After the Leaves Fall

by Nicole Baart

  The Walker family was in Florida when the rumors began to fly, but I had given Grandma permission to fill them in on the entire situation before they left. They would keep my secret, and I didn’t blame her one bit for wanting to tell them—our families had been friends for far too long to let something so consequential be discovered in the trickle down of a vicious small-town rumor mill. But in a way I wished I could have been the one to tell Thomas. It would have been awkward, painful even, but I felt able to take full responsibility for myself, and though I knew things could never be patched up with us, I wanted him to know that I was strong now. Or at the very least, aware of myself: my own strength, my immeasurable weakness.

  Almost as if my body was unwilling to let me forget that very weakness, it had begun to rebel against me. My mornings became a nauseous affair where a thing so small as walking down the stairs into the kitchen brought on a wave of seasickness so intense that I had all but sworn off food and movement between the hours of seven and ten. I was on the verge of adding opening my eyes and breathing to the ever-growing list of nausea-inducing activities.

  But every day when midmorning rolled around, the sickness left nearly as quickly as it had come, and I found myself energetic and eager for any activity that would make me feel healthy and human again. Usually I bundled up against the cold and fought my way through snow so high it washed over my knees and took the long walk through the grove to meet the mailman as he crept by around quarter to eleven.

  “Morning, Julia!” he would call with a smile, standing beside a brown station wagon with a U.S. Postal Service magnetic sign slapped on the door. He always waited for me if I was still trekking up to the road and gave me the rubber-banded bundle of letters and flyers with a conspiratorial wink. Bushy white eyebrows poked out from underneath his stocking cap, and I always had to suppress a giggle when he winked and made them do a little caterpillar dance. He was a gentle man and kindhearted. When I accidentally let it slip that I was having a baby, he touched my hand as he passed me the mail and promised he wouldn’t tell a soul. He didn’t judge me or turn away from me, but he gave me a look that nearly broke my heart. I wanted to comfort him.

  One early January morning, I walked up in the snow and he was lounging beside his car as if he had been there for hours.

  “Got some bills, Julia,” he called as I got closer. He said that nearly every day.

  “Good, Eli; we like bills.” It was my standard reply.

  “Got a Wal-Mart flyer,” he added.

  “Keep it,” I said. “I know what they have at Wal-Mart.”

  He laughed. When I broke through the snow at the edge of the road and stepped onto the asphalt with a huff, Eli waved an envelope almost happily in the air. “Got a letter today too.”

  My breathing was a bit labored from the exertion of climbing through the clinging snow, and I cocked my head at him as I puffed in and out. “Who’s it from?” I asked, struggling a little to make the words come out normal.

  “No return address.” Eli sighed. “Maybe it’s a love letter!” He blurted the words out merrily, then blushed to the whites of his eyebrows as he realized what he had just said to an unmarried, pregnant teenager. “Er, um … I …”

  It hurt to see him so embarrassed, and I quickly jumped in. “Maybe it’s a belated Christmas card. I love Christmas cards!”

  “Yeah, that’s it, a Christmas card.”

  As I accepted the collection of mail, I gave him a full, toothy smile to let him know that any slip of the tongue was instantly and entirely forgiven and forgotten.

  He smiled back a bit uncomfortably and offered me a little wave and a nod as he hopped back into his car.

  I stood on the edge of the highway by the mailbox and looked down at the modest farmstead below. Traffic was slower than one car every few minutes or so, and when the improvised mail truck was gone, the road was quiet and the air was still. Winter has a sound all its own, and without birdsong or buzzing insects or a breeze in the grass, I could hear the ethereal creak of snow on snow and ice on ice. The outbuildings were dark and empty and covered in untouched snow like a child’s toys abandoned in a sandbox for years. Roofs sagged beneath the weight of all that whiteness and leaned heavily on tilting walls as old men with burdened backs rest precariously on canes. It wasn’t a sad sight, merely tired. The farm looked as if each year of existence had slowly chipped away at the optimistic belief that everything would turn out all right in the end, that happily ever after is the bookend to every story. I realized, as I stood there, that I would never have the fairy-tale ending. But weary buildings with a lifetime of living etched in their aging walls offered their own sweet perspective. A life that seemed attainable.

