They had just finished dinner—Richard was clearing the table, Ginger was loading the dishwasher—
when the side door opened. After three nights at Angie’s, Julia was back. No explanation, just a brief nod to her parents—what that meant, Ginger had no idea—and up she went, disappearing into her room.
Had positive thinking actually worked? Ginger gave it another try. “Do you think this means the Nick thing is over?”
The answer came in the form of a sharp rap at the front door. Richard answered it. The boy walked in, grunted hello, and went up the stairs, two at a time. Ginger heard Julia’s squeal of delight and recalibrated. Was Julia home because Angie’s mom finally realized she was being played?
It didn’t matter. They had a new problem now. Without discussion or permission—was this a permission situation?—Nick set up semipermanent residence in their house. Now when Julia came home from school, Nick was with her. Every night at dinner, Nick sat down and joined them. And as if they were in some kind of reverse fairy tale, he stayed until just before the clock struck twelve.
Most nights, Ginger and Richard were in bed by eleven, but Ginger wouldn’t fall asleep until she heard the sound of the boy clomping down the stairs. He wasn’t quiet—it wasn’t as if he was sneaking out—but sometimes she had to strain to hear the door close over the sound of Richard’s snoring. It really was galling that Richard could drop off to sleep while the boy was still across the hall in Julia’s room.
Ever the adapter, Ginger made accommodations. Cooking for four was not that different from cooking for three, and after she explained to Nick that they didn’t wear shoes inside the house—a quirk of Richard’s that she understood—he was pretty good at remembering to leave his disintegrating sneakers on the metal shoe tray near the door. The hardest part was watching Julia trail after him like a pet as he lumbered from their refrigerator to their basement to her bedroom. She’d made a brief attempt at declaring Julia’s bedroom a “No Nick Zone” but surrendered that point after Julia replied, “No problem. We’ll hang out at Nick’s instead.”
This wasn’t the solution Ginger had in mind, and it gave her pause. Why weren’t they hanging out at Nick’s?
Nick gave her the answer. “We can go to my house now if you want. But my mom’s home. It’s going to smell.” He turned to Ginger. “My mom smokes and the smell makes Julia sick.”
At least there was that to be grateful for. Julia didn’t like the smell of cigarettes. And while
she was being all positive-thinking about it, she might as well also be grateful that so far Julia kept her bedroom door open and so far there’d been no appeals for the boy to spend the night. Those were her new lines in the sand, though the possibility of Julia crossing them hovered like a threat.
To minimize her distress, Ginger tried to make the sight of Nick go blurry. She could do that if she concentrated, turn the actual boy padding around her house into a vague tall shadow. And Nick, it appeared, had figured out a way to do the same with her.
Richard developed a different strategy for dealing with their unwelcome house guest, a combination of a things could be worse attitude and a sudden spike in late nights at the office. Dinner went back to a threesome, Ginger reduced to an appendage.
When the line in the sand was finally crossed—Julia closed her door with Nick inside her room—Richard wasn’t home. This left Ginger standing her ground alone, in the hall, knocking hard on her daughter’s door.
“Jules? Open the door.” She knocked again. “Sorry, Jules, but your door has to stay open.” She waited another moment. “I’m coming in.” She gave them one more warning. “I’m opening the door now.” She squinted, afraid of what she’d see.
What she saw was this: Nick and Julia sitting on the floor, backs against the bed, headphones plugged into the computer on Nick’s lap, sharing earbuds so that each had one ear connected to the headphones and one ear that surely had heard her calling from the hall. Julia, oblivious to her presence, pointed to the screen. Nick laughed. Ginger squatted in front of them. “Why didn’t you answer when I knocked?” She lifted the computer off Nick’s lap.
Julia jumped up and the headphones split in half. “God.”
“Door has to stay open. Understood?”
It was Nick who answered, “Sure.”
She waited an hour to check. This time the door was closed but not latched, a technicality, really, but by then she was too tired to start a new round of battle, so she let it be.
When Richard came home, he was surprisingly unsympathetic. “What were they doing wrong?” he asked. “They were on the computer, right? How is that bad?”
She chalked up his brusque tone to another bad day at work.
That night, as she lay in bed waiting for Nick to go—his departure, she noticed, had now slid to one o’clock—Ginger decided this business of having the door shut but not latched was plain wrong. Same went for the new departure time. She made a list in her head of nonnegotiable rules and turned to share it with Richard. “You awake?”
His reply was a snore that sounded fake. Okay. It didn’t matter. Her decision was made. She would handle this on her own.
The next night at half past eight—Richard at work as usual—Ginger was in the living room catching up on back issues of the American Journal of Public Health when she heard movement above.
Upstairs, her suspicions were confirmed. The door was shut but not latched. This time she entered without knocking. “Sorry.”
Julia looked up. “What?”
“Sorry, but shut is the same as closed.”
Julia shrugged and went back to what she was doing.
Ginger surveyed the scene. They were sitting on the floor. Julia’s computer was on Nick’s lap.
Nick had on a new set of headphones—probably because the other set broke. Julia was cutting up a bedsheet. Before Ginger could figure out why Julia would cut up a bedsheet, her attention was drawn
back to Nick. He was fiddling with a helmet. The helmet had wings sprouting from the ears.
Nick, she now noticed, was wearing something other than his usual torn shirt. He had on a jacket, military-looking, though what branch she couldn’t place. The jacket was old, the material shiny, with maroon epaulettes, and on one sleeve, just below the shoulder, a crest with a bar and stars.
She glanced over and saw Julia was wearing an identical jacket, though hers had a pin on the lapel. It was the letter S. Ginger took a moment and put it all together. “You’re wearing Salvation Army uniforms. Did you join the Salvation Army?”
“Very funny,” Julia said, but she didn’t look up.
“And why are you cutting up my sheet?”
“We bought the jackets today,” Nick said. “Cool, right? Wait, that’s your sheet?”
Julia set down the scissors. “I don’t think you want to know the answer.”
Ginger felt her cheeks flush. Julia was both wrong and right. She absolutely did want to know, but she also absolutely did not. “Door stays open,” she told Julia. “Or Nick goes home.”
She was back in the living room, eyes skimming over words in the magazine without taking them in, when Julia and Nick ran down the stairs and, without a word to her, retreated to the basement. When Ginger opened that door and brought down a load of laundry so small no one could be fooled into thinking it was worth washing, she found them sitting surrounded by toys. There was an American Girl doll, a doll suitcase, a doll cello, an old coffee can filled with markers, a decade of forgotten craft kits, modeling clay, glitter, string art. In the middle of it all was a garbage bag, which Julia seemed to be methodically filling with the remnants of her childhood.
Ginger deposited the laundry basket on the washing machine and headed back upstairs. As she passed them, she saw they were texting and laughing. Were they texting each other about her?
“You have to help me out here,” she told Richard later, in bed, after she filled him in on what happened while he was at work. “Can you come home early tomorrow? Talk to her, maybe? See if you can find out what’s going on? She’ll talk to you.”
Richard sighed. “Okay.” He closed his eyes. “I’ll try.” He turned on his side, giving her his back. “But I really don’t think it will help.”