Haley Hach is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s published in Narrative Magazine, Raritan, The Saint Ann’s Review, CutBank, Santa Monica Review, and others. She teaches at Eugene Lang College and lives upstate with her family.
Julia, at twelve, thirteen years old, bore the reputation with teachers and parents of friends, parents of her brother and sister’s friends, as being responsible. A sturdy girl. No gossip. She was clean, dependable. She did her homework. She held doors for people. She had a calendar on her desk with babysitting appointments in it. In neat handwriting she wrote out names, addresses, and phone numbers.
Kids asked for her. Every weekend she had at least one babysitting job.
She didn’t even know what to do with all the money she made.
Unfailingly, parents made small-talk and accidentally brought up her mother.
“How is your mother?”
It happened again and again. It made everyone miserable. The mention of death paralyzed everyone around her. Its chemistry had teeth.
“No, no, it’s okay,” Julia said. “It happened a long time ago. I don’t really remember her.”
Sometimes parents grabbed and hugged her. Sometimes they said nothing and then apologized, saying they didn’t know what to say. Often they paid her twice as much. Once, a woman, a mother of three, openly cried and Julia felt compelled to comfort her.
“Bless you,” the mother said. She smiled with sad wet eyes.
“I have my dad,” Julia explained. “And my brother and sister. We’re good. I promise.”
At school, girls spoke of their mothers. They were a central force in their lives. Movies and television shows were stuffed with moms. Good ones, bad ones, drunk ones, bad-joke moms, cookie-and-oven-mitt moms. Moms who were beautiful, moms who were happy, and those who weren’t. Julia grew to be suspicious. What was the big deal? What was a mother supposed to do?
At her first high school party she talked to a group of kids she didn’t know. She began to binge-lie. It felt great. She said her mother was alive. She visited sometimes. She was a celebrity. She had a pet monkey named Pip. She’d been in the circus for years. She could do amazing things with her body. She was really special. You should see her, she said. We have the same nose.
Virtually overnight Julia became known as the girl who told bizzare stories—lies—about her dead mom. People watched her in new ways. It changed how she saw herself. She’d already established herself as being logical and trustworthy. Now, not as much.
Julia became aware of the accidental power of tiny changes. Simple words changed everything. She was not the Julia everyone knew. Her brokenness, suddenly, was with her. She couldn’t hide it as easily as she’d done.
She still babysat, and people still liked her, but change surrounded her. She felt it.
A dark wonder crept inside her, stirring and curious. She thought it might be time to think about her mother’s death—really think about it—and come to a conclusion about what it meant to her, what it had done to her.
She didn’t share this with her family.
Dead mothers are rare.
Julia now felt singled out at school and among her friends. They looked at her searchingly, trying to locate pain. She sensed it in school hallways. She sensed it at lunch. It became harder to pretend she was whole, that she was fine. There were three other students with dead mothers and she stayed away from them. She didn’t know their names. They didn’t exist.
She cracked. But only a little, just tiny fissures. She tried her best to perform a sense of wholeness. But she ate lunch alone at least once a week, with a stern face. She stopped imitating her teachers during passing periods. The death of her mother, in high school, was finally acknowledged publicly. What had been whispered in elementary and middle school was now yelled: Hey, Julia! Screaming up and down lockered hallways. How’s your mom? When is she coming back with her pet monkey? Hey, Julia. Julia! Julia Bohnam! How's Pip?
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” she said to a mean-looking boy with green teeth. He had flesh-colored hair like wire sprouted around his mouth. She thought his name might be Daniel, but wasn’t sure. She hugged books to her chest.
He laughed in her face. “Why not?” he said.
“Because it was a lie,” she said, simply.
“I heard your mother is in the loony bin,” he said.
Julia stared at him. “What?” She blinked. She’d certainly never heard that before.
“Your mother is insane,” said the mean and ugly boy. “That’s what my mom said. She’s not dead, ha ha. She’s worse than that.” He laughed once more. His green teeth leered at her, wet. Julia stood frozen. Worse than dead? She tightened her grip on the books pressed to her chest.
He rolled away from her, smirking. He joined other kids walking to class, or to lunch, or wherever it was they went. Some students wandered out among cars in the school parking lot, scattering and lost like geese.
Julia hoped it was true, even if it was impossible.
It opened a brand new idea. Maybe I can meet her?
She kept this conversation a secret from her family. It was a ridiculous and sad fantasy. It showed her defeat. No one could know.
She went to the public library and tried to find books about psychiatric hospitals and mental illnesses. She found what little the library had, sat in the aisle flipping through books. None of them gave her the information she was looking for.
