by Deborah Reed
Now hours had passed since he’d spoken to June, the high desert giving way to evergreen forests and the summit dotted in clumps of old snow. The Willamette Valley sprouted tulips and stretches of grass and gangly strings of hops. The coastal range was choppy with clear-cuts, brutal scenes of stumps and sky where ancient trees were supposed to be. Those views were hideous, hillsides stripped and taken against their will. A rape, he thought. The ravaged landscape. Ever since his children were killed, his thoughts, without warning, could twist repulsively in dark directions, bracketing innocent phrases with a perverseness he could not control. He looked out onto the land and thought, Slaughtered, gruesome, monstrous, obscene.
He turned the radio higher than was comfortable and passed the time by guessing snippets of songs between the static. He dialed in a Mexican station with a crisp clarity, and the cab of the truck filled with bright and tinny mariachis and a stream of trumpets that mocked his sober mood. The world felt as if it were falling even further out of context, becoming dreamlike, without a hold.
“Viva America!” a man sang, and Jameson rolled down his window as he veered onto Highway 101. The scent of the Pacific Coast reached him before he could see it, so thick he could taste the moisture and salt, and the pine, too, coming for him like an invitation from someone he loved but could not trust, someone waiting on the other side of a door with bad news, even as they called out sweetly for him to come inside, asking with equal kindness what had taken him so long.
13
A pallet on the floor? How odd he was. How odd that she’d laughed like that, making jokes at her own expense. He had lived here while she was abroad, but having lived here wasn’t enough to make him feel so familiar. Not enough to put her so at ease. I’m a dry drunk, she’d said. Heaven help her.
Was it the one a.m. phone call, the strange dreams that had her acting this way?
Niall was moving on.
After a third cup of coffee her hands were trembly and damp. She missed her mug and she missed her pillow, and she missed Niall with a goddamn fury that pressed so hard it seemed as if the bones in her chest might crack if she didn’t shorten up her breath. She sat at the table and kneaded the velvet hem of her robe.
A flash of Leigh and Cordelia flittered at the corners of her mind. June stood, looked around as if spooked. She lowered herself back into the chair, stood again, unsure what to do, as if doing the wrong thing might jinx her.
They could keep their beer, she thought. No rewrites on that. Hadn’t they been through enough? Weren’t they about to go through much worse before things took a turn for the better? June could appease those young women; it was the least she could do. They could have their drinks, and she would get them off the kitchen floor, get them standing, at least one of them, for starters, could hand the other a beer. June’s problems were not their problems. Mostly they were not. One of them ought to enjoy a cigarette, too—nothing like a kitchen filling with clouds of thin blue smoke on a hot summer day.
June poured the rest of her coffee down the sink, not quite ready, though certainly on the verge of taking up the pen, as it were. It was at this table all those years ago where she’d sat across from her father while he smoked, and here where she’d tried so hard not to cough, and tried harder still to gather her thoughts for what to do. Excuse herself and run next door? Or do nothing at all, and her father might tire and get up and return to his room. Trouble had gotten on everything. “The music so loud in there you couldn’t hear your own voice,” he’d said. “You couldn’t hear your own thoughts.” He laughed and shook his head, and June asked what he was talking about. And then the washing machine clunked to a stop, like a signal for him to stub his cigarette in a coffee mug. He rose without a word, piled the wet drapes into the laundry basket, and carried them, barefoot, out into the rain. When he began hanging them on the line, June started to cry. “Where are the pins?” her father asked. June remained paralyzed at the back door, shivering as the warm air from inside pulled the smell and heat of the fire past her legs in exchange for the cold. She searched across the yard for Grandmam—and here she came, suddenly at her father’s side, and Granddad too, exchanging glances behind her father’s back. “Get inside, love,” Granddad called out to June, and then, as if at the sound of his own father’s voice, her father collapsed in a heap.
