Julie
1962
W
ithin a matter of days, we had packed our belongings and left the bungalow for the last time, and that put an end to my sleuthing. Isabel’s funeral took place the day after we returned to Westfield. I didn’t go because I woke up that morning with what, in retrospect, was surely a psychosomatic stomachache. Simply lifting my head from the pillow caused the room to spin and my stomach to churn. Lucy was sent to a neighbor’s house, while I stayed home alone with my aching belly and my troubled conscience. I wondered if I had cancer. I was terribly afraid of dying with such an enormous mortal sin on my soul.
The following Saturday, I waited for my turn in the confessional. I sat between my mother and Lucy in the pew at Holy Trinity, trying to figure out what I would say to the priest. I was
always so mechanical in the confessional with my carefully rehearsed list of sins. This sin did not fit neatly into my usual categories, and although I’d tried to think of a way to confess many times since it had happened, I still walked into the tiny dark cubicle with no idea how to begin.
It didn’t matter. The second the priest drew back his little window, I started to cry. I recognized my confessor as Father Fagan, the oldest priest in our parish. He was white haired and walked with a limp, like my father, and he had big hands that had rested gently on my head more than once over the years. I let out huge, gulping sobs that could probably have been heard throughout the church. I thought my mother might open the door to the confessional to see that I was all right. Maybe she would hold me as she had not held me since Isabel’s death, but that didn’t happen.
Father Fagan managed to find a break in my weeping to say, “Tell me what’s troubling you, my child.”
“I…” I gulped down a fresh set of tears. “I did something that got my sister killed,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. His voice was very calm, not at all incensed or shocked, and I wondered if he knew about Isabel’s death and my role in it. I would later learn that he had been the priest at her funeral. “I think it would be good if you and I met together in the rectory tomorrow after church,” he said. “Could you do that?”
I was surprised. I couldn’t imagine confessing my sins face-to-face with a priest, but I knew I could not decline the invitation.
“Yes, Father,” I said.
“Good. Come see me at one o’clock and we’ll chat.”
I started to stand up, but dropped to my knees again. “What if I die between now and then?” I asked. “I have a mortal sin on my soul.”
“You’re forgiven that sin, child.”
“But…I haven’t even told you what I did. It’s…I think it’s unforgivable.”
“Nothing’s unforgivable, Julie,” he said, stunning me by using my name. “Right now, go to the altar and say three Hail Marys and make a good act of contrition. And then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said, standing up again. But I didn’t feel forgiven. I felt as though he didn’t quite understand how terrible I’d been.
The next day, my father took me to the rectory and waited in the parlor while I spoke with Father Fagan. We sat in a small room furnished with fancy chairs and a chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling. I told him everything I’d done, and he listened, nodding slightly every once in a while.
“Your sin was envy.” He sat in a large chair that made me think of something a king might sit in. He held the fingertips of his hands together as though he might start to pray at any moment. “And lust for your sister’s boyfriend,” he continued. “And lying to your parents, as well as to a number of other people. And also, disobedience.”
I nodded as he catalogued all the things I’d done wrong.
“But,” he said, “your sin is not murder.”
“It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t—”
“You did not mean for her to die.”
I lowered my head and watched as a tear fell from my eyelashes to form a dark stain on my blue skirt. “No,” I said.
“You did not mean for her to die,” he repeated, as if he wanted me to truly believe it.
I shook my head. “I loved her,” I said.
He nodded. “I know,” he said. Then the tone of his voice changed, and I knew we were coming to the end of our ses
sion together. That disappointed me. I could talk about everything here. I couldn’t talk about any of it at home. “Julie,” he said, in his new voice. “I want you to feel you can come to me any time you need to. Any time. You can call me in the middle of the night if you need to. The Lord and I will always be here for you. Now, let us pray for your sister’s soul.”
That’s what we did. For a few minutes, I sat with my head bowed as he asked God to watch over Isabel. I felt the tiniest molecule of peace work its way into my heart as he spoke.
When we had finished praying and I was on my way out of the office, it suddenly occurred to me that he had not given me a real penance. The Hail Marys from the day before surely didn’t count; they were far less than I would have received from the priest in Point Pleasant for one single impure thought.
“You forgot to give me my penance,” I said, my hand on the doorknob.
“You need no penance from me,” Father Fagan said. “Your true penance is that you will have to live with what you did for the rest of your life,” he said.
He could not have been more right.
