It was on the bottom of the stack when she set the mail down on the counter. Hard to believe she didn’t know, didn’t feel it ticking like an impatient clock there in her hand. Surely she should have felt it, heard it? The name no one had called her since she left Lawrence Mill scrawled in ink across the envelope. Jules. Seeing it like that was familiar and foreign at the same time—it is her name still, and yet it isn’t. He’d written the wrong address—the apartment she lived in with Evan years ago. Yellow forwarding stickers made the envelope eye-catching in the sea of bills and catalogs.
She thought of Reba then, of how both girls were fascinated with the postal service when they were young. They wrote letters to each other and stamped them with the most interesting stamps they could find in Aunt Molly’s junk drawer. Then they tucked their letters to each other into their side-by-side mailboxes, lifted up the little red flags, and waited until those same letters returned, Reba’s letter in Julie’s mailbox and vice versa.
It was difficult to convince the postman to take their letters away, instead of simply swapping them on-site. “You’re next-door neighbors, ladies,” he said, shaking his head when they cornered him at his mail truck one afternoon. “You’re with each other every day. Why bother with the letters?”
But they pleaded with him, and he finally agreed. After that, the letters came back with the stamps marked over with mysterious black ink. They spent hours imagining where, exactly, their letters might have traveled before returning to them. Exotic locales, big cities, at least across the entire state of Mississippi—surely not just down the street to the Lawrence Mill Post Office and back again.
Through those same mysterious pathways, August made contact with her that night, for the second time in ten years. The letter in her hand felt different than the email that had come before, more real somehow. He knew where she was. More or less. She tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter, read through it quickly, and then ripped it into tiny bits that fell like damaged snowflakes onto the kitchen countertop.
The email, that first tentative contact, had arrived in her inbox three months before the letter came up in the mail. She was heating up frozen pizza while Beck tapped away on the computer at the small desk in the living room. Death Cab was playing on the iPod, and Julie could hardly hear Beck’s singsong voice when she said, “Mom, you’ve got email.” She was so small that her feet didn’t touch the floor when she sat in the desk chair. Beck is as excited about email these days as Julie and Reba used to be about mail from the post office.
“What?” Julie asked.
“Email! Three messages. Want to know who they’re from?”
“Sure,” she said, pulling the plastic seal from the edge of the pizza. “Probably spam.”
It wasn’t, though. Beck read out the return email addresses for Julie one letter at a time. If it was a name or an actual word (and not a random jumble of letters and numbers), Julie asked Beck to sound it out. Extra practice, for school. But when Beck spelled enough letters to make out his name, Julie dropped the pizza, the still-icy pie rattling the metal of the old stovetop.
“Who?” Julie said. She didn’t want to believe it, went to the computer to see it for herself.
And there it was, his name in the sender column, no silly nickname or slew of letters to make her doubt it, only his name, simple and bold. She isn’t hard to find in the digital world. She’s less comfortable with technology than others her age, but she has a Facebook page with her email address listed on it. Brighton said something about it being helpful for her acting career. But still. August was looking for her.
“Beck, don’t you have homework?” Julie asked quietly.
“No, I don’t have any.”
“Go get it,” she said.
“But I—”
“Beck, go.”
Beck slid from the desk chair and Julie fell into it, one hand gripping the edge of the wooden desk.
Sorrow drips into your heart through a pinhole, the voice sang from the iPod dock. Haunting, chilling. Julie opened the email, the mouse already damp with sweat from her palms. She read through the message, blinking as the music played.
“Mom, are you okay?” Beck asked.
Your love is gonna drown.
Julie clicked Delete, jumped to turn the song off, and looked at Beck blankly. She felt very far away from her daughter at that moment.
“Mom, who is she?” Julie didn’t know if Beck had managed to sound out the name or if Julie had spoken it aloud without realizing. “Who is Reba?”
6
So many nights, Julie dreams of Reba. The dream that comes most often, the one that is most vivid, takes her back to when they were children. Even in the dream, she knows it isn’t real. The scene is too perfect, too glossy, like a Photoshopped picture. Ethereal.
They run through the forest, laughing. But then Reba runs ahead, and Julie yells for her to come back. They’ll be in trouble if anyone finds them playing here.
The trees hold glittering emerald leaves that sparkle but hang out of her reach. Even the lowest branch is above her head. The trunks of the trees are deep brown and too smooth to be authentic. When Julie stops to run her finger against one, it feels more like the sanded backs of the chairs in Molly’s old dining room set.
The sun sits lower in the sky than it should. It’s midday, but the sun feels low enough to touch and shines so brightly that when the light falls against the leaves, the leaves reflect it back, jewellike. Green and yellow and white light dances along, everywhere, and Julie is blinded.
In the dream, nothing else moves. The wind doesn’t howl or even whisper, the shining leaves hang still, and the sun sits suspended, the blurry orange-white orb never faltering behind clouds. There are no clouds, only bright rays of sun.
