People passed her on the street and gave her sympathetic glances. Canadians could be like that—quietly sympathetic but politely distant. Julia was grateful for their sympathy and even more grateful that no one stopped to ask why she was crying. For her story was both too long and too utterly fucked up to tell.
Julia never asked herself why bad things happen to good people, for she already knew the answer: bad things happen to everyone. Not that this was an excuse or a justification for wronging another human being. Still, all humans had this shared experience—that of suffering. No human being left this world without shedding a tear, or feeling pain, or wading into the sea of sorrow. Why should her life be any different? Why should she expect special, favored treatment? Even Mother Teresa suffered, and she was a saint.
Julia did not regret looking after The Professor while he was drunk, even though her good deed had not gone unpunished. For if you truly believe that kindness is never wasted, you have to hold tightly to that belief even when the kindness is thrown back in your face.
She was ashamed that she’d been so stupid, so foolish, so na?ve as to think that he would remember her after a drunken binge and that they could return to the way things were (but never were, really) that one night in the orchard. Julia knew that she’d been swept up into the romantic fancy of a fairy tale, without any thought of what the real world, and the real Gabriel, was like.
But it was real—the old spark was there. When he kissed me, when he touched me, the electricity was still there. He had to have felt it—it wasn’t all in my head. Julia quickly pushed those thoughts aside, willing herself to stick to her new, non-Emerson diet. It’s time to grow up. No more fairy tales. He didn’t care enough to remember you back in September, and he has Paulina, now.
When she entered her little hobbit hole, she took a long shower and changed into her oldest and softest flannel pajamas—pajamas that were pale pink with images of rubber duckies on them. She threw Gabriel’s T-shirt to the back of her closet where it hopefully would be forgotten. She curled up on her twin bed, clutching her velveteen rabbit, and fell asleep, physically and emotionally spent.
While Julia was sleeping, Gabriel was warring with his hangover and fighting the urge to dive into a bottle of Scotch and never resurface. He hadn’t gone after her. He hadn’t run for the stairwell and stumbled down thirty flights to meet her at the lobby. He hadn’t taken the next elevator and raced to the street to catch her.
No, he’d stumbled back to his apartment and slumped into a chair, so he could wallow in nausea and self-loathing. He cursed the roughness with which he’d treated her, not just this morning, but since his first seminar back in September. A roughness made worse by the fact that she had suffered saint-like in silence, all the while knowing exactly who and what she was to him.
How could I have been so blind?
He thought of the first time he’d seen her. He’d returned to Selinsgrove in depression and despair. But God had intervened, a genuine deus ex machina. God sent him an angel to rescue him from Hell—a delicate, brown-eyed angel in jeans and sneakers with a beautiful face and a pure soul. She comforted him in his darkness and gave him hope. She seemed to cherish a sincere affection for him despite his failings.
She saved me.
As if that salvation wasn’t enough, the angel appeared to him a second time, the very day he’d cruelly lost the other strong force of goodness in his life, Grace. The angel sat in his Dante seminar, reminding him of truth, beauty, and goodness. And he responded by snapping at her and threatening to push her out of the program. Then this morning, he was cruel and compared her to a whore.
I’m the Angelfucker now. I’ve fucked over the brown-eyed angel. Gabriel cursed the irony of his name as he walked to the kitchen to retrieve her note.
Holding her beautiful, fragile message in his hand, he saw his own ugliness—not an ugliness of body but of soul. Julianne’s note, and even her breakfast tray, confronted Gabriel’s sin in a manner that was stark, convicting, and absolutely unrelenting.
She could not have known this, but in that moment her words from a week ago rang true. Sometimes people, when left alone, can hear their own hatefulness for themselves. Sometimes goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is.
Gabriel dropped her note onto the counter and buried his face in his hands.
***
When Julia finally awoke it was after ten o’clock in the evening. She yawned and stretched, and after making a very sad bowl of instant oatmeal and barely being able to choke down a third of it, she decided to check her voice mail.