And it was as if, Duncan realized, Claire had never left: she’d slipped off her shoes and curled into that armchair and commanded his attention because of her mere presence, never mind that voice he’d so missed, that chiseled face, the shape of her hands, neck, her shoulders. He has no photograph of her, has never seen one; even Claire’s high school yearbook had a blank frame rather than a portrait. So, he said slowly, you think this keepsake will matter to Sam.
As a reminder of that moment and its meaning, yes.
Duncan went into the other room and returned with the bottle of rum, poured her another shot, poured himself one. As Sam intends to return, Duncan said, he’ll likely be spending a lot of time with Oldman.
But he and Oldman will never recapture that moment in the same way as my photograph.
Memory can be powerful.
Or distorted, or empty. Claire brushed her hand through the air, stopped Duncan from responding. Duncan, I spent every night at Iris’s searching through the upstairs of her house, going through every book, every drawer, every closet, that attic, every nook and cranny, hoping to find something, anything—a picture, a handwritten note, a letter—that might have survived from my childhood. It must have disturbed Iris, though she never said, for the day you and I—and Meredith—had lunch I returned to find that Mabel, who’d visited Iris the same day, had brought and left—surely at Iris’s request—a shoebox half filled with photographs of us. Of me, of Iris, sometimes of the three of us. The shock was, I hadn’t remembered, didn’t remember, Iris as she’d been before she withdrew from the world; what shocked me more is, I realized I was photographing Iris every day while staying with her—recording everything she did, her every expression and gesture—because I don’t and can’t remember what Iris actually looked like during my childhood, not even in the following years when I lived in the cottage. And what she looks like now bears no resemblance to the woman in those photographs. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also somehow animated in those stills, there’s laughter behind her smile, amusement in her eyes; I could see how supple and graceful she was, imagine her walking or dancing or swimming out of those frames. Those photographs are now all I have of then, in contrast to all I have of now. But the in-between, well, what of that? Who was she?
Someone, Duncan pronounced slowly, who wanted to forget.
He saw the quizzical, incisive look on Claire’s face, watched her sip the rum, anticipated the question he knew would not remain unspoken. He braced himself, felt oddly, slightly drunk.
And was that possible? Claire asked. Were you able to forget, was I, as much as we tried?
Duncan emptied his glass, reached for the rum and poured another two fingers, shook his head, sighed. Admit it, he told himself, but the most he managed was: At times I’ve missed you, Claire.
She got to her feet, walked over to him. Don’t hog that rum, she warned, taking the bottle from him, pouring herself another shot, taking a sip, studying him the while. Get up, she said, putting her glass down, taking his glass from him. When he stood he met the hand she’d raised as if to dance, felt her other hand on the back of his shoulder, encircled her waist with his free arm. Claire—
You owe me this dance, Duncan. It was the only promise you ever broke.
And she stepped in to him, rested her head against his clavicle. His arm tightened about her waist, his cheek felt the softness of her hair, his hand the warmth of her skin radiating beneath her shirt, the shape of her hips and breasts pressing against him. He didn’t know how long this might last before he caved in: no music played. This should have happened on the night of her prom—she’d been furious that he wouldn’t take her, furious when he told her to do what every other respectable senior did, go with a date, that, yes, he’d arranged to be one of the prom’s chaperones and, yes, he’d dance with her once, only once—and of course he couldn’t dance with her then, he couldn’t even permit himself to hold her for one dance at arm’s length, for she wouldn’t have allowed that, she would have closed the distance between them, and he’d refused to make a fool of himself in public when he’d never made a fool of himself during all those years, despite his private yearnings. They swayed slowly and held each other tightly, and he knew how dangerous the moment, this was a terrible mistake, it would take so little to forget where he ended and she began: and it took so little, one long deep kiss that might have become an everlasting trespass had Claire not finally pulled back, stopped moving her feet, freed her hands to hold his face and then quickly, sweetly, kiss him once again, then placed her fingers on his lips.
You’re spoken for, Duncan, she whispered, you’ll marry Meredith.
He felt his throat constrict, swallowed hard, nodded slightly.
And I’m giving you Iris’s place as a wedding present. No—she said, placing the whole of her palm over his mouth—listen to me. Oldman has plans for June and Luke. When Sam returns, offer him this apartment. I don’t want Iris’s property. I won’t sell it, and I won’t use it.
She dropped her hand then, but not her gaze. He pulled her close, buried his face in her hair, inhaled her scent, and after a long moment loosened his grip and stepped back, let go. She turned away from him, crossed the room, picked up and put on her jacket, came back and emptied what was left in her glass into his, straightened. He took a deep breath, ventured: And if you had a reason to stay?
She smiled wryly, gently shook her head. Now that you’ve finally made good on your promise to dance with me, I don’t even have a reason to return.
He followed when she stepped past him, but she raised a hand with her back to him, halting him in his tracks. She crossed the threshold, then turned to face him.
I love you, Duncan.
I know, he said. And then she was gone, her tread light on the stairs, the opening and closing of the door so quietly done that he wasn’t sure until much later, when he’d finally summoned the courage to go downstairs, whether she’d left at all.
