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Just as she’d done for the previous twenty years, Julia took the train back from the city of Chicago to the suburb of Bartlett, where she and her husband had raised their three children. Bartlett was a cozy little town where everyone knew one another. All the houses had been built about twenty-five years ago to account for the young couples leaving the city to start their families, and entire “pedestrian” areas had been built up to create a sort of “city-living” feel, which was sterile but still okay. The train ride was a little more than an hour, which gave Julia time to fall into the beautiful haze of her favorite album, Blue by Joni Mitchell.
The album had always reminded her of her mother, Greta. She’d played the album on repeat during cloudy summer days as the Copperfields had sat around the house, reading books, writing in journals, or making little sketches. Julia’s heart swelled with longing for those long-lost afternoons.
Did Greta still listen to Joni Mitchell?
Did Greta still think of Julia at all?
The three-bedroom cookie-cutter house on the western end of Sumter Drive featured a basketball hoop in the front drive, a large dying bush that needed to be pulled out of the earth, and flower beds that would need plenty of tender-loving-care that spring. Julia stood before it, inspecting its beige coloring, its big plastic garage door, and the oil stain in the driveway, which had dripped out from her eldest’s car before she’d moved out west and sold it.
This wasn’t the first time Julia had compared her adult home to her childhood one.
In truth, The Copperfield House probably looked a lot different in memory than in reality. The Victorian home loomed heavy in Julia’s mind, with its glorious artistic detail, enormous windows, hardwood floors, and flourishing curtains, which took on the Atlantic breezes.
Such a sharp contrast to this Midwestern house in the suburbs.
Such a sharp contrast to Julia’s reality.
Julia pressed the garage door code into the side of the door and watched as the door began to raise toward the roof. The garage held only her vehicle, a shiny black SUV that she’d hardly driven since her last child had gone to university the previous autumn.
Her husband’s car, a trendy Camaro, was, as usual, someplace else.
Julia kicked off her heels and paced toward the refrigerator, where she leafed out a bottle of rosé and poured herself half a glass. The kitchen was spotless, all the dishes put away, the coffee pot gleaming even after its morning use, and all the breakfast crumbs deposited in the silver trashcan. The refrigerator featured several family photographs, moments in time when her children had celebrated various life events, such as birthdays, graduations, and piano recitals.
Anna. Henry. Rachel. Her babies.
Seeing their faces made Julia’s heart surge with love.
But seeing their faces also reminded Julia that she’d failed them.
She’d meant to be a powerful mother, a successful businesswoman in her own right. Someone her children could respect and look up to.
Her phone dinged with a voice message from her husband. Julia took a long sip of her wine, coating her tongue with the dry, crisp liquid. She then pressed PLAY.
Jackson Crawford’s voice bellowed through the speaker, strong and sure of itself.
“Hey, babe. Chasing down a story tonight in Hyde Park. Don’t wait up for me.”
Julia’s nostrils flared. She resented voice messages. It was like their sender didn’t have the “time” to type out a simple message. She refused to send a voice message back and instead texted.
JULIA: Good luck tonight.
JULIA: Make sure you’re home tomorrow.
JULIA: Remember. The kids are in town.
Perhaps only to add to her irritation, Jackson sent a voice message back.
“I know the kids are in town tomorrow. I wouldn’t forget something like that.”
Julia rolled her eyes into her head, smacked her phone back on the counter, and made her way around the island, her wine glass in hand. Seconds later, she collapsed across the beige comfort of the couch, the remote control extended. In previous years, she’d prided herself on staying busy after work, going over manuscripts for the publishing house, helping one of her children with their homework, or assisting Rachel with her piano studies.
Now, she flicked through channels aimlessly as though she was on a mission to waste time.
Julia’s husband, Jackson Crawford, was a renowned video and print journalist. He’d had his own political and socioeconomic column in his twenties and thirties, which had bolstered him in the public eye. He’d finished his column in his late thirties and moved on to become a more public face, which was proof, to Julia at least, that men’s careers flourished as they aged while women’s floundered. Probably this wasn’t entirely fair to say, given that her publishing house’s failure had nothing to do with her age of forty-two. However, when she felt most resentful of her husband, she paraded through these thoughts angrily, usually while drinking wine.
Julia reached for her phone to text one of her children. Rachel. She was the youngest, only nineteen, and had recently left the nest. She went to college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she majored in English Literature and minored in French.
JULIA: Hi, honey. How was your French test this morning?
It took Rachel a little while to respond to her message. She was probably studying in the library or grabbing coffee with a cute boy, or eating lunch in the dining hall, whatever it was nineteen-year-olds did during their first year of university. Julia could only fantasize, as she’d taken a very different path in life.
RACHEL: Hey, Mom. I think I messed up some of the grammar. Thank God, it wasn’t worth that much of our grade.
RACHEL: Excited to see you tomorrow! Going to bed early, so I don’t miss the bus.
JULIA: You’d better not miss it! Your father and I can’t wait to see you.
