Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  “I’m Beck. Who are you?” Beck loves conversation, will talk to anyone. Julie has a certain fear of someone stealing her away—all they would have to do is say hello.

  August laughs.

  “This is, um…this is August.”

  “Oh. Hi, August.”

  “August and I went to high school together.”

  Beck is very interested in this piece of information. “You knew Mom in high school?”

  “Sort of,” he says.

  “Sort of? Did you know her, or did you not?”

  “I did.”

  “You did? What was she like?”

  “She, well…she…”

  Julie interrupts, has to at this point, with the fascinated look on Beck’s face and the decidedly embarrassed expression that August is wearing. “Beck, August and I need to talk alone, okay? Go get in bed.”

  “Okay. Nice to meet you, August.”

  “You too, Beck.”

  “Yours?” August asks, amused, when Beck has gone back into her bedroom.

  “Mine.”

  “Listen, Jules, will you just not rule anything out yet? Think about it. I’m going to be here in town for a little while. We don’t have to figure it all out tonight.”

  Julie sighs. “How long are you going to be around?”

  “Until I talk you into going to Lawrence Mill with me.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Not trying to be.” He looks down at the floor, then back at her. “Hey, I know about the diary. You have it, right? I mean, I thought that…you know, if I really can’t talk you into going to Lawrence Mill, then you might at least give me the diary. Or let me borrow it, maybe.”

  Julie stares at him, confused. “Diary?”

  “You don’t have to lie about it. She was bringing it to me that night at the bridge. Reba wanted me to have it.”

  “August, I’m not lying. I didn’t know she had a diary. You never mentioned a diary.” She stands, stunned, thinking of how dangerous a journal of Reba’s could have been in the wrong hands. If it’s even true, and not some lie August has cooked up to get her back to Lawrence Mill. It’s hard to believe her friend would have been so careless as to document the things that happened that year.

  “Yeah, I know. I knew you wouldn’t just give it to me. I figure it’s probably…you know, sacred to you, or something…but if Lawrence Mill is definitely out of the question, I was hoping you’d let me at least take a look.”

  “She wrote…about the two of you? In a diary?”

  August’s dark eyes study her, trying to decide if she knows more than she is telling him.

  “You really don’t have it?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Reba wrote about everything in that journal.” His voice has taken on a curiously frantic rhythm, and his hands reach out and clench her arms in a way that feels at once intimate and unfamiliar. “If you don’t have it, then who the hell does?”

  9

  August had thought he’d never see Jules again, and now here he is, in her apartment, talking to her like he knows her. He thought he would feel triumphant, thought that something unsettled inside him would finally quiet. Did he expect her to make him feel whole again? Jules had never belonged to him. She isn’t his lover, never was, although maybe she could have been. If it had been her, and not Reba, alone in the field that day. But he knows that isn’t true. It was always Reba, for him. It always had to be Reba. Not that it matters now.

  He remembers Jules well from high school, her cold, hard edges and tough attitude. She just didn’t give a damn. Such a contrast to Reba’s welcoming softness. It was a beautiful picture, though, the two of them, always together, Jules’s long dark hair and dark eyes and sexy mouth, dangerously appealing. And Reba, small and blond, all sweetness and innocence. You couldn’t help wanting to touch them and to stay away at the same time.

  It’s not like he showed up on a whim. How long has he been trying to get in touch now? A year or so, at least. Thinking about her for so much longer than that, but figuring he was probably better off not knowing everything. He’s changed his mind about that as he has gotten older. Now, he needs to know it all, has given up on ever moving on until he does. Lately, he feels like he’s sinking, like his heart isn’t in the present anymore, like the past could swallow him up.

  So, he gave in and came to New York to try to find Jules. She’s the only one who has the answers. He feared having to search through the whole damned city, but finding her had been easy. He didn’t know her address, but a simple Google search of her name brought up the website for the bus tours, her photo right there under the Meet Your Tour Guides tab. If he believed in those kinds of things, he would say it was fate. Only, once he saw her leaving work, he didn’t know how to approach her, what to say after all this time. He knew he was being sketchy and borderline criminal, but he started following her, thinking that the words would come. It was a messed-up way to start things.

  His instinct had been to follow her last night, when she ran out of the club, but common sense had won out for a change. Chasing her down the street would only make it worse. He needs to explain himself, but here he is, coming apart in her kitchen instead. He’s got to pull himself together.

  She’s different now, he can tell. It’s more than the hair. She was so reckless back in high school, radiating all that sensuality and confidence. Now she’s poised, controlled. She has grown into herself. It isn’t his place to say so, but she is even sexier now. There is still something…aloof about her, but she has lost those hard edges, that coldness. He can tell that if the right person touched her these days, she might feel something.

  But she is uncertain, not at all the carelessly confident girl from his recollection. Though maybe it is his presence that’s done that. And she doesn’t have the diary, which is a shock. That changes things.

  He remembers that day at Reba’s locker so clearly that it might have been only yesterday. The last time he spoke to Reba. She seemed so wary of him, and she talked about giving him the diary. She said they needed to meet somewhere later, that there were things he needed to know.

