Julia's Daughters

I walk out of the principal’s office. My daughter is still sitting in the same chair, bouncing a kid’s gumball-machine ball against the wall. She’s dressed like the other girls I passed in the hallway, but the similarity doesn’t go beyond the uniform embroidered with the school crest. (The black polo she’s wearing is supposed to go with the red skirt, not the black one. And she’s the only one wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt under her polo. She always wears a long-sleeved black T these days.) Haley looks like she belongs more on a punk rock stage than at an exclusive high school. Her hair, an unnatural shade of shoe polish black, is cut ragged around her face like she hacked at it herself. Which she did. She’s got multiple rings in her ears and her fingernails are painted black. Her face is pale, but her green eyes, my eyes, are rimmed in heavy, black liquid liner. She looks tired. Sad. And older than her seventeen years.

I walk up to her, my feet so heavy I can barely lift them. I stop. She continues to bounce the ball. She’s been bouncing the same ball for weeks. I wonder if she knows how much the bouncing annoys me. Probably.

“You said you were expelled for smoking a cigarette, Haley,” I say. “Dr. Carlisle says he expelled you for possession of marijuana and what appears to be prescription painkillers he found in your backpack.” I hold up one of the two Baggies the principal handed to me. “Where did you get Percocet?”

“Linda. Don’t worry.” She bounces the ball again. “She’s still got plenty.”

I want to snatch the bouncy ball in midair and throw it. Hard. Possibly bounce it off my daughter’s head. Or maybe the snooty secretary’s . . . or the arrogant principal’s. I take a breath. I have to stay calm. Haley’s been through so much. I can’t “lose my shit” as she would say. I take another breath. “Dr. Carlisle could have called the police, Haley. You could have been arrested for this.” I shake the Baggies of pills and marijuana at her.

“Nah.” She doesn’t look at me. “They’re trolling for new students for next year. He’d never want that kind of thing in the newspaper.” She tosses the ball against the wall again, a slow, taunting motion. It bounces. She catches it.

The repetitive sound grates on my already strung-out nerves. I feel light-headed. I can’t remember when I last ate something. Yesterday at lunch time, maybe? “We’ll talk about this at home,” I say. “With your dad.”

She doesn’t respond. She just bounces the ball again.

Tears well in my eyes and I glance away. I’m tired of crying. I wish I could stop. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go home.”

Haley takes her time getting out of the chair, picking her backpack up off the floor and slinging it over her shoulder. She’s the living-color epitome of the clichéd sullen teen, or in black-and-white, in her case.

Haley walks into the main office and out the door.

“Please sign her out, Mrs. Maxton,” the secretary tells me.

“She’s not coming back. She’s been expelled.”

The woman offers a perfunctory smile from her desk. “Rules are rules.”

I sigh as I walk over to the counter and sign Haley out. It takes less energy than arguing with the secretary.

I find Haley waiting at my car. It’s new. Ben bought it for me in January for my forty-second birthday. I had wanted a sportier car, one less mom-like than my old minivan. I’d been so happy when he drove the little Toyota RAV4 into the driveway. It had everything I wanted: leather seats, GPS, sunroof.

I hit the unlock button on my keys. When I get in, I can still smell the scent of new leather. It’s funny how something that had been such a big deal could so quickly become something furthest from your mind. I haven’t thought about the car in weeks. Forty-seven days.

I throw the Baggies onto the console as Haley gets into the front passenger seat, taking her time. I wonder if I get stopped for speeding and a cop sees my weed and pills if he’ll arrest me. I wonder if I’d put up an argument. A jail cell seems appealing right now. If I go to jail, Ben will have to deal with Haley. I’ll have to deal with an orange jumpsuit. I almost smile. Caitlin had been a TV addict. One of her favorite shows had been a Netflix series about a woman in jail for a crime she’d committed years before. Caitlin had dressed last Halloween as the main character, Piper Chapman. The orange jumpsuit is still in the front hall closet.

It’s funny the things that go through your mind.... She’d looked so cute, my daughter dressed as a convicted felon.

I start the car because it’s warm inside, but I just sit there for a moment, my hands on the steering wheel. My thoughts drift from the Halloween costume on the floor of the closet to my daughter sitting beside me. Drugs? Now she’s taking drugs? Or selling them? She didn’t even attempt to offer a flimsy they’re not mine, they’re a friend’s. I know I should say something, I just don’t know what to say. Tears fill my eyes.

