by Abby Bardi
“Oh, right, the house sale.”
“I guess we’ll be going to settlement one of these days.”
“I guess.”
“Though Norma apparently dropped the ball on a few things. I haven’t gotten any information from her for a while.”
“She’s been busy.”
“Busy?” He snorted. “She’s a soccer mom. How busy could she be?”
“Well, there was this little fire situation, and then before that, there was Bob leaving her for her friend Candy.”
“Say what?”
I gave him the lowdown.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” I expected him to say something sarcastic about Norma, but he just shook his head like he actually felt sorry for someone besides himself, which would be a first.
“I’m going to see Pam,” I said, leaving them to talk about whatever common ground they could come up with.
I sat in the chair Tim had vacated.
“Julie, I’m so sorry.” Her eyes began to fill with tears. “I should have stopped it.”
“Oh, no, come on. I’m just so glad that you’re—that you’re—” I couldn’t get the words out.
“It came through the back door. We were trying to put it out but it got too big really fast.” Something dark and scary flashed in her eyes.
I tried to change the channel. “Hey, it’s over. Don’t think about it. All that matters is that you and Ricky are okay.” I didn’t mention Ray, and I was glad she didn’t ask about him.
“Is your building—?”
“Well, it’s still standing.” I decided not to tell her the rest.
“You and Milo saved our lives.”
“It was Milo’s idea. He busted in there while the firefighters were still bullshitting around outside.” I kept my tone light, trying not to see that moment over and over in my mind when the kitchen door stuck and I knew someone was on the floor behind it.
“Yeah, a firefighter on the news said they hate it when people do that. He called it freelancing. The doctor said if we’d been in there a minute longer, we wouldn’t have made it,” she said. That darkness in her eyes again, and then, a moment of silence. Then she said in a cheerier version of her new raspy voice, “How are things at home? Is anyone walking the dogs?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’re not walking them?” She looked like she was about to jump out of bed and grab a leash.
“Hey, I let them out, they’re fine. How soon can you get out of here?”
“I don’t know. I have to pass some kind of oxygen test first. It’s like the bar exam.”
“You’ll do great. You’re good at tests.”
She laughed her raspy little laugh. We sat for a while, not saying anything, and then her eyes started to close.
“I’m going to get going.” I patted her arm. “Get some rest. I’ll be back later.” I gave her a careful hug.
“Julie,” she said as I was going out the door, “take the dogs for a walk.”
“Okay, I will.”
“And will you send Milo in?”
I said I would.
When I found Milo and said, “Your turn,” he threw down his magazine and took off. I watched him as he hurried down the hall.
***
Sally and Max jumped all over me like I had Milk-Bones in my pocket. It was a cold, gray afternoon, but I decided to do what Pam told me, although it looked like it might rain, even snow. The poor dogs had to be bored to death by this time, and if you didn’t keep Max entertained, he would chew on your favorite shoes and then relieve himself on your leg. I put their leashes on them and as we headed out the door, they turned around and smiled like they were glad to see me back at my post, then yanked me out the patio door and into our backyard. They ran with steaming breath along the edge of the hill, dragging me through the bare trees up a little path that used to lead to the woods I played in when I was a kid. There was a housing development in their place now. In the summers, we always hiked to a big pond that wasn’t there anymore and fished in it with rods we made out of sticks. Our old yellow labrador, Buddy, would lie quietly, then jump up barking for no reason, scaring the fish away. I loved Sally and Max, but I still missed our old dogs. When we were kids, Tim, Pam, Donny, and I had spent all our time chasing them through the woods. It was always the four of us—Norma was home making cookies as hard as hockey pucks with her Easy-Bake Oven, and Ricky wasn’t born yet. Back then, Tim watched out for Donny and me and beat up people who picked on us for being twins. In high school, he changed and started hanging out with cool kids who made fun of us, and for a long time I waited for him to change back, but he never did.
The dogs pulled me up the path until it ended suddenly at a cul-de-sac of townhouses and there was nowhere else to go but back into the dark cloud of things I didn’t want to deal with: calling the insurance agent, talking to Norma about the house sale, trying to get into my building to see if anything was left of my stuff. And way worse than any of that was my terror about Ricky. I felt sick every time I thought about him hooked up to those machines, and I almost wanted to lie down on the path and cry, but the dogs pulled me into a 180 degree turn like they were ready to get home now, since fat drops of icy rain were starting to hit us, and they hated to be wet. Max stopped every few feet to pee on things, but Sally kept jerking me along the path. As we got closer to our house, it started to pour. Sally and I made a run for the front porch, dragging Max with us. We dashed to shelter, all of us panting. I still wasn’t feeling that great. I let the dogs into the house, where I could hear them shaking water all over the living room, and sat in a beat-up blue chair on the porch that had always been my favorite. I stared across the street where some yuppies lived now and watched the rain as it streamed onto the road and into the creek. It was the kind of weather that often led to a flood. Bring it on, I thought. My walk, in what was left of the woods, had helped me forget everything for a second, but now I was back to reality. I was scared shitless about Ricky, despite all the perky things Norma and Star said. I was pretty sure Pam would be all right—the doctors said she would—but we had almost lost her. And then there was Ray—Ray and his wide pirate’s smile, his rants about Atlantis.
