by Deborah Reed
This caseworker was the third assigned to Ernest in less than a year, and she explained to Jameson how things got a little hairy when Ernest showed no interest in the truck. Melinda had tossed it back into the toy box, and the startling crack of plastic hitting plastic made his bottom lip quiver, and for the final few minutes he chewed the blue satin edge of his blanket. Melinda didn’t look at him after that. She got up to leave, saying “OK, kid. OK, little dude. You keep being cute,” and Ernest didn’t exactly cry. “He roared,” the caseworker said. “Like some vicious howl of a protest.”
Jameson glanced toward the bathroom door. Ernest didn’t like trucks. He liked a Wiffle ball he could wear on his fingers. He liked to stand back and cover his ears while Jameson ran his tools, smiling through his fear of loud noises. The only thing he ever threw were rocks in the creek behind their house.
“Could you hear it in the waiting room?” she asked.
Jameson crossed his arms. “No,” he said. “No, we couldn’t,” though his ears were not what they used to be after years of using power tools. The way she was describing the scene, he imagined an unleashing, a child possessed, curtains sucked outward through windows, a water glass shattered on a table. She demonstrated how Melinda had cupped her ears against the screaming, saying “Jesus!” on her way out the door.
The image of that small boy in that room under those circumstances, without Jameson or Sarah Anne to comfort him, caused a helplessness to rise and snag in Jameson’s throat. They were the only true caretakers Ernest had ever known, and they had brought him here for this. Left him in there while his lip quivered and he cried like the day he was born, a cry so awful they should have been able to hear it in the waiting room but did not.
Jameson filled his chest with air, drawing as hard as he could manage without appearing troubled. It was important to appear untroubled. Their fate rested in the hands of this young woman who could not have been much older than Melinda, and their lives already so fragile and dangling, held together as loosely as a mobile shifting at the slightest touch. This person, with the scratch of a pen, had the power to send the entirety of their days swinging.
“I think she’s been calling us and hanging up,” he said.
The caseworker narrowed her eyes. “Melinda?”
Jameson nodded at his feet.
“How do you know it’s her?”
“We don’t.”
“OK.”
Jameson should have kept his mouth shut.
“I can ask her about it if you like,” the woman said.
“No. Forget it. We’ve got enough . . . we just want to focus on Ernest.”
After a moment she went on to tell him she would not recommend returning Ernest to his mother’s custody. Not yet. Then she reminded him that the courts do shoot for that, for rehabilitating the birth parents. The state’s objective was to safely extract the children from the system and return them to their homes. She made air quotes around the word homes. It was impossible to tell whose side she was on, if anyone’s. Extract, like ticks, Jameson thought, like parasites, though he tried to cut her some slack. Maybe she was just trying out the word.
Sarah Anne exited the bathroom looking as stunned and voiceless as Ernest. The caseworker walked them out. She took hold of Jameson’s arm in the parking lot and faced him. “This is a great thing you two are doing here,” she said. “I mean, after all you’ve been through.” She sighed. “I really admire you.”
“Thank you for your time today,” Jameson said, hoping she was trying to be kind. Surely her heart was in the right place. He stepped away to open the car door for Sarah Anne, then he took Ernest and strapped him into his seat in the back.
When Jameson started the engine, the boy’s eyes appeared larger than usual in the rearview mirror, vacant and ancient, his body limp as if resigned to some terrible, inevitable fate.
