Susan Taylor Chehak

Chapter One

How about if for now we skip the once upon a time? That, and who she was and where she was born, how she grew up with her mom (accountant) and her dad (actuary) in a world of numbers and dates and formulas and facts with one living sister (Janet, seven years older) and one dead brother (Horace, the infamous unborn twin) in a smallish brick house in Nowhere, New York, with trees in the yard (maple and oak) and bushes by the windows (juniper) and flowers in the garden (roses, lilies, irises) and one of those quilted covers over the toaster that matched the oven mitts above the stove – just to give you a feeling for Mrs. James and her sense of style (toilet seat covers, refrigerator magnets, pastel sweater sets, sensible shoes). How about instead we go right to the point of where she found herself at the end of this story, all out of options with nowhere to turn, because she'd already done everything that she could think to do to put things right again when they had all gone so terribly, and to her mind tragically, wrong.

Which was: holed up in the English Department offices on the third floor of Stanley Hall at Springer College in Brevity, Iowa – Veritas Odit Moras – with the triple loop of a fully loaded ping pong ball bomb collar hanging around her neck like a string of oversized pearls on a little girl playing pretend, which is pretty much what she was. Except that this was not a game, it was real. One flick of the Bic, and ka-boom.

What else do you want to know?

Her name was Julia James, and maybe you've already heard of her, because she did gain some notoriety after what happened, but it's important to understand that before that she was no one. She was seventeen years old at the time of her crime – if it was a crime, and that's still up for debate, whether Julia is our hero or our villain – and she had never been in any kind of trouble before. That's not to say she wasn't everything her mother always believed her to be, which was a liar and, now and then, a thief. Maybe it's just to say that she'd never been caught.

We can tell you this: she sincerely didn't mean for it to go as far as it did. She had always hoped that someday she'd be famous (doesn't everybody?), that she'd do something big, something important, something that would make people sit up and pay attention. That she'd be someone, somehow, and yet never in the wildest of her wild dreams did she ever imagine that it would have come to the crisis that it did and become the legend that it has. But there it is. The truth won't wait.

o0o

The facts as we know them are these: a certain Ms. Julia James was in the employ of Mr. and Mrs. Deacon Bensenhaver Molene at the time of what everybody thought and said was their collapse. She'd been working for them for about three months by then, since the start of summer. Job title? Housekeeper. Caretaker. Companion. Job description? Do whatever there was that needed doing. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, washing, mending, minding. You name it, and it was Julia's to do for them.

The arrangement that they had was not exactly a formal one, because that's not how it happened. And it wasn't something that she was trained to do, either – she would be the first to admit that. Quite the opposite. If Julia was trained to do anything it was to keep to herself and stay out of the way, not be the one whose responsibility it was to get everything done to make sure that somebody else was fed and warm and clean and dry (and safe and sound and whatnot).

She was nobody's mother (yet), and she was not a nurse, either. There is no evidence to suggest that she ever explicitly claimed that to be her profession, to the Molenes or to anybody else, although it's possible that some assumptions were made and then left to stand, without any denial or correction from her. She did wear a uniform sometimes – that's been documented – so maybe this made it seem like the position was more legitimate than it actually was? Or maybe it made it seem like she was pretending to be someone that she was not.

That white nurse's uniform (skirt, blouse, stockings, shoes) was all her own doing. She has admitted to that, too. Nobody asked her to wear it. Nobody told her to wear it. This was all Julia's own personal choice, of her own personal devising.

At one point she found herself wanting to show it to her mother, but that was clearly just wishful thinking, and besides, Julia was not about to spend the money to call and say, "Hey Mom! I have a job and I wear a uniform and I know what I'm doing and people trust me!" because she knew her mother would not get it, and even if she did she wouldn't have cared, not really. Or worse, she wouldn't have believed it anyway.

Nevertheless the uniform did mean something to Julia, which maybe makes it sound more complicated than it was. She just liked the phony white fabric. She liked how it was clean and slick and easy to take care of, too. Wash warm. Drip dry. Cool iron, if you must. It was important-looking. Serious-seeming. And if you want to know the truth, she liked how it looked on her. She has always had a classic figure. Very small waist. Long legs. Full hips. Nice breasts. Emily had been heard to say more than once that to her Julia was the very picture of an angel.

She bought the whites at the Green Square Swap Meet that they have in downtown Brevity every Sunday in summer. On her days off Julia prowled the church bazaars and tag sales around town and because Number One, she was a frugal person (thanks Mom) and Number Two, she knew a good bargain when she saw it (thanks Dad), she was able to outfit herself quite well while she was in Brevity and nobody was the wiser. Plus, Number Three, Julia had no living expenses to speak of that time (thanks nobody but herself). She worked hard to pay her way. She did what she had to do, that's all.

