Chapter Twenty-Two
Traffic was heavy going down I-5. Danny saw a car flying a Denver Broncos’ flag and remembered the big game was scheduled for three o’clock. “Must be traffic headed to the Superbowl,” he said.
“Is that today?”
“Yeah, in San Diego.”
“You should have said something. We could have stayed home to watch it.”
“It’s not that important to me. I’d rather be going to San Juan with you.”
“San Juan Capistrano.”
“Whatever.”
Figuring he was going overboard to please her by denying himself the annual Superbowl ritual, Julie could not help feeling a little guilty. If she were in his position, she might not have done the same. Plus, now she owed him something in return, some in-kind, selfless gesture to be named later.
She hated feeling guilty. The truth was, she had little practice at it, having been an only child and always the do-gooder in their marriage. Danny was the one constantly in the doghouse, guilty of something or other. She, on the other hand, had actually made an art form out of piling guilt trips on him, so that he always owed her something in payment — though he rarely paid off his debts in that regard. Still, the slow, consistent build-up of this mountain of debt had been a key element in their estrangement. And she had played the injured party so long, she was incapable of pretending that nothing was wrong in their relationship. Unfortunately, she never learned how to forgive and forget, how to reset the clock, to balance the score in the game of married life.
In addition to the guilt trip fabrication, there were other thoughts distressing her as the desert scenery drifted by. After motherhood and family had been thrust upon her, for twenty years she had applied herself as dutiful wife and mother only to fail miserably in the end. And though it was probably safe to say at this point that her kids have turned out okay, the family was nonetheless decimated by the divorce, blown apart, both geographically and emotionally. Consequently, even at her most optimistic moments, she could not look back over those years and proclaim success regarding her efforts as wife and mother.
She subsequently came out here and joined the ranks of single-minded, modern career women. True to form — although in only a fraction of the time it took for her marriage to unravel — she also managed to screw-up her career pursuit, thereby qualifying for membership in the “repeat offender” club. Most disturbingly, all her strength seemed sapped in the process. And then along comes Danny, all re-styled and cheerful, as if to remind her that nobody really cares if life has dealt her the worst blow of all — no money and no prospects. His cheerfulness only reinforcing her conviction that the miserable burden of her mistakes and failures must be borne by her, alone.
How dare he come out here and pretend that everything’s all right, she thought, though she remembered she had mentally forgiven him for his past infidelity. And she had also accepted a sizable measure of the blame for their failed marriage, at least privately. But his presence galled her nonetheless, probably because, with him here, she could no longer hide from the ugly truth of her inadequacies. Although, curiously, she also sensed that if she opened her heart to him now, it was entirely possible that a healing process could begin within her own heart, something she desperately needed.
She knew the mature thing to do was to come clean, to admit her blunder with Mike which led to her second big fiasco. Moreover, now would be the perfect time to do it — Danny at the wheel, tracts rolling by to the right and left. The scene was set perfectly. But she remained so terribly embarrassed over her own complicit behavior and at how naive she had been that she could not find the words to begin. Naturally, she could put the blame on Mike. But Danny was not entirely without brains. Sooner or later he would figure out what really happened, which would only serve to embarrass her more. It also dawned on her that the final insult might still be awaiting her, like a sentencing hearing after the guilty verdict has been ominously handed down. She could soon find out that Mike had given her some kind of sexually-transmitted disease, many of which are incurable, as she has come to understand. Such a revelation, besides dashing her hopes for future love and happiness, would put an entirely different spin on her story, a decidedly dismal one, to say the least. So, first things first. She would go to the local clinic tomorrow for a check-up and a blood test. If things came out okay, she would come up with a plausible story for Danny’s ears.
There was, however, one bright star in her otherwise dark and dismal sky. With the telltale signs of PMS coursing through her system, she felt certain she was not the least bit pregnant.
She studied his profile as he piloted the rental car. There was delight in his face and a look of conviction. This was a different person than the one she had divorced — happier, more thoughtful and compassionate, and less self-motivated — or so it seemed anyway. She despised the mere thought of having to tell him her story at all, with its sordid detail and self-accusatory timbre. Oh well, she thought, as they approached the exit for Mission Viejo, It will have to wait. I’ll tell him when I’m good and ready, and not before.
“We’re almost there. Ours is the next exit,” she said.
“Right. Tell me again what this place is all about.”
