After the Leaves Fall Read online

  “I like her voice,” I finally said, trying not to sound strained.

  “It’s Chris’s CD—it’s not something I would normally pick up.” I didn’t say anything more, so he continued, “I like it, though.”

  “Me too.” I stood stock-still in the middle of the room and watched him as he avoided looking at me.

  “Sure is hot,” he tried again, and although he attempted to do it casually, I saw him glance at his watch.

  “Yeah,” I replied, wishing with every fiber of my being that I could erase my steps and forget I had ever come to see Thomas today.

  We didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and in those seconds, the months and years of our relationship were diminished into something that carried none of the weight and significance that I knew in my soul they had. It felt worse than death. It felt like everything good that we had ever been was being carried away with each faint note that floated from the room and disappeared into the stillness. He was slipping further away with every breath we took in silence. When I lost my dad, at least I’d lost him loving me.

  After the last wrinkled shirt had been deposited on the wash pile, the dorm room was neat and there was nothing left for Thomas to do. He stood for a moment surveying every aspect of the room and avoiding my gaze. Everything must have met his approval because he glanced at his watch again—not even trying to hide it this time— and then put his hands on his hips, squared his shoulders, and turned to the one thing he had left to address: me.

  “Look, Julia,” he started, “it’s nice to see you and all, but I’ve got someone coming over in a few minutes. …” His eyes dropped away from mine as he trailed off.

  “It’s okay,” I blurted out. “I was just out for a drive and thought I’d stop by.” The lie sounded pathetic even in my own ears.

  He seemed relieved that it was going to be easy to get rid of me. “I mean, I’m not trying to kick you out or anything—”

  Two short raps on the open door behind me caused us both to whirl around.

  She was standing in the doorframe, knuckles still suspended against the wood and smiling beguilingly at the two of us. She was bright and vibrant with eyes so brown and rich they looked like the last swallow of a cup of hot, black coffee. Her teeth were dazzling against her skin, and everything about her seemed luminous.

  I turned to Thomas.

  He had taken a step back from me as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t, even though we were easily ten feet apart. “Francesca,” was all he said.

  It was the way Thomas looked as he watched her that told me everything I believed to be true was not and may have never been. He loved the girl in the door with more than just his eyes, and my mouth went dry as I realized that if he’d ever loved me at all, it was nothing compared to this.

  But it was worse than that. As I stared at Thomas, his eyes darted back to mine, and the guilt written deep within them told me that he knew. He knew—he had probably always known—that I loved him, and in his face I read that he also knew he could never love me like that. And he didn’t stop me. He had never once even attempted to stop me.

  “Who is this, Thomas?” Her voice was light and cheerful, begging to be answered, but he didn’t say a word.

  I tore myself away from Thomas in time to meet her as she walked up with her arm outstretched. I was hardly even aware of doing it, but I took her hand, and it was as smooth and dark as toffee and cool in spite of the heat.

  “I’m Francesca,” she said with a smile, and although I hated her, her eyes were warm and genuine. “Thomas apparently has no manners.” She gave him a look that was both soft and mischievously stern. She held my hand a second longer, waiting for me to introduce myself.

  When I didn’t, Thomas finally stepped forward. “I’m sorry, Francesca. Julia and I were just talking, and … I guess I just wasn’t thinking.” He looked back and forth between us. “Francesca Hernandez, Julia DeSmit. Julia, Francesca.” He paused before adding, “Julia is like a little sister to me.”

  “Oh, that’s so sweet!” Francesca gushed.

  “She lives on the farm next to ours; don’t you, Julia?” Thomas prodded.

  I opened my mouth and when nothing came out, nodded slightly.

  “You’re so lucky to have family nearby,” Francesca said, shaking her head to get her chin-length chocolate curls off her cheeks and forehead. It hurt to watch her.

  Now that Francesca was in the room and the worst of it was already over, Thomas seemed more relaxed, and he gave me an almost-normal smile as he said, “Francesca is from California.”

