Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  Julie took a step back, and another, and then she was running and couldn’t stop. She kept going until she tripped in the field, fell down on the ground and clutched at the flattened grasses, tree limbs swaying around her in the winter breeze.

  72

  When Julie snaps the book closed hours later, sunlight is trying to force its way in through the heavy curtains and she can feel her cheeks, hot with hatred. She’s finished Reba’s diary, read every single entry, and she can’t think of a time when she’s ever hated a person more than she hates Toby right now. There’s anger at Reba too. She can’t deny that, but it’s futile, fruitless—there’s no outlet for it. She changes into fresh clothes quickly and smears enough makeup on her face to cover the raccoon-like circles beneath her eyes, left behind from alcohol and tears.

  This changes things.

  She scribbles a note to August, then grabs her purse, her keys, and Reba’s journal, taking an extra moment to tie the book closed, wrapping the silky ribbon into a delicate bow when what she wants to be doing with her fingers is wrapping them around a throat, wants to clutch a knife blade, a gun handle.

  She wants blood.

  She feels guilty leaving the book and the note outside August’s door, and she hesitates there, trying to decide if she should leave the diary for him at all. It would be better for him if she destroyed it, if he never knew the truth about the girl he loved. So much better. But she thinks of Reba, and all of the lies, and knows that this one time she can give August the gift of the truth. It’s a cruel, awful truth, and Julie doesn’t like to think of him reading the book alone, but she knows it is right.

  So she leaves them, the book and her note, on the carpeted floor outside August’s hotel room for him to find at a more reasonable hour.

  She walks as fast as she can through the lobby, even though it is barely six thirty a.m. and no one is around to see her. Still, she feels sneaky as she walks out into the empty Saturday morning streets. She knows August will feel betrayed when he wakes up and finds that she has gone.

  But by then, she’ll have already confronted Toby.

  73

  The Haywood Studio is on the bottom level of an old brick building in a long row of old brick buildings in downtown Opal. Close enough to The Inn that Julie had been able to walk, though it had taken her a while. She can’t believe Toby has his own art studio, that success could really come to someone as scheming and awful as her cousin.

  The morning sun is blinding, and the sidewalks are empty at this early hour. She doesn’t even know if the studio is open yet, and she feels suddenly very stupid. Of course an art gallery or studio—or whatever the hell this place is—isn’t open at seven in the morning. Her anger had overcome her logic, and she’d walked nearly a mile without a thought as to whether Toby would actually be here.

  The studio has a wooden plaque beside the door, the word Haywood carved into it in gloomy, gothic script. Julie stares at the sign and fights the urge to tear it from the brick and smash it into the sidewalk. Through the glass pane of the door and the floor-to-ceiling windows, she can see huge art installations lining the exposed brick walls and imposing black-painted chandeliers hanging unlit from the ceiling. But there is a light glowing near the back of the studio, from a staircase maybe. Someone is here. She hasn’t come all this way for nothing.

  She presses the button by the door three, four, five times. The door trembles back and forth in its frame with the force of her fists pounding against it. He will hear her. Little birds teetering along on the sidewalk fly quickly away from the sound. She’d thought the walk would help calm her down before this confrontation, but she’s just as livid as she was when she left the hotel. She stops, waits. A car drives past. When no one comes down the stairs, she resumes banging against the glass pane.

  Finally, the sliver of light from the stairway spills into the gallery. And there he is. Toby, looking hungover as hell, but otherwise every bit the same as he did the day he let her out at the airport. Good riddance, he told her.

  Looking at him as he walks out of that back room—with his long hair tied back and his V-neck T-shirt covered in flecks of paint so that he looks more like a ragged housepainter than an actual artist—Julie is the closest she’s ever come to wanting someone dead. She can feel it, this rage, rising up through her body, and she might burst through this damned door if he doesn’t open it soon.

  He doesn’t look as surprised as she wished he would, but for a moment, he does look scared. Maybe it’s the murderous expression she knows she is wearing, or maybe it’s the way she’s still beating her fists against the door. He walks cautiously to the door and twists the lock.

  “Goddamn it, Jules,” he mutters, looking around like she might not have come alone. “You gonna knock the door down?”

  He steps back as she swings the door open with one arm and bursts into the room, her fury in full, vivid bloom as she sees that face, that full mouth that has fed her probably a thousand lies.

  “You goddamned liar!” she screams, rushing him before she has thought things through. She wants to tear him into pieces, wishes she was made for it. As it is, she can only pound her fists into his chest as he backs away from her with his eyes wide and his mouth open in shock. “You evil, disgusting liar!”

  She has backed him into a wall, but still it seems like ages before Toby realizes that she is actually hitting him, before he grabs her wrists and holds them in the air, like a movie paused in the middle of the action.

