Mine to Tell (17 page)

“So, can you tell me how things are going with, you know…” She nodded toward my piles of Julianne.

“They’re good,” I whispered. My mother had compromised herself to come here and ask what I was doing. I knew I should do as much for her. “It’s hard, though.”

She looked at me, a question on her face.

“I’ve found things out about her that confuse me,” I confessed. Her eyes widened. “And I’m putting them into my story. Carefully. That’s what Edith’s talking about. It is more than renovation articles. You’re right.”

My mother tightened, trying to hold onto that balance between loving me and upholding the Crouse family edict. One hand rose nervously to her throat.

“I’m telling her story,” I said, understanding that nobility for one’s daughter had a limit and I might be approaching that. “Or she is.”

“Oh, Annabelle, do you think that’s okay? Simon would turn in his grave if he knew. And Levi would be upset too, if he still lived around here. And your grandpa… Think of the trouble this will bring on us. I should never have let you do this thing.” She was like a windup toy. All of a sudden she was wound too tight and spinning out of control until the knob could wind itself down. She was wringing her hands in time with her effusion.

I reached over and laid my hand on hers, pressing down so she’d stop fidgeting and making herself worse. “Mama, no one’s going to know. The newspaper’s in Cincinnati, not here. It’s hundreds of miles away.”

“But still, someone might make the connection…” The knob was still turning, spinning out the rest of its coiled worries.

“They can’t. They won’t know it’s about her, or you, or any of us. I made up a name for her, and I don’t even tell where the story takes place. My name’s not even on the articles. No one will ever know.”

Her eyes weren’t focusing. They were like glass orbs staring across the room, through the wall, and back in time. Years of worry had her again, bullying her into submission, refusing to let her and the rest of my family close the gap and heal.

“Mother!” I snapped. Her head turned my direction, distress heavy in her eyes. “I haven’t said anything bad. It’s a woman’s story. Kind of a mystery. That’s all.”

I looked for a hint of relief on her face, but it wasn’t there. But there was a deep desire to be relieved, to trust that nothing incriminating was being said, and that even if there was such information, I wouldn’t say it. Not to the tens of thousands of persons hundreds of miles away.

“So you want to see some of the articles I’ve already sent?” I asked.

She nodded a tiny nod. I rose, went to a notebook I’d been keeping the printed articles in, and took out the first few and brought them back to the sofa.

“All of them,” she said. Her face had the command of a parent and the pleading of a child. I nodded and retrieved the whole notebook and sat near her. “We’ll read them together, Mama. I think you’ll like them.”

I wasn’t sure she would at all, but I wanted to believe it. She leaned back, and I snuggled next to her and held the book up so she could see. She gazed at the first page, the title, and then her eyes settled into that slow rhythm of back and forth, working their way through the first part of Julianne’s story:

“ ‘Houses with inhabitants are homes. The lifeblood and soul of its occupants infest the wood, the paint, the shutters, until the building begins to breathe on its own. When circumstances change and it becomes just a house again, a place abandoned and ignored, what will it take to infuse life into it again? A coat of bright colors? A new roof? A person who cares?’ ”

Mama looked up at me, thoughts churning behind her gaze.

“Go on,” I prodded, “it will be okay.” She did. She read on, smiling at times at my ineptness at carpentry, shaking her head as I explained why I left the home the way it last was without any modern conveniences. Then, slowly, the small flavor of my thoughts of Julianne began to infiltrate the tale, my great-grandmother taking on the form of me:

“ ‘This house had held its own over the years it stood vacated, its previous inhabitant still here in essence, fragments of her heart and her hurt left behind like bread crumbs marking a trail she wanted someone to follow.’ ”

She read on, one hand raised to her mouth as she saw the true Julianne emerge:

“ ‘A secret trove, almost as invisible as the soul, beat within its walls, keeping the abandoned structure alive, keeping her love alive, the one she’d given herself to before she was boarded inside.’ ”

When Mama finally reached the end of the last page, she looked at me through glistening eyes. Maybe glistening with tears for her daughter who’d written something that moved her. But hopefully glistening with a light that burned deep within, one that had been buried for years.