  “My family has been in the San Diego area for four generations, but whenever somebody hears my last name, they think I don’t speak English!” Francesca laughed as she took the spot on Thomas’s sofa that I had intended to occupy. She spread out her arms and looked meaningfully at me as if she were about to confess an unpardonable sin. “Funny thing is, I don’t speak Spanish!”

  Thomas joined in laughing with her.

  I still hadn’t said a single word, but Francesca didn’t seem to notice. “I came to Glendale Hill because my aunt came here … and I wanted to get away from home,” she offered, winking at me. “Everyone asks that question within five minutes of meeting me, so I’ve decided to get it out of the way early on in the conversation.”

  I don’t care, I thought, and for a heartbeat I was sure that I had said it aloud. But she was still smiling, and when I looked at Thomas, he was too. Apparently I hadn’t said anything nearly so impolite. In fact, I hadn’t said anything at all, but somewhere in the back of my shock-numbed mind I knew that at some point I would have to speak. I could not simply walk away. Yet what could I say to her? It was impossible to even formulate a coherent thought, much less carry on a conversation with the girl who made Thomas look at me that way. More than anything, I wanted to run, to pretend that I had never heard the name Francesca, but wasn’t that what they were expecting? After all, I was little more than Thomas’s baby sister.

  The music in the background faded to silence during a pause between songs. It couldn’t have lasted for more than the span of a breath, but to me it stretched unbearably.

  “What’s your major?” I finally asked. The numbness faded slightly.

  Although my words were hardly audible, Francesca was prepared for the question. I hadn’t impressed them with my witty resilience or buoyant spirit—it was the quintessential inquiry on a college campus.

  “I’m in nursing,” she answered, wrinkling her nose as if it was a distasteful occupation to her. “My mom is a nurse, two of my aunties are nurses, and my grandmother was a nurse. … You get the picture.” Directing her attention to Thomas, she said demurely, “I didn’t know you were a Norah Jones fan.”

  I had never seen Thomas blush—unless you counted the time that we walked in on his parents kissing in the kitchen—but with Francesca’s words his ears turned pink, and he tried somewhat unsuccessfully to hide a little-boy grin. I felt myself disappear from the room.

  “I’m a new convert,” he said carefully. Only someone who knew him well would understand that he was hoping beyond hope that she wouldn’t ask him what his favorite song was on the CD.

  “Are you familiar with Diana Krall? She’s actually a jazz singer, but . . .” Francesca trailed off as she realized that I was still in the room. “I’m sorry, Julie. We’re being rude. What kind of music do you like?”

  It wasn’t that she called me Julie that made my heart pound twice for every normal beat, although I hated it when people did that. It wasn’t the obvious delineation that separated the three of us into them and me. It wasn’t even that Francesca was blinking innocently at me with her stunning dark eyes, and I couldn’t meet her gaze in return. It was that they were openly placing me in the role Thomas had so offhandedly designated for me—they were treating me like a little sister instead of an equal. I was an afterthought, a nuisance that they would say good-bye to with relief. And I was supposed to be making small talk about
my musical preferences.

  “I have really eclectic taste in music,” I said after a moment. “I don’t think I could name a particular favorite.” Speaking had made me finally able to put one foot in front of the other, so I forced a distracted smile and made my way to the door. Composing myself for one last civility, I said, “It was nice to meet you, Fran.” I knew I was being childish by refusing to call her by her proper name, but deep inside of my horror was a cool, hard anger, and it felt good to say it wrong.

  “Francesca,” Thomas corrected.

  I just smiled and gave them both a little wave. “Have a good evening.”

  They each said good-bye, and the last thing I saw as I left was Francesca shooting Thomas a raised eyebrow and a wholesome, confused expression. I didn’t buy it. Sweet and wonderful person or not, she knew exactly the dynamics in the room, and she was only pretending to be oblivious. Somehow it suited her purposes to be naive.