  Forgetting about the letter, I started slowly down the plowed driveway, avoiding the hard-packed, icy ruts and throwing my arms out for balance when my boots skidded over a patch of frozen slush. It was peaceful and solitary, and I didn’t turn around when I heard a car in the distance, waiting instead for the interruption to fade into the expanse of far-flung horizon. But as the engine revved closer, I glanced surreptitiously over my shoulder and watched an apple red SUV turn at our mailbox. It was the Walkers’ Suburban.

  I took an unbalanced step to the side of the driveway and watched the vehicle inch its way toward me. Thomas was at the wheel, and I tried to swallow the dry air in my mouth when I saw the reluctant droop of his head, as if someone were pushing him forward against his will. It struck me that though I had been brave and almost eager when speaking to him was little more than a hypothetical, with his vehicle creeping down my driveway, there was nowhere I would rather be than miles away from where I was. I scanned the Suburban for his brothers and sisters. For Francesca. He was alone.

  He pulled next to me, and I watched his window hum down smoothly. Watched the glass steadily withdraw into the door instead of watching him. We stayed like that for a moment, me exposed and chilly on the side of the gravel driveway, him wrapped cozily in the warmth radiating from the cranked heater. Uneasiness snaked between us like a live current.

  Finally, with a palpably forced cheer, he said, “Would you like a ride?”

  I looked at his face and saw my own discomfort and apprehension written in his hesitant gaze. “Where?” I asked slowly, because I couldn’t imagine going anywhere with him.

  He gestured at the house, and I raised a cautious eyebrow at him.

  “Look, I was just hoping we could talk for a minute. Do you have a minute, Julia?”

  It was hard not to let a self-deprecating smile crease my lips. What did I have if not bottles of time lined up as yet-to-be-filled days and years that stretched endlessly before me? “Okay,” I said because it was the only conceivable response. “But I’ll walk.”

  Thomas lifted one shoulder as if to shrug and took his foot off the brake. I watched him coast down the incline and pull up to the garage door.

  Following gingerly in the tread left by the mammoth SUV, I tried to imagine what Thomas hoped to accomplish by showing up unexpectedly. I didn’t know what to say to him—or how to prepare my mind or heart for whatever he hoped to say to me—and I couldn’t begin to presume that I knew why he was here. It wasn’t really fear or even regret that gripped me as I walked and waited, just a reluctant hope that everything could be forgiven between us even if it was never forgotten. I resolved to seek peace.

  By the time he had turned off the SUV, stepped out, zipped up his coat, and walked a few paces to stand in the dim, gray shadow of the ramshackle chicken coop, I was only feet away. Expectant.

  “I thought you were in Florida,” I said, eager to at least start on safe ground.

  “I was. We got back late last night.” Thomas scuffed his feet at the snow.

  Though I instantly regretted thinking it, I couldn’t help but remember the tilt of his head and the suddenness of the smile that had caught me all those years ago. If I took only a few steps backward, I would be in the very spot where I had first laid eyes on Thomas.

&nbs
p; “I bet it’s nice in Florida this time of year,” I tried, attempting to be natural.

  “Very nice,” he echoed. His brown hair had been lightly sanded with blond in the ten days of their vacation, and his skin was tanned and smooth.

  I studied the side of his face as he gazed over the barren fields, and I glimpsed a curve of white skin just above his ear—bare and cool and intimate—hidden in the shadow cast by the straight angle of his hair. It struck me as almost indecent. I looked away quickly, feeling like I had seen something that I should not have seen.

  He turned to glance at me and misread my blush to mean that I was ashamed of the pregnancy he obviously knew all about. “I’m sorry about … ,” he began, and I saw crimson start to creep up his neck too as he tried to backpedal out of an impossible situation. “I mean, I’m not sorry. I just . . . I heard about . . . it must be very . . .”

