The Secret Letters (15 page)

There was no time to take the detour down Route 40. The streetlights gave Main Street an unearthly glow, and in the dim light, I could see the yellow tape in front of my building, the deep black holes where the windows had been. I floored the gas pedal and headed out of town as fast as I could, cranking up the radio so I couldn't hear Star crying.

In the burn unit, Norma dug her nails into my arm. “He took a turn for the worse,” she said. “They're doing emergency surgery.” Star let out a bloodcurdling scream, and Norma shot her a poisonous who-the-fuck-are-you look. I tried to calm Star down, but she just went on wailing. Norma took me aside and gave me the details of the surgery, but I couldn't understand anything she said.

Hours went by. Star finally stopped sobbing and sat staring at the wall like she was watching a movie of happy memories with Ricky. I watched the wall, too, chewing on my fingers until one started bleeding and I had to ask a nurse for a band-aid. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and decided to dash over to the other hospital to see Pam.

She was awake when I got there, eating a bowl of slime (probably oatmeal). “Hey!” she rasped when she saw me. It was such a relief to see her sitting up, looking more or less normal, that I nearly burst into tears. “Good news. They say my levels are back to normal and they might let me go home tomorrow.

“You look amazing.” She looked strange with no eye makeup, but not in a bad way.

“They said I don't appear to have any significant aftereffects from the smoke inhalation. Except I'm still hoarse, but that will go away soon. And I'm kind of tired. You look tired, too. You look like shit, actually,” she added, not unkindly.

“Now that you mention it, I feel like shit.”

She patted me on the knee, like I was the one who was injured. “How's Ricky?”

A wave of panic shot through me, but I said, “He's holding his own.” I wasn't sure what that even meant. Before she could press me for details, I changed the subject. “Where's the prince of darkness?”

“Timmy? He flew back to sunny California. Repo calls.”

I plucked one of Milo's roses out of the vase next to her bed and examined it carefully. “So guess who I met yesterday. Mom's old friend. Julia Fallingwater.”

“Julia—is she the sister of—wait a minute.” I could see her brain was scrambling to make sense of things, and rather than torture her, I just blurted out the whole story.

While I was talking, she just looked sadder and sadder, and when I finished, she just said, “Oh, Jools.”

“It's okay.”

“It's not okay.”

“Sure it is.”

“No, it isn't. Wow.” She shook her head. “I don't know if I was ever totally convinced that Fallingwater was your father, but it never occurred to me that he was—”

“I know.”

“I'm so sorry.” She really did look sorry.

“Hey, it's no big deal,” I said.

“It's just so sad.”

“It is what it is,” I said, a saying our mother had been partial to.

“I guess so.” She patted my hand. “Well, thank God Ricky's doing okay. I tried calling Norma earlier, but she didn't pick up.” She started asking me specific questions about his progress, and I didn't want to say anything for fear of sending her into a
tailspin, so I told her I had to run over to Bayview to check on him. I said a quick goodbye and shot out of there. In the hall, I found Milo sitting next to Pam's ex-friend Doug, the developer. “How's Pam?” they both asked. I told them she was doing great.

“How's the sale going?” I asked Doug, not very nicely.

“Uh, the sale?”

“Our house? You know, raccoons, snakes?”

He gave me a weird look. “Didn't you hear? It was called off.”

“It was what?”

“Called off. Canceled.”

“Who called it off?”

“Your sister.”

“Pam called it off?”

“The other one. She said you weren't selling.”

“
Norma
called off the sale?”

“Yep.”

“No fucking way.”

“Fucking way.” He didn't sound happy.

“Till when?”

“Till whenever. She says you and your brother need a place to live, so the house isn't for sale.”

I thought about how long it might be before Ricky was able to leave the burn unit. I wouldn't let myself even consider the possibility that he might never come out. “Are you sure?”

He was sure. “Is Pam free now?” He and Milo both stood up.

They couldn't both go in at once. “Who got here first?”

“I did,” Doug said.

“We arrived simultaneously seven minutes ago,” Milo said.

I had no trouble knowing who to believe.

“Why don't you go ask her who she wants to see?” Doug suggested. He sounded pretty confident.

I stuck my head in the door of her room. “Doug and Milo are here. Which one should I send in?”

Without hesitating, she said, “Milo.” I was about to leave, but turned around to say something and saw her giving her lips a quick swipe with a wand of pink lip gloss. I flashed back to the way she looked when Milo carried her out of the fire, then she morphed back into the present, grabbing a tissue and blotting her lips with it.