June had stepped back out of the rain. “One, two . . .” she whispered, counting her footfalls to make sure she’d done it correctly, as if everything needed to follow some code to keep the whole of it from breaking.
Her grandparents held her father on each side, and the three of them stumbled into the kitchen. Everyone was crying now, her father worst of all, sobbing like nothing June had ever heard, a wild misery that, to this day, caused her eyes to well up at the thought. Every bit of what was happening was happening because of the trouble with June.
Grandmam remained upstairs with June’s father while June helped Granddad warm up yesterday’s soup and potato bread, or rather watched him from a distance. His energy seemed to have been dialed down to the end of the gauge. He was upset with her. Everyone was upset with her, and how could they not be? June had overheard Granddad on the phone with the principal the day before, agreeing to pay for Heather’s medical expenses. But Mr. Oliver, a man her father’s age, was asking for something more. “But you’re telling me the cut was superficial,” Granddad had said. “The girl didn’t need any stitches. OK, several. All right. Yes, Heather. I do know her name. Of course it matters, son, but to not allow June to return to school . . .”
By the time Grandmam came downstairs an hour had passed, and June and Granddad were reading quietly in the living room in front of the fire. “I could use a little something to eat,” Grandmam said, and she sighed loudly, and Granddad sighed too, and together they met in the kitchen and spoke Irish, and June had never felt so alone in the world, and that was before she knew the full extent of what it was to be cast aside and forsaken.
Nearly nine months later, Granddad burst through those dreaded double doors in Salem and found June coloring at a table with two other girls in a room so quiet June could hear the breath of each girl next to her, smell the oil on their skin and hair. Every girl had her own coloring book with pages of empty houses and trees, even the teenagers. Every girl had a set of five crayons. Granddad called out for her, and June startled and stood as if she were about to be disciplined. But it was Granddad, not the director, taking June by the wrist. They scuttled out with several of the staff following in protest. Granddad didn’t look at them, not once. His brogue was thick and loud when he said, “Do not go near this child. And you best not come anywhere near me.”
He brought June home to the carriage house, to her old room, her father no longer upstairs, no longer anywhere. Grandmam was in the kitchen—a version of her was, stiff and hollow, a stranger, really, compared to the person June had known and loved all her life. Here was a much older woman greeting June with a cursory hug, looking around at everything other than her grandchild. When her eyes finally did meet June’s, it was June who turned away. To be seen by Grandmam made her chest ache. She, above everyone, seemed suspicious of the secret corners of June’s mind and heart, Grandmam’s eyes like spotlights aimed at every bad deed, and there were plenty. More than before she’d gone away.
That first night back home, she had asked in a trained tone of politeness if she could sleep in her own bed, if she could go on living there, because to let it go, though she did not say so, was to let her father disappear completely. Her mother, too. Her grandparents spoke to each other in Irish before they agreed. For years after, until June was sixteen, they slept in the carriage house with her—Grandmam in June’s father’s old bed, Granddad on a cot next to his wife. The nights were no longer filled with the sound of a clicking typewriter or the scent of grilled cheese and tea and tangerines. No more Buttercup Byrne or What’s the news? No maps, no plans, and all the laundry was done next door, as were the hours of homeschooling with Grandmam and a t
utor named Mrs. Crowley, who came twice a month to see that June was keeping up with the state requirements.
June had spent entire afternoons cradling her knees to her chest on the lounger in the carriage house yard, her eyes closed to the sun, when there was sun. She must have appeared lonely, bereaved, and disturbed, or at least bored and dulled by a lack of social interaction and friends. June was some of those things but not all of them, and not all at once. She was grateful to be home, if grateful was the word. It wasn’t, but she could think of no other. She was where she wanted to be, and yet everything ached. She hurt when she climbed the hazel tree, hurt when she looked up at the window and her father was not watching for her, not sitting sideways in the stuffed green chair that matched the set at her grandparents’ house. She hurt not seeing his eyes seeing hers, his small smile matching her own.
