“Nine?” Nicola says. “In eight years?” She thinks about the time her parents got rid of their ugly brown couch and replaced it with a new piece from the store, which was easier on the eyes but far less comfortable. Nicola and her sisters lost theirmindsover the loss of that couch. Change agents, they were not. And here was Juliana, moving from place to place, all of her things thrown in a black garbage bag.
(Nicola adds the garbage bag to the scene for dramatic effect; maybe Jade had a suitcase or a duffle, she doesn’t ask.)
Nine places, Juliana confirms. The place with the cats. The one with the twin babies. The super-Christian one, the dirty one, the clean one. The really dirty one. And so on. The one where the dad sat too close on the couch during TV time. The one with no dad; the one with two dads.
In some of these homes she was welcomed; in others she was barely tolerated. In one she was the only foster kid. In another she was one of five.
Her time in the foster system was a turning point for Jade academically. Previously she’d been a careless student, sometimes doing what she needed to get by, sometimes not even that much. Shewas bright, and she understood the concepts being taught almost immediately, but she was that kid who was constantly not working to her full potential. Who was anyone at the school going to tell? Nobody came to her parent-teacher conferences. Nobody answered the phone if a teacher called home. Eventually, overwhelmed by how many other students they had who needed help, how many other calls there were to make, the teachers stopped calling.
In the foster homes, that all turned around. Jade’s goal was to take up the smallest amount of space possible in any given situation, and to be the best version of herself she could be. She wasn’t optimistic enough to think she could attract praise, but she wanted to avoid attracting negative attention. Often this meant that when other members of the family were doing whatever they were doing, Jade found a corner (not always literally a corner, but often enough, yes, a corner) and pulled out her books and her homework and got to work. By sixth grade she was winning spelling bees. By eighth, placing into algebra so that in high school she could double up math classes sophomore year and get to AP Calc by the time she was a senior. In tenth grade she began prepping for the PSAT; when she took the test her scores were high enough to net her consideration as a National Merit Scholar, which she then became.
“It was like a drug for me,” Juliana tells Nicola. “Achievement. I’d get some, and all I could think about was how I was going to get my next bump.”
On and on goes the story: the guidance counselor, the scholarship. The college part. The early time in New York, where Jade met George and later David. The will, the children, the affidavit, the name change, the business. The paper millions, which, in just over two months, after the IPO, will be real, actual millions, an amount of money that Nicola simply can’t fathom. All of this brings Juliana around to where she started the story, with Taylor texting to meet her at the bottom of Mohegan Steps. Because Taylor, as it turnedout, had excavated the land where Juliana thought she had buried the past. Taylor had brought a backhoe to the cemetery, and she was ready to bring up the bodies.
Enough of the metaphors. You get the picture.
Nicola can’t remember the last time she stayed up talking and listening like this. College, probably, when sleeping until early afternoon the following day was an easy option. It was long enough ago that she’s forgotten how at one crucial point fatigue overtakes you—for Nicola this happens around 1a.m.—but if you push through, what happens is that the fatigue is replaced by a surge of energy, an exhilaration of sorts. The next day, of course, brings the real fatigue, the scratchy-eye, scratchy-skin feeling, and she knows that’s what she’s in for at work. But Juliana wants to talk, and Nicola has the only set of ears around. She takes a blanket after all.
“How’d sheknowall that?”
“Ohhh,” said Juliana. “I left that part out. Shelly Salazar told Taylor my old name and she ran with it.”
“Makes sense. She used to be a track athlete.” Nicola remembers someone telling a story about that at the wedding. She can see it: the blond ponytail, the long legs and little shorts, the determined set of Taylor’s mouth. She can see her arms pumping and her feet kicking up behind her. She can see her winning. (But is this the time for a joke? Probably not.)
Still visible, in the distance, is that green light at the end of Taylor and David’s dock. Green for money. Green for envy. Green forgo.
“What are you going to do?” she asks.
“I don’t have a choice. Taylor has me. I can’t have anything happen right now that would make the investment bank or the board skittish. I can’t risk my business.”
“No,” Nicola agrees, even though really, what she knows about investment banks and boards and IPOs would fit on a baby’s pinky nail. “No, you don’t want to make anyone skittish.” She waits some more and then she says, “Still. Your heart must be breaking.”
“You have no idea.”
Nicola is offended by this at first—who is Juliana to say if she’s ever had a broken heart?—until she keeps talking. “You have no idea, Nicola, what it’s like to be loved by only two people in your life, and only briefly, and not to have them. George loved me, and David loves me. That’s it, for my whole life. That’s not how it’s been for you.” She pauses, and Nicola knows Juliana has more to say, so she doesn’t fill in the pause. “I can tell how many different people love you. People move differently in the world when they’re loved by a lot of people. You have parents, friends, cousins, Jack Baker—”
“NotJack Baker,” Nicola breaks in. “That wasn’t love.” Nicola hates Jack Baker so much right then. She hates his breezy, athletic, careless way of moving, and she hates the way he made her pay for five cocktails when she could barely afford one, and especially,especiallyshe hates the way she’s still so attracted to him that if he were to show up right now and hold out his hand and walk her across the grass to her cottage she’d probably go with him. “That was just a stupid fling,” she says.
(She consoles herself with the thought that if her heart is big enough to hold all that hate for Jack, it’s big enough to hold plenty of love too. Maybe not all of it right now. But in the future, for someone else.)
“Fair enough. Okay. But lots of others. You just... well, you have no idea. That’s one thing I love about David, you know. All those family traditions and values, all that warmth and love. It just oozes out of both of you. You don’t know how foreign that is to me, howexotic.”
Nicola doesn’t know what to say. Juliana is exactly right. Nicola has been loved unconditionally by her immediate family, by David and his family, by too many friends to list at the moment. By Zachary, at one time. She’s given that same love back to all of those people without thinking twice about it. It was easy, because the supply was replenishable.
“I mean, if you look at where you started, and where you are now...” Nicola gestures back toward the giant dark house behind them, then to Juliana, the girl reaching for the mac and cheese in that Lawrence two-family. “You’ve made it. You’ve made the quintessential American leap, from one social class to another. There are countries all over the world where that’s not an option. There are so many people inthiscountry for whom that’s not an option.”
Juliana is silent for so long that Nicola wonders if she’s heard her. She pulls the blanket tight around her, and she waits, and finally Juliana speaks.
“There is no American Dream,” she says.
“Oh, come on now,” says Nicola. “That’s like telling a six-year-old that there’s no Santa Claus.”
“You know there isn’t one of those either, right?” They’re both staring straight ahead, and it’s pretty dark still. Then Juliana’s voice turns serious. “I always thought it’s terrible that as a group, as asociety, we let children believe in this thing knowing that one day they’ll find out that they’ve been tricked.”
“Do you feel likeyou’vebeen tricked?”
“About Santa Claus?”
