“They lit the ballroom up for the holidays, with the tree in that one corner. They had a menorah, too, of course, but they didn’t really mean it,” said Patti. “Oh, damn. I’m going to get teary, thinking about Immie in that blue velvet dress. I bought her a holiday dress for that concert, royal blue with darts down the front.”
“Immie rescued me on my first day at Greenbriar,” said Jule. “Someone knocked into me in the cafeteria line, and spaghetti sauce splashed all over my shirt. There I stood, looking at all those glossy girls in clean clothes. Everyone knew each other from the lower school already.” The story flowed easily. Patti and Gil were good listeners. “How could I sit down at anyone’s table when I had sauce, like blood, all over me?”
“Oh, sweet potato.”
“Immie came striding over. She took my tray out of my hands. She introduced me to all her friends and pretended she couldn’t see the mess all over my shirt, so they pretended they couldn’t see it, either. And that was that,” said Jule. “She was one of my favorite people, but we never kept up after I moved away.”
Later, in the living room, Gil settled into the couch with his oxygen tubes in his nose. Patti brought out a thick photo album made of gilded paper. “You’ll let me show you pictures, won’t you?”
They looked through old photographs. Jule found Imogen exceptionally pretty—short and a little impish. She had light hair and fat dimpled cheeks that later became high cheekbones. In many of the pictures she was displayed in front of some attractive destination. “We went to Paris,” Patti said, or “We visited a farm,” or “That’s the oldest carousel in America.” Immie wore twirly skirts and stripy leggings. Her hair was long in most pictures, and a little wild. In later pictures, she had braces on her teeth.
“She never had any adopted friends after you left Greenbriar,” said Patti. “I always felt we failed her that way.” Patti leaned forward. “Did you have that? A community of families like yours?”
Jule took a deep breath. “I didn’t have that.”
“Do you feel your parents failed you?” asked Patti.
“Yes,” said Jule. “My parents did fail me.”
“I think so often that I should have raised Immie differently. Done more. Talked more about the difficult things.” Patti rambled on, but Jule didn’t hear her.
Julietta’s parents had died when she was eight. Her mother passed away from a long and gruesome illness. Shortly afterward, her father bled himself out, naked in a bathtub.
Julietta had been raised by another person, that aunt, in a home that was not a home.
No. She would not think about it anymore. She was erasing it now.
She was writing a new story for herself, an origin story. In this version, the living room was trashed. In the dark of night. Yes, that was it. The story wasn’t finished yet, but she ran it through as well as she could. She saw her parents in the circle of light created by the streetlamp, dead in the grass with the blood pooling black beneath them.
“We need to get to the point,” said Gil, wheezing. “The girl doesn’t have all night.”
Patti nodded. “What I haven’t told you, and why we asked you here, is that Imogen dropped out of Vassar after first term.”
“We think she got in with party people,” said Gil. “She didn’t work up to her potential in her classes.”
“Well, she never did love school,” said Patti. “Not the way you obviously love Stanford, Jule. Anyway, she left Vassar without even telling us, and it was a month before she even got in touch. We were so worried.”
“You were so worried,” said Gil. He leaned forward. “I was just angry. Imogen is irresponsible. She loses her phone or forgets to turn it on. She’s not good with calling, texting, any of that.”
“It turns out she went to Martha’s Vineyard,” said Patti. “We used to go there all the time as a family, and she ran away there, apparently. She told us she rented a place, but she didn’t give us an address, or even a town.”
“Why don’t you go see her?” asked Jule.
“I can’t go anywhere,” said Gil.
“He has kidney dialysis every other day. It’s exhausting. And he has to have procedures,” said Patti.
“All my insides are coming out soon,” said Gil. “I’m going to be carrying them around in a bag.”
Patti bent and kissed him on the cheek. “So we had the idea that maybe you’d like to go over, Jule. To the Vineyard. We thought of hiring a detective—”
“You thought about it,” said Gil. “A ridiculous idea.”
“We did ask some college friends of hers, but they didn’t want to interfere,” said Patti.
“What do you want me to do?” Jule asked.
“Make sure she’s okay. Don’t tell her we sent you, but text us so we know how things are going,” said Patti. “Try to convince her to come home.”
“You’re not working this summer, are you?” asked Gil. “No internship, nothing like that?”
“No,” said Jule. “I don’t have a job.”
“Naturally we’ll pay your expenses to the Vineyard,” said Gil. “We can give you gift cards for a couple thousand dollars, and we’ll pay for a hotel.”
The Sokoloffs were so trusting. So kind. So stupid. The cats, the dogs who pooped on the deck, Gil’s oxygen tank, the albums full of pictures, the worry about Imogen, the interference, even; the clutter, the lamb chops, the chatty way they talked, everything was wonderful.
“I’d be glad to help you out,” Jule told them.
—
Jule took the subway back to her apartment. She opened her computer, did a search, and ordered a red Stanford University T-shirt.
When it arrived a couple of days later, she yanked the neck until it was loose and sprayed the bottom edge with bleach cleaner to make a stain.
She washed it repeatedly until it was soft and seemed old.
STILL THE SECOND WEEK OF JUNE, 2016
NEW YORK CITY
One day before dinner at Patti’s, Jule stood on a street in upper Manhattan, holding an address on a scrap of paper. It was ten a.m. She wore a flattering black cotton dress with a square neckline. Her heels were black, too, with a sling back and a sharply pointed toe. They were too small for her. She had a pair of running shoes in her bag. She had made up her face in a style she thought of as college girl. Her hair was in a bun.
The Greenbriar School occupied a number of renovated mansions along Fifth Avenue at Eighty-Second Street. The stone facade of the upper school, where Jule was to work, stood five stories high. A curving set of steps led to statues by the entrance. Big double doors. It looked like a place where you could get a highly unusual education.
“Event is in the ballroom,” said the guard as Jule went in. “Staircase on your right to the second floor.”
The entryway had marble floors. A sign to the left read MAIN OFFICE, and a corkboard next to it listed the graduating seniors’ college destinations: Yale, Penn, Harvard, Brown, Williams, Princeton, Swarthmore, Dartmouth, Stanford. They seemed like fictional locations to Jule. It was strange to see them written down like a poem, each name on its own line, and each word speaking an immensity.
At the top of the stairs, the hall opened into a ballroom. A commanding woman in a red jacket came forward with a hand outstretched. “Catering? Welcome to Greenbriar,” she said. “So glad you could help us today. I’m Mary Alice McIntosh, the fund-raising chair.”
“Good to meet you. I’m Lita Kruschala.”
“Greenbriar was a pioneer in education for women beginning in 1926,” McIntosh said. “We occupy three beaux arts mansions that were originally private homes. The buildings are landmarked, and our donors today are philanthropists and supporters of education for girls.”
“It’s an all-girls school?”