Chapter 16 #2
“I’m really pulling for you to get this.” Leo was still talking. “Go in there and give it your all, but I have your back, kiddo.” He shot her another easy smile.
And then she struggled to recall why she hadn’t called him back three years ago.
Why in the hell shouldn’t she audition for him or let him help her now?
She suddenly remembered what had attracted her to Leo in the first place, that in spite of everything he had working against him (and the fact that he had a wife and a kid), he always, deep down, truly seemed to believe in her in a way no one else did or could.
“Thanks,” she told him. “I really appreciate this. It was so nice of you to think of me for this part.”
He nodded. “I’ve missed you a lot, kiddo,” he said.
And then she walked into the audition, trying to push that comment out of her mind. She told herself this was about her. Not him.
A month later, Julia sat on the white leather sectional in the Ocean Boulevard house, watching Nora’s eyebrows knit together as she reviewed a script.
Nora had sent both her and Emily an email to let them know that rehearsals on her new show were set to begin the week she got back from Coronado, and so she would need time in the schedule this week to prepare.
Emily hadn’t responded. Julia had replied all: No problem. We can work it in—congrats, superstar!
But Nora had only been here an hour, and she already seemed a million miles away.
Julia had tried to sound super supportive over email, still feeling guilty about the way she’d totally missed Nora’s last big stage role.
But now she wished Nora would put her script away, at least for a few days.
And she hoped she could convince her after Emily got here.
Julia had arrived in Coronado feeling oddly unmoored and she needed Nora to be her normal fun self.
Ted and Veronica had gone to the Hamptons for the week, and Julia had silenced her BlackBerry.
She’d decided she would check it only periodically, just in case any family emergencies should arise.
(Ted promised her they would not. And Julia did feel he had this one week a year down pretty well at this point.) Then Ted, half-serious, had said to her right before she left to catch her early-morning flight: Don’t disappear on us again, Julia.
He’d said it like it was a joke, but she’d found it entirely unfunny on all fronts.
That wasn’t what had happened two years ago, and Ted knew it.
He’d known where she was the whole time she was gone.
Nate had called him from the hospital, and then again from his house the following week.
Ted had known she’d needed the mental, emotional, and physical space to process the way her body had betrayed her.
Two years later, his joke about it made it all feel raw again.
And it irritated her that he could find humor in her falling apart.
“Well, you neither,” she’d chided back earlier this morning, trying to keep her voice light. “Don’t you fall in love with the Hamptons and leave me.”
Ted had groaned and rolled over in bed, pulling the covers over his head.
They both knew he hated the beach, and that he didn’t even remotely love the Hamptons the way Julia loved Coronado—he loved that his mom would dote on Veronica for the week while Julia was away.
And that’s why he went. And that’s why Julia hated that he went.
And that’s probably why he made sure he definitely went.
“Have a good week. Love you,” Julia had said as she’d wheeled her suitcase out of their bedroom.
He’d probably said Love you back, but she was already down the hallway and didn’t hear him say anything.
“Have you guys talked to Nate yet?” Emily said later that night, as she roasted their marshmallows over the backyard firepit.
Nora had finally put her script away. Julia had had a glass of wine at dinner and her cheeks were red now, her face more relaxed as she sat wrapped in an afghan on the outdoor sofa, waiting for Emily to prepare their treats.
Nora shook her head. Julia said, “A few weeks ago. Why?” But the truth was she hadn’t actually talked to Nate in almost two years at this point.
They’d emailed. Mostly business about the rental, with the exception of a few pictures he’d sent of Mallory’s first birthday a few weeks earlier, and one she’d sent him last fall of Veronica’s first day of second grade. It felt safer that way. Email.
“Did he tell you about Heidi?” Emily said, squishing a melted marshmallow and chocolate in between two graham crackers. She handed the first one to Nora.
“What about Heidi?” Nora asked, licking the melted chocolate off her forefinger before taking a bite.
“She left,” Emily said, lowering her voice to a whisper, so on the off chance Nate walked out into his backyard he wouldn’t hear. They all glanced next door briefly, and the house was dark and quiet. He didn’t appear to be home.
“Left how?” Julia frowned.
