A Song For Julia Part 40

"Of course I do," she said viciously. "The year you shamed your father and nearly wrecked his career by letting that picture get out?"

With my left hand, I started slowly sliding off the bangles and bands I always wore around my wrist. In a conversational tone, I asked, "Mother, why did you never ask me when and how that picture was taken?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Why would I want to know? Why would I ask when my oldest daughter had become a drunken s.l.u.t?"

Carrie gasped, and Alexandra sat up her in her seat, eyes wide and shocked.

You'd think, when she threw out words like that, I would want to cry. That I'd want to hole up in my sh.e.l.l, wrap myself back up in that safe coc.o.o.n that protected me ever since my senior year.

I was done hiding. My wrist clear of obstruction, I ran my fingers up and down the scars on the inside of my right wrist. Her eyes widened when she saw the scars. I said, "Do you remember when I came to you on New Year's Eve of 2000? You and Dad were getting ready to go out, and I came in crying? Because I needed a mother for a change? You said, and I'm quoting, 'Maybe things wouldn't be so bad at school if you hadn't behaved like a s.l.u.t.' Do you remember that?"

She winced. Good.

"I remember it, Mother. Because I needed you. And not long after all of you left, I went into the bathroom and slit my wrists. These are the scars."

She gasped then ordered, "Alexandra, Carrie, go upstairs, right now."

Alexandra didn't wait around. She was gone in a flash. But Carrie said, "I'm staying here with my sister." Then she reached across the table and took my right hand in her left.

My mother turned on me then. "I don't know why you're bringing this up now. I don't even know who you are."

"Of course you don't. You never bothered to ask. You never asked me what was wrong. Mom, that stupid picture? I was fourteen when it was taken, and the boy was eighteen. I needed help from you. I needed you. But you were too busy that year, weren't you? With George Lansing? Am I right?"

She clenched her fists. "Whatever you thought you saw that night, you were mistaken."

Carrie's eyes were wide. I'd never told her about Mother's little secret.

"Is that why you shut me out that year in China, Mom? Because of Mr. Lansing? Because you were too busy having your tawdry little affair to notice that your daughter was in an abusive relations.h.i.+p with someone years older?"

My mother stood up, her lips compressed into a tight line. "I don't have to listen to this."

"Yes, you do! You've treated me like dirt for the last eight years!" I shouted. "When I came home from that hideous abortion clinic in Beijing, you never even asked me what was wrong or where I'd been! Didn't you notice all the blood on the sheets, Mom? Didn't you notice how sick I got? I needed a mother and all I had was ..." I shook my head. "Nothing. Not once were you there when I needed you. When Lana sent that picture out, you didn't offer to help. You didn't hug me, and tell me it was going to get better. Someone in Bethesda Chevy Chase made copies and stuffed them in people's lockers at school. They tortured me, Mother. To the point where I couldn't see any way out but suicide. And what I've never understood, to this day, was why? Why wouldn't you help me? Why weren't you there when I needed you?"

My mother's face twisted, and she started to cry. "I ..." she whispered. "I didn't know it was so bad for you. You're my daughter. I just wanted ... I wanted you to be better."

"You wanted to protect yourself."

She shook her head. "No ... that's not it at all. Your father and I...we went through a really rough time in Belgium and in China. We thought ... we'd fallen out of love. And he had an affair in Belgium. And ... yes. I did in China."

I wanted to vomit. "So you were just too preoccupied."

She looked at me, her face unreadable, and she said, "Julia ... what happened in China?"

So I told her. The whole stupid story of me falling in love with a boy too old for me, of him using me, and treating me like dirt and making me feel like it was my fault. By the time I got to the abortion, and being lost and wandering Beijing in the snow afterward, she was crying.

After I finished the story, I said, "For the longest time I thought you hated me. That there really was something wrong with me. That it was my fault Harry did that to me. That's what he told me. That it was my fault." I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. "It wasn't, Mother. I didn't make all the right choices, but I was a kid. And no one was helping me. No one was there to talk to about it, to guide me. The only family I thought I had then was a twenty-year-old Marine who I thought I'd never speak to again."

Carrie murmured, "You've got family now. You've got me."

I looked at my sister and blinked my eyes to hold back tears.

My mom looked at us, her face a portrait of loss and shock. She shook her head then ran out of the room without another word.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

Part of my armor (Crank) Look, I know I cook for a living. On a three foot grill, with set procedures. But it was Christmas morning, and I wasn't going to let a Christmas morning go by without a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes. Because if Dad had been home, that's what he would have done. What I didn't realize was, cooking in Dad's kitchen? It was completely different.

Mom finally stepped in after I set the frying pan on fire, flooding the kitchen with smoke and setting off the fire alarm.

We finally got it sorted out, though opening the windows and doors when there was a foot of snow on the ground outside was bracing, to say the least. But Mom laughed it off, and Sean put on his winter coat, and we spent the morning laughing and being a family.

None of us said anything about the fact that Dad hadn't called. Maybe he'd get to a phone today. I don't know what the phone situation was over there. He mentioned something like big call centers they get bussed to when he called a couple weeks ago. He's writing almost every day.

Mom had gone out and bought a small blue star flag and mounted it in the window. She explained the tradition from World War II: families would put a blue star in the window representing each member of the family serving overseas in wartime. A gold star meant they'd lost a family member.

I wasn't much for prayer, but I'd found myself praying for Dad and for this thing to not actually come to war.

After breakfast, I cleaned up, then offered to start cooking Christmas dinner. My mother shooed me out of the kitchen in a hurry. "Go entertain your brother," she said.

I think she was enjoying this.

I could do that. We hooked up the new Xbox I'd bought him, now that I was actually earning money from the band, and goofed off playing games.

