Introduction

"Beautifully written...a great book club pick!" -- Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author

A deeply felt family narrative that examines the fine line between selfishness and what passes for love.

After nearly two hundred years of housing retardants, as they were once known, the Beechwood Institute is closing the doors on its dark history, and the complicated task of reassigning residents has begun. Ella Jules, having arrived at Beechwood at the tender age of eight, must now rely on the state to decide her future. Ella’s aging parents have requested that she be returned to her childhood home, much to the distress of Ella’s siblings, but more so to Lynetta, her beloved caretaker who has been by her side for decades. The five adult Jules children, haunted by their early memories of their sister, and each dealing with the trauma of her banishment in their own flawed way, are converging on the family home, arriving from the far corners of the country?secrets in tow?to talk some sense into their aging parents and get to the root of this inexplicable change of heart.

The Precious Jules examines the thin line between selfishness and what passes for love. This family story asks what is best for one child in light of what is perceived as the greater good, and just what is the collective legacy of buried family secrets, shame, and helplessness. The Precious Jules is a deeply felt family narrative that will make you fall in love with these flawed and imperfect characters standing on the threshold of an awakening they never expected.

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Excerpt

1

Roland Park, Maryland

Winter 1974

The Children

Their mother opens the bank of doors between the mammoth dining room and the sunroom every morning to let the space warm while the children have their breakfast. Afterward, she escorts them in to play. Today a low winter sun streams hard through the long windows.

Her feet are swollen again, as they are with every pregnancy, doughy loaves rising out of her slippers. Little George, kneeling at her feet, pokes a finger at the top of one foot to watch a sphere of white quickly bloom and then fade when he pulls away. He is only three and this is a fascinating thing to him. Jax, having celebrated his sixth birthday the night before, is on his knees with six shiny new Matchbox cars, swishing them across the floor to rev the tiny wheels. Nearly five-year-old Belle watches her mother as well, stares at her feet, and notices the way the sun spatters across her ankles. Belle draws her eyes up over the great mysterious mound of her mother’s belly to Ella, Belle’s twin sister (who looks just like Belle but is actually nothing like her at all), perched awkwardly on her mother’s fullness, tangling her fingers in their mother’s hair, pulling strands of it to her mouth, Ella’s head tilted to the crook of her mother’s neck.

“Be a good girl,” their mother says, reaching around to unwrap Ella’s arm from her neck like a scarf. “Everyone be good.”

The children don’t acknowledge this. They know she is talking to Ella. By comparison, they are always good. Ella is the one who spits out her food at the table, randomly kicks their collective shins, screeches when startled by the banging of pots in the sink or the beeping of the timer on the stove. That morning at breakfast she flipped her bowl of Cheerios to the floor, forcing their mother to ease herself and the mass of her pregnant belly under the table in order to clean the mess. All the while Ella sat banging her spoon overhead, dragging her hands through the slop of milk, and flinging her legs wildly so that the others—Jax, Belle, and George— scooched their chairs farther from her, afraid of being kicked.

“Ma-a-a,” Ella says, pulling at her mother’s hair as her mother slides her down to the floor. “Ma-a-a.” Her voice, like the bleating of a lamb but guttural.

Ella’s speech is thick, the few words she knows falling from her mouth in broken chunks. Sometimes a word gets wedged in her throat and replays itself on a loop. “Ma-a-a.” She heaves the sound out of herself with what seems a painful effort and then, without rhyme or reason, the sound stumbles out of her again and again, landing in the midst of the three siblings. “Maaa-aaaa.”

Ella is not fully able to walk, though she can right herself with something to pull up on, maybe manage an unsteady step or two. For this reason, her mother sets her in the center of the sunroom where she is unlikely to move and is usually content to drift off into her own world or watch her siblings play.

Hillary Jules leans over to dig in her children’s toybox and pull out toys to set in front of Ella, things that don’t have sharp edges and things she can’t swallow. Ella tries to swallow everything, and there are rules about what she can have. The children all know a toy has to be bigger than their own hand before they give it to her. Nothing that comes from a Cracker Jack’s box, no army men or Silly Putty, rubber balls, marbles, Lincoln Logs. No Matchbox cars or Mr. Potato Head pieces. No pennies that she can swallow in an instant and no one the wiser. No Tinkerbell Toilet Water or Mexican jumping beans or crayons and especially no hair barrettes, which, they all know from experience, can tear a small child’s esophagus and temporarily steal what voice she has. Even little Georgie knows the rules. He anxiously scans the floor around Ella and, spying a Lego within arm’s reach of his sister, grabs it quickly and hands it to his mother, proud of himself for having noticed it.