I was worried sick about Ricky, Ray was dead, everything I owned in the world had burned up, and the man named Fallingwater had never existed, but here was my sister, putting on lip gloss, a miracle. I wanted to say something but couldn't think what it might be. I just stared at her for a moment, then said goodbye again. She waved her pink-splotched tissue.

Back in the waiting room, I pointed at Milo. “You win,” I told him, and he raced off to see Pam. “Sorry, dude,” I said to Doug. He shrugged. I added, “All's fair in love and war.”

“And real estate,” he said.

There was no point telling him that was where he screwed up.

***

Star was asleep when I got back to Bayview, sprawled across a couple of chairs. Norma was on the other side of the room, holding
People
magazine but not reading it. She waved when she saw me and told me there was no news. “No news is good news,” she added, though my guess was that it wasn't. She pointed to Star and made a prune face. “She's drooling in her hair. How's Pammy?”

“She's amazing.” I gave her the highlights, then briefed her on the Milo and Doug situation.

“I can't believe men are still fighting over her,” she said, shaking her head.

“I think Milo's team is winning.” I felt a little twinge of jealousy, saying that, then felt like an asshole.

“I should have done that. Dated lots of guys.
Had sex with them
.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Instead of getting married to that dickhead.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” I said, trying to stay out of it. If I said anything bad about Bob, she would probably snap at me that he was a great guy and a good father and blah blah blah.

She glanced over at Star. “Doesn't she have a job?”

“She works in the coffee shop.”

“Well, it's awkward. I've got nothing to say to her.”

“She's a nice kid.”

“Maybe, but she has no business being here. She's not family. What's with the nose ring?”

“Oh, you know.”

“No, I don't know.”

“I was thinking of getting one.”

She didn't respond. She was definitely off her game.

Star woke up and started crying again. I sat next to her and found myself launching into a speech about how this was the best hospital in America, maybe the world, and they could do all kinds of amazing things nowadays, and there was no reason to worry, and everything would be fine, fine, fine. I couldn't tell if this helped, but finally she stopped crying and we just sat together, not saying anything, and after a while, Norma moved over and sat down next to me. I don't know how long the three of
us waited in those hard plastic chairs. Time stopped, and while we waited for it to start up again, I breathed in and out, feeling lucky I could do it. Air was like a cocktail, and we all went on sipping it day after day, without thinking about it. I considered giving up on food service and opening an oxygen bar. I had heard there was such a thing. I couldn't imagine how I could ever cook anything that tasted as good as O2 (its nickname). Or maybe I'd open an apple farm, where I could work outdoors. Or maybe I'd become a sky diver. I snacked on air, a sip here, a gulp there, appreciating every juicy breath, no ventilator or tubes in my nose, straight up, no chaser.

We must have all been drunk on air, because when the doctor came and told us Ricky's operation had been a success, the three of us screamed and threw our arms around each other, jumping up and down in a crazy group hug, and if Norma ever disliked Star after that and thought she wasn't family, she never showed any sign of it.

Ricky was furious when he found out he had slept through the whole holiday season, so Pam came up with the idea of celebrating Christmas anyway, and he was all for it. We had spent so many hours watching him breathe, waiting for a sign of anything we could do for him, that if he had wanted a team of Elvis impersonators in Santa suits, we would have found them. Luckily, he just wanted a big family dinner and our old decorations: the inflatable reindeer, flashing icicle lights, and a tree that wasn't fake—the whole nine yards.

Milo found a little pine somewhere, and when we propped it up in the living room, it smelled like Christmas, though it was an unseasonably warm March day. Time was out of joint, Milo said, but Pam said that was our new normal. When Ricky saw the tree, he smiled with the part of his face that still worked and said, “Perfect.” His speech was slurred because he was still on heavy drugs for pain, but the doctors said the burns were healing well, and he could walk a little, with help. We were already used to the way he looked, though people in Target gasped and looked away when we wheeled him around in there, and the doctors said they were going to try to fix the scars when he was strong enough. He had lost a couple of fingers, but he could still work a TV remote like nobody's business. Things were definitely not perfect, but they could have been a lot worse, and we knew it. We thought every day about exactly how much worse they could have been.

One day, I got up just after noon as usual, came downstairs, and found Pam and Star on the couch, hugging and crying. Panic flooded me.