Happiness had confused her ever since. It pulled like an adhesion across her chest, had no give, and burned. It made her anxious and fazed, and only afterward, when some distance was afforded her, could she feel pleasure in the form of relief. Joy was no better, coming for her with a deep roiling in the gut. The idea that she was not entitled to anything good had taken hold.
Heather Atkinson’s mother told Grandmam that Heather was afraid to go to school, that she couldn’t trust the other children not to hurt her, and Mrs. Atkinson herself was having nightmares, which she expressed to Grandmam in a high-pitched stream of emotion at the front door a few days before June was sent away. And how was it possible for things to get worse from there? June never even tried to save the girl who slept closest to her when Mr. Thornton came around in the night. Did he touch you? Granddad later asked. Did he lay a hand on you? Claire Young was the girl’s name. She was two years older than June but smaller and quieter, and June had not made a sound when Mr. Thornton sneaked her away. Mr. Thornton liked to hit the girls. He’d chosen only the sweetest girls, the ones who shared their crayons and cookies and socks and who cried when they saw others cry. He took them into the storage room down the hall and smacked them with his bare hand while their pants were down, and he forbade them from making a noise or he would take them into the cellar, where they could scream all they wanted and no one would ever hear. The other girls, those who, like June, had not been touched by Mr. Thornton, girls who had been at the school for years, told her the full story on the first night she arrived. These were the mean girls who fought and stole and kicked the staff, and more than once it occurred to June that if anyone deserved to be hit, it was them, but they were not the ones Mr. Thornton chose, and he did not choose June, and she understood this to mean it was because she was as bad as the others, and of course this was true, given the way she pretended sleep when Mr. Thornton came for Claire.
Here’s to seeing you or not seeing you.
June stood and wrapped her hair into a knot.
14
The electric-blue horizon turned Jameson’s breath into small wisps of air. The view was the same as it had always been—layers upon layers of churning color—ultramarine and jade and snowy whitecaps crashing against the outcroppings, and craggy spruce clinging to the iron-stained rocks above. Junipers shaped by the winds pulled like beasts reaching for land, and the evergreen shoreline sliced through with the light gray bark of alders, and all of this at once was a sight above every other on earth, if you asked Jameson.
He shut the radio off and grabbed his cell to let Sarah Anne know he’d arrived, but his phone was still out of range. She’d be checking the time, waiting to hear. He wanted to say that the staggering beauty still broke his heart the way it always had, even from before, in that other life, the one they used to share. It’s magnanimous, he wanted to tell her, still, he’d clarify, even now. He was overcome with mercy. This thing here was something they could count on, its grandeur as heavenly as it ever was, and he would tell her how he wished she were with him now, and that he’d hated to leave her alone.
I’m not alone, she would say. Of course, he’d reply. Of course you’re not alone. How is the boy?
Seven hours and hundreds of miles had accumulated in Jameson’s lower back and hips, and by the time he pulled into the driveway and stepped from the truck, he felt drowsy and stiff, shaking his legs to get the blood moving again. He slipped off his cap before it was lost to the wind, and the familiar tang of briny air this close to the sea slapped him awake. He pressed his cap to his chest like a man pledging his devotion, though in truth he was standing in the gravel drive facing the house June had hired him to restore, and he was second-guessing everything.
No Trespassing on the front door and fence made him wonder if anyone had ever tried getting in. No Trespassing always struck him as rude, an affront to the kind people who’d once lived there, and to the people without any ill intent who might walk by.
He glanced next door, and again at the house in front of him. He looked up and down the street, and there didn’t seem to be another house for hundreds of feet in either direction. He didn’t know these Sears houses were here. He’d never been this far up the road.
He dialed Sarah Anne again. This time the call went through, though it rang until her voicemail picked up. “I’m here,” he said, his tone flatter than he’d intended. “I made it just fine,” he added, nodding at the ground. “Call me when Ernest goes down. Hug him for me. I love you, Sarah Anne. Oh, and the house is way up the hill. A place I don’t know. I’m relieved. You know. I don’t know these people and they don’t know me. They don’t know us. So. OK. I’m here.”