She opened her mouth. “It’s beautiful,” she said, touching the last page. “But it’s more than that. It’s…it’s…”

I saw a hidden truth fighting its way to the surface. She didn’t know how to put it into words, since it had been buried for so long.

“It’s okay, Mama,” I said, “I feel it too. Julianne just put on paper everything we didn’t understand. Her prison was what other people put her in. We’re letting them put us in, too.”

Surprise swept over her face, and for a few moments we just sat there, staring at each other. Finally she sighed and touched my hand with trembling fingers.

“Trevor,” she said. It was a statement and a question that we both knew the answer to. My only response was to keep breathing. “I saw you the other day, beside the house, watching him. It was awful, I know. Not the way you thought things would end up. I swear I don’t know where your brother finds some of his friends or why he’d entertain them that way, but…”

It’s okay, Mama,” I said. “I guess it was something that couldn’t hold together. It’s over, and Trevor is free to do what he wants.”

Silence returned and we sat there, the “old” lesson that Julianne was teaching us was becoming the “new” lesson—new life—in our minds.

Chapter 27

“For I have no one else of kindred spirit who will genuinely be concerned for your welfare.”

Jill, my best friend and photographer from my newspaper in Cincinnati, came with her camera and a wealth of city energy. I’d been so long in Julianne’s world and my rural homeland that I’d forgotten what the city felt like until she breezed through my doorway, dragging enthusiasm with her, filling my quiet little home with colors, lights, and near-bodacious mannerisms. I smiled and then I laughed. My goodness, it was wonderful to see Jill again.

She flung her jacket onto my sofa, exposing a colorful jumper, with contrasting tights on her too-thin legs. She was lithe, and so was her chin-length straight brown hair as it swung around her face when she set her suitcase on the floor. The camera equipment made it gently to my table and everything else was dropped.

“Marvelous,” she said, as she spun in my little main room. I was flattered. Jill had an artist’s eye—that’s what made her such a compelling photographer—and if she saw zest in my sparse surroundings, then she might just capture the underlying vibrancy that I believed Julianne had left behind.

She rounded my direction. “This is going to be absolutely wonderful, spending time with you, shooting this old home, and taking a breather from Cincinnati.” She laid it all out there while I continued to smile. She didn’t need a breather from the city, it probably needed a breather from her. She was just what I needed, though, and that was suddenly clear.

I’d moved my belongings into the empty bedroom upstairs, the one with the trap door that led to Julianne’s sanctuary. I loved Jill immensely, but Julianne was sacred, and I felt better putting myself between her and the world, protecting her as much as I could and leaving myself in control.

In the other bedroom my mother and I had arranged old relics of furniture with lots of age and character. Jill squealed when we entered. “Oh, it’s perfect,” she sang. I helped her unpack amidst the din of her oohings and ahhings, and then we marched downstairs.

“I want to see and know everything,” she said, fitting her camera with lenses as she stood near my kitchen table.

“So soon? Don’t you want to relax first?”

“This is relaxing.” She laughed. “This is a real treat for me.” She looked up and snapped a completely candid shot of my face as I stood marveling at her enthusiasm and equipment.

“None of me in the shoot, right?” I was suddenly stern. “My family wants their identities protected.”

“Got it!” she said, her playful artistic side showing no sign of feeling rebuffed.

“Really, Jill, it means everything to my family.”

“No problem,” she said again, fiddling with a lens. “I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

She looked up at me. I knew Jill wouldn’t hurt anyone intentionally, but she was an artist, and artists respond to unexpected spurts of creativity like plants do to sunlight. Her promise was there in her imaginative eyes, their glitter almost overpowering it, and I knew that was as chaste a response as I was probably going to get.

“Edith can’t wait for pictures,” she rambled on. “This storyline has drawn more interest in our paper than the national news.” She looked up at me. “Do you suppose it’s the daring, independent woman slant?” she asked. “Or the unrequited romance?”

