What Followed Her Out

Years have passed. The specter of Julia is buried, yet remains.

Mila didn’t know her. No one did.

She knew her arrogance. Her indifference.

Was Julia aware of who first opened that wound?

Her father’s wife ran a clothes-washing business and made Julia iron for hours on end while her father said nothing.

The stepmother had a teenage son who could do no wrong.

Young Julia could do no right.

“Baja la cabeza, mierda,” she would say, pulling the girl’s hair to avoid her stare.

That was life for young Julia: in and out of public school, back and forth between her parents, ashamed of her own social class.

Mila never knew what happened in that house.

She only knew what followed her out of it.

***

The first time Mila showed Julia a little piece she had written, they were on a city bus, of all places. Mila was in her early teens.

She had thought about it for days, whether to show it to her or not, then dared herself to do it right there.

“What’s this?” Julia said, unfolding the small piece of paper.

“Chip off the old block. Just like her father,” she said, laughing uproariously as she looked at it.

Mila smiled as if that had been the joke all along, folded the paper, and tucked it away.

Yes, Julia had once been a girl forced to lower her head and suffer indignities.

And no one came for her.

Maybe that was where the wound began.

She regretted having children, let alone motherhood.

No reproach there.

But it was still her choice to pass humiliation down to the last child she birthed.

No absolution.

Old age doesn’t exonerate her any more than sobriety exempts addicts from the harm they caused.

At dusk, Mila wonders if, in the recess of what is left of Julia’s mind, she remembers.

Hope not.