1983
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 28, 1983, Julie rose from a restless night in her brother’s spare bedroom. Jack had already left the house—probably he was on his way to court to answer the subpoena. She phoned Jack’s wife Anna to tell her what had transpired the night before, and they talked about whether Jack was on his medication and how they could get him back into the VA to see the psych doctor. They hung up without a plan. She then phoned the hospital where she worked as a nurse and called in sick before slipping into a plain white cotton outfit she’d found in the closet. She made no attempt to hide the puffy bags beneath her large, round eyes with makeup. Passing by the hallway mirror she adjusted a small-brimmed reddish hat she found in the closet and walked to the bus stop.
She saw Father Ryan—two dark olive eyes on each side of a pugilist’s nose staring back. He patted the empty seat next to him. In his rough Irish brogue, he bid her good morning and returned his attention to his newspaper. But after a few stops, he folded it in his lap and started a conversation, one which Julie found hard to follow. It wasn’t the first time the gray haired Jesuit looked into her lime-green eyes and mused about the unfathomable—this time how life flowed, sometimes fluctuating slowly, sometimes going “bang bang,” outside our control.
“All things happen for a reason, Julie. Happenings are really signs.”
“Father, I take things as they unfold, don’t question much, maybe don’t even see the signs.” She fiddled with her hat, wondering if it smelled musty, like the bedroom where it had laid untouched for years.
The priest rolled the newspaper into a hollow tube, tapping it on his palm, putting it to his eye, and looking through it like a telescope.
“From the time you were a little girl at St. Pat’s Grammar, you charted your own course.”
She could not tell if he was teasing or serious. She clutched her purse and squeezed her knees tight to avoid touching him. Then she looked over and smiled without cracking her lips. “I can’t put no finer point on it than that, Father. Guess I learned early in life not to reach for the next moment when it wasn’t time.”
Julie looked out the window. “But I wonder, wonder if the Lord always gives us a sign. You know, that it’s coming.” She heard the buzzer signaling the driver to pull over at the next stop. The bus changed lanes and slowed down.
Ryan twisted the rolled up newspaper with both hands. “He always gives us a sign, Julie. Sometimes like a message inside a bottle bobbing its way to shore, and sometimes it comes like the ocean itself, pounding the rocks in the throes of a storm. We have to want to see the sign.”
Julie rose grabbing the overhead strap as the bus crawled to her stop. She smiled at the priest, this time showing the fullness of her perfectly straight teeth. “You’ve made me self-conscious of the bus pulling on me while it slows.”
“Yes,” he said waving goodbye (or giving benediction? she wondered). “We go through life mostly unaware of what’s happening to us, but if we have faith, we’ll surely see the signs.”
Julie gingerly stepped from the bus one foot at a time and walked to the courthouse, where the doors were still locked. She sat on a bench in a courtyard lined with zinnias and black-eyed Susans. It reminded her of a secret garden she’d once had. She pulled her diary from her purse and wrote:
Father Ryan thinks hidden forces move us through the simplest and most complex parts of life, birth canals, hospital beds, graves, purgatory and maybe hell. These are signs. Maybe today’s bus takes me to the place where those hidden forces connect the part of me left behind to the part of me that I see in the mirror every day.
Julie waited until a Federal Marshal unlocked the outer glass doors. “Sir, can you tell me where the trials are held?” she asked. The Marshal lifted his thick arm and pointed down an empty hall. She walked down the wide granite corridor, her low heels making a sharp, tapping sound that echoed off the walls. She stopped at a brown cork bulletin board next to the clerk’s office. And she gasped when she saw his name: Roger Girardin versus the U.S. Army—Courtroom 6, 10:00 a.m. She hadn’t seen it typed out since she saw the notice from the Army in the Girardin family living room thirty-three years ago. It was eerie to see the name posted, impersonal, not like she saw it, written out in his handwriting on Christmas or birthday cards, on letters tucked into the shoe box she had kept in the back of her closet in a bed of silvery dust balls. In that same place, she kept her high school graduation pumps, next to the galoshes she wore to the beach the day she and Roger whispered goodbyes, the week after he unbuttoned her dress in a New Haven hotel, the same dress hanging over the collection of footwear.