Admittedly she did not know exactly what she wanted to find. At the very least she knew her mother’s name wouldn’t be printed in a book. A photograph and an address? Incredible. She knew she was doing everything wrong.
Even fantasies have rules? It seemed unfair.
She approached the help desk. A potted plant sat on one corner, a soft-looking tender green fern. Julia fought the urge to pet it. She asked a librarian about asylums in Iowa. The woman turned to face her. She wore a puzzled expression, like she’d caught her in the middle of a thought. Her gaze sharpened to a point.
The librarian stared at Julia for what seemed like a very long time. Her eyelids closed and opened slowly, again and again, as if trying to place her. Miserable, Julia waited it out. She looked at her watch without reading the time.
“All major hospitals have psychiatric units,” she said, finally. “But as for psychiatric hospitals, a building in itself? Most of those are back east. There is a lot more information on those. There is one in Michigan, if I am correct.” Julia frowned. “Are you interested in the history of psychiatric hospitals or about diagnoses of mental health, types of treatments?”
She suddenly felt very cold. Julia didn't know how to answer the question. I'm looking for my mother. A baffled and sterile thought. She covered her mouth in case she spoke it aloud. She felt light-headed, ashamed. She didn’t want to speak anymore. She might leak information.
“Well, the books are all in the same general area,” the librarian said. “You’ll see.” She wrote the aisle and number on a card which sent her back to where she’d just been. She tried flipping through a few other books. Julia sat on the floor again, and tried to read generally about the subject.
Much of the syntax was complicated, turgid; she could not discern what she was reading. She carefully read word to word, completely lost.
She felt removed from a certain concrete reality, helpless from intention and authority. The world was big and everywhere but not here with her. She was silly and alone. She remained small. A lost girl. She would not find anything about her mother in these books. Her mother died years ago, when she was very young, just as they had told her she had. A freak accident. Barely a story. She fell at the mall, hit her head wrong. The end.
A figure appeared overhead. The librarian again. She smiled down at Julia, her lips pressed tight. Her cheek muscles rose up and gathered around one of her eyes. Sharp features, she had arched eyebrows and stark cheekbones, like the cruel beauty of villains in old stories.
“I know you,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“I knew your mother,” the librarian explained. “We were friends. Do you mind if I ask what exactly you’re looking for?”
Paralyzed with a terrible shyness, uncovered, naked, sad, and desolate, Julia didn’t want to speak. This woman knew her mother? Her actual once-living mother? Julia shook her head. She felt her octopus hair rising in the back and reaching out. Her head tingled with pinpricks.
“Are you chasing an idea you have about your mother?”
Julia swallowed hard. She pressed her eyes shut. How could this woman possibly know that? What clues did she give away?
“Your thoughts are powerful. Do you know that? Look at me. Thought alone, just thoughts, are very powerful. Are you aware of this?”
“I don’t know,” Julia said, in a near panic. She kept her hands busy. She flipped books over, hid the titles. “I’ve never, you know, thought much about it,” she said. She peeked at the woman staring down at her, a long face with a nose that aimed at her like a finger. Julia looked quickly down.
She believed this woman could see right into her. Through her hair, scalp, and skull, the wet cords of nerves travelled behind her eye sockets and fanned into her brain, where, she was certain, the librarian could see the whirring nonsense play out: I want to pretend I can find my mother. Because she probably needs me as much as I need her.
“You’re not listening,” the librarian said. “I want you to think about this later. You are your thoughts, do you understand?” She squatted and stared. Julia wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead, Julia focused on a mole livid on the woman’s neck, raisin-shaped and dark, textured.
Julia didn’t know what to do. She was on trial. And she was guilty. She made the three stacks of books into two stacks of books, big to small. The silence between them seemed noisy, brimming with shame. It occurred to Julia she had to speak. “I am my thoughts?” she said. “I don’t see how.”
“You’re not listening to me,” the librarian said again. “You have to love yourself for being human and you need to forgive yourself for being human.”
“What?” Julia stammered. She felt a flush of sweat wash her armpits and crotch. She couldn’t process the statement. A bright day, windows everywhere. Printed words were smashed together like silence itself. The smell of book glue—once hooves of animals. Horses and cows. She remembered pigs have hooves, too. Big hooves.
“Negative and confusing thinking will have a bad effect on your life,” the woman said.
Julia understood this. She nodded, but barely. She wanted to show how uncomfortable she was, how unfair. “Why are you telling me this?” Julia asked.
“I want to warn you about negative thinking,” the librarian said. “Because I knew your mother.” She smiled and her teeth seemed dangerous. “She was a good woman.”
“She was?”
“Surely you know that. I mean, you must know that!”
“Yes,” Julia lied. “I have to go.” She stood.