My grandparents put our bungalow on the market, and it sold quickly. That, too, was my fault. The house had meant so much to all of us and had been part of my family’s history for nearly forty years. We would never again go down the shore in the summer. That chapter of our lives was over.
No one ever said,
Julie, you are to blame for this, you are a horrible person,
but no one needed to. Everyone knew that was the truth. It was weeks before my mother could talk to me without asking me,
“Why? Why? Why?”
For a while, I felt cut off from
the warm family life I had always known. That improved over time, although except for my father’s initial compassionate response to me, no one ever said,
It’s all right, Julie. We know you didn’t mean for Isabel to die.
Only Father Fagan provided that sort of comfort in the weeks and months that followed Izzy’s death, but I really needed to hear those words from someone in my family. And I never did.
Lucy
“D
o you recognize that little building?” Julie asked me, as we turned the corner into Bay Head Shores. She pointed to our left, where a tiny antique shop was tucked beneath the on-ramp of the Lovelandtown Bridge.
I shook my head. “Not even a little bit,” I said.
“Well, it looks completely different, of course,” Julie said. “And the big bridge was just a little one back then, but the antique store used to be the corner store. Or at least that’s what we used to call it.You loved the penny candy.”
“I remember the penny candy,” I said, picturing long strips of colorful candy buttons.
“One time we rode our bikes here and got sprayed by the mosquito truck on the way home,” Julie said.
“I remember that, too,” I said. “I fell off my bike and cut my
arm.” I looked at my arm as though expecting to see a scar, but I wasn’t even sure which arm I’d injured. “We’ll probably die premature deaths because of that DDT or whatever it was,” I added.
Julie turned the next corner. “Do you want to drive by the bay and our old beach before we go to Ethan’s?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Later,” I said. I had a urinary-tract infection, which seemed terribly unjust since I hadn’t had sex in months. At that moment, all I could think about was using the bathroom at Ethan’s house.
It was early on Friday afternoon and Ethan had invited Julie, Shannon, Tanner and me to his house for the weekend. Shannon and Tanner had begged out, but I’d accepted. Something was pulling me down to the shore. I wanted to see what I remembered.
For a number of reasons, I wished that Shannon and Tanner were with us. I wanted my niece to see an important part of her mother’s childhood, but more than that, I thought that both Julie and I needed more time with Shannon and Tanner. I liked the little I knew of Tanner. I’d only gotten to spend time with him at the barbecue, but he’d impressed me and I thought Shannon could do far worse than a bright, socially conscious—not to mention handsome—young man. Not nearly young enough; I agreed with Julie on that point. Still, that was not our choice to make. The thing that wrenched my heart and that I knew was killing Julie, was that Shannon wanted to move so far away from us. I remembered what it was like to be young and in love and yearning for my independence, and visiting home had been one of the last things on my mind.
“You know,” I said now to Julie, “we’ll just have to go to Colorado ourselves a couple of times a year. We’ll take Mom with us.”
“What?” She glanced at me in confusion, then laughed. “Oh, you’re back on that topic again.” We’d talked about Shannon and Tanner for most of the ride down the shore, but I could see that Julie had now shifted gears to our old neighborhood and Ethan. “I don’t plan to go to Colorado a couple of times a year,” she said, “because I don’t intend to let Shannon go.”
“She’s pregnant,” I said. “She can become legally emancipated and do whatever she likes if she wants to.”
“Can we talk about this later?” she asked, as we turned yet another corner.
“Sure,” I said. We’d recently gotten into this dance of Julie denying the reality of Shannon’s leaving and me trying to force it down her throat. “Sorry to be a pain,” I added.
To our right, between some houses, I saw the canal.
“Oh!” I said. “Is this our old street?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow. I’d never recognize it,” I said. Then I asked rhetorically, “Where did all these houses come from?”
Julie stopped the car in front of a sunny yellow-and-white Cape Cod.
“Do you recognize this one?” she asked.
I didn’t. “Is that ours?” The house meant nothing to me.
She nodded.
I looked at the mailbox, painted to resemble the sea and topped by a sailboat. “Somebody loves this house,” I said.
“And this is Ethan’s house,” Julie said as she pulled into the next-door driveway. She opened the car door before even turning off the ignition. The recent change in her was dramatic. I knew she was upset about Shannon, and I knew the past was weighing heavily on her in a way it had not for many years, but there was also a
joy in her I couldn’t remember ever seeing before, not even when she was falling in love with Glen as a young woman. And the cause of that joy walked out the front door of his house and over to us, giving Julie an embrace that lasted several seconds as he planted a kiss on her neck. The scene made me smile.