“It’s an old Catholic Mission, built in the eighteenth century by the Spanish. There’s a church, a fort, gardens, and a museum that celebrates the various cultures that are the heritage of California — Spanish, Mexican, and Indian.”
“Anything about Don Diego or Sergeant Garcia?”
“Danny, don’t be ridiculous. What am I going to do with you?”
“You could hold my hand for starters.”
“I guess I could do that. If you insist.”
“I insist.”
As they meandered through the gardens, Danny felt both pleased and proud that Julie was by his side once again. It now appeared as though he had prepared himself adequately. He and Julie were getting along; there was no rancor between them. He even sensed a knitting together once again, only this time in a better fashion than before — more equably, and he hoped more permanently. Although she had not yet given him any clear indication that she might take him back, he was feeling more and more comfortable with the idea of asking her. But he was no longer impetuous as he had been in the past. He would wait until the perfect moment. He had all week.
Each time he looked at her, his heart overflowed with pride because he knew she was the one perfect mate this world had to offer him. He had come to his senses when he realized as much, albeit a little too late to prevent the collapse of their marriage. But who knew? The divorce may have been a necessary prerequisite to this current state of mind, a condition in which he could only be viewed as smarter, more mature, and, at long last, thoroughly convinced that Julie had been the one for him from the beginning. And, in choosing her, he had inadvertently stumbled into the best decision of his life.
He watched her as she looked through the viewfinder of her camera, taking aim at some unusual-looking desert flora, currently in full-bloom. There was a peculiar, haunting beauty about Julie Baker Predmore, a mysterious quality that had always drawn him to her, and now, it was pulling him more intensely than ever.
But he was not harboring illusions. He knew she had a dark side, a part that made her unpredictable and bristly, and that had held him at arms’ length for so many years. Plus, she has never been transparent. During the years of their marriage, he rarely knew where he stood with her. Indeed, his previous withdrawal from her was predicated on an erudite fear over how she might react to any given situation. Now, he knew even less about her, especially concerning her private thoughts and motives.
But today, the mystery only added to her allure. And furthermore, he was certain he knew most of her trigger mechanisms, having repeatedly, even habitually, sprung them in the past. From here on out, he was bound and determined not to set her off, at least not in predictable fashion.
Still, it was another realization that pulsed most notably in his mind, and which was keeping him from expressing himself with her prematurely. Since he had already lost her once, he was now in the enviable position of no longer having anything left to lose. He had lived eighteen months without her; he could certainly wait a few more days if necessary.
On the other hand, his confidence was bolstered by something visibly apparent in her emerald eyes when she looked at him. It was there from the moment he showed up at her door. He could not be sure that it was a look of love, but something about it helped him believe that winning her back was definitely within the realm of possibility.
“Let me take a picture of you standing right over there.” Danny pointed to a spot between two succulent plants with long, spiny, near-upright fronds. In the background, the rounded backs of the coastal mountains arched gracefully against a cloudless sky.
Julie did as requested. She was still dressed in her turtleneck and jeans, cinched together with a bright silver belt buckle. Danny took a full-length shot of her in partial profile. The pose made her look fetching, he thought. And then, with the assistance of the zoom lens, he moved in for a close-up of her face against the desert skyline.
Just as he snapped the picture, there was a vibration, a rattling of the ground beneath him, like the sensation you get at an air show when the big, old, prop-driven bomber thunders by overhead. But this was clearly not an atmospheric disturbance. Instinctively, though he had never felt one before, he knew it had to be an earthquake.
“Ooh,” Julie said, a sudden look of astonishment on her face. “It’s a quake, a good one.” The rumbling continued, more or less unabated.
“This is unbelievable. It’s going on and on.”
Though it seemed much longer, the earth shook for only about thirty seconds and then all was still again, except for the contents of Danny’s stomach.
“Does this happen often?”
“Fairly often, although most quakes aren’t that strong. This one could have done some damage, depending on where it hit anyway.”
Danny suggested they sit together on a nearby bench for a moment. “That was the weirdest sensation I’ve ever felt,” he told her. “It was like the earth had turned into the ocean for a few seconds. There wasn’t even any warning.”
“There never is. Earthquakes just happen, when you least expect it.”
“Wow.” He was visibly shaken from the experience. “Do you think anyone was hurt? I mean, could it have been strong enough to do the kind of damage that happened in San Francisco that day before the World Series game got going?”
