After the Leaves Fall

by Nicole Baart

“You’re supposed to inhale,” Brandon said. Each word was punctuated by a little puff of smoke.

  I put the cigarette to my lips again and took the tiniest, shallowest breath I could. The smoke hit the back of my throat like vaporized fire. Gasping and coughing, I doubled over and in the process dropped the cigarette in the inch of accumulated snow.

  When I straightened up, I expected Brandon to be laughing at me, but he smiled gently and said, “Try again.” He offered me his cigarette. “Thomas told me you were a good girl. I should have expected that to happen.”

  Brandon taught me how to smoke the night of my first kiss. It was almost as if the latter act replaced the former because he never kissed me again. We did, however, continue to get together and talk, and each time I had a smoke or two with him. I felt a little cold-blooded, but when he graduated early two months later and left to get a job in the city, I was far less than heartbroken.

  I never saw Brandon again, and I almost never smoked again. Once or twice I imagined what it would be like to see my mother after all these years and light up a cigarette in her company. I wondered if she’d appreciate the irony.

  Consumed

  Dear Julia,

  I heard about what happened to your father. I am very sorry for your loss. I would have written sooner, but I did not know that it happened until a few weeks ago. Please let me know if there is anything I can do.

  Yours truly,

  Janice

  I received the card from Janice six months after my dad passed away. It was postmarked Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the envelope was ragged and smudged, with a torn corner that someone had tried to fix with Scotch tape. The card itself looked expensive with a little brass-colored cross attached to the front and a perforated bookmark on the back flap that contained the Twenty-third Psalm. Janice’s handwriting was the same flowing cursive that I remembered—beautiful to look at but hard to read. I had read the card at least a dozen times before I could decipher every word.

  It was the first correspondence from her since she left—I had to take a moment to calculate it—seven years previous. Dad had been in contact with her parents in Arizona a few times, and I vaguely remembered a man delivering a large brown envelope to our house and waiting while Dad signed his name on a clipboard. But I had never spoken to her since she walked out of our lives in her fuzzy lavender sweater, and I had certainly never received a card or letter.

  Papa and Gram, her parents and our only connection to her, lived in Tucson, and I hardly ever saw them even when Dad and Janice were together. After the divorce, it was almost as if Janice was entirely wiped from our lives. She was obviously gone, but Papa and Gram were pretty much out of the picture too. They were young grandparents, and when I was old enough to understand, I got the impression that they had wished I would have waited to make my appearance in the world until they had a few more gray hairs. Occasionally I would receive a late birthday card from them with a crisp five-dollar bill tucked inside. But Janice never sent a thing.

  Until the sympathy card.

  I opened the card without looking at the return address, and although I was curious who had sent it, I wasn’t prepared for her name in willowy black pen at the bottom of the page. I put the card down without reading it. It took two days for me to be able to pick it up again and scan the few lines she had penned.

  For all my hesitancy, though, I couldn’t really begin to explain what I was feeling as I held something that she herself had held so recently—something that she had intended for me. Each emotion jostled for attention, and in the ensuing confusion I had to be content with momentary sparks of anger, longing, helplessness, and even fear.

  What bothered me even more than the fact that she had reached out of her self-inflicted exile and made a pathetic attempt at sympathy was what every word of her letter seemed to imply. Every word of every sentence told me unmistakably that she cared nothing for me or even Dad, the man she had married. Didn’t you have to feel more than a negligible amount of affection to have a child with someone? Clearly we were nothing more than a blip on the radar—people who barely registered on the compass of her life. I’m so sorry for your loss, she had written, and the whole world would have been a very different place if she had left the y off your. Wasn’t his death her loss too? Hadn’t she cared for him even a little? Didn’t the memory of him conjure up a hint of regret? Apparently not.

  “Who signs a letter to their daughter yours truly?” Thomas asked with disgust when I showed him the card. I had been hiding it in my drawer for two weeks before I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to share it with him. I needed the catharsis of hating her with someone.

