“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes. Yes, I heard.”
“Her cancer came back. They thought she was fine. But it came back, and by the time they found out, it was in her bones and her liver. Richard and the kids are pretty shaken up about it.”
Julia bit her lip and stifled a sob.
“I knew you’d take the news hard. She was like a mother to you, and Rachel was such a good friend of yours in high school. Have you heard from her?”
“Um, no. No, I haven’t. Why didn’t she tell me?”
“I’m not sure when they found out that Grace was sick again. I was over to the house to see everyone earlier today, and Gabriel wasn’t even there. That’s created quite a problem. I don’t know what he’s walking into when he arrives. There’s a lot of bad blood in that family.” Tom cursed softly.
“Are you sending flowers?”
“I guess so. I’m not really good at that sort of thing, but I could ask Deb if she’d help.”
Deb Lundy was Tom’s girlfriend. Julia rolled her eyes at the mention of Deb’s name but kept her negative reaction to herself.
“Ask her, please, to send something from me. Grace loved gardenias. And just have Deb sign the card.”
“Will do. Do you need anything?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Do you need any money?”
“No, Dad. I have enough to live on with my scholarship if I’m careful.”
Tom paused, and even before he opened his mouth she knew what he was about to say.
“I’m sorry about Harvard. Maybe next year.”
Julia straightened her shoulders and forced a smile, even though her father couldn’t see it. “Maybe. Talk to you later.”
“Bye, honey.”
The next morning Julia walked a little more slowly on her way to the university, using her iPod as background noise. In her head, she composed an e-mail of condolence and apology to Rachel, writing and rewriting it as she walked.
The September breeze was warm in Toronto, and she liked it. She liked being near the lake. She liked sunshine and friendliness. She liked tidy streets free of litter. She liked the fact she was in Toronto and not in Selinsgrove or Philadelphia—that she was hundreds of miles away from him. She only hoped it would stay that way.
She was still mentally writing the e-mail to Rachel when she stepped into the office of the Department of Italian Studies to check her mailbox. Someone tapped her on the elbow and moved out of her periphery.
She removed her ear buds. “Paul…hi.”
He smiled down at her, his gaze descending some distance. Julia was petite, especially in sneakers, and the top of her head merely reached the lower edge of his pectorals.
“How was your meeting with Emerson?” His smile faded, and he looked at her with concern.
She bit her lip, a nervous habit that she should stop but was unable to, primarily because she was unaware of it. “Um, I didn’t go.”
He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He groaned a little. “That’s…not good.”
Julia tried to clarify the situation. “His office door was closed. I think he was on the phone…I’m not sure. So I left a note.”
Paul noticed her nervousness and the way her delicately arched eyebrows came together. He felt sorry for her and silently cursed The Professor for being so abrasive. She looked as if she would bruise easily, and Emerson was oblivious to the way his attitude affected his students. So Paul resolved to help her.
“If he was on the telephone, he wouldn’t want to be interrupted. Let’s hope that’s what was going on. Otherwise, I’d say you just took your life into your own hands.” He straightened up to his full height and flexed his arms casually. “Let me know if there’s any fallout, and I’ll see what I can do. If he shouts at me, I can take it. I wouldn’t want him to shout at you.” Because from the looks of it, you’d die of shock, Frightened Rabbit.
Julia appeared as if she wanted to say something but remained silent. She smiled thinly and nodded as if in appreciation. Then she stepped over to the mailboxes and emptied her pigeon hole.
Junk mail, mostly. A few advertisements from the department, including an announcement of a public lecture to be delivered by Professor Gabriel O. Emerson entitled, Lust in Dante’s Inferno: The Deadly Sin against the Self. Julia read the title over several times before she was able to absorb it into her brain. But once it had been absorbed, she hummed softly to herself.
She hummed as she noticed a second announcement, which mentioned that Professor Emerson’s lecture had been cancelled and rescheduled for a later date. And she hummed as she noticed a third announcement, which declared that all of Professor Emerson’s seminars, appointments, and meetings had been cancelled until further notice.
And she kept right on humming as she reached back into her pigeon hole for a small square of paper. She unfolded it and read:
I’m sorry.
-Julia Mitchell
She continued to hum as she puzzled over what it meant to find her note in her mailbox the day after she’d placed it at Professor Emerson’s door. But her humming finally stopped, as did her heart, when she turned the paper over and read the following:
Emerson is an ass.
Chapter 3
There was a time when, in reaction to such an embarrassing event, Julia would have dropped to the floor and pulled herself into a fetal position, possibly staying there forever. But at the age of twenty-three, she was made of sterner stuff. So rather than standing in front of the mailboxes and contemplating how her short academic career had just gone up in flames and been reduced to a pile of ash at her feet, she quietly finished her business at the university and went home.
Pushing all thoughts of her career aside, Julia did four things.
First, she pocketed some cash from the emergency fund that was conveniently located in a Tupperware container underneath her bed.
Second, she walked to the closest liquor store and bought a very large bottle of very cheap tequila.
