by Deborah Reed
It was also at this table where, on a good day, her father had prepped her for spelling tests, often pausing to say she surely knew the words already, and most times she did—aggregate, catkin, deciduous, habitat. Grandmam had taught June to read when she was four, using circulars and illustrated feed catalogs that came in the mail. Sometimes her father made oatmeal with cream, or BLTs using Grandmam’s homemade dill mayonnaise, and they sat across from each other with an even split of Coke. Sometimes, too, her father set his glass down and glanced up from his plate with raised eyebrows at the sight of June, as if surprised to find her there, surprised by her very existence. Other times his lids remained closed while he spoke in a whisper, as if through the fog of a headache, though he never complained of one. Maybe he was searching for the right thing to say. Maybe he was drawing on his thin supply of patience needed to make it through another hour with June.
He wasn’t always so unreachable. There were days, too, when the house rattled to life in the form of maps—artful copies of hand-painted pines and snowy slopes and roads from long ago, spread out in a series across the living room rug. Towns circled in red were places her father and mother had visited; others, circled in green, were places her father promised to take June. His eyes were electric then, open and aflame, the way Granddad spoke of the rockroses bursting on the patio. The washing machine churned all afternoon with laundry, while a pot on the stove bubbled Jonagold and McIntosh apples, and the house had the feel of a mother and a father, everything working, cinnamon and butter, the tart-sweet scent of homemade applesauce filling every room. On those days her father called her Buttercup Byrne, and June collected primroses or daffodils, whatever was in season, and placed them in a jam jar on the table, the way she imagined her mother might have done.
June closed her eyes every time she spoke to Victory International Shipping.
Last week Niall called for the first time in a year, and June closed her eyes and listened to what he had to say.
2
Evening arrived on their high-desert acres in eastern Oregon without a chance for Jameson and Sarah Anne Winters to settle into lamplight, have a meal, and watch the news.
At first they’d held off preparing dinner, thinking the boy would wake at any moment, but three hours passed and he was still facedown on the sofa where he’d cried himself to sleep. He hadn’t had lunch or been cleaned up in any way—his feet, hands, and face were smeared red and black from tripping in the strawberry patch at the side of the house after he’d hit the ground running. He’d sat in the damp soil and cried while bees floated near his sweaty face and hair. He dug his heels into the patch and shrieked when Jameson tried to come near.
Their confidence was slipping. Soon it would be bedtime. Should they carry him to his room in this shape and tuck him in for the night? He clearly needed rest, they said, gazing from the living room doorway. The poor boy, they said. On this they solidly agreed.
His sixteen-year-old mother, Melinda, had been shooting heroin in a convenience store bathroom at the start of her labor, and the clerk, an eighteen-year-old boy who’d graduated from the same high school Melinda had dropped out of, tired of waiting for her to come out, and busted in. Then he tired of waiting on an ambulance, and locked the glass entry doors and drove Melinda fourteen miles to the ER. She named her baby Ernest, because the boy had a book by Ernest Hemingway on the dashboard of his car, and she held it in her hand as he drove, and was holding it still when the nurses wheeled her in. She called the baby Ernie, like a stuffed toy one could leave on a bed for days. Now he was two, and for the past twelve months he’d been in foster care with Jameson and Sarah Anne. After all this time they should have a feel for what to do. After all this time they shouldn’t have days like they had today.
Not true, Sarah Anne said. She called that wishful thinking, said no one was going to be served by that, and could Jameson please pass her the broom?
A short while earlier Jameson had imagined fever in the boy’s bright cheeks while he slept, but his forehead felt cool and moist and soft. The child was simply worn out, and his face, coated with the sticky sheen of dried tears, held a beauty that occupied Jameson, a strange blessing that had stalled him, crouched and staring at the small mouth and swollen eyelids and the tiny spiral of his ear.
“Maybe the smell of hash browns will wake him,” Sarah Anne had whispered, and Jameson tilted his head as if listening for some other voice, but he took the hint. Hash browns were a household favorite. And dinner needed to be made.
