Things Unsaid: A Novel (33 page)

Carefully, with a thick-tipped black Sharpie, Jules labeled each box of photos by year. Almost forty years’ worth there. She breathed in deeply, feeling grateful for Zoë’s big heart. Unlike her mother, Zoë liked exhuming old memories. Her daughter loved going over ancient history—which, for her, was anything that had happened before she was born. Seeing her parents as kids and teenagers was like a sci-fi trip for Zoë, a blast from some strangers’ past. Two young people not even remotely connected to who her parents were. That was to be expected.

Jules wiped away a tear.

Zoë laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “Mom, you’ve always been such a sucker for this stuff. No need to cry!”

It seemed like years since Zoë had had that smile. Jules kept on packing, feeling her daughter’s sunshine.

Zoë had been on a mission lately, planning her independence, her future. Now she sat cross-legged on the floor of the almost-empty house and tapped rapid fire on her laptop—applying for financial aid. For next semester’s work-study program. Jules’s eyes lingered over her daughter’s face, and she smiled as she watched her daughter sort through a big stack of college brochures, attaching Post-its with scribbled notes on them to some. Zoë was with her again. And Mike had decided to move closer to be nearby, too. They were all that mattered. Why was he so generous to her after all that had happened?

On her own, Zoë had decided to look at other psychology programs besides Stanford’s, particularly the one at the University of Colorado Boulder. Palo Alto had bad memories for her, ones she didn’t want to
revisit, she had confessed to Jules when she told her she was considering Colorado.

Sergeant Savage had reassured them that Nagy would be in prison a long time. Only two months of Zoë’s life had been lost to her crisis. Her daughter was lucky. So was Jules. Thank God for Mike and Joe Santini.

“Mom, did you say you called Financial Aid at the University of Colorado? What did they say?” Zoë asked, fidgeting with flyers and envelopes. Jules caught the enthusiasm in her daughter’s voice.

“Oh, honey, I kept careful notes … If you can find them in the clutter. The bottom line is that with your grades and a work-study program, you can cover all costs for their psych program. But Stanford is also very open to working with you …”

“That’s okay, Mom. Not interested in them anymore,” was all her daughter said.

Jules gave her shoulder a squeeze. “It’s so good to have you here with me. You and your dad. To have him close by, I mean.”

Zoë smiled, but squirmed a bit. “I know, Mom. No need to get emotional about it.”

“I’m going to go box up some stuff in the study,” Jules said, walking away before her daughter could see the tears in her eyes.

No more procrastination. No more distractions. Jules reached for some of Mike’s books that had been boxed for about a year now, ever since he had moved out. She frowned. His copy of the SEC’s Investment Company Act of 1940—Mike’s bible for mutual fund legal code—was there. That was odd. Why hadn’t he taken it with him? Then again, he never asked about it.

Jules struggled to pull the volume out of the box. When she finally managed to yank it free, a yellowed, handwritten note fell out. She picked it up.

It was a page from Mike’s appointment calendar: January 9, 1998, 5:30. T. Schlepp. “For my Jules,” Mike had written in pencil in the margin. Another page fell out. From Schlepp’s desk calendar—same date, noting a meeting with Mike.
What is this?

Jules boxed up the Investment Company Act of 1940, then carefully folded the note and two ripped pages, slipped them into her bathrobe, and crawled into her bed. The digital clock flashed 12:45. The Hour
of the Mouse in the Buddhist zodiac: the Hour of Secrets. Not so late. Jules was wired from all that packing. Maybe Mike was still up. She had to know. She picked up the phone and called.

Mike answered on the second ring. “Jules? Why are you up?”

She hesitated. She thought of how much she loved waking up in his arms, shaking off the effects of a nightmare. She burrowed her face in the neck of her old nightgown, the one Zoë had given her as a birthday present years ago. After all this time, it was still her favorite. Mike loved it, too.

She willed herself to be direct. “I found your copy of the SEC volume. While I was packing.”

“Oh yeah, that. Donate it. I’ll pick up the rest of my junk tomorrow, along with anything you’d like me to store for you.”

“I know. But … something fell out. A torn-out page from your appointment book. Hidden in the space between the leather binding and the sewn pages in the spine. January 9, 1998. Remember now?”

Silence on the other end. Then, finally, “If you had found it before all this, maybe we would still be together.”

“I never knew. Never. That you had visited him. In his office that day. For me.”

“There’s nothing left to say, Jules.”

“There’s always something more.”

“Not now.”

“This is our secret, sweetheart. I promise never to tell.” Pause. “You just talked, right?”

“More like rage. Spit out lots of words that had been bottled up inside me for way too long. But nothing more.”

He was crying now. Their being a couple was no longer realistic, even though she wanted it. Mike had been generous—too generous—for a long, long time. They were done.

“Zoë and I are going to cook up a storm for Thanksgiving. Make silly orange-and-brown turkey cookies, too, like we did when Zoë was little. I’d
really
love to have you there with us. Can you come over? Zoë would love to see us together—carrying on the ‘Rockwell’ version of the family Thanksgiving. For old times’ sake. It will also be close to the one-year anniversary of my parents’ deaths.” Jules mentally scanned
for the most benign topics she could think of to talk to Mike about, but came up blank. So instead she said, “And I miss you … so much.”

“I can’t make any promises,” Mike said, his voice thick. “But you know, you
are
the very best mama.”

Jules couldn’t speak. She knew he knew she was crying now, too. Her quiet crying. Flicking tears, like fleas, from her eyes, she fluffed up her pillow in the dark and pressed her face into it.

