maternal time investment. This made him her favorite, though she would never admit it to anyone, even Christy, mainly because he was far less exhausting, although she knew that it was also because she, who had been the tall, skinny, brainy girl humiliated by the cheerleaders and whose best friend was her hamster, was delighted to have given birth to one golden child. But even he had started writing acrostic poems about the different seasons, and Kristian reported that in the one called

  W

  I

  N

  T

  E

  R

  he had written Wishing for fields and mountains at the beginning.

  One thing was for sure. Julia knew when to hold them and when to fold them. She would never lose her passion for New York, but she could love it from a distance. Within a fortnight she had found a house just off Broad Beach to rent, a good school with huge windows and a soccer pitch nearby, and a tenant for the loft on Rivington Street. Lucy and Richard were making noises about buying the cottage upstate because Lucy had come into some money after her mother died. Julia was not even annoyed when Kristian declared this was all synchronicity; she was finding his New Agey-ness endearing these days, and anyway, he was right. The kids would be surfing, and he would be running breath workshops in Montecito within days of their arrival, and, while she would never be a person described as “laid-back,” she might no longer be one who hovered on the edge of a nervous breakdown at least once a month. No, everything had clicked into place with a devastating momentum.

  “And it’s not like I’ll never see you again,” she finished. “I’ll have to stay at your place when I come back for work.”

  Christy reached over and took her hand.

  • • •

  OUTSIDE, THE SNOW had settled, and, from the bustle in the hallway, they realized that Lucy and Richard were bundling the children into their outdoor clothes and snow shoes.

  “Where are Christy and Julia?” called Richard, as he headed out.

  “In the den, probably,” replied Lucy. “Leave them, they need a little chat.”

  “Even I, insensitive male that I am, could tell there was a bit of aggro.”

  “Oh, they’ll be fine,” whispered Lucy, and they could hear the grin in her voice. “It was just a storm in a PMT cup.”

  They could hear Richard laughing behind the closed front door.

  Julia looked at Christy apologetically.

  “I like her,” said Christy, and they hugged and wished each other happy holidays, though inside they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  one thousand words a day

  It was dark outside, although the bars on the tiny windows in the dingy classroom wouldn’t have let much light in, anyway. Lucy sat at the desk, arranging her pens and blank pad in a neat pattern in front of her. She looked up and smiled nervously once at the other people in the room: four other women aged between eighteen and eighty, and two gray-haired men who looked more scared than she was. She picked up her pen and wrote the date, January 21, underlined it using the spine of the People magazine that she had in her handbag, and quickly stuffed it back in. It wasn’t quite the image of herself she wanted to portray in a creative writing class where the serious-looking woman next to her was reading Freedom and nodding earnestly every couple of paragraphs.

  Julia had given Lucy the course as a present before she left for L.A. They were sitting in Café Mogador having a farewell breakfast when Julia handed her an envelope which contained details of the place and time of the course (every Wednesday night for the next eight weeks, seven until ten o’clock) and a receipt indicating she had booked Lucy in and paid for it.

  “Don’t worry, it wasn’t expensive,” she said reassuringly. “It’s taught by Ryan James—you know, Robyn Skinner’s ex. Don’t know if he’s any good, but it doesn’t matter. I just really feel you should do it. You need to do something, Lucy.”

  Lucy nodded. In Julia she had found a friend with whom such directness could be given and taken without rancor, in the spirit of the generosity Julia always showed. The question of whether writing could indeed be a suitable occupation for Lucy had been vexing them for many months now, and she and Julia had discussed different possibilities at length. For although her life was full and busy and exhausting these days (with young children and housework and volunteering at the school and being happily married), Lucy still found herself considering Is that all there is? and wanted something more, something that was not just about financial independence, though that was certainly a desire that had been reawakened in her, but would give her the confidence to sashay through middle age like Tina Turner, with her skirts hiked above her fantastic legs. Julia encouraged her in this determination.

  “What are we all meant to do, Lucy?” she would say. “Lie down and die? I don’t think so.”

  Lucy didn’t think so, either, which is why she thanked Julia from the bottom of her heart and promised faithfully she would attend.

  At that moment, Julia’s attention had been diverted by a text coming through called News About You! Julia explained that some underpaid minion in her agent Clarice’s office had the job of scannin
g all media for references to clients.

  “It’s very interesting,” she said. “Sometimes I learn things about myself I never even knew.”

  Today however, the minion had made the colossal error of telling Julia that a Julia Kirkland had died yesterday of complications of emphysema at the age of 103. This threatened to ruin Julia’s morning, as she couldn’t help but wonder if it was some strange portent, but after another cup of coffee she brightened—103 was a damn good age, after all—and suggested to Lucy that she make it the first line of a story. That morning, Julia learned she had died, or something like that.

  “I wouldn’t want to write about you,” replied Lucy.

  “It wouldn’t be about me, necessarily. Or if it were, you could just change my name.”

  Lucy suddenly remembered Richard telling her what Kristian with a K had said about Julia before she had ever met her.

  “Is that why all artists need the ‘splinter of ice’?”

  “Oh, please,” Julia snorted dismissively. “Kristian’s always banging on about that, but I think it’s just silly. All artists use things that have happened to them, whether they paint, or act, or write. It helps to make sense of everything. Anyway, my dear, in case you hadn’t noticed, you have the splinter of ice, too. With you it’s the ability to distance yourself from people and observe them.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a great thing when you say it out loud. You know, for a person to be like that. Distant.”

  “Why? I think it could give you a voice. A way of writing about life the way you see it. You have a distinctive view of the world. That’s why you should use it. Mark my words, Lucy. You have something to say.”

  Lucy smiled. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “Ditto,” said Julia. “You’ll have to come visit me in Lotus Land. Make sure Kristian doesn’t force me into buying a juicer and doing family yoga.”