Chapter 17
AFTER GRANDMA VERA DIED, Julia had saved cleaning out the large chestnut armoire in the dining room for last.
Bagging up and donating the contents of Grandma Vera’s closet, kitchen, and living room had been one thing.
She’d set aside the videocassette of Some Like It Hot that they’d watched at least ten summers in a row (which she would give to Nate for safekeeping), the Barbra Streisand records (which she would ship to Nora), and Grandma Vera’s poetry collection (which she would ship to Emily).
For herself, she had set aside Grandma Vera’s favorite crocheted orange-and-green afghan that they had used to warm their legs on chilly nights out back by the firepit.
But all the rest of Vera’s clothes and possessions had been bagged, boxed, and easily loaded into the back of a Goodwill truck.
Everything, that is, but the contents of this armoire.
The miscellany of her life, the entirety of her life.
You couldn’t donate old birthday cards and business cards, bills and letters.
But how did you just… throw them out? Julia stared at the top-left drawer, the memory of what she’d seen within vivid even now, many years later.
What if she’d been wrong? What if she’d been right?
One thing she’d come to admire about Ted in the few months she’d been dating him was his fearlessness, and she imagined, if he were sitting here, he would tell her just to open up the damn drawer, methodically sort through the contents.
He would tell her not to run away, or hide from, or, worse, fear the truth.
Easy for him to say, though, when he had two very alive and still married parents on Long Island, whom he talked to precisely once a week, every Sunday afternoon at two o’clock for twenty minutes.
She knew Ted could never understand this part of her, this wanting.
This longing. She knew, also, that she would never tell him about this.
Even the thought of mentioning it to him felt embarrassing, her biggest weakness.
Still, she had to face it. She took a deep breath, stood, and opened the top-left drawer.
It was more filled than she’d remembered it, stuffed full with stacks of letters.
But the sender, the return address, all seemed to be the same one in Santa Monica that she had glanced nine years earlier when Grandma Vera had sent her to the armoire in search of her ob-gyn’s card.
Julia quickly rifled through the letters now, and it appeared the postmarks went back at least fifteen years.
Julia felt the sudden sting of betrayal. It ripped through her belatedly, years, or decades, too late. It felt hot building up inside her chest, suddenly indistinguishable from grief.
What was she supposed to do now?
She could shred these, throw them away. Make sure Nora and Emily never knew anything about them. Push this down and hide it inside of her, the way she had already for years.
But the budding lawyer in her would never throw away evidence. And she decided in that moment, that’s exactly what these letters were: evidence.
What if one day she wanted to read them? What if one day she needed to read them?
Before she could change her mind, she quickly packed them up inside a small box, and then walked to the post office and shipped them back to her DC apartment.
The night before she left, the house was totally empty.
She’d had all the remaining furniture hauled away to be donated earlier that afternoon, and then, just around dinnertime, she realized, she didn’t have a place to sit and eat or lie down and sleep.
It was unlike her, not to plan for such a thing, and that’s when the grief suddenly crested in her chest, and she sat down in the middle of Grandma Vera’s empty living room and began to cry.
She heard a sudden knock on the front door, and she knew without even getting up. It had to be Nate. Could he somehow intuit every little thing she was feeling, as if it traveled to him in paper airplanes across the short distance between the two houses?
But no, that was ridiculous. She’d told him her flight was in the morning. He’d probably just come over to say goodbye.
She stood and wiped her tears away, straightened her ponytail, and then she walked to the door. As soon as she opened it, his face dropped. “Jules,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. Everything. Grandma Vera was dead, and her entire house was empty, as if she had been completely and irrevocably erased in only a few days and a few donations.
But perhaps the most pressing issue at hand, if not totally what had brought her to tears, was that she hadn’t considered spending one last night in this completely empty house.
“I don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight,” she finally said.
He held out his hand, then patiently waited for her to take it, while she hesitated.
I have a boyfriend, she thought. But Nate was her family.
He’d said the other night that she was like a sister to him.
It wouldn’t do her any harm to take his hand now, to hold on to him and steady herself for just a moment.
“Go get your things and come stay the night at my house,” he said softly.
“Come on,” Nate urged her, his hand still outstretched.
“You can sleep in my childhood bedroom. I’ve been wanting to turn it into a guest room—I haven’t had the chance to fix it up yet.
But my old bed is still in there. You can sleep there. ”
Nate’s bed, where he’d slept as a teenager.
Seventeen-year-old Julia, twenty-year-old Julia would’ve burned up in agony (or was it ecstasy?) at just the very thought.
But here, twenty-six-year-old Julia was so long over Nate.