June
SHE STOOD ON the cottage porch in the deep of night, the stars and moon lost, nowhere, not a glimmer of any universe beyond the blackness of the overcast shawling the sky. No light emanated from the upstairs of Iris’s house to spill powdery shapes upon the garden: Claire was gone, had been for days, and Iris again sleeps in a pitch-black house. The cold air tangs of metal, June can taste the promise of snow. Her breath came from her in silvery wisps, and she willed her shoulders, arms, fingers to relax, go limp, willed the tension in her body to ebb, be gone, even as she watched Iris’s house apprehensively. Iris, Claire told her before leaving, is dying, will soon die. June hadn’t realized that, not fully—that soon shocked her—and now lives in daily fear that she, June, will be the one to find Iris dead. The thought that on any given morning, even tomorrow, Iris might not rise again sends a tremor that squirrels up her spine, the dead, as they say—no, perhaps in this case the near-dead—dancing on her grave. By the time she folds her arms and holds her elbows, the sensation is gone.
Claire was clear as to what June was to do when Iris dies: call Duncan, then go back to the cottage and keep Luke inside until he arrives. She told June this twice. Said as well: Arrangements have been made, you’ll be taken care of.
Iris has repeatedly told Luke that she is going to hibernate this winter, like his turtle.
She has repeatedly told June: I am tired of dissolving.
June examined the incomprehensible sky. Without galaxy swath, without pinprick planet light, without the moon, nothingness stretched past infinity. She felt tired, crushed, hollow: the knowledge of Iris’s certain death has left her reeling. The endless night, endless dark, mirrors her dismay. Iris’s death-to-be has unmoored her: she knows she will not be able to bring herself to stay here, not be able to explain to Luke that Iris is gone. If she, they, remained, that empty house would not let him forget Iris; the day the garden turtle emerged into the spring’s warmth Luke would expect Iris to do the same, to reappear: the child knows nothing of death, or of lies. June didn’t
know how to rail at the heavens, to rant aloud; instead, she lets the cold seep into her bones, stands within this barren season that remains sluggish, unborn, and under the heaviness of this dark that threatens to defy gravity, thwart the fall of snow, press upon Iris and suffocate her.
June already misses her. She feels oddly close to Iris; and but for Iris’s sternness, her inviolable withdrawal from the world, they were not completely unalike. They never discussed their pasts or their private lives or voiced opinions; each was comfortable with the other’s reticence; and if either communed with spirits or gods or prayed, each did so in the garden and did not let on. Iris came to love Luke, and June came to love Iris, not only because she took on the role of Luke’s grandmother, but because she was nonjudgmental, reserved, committed to a way of life she’d created for herself, and stalwart in the face of her relentlessly devastating incapacities—the loss of coordination and strength, that slow slide into utter debilitation—never admitting to her needs in words, only in deed, allowing June to take over what Iris slowly, then more rapidly, became incapable of doing. If Iris’s silence stemmed in part, in the beginning, from resentment, if June had indeed been an unwelcome guest—which she would never know for sure—she had never suspected.
Iris, Iris, June whispers. She summoned nothing by having spoken, not even the air stirred, words had no power over Iris’s condition or the night’s stillness. Snow, she begs heaven: Iris lives for the snow, lives to watch the day Luke will play in it, lives to see it cover the garden grounds, lace the trees’ branches, cloak the cottage and leanto roofs. Snow for Iris, for the little joy that is left to her, snow for me too, June implored, to stop these empty useless days and nights from pounding through me like blows. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to leave Iris alone during the days; at least if it snowed June would have an excuse to be in the garden, to shovel, to help Luke make a snowman, to momentarily remove herself from Iris, to momentarily push back that monstrous vastness—which June could not fathom or imagine filling—that awaits her. To momentarily forget Sam.
He told Luke that he’d be back, and he promised June the same. She doesn’t know whether to believe him, or what his return might mean. They didn’t speak of that, but they’d told each other what they dared. Sam: of the war, of how it changed him, of crazy Rita, of Freddie, of Leonard and the soup kitchen, of how Sam had come to the conclusion that he’d rather take the chance that a few thousand people might get used to him here than remain in the city, where seven or eight million people never would. And June: of the trailer park, of Auntie, of her walkabout mother, of the trip across the country, of the dog on the beach, of Ward. Of how she didn’t know why Mabel, then Iris, had taken her in, or why Oldman—the kindest man in the world—had so generously made her and Luke a part of his life.
She misses Sam. She’d liked being with him, liked his quiet ways, liked the way he’d told her he didn’t know whether to believe in lucky stars or guardian angels, but that before meeting Oldman his life hadn’t had much rhyme or reason to it and that he’d felt for a long time that he was at its mercy, which hadn’t been very merciful. She liked the way he’d said that if he ever took life by its tail, he’d have Oldman to thank; and that if he ever stopped letting things slip through his fingers, he’d probably have her to thank. She liked how gentle, how careful, he was with Luke. Liked that he’d asked her, shyly, what no one else ever had: Did you love him?—to which she replied, I wasn’t allowed that. She liked the way they’d held hands with Luke, the child between them, and the way Sam sometimes pushed an errant strand of hair back behind her ears, smiled into her eyes. She liked that they hadn’t kissed, that he hadn’t pressed her, that he hadn’t pretended they might have a future together; but now these things saddened her, leaving her to wonder—standing in that freeze beneath that empty sky—whether it saddened him too, whether she would ever know.