Julia continued to flick through the channels, never lingering on any one show or news segment for longer than a few minutes. She refilled her glass of wine soon after, half-considering the concept of dinner before shoving the thought away. Tonight was meant for digging into the depths of her despair. She undressed in the living room and splayed out in her underwear, something she’d seen Jackson do time and time again. It was just as much her house as it was his.
Jackson. Jackson Crawford.
Julia drew her nails across her stomach, gazing at the photograph of herself and Jackson perched on the fireplace mantel to the left of the television. The photo had been taken ten years ago when Julia had been thirty-two. Orchard Publishing had been on the up-and-up, and Julia had been the more “promising” professional in their couple-dom. Jackson had called her his “more powerful partner.” At the time, he hadn’t even resented it.
Back then, they’d had the children to consider. Anna had been twelve; Henry had been ten; Rachel had been nine. Personal resentments within their marriage had been more easily wiped away.
Had she loved him back then? Really loved him?
Julia leaped up to inspect the photograph closer. In it, thirty-two-year-old Julia had splayed a hand tenderly across Jackson’s chest. Her eyes twinkled knowingly; Jackson played with the curls of her soft dark hair. They were certainly the portrait of a happy couple.
But to Julia, there in the shadows of her living room, she and Jackson looked like strangers.
Julia returned the photograph to the mantel and collapsed back on the couch. The room spun around her strangely as she continued to flick through the stations. Her thoughts were so rowdy, so loud as they tossed back and forth in her skull that she nearly missed the segment on Channel 4 that changed her life forever.
The headline was dramatic and jarring.
NOVELIST BERNARD COPPERFIELD RELEASED FROM PRISON AFTER SERVING A TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR SENTENCE.
Julia dropped the remote to the ground at her feet. On-screen, a female announcer, spoke:
“In the spring of 1997, Bernard Copperfield, renowned novelist and a man previously thought to be a genius, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for conning eighteen million dollars from friends, colleagues, and other wealthy residents that resided on Nantucket Island. Twenty-five years later, Copperfield has been released and is said to be returning to his home in Nantucket.”
The station then showed an image that nearly shattered Julia’s heart.
A man stepped out of a black vehicle in a sad-looking grey suit. The man was seventy with white-grey hair and wrinkles etched along his eyes, cheeks, neck, and a scowl. The man was hardly recognizable as Bernard Copperfield, save for his six-foot-three stature and something about his eyes. Julia leaped to her feet, gobsmacked by the sight of him.
She hadn’t seen her father’s face since April 12, 1997.
Yet there he was, in the flesh.
And he was headed back to Nantucket Island.
Back to The Copperfield House.
“What do you think you’re going to find there?” Julia breathed, aghast. “Nobody is there for you. Nobody cares about you. Nobody wants you back.”
“We can be sure that he’s paid his debt to society,” the newscaster continued confidently.
“Yes, to society. But what about his family?” Julia howled to the empty room.
Julia hadn’t felt this enormous swell of rage in quite some time. During the years of profitability at her publishing house, she’d thought maybe she’d forgiven her father for his crimes, for destroying their family and tearing her life apart. “It all worked out the way it was supposed to,” she’d told Jackson once. “I genuinely believe that.”
Julia grabbed her phone, feeling suddenly volatile. She had half a mind to call that newscaster on the air and tell her exactly what kind of hell Bernard Copperfield had created for the rest of the Copperfield family.
But it wasn’t like the newscaster could understand.
No. The only people who could understand were the Copperfields themselves.
And she hadn’t spoken to any of them since she’d left the island.
Well, that was kind of a lie.
She and Ella had had an email exchange a few years ago.
The email exchange had not gone well. Ella had told Julia to leave her alone.
Julia knew she was mostly to blame for Ella’s less-than-stellar view of Julia. When Julia had taken off with Charlie only about two months before high school graduation, Ella was left in that big house alone with their depressed mother, who’d refused to get out of bed, let alone leave the house. Ella had felt abandoned. The others, Alana and Quentin, had stayed away for good, treating Nantucket like a plague den.
After Ella's graduation, she’d headed to NYC and begun the acclaimed indie rock band, Pottersville, with a drummer she’d met in Greenwich Village.
Since then, she and the drummer had had two children and a rocky relationship that was frequently written about in lesser-known indie rock tabloids. “The on-again, off-again romance of indie rock band, Pottersville.” “Who’s caring for the kids?” “Is Ella Copperfield too old to be an indie rock musician?” The tabloids were haunting. Julia had read each and every one religiously. She had alerts set up on her phone, which told her when anyone anywhere had written something about Ella. The fact that she’d recently learned her son, Henry, was a fan of Pottersville had stopped her in her tracks, but she still hadn’t told him Ella was his aunt. It would only complicate things.
She had alerts set up for Quentin and Alana, as well. But she resented Quentin’s rise in popularity... and hardly ever saw anything about Alana unless it was about her husband, the acclaimed painter, Asher. In those articles, Alana was listed as little more than an afterthought. “His wife.”
Call one of them. Any of them.
The thought rang out through Julia’s mind. But it was laughable. What could she possibly say to her siblings about their father’s release? They were all strangers, now.
“Good luck to you, Dad,” she muttered to the television, her voice layered with sarcasm. “I’m sure Mom will be pleased to see you again.”