Chapter 34
IN JANUARY, AFTER THEY moved Veronica into her dorm in Connecticut, Julia and Ted drove back home together to Maryland, taking two-hour shifts each on the six-hour drive, which they passed listening to a murder podcast. Julia found herself thinking the whole ride back, Why couldn’t we just exist like this for the next thirty years?
But as soon as they got home, Ted started packing up his things.
They’d already pushed their divorce plan six months, when Veronica switched to Adley as a spring start.
And apparently, Ted’s girlfriend, a young paralegal at his firm, had already moved into a bigger apartment in anticipation of Ted’s finally joining her.
He didn’t want to make her wait even another moment.
He told Julia this while he packed up his clothes, and then he told her she could stay in the house for a few months while she figured things out.
That he didn’t think they should worry about putting it on the market until summer, after Veronica’s first semester, when they could tell her about the divorce too.
“God, you’re such a cliché,” Julia told him as she stood in the doorway to their bedroom, watching him fold his shirts. “You’re actually leaving me for some twenty-five-year-old?”
“Julia,” Ted said calmly in response. “I’ll try to say this in the nicest way possible, but you don’t want me, and you don’t want this life.
You haven’t been happy in years.” He paused for a moment, and then added, “And you can’t say I’m leaving you when you checked out of this marriage a long time ago.
Do yourself a favor and figure out what you actually want. ”
“Fuck you,” she said in response, her voice shaking.
Then Ted suggested they take a cooldown period where they wouldn’t speak at all until summer, so they could hash out the details amicably come June or July once she was feeling calmer.
Never mind that they had already been in a four-year cooldown period.
Julia said nothing in response. Ted took his bags and left.
Suddenly, all alone in her huge, quiet house, Julia didn’t know what to do with herself.
So she worked, and she worked. And she worked some more.
Some nights she fell asleep at her desk after midnight and woke up at four a.m., not even bothering to go home and shower before she started work again later that morning.
And by May, she was so exhausted and burnt out that she made a huge, ridiculous mistake and filed the wrong brief for the wrong case.
Her boss pulled her aside, told her she was worried, and that she thought Julia looked terrible and needed a break.
I want you to take all your PTO and come back to us refreshed.
So, Julia wasn’t exactly fired on top of everything else. But she did have a six-week forced vacation starting in the middle of May.
She had all the time in the world, so why not drive to Coronado?
She remembered Emily had done it once, years ago, in the old beater family car.
Certainly, she could pack up her fully loaded 2018 Volvo SUV and make the drive in one piece.
She’d always wanted to do a cross-country road trip with Ted, when Veronica was younger.
But there was never enough time. Never enough vacation days to make all the effort.
And now, finally, she had the chance. She convinced herself this was a good thing. An adventure.
Two murder podcasts later—somewhere in Arkansas (or maybe it was Oklahoma?)—Julia stopped at a gas station to fill up, and then she ran into the very dark, disgusting bathroom to pee.
Another hour of highway passed before she realized she’d been driving in silence, that she had put her phone down on the sink in that gas station bathroom to thoroughly wash her hands, and that she must’ve forgotten to pick it back up again before she left.
She would get off at the next exit, circle back.
But by the time she made it back to the disgusting bathroom, her phone was long gone.
At first, Julia burst out crying when she’d realized she’d lost her phone in a gas station bathroom.
What else? What more could be taken from her? She’d already lost everything. Everyone had left her. Her stupid phone was her lifeline, and now that was gone too?
But then she’d bought a map at the gas station. She’d charted an old-school path to California with a pen, and she followed road signs, the way Emily must’ve done when she drove a similar route almost twenty years earlier.
Without murder podcasts to listen to, she turned on the radio, and suddenly she was singing along to eighties rock, remembering what it felt like to be young, free.
Untethered. To be herself. Here she was, all alone, no connection to her (former) world.
And she was just someone, a person, again.
Not a wife, not a mother. Just a singular being.