  “Jesus Christ, Jules!” he shouts. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  She pulls her wrists from his grasp and finally steps back, breathless. “You lied to me,” she says. “All this time, all these years.” She looks around the gallery and then closes her eyes. It’s too hard to look at them—all the paintings of Reba: Reba in her bedroom and in Toby’s, Reba’s eyes agonized and accusing as she stands out back behind Southern Saddle, Reba on the bridge, even a few of Julie and Reba together. God, she should have guessed when she saw Toby at his New York show—although, in her own defense, the works he featured then had been far less…obvious.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Toby says as he wipes the back of his palm across his mouth. But it’s hard to lie when the evidence is larger than life and hanging on the walls in front of her.

  She licks her lips, preparing to savor this moment, this bombshell, this uncovering. “Reba had a diary.”

  “No, she didn’t.” Toby’s response is immediate and expected. He never knew about the diary, after all.

  “She did. Pretty purple thing, tied with a satin ribbon. And guess what I found out when I read it?”

  Toby looks defiant. “Who’s lying now, Jules? She didn’t have a diary. Why don’t you tell me the real reason you’re here.”

  “She had a diary. You belong to me, you told her. When you want to go to him, come see me instead. Sound familiar?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know a thing about it.”

  “Yeah? Then why don’t you tell me? Why don’t you tell me what really happened at the bridge? Did I really push her, or was it you?”

  She expects him to yell, to shout, to scream. She does not expect him to fall apart on her. But that’s what he does, sinking to the floor and folding in on himself, running his hands through his hair and causing it to come loose from its rubber band. “Fuck,” he says, his voice cracking. He closes his eyes. “I didn’t… I didn’t. It wasn’t like that. It was an accident. She just fell.”

  She blinks and stares at him, there on the floor. “I didn’t kill her,” she says flatly.

  He leans back and stares at the painting. “No. You really never figured that out?”

  She hadn’t dared to really think it. It doesn’t take away the devastation of having lost Reba, but it takes away the weight of it. Believing Toby—believing that she pushed Reba f
rom the bridge—changed her entire life. And it wasn’t even true.

  “Why?” she hisses at him, her fingers grasping the small counter behind her, gripping the ledge to keep from launching herself at him again, from tearing his hair out. “Why did you make me believe I did it? Do you hate me that much?”

  He looks up at her, and she can see the tears pooling in the corners of his bloodshot eyes. He is probably playing her with the waterworks; he probably has another lie to feed her.

  “I never said you killed her, Jules. That may be what you heard, but it isn’t what I said. But you were there, drunk out of your mind, and Reba fell into the river, and you stood there. I yelled at you to get help, to do something, and you just stood there in some kind of fucking daze. You may not have killed her, but you sure didn’t do anything to save her, either.”

  Julie stands there, stunned. She thinks back to that night at the river, to her fuzzy memory of the two people arguing on the bridge, how it always felt like she was watching the scene unfold instead of being a part of it. Because she wasn’t part of it.

  “You’re sick,” she says. “You hurt her, you tricked her, you used her. If you didn’t push her off that bridge yourself—which I’m not even sure I believe—that still doesn’t change the fact that there is blood on your hands. If she’d never gotten involved with you, she’d still be alive.”

  Toby laughs, a cold, cruel laugh. “Yeah, well, I think that could be said for all of us. You ask me, you’re as much to blame as I am. As the boy is. She’d have been better off to stay away from the whole lot of us, wouldn’t she?” He holds his arms out, palms facing up, and she can see, then, the long, thin scars on his wrists. “You think I don’t wake up feeling guilty every goddamned day of my life? You have no idea what I feel.”

  Don’t look at them, she thinks, trying to keep her eyes off those scars, trying not to feel sorry for him. He doesn’t deserve it. “I know you were obsessed with her then,” she says, looking around the room at all of the paintings of Reba. “And I know you still are.”

  He follows her eyes, looking around at this strange shrine to Reba. “It’s not an obsession,” he says fiercely. Then he laughs again, that same harsh laugh. “I loved her.”

  “Yeah, join the club. We all loved her, Toby.” She thinks of the irony of it, that the three people who claimed to love her the most seemed to have all played a role in her demise. She suddenly feels that she has to escape from this poisonous space, escape from Toby having a breakdown before her eyes, escape from Reba’s eyes staring out at her from a dozen paintings.

  “I didn’t mean… I didn’t mean for things to happen the way they did. I thought I had some kind of power over her, but it was the other way around. I fell in love with her, and I thought she might…might have loved me too. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but there was something real between us. It was more than an obsession.”

  She could tell him that he is right, that Reba felt something for him too, but the words won’t come. She can’t bring herself to give him even an ounce of peace. Even if he had suffered. Even if he is suffering.

  “She had something real with August too,” Julie says quietly. It felt more thrilling than she’d ever admit to be able to add to the hurt.

  “That wasn’t his baby,” Toby says, and she can tell that he truly believes it. “Reba’s baby… That was mine. My baby…my family…” He trails off, and she can actually hear his sobs. And she knows that she doesn’t have to do it, doesn’t have to be as evil as he is, doesn’t have to wound him the way he wounded her.

  In the end, she can’t resist.

  “Toby,” she says, her voice even, controlled. “There was no baby. There never was. Reba lied to you. She lied to all of us.”

  He looks up, stunned. “No,” he says. “She wasn’t like that. Reba wasn’t like that.”

