Acts of Love (44 page)

Julia shrugged. “They'll give me some financial aid.”

“And your father doesn't want you to go?”

“He won't give me an answer. He met with Mrs. Murphy and he wouldn't give her an answer, either. The thing is, the semester starts next week.”

“And you want to go?”

“Yes,” Julia answered simply.

Sandy rounded the turn onto the road that would take them up Candle Hill. “Julia,” she said quietly, “your father and I…”

Julia's eyes narrowed.

“Let's just say he doesn't exactly value my opinion.”

Julia turned to her, moving her leg up onto the seat. “Will you at least try?”

Sandy pulled into the empty driveway. Julia had never asked anything of her before, and even now there was no supplication in her manner, only a matter-of-fact weighing of the odds.

“I'll try,” Sandy said, “but I wouldn't count on anything.”

Julia nodded and got out without saying thank you.

 

S
ANDY WATCHED
J
ULIA
go into the house and close the door behind her. She backed slowly out of the driveway and headed down Candle Hill. The road had patches of ice, and for a while she thought only of this, navigating carefully.

Coming into town, she found herself a block away from the house on Sycamore Street, and though she had carefully avoided it all year, this time she made the turn and drove slowly by. There were no cars out front. Garish chrome-yellow curtains hung in the living-room windows. A child's paper snowflakes were pasted on the upstairs windowpanes.

There was a time, during Ted (there was no other way for her to think about it, no acceptable term to refer to it by), when she used to drive by the house surreptitiously on her way to work, on her way home, sometimes even making a special trip during the day, though she was ashamed of the compulsion. The house seemed then to have grown in height and width, a mansion of reproach, as she tried hopelessly to fathom what lay within. Perhaps she simply needed to remind herself of its existence.

She circled the block once and drove into town, parking behind the framing shop on Main Street. She locked the door and walked two blocks to the pub where she had first run into Ted alone. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkened air, the sawdust and smoke. She took a seat at the bar and ordered a vodka on the rocks, taking a large gulp as soon as it arrived. She no longer thought of leaving Hardison, no longer bought foreign-language tapes and out-of-town papers, no longer invented excuses at four in the morning for her inertia. She looked at the town now with a proprietary nostalgia that others hold only for places they have left, and there were moments when it almost comforted her. Anyway, she knew that it was home. She finished her drink quickly and ordered another, already feeling the alcohol wash into her brain, sharpening its edges, clouding its center. She carried her fresh drink to the pay phone at the end of the bar by the service station and took another sip before she dialed Ted's office number.

“Hold on,” the secretary said, “he was just leaving.”

Sandy waited, curling the wire around her finger.

She released it when she heard his voice.

“Yes?”

“Ted? It's Sandy.”

He did not say a word. The jukebox kicked in with an old Motown song, the Four Tops or the Temptations, she wasn't sure which.

“It's about Julia.”

“What about Julia?”

“Can you meet me?” She dipped her forefinger in her drink, and licked it. “Please.”

“What about Julia?” he repeated.

“I don't want to talk about it over the phone,” she answered, and told him where she was.

She was on her third drink when he arrived.

He took a seat on the bench next to her. They nodded in the only greeting either could find. “I'll have a club soda,” Ted told the bartender.

Sandy looked at the clear, fizzing drink when it arrived. “Not drinking?”

He shrugged, unwilling to tell her that he had quit months ago, as if that would be an admission of past error. “Before you say anything,” he started gruffly, “let me just tell you that no matter what this is about, the only reason I came is to tell you that I don't want you sticking your nose in my family's business.”

“They're my family, too,” she said quietly. She could feel the liquor, much more than she was used to, splashing about in her heart. “They're all I have left of her.”

He didn't say anything.

She straightened up. “Look, I don't like this any more than you do.”

“Just get to the point, Sandy.”

“I gather Julia is in trouble.”

“Everyone's in trouble at that age.”

“Give me a fucking break, okay? Just give me a fucking break,” she said. “Julia is in trouble, Ted. Let's at least be honest about that.”

He said nothing, just played with the straw in his drink.

She looked over at him in profile, his head bent. She remembered suddenly the way his penis would quiver inside of her when he was done, and she flinched deep in her belly. “Why don't you want her to go to this Brandston place?” she asked abruptly.

“I never said I didn't want her to go.”

“Then you'll let her?”

“I just don't want other people making up my mind for me,” he said.

“It seems to me you're not doing such a good job of making it up on your own.”

He turned to her harshly. “Is that how it seems to you?”

Sandy leaned back on the bench. “Maybe she needs to get away from all of us,” she said quietly.

“How will that solve anything?”

“There'll be people there who know how to help her.”

“She doesn't need them.”

“She needs more than us. Look, I don't care what happened anymore, I don't care about anything. Just let her go, okay? Let her have this chance. You owe her at least that much.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“I don't mean to.”

Ted ran his hands through his hair and looked at Sandy. She met his eyes, but all either of them saw was the realization that they would never be completely free of each other. They both looked away.

“You're still with John?” he asked.

She nodded.

“You should call him and have him pick you up. You shouldn't drive like this.”

“I'm all right.”

