Golden (26 page)

“Because?” she whispers.

“Because he still loves you. He's never gotten over you. He went back hoping to find you, and he's been there ever since, and he's sad. He's alone, and sad, because he's loved a ghost for the last ten years.”

She lets out a breath and looks down at her hands in her lap. They're paint speckled, just like she wrote about his being, and I want to point it out to her, how perfect that one thing is. She's crying now, and I'm sure they're happy tears, because after what she wrote, and after finding her living the same kind of sad, lonely life, she has a second chance. I've just handed it to her.

“It's why I came,” I say. “So you would know, and you could come back, and the two of you can be together, because you're supposed to be. There's no other reason why it would've worked out like this. There are so many pieces that came together just perfectly, and I didn't think these things actually happened in real life, but they do, and I found you, and now you can go back.”

I stop, out of breath.

And here we are, in the moment I've pictured since I saw the painting and realized it was hers. This is where she jumps up, tears of joy streaking her face, and says “Let's go back.” This is where we leave her apartment without bothering to turn the lights off or blow out the candle because she can only think of getting back to Orion. And this is where we drive through the night and the rain, and we end up in Summit Lakes just as the sun is rising over the razor peaks, splashing warmth and rosy light into the cold granite. This
is where the background music rises and swells and we get to Kismet just as Orion is unlocking the door. And he sees her. And she sees him. And it's perfect. I'm so happy, and so caught up in imagining it all that it takes me a moment to notice.

Julianna's shoulders are shaking, and the tears that are now rolling down her face don't look like happy tears. As soon as she brings her green eyes to mine, I see hurt, maybe even anger.

The picture in my mind breaks apart and clatters to the floor of her lonely apartment. “You never should have come here,” she says through tears.

I don't believe her. And it makes me want to cry because I don't understand. I don't understand at all. I try to explain it better. Maybe I got too carried away. “Of course I should've come. Don't you
see
? The two of you had something—had that thing that everyone hopes for, and then you lost it, but now you have another chance, and . . .” It's not working, I can tell, but I keep going, pleading now. “You can go
back
, and he'll be there, and I know he'll still feel the same way about you, I know it. It's not too late. It can still be . . .”

I can tell by the look on her face she doesn't think so. I don't finish, and we fall silent. Even the rain outside fades into the silence while I wait for her to say something. And then finally, she does. “I can't ever go back there.”

She leans in and takes my hands in hers, looks me in the eye, and speaks forcefully. “And nobody can ever know about me. Especially Orion.”

I pull my hands away. “What?
WHY?
” Now I'm angry. “Don't you
see
?”

“Don't
you
?” she fires back at me. “Shane died ten years ago, and it was my fault.” She pauses. Makes sure she's still looking me in the eye for what's next. “I ran away,” she says. “Like a coward. I let a whole town think I was dead too. There's no coming back from that.”

I don't say anything. It'd been there, in me, this worry about what had happened to Shane. First I'd hoped that he had made it out too somehow, that maybe they'd agreed to go their separate ways, start new lives, fresh. But really, I knew that didn't make any sense. I knew there was probably something else, and I'd pushed that thought away. I'd wanted to find Julianna more than anything, but I wanted to find her as I thought of her before. A perfect, beautiful mystery. And I thought I wanted to know what really happened that night. But now, the way she's looking at me, I know I don't. I don't want her to tell me the rest, because I want her to be innocent.

I want her to stay golden.

“Sudden and swift and light as that

The ties gave,

And [she] learned of finalities

Besides the grave.”

—“The Hill Wife,” 1916

“We weren't fighting. Not at the party, like the papers said after. And Shane wasn't driving when it happened.” She pauses. “I was.”

A bubble bursts in my mind—everything I'd assumed—gone. She's just rewritten history for me, and I scramble to keep up and reframe it in my memory.

“He'd been drinking, and I wasn't, so I drove when we left, straight out into that storm. And it was the most scared I'd ever been driving in the snow. It was coming straight at the windshield, so hard and fast that the only things I could
see in the headlights were the trails of white stretched out in front of us. I couldn't even see the road.”

I nod. I know exactly what she's talking about. My mom avoided driving in storms as much as she could, but the few times we had, the view out the window had reminded me of Star Wars, when they shift into light-speed and all that's visible are the stars stretched out blurry in front of them.

“I should've just driven him home. I tried to. His parents would've let me stay the night in the guest room. I would've gone home in the morning, everything could've been different.” As she says it, I wonder how many times she's thought those things. How many times she's thought of all the ways it could've been different. I don't say anything though, and she keeps going.

“I decided that morning, before graduation, that I couldn't go another day without telling him that something had changed with me, and that I didn't know if it was something that could change back.” Regret washes over her face as she looks at me. “I loved Shane, more than anything, and we'd daydreamed a future together, and it was a perfect one. One I should've wanted, you know? And then I met Orion, and that daydream seemed so much smaller somehow, and it started to feel like it didn't fit right anymore. Because I fell in love with him, too.”

She glances down at her hands again, maybe afraid of what I think, but I'm not judging. I'm just listening. It's strange to actually hear her talk about it all, because in my head it was so much different.