  Julie can feel her lips turning up in a hard little smile. “Well, then I guess she learned something from you after all.” She turns to the door, prepared to leave him like this, reeling from a truth he can’t bear to believe. It’s poetic, she thinks. The brutal lie Toby let her believe ten years ago changed the course of her life. The same way that Reba’s deception changed Toby’s life, left him hungering for a family that didn’t even exist.

  “I want that diary, Jules,” he says, reaching an arm out as though to grab her, but he is too far away. “Please…I need to see it.”

  He is a shell, a broken version of the cruel teenager she once knew, and she sees that she hadn’t even needed to try to tear him to pieces—he’s already in tattered shreds. And she hates it, hates him for being so vindictive in the past and now so vulnerable.

  She looks into those hard green eyes one final time. “Fuck you, Toby,” she says, before she walks out of the gallery and leaves her cousin behind forever.

  74

  REBA’S DIARY, 1997

  I miss Jules. If she were here, if she’d never stumbled upon August and me that night in the woods, then we would be watching old Christmas movies in our pajamas on my living room floor, spinning our stories about the future, about spending our winters together in New York City.

  That’s how it’s supposed to be. When we were kids, my mama would buy us matching flannel pajamas with reindeer or Christmas trees or snowflakes. Jules would have Christmas dinner with Molly and Toby, and then she’d come over to my house and we’d put on our matching pj’s. We’d find whatever movie was on TV—Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life—and lie in the floor with pillows beneath our heads. Sometimes Mama or even Daddy would sit on the sofa and watch along with us. The lights from the tree in the corner would flash onto the TV screen, adding bright, brilliant colors to the black-and-white films.

  It isn’t like that this year. Instead, I sat through an uncomfortable Christmas dinner with my parents, mostly quiet except for the clanking of silverware against the china and my daddy’s occasional small talk. He was in a strangely pleasant mood, and I don’t know whether it was because of the holidays, or if he has finally gotten over losing the stupid promotion.

  “You know, the truck has been making a funny noise,” he said casually. “I saw Toby out in the yard yesterday, and he said he’d take a look at it for me, once the holidays are over. The boy knows a little something about cars, apparently.”

  I felt sick at the mention of his name. Toby was nice to my daddy? Toby was nice to anyone?

  “Oh, really?” It was the most I could get out.

  “He’s a good kid,” Daddy mused. “Wish he didn’t have that long hair, but I guess I was a bit of a rebel in my time too. He’ll keep me from having to take the truck in to the shop, maybe save me a few bucks.”

  I would have laughed, but I was in complete shock. Toby—a good kid? A kid at all? I fought to keep a blank expression on my face because I could feel an entire universe of emotions threatening to break free.

  And now I am alone in my room on Christmas night, and the soft noise of my radio playing isn’t enough to distract my thoughts from the biggest lie I’ve ever told.

  I’m not pregnant.

  I’d considered the possibility, after Southern Saddle. Surely seeing Toby with someone else couldn’t have affected me so much, so viscerally that I’d been physically ill? And for a few terrifying days, I considered buying a test. But then I started my period, so apparently Toby could affect me that way. Toby, and one very strong drink.

  It isn’t easy and it isn’t simple, the kind of agony I feel. Which is why I let myself cling to August, sweet August who cares about me. Which is why I made the crazy suggestion that we go away together. Except once I said it, in that moment, it seemed like the perfect idea. I could love August again, the way I am sure he loves me, if I could only get away from Toby. August and I could go away together, and Toby would disappear. The only thing left would be the sweet perfection I’d felt with August before I stumbled upon Tob
y in my bedroom.

  Except…was it perfection? What we had was nice. A sweet, genuine boy falling in love with a sweet, genuine girl. But I’m not that girl anymore. Now that I know about darker things, darker feelings, I wonder if being with August could ever be right again.

  But then August said he wouldn’t go away with me, and I felt angry and betrayed. The same way Toby made me feel that night at Southern Saddle. And I felt vicious suddenly, vengeful. I wanted one of these boys to feel the way they made me feel.

  The lie tumbled out of my mouth like a grenade. Explosive.

  Bad enough that I said it to begin with. But I was immediately punished for it (by God, or the universe, or whatever), because Jules was there, saw me with August, and heard my fake confession. And now I can’t take it back, can’t admit that I could lie about something so sacred.

  I haven’t spoken to Jules since that night by the river. What would I say to her, anyway, when I can’t lie and I can’t tell the truth?

  75

  It was Nell who finally set Julie straight all those years ago about love and friendship and everything else. Nell gave her exactly what she needed, only a little too late.

  In the cold, empty week between Christmas and New Year’s, Julie visited the flower shop, entering through the front door like a stranger and not through the back like she was used to. She was worried that Reba might be there, but she didn’t see her when she looked in through the front windows.

  “Just a minute!” Nell called from the back, when Julie walked in.

  “It’s me,” Julie said.

  “Hey, Jules,” Nell said with a smile. “How was your holiday?”

  “Okay, I guess.” When Julie didn’t say more, Nell’s expression immediately turned to one of concern.