“Why so serious, Ernest?” Jameson whispered to Sarah Anne, and his attempt at humor was met with a shake of her head at her window. By the time they pulled out onto the road, Sarah Anne blindly reached for Jameson’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
5
Sometimes a different kind of chatter sifted through the yard toward June—one of unseen golfers, spitting and cursing, their anger spiking at the game. The men’s banter seemed to be born of the sport, and often was laced with homoerotic jabs. Perhaps this was the case with all sports. June did not claim to know or understand. Get it in there! You went soft two holes ago! The rain was a bitch, the green could suck their dicks, but what really got their backs up was the elk taking over the fairways with their half-ton bodies and mounds of dung left in their wake. Elk arrived when they felt like it and stayed until it suited them to leave. I swear, if I had a rifle. And the goddamn dues we pay. There was no shortage of growls and grunts at the sky, at the gods of indifference as the beasts shambled like languid camels, taking their time to chew and rest on the manicured greens. Chunks of grass flew from their hooves when they stood, and again when they trotted off toward the meadows between the forests. They ignored the men and their clubs, paid no mind to the groundsman and his oversized mower, which he sometimes gunned straight for the herd, as if this, too, were a sport. But the groundsman was forced to veer off at the last second as the elk stood their ground. The man must have known what would happen, even as he went after them, must have known after the very first time that elk did not seem to know fear.
“You need to face yourself,” Niall said before he left her. “Face your fears for both of our sakes.”
One month ago June had taken her final drink, in what she hoped would be the final series of final drinks, the same day a herd of elk wandered up the road, through the woods south of the house, and onto the golf course. She’d watched from the kitchen through binoculars as their leisurely bodies roamed the fairway, the morning dew beneath them a silver blanket in the sun. Puffs of warm breath clouded their faces in the chilled air. June set the binoculars down and held her coffee cup to her lips, still watching, while behind her the fire she’d made first thing was beginning to heat the rooms, the sounds of crackling, spitting wood already a comfort to her bones. The elk were a good omen, Granddad used to say. They understood when to come round and when to carry on, and the compass that guided them could be trusted and known. Like birds and their north-south journeys, the flowers and bears returning after lying low, every living thing, he told her—aside from human beings—could be trusted and known.
“Face myself?” she’d said.
“I mean face what happened to you,” Niall said. “If you could see . . .”
“What happened to me?” June laughed. “Nothing happened to me, Niall.”
“You see, that right there, that’s what I’m talking about. You have this idea that the things you did and didn’t do were of your own making, within your power or something. You were a child. A seven-year-old kid.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know everything, June. That’s the problem.”
“What did you just say?”
“I know everything, and that means you’ve got nowhere to hide.”
June had lowered herself to the edge of the bed, hardly able to find gravity. She felt too light, so airy, floating up and away while an imposter appeared to be acting out her scene below. “I know everything about you, too, Niall,” she said. “I’m not stupid. I want you to leave.”
“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”
June had stood and made herself another drink.
Now she was slick with a healthy kind of sweat on the camp blanket, her skin tight from so much sun.
She caught a whiff of something rank that had not come from the sea, and lifted her arm and sniffed. A shower was in order. It had been in order yesterday, yet somehow she hadn’t seen to it. She didn’t care to undress in the bathroom. Her thin, angular reflection in the long mirror made her uneasy, made her feel as if she had to force another change, or at least take better care of herself. Just the id
ea of the effort exhausted her. Years of drinking, the last three in particular, seemed to have accelerated a decline in her looks, she thought they had, but there was no way to be certain, because she had, realistically, gotten older too. Her parents didn’t live long enough for her to know their middle-aged faces, and to discover who’d given her what looks and lines, or lack thereof. Were the parenthetical creases around her mouth inherited from one or the other family member, like her first gray hair two years ago? Would her mother have aged the way June was aging if she had lived? June had only her grandparents to go on, and it seemed they had been old her entire life.
It wasn’t until June returned to Oregon that she fully understood why Niall had left nearly everything behind. It had taken her a while to come to it, but by the time she was ready to leave Ireland, she’d felt like burning down the house, scorching every last possession that could be measured against the pain of its memory. Should her parcels ever arrive, she might just drop them off at the town dump, even her mug and her pillow.
Six months after they had separated, June received a large envelope that contained a handwritten letter from Niall.
Dear June,
Please be so kind as to forward my ties (see address below) and my expensive black leather shoes with the reissued heels. Enclosed you will find a letter from my attorney, who has drawn up the documents for the divorce. I should hope that by now you’ve considered everything yours, including the house, of course, as it was never really mine to begin with.
