During those first cold months, it hadn’t occurred to her to start removing or rearranging his things. It was crazy, she knew, but it seemed perfectly possible that one day he might reappear, as if nothing had happened, that she might come home one afternoon and there he would be, beaming at her from the piano, asking her in one of his impromptu librettos what kind of day she’d had. Even if it had occurred to her to move his things, it would have struck her as sacrilegious.
So his clothes stayed in the closet, his shaving things in the bathroom cabinet, his sheets of music still stacked on the lid of the piano, which Amy rarely played anymore. Julia understood why and didn’t push her, hoping that in time she would come back to it. Meanwhile, the piano stood like a solemn black mausoleum, gathering a dust of memories on its closed lid. And as the months passed, so the echo of its silence grew ever more deafening.
On the night Ed died Amy had slept in Julia’s bed and she’d slept there ever since. Again, Julia worried if this was right, if it would somehow hamper the child’s independence. But the truth was, they both enjoyed the comfort and the company, enjoyed having someone to hug in the middle of a cold night when either one of them felt lonely or sad. At weekends they would have breakfast in bed and lounge there half the morning sometimes, reading their books and chatting. And it was while doing that this morning that Julia had casually floated the idea of removing the rope rail. It was no big deal, she said, but maybe it would give them more space for Frisbee and ball games and so on.
‘Would we get a man in to do it?’
‘A man? Are you kidding? This is no job for a man. You and me, sister. The gals is gonna do it.’
Amy grinned. ‘Cool.’
‘You don’t think it matters that it was, you know, well, Daddy’s thing?’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me. He’d say it was the right thing to do.’
Now, six hours later, the chainsaw was almost through the last post.
‘Okay!’ Julia yelled. ‘Get ready. Here she goes!’
‘Timber!’
The post toppled slowly and as it landed on the grass with a thump, they both cheered. Julia killed the chainsaw and when its noise subsided they heard the phone ringing.
‘Honey, would you get that?’
Amy ran up onto the deck and into the house while Julia took off her hardhat and, picking up the spade, started to dig around the foot of the post to loosen the cement footing.
‘Mommy? It’s for you.’
From her voice, Julia knew there was something special about the call. She took off the gauntlets and stepped up onto the deck.
‘Who is it?’
‘I think he said he was your dad.’
‘Well, there’s a thing.’
She made a comical face and ruffled Amy’s hair as she walked past her toward the deck doors, trying to look unruffled. In fact her heart was doing cartwheels. She hadn’t heard from him in five years and it was probably more like fifteen since she had last seen him. When they invited him to the wedding, he had written back with some feeble excuse. He had never met Ed and never met Amy, his only granddaughter. By the time Julia picked up the phone, she was already seething.
‘Hello?’
‘Julia?’
‘Yes, who is this?’ It was mean, but she couldn’t resist it.
‘It’s your father.’
‘Oh. Hi.’
‘Hi. How are you?’
Julia laughed. ‘Well, I’m just . . . Completely fine, thanks. How’re you?’
‘I’m okay. That was Amy, I imagine.’
Imagine. Of course, that’s all he could do, never having laid eyes on her.
‘Yep. That was your granddaughter.’
There was a pause. She wasn’t going to make it easier for him by filling it.
‘So, listen. I’m calling from Seattle.’
‘Oh, nice.’
‘Yeah, I’m over here for a couple of days on business. And, well, I wondered if I might hop on a plane and come down and visit with you.’
It almost floored her. She couldn’t think what to say. She looked around and saw Amy standing in the doorway, watching and listening.
‘Of course,’ her father went on, ‘if it’s inconvenient or you’d rather I didn’t, I’d absolutely understand.’
‘No. Well. I mean, God, it’s just been such a long time.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
There was another pause, while Julia’s mind scrolled on overdrive through all the conflicting emotions he had managed to stir with so few words.
‘Listen,’ he went on. ‘I know how you must be feeling—’
‘Please don’t presume to know how I feel,’ she snapped.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Look, maybe it was a bad idea to call.’
‘I don’t even know where you live nowadays!’
‘I know.’
‘I mean . . . Jesus!’
She was about to ask who the hell he thought he was, calling out of the blue like this and thinking he could just breeze into their lives when it suited him. Then she turned and looked again at Amy and saw how worried she looked at hearing all this. She reached out an arm and Amy came over and nestled against her. Julia took a deep breath and said quietly into the phone:
‘Come.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Come and see us. We’d like you to.’
He flew in the following evening.
His hair was completely white and he was shorter and slighter than she remembered him. She had worked out that he must be in his mid to late fifties but he was still a goodlooking man. Above all, she remembered the crooked smile and the blue, faintly melancholy eyes. He saw her as soon as he came through the arrivals gate and headed toward where she stood with Amy tucked under her arm.
On the way to the airport and all the time they had been waiting, Julia had been lecturing herself not to cry when they met and as he drew near she could see he was fighting tears and she guessed that he had probably made the same resolution. He hugged her tightly and for a long time, neither of them saying a word, and the smell of him came back to her and it was that, more than anything, that nearly set her weeping. But they both just about held out.