“Like moved out in the middle of the night, note on the kitchen counter that she wasn’t equipped to be a mom, left.” Emily handed the second s’more to Julia. But Julia’s stomach churned and she suddenly wasn’t hungry.
“How do you know this?” Julia felt stunned in disbelief and did not immediately take a bite of the s’more.
“I ran into him earlier, when I was walking on the beach, and he told me.” Emily shrugged. “So neither of you knew?” Emily made a pained face.
Julia thought about Mallory, what it would be like for her to grow up without her mother around, and then, later, to know that she had a mother who’d once abandoned her.
She thought about Nate, who was suddenly, deeply in the trenches of parenthood all alone.
She put her s’more down on a napkin, unable to take even the smallest bite.
“What kind of a woman would do something like that, abandon her own daughter?” Nora sounded aghast, but she finished off the last of her s’more with one final bite.
Julia averted her eyes, focusing on her magenta polished toenails, and Emily was concentrating very hard at assembling the final s’more for herself.
“A selfish fucking bitch,” Emily said sharply. “That’s who.”
The harshness of the words made Julia feel even more uncomfortable. She squirmed a little, curling her toes. But the truth was, Emily wasn’t wrong. Julia knew that better than anyone.
On Friday afternoon, Emily spotted Cara standing at the corner of Orange and B Avenues.
They were supposed to meet for lunch at Miguel’s, and as Emily walked there down Orange, suddenly, she saw Cara’s lithe frame in a floral sundress, standing beside the B Avenue sign, as if that’s where she’d been planning on meeting Emily all along so they could walk the rest of the way to the restaurant together.
She raised both her arms up to wave, and a smile erupted across Cara’s pretty face.
Damn it. Why does she still look so good?
Emily had agreed to meet for lunch, but only at the end of the week.
Thinking that if she saved this for last, she’d get it over with quickly, fly back to Florida, and forget all about Cara.
And yet, seeing her standing there again, Emily felt something erupt in her chest, something painful, different from what she’d been expecting.
She’d thought she would be angry, but instead all she felt was deeply hurt.
Cara had abandoned her, once. Why was Emily so easy to walk away from?
“I love your hair!” Cara exclaimed, walking toward her now, then reaching a hand up to touch Emily’s short, blonde crop.
Emily had almost forgotten about the boring shoulder-length brown hairdo she’d once sported, a lifetime ago, back in Boston.
“Can I give you a hug?” Cara asked. “Is that all right?”
Before Emily could answer, one way or another, Cara had wrapped her arms around her and squeezed her tightly. “God, it’s great to see you. I’m so glad we made this work.”
Cara still smelled like strawberries and summertime, and for the moment it took for Emily to extricate herself, she struggled to breathe.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she said abruptly, stepping back.
She was thinking about poor baby Mallory, about her own mother, about the way she had felt that cold Boston winter walking back and forth on Beacon Street below Cara’s apartment. Alone. Unworthy. Left behind.
“You can’t do lunch?” Cara laughed.
Emily shook her head. It wasn’t lunch. It was people who disappeared.
Cowards, liars. The kind of selfish people who didn’t stick around when things got hard.
That was what Emily couldn’t and wouldn’t do.
And maybe Cara had a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of it.
She’d driven all the way here from LA just to see Emily!
But Emily suddenly didn’t care; she couldn’t hear it.
She didn’t want to hear it. “I’m sorry,” she said instead.
And she really did feel a little bit sorry as she turned around and walked in the opposite direction down Orange, leaving Cara standing all alone at B Avenue, her pretty mouth agape.
Julia spotted Nate struggling to make it down his porch steps with a stroller.
It looked like a Bugaboo from her spot across the yard on Grandma Vera’s front porch swing, but she decided that it must be a knockoff.
Nate didn’t seem like the type to spend $1,200 on a stroller.
Unless Heidi did. But damn, did a woman really spend that much on a stroller and then just abandon her kid?
“Jules, hey.” Nate had seen her and now that he’d gotten the stroller down the steps, he’d stopped on the path, called out to her, and waved.
She blushed, wishing she hadn’t been staring at him so intensely. She wanted to tell him it was the stroller she’d been staring at, not him, but instead she said, “Long time no see.”