Just Julia May, driving on the wide-open highway, belting out Springsteen at the top of her goddamn lungs.
No one needed her. No one could find her, even if they wanted to.
Then, without her phone, she lost track of time, of days, of where she was headed or why.
She strangely found herself following the signs to LA instead of San Diego.
She should go to Disneyland! She had never made it there.
She didn’t stop, though. She kept driving straight through Orange County too.
No, there was one thing all this time, all these years, that she had never confronted.
A literal Pandora’s box. She had opened it up only once, in the summer of 2006, after she’d finally made it home to Maryland, broken, bloodless, and feeling like the worst mother in the world.
She hadn’t been able to bring herself to confront Meredith May when Nate drove her to her house.
But after she’d gotten back home, she had brought herself to open up the box of Meredith’s letters from Grandma Vera’s armoire.
She’d read through enough of them to learn that Meredith, at least as of 1998, had been working in LA with some success as a voice-over actress under a stage name.
But why, Julia had wondered then, couldn’t Meredith have done that from Chicago, while staying with her daughters? Her family?
And now, as she drove past the exit for Disneyland, she understood that there had been an anger, a resentment brewing inside of her since she’d opened up that Pandora’s box in 2006.
It had seeped into her pores, eventually spilling over, out of her, into everything in her life.
Her career, where she felt a desperate need to fight for children who couldn’t fight for themselves.
Her unrelenting need to keep Veronica so very close.
She had worked so hard to be the opposite of her mother, and somehow, in the process, had still ended up ruining everything?
Her job. Her relationship with her daughter. Her marriage.
And that’s when she realized where she was actually driving to, where exactly she needed to go.
It took her three days after arriving in Santa Monica to track Meredith May down.
Her house on Ocean Lane had been sold three years earlier, after Meredith had a stroke. Julia finally found her by visiting the office of the Realtor who’d handled that sale. Meredith was in an assisted-living facility now, near Burbank.
Julia showed up there on the day she was supposed to show up in Coronado, though by then she had completely lost all sense of time without her phone.
She suddenly found herself sitting at a table across from a wheelchair-bound stranger, in a lovely, bright, windowed common room, decorated in red, white, and blue for Memorial Day.
This looked like a nicely kept up facility.
Julia supposed her mother was being well taken care of near the end of her life.
And while that thought should’ve made her happy, weirdly, it only made her feel irritated.
“I’m Julia—” she began as she sat down.
“I know who you are,” Meredith said slowly.
She had blue-gray eyes that reminded Julia of eroded beach pebbles.
And it occurred to her she hadn’t remembered the color of her mother’s eyes before now.
She and Nora had green eyes; Emily had hazel.
And she would not have expected their mother’s eyes to look at her so stonily, to be so gray. “Why are you here?” Meredith asked.
Julia suddenly had so many questions. And yet she couldn’t manage to articulate any of them in real words.
Her mother. Her mother sat before her, aged.
Alive. She hadn’t died giving birth to Nora or in the forty years since.
She’d run away. She’d written to Grandma Vera, but she’d never once reached out to her daughters. Not in forty years.
“Why visit me now?” Meredith said.
Julia thought about Ted, about Veronica. About her stupid lost phone. But she didn’t say any of that. “I guess I just wanted to see if you were real,” she finally said.
“And your father couldn’t talk you out of it?” Meredith said, an edge to her voice.
Her father. She thought about how he evaded her questions, even when he was going through chemo.
In some twisted way, he’d been lying to protect them.
Having a dead mother was, in his mind, better than having a mother who’d abandoned them.
She suddenly pictured the steep look of disappointment that would overtake his kind face if he could somehow know that she was here right now.
“Dad died five years ago,” she finally said.
A flicker of something washed across Meredith’s face. But Julia wasn’t sure what emotion it was.
“Cancer,” Julia added.
Meredith sighed. “I wish you hadn’t told me that. I liked thinking he was still alive.”
“But he’s not,” Julia said firmly.
“Sometimes it’s better not to know the truth,” Meredith said.