And my beautiful dream restaurant had poofed away, the way dreams do. Everything was gone. Nothing was the same but this sagging porch with its same crummy old furniture and window boxes of dirty plastic flowers and the sound of water dripping from the roof where the gutters needed to be replaced. From the porch, I could see the neighbors’ giant inflatable Santas and sparkling reindeer. Our lawn was naked and dark.
The sound of barking from behind the storm door made me jump, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a woman hurrying up our front walk. She had short, straight salt-and-pepper hair and wore a blue raincoat with long buttons. She ran up our steps and onto the porch, out of the rain, then stood smiling like she knew me. I figured she was a Jehovah’s Witness and I was about to tell her I worshipped Satan when she said, “You’re Julie Barlow, right?” I said I was. “I hope I’m not bothering you.”
“Are you a reporter?” I was ready to shove her down the stairs if she was.
“A reporter? Oh, no, hon. I saw you sitting there and I thought I’d stop. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about what happened.”
“How did you know who I was?”
“I saw you on the news.” She stared down at me like she was memorizing my face. “I’m an old friend of your mother’s.”
I looked up at her. She was about my mother’s age, with a broad, tan face, and no makeup. She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen before. “Have we met?”
“No, I don’t live around here. When I first saw you on the TV, I knew you were related to Cynthia. You look so much like her, I guess you know that. I wasn’t planning to drop in or anything, but I was just driving by and I saw you sitting here.” I was staring stupidly at her, not saying anything. “I just thought I’d—” She didn’t finish her sentence. Then she asked, “How is Cynthia? Is s
he here?”
“She passed away last April.”
She stared at me as if she hadn’t quite heard what I said, then turned away and leaned against the porch rail.
“Are you okay?” I asked after a while. She didn’t say anything. “Do you want to sit down?”
She moved toward a plastic chair across from me. I was about to warn her that if she sat in it she’d end up covered with stripes of dirt, but she sank, almost fell, into it before I could say anything.
“Are you okay?” I asked again. She really didn’t look okay.
“It’s just such a shock.”
“I know,” I said. “You were good friends?”
She nodded without looking at me.
“I guess you hadn’t seen her in a while?”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure why I should be sorry. The dogs were pressing their noses against the storm door, watching us. “I didn’t get your name.”
“I’m Julia.” She turned toward me and held out her hand, and I shook it. Her hand was small, with fine bones, and it was like holding a bird. Someone once told me birds’ bones were hollow so their weight wouldn’t drag them down when they flew. “Nice to meet you,” I said. Funny that we had the same first name, I thought. I didn’t recall ever hearing about anyone named Julia, my real name. “How did you know my mother?”
“We met a long time ago.” Now her eyes were on me. Her eyes were birdlike, too, small and black. Though, I reflected stupidly, I had also read that birds could only see out of one side of their faces at a time. I wondered why I seemed to know so much about birds.
“Then you moved away?” I figured they must have gone to high school together.
“No, I didn’t live here. I was visiting some relations here when we met.”
“Oh, I see.” I wondered absently about the logistics of this, how you could get to be good friends with someone who didn’t live where you lived. “Where are you from?”
“Arizona.” She had a funny way of talking—not an accent, exactly, but like each word was clipped off at the end like a cigar. Behind her, rain continued to pour.
“Oh, Arizona. It’s supposed to be nice out there.”
“You’ve never been there?” She took a tissue out of her pocket and dabbed at her nose.
“No. I’ve always wanted to go, though.” I was about to tell her my father was from there, when something stopped me.
“You should go. It’s a beautiful place. Of course, Maryland is beautiful, too.”
“Wait,” I said in a voice that was a little too loud. “Wait, wait.” I must have looked strange, because she gave me a startled look like she was wondering what my problem was. “What did you say your last name was?”
“I didn’t say. It’s Fallingwater,” she said. “Julia Fallingwater.”
“Are you the sister of Mom’s friend?”
“Mom’s friend?”
“A guy Mom used to know, a guy named Fallingwater. Are you his sister?”
“No. I don’t have a brother.”
“Oh, come on. J. Fallingwater. That was her friend’s name.”
“No, that’s my name. Julia Fallingwater. That’s me.”
“There’s no man by that name?” I was starting to feel my lungs closing up, like they already knew something I didn’t.
“Not that I know of. It’s not a common name.”
“You’re J. Fallingwater?”
“That’s right.”
“No way,” I said. “No fucking way.”
“Excuse me?”
“This can’t be happening.” I could feel my lungs slam shut. I tried to keep them open with the power of positive thinking like my mother had always yelled at me to do, but they definitely had other plans. I started to make a weird noise, a cross between a wheeze and a whoop.
“Are you okay?” she asked. I answered her with a death rattle. “Is something the matter?” She leaned over and was about to touch my arm, but I pulled away before she could reach me. I wrapped both arms around myself like I was trying to roll up in a ball.