  Though the music took flight and evaporated into the air around me, my feet felt heavier and heavier with each step farther away from Thomas’s room. I took quick, shallow breaths to stop myself from crying—I could not cross the greenbelt with tears in my eyes. I had always been able to turn off my emotions, and I did that now, focusing on the betrayal I felt instead of the pain of losing a friend. Galvanizing my hurt into anger was the only way I knew to preserve myself. I was so absorbed in trying to do so that when Thomas grabbed my arm halfway down the first flight of stairs, I nearly screamed in surprise.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, just held on to my arm and looked at me with a mixture of emotions that seemed confusingly incongruous. I could tell he was still annoyed with me, but underneath that he was also upset, and although I wouldn’t have believed it thirty seconds ago, he seemed hurt, too.

  “Julia—”

  “Thomas, don’t,” I interrupted, trying to pull away.

  He let go of my arm but matched my stride as I continued down the steps. “It’s not like we ever dated.”

  “I know” was all I said.

  We rounded the landing on the second floor, and Thomas jogged a few steps around the far side of the banister to stay by my side.

  “Our friendship was never romantic,” he tried again.

  “I know.”

  “I’m allowed to date whomever I choose.”

  “I know.”

  He groaned in frustration and jumped down a step to stand in front of me.

  I stopped and our eyes were almost level. I didn’t avoid his gaze.

  “Then why are you being like this?” Thomas’s eyes were clear and blue and sad. They sought me out from behind my anger and held me in a place where we were on familiar ground, a place where we felt comfortable looking into each other’s eyes. He sighed, and the regret in that one soft sound made the tears I had been holding back fill my eyes so quickly that I didn’t even have time to blink them away.

  Watching me cry, Thomas said, “Julia, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was cold to you when you came over this afternoon. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Francesca sooner.” He couldn’t stop the words now that they were coming, and he continued as if a string of apologies could repair what had been broken. “I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings. I’m sorry Francesca called you Julie. You know, she really is great. You two have so much in common—you’re going to like her so much. …”

  He stopped and gently reached out both hands to brush them across my cheeks. “Don’t cry,” he said, wiping my tears away. “I said I was sorry. I’m still your best friend.”

  I closed my eyes and suffered the warmth of his skin on my face. He was the same Thomas as always and I was the same Julia, but everything had changed. As much as I wanted to, there was no going back. I couldn’t pretend that I believed he was anything less than the one person who could save me from myself. I couldn’t be his best friend, his sweet little sister, and watch him fall in love with the woman who would take the place that should have been mine.

  With my eyes still tightly shut, I whispered, “Thomas, you apologized for the wrong things.” And then I pulled away from him and walked down the rest of the stairs and into the fading sunlight.

  Lessons

  AS I DROVE away from Thomas the day everything changed, I found myself ensnared in the story of the chick.

  It had nothing to do with Thomas or Francesca or what I was feeling, but I replayed the incident again and again in spite of my every attempt to focus on the present, to deal with what had happened. Maybe it was a defense mechanism—my mind was refusing to concentrate on Thomas because it would simply be too difficult. Maybe the stories were somehow connected, and deep down I knew that one would make sense of the other. Whatever the reason, this particular piece of my personal history lived in my mind for the remains of the day, and with it I spent more time thinking about my father than the man who had slipped from me that afternoon.

  My dad had loved to tell the story of the chick.

  It was less dramatic than downright silly, a childish encounter that left Dad with what he considered to be a meaningful and allegorical little anecdote and me with an acute feeling of repentance that faded with every year that marched between the spring I was six and the present day. While I used to cringe in horror whenever Dad would begin to recall that particular episode of my life, the older I got the less I cared and the less I even bothered to listen to his tender retelling.

