Chapter 12

16

'In the end, ' Julia thought, still driving north, 'the choices I thought I would have to make when I got home seemed already made... as if something totally outside my control was pushing me toward this particular path.'

Smiling, Julia remembered that first moment when she returned home, as she pushed open the door and found a scattered pile of mail hindering her. Setting down her suitcase just inside the entryway, Julia bent over and began scooping up the assorted envelopes, flyers, and booklets; as the stack grew in her arms, Julia thought that, since she had so little to unpack anyway, she might as well get started with the task of sorting the unruly pile into what was worth opening and what was destined for the garbage can. When she was sure it was all off the floor and that none of it would fall from her arms, she stood and walked the six short steps it took to get from the front door to the kitchen.

Reaching the table in the nook by the window, she paused while thinking of how best to arrange the burden in her arms... and then she flung her arms open, letting the envelopes scatter across the table, with some fluttering over the edge and coming to rest on the floor again. As she surveyed the colorful randomness of the mess she'd made, Julia smiled an almost invisible smile. Then, as she turned toward the kitchen counter to make coffee, she took in the sight of the rest of her small kitchen as compared to the disorder of the table, and the jarring difference between the two immobilized her. Suddenly, she noticed how blandly she had decorated the kitchen, with its hues of white, créme, off-white, and eggshell. In the two weeks she'd been gone, dust had accumulated on her coffeepot and toaster; it had been her habit to dust every two or three days, and she had never noticed how quickly the dust could grow quite thick. 'Just two weeks away, ' she thought, 'and you could easily trace your name in the dust that has settled.'

Even as she was thinking this, her imagination conjured a ghostly image of a much older version of herself, walking around the kitchen. Her doppelganger wiped each surface with a damp cloth, taking the dust away, and then moving on to another. Yet, even as she moved on, dust quickly re-accumulated; in a matter of seconds, the dust was just as thick as if it had never been removed. Then the ghostly image turned toward real Julia, and the flesh and bone version took a step backward; the old woman who wavered in translucence in front of her was coated in dust from head to toe. Her hands, her face, her hair - any areas exposed to the air were covered with a thick layer of dust, to the point where the creases of age were filled and smoothed over. Looking into her own face, Julia couldn't see the lines and wrinkles she expected; instead, she saw only a mask of light colored motes that disguised what she imagined she might look like in later years. Looking over to where Julia stood, her older self spoke softly. "I'm so sorry about the condition of the kitchen, dearie. It seems all I ever do is dust, dust, dust, and it never ever goes away. It just seems to get thicker and thicker..." The voice trailed off as the woman took her cloth and again started wiping off the counter, seemingly oblivious to the futility of her effort... or the amount of dust clinging to her own skin.

Engrossed her vision, Julia did not notice one particularly large manila-colored envelope tottering on the edge of the table. As she swayed slightly while watching the movements of her older self, she bumped the table once... twice... and then a third time, whereupon the envelope fell to the floor with a loud slap! Startled, Julia looked down to see what had happened, and when she looked up, her imaginary self was gone, and the thick dust that had coated the counters of her waking dream had returned to the more moderate accumulation of her two-week absence.

Stunned, Julia pulled a chair from under the table and sat down heavily. 'Is that what my life has become... so endlessly repetitive with so little gained? Have I focused so much on order and calm and... and... ordinariness that I haven't noticed how my own life has become as hidebound and useless as a dust-covered collection of antiquated knick-knacks?' Julia put her head in her hands, her elbows on the table; her mind was awash with memories of what she had done or been doing before her fateful trip to Ogdensburg... and she found much of it to be stale and void of life, like a dusty and unused appliance sitting atop her kitchen counter. The dichotomy of her life before and after meeting the professor and Sarah struck her with the same force as that of the difference between the scattered pile of mail on and around her table and the rest of kitchen. The same words seemed to apply to both her prior life and the rest of the kitchen: colorless, dusty, sterile, useless. It was as if her brother's death had awakened from a deep sleep, a coma in which she did the same things over and over again. She had tried to go back to sleep after her return from Rochester, but something in her had refused to go back to being the "old" Julia. And now, having tasted just a bit of what lay beyond her own experience, most of her life paled greatly in comparison.