CHAPTER 15
Despite having been invited in, I still felt awkward and out of place in Julie’s apartment. We entered in single-file and with an unspoken but shared sense of sorrow—livestock to slaughter—Julie in the lead and myself bringing up the rear. She stepped to the side, let me pass, then closed the door and engaged a vast collection of locks.
A tiny parlor opened into a substantial but modestly furnished living room, where an inexpensive circular rug covered most of the worn hardwood floor. The furniture was mismatched and old, and the walls had been painted a light gray, which gave the apartment a gloomy feel even in the light of day. Two windows dressed in faded white curtains stood at the rear of the room overlooking an empty playground and an adjacent avenue beyond. Small silver crucifixes dangled in each window, facing the street like sentinels. I pretended not to notice.
Julie brought me through the living room and into an equally dismal kitchen. A card table, its vinyl top littered with burn marks and small tears, sat in the center of the room surrounded by four folding chairs. A large glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, a deck of cards and various religious books, including an old Bible, lay scattered across it. Suspended from a curtain rod in the window over the sink was another silver crucifix.
The apartment was filled with religious trinkets and small statues, but I couldn’t be certain if I’d entered a temple or a bunker. I’d not seen a single photograph of her family, or anything that linked her to anyone for that matter, only an impersonal and joyless space that seemed a shrine to isolation.
Julie motioned to the table so I slid into one of the chairs while she put a kettle of water on to boil and excused herself; vanishing down a hallway off of the kitchen. Though I hadn’t seen him since entering the apartment, I caught a whiff of the pungent odor of cooked heroin, and assumed the man was down that hallway somewhere too, filling what was left of his veins. I was still stunned that Julie had let me in at all, and I couldn’t lose the disconcerting feeling that she’d somehow been expecting me. That was wildly improbable, of course, but it seemed the only reasonable explanation for her saying, I knew it, when I’d first mentioned Bernard, and for allowing a stranger into her home with virtually no questions asked. Coupled with the general feeling of unease the apartment emitted, my nerves were on edge and the back of my neck had begun to tingle. But there was certainly no chill in the stagnant air. In fact, it was then that I noticed all the windows were shut, and I found myself wondering why they would be on such a pleasant spring day.
I could feel the man’s eyes on me before he emerged from the hallway and glided over to the table. Much calmer and under control now, but to the point of being just barely conscious, he sat down in slow motion and leaned heavily against the rickety table, a ludicrous drug-induced grin on his face. He seemed incapable of small talk so I looked at the Bible without trying to be too obvious. Like the other books on the table, it was tattered and dog-eared, and an inordinate number of pages had been book-marked with small sticky notes.
But for the man’s slow steady breathing, the apartment seemed impossibly quiet.
“You ever ask yourself,” he said, slurring the words, “how you got to be here—you know, like—like in this place at this time?”
I looked into his filmy eyes. “Been asking myself that a lot lately.”
“You look… tense.”
“It’s a tense time for me.”
“Well,” he said, his eyes closing, rolling slowly back into his head, “I figure worry is like this essentially useless, like, thing, you know? Because—dig it—because it like, it like makes us feel safe because it gives us this illusion, this lying-ass illusion that we have power. More power than we really have, you see what I mean? But in the end, man, in the end, all that leads to is fear, right? And fear leads to confusion.” He opened his eyes, smiled at me. “So the way I see it is, we all got to, like, to do whatever we can to clear our heads. You see what I’m saying, man?”
I wanted to get away from him, but continued to hold his gaze. “Yes.”
“Questioning where some burned out spike addict gets off tossing around advice, right?” He laughed dreamily.
The creaking floor distracted me, and I turned to see Julie crossing the kitchen to a row of cupboards above the only counter space in the room. “Hush up now, Adrian,” she said coolly. She had changed into a pair of old jeans and a lightweight sweater, and had let her hair down, which now hung to just above her shoulders. Tied back, as it had been when I’d first seen her, the gray at the roots was far more evident. “Would you like some tea?” she asked.
“No. Thank you, though.”
She took two cups and saucers from the cupboard and placed them on the table along with a bowl of sugar, then went to the refrigerator and returned with a small pitcher of milk. She considered me a moment, as if she planned to speak, but instead moved back to the counter and rummaged through her purse until she’d found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit the cigarette with her back to us, only turning around once she’d drawn an initial drag and exhaled it with a sigh.
Julie Henderson was not aging gracefully. She wore no makeup and had gained some weight, and that, combined with a look of exhaustion and a clearly intentional effort to mask her natural beauty and appear average—if not outright unattractive—gave her a slovenly look. She took another heavy drag from the cigarette, and I noticed nicotine-stained fingers with nails gnawed down to nearly nothing. She was six years older than I, which still only made her forty-four, but in her current state she looked closer to sixty. An unhealthy, emotionally ravaged and physically debilitated sixty. Somewhere nearby, her magnificence remained, buried beneath lines and crevices and dark rings, as if every instance of pain and fear and sadness and loathing had left a physical mark, a reminding scar. The nineteen-year-old bombshell was long dead, and despite her obvious difficulties, living in her place was an adult, a woman, someone of substance, and someone for whom Madison Avenue-defined beauty was clearly no longer relevant or even of interest.
Julie swept her hair back away from her face. “How did you find me?”
“Your address is in the book, but I didn’t know you were in Cambridge until Brian told me. I bumped into him in town.”
“Brian.” She spoke his name as if it left a foul taste in her mouth. “Does he know you’re here?”
“No.”
She quietly smoked her cigarette for a moment. “Why did you come here?”
It was a good question. What had I been thinking—who the hell did I think I was? Whether my suspicions of what had happened years before were accurate or not, what right did I have to appear from nowhere and disrupt this woman’s already difficult life? “It might be better if we spoke privately.”
“Whatever you have to discuss with me can be said in front of Adrian, it’s all right.” Her tone wasn’t angry but she had obviously already grown impatient. “I trust him completely.”
I saw Adrian grin and wink from the corner of my eye. My palms had begun to perspire so I nonchalantly wiped them on my pants and attempted a coherent sentence. “Look, I know this is beyond odd—my showing up out of the blue like this, someone you never really knew that well and haven’t seen in years—but I didn’t know where else to turn. It’s probably ridiculous, my being here, but I needed to talk to you, Julie.” I folded my hands and placed them in my lap in an attempt to hold them steady. “I asked before, but—do you remember someone from town—from Potter’s Cove—a boy named Bernard Moore?” This time she gave no reaction, so I described him.