The sun covers everything.
Julie runs. She calls Reba’s name, and it is the only sound in the forest, which normally sings—loud and alive with birds and crickets and the river. Where has the river gone? She looks to the left and sees the riverbank, the riverbed dry and empty, the bridge planks broken and scattered along the bank. And the forest, stretching back farther than she can see. She runs, but her feet make no sound, no crunching of leaves or flattening of wild grass beneath her.
Finally, there is Reba, standing by a growth of honeysuckle bushes, the white of their flowers so pure and sparkling that Reba seems to glow beside them. She plucks the honeysuckle gently from the bushes and strings together a chain of flowers.
She doesn’t eat the syrupy liquid from the center, but leaves the thin, milky pistons pointing, surrounded by silky petals. It isn’t real, but it is. Honeysuckle aren’t daisies and have no stems to tie, but they cling together anyway, the ends of the wild weeds forming something much more elegant than a daisy chain.
“I lost you,” Julie says.
Reba doesn’t look up. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she whispers. She finishes the chain and slips it over her head. And it is beautiful, the wreath of wildflowers around her neck shining, the petals iridescent as pearls. She smiles.
But then Julie can’t see her face. And slowly, Reba fades away, every bit of her, and the flowery chain falls to the ground.
The necklace glistens, but when Julie picks it up, it wilts too quickly in her hands, as though her fingers are poisonous. This can’t be real, she always thinks at this part of the dream. What’s wrong with the flowers?
But she knows the answer already. It isn’t the flowers. It’s Julie. She kills the things she loves.
Brown petals fall to the ground and curl up until there is no chain at all, only dead flowers at her feet. Her hands are outstretched but empty.
Julie calls for Reba but there is no answer, and she knows then that she is alone.
In the mornings when she wakes, her eyelashes cling, salty, to one another, and it is hard to open her eyes.
• • •
Nell told Julie once that thinking about someone often enough will make them appear. They will be in your thoughts, and then suddenly they will be standing behind you at the grocery store or in the car next to you at a traffic light, when you’ve gone years without seeing them at all. It happens all the time, she said.
But then there are all the times Julie has thought of Reba and she’s never appeared, not even once. She knows what Nell would say to that: Honey, that’s not how it works. You can do a lot of things, but you can’t think somebody back from the dead, no matter how hard you try.
August isn’t dead, though. She should have tried harder not to think of him.
7
Julie is a mess when she leaves Sax, and she knows she can’t go home yet. She walks the city blocks near her apartment, trying to calm down, all the while imagining August stepping out from around each corner.
Beck’s sitter isn’t in the apartment when Julie finally unlocks her front door. It’s Brighton she sees instead, sitting on the sofa, sleeves rolled up, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and his eyes alert with worry.
“Jesus, Julie. Where have you been?”
“Out. Thinking.” She walks into the kitchen and pours a glass for herself. She eyes the mostly full bottle. More than one way to forget. How easy it would be to mix the whiskey with a sleeping pill or two, to fall back into old habits. But she knows she can’t. She knows how much she scared Brighton years ago, after Evan left. Beck was too young to remember, but Brighton won’t forget. He doesn’t hold it against her, though.
“I sent the sitter home,” Brighton says. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”
Julie sits next to him on the sofa. “I don’t.”
“So,” Brighton says finally. “That was August.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Apparently.”
“Are you afraid of him? I mean, I know the story and all, but you sort of lost your shit back there.”
“I don’t know. I mean, not afraid. But he’s here, Brighton. And he’s been following me.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I sort of met him. After you left. I approached him.”
Julie wants to be angry, but a certain exhausted numbness has taken over, and all she can do is stare.
Brighton sighs. “I wanted to know what he’s doing here. Why he tracked you down.”
“And?”
“Turns out he came to the city looking for you, but he didn’t know what to say when he actually found you. So he’s been hanging around for a few days, trying to get up the nerve to talk to you. I told him the stalker routine wasn’t the best way to win points. I don’t know why you’re so surprised that he’d show up, though, after the email and the letter. He was bound to turn up in person sooner or later.”
She’s silent.
“I’m no psychologist, Julie, but you’ve been torturing yourself for years. Now August is here, practically at your doorstep. Would it be so bad to at least listen to the guy? Maybe going back there wouldn’t be the worst thing ever.”
“You’re taking his side.”
“I’m on your side.”
“I can’t, Brighton. I can’t go back.”
He looks at her, clearly trying to figure out the best way to proceed. Finally, he shakes his head. “Jules, huh? I’ve never heard anyone call you that before.”
8
Rain smashes against the single window in Julie’s room, pelting the glass with hard little pops as she pulls on her yoga pants. The sound makes her think of Toby. She saw her cousin once, months ago, but it’s been years since they’ve talked.
She doesn’t miss him.