Sincerely,
Niall
Never really his to begin with? She liked to think he’d meant that the house in County Carlow had been more her project than his, and that it wasn’t just about the fact that the advances from her publisher had paid for nearly all of it. Back then they had shared everything, including the belief that they would remain together for the rest of their lives. But the once-hallowed rectory they’d purchased as a couple, where monks had lived and died for centuries, many buried on the edge of the grounds at the base of the hill, this project they had thrown everything they had into making a home, would soon belong to some other family with plans and dreams still viable. Meanwhile, June was waiting for the market to pick up.
How arrogant for Niall to assume she had held on to his things for so long. And how humiliated she was that she had, in fact, done just that, left everything in place, like a shrine to the life they’d once shared.
An archaic law meant they had to wait to file for divorce until after a year of separation, giving both parties time for reconciliation, for the possibility that their ways might be mended and the sanctity of marriage saved from collapse. June thought it absurd, even as a part of her had begun to think that Niall would change his mind within a year, because twelve months without her should have been enough to make it all clear. She didn’t think he’d move on so quickly, that he was capable of a freedom she did not possess, one that allowed him to start a life with someone new, to live free of the existence of what had once been a very full and mostly happy life, June had believed it was, a life that he had sworn to live out with her. Then again, he had taken liberties during their marriage, and now he had called her, and June was certain that Angie—his Aussie Angie—remained unaware.
She did not send the ties or the shoes. She did not ask why he wanted those things and nothing else. She did not reply at all, except to his lawyer, to say that yes, it was all agreed, everything so civil and cordial and sane.
June’s own clothes were nowhere, or somewhere, but not here. She’d had the foresight to bring a few summer things with her, along with jeans and a jacket and her old robe for the mornings and late at night. Her father’s custard-yellow cardigan hung in the living room closet. She’d rotated what she did have, sometimes in a single hour, layering and peeling off repeatedly as the weather shifted and shifted again. But for the past week the sun shone sudden and hot, and was apparently here to stay. June needed few, if any, clothes at all.
She lay on the camp blanket, allowing herself one last thought about Niall—recalling the casual, tossed-off nature of his clothes around the house, laundry appearing in various rooms in those early days of his departure like ghosts shocking her to her knees upon entering a room. His jeans and underwear on the back of the bedroom chair, shoes piled clumsily near the front door, everything vexing her, their purpose beyond her understanding. The laundered shirt she’d come across a good two weeks after he left, dangling from the hook on the bathroom door, smelled of lavender fabric softener, nothing at all like Niall, and June lost her mind. She grabbed the barber scissors from the drawer and made of the shirt twenty jagged pieces, which she threw in the bathroom wastebasket, and then she yanked the basket out and dumped its contents—including several cotton swabs with dots of orange wax from Niall’s ears, which caused a screech of horrible laughter to rise in her throat—into the kitchen bin, and then she emptied that into the larger bin near the road. It was there that she saw the cuts on her left palm, three slick red openings, triangular points not severe enough to suture, she didn’t think. Ravens squabbled behind her, the sound rising as more piled on, until there was no other sound in the world but the shouting match of these creatures. The stone rectory had been built in 1702, and the ravens had been there from the start, mentioned in the monks’ records, and here, on this day, the cawing seemed to echo throughout the countryside, over the river and against the dairy cows dotting the hills of County Carlow. And then it stopped abruptly, and June found herself standing inside the front door, her arm dangling, blood dappling the wide oak planks, dribbling the side of her bare foot. Her pulse turned hot, the bones in the back of her hand heavy, so alive was she, standing for as long as it took her open skin to thicken and dry.
Niall had walked out the door wearing June’s favorite shirt: soft blue linen and bright white buttons, a tiny hole near the bottom where he’d once caught it in his zipper, a hole made larger the time June snagged it while pulling down his jeans one Saturday afternoon.
