Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  He’d needed someone else to feel it, and when Jules had misheard him in the hospital, he’d just gone with it. Let her wonder what she did, let her feel wrong, and bad, and guilty.

  Like he did.

  When he opened the door to his bedroom, the painting of Reba was staring back at him from the wall, the slash from the mirror repaired and every bit of it finished now with the waterfall behind her. Why the hell had he painted her like that, there? Almost like he’d known it would end this way. Almost like he’d seen how the whole thing would unfold.

  He grabbed his paint jars and unscrewed them, then hurled them one by one against her painting, so that odd, awful colors splattered against the ivory of her skin, covered the soft bends of her fingers, marred the perfect pink of her lips. The mess of paint seeped down onto the carpet and pooled there, and he didn’t care.

  He needed to sleep, needed to close his eyes and forget it all for a while. He tore through his drug stash, little bags flying to the floor as his hands dug deeper. Pills, surely there were pills in there somewhere.

  If he could get to sleep, maybe it would stop. Maybe she would be alive when he woke up. Maybe she’d be alive in his dreams.

  • • •

  Nell’s shop was dark, and she was locking the door when he cleared his throat behind her. “You didn’t tell anyone I was there,” he said. She turned to look at him, her orange hair glowing like a flame in the evening light. “You protected me. Why?”

  He had the uneasy feeling that she could see right through all the bullshit. “I protected her, Toby. As best I could at this point, anyway.” She was quiet for a moment, and then asked, “Did you do it? Did you kill her?”

  He swallowed. “No. I tried… I tried to save her.”

  “She meant something to you,” Nell said as though it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. She had a tote bag over one shoulder, and he could see the corner of a book sticking out, something with a purple cover. Vaguely familiar.

  He nodded, and he was fucking pathetic, because he couldn’t keep from looking down, from sucking in a deep breath.

  “What happened at the bridge, Toby?” When he didn’t respond, she asked again. “I covered for you, you know. Told the police that I was the one to find her, the one to pull her out. Even helped put this crazy suicide idea in everyone’s heads. Figured it was best no one went digging too deep. Don’t you think the least you can do is tell me the truth? Your truth, at least?”

  “You knew,” he said. “The baby. I forgot that you knew.” Nell shook her head and opened her mouth to speak, a hand held up as though she might argue with him, but she closed her mouth again when he said, “That was decent of you, to lie. To help.”

  “Tell me what happened.” And she was there, and he owed her, and there was no one else to tell. No one else would ever know that any of it had happened. So they sat down on the porch in the fading sun, and he told her everything. And she listened, and she didn’t judge him. They’d never been close before, but from then on, it seemed like she was looking out for him. Got to where he trusted Nell more than just about anyone else he knew.

  He’s got to admit, diary or no diary, he still does.

  93

  August read about it in the paper. The paper. It still stings to think of finding out that way. He hadn’t met Reba at the bridge like he’d said he would, and she was dead. Did she think he’d deserted her, that he’d left her to face things alone? He’d gotten her into this terrible mess, when all he wanted to do was love her. She’d killed herself, and it was all because of him.

  After the fire, his father’s boss approved an immediate transfer back to Virginia for the safety of their family. August would go back to his old high school that he’d hated leaving, and Lawrence Mill would be a wonderful and terrible dream—a place where he’d found his would-be future and it had jumped off a bridge and disappeared forever.

  He didn’t care, then, if he ever came back.

  94

  Back then, Julie could hardly bring herself to visit Reba’s grave. It was a special kind of torture, but she made herself do it. It seemed like the sun was shining cruelly each time she visited. How could the sun shine when Reba was gone? If only it would rain, and she could feel it on her hair and her skin, as real and wet and stinging as tears.

  The sun exposed her for the killer that she was. If she hadn’t been such a coward, if she hadn’t been desperate to leave Lawrence Mill, then she would have marched herself down to the police station and told them the truth. They would have locked her up, in the prison thirty miles outside of town, and she would have become an urban legend, and then people would have forgotten about her completely. She didn’t know what was worse—being held responsible for it or getting away with it.

  Drowning, the police said. That Reba jumped off the bridge in the middle of the storm, hit her head on the way down, drowned in the raging waters.

  The stone wasn’t up yet, but Julie knew where to find Reba—the fresh patch of earth, not even grass-covered yet. Just dark-brown Mississippi soil. When she sat there, she tried to pretend she was on the soft carpet of Reba’s bedroom floor and that Reba was beside her and that the noise of the wind in the trees was a song on the radio.

  But Reba wasn’t beside her. Reba wasn’t anywhere at all.

  “I’m sorry,” Julie whispered into the ground. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  • • •

  Things went back to normal, or as normal as they could be when Reba was gone.

  Mr. McLeod was arrested for arson, but the police were kind enough to wait until after the funeral to arrest him. And then they let him go, because, for all of his talk, there was a convenient lack of evidence to tie him to the fire at August’s house. Or, if there was evidence, it had gone missing. It helped that Mr. McLeod was friends with the police chief, and that the Elliotts left town suddenly and wouldn’t come back to testify.

