CHAPTER 21
Julie
I hadn’t intended to call Ethan after I got out of the interview. I was certain I’d cut into his work time the day before and didn’t want to take up any more of it, so my plan was to drive back to his house, leave him a thank-you note, and head home. But as I pulled away from the police department, still shaken from so many unexpected questions, the memories churned in my head and I felt lonely with the weight of them. George. Ned. Isabel. They were all I could think about, and I hadn’t said anything I’d wanted to say about them to the police. I’d screwed up the interview, letting my interrogators rattle me. I needed Ethan. I needed to talk. To vent. I swerved over to the side of Bridge Avenue, stepped on the brake and grabbed my cell phone. I had to dial three times before I managed to tap out the right number.
“Julie?” Ethan answered the phone. “How’d it go?”
I started to cry, unable to find my voice.
“Meet me at my house,” he said. “Are you okay to drive?”
“Yes,” I managed to say. I felt such relief at reaching him.
His truck was already in his driveway when I arrived at his house. I walked inside without knocking and he greeted me in the hallway, pulling me into a hug as he had the day before, but this one was not a surprise and it felt natural and welcome to me. I pressed my forehead into his shoulder, my hand against his back, clutching the fabric of his shirt.
“Shh,” he said, as if comforting a child in the middle of a nightmare. “It’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.” He took a step away from me. “Do you want to sit outside or on the sunporch?”
I thought of the neighbors in my old bungalow, possibly sitting on my old screened porch, watching me fall apart in Ethan’s backyard. “Sunporch,” I said, already walking toward the back of his house.
I sat on the white wicker love seat facing the canal, and although there were other seating options available to him, Ethan sat down next to me. He’d been working outside; the skin of his arm was hot against mine and I could smell the scent of sun and soap on him. I was glad he was there with me. We were on different teams in the investigation, wanting and expecting different outcomes, yet I knew he would understand how I felt.
“So,” he said, “what got you so upset?”
“They questioned me as if I were a suspect,” I said.
We were sitting so close together that I couldn’t really look at him, but I felt him nodding.
“I was afraid of that from some of the questions they’d asked me about you,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t really suspect you, though. They just need to rule you out. They have to look at everyone who was involved at the time. They asked me some tough questions, too.”
“I just never expected it,” I said. “I’d never thought about the case from the authorities’ perspective. I do look guilty. I had the motive. I knew where she’d be. I was there at the same time.” I shook my head. “I understand why they’d have to look at me that way. It’s just that it took me completely by surprise. And I got angry and said I had nothing to do with her murder, but of course…” My voice caught in my throat.
“Of course what?” Ethan asked.
“Of course I did have something to do with it.”
“Julie.” He took my hand and held it on his thigh. “You were only twelve. You were a child.”
People had said that to me before. Friends. Therapists. But Ethan had been there. He’d known me. He’d known the sort of person I was. The words meant more to me coming from him.
“Thinking about everything made me remember…caring things about Isabel,” I said. “We didn’t get along that summer, but I know deep down we cared about each other. I know I loved her.”
“Of course you did,” Ethan said. “Ned thought I was a jerk and treated me accordingly back then, but I still know he loved me. And,” he added, “I also know he loved Isabel. That’s why it doesn’t make sense that he’d kill her.”
I watched a sailboat make its graceful way toward the bridge. A child wearing a life preserver was on board with her two parents, and it looked like her father was trying to teach her to dance.
“I’ll tell you what I told the police,” I said, my thoughts returning to Ethan’s comment about Ned. “I told them that you can never really know another person.You don’t know what was really going on inside of Ned, Ethan. No one could.” Glen had provided my unhappy introduction to that theory. “I thought I knew my ex-husband as well as I knew myself,” I said. “I thought he was so in love with me. I thought he was honest and honorable. But while I was thinking all those things, he was having an affair.”
“Oh.” Ethan rubbed the back of my hand with his thumb. “I know what that’s like,” he said. “So did Karen. My ex-wife.”
“Really?” I wondered how similar our experiences had been. “Did it go on a long time?”
“About a year.”
“Glen’s, too,” I said. “At least I think it was only a year, but like I said, I didn’t really know him. How did you find out?”
“She told me. She was in a play with the local community theater and she came home one night and told me she was in love with the director of the play and wanted a divorce.”
“Wow,” I said. I tried to imagine the scene. Which room of this house had they been in when she told him? Had he slept in the guest room that night? Or had she? Glen had slept on the sofa in the family room; our guest-room bed had been covered with boxes of my books. “Were you devastated?” I asked.
“Completely,” he said. “I’d never pictured myself getting a divorce. It wasn’t a word in my vocabulary. My parents were married nearly sixty years, and they were excellent role models on how to run a marriage. They had good communication and a lot of love. I thought my marriage was the same way, but I was wrong.”
“That’s what I mean,” I said. “You have this illusion of what someone is like.You assume that if the marriage is great for you, it’s great for them, and unless they speak up, you don’t have a clue.”
“Your husband didn’t speak up?”
I shook my head. “No, and guess how I found out?”
“How?”
“The woman called me. She said she knew Glen was struggling with how to tell me, so she decided to tell me herself.”
Ethan laughed. “Well, you know who wore the pants in that relationship,” he said.
“I thought it was a cruel hoax,” I said. “Maybe one of Glen’s co-workers was angry with him and trying to hurt him. But when Glen came home that evening and I told him about the call, he started to cry…and that was the beginning of the end.” I let out my breath in a long stream. “It was so incredibly painful to imagine him with someone else.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said, and I knew he understood. “Did he end up marrying her?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “They broke up right after he and I separated.” I looked down at our hands where they rested together on his thigh. His skin was a ruddy color, his beautiful fingers smooth on top, rough on the bottom where they pressed against my skin. There were tiny, nearly microscopic, lines everywhere on the back of my own olive-toned hand. My hands were turning into my mother’s. “It was partly my fault,” I said. “The end of our marriage. I was a workaholic.”