“Amazing news!” Pam said in her fake-happy voice, a weird look on her face. “Star is pregnant!”

I ran over and joined their hug. At the same time as I was screaming and cheering and even crying a little, I was privately wondering how the hell Star and Ricky were planning to deal with this.

“How did it happen?” I asked Pam later. She gave me her “you moron” look like she was about to explain the birds and bees. “You know what I mean.”

“They don't believe in birth control.”

“Not natural?”

“Right. So she takes wild yam pills.”

“Does that work?”

She gave me the “you moron” look again.

“What are they going to do?”

She said Star didn't want an abortion. “Not natural?” I guessed.

“She wouldn't even talk about it. She started crying, and I started crying, and that was the end of it. Ricky's going to be a dad.”

As Pam and I drove to Babies R Us for some spring-Christmas shopping, I was thinking how fucking weird it was the way things had turned out. Not even Madame Rosa could have predicted it, not that she was any good at predicting. “You know, life. Everything. It's just so—” I couldn't figure out how to finish my sentence.

“Yeah,” Pam said. She knew what I meant.

***

Pam wanted me to plan our Christmas dinner, but I hadn't even used a microwave since my restaurant closed. Whenever I thought about cooking, the beautiful plates at Falling Water floated in my mind with colors and tastes blending into paintings, and I would slam the fridge shut and order takeout for all of us. The people at Fast Wok on Route 40 knew my voice when I called.

At first, I just said yeah, sure, whatever, to the menu items Pam suggested, but
finally one day, she crossed the line with green bean casserole.

“Hell no.”

“But it's yummy,” she said.

“Hello! Campbell's soup? That's just embarrassing.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“I don't care. Just not that.”

But I couldn't stop thinking about it. A cream sauce with gorgonzola and a little sherry began to bubble in my imagination. Soon I was in the produce aisle at Safeway with a shopping list that had started out in Pam's handwriting but was now covered with mine.

***

I was on my way to check on Ricky when Star handed me the phone. There was no one I felt like talking to, so I never picked up the landline when it rang, but she chatted away with anyone who called: telemarketers, bill collectors, it didn't matter. When I said hello, I heard, “Hi, Julie, it's Julia Fallingwater. Your mother's old friend,” she added, in case I didn't remember.

“Oh, right,” I said, like I had just placed her. “Hi.”

“I was just in town and I thought I'd call and see how you all were getting on.”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Your sister-in-law tells me your brother is doing really well.”

I didn't bother to explain that Star and Ricky weren't married, a fact that drove Norma crazy. “He's hanging in there.”

“I'm so glad to hear that. She told me he's just about fully recovered.”

Another raving optimist. “Well, I don't know if I'd go that far.” I told her about the wheelchair, and the damage to his hand and face, and the way his burns were healing. She seemed so interested that I even found myself telling her about the
pregnancy, and she congratulated all of us. I asked her how her sister was, and she said she had passed away.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. People were supposed to say hopeful things about death at that point, but I couldn't.

“I've been staying at her place, packing boxes,” she said.

I remembered how we had tried to clear out everything in our house before we gave up. “That's hard.”

“It really is,” she said. “I keep finding things that bring back memories. Anyway,” she said in a brighter tone, “I thought of you and wondered how you were keeping.”

I told her more about Ricky, about his physical therapy, and all the new things he was able to do every day. She kept asking questions, so I just went on jabbering, telling her how excited we were about the baby, and about our plans for Christmas dinner.

“What a great idea,” she said. “It's just the kind of thing your mother would have wanted you to do.”

“Is it?” I don't know if it was the mention of my mother that did it, or that she was such a good listener, but I heard myself inviting her to dinner. There was an awkward silence, like she thought that might be kind of weird, and I was already thinking that, too, but then she said if she was in town, she would try to make it, and we left it at that.

The next day, we were all in the kitchen going over our menu when I casually mentioned that I had invited Julia Fallingwater to our holiday dinner.

“Who?” Norma asked.

“Mom's friend?” I said, like she was an idiot for not knowing.

Pam caught my eye and mouthed, “What the fuck?” When everyone else had
left, she stood in front of me with her arms folded.

I didn't have an explanation, so I shrugged and said, “The more the merrier, right?”

“I'm sure she's very nice, Julie.” I didn't say anything. She shot me a gimlet-eye that was scarily like our mother's. “She's not your father.”

“Duh,” I said.