“That’s hard to say.” Julie laughed a little, not mockingly, but she couldn’t help being amused by Danny’s childlike reaction to the tremor. The actual experience of the earth moving was something he obviously had never felt before today. He was responding in the same way she had as a teenager, upon coming to Michigan and seeing her first snow storm.
“You know what’s really strange?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s like there’s a trend going or something. Every time they have a major sporting event on the West Coast, there’s a quake right around game time.”
“Well, there are over five hundred quakes a year along the coast which are strong enough to be felt.”
“Holy cow. That’s over one per day. It’s no wonder people are scared out here.”
“Yeah. But you can’t go about living your life in fear of what might happen to you. Besides, statistically speaking at least, many more people get injured and killed from other natural disasters in the U.S., like hurricanes and tornadoes and ice storms and plain, old, mid-western winter weather. And really bad quakes only occur about once every fifty years, on average. Personally, I rarely give tremors like this a second thought. After a momentary disruption, life goes on. It does give the TV news something to talk about, though, especially if a chunk of concrete comes loose from a building and falls on somebody’s head. They get a lot of mileage out of things like that.”
“I imagine they do.” Danny was amazed at how unruffled Julie was from the experience, and how nonchalant over the prospect of earthquakes in general. This, his first quake, was a daunting experience for him, though he has never been one to scare easily. It gave him pause to think that, if he lived here, he would not be able to depend on the earth remaining fixed underneath him. Perhaps, in time, he could get used to the sensation. But he did not think he could ever overlook the potential for disaster. Nor would he be able to put aside thoughts that the next one might be coming for him.
She reached over and touched his hand. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. I’m fine. It was just such a strange sensation, that’s all.”
She glanced momentarily out across the desert landscape. About twenty feet away, a small bird bathed in a shell-shaped pool of water, splashing about noisily. Groups of people strolled through the gardens, obviously enjoying the magnificent afternoon. A sudden chill could be felt in the breeze, evidence that the evening air was already descending upon them. Like her, nobody else seemed the least bit phased by the earthquake they had just experienced. She looked back at Danny. He was gazing about the garden, using the viewfinder of her camera as a spyglass of sorts, looking for some more good photo opportunities. Sensing her attention being directed to him, he lowered the camera and smiled.
Julie smiled back and said, “There’s a lesson to be learned from earthquakes, you know.”
“What’s that?” He looked genuinely interested.
“It’s simple, really. What you just felt was the earth relieving itself of stress. You see, all this pressure builds up underground along the edges of tectonic plates called faults. That’s important I think — that they’re called faults. Keep that in mind.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, in certain areas like here in California, these plates, which are really giant pieces of the earth’s crust, are trying to slide past each other at the rate of a few inches per year. This happens along a fault line — like the San Andreas for instance. You’ve heard of the San Andreas Fault, right?”
“Of course.”
“Well, in order for one plate to move past the other, something has to give, only the plates are made out of rock, so they don’t give very easily. They don’t just slip on by, if you know what I mean?”
“I think I’m getting the picture.”
“Okay. What happens is that one plate resists the other until the pressure becomes great enough that the strength of the rocks is overcome, and then, boom! You get a quake.”
“That makes sense,” he admitted. “But what’s the lesson?”
“I was coming to that. Have a little patience.”
Danny rolled his eyes.
“The lesson is this: You and I are like these plates, see. We’re jammed up against each other with a fault line in between. Then, as we move along in life, inching past each other, pressure builds up until something has to give.”
“And in our case, a lot gave.”
“Precisely.”
Danny thought silently for a moment, considering the metaphor. She was, of course, totally on the mark. She had described their situation brilliantly.
“You’re absolutely right,” he told her. “The question is, what can we do about it?”
“Well, if we were truly like earthquake faults, considering we’ve already had “the big one,” we wouldn’t have much to worry about for another hundred years or so. Take that stone church over there for example. The tower was knocked off it by an earthquake back in 1812, but, since then, there haven’t been any severe tremors along this part of the coast. Unfortunately for us, however, we’re not rocks. We’re human beings, and that makes us totally unpredictable, much more so than the science of plate tectonics anyway.”
Danny wondered how she had gotten so smart all of a sudden. In the past, he never really gave her much credit for insightful reasoning. “Where did you learn all this, in college?”
“In life mostly. Life’s a pretty good teacher, you know.”
He could not argue with that.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s walk around some more. I’m getting cold sitting here.”
