“Oh, sweetie,” she said, weeping, pulling her in. Julia fell into the maternal hug, at once pillowy and strong and saturated with warm sadness.
Chloe was right behind her mother, and the two teens pressed their foreheads together when they embraced. “I’m so sorry, Jules. I’msosorry.”
Everyone was sorry. Which left Julia in the odd position of telling everyone who said it that it was okay when, really, nothing was. With Chloe, Julia did not say this. She nodded and cried, and swore under her breath, and let her best friend hold on to her.
Candace had stood in the background, watching with a pinched look of despair but also something else. Awkwardness, Julia thought. Pippa, having heard the fuss from her room upstairs, appeared at the bottom of the stairwell, and Mrs. F scooped her up, too. Julia was relieved when her aunt invited everyone to move into the living room to have some tea. What she lacked in maternal instinct, she possessed in manners.
They stayed awhile, sniffling between attempts at normal conversation, but it all felt forced and tiring, and Julia soon found herself wishing they would go. Chloe sat close beside her on the couch, squeezing her hand. They didn’t go out to the barn to hang with Raddy, like usual. There was no pulling Chloe up to her bedroom to whisper about Sam’s latest text or to giggle about school gossip. When they finally left, Julia stood at the front window watching the car go.
Without warning, her chest smarted with something like anger. Chloe got to go home with her mother. Back to her house, where everything was normal and everyone was accounted. Julia had been there hundreds of times, so she could picture the rest of their day: Mrs. F would make something good for dinner. Chloe and her little brother, Matt, would argue about who set the table and who fed the dog, but eventually, both chores would get done.Mr. Fitzpatrick would wander in from work in his suit, his tie as loose as his smile. He’d be tired but happy, and they’d all sit down together to eat.Together,Julia had thought as she’d watched their car turn around a corner and disappear behind a stand of trees. It only made her miss her parents more.
The only person who did not make her feel worse was Sam. Since the morning after he’d texted. All day, each day. What Julia found she liked most about his messages was what Sam didnotsay to her. Sam did not ask how she was. He did not tell her it was going to be okay. Nor did he press her to reply, which she did only once: “I feel like I’m broken.”
His reply came right away: “Because you are. But I’m here for you.”
After that, Sam sent her texts instructing her to go down to the lake, where he would leave something for her. He understood she didn’t want to see him yet. But still, he found ways to send tidings. There, in the sand at the base of their special rock, he left his messages.
“I miss you,” written with a twig stuck in the sand.
“Beauty” next to a small bouquet of silvery bird feathers tied with a red string.
“Hope” etched into the mud beside a puddle filled with wildflower petals.
Each message a secret comfort to her soul.
Between comforting her sister and crying for herself, between trying to eat and trying to sleep, and navigating their aunt, who stood out in their family home like a foreign object, Julia found herself depending on Sam’s messages. They were the only things that got her through each day. She woke to them in the morning. And she looked at them one last time before bed. Sam was her lifeline, even if she couldn’t bring herself to see him yet.
“Why don’t you want to see him?” Chloe asked.
“I can’t. I just can’t.” It was true. There were too many reasons she could not.
First, there was the matter of Pippa, who sensed like a little wild animal if Julia’s attention turned anywhere other than toward her. Pippa was skipping and coloring one minute, then sobbing the next. Julia could not leave her.
But it was more than just Pippa that kept her away from Sam. There was the gnawing terrible guilt she felt. He was the reason she’d sneaked out and left the house that night. The last time her parents were alive, Julia had not been sleeping in her room under the same roof, like she was supposed to be. Like they believed her to be. She’d been out in the woods with Sam.
All Julia knew about what happened after she sneaked out with Sam was that a little after midnight, her parents took a drive.
From what Eliza told the girls and the police, the last guests had just left the party, and she’d bumped into Alan and Anne in the front driveway on her way home. They’d thanked her for all her help and said good night. Anne had even hugged her, she recalled tearfully. They seemed happy. As Eliza walked toward her car, she heard Alan say to his wife, “Come on. Let’s take a moonlight drive.”
Julia would never know if her mother agreed right away or if her father had to work his charm to convince her. It was late, but the moon had been almost full, so full that Eliza said she could see her way easily across the yard to the side field where her car was parked.
Julia was surprised they had gone for a drive. They didn’t like to leave the girls home alone, even though Julia had babysat Pippa plenty of times. But those times were different; they were planned. Julia was told where they were going and when they’d be back.There were goodbyes and hugs. So it made no sense to her that they had just gotten in the car that night and driven off.
If Julia had thought the day her parents died was the worst day of her life, the funeral made her reconsider. The morning of the service, Eliza had come back to the house to help the girls pick out dresses and get them ready. Julia did not care what she wore. For all she cared, she could stand up in front of the church naked. What was the difference? She’d been ripped open and laid bare to the universe. Her limbs weighed a thousand pounds, and she moved through each day doing what she was told. It was easier. She did not want to think. But that day at the funeral home, seeing all the people from Saybrook and beyond who’d come to say their goodbyes, had momentarily jolted Julia back to life.
There was not an open seat in the church, and many of the mourners had to stand against the walls in the back and along the windows. So many sorrowful expressions turned their way when she and Pippa entered the church. Julia could almost feel the weight of them as she processed down the aisle. There was her nursery school teacher, Miss Flynn, dabbing her nose with a tissue in the last pew. The owner of the IGA market, sitting in the row beside the Walterses. Her riding instructor, Heidi, waved sadly from across the aisle as she and Pippa passed. So many of the faces she’d seen just nights before at the gala. Faces that had been laughing and dancing and eating fine food in her very own backyard. Dressed up as they were now, only this time in mourning attire.
As Julia and Pippa followed Candace down the aisle of the church to the front pew, Julia stole glances at those faces around her. Red-rimmed eyes. Pursed lips. The muffled cries that escaped when they laid eyes on the Lancaster girls, as if this were the saddest thing they had ever seen. Julia had wanted to escape. To turn and race back down the aisle, and push open the church doors, and scream at the sunlight, which she could not believe had the gall toshine on this of all days. But she did not. Because when she got to the front of the church, Candace, who’d been blocking Julia’s view, stepped aside, and Julia’s attention was ripped from the sorrow around her to the two coffins directly in front of her.
They lay side by side, blinding her: the white lacquer, the brass handles, the wave of flowers that cascaded over them. So many flowers that the stems and blossoms overflowed, filling the narrow space between the two coffins, intertwining like hands being held. It was all Julia could do to sit down in the pew before her knees snapped beneath her.
Now, sitting in the therapist’s office as Lottie handed her an appointment card for next week’s session, Julia realized she was holding her breath again. Something she seemed to do all the time now.
How foolish. What could she possibly be afraid might happen? The worst already had.
ElevenGinny
The lake cottage was summer perfection. Oh, it was far from perfect, as far as a dwelling went. The hundred-year-old rental was tiny. And it was perched on a steep rocky slope overlooking the lake whose waterfront access consisted of a hillside staircase constructed of old logs that jutted out at precarious angles the whole way down. Not to be attempted in the dark or after a couple glasses of wine, Ginny noted. Inside, the kitchen was dated and basic: a farmhouse sink, a butcher-block counter, and a behemoth GE Americana turquoise refrigerator that was so prehistoric Ginny looked it up on eBay and learned it was a 1964 World Fair special edition. To her surprise, it still worked, even if it hummed loudly.
