“Won’t work,” he told her, shrugging. “Your mother tried. Paint doesn’t stick to that wallpaper. Won’t tear off, either.”
She paused. No one in this town would give an inch. Not with her mother. Not with this … wallpaper situation. “So what you’re saying is, I’m stuck with the mood room.”
“Unless you want to move.”
Emily leaned back against the red refrigerator, because standing on her own suddenly seemed too much of a task. Grandpa Vance watched her silently. She didn’t realize until that moment that he listed to one side, as if his left hip hurt him. “I’m still waiting for someone to tell me this is all just a trick being played on me,” she finally said.
“I know that feeling well,” he said quietly.
She met his eyes. “Does it get better?”
“Eventually.”
Not the answer she wanted. But she was going to have to live with it.
What choice did she have? She had nowhere else to go.
OVER SEVENTY years ago, during the full moon in February—people called it the Snow Moon—when Piney Woods Lake froze solid and the aquatic plants trapped in the ice looked like fossils as kids skated over them, the house beside the Coffey mansion on Main Street caught fire.
Flames were jetting out of the windows of the house by the time the fire engine arrived. The vehicle had to be pushed there by the six strongest men in town because it wouldn’t start in the cold. The town gathered in the park across the street to watch, huddled together under blankets, clouds of ice from their breath hovering above them. Vance was only four years old at the time, and his height was not yet a concern to anyone in his family. In fact, at the time, his father had actually been proud of what a strapping boy he had. Vance was wearing a red hat that night. It had a ball on top that his older sister, who was standing close behind him as they shared a single blanket, kept batting playfully back and forth.
Everyone watching the fire was riveted by the undulating yellow-golds and blue-oranges. It was like watching a memory of summer that the dark, relentless winter had almost made them forget. Some were so mesmerized, so ready for warmer weather and an end to aching joints, frozen commodes, and skin so dry it cracked and fell away like paper, that they walked dangerously close to the burning house and had to be hauled back by firemen, covered in soot.
First one person saw it, and then another, and soon the entire crowd was watching, not the fire, but the house next door—the Coffey mansion. All the servants were leaning out the windows on the side of the house facing the fire, and they were throwing whatever liquid substance they had on hand at the flames next door, trying to keep the fire away from the Coffey mansion. They threw water from flower vases, jars of peaches swimming in juice, a snow globe from one of the children’s rooms, a leftover cup of tea from breakfast.
The town watched in awe, and slowly began to realize that the Coffeys weren’t coming out and their loyal house staff was bravely trying to save them.
The fire was eventually extinguished and the Coffey mansion wasn’t affected, except for some burnt azalea bushes that the cold had killed anyway. The next morning, the story began to circulate that the Coffeys had huddled in their basement while the fire had raged next door, claiming they would rather die than come out at night.
People had always known about the Coffeys’ aversion to the dark hours, but no one had ever realized just how serious they were about it. It was the first time the citizens of Mullaby began to wonder, What if it wasn’t that they didn’t come out at night …
What if it was because they couldn’t.
Dulcie had loved that story when she was a little girl. Sometimes Vance had to tell her twice before she would go to bed. Dulcie had always been close to her mother, but she’d never wanted much to do with him. Maybe because he’d been so cautious around her when she was a baby. She’d been so unbelievably small compared to him. He’d been scared of accidentally stepping on her, or losing her in his broad hands when he picked her up. So when he’d found something, like stories of the Coffeys, that brought Dulcie closer to him, he’d been thrilled. He hadn’t known at the time that he’d been building the framework for disaster. By the time she was a teenager, she’d been obsessed with the Coffeys.
He didn’t want that for Emily.
After Emily had gone to bed that night, Vance moved a chair to the back porch and waited, a flashlight in one hand, a piece of clover for courage in his other. The full July Buck Moon was out—a time for the young and randy.
The Mullaby lights had been around a long time, and there were dozens of stories about them. But after the fire, the rumor started that the Mullaby lights were really the ghosts of Coffey family members who had passed on, running free at night in death as they were never able to in life. That rumor stuck, and to this day, it was still what the people of Mullaby told all outsiders who asked.
When the light appeared in the woods that night, he stood and turned on his flashlight.
“Go back to where you came from,” he called softly, knowing it could hear him. “I know what my daughter did to you. But you can’t have Emily.”
Chapter 9
Late Monday afternoon, Julia was walking home from the post office, a bundle of mail in her arms. She was reeling from the news she’d just received.
As she turned the corner to Shelby Road, she lifted the postcard from the top of the bundle again.
She still couldn’t believe it.
The postcard was from Nancy, one of her best friends in Baltimore. Because Julia couldn’t afford a phone in her apartment while living here, once a month or so Nancy would write with what was going on with Julia’s old group of friends—a rowdy group of young professionals who drank cocktails and talked a lot without saying very much. Julia had suspected that they’d been popular kids in high school, and she liked that they thought she was one of them. This particular postcard had thrown Julia for loop. On it, Nancy—whom Julia didn’t even know was seeing anyone—had written that she had suddenly gotten married. She’d also written that their friend Devon had moved to Maine and their friend Thomas was taking a job in Chicago. Nancy promised to give Julia all the details as soon as she got home from her honeymoon in Greece.