Julia was not able to tell anyone where the woman who sold those uniforms to her got them for herself, because the fact is: she never asked about it. For all Julia knew, they weren't even hers in the first place. Or if they were, she had definitely grown out of them, and probably so some time ago. Maybe the woman used to be a nurse herself, when she was younger, or thinner. Or maybe she had a daughter who had been a nurse and then she died of something that she picked up from one of her patients and now the mom was trying to get rid of her daughter's old stuff, for which she had no use anymore, and make a little bit of money from it at the same time. To pay for the casket and the funeral and the flowers and so on and so forth and all like that.

That whole train of thought brings up some other questions, though, ones that may or may not be important. Such as: Are nurses allowed to sell their old uniforms? And: Is wearing a nurse's uniform some kind of an impersonation? And: Could a person get in trouble for impersonating a nurse? If so, it probably doesn't matter anyway, because that's definitely not the worst thing that Julia has ever done, before or since.

o0o

The Molenes weren't looking for help when Julia showed up. In fact they didn't even know they needed it until there she was, emerging from the mist, an apparition at their door. Hungry and cold, because she'd been on the road for several days already by then, riding on the Greyhound from Erie to Ottumwa, with a hitchhike at either end and three stop-overs along the way.

Julia's thought was that Emily would take one look and know how much she loved her, she'd be so happy to see her, she'd take her in without a moment's hesitation, and then they'd have this perfect little family, the family of Julia's dreams. Maybe there would even be other kids, Emily's own children, a bunch of brothers and sisters for her to have to contend with. They'd be jealous at first, but then when they got to know Julia better, they'd realize that she was no threat to anything and then they'd come to count her as one of their own. By the time she actually got there, however, it was way too late for any of that. A lifetime too late. Too much time had passed already, and Julia was too young and Emily was too old. Deek, too. Besides, there weren't any children anyway. Never had been.

Julia tried. She did the best she knew how. But it was impossible, and before she knew it, the whole thing had just gone too far. That was not her fault. (We must insist upon this.)

It was early summer and a storm had rolled in over the plains on its way to the mountains far away, so it was raining – the kind of blind solid downpour that stops just as suddenly as it starts – and Julia was soaked. In fact, she was a mess in all kinds of ways at that time. A rag, a bone, a hank of hair, as her Aunt Lucy had been heard to say. Of herself, of course, not of Julia.

She had hitched from Nowhere to Erie, in the dark and all alone, just a girl, with nothing but her own wits to keep her safe from harm. A nice woman in a family van stopped and offered her a ride and then turned around and scolded her for accepting it, going on about how she used to bum rides when she was in college but that was then and this is now and you can't trust anybody anymore (though it seemed she was having no problem trusting Julia), until finally she let Julia out at the bus station, with another warning to be careful and pay attention and don't talk to anybody, especially not if he's a man. Either it was a while before this lady missed the two twenty dollar bills from the wallet in her purse or she didn't want to admit to her own vulnerability, because Julia never saw her again, although she did spend four more hours at the station waiting for the bus to come in, and by the time she'd begun to feel the stab of remorse and think about somehow giving the money back, she was long gone and it was too late for any of that. By then it was the middle of the night and so far away from Nowhere that Julia didn't even know where she was anymore. More no one and nowhere than she'd ever been before. She half expected that her family might be looking for her, that her mother would be sorry when she saw that Julia had left not just her house, but the town altogether, but that didn't happen (more wishful thinking), so it looked like Mrs. James was as glad as she had always told her younger daughter she would be that the girl was gone and out of her hair.

Mostly it was uneventful, but the one good thing that occurred on that trip was that Julia experienced her first real mindreading episode – after all those fruitless months of lessons and hard work and practice at it – and when it finally happened she realized that she'd been doing it all wrong, all along. She had been calling it mindreading, but that was a total misnomer, misleading in its implication that what she was supposed to do was use her intuition to read other people's minds and so that way she could come to know what they were thinking. You see, she thought if she could learn to do that, then she would know just what they wanted, and then maybe she could find a way to give it to them somehow, whatever it was – if it wasn't too expensive, that is, and if it wasn't something that would bring misery to someone else – and then they would be happy. This was how Julia James was going to save the world. She figured the more people who were happy, the fewer people who would be unhappy, not only because their own minds had been changed but also because that made them nicer to everyone else around them. Like a virus, she thought, such happiness couldn't help but spread. (Naοve girl. Such a child. If nothing else, we have to love her for that.)

