That Summer: A Novel (39 page)

That was absurd, of course. She’d been five. She’d been alone and scared and in a cloakroom with an impatient assistant teacher. She wasn’t to know that her panic would set in train a chain of events that would upend all their lives. Who could have? It had been a perfectly logical five-year-old reaction, sniffles and loss of bladder control. That was what five-year-olds did.

They hadn’t pursued the topic further over dinner. When the coffee came, black for her father, a cappuccino for Julia, they had reverted, by mutual, unspoken consent, to safe topics, impersonal topics: her father’s conference schedule, the books she had been reading.

Back to the old routine. On the surface, at least.

Julia had nodded and smiled and kept up her end of the conversation with her mind circling over and over what her father had told her, restructuring the landscape of her childhood.

She’d always assumed, when she’d allowed herself to think about it, that her parents’ relationship had been a great love affair, that Helen was her father’s consolation prize, the sop of old age. After all, he needed someone to keep him company when Julia went off to college. But her mother would always be the Great Love of His Life. That was why he wouldn’t talk about her. That was why he blamed her so for dying.

It didn’t sound like that anymore. It sounded like her parents had stumbled into something too young and discovered they weren’t really suited to each other at all.

But they were stuck with each other. Because of her.

Julia wondered what would have happened if her mother hadn’t died in that crash, if her father hadn’t whisked her away to New York, and Third Avenue, and an entirely new life. Would she have found herself in the middle of a prolonged and acrimonious divorce? She’d seen it among school friends: weekdays at Mom’s and weekends at Dad’s and complicated negotiations over who was going to attend which school play.

Julia looked at the painting on the easel, forever summer, the scene sun washed, the colors bright, as that other Julia, five-year-old Julia with no idea what was to come, swirled in a circle, around and around and around, until the sky and the leaves patterned themselves into a kaleidoscope around her.

It was strange to think that she and her mother had been on their way to this house when the car had gone off the road.

Julia remembered, as she had that first day back, that walk up the brick path, holding on to her mother’s hand, the bricks slick beneath her beloved red Mary Janes. The memory came, as it had that other time, with a little trickle of unhappiness, a sense of remembered dread. She remembered being whiny and cranky, pulling against her mother’s hand. Julia had wanted to go back home; she was tired; she wasn’t feeling well. But Mummy wasn’t listening. Mummy marched her onward, telling her sharply to pick up her bag before it dragged in a puddle.

Julia found herself looking down at her hand, half-expecting to find the tattered old carpet beneath her feet transformed to rain-wet bricks, and a small blue valise dangling from her hand.

She’d been so proud of that valise, with sliding latches on the top that went
click
and an elasticized blue band inside. She could practically feel the pressure of the handle against her palm, her own little blue faux leather suitcase, usually used only for transporting Barbies but that day inexplicably heavy with the weight of her own small jumpers and dresses.

Her mother had been carrying a suitcase, too. It was in her other hand, the hand that wasn’t holding on to Julia’s, making her gait awkward, making her jerk Julia’s hand up at an uncomfortable angle.

Your mother was leaving me when she died
, her father had said.

There was no reason for him to have gotten it wrong. But for the fact that she remembered that long trek down the walk, her mother’s too-tight grasp on her hand, pulling her along when she would have dawdled and scuffed her soles against the bricks. There had been a row with Daddy, and Mummy had packed her things and put her in the car and told her that they were staying with Aunt Regina for a while.

Had Mummy left Daddy before? Julia didn’t think so. It had sounded, from what her father had said, that her mother’s packing her up and storming off had been an unusual occurrence, the culmination of months of frustration boiling to the surface.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, then. Or a patchwork of fragments of memories from other times, other visits.

Julia tried to tell herself that that made the most sense, but the more she thought about it, the more sure she was; that rainy fall day had been the same rainy fall day her father had forgotten her at kindergarten. Embarrassment at behaving like a baby had made her querulous and difficult; usually she loved going to Aunt Regina’s, but that day she had been particularly stubborn and obstructive. She had wanted to stay home with Daddy and be tucked into bed with her stuffed rabbit; she didn’t want to put on her shoes and go back out in the rain.