Her honeymoon.
In Greece.
Julia hadn’t expected everything to remain static while she was away, she just didn’t think things would change so much. And all at once. She thought there would be more to come back to. But now, when she left Mullaby and moved back to Baltimore, there would be hardly any friends to reconnect with. That had been part of the plan, part of what had been keeping her going.
She tried to rally. She still had her Blue-Eyed Girl Bakery dream. The bakery, after all, was the whole reason she was doing this, the reason she had confined herself to this hell for two years. Growing apart from her friends had always been a risk. Blank-slate friendships were thin and temperamental. She knew that. There was no history there to cement people together, for better or worse.
So she would just deal with this.
She’d dealt with losing much worse.
She heard a splashing sound, and looked down the sidewalk to see Emily in front of Vance’s house. There was a sudsy bucket by her feet, a sponge in her hand, and a large old car at the curb, a car that was steadfastly refusing to get clean despite Emily’s effort. And it was a lot of effort. Work-off-your-frustration effort.
Julia tucked the postcard into one of the catalogs in her bundle of mail, then walked over to Emily. She hadn’t seen her since Saturday and wondered if she and her grandfather were communicating any better, if Vance had finally told her everything. She stopped a few feet away from her. “Nice car.”
Emily looked up. Her fine blond hair, as usual, seemed suspended in midair, half up in a ponytail, half hanging down around her face. “Grandpa Vance is letting me drive it. His mechanic is picking it up tomorrow morning, but I pushed it out of the garage so I could wash it first.”
“I didn’t know Vance
still had this.” Julia walked over to the car and leaned down to look in a dusty window. “It belonged to his wife, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Julia watched Emily scrub the hood for a few moments. “Have you talked to your grandfather?”
“Yes.” That one word conveyed all Julia needed to know. Emily used her forearm to push some hair out of her face, then resumed scrubbing. “I didn’t know it was going to be like this. But my mom knew. I’m sure that’s why she never came back, and why she never told me about this place. I’m beginning to think she wouldn’t want me here.”
Julia looked from Emily, to the car, and back again. If Julia had had a car at Emily’s age, she knew exactly what she would have done. Hell, she was even thinking about it now. “Planning to leave?”
Emily looked surprised that Julia had caught on so quickly. She shrugged. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“Well, if you’ll hold off for a little while, the Mullaby Barbecue Festival is this weekend. It’s a pretty big deal around here. Do you want to go with me?”
Emily didn’t look at her. “You don’t have to do this, Julia.”
“Do what?”
“Try so hard to be friends with me. My mom was cruel to you. You don’t have to be nice to me.”
Oh, hell. “So Vance told you that, too?”
“He said my mom used to tease you. What did she do?” Emily finally met her eyes. If she were any more sincere, she would dissolve into fresh air and blow away.
Julia shook her head. “You shouldn’t worry about it. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Please tell me.”
“It’s not exactly my shining moment, Em,” Julia said. “But, if you must know, aside from the pink hair, black clothes, and black lipstick, I used to wear a studded leather choker that looked like a dog collar to school every day. Your mother would bring dog treats to school and throw them at me in the hallways. Once, she even gave me flea powder. When she didn’t have anything on hand, she simply barked at me.” She paused at the memory. She hadn’t thought about that in a long time. “To be fair, I gave her a lot to make fun of. You’ve seen the photos. I probably brought it on myself.”
“Don’t. Don’t justify it. No one should ever compromise the dignity of another human being.” She shook her head. “My mom taught me that. Can you believe it?”
“Yes, actually,” Julia said. “I can.”
“You told me she was popular.”
“She was popular.”
“But no one liked her?”
Julia thought about it for a moment. “Logan Coffey did.”
Emily dropped the sponge she was holding into the bucket at her feet. “I’m sorry for what she did to you.”
“I would never blame you for something your mother did, sweetheart. No one worth your time would. You’re not who your mother was. In fact, I’m beginning to think you are who your mother became. It might be worth staying, if just to prove that to everyone.”
Emily seemed to be thinking it over when they both heard a car door slam. They turned to see Sawyer standing beside a white Lexus hybrid parked behind Julia’s truck next door.
He took off his sunglasses and tucked them into the collar of his shirt, then walked toward them.
“Is he here for your date?” Emily asked.
Julia turned to her. “What date?”
“He asked you out for Monday night. When we were at the lake.”
Julia threw her head back and groaned. “Oh, damn.”
Emily laughed. “You forgot? You forgot you had a date with him?”
“Sort of.” Julia looked at her and smiled, glad that at least Emily was finding some humor in this.
“Hello, ladies,” Sawyer said from behind her.
“Hi, Sawyer. Julia didn’t forget you were going out,” Emily said. “She’s … just running late. It’s my fault. She was going to change when I stopped her to show her my car. Right, Julia?”