  But with my sweaty hands wrapped tightly around the sticky steering wheel as the speedometer reached sixty on the gravel roads, I struggled to remember the words he used and the tone of his voice. With a growing sense of almost desperate loss, I found that I had forgotten the story—not the actual events, the skeleton of what happened, but the beauty of what Dad had seen in it. It was a cavernous feeling—a dark and echoless free fall—because who would ever remember with him gone?

  It had been early spring and my grandpa, who was only slightly over a year away from the heart attack that would take him peacefully in his sleep, had ordered fifty broiler chicks for the little hen-house he had spent the winter restoring. The building was old and full of cracks and holes, but Grandpa had sealed them to the best of his ability and had bought a few old heating lamps from a neighbor who had once raised golden retrievers.

  April should have been a fine month to receive chicks, and Grandpa was confident about the state of his chicken coop. But after almost two weeks of above-average temperatures in the sixties and even seventies, a cold front moved in and brought with it rain that turned to freezing rain that—against all our most fervent prayers—turned to snow. Just under a foot fell in the hours between midnight and 6 a.m., so when we woke in the morning, the world was a very different place than it had been when we went to sleep.

  The warmer weather had encouraged trees to bud and tulips to leap out of the ground, and now snow was draped like Dutch lace over the promises of spring that had been so plump and unspoiled only twenty-four hours before. Everything was soft and blurred, and the wind continued to shift the landscape by blowing and whipping the snow into creamy drifts that crept silkily up the sides of some buildings and left others clean and bare. For December, it would have been stunning. For April, it was devastating—particularly to the lemon-colored chicks huddled in Grandpa’s drafty chicken coop.

  School was canceled, and since Dad taught science at the high school, we both had the day off. After scrambled eggs on toast and hot chocolate for breakfast, he donned his parka and scooped the driveway while I watched from the kitchen window. We let the car run for a full five minutes before we got in it and made sure to call Grandma to let her know we were coming just in case we got stuck and no one knew where we were. Janice had made it in to the office, and we didn’t expect her to give us a second thought throughout her busy day.

  The roads in town had been plowed and weren’t as bad as we thought they might be, but once we left city limits, the snow swirled over the road like crystallized fog. Ditch and asphalt became one, and the only thi
ng that kept us from driving right off the road and into the snowbanks alongside Highway 10 was the fact that the road was straight as a pin—Dad simply refrained from turning the steering wheel. We didn’t meet any cars, but it was exhaustingly slow going. I think he would have turned back, but the visibility was so bad he couldn’t see a field driveway to pull into.

  When we crested the hill above Grandpa and Grandma’s farm, the view was spectacular. The sky was blue above the ground-storm, and the sun glared blindingly off the newly covered fields. The whole earth was blanketed in white, and the wind was spinning the snow into swirling funnels of diamond light.

  “We may not make it home if this keeps up,” Dad commented with a grim smile.

  The thought didn’t disappoint me.

  Grandma was just putting on her boots as we came rushing into the entryway, shaking snow from our coats.

  “It’s freezing, Grandma!” I yelled, my enthusiasm bubbling over.

  She laughed. “I know, but it’s April—it’s not supposed to be freezing!” She cupped my hooded face in her gloved hands and kissed my snow-damp forehead. “Grandpa is with the chicks. You want to come see?”

  This was why I had wanted so badly to come in the first place. I was dying to see the chicks that were still tiny enough to hide in my cupped hands. I practically hopped with impatience as I waited for Grandma to tuck her slate and silver curls into the hood of her coat and wrap a hand-knit scarf around her neck and face.

  Bundled against the cold, we headed outside again, and I felt Grandma take one of my hands and Dad take the other. The snow barely covered my boots in some places, but in others they had to swing me over drifts that would have engulfed me.

  The chicken coop was faded red and often obscured by the swirling whiteness, but we could always make out the shape of it at least, and before my toes got too cold in my boots, we were tromping up the two sagging concrete steps and into the leaning little building.