“Welcome, Lucy!” he said to me, giving me the much shorter and more perfunctory version of the hug he’d laid on my sister.
“Hi, Ethan,” I said. “I’m desperate for a bathroom.”
He laughed, pointing behind him to the house. “Halfway down the hall on the right,” he said. “We’ll meet you in the yard.”
When I left Ethan’s bathroom, I headed for the back of his house. Through the open jalousies on the sun porch, I could see the canal clearly and suddenly everything seemed familiar. I walked outside to where he and Julie were leaning against the chain-link fence watching the beginning-of-the-weekend array of boats on the water. I felt almost dizzy with déjà vu. The current was so fast, and I remembered my fear of it. I’d have nightmares of falling into the canal and being swept away by the water as I struggled unsuccessfully to swim into one of the docks.
I shivered as I leaned against the fence next to my sister.
“Whew,” I said. “I remember how scared I was of the water.”
Julie put her arm around me. “You were,” she said. “Poor little kid.” She nodded in the direction of the yard next door. I had not even thought to look over there. “Do you remember it?” she asked.
I looked across a short metal fence to see a little boy playing in a swimming pool. He was riding—and falling off—a huge plastic alligator, while a heavyset, dark-haired woman relaxed
with a book on a lounge chair nearby. I could see the top of a boat in the fenced-in dock, but the long, dark, deep-green screened porch was the most familiar part of the scene to me.
“I’d love to see the house inside,” I said. “See how it’s changed.”
“It’s totally different,” Ethan said. “I’ll give them a call later and we can go over.” He glanced at Julie. “You don’t have to go with us, if you don’t want to.”
Julie bit her lip. “I think I can do it,” she said. It was clear they’d had a conversation about this before.
We spent the rest of the afternoon on Ethan’s boat on the canal and the river. It was my first voyage ever in those waters, since I’d been too chicken to go out on our boat when I was a kid. I loved it now, but what was most amazing to me—
thrilling
to me—was seeing Julie in a boat again. She laughed when the wake of a much larger boat sent a wall of water crashing over us, making us look like two women in a middle-age wet T-shirt contest. She was not only finding love in Ethan, I thought, but also a rekindling of the courage and vitality she’d lost many years ago. Watching her laugh put a lump in my throat.
After dinner, as the sky turned fuchsia from the setting sun, we strolled barefoot across our old front yard and knocked on the frame of the screen door. The young dark-haired woman I’d seen in the backyard pushed the door open for us.
“Hello!” she said, as we entered. “I’m Ruth Klein. And you guys must be the former residents of our house.”
“Hi, Ruth,” Ethan said to her. “This is Julie Sellers.” He rested his hand on Julie’s back. “And her sister, Lucy Bauer.” We stood packed into the hallway near the front door.
“When did you live here?” Ruth asked. She was beautiful in
spite of the fact that she was quite overweight. Her pink skin was flawless, her blue eyes a vibrant contrast to her dark hair.
“Our grandfather built the house in 1926,” Julie said. “Lucy and I lived here during the summer in the fifties and early sixties.”
“Oh, wow,” said Ruth. “I bet it’s totally different by now. Where do you want to start your tour?”
“Well,” Julie looked at the partly open door on our left. “This used to be our grandparents’ room.”
“Go ahead in.” Ruth leaned forward to push the door open. It was a small room with a queen-size platform bed and sleeklined dresser and armoire. “This is the master bedroom, as you can probably tell,” she said.
Julie nodded. “And across the hall was the bathroom.”
“Still is,” Ruth said, and we followed her across the hall, taking turns peering into the tiny bathroom. The toilet and pedestal sink looked new. In the corner was a small triangular tub.
“We just had a shower there,” Julie said.
“I think the people before us put the tub in,” Ruth said.
We walked a short distance down the hall. “Here’s our son’s room.” Ruth pointed to her left. Inside, the room was just barely wide enough to fit a twin bed and a tiny dresser.
“This was Mom and Dad’s room, right?” I looked to Julie for confirmation.
“Yes.” She smiled. “They didn’t have much space, did they?”
Across the hall was the kitchen, and it was unrecognizable as any room we’d ever lived in, with white glass-fronted cabinetry and granite countertops. Julie laughed.
“Well,” she said, running her hand across the blue-gray granite. “I can tell you our kitchen looked nothing like this. This is beautiful.”
“This—and being on the water, of course—were what sold us on the house,” Ruth said.