But her mother had been adamant. And her father—he hadn’t said anything at all. He had just stood there as they left, his arms folded across his chest.

Standing in the middle of the old nursery, still in her cocktail dress, Julia closed her eyes and forced herself to relive that walk down the path. The door opening. Aunt Regina standing in the doorway. The triangle of light falling from the hall out onto the steps.

They’d gone with Aunt Regina into her lair. That must have been Aunt Regina’s name for the little room between the living room and the library. It came pat into Julia’s head, without explanation.

She couldn’t picture Aunt Regina’s face. Instead, she remembered her as a collection of attributes: long, jangly earrings; the scent of cigarette smoke; the hem of a brightly patterned dress; a raspy, smoker’s voice.

She remembered the creak of Aunt Regina’s favorite chair as she’d flung herself down in it, her deep voice saying,
You’re welcome to stay if you like.

But you don’t think I should,
Julia’s mother had said, her voice high-pitched, still angry.

Aunt Regina had taken a long drag on her cigarette.
You know I never give advice—no, Julia, darling
, not
that record—but … For better or for worse, they say.

And her mother’s voice.
I hate it when you’re right.

Hate me from a distance, then. But have a drink before you go.

It was like looking into a snow globe, the scene distorted with distance and time but complete in every detail. Julia could remember sitting on the floor, sulkily sorting through Aunt Regina’s records while the adults talked behind her, above her head. Sometimes Aunt Regina let Julia put a record on the turntable and position the needle, but today she had shooed her away and told her to let the grown-ups talk. Julia could remember that pattern of the rug, the prickle of the nap.

What she couldn’t remember was what had happened next. It faded away, as childhood memories did, crystal clear and then gone.

Julia wandered over to the old sofa where she had sat with Nick and plopped heavily down on the worn seat.

What if they really had gone to Aunt Regina’s? What if the accident had happened not on their way out but on their way home?

There must be some way of finding out for sure. Traffic records, police report? The time of the accident would be on record somewhere. Nighttime. It had happened at night, after dark. That she remembered vividly enough from a hundred nightmares, the rain greasy and wet against the windshield, the sudden flash of lights, the skid, the swerve, the crash.

She was pretty sure it hadn’t been dark when they’d left her parents’ flat. Or when they’d pulled up at the house at Herne Hill. It had been afternoon, a grim, gray sort of afternoon, the rain puddling along the walkway, sinking through the fretwork of her Mary Janes, when they’d arrived at Aunt Regina’s.

If they had arrived at Aunt Regina’s.

Before she could think better of it, Julia dug her cell out of her bag and pulled up the number of her father’s hotel. The bored-sounding person at the switchboard put her through to his room without question.

It rang three times before she heard the unmistakable noise of a phone being dropped and then dragged up again.

“John Conley,” he said blearily.

Damn. She’d forgotten about his usual ten o’clock bedtime. “Dad? It’s me.”

She heard a rustle of pillows as her father pulled himself up, his voice sharp with concern: “Is everything all right?”

Maybe this should have waited until morning.

“Everything’s fine,” said Julia hastily. “I just wanted to see you again before you go. Do you have time for a quick coffee tomorrow between your panels?”

*   *   *

Julia met her father at four the next afternoon, in a Costa Coffee around the corner from the conference center. It was soothingly generic, the same beige-upholstered benches and round wooden tables as a thousand other Costas in other parts of London.

“So,” said her father, “what is this in aid of? Not that I’m not always happy to see you,” he added.

He’d chosen one of the dark, straight-backed chairs instead of the cushy banquette. He scooted his chair awkwardly closer to the table, giving his cup of coffee a slightly dubious look.

Julia felt a sudden surge of affection for her father. She knew that meeting her today in the thick of Day One of his conference hadn’t precisely been convenient; he’d probably had to blow off some colleagues to do so. But no matter how hard her father had worked, no matter how crazy things had been, he had always come running when she really needed him.

