The Walking People (46 page)

"I know, Ned. I'm very sorry."

"Ah, it's all right. My wife, though, she's having an awful time since then." Ned turned a little in his seat to look at Julia. "You're an educated person."

Julia waited.

"So tell me this, is my boy any wiser now that he's in heaven? Is he looking down and understanding things like he's still three years because time stopped for him at three, or in his mind is he wiser than three?"

"I don't know, Ned."

"And when I meet him, will he know me? From watching me all the time? Or does time go by there the same way it goes by here, when you get on to other things and start to forget?"

Julia, full to the brim with her own questions, let his questions float in the air between them without answering.

 

After circling every block in Woodlawn between the cemetery and East 240th Street, Ned finally stopped talking long enough to remind Julia which turns to take to get to his apartment.

"Will we go for a pint?" Ned asked gamely after popping the car door open and placing one foot on the street outside.

Julia considered it for a few seconds. A pub could be the setting that set him on course again, got him to focus on what she was asking, but when she looked over at him, he blinked once, slowly, and when he blinked again, his eyes stayed closed. The way he was now, there would be too much to wade through, too much of his own static to get a clear picture on hers.

"Oh, thanks," said Julia. His eyes flew open. "I'm wrecked from today." She rubbed her arm from her bicep to her shoulder to remind him. When he still didn't get out, she turned her polite smile to the front windshield and pretended to squint at something in the distant dark. She could feel the warmth of her face from the sun of that afternoon, and she knew her skin was glowing in that way she'd been complimented on in the past. Her ponytail had loosened in the course of the day, and there were pieces framing her face. She reached up and tucked one of the loose pieces behind her ear. She could feel something happening, that same stirring in the air that always signaled when a guy was about to touch her or kiss her or ask to be touched or kissed. But this was a first. As she got older, it seemed the difference in age between herself and her parents was shortening, and it was her friend Mary who'd recently asked if she had a crush on any of her father's friends. Ned, two years younger than Michael, was Greta's age, thirty-eight.

"You're lovely-looking," Ned said, reaching his hand across the space between the seats, and instead of leaning away, Julia became fixed where she was, one hand on the wheel, the other resting, palm down, on her own thigh. She waited to feel where his hand would land, but after half a dozen thunderous heartbeats she looked over to see it resting on the gearshift, his chin tucked into his collarbone, Ned sound asleep.

"Ned," she said, squeezing his hand. "Wake up. You're home."

Ned's head snapped up, and he looked surprised to find one leg already outside. "Well, thanks again," he said, smiling brightly, and slowly, slowly, pulling himself by the frame of the door, he got out of the car.

 

Julia had an easier time finding her way back to the Bronx River Parkway than she expected, and when the bridge loomed for the third time
that day, she turned the wheel and the car dipped quickly down the ramp, then back up, and she was suspended over the Hudson, her headlights pointing north, the lights of Manhattan bright over her shoulder and in her sideview mirror. For the second time that evening, Julia looked at the clock—not quite midnight—and recalled one of Greta's stories of home. This time it was of a woman—an old woman, Julia had always assumed, Greta had never said—who didn't know what to do about some of the sad things that had happened to her, so she stopped doing anything at all, just sat in a chair and stared out the window or lay flat on her back in her bed looking up at the ceiling while the world kept turning underneath her. Years went by, and the woman stayed like this, solemn as a tree, not seeing with her eyes, not hearing with her ears, just breathing in and out. "She was coping, you see," was how Greta always put it. Then, without warning really, without those little pushes or sparks that always come first when you read about such people in books or see them in the movies, the woman had started to come around again, seeing and hearing and doing the way she used to. Soon after she came around, another sad thing happened—someone she loved had to leave her, and she knew she mightn't see this person again, or at least not for a very long time. But instead of locking herself away as she did before, she met this new sadness head-on, walked up to greet it, stepped into its fold, and wore it like a shawl she could put on or cast off at her own choosing.

