Acts of Love (43 page)

Their eyes met.

“Julia, come here,” Ted yelled.

She turned away from Sandy, away from the boy, and skated to the shore.

“What?”

“It's time to go.”

“You go. Colin will take me home.”

“Go say goodbye to him and meet us by the car. Now.”

He watched as Julia trudged off, angry but mute.

 

S
ANDY RUBBED HER BRUISED HIP
as John drove them home. “I told you, I hate this kind of stuff,” she said.

“You told me that you'd never even been ice skating.”

“I've never been to boot camp, either, but I don't need to go to know I wouldn't like it.”

“Compromise, remember? Wasn't that going to be the house rule? One Sunday you choose what we do, one Sunday I choose?”

“I wish you'd stop treating this as summer camp,” she muttered.

“And I wish you'd stop treating this as a trial.”

“Well, it is a trial, isn't it?”

He turned briefly from the road to her. “It will never work if that's how you think of it.”

They pulled up to the house and John got out first, opening the front door with his keys and watching her go in. Some of her boxes still sat in the living room (he had unpacked the first weekend they had moved in), and many of her clothes were still in a suitcase, or hanging in a vinyl garment bag in the closet.

She turned to him. “Now what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it's your Sunday, after all. Now what do you want to do?”

John looked at her, frustrated. “We're not on a date. Okay? Let me repeat this. We are not on a date. This is your home, our home. Do whatever you want. Go upstairs, lie down, read a book, whatever.”

Sandy nodded and went upstairs. She lay down on the queen-sized bed and stared up at the ceiling, listening to his footsteps below, the refrigerator door open and shut, the lid on the garbage can slap closed. She knew that he was right, knew that if they were to have any chance at all, she would have to stop checking on their progress every hour, every evening, assessing if they had hit normal yet. The truth was, she wouldn't know it when they got there. The only people she had ever lived with were Jonathon and Estelle, and Ann.

It had been a shock to them both to realize that they were not severed after all, could choose not to be. “But we can't go backwards,” John had said, and suggested that they try living together. She nodded apprehensively, the bridge between them still precarious after the weeks and months of late-night parrying after the trial. There was no alternative save more aloneness in a house that had come to haunt her with its litany of absences, the girls' twin beds empty, the hallways dark and quiet. Still, there was no more talk between them of marriage, of past proposals or of the future. She remembered the night, soon after the trial's end, when he lay on her bed till dawn, fully clothed, refusing to touch her, refusing to talk to her, refusing to leave. “Unable,” he clarified later.

He found the house a week after she said yes.

She heard him downstairs, putting on his new CD of Peggy Lee's greatest hits. She picked up the book by her bedside and opened to the dog-eared page, but the words from the music below kept infiltrating her mind, even after she got up to shut the door.

The book fell across her chest.

Julia's eyes across the ice, glare on glare, her hair shoulder-length now, like Ann's.

At first, Sandy had watched Julia and Ali from a distance, driving by the school as it let out, calling up acquaintances to check on their progress, sniffing for damage. It was as if she expected a tangible eruption, something so vibrant that she would see it from afar, hear it from miles away. She waited anxiously and found instead only a nebulous going-on, until she was no longer quite so sure what she had thought to guard them against.

The first time she had stopped the car, gotten out, beckoned them, Julia had stood with her hands on her hips. “How come you always drive by and never stop?” she demanded. “Don't you think we see you?” Sandy, caught, embarrassed, had no answer.

“Would you like a ride home?”

The girls, Ali first, then Julia, climbed into the front seat beside her and gave her directions to the rented house they were staying in, two miles from Sycamore Street.

“How's school?” Sandy asked, light, awkward. She looked out of the corner of her eye at Julia, searching for signs of softening, of forgiveness.

“I have Mrs. Fineman,” Ali answered. “She has red hair, and she's so skinny you can see through her skin. Do you know her?”

Sandy smiled. “I don't believe I've had the pleasure. Julia?”

“It's okay.”

Sandy waited for more. She had heard that Julia was having problems. There was talk of tutors and of counselors and of special dispensations.

But Julia said nothing, only pressed against the back of the seat and watched Sandy scrupulously as she drove, the curve of her forearm, the new way her hair was pulled back in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Sometimes, for the most ephemeral of instants—when the left side of her mouth fell down in the corner, when she leaned forward across the steering wheel at red lights—she resembled Ann, but the similarity always vanished before Julia had a chance to grasp it, leaving only Sandy in its wake.

“We're going to have a new home,” Ali said.

“Oh?”

“Soon,” Ali added. “We're building it ourselves.”