His mother thanks him and tosses the block to the toy bin. George feels a small swell of pride in having been helpful. His mother proceeds to surround Ella with colorful things—fat stacking rings, oversized blocks, a Nerf ball—and leaves the room, her robe flying behind her, to head upstairs and dress for the day. The children know to expect her return shortly. Her blond hair will be pulled back with her favorite black velvet headband that brings out the dark in her lashes, her cheeks and lips blushing with pink, pearl earrings set delicately in the lobes of her ears, though lately she wears them less and less as Ella has taken to pulling on them.

“Maaa-aa-aa.”

“Shut up, Ella,” Jax says from where he is sprawled on his belly with a Matchbox car. He continues to rev it, dragging it across the floor, making a small ripping sound. When he lets go, it shoots across the floor and smacks into the wall across the room.

Jax is a thinker, and the first thing he said last night after unwrapping the sixth car was that next year he was going to be seven and would get seven cars, and the next year eight, and he continued doing the math aloud until George announced that he, too, would get six cars for his birthday.

“No, George. You get four cars. You are only going to be four, so you get four cars.” This had sent George into a fit of tears and had required a great deal of effort on their father’s part to explain to George that someday he was going to be six and get six cars, but not for his next birthday, at which point he might not even want Matchbox cars. But George was certain that they were exactly what he wanted, and furthermore, he wanted six of them.

George has not forgotten about the cars. On this morning he is now intently watching his big brother, Jax, play with his gifts and is perfectly happy to jump up and fetch each one after its fabulous crash into the wall.

Jax lets another car rip across the floor, but it hits the edge of the braided rug where Ella sits and the car tumbles over, landing inches from her. Ella smacks her hands down to snatch the car but misses it. “Ma,” she says. She lifts her eyes to the ceiling. “Ma-a-a.”

George knows the rules. Knows that this is something Ella is not allowed to have. He scrambles on his knees from where he sits watching, shoots across the three-foot span of floor, and reaches to grab the car before Ella’s spastic slapping hands can land on it. But Ella surprises them all and manages to bring her hand down on the tiny metal car and lift it from the floor in a swift jerk before slamming it down again on the back of George’s head.

Belle is on alert now. Ella has surprised them all. It’s so confusing. The way her twin sister can be so remote, so unengaged with Belle and her brothers, so placid, and then suddenly transform into something to be reckoned with. And furthermore, Belle cannot understand how it is that Ella hasn’t the muscle strength to walk on her own and yet she can lock her fingers around hair and yank it out at the roots, latch onto an arm or a shoulder with her teeth and tear out a chunk of flesh, stab a fork so hard into a plate that it cracks in two, and that she is able to bring that car down so hard that blood is now gushing out of the back of George’s head, shooting as if from the lawn sprinkler.

George touches the stinging place on his skull, feels the sloppy wet of it, and brings his fingers—shiny and bright-red—down to his face, stares, reaches again to the back of his head.

Belle feels the fear creeping over her, turning her legs to Jell-O, urging her to move back, turn away. She watches Ella, her eyes glazed over and unfocused, her body rocking, the shiny blue metal of the car protruding from her mouth. And there is Georgie, again touching the back of his head and looking at his fingers, a slow look of horror rising on his face, touching and looking as if he can’t believe this flood of blood is his own. And then, long after Belle anticipates it, George lets loose a curdling scream so loud and shrill that it startles Ella and her entire body gives a great shiver. Ella snags George by the hair and yanks him to her, the car tumbling from her mouth, his face smashed to Ella’s own.

“Get her off me!” Blood seeps through his blond hair, smearing down the back of his neck. George slaps blindly at her, at the air, unable to pull his head from her grip.