  “Janice does,” I said bitterly. “I didn’t expect love from her, but maybe sincerely. Yours truly is downright laughable. She’s not mine and she’s certainly not true.”

  Thomas laughed. “It’s like some Elizabethan love letter—unrequited love and all that garbage.” He turned the card over and detached the bookmark. It made a satisfying zip. “Do you want to keep this?” he asked, offering me the pocket-sized psalm.

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s a Bible passage, Julia!” he exclaimed, feigning shock.

  “It’s from her.”

  “In that case, I’ll be right back.” Thomas took off toward his house, and I was left alone on the cold seat of the wooden swing beside the barn.

  It was April, and the snow was melting furiously in the tepid fifty-degree sunshine. My shoes were caked with dirt and grass, and the lawn beneath me ran with little rivulets of water. There was a cool breeze from the west, and my cheeks were numb and cherry colored, but the sun was warm on my back and I had taken off my coat to absorb it. Spring was always beautiful in the Midwest, and this one was particularly spectacular—lots of late snowstorms and then crocuses poking their purple, turtle-shaped heads out of the disappearing white blanket.

  Dad had been gone for over six months.

  I would have been passably content if Janice hadn’t disturbed my world.

  I kicked my feet off the ground and began to pump the swing as high as I could. The wind whipped my hair around my face, and I closed my eyes to let it wash over my cheeks. I swung in the darkness, clinging tightly to the cold chains, until I started to get dizzy. When I opened my eyes, Thomas was back.

  “Trying to fly away?” he quipped, taking a seat on the swing next to mine and hooking his arms lightly around the chains. I didn’t respond, and he watched me for a minute before saying, “Hang on.” Then he shot out an arm as I swung back, and I felt him push my shoulder. I went spinning out of control and couldn’t stop a breathless giggle from escaping when my stomach sank away.

  “You’re such a jerk,” I reprimanded him when I had slowed to a gentle sway. But I didn’t mean it and he knew it.

  Getting off his swing, he came to face me and grabbed my knees to stop my movement completely. “I have something for you,” he said with a glint in his eye.

  “What?” I demanded, because Thomas was the kind of guy who would make you guess until you didn’t care anymore. “I’m not guessing,” I added.

  “Here.” He handed me the bookmark from Janice’s card. “Wait a second. …” He rifled in his coat pocket and, emerging triumphant with a little book of matches, placed them in my other hand.

  I looked at him expectantly.

  “Burn it, sister.”

  I didn’t question him. I laid the little slip of paper on my lap and carefully took a matchstick from the book. Flipping the cover over, I placed the match between the green strip and the cardboard and pulled. It sputtered for a moment, and a few sparks skipped off the end. Then a flame engulfed the short stick, and without hesitating, I grabbed the bookmark and held the flare to the lower right-hand corner. Orange fingers tentatively licked up the side of the glossy paper before grabbing hold and consuming the entire thing in dancing fire. Slowly, ashes began to fall away, and I watched the Twenty-third Psalm disappear. “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the d
ays of my life. …”

  “Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned,” Thomas prayed when I had finally dropped what was left of the bookmark.

  “You’re not Catholic, Thomas. And I wasn’t burning the Bible. I was . . .” I stopped, not knowing how to articulate what I had done—not wanting to even try to articulate what I had done. I closed my eyes on the hot tears that came from nowhere and managed to stop them before they spilled.

  “God knows, Julia,” Thomas said, and his voice was achingly sincere. “Here, finish it off.” He handed me the rest of the card.

  The tears were gone as quickly as they had come, and one more match reduced Janice’s words to smoke. The little cross didn’t burn, but the heat melted the glue that held it on, and it fell into a puddle at my feet.

  Thomas picked it up and wiped it off. “Do you want to keep this?” he asked, offering it to me.

  “Not particularly,” I answered, but a part of me wanted to reach for it. I stopped myself.