“I want you to think about what I said. Think positive. Life is hard enough. Don’t go chasing rabbit holes.” The librarian tucked her teeth back in her lips and nodded, curt.
The terrible conversation ended.
Julia ran through the library. That was her mother’s friend? That freak?
What’s a rabbit hole?
The late afternoon burned bright as knife blades. It shimmered a brassy hard light. Her heart pounded. She ran home. Margaret and Thomas were in the living room when she burst in.
“What happened?” Thomas said. Concern pushed out of him. “Julia?”
“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.” Margaret reached for her but she pulled away. Guilt and anxiety were present on her face and hands. It was in the way she walked. The way she turned and climbed the staircase. It performed through her.
She knew this now.
She knew exactly what her mother’s death had done for her. It had built her.
She sat at her mirrored vanity and looked at herself, bewildered. She combed her hair with a boar bristle brush.
She was afraid of how unprepared she’d been to have that awful conversation.
That kind of thing can happen at any minute? Doors open like that and garbage will rain down on you? She was angry.
Nothing made sense. She worried nothing ever would.
She sat at her bedroom window. Hours later Julia was still threatened by the intimacy of the woman’s words. Jinxed, even. Hexed. Julia, look at me. You are your thoughts, do you understand?
She squeezed her hands in her lap. No, she didn’t understand. How am I my thoughts? How?
She gazed out at the levels of color in the sky, apricot and pink, the underbellies of clouds fresh and relaxed with lavender-blue. She tried some deep breathing. A mess of swallows swooped up into the sky, and then down, folding over like a page.
The birds landed at once in the neighbor’s tree, darkening it with dots.
How much pain lodges in the body? Julia wondered. How much love? How much knowledge and how much want? She combed her hair over and over and wondered: And where does it go? All of the stuff we think about, want, or are afraid of?
Does anything disappear?
She’d never known specifically if she’d loved her mother but knew the answer must be yes. She loved her. In fact, she loved her still.
The birds flitted here and there. They rose into the sky in a large swooping arc.
That day changed her. Julia was different after that. Nobody knew it but her.
Her father came home from work. His voice puttered up the staircase, joined by Margaret dancing in the living room. Thomas was laughing. They shared stories of the day, but Julia stayed quiet. The evening happened just as it had more or less a thousand times: movement, voices, a clock chiming the ever-changing hour.
Evening turned from pink to purple before settling into darkness.
The little oven window showed a glistening chicken inside. She sat at the table and waited, perhaps, to be noticed. The smiling retriever came and lay under her bare feet.
Julia felt pinned in the center of her own life.
Her father stood at the stove with a bag of frozen peas and carrots. He stirred them in melted butter, as he often did. Margaret was auditioning for a part in the school play. She excitedly recited lines in different accents. Thomas talked about essay topics for his college entrance application.
Julia sat with her vegetables and meat. Silverware in both hands, a goblet of milk, and a napkin.
“How was school?” Her dad took off his apron and sat.
“I have a geography quiz tomorrow,” she answered automatically. She never had to think when asked about homework. School was easy.
Thomas had his notepad and pen at the table. He read from his notes. “I’ve been given two prompts,” he said. “Please submit a one-page, single-spaced essay that explains why you have chosen this college and your potential major, department, or program.” He took a bite and continued reading. “Or the other one is just write about what motivates me and why.”
“I like that one,” Margaret said. “You can talk about who you are. Or who you want to be.” She turned to the dog and screamed a line from the play: “Oh, aren’t you absolutely divine?”
A hole appeared in Julia’s chest. This had happened before, a cold feeling, and it scared her. She didn’t know what it was made of, or what made it. Sometimes it felt attached to her body, or it was a palpable heaviness in the room, jangling and dangerous.
Years later she learned these moments were probably the beginnings of a panic attack, but the definition didn’t describe the experience: Transcendental, vivid, and phantasmagoric.
She leaked fear.
She knew she could avoid the worst of it if she acted fast. She got to work eating. All thoughts stopped and she floated, formless and tranced.
“Whoa there, Julia,” her father said.
A mess lay before her. Potatoes and chicken, gravy-poured vegetables and rolls with wet bite marks. Binge-eating. She’d done it again. Her hands tense on the knife and fork. She dropped them with a clattering like a quick scream. She’d eaten an entire plateful of food and served herself a second helping. When had she done that? Just now?
Julia kept her eyes down. Her hair did the octopus thing.
“Oh, gosh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
It was obvious, wasn’t it? Love me, her plate cried, Love me now. She picked up fallen peas, dropped them in her napkin. She wiped her mouth, covered the spilled food on the placemat, a glob of butter near her wrist.