  But they never did have that talk, and he never did read the diary.

  Someone out there must have it, though, the lavender book he gave Reba for her birthday. He has always imagined it with Jules and isn’t pleased to think that someone else might know Reba better than either of them did. He needs to know what’s inside the diary, and Jules is his only connection to that awful Mississippi town. He has to convince her to go there with him, because the only place they’ll find that book, if it can even be found, is in Lawrence Mill.

  10

  REBA’S DIARY, 1997

  Sometimes I think about what would happen if Jules and August ever met—like, really met, outside of school. If I ever got the nerve to tell Jules that August is more than some boy in one of our classes. That he’s special to me.

  I can’t imagine them as friends; they have nothing in common besides me. But, maybe that would be enough. I wonder. I see us all together, chatting peacefully by the river or outside Nell’s.

  It’s hypothetical, a scene born entirely from my imagination. They’ll never know each other that way, because I’ll probably never be able to tell Jules the truth.

  And anyway, I meant to start at the beginning.

  11

  Julie can’t sleep.

  Thinking about the meeting with August keeps her awake for hours, wandering the apartment without purpose. She curls herself into a ball on the living room sofa and tries to watch the infomercials on TV. Then she is up again, in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator door and eyeing its meager contents, listening to that soft, regular hum. Back to the sofa. She can’t close her eyes, not when the things she doesn’t want to remember are waiting behind her eyelids. But it is night, and things are still and quiet, at least i
nside the apartment, and she can’t help but think, even with her eyes open wide.

  Diary…

  Knowing such a thing might exist makes her yearn to hold it in her hands.

  Forget it, she whispers to herself in the darkness. (Does she whisper it, or is it only a thought?) Maybe there is no diary. Maybe it is only a fabrication, put together by August to convince her to go to Lawrence Mill. How could she go back? But how could she not, if Reba’s diary is there, somewhere, waiting for her to find it?

  You have to forget. But she can imagine Reba’s face in her mind, the almost-parted lips, water swirling the blond strands of her hair. Her wide-open eyes, staring.

  • • •

  “You think you know what you want,” Lila says, taking a long drag on her cigarette and breathing an elegant smoky curl into the air. “We all think we know, because that’s the easiest way, isn’t it?” She wears a white button-down shirt, top three buttons undone. The pointy-nailed fingers of her right hand toy with the pearly buttons. “You think you want to be an award-winning actress, a famed playwright or screenwriter. Am I right?” No one speaks. Julie sits, arms crossed, alert.

  “But before you can know what you really want, before you can get it, you have to know yourself. Really know. And how many of you can say that you really, truly know yourself? One of the most difficult things for artists is to do what’s necessary to fully understand who they are, to realize their own unique fears, to know why they feel the things they feel. The best, most authentic way to become someone else, or to write something life-changing, is to know yourself. What I suggest to all of you is this: to truly understand yourself as an artist, you have to understand where you come from. You don’t have to embrace it, but you can’t deny it, either. Sometimes that means going away from what you know. But sometimes it means going back.”

  Julie stares at Lila, those long fingernails red as a ripe apple against the white of her shirt. She can’t do it—no matter what Lila says, no matter what August says. She can’t return as though she was there only yesterday, as though she belongs there. As though she has any right to be there, when Reba isn’t.

  But the words echo in her ears. Go back.

  • • •

  “I can’t just leave,” she says to August, the second he opens his hotel room door. “I’ve got responsibilities here—my daughter, work. I can’t just pack up and go.” She’s never thought of how hard it would be to turn him down if he was standing right in front of her, and not on the imagined other end of a letter.

  “Jules, I’m not talking about a permanent move. A few days, a long weekend, maybe. I’ll take care of the plane tickets. We’ll both leave from here.”

  “Why now? We could meet there later—during the summer, maybe.”

  “You think I’m lying about the diary. I’m not. If it’s there, don’t you want to find it? How can you wait here and wonder? Besides, if I leave here without you now, I’ll probably never hear from you again. You think I’m going to take that risk?”

  “What about you? Don’t you have a job? How can you be here indefinitely? How can you have time for this?”

  “My work is freelance. I own my business. I make my schedule. I planned for this when I came here.”

  Julie feels a surge of jealousy at his freedom. But also, standing here with him, she feels guilty, like she owes him the answers he wants, because she is the one who took away the thing he wanted most. Even if he doesn’t know it. If he knew everything, he wouldn’t be so determined to keep her close, wouldn’t want to be near her ever again.

  So it is guilt that does it, but she also can’t deny the allure of Reba’s journal, a chance to read her best friend’s thoughts. It would be so painful to read it all, but an opportunity to get close to Reba again in the only way that’s left. Julie can’t turn her back on the possibility.

  “I’ll talk to Beck’s dad about keeping her,” she says quickly, before she changes her mind. “See what I can work out. I’ll keep you posted.”

  12

  Calling Evan shouldn’t be so hard, but God, Julie hates it. He is almost always the one to call to schedule his visits with Beck. His work makes his time with his daughter erratic—sometimes he has her for two weeks straight, other times he goes months without seeing her.

