Chapter 7 #3
He paused for a moment, ran his hand through his messy curls. “You can’t give up, okay? Don’t ever give up on the one thing you truly want.”
Nora nodded, and for a little while, all the doubts in her head were drowned out by the sound of the waves hitting the side of the boat.
“Do you have a joint?” Nora asked Emily later that night.
It was almost ten, but Nora didn’t feel remotely tired.
Her conversation with Nate was still running through her head.
And Dad had left her another voicemail, asking if she’d talked to Julia and if he should pay her tuition deposit for the fall.
“Why would I have a joint?” Emily asked.
“I quit smoking pot. And anyway, I flew this year.” But the truth was, she had been thinking about Cara, from Logan Airport.
Emily had saved her number in her flip phone and had been wondering if—and when—it would be okay for her to call it.
She sighed. “I could really use a joint too actually.”
“There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge,” Nora said. “I bought it yesterday at Vons when I picked up my graham crackers. Should we invite Julia to join us?”
“Nah. It’s late. She must be asleep. And she wouldn’t drink with us anyway. She’d probably complain it would go straight to her boobs and make the baby drunk.”
Nora giggled. It was funny only because it felt so accurate. That was exactly what Julia would say. Only she wouldn’t use the word boobs. And she’d have some scientific fact from some book she read to back it up.
Julia was not, in fact, asleep.
She put Veronica down in the Pack ’n Play, and then she noticed something unusual.
The light was on in Nate’s childhood bedroom, directly across from hers.
After Nate had moved back into the house as an adult, he’d taken over the master bedroom downstairs.
Julia hadn’t seen that light on from here in years, even since before Grandma Vera died.
She went to her window and opened it, and then Nate did the same across the way. She had no paper to make an airplane, and anyway, it had been so long, could she still remember exactly how to make one fly into his window?
They stared at each other for a few moments, doing nothing at all, and then Nate made a come-over-here motion with his hand. She hesitated, glancing at the Pack ’n Play. But Veronica was sound asleep, and if she left the window open a bit, she’d still hear her cry from next door.
She ran quietly down the steps, but when she reached the living room, the sound of her sisters’ laughter trailed in from somewhere out back.
She paused for a moment and wondered if they were smoking pot again.
But she didn’t smell it, and she wanted to go next door and see Nate more than she wanted to know what they were doing, so she kept on moving toward next door.
Nate opened his front door before she could reach up to knock, as if he had been standing right there, waiting.
“Hey,” he said softly.
“Hey,” she said. But neither one of them moved. They just stared at each other for another minute.
“It’s a nice night,” Nate finally said. “I was thinking maybe we could take a walk, down Ocean Boulevard to the Del. You know, like we used to.”
She thought about that walk, the first summer they dated, when she was seventeen.
They took that walk every night that week, except the day she’d gotten stung by the stingray.
How many times they had stopped, leaning against the stone seawall along the way to kiss.
How greedy, how hungry they were for each other.
The thought of it now made something ignite in her that she’d forgotten about.
Desire had all but vanished in the second half of her pregnancy, in the first six months of Veronica’s life.
And weirdly, something stirred inside of her again, here, face-to-face with her teenage boyfriend.
As she stood before him, sleep-deprived and in a milk-stained oversized T-shirt!
It was that thought that made her laugh.
Nate smiled. “It’s nice to hear you laugh.
You looked so… so… earlier, this morning, I mean.
” He didn’t finish the thought, as if he wasn’t exactly sure how to describe the terrible way she looked.
Like a tired, overworked, flailing cow, that’s how she’d looked.
And poor Nate didn’t have the vocabulary to figure out a way to say that nicely.
He stepped out of his house and shut the door behind him, standing next to her on the porch. “Come on,” he said. “Walk with me.”
“I shouldn’t. Veronica is next door asleep. She could wake up.”
“And your sisters are there if she does,” Nate said.
“Both are probably high,” she said. “Or drunk,” she added.
Nate chuckled. “They can’t be that drunk. At least not Nora. And we’ll be back in an hour. It’ll be okay.”
He bounded down the steps to the sidewalk and then turned back to her expectantly, waiting for her to join him before he crossed Ocean Boulevard to the sidewalk on the ocean side of the street.
He was right. Veronica was asleep. Emily and Nora were at the house. The cool evening air, the sweet scent of honeysuckle, standing here, being with Nate, it all made her feel a little bit alive again. She couldn’t help herself; she walked down the steps to join him.
They walked down the sidewalk together in silence for a few moments before Nate said, “I can’t believe you actually have a baby.”