Ted didn't say anything else but put some money on the bar. “Do me a favor,” he said to the bartender, “call Norwood's Sporting Goods and have John Norwood come pick her up.” He looked once more at Sandy, and he left.

 

T
HAT NIGHT
, long after the girls had gone to sleep, Ted lay on his bed, watching the patterns the reading light made across his bare chest. There were times when his skin literally ached for touch. Many women called him after the trial, some even showed up in his office, pretending to have projects to discuss, curious women, daring women, women he disdained.

He rolled over onto his right side and dug his hand between the mattress and the box spring, carefully pulling out a Polaroid picture. Ann, naked on their bed, on all fours, her round breasts hanging, her ass in the air, her head thrown back in embarrassed laughter.

When they were trying anything, freed by their own unhappiness.

She had grabbed the camera, held it close to him, too close, the pictures a blur of hair and pores, he had ripped them up. Only this one remained.

He traced the contours of her curves on the small, glossy print, held it close to his face, as if he could smell her if he tried. And his other hand moved slowly down his body to his crotch.

 

J
ULIA HEARD HIM
, long past midnight, wandering around the house as he often did, his bare feet slapping against the wooden floors. She listened as he opened Ali's door and went into her room, then walked quietly out a few moments later. He came to her room next, and she pretended to sleep while she watched him out of a slit in her eyes, standing in her doorway, staring at her motionless body for what seemed like an eternity before he slowly turned away and went downstairs to pace the living room.

And later in the night, she heard him weeping, his muffled sobs deep and distant and alien.

It was close to dawn when she finally fell asleep, the sounds of Ted brewing the first coffee of the day dimly finding her in her dreams.

 

T
ED RAN HIS HAND
over his unshaven face and shut his tired eyes. The strong coffee rumbled in his stomach, and he pushed the third cup across the table, away. The gray morning washed the kitchen in its shadowless light. He heard the toilet flush upstairs, a door open and close. He had already put bowls out for the girls' cereal, and two glasses of orange juice.

They came down together and took their places at the table.

He watched as Ali poured cereal, and then milk, into the white china bowl. Julia, who had been refusing to eat breakfast for months, barely sipped her juice.

He rose, moved the unopened newspaper from the table to the counter, watched her play with the place mat, the napkin.

“Okay,” he said wearily. He was looking directly at Julia.

She turned to him. “Okay, what?”

“Okay, you can go.”

She looked at him suspiciously, studying the minutiae of his face for evidence of teasing or testing or weakness.

“You're sure this is what you want?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“I'll call Mrs. Murphy and find out what to do later this morning,” he told her. He watched the realization spread across her still-sleepy face, and he turned away.

He loaded the girls' cereal bowls into the dishwasher. “You'd better hurry,” he said brusquely. “The school bus will be here any minute.”

 

O
N THE NIGHT BEFORE
J
ULIA WAS TO LEAVE
, she waited until Ted had gone to sleep before rising quietly from her bed. Ali's door was closed; the house was silent.

It was pitch black as she sneaked downstairs, clutching the brown paper bag that she had taken from her desk drawer. She went first to the basement to get a shovel and the boots that rested by the door, and then out into the night. A pale and lumpy moon lit the ground in front of her.

She walked to the far end of the backyard and put the bag down behind the largest maple tree. The earth was frozen, and it took her a long time to dig even a few inches.

Just before putting the bag into the shallow hole, she opened it one last time, fingering her mother's note,
Julia, honey, I miss you already,
Peter's original note with his phone numbers and the fragments of his letter, the brown, curling ribbon from Ali's collage, Sandy's netted bikini panties.

Shivering from the cold, she rolled the bag shut and put it in the earth, where she carefully covered it with dirt and rocks and ice.

 

A
LI
, barefoot in her flowered flannel nightgown, watched from her window as Julia walked back to the house, dragging the shovel behind her.

She stared out for a moment longer at the dark and empty yard after Julia had disappeared inside, and then she let the filmy white lace curtains fall closed and climbed quietly back into her bed.

ACTS
of
LOVE

EMILY LISTFIELD

A Readers Club Guide

S
UMMARY

In a suburb near Albany, New York, Ted and Ann Waring are waiting for their divorce papers. Ted is hoping for reconciliation—until, after returning from a hunting trip with their two adolescent daughters, he loses his temper one more time.

Was Ann's death an accident, or was it murder? Thirteen-year-old Julia testifies against her father, setting in motion a struggle that pits family, friends, and townspeople against one another. Julia and her eleven-year-old sister, Ali, must weather the scrutiny of the townsfolk and their schoolmates as they struggle to adjust to living with their mother's sister, Aunt Sandy. In the meantime, Julia is working as hard as she can to skyrocket away from everyone who loves her, while Ali is dazedly trying to find truth and balance between loyalty to her sister and love for her father. Sandy, wrestling with a burgeoning relationship that threatens to turn into marriage, something she's both longed for and feared all her life, finds herself mining the past for clues about her own role in her sister's death. And Ted must face all of his demons as every flaw in his character is paraded out for examination, his sixteen-year marriage dissected in front of everyone he knows.

As the many layers of truth about the killing unfold in the courtroom and in the characters' lives, this deeply moving and often chilling narrative explores the ways in which the emotions and evasions of the past reverberate uncontrollably into the present.