CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 1SHE DOESN’T NOTICE THE letter at first. Buried in the pile of mail threatening to become a paper avalanche, it takes her a good minute to pull all of it out of her mailbox, which resists her mightily, like there’s something on the other side trying to pull her in.
And these days it takes a good two glasses of cheap wine—from a box with a spout, all she can afford—for Julia to even work up the nerve to place that tiny mailbox key in the tiny metal lock. Letters are enemies. Letters are black ravens, harbingers of bad news, and if she doesn’t look at the mail she can pretend it isn’t there. Not the bills stamped red and URGENT, not the letters from her husband’s—her ex-husband’s—attorney, not the blocky envelopes from the IRS marked CERTIFIED DELIVERY, TIME-SENSITIVE. She would have put it off for another day, maybe two, but the electricity in her claustrophobic studio apartment has been cut off, the temperature’s over a hundred, and she’s too ashamed to call for the minimum balance.
You reap what you sow. Something her mother always said that never really made sense to Julia. Like her father leaving them, for instance. Had her mother sown that seed? Was it really her mother’s fault that he’d packed a bag after that explosive fight and then vanished for the rest of their lives?
Was it her fault Ethan had deserted her? Desertion. A perfect word—she pictures a WWII soldier abandoning a post under fire, running to save himself while the rest of his troop is slaughtered. The film of sweat above his lip, his boots sinking into a French bog.
A barking dog startles her. It’s inside one of the ground-floor apartments, wet nose pressed against the mosquito screen of the window. She quickly wraps the mail in a Kmart flyer, tucks it all under her arm, and begins the long climb to the fifth floor—cement steps held aloft by a rusting metal frame that shivers when a freight truck passes by. There are cracks in the stucco walls. Occasional splatters of graffiti. Red scrawls that look like letters, the meaning incomprehensible.
She should get out more. It’s not good to be alone all the time. That’s what her therapist said when she could still afford the co-pay to see him. Your divorce isn’t the end of your life. You need to go on. For Evie.
But it was the end of her life, and if there’s another one out here for her, damn if she can find it. All she feels is suspended—between the past and the present, between the future that she wanted and the one she’s living.
Maybe she’ll end up like 216. John, she thinks his name was. Or Dan? Only met him once when she was moving in—thin and broken, with bloodshot eyes, a limp handshake and a softly spoken offer to take anything she didn’t need off her hands. After that, his door was perpetually shut. After that, there was a piece of plywood nailed over the window.
After that, there’d been a smell.
She’d thought it was a dead rat in the walls, or maybe even a whole nest of them, because the smell had grown stronger, so bad she had to leave the windows open even with the air-conditioning on. Calls to the landlord went unanswered. Just as she was thinking about reporting a code violation, she came home one day from a fruitless job interview only to find a dumpster rolled up in the parking lot, men in hazmat-type suits and gas masks carting out junk from 216, a van marked BIO-KLEEN in the courtyard, some kind of pump with a hose connecting to the apartment’s window.
Hoarder, one neighbor said.
Found him when they were spraying, said another. Body just went and exploded when they tried to wheel him out.
It took a while for the cleanup. Everything had to be replaced. And things that had been tossed in the dumpster, some of it made its way back into the complex. She’d watched one woman pull a floor lamp out of the detritus, a few splotches of God-knows-what on the lampshade. John/Dan’s car—a clunky, rusting Oldsmobile with a year’s worth of dried leaves stuck under the windshield wipers—eventually lost its tires. Then the hood, and most of the engine. Someone bashed the windshield, even cut out the leather from the seats before it was eventually towed away. A family moved into 216 not long after the fresh paint had dried. Probably thought they were getting a steal with all new appliances, countertops, and closet doors.
Finally she reaches her apartment and pulls out her key to unlock the security door. Ignores the scratches where attempts to force it open have failed.
Not that there’s anything here worth stealing. Slim pickings. If she died alone in the apartment, they could probably just roll her up in a rug and rent it out the next day.
She steps inside. The smell of cigarette smoke and cat piss greets her, worked so deep into the brown carpet by the previous tenant that it still lingers one year later.