  Reba’s autopsy results were manipulated—at least, Julie was convinced of it then. She didn’t know how, but maybe the police chief helped there too. Maybe he told the McLeods about Reba’s pregnancy in private, or maybe he hid the information and never told anyone at all. Julie waited and waited for the results to be released, but the autopsy only confirmed drowning as the cause of death. Nothing more was ever mentioned. Julie went to Nell the day she read it in the paper, and Nell didn’t seem surprised. She just shook her head and said something about not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Julie wanted to confess, at least to Nell. But in the end, she was too afraid.

  And then August left, and there was no one else to know the story, and there was no one else to suspect that Julie could be cruel enough to kill the only person in the world who cared about her. And the baby—if she’d killed Reba, she’d killed the baby too. Julie was all alone, and it was all her fault.

  The doctor had given her little white pills to take home with her, and she walked, sedated, through the halls at school, alone. People stared at her; people talked. But she didn’t care.

  She knew, even then, that nothing would ever be the same.

  95

  “You left, right after everything happened,” Julie says, her knees tucked against her chest, the towel falling loosely from her body. The clouds have turned the afternoon sky so dark that it feels like night, and still they haven’t moved from their lounge chairs.

  “Yeah. Dad demanded his old job back, and after he told the corporate office what happened and what he suspected, they moved us back up to Richmond. I’ve been there ever since.”

  “Have you ever told anyone?”

  “I’ve never even come close.”

  “So…what happens now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Impulsively, she moves from her lounge chair to sit next to him. “I don’t know how to move past all this,” she says.

  “Jules, here’s what I think.
We were kids, all of us. I want to hate her for all of the lies, for making me think…that I was special to her. But she was a kid too, caught up in things that she didn’t know how to handle. We all made mistakes. I’m starting to think that maybe we shouldn’t hate ourselves for it.”

  She can feel the words taking tentative hold in her mind, can feel herself toying with the idea of letting them stay.

  His kiss is unexpected but soft, almost familiar. The wind shakes the trees along the fence, and his chest is muscular beneath her palms. Their bodies press together warily, and the lounge chair groans beneath their combined weight.

  And then it starts to rain, and he pulls her closer.

  She pushes him away, gently, after a few moments. “I’m not her,” she says, and he nods, trailing hesitant kisses along the line of her shoulder.

  “I know,” he whispers, and she can feel his warm breath and the cool raindrops along her skin. “God, Jules, I know.”

  • • •

  Part of her can’t believe this is happening, that she is following August to his hotel room, letting him slowly peel the soaked underwear from her skin, that she is undoing the buttons on his shirt, all in silence. His skin is hot against hers and she clings to him as he lifts her up in his arms and settles her onto the bed. Rain beats against the windowpanes, and it’s the only sound besides the tender noise of their kisses. It’s different, with him, or maybe she is the one who is different. She’s still too filled with emotions from the past few days to hide much, to wear the mask she has worn with so many others. She can’t pretend it’s only about sex when it isn’t about sex at all, not when she needs to cling to someone. No, not someone—it has to be him.

  She spends the rest of the day with him, in his hotel room, with the curtains pulled open to the storm outside. She can’t decide if it’s wrong. Any other day before today, she wouldn’t have dreamed of touching him, couldn’t have imagined taking something that had been so completely Reba’s. But now she knows that he wasn’t, hadn’t been.

  “Jules,” he murmurs against her skin, and she wonders why the name doesn’t feel so wrong when he says it.

  When she finally falls asleep in his arms, the clouds have moved away and late-evening sunlight filters through the window and into the shadowy room. She knows that he is awake later, in the middle of the night when she slips from his bed and back into her clothes, but he doesn’t stop her from leaving. She can feel his eyes on her as she tiptoes out.

  • • •

  “So…” he says to her the next morning, at the small table in the breakfast area of the lobby.

  “So…”

  “There’s something I’d like to do today, before we leave,” he says.

  “Me too, actually.”

  After they are packed and the bags are loaded into the small Honda, she drives the car back to Nell’s, to the recreation center behind the flower shop. They walk to the little footbridge in the hazy morning light. August climbs carefully down the riverbank, finally crouching when he reaches the river’s edge. He opens the clasp on the large manila envelope he’s been clutching and pulls out a small stack of photos. When she makes it down the bank herself, Julie looks over his shoulder and gasps. Such beautiful photos of Reba, some up close, some far away, some from outside Nell’s shop with Reba’s hand shading her eyes from the hot summer sun. She can’t help but be reminded of Toby’s gallery, of the paintings. She thinks of the similar ways that the two men have memorialized Reba, thinks of Toby in his studio, still painting her, while one at a time, August slides his photos into the river, and they watch as her face sinks into the water and is carried away by the slow-moving current. “Good-bye,” Julie hears him whisper.

  They make one final detour, and then Lawrence Mill and the town of Opal are fading in the rearview mirror. Julie has a feeling she’ll never be back.

  At the airport, August hugs her, his arms warm around her waist. And then he is gone to catch his flight back to Virginia, and she is boarding a plane to New York, and she is surprised at how much she misses him already.