God, don’t let her think about any of that.
Let her think about Leigh and Cordelia in their pretty bridesmaid dresses, and about their problems, which June would need to make a whole lot worse before she could make anything better. And finish the damn novel at last.
A sudden hunger sneaked up on her as she lay naked from the waist up, lost in a kind of uneasy, savage heaven. She thought of steak, something she had not eaten, it seemed, in years. She wasn’t eating well since she stopped drinking. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? She’d gone from three decent meals a day to finding herself sucking a spoonful of peanut butter at the sink, staring at her grandparents’ house, those No Trespassing signs tacked on the front door and gate.
If she were still a child, she’d be afraid of that abandoned house and its orange cautionary signs. She was somewhat afraid of it anyway, staring through the window as she sometimes did while eating an apple at the sink, or throwing back a handful of grapes, maybe a slice of toast and butter if she remembered with her morning coffee. And pistachios. This morning she’d walked barefoot across nutshells that had somehow fallen to the kitchen floor. She’d cleaned them up and then stepped on others near the back door. Her clothes didn’t quite fit. Her only pair of shorts slipped down around her hips.
Aside from the plumber and electrician, and of course the woman’s voice on the phone this morning, June had barely spoken to anyone in the weeks before Niall phoned. Only Helen at Helen’s Bakery and Grahame at the Little Grocer, and only then about bread, coffee, and Honeycrisp apples, and to ask if someone had the name of a roofer and a good contractor. The man who’d worked on the carriage house had since injured his back and was now lost in a fog of Percocet, gone to live with his sister in Phoenix. Grahame gave June the name of a guy who knew a guy. Then, as was always the case with coasties, Grahame talked about rain, lamenting the bright summer sky, the tourists and their SUVs lining the only road into town. Others in the store chimed in about missing the rain t
oo, and June asked, “Even when it swells the walls of your house and loosens the roof tiles and grows toadstools and mildew in the corners and sends trees sliding down the mountain?” They thought she was funny, and told her she sure could talk, and Grahame said she reminded him of her grandfather. Six hundred people lived in the village and on the side of the hill, and June was one of them now, a coastie again for better or worse. She’d nodded in some kind of agreement with Grahame and the others, but she didn’t miss the rain, not at all, and this was further proof that she did not know where she belonged.
Now the sounds of steel clubs jostling in someone’s leather bag, a golfer settling near the ninth hole. He was close to her trees, and the jangling, high-pitched rattle of his clubs reminded June of the old milk jugs delivered before dawn.
It was impossible to return to this house without recalling the way her father had closed himself off inside his bedroom, days spent sleeping, June guessed, because by night she often woke to the sound of his transistor radio on low and the click-clicking of his typewriter filling pages with words he later burned in the fireplace. Sometimes she found snippets that remained in the hearth, sentences that June later understood were like those of a sportswriter. Her father had been summarizing the baseball and basketball games he listened to on the radio. She could hear him stand and stretch and slip around in the dark to use the bathroom, or tiptoe down the creaky stairs into the kitchen for something to eat. Drawers clattered and the refrigerator snapped open and shut, and then the smell of a grilled cheese sandwich might drift up to June’s room at three a.m. Grandmam always said that the clock was off in her son’s head, but Granddad gave a look that said it was much more than that. June would have liked a grilled cheese too, to go downstairs and say to her father that the smell of warm cheese and butter made her hungry. But she was five or six years old, and she remained beneath her quilt, pretending sleep. A single word from her mouth, the mere sight of her in the dark, might frighten her father. It had happened before, and Grandmam was the only person who could calm him. So June learned to be invisible, to breathe in the scent of the cinnamon-ginger tea and a peeled tangerine that her father carried up the stairs to his room, and to not make a sound. Lying low, holding back, was a form of love and charity, June believed, though she was beginning to understand that it had not served her well with anyone else in her life, and had in fact worked against her in the most dire ways.