She introduced him to Amy, who squirmed and gave him a coy grin. He clearly didn’t know whether or not to kiss her and so he took her hand and held it in both of his and Amy, whose subtle reading of such emotional quandaries never failed to amaze Julia, reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
On the way home he sat pivoted in his seat, talking mostly to Amy in the back, about his trip and how he had been in Vancouver a few days ago and seen a rare white whale there in the zoo. He asked her about her school and she told him how she’d started horseback riding and was learning how to lope and gave him the names and descriptions of all the horses at the stables. By the time they reached home, the two of them were already friends and, while Julia made supper, Amy took him on a tour of the house, then led him down to the river.
Watching them from the deck while she set the table, Amy chattering away and holding his hand and her father in his faded denim shirt looking down at her, hanging on the girl’s every word, Julia had a vision of herself at Amy’s age, walking and talking with him in the park and feeling so protected and proud of him and proud too of herself to be treated seriously, not like some silly kid but like a grown-up whose views on life were just as valid as his own.
The cement footings of the rope-rail posts were still lying on the grass. Julia heard Amy telling him that they had turned out to be too heavy to shift and that Mom had been forced to concede that they did, after all, need to ‘get a man in’ to move them. It was a hint as broad as it was unintended and when they came back into the house, Julia’s father said he would see to it in the morning.
Sitting out on the deck eating their steaks by candlelight, with Amy still gabbling away, it occurred to Julia that this was the first time she had ever cooked a m
eal for her father and how, strangely, she felt herself to be as much his parent as his child.
At bedtime Amy asked if he would come upstairs and read her a story and while he did, Julia cleared the dishes. She went upstairs just as he was saying goodnight.
‘He’s lovely,’ Amy whispered after he’d gone downstairs.
‘Yeah. He is. And so are you.’
When she came downstairs her father was sitting out at the table again, smoking a cigarette. He said he hoped Julia didn’t mind and she said she didn’t so long as she could have one too. He gave her one and lit it for her.
‘She’s a great kid,’ he said.
‘Yeah. She is.’
For a while neither of them spoke. It was he at last who broke the silence.
‘Julia, there’s so much I need to apologize for, I guess I don’t know where to start.’
‘Why don’t we just take it as said. I guess I’m just a little puzzled about why now, after all these years.’
He stared at the table for a moment. Julia couldn’t stand the taste of the cigarette and stubbed it out.
‘Last year I got cancer. Skin cancer, a malignant melanoma.’
Oh God, she thought. Please. Not another death. He must have read the thought in her face, for he went on quickly, stubbing out his cigarette too.
‘No, I’m okay. They found it early. Well actually, Claudia, my wife—’
‘I know who she is, Dad.’
‘Of course you do. Anyway, she found it. And they cut it out and I’m fine. Really I am. But these things make you stop and think. You know? About the important things in life. And, with you and me, I don’t know, I realized I’d just been so dumb. To let things go so far. Let all that time slide by. Because the more you let slide, the harder it is to reach over it. Hell, I’m not saying it very well . . .’
Julia reached out and took his hand.
‘It’s okay.’
‘No, it’s not. Julia, I never met your husband, for Christsakes. I was never there for you when things were so hard for you. I can’t even pretend I didn’t know, because your mother always told me. She told me what a great guy Ed was and begged me to come to the wedding and Amy’s christening, even to the . . . to Ed’s funeral. But I’d just let it all go so far, let it all slide, and I was just too, I don’t know, ashamed or something, yeah, ashamed, to get in touch. And, God forgive me, I am so, so sorry. I feel such a goddamn fool. Because here you are, so beautiful and wonderful and Amy too. And . . . Oh boy, I’m sorry.’
He turned his head away and wiped his eyes. And Julia got up out of her seat and went to him and knelt beside his chair and put her arms around him and for a long time they held each other and wept.
‘I wish I could have another go at it,’ he said. ‘I’d do better next time.’
The next day he helped them clear the cement boulders of the post footings and fill in the holes and then cut the posts into firewood which they stacked in the barn. He was flying back to Seattle that afternoon and from there straight back to Europe. Julia and he had only a few more moments alone before he left. Amy had insisted on making them sandwiches for lunch and while she was in the kitchen doing that, Julia and her father sat on the deck drinking iced tea.
‘It’s a beautiful place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Do you see yourselves staying?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe you should travel a little. It’s good to travel.’
‘Maybe we will.’
‘You could come and stay with us. See Europe.’
Amy appeared in the doorway with the sandwiches.
‘I want to go all around the world,’ she said.
They drove him to the airport where he made them promise to consider coming to stay with him and Claudia in Germany. It was sweet of him but Julia knew it would never happen and suspected that he knew it too.
