That Summer

by Lauren Willig

  Julia looked at the painting on the easel, forever summer, the scene sun washed, the colors bright, as that other Julia, five-year-old Julia with no idea what was to come, swirled in a circle, around and around and around, until the sky and the leaves patterned themselves into a kaleidoscope around her.

  It was strange to think that she and her mother had been on their way to this house when the car had gone off the road.

  Julia remembered, as she had that first day back, that walk up the brick path, holding on to her mother’s hand, the bricks slick beneath her beloved red Mary Janes. The memory came, as it had that other time, with a little trickle of unhappiness, a sense of remembered dread. She remembered being whiny and cranky, pulling against her mother’s hand. Julia had wanted to go back home; she was tired; she wasn’t feeling well. But Mummy wasn’t listening. Mummy marched her onward, telling her sharply to pick up her bag before it dragged in a puddle.

  Julia found herself looking down at her hand, half-expecting to find the tattered old carpet beneath her feet transformed to rain-wet bricks, and a small blue valise dangling from her hand.

  She’d been so proud of that valise, with sliding latches on the top that went click and an elasticized blue band inside. She could practically feel the pressure of the handle against her palm, her own little blue faux leather suitcase, usually used only for transporting Barbies but that day inexplicably heavy with the weight of her own small jumpers and dresses.

  Her mother had been carrying a suitcase, too. It was in her other hand, the hand that wasn’t holding on to Julia’s, making her gait awkward, making her jerk Julia’s hand up at an uncomfortable angle.

  Your mother was leaving me when she died, her father had said.

  There was no reason for him to have gotten it wrong. But for the fact that she remembered that long trek down the walk, her mother’s too-tight grasp on her hand, pulling her along when she would have dawdled and scuffed her soles against the bricks. There had been a row with Daddy, and Mummy had packed her things and put her in the car and told her that they were staying with Aunt Regina for a while.

  Had Mummy left Daddy before? Julia didn’t think so. It had sounded, from what her father had said, that her mother’s packing her up and storming off had been an unusual occurrence, the culmination of months of frustration boiling to the surface.

  Maybe it was wishful thinking, then. Or a patchwork of fragments of memories from other times, other visits.

  Julia tried to tell herself that that made the most sense, but the more she thought about it, the more sure she was; that rainy fall day had been the same rainy fall day her father had forgotten her at kindergarten. Embarrassment at behaving like a baby had made her querulous and difficult; usually she loved going to Aunt Regina’s, but that day she had been particularly stubborn and obstructive. She had wanted to stay home with Daddy and be tucked into bed with her stuffed rabbit; she didn’t want to put on her shoes and go back out in the rain.

  But her mother had been adamant. And her father—he hadn’t said anything at all. He had just stood there as they left, his arms folded across his chest.

  Standing in the middle of the old nursery, still in her cocktail dress, Julia closed her eyes and forced herself to relive that walk down the path. The door opening. Aunt Regina standing in the doorway. The triangle of light falling from the hall out onto the steps.

  They’d gone with Aunt Regina into her lair. That must have been Aunt Regina’s name for the little room between the living room and the library. It came pat into Julia’s head, without explanation.

  She couldn’t picture Aunt Regina’s face. Instead, she remembered her as a collection of attributes: long, jangly earrings; the scent of cigarette smoke; the hem of a brightly patterned dress; a raspy, smoker’s voice.

  She remembered the creak of Aunt Regina’s favorite chair as she’d flung herself down in it, her deep voice saying, You’re welcome to stay if you like.

  But you don’t think I should, Julia’s mother had said, her voice high-pitched, still angry.

  Aunt Regina had taken a long drag on her cigarette. You know I never give advice—no, Julia, darling, not that record—but … For better or for worse, they say.

  And her mother’s voice. I hate it when you’re right.

  Hate me from a distance, then. But have a drink before you go.

  It was like looking into a snow globe, the scene distorted with distance and time but complete in every detail. Julia could remember sitting on the floor, sulkily sorting through Aunt Regina’s records while the adults talked behind her, above her head. Sometimes Aunt Regina let Julia put a record on the turntable and position the needle, but today she had shooed her away and told her to let the grown-ups talk. Julia could remember that pattern of the rug, the prickle of the nap.

  What she couldn’t remember was what had happened next. It faded away, as childhood memories did, crystal clear and then gone.

  Julia wandered over to the old sofa where she had sat with Nick and plopped heavily down on the worn seat.

  What if they really had gone to Aunt Regina’s? What if the accident had happened not on their way out but on their way home?

  There must be some way of finding out for sure. Traffic records, police report? The time of the accident would be on record somewhere. Nighttime. It had happened at night, after dark. That she remembered vividly enough from a hundred nightmares, the rain greasy and wet against the windshield, the sudden flash of lights, the skid, the swerve, the crash.

  She was pretty sure it hadn’t been dark when they’d left her parents’ flat. Or when they’d pulled up at the house at Herne Hill. It had been afternoon, a grim, gray sort of afternoon, the rain puddling along the walkway, sinking through the fretwork of her Mary Janes, when they’d arrived at Aunt Regina’s.