Julia fiddled with the ridges on her insulated cup, so different from the familiar feel of the cardboard Starbucks sleeve, and tried to think of a way to tell him without sounding like a complete nut job.

“Do you know how I mentioned I’ve been remembering things?” she said.

Her father started to raise his coffee to his lips, thought better of it, and put it down again. “Is this in reference to what we discussed last night?”

Ah, her father’s usual warm and direct way of communicating. “Yes,” said Julia determinedly. “It is.”

Her father twitched his shirt cuffs down beneath his jacket sleeve. The cuff links were silver and monogrammed. “If you think I ought to have told you sooner—”

“No,” Julia said quickly. “That’s not it at all.”

Her father waited for her to go on.

Julia wrapped her hands around her cup of coffee. “I think you got it wrong. I don’t think Mummy was leaving you when she died. I think she was coming back.”

TWENTY-FOUR

London, 2009

Her father stared at her as though she had just told him she had seen an extraterrestrial dancing a tango in Trafalgar Square.

In a voice that sounded like it had been scraped from the very back of his throat he said, “What makes you think that?”

Julia explained her reasoning. It sounded rather thin when voiced right out, nothing but a hodgepodge of hazy memories from twenty-five years ago. She couldn’t have said why she was so sure, but she was.

“There must be some way to verify it,” she concluded. She looked up at her father over the lid of her coffee. “The police reports?”

Her father’s face had gone as gray as his hair. “I don’t know. Maybe.” His hand knocked against his coffee, and he hastily righted it again before more than a few drops sloshed over the side. “The car had spun all the way around. I never thought to question which way it was going. I just assumed—”

He broke off, taking a quick, violent gulp of his coffee.

It must have been boiling hot, but Julia didn’t think it was the heat of the coffee that was making the sweat bead on his brow.

“What time did Mummy and I leave the flat that afternoon?” Julia asked.

“Four? Five?” Her father made a helpless gesture. “I went back to the hospital. When—when the call came, it took them some time to find me. They must have tried the flat first, and then the hospital. The nurse they spoke to thought I had gone back home. It took them calling the hospital again, later, before the nurse thought to look for me. I had fallen asleep in the break room.”

Her father’s expression was bleak as cold concrete. Julia felt as though she were opening the door to a place she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to see. But once she had come this far, there was no turning back.

“When did you finally hear … the news?” she asked carefully.

“The police didn’t track me down until nearly nine o’clock that night.” Her father’s lips set in a tight, gray line. “I never saw the site of the accident. It was all cleared away by the time they got to me. Your mother was in the morgue and you were in hospital with a cracked rib and a particularly nasty concussion.” His voice was taut with remembered pain. “You saw double for days. I was terrified that there had been permanent brain damage.”

“Well, that bit is still debatable,” said Julia in an awkward attempt at humor.

Her father looked at her fiercely over the rims of his spectacles. “Don’t even joke about it. I’d lost your mother and I was so terrified I would lose you, too.” He laughed, without humor. “I think I may have gone a little bit mad for a time. I was convinced your aunt Regina was going to try to take you away from me.”

“Was that why we left London so suddenly?” She didn’t remember much of it, just the flurry of activity, the international phone calls at odd hours, and the moving men coming and taking their things away. She’d cried when she had to say good-bye to the neighbor’s cat.

She imagined the cat had been rather more sanguine about it.

“Yes,” her father said soberly. “Not that I regret the move. I’ve been very happy there.” He looked hastily at Julia. “You were happy there, weren’t you?”

“I can’t imagine having grown up anywhere else,” said Julia honestly.

It was what it was. Any life she might have had in London was purely a hypothetical.

She wasn’t sure her father even heard her. He was far away, immersed in his own thoughts. “If you’re right … Christ. All this time, I’d thought your mother had given up on me, given up on our marriage. She’d taken you away from me. You could have died in that car.” His voice resonated with old rage. “I was so angry with her.”