His visit affected her deeply. It was as though a circle had been closed. In some mysterious way, it also seemed to release her, made her feel that it was time to take a step forward. A week later she gathered Ed’s clothes and shoes and gave them to a charity store in town. She cleared his things from the bathroom cabinet and boxed all the sheets of music so that they could be stored tidily in the bookshelves. And she gave his specially adapted computer equipment to the local chapter of the Association for the Blind.
School started again for both of them and Julia tried to fire herself with a new enthusiasm for her work but found she couldn’t. In class, she caught herself staring out of the window and having to ask her pupils to repeat questions that in her daydreams she hadn’t heard. The prospect of another cold winter and another school year with all its cyclical familiarity depressed her.
She loved Montana and if Ed were still alive, she would have been perfectly content to go on calling it home. But the truth was, it had always been more his place than hers. She couldn’t see herself spending the rest of her life there. Of course, it was Amy’s place too, the only home she had ever known. But the girl was young enough and bright and secure enough to adapt anywhere. As the fall closed in and the days drew shorter, so Julia grew steadily more restless and convinced that it was time for some sort of new beginning.
In her new mode of tidying and clearing, Julia had found some big boxes of photographs that for years she had promised herself to sift through and stick into albums. It was just the job for a cold and gloomy fall weekend and Amy was excited by the idea. They went into Missoula to buy six smart albums, came home and lit the fire and then settled in front of it on the floor with the photos spread around them.
Julia hadn’t realized how ancient some of them were. Some even predated her meeting Ed. Amy found a batch of Julia and Linda dressed up as hookers for a fancy dress party in Boston and laughed so much that Julia thought the child was going to do herself an injury. Julia pretended to be indignant.
‘I don’t know what’s so darned funny. That’s how we always dressed in those days.’
In one of the boxes there were photos that Julia had taken as reference for her painting and among them were those she had shot on her trip to Kenya, the summer before she met Ed. Amy was transfixed. They had talked about her African adventure before but Amy now wanted to know the story behind every picture and about everything else that Julia had seen and done while she was there. One of the pictures was of some lions lazing in a tree.
‘Did you really get that close?’
‘Uh-huh. We were in a truck, so, you know, we were safe.
Anyway, they eat so many tourists they get bored of the taste.’
‘Can we go to Africa one day?’
‘I don’t see why not. One day.’
Not long afterward Julia was sorting through some old magazines and came across the one with Connor’s article about St. Mary of the Angels, the rehabilitation center for child soldiers in Uganda. She put it aside and took it to bed that night and with Amy snuggled asleep beside her, read the piece again, trying not to rustle the pages as she turned them. She found herself staring for a long time at the picture of the ten-year-old boy, Thomas, so traumatized by what had happened to him that he could no longer speak.
The first time she had looked at it, a few months before Ed died, it had made her weep, but now it didn’t. In the accompanying article Connor wrote that the center was mostly funded by a charitable organization based in Geneva but that its resources were sorely stretched and that there was a constant need for ‘both financial and practical help.’
At first Julia thought maybe she could hold a fundraising event at the school, get her pupils to write to the children at St. Mary’s, even start some kind of sponsorship arrangement. Then she read the next sentence. It quoted Sister Emily, the center director, saying that she was always short of ‘properly trained and qualified staff.’ It set Julia’s mind whirring.
That was exactly her field. She thought of what Amy had said about wanting to go to Africa. She put the magazine down, switched off the light but couldn’t switch off her
head. She lay awake almost the entire night thinking about it.
For days she didn’t mention it to anyone. It was an absurd idea. How could she uproot them both, take Amy out of school and go waltzing off with her to Africa? What about all the danger and disease? It was out of the question.
But try as she might, she couldn’t shake the idea that somehow it was meant to be. What an extraordinary experience for a child it would be, to see another continent, to get to know another culture and another people. What a great adventure it could be for both of them. And it wasn’t as if it was going to be forever. A few months, a year at the most. Like a long working vacation; like working for WAY in the old days. She wouldn’t even have to give up her job at the school; Mrs Leitner would let her take a sabbatical, she was sure. They could rent out the house, which would pay for the trip. And they would both come home with their lives enriched.
By churning all this in her mind for many days and nights, Julia managed to turn what had begun as a hare-brained fantasy into a serious, worthwhile proposition, bursting with benefits for all concerned; something which wasn’t merely possible but which positively demanded to be done.
She agonized about how best to broach the subject with Amy or whether she should mention it at all until she had checked things out more. In the end she came right out with it. They were having supper at the kitchen table, eating one of Amy’s favorites, spaghetti with pesto sauce.
‘Do you remember how you said you’d like to go to Africa?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Did you really mean that?’
‘Sure I did. Why?’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe we should.’
‘You mean, like, a vacation?’
‘Well, yeah. We’d certainly have a vacation. We could do a safari, see all the animals.’
‘Hey, Mom! Are you serious? Wow!’
‘But I was also thinking that maybe I could work there for a while.’
‘What, we’d, like, live there?’
‘Maybe. Just for a while.’