Unlike Jameson, Sarah Anne possessed a reserve that kept her steely and straight, even as she came across as soft and clear-eyed, which was as genuine as the rest. As far as he could tell, Sarah Anne became more of what she’d always been after the children died, while the best of what Jameson might have been had thinned out, diluted by anger, guilt, and grief. He did not know how to live in a world where such things could happen. And maybe it was also a fact that he did not carry the same appreciation or kindness for the world that Sarah Anne had to begin with.
This place was a downtrodden mess. June’s grandfather may have kept it in good condition when he was alive, but it had definitely fallen into full disrepair. Most people were shocked to see how quickly an empty house could go to rot. But homes like these were made from living things, ashes to ashes, no different from human beings, and just like human beings they needed to be cared for in order to keep going, to keep giving something back.
An overgrown footpath led to the south-sloping porch, held up by a truncated beam meant to brace the pitched roof. The roofline was a complicated collection of A-framed dormers. The shingles were warped with moss, and some were missing altogether, which meant leaks on the inside and deep-seated rot he’d have to root out and fix.
He wiped his forehead of sweat.
The absent gutter had taken a fair bit of trim with it when it fell, and the cedar siding was thin, the color of driftwood, a faded gleam of silver-white in the late-afternoon sun.
“Can we leave our siding like that?” Sarah Anne had asked years ago when they bought their first home, two miles from where he now stood. She’d loved the well-worn look, called it homey and cozy. But he’d been forced to replace most everything. She hadn’t understood the hidden rot underneath. By the time they sold it, the shingle siding was solid and a rich chestnut brown, the entire house eerily perfect. He wondered if the family who’d bought it still lived there. If they’d taken care of it, and felt at ease in all of its rooms.
Oh heavenly hell, his father used to say. Jameson had made a commitment to work here, and that was a fact, and he would get to it like his father had gotten to it, like his father’s father had gotten to it before him.
It was apparent right away that June’s house stood in clear view of her grandparents’, and he guessed he’d be seeing quite a bit of her if she wasn’t hiding. The front porch had a panoramic view of the ocean, as well as a view of what Jameson deduced would be June’s kitchen and living room on the firs
t floor, and the north-facing bedroom upstairs. He wondered what she thought of selling a house that came with this kind of built-in observation of her life.
By contrast to the abandoned bungalow, every inch of her place appeared plumb and stout. Aside from the ungainly hazel tree separating the houses near the road, her property was tidily buttoned up. There was the shed near the fence with the electricity June told him he could run his utility cords from; its cedar siding matched that of her house, a velvety chocolate brown that made the white trim appear brighter, newer than perhaps it was. A walkway made of river rock led to her front porch, lined with swaying, silvery blue oat grass. A small patch of manicured front lawn spread out like a blanket beneath a set of red Adirondack chairs facing the ocean, the whole scene a picture of perfection, or should have been. Jameson couldn’t get past the feeling that the place was slightly off, as if everything had been staged.
Hydrangea, lavender, and euphorbia encircled the immediate area of the house, and out to the sides of each property spread a thick cluster of trees, acres of conifers casting long shadows from the sun. The familiar, acidic scent of pine reached him in waves, the way it used to every morning when he opened the patio doors and stepped out with a cup of coffee to watch the juncos and towhees vie for the feeder in the yard.
He slammed the truck door and gripped his hips and looked around while a light wind cooled the sweat along his hairline. He had not imagined the closest homes would be so far away. There were stretches of knotted spruce with bulbous burls, salal underbrush breaching upward of six feet with pale berries still raw this time of year. Deer fern filled in the rest, everything in its own shade of green. He put his cap back on, tore it off, and mussed his damp hair into place as if trying to present himself, as if someone might see.