But what Julia learned, there in the dark on that bus on a highway from Nowhere into nowhere, was that she wasn't the one who was supposed to read other people's thoughts, it was other people who were supposed to read hers. By her sending them out strong enough and in just the right way so that the other person would be able to hear it and pick it up. It wasn't clear what good that did them, whether it would make anybody any happier if only they could know what Julia was thinking, unless what she was thinking was about how good and beautiful and perfect they were – which was, most of the time, a big enough challenge in itself, never mind sending such thoughts out loud and strong enough that they might have a chance of being overheard. No wonder it was so hard.

You know when you stare at the back of someone's head and then eventually they snap to and turn around and look at you? Like that. Or when you're thinking about someone you haven't thought about for a long time and then all of a sudden the phone rings and there they are, telling you that they've been thinking about you, too. It wasn't mindreading that was Julia's psychic talent. It was mindwriting. Or to put it another way, it was mind control.

This was a tremendous revelation to our girl. So huge it almost made her turn around and go back home to try again. Because once she had it figured out, well, that changed everything. Once she knew what she was supposed to do, then she also knew what she was going to have to do to practice getting better at it.

The mind belonged to an endomorph. Female, maybe forty years old, black hair, blue eyes, medium height, 250 pounds and all that goes with that – shortness of breath, diabetes, high blood pressure, varicose veins inking the insides of her thighs. She had taken the aisle seat next to Julia, who honestly had no prejudice against her for her size, per se. Mrs. James happened to be a fat woman, too, and Julia's sister and her aunt Lucy – those three of the most important women in her life, all of them were overweight in their own way. No, it was that she was taking up more than her fair share of the seating area and her skin was deathly white and, where it touched Julia's, clammy and cold. Soon she was sleeping. Julia stared at her. She thought daggers: "Go away. Go away. Go away. You don't want to sit next to me. You don't want to be here." And then, two hundred miles later, at the next stop, the woman woke up and she got off, just like that. So maybe that proves something.

Whether you think so or not, the point is, Julia believed it did.

o0o

We might wonder what Emily Molene must have thought when she saw Julia that first night after she arrived in Brevity, and we might reasonably guess that she was scared. Even after Julia explained to her who she was – "Julia! Julia James!" She had to shout for Emily to hear her through the front door, which she refused to open, which was as it should be. "I've read your book! I'm your biggest fan!"

Emily was squinting back through the glass pane in the front door, her face distorted by its bevel. She had no intention of letting anybody come inside her house, rain or no rain, and we can understand her position – an old woman has no business opening her door to a complete stranger, which is what Julia was to Emily then. Not even to a complete stranger who is a harmless-looking girl. Julia even told Emily this later, after she was settled in and living at the house in the Molenes's employ.

She might have given up and gone away, tried again later maybe. Or she might even have seen the whole thing for the true folly that it was and quit right there – in which case none of what happened would have happened – except that then there was Mr. Molene coming in the gate and up the walk, with Plato panting at his heels. It was his constant companion, that big black German shepherd. Friendly enough all right, but not the kind of dog you wanted to be fooling around with if he didn't already know you.

So there was Deacon Molene, all gruff and grumpy the way he could get sometimes, and he was wanting to know what Julia was doing there on his front porch, but it wasn't like he was afraid of her or anything like that – because he had the advantage of the dog, for one thing, and for another, she really was just a bit of a girl without much muscle or meat, and for a third, Deek was not ever afraid of much.

"What's there to be afraid of, at my age?" as he would say himself.
He brushed straight past her into the house, but he left the door open, so she took a chance and followed him right on in.

By all accounts, the place was a mess back then, before Julia took it over. More of a mess, that is. Two old folks living alone like that, they didn't have the strength to keep it clean, or maybe they just couldn't see it well enough to know how bad it was. Dust balls, layers of grime, fingerprints on the glass and spots on the floor, stains on the carpet, wallpaper faded and torn.

This was all vaguely familiar to Julia, reminiscent of another old house back in Nowhere – big and dark and ugly – except that one didn't have anybody living in it but ghosts and bums and vermin and bugs. It had long been abandoned, by three elderly sisters who lived there and had kept so much to themselves that they were dead for a week before anybody missed them or bothered to go looking for them. Found frozen. Stuck together like a pack of hamburger patties, spooned for warmth in their shared bed. They were comic book crazy ladies, spinsters, hags, and they were pack rats, too. Newspapers piled up to the ceiling. Boxes all over the floor. Books and magazines, milk cartons, old soup cans. And cats all over the place, as well, pissing and pooping and making more cats.