  She knows more than she ever wanted to, and it aches, this knowledge, but it also feels like freedom.

  96

  Toby almost misses the envelope propped against the door when he steps out to check the mail. The yellow of it catches his eye, though, and he leans down and picks it up. It’s got his name scrawled on the front, and when he tears it open, a faded, water-stained purple book falls into his hands.

  97

  The taxi careens through the streets of New York City, carrying Julie home from the airport.

  She knows that Brighton will be waiting for her when she gets home. Loyal Brighton, who came so quickly when she called him all those years ago, when Evan left a crying baby Beck in her arms and she had no idea what to do with her. In the first weeks, months, she felt wrecked. Brighton found her many nights curled up in the bathtub, in her closet, on the kitchen floor, pathetic.

  Beck never knew. By the time she was old enough to hold on to her memories, something had changed. It was Brighton who made Julie believe that she could do it, that she could be someone’s mother. He never tried to make her feel bad for needing some time to warm up to it all. She loves him for it.

  Sure enough, he is waiting on the steps of her building when the taxi pulls up to the curb.

  “Welcome home,” he says, embracing her as though she has been gone for years. He looks at her, hugs her again, reaches for her bag. “How was the trip? I wondered if it would do you some good. Did it?”

  “It was… Wow, I guess it was enlightening,” she says finally.

  “Well, come on,” he says. “Fill me in.” Julie pays the driver and follows Brighton up the steps into the building’s lobby and up to her apartment.

  The lights are out, and the apartment is chilly. But she is home. Brighton moves to the kitchen and pours two glasses of white wine from a bottle in the fridge.

  She takes a sip of the wine and sets it down. She’s thinking maybe she’ll stop drinking for a while. After a deep breath, she starts to talk. About how she thought she’d killed Reba, how thinking of herself as a potential killer shaped everything, how she found so many little ways to punish herself, how she drove Evan away because of her own guilt.

  “I know how you feel about Evan,” she says. “But it was never his fault. You should know that. It was always me, pushing him away.”

  “What does that have to do with your trip to Lawrence Mill?” Brighton asks.

  She takes a deep breath. “It wasn’t true. I didn’t kill her. She…fell, I guess.” And then she tells him everything else—about the diary and what it exposed, and how it proved wrong all of the things she thought she knew about Reba.

  “Wow,” Brighton says, when she is finished. “That sounds like one screwed-up story.” She looks at him and nods. “So, Jules,” he says, and hearing her name that way, from someone other than August, doesn’t bother her the way it would have only a few days ago. “What happens now?”

  But she doesn’t really have an answer.

  • • •

  Julie opens the door to her apartment, and Evan and Beck cross the threshold. “Mom!” Beck says. Julie reaches down to hug her and Beck squeals with delight, and Julie feels an almost painful kind of pleasure.

  “Did you have a good time?” Julie asks, smiling and drinking her in.

  “Yes! I had a very good time. Daddy took me to see a concert at Central Park.”

  “He did?” Julie looks up at Evan, and he smiles. “That sounds like a lot of fun. Hey, why don’t you go put your suitcase away and let me talk to your dad for a second?”

  “Okay. And then will you tell me about your trip?”

  Julie nods, and Beck tugs her little suitcase into her bedroom and disappears.

  Evan. He’s unshaven, his blue eyes vivid against his skin, against the soft pink
of his boyish lips. She thinks of how simple it might be to search Evan’s eyes for a flicker of something she used to see there. He’s so precious and so familiar to her, and the reasons she thought that she didn’t deserve him are gone, aren’t they? How easy it should be to love him now, to say so…except that she doesn’t know if it would be the truth anymore.

  Instead, she reaches her hand out. It lands on his elbow. His sleeves are pushed up, and her hand touches bare skin. He flinches but doesn’t pull away.

  “Evan,” she says.

  “Julie, I…” He trails off. He steps back, and his boot toe catches the rough fringe of the ragged rug beneath his feet. He looks down and shakes his foot to free the threads. “You should really get rid of this rug,” he says.

  “I hurt you,” she says. They have never discussed it, how things ended. “I hurt you back then, but I didn’t mean to, not ever. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

  “Really. This rug is terrible.”

  “Evan,” she says again. She studies his brown boots, his jeans. Then she cautiously looks up at his face, his strong cheekbones. The flutter of his eyelashes as he blinks, when he finally looks at her again.

  “I know, Julie. Of course I know.”

  Beck steps out of her room, sees the two of them together, Julie’s hand on Evan’s arm, his hand covering hers. Beck’s eyes are wide—she’s never seen them this close together, never imagined her parents as people who might have loved each other. It’s a gift Julie wishes she could give her daughter, but looking into the light, lovely blue of Beck’s eyes, it feels as if she can almost, finally see things clearly.

  • • •

  Julie holds Beck’s hand as they walk through Central Park. The sun peeks shyly from behind a cloud, and the trees are yellowy green with new leaves. It is warm, and she and Beck have happily shed their winter coats and boots. The park is crowded with bikers, runners, couples walking, mothers pushing strollers. Picnic blankets.