This story first appeared in the Toronto Star, August 5, 1995.
© S.P. Hozy
I hadn't seen Julia for nearly twenty years. When her father was sent to prison, she had gone to live with her grandmother in Saskatoon. I was fourteen and I guess she must have been fifteen or sixteen. We weren't really friends because Julia was a grade ahead of me in school, but on Friday evenings we used to walk together to the Bookmobile that came to the school parking lot and get out enough books to last two weeks. We were both heavily into romance and mystery, preferably together, and would devour a book in an evening, lingering over the inevitable clinch at the end. We never thought of it as fantasy, but as the life that was waiting for us just a few years down the road. Soon we too would be desirable heroines about to be discovered by Mr. Right.
When everything changed, it was with the swiftness of a knife slicing the air. Julia's mother was dead and her father was sent to prison. They called it second-degree murder because they couldn't prove he had been planning to do it. It was a crime of passion, they said. But murder all the same. Then Julia disappeared from my life and I stopped going to the Bookmobile because my parents didn't want me walking by myself after dark.
I never really forgot about Julia, but I thought about her less and less as the years went by. Nobody ever really knew what happened between her mother and father, but the rumors persisted for years. In court it had come out that Norm Walker believed his wife was having an affair and he had killed her in a jealous rage. Mr. Walker never took the stand, on the advice of his lawyer who believed he would come across as hostile and violent, so no one got to hear Norm's version of events. He pleaded insanity and his lawyer tried to prove that he had been tormented by his wife's infidelities, hinting that there had been more than one, and that he hadn't known what he was doing when he stabbed her twenty-three times with a boning knife. No one was ever named as Mrs. Walker's lover, so naturally everyone within a radius of twenty miles was suspect from that time on.
I finished school and moved to Toronto to take a secretarial course at Shaw's Business College. I started working at Upper Canada Life Insurance and after ten years they made me assistant manager of personnel, which is where I came across Julia Walker's job application. She was the right age, thirty-five, single with no children. Her application said she had worked in a number of cities and towns from Saskatoon to Thunder Bay. I pulled her application out of the pile and set it aside.
I debated with myself for several days about whether I should call her or not. I could have placed her in a job easily enough. There was always someone leaving to have a baby or just to change one clerical job for another, but that wasn't the point. I wasn't sure what I would say to her when I introduced myself and she remembered who I was. I even asked my husband what he thought I should do. Of course, I had to tell him the whole story, about the murder and the trial, and I was surprised at how clearly all the details came back to me. Maybe what I was really remembering was the truth as I had imagined it all those years ago. It was not an event I had witnessed with my own eyes, and yet I could picture the whole thing vividly in my mind, as if it were a memory I had been storing there.
My husband thought I should call her up just out of curiosity, forget the job, and dredge up the whole thing with her to find out what really happened. I was appalled that he would consider that an option, but then, he hadn't been there and I guess it was no different than something he had seen on television or read in a book. Not something that had happened to real people. I thanked him for his advice and went back to my own deliberations.
I finally decided to call her in for an interview. Maybe it was more out of curiosity than friendship, but I told myself that if she was qualified for the job, I was in a position to help her out and why shouldn't I? Just because I knew her twenty years ago shouldn't prevent her from having a fair chance. That would be discrimination.
The day of the interview I dressed especially carefully and had a nervous stomach. My hands felt clammy and I had to force myself to pay attention to my work. The appointment wasn't until eleven o'clock and I was kicking myself that I hadn't made it earlier. When eleven o'clock finally did roll around, she was there, right on time and I was shaking her hand and introducing myself. Of course my married name meant nothing to her and she apparently didn't recognize me. She, on the other hand, was immediately recognizable to me. Older and sort of worn looking, as if life had beaten her down, but still Julia twenty years later.
"I used to be Cartwright," I said, "Sandra Cartwright."
She looked puzzled for a moment, as if I'd spoken to her in French or something, and then the light of recognition hit her eyes and she smiled a polite, colorless smile.
"Oh yes," she said. "I remember. We used to go to the Bookmobile together. It seems like such a long time ago, doesn't it?"
"It was a long time ago," I said. "Nearly twenty years."
She nodded politely, but there was no memory in her eyes, just a blank, colorless gaze. It was as if she did not know how to remember, as if it were a skill she lacked, like the ability to speak French.
I gave her the job and slowly, over the next two years, we pieced together a friendship of sorts. She still liked to read romances and I would pass books along to her that I had read and we would talk about them instead of our real lives. Once I gave her a murder mystery that I had enjoyed, but she gave it back to me and said she didn't read mysteries. I felt a little guilty, wondering if I had subconsciously done it to test her, but her rejection had been so bland, as if she liked green grapes but not red, that I ended up feeling foolish for even thinking about it at all.
Then one day, out of the blue, she asked me to do her a favor. She had accumulated a couple of boxes of books and would I mind coming by with my car one day to pick them up.
"I don't really want them back," I said. "Isn't there anyone you can pass them on to?"
"Not really," she said, her pale face flushing a dull pink. "I don't know anyone who reads them."
"Well, look," I said hastily, "why don't we donate them to the hospital? Even if the patients don't read them, I'm sure the nurses will." I tried not to sound like I was covering over some mistake I had made, but that's how I felt. She had a way of looking wounded over the least little thing. She made me feel like if I said a sharp word to her she would bleed. I had to be so careful.