We walked the last few steps of the hallway into the living room, which was painted a soft yellow and furnished with chairs and love seats upholstered in a variety of blue-and-yellow prints. Gauzy white curtains hung at the windows.
“This room seems much more open than it did before,” I said.
“You’re right,” Julie said. “I think it was a darker color or something. I love it like this.”
“We used to play Uncle Wiggly in here,” Ethan said.
“I beg your pardon?” Ruth asked with a laugh.
“It was a board game,” Julie explained.
I looked down at the oak-colored laminate beneath my bare feet. “This used to be linoleum,” I said. Then my eyes were drawn to the staircase at the side of the room. “Look!” I said. “Real stairs!”
Julie laughed. “We had pull-down stairs when we were kids,” she said. “Lucy was terrified of them.”
“Would you like to see up there?” Ruth asked.
“Would you mind?” Julie lifted her hair off her neck, as she often did when she was having a hot flash. “It was an open attic when we were kids,” she continued. “Just a bunch of beds divided by curtains.”
“Like a dormitory?” Ruth asked.
“Sort of.”
The three of us followed Ruth up the stairs, where we discovered the attic had been completely transformed. Now it contained an office with three skylights, a large playroom, two small bedrooms and a bathroom with a shower. Everything
looked scrubbed and neat and well loved. You would have to work really hard to feel any bad memories in this house, I thought. There was nothing from the past left to trigger them.
I thought of asking to use the bathroom. I was okay for the moment, but I knew that my infected urinary tract could and would act up at any minute. Julie, Ruth and Ethan, though, were already heading back toward the stairs. I could wait.
Once we were downstairs again, Julie turned to Ruth. “It makes me happy to see how nice the whole house looks,” she said, touching our hostess’s arm. “I can tell you love living here.”
“We do,” she said, guiding us through the open French doors onto the porch. “Was the porch screened when you lived here?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” Julie said, looking from one end of the porch to the other. “This is where we spent most of our time.”
I remembered the porch. Of all the house, it had changed the least, perhaps because the view was still of the small sandy backyard and the water. A long farm table and six ladder-back chairs stood where our old table used to be, and white faux wicker rockers and love seats and coffee tables filled the rest of the space.
The little boy I’d seen in the pool was sitting in the backyard, sharing a lounge chair with a man who appeared to be reading to him in the fading light. Nothing made me happier than seeing a parent sharing a book with a child.
Ruth must have seen me watching them. “Come meet my family,” she said.
We walked outside. The sand in the backyard was already cooling down, and it felt good beneath my feet. The man spotted us and he and the boy stood up.
“Hi, Ethan,” the man said. “And these must be the former owners.”
Ethan introduced us to Ruth’s husband, Jim, and their seven-year-old son, Carter. We chatted about the house and the area for a few minutes, swatting mosquitoes as darkness began to close in on us.
Julie’s gaze shifted to the part of the yard nearest the corner of the house. “When I was a kid,” she said, pointing, “I buried a box of treasures right over there.”
“A treasure box?” Carter asked, looking interested in our conversation for the first time.
Julie nodded.
“Could it still be there?” Ruth asked.
Julie shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe someone found it during the last forty years, or they had some work done to the house foundation and it got disturbed.”
“Or maybe it
is
still there,” Ethan said. He nudged Julie. “Do you want to see?”
Julie looked at our hosts. “It wasn’t buried very deep,” she said, and I knew she was reassuring them that we wouldn’t be digging up their entire yard. “Just a few inches, really.”
Ruth looked at her husband, whose expression said,
Why the heck not?
“I’ll get a shovel and flashlight,” he said, and he headed toward the garage.
Carter looked up at Julie. Even in the dim light, I could see he had his mother’s pretty blue eyes. “What did you put in the box?” he asked.
“Things I found,” she said, as we started walking toward the corner of the house. “Just silly things.”
Jim returned with a garden shovel and a strong halogen lantern.
“You know,” Ruth said, looking at the small shovel her husband had provided, “people have brought in fresh sand over the years. We had a couple of truckloads come in when we moved here. It might be down pretty far by now, if it’s still there at all.”
Julie took the shovel and knelt in the sand, glancing at the corner of the house, taking some measurement with her eyes. I could tell that, even after all this time, she knew exactly where the box should be. With the shovel, she smoothed away a couple of inches of sand from the surface of the ground. Then she set the blade of the shovel into the sand at a ninety-degree angle, and we heard it hit something solid.