She had a serious boyfriend! She was almost a lawyer!
Nate was offering her his old bed to crash in for the night, because her alternative was sleeping on the floor.
Case closed. Of course she should take him up on it.
She should take his outstretched hand. There was no reason not to.
But—
The bedsheets smelled like Nate. Or maybe it was this whole entire room.
He said he hadn’t slept here since he’d moved back in, remodeled the master for himself.
But she pulled the covers up to her head and sandalwood and the ocean invaded her nose.
She pulled them down, kicked them away, and still, the smell lingered.
She stood up, went and opened the window, hoping some fresh air would cool the heat that smell had suddenly injected into her limbs.
She stared straight into the now empty, dark space across the way, where she had once stood and thrown paper airplane messages to Nate as a kid.
They would refurnish Grandma Vera’s house to make it suitable for a rental, and she still planned to come back to that very room once a year, every single May.
She thought again about the letters in the box.
Maybe she should’ve just shredded them. Let the past stay buried.
“Jules?” Nate’s gravelly voice came through the closed door. “You need anything? I’m headed to bed.”
She suddenly noticed a tiny hummingbird, flitting in between her window next door and this one, like it was connecting the two with an invisible thread. Like she had always been connected to Nate with that same invisible thread.
She knew what she should say, what she should do, but the hummingbird flew close enough for a moment that she felt like it was trying to tell her something, before it flitted away altogether into the night.
Then, for once, her body and her mind disconnected.
Julia turned away from the window and walked to the door, opening it quickly.
Nate raised his eyebrows, surprised. “Do you need something?”
When Nate’s mother had gotten sick, he’d pushed her away. Now her own body felt heavy from grief, but Julia had the opposite response. She suddenly needed to pull Nate close.
“You,” she heard herself saying in barely a whisper, so for a moment, while Nate stood in the doorway frozen, she wasn’t actually sure she’d actually said anything out loud. “You.” She repeated it a bit louder.
“You don’t mean that, Jules,” Nate finally said.
“I do,” she insisted. Though maybe she didn’t.
It was hard to tell. This was the very first time she’d ever been in Coronado without her sisters and Grandma Vera.
No one would know what happened right now, tonight.
No one except for her and Nate. And it was hard to feel anything except for this nostalgic twist of desire in her stomach, incited by the smell of everything she’d wanted in her teenage years.
“What if we just put tonight in the vault,” she said.
It was the same phrase Nate had used when he’d broken up with her six years earlier.
She’d been twenty, desperately in love with him, desperately sad for the way he was suddenly losing his mother.
She had pulled him out of his house, attempting to pull him out of his grief, held his hand as they’d walked out to the beach, down to the edge of the ocean early one morning.
Nate had leaned down and kissed her, slowly, deeply, more passionately than he ever had before.
And then he’d told her he wanted to break up.
I can’t love you anymore, he’d told her. Let’s just be friends.
What about that kiss? she’d said, suddenly annoyed that his mouth seemed to be saying two totally different things at once.
A goodbye kiss, Nate said.
But why had goodbye felt so much to Julia like desire?
No, Julia insisted, stupidly certain she could still change his mind. What am I supposed to do with everything that kiss just made me feel? I know you’re hurting, but I can help you. We don’t need to break up!
And that’s when he’d said it: Can we just put that kiss in a vault?
He clarified he didn’t want to lose her as a friend.
So why couldn’t they just lock up any remaining sexual tension, lock it away.
Why couldn’t she return the next May and the next and the next, and still act normal, like his best friend next door, like she had for years before they’d ever kissed to begin with.
Why couldn’t mistakes, teenage slips, he’d called them, be corrected, reversed, even forgotten?
Nate just stared at her now, as if he too was remembering that moment on the beach. That last kiss that had meant nothing and everything at once. “The vault is some stupid thing some stupid hurt kid made up a long time ago,” he said.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“You will tomorrow.”
“I won’t,” she insisted. (Though he was right. She would care the next afternoon when she walked back into her apartment, her lips still feeling swollen, and found Ted sitting on the couch waiting for her with a surprise box of welcome-home chocolate chip cookies from Reeves.)
But that night, she really, truly didn’t care.
She couldn’t think or see beyond what was right in front of her: Nate.
He was still staring at her, standing firmly in the doorway, and then she reached for him, grabbing a fistful of his T-shirt in her hand, and pulled him closer to her, into the room, up against her chest. He moaned softly, like he had been waiting for her to do just that for years.
He leaned down and kissed her, gently, hesitantly at first. “Are you sure?” His mouth moved close enough to hers that she felt the words on her own lips more than she could hear them.
But instead of answering him, she kissed him back.