For Danny’s benefit she had tried to appear unaffected by the tremor, but she was now beginning to realize that it had a profound effect on her as well. With it, had come a new-found freedom for self-expression, something she seemingly did not possess earlier. It was as though the relieving of the earth’s pressure had loosened some things within her as well, things that had been bound up by stress and fear. If there was ever going to be a time to open up to Danny, this had to be it. While reaching for his hand she took in a deep breath and then slowly let it out.
“You know Danny, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
First, Julie explained that she needed him to simply hear her out. They could discuss it after she finished telling the story. “No problem,” Danny said. Valerie Robinson had schooled him in the art of listening.
Next, Julie said that, if they were to be close friends again, they would have to be honest with each other, willing to share their intimate thoughts and experiences. Danny agreed, saying he wanted that kind of relationship as well. She cautioned him. He was supposed to simply listen.
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
She explained how Mike had offered her the promotion, and how excited she had been to finally get out from behind a secretary’s desk. Mike had promised to help her succeed in marketing and get her involved in the sales process. She got a small raise, but more importantly, she was going to learn some new skills.
There were signs from the beginning that Mike was interested in her, she admitted. But she had insisted they keep things entirely professional.
She and Danny were standing together by the Indian cemetery. Danny listened silently, sensing where she was going. The images flashing through his mind prevented him from making eye contact with her while she related the events of the past two weeks.
Eventually, Julie got around to the part about the presentation at Clark and Betts, and how Mike had driven them up to Thousand Oaks for the meeting. It was the day of the floods, she said, except that no one knew how bad the weather was going to get.
“Then, with the freeways and bridges flooded out as they were by early afternoon, and the CHP telling everyone to stay off the roads, we had no choice but to find someplace to stay the night.”
This was going to be the hard part, she told herself, as if she had just come to that understanding. She had no precise words in mind for the sordid part of her story.
“Mike could only find one suite available for the night. A lot of people were in the same predicament. I didn’t like the idea of sharing a room, but at least it was a suite.” She digressed for a moment and began explaining how difficult it had been to meet the right kind of guys — meaning the marrying kind, though she did not say as much. She had “no real dating life,” is what she did say. She truthfully admitted to having lonely times, though school and work tended to take up so much of her energy. “It never got so bad that I was ready to drop my standards or do anything rash. But let’s face it, I’ve not been getting any younger, and I didn’t want the years to just pass my by, leaving me to live the rest of my life alone.
“You need to understand what I was dealing with,” she added. “Mike definitely had a lot going for him — success, intelligence, good looks. And, by this time, he had clearly taken an interest in me. I know I was foolish; I led him on. But I never intended for things to go as far as they did. Then, when I tried to stop him, I couldn’t. He was too strong for me, Danny.”
Finally, he looked right at her. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. Without saying a word, Danny put his arms around her and drew her close to him. Her body was shaking. She began to cry openly, and as she did, her slender frame convulsed with waves of emotion. After a moment or two, with one hand, she reached up and brushed away tears from her face. With the other she held onto Danny’s shoulder.
They stood there in each other’s arms for several minutes. Neither of them spoke. Actually, Danny was at a complete loss for words. Additionally, he doubted that she was altogether finished with the story. There had to be more, he believed. But at least one good thing had come out of all this: His wife was in his arms again. And, feeling her body pressed against him, he was in no hurry to let her go. Instead, he held her a little more tightly and, throwing caution to the wind, he kissed her, just above her left ear. Then he whispered some reassurance. “I’m here for you, Julie. I’ll always be here for you.”
She relaxed her hold on him and with her pain-distorted vision, looked straight through his eyes into his soul. “How can you say that, Danny. You live two thousand miles away.”
“That can be fixed.”
“I’m not going back to Michigan. This is where I belong, Danny. I’m sorry.”
“Let’s not worry about that now. You’ve got more important things to think about. Like, what are you going to do about your job?”
“That job is history. But I am going in tomorrow to personally deliver a threatening letter which I hope will result in some significant severance pay.”
“If you need money for a while, I’ll be glad to help out.”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
“Why not? You’re my wife. You’re my responsibility.”
“I divorced you, Danny, remember?”
“But I’m still here. You can’t get rid of me that easily. Besides, I still love you, Julie. I’ll always love you. I made a huge mistake a couple of years ago, something I’ll regret for the rest of my life.”
She sniffed back some more emotion.
Danny took out his handkerchief and handed it to her. “Come on,” he said. “I believe it’s time I took you home.”