The Walking People (52 page)

 

When the digital numbers on the screen of Julia's office phone read 12130, she set her e-mail to an automated reply and picked up her bag. She dialed the garage downstairs and told the attendant she'd be down in ten minutes. She pressed the code on her phone that sent messages directly to voice mail. She pushed the papers on her desk into a neat pile. She walked out into the hall, pulled her office door closed after her, and, like everyone else, turned north. Thankfully, David's office was empty when she passed.

"I'm out of here," she whispered to her assistant, who was on a call. Rebecca nodded, waved her away, mouthed the words "Have fun." Julia continued north along the corridor, turned left, left again, and left once more, until she'd completed a lap and found herself at the bank of elevators.

"Going down," she said to the crowd pressed inside the first elevator that opened, and determined to find room where there wasn't any, she maneuvered herself inside.

 

Coming from her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, Julia usually took the subway to work. Two subways, in fact. She had to transfer at Union Square. So, on a day when she already felt a little peculiar—as if her mind were tethered on a short leash and trailing slightly behind
her body—taking the elevator straight to the basement of her office building and getting into her car was just one more aberrant drumbeat in an arrangement that was already out of tune.

It was the warmest Friday New York had seen in months, and for this reason she expected a lot of traffic leaving the city, pasty-faced apartment dwellers heading full speed for the sandy beaches of Long Island and New Jersey. Instead, she shot out onto empty highway, open road. Foot pressed to the gas pedal, she reached over to dig the E-ZPass tag out of the glove compartment and sailed through the tollgate. Up and down exit ramps she flew, barely tapping the brake, hurtling along the Grand Central, the Van Wyck, the car washes, dance clubs, and low-slung houses of Queens all standing at attention, all shifting in their foundations a little to twist from left to right as she passed.

She arrived at JFK an hour and twenty minutes before the flight was due to land. Alone, holding her purse close to her body, she sat at a table in the Euro Café and ordered a glass of white wine. Not ten seconds later she got up, tapped her waitress on the shoulder, and changed the order to a vodka tonic. By the time she returned to her seat, the notice on the arrivals monitor said that Aer Lingus Flight 107 was running forty minutes late.

After her second vodka tonic—which she rationalized by figuring the flight would be further delayed, and counteracted by also ordering a cheese plate — she asked herself, for perhaps the thousandth time that week, the millionth time since that last night in the old apartment in 1986, why she'd never gone to Ireland. There had been chances. A bike tour organized by a friend in 1994, cheap flights advertised in full-page ads in the
New York Times
every winter. She'd been to France, to Spain, to Italy. She'd been to London more than a dozen times for work. On one of the more recent London trips, on a walk through Hyde Park with Francis Brown, a British colleague who liked to talk about the kingdom past and present and never once mentioned his wife or young child, she learned that there was a bus that went from Victoria Station to Galway City.

"A bus?" Julia had asked at the time, checking her knowledge of geography. "Isn't there a little thing called the Irish Sea?"

He'd laughed, touched her arm. "It travels up to Liverpool and drives right onto the ferry. On the Irish side it stops in Dublin and Galway City. It's a long journey, all told. Twelve, thirteen hours."

"You're kidding," Julia had said, astonished. This mundane fact made Ireland seem closer. Getting to an airport and boarding a plane was a project, an event to be planned, coordinated, arrived for in the correct socks and shoes. But a bus was a different story. A bus never left the ground. People hopped on buses without thinking twice. She'd passed Victoria Station almost every day she'd been in London.

"Ever been?" Francis had asked.

"My parents are Irish," Julia said. "From the west. Galway."

"Oh," Francis had said. "So you know."

The next morning, a Friday, Julia had walked over to Victoria Station to see if it was true, how long the journey took, how much it cost. Twenty-two pounds sterling, the board said. She had more than a hundred in her wallet. I could do this, she thought. I could go. I could roll right into Galway City and take a local bus to a place named Conch. From there I could ask people to point me in the direction of Ballyroan. Maybe I wouldn't even have to ask. Maybe someone passing by the bus stop—coming out of a pub, perhaps, or on the way home from Mass—would recognize me as a Cahill. Maybe that person would offer me a lift, or at least lend me a bicycle. In Ballyroan they'd know me before I even reached the front door. "It's Julia come home," they'd shout. Johanna would take one look at her and know that Julia knew everything and had come anyway.

