His mind paused on Tony’s wife for a moment. Whenever Julia’s face came into his mind he pushed it away, but today he let it linger. Her hair bathed in sunlight, like the first time he saw her at the kitchen sink. The longer he pictured her, the more her resemblance to his departed wife dawned on him. The hair was wrong, and the nose, and build, but the eyes, the smile, the warmth. That’s what it was: just like Irene. They bore the markings of supremely good women. Good women who had married men who had to work to be good.
35
Julia Hall, 2015
Tony’s cell rang in the kitchen. Julia turned up the TV and left the kids on the couch, walking quickly to meet Tony as he answered the call. Tony had gotten home late that morning and told her what he’d done: found Walker’s home address on Salisbury’s registry, gone to Walker’s house, pushed him, threatened him. Julia had laid into him, he’d cried, she’d holed up with the kids in the living room, ignoring him as she tried to process the insanity he had just confessed to.
Then nothing had happened for hours. She was certain the quiet wouldn’t last.
And she was right. It was the detective on the phone.
“I just got a call from Ray Walker,” Detective Rice said.
Julia’s heart fell into her stomach. Tony was going to be arrested.
Tony opened his mouth to speak, and Julia held up a hand. Whatever Tony was going to say, she didn’t want the police to hear it. No admissions.
After a beat, Detective Rice said, “You there?”
Julia nodded at him.
“Yup,” Tony said.
“And Julia?”
“I’m here,” Julia said.
“Okay,” the detective said. “Tony, Ray Walker says you assaulted him at his house this morning.”
Julia’s gaze moved from the phone to her husband’s face. His puffy eyelids were closed and his brow was furrowed with worry.
“Says you threatened to kill him.”
A chill squirmed up her spine, and she shuddered.
“So it’s assault, terrorizing, tampering with a witness.”
Julia brought her hands to her face. The whole mess they were already living was going to start again, this time with Tony as the defendant. Her brain started listing potential outcomes: probation, jail time, a record. Tony’s office would find out—lawyers were the biggest gossips. The media would find out. They were already all over Nick’s case. Everyone would know.
After a long pause, Detective Rice said, “That’s what you might have been charged with.”
Julia lifted her face from her hands. Tony looked at her in confusion.
“He’s not pressing charges,” the detective said.
“What?” Julia asked.
“Yup. Not sure how you got so lucky.”
Tony handed Julia the phone and laid down on the kitchen floor.
“So . . . that’s it?” she asked.
“For now,” he said. “Tony. I don’t know what you were thinking. But this isn’t going to help anyone. You hear me?”
On the floor, Tony nodded. His head lolled on the tiles, his arms down at his sides.
“I’m not a big fan of the Boondock Saints, you hear?” Rice said. “You let us take care of this.”
“Thank you,” Julia said.
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “This would have been a different conversation if Walker wanted to press charges.”
They hung up.
“I don’t know what I was thinking.” Tony stared up at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
Julia did.
Tony had always been a fixer. He liked to fix problems: mostly other people’s.
It took Julia a while to notice it, but once she did, it bothered her. The porch light at her apartment burned out: he showed up with a bulb, screwdriver, and stepladder. She caught a cold: he brought take-out soup and encouraged her to nap. She was moody: he wanted to talk about it. Her best friend, Margot, told her it was romantic. Julia felt disrespected, like he thought she couldn’t take care of herself. Julia may have had the perfect childhood, with all the financial and emotional security a kid could ask for, but she’d been dealt a tougher hand in college. Her dad withered and died in the span of a month. Her mother had to give up her business. Julia started bartending to help pay for school. By the time she met Tony, she’d grown confident in her self-sufficiency, and proud of it.
Then one night during their first winter dating, one of Julia’s coworkers got mugged. The woman was walking to her car after she closed up the Ruby, the bar where she and Julia worked in Portland, when a white guy in a hat and scarf showed her a switchblade and demanded her purse. She wasn’t hurt, she told Julia after, just shaken. Julia told Tony on her way to work. She regretted it instantly. In the span of their five minutes on the phone, he told her not to go in, asked her if she’d get a different job, grew angry, and told her she should quit. She hung up on him. She’d never even heard of a mugging in Portland before. The odds of it happening to her seemed low, her coworker was fine, and Julia didn’t have much worth stealing. Near the end of her shift, Tony showed up at the bar. He started by apologizing for being so crazy on the phone. She almost believed him, until she realized he was there to walk her to her car.
When the last barflies buzzed off at closing time, she locked the door and turned to Tony. All the things she hadn’t said came up at once, like she’d been keeping a list to lob at him. She could see what he was doing. He didn’t trust her to take care of herself. He didn’t respect her decisions. And then she upped the ante.
“You’re possessive.”
Tony shook his head in confusion. “Possessive?”
“Yes.”
“You’re being crazy. The girl who does the same job as you got mugged last night. He could have done a lot more than show her a knife.”
