Lucid Interval, 3
Julie Cooper has never been particularly spiritual. She’s never bought into the notions of karma or fate or luck. She doesn’t believe that everything happens for a reason. She believes in actions and consequences. She believes that a woman makes her own destiny through her choices in life. She never would have gotten out of Riverside if she didn’t.
Julie Cooper does, however, believe in irony. God knows she’s seen enough examples of it in her own life, like when Jimmy’s shady stock market dealings turned around to bite him in the ass, leaving her family dependent upon Kirsten Cohen’s charity to keep them afloat, or how Julie had ended up destitute and living in a trailer park after Cal, her billionaire real-estate mogul husband, passed away. Now that was ironic.
So is this:
For the past few weeks the Cohens have been tearing their hair out, spending thousands of dollars on a private investigator to track down their wayward foster son and out of the clear blue sky on a Tuesday afternoon, Julie runs right into him. Literally.
Julie is driving, or crawling really, down a jammed section of the seven-ten freeway. Like most days since the funeral she’s not going anywhere, and that has nothing at all to do with the traffic. It gets to be too much, just being in the house where Marissa used to live, walking past her room, seeing her clothing still hanging in the closet, her makeup still laying on the counter, spread out like she's expected home any minute, or like she was just there. Everything is exactly as Marissa left it. The only thing missing is her daughter.
Marissa’s absence follows Julie around like a shadow, always in the back of her mind. Sometimes she can occupy herself so fully with chores and projects that she forgets, very briefly, about her daughter. Sometimes sleep or medication helps her escape. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes she has to get out, run from her daughter’s shadow, and it doesn’t matter where she goes, only that she’s out in the sun.
Sometimes Julie feels like she’s searching for something. Sometimes she entertains the wild, dangerous idea that her daughter is out here somewhere and if she just looks hard enough Julie can find her and bring her home. But at the end of the day she always finds herself back in Newport, low on gas and empty-handed with a hollow feeling inside.
Julie is driving with the top down on Neil’s Lexus. She has her sunglasses on, Burberry scarf wrapped over her hair, red lipstick, French manicure and high heels. Tanned and toned, she’s the very picture of glamour and wealth. Truck drivers heading for the port in Long Beach honk their horns at her and wave. Construction workers in the median turn her way and whistle, high and shrill.
She doesn't mind this kind of attention. Strangers look at her and they see a beautiful woman, not a grieving mother. It reminds her that there's a whole world out there. It reminds her that life goes on.
Julie hears the Impala before she sees it: loud engine, louder bass. She turns her head, lowers her sunglasses. Four Latino boys cruise past her on the shoulder, fed up with the traffic, heading for the next off-ramp. One of the boys stands up in the back seat. He's wearing low-cut jeans and a tight wife-beater. He has great arms. “Te quiero!” he shouts at her, grinning ear-to-ear. The rest of the boys in the car whoop and laugh and gesture for her to follow them.
Twenty years ago she would have.
Julie used to be the kind of girl who chased the boys in the slick cars, the boys with the motorcycles and the leather jackets, who smoked and drank and threw wild parties, back when she had big hair and wore fuchsia nail polish and off-the-shoulder sweatshirts. But that was a long time ago, before she got married, before she had children, before she knew anything at all about life. Julie catches her reflection in the rear view mirror, and she wonders where that wild redheaded girl from Riverside went, and if she's ever coming back.
Julie stays on the freeway, creeping forward with the rest of the traffic. She watches the Impala grow smaller until she loses sight of it at the top of the overpass. Since she's not paying attention to the cars in front of her, she doesn’t notice the flare of brake lights on the Jeep in front of her until it’s too late to stop.
There’s a brief, screeching sound of tires, then the crunch of fiberglass and plastic meeting metal. The impact is just hard enough to make the Lexus rock on its tires.
“Dammit!” she hisses.
Other drivers are staring. Julie adjusts her sunglasses and flips her turn signal on. She follows the Jeep’s hazard lights to the shoulder.
A fifteen-mile-per-hour collision isn’t enough to hurt anyone but it is enough to dent the Jeep’s bumper and crack one of the Lexus’ headlights. Julie can see the damage from where she is, and really the last thing that she wants to do is get out of the car on the side of a dusty, congested section of freeway littered with broken glass and be gawked at by families in mini-vans coming back from their day trips to the Queen Mary.
Then the driver of the Jeep gets out of his vehicle and walks towards his back bumper. He's a young man, wearing a denim jacket and black pants. His head is down to inspect the damage.
Julie feels like floor of the Lexus has dropped right out from under her.
Very slowly, very carefully, Julie opens the driver’s side door and steps out onto the asphalt. She walks toward the Jeep, grinding dust underneath her red Prada heels. She’ll never be able to polish the scratches out.
The driver of the Jeep watches her approach, arms at his sides. He doesn’t make a move to meet her.
Julie pulls her shoulders back, blinks tears out of her eyes. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of the traffic. She says to the young man, “I’m going to need your information.”
And for once Julie Cooper doesn’t go back to Newport empty-handed.
XXXXX
Julie shows up at the Cohen household just as Kirsten is setting the table for dinner. To say that her relationship with Sandy and Kirsten has been strained would be an understatement. It’s been weeks since she last dropped by unannounced and she’s not certain how she’ll be received.
The front door swings wide open to reveal a wide-eyed Sandy Cohen. After an open-mouthed pause he says, “Julie.” His posture, his voice and his mannerisms convey only surprise. It’s very Sandy Cohen of him. He shows her only what he wants her to see and nothing else.