“It’ll be ready in about forty-five minutes,” he said, walking past her, and it sounded as if he were giving her a hint, implying that she figure this thing out by the time he put food on the table. And then he guessed that that was what he meant, but wished he hadn’t meant it, so he stepped back and kissed her on the cheek to soften what he’d said and how he’d said it, but he could see she knew all about that kiss, and barely raised her face to meet his lips. When he began cooking up their breakfast for dinner, he no longer cared for the idea, and was pretty sure Sarah Anne didn’t either.
They’d received another crank call this morning on the kitchen phone. People who knew them didn’t call that phone, and of course they wouldn’t hang up if they did. Jameson’s best guess was Melinda. Maybe she was trying to scare them. Maybe she had something to say but kept losing her nerve. This morning Sarah Anne heard breathing on the line.
Shadows had sloped across the cabinets and oven where earlier in the evening Jameson had leaned into his hip; the crooked feel of his bones, especially his left leg, added to the distraction. He’d been lost in thought with a cold egg in his hand, the desert air drifting through the screen and chilling the back of his neck. If the boy was dreaming, what might those dreams turn out to be? Maybe that first year of his life had vanished from memory. Maybe it continued to haunt him in his sleep.
Jameson knew how the past could rise up inside the walls of a dream and fill the body with an urgent confusion, with all the markings of a real and merciless now. How could a child be expected to understand that what he saw wasn’t happening again when a grown man with logic and defenses could be jerked from sleep by his own screams? Three years after the worst days of his life, Jameson’s feet still might swing to the floor in the middle of the night, eyes wide and hands pressed forward in the dark, until Sarah Anne’s touch went from a threat on his shoulder to a woman’s fingers guiding him back beneath the sheets, a woman slowly shifting from a stranger into the shape of his wife, someone he had loved for the better part of twelve years.
The boy was slight for his age; his arm dangled above the floor as he slept. His fist twitched near his soft blanket, tucked and hanging from beneath his neck. Every now and then he slugged the sofa cushion.
Jameson cooked hash browns and cheddar omelets and ready-bake biscuits with Sarah Anne’s homemade strawberry jam while Sarah Anne picked up the mess of the day throughout the house, sweeping the dried grass and dust trailed in on Jameson’s work boots, for which he apologized and she waved off, saying the whoosh and scratch of the broom calmed her nerves.
When dinner was ready they took quiet care scooping it onto plates and into bowls, the melted cheddar escaping the folds of each omelet, stringing cheese from dish to dish. They placed the boy’s empty plate in front of his equally empty snap-on highchair, just in case, and his small fork and spoon there, too. Steam rose from the food at the center of the table, and Sarah Anne reached for Jameson’s hand, laid hers on top of his, and each offered the other a small, defeated smile, like a prayer before lifting their forks. They ate, setting silverware gently against stoneware, swallowing slowly as if the sound of their throats might wake the boy, though they wanted more than anything to wake him.
We look feeble, Jameson thought. Thin and sapped and frail as fifty years from now. They were thirty-five years old, with spring birthdays two months apart. They ate what they could and then they cleared the table and began washing dishes, taking turns peeking into the living roo
m.
Jameson leaned next to Sarah Anne at the sink and asked if it wasn’t better to keep soap off the iron skillet she was washing. She blinked as if coming to, set down the bottle of dish soap, and thanked him for noticing. He reached for the skillet, and with it, her hand. He said, “You can go rest in there with him if you want.”
“I don’t think I could,” she said. “Rest, I mean.” She slid her fingers from beneath his. “But you can wash the skillet if you want.”
His mind had wandered while cooking the hash browns, trailing the many things that had gone wrong by midday. He’d stared at the woolly sunflowers across the meadow, the sway of yellow petals still bright in the dusk, while thin strings of potato burned along the edge of the skillet, encrusted so deeply it appeared to have been soldered to the iron. Now he was scouring with the arm of a man capable of rebuilding a house, and still the black scabs remained.
He eyed the dish soap, let it be, and then eyed it again, wanting only to accomplish this one simple thing.
When Sarah Anne turned to open the fridge, Jameson squirted a shot of blue soap onto the edge of the skillet. He went at it with the steel brush, and this time the flakes broke free.
