Then Came You (24 page)

“How are the boys?” I asked, after I’d ordered fruit and she’d asked for apple cobbler. When she reached into her purse for her phone pictures I knew she’d have, I saw a sippy cup, the box for a Dan Zanes CD, a wallet bulging with change and receipts, and I recognized her, the way it felt like that performance artist had once recognized me, like I could see who she really was; everything she wanted, everything she dreamed of. At that moment I felt like I could be a sort of fairy godmother, not just an employer but a friend. I could make her dreams come true the way I’d wanted someone to make my own dreams come true . . . the way I’d wanted my mother to come back, to take me out of that cold and cheerless house in Toledo and take me to California, land of golden sand and lemon trees and men who’d play their guitars on the beach.

Annie looked startled when I reached across the table and squeezed her hand, but she squeezed back gamely, smiling at me. “You must be so excited,” she said. “This must feel like it’s taking forever.”

“I can wait,” I told her. I’d waited for love, I’d waited for Marcus, and I could wait until May for the arrival of the baby who would serve as living, breathing, evidence of our love; the baby who would make us complete.

A
fact I have learned as I’ve moved further away from childhood: if the telephone rings before seven a.m., it’s never good news.

In the predawn gray on a Thursday morning in October, the buzzing of my BlackBerry jolted me awake.
Rajit,
I thought, rolling over with my eyes still shut. I’d been in the office until eleven the night before, working on the common stock comparison for a footwear factory that one of our clients in Kansas was planning to acquire, and rather than bothering Kimmie, who went to bed at ten, I spent a rare night at home. Rajit had probably forgotten his passwords again (after being up all night doing cocaine, I suspected) and was calling me to get them.

I saw a Pittsburgh area code—not Rajit, then—and pressed the button that would connect the call. “Hello?”

I half expected I’d hear my father’s voice, but instead, there was a stranger on the other end of the line, a woman who sounded young and unsure of herself. “Is this Julia Strauss?”

I sat up, my mouth suddenly dry and my heart beating too loudly. “Yes.”

“This is Sergeant Potts with the Pittsburgh Police Department.” I knew then, before she had to say another word. “Your
mother gave me your contact information. I’m calling about your father. I’m afraid I have bad news.”

“Is he...” I swallowed hard, my throat clicking. “Is he in trouble? Did he get arrested? Does he need...”

“We got a nine-one-one call this morning, just after five a.m. Your father’s girlfriend had found him unresponsive. The para-medics made attempts to resuscitate him, but...”

But.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you,” said Sergeant Potts, “your father is dead.”

I closed my eyes, holding perfectly still, like maybe if I didn’t move I could unhear what I’d just heard. Outside my door, my roommates were stirring around me, getting ready to start a normal day, Amanda plodding into the kitchen to make coffee, Wendy flushing the toilet and turning on the shower. “Ma’am?” the police officer said.

“How did it happen?”

“The investigation isn’t complete,” she said. “We’re still talking to people. Gathering evidence.”

“Were there drugs involved?”

Sergeant Potts paused.

“My dad was in rehab this summer,” I said. “He was in a halfway house for six weeks after that. He was going to meetings. I thought . . .” My voice caught in my throat. I thought he’d get clean. I thought he’d be grateful. I thought my sacrifice would have meant something.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Yeah, I’m sorry, too.”

I left Rajit a message, telling him there’d been a death in my family and that I’d need the rest of the week off. I pulled my laptop out from under the bed, turned my back to the door, and called my mother. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, no.” I could picture
her, in her blue robe, her hair in a ponytail, coffee mug in her hand, pitying me and Greg, of course, but maybe feeling relieved, too, glad that this was over, that he wouldn’t be in the newspapers again, that he wouldn’t embarrass us anymore.

“Sweetheart, there’s nothing more you could have done,” she said. “I hope you know that.”

But it hadn’t mattered. Nothing I’d done had mattered. I bit back my tears. I had arrangements to make, plane tickets to book, a funeral to plan. “Do you know anything about what he’d want?” I asked.

She sighed. “Probably the veterans’ cemetery. That was what he always said.”