That house became a sort of tourist attraction at first, drawing in the kind of people who will drive around all weekend looking for ghosts and spirits from the other side. Nobody asked the obvious question, which is if it was that cold in there that the three ladies were frozen solid into one clump, so it took a truck to get them to the mortuary for a thaw, then how come those cats didn't freeze, too?

Of course it wasn't nearly that bad for Emily and Deek. They were old, but they were not crazy. They had a maid service that had been coming by once a week to clean up after them, but it is Julia's opinion that those girls are lazy, and they'll rob you blind, given half a chance. At least that's what her sister Janet always said, and she would know, because she used to be one of them herself, before she married the cop and retired into fulltime housewifery, which included taking care of her daughter and cooking for her husband and cleaning a house of her own. Once Julia was there to help, though, the Molenes had no need for anybody else anymore.

So, sure, they took her in that night. These were kind and generous old souls we're talking about here. Plus, they were still innocent and selfless, then, and on the side of all that's good and holy. Although she did scold them for it eventually, just as the lady in the truck had scolded her, and she did warn them that they should never even think of doing such a thing as that again, still, Julia was grateful for it at the time. She didn't have a penny to her name – having spent it all on the bus ticket and some magazines to read and food to eat along the way – or anyplace else to go – because their home had been her destination all along. She was on a mission, a quest you might say, and now there she was, completely depleted and at the mercy of fate, without any other options, no plan B.

We know that Julia came from a family that was good with numbers, especially the kind that add up to something. Her father was an actuary, and he had always told her, among other things: "Cover your ass." Her mother's more domestic and mannerly version of the same advice: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

But they were ones to talk, weren't they? Those two, her esteemed progenitors. Mucked up their own lives big time, what business did they have telling Julia how to manage hers? None whatsoever, not as far as she could see. That big mess they'd made for themselves had definitely trickled right down to her, the younger of their two surviving children and in fact that's how it was that she happened to be there at the Molenes's door in the first place. She was just hoping for some hospitality, which Deek and Emily gave her in great and generous abundance, no questions asked, and which she constantly reminded herself she had never gotten from her own family and was more than lucky to ever get at all.

They didn't quite know what to do make of her, at first. But once she had explained all about who she was and why she'd come – because she'd read Emily's book, many times, and it had touched her deeply, it had changed her life, so she felt that she just had to meet the author – then Emily invited Julia to come in, sit down, and have some tea.

She played it cool; she took her time. It wouldn't have done any good to rush them into accepting her as one of their own. That would have to wait. Emily made the tea (weak) and put out some cookies (stale), and they sat in the front parlor (dusty and dim) and it didn't take a genius to figure out that the best way for her to be allowed to stick around for a while (forever!) would be if Julia could make herself indispensible to them. So, that's what she did. And it wasn't even that hard, because they really were in need of someone like her in their lives just then. She wasn't afraid to work. She would do anything they asked her to do. And then some.

o0o

After the tea was cold and the cookies were all gone, Julia made to be on her way. She said her thanks yous and her good byes, as polite as you please, and then she slipped around to the back of the house, where Deek had parked their car – a big black Lincoln convertible with comfy red leather seats – and she crawled into the back. Of course, there were plenty of other places she might have holed up that night. There are kids all over the country who get themselves locked inside a Wal-Mart or a Target store and then find a place there to sleep until morning. And in a college town like Brevity, there were always encampments around, too, home to runaways on the loose, traveling from here to there, following bands or just hanging out on the streets together. There was always someplace to sleep. But Julia valued her privacy for one thing, and for another, she wanted to stay close. No reason to wander off and make friends or risk a confrontation with a friendly, kindly cop who took a special interest in returning lost children to their bereft parents and forsaken homes.

Instead, she made a pillow of her knapsack and a blanket of the lap rug that Emily kept for use when they went for a drive with the top down, and she curled up to sleep there in the backseat of the car.