Belle is frozen, terrified that Ella will turn her attention to her. She watches Ella fall backward, taking her little brother down on top of her, his head twisting, Ella’s fingers snagged in his hair. His face angled just enough that Belle can see the blood now, so unnaturally crimson, a Christmas red, smeared between the two of them, and Ella, openmouthed, blood running in tiny rivulets between her teeth. Belle will forever remember the low thunk in her belly, the way she scooted back across the floor, that she couldn’t bear to look and yet couldn’t turn away and instead clapped her hands over her eyes, staring through her fingers.

It is Jax who flies across the room. He rips Ella’s hands from George’s hair and pins her flat to the floor so George can escape, shooting like a spider across the rug and back into the corner of the room where he sobs and wails for their mother.

Belle can hear her mother coming from the second floor, her steps thunderous on the stairs overhead.

Jax pins Ella by sitting on her chest and the two of them slap-slap at one another until Jax rolls off and kicks her with the bottom of his foot. Ella moans. The sound, pitiful and vulgar, repulses Belle. But then, seeing her twin flat on the floor, her head weaving side to side, the gush of her breath in and out, Belle has a strange urge to reach for her, quiet her, wants to slip Ella’s thumb in her own mouth and disappear into a long-ago warm wet darkness with her.

Their mother must have been in the middle of dressing. She has pulled a huge tent of a dress around herself but only managed the few snaps at the neck so that her belly, rippled in blue veins, protrudes, and the dress flies behind her as she comes through the dining room, her body tilting as she rounds the dining table and streams into the sunroom. She has no panties on and below the mound of her belly is a patch of downy hair that—for a brief second—makes Belle think she is hiding the new baby down there, that it has been under there and between her legs all this time. Much like a kangaroo hides her young in her pouch, their mother has been hiding the new baby from them. It isn’t safe to let it out just now.

“Oh, my lord, oh, my babies!” Their mother looks from one to the other and clearly doesn’t know which child needs her most. George is crying so hard in the corner that he can’t get any breath into himself. But he sees her, sees his mother look from him to Ella and back again, sees the way she hesitates. Ella is on her back, her arms wrapped over and around herself, rocking side to side. George chokes, the blood pouring from a bite over his brow and a rip in his nostril that hangs like a small flap. He wipes at his face, smearing himself crimson. “Georgie, Georgie, don’t touch it, honey.” Their mother squats to the floor on her knees, scoops him to her.

“Ella was killing me,” he manages to say, spitting and choking into her neck.

“No, honey, no. She wasn’t killing you. Don’t touch, Georgie. Let me look.” She cups his face in her hands and tries to lift it. George allows it, his lips trembling, tasting the blood that runs from the rip in his nose. He squints the eye beneath the torn brow, blinking scarlet tears. His mother holds his head firmly at a short distance to look at him, study the wounds, but he can’t bear the distance between the two and peels her hands away to dive into her chest again.

Jax knows that head wounds bleed excessively. He has heard his mother say so. He believes her, tells himself that this is not as bad as it looks. Only a few weeks ago he had hit his head on the blade of his sled when it flipped on an icy patch and the bleeding had been hard to stop. But he hadn’t even needed stitches, much to his disappointment. Still, things look bad for his little brother.

Jax is still on the floor, keeping Ella at bay with an icy glare. To Belle, he seems terribly brave. Then, his teeth still locked together, Belle hears him say, “I hate you, Ella. I hate your guts.”

“Don’t say that, Jax. Shame on you!” says their mother.

Belle sees the sudden tears bloom and gush, a brief burst of rain on her big brother’s face. Though Jax sits up quickly and wipes them away with his fingers, now tinged with his little brother’s blood so that no one but Belle will ever know he has been crying, and it only looks like George’s blood has smeared across his face in the struggle.

A bloody wash among all of them, watery pink in the run of Jax’s tears, on Ella’s mouth —as if she is an animal coming up from its kill—and George’s head and face, his hair, their mother’s neck and breasts where George buries himself. Red splattered brightly across the paned windows. Only Belle, her back to the wall, her small lips trembling, her arms crossed over her shoulders, is untouched. She will forever think of herself as having been spared.

Will forever wonder why. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

The Jules Family are put in a tough situation from the very beginning. What would you have done if this was your family and decision?

Examine the relationships you have with your own siblings or close relatives. Did this story challenge your narrative of what it means to be a sibling?

The Jules Family is very large and full of different personalities. Which character did you relate to the most, and why?

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