  “You know what really gets me,” I said a few moments later. “I really can’t stand it that she wrote ‘please let me know if there is anything I can do,’ but she didn’t leave any information. No address, no phone number, not even an e-mail address.”

  “Would you contact her if she had?” Thomas didn’t look at me as he asked the question but cocked his arm back and prepared to launch the little brassy cross into the alfalfa field. I watched his arm swing in a perfect pitcher’s arc. But he kept his fist closed and without looking at the cross again stuffed it absently into his pocket. “Well, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you care?” His eyes bored into mine.

  I fumbled. “Because … because she should have.”

  “She didn’t do a lot of things she should have.”

  “I know,” I said, and I couldn’t stop myself from sounding miserable. Then, before I could think about it, I blurted out, “She should love me—at least a little.”

  “Your dad loved you enough for both,” Thomas said quietly.

  “I know,” I whispered. I sounded even more miserable.

  “I love you, Julia,” he said. Then he stepped close to me and, sliding his hand under my chin, lifted my face and placed a solemn kiss on the highest curve of my cheekbone. His lips brushed the farthest tips of my eyelashes.

  “I love you, Julia,” he said. And I took him at his word.

  Deccrescendo

  THOMAS HAD BEEN a freshman at Glendale Hill University for all of two weeks when she stole his heart. It made my pace quicken and my blood simmer to even think of it that way, but try as I might to reframe the context of their newborn relationship, it could be considered nothing less than a brazen, outright, unrepentant theft. Thomas was mine as much as the hand on the end of my arm belonged to me and me alone, and the intensity with which I loathed her for the way she sidled up to his life and made it a part of her own was matched only by the inexpressible fear I felt as I watched him slip away. Although, if I was brutally honest with myself, I couldn’t describe Thomas as slipping away—he fell away from me like a rock flung carelessly over the side of a cliff. He plummeted.

  Glendale Hill was less than a half-hour drive from Grandma’s farm, and if I was really eager to get there, I could make it door to door in exactly twenty-one minutes. I had already visited Thomas three times and would have gladly gone every single day if Grandma hadn’t sat me down and earnestly outlined her expectations for me in my junior year of high school. I had a job taking tickets at the local movie theater—a small, two-screen affair with ancient red brocade carpet and a candy counter that was polished so smooth I could accidentally sweep a bag of M&M’S right off the edge as I shoved it toward a customer—and, more importantly, I had grades to maintain. Grandma had visions of scholarships dancing in her head, and although Dad’s life insurance could easily carry me through as much schooling as I could ever want, she had no inclination to pay full tuition when the day eventually came.

  Besides, as Grandma so candidly put it, “Thomas needs some space. He’s in college now.” As if college were an alternate universe where Thomas would shed his old life to morph into something entirely new and different.

  I ignored her as much as I could and dropped in on Thomas whenever I wasn’t working and he had visiting hours—no girls in the guys’ dorm rooms and vice versa except during a rigid and incomprehensible schedule that I kept tucked in my purse.

  The first three times I saw Thomas in his new context had been great. He welcomed me with a bear hug and introduced me almost proudly to his roommate, a slightly chubby guy from Texas who had a drawl as slow and sweet as the smile that curled leisurely across his face. I liked him instantly, and the three of us sat on the ratty old sofa tucked under the loft that contained their beds and drank copious cups of coffee. We played Mario Kart because it was cute to be impish and playful and because anything that was not the norm was cool, as everyone had spent the first eighteen years of their lives trying to fit in and was just plain sick of it.

  I loved it. I loved this relaxed, happy Thomas, who laughed easily and who seemed to have grown up and become more childlike simultaneously. I loved to peer around the open door of his room and see him hunched over a book so immense and burdensome it could contain nothing less than the secrets of the universe. Mostly I loved it that he still had time for me. His eyes lit up when he saw me, and he seemed eager to make me a part of his new world. Grandma was wrong. Thomas didn’t need or want an ounce of space from me.