  If they had arrived at Aunt Regina’s.

  Before she could think better of it, Julia dug her cell out of her bag and pulled up the number of her father’s hotel. The bored-sounding person at the switchboard put her through to his room without question.

  It rang three times before she heard the unmistakable noise of a phone being dropped and then dragged up again.

  “John Conley,” he said blearily.

  Damn. She’d forgotten about his usual ten o’clock bedtime. “Dad? It’s me.”

  She heard a rustle of pillows as her father pulled himself up, his voice sharp with concern: “Is everything all right?”

  Maybe this should have waited until morning.

  “Everything’s fine,” said Julia hastily. “I just wanted to see you again before you go. Do you have time for a quick coffee tomorrow between your panels?”

  * * *

  Julia met her father at four the next afternoon, in a Costa Coffee around the corner from the conference center. It was soothingly generic, the same beige-upholstered benches and round wooden tables as a thousand other Costas in other parts of London.

  “So,” said her father, “what is this in aid of? Not that I’m not always happy to see you,” he added.

  He’d chosen one of the dark, straight-backed chairs instead of the cushy banquette. He scooted his chair awkwardly closer to the table, giving his cup of coffee a slightly dubious look.

  Julia felt a sudden surge of affection for her father. She knew that meeting her today in the thick of Day One of his conference hadn’t precisely been convenient; he’d probably had to blow off some colleagues to do so. But no matter how hard her father had worked, no matter how crazy things had been, he had always come running when she really needed him.

  Julia fiddled with the ridges on her insulated cup, so different from the familiar feel of the cardboard Starbucks sleeve, and tried to think of a way to tell him without sounding like a complete nut job.

  “Do you know how I mentioned I’ve been remembering things?” she said.

  Her father started to raise his coffee to his lips, thought better of it, and put it down again. “Is this in reference to what we discussed last n
ight?”

  Ah, her father’s usual warm and direct way of communicating. “Yes,” said Julia determinedly. “It is.”

  Her father twitched his shirt cuffs down beneath his jacket sleeve. The cuff links were silver and monogrammed. “If you think I ought to have told you sooner—”

  “No,” Julia said quickly. “That’s not it at all.”

  Her father waited for her to go on.

  Julia wrapped her hands around her cup of coffee. “I think you got it wrong. I don’t think Mummy was leaving you when she died. I think she was coming back.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  London, 2009

  Her father stared at her as though she had just told him she had seen an extraterrestrial dancing a tango in Trafalgar Square.

  In a voice that sounded like it had been scraped from the very back of his throat he said, “What makes you think that?”

  Julia explained her reasoning. It sounded rather thin when voiced right out, nothing but a hodgepodge of hazy memories from twenty-five years ago. She couldn’t have said why she was so sure, but she was.

  “There must be some way to verify it,” she concluded. She looked up at her father over the lid of her coffee. “The police reports?”

  Her father’s face had gone as gray as his hair. “I don’t know. Maybe.” His hand knocked against his coffee, and he hastily righted it again before more than a few drops sloshed over the side. “The car had spun all the way around. I never thought to question which way it was going. I just assumed—”

  He broke off, taking a quick, violent gulp of his coffee.

  It must have been boiling hot, but Julia didn’t think it was the heat of the coffee that was making the sweat bead on his brow.

  “What time did Mummy and I leave the flat that afternoon?” Julia asked.

  “Four? Five?” Her father made a helpless gesture. “I went back to the hospital. When—when the call came, it took them some time to find me. They must have tried the flat first, and then the hospital. The nurse they spoke to thought I had gone back home. It took them calling the hospital again, later, before the nurse thought to look for me. I had fallen asleep in the break room.”

  Her father’s expression was bleak as cold concrete. Julia felt as though she were opening the door to a place she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to see. But once she had come this far, there was no turning back.

  “When did you finally hear … the news?” she asked carefully.

  “The police didn’t track me down until nearly nine o’clock that night.” Her father’s lips set in a tight, gray line. “I never saw the site of the accident. It was all cleared away by the time they got to me. Your mother was in the morgue and you were in hospital with a cracked rib and a particularly nasty concussion.” His voice was taut with remembered pain. “You saw double for days. I was terrified that there had been permanent brain damage.”

  “Well, that bit is still debatable,” said Julia in an awkward attempt at humor.

  Her father looked at her fiercely over the rims of his spectacles. “Don’t even joke about it. I’d lost your mother and I was so terrified I would lose you, too.” He laughed, without humor. “I think I may have gone a little bit mad for a time. I was convinced your aunt Regina was going to try to take you away from me.”

  “Was that why we left London so suddenly?” She didn’t remember much of it, just the flurry of activity, the international phone calls at odd hours, and the moving men coming and taking their things away. She’d cried when she had to say good-bye to the neighbor’s cat.

  She imagined the cat had been rather more sanguine about it.

  “Yes,” her father said soberly. “Not that I regret the move. I’ve been very happy there.” He looked hastily at Julia. “You were happy there, weren’t you?”

  “I can’t imagine having grown up anywhere else,” said Julia honestly.