Julia looked at her strangely before realizing that Emily thought she was helping. “Right,” Julia said. “Let me know about going to the festival on Saturday, okay?”
“I will.”
Julia turned and took Sawyer’s arm and led him next door. “She thinks you’re here to take me on a date,” she leaned into him and whispered. “And she just went to a lot of trouble to help me save face because she thought I forgot. Go along with it, okay?”
“Okay,” he said amiably as they walked up the steps to Stella’s house. “But I am here to take you out. And obviously you did forget.”
They entered the house and Julia set her mail on the table in the foyer. “I’m not going on a date with you,” she said.
“You accepted in front of Emily. And she just covered for you. What kind of example are you setting?”
“That’s a low blow. Just wait here until she goes inside.”
He went to the living room window and pushed the curtain aside. “That might take a while. That car is filthy.”
Julia smiled. “She seems thrilled with it.”
“How was she when you took her home Saturday? She seems okay now.”
“She’s coping. Her grandfather finally told her some things about her mother’s time here. I think she’ll be better prepared for snubs from the Coffeys now.”
“She really is nothing like Dulcie.” He let the curtain fall, then walked over to Stella’s striped silk couch—the one she didn’t let people sit on—and sat, crossing his legs and stretching his arms over the back. She found herself staring at him. He was just so perfect. “You do realize that the longer I stay in here, the more likely she is to think we’re doing something scandalous,” he said.
“Like what? Stealing Stella’s furniture?”
“You’re being obtuse.”
“And you’re being manipulative.”
He shrugged. “If that’s what it takes, then I have no problem with it.”
“Careful, Sawyer, you’re acting a lot like you did when you were sixteen. And here I was thinking you’d improved so much.”
“And there it is,” he said with satisfaction.
“What?”
“Exactly what I want to talk about.”
She’d walked right into that. “No,” she said. “Stella will be home any minute.”
“She won’t be home for an hour or more.” He locked eyes with her, holding her there on the spot. “You said you’ve forgiven me. Is that true?”
“I’m not doing this. I’m not having this conversation.” She shook her head adamantly.
“Why?”
“Because it’s mine, Sawyer!” she said. “It’s my memory and my regret. It’s not yours. I’m not sharing it with you. You didn’t want it then. You can’t have it now.”
The words were strung in the air like garland. She could almost see them.
Sawyer stood and she thought for a moment that he was walking toward her, and she hastily took a few steps back. But she soon discovered that he was walking to the fireplace mantel in Stella’s living room. He stopped there and put his hands in his pockets, staring into the empty fireplace. “Holly and I couldn’t have kids.”
Julia paused at this sudden change in subject. Sawyer and Holly had gotten married right out of college. Her father had told Julia about it in passing one year. It had hurt a little, but hadn’t surprised her much. Sawyer and Holly had dated since middle school. What had surprised her, when she moved back to Mullaby, was discovering that their marriage had lasted less than five years. Everyone, including her, thought they’d be together forever. Julia in particular knew all that Sawyer had done to preserve his relationship with Holly when they were teens.
“The ironic thing is, I was the problem,” Sawyer continued. “I contracted chicken pox my senior year in college and had an unusual reaction to it. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think of what happened between us, Julia, and how I responded. My fear and my stupidity not only made what was already a horrible time in your life worse, i
t destroyed what turned out to be my only chance to father a child. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I knew the moment I saw you again that you were holding on to what had happened, that I was still, in your eyes, that stupid, stupid boy. Maybe this will make you feel a little better.”
“Feel better?” she asked incredulously.
He shrugged. “To know that I got what I had coming.”
For the first time, Julia realized Sawyer might be just as messed up as she was about what had happened. He was simply better at hiding it. “What is the matter with you?” she demanded. “How could you possibly think that would make me feel better?”
“It doesn’t?”
“Of course not.”
Still staring into the fireplace, he said, “I’ve read that an abortion rarely affects a woman’s ability to bear more children. Is that true?”
She hesitated. “I assume so.”
“I’m glad,” he said softly.
This had been hers, and only hers, for so long. She didn’t think he cared, or even deserved, to know what she’d been keeping so close to her heart, this hope she’d been carrying around for so long. “You bastard. I was happy being mad at you. Why couldn’t you have just left it at that?”
He smiled slightly. “Because I get such a kick out of telling beautiful women that I’m sterile.”
At that moment, the front door opened and there was Stella. She always smelled like carnations from her florist shop when she came in from work. The scent ran ahead of her into the room, like an excited pet.
“I told you she’d be home any minute,” Julia said.
“Am I interrupting something?” Stella asked hopefully, looking back and forth from Julia to Sawyer. “I can come back later. As a matter of fact, I don’t have to come back at all. I can be gone all night.”
“You’re not interrupting anything. Good night.” Julia turned and jogged up the stairs to her apartment.
“Night?” Stella said. “It’s barely five o’clock.”
Julia locked the door behind her and went straight to her bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed, then she fell back and stared at the long yellow squares of daylight stretching across the ceiling.
Sarah Addison Allen Page 10