“It’s not just this, it’s everything! You think I can’t change a light bulb! You suffocate me! I’m not your child!”
“What the fuck, my child? You’re my girlfriend, and I love you, why is that so hard for you?”
“Why is it so hard for you to let me take care of myself?”
“It’s what I do!” Tony shoved the barstool back and stood. “I take care of the people I love.” He was breathing heavily, like he’d just sprinted. “My love suffocates you?”
Julia crossed her arms, tried to collect herself. Instead, a sensation of terror washed over her. This might not be a fight. This might be the end.
“There is so much that I love about the ways you love me,” she said. “But if you need to be saving someone all the time . . . that doesn’t work for me. I don’t need that, I don’t want it. And I hope you don’t, either—I hope you don’t need to be with a weak woman to feel like a man.”
He opened his mouth, and she held up her hand.
“I don’t think you do,” she said, “consciously at least, but you need to listen to what I’m saying. How you’re acting right now, it’s not how I want my boyfriend to be. I need you to change.” She inhaled. Exhaled. Goddamn it, her tears had pooled and spilled anyway. “Or I need you to go.”
She’d said what she had to, and she met his gaze now, defied him to call her wrong. His dark hair went black in low lighting like this, and he came toward her, sharp features on a pale face. He wound his arms around her middle, rested his face against her neck. He kissed the hollow of her collarbone and released her.
“Okay,” he whispered.
He reached behind her, turned the dead bolt, stepped around her, pushed through the door and onto the street.
He was leaving. He was leaving her.
He turned back. “This isn’t me leaving,” he said, as if he could hear the voice in her head. He narrowed his eyes, angry but playful. “I’m letting you walk to your car.” He shook his head, then he turned and left.
She’
d been right to take a stand that night, but wrong, too. So much of love was contradiction. For Tony, loving Julia was letting her be her own hero, even though his self-worth seemed to be founded on what he could do for the people he loved most. For Julia, loving Tony was letting him take care of her, as much as it scared her to start needing what she could lose.
And right now, Tony wanted to take care of Nick. His little brother, the boy he’d saved again and again. He had nowhere to put all that anger and despair.
Julia laid down on the cool kitchen tile beside Tony and took his hand in hers.
* * *
The next afternoon, they found themselves playing a game that resembled football in the side yard. Chloe’s version of the sport included throwing the Nerf ball at the participants and touchdowns by either team at the same apple tree. It was confusing to say the least, but each time Chloe announced a new rule as the game progressed, Julia found her too charming to reason with, and so they complied. The kids had Julia laughing so much that her mood had lightened, and Tony seemed to be trying his best. He ran the yard, bickered playfully over the rules, glanced at her with eyes that seemed to measure whether she was having fun. He was apologizing.
“Wait, Seb,” Chloe said to her brother.
Seb paused midsprint for the apple tree, squeezing the ball between his two small hands.
“The tree is ghouls now.”
Tony shook his head. “What?”
“Ghouls, Dad,” Chloe said, like Tony was an idiot.
“Why would we have ghouls in football?” Julia laughed. Tony held his hand out toward her in a gesture that said Thank you! She smiled at Tony and held his eyes. Even when it was against their own children, it felt good to team up with each other.
“It’s not football, it’s tag-football-dodgeball,” Chloe said.
“Dodgeball,” Seb chortled as he threw the ball at his sister.
Julia’s cell trilled in her pocket. There were only a handful of people she’d answer a call from right now—Charlie Lee was one of them.
“I’ve got to take this, but I’ll be right back,” Julia said as she jogged toward the house and out of earshot. She paused at the front step and sat beside the jack-o’-lanterns they’d left moldering there since Halloween.
Charlie apologized for calling over the weekend.
“Are you kidding? I’ve been dying to hear from you.”
“Ah,” he sighed.
And just like that, she wished she hadn’t answered. “What? Nothing?”
“I’m sorry, Julia. If he did this to anyone else, I didn’t find them.”
Shit. “That’s okay.”
“I thought I was on to something at one point, but . . .” He paused.
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, it was a dead end. A bartender in Providence thought it was possible he saw Ray Walker one weekend at his bar, two years ago.”
“Providence, Rhode Island?”
“Yeah, Walker’s company sells all around New England. So I reached out to a bunch of gay bars in some of the bigger cities.”
Julia’s heart pounded in her ear against the phone. “And?”
“And nothing, really. He remembers a real handsome guy coming in two nights in a row, talking to a shy young regular. On the second night, the kid left with the guy. The bartender was planning to ask the regular about it the next weekend, but the kid never came back.”
A yelp from Chloe drew Julia’s eyes to the backyard. Tony was chasing her with the ball.
“Long time after that, the bartender saw the kid at a farmers market with a girl. He called her a ‘beard’—I guess they were acting like boyfriend, girlfriend. Bartender thinks she got wise to things. He never thought anything bad had happened. Until he got my email.”