“Sandy,” she says with a small smile, “May I come in?”
“Of course you can.”
When she crosses the threshold he sees the Lexus sitting in his driveway with its dented fender and broken headlight. “Oh my God, what happened?”
She waves a hand dismissively, upbeat, “Oh, fender bender. No one got hurt. It’s nothing that Neil’s insurance won’t cover, hopefully.”
Sandy eyes her suspiciously. “You seem a little shaky. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Better, actually, than I’ve been in a while.”
Sandy nods but he doesn’t ask what she means. He’s a patient man, the kind of man who knows that the answers to all of his questions will be revealed if he looks and listens hard enough.
Sandy leads her into the kitchen where Kirsten is laying down napkins and silverware at the table. It’s been weeks since she and Kaitlin and Neil sat down for a full meal together.
Kirsten is only setting three places, and it reminds Julie why she came.
“Kirsten, we have company,” Sandy says by way of announcing her.
Kirsten looks at her and her eyes light up, putting to rest any doubts in Julie’s mind about whether she would be welcome in their house. She strolls right up and pulls Julie into a hug. “Julie, how are you?”
Julie smiles a little. She shrugs, “One day at a time.” She’s not surprised to find that her eyes are wet. This happens a lot lately. Everything makes her tear up. Changing a trashcan liner makes her tear up.
Kirsten notices. She puts her arm around Julie and guides her to the table.
Julie tries on a smile, still sniffling, “Okay, believe it or not, I didn’t actually come to cry on your shoulder.”
“I always have one available,” Kirsten assures her. “It’s good to see you.”
Julie has missed this. She’s missed her friend. Sometimes it felt like Marissa wasn’t the only one who left her. Many of her closest friends didn’t know how to react around a grieving parent. Some of them smothered her with platitudes as if they could relate to what she was going through, which was bad. Some pretended that nothing had happened at all and acted as if Marissa never existed, which was worse. Some of them disappeared from her life completely, never called, never visited, and that, to her, was the easiest reaction to understand.
Julie reaches into her purse and pulls out an empty envelop, the kind with a clear little window for mailing a bill. It’s been opened and the contents removed and folded and stuck in her purse where it stayed for who knows how long until Julie needed something to write on. She holds it out to Kirsten.
“What’s this?”
Kirsten is sitting with her elbows on her dining room table, turning the envelope over in her hands. There’s an address written on the back. She reads it out loud.
“Julie, what is this?” she repeats.
“That is, uhm, where you can find Ryan.”
“What?”
“I ran into him today. Literally ran into him. Rear-ended on the seven-ten freeway about two hours ago.”
Kirsten’s eyes widen. She sits up straighter. “Oh my God.”
“I know, small world.”
In the kitchen Sandy gives up any pretense that he wasn’t listening to their conversation. He strides over to stand behind his wife. He rests his hand on her shoulder. She reaches up to clasp it.
“Was he okay? Are you okay?” Kirsten asks, reaching across the table to Julie with her free hand. They form a chain, the three of them.
Julie gives several quick, jerky nods, “We were both fine. Neil’s insurance premium is probably going to go up, but…no police, no ambulances, no fire trucks.”
“How did he look?” Sandy asks.
Julie thinks about Ryan, standing by the side of the road. He had looked different to her, older. His cheeks were more hollow and less smooth than she remembered, the boy burned away to reveal the man underneath.
“He looked okay, all things considered.”
Sandy is scanning the address on the envelope. “San Pedro,” he reads. “Julie, how did you get him to give you this? I’ve had an investigator trying to track him down for weeks. Nothing. He hasn’t used a credit card, hasn’t given out his social, hasn’t had a traffic ticket. When that kid doesn’t want to be found, he doesn’t want to be found.”
Julie picks her words carefully, “It took some persistence,” she says slowly. Sandy and Kirsten are hanging on her every word. “I asked nicely, then I told him that if he left without giving me his address I’d give his license plate number to the police and have him arrested for fleeing the scene of an accident.”
“Wow,” Sandy says.
“He didn’t promise to pick up the phone or answer the door, but he swore that the address is legit.”
“Julie, this is fantastic,” Sandy tells her. “I’m lost for words.”
“I’m feeling a little speechless myself,” Julie confesses. “When I saw him I couldn’t believe my eyes. I must have been the last person on this earth that he wanted to meet on the side of the road.” Especially considering what she said to the boy the last time they saw each other.
Seeing Ryan again made her realize what a mistake those words were, and she’d apologized to him, right there on the side of the road.
Only she wasn’t just apologizing to Ryan for the things she’d said. She was apologizing to Marissa through Ryan. For the past month Julie has felt her daughter slipping away from her, passing into memory. The only way that she can keep Marissa alive is to keep those that she loved close. Ryan was an important part of her daughter’s life for three years, and if Marissa left even a little bit of herself with him when she died, that’s enough.
Julie can’t explain these things to Sandy and Kirsten. She can’t tell them how she ended up sobbing in Ryan’s arms on the side of a busy highway at three o’clock in the afternoon. They would sympathize but they wouldn’t understand. They had to be there, and Ryan was.
Her eyes are welling up again. Her nose must be bright red by now.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Julie asks.
Kirsten rubs her arm.
Sandy hands her a napkin to dry her eyes.
“Another word comes to mind,” he says.
To be continued...
Part 4
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