I told her I’d call her once I’d bought my ticket. She said she loved me and that she’d see me soon. Then, because I couldn’t think of what else to do, I went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. “Jules, you’re gonna be late!” Amanda sang toward the door. Amanda was an actress, which meant, these days, that she was mostly a caterer.

“I think I’m sick,” I said. My voice was convincingly froggy, which would spare me the trouble of telling them what had happened. I’d have to do it eventually, have to endure their sympathy and come up with some story about my father’s death, but not yet. I made sure the door was locked, picked up my phone, and called Kimmie.

“Hey!” I could hear noise around her. She was in the subway station, I figured. On her way to the lab, with her backpack bouncing on her narrow shoulders, sneakers neatly laced. Something inside of me shifted, and I felt almost faint with longing. I wanted so badly for her to be with me.

“Hey!” came Kimmie’s voice again, bright and almost jubilant. “Jules, is that you, or are you pocket-dialing?”

“It’s me,” I managed. One tear rolled down my cheek
and plopped onto my shirt, leaving a damp circle. “My father died.”

“Oh,” Kimmie said. “Hang on. I’ll be right there.”

I packed up my makeup bag, my toothbrush, my comb. From my free-standing wardrobe, I extracted a black skirt and gray blouse, an outfit that always made Rajit, wit that he was, tell me I looked like I was on my way to a funeral. Black pumps, a bra, and a few pairs of panties. I had other stuff, sweatpants and T-shirts and pajamas, at my mother’s place.

My BlackBerry lay on my rumpled bedspread, blinking, probably already filling up with messages from work. I ignored it, pulling on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, yanking on socks and my running shoes and shoving everything into a duffel bag.

Forty minutes later Kimmie was at the door, with a to-go cup and a cinnamon roll in wax paper. She shooed me into the kitchen, which was blessedly roommate-free, and handed me the cup. “What can I do?” she asked. “How can I help?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I was collapsed at the table for two wedged into what the real-estate agent had optimistically referred to as a “breakfast nook.” Part of me had known this day would come ... but, even so, I’d done very little to prepare for it. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve never done this before.”

“Drink,” said Kimmie. I took a sip from the cup. The tea was hot and strong, laced with sugar. “Where’s Dad now?” she asked.

“Huh?” For a second, I’d thought she was talking about her father, not mine. I tried to remember whether I knew, finally shaking my head. “I’m not sure.”

“You got that police officer’s number?”

I hadn’t written down the number, but it showed up on my
BlackBerry. Kimmie hit “redial” and lifted the phone to her ear. “Yes,” she said, in a crisp voice, one I recognized from the admissions office, when she’d take parents’ phone calls. “May I speak to Sergeant Potts, please?” She waited, then said, “Hello, I’m a friend of Julia Strauss. We’re on our way back to Pittsburgh, and I need to know . . .” She paused, then nodded.
Scritch-scratch
went her pen. “Mmm-hmm. Yes. I see. And how long will that take?” More writing. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to live in my head right now, which insisted on serving up a slide show of my father, cold and stiff and dead on the shag carpet of that crappy apartment . . . and of a child with my face, a child that would be half mine, a little boy or little girl I would never know. The price I’d paid. The sacrifice I’d made for nothing.

“Can you give me that number?” Kimmie was asking. “Should I have the funeral director get in touch?” I watched her, wondering, dimly, how she knew how to do all of this. Who had she buried? I’d have to ask.

She hung up the phone and set it, facedown, in the middle of the table. “They took his body to the medical examiner’s office. There’s going to be an autopsy, because it was . . .” She paused, looking flustered for the first time, glancing at her notes. “Because he didn’t die in a hospital, I guess, so there wasn’t a doctor there. That’s what they have to do.”

“He overdosed.” My voice was flat. Kimmie got up from the table and stood behind me, one hand resting lightly on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly.

“Can you . . .” My voice was almost inaudible. I could barely get the words out. “Will you come with me?”

She answered instantly, as if nothing else were even possible. “Of course I will,” she said.