I thought for a moment. A woman in the early 1900s taking off for two unexplained weeks, risking everything and then losing it for…what? I still didn’t know, but maybe in the heart of every housewife, girl friend, or single working woman was a lust for individuality, for laying claim to that thing which called her, something bigger than the life and the circumstances she was supposed to be cut out for, the ones she found herself in.

“Whatever it is, it’s certainly changed my life,” I said, not meaning to say that out loud.

She pinned me with a gaze. “You mean since you moved here?”

“Well, yes, that.” I looked around.

“You don’t know what you’re going to do next, do you?” she asked suddenly. She took a seat at the table, instead of waiting for an answer, and settled her camera in her lap. “This story is really real for you, isn’t it?”

“It
is
me,” I said, “I just don’t know how much yet.”

She resumed tinkering with her camera, but distractedly, her hands doing one thing and her mind another. I could see it in her expression.

“I saw Trevor the other day. I’ve seen him several times lately, at the usual places where I used to run into the two of you.” She looked up. I tried to hold my face expressionless, something she wouldn’t be interested in photographing. “He didn’t say much,” she continued. “Didn’t look like he wanted to, either. Kind of busy, in a cold and frightened sort of way.”

I tilted my head, guessing what she meant but wanting to play dumb, to be dumb, to never have to go through these pangs of being a piece of something broken that was trying to mend and create a new identity for itself again.

“He doesn’t look good. He’s kind of callous, like he’s hurt and trying to pretend he’s not.”

“He’s with someone, you mean,” I finished for her.

“Not someone in particular,” she said, setting the camera down again. “Just with…well, with other people.”

“Blonde?” I asked with what little breath I had.

“Sometimes, but not always.”

I didn’t know whether I should be relieved or not. He was going through the motions of relationships, but his heart was still his…or mine…or malfunctioning…at least it wasn’t anyone else’s…if that mattered.

“Well, he’s free to do that,” I said to the air space in front of me. “It isn’t fair to ask him to wait, when I’m not sure what he’d be waiting for. Not sure what I’ll have to offer him when I’m finished here.”

Jill looked around the room, soaked it in, not in an evasive way to slip out of our conversation but in a pensive one. “This is good,” she finally said with a slow nod. “There’s something of you here, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe we’ll find it while I’m around. You think?”

She looked optimistic, her love of life not daunted long over the changes going on in mine. I smiled, or at least I tried. It would be wonderful if she helped me. It would be
so
wonderful.

****

I couldn’t bring myself to tell Jill everything. Sharing Julianne required complete trust, and even though I knew at some level Jill could be trusted, we weren’t at the point we needed to be. The one where Kyle and I were, and I realized that as I pondered how much to share. How had Kyle reached that place with me? There was no initiation like I wanted for Jill. He was just there. Actually, he was there before I was.

At her request we’d dug right in, and I was reading her selections from Julianne’s letters, and from Kyle’s and my transcribing, when the door opened and he was there, as if on call, as if he’d heard my voice and Julianne’s words. My heart beat a little harder when I looked up and saw him. I felt myself redden as I gazed at his tall, lanky form.

A flash filled the room, and I realized Jill had captured the moment. Another flash and she had him too, both of us on film in that raw moment of seeing each other, with Julianne binding us. I jumped to my feet, wanting to steal that moment back, erase it, save Kyle from exposure in the same way I wanted to protect Julianne.

“Jill, put that thing away!” I admonished her as I made my way across the room. “Kyle, come in,” I said guardedly as I reached him. “Come in and meet my friend from Cincinnati.”

Kyle drifted behind me as I made my way to Jill. She’d stood, her camera dangling around her neck, a large smile on her face. She leaned around me and grabbed Kyle’s hand and pumped it vigorously.

“She’s my photographer,” I said. It almost sounded like an apology as this energetic woman intruded on Kyle’s solitude. I wanted to step between them and spare him Jill’s enthusiasm, but when I glanced at him, he seemed to be holding his own.

“I’m Jill,” she explained, even though it was apparent who she was. “You must be the neighbor man who’s helping Anna.”

“I am,” he said, taking her wrenching handshake well.

“Join us,” Jill pleaded. “It’s perfect that you’re here, since you’re such a large part of the story.”