"So what's the moral?" Julia had asked once at fifteen or sixteen, feeling cheeky and impatient with this story she'd heard a million times. "Is there a point?" Greta had shrugged, seemed genuinely stumped, but days later, after the storm had passed and the tension between them had disappeared—at least until the next time Julia asked to do something and got a negative answer—she'd taken a seat at the tiny kitchen table across from Julia and her bowl of cornflakes and said, "I think it's that we don't know what we're capable of. None of us. Until we get up and try to do it. If there's a point, that might be it." Forty-five minutes later, after Julia had packed her bag, walked the twelve blocks and three avenues to school, and taken her seat in first period, she finally remembered what in the world her mother was talking about.

Before Julia knew it, she was in New Jersey, and the cars heading home after an evening in the city fell into place in the lanes beside her. How long until she got used to going through New Jersey every time she traveled between the new house and the city? "It's on the other side of the Hudson," she told her friends, and just about all of them had said in one way or another, "but that's New Jersey" or "but you're moving north, upstate, and New Jersey is south." If you couldn't get there on the subway, it just didn't make sense. Julia went with two of them to the bookstore to look it up on a map, and tracing the route with her finger, she showed them.

For the rest of the drive home Julia wondered what her parents might be capable of. There could be no mistake. The letters were that clear, her Aunt Johanna's name all over them — Johanna's pregnant belly, Johanna's apologies, Johanna's pleas to send Julia to California. Letters from Greta's mother—who sometimes signed Lily, sometimes Mam, sometimes Mother—saying enough is enough. She wanted Julia to come to Ireland. James and Eavan's birth certificates had been in there too, listing the parents as Greta Cahill and Michael Ward. Julia's eye had run over them at first, greedy for what else she would find about herself, but it was as if her mind split into two directions, one half poring over as many letters as she could process, the other half stuck on some detail of those certificates. Cahill, she realized. Greta Cahill. When had they ever celebrated an anniversary? "Oh, 1966," Greta always said when Julia asked, as if it was a nuisance to look back so far. "You were two and cute as a button." But winter or spring? Summer or fall?

Michael and Greta, the pair of them, had embraced a lie and swallowed it whole. Julia imagined walking into the kitchen as soon as she got back to the house in Recess and accusing them. Then, just as clearly, she saw Greta scowl, scratch her head, try to remember, oh yes, that rings a bell, haven't thought about that in years, and then lean forward in that Greta way and ask if it mattered so much, it was nothing to get upset about. And then later, Greta and Michael alone in their bed would talk about it all night, the way they talked about everything, his low tones answering her high tones as if it was something to get through, not something that was.

Which of them is more guilty, Julia wondered, glimpsing a deer bounding across the road at the very limit of her headlights' reach. She pressed lightly on the brake. She moved over to the slow lane, rolled the window down, noticed for the first time that she hadn't had the radio on since she and Ned got back in the car after buying beer and cigarettes. Like all things Greta and Michael did, Julia guessed that they were in on the story fifty-fifty, had agreed on every detail before going forward, just as they talked and talked and talked and eventually agreed on everything. Even when they argued, they did so in a code only they understood, with looks and chopped-off sentences and the occasional closed door that was usually kept open. As Julia's friends' parents began leaving each other—the first, Patricia Scott's parents in first grade, Julia hadn't known such a thing was possible, all the way up to the previous week, when her friend Mary's parents sat their children down, all grown, and announced they hadn't loved each other in years—Julia was absolutely certain that it had never crossed Greta's and Michael's minds. How could her Aunt Johanna—she revised the thought before it was fully formed—have competed with love like that?

And then, for what felt like the hundredth time that day, Julia wondered how Greta could not be her mother. It just seemed impossible, not with the way she watched her from across rooms, and all those years looking at her homework and putting it aside to show Michael, and the two of them shaking their heads in wonder at her book reports and science fair projects and saying things like, "Where did you come from?" And "Where did we get you?" as they squeezed her and rubbed her head and beamed. Just last month Julia had met a friend at a diner on West Thirty-fourth Street and, as she was coming out, had seen Greta in the distance, leaving Macy's and turning east for the long walk home. "I can't believe it!" Greta had cried when Julia caught up, grabbing Julia's arm and hugging her as if they hadn't seen each other in ages, as if it were nothing short of miraculous that they'd found each other like that, at just the right moment, odds one in eight million.

