Seeing Julia (7 page)

I pause, take another deep breath, and glance over at the good doctor. He just regards me with those grey eyes of his, too much like Evan’s, takes notes, and watches me.

“I said to the officer. “It won’t be stopped. Will it? The happiness is really gone forever. This pain is never going to go away. Is it?”

“You should sit down,” he’d said back to me and asked me my name.”

“I’m Julia Hamilton,” I answered. I remember the sparks flying as one of the fireman wielded another saw and cut through the metal from the other direction. All the firemen exhibited this desperation; their faces contorted with stress and recognizable fear. And, I kept wondering;
does mine?
”

I inhale air and hold it for a moment. I count to fifteen. My breath uneven now as I practically gulp for the air.

“Then, I said, and, that’s Evan,” and pointed toward the Porsche again. “My husband, Evan Hamilton. He’s twenty-eight, more than a year older than me. This is Reid, our son, he’s six and half months old.” I remember reaching for my baby’s hand. His fingers felt so small in mine. “What’s your name?” I’d asked the officer.”

“He answered. “I’m Lieutenant Grant,” His voice was so soothing, a priest giving benediction, gravelly. He looked from me, to Reid, to Evan’s car, and back again at me.”

“I remember saying to the officer, “I think I’ll sit down.” And, then, all I saw was ice cream, and the post office, and the little market a mile up the road from our beach house, and Evan’s face, then, just his smile. It’s the last thing I remember seeing.”

I look over at Dr. Brad Stevenson now. Conveying an are-we-done-here? look.

“And,” I say with inevitability. “That’s why I hate Advil.”

The psychiatrist regards me with his steady professional gaze, but his hand trembles betraying his own turmoil over my story. He glances down at his watch.

“Time’s up,” I say. All he can do is nod.

≈
≈*

“Do you go back and read those? I mean some people take notes and then never read them. What do you do?”

“I read them.”

“Good for you. I never read them. I’ll take notes and commit them up here.” I point to my temple. He watches me from this introspective place, trying to figure me out, I suppose.

I bequeath him with my most devastating smile, the smile Kimberley taught me long ago. The smile that gets a girl everything she wants. She’s right, of course. It does. Only, I don’t know what I want, so I falter with it, now. The good doctor shifts in his chair and gets this uncertain look.

Note to self: Got to watch who you smile at like that.

“Ms. Hamilton,” he begins again. His fingers form a steeple in front of him now, he seems in contemplative thought.
The thinking man
. My smile gets wider at my racing thoughts. “Tell me about Afghanistan.” My smile disappears.

“I’ve never been there.”

“You hate a place you’ve never seen?” His feigned surprise amuses me on some level, but I reward him with a withering glance.

“Sometimes, you don’t have to see it to hate it, Dr. Stevenson. Surely, you understand the power of hate.”

“Who did you lose in Afghanistan?”

“I don’t … talk about that.”

“Whatever you say to me doesn’t leave this room. It’s between us. No one else. You wrote it down.” He gives me a nonchalant shrug. “That’s the first indication that maybe you want to talk about it. Tell me about these things that start with the letter
A
that you hate.”

Stunned into silence, I contemplate my next move. The more I talk to him, the more I feel the emotional shield I normally hide behind begin to disintegrate. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if I’m in a Hatha yoga class.

“If we’re going to talk about Bobby, we have to start at the beginning,” I say with deprecation. He nods encouraging me with this sympathetic look and his rapt attention. “So, Kimmy,” I incline my head, questioning him with a glance, to determine if he remembers Kimberley from the more than ten times he’s seen her in my hospital room the past four days. He inclines his head again.

“So Kimmy sees me at Chicago O’Hare. I’d just turned eighteen. I’m incognito. I’d dyed my hair, changed my name. I was on my quest to get out of there. I had my suitcase with all my belongings in it and I stood at the reader board and was trying to decide where I wanted to go. But then, I saw Kimberley. Kimberley Powers. We’d gone to school together at Hopkins before the courts sent me away to live with my grandmother.

It’d been over two years since I’d seen her. She looked even more awesome at eighteen. In my mind, I was unidentifiable, but I was still worried she’d seen me and struggled to remain nonchalant. But she passed by me, like a model, swanking down the runway with her long legs, wearing a black and white ensemble with black strappy sandals.”

I shake my head and laugh at the memory of her. “I remember studying the reader board even more intently, hoping she hadn’t recognized me. Rio de Janeiro. Reno. Raleigh. South. West. East. Where to go? Her perfume assailed me first and then, her lyrical voice, when she said, “Julia Hawthorne. Where have you been for past two years?”

I smile over at Dr. Stevenson.

“She will not be
denied
. She convinced me to head to L.A. with her. As you can imagine, you don’t say no to Kimberley Powers. She was the coolest girl at Hopkins. She was on her way to L.A. to meet up with a former classmate of ours, Bobby Turner. I
definitely
remembered him from two years ago.”

I walk back over to the window and look out at the bleak winter day. I stare at my own reflection. This stranger stares back.
Who am I now?