  The sun was just resting on the tops of the trees when I pulled into the visitors’ parking lot outside Thomas’s residence building late one uninspired afternoon. The greenbelt between the squat, brick structures of the old part of campus was filled with students lounging in the shade as they tried to stay cool. The little park was dotted with blankets and bodies, and where there would normally have been Frisbees and footballs and laughter there were only sun-lazy conversations and often closed eyes and no conversation at all. It was so humid the grass was damp, but since the dormitories had no air-conditioning, the sticky moistness of the sun-scorched fall ground was far preferable to the suffocating heat of the seemingly never-ending floors of tiny rooms.

  I stayed on the sidewalk so I could browse the faces as I walked by. Thomas didn’t know I was coming, and I didn’t want to miss him if he was anywhere but in his room. The brief walk to building D—a piece of unimaginative, weak-tea brown architecture that was aptly named after nothing more creative than the next letter in the alphabet when A, B, and C had been used on the surrounding dormitories—revealed no languishing Thomas and no faces I could recognize.

  Some of those blank faces watched me as I walked past, and halfway across the open space I was suddenly so self-conscious that I had to force myself to maintain the relaxed pace I had set. They were looking at me as I naively paraded myself down the center of the lawn, and as their eyes traced my steps, it struck me that they knew—they had to know—I was just a little sixteen-year-old high school student. I didn’t belong here. I looked downright silly walking across the campus like I owned the place. I was what people needed space from when they went to college in the first place.

  Building D was no more inviting than the student-lined greenbelt had been, and the stillness of the stagnant air slowed my steps—I had to wade through the thickness. Feeling defeated and obtuse and ridiculous for even being here in the first place, I would have gratefully returned to my car and cranked the air-conditioning if I wouldn’t have had to face the gauntlet of college students to do so. But I had made it this far, and Thomas was the closest oasis to provide a soothing balm for my heat-exhausted soul, so I climbed despondently to the third floor.

  His door, like every other door along the nearly abandoned hallway, was open, but it was impossible to tell if he was in his room or not. I didn’t really care either way anymore. I just wanted a place to escape for a moment.

  When I reached the room that had Thomas and Chris written on r
ed construction paper beside the door, I didn’t knock or even pause. It was only when I was poised to throw myself down on the couch that I realized Thomas was here too.

  He was kneeling on the floor with his back to me as he fiddled with the dials on the stereo beneath his desk. There were speakers in each of the four corners of the room and a subwoofer behind the couch—status symbols for any self-respecting college boy—and as I stood in the middle of the room, soft music began to drift over me as if Thomas had known I was coming and had arranged this calming breeze of song. I listened for a moment and watched his back—he hadn’t yet noticed that I was here—and the sweet, soulful strains of something I didn’t recognize hung mournfully in the air between us. It made me feel strangely shy.

  “It’s pretty,” I whispered. “Who is it?”

  Thomas’s head whipped around so fast it was obvious I had scared him half to death. “Julia—” He spat out my name like a curse and took a deep breath to steady himself. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  I came to see you was the obvious answer, but it was a difficult thing to say because it was clear that he was very surprised and not necessarily happy to see me. He was looking at me with an expression I had seen many times before, but it had never been directed at me; the mixture of annoyance and displeasure in his eyes was usually reserved for his siblings when they had done something unforgivably obnoxious.

  Thomas blinked quickly and the expression disappeared, but I didn’t find the ensuing blankness in his gaze any more comforting. His look had paralyzed me, and when I didn’t answer him right away, he stood up and waved a hand at the speakers, answering my question instead. “Norah Jones.” Then he began to pick up stray clothes and dump them in the hamper in his closet.

  I had to force myself to breathe around the pounding heart that had found its way into my throat. Something felt very wrong, and not knowing what it was only gave me a false hope that I was misunderstanding the way he turned his back to me. I’m not sure there is anything more agonizing than empty hope.