After that, Sandy picked them up a few times a month, driving them back to the rented house, and later up to Candle Hill. Once Sandy came in with them, but she could not seem to go farther than the edge of the living room, so clean and white and new it made her shiver. Julia watched her, and understood. They looked across the foyer at each other, the sound of Ali's determinedly cheerful babble only barely reaching either of them. “Will you walk me to the car?” Sandy asked.

Julia followed her out into the driveway.

“You're all right here?” Sandy asked.

Julia shrugged.

“I know that you don't have much reason to trust me,” Sandy said, her arms crossed as she leaned against her car, “but if you ever need anything, anything at all, I hope you know that you can call me.”

Julia did not answer, only stored the information deep in her pockets with all her other last resorts.

The next time she drove them home, Sandy did not get out of the car.

She never knew if the girls mentioned her visits to Ted, though she suspected that they didn't.

Downstairs, the CD ended and John did not move to put another one on. Sandy pictured him reading the last of the paper, his hand rubbing his left ear unconsciously. Sometimes, to stop him, she took the lobe in her mouth and bit it gently. She lay still a few more minutes, and then she went down to join him.

 

A
S SOON AS THEY GOT HOME
from the lake, Julia went directly to her room, closed the door, and locked it. She kicked off her sneakers and sat down at her desk, opening the top drawer to find the same brown bag she had hidden at Sandy's. She opened it just enough to remove the letter she had gotten last week from Peter Gorrick.

Julia folded the letter and was starting to put it back in the brown bag when she changed her mind and ripped it into quarters, and then eighths. She knew that he would never help her. Nevertheless, she put the fragments back into the bag instead of in the wastepaper basket that sat by her feet.

She closed the desk drawer and walked carefully to her door, opening it just a crack. The smell of hamburgers Ted was cooking for dinner rose from the kitchen. Though his cooking had improved in the past months, Julia still made a point of eating as uninterestedly as possible, hurrying from the table as soon as she was done.

His eyes when he watched her across the table, patient and bemused, as if she would be here, be his, forever.

She shut the door, locked it, and turned on her stereo as loud as it would go.

 

S
ANDY SAT AT HER DESK
the next day with a stack of layouts before her, arranging her thoughts after the daily one o'clock meeting to decide the front page of tomorrow's paper. Since she had been named deputy managing editor, she had come to dread these conferences, when Ray Stinson, seated at the head of a long mahogany table, would grill his four editors mercilessly about why they thought their story was more important than the others, and whether the focus was sharp enough. Sandy, always before secure in her opinions, tended to overprepare and to throw her facts to the center of the table with too much force, while she waited, armed for disagreement, for them to be dissected. Her relations with her co-workers, strained only at times before, had grown increasingly sour since her promotion. She had thought at first that it was simply due to the new authority it gave her—to cut, to alter, to suggest, to veto. But she had come to realize that it was more than that, that it had to do with the trial, with Ted, with her. She knew that they wanted her to pay—pay in a way that they would be able to see and to measure. Instead, she had won again today, and the three-part series on the state's budgetary problems would appear on the front page on consecutive days.

She went through the first installment once more, putting question marks by statements she thought the reporter could do a better job of clarifying. No one in the office asked if she wanted coffee, no one asked how her weekend had been. The only person who went out of her way to be nice to her was the woman who had taken Peter Gorrick's place.

She was just starting on the second installment when her telephone rang.

“Hello?”

“Sandy?”

Sandy bolted upright. “Julia?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

There was a long pause. “Can I see you?”

“Of course. You're sure everything's okay?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you want me to pick you up?”

“Behind the school,” Julia answered, and hung up. She had put off this phone call, put off even the consideration of it, for as long as possible. But she no longer saw another choice. She went outside to wait.

 

T
HE FENDER ON THE OLD AQUA
H
ONDA
rattled as they drove away from the school and onto the back roads. Julia rested her feet on top of her knapsack on the floor, her knees, in leggings, rising to her chest. She stared out at the pines and the piles of snow passing by. The windows were rolled up tight and she could hear Sandy breathe, swallow, wait. Julia licked her chapped lips.

Sandy drove slowly, drawing out their time together, trying to outdistance Julia's silence, but fearful that if she pushed, Julia would return to cover. Four more miles passed. “Is something wrong?” she asked at last.

Julia crossed her left leg over her right. She wiped a smudge of dirt from inside the window and cleaned her finger on the car seat. “Can you talk to my father for me?”

Sandy blanched and gripped the steering wheel rigidly. “About what?”

“They're going to leave me behind. I'm flunking four courses. But Mrs. Murphy found this school, Brandston Academy. It's only forty miles away. They said they'd take me for the spring semester. It's for kids like me.”

“Kids like you?”

Julia's voice went low and sarcastic. “Kids who need special attention. You know, problem kids.”

“I see.” Sandy was momentarily taken aback. “Are you a problem kid?”