We hadn't opened everything. When I woke up this morning, there were two gifts under the tree from Julia. One for Sean, one for me. I'd looked at my mom and she said, "She gave them to me before she left town and asked me to make sure you got them."

She'd purchased Sean an updated 2002 edition of the 20-year-old medical textbook he'd been reading for the last several months.

I hadn't opened mine yet. I wanted to talk to her when I did, and I was watching the clock, waiting for noon here, nine A.M. in California. She'd be up by then, I was sure.

It was one minute after noon when I called.

The phone rang ... two, three times. I was afraid she wasn't going to answer, but on the fourth ring she picked up.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said. "Crank?"

"Hey, Julia."

"Is everything okay?"

I smiled, bitterly. Of course. She wouldn't expect a colleague, a member of the band, to call her on Christmas morning. That was something close friends did. It was something for family. Or lovers.

We were none of those things.

I took a deep breath. "I called to wish you a Merry Christmas."

She was silent, and then said in a small voice, "I miss you."

My heart started pounding. Did she just say that? Was she s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with me? Is that all it took to get me into an uproar? I grimaced. "I miss you, babe."

"Call me babe and I'll punch you right through the phone line, Crank."

"That sounds more like you," I said. "How are you? How is ... everything?"

She said, "It's tense here. I'm sort of in a minefield with my family at the moment."

"Families are always minefields," I said.

"Have you heard from Jack?"

"No ... not in about a week."

"If you do, please tell him-" She cut herself off, then said, "Tell him I love him, and I'm thinking about him, okay?"

"I will."

"Did you open your present?" she asked.

"Not yet. I kinda wanted to talk with you first."

"Well, open it, bonehead."

I grinned. It was weird. It seemed like it had been weeks since we'd had a casual conversation that wasn't weighted with tension and emotion. "All right," I said. I walked over to the tree and picked up the tiny box, which didn't weigh more than an ounce.

"Is it empty?" I asked.

"Yes, I decided to give you two cubic inches of oxygen."

I rolled my eyes and tore open the wrapper. Then I noticed my mom looking in from the kitchen. Nosy. I turned my back, keeping the phone tucked between my ear and shoulder, as I opened the tiny box inside the wrapper.

Inside the box was a tiny friends.h.i.+p bracelet ... woven, with pink and white threads. It was worn ... really worn. I wrinkled my eyebrows. It was the one I'd seen on her wrist a thousand times. I didn't think she ever took it off.

She'd been wearing it the day we met. And every day since. This ... I was afraid to even ask what it meant.

"Your friends.h.i.+p bracelet," I said.

She was breathing heavily at the opposite end of the phone line. "Yeah," she said. "Okay-you have to promise you won't think I'm weird."

"It's a little late for that," I replied.

"Shut up," she said. Then she went on. "Well ... I used to make those when I was in middle school. Corporal Lewis brought me the kit back from the States when he'd gone home on leave. He was just considerate that way."

I grinned. She'd talked a lot about her Marine Corps bodyguard from those days.

"Anyway, I made that one. But I didn't really wear them, until after ... after I hurt myself. And then ... well, you've seen. I wear a thousand bracelets, to ... to hide it. To hide me. And that one, I've worn every day since it happened. Until this week. It was part of my-part of my armor. But I don't need it any more."

Jesus H. Christ. My eyes burned a little, and voice rough, I said, "Holy cow, Julia. That's ... that's some gift."

"You don't think I'm weird?"

"Of course I think you're weird," I said. And then I went on, knowing that I shouldn't, knowing that it was a mistake, but I did it anyway, because it was just true, and she had to know it. "That's one of the reasons I love you."

She was silent, breathing at the other end of the phone line.

"Oh, Christ, Julia. Don't hang up on me. I'm sorry if I upset you by saying that."

She was still silent, and I'd have sworn she'd hung up on me if I couldn't hear her breathing. Finally, she whispered, "Promise you won't give up on me, Crank? At least not until I get home after the holidays? Please?"

I sucked in a breath. Then I said, "I'll never give up on you. Do you hear me? Never."

"Merry Christmas, Crank."

"Merry Christmas, Julia."

With a click, she hung up the phone. I put the phone away and stared at the bracelet. It was a little thing, the threads frayed and worn, the white threads permanently stained to gray. But it was part of her armor. I wondered if that meant she was going to let me through?

It was too small to fit my wrist, by far. But I bet we could enlarge it somehow. I walked toward the kitchen, calling, "Mom? I need your help with something."

The next two minutes of my life will be engraved in my memory forever. As I walked toward the kitchen, someone knocked on the door. Thinking Tony was early, I veered off course, toward the front door, just as my mom came out of the kitchen. She was wearing Dad's "World's Greatest Mom" ap.r.o.n ... which, of course, had once been hers. I opened the door and stepped back in shock.

My mother gasped and covered her mouth.

Two men, both of them in Army dress uniforms, stood on the porch. One had the stripes of a master sergeant; the other was a chaplain. A notification team? We weren't at war yet, what could have happened? Was Dad okay? I started to panic.

"Oh, G.o.d, please no," my mother moaned. I grabbed her, because she had started to collapse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

I need a favor (Julia) I'll never give up on you. Do you hear me? Never.

I hung up the phone and sat there, his words echoing in my head like a song.

I didn't deserve that kind of devotion. I was terrified of what it meant. I couldn't imagine how to live up to it: I was afraid I'd pull back, that I'd never give him what he needed.

But for the first time, I was starting to feel like I could try.

When I went downstairs after the phone call, I left my bangles and bracelets on the dresser. I felt naked without them. The only thing on my wrist was the delicate watch Barry gave me that Christmas in Belgium. But maybe I didn't need to hide any more. I leaned up against the doorframe and looked in on my family.