"How about Saturday morning," I said. "I'll come by about ten."
She smiled a relieved smile, as if her ordeal was finally over, and agreed to see me at ten. I guess it was an ordeal for her in a way, asking for a favor. It was a very personal thing for her to do.
"She's like a frightened little animal, " I told my husband later. "The least thing can be threatening and you have no way of knowing what her fears are. You just have to wait until you do something she reacts to and then you know whether to do it again or not."
"Well, it's understandable, don't you think?" my husband said, with his usual logic. "Her father murdered her mother. In her world, anything can happen. The most horrible thing imaginable could be just a heartbeat away and she has no control over it. She knows that for a fact. You and I don't."
"But it was a long time ago," I said. "It's not as if something like that happens to you every day."
"That's true, but maybe her life stopped with that event," he said, with uncharacteristic insight. "Maybe she was so traumatized by it that it's as if it happened yesterday. I don't think you get over something like that."
Sometimes he surprised me. "What have you been reading lately?" I asked.
Saturday morning at ten I was ringing the buzzer to Julia's apartment. She lived in a hi-rise building in Thorncliffe Park that had maybe five hundred apartments in it. A place where you didn't ever have to get to know anybody. There was the smell of onions frying in the hallway on the fourteenth floor and a woman wearing bedroom slippers carrying a laundry basket got on the elevator as I stepped off. I found apartment 1420 and tapped on the door.
Julia opened it instantly, as if she had been waiting right there. She had her coat on and the two boxes of books were sitting by the door. She had no intention of inviting me in. The apartment felt stale and musty, as if it were filled with old furniture, although I could see from the doorway it was not. It was barely furnished, in fact, just a small sofa and coffee table facing a shelf unit with a T.V. and some china dogs and cats on it.
I picked up one of the boxes and she stooped to pick up the other. I heard a deep, phlegmy cough from one of the bedrooms and someone cleared his throat and lungs of about three packs of cigarettes. I looked at Julia and she froze in mid-motion. Her eyes pleaded with me not to ask, but I just kept on staring at her.
"It's my father," she whispered tensely. "He lives with me."
I didn't say a word, just backed out the door carrying the box of books. I held the elevator while she locked the door and brought the second box. She didn't look at me while we were in the elevator, nor did we speak in the car.
After we dropped the books off I drove to a Golden Griddle and told her I was buying lunch. She didn't look too pleased, but all she said was "I can't be out too long."
I waited until we'd placed our orders before I spoke. "Tell me about it," I said. "I want to know what your life has been like." She straightened her cutlery for a minute and drank some water, but soon she told me about the loneliness and the guilt and the shame she had felt for the past twenty years. She spoke carefully and precisely, as if she had memorized a speech about human emotions. In the end, her father had been released from prison after fifteen years, a broken wreck, as she called him, and had come to live with her.
"Why did you take him in?" I asked. "Surely you don't feel any obligation towards him."
"But I do," she said. "Don't you see, it was all my fault in the first place."
"What are you talking about? You were fifteen years old. How could you have been responsible?"
I didn't think it was possible for her to look any paler. "I was the one who told him about Roger Tait."
"The piano teacher?" I said. "But -"
"I told him Mother was taking piano lessons with Roger. I didn't realize it was a secret." She was speaking so softly I had to lean forward to hear her. "It was because of Roger that he killed her. I'm sure of it."
I suddenly realized, to my horror, what she'd been living with all these years. "You can't believe your mother was having an affair with Roger Tait?"
"You never saw them together," she told me. "They used to laugh and carry on like a pair of kids. She never really learned to play the piano. She just used to go to be with him." She looked like she was going to cry. "And I ruined all of our lives because I couldn't keep my big mouth shut."
Sometimes I have to wonder if everything that happens to us is because the universe is governed by chance. Chance encounters. Mistaken assumptions. Bad timing. "Finish your coffee," I said, "while I pay the bill. We're going for a ride."
We drove down to the Beaches and I parked the car across the street from a small two-story frame house with periwinkle blue shutters and trim. The yard was immaculate, a graceful mountain ash shading the front porch.
"That's where Roger Tait lives," I told her. "He's lived there for over ten years with his boyfriend Ben. Roger's gay, Julia. He was never your mother's lover and it's not your fault your father killed her. He didn't kill her because of Roger."
She sat staring at the house for a long time. Almost long enough for all the hurts of the last twenty years to go through her mind. Every now and then she would blink her eyes a few times and swallow, as if she were watching a video behind her eyes from some implant in her brain. When she finally turned to look at me, there were two bright pink spots burning on her cheeks and it slowly began to dawn on me what I had done.
Of course she didn't come to work on Monday. They didn't find Norm Walker for a week. When the superintendent finally went into the apartment, the smell was almost overwhelming. She had used a big knife and she must have done it when he was asleep because he was just lying there in his bed with a lot of blood around and four stab wounds in his heart.
They caught up with her a week later in Vancouver. She was in pretty bad shape and the court ordered a psychiatric evaluation to see if she could stand trial. They charged her with second-degree murder. They said it didn't look like she had been planning to kill her father, but it was murder all the same.