“Oh, Jesus,” Haley mutters.

I lean forward, pressing my forehead to the steering wheel, covering my head with my hands. Haley makes no attempt to comfort me . . . or argue. I hear her digging around in her backpack. When I lift up my head and glance at her, she’s got her earbuds in her ears and she’s staring straight ahead. She rubs her left arm, another habit she’s developed since the accident.

After a couple of minutes, I wipe my nose with the back of my hand and shift my little silver SUV into reverse. And drive home with my Percocet, my marijuana, and my daughter.

“What are we going to do, Jules?” Ben sits down on the edge of the bed. Our bedroom is dark, except for the light that comes from the bathroom.

It’s after dinner, eight or so, I imagine. Ben brought pizza when he came home from work. I heard him and Izzy talking in the kitchen. Not what they were saying, just their voices. Then the sound of the TV. I’m sure they ate their pizza in front of the TV watching something on the Discovery Channel. The one interest he and our ten-year-old share. Haley went to her room when we got home from school, where she’ll stay until everyone goes to bed. Only then will she get up and forage for food. Or maybe drugs from our medicine cabinets . . .

When I don’t respond to Ben, he makes this sound in his throat that signals that he’s frustrated with me. He’s been doing it for weeks. He doesn’t understand the devastation of my heart, my soul. I know Caitlin was his daughter, too, but he doesn’t seem to feel the way I do. About anything. He missed two days of work after she died. He didn’t miss bowling league with his brothers or a single weekly Kiwanis club meeting. He said it was easier for him to carry on. What does that even mean?

“We need to talk,” he says.

“I know,” I murmur. And I do know that we need to talk. About Haley, about Caitlin, about the state of our marriage, but I’m not ready. I’m just not.

“There’s salad from Tony O’s in the fridge,” he tells me.

I’m lying on my back, my head on my pillow, my arm across my forehead. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll get some later.” Of course I have no intention of eating it. I was always a little on the chubby side, particularly after having my girls. A size twelve, sometimes a fourteen squeezing into size twelve jeans. For the first time in my life I’m not counting calories or trying to make good choices. I’m on the dead child diet; just the thought of food makes me queasy.

Ben sighs again, but he doesn’t get up from the bed to go back to the TV. I get the idea he means business tonight. In the first weeks after the accident, he came into the bedroom two or three times each night to ask me a question or try to say something that might draw me back into the normalcy of the life we used to have. As the days passed and I didn’t snap out of it (Linda’s words, not his), he began to come in less frequently. This is the first time he’s been in here when I was awake in days. Most nights, he stays out in the living room and sleeps in front of the TV in his recliner.

In made-for-TV movies, the kind Caitlin loved to watch, you always see couples clinging to each other after a tragedy. Sobbing together, the husband holding the wife against his chest, comforting her, but that’s not real life. At least not in the Maxton household, though maybe it was a few years ago. I don’t know.

I think we held onto each other after the ER doctor came into the little waiting room and told us they’d been unable to revive Caitlin, but that was instinctive. Like clinging to a life raft as the ship goes down. We held hands at the funeral, but that’s been the limit of our physical contact. It’s not that I don’t think Ben is hurting. That’s not it at all. Maybe it’s the opposite. I know he’s hurting so badly that I’m afraid to touch him, afraid his pain will rub off on me and it will be too much. I’ll collapse under the weight of our combined pain. Or maybe I’ll just disintegrate. I’ll disappear in a wisp of smoke or a puddle of green plasma goo.

“Jules.” Ben’s voice penetrates my thoughts. He and Laney are the only people who ever call me Jules. The only people who know me intimately enough to call me Jules.

He turns on the light on my side of the bed and I squint. I have to make myself look at him. I fight tears on the verge. I know he’s got to be sick of listening to me cry. I’m sick of listening to me cry.

“Drugs?” he says. “She’s doing drugs now?”

“Marijuana,” I say, meeting his gaze for just an instant. I sit up. His eyes are brown. Nice eyes. His eyes were the first things I noticed the night I met him at Cal State, Bakersfield, where we were both students. “It’s practically legal.” I consider reminding him that he’s been known to take a hit from a joint with his brothers on Sunday afternoons in their mom’s backyard, but I don’t. It’s never really been an issue between us. I don’t smoke it; I don’t have anything morally against it for adults, but a glass of wine or beer is my limit to mind-altering substances.