•  •  •

Kimmie gave me the window seat on the plane. I leaned the top of my head against the glass and stared out at the sky. All through the ride, she kept giving me things—a novel, a honey-nut granola bar, a bottle of water, tissues. I read, or tried to; I ate and drank what she gave me; I cried, wiping my eyes with my sleeve; and every once in a while I’d manage to tell her something about my dad: how he’d taken me horseback riding once after I’d seen
International Velvet
on TV, how proud he’d been when I’d gotten into Princeton. Kimmie listened quietly, nodding. “You must have loved him very much,” she said. For a while, when no one was looking, she held my hand.

It was getting dark when we landed in Pittsburgh. My mother picked us up, her eyes red, her hair still frizzy, tucked into its morning ponytail. “There’s soup and frozen pizza if you’re hungry, and, Jules, I put the air mattress in your room, and there’s fresh sheets...”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Did Greg get in touch?” my mother asked.

“He texted.” My brother had, indeed, sent a message consisting of two words:
NOT SURPRISED
. For Greg, our father had died a long time ago ... probably the night he’d stolen Greg’s prized possession, a baseball signed by Reggie Jackson, and sold it. Since then Greg seemed to have decided, maybe unconsciously, that the easiest thing for him to do was to simply hate our father, to forget that, once, he’d been a good dad.

“I’m glad you’ve got such a good friend,” my mother whispered after Kimmie carried our bags up the stairs, slipping quietly out of the room to give the two of us time together. I didn’t answer, didn’t even think to wonder if she suspected Kimmie was more than that.

Upstairs, Kimmie and I took turns in the shower, then had a funny little fight about which one of us should take the air
mattress. Finally, I lay down on my bed and Kimmie lay down beside me, fitting her body against mine. I buried my face in the silken net of her hair, and that was how I slept.

The next morning, my mother drove us to the Hoffman Funeral Home, then sat outside waiting in her car. “I could come in,” she’d offered, her voice tentative, and I told her what she expected to hear: “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

The office floor was thickly carpeted; the chairs were plush and padded. There was a pitcher of ice water on the sideboard, a metal urn of coffee, and a pair of cut-glass decanters, one with amber liquid, the other with something clear.

Monday morning,
I told the Hoffman who was helping us, a middle-aged, round-faced man who wore a sober gray suit and a small, sympathetic smile. I told him I would bring clothes for my dad to wear, that the coffin would be closed, that my mother should get the flag that would drape the coffin, and I’d get the bullet casings from the gun salute. (“As a remembrance,” Mr. Hoffman said, and I’d nodded, wondering briefly what I was supposed to do with spent shell casings. Put them in a candy dish? String them on a length of silk thread and wear them as a necklace? Offer them to Rita, who I’d have to deal with soon?)

There was a display room, where I picked out a simple coffin—it was one of the least expensive, and still more than two thousand dollars. “Now, what were you thinking in terms of a service?”

“Small,” I said. “Just the family.”

“And will you be writing an obituary? We can help with that if you...”

“No obituary.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. The air in the room felt thick and unwholesome.
The newspapers had already had enough to say about my dad, after the car accident, after his trial. Maybe they’d use the official notice of his death to dredge up the old stories, and write a piece about the disgraced schoolteacher’s unsavory demise. For all I knew, the shame could have been part of what killed him. My dad could have literally died of embarrassment.

Mr. Hoffman touched my arm. “Are you all right? Why don’t we sit down?” Kimmie poured me a glass of water, and I gulped it gratefully.

“Now. How many copies of the death certificate will you require?”

I looked at Kimmie, who shrugged. “I don’t know. What do I need them for?”

“Your father was a teacher, right?”

I nodded, not bothering to correct him, to explain that my father hadn’t been a teacher for years, that for years he hadn’t been anything but a junkie and a drunk.

“So he’ll have a checking account, a savings account. Investments. Cars and a house in his name . . .” I let him talk, not bothering to correct him as he listed the things that a man of my father’s age and station should have had. We agreed on twenty copies, I wrote him a check, shook his hand, and told him I’d see him at the cemetery.

My mother was waiting in the parking lot, with her cup of black coffee and a book on tape. “Greg called,” she said. The Camry started with an unpleasant grinding sound. I wondered how long it would run and if she’d have enough money to replace it, and whether I’d be able to help. “He’s not going to be able to make it.”