“Does he remember the regular’s name?”
“No, not his last name, anyway.”
“So . . .” So it really was nothing.
Julia studied her boots. Rolled her ankles to see the bottoms. Her treads were filled with mud and strands of grass.
“I’m really disappointed,” Charlie said. “What he did to your brother-in-law, there must be others out there. Just hard to find them.”
“It was sweet of you to look for me, really.”
“I still might hear back from some other bars. If I do—”
“Yeah, just give me a call, but don’t spend any more of your time on this.”
Charlie paused. “I know you’re worried about court, but try not to be.”
Julia pulled back her jacket sleeve to wipe her nose on her flannel beneath. She was starting to feel like crying.
“They have plenty to nail him,” Charlie said. “If I had to put in my vote, I’d say Raymond Walker is a man whose lifetime of good luck has finally run out.”
After they hung up, Julia sat by the pumpkins and turned her phone over in her hands. A lifetime of good luck, that could explain it. Charlie was good, but if no one had reported Walker, if no one had pictures of him, or DNA samples—she shuddered. A lifetime of good luck. She looked up across the lawn. Tony was swinging Chloe around by the waist while Seb leaped at her, trying to grab the Nerf ball from her hands. The kids were chattering and whooping. Tony laughed, set Chloe down, rolled his shoulders, dropped his smile. Watched the kids run for the tree, some kind of wistful look on his face. What about their long run of bliss? Had that run out, too?
36
Julia Hall, 2019
It had snowed on the last day of November that year. They woke up one morning to find that the fall was over. The winter that followed buried them.
That was the winter where Julia learned that you could lose yourself in the snow. You could lose sight of where you were if you didn’t keep your wits about you. You were closer to spring than you’d been in the fall, but the low light, the mounting snow, it blinded you to the promise of spring. Just like the plants outside, you had to strip yourself down and harden to survive.
She glanced sideways at Detective Rice.
If she’d never seen this man again, she might have died happy.
“You know why I called you here, don’t you?”
Yes.
“No,” she said.
Could he see the sweat at her hairline?
“I look back on Nick’s case,” the detective said, “and I see all the mistakes I made. What I sat on. And what I missed. When Walker called and told me what Tony had done . . . I look back on that day, and I wish I’d seen what was coming.”
Detective Rice was taking his time, offering up his memories like they were apples he was plucking from the trees on a lazy stroll through an orchard. Like they were just occurring to him and she might like to see them. But he was moving chronologically—methodically. He’d walked her through the fall, and the winter would come next.
For a moment, Julia indulged the voice of her inner victim. I shouldn’t have to remember all of this. It’s not fair. Then she silenced the voice. The voice was a fake. In truth, she thought of that winter frequently, with or without detectives calling her to their apparent deathbeds. She had learned to control the strong feelings tied to that time—the memories still existed, but she viewed them with the cool detachment of a researcher, perhaps, observing the actions of unknown persons. That hadn’t been them, Tony and Julia. That was some other couple. And when her mind drifted to that couple—on winter nights; or in the early moments of her waking from a nightmare; or, for some reason she could not recall, whenever Tony made BLTs—she would watch that strange couple for a moment and then release them.
Today, a long-sedated emotion had reawakened in the pit of her stomach as she sat facing the detective, the embodiment of the criminal justice process. His sagging skin and ill coloring were a distraction; a fortuitous ruse on his part, but she knew what he was. A cop was always a cop: retired or not, dying or not. An
d history always demanded justice, didn’t it?
Because she knew why she was here. She knew what came next. The detective had taken his time, but they were approaching it now: the winter that Raymond Walker would go missing.
III.
DECEMBER
“We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,”
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.
Oliver Herford, “I Heard a Bird Sing”
37
Nick Hall, 2015
Jeff’s office was small and toasty. The wall behind Nick’s seat on the couch was brick, and the window there cast the bright light of early winter onto the counselor’s warm brown face. Per usual, Jeff was wearing a sweater and slacks. Every now and then, he hooked a finger under the band of his silver wristwatch and stretched it as he listened to Nick. Nick had taken off his boots at the door, and he rubbed his socks back and forth against the plush carpet as they talked.
“So it feels like a relief,” Jeff said.
“Yeah.” They were talking about what Nick had been doing to himself. The picking, or whatever.
He’d already talked about it in the emergency counseling session he had with some woman after Thanksgiving. Talking about the same stuff with Jeff wasn’t going to help. He knew why he was doing it, picking at his skin. It was a distraction from the truth. He’d almost told Jeff once before. Almost told Tony, on Thanksgiving. He thought he could change the truth if he told himself the false story over and over, but it was only getting harder.
Jeff was saying something, and Nick cut him off.
“Can you explain again how it works with us, like with court?”
The Damage Page 17