“What about the pills?” he asks. “Where did she get them? One of her friends, I bet. Cassie or . . . or that asshole Todd.” He strokes his receding hairline. “I told you we should have forbidden her to see him after that run-in with the police at Christmas. Mom said we’d regret it if we didn’t.”

I exhale. “It wasn’t a run-in with the police. They were in a fender bender. He wasn’t even at fault.” Ben’s right, though. Todd is an asshole. Just not the responsible asshole, in this case. “Haley says she stole the Percocet from your mom’s medicine cabinet.”

He doesn’t react. He rarely does when the conversation has anything to do with his mommy doing something or saying something she shouldn’t. It’s like he’s totally blind to her flaws.

“Was Haley taking the pills?” he asks. “You said it was a whole bagful. Was she taking them or selling them?”

I close my eyes for a moment. “Probably both.”

He pinches his temples between his thumb and forefinger as if he can squeeze the truth out of his head, or just the knowledge of it.

I note he’s not interested in discussing the fact that his mother is making drugs available to our daughter. There had to have been forty in the sandwich bag. I wonder how Linda didn’t notice that she was missing forty Percocet.

“I can’t believe she’s been expelled.” He throws up his hand. “How the hell is she going to graduate now? She can’t even go to community college without a high school degree. I guess we could send her away for a semester or two.” His gaze darts to mine for just an instant and then he looks at his shoes.

I frown. “Send her away?”

“Mom thinks we should consider a boarding prep school. St. Andrews won’t take her, of course, but maybe even outside the US . . . France, maybe.” He’s talking too fast for these to be his own words. He and his brothers all attended St. Andrews boarding school from the sixth grade through the twelfth. Linda couldn’t be bothered to parent through the difficult years. “Haley wanted to go on that trip last Easter to France. Kids do it all the time. She could finish her high school degree and then maybe take some college classes. It might be the best thing for her. A little tough love.”

“Send her away?” I say it again, unable to believe he would even suggest such a thing. I lose one daughter and my husband wants to send another away? The idea is so absurd that I don’t know if I want to laugh or hit him with something. If I were the kind of person who hit people, I definitely would have. I wonder if I’m becoming a person with violent tendencies. Earlier in the day I had the impulse to throw a ball at Haley. “We don’t have money for that sort of thing. Do you know what it costs for boarding school in France?”

He hesitates and I know what he’s thinking before he says it. “You have your money. The money your mom left you.”

I exhale. I can’t meet his gaze. The money’s been sitting for years in an investment account. Dirty money. Money my mother left me when she died of cirrhosis of the liver. My stepfather left it to her when he died. Money he won in a lawsuit I never thought he should have won. If I were ever going to spend the money, I’d certainly spend it on my children, but not like this. “We’re not sending Haley away,” I say quietly.

“Well, we’ve got to do something. She’s out of control. The crazy black makeup, the lying, the constantly late on curfew. And now we can add drugs to the list. I’ve got enough problems at work, Jules. I don’t need this. I told you she looked zonked on something the other day.”

He gets up and goes to the laundry hamper near the bathroom door. He begins to pull dirty clothes out and drop them on the floor, dividing them between lights and darks the way I taught him when we were first married. His mother had always done his laundry for him, even when he was in college, before I introduced him to the washing machine. If I’d let her, she’d still be doing his laundry.

“Maybe getting out of here, out of this house, out of the state would be good for her. New friends. A fresh start.”

“Out of sight, out of mind?” I ask.

He doesn’t refute the accusation. We both know that’s one of his best coping mechanisms. Sweeping things out the door or at least under the rug. Always has been. His whole family deals with problems that way.

We’re both quiet for a minute. I feel so alone. So isolated. So sad and lost. I know at least part of this is of my own making. I’ve allowed our marriage to fall apart, but that doesn’t make it any less painful. I think about the fact that if Caitlin were here, she’d have an opinion on what we should do about Haley. She was always better at handling her sister than we were. If Caitlin were here. If Haley hadn’t—

I feel myself teetering on the edge of the precipice I’ve become too familiar with in the last forty-seven days. I know I shouldn’t be angry with Haley. It was an accident. Just an accident. A terrible mistake. She had not been drinking alcohol that night, not taking Percocet or even smoking a joint. Her tox screen had come back negative for any illegal substances. She really just made a mistake and didn’t see the stop sign. Didn’t see the big pickup truck coming from her right.

Ben picks up an armful of dark clothes and heads for the door.

I guess our talk is over.