Mike had been right all along. About the old battlegrounds. She had thought she was so self-sacrificing—meeting obligations to her parents, bailing them out. But she had been thinking only of them. Not of her own family. She understood that now.

“I do still love you, Mike.” She swallowed hard. “Did I tell you I’m psyched about a new book idea? A children’s book for dyslexic children. Like Max. He’s always made me laugh. What do you think?”

Mike laughed—that strong belly laugh of his that was so contagious. “That’s great. It really is. Zoë told me. I’m so happy you didn’t give up. Can’t wait till the movie comes out.”

That had always been their standing joke—that her book would be made into a Hollywood movie and all the women who were afraid they would turn into their mothers would buy tickets and see it over and over again. Mike still knew how to relax her; his voice was like a shiatsu massage for her mind.

“I’ll be there for Thanksgiving,” Mike said before hanging up, and she heard his kiss on the phone—the kind reserved for family.

T
he air was brisk. Winter air. Energizingly cold. The kind only experienced in New England, especially in Vermont. The kind of chill that warmed Andrew, that made him feel good to be alive. He double counted the chairs and place settings for Thanksgiving dinner. Never could keep straight how many were coming. Ashley was an only child of a single mom, so she liked large family gatherings. He guessed she was trying to make up for something she thought she had missed in her childhood. Who wasn’t?

There were six dining room chairs that matched the table. Adam, Jake, Ethan, and Abigail made four. Then there was Jason, his son by Ashley. Five. Grissim, his military classmate who had looked him up on Facebook after all these years, made six. Jake’s friend, Kyle, was number seven. And he and Ashley, the two of them made nine. Nine people and enough side dishes for at least a dozen—insurance that they wouldn’t run out of food. Ashley would be exhausted after all the preparation. Andrew’s job was easier. He was just in charge of making the pies and grilling vegetables. And locating extra chairs.

He was in the garage getting out three folding chairs when the doorbell rang. It was four o’clock. Abigail. Damn her. She was always at least an hour early.

“Hi Andy,” she said. He cringed at the nickname, as he always had. She gave him a peck on the cheek. It felt like a pinprick, still annoying minutes after it happened. “We brought pumpkin pie.” Andrew thought Ashley had told her to bring mashed potatoes. Now they would have two pumpkin pies. “Ethan here made the pie himself. Just for his dad.”
She knew Andrew melted at being called Ethan’s dad. And Ethan had no one else to call Dad since Jonathan would have nothing to do with his biological son. “With love and gratitude.”

He picked Ethan up and raised him high in the air, smiling at the lanky boy.

“Put me down, Dad. I’m too big to be picked up.”

Andrew still felt Ethan was his son. He always had loved boys.

Adam, removing chestnut-and-corn stuffing from the turkey, looked up when Andrew entered the kitchen and grinned. Andrew loved the Early American kitchen, the knotty-pine counter and copper-hooded stove. With the food laid out on the counter, it could be a picture-perfect, vintage
Saturday Evening Post
cover.

Adam’s cheeks were stuffed with nuts, just like the huge bird he was tenting with foil. It was strange that he was doing this without his brother; the twins always did everything together, to the point that Andrew sometimes felt like he had double vision. It could be disorienting.

“H-h-hey, Dad, what’s up? Do y-y-you like the size of this fella?” Adam stuttered. All that money on speech therapy, and he still stuttered like that. Just like Andrew had as a teenager, before GWMA. His father had often mimicked him. How he’d hated that! He would never do that to Adam. He patted himself on the back for having saved for family expenses like speech therapy, braces, things like that. For following his father’s advice, but doing it one better.

“Looks great!” Andrew said. “But where’s your brother? Shouldn’t he be helping you?”

Adam shrugged. “Dunno.”

The turkey was enormous, a least twenty pounds, and the aroma was overpowering, seeping out from underneath the aluminum foil. A reminder of family gatherings—of chicken. Andrew assumed it was roasted all the way through, but didn’t check; he didn’t want to mess with Adam’s work. Ashley could deal with it. Anyway, he needed to go out to the woods in back and gather firewood for the great big bonfire
they would have later, the kind you could only have in Vermont. It would be at least six or seven feet high. He knew it was illegal to have open fires burning in California, and somehow that made him want to build his own bonfire even more. Do something that Jules couldn’t.

His feet crunched on the pathway he had cleared around Halloween time—some of the yellow and red leaves crispy, others limp. He always had his heavy work boots on when he went back there for the soft places in the mud, the puddles that never seemed to dry up—even in the heat of the summer. When it was hot like that, they were habitats for new families of mosquitoes—or, as he liked to call them, the “Vermont state bird.” At least during the winter the puddles froze, keeping the mosquitoes at bay until the next thaw.

He walked farther in, towards the creek, which would be frozen by Christmas. He was heading to his usual firewood-gathering place, where fallen tree trunks downed from previous thunderstorms made for good scavenging. But as he approached, he heard whispering. Who could that be? He stopped in his tracks and peered around the bend.

Jake was bundled up in his familiar navy-blue Patagonia and huddled over someone sitting on a log. Andrew couldn’t see the guy’s face, but he recognized his voice. Kyle. He almost called out his son’s name, but something made him stop. He moved behind an old maple tree, and stayed just long enough to see that Kyle was unzipping Jake’s jeans. Then quietly, very quietly, Andrew turned around. He crept away, hoping the leaves didn’t betray him.