Beach Read(60)

Julie-Ann pulled a cigarette pack off the table and lit up, then offered us the box. Gus took one, and I knew it was more to put her at ease than because he truly wanted one, which made me smile. Even though what we wrote and said we believed was so different, I’d started to feel like I was capable of knowing Gus, reading him, better than anyone else I’d ever met. Because every day we spent together, this peculiar feeling was growing in me: You are like me.

Julie-Ann lit the cigarette for him, then sat back, cross-legged. “They weren’t bad people,” she said. “Not most of them. And I couldn’t let you go thinking they were. Sometimes—sometimes good, or at least decent, people do bad things. And sometimes they actually believe they’re doing what’s right.”

“And you don’t think that’s just an excuse?” Gus asked. “You don’t believe in any kind of internal moral compass.”

The way he said it made it seem as if he himself did believe in such a thing, which would’ve surprised me a few weeks ago, but now made perfect sense.

“Maybe you start out with that,” she said, “But if you do, it gets shaped as you age. How are you supposed to believe right’s right and wrong’s wrong if everyone around you says the opposite? You’re supposed to think you’re smarter than all of them?”

Dave returned with three water glasses balanced between his hands and passed them out one by one. Julie-Ann seemed reluctant to go on with her son in the room, but neither she nor Gus suggested he leave. Probably because Dave was approximately thirty years old and paying for the house we were in.

“A lot of these people,” Julie-Ann went on, “didn’t have much. I don’t just mean money, although that was true too. There were a lot of orphans. People estranged from their families. People who’d lost spouses and children. At first, New Eden made me feel like … like the reason everything had gone wrong in my life up to that point was that I hadn’t been living quite right. It was like they had the answers, and everyone seemed so happy, fulfilled. And after a lifetime of wanting—sometimes not even wanting anything specific but just wanting, feeling like the world wasn’t big enough or bright enough—well, I felt like I was finally pushing back the curtain.

“I was getting my answers. It was like this great big scientific equation they’d solved. And you know what? To an extent, it worked. At least for a while. You followed their rules, did their rituals, wore their clothes, and ate their food and it was like the whole world was starting to light up from within. Nothing felt mundane. There were prayers for everything—while you were going to the bathroom, while you were showering, paying bills. For the first time, I felt grateful to be alive.

“That’s what they could do for you. So then when the punishments started, when you began to slip up and fail, it felt like there was a giant hand on the bathtub plug, just waiting to yank it up and rip it all away from you. And my husband … He was a good man. He was a good, lost man.” Her gaze skittered toward Dave and she took a slow puff.

“He was going to be an architect. Build sports stadiums and skyscrapers. He loved to draw and he was damn good at it. And then we got pregnant in high school, and he knew all that had to go. We had to be practical. And he never once complained.” Again her eyes gestured toward her son. “Of course he didn’t. We were lucky. Blessed. But sometimes when life throws a wrench in your plans … I don’t know how to explain it, but I just had this sense when we were there. Like … like my husband was clinging to whatever he could grab hold of. Like being right mattered less than being … okay.”

I thought about my father and Sonya. About my mom staying with him, even knowing what he’d done. Her insistence that she’d thought it was over.

Well, why did it ever start? I’d demanded in the car before she had taken up her mantra: I can’t talk about it; I won’t talk about it.

But the truth was, I had a good guess right away.

In the seventh grade, my parents had separated. Briefly—just a couple of months—but he’d gone as far as to stay with some friends of theirs while he and Mom waited to see if they could work things out. I didn’t know the whole story. They’d never gotten to that screaming-match level most of my friends’ divorced parents had reached, but even at thirteen, I had seen the change in my mother. A sudden wistfulness, a proclivity for staring out windows, escaping to bathrooms and returning with puffy eyes.

The night before Dad moved out, I’d cracked my bedroom door and listened to their voices carrying up from the kitchen. “I don’t know,” Mom kept saying tearfully. “I don’t know, I just feel like it’s over.”

“Our marriage?” Dad had asked after a long pause.

“My life,” she’d told him. “I’m nothing but your wife. January’s mother. I’m nothing else, and I don’t think you can imagine how that feels. To be forty-two and feel like you’ve done everything you’re going to do.”

I hadn’t been able to wrap my mind around it then, and obviously Dad hadn’t either, because the next morning they’d explained everything to me while the three of us sat in a row on the edge of my bed and then I’d watched his car pull away with one suitcase in its back seat.

I’d believed life as I knew it was over.

Then, suddenly, Dad was back in the house: proof that nothing was unfixable! That love could conquer any challenge, that life would always, always work out. So when he and Mom sat me down to tell me about her diagnosis, and everything else in our lives changed, I knew it wouldn’t be permanent. This was just another plot twist in our story.