Ward had never said farewell.
And Iris would never, even if she knew beforehand the moment of her death.
Everyone, June was coming to realize, has their own way of bowing out.
Snow, she whispers, summoning the first flakes to fall on the palms of her open hands she raises toward the sky, snow for us.
Iris
THE FIRST SNOWFALL was light, but did not disappoint: it laced the boughs and fallen leaves and filled in the troughs of the furrows and the dimpled earth that had been turned over, sparkled on the leanto and cottage roofs. Where mounded, the soil poked dark veiny crests through the fragile whiteness. The snow did not melt, but on a day of dazzling sunlight softened, then froze in the night, leaving a crust whose shadows gleamed bluish and roseate.
The snow’s appearance quickened Iris’s spirit. She did not hibernate, indeed became more animated, more alert, sat awake through the days in that armchair that had been repositioned for her to face the garden. At times frost crystals made fantastic patterns in the window corners of the French doors. The boy’s cold cheeks sometimes brushed against hers, the touch a capture of ice breeze. He always smelled of winter now, of its pure, frigid scent. The girl moved about as she always had, a phantomlike presence easy to mistake for nonbeing, and—without mentioning her delight, which Iris found apparent in the smoothness of June’s expression, which no longer betrayed any disquiet—came to trust in what appeared to be a rally on Iris’s part. Iris did not dissuade, simply dulled her tremors with larger doses of antispasmodics than she was allowed, and waited for what she imagined would be a perfect day, and marveled, for that thin snowfall had also blanketed her memories. She found herself living only in the moment and, when she reached back into the past, found herself rebounded, returned to the now and most recent present. She could summon at will the sound of Claire’s movements on the upper floor, the pleasant sensation of Claire gently toweling her back, even more gently brushing Iris’s hair, summon the intense gaze of those beautiful dark eyes, their final moments together, Claire saying I’m glad I came, and Iris demurring And I’m glad you stayed. She could, when alone, feel Luke resting in her lap, feel him reach up to twist a strand of her hair around his small fingers, smell the sweetness of his breath, feel his blood pulse beneath his wrist’s thin skin, summon his laughter. She could see—and feel—the unspoken love June showered upon them both.
Iris was no longer dreaming of Matthew. By the second snowfall—which was so heavy that it bowed tree branches, bent bushes, buried all traces of the garden—she no longer dreamed at all. And she did not that day, or the next, or ever hibernate, and Luke didn’t ask her if and when she would, for—delighted with the snow, excited by playing in it—he’d momentarily forgotten a turtle Iris did not recall, the one asleep in a small cave beneath a rock ledge that now couldn’t be seen. Iris kept secret her discovery that, by combining doses of antispasmodics and sleeping pills, she could disengage from her body. She sat disengaged in that armchair and looked out upon the whitened garden’s expanse littered with snow angel impressions, one small snow fort, and one darkly gleaming pathway shoveled from the leanto to the cottage to her own patio and then beyond to the outer door, and sometimes became mesmerized by the snowman—whose beatific smile and button eyes looked upon her kindly—that stood just beyond her patio.
All, Iris assured June, was as it should be. This, a perfect day: the low, unbroken overcast that presaged another snowfall to come before midnight; the boy who’d lain in her arms now frolicking in the snow with that unbridled joy only children and the innocent are capable of; the sandwiches made and wrapped and refrigerated, the tea served and cleared, the dishes done, everything in its place. The perfect day, and now the perfect dusk; the boy, racing along the shoveled path, made smaller by the waning light and, with that dark snowcap pulled low, as much like an elf as Claire had been at that age; the girl, waving at Iris, and then Luke rushing back to do the same. Goodbye, goodbye: and then they were gone, to Oldman’s, and Iris—after the snowman and garden disappeared at day’s end—put on the one floodlight that perched on the middle
of the pergola’s edge, and it illumined the snowman and beyond and, of course, made the dark in which she sat blacker than any night.
Perfect day, oh perfect night: yes, Iris decided again, all was as it should be. She’d thrown away the prescription vials during her daughter’s visit, and no one knew how many pills Iris hadn’t taken, how many she’d saved, how many she now fingered in a pant pocket, how many she would swallow: as many as there were, more than enough, she knew, to allow her what she had chosen as a perfect end to this perfect day, perfect night, and all that had come before. When June later that evening walked through the floodlit garden carrying her sleeping child, she never suspected that Iris still sat in the armchair, her gaze—upon the snowman—sightless, and her face serene.
About the Author
MELANIE WALLACE is the author of The Housekeeper, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and Blue Horse Dreaming, which was long-listed (in translation, as Sauvages) for France’s Prix Femina. Born and raised in New Hampshire, she now lives with her husband in Greece.
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