  “It’s all rather indescribable,” I offered carefully. Thomas still looked sick to his stomach, so I continued, “I’m okay—really I am.”

  “You look okay,” he said tentatively and then cringed at the implication in his words—the expectation that I would have been tent-sized already or at least haggard. Not bright-eyed and blushed from the cold. Not like myself.

  I understood how he felt every time I looked in a mirror. Shouldn’t something unmistakable have changed in me? Shouldn’t it be possible to read what lay before me like a scarlet letter emblazoned on my chest? We had all read the book in English class those many years ago. We knew the price of stupidity … or at least of getting caught.

  We stood in the snow and the silence, and I spent more time wondering what Thomas was thinking than concentrating on my own thoughts. I imagined he wanted to ask me who the father was, wanted to confirm his suspicion that the “jerk TA” from statics was everything he had tried to warn me he would be. I couldn’t admit that to him.

  Instead, when the lack of words became almost tangible in the air between us, I presented the answer to a less-burdened question. “August,” I said as if he were waiting for me to say it. “The baby is due in August, so I suppose I have a few months yet of looking pretty . . . okay.” I had meant to say normal, but the word seemed somehow irrelevant.

  Thomas nodded slowly at me. “August is a long time away.” He made it sound like everything could be the way it had always been between now and then. Like the stork would come and deliver the baby near the end of the summer, and until that point I could just be myself, live my life as though nothing had changed.

  “How’s Francesca?” I suddenly asked, compelled by a need to shift the conversation off myself.

  He looked at me sharply, as if I were picking a fight or pressing a wound, though I had only said it because I could think of nothing else to say. “She’s fine,” he answered after a moment. “We’re back together.”

  I actually smiled. “I’m glad, Thomas,” I said and was mildly surprised to find that I meant it quite sincerely.

  He still studied me with a bit of a guarded look, but a smile made a quick sweep over his face as he must have realized that I meant him no harm. “You know,” he said bravely, “you are very much like her. She reminds me of you. Or you remind me of her.”

  I tried to take his summation as a compliment. “Say hi to her for me, okay?” I blurted out, astonishing even myself. It was little more than a courtesy, but I couldn’t believe that I had the civility to say it.

  Thomas must have appreciated the miles we traveled in those few words, and he quickly changed the topic again lest we find ourselves taking steps back instead of forward. “Did you get my letter?” he asked.

  “Letter?” I shook my head. “I didn’t get a letter from you.”

  Thomas reached for my hand and pulled a yellow envelope from the stack of mail in my loose grip. A flyer slipped from the bundle and fell to the snow at our feet. He picked it up with a flourish and returned it to me without giving me back the envelope that he had grabbed.

  “You did get my letter,” he said with an edge to his voice that was a little too light, too carefree.

  If I had thought before that he’d come to patch things up with me, I knew now that his visit was to explain whatever he had written in that letter. The relief playing at the corners of his mouth was unmistakable. A part of me wanted to wrench the envelope away from him and rip it open, to hastily read what he didn’t want me to see. But I wasn’t five and I wasn’t about to make a scene, so I tried to keep my voice even as I asked, “Do I get to read it?”

  “It doesn’t say much,” Thomas assured me. “Anyway, I wanted to say it to you in person, and now I can.” His words hung for a moment before dissolving into little puffs of evaporated air. I could smell the peppermint gum in his mouth as I watched the struggle behind his eyes when it struck him that he would have to say those things now. He shifted nervously on his feet, knowing that I was waiting. That I expected to hear whatever he had penned in the card he refused to let me read. Now.

  I waited.

  Thomas cleared his throat. “I just … I wanted to say that you were a good friend.” He said it quickly, though I didn’t think it was a lie. There was something about our friendship in that note.

  I looked at him unblinkingly.

  “And that I’m sorry about anything that I ever did to hurt you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” It must have been too much of an admission, for he added, “If I hurt you.”