Third, she went home and wrote a long and apologetic condolence e-mail to Rachel. Purposefully, she neglected to mention where she was living and what she was doing, and she sent the e-mail from her Gmail account rather than her university account.
Fourth, she went shopping. The fourth activity was intended only as a weepy and somewhat heartbroken tribute to both Rachel and Grace, because they had loved expensive things, and Julia was in reality too poor to shop.
Julia couldn’t afford to shop when she came to live in Selinsgrove and met Rachel in their junior year of high school. Julia could barely afford to shop now, as she eked out a meager living on a graduate student’s stipend, without the eligibility to work outside the university to supplement her income. As an American on a student’s visa, she had limited employability.
While she walked slowly past the beautiful shop windows on Bloor Street, she thought of her old friend and her surrogate mother. She stood in front of the Prada store, envisioning the one and only time Rachel had taken her shopping for couture shoes. Julia still had those black Prada stilettos, tucked in a shoebox in the back of her closet. They’d only been worn once, on the night she’d discovered she’d been betrayed, and although she would have loved to have destroyed them like she destroyed her dress, she couldn’t. Rachel had bought them for her as a coming-home present, having had no idea what Julia was actually coming home to.
Then Julia stood for what seemed like forever in front of the Chanel boutique and wept, remembering Grace. How she always greeted Julia with a smile and a hug whenever she came to visit. How when Julia’s mother had passed away under tragic circumstances, Grace had told her that she loved her and would love to be her mother, if she’d let her. How Grace had been a better mother to her than Sharon ever had, to Sharon’s shame and Julia’s embarrassment.
And when all her tears were gone and the stores had closed for the evening, Julia walked back to her apartment slowly and began to beat herself up for having be
en a bad surrogate daughter, a lousy friend, and an insensitive twit who didn’t know better than to check a scrap of paper to see if it was blank before she left it behind with her name on it for someone whose beloved mother had just died.
What must have been running through his mind when he found that note? Heartened by a shot or two or three of tequila, Julia allowed herself to ask some simple questions. And what must he think of me now?
She contemplated packing up all of her belongings and boarding a Greyhound bus bound for her hometown of Selinsgrove, just so she wouldn’t have to face him. She was ashamed she hadn’t realized it was Grace that Professor Emerson had been discussing on the telephone that terrible day. But she hadn’t even contemplated the possibility that Grace’s cancer had returned let alone that she had passed away. And Julia had been so upset about having gotten off on the wrong foot with The Professor. His hostility was shocking. But even more shocking was his face as he cried. All she had thought about in that terrible moment was comforting him, and that thought alone had distracted her from considering the source of his grief.
It wasn’t enough that he’d just had his heart ripped out by hearing that Grace had died, without having an opportunity to say good-bye or to tell her that he loved her. It wasn’t enough that someone, probably his brother Scott, had effectively torn into him for not coming home. No, after having been destroyed by grief and crying like a child, he’d had the delightful experience of opening his office door to escape to the airport and finding her note of consolation. And what Paul had written on the other side.
Lovely.
Julia was surprised that The Professor hadn’t had her dismissed from the program on the spot. Perhaps he remembers me. One more shot of tequila enabled Julia to formulate that thought, but to think no further, as she passed out on the floor.
***
Two weeks later, Julia found herself in a slightly better state as she checked her mailbox in the department. Yes, it was as if she was waiting on death row with no hope of commutation. No, she hadn’t dropped out of school and gone home.
It was true that she blushed like a schoolgirl and was painfully shy. But Julia was stubborn. She was tenacious. And she wanted very much to study Dante, and if that meant invoking an unidentified co-conspirator in order to escape the death penalty, she was willing to do so.
She just hadn’t revealed that fact to Paul. Yet.
“Julianne? Can you come here for a minute?” Mrs. Jenkins, the lovely and elderly administrative assistant, called over her desk.
Julia obediently walked toward her.
“Have you had some sort of problem with Professor Emerson?”
“I, um, I…don’t know.” She flushed and began to bite viciously on the inside of her cheek.
“I received two urgent e-mails this morning asking me to set up an appointment for you to see him as soon as he returns. I never do this for the professors. They prefer to schedule their own appointments. For some reason, he insisted that I schedule a meeting with you and have the appointment documented in your file.”
Julia nodded and removed her calendar from her knapsack, trying hard not to imagine the things he had said about her in his e-mails.
Mrs. Jenkins looked at her expectantly. “So tomorrow then?”
Julia’s face fell. “Tomorrow?”
“He arrives tonight, and he wants to meet you at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon in his office. Can you be there? I have to e-mail him back to confirm.”
Julia nodded and noted the appointment in her calendar, pretending that the notation was necessary.
“He didn’t say what it was about, but he said it was serious. I wonder what that means…” Mrs. Jenkins trailed off absently.
Julia concluded her business at the university and went home to pack with the help of Señorita Tequila.
***
By the following morning, most of Julia’s clothes were packed into two large suitcases. Not willing to admit defeat to herself (or to the tequila), she decided not to pack everything, and thus found herself twiddling her thumbs anxiously and in need of a distraction. So she did the one thing any self-respecting, procrastinating graduate student would do in such a situation besides drink and carouse with other procrastinating graduate students—she cleaned her apartment.