Julia laughed. Nate sounded like he was still sixteen years old.
“I mean, what’s that even like, Jules?”
It was one of those things, like anything else, she supposed, hard to believe or imagine until you were actually living it day to day.
And then it just became… strangely normal.
Julia had felt that way about being a wife, a lawyer.
And now a mother too. “It’s nice,” Julia said.
“I mean it’s hard, of course. I’ve barely slept in six months. And my body is a mess.”
Nate shook his head. “You look the same to me. You look great.”
She blushed. Maybe her oversized milk-stained T-shirt somewhat hid her giant sore breasts and her still-bulging belly? “You’re such a liar.”
“I’m not!” Nate insisted. “I think motherhood agrees with you.”
She nodded. “Veronica’s amazing, and sometimes I just stare at her after she falls asleep, and I can’t believe I made her. I made this new, beautiful tiny person somehow, out of nothing. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.”
“Well, technically you and Ted,” Nate joked. “I remember high school health class.”
Julia blushed again. “Right. Ted was involved.” Veronica was half him, so why did it feel like he didn’t do half the work in taking care of her?
Sure, there was the biological aspect of Julia having carried the baby in her womb, breastfeeding her now that she was here.
But since Veronica was born, Ted had gotten a promotion after being part of a team working on Bush v.
Gore. He was swamped and worked longer hours.
It’s not that Julia wasn’t happy for him, it was more that she could no longer totally understand him.
She felt like she was drowning every second she was at work and away from Veronica. He’d been working even more.
“In all seriousness, though, you’re happy, right, Jules?
I was really worried when I saw you this morning.
And now you’re frowning,” Nate said, interrupting her thoughts.
Was she frowning? She made an effort to turn her expression more neutral.
“The baby. Ted. They make you happy, right?” Nate asked.
She nodded, though the truth was what she’d been feeling lately wasn’t anything that resembled happy.
She loved Ted. She loved Veronica. Of course she did.
But she wasn’t exactly radiating joy these past few months trying to balance everything on her own.
But that felt too complicated to explain to Nate, so all she said instead was, “Ted and I actually got in a huge fight right before I left.”
Nate was silent for a few steps, and then stopped at the B Avenue crosswalk, turned, and faced her.
“If you need me to fly to DC and beat the shit out of him, let me know.” He said it with all seriousness, but Nate was the last person who would ever beat anyone up.
Rescuer of spiders and crabs since childhood.
Julia burst out laughing. “I don’t believe you have it in you to do that, one. And two, I can take care of myself, thank you very much.”
Nate grinned. “I know you can, Jules. That’s not what I meant to imply.”
“Anyway, it’s kind of my fault,” Julia admitted quietly as they continued walking. “Ted said something very honest about me that I couldn’t quite process. It’s why I got so mad at him.”
Ted was right. She would never be happy with the way anyone else watched over Veronica.
But at the same time, she had no idea what the hell she was doing as a mother on her own.
She wanted to be everything for Veronica that she’d never had as a kid herself.
Except, she wasn’t even sure exactly what that entailed.
“The real problem isn’t Ted, it’s me. I didn’t have a mother growing up. What if I don’t even know how to be a good mother?”
“You had Vera,” Nate said quickly.
Julia nodded. And she chewed on her bottom lip, considering telling Nate more, what was really bothering her, deep down.
But she hadn’t ever told anyone this particular truth, and if she said it out loud to Nate now, well, then maybe it would be real.
All this time, she hadn’t ever quite admitted to herself it was real.
So instead she said, “Ted and I are going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I do though,” he said softly. “I can’t help it.”
“Of course you do. I’m like your little sister.” She repeated back the words he’d said to her a few years earlier. If there was one thing Julia knew that could sum up almost the entirety of her life, it was that the more times you repeated a lie, the more true it began to feel.
Nate didn’t say anything in response. Up ahead, the Hotel del Coronado came into view, twinkling, the red triangular roofs of the towers lit with white string lights for the summer.
Grandma Vera had told them once that L. Frank Baum had written some of The Wizard of Oz series in Coronado, living in a house just a few blocks from hers, by Star Park, and that some people would say this hotel, with its grand red turrets and beautiful white towers, was his inspiration for Emerald City.
There’s no place like home, Julia thought, staring at it up ahead of them now.
Nate suddenly reached for Julia’s hand, and then they held on to each other as they walked up closer to the hotel.
“If you’re ever not okay, though. You’ll tell me?” Nate said, squeezing her hand gently. “Promise me, Jules.”
“I promise,” she said.