She made another attempt at using her clairvoyance by trying to contact her mother that night, but without success. Instead of breaking through the barrier of time and space, just to let Mom know where she was – in case Mrs. James was worried or wondering or feeling some remorse, which we can suppose was not the case – and that she was in a place that was safe and warm and dry, Julia bumped right into the Big Nothing. Emptiness. Silence. Not even a flicker. Not even a peep. Worse than that, she seemed to have invited a violent thunderstorm to gather and strike instead. The kind you read about or see on television after it's over, one that blows through those little farm towns and smashes all the houses flat, tearing up trees and knocking down barns and tossing mobile homes around from one trailer park to the next like a handful of Legos. Where the next day everybody stands around stunned, taken totally by surprise, as if they've been led to believe that somehow because they live in another sort of nowhere that is the middle of America, nothing of any event or consequence is ever supposed to happen to them that might turn their world around and upside down so that everything can never be the same for them again. So stupid-looking that no matter how compassionate you're trying to be you can't help but think that in a way they kind of deserved it?

All that was going on, the blowing and the booming and the flashing and the pouring, but Julia hardly even noticed, because she was exactly where she wanted to be: safe and sound, cozy as cotton, and sleeping like a baby on the wide warm leather meadow that was the backseat of Emily and Deacon Molene's car.

o0o

There was Deek the next morning, up bright and early – as we have since learned was his daily habit – to take Plato out for his walk and examine the devastation. Soon, too, Emily was out there in her galoshes to try to do what she could to salvage her battered flower garden, which wasn't much. After a while Deek came back and they all – man, woman, and dog – went back inside the house, but Julia held back. She took the time to run her fingers through her hair, swap one T-shirt for another, put her shoes back on and splash water from a clean puddle on her face, before making her way through the rosebushes around the side and on up to the front door again to knock. No answer, but the house was not locked this time, and that was either a careless oversight or it was a foolishly false sense of safety or it was a timely stroke of luck – either way Julia took advantage of the situation by simply opening the door and walking in and getting straight to work. As easily as that is how it all began.

The point is this: the arrangement Julia James had with the Molenes was not in any way exploitive – neither them of her nor her of them – the way some people might choose (or have been led) to believe. No, it was just a simple arrangement, of mutual benefit to all: she needed them, yes, but they needed her, too. Maybe even more so, if we are to tell the truth. It was that simple. She came along for reasons of her own, and they took her in for reasons of their own, and that's how it came about that she was there, a witness to what happened to them. To what was done. To what they did. And how. And why.

And all right, so what if they were as ancient as a pair of old trees, and feeble and deaf and all that. So what? We might just as well argue that Julia was only a child, nobody from nowhere, too young and ignorant and innocent to blame. But, she loved them! And, they loved her! Didn't she? Didn't they? And isn't that enough?

o0o

She was there first thing in the morning and she stayed all day, every day, doing anything that needed doing, until after they had had their dinner (fixed and served by Julia) and were ready to go up to bed (made and straightened by her), and then she'd leave, go out the front door and creep through the bushes, around the side, to the back, climb into the car again, and sleep. Very quickly they had settled into this routine and just like that she had become a permanent sort of fixture in their household. Until it seemed they no longer knew what to do or how to get along without her.

Between chores, Julia explored the house. She considered that to be part of her job, as well. She learned about Emily and Deek's habits, witnessed the small sweet demonstrations of their love for each other and the petty humiliations that constantly befell them because of their age and its consequent infirmities. The pills, the aches and pains, the forgetfulness, the minor accidents. Before long she had left the car and moved into the house, and whether they were aware of that or not, what does it matter, really? She worked out a schedule, getting up very early in the morning while they were still asleep. Only Plato heard her creeping around upstairs in the attic on the third floor, above them. He watched her come and go, but he didn't bark or make a sound. In that way he, too, was Julia's friend. She had him hypnotized, perhaps.

They just accepted her, that's all there was to it, and they insisted on paying her for the work she did for them, of course. It didn't take long, only a few days, really, before it was like she was a part of the family, just as she had dreamed she might someday become. They insisted that she call them Emily and Deek, which she had not presumed to do until then. "No need for formalities," Deek said. With Emily nodding and smiling: "You're our own good girl now, Julia." Who would want to argue with that?

o0o

Some people have already said that Julia James was crazy. They've told themselves and each other and everybody else that if her story isn't an outright fib, then it must all of it at least be some weird and complicated wishful dream she had, a delusion, an hallucination, a figment of her imagination that it looks like we're now in the process of turning into a figment of yours.

Or, worse, they think it's just another lie, one among many, this one built to get Julia out of the trouble she was in at the time. As if she cared about that. A way for her to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of her choices – some of which, however well-intended, were admittedly ill-advised – or blame for the results of her actions. So she could honestly say that whatever happened, it really wasn't her fault.

Maybe this is true. Maybe Julia was a liar about this, too. Maybe she was crazy. She was young, but she was not stupid. That much, at least, we know is true.