No, her place is just a dreary, small box with a view of a Del Taco parking lot and a stretch of the southbound Los Angeles 405 freeway. Furniture so scarce as to be practically nonexistent. Blankets on the floor where her air mattress popped—can’t afford a new one. Folding chair and TV-dinner tray for a table. An ugly gnome for a doorstop; it had been abandoned along with the folding chair by a neighbor who was moving out of state. Stack of library books in the corner, novels she picks up and then puts down again, realizing she hasn’t read a word.
A Christmas tree ornament with Evie’s picture hangs from the overhead fan blades. Something Evie made for her. The only thing Julia has left from her life before.
Her life before. A rambling Victorian in Palo Alto she’d bought with Ethan and spent years lovingly renovating.
Don’t go there, Julia. Don’t go there.
But where the hell else is she supposed to go? She closes her eyes, tries to concentrate on the sounds around her, the here and now, her therapist would say; she tries not to think how naively happy she was, bringing the Victorian back to life, or the layers of paint, stain, and grime she scraped and buffed out of the mahogany staircase. She tries not to think how much he probably got for it.
But then she does. Another cool million at least. Enough for a year’s worth of motions. Not that he was short of cash in the first place.
Did he feel anything when he toured the realtor through the house, pointing out the vaulted ceilings she’d painted, the crystal chandelier she’d picked out, the oak floors she’d refurbished? Or was it by then just another object among all his other objects, an acquisition that had outlived its purpose, bereft of meaning?
It had been astonishing how cold he became, and how quickly. Like the person she thought she’d married was just a mask, a performance, until the real Ethan seeped through.
A baby cries. She tries to hold onto that sound, tries to land herself in the present. It’s hot inside. God it’s so un-fucking-believably hot inside. An oven. A furnace. A pyre.
Of course she’d signed the prenup. Of course she’d thought it’d last forever. Idiot, idiot, idiot. He’d had two divorces, but the exes weren’t like her, he’d said. She was special, he’d said. Unique. Words never used to describe Julia Greer, not even remotely. They were so superficial. Boring. Not like you. You’re so smart, and funny, and clever. At the time, a part of her—a huge part—had wanted to laugh it off, and maybe she would have if she hadn’t just been spectacularly dumped from a five-year relationship. In her secret, wounded heart, it felt like some kind of vindication, this love from a man who was rich, and charming, and handsome. Everyone told her how lucky she was—they were incredulous, in fact, that she’d landed him.
Now, not so much.
Did I lock the door? Christ, no, she hadn’t. What was she thinking? Someone could have followed her, someone could have . . .
Julia takes a breath, opens her eyes, and locks the door behind her—dead bolt, check, chain, check.
Next. Just think about next. She heads for the kitchen, where the refrigerator’s hum is sadly absent, pink liquid oozing from the freezer—goddamn, the ice cream—then it’s time for a quick bill sort on the kitchen counter, ordered by post date with the most recent on top. Ads and junk straight into the trash, letters from DOUGLAS CLARK, ATTORNEY AT LAW dropped into a drawer, which is quietly, ominously, filling with other, unopened envelopes. So many she can hardly close it.
Without thinking, she flips a light switch. Nothing, of course.
This is my life now. I can’t believe this is my life now.
And it’s true, she simply can’t. Getting work again was harder than she’d expected—she’d let too many years slip, content to be the stay-at-home wife and mother, or that’s what she’d told herself when Ethan had frowned on her particular beat. Do you have to do investigative pieces? I know some of these people. It could make Christmas parties embarrassing. The truth was probably—no, the truth was—that the entire experience had turned her head. She’d tossed aside her pragmatic, doggedly inquisitive self for the very things she’d always poked fun at. Playdates. Decoupage parties. Evenings at the opera while the requisite Stanford chemical engineering student/babysitter read stories to Evie in French. It was another strata, this world, a completely different atmosphere. She’d spent so many gritty years taking cracks at it, trying to find her way in through the air vent, talk her way past the doorman, to expose the concealed, ugly downside, that to suddenly be invited in through the front door, to watch the careful machinations of celebrities, politicians, CEOs, see true power move . . . well, it was breathtaking. So alluring to become, tangentially, a part of it.