It didn’t take very long. But by the time she was finished, everything was in perfect order, lightly scented with lemon, and scrupulously clean. Julia took more than a little pride in her achievement and packed her knapsack, head held high.
Meanwhile, Professor Emerson was stomping through the halls of the department, leaving graduate students and faculty colleagues spinning in his wake. He was in a foul mood, and no one had the courage to trifle with him.
These days he was ill tempered to begin with, but his fractious disposition had been exacerbated by stress and lack of sleep. He had been cursed by the gods of Air Canada and consequently seated next to a father and his two-year-old child on his flight back from Philadelphia. The child screamed and wet himself (and Professor Emerson), while the father slept soundly. In the semi-darkness of the airplane, Professor Emerson had reflected on the justice of government-enforced sterilization on lax parents as he mopped urine from his Armani trousers.
Julia arrived promptly for her four o’clock appointment with Professor Emerson and was delighted to find that his door was closed. Her delight soon left her when she realized that The Professor was inside his office growling at Paul.
When Paul emerged ten minutes later, still standing tall at six foot three but visibly shaken, Julia’s eyes darted to the fire exit. Five steps and she’d be free behind a swinging door, running to escape the police for illegally sounding a fire alarm. It seemed like a tempting proposition.
Paul caught her eye and shook his head, mouthing a few choice expletives about The Professor, before smiling. “Would you like to have coffee with me sometime?”
Julia looked up at him in surprise. She was already off kilter because of her appointment, so without thinking much about it, she agreed.
He smiled and leaned toward her. “It would be easier if I had your number.”
She blushed and quickly took out a piece of paper, checked it to be sure it was free of any other writing, and hastily scribbled her cell phone number on it.
He took the piece of paper, glanced at it, and patted her arm. “Give him hell, Rabbit.”
Julia didn’t have time to ask him why he thought her nickname was or even should be Rabbit, because an attractive but impatient voice was already calling her.
“Now, Miss Mitchell.”
She walked into his office and stood uncertainly just inside the door.
Professor Emerson looked tired. There were purplish circles underneath his eyes, and he was very pale, which somehow made him look thinner. As he pored over a file, his tongue flicked out and slowly licked his lower lip.
Julia stared, transfixed by his sensual mouth. After a moment, through a great effort, she dragged her gaze away from his lips to look at his glasses. She hadn’t seen them before; perhaps he only wore them when his eyes were tired. But today, his penetrating sapphire eyes were partially hidden behind a pair of black Prada glasses. The black frames contrasted sharply with the warm brown of his hair and the blue of his eyes, making the glasses a focal point on his face. She realized immediately that not only had she never seen a professor as attractive as he before, she had never encountered a professor who was so studiously put together. He could have appeared in an advertising campaign for Prada, something no professor had ever done before.
(For it must be noted that university professors are not usually admired for their fashion sense.)
She knew him well enough to know that he was mercurial. She knew him well enough to know that he was, at least recently, a stickler for politeness and decorum. She knew it would probably be all right if she sat down in one of his comfy leather club chairs without his invitation, especially if he remembered her. But given the way he had add
ressed her, she stood.
“Please be seated, Miss Mitchell.” His voice was cold and flinty, and he gestured to an uncomfortable-looking metal chair, instead.
Julia sighed and walked over to the stiff Ikea chair that sat just in front of one of his massive built-in bookcases. She wished he had given her permission to sit elsewhere but elected not to quibble with him.
“Move the chair in front of my desk. I won’t crane my neck in order to see you.”
She stood and did as she was told, nervously dropping her knapsack on the floor. She winced and blushed from head to foot as several of the smaller contents of her bag spilled out, including a tampon that rolled under Professor Emerson’s desk and came to a stop an inch from his leather briefcase.
Maybe he won’t notice it until after I’m gone.
Embarrassed, Julia crouched down and began to gather up the other contents of her knapsack. She had just finished when the strap on her very old bag snapped and everything she was carrying crashed to the floor with a loud bang. She kneeled quickly as papers, pens, her iPod, cell phone, and a green apple skidded across the floor and onto The Professor’s beautiful Persian rug.
Oh, gods of all graduate students and eternal screw ups, kill me now. Please.
“Are you a comedian, Miss Mitchell?”
Julia’s spine stiffened at the sarcasm, and she glanced up at his face. What she saw nearly made her burst into tears.
How could someone with an angelic name be so cruel? How could a voice so melodic be so harsh? She was momentarily lost in the frozen depths of his eyes, longing for the time when they had looked down at her with kindness. But rather than give in to her despair, she breathed deeply and decided that she had better get used to the way he was now, even though it was a grave and painful disappointment.
Mutely, she shook her head and went back to filling her now broken knapsack.
“I expect an answer when I ask a question. Surely you’ve learned your lesson by now?” He studied her quickly, then glanced back at the file in his hands. “Perhaps you’re not that bright.”