  “You did,” I confirmed, because I needed to say it to him. “You did hurt me.” And then, since I could hardly blame him for all that had happened, I said quietly, “Apology accepted.”

  He had been looking at the ground, and when he heard the earnestness in my voice, he lifted his eyes to give me a sheepish smile. “Thank you. I had to hear that from you.”

  “Was there anything else in the letter?” I asked, still feeling like there had to be more to it for him to wrench the envelope from my hands as if he regretted ever sending it.

  Thomas gave me an impenetrable look before sliding his thumb under a loose corner of the envelope and ripping an ugly gash in the buttery yellow paper. There was a blank white card inside, and as he took it out, I longed to snatch it from his grasp and know what he had written. But it was probably better not to know. I folded my arms across my chest and watched as he tipped the card on its side and caught something in his outstretched palm. He clutched it for a moment in his closed fist before holding his hand out to me.

  When I paused, Thomas nodded, and I extended my arm to accept his little gift. He put something cold and tiny on my fingers, then curled my hand around it and squeezed my fist in his own warm grip.

  I pulled my hand from his and studied his diminutive present. It was a cross painted with a cheap, bronze-colored lacquer that had aged rather unattractively to a rusty green. I didn’t recognize it at first.

  Thomas obviously saw my confusion because he jumped in to clarify. “It’s from that card, Julia. The one Janice sent you when your dad died … ?”

  “We burned the Twenty-third Psalm,” I remembered aloud.

  “Yeah, and the cross fell into the mud and I picked it up.”

  “And kept it?” I asked incredulously.

  Thomas laughed a little at himself when he admitted, “It felt weird to throw it away. It’s sacred somehow, you know?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  He must have anticipated more of a reaction from me because his arms hung awkwardly at his sides, angled and rigid, as he studied me. “I just wanted you to have it,” he muttered. “Don’t think that I think it means something, because I don’t. . . . I mean, the cross means something, but I’m not trying to . . . be profound. . . .” He trailed off. “I just thought you might want it.”

  Although whatever power Thomas had once had over me was now little more than a dim and quickly fading spark, it still hurt to see him so self-conscious and uncertain. As if waking from a sound sleep, I roused myself and rushed to smooth things over, pushing my own reaction to his unsol
icited gift deep inside. “It’s nice, Thomas. I’m glad you gave it to me.”

  “You are?” he sputtered. “Because I almost didn’t give it to you. That’s why I’m here—I thought you might be angry with me.”

  The anger I had felt toward Thomas had diminished when the reality of my own imploding life had taken center stage. A letter with a cheap, old cross was not enough to rekindle any emotion more potent than defeat, though I could hardly say that out loud. I suddenly felt very tired and could not stop a weary sigh from escaping my lips.

  “I’m not angry,” I said. Then I wrapped the cross in my fist and waved it at him with what I hoped was an intrepid, even optimistic, smile. “Thank you.”

  He hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat as he murmured a shy “You’re welcome.”

  And that was it. There really wasn’t anything left to say. The space between us was rich with good-byes and the soft and resonant click of a firmly closed door. A small part of me wanted to put my arms around him one last time, but instead I leaned back and made a tentative move toward the house. He fell in step beside me. We remained in our own thoughts as we walked to his Suburban, and I waited politely for him as he opened the door to hop in.

  He climbed into the driver’s seat and started the SUV, holding the door open with one hand to give me a sweet, sad smile. “Bye, Julia.” It was clear that he wanted to say more. The words fought on his tongue and he opened his mouth and closed it again, but before I could say a quick good-bye and end the conversation, he pressed on. “Good luck with everything, okay? And, hey, I want you to know that—”

  “Thank you, Thomas,” I interrupted. “It was very nice of you to stop by.”

  He looked for a moment like he was going to continue his thought, like he wouldn’t be able to put the transmission in reverse without saying everything he had come to say, but then he rubbed his fingers roughly over his lips and forced a smile at me. “Take care, Julia.”