Standing in the middle of Victoria Station, Julia had looked down at herself: a dark gray gabardine suit with a pencil skirt that just hit her knees, bare legs, pointy-toed slingbacks that had pressed her toes into a single throbbing unit by the time she'd crossed the lobby of her hotel.

She'd waited until the bus passengers boarded. Men, women, and children with their backpacks slung over their shoulders. I could get on that bus, Julia told herself, but she stayed rooted to her spot. She stayed long enough to watch the bus pull away, the exhaust pipe billowing dark smoke that hung in the air long after the bus disappeared.

After a third vodka tonic, the three untouched hunks of cheese before her shiny with oil, Julia reminded herself that she had the advantage: Johanna and Tom didn't know about the night she'd feasted on the bundle of letters until Greta returned with a pizza box in her hands and a grocery bag dangling from her middle finger. In all the writing back and forth they'd done over these past weeks, no one had come anywhere near mentioning daughters and mothers, and who belonged to whom.

It would be kind of funny, Julia thought, if we died together today. If there was an accident and we died. And then when they examined the bodies and had to draw their conclusions, the doctors would discover that the driver of the 2001 Honda Accord and the female passenger were daughter and mother. Julia saw them sailing over the guardrail on the George Washington Bridge. She saw the nose of the car hitting the water. If they survived the impact, she saw them struggling with the doors, the windows, not immediately realizing that the electricity in the car had shorted out. That's the trouble with power windows, Julia might say, sighing, as the car sank to the bottom of the river.

The thought was the opposite of funny, Julia knew very well as she pushed her glass to the other side of the small table. It was just that an accident, a death, would represent very neat bookends in Julia's life. That's all. Johanna there when Julia began her life, and there again when she died. And no day in between.

Then Julia said to herself what Donald MacEwan used to say to her all the time: Julia, you are a very strange person sometimes.

Julia signaled her waitress. "Excuse me? Can I please get a burger and fries? And a very large glass of water?"

 

As Julia watched the stream of people coming out of customs and through the doors, she was sure she'd spotted them half a dozen times. In some instances the woman convinced her, in others the man. Each time, Julia either heard them address each other by name or watched as they were claimed by another person. Just once she went as far as saying "Johanna Rafferty?" to a woman in brown tweed, steel gray hair coiled at the back of her head.

"Sorry," the woman said, an American, shaking her head and turning away from Julia as she scanned the crowd.

After twenty minutes of standing on her tiptoes, keeping her eyes fixed on the double doors that all passengers had to pass through, Julia began to worry. The stream had been reduced to a trickle. A customs officer closed one of the doors.

"Is that you, Julia?" a woman's voice came from somewhere to Julia's left. For a split second she thought it was Greta. Eavan and James had spilled the beans, and Greta had come to the airport to put a stop to it somehow. But the accent was the slightest bit thicker, and there was a certain quality in the pronunciation of her name that made Julia turn around.

"Johanna?"

Johanna released the handle of her small suitcase, grabbed Julia, and pulled her toward the warm softness of her wool cardigan. Julia could feel Johanna's heart beating against her ear as the woman clutched her. Then Johanna pushed her away as abruptly as she'd pulled her close, pushed her as far as possible without letting go. She looked at Julia's face. She let her glance skitter quickly up and down Julia's body, and then land, again, at her face. As Julia let herself be examined, she noted that Johanna was taller than Greta. She wasn't fat, but she didn't have Greta's airy lightness, that impression Greta gave sometimes of being a collection of bones arranged and attached so precariously that a strong wind could blow them apart. If Johanna had two feet planted on the ground, it would take a lot to knock her down. Her coloring was the same as Greta's, and both women had stayed away from dyes when their hair began to turn gray. She looked, Julia supposed, exactly as she expected Johanna to look. She was wearing navy pants, very well cut, and a long, belted tunic-style blouse under her cardigan. Her earrings matched her necklace, and her nails were painted a muted pink. She is an attractive woman, Julia thought, and she is perfectly aware of her appearance. Without meaning to, Julia conjured up Greta and placed her beside her sister. Greta, who just a few weeks ago, after walking through Prospect Park with Julia, plopped down on a bench, looked at her feet, and said, "Are these the shoes I'm wearing? Well then, it's no wonder."