  To have to call him at all, even this once, is a form of giving in. But if Julie is going to consider taking this trip, she’d like to know that he’ll be around. If he won’t be, she’ll have to schedule Tara, the sitter, for the long weekend. But maybe Evan is performing in New York or on a break right now.

  Her call goes to voice mail. She hates him for forcing her to leave a message—such evidence that she needs him. When he calls her back ten minutes later (was he screening her call?), she learns that he is in New York for the next month, until shooting begins on an independent movie he’s committed to.

  Hearing his voice makes her chest hurt, a tiny, unnatural pain, like moth wings flapping against her heart. It used to be such an immobilizing ache, but now it’s only a flutter, a handicap she has learned to live with.

  She walks home from the subway station with the cell phone pressed against her ear. “I need you to meet me somewhere, when it’s convenient for you.”

  “Julie…” He mumbles her name. She can hear his ambivalence, can almost feel it sizzling through the phone. Simple phone conversations are strange enough.

  “It’s about Beck, of course.”

  “Oh. Everything okay?” His normal, confident voice returns. Father is a role he can play. She’s only thrown him off for an instant.

  • • •

  They meet at Brew the next day. I’ll be in the neighborhood, he said, but she didn’t ask why. She sits at a table in the back, sipping black coffee and watching for him through the wide front windows. The shop is bathed in afternoon sunlight. It almost convinces her that when she walks out the door, she won’t feel the chill.

  There are only two other patrons in Brew at this time of day, a man and a girl, at separate tables. The man is wearing a business suit and reading On the Road. Evan used to love Kerouac. He had the same book tucked in his messenger bag on the day she met him. The girl, the other patron, is dark-haired, with earphones tucked into the curls of her ears. She is bent over a notebook, pen in hand. Julie wonders if it’s a journal.

  Evan wears a dark wool coat and blue jeans and has such a confident walk that, in the instant before he opens the door and she sees his face, Julie has already recognized his silhouette through the window. She realizes, belatedly, that she could have had this conversation with Evan over the phone. Maybe she’d wanted this excuse to see him.

  Evan. Confidante, lover. Husband, for a moment. Enemy. Stranger. His eyes stand out on his face, blue like the cerulean crayon in Beck’s craft box, or like that paint sample Julie found in the hardware store when she and Evan painted the old apartment. They never even used that color, but she kept the sample—a reminder. It lives in her nightstand, taking up residence with other small mementos. Night Sky, the sample is called. But Julie has never seen a night sky as deep, as intense, as Evan’s eyes. Now they are her daughter’s eyes too.

  His other features are sharp but boyish: pinky cheeks and small, pink lips on a body that is slim, slightly muscular. His hair hangs longer than the last time she saw him, dark blond and windswept. When they first met, Julie was taking a Greek mythology class, and Evan reminded her powerfully of the boy god Eros, youthful and yet somehow overwhelmingly sensual.

  Touching him seemed so natural once, but she doesn’t do it when he finally approaches, removes his coat, and tucks it around the back of his chair before taking a seat at the small table.

  “Julie.”

  “Evan.” He wears a brown T-shirt, with a long-sleeved thermal underneath. She’s seen him wear this combination before.

  She knows his entire body. As he sits across from h
er fully clothed, she can see him in her mind, wearing nothing. She remembers it all—the feel of his skin beneath her palms, the inexplicable roughness of his hands, the mole on his pelvis. Sandy-colored leg hair, the curve of his calf, thigh. The moon and star tattoo on his back, and how she used to trace it with her fingertips while he slept. She has a matching star on her hip.

  “I need to go out of town,” she finally says. “Soon. Maybe next week, even. Just for a few days. Can you keep Beck?”

  He glances down at the table, his eyelashes a full curtain against the blue-stained irises of his eyes, and she thinks of how he looks while sleeping, lashes sealing the pale, peaceful half-moons of his eyelids. “Where are you going?”

  She isn’t sure it’s any of his business, but she answers anyway. “Mississippi.”

  “Home?”

  “Not home. New York is home.”

  “Is everything okay? You aren’t thinking of moving, are you?” It pleases her a little to see the quick panic on his face, even though she knows it has more to do with Beck than with her.

  “No, of course not.” Even Evan knows she has never been back.

  “Okay, sure. I’ll be happy to keep Beck. But, Julie… I mean, you’re going to come back, aren’t you?”

  It stings. She remembers when she gave birth to Beck. After they were discharged from the hospital, she’d thrust the baby into his arms and begged him to take her. You have to, she’d said.

  “Of course I’m coming back. You think I’d just leave her with you? I know better. Full-time parenting isn’t exactly something you have the time for.”

  She doesn’t even mean to be so harsh. Call it self-sabotage, a way to protect herself from the possibility of them ever growing close again.

  “Jesus, Julie. Don’t start.”

  There was a time when she loved the way he looked at her. She can’t stand it now. So she focuses instead on the chalkboard menu behind the counter.