She was teaching the boy that it was all right to sleep and eat and play when he wanted those things. She was teaching him to perceive his own needs. It was all right to leave him on the sofa like that. It was.
Jameson and Sarah Anne only ever called the boy Ernest. They liked to say, “Why so serious, Ernest?” because it made them smile, just enough, while greeting sorrow head-on. But Jameson continued to think of him as the boy, a changeling who’d come to live with them, a substitute for the real child who’d lost his place in their home. This boy could sleep for long hours in the daytime. This boy’s deeply red mouth was often puckered in quiet, like an old man gathering answers from the corners of his mind. This boy was unnaturally angelic, round-faced, with immense brown eyes. This boy was slightly lovelier in looks than Jameson’s own children had been, and he hated himself for thinking such things.
He and Sarah Anne had stood over him wondering what to do today, but it wasn’t like they didn’t know how to parent. Parenting wasn’t new. Until three years ago Jameson and Sarah Anne understood just what to do with a child, with two children, with twins. “Oh, they’re twins!” everyone said, especially in summer on the beach, surrounded by tourists who didn’t know them. “Boy and girl twins! ” they’d say, like a joyous discovery. For the entirety of their short lives, seven years to be exact, Piper and Nate had remained polite about being on curious display. They were courteous when told how identically they resembled each other. Said thank you and smiled as if they’d never heard it before, grinned as if it were a compliment, and in truth, it was. There were times when it had pained Jameson to see the love the twins had for each other; to look directly at it was like looking into a fiercely bright light not meant for the eyes. The soft sound of their voices in the next room, the giggling they sparked in each other, was like listening to a beautiful piece of music with the volume turned way too high. That undercurrent of blazing affection was not of this world, and he could never say this to anyone, especially not now—certainly he could never say this to Sarah Anne.
3
June’s cutoffs were short, very short, practically underwear, the only strip of clothing that marked her skin when she woke twenty minutes later in the sun. She peeled back the waistband to see the burnished tan line across her belly. She was becoming browner by the day.
“What if I was wrong?” Niall had asked on the phone last week. June almost didn’t answer when she saw who was calling. “And what if you were wrong, too?” he said.
This morning June filled the bird feeders in the front and back of the house, with millet for the chickadees and sunflower seeds for the nuthatches, and even with her eyes closed she knew which birds had arrived by their songs. Granddad had taught her to pay attention.
Aside from the houses, June had kept very little of her family’s belongings. She was trying to make her life her own, shaving off pieces of the past in exchange for the larger whole of the present. She’d kept the braided living room rug in the carriage house, soft wool and the greenish white of spindrift, its oval shape like a pond in the center of the room. She added a charcoal-colored loveseat to the two leather chairs, and the furniture appeared to float along the edge of water when the glow of summer sun saturated the walls by late afternoon. As a child June often anchored herself to the spiral at the center of the rug and read a book, the same small swirl where her father spread out the maps. Several nights ago she sat there while reading Granddad’s field notes.
Thirty elk arrived today, and took refuge in the post office parking lot, causing a stir for the locals and their dogs. The bluebells rose to the sun on this third day in March, 1971, a glory that has lightened the mood.
Overcast, and the last of the Canada geese are headed south, their final calls echoing from sky-high arrows that broke my heart until Maeve set the house to smelling of roast and garlic stew.
“Pay attention,” Granddad used to tell her. “The trees and the birds and the orb weaver know as much as we do about this world, if not more.”
When she’d hung up with Niall, the desire to jump into her father’s old truck and head to the liquor store in Wheeler was difficult to calm. Reading Granddad’s notes had only made it worse. She could practically hear her grandparents’ Sláinte, and see their tumblers of beautiful brown whiskey on the porch during long summer evenings, and by the fire during winter when the sun set early and the days were unbearably short.
“I’m sober,” June had said to Niall. “Nearly a month. What do you make of that?”
“That’s grand, June. You sound wonderful, brilliant. Are you happy? You sound quite happy.”