“Holy shit,” I wheezed. “Holy, holy shit.”
“Have I said something to upset you?”
Though I could hardly breathe, I could feel myself starting to laugh. It was a scary laugh, like the creaking of an old door hinge, a door to nowhere, the ridiculous fucking nowhere I had dreamed up for myself. I jumped up and lurched past the storm door into the house. The dogs started barking, and I half-noticed Julia right behind me. Apparently, she was not afraid of big dogs. I flung myself onto the couch, put my head in my hands, and leaned over, trying not to pass out while I fought for breath. I could hear her heading into the kitchen and rustling around. The dogs tried to climb onto the couch next to me, and I waved them away.
“Here.”
I looked up. She was standing in front of me with a glass of water. She held it out to me. “Drink this.” I didn’t reach for it, so she set the glass down on the coffee table on top of a coaster. The coaster had a picture of Ricky on it, one of a set my mother had made out of photographs of us. Ricky was about two in the picture, with blond curls. I managed to wheeze out the word “asthma.”
“Do you have an inhaler somewhere?”
I pointed toward the bathroom, where I had left it on the sink. She dashed in there, the dogs right behind her, and came back with my inhaler. I shot a bunch of medicine into my lungs and forced myself to breathe it in, as slowly and calmly as I could make myself. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a mountain pathway, but the air had turned to water that was seeping into my lungs and choking me, and I fought my way to its surface, then went under again. Just as I was beginning to think I might as well drown and be done with it, I could feel my breathing start to become more regular.
When I opened my eyes. Julia was perched on the edge of the coffee table, watching me.
“So,” I said when I could talk, “you’re Julia Fallingwater.”
“Did your mother ever mention me?”
“Not exactly.”
“You seemed to recognize my name.”
“Did I?” I managed a little chortle.
“It seemed to upset you.”
“Oh, did I seem upset?”
She looked puzzled, like she just couldn’t do the math.
I had only known her for about twenty minutes, but I already wanted to punch her in the face. I was furious at her, and at my mother, and at the man I’d thought was my father, and I wished they could all feel half as bad as I felt. My mother was gone, and that man had never existed, and there was just Julia, sitting across from me, in a flowered shirt—she had taken off the raincoat and laid it on a chair—leaning over like she wanted to hug me, or at least pat my arm the way Mom would have, but was afraid to touch me. What the hell, I thought. I decided to drop the bomb on her.
“We found the letters.”
“The letters? My letters? You—she kept all my letters?”
“Well,” I said, with only a hint of a wheeze, “I don’t know if it was all of them. There sure were a hell of a lot. And all so imaginative. You never said the same thing twice, I’ll give you that.”
“You read them?” She gazed at me without the slightest hint of embarrassment.
I nodded. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but I was suddenly flooded with shame for invading her privacy, and my mother’s.
“How did you know they were from me?”
“I didn’t. I just figured it out a minute ago.” I remembered Pam and me tearing through the house, looking for evidence of who my real father was. It seemed like another lifetime.
“It’s been so long,” she said. “I didn’t imagine her keeping those letters for all these years.”
“She never threw anything away.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying not to let my lungs go into spasms.
She picked up the glass of water and handed it to me. I held it for a moment. The glass was coo
l against my hand. Then I drank it.
XIX
“So,” I said, “my mother was a lesbian.”
We were drinking herbal tea Julia found in a cabinet. It tasted like tears. She was curled in the big green armchair, the one my mother had always sat in.
“Well, not exactly.” She took a sip of tea.
“You mean you weren’t—”
“Oh no, hon, we were. I just mean—”
This had to be one of the most awkward conversations either of us ever needed to have, and for a moment I felt sorry for her, but she seemed in better shape than I was. “I get it,” I said. “You were her only detour from heterosexuality.”
“As far as I know.”
“Wow.” I guzzled tea. “It’s hard to wrap my mind around this. I thought I knew her.”
“I guess we don’t always know our parents.” Her voice was light, like she was singing.
“I should have guessed from the letters that you were a woman. Men don’t write letters like that.”
“Sure they do.”
“Not any of the men I know.”
“Maybe you know the wrong men.”
She had a point.
“I don’t get out much,” I said.
She laughed. “You remind me so much of her.”
“That’s what people tell me. I can’t really see it, myself.”
“You have the same eyes.” Something in her face changed, and I remembered all the romantic things she said in the letters.
“So how did you two ladies meet?”
“Well, funny story. We were standing in line at the A&P. We just got to talking, and that was how it started.”
That didn’t seem like a very funny story to me. “I thought you didn’t live here.”
“I was visiting my sister, and she asked me to do a little marketing.”
“So you were doing a little marketing.” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“I know this is upsetting for you, hon. Believe me, when I stopped by, I had no intention of ever telling you any of this.”
“What was your intention?”
“I don’t know.” She looked around the living room, taking in the empty shelves that had once been filled with my mother’s collection of collectible figurines. “When I saw you on TV, I thought I’d just drive by the house. For old times’ sake.”