And then the clock struck twelve. The carriage turned back into a pumpkin. And she was abruptly dumped back into her old life. Actually, far worse than her old life. Because now no one wanted real reporting anymore, just headlines to be outraged about, with as little substance as possible. All the editors she’d used to know had either wisely shifted to public relations firms or had just been laid off, working in whole other industries altogether. So now she pushes out pitches the way a castaway tosses bottles into the ocean, with about the same level of expectation. Maybe one day she won’t have to cobble together freelance blog gigs, barely eking out an existence from week to week—“Thigh Gaps to Die For,” “The Puppy That’s Besties with a Bear,” “Worst Celebrity Selfies.” Maybe one day she’ll be able to afford an attorney to look through that drawer, to respond to the motions she subconsciously knows are being passed by the judge in her absence, building an impenetrable wall, brick by brick, between her and her daughter. Maybe one day she’ll see Evie again.
But she doubts it. Not without a miracle, and she’s not the miracle-believing kind. She couldn’t even afford the plane ticket.
Is she thinking of me right now?
She remembers the last time she saw Evie, the funny, floppy wave she gave Julia with her six-year-old hand, trying to cheer her up; she remembers the moment Evie turned her back—small shoulders hunched and sad—then walked across the parking lot to Ethan’s silver Mercedes. Somehow Julia managed to hold it together as Evie got in the car; she managed to stay upright, crack a smile, wave, even though her heart threatened to erupt from her chest. There was the purr of the engine, a soft fog of exhaust, and then the car slipped away, merged into traffic, disappeared. Gone. Gone on an airplane, gone five thousand miles away. Had Evie ever spent a night without her? Maybe a handful.
She’d seen news footage of women keening after a bomb exploded on their family homes in some distant country, faces twisted in anguish. She’d done the same in the parking lot after Evie was gone. A vocal register she never knew she was capable of. Her legs had given way. Arms had gone numb. Eventually someone called an ambulance. She doesn’t remember much after, and lost time—a few days at least—before her fractured mind started to bind itself together again. Functional, but never the same. She doesn’t think it would take much to send all the pieces careening off in different directions. At least she’s poor enough to be on Medicaid, so the prescriptions are free.
Black spots threaten the corners of Julia’s eyes, the kind that warn of an impending migraine. She needs to unwind somehow. The boxed wine in the fridge will be warm and it’s practically empty, but she might be able to get half a glass. When taking this medication, do not consume alcoholic beverages, her yellow pill bottles say. It gives her a small sense of satisfaction to disobey them, these little missives from the pharmaceutical companies, with their little strike-out symbol over a martini glass. Use caution when operating a vehicle.
As if that could be the worst of her problems, getting into a car accident. What pill can she take to get her daughter back?
And that’s when she sees it. A strange, pale blue envelope dropped on the floor like it was wisely trying to escape. At first she thinks it must have been put in her mailbox by mistake—the paper’s too nice—but it’s her name and address written in shaky blue cursive on the front (the sorters at the US Postal Service can still read cursive?). A neat return address label in the corner, the kind you can buy with your personal checks. DR. LYDIA GREER.
God, Aunt Liddy? She’s still alive? The woman must be ancient by now; the only time they’d met was well over twenty years ago. Julia remembers a large, Spanish-style house in the Pasadena hills, a wide grove of orange trees just beyond a Victorian greenhouse, and crystal bowls filled with candy in just about every room. Her mother had instructed her not to play in the basement, which of course made it just too tempting. After venturing down the creaky wooden stairs, she discovered rough-hewn shelves filled with dusty jars, holding dead and dried insects, strange, marvelous, and threatening. A range of faded moths pinned on a velvet board, a thick bug the size of her hand curled into a ball under a microscope, small stuffed birds with mean glass eyes and molting feathers. Creatures that made appearances in her nightmares for years to come.
And something else, a bizarre shape under the stairs. What was it? It’d almost made her lose her mind; she remembers bolting up the stairs in a near panic. A sheet . . . there was a sheet, and the sound of something digging. She’d pictured it chasing her, snatching at her heels as she ran back up the stairs into the kitchen.
Don’t let your imagination get the best of you. Something else her mother would say, frequently.
It wasn’t her imagination, though, that had gotten the best of her in the end. Rather the lack of it. Because she’d never imagined being the third ex-wife.
For a moment, Julia hesitates before opening the letter. Wonders what new disaster looms on the horizon. But she tears it open anyway, a dare to the universe, or God, or whoever.