June opened her eyes to the yard, shielded the sun with her hand as the sudden, frenetic flood of golden-crowned kinglets rushed in like small leaves scattering through the Douglas fir. It was that time of day, the air filling with their thin, boisterous song as they picked the cones clean. June’s father had mastered their cheeps, calling them into the yard, within a foot of June if she and her father remained still. Tiny bright crowns lifted off their heads like flames. Whether the song imitated calls for mating or declared a territorial war, June couldn’t remember, or perhaps had never known. The goal of every living thing is to stay alive, her father once said.
Mornings June drank coffee from one of Grandmam’s rose and white teacups, displayed on her open kitchen shelves above the woodblock counter. Grandmam’s peacock-blue linen apron, a little threadbare, hung on the copper hook near June’s stove. Granddad’s field notes lined the bottom bookshelf in her living room. Her grandparents couldn’t possibly have gone.
Granddad had traced the height of the hazel tree until it finally stopped growing, having sprouted like a miracle from the pocketful of hazelnuts he’d brought with him from Ireland. Hazel was one of the seven noble trees of the Celts, and he encouraged June to climb it, this lanky shrub of a tree that somehow stood nearly fifteen feet tall. It brought wisdom and inspiration, he said with genuine seriousness. Her grandparents spoke Irish when they were alone, and their melodic voices sifting from the next room caused a knot in June’s chest, something felt but not understood, at least not then, not until twelve years ago when she decided to study Irish literature in Ireland, met Niall, became a writer, and made a life for herself in the very county her grandparents left behind so long ago. All those details in Granddad’s little books an example of what it was to be a pupil of life itself, devoted to making sense of the world, and beyond making sense, to no purpose at all, except to sit with the wonder of it. “Write it down,” he used to tell her. “Then you’ll know what it means.”
June had grown bored with her fictional characters, Leigh and Cordelia, spindle-legged sisters with not enough trouble in their lives. Perhaps this was the real problem and not June’s lack of drink. She’d abandoned the twenty-somethings jus
t after they had zipped themselves tightly into elegant dresses and slid their feet into matching champagne-colored heels.
Niall had been June’s editor in Ireland. When they separated, he went to work for another publishing house, in Australia, something he’d been considering for years. Lately it had crossed her mind to call him and ask for advice, to see if he could talk her through the puzzling out of plot, the ways in which she might fit it all back together.
The camp blanket was one of the first things June unpacked from the airtight cellar that Granddad built to the right of the carriage house’s back door. The blanket was of 1960s vintage, with a fleecy pattern of pink, green, and orange diamonds on one side, a solid canvas-green on the other, and if June had to choose what she loved most of the things she’d kept, she’d say the blanket. She’d say the notebooks. She’d say her mother’s artwork. She’d say that nothing quite compared to the bungalow. Its three bedrooms and large dining room with the heavy pocket doors sliding out of the living room wall, the large French doors opening onto the garden and the spread of white trees, had always been enchanting and dreamy, especially compared to the moody, complicated rooms of the carriage house.
A week before her father died, a flurry of life took over the carriage house, a chaos of cleaning and making plans. Her father purchased a Polaroid camera for June and took her on the only trip they would ever take from their map of circles, though it ended the second day in the high desert when her father began speaking to her with eyes closed while driving. The truck lurched into a ditch and the axle snapped in two. June’s top front baby teeth, already loose, were knocked out when her mouth collided with the dash. Granddad and Grandmam arrived hours later and got the truck fixed. They wrapped June in the camp blanket and everyone was quiet, speaking only of the axle, nothing of the cash Granddad handed to the tow driver and mechanic, nothing of June’s bloody lip and missing teeth. On the way home June rode with Granddad in his truck, Grandmam drove her father behind them in his, and June glimpsed their dulled faces in the side mirror when the light was right. They didn’t appear to speak in all the hours it took to get home. Up front with Granddad the conversation ranged from desert rabbits and birds of prey to the way Americans cut their food with the side of their fork. Granddad lisped his brogue in a show of solidarity with June’s missing teeth, and June laughed against the golden sunset, her Polaroid beside her, while eating cup after cup of vanilla pudding from the Shop and Go, where they’d filled both trucks with gas.