“I met a woman today who said she knew Mother,” she said, but she said it so quietly no one heard.
“I made cookies for dessert,” Margaret screamed. “Don’t let me forget!”
“Everyone who thinks walnuts belong in a chocolate chip cookie should be shot,” their father said.
“I would never!” Margaret squealed. “Never ever!”
“You must be growing,” Thomas said, and touched Julia’s hand. “You’re hungry. You okay?”
Julia smiled, or tried to, and pushed away the plate. “I guess so.”
Mid-westerners, they were not a family that communicated emotional pain. They were a motherless lot, kept safe by a kind and hard-working father, who did his best, and three quickly-growing kids. Julia was the baby, the only one who barely remembered their mother at all.
The days continued without a hiccup. That day, a week, a month.
Thomas wrote his college entrance essay and sent the envelope out with the water and electric bills. Life remained organized and limited. Julia babysat on weekends. She played hide-and-seek for money. Margaret performed five nights as a minor character in the play.
All of which were more or less successful. Thomas got into two of the three colleges he applied to. Margaret got a standing ovation. Julia was awarded “most diligent” in her favorite class, journalism. She stopped lying and found her way back to the place she’d been before. It was different, of course, but no one bothered her. Living with secrets had become a central feature of her mental processing. It had always been there, a blatant science of the mind.
Maybe it was what happened to all girls who’d lost their mothers at a tender age. All girls whose family moves on, not talking about what their mother was like, or even that it was sad, years later, that she’d missed everything and no one knew her voice.
More chickens baked in the oven. Sometimes a long piece of salmon, topped with slices of lemon, or cream-of-mushroom noodle casseroles, little round fat-twinkling hams.
Julia did not explain why she kept a sudden distance from the library. Thomas and Margaret teased her about it, asked her to explain, but she refused. She figured if she never mentioned the librarian and if she never saw that woman again, there might not be enough evidence to believe she’d been real.
But wouldn’t you know Julia saw her anyway. There she was. Boom!
Julia spotted her on an errand with her father. The librarian walked easily down the street, looking exactly as she’d been. In fact, she even seemed more real. She was the most human person on earth. She knew things. The long face and nose like a finger-point, an accusation. Afraid, Julia crouched down.
The librarian crossed the intersection with a brown curly-haired dog on a leash. Her coat flapped open, flashed a vibrant luxe purple lining. Her hair was blown every which way, her sharp jawline was as real as a white stripe. She was close enough Julia saw the raisin-shaped mole.
Julia had been right to be afraid. She was afraid of the awful power of truth—the fact that a living breathing woman knew her mother when she, too, was real. It haunted her.
The ghost of her mother lived inside her body.
Oh no, she thought, because it made sense.
She sucked in a breath. She worried she was giving too much away by sitting in the car not breathing, so she tried to do it quietly, but it was harder than she expected.
Julia had no control over herself. Snot and tears crowded her face. She couldn’t remember how to breathe.
“Good lord! Julia!” her father shouted. “My god! What happened? What’s wrong?”
She gasped, wet-faced and wild-haired.
Recklessness continued its hot ballooning screech. Julia wasn’t certain she could explain herself.
They pulled into a parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. The smell of beef and boiling grease filled her lungs. Through a distortion of tears she saw shapes of people moving, laughing. Picnic benches sat in the shade of large trees; lazy glitter of cottonwood seed pods floated sideways through the day. The sky blue as blue can be.
“Nothing,” she managed.
“How can this be nothing? Look at you. What’s going on?”
Julia felt sorry for him, confused as he was. He looked at her with incredulity and concern. He didn’t know how to touch his children. She wanted a hug. His hands stayed cupped in his lap. They were both ashamed.
She swallowed hard, used her sweater to mop up her face, and smoothed her hair. She demanded it over, this hysteria, whatever it was. Her heartbeat purred, under control.
“That’ll never happen again,” she told him. “I just had a scary thought, I think.”
“But why? What thought?” he said, and when she didn’t answer he experimented with a little grin. “You okay? What was the scary thought?”
“I’m completely fine,” she said.
“Maybe we’ll talk about it later?” He said this knowing she’d never bring it up again. There were rules in everything. Especially secrets. Or whatever this was.
“Sounds good. Maybe later we’ll talk. I’m here for you, kid.”
She never saw the librarian again. She never spoke of her.
Julia’s father found a song on the radio that saved him. Gladdened, he tapped the steering wheel, singing. He made right turns and left turns, deep into the neighborhood where they lived. Des Moines jumped left and right. Trees and rooftops surrounded them completely, as it always had. Their home was the place they ate, slept, survived, and eventually, grew old enough to scatter.
