Page 66 of Requiem

Julia 25

I poke at the pancakes, awkwardly. Funny, I’m not very hungry now that they, and Jeremy’s mother, are sitting in front of me. She’s looking at me intently and I feel the need to look away. Finally, I bring my eyes back to her face. She smiles at me kindly.

“Julia. Please don’t be nervous. I promise you, I don’t bite.”

I feel a rush of warmth to my cheeks. “I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I just – this is awkward.”

She nods. “Yes, it is. But it doesn’t have to be. Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself? How did you come to play the cello?”

“I was at the Children’s Home … kind of an orphanage here on Long Island …”

“Your parents are dead?” she interjects, her face wrinkling with concern.

“Yes. Uh – no …”

She raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think there’s much wiggle room in there. They’re either dead … or they’re not.”

“Right. Well, my mother is alive. My father is dead.” She swishes her coffee around, waiting for me to elaborate. “My mother was a drug addict. She left us when I was five. After she’d gone, my father was abusive … physically,” I hurry to add, not wanting her to think it was anything darker than that. “I – I look a lot like her, you see. And he was so angry …” I break off for a moment and look down at my half-eaten breakfast. When I glance up, she’s still waiting patiently.

“Anyway, I was taken away from him when I was eight. That’s when I went to the Children’s Home. And that’s where I met Matthew. His parents died in a boating accident. He was my only friend and he’s the one who introduced me to music. I didn’t speak, so the cello was my voice.”

She looks startled, then confused.

“You were … mute?”

“Yes … sort of, for more than a year. I stopped talking the day I went to school and the teacher realized … what was going on at home. I was afraid to answer questions from the police and the doctors and the social workers. I thought if I told them what was happening, my father would get mad at me and hurt me. So, I didn’t speak then, or for more than a year afterwards.”

Trudy Corrigan puts a firm, reassuring hand over mine. “You were a strong girl. And you’ve grown into an even stronger woman,” she informs me.

I shrug. “I wasn’t always so strong. I became strong after …” I stop cold, but she knows exactly where I was headed.

“After Jeremy destroyed your life,” she finishes for me.

I nod dumbly.

“He’s good at that, my son.”

Another silent nod from me. I’m afraid if I open my mouth I’ll fall apart.

Trudy clears her throat and continues. “Brett came to see us a while back. He was very upset … said he’d just stood by and watched Jeremy hurt some poor girl. He didn’t help her and he was having a hard time living with that.” Piercing, hazel eyes consider me carefully. They are Jeremy’s eyes, I can’t help but notice. And David’s. “Was that you? Were you that girl?”

“Yes,” I whisper. “That was me.”

Trudy’s lips draw into a tight line and her brows draw in toward the bridge of her nose. This expression, too, is a carbon copy of Jeremy’s.

“Well, you should know that it was eating him alive.”

“We’ve talked about it,” I assure her. “He – he’s more than made up for it since then.”

“I’m glad,” she says with some relief before she changes her tack. “Now, what of your mother? Where did she go after she left you? If you don’t mind me asking, that is …”

“Umm, no, no, that’s fine,” I say, my voice a hair uncertain. “She ended up as a … uh … prostitute,” I finally spit out with great difficulty. “She tells me she was an addict and often exchanged … sex acts … for drugs.”

The concern on Trudy’s face is so deep – so sincere – that she makes me feel as if she understands, even before I’ve told her everything. It gives me the courage to finish. “Somewhere along the line, this guy managed to get her off the streets. He married her and now she has a new life, complete with a new daughter.”

“Oh, my. Well, it sounds like she pulled herself out of a bad situation. It’s easy to see where your fortitude comes from, Julia.”

I don’t quite know how to respond to that, so I don’t. She notices.