  It was what it was. Any life she might have had in London was purely a hypothetical.

  She wasn’t sure her father even heard her. He was far away, immersed in his own thoughts. “If you’re right … Christ. All this time, I’d thought your mother had given up on me, given up on our marriage. She’d taken you away from me. You could have died in that car.” His voice resonated with old rage. “I was so angry with her.”

  Julia traced rings with the spilled coffee on the table. “I kind of got that.”

  “Yes.” Her father looked away, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down beneath the neat knot of his tie. “I know. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve done you a great disservice. Helen thinks—”

  He stopped, looking guilty, and took a quick sip of his coffee.

  Julia couldn’t blame him. Once upon a time she would have bitten off his head for discussing the inner workings of her psyche with Helen.

  “What does Helen think?” Julia asked resignedly.

  Her father pushed the stems of his glasses more firmly behind his ears. “She thinks I ought to have spoken about all of this with you years ago. She was concerned that by not addressing it, I”—he floundered for a moment, chosing between evils—“may have stunted your emotional growth, made it hard for you to develop, er, relationships of trust.”

  “Relationships of trust?”

  “She means”—Julia’s father was visibly discomfited—“that my refusal to address your mother’s loss might make it difficult for you to be intimate with others. Not in a sexual way,” he added hastily. “Emotionally.”

  Julia opened her mouth to tell her father where Helen could put her opinion. And closed it again. It wasn’t just Helen. Lexie, her college roommate and closest friend, had said much the same thing. Julia had told her that she had no right to psychoanalyze her on the strength of one intro psych class.

  Fine, Lexie had said. Then go see someone who does.

  So Julia had gone, grudgingly, to the department euphemistically referred to as the mental health center. The shrink had told her, in somewhat more polished terms, pretty much what both Helen and Lexie had said.

  Julia had made it a point not to return to that part of campus. She was perfectly functional as she was and she wanted to keep it that way, thank you very much.

  Only, maybe she wasn’t.

  Julia grimaced at the lipgloss–stained lid of her coffee. “I haven’t been particularly nice to Helen, have I?”

  “You haven’t been not nice to Helen,” said her father helpfully. Somehow, that made it even worse. With a light sigh he sat back in his chair. “She didn’t want to force you into an intimacy that might make you uncomfortable. She was hoping you would come to her on your own time. That’s what she said,” he added hastily, just in case Julia might think any of this was his idea.

  Julia thought of all the tentative overtures over the years, the invitations to go shopping or meet for coffee or see this or that exhibit at the Frick or the Met. It was all right for Helen to suggest such things, Julia had told herself self-righteously; Helen didn’t work anymore. She had time for all those frivolous ladies-who-lunch things. She, Julia, was too busy being a productive member of society.

  Which was really all bull when she got down to it. She could easily have met her on a Saturday or gone up to the Hamptons on a weekend when invited. She’d deliberately held herself aloof.

  When you cared about people, you got hurt.

  “It wasn’t so much for her own sake,” her father said. Mumbled, really. He directed his attention to a scratch on the wooden table. “I believe it was more that Helen was concerned that my—er—baggage might be preventing you from developing a proper relationship. A proper romantic relationship.”

  He didn’t exactly squirm as he uttered those last words—her father wasn’t a squirming man—but his expression was that of a man contemplating a do-it-yourself tooth extraction.

  “I date,” said Julia defensively.

  “Yes, yes,” her father said quickly. If this conversation was unpleasant for her, it was probably pure torture for him. “I’m sure you do.”r />
  They sat in silence, Julia nursing her coffee, her father adjusting and readjusting his cuffs.

  After a long moment, he said diffidently, “I do hope you won’t hold any of this against Helen.”

  “No,” said Julia distantly. “She means well.”

  What was more disturbing was that she might also be right.

  When Lexie had voiced similar opinions, Julia had always indignantly retorted that it wasn’t as though she didn’t date. She did. She dated enough for multiple people.

  It was true, though, that none of them had ever lasted long. Her longest relationship had lasted nine months, and that was probably only because it had been during her consulting days, when she had been rocketing about from project to project. She and Peter had seen each other only on alternate weekends, when she’d been back in New York. They’d never even reached the point of leaving toothbrushes in each other’s apartments.

  Had there been anyone serious since? Not really. She tended to break up with them before things could go too far. The two-month rule, she called it. Lexie called it something else entirely.

  Julia had always prided herself on staying friends with her exes. No hurt feelings, no drunk dials. It had never occurred to her, until now, that that might not exactly be a point of pride. It had always been easy to end amiably because she’d never invested much in any of them in the first place.

  She’d opened up more to Nick Dorrington in that one evening in the attic than she had to Peter in nine months.

  Which was probably why she had been so quick to believe the worst of Nick.

  The realization hit her like a triple shot of espresso. She tried to come up with other reasons, with excuses, but there it was, staring her in the face. Natalie had offered her an easy out. She’d wanted him to have a flaw—no, more than a flaw. She’d wanted him to be something irredeemably awful. Because then she wouldn’t run any risk of growing attached to him.