But somewhere under all the evidence to the contrary—a mother's
love, a mother's pride—there was place in Julia's gut where all of this felt true. Johanna, Tom, the two other brothers in Australia—it wasn't that anyone had ever forbidden mentioning them, but they weren't mentioned except in Greta's recollections of some day a long time ago—and never by name. Johanna used to write, and even call once in a while, but all of that had stopped once Lily died. There was no word about what they were all doing now. And in these recollections Greta's siblings were never more than background figures, beside the point. Julia could pinpoint the day, the moment—Christmas, she was fifteen—when she realized with a lurch that all these people were still alive, lived just a plane ride away.

Julia drove two houses past her own before she realized her mistake and turned around. The windows were dark except for one in the middle and a light outside the front door that Julia hadn't noticed that morning. Unwilling to get out of the car just yet, she sat and considered how she would put it. I know. Or, Mom I have something to tell you. Or, Mom I think you have something to tell me. Or, Dad, is there something you want to tell me about my mother? But in answer to each of these tries she saw only Michael's raised eyebrows, Greta's face open and interested, as if she was about to hear good news.

After twenty minutes or so in the dark car, Julia saw movement in the one lighted window, then the front door of the house opening and the screen door pushed ajar by a long, pale arm as a collection of moths fluttered around the light.

"Hello?" Greta called in a stage whisper. "Is that you, Julia?"

"Yeah, it's me," Julia whispered back, elbow resting on car door, chin resting on fist. The suburbs were dead silent at night.

Greta nodded, relieved, and, leaving the front door wide open, turned to retrace her steps down the hall. She switched off the lamp beside her bed, and after postponing it for so long, after pinching herself awake for a good hour and a half or more, with her daughter finally home safe on the driveway outside, opting, no doubt, to use her own private entrance whenever she finished thinking about whatever she was thinking about out there in the utterly mute dark, nothing like the dark of the country, Greta closed her eyes and waited for sleep.
Beside her, Michael grumbled indistinctly, grunted something that sounded like a reprimand, and then sighed. He turned, rearranging his wounded body under the thin cotton sheet.

"She's home, is she?" he said, reaching out to rest a sleep-warm hand on Greta's hip, and then, asleep again, he snorted, flinched, tugged at Greta's nightshirt as if it were a rope pulling him forward.

O
N THE MORNING
of the day of Michael's retirement party, or
party day,
as Greta and the children had been mouthing over Michael's head and behind his back for going on six weeks, Greta stopped sweeping the front step to watch a black cat emerge from behind a tree, walk across the neighbor's lawn, across the sidewalk, across the sun-warmed tarmac of the street, hop up the curb on Greta's side, prance across the Wards' lawn, and brush against Greta's bare shin as she passed by (it was a she-cat) to settle herself on the Wards' welcome mat. Good luck or bad luck? Greta couldn't remember. Good luck to see a black cat on moving day. Good luck on a wedding day. Bad luck to see one by moonlight. Bad luck to have a black she-cat look at you if she's just after licking her paws. But what about on party day? The cat purred, stretched herself across the mat, settled in for a sleep. Step over her, Greta told herself as the cat's soft belly rose and fell. Glad none of the children had arrived yet, and with a suspicion that the neighbors were looking out their windows and laughing at her, Greta turned and walked around the house through the dew-wet grass. She felt younger than fifty-nine today, as if she could run ten times around the block without getting winded or turn a cartwheel on the lawn if the mood took her. She climbed up the back steps, left wet footprints across the dry boards of the deck, and entered the house by the back door. The
morning weather report had called for heavy rain, but so far the sky was blue and the day unseasonably warm.