“So I told Shane, once we left the party and we were in the car,” she continues. “Not everything. Just that I thought
I might need some time to think, that maybe we needed a break to make sure that we were really what we wanted.” Her eyes well up again. “I wasn't trying to hurt him. I was trying to do the right thing after doing the wrong thing with Orion. But I did hurt him. So much.

“He didn't say anything at first. He just went silent, and it scared me because he'd never done that before. We'd had arguments, but this was different. There was only the sound of the wipers going, and the wind all around the car, and him not saying anything. And the only thing I wanted was to take it back. I still would, in a second.”

She shifts her weight and unfolds her leg from beneath her, and I wonder if she
had
somehow taken it back, been able to smooth it over, how different her life would be. If Shane really would've been the choice she'd made. I can't see it. Not after knowing what I do about her and Orion.

“After that, he got mad. It was hurt coming out as anger, and I could tell it was a bad idea to try and talk about it with him so upset. I tried to take him home, but he kept telling me to just drive. That we couldn't go back until we figured things out. And I was crying, and driving, and he kept asking me what I wanted and what I meant, and I couldn't tell him because I was scared of what I might say.”

She pauses to wipe away another tear.

“So I said I didn't know, and that made him more angry than anything, because he said he
did
know what he wanted, that he always had, and that it was me. When he said that, I felt like the lowest person in the world. Like I was throwing away everything that meant anything to me. I hit the brakes.
I wasn't thinking, I just wanted to stop and tell him I was wrong, and that I was sorry. That I took it all back. But the back of the car swerved over the ice, and then we were spinning. I panicked. He grabbed the wheel. We couldn't fix it.

“And then we were falling.”

She looks at me with somber eyes, and it feels like forever before she speaks again. When she finally does, she says, “I thought I was dead when we finally stopped at the bottom. We'd tumbled down the side of the ravine, and the noise was deafening all the way down. Metal crunching and glass shattering, and me. Screaming. And then finally we were still, and it was so quiet, I thought I had to be dead. The headlights were still on, and down at the bottom where we were, there was no wind. The snow was still falling, but it was just drifting down in the lights, like feathers after a pillow fight. For a few seconds it was the most peace I'd felt in my life. I closed my eyes, accepted that was the end, and almost felt relief.”

I picture her there, inside the Jeep on its side at the edge of the river, the canyon lit up glowing and white with their headlights, and snow falling silent in the night. Thinking that was it. How horrible.

“But then the cold started to seep in,” she says. “It was water, from the river, and it stung enough to wake me up, or bring me back, and when it did, the first thing I did was reach my hand out for Shane, but he wasn't there. He wasn't in the car anymore.

“I panicked all over again. I fought with my seat belt, and when I got it open, I climbed out his window. It was broken, and it cut my hands when I did.” She shows me the palms of
her hands, both crisscrossed with deep scars. “I was so numb with cold and shock, I couldn't feel anything, but I knew I needed to find Shane and make sure he was okay.”

Her voice hitches and she has to stop there. Tucks both knees to her chest and buries her head in her arms and cries softly. I say nothing, but I see it in my mind: the snow and wind, words she couldn't take back, the bottom of the ravine. The empty Jeep. I wipe at my own eyes, and wait until she lifts her head.

“I found him because of the blood. It was dark on the snow, like someone had spilled paint all over a canvas, and I followed it to the edge of the river. And then I saw him and”—she pauses to take a breath—“he was on the other side, wedged against a tree branch that bent down into the water. It was holding him there, and the river was moving fast around his legs. His arms were just drifting, and he was so white already. I ran in, and I couldn't feel my hands or my feet, but I had to swim because it was deep where he was.” She stops, presses her lips together, and I can see she's reliving every moment as she tells it.

“I almost didn't make it to him,” she says. “But I reached out for that branch, and it saved me. And then I was there with him. I put my hand on his cheek and called his name. I screamed it. I slapped his face, and then I put my lips to his and they were already ice, but I pushed air into his mouth again and again because I didn't know what else to do. I begged him to wake up, but he didn't, so I held on, and I tried to hold him, too, until someone came for us. But there was nobody. And then the headlights went out, and I was
alone in the dark, freezing to death and trying to hold on for us both. And I had to choose.”

Her eyes brim again as she brings them to meet mine. “The only thing I wanted to do was go with him. Follow him, into the dark of the water and the night, because I couldn't imagine life without him.” She shakes her head. “But I didn't. I swam to the shore.”

I'm the one who's crying now, sitting on the couch of her lonely little apartment, with the rain pouring down outside, and the memory of cold and tragedy filling the space inside. I can see it all, how a word, an action, a series of moments can add up to this, and it makes me want to reach a hand out to her because I can also see the guilt in her shoulders, in her eyes, imprinted permanently into every bit of who she is now.

“I killed him,” she says after a long moment. “And he died thinking I didn't love him anymore. I killed
us.
Everything we had, and everything we were, was gone. It disappeared when I said those things to him. And when I realized I could never undo it, or make it right, I wanted to disappear too.”

She stops, and when she does, I notice the rain outside has subsided. Instead of a steady shower on the roof, there are intermittent drops. The flicker of her candle against the window. A low hum and a moving beam of light from a passing car below. I almost want everything to stop right there. I'm afraid to hear what comes next in her story, because she did. Disappear.