On quiet nights when they were teenagers, Toby and his friends would crowd into Toby’s car and drive through the neighborhoods in town, throwing eggs at dark houses. Julie was forced along only once. She had no choice, because Toby was her ride home from a late-night play practice at a classmate’s house. Two friends were with him, loud and so strung out that they crushed an egg in Toby’s car and tried to scrape up the yolk with their hands. They dumped what ooze they could collect out the front window of Toby’s Firebird, the slick remains sliding down their wrists and forearms.
The wind caught a bit of it and slung it onto Julie, and she was trying to clean the disgusting egg mess from her long hair when the three boys leaned out the car windows, bodies so far outside of the vehicle that she couldn’t believe they didn’t all tumble out into the street. The Firebird swerved along the empty road while they hurled the eggs at the windows of an anonymous house. At least, anonymous as far as she knew. Maybe they had a vendetta she didn’t know about. She didn’t see it, only heard the sound, the smash, smash, smash of whole eggs colliding with glass, with vinyl siding, with brick. Pelting like hard rain. She remembers being glad for once that Reba wasn’t with her. Reba was too good for Toby and his trashy friends.
Toby. August. Reba. It’s all back now, as fresh in her mind as if she were still a teenager and not a grown woman.
• • •
All day long, Julie expects August to materialize, from the time she and Beck leave the apartment in the morning through her yoga classes to the second she arrives back home at the end of the day. If she’s honest with herself, she’s been expecting him for the past ten years. Hasn’t she known that one day she would turn a corner and he would be standing there, and he would want to know everything? He’d want to know what happened to Reba that night. He would ask, and she would say the words, would finally admit the horrible, horrible truth.
Strange, now that she’s seen him with her own eyes, she can’t feel him anymore, doesn’t have that prickling awareness of being watched. So she manages to be unprepared, standing barefoot in her kitchen, cleaning up the remains of Indian takeout, when he finally knocks.
“Mom,” Beck calls. “Someone’s at the door. Can I get it?”
“No, sweetie. Go to your room and get ready for bed. I’ve got it.”
Julie takes a deep breath, hands trembling slightly as she unlocks the door. And there he is, standing right in front of her, and she might as well be seventeen years old again.
“Jules,” he says. He has a deep, strong voice, similar to the ones she remembers narrating the books on tape that Aunt Molly used to listen to. Molly kept them in the car all the time after Uncle Ted left, as though music was too pleasant for her mood. The books on tape weren’t just for road trips, but for ten-minute drives to the grocery store or to the Thomas Pharmacy and Car Care, so that any time Julie went somewhere with Molly, a piece of a story, a few sentences, deposited themselves into her memory. These days, when she hears those same book titles, she recalls not entire plots, but a mishmash of strange sentences. Senseless.
“August.” It’s the best response she can come up with. August, whose name she has never forgotten. He never became just the boy Reba loved or the boy who changed it all, although he was certainly those things. If not for him…
“How did you get in here?” She knows she didn’t buzz him up.
“I followed someone in. No one asked any questions. I can’t believe it’s really you. Finally…” His voice falters, falls away. “I’ve, um, I’ve tried so hard to find you.” He didn’t really expect to find her, though. She can tell. This is unrehearsed.
“What do you want?” she asks, as if she needs to. He looks awkward, hovering in the hallway, and it’s too late for her to run. She can’t help but step aside and motion for him to come in.
“I don’t know, Jules,” he says, running one hand over his very short hair. “Did you get my letter?”
She could lie, planned to, but it’s the truth that comes out. “Yes.”
“The email?”
“Yes.”
“You could have, you know, responded. Or something.”
“I could have.”
“You know what I want, then. I want to talk to someone else who knew her. Who knows what went down back then, how it all fell apart. I want to go back there, to Lawrence Mill, and I want you to go back with me.”
She leads him to the sofa where they both sit, but she doesn’t respond.
“You could have saved me a lot of trouble by responding to the damned email,” he says, looking down at his hands.
She is suddenly angry. “I don’t know who you think you are—”
He holds up a hand, and she snaps her mouth shut without finishing the sentence.
“Please,” he says. “You know the truth about what happened that night, don’t you? You knew her in a way I never got to. You know so much more than I could have ever hoped to know.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she says, and the lie sounds weak. She stands, walks to the kitchen, and he follows. “I haven’t been back there in… God, who knows? A decade?” she says, pressing her hands flat against the cold surface of the kitchen counter. “I can’t do it.” The lights in the kitchen seem too bright, the air uncomfortably warm from the dishwasher groaning in the corner.
“Look, I’m sorry for barging in on your life. This all happened a lot differently than I thought it would.”
“How did you even find me?”
“Internet.” He smiles, a soft, sad smile, and she can see how Reba was drawn to him.
Julie hears a door open, and Beck comes bounding into the kitchen in her purple pajamas. “Mom,” she says, stopping in her tracks when she sees August. The intrigue is apparent on her little face.
“Hi,” she says to him.
“Hi.” August is surprised to see her, but he smiles at the little girl warmly.
Secrets of Southern Girls Page 3