"You look like yourself," Johanna announced. "No one else but yourself. Doesn't she, Tom?"

Tom stepped forward, held his hand out for Julia to shake.

"Good God, Tom, will you not hug her?" Johanna asked, giving him a small shove. "All this time, and you put out your hand like she's a neighbor from up the road?"

Julia stepped up and hugged him as he blushed, patted her back, squeezed her shoulder, and then let her go. Unlike Greta and Johanna, who still had large sections of dark hair, his hair was completely white. Julia had forgotten how much older he was than his sisters. Ten years, at least. Maybe more, she couldn't remember. His face was windburned and shadowed with stubble except for one pale line extending from his top lip to his nose. A scar, Julia realized, wanting to reach up and run her finger along it. She remembered something about a cleft palate, telling Greta the proper name for when, as Greta put it, a person's mouth was twisted up toward his nose.

"Were you waiting very long?" Tom asked, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully, as if he were unused to the sound of his own voice. "They stopped me because I checked the box to say I work with farm animals. I was thinking of you out here wondering where we could be, and everyone else out before us." As he spoke, Julia noticed that he was careful about the placement of his tongue, the shape of his lips, the rhythm of his breathing as he exhaled through his nostrils. How difficult it must be, Julia thought, to teach an adult man to speak with a new mouth. How difficult it must have been to learn.

"They thought you had that mad cow disease, Tom," Johanna said. She turned to Julia. "You get wise to them, I suppose, after a while, going back and forth to America. They give no such trouble going to Australia."

To Australia, Julia noted. To visit the other brothers, she supposed. She almost laughed at the lengths Greta had gone to in explaining why Johanna and Tom couldn't travel. What a good job she'd done when Julia, at forty-two years old, even after knowing all the other lies Greta had told, found herself surprised to learn that they could manage to leave Ireland at all. So it was only America they avoided. She
pictured them at home, a generic seaside scene, waiting for the post and for their invitation.

"We can't have been the only country people on that flight," Johanna said. "The only ones who came into contact with a cow in the past month—or however they put it. It's still Ireland, for God's sake. It hasn't changed that much. You should have seen the cut of the boots on the man sitting next to me."

And then, before Julia could comment, Johanna asked, "How's your mother and father?"

"Oh, fine," Julia said, reaching to help with the bags, surprised to see that her hands were shaking. The pleasant buzz she'd had in the Euro Café had worn off mostly, but she could still feel the heat of the alcohol in her blood.

"Fine," Tom repeated. "That's an American word. I suppose Greta speaks American now too."

As they left the terminal and strode out into the sunshine, Julia excused herself for a moment and dialed James on his cell phone.

"All set," she said when he answered.

"Good for you," he said, "because we're up shit creek on this end."

"What?" Julia asked, trying to keep the alarm out of her voice as Johanna and Tom ambled along beside her. They stopped at the crosswalk. Julia overheard Johanna remind Tom to always look left first and then right when crossing a street in America, and then she watched as Johanna reached over and fixed his collar. She did not look nervous, Julia noted. Or guilty. Or ashamed. Or the least bit worried about what Julia would think of her. They were well dressed for a seven-hour flight, and at first Julia chalked this up to being old-fashioned. Then she remembered that they'd come prepared to go straight to the party. They'd gotten ready for the reunion three thousand miles ago.

"Little Miss Hormonal told Mom about the extra surprise, and she's not happy."

"Okay, well, what do we do? Do we still come?"

Tom and Johanna both looked over at her and then at each other. "I guess," James said. "I don't know. Your call."

Julia turned and took a few steps back toward the terminal. She smiled at Johanna and Tom, holding up a finger to show it would just
be a minute. Johanna was watching her, saying something to Tom that made him shrug. As James waited for her decision, Julia watched Johanna take off her sweater, fold it, unzip her suitcase to place it on top. She watched Johanna undo the brown suede belt cinching her long blouse. She watched Johanna try to smooth out the wrinkles of her blouse with her hands. She watched her redo the belt. She watched her say something else to Tom, and she kept watching as they walked off a few paces to look at something in the distance. Maybe I should tell her that I know, Julia thought. Just to see her face.