“Are you still?”
I had to laugh. “Well, I was, until this whole thing with Ned’s letter came up. I haven’t written a word since then. At least not a word worth publishing.”
“I try not to think in terms of fault,” Ethan said. “I know it sounds trite, but Karen and I just drifted apart. She got very involved in her theater work and it was new and exciting for her. She got more and more into it until she said she wanted to move to New York to have a better chance at acting.”
“Really! Is that where she is?”
“Uh-huh. She married her lover, but she’s not acting, ironically. She’s still teaching, just as she was here. I think she’s happy, though.”
“You don’t sound angry,” I marveled.
“I’m not. I’ve forgiven her. It wasn’t easy for her, either.”
Men handled the end of relationships better than women did, I thought. “I think I’ve forgiven Glen,” I said, not sure it was the truth. “But I still get angry with him for not letting me know he was unhappy. For being so passive. It’s hard to fix something if you don’t know it’s broken.” I thought of Shannon and the toll the divorce had taken on her. “Does Abby know about her mother?” I asked.
“That she left me for another guy?” he asked, and I nodded. “Yes. It was no secret. She was furious with her for a while, but they’ve worked it out.”
“Shannon doesn’t know,” I said. “I don’t want her to think badly of her father.”
“That’s wise of you,” he said.
I rested my head against the wicker back of the love seat, looking at the paneled ceiling of the porch. “My own relationship with her is going south fast, though,” I said.
“How come?”
“She says I’ve suffocated her and I probably have,” I said. “Sometimes I feel as though she hates me. When I came to your house the first time and Abby was leaving, she told you she loved you, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time Shannon
said those words to me.”
“You tell her, I guess?” Ethan asked.
“Of course. And either she doesn’t respond, or she says something like ‘uh-huh.’”
Ethan chuckled. Then he asked, “How often do you tell your mother you love her?”
I was taken aback. Never, I thought with a jolt. The last time had probably been when I was a child. Probably before Isabel’s death. “I show her I love her in a lot of ways,” I said.
“It’s not the same, though,” he said. “You want to hear those words from Shannon, but how can you expect her to say them to you when you don’t even say them to your own mother?”
I was quiet, thinking. How did you express those feelings after a lifetime of holding them in? I thought of calling my mother right that moment and telling her I loved her. I couldn’t do it, and I knew the reason why: I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to say the same words back to me.
The topic was a sad, difficult one, and still I liked sitting there with Ethan, talking with him about everything on our minds. It was perfect, like pillow talk without the sex. What could be better? Yet there was a very small part of me that was wondering how it would feel if our hands were resting on my thigh instead of on his. I liked this new and improved Ethan very much.
“I’m sorry I was so cold to you when we were twelve,” I said.
He laughed. “Don’t be,” he said. “I was in my own little world. I was an oddball, and a frustrated one, because I had a huge crush on you that summer.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I thought you were so cool, a tomboy but with a certain twelve-year-old feminine charm.”
I laughed as well.
“But I didn’t know how to talk to you anymore,” he said. “You’d matured beyond my reach. I wanted to go crabbing and fishing with you, like we used to. I wanted to ask if I could go out in your boat with you, but I knew you didn’t want me hanging around you anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If I’d known you’d turn out this good, I would have let you tag along, believe me.” The words poured out easily, and I was not sorry I’d said them.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s really nice to hear.”
A moment passed and again I found myself imagining his hand on my thigh, my belly tightening a bit at the thought.
“You had so much spirit,” Ethan said. “You were such an adventurer.”
“That girl’s gone,” I said with some sadness. “She died when Isabel did.”
“I bet she’s still in there somewhere,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Life is so good, Julie,” he said. “And it’s so short. We’ve got to take advantage of every minute we’re given.”
“Are you on antidepressants or something?”
He laughed again. “I’m just lucky,” he said. “I think I got an overabundance of serotonin when I was born. Maybe I got Ned’s share.” He sobered at that thought, growing quiet, and I let him have his silence. Then he spoke again. “I think I was influenced by my parents,” he said. “They were very positive, can-do sort of people. I always remember something my father said in one of his speeches after he lost his bid for governor. We were all there with him. It was in Trenton, and I was standing behind him with my mother and Ned, and I was about fifteen and trying not to cry because I didn’t want to look like a jerk, but I felt really sorry for my father. He’d worked so hard on his campaign and, to me, it seemed as though nothing mattered anymore. Dad did the usual sort of speech about thanking his staff and the people who’d voted for him. A reporter shouted out the question, ‘What will you do now?’ and my father waited a minute and then answered that he didn’t believe the old adage that when a door closes, a window opens. He said he believed that when a door closed, the entire world opened up to you, and that he would find other ways of serving the people. And that’s what he did. He reopened his law practice and took pro bono work. We had money, so that was never the issue. He worked quietly and tirelessly until he retired. Anyhow, his words that day stuck with me. He didn’t stay mired in his sadness.”
“He was a wise man,” I said. I was thinking, A man like that would be able to tolerate learning about his son’s guilt. He would be able to bounce back from that revelation.
Ethan must have been thinking along similar lines.
“You know what, Julie?” he asked.
“What?”
“We’re going to have to tell our parents about Ned’s letter before the cops do.”
“I know,” I said, resigned.
Ethan let go of my hand and put his arm around me. “And maybe an ‘I love you’ when you share that news with your mother might soften the blow,” he said.