“So, we boarded the plane for L.A., despite my normal distrust of people.” I glance back at the doctor and see his slight amusement at my comment. “I spent the majority of the flight filling her in on what had happened to me for the past few years. I even shared the finer details about my grandmother and her drinking and how I’d been little more than an indentured servant to her, while she waited to get her hands on my trust fund. That day. My eighteenth birthday.

I’d been to the bank, cleaned out my account and shown up at Chicago O’Hare and all Kimmy said was, “Well, your double down secret is safe with me.”

I expel a gratifying sigh, now, and allow myself to experience a little happiness at the memory of Kimberley and her solemn vow. My secrets have always been safe with her.

“So we deplane. And, there’s Bobby, just inside the terminal at LAX. He’s leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest, wearing these black jeans and a white Polo shirt with the UCLA Bruins logo, a true golden boy. I think I actually shivered, when he shook my hand and said, “Nice to
see
you, again, Julia.” I’d been away from New Haven for a few years and the guy still remembered my name. I remember Kimberley looking at me funny and glancing down only to discover I was still holding Bobby Turner’s hand.”

I laugh at the memory and the feeling it evokes. I think it surprises the good doctor. He gets this incredulous look on his face.

“Somehow, with astounding ingenuity, Bobby manages to load all of our luggage in his white Porsche. The top was down and I sat in the middle, my bare legs straddling the stick shift. His hand was in constant motion, shifting the gears. I was trying to find air, while his hand was brushing against my inner thigh every few seconds.” I blush as I tell this part of the story and note Dr. Stevenson is still looking at me in veiled astonishment.

“We arrive at this fabulous beach house he’s rented with Kimberley in Marina del Rey and I walk in with my suitcase and he takes it from me and says, “Your room is this way. Here, let me show you.” I smile over at the doctor. “My room was his room. Just like that, he loved me and I loved him.”

I stop talking. It takes a few minutes to recover, to find enough detachment left inside of me to go on.

“The three of us attended UCLA. He’s in the ROTC program and playing soldier on the weekends every so often and I didn’t pay any attention to this aspect of his life. He talked about law school and I talked about being a writer. Our life together was amazing and grand. Our future predetermined, like the stars in the galaxy. After graduation, we were going to get married right on the beach. We’d buy a house, have kids, he’d be a lawyer, I’d write.”

My smile vanishes.

“Then 9/11 happened and he talked about what he needed to do for his country and I just didn’t get it. I was busy planning our wedding on the beach at Marina del Rey and he was talking about Afghanistan and duty. So when he told me he’d made his decision, I thought, great he was ready to set a date. We’d been talking about keeping things simple and I was saying June at the same time he was saying my orders are for Afghanistan and he was leaving at the end of the January. He’d signed up to serve as second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Not the Christmas present I hoped for.” I walk back from the windows and stand in the middle of the room and gaze at the good doctor. My breath comes less even, now.

“So, we’re together, only I was in L.A. trying to breathe without him. And, he’s in Afghanistan and had begun to wonder what he’d gotten himself into, going on three years. He sent me a letter every day. I had more than a thousand letters from him.” I give the psychiatrist a pleading look, but he just inclines his head encouraging me to continue.

“Kimmy spent her free time trying to distract me. She was good that way, always up for distraction. She convinced me to go to a movie and we had a few drinks at a bar afterward, so it was late when we got home. She kept reminding me all night that Bobby would be home in sixty-three days for good. As if I needed reminding, I’d told her, it’s sixty-two days, twelve hours and twenty minutes and ten seconds, to be exact.” I smile at the memory, then, it falters. “I already had my wedding gown. I was going to marry that guy as soon as he got off the plane. No fanfare, no guests, just a minister, Kimberley, Stephanie our other roommate, Bobby, and me. So, we had just gotten back to the beach house and Kimmy pressed the blinking light on the answering machine. I remember Bobby’s dad’s voice filled the room in this inconsolable tenor as he said you need to come back to New Haven, Julia.” I stop and take a breath. “My life had been over for twenty-one hours and thirty three minutes. I just didn’t know it,” I whisper now.

I count to thirty, trying to take even breaths, in and out. All the while, Dr. Bradley Stevenson concentrates on me with this incredibly sad look on his face. With a sudden need to sit down, I steal into the chair opposite him and put my head between my hands.

“Bobby was killed in
Afghanistan
,” I say in a low voice. “He was twenty-four. They didn’t keep him safe. The
Army
didn’t keep him
safe
.” I can hear the hostility in my voice. I raise my head from my hands and just look over at Dr. Bradley Stevenson as if to say,
solve that one, doctor
.

“I’m sorry.”

“Everybody is. Everyone is always
sorry
.”

“Sometimes that’s all we can be. No one can pretend to understand your pain.”

“Right.” I look over at him in distress. “But everybody
tries
.”

We share five minutes of pure silence. I watch the clock tick off the time. Five minutes ten seconds. Five minutes twenty seconds. Five minutes thirty seconds. I sigh. Apparently, I’m supposed to end this absolute stillness. “Do you ever just want to say, fuck it? Fuck all of it? Because I do. Sometimes, that’s all I want to do.” I stand up and walk over to him and touch his hand, trailing my fingers along his forearm in the same suggestive way Kimberley always appropriates with men. Of course, I am way out of my depth, beyond my normal character fiber, but I press on. “What do
you
want to do, doctor?”