A Million Junes

by Emily Henry

  The girl crouches and presses her ear to the hen.

  I remember this. How we listened to the bird’s quick, viscid heartbeats.

  The two heads stay bowed together, listening and counting. Three hundred and eight heartbeats in one minute. They hear three hundred and eight pulses, like a tiny mallet hitting a glob of paint. Three hundred and eight disseminations of blood and oxygen, of life. There’s sweat on Dad’s neck from working out in the yard and dirt on my knees and cheek from following along, pulling wild onions up and pretending to mix potions from them, biting into their sweet white heads only to spit them out across the grass.

  It’s warm, so warm, and they’re huddled together, and I can’t hear the three hundred heartbeats, but I remember their sound and the way I looked into Dad’s eyes while I listened and how he just barely smiled and I knew he loved me.

  “Do you hear it?” he hums. She nods, and he releases the chicken to strut toward a sunny patch. Dad lies on his side and presses his ear to the earth. She does the same, facing him. “You listenin’, Bug?”

  She nods. He smiles. The heartbeat of the world. That’s what I’d been sure I heard that day. It made me feel small but safe too, like I was a tiny part of an unbreakable thing.

  When you lose someone, you start to feel like there’s an expiration date on your crying. All your friends and neighbors and teachers expect it for a couple of weeks. They’ll ask you how you are, and as you’re saying Okay, you’ll begin to shake, and they’ll fold their arms around you until it passes, maybe send you to the bathroom or the office. They expect that for maybe a month, any innocuous question might trigger a process in your brain: homework > you used to do homework at the kitchen table > Dad used to lean over you, chewing on chips as the crumbs fell onto your paper > Dad > Dad’s dead.

  It’s not like anyone says you should get over it. But they think—and they’re mostly right—that someday you won’t think about it so much. Or maybe you will. But you’ll only remember things you loved and appreciate that you had them, and the hurt will have burned off like morning mist does as the sun rises higher.

  They don’t expect that, in the middle of the night ten years later, you might find yourself lying in bed, staring at the stars that no longer glow on your ceiling, trying to remember how it felt when Dad threw you over his shoulder and carried you, squealing with laughter, around the house. Or how he’d hold on to your wrists and spin you so fast you flew out in a circle like those carousel swings. They don’t know that, the more time passes, the more you forget, and the more you forget, the more it hurts—less often, sure, but worse. You want to dig your fingernails and teeth into the ghost that’s slipping through your fingers.

  I couldn’t have known how much it would hurt to see him again, to remember his minutiae.

  I watch Dad’s and the little girl’s mouths turn up in matching smiles, and I’m still a tiny thing and the world still feels unbreakable, but that no longer makes me feel safe. Because Dad is gone and the world doesn’t notice; its heart keeps beating like he was never here.

  Dad’s eyes take on a watery sheen, as if he knows he’s already gone, that this is only a memory and we’re lost to each other. Almost like he misses me too. He sits up and runs a hand over the little girl’s head. “Bug, why don’t you go inside and get ready for dinner?”

  She nods, because she loves him, because she would do anything he asked, then stands, a whopping three and a half feet tall, and runs across the grass to the house.

  Dad stays where he is, staring at the woods. Saul nudges my arm, pointing out toward where Dad’s looking. There, I see it: a dark, warbling shape. The sprite we never named, and by default, or maybe through fear, became Nameless. The cold, angry one whose touch made you feel alone, steeped in nightmare.

  Who brought with it panic and death.

  Dad gazes out at it until finally it vanishes. Then he stands and goes inside.

  Thirteen

  AS soon as Dad steps inside, all noise cuts out, and the rippling grass and bobbing branches pause. The world freezes as I chase after him, and Saul follows me. But when we cross into the sunroom, the light vanishes; the sound of owls and crickets cuts back in. A high moon and sparkling stars replace the sunset, blues and greens encroaching on the yellows and golds, an empty stretch of grass where the shoes were.

  We freeze in the doorway, taking in the transformation. I look toward the point in the woods where the dark thing hovered. I remember now: The day after Dad showed me the chicken’s heartbeat, we found that same hen torn up in the yard. I’d cried, and Dad had assured me the bird was in heaven now, flying better than it ever did on earth.

  By that time next week, Dad was gone, and when I saw him in his casket, I’d thought of that bird. I’d tried to find comfort imagining my dad with big brown wings that let him soar over indigo water. Instead I kept seeing the visible muscle and ligaments pulled loose from the chicken’s bones. Dad was supposed to be unbreakable, an essential piece of the universe, as important to our woods as the sun itself. So was the hen. So was I. We all were, but especially him.

  “What was that?” Saul whispers. Now that we’ve emerged from . . . whatever that was, his voice is back. I shake my head. “I don’t know. The past? A memory?” I press the heels of my hands against my eye sockets and try to shut the door to grief before it can flood me. “No,” I hear myself say.

  It sounds so futile. No, he can’t be dead. No, I can’t keep seeing him only to have him ripped away again. “I don’t want him to be gone,” I half-sob for the first time since I was eight, another fruitless sentence in a time when words are powerless.

  Saul draws me into him, folding his arms around me. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t understand how that happened, but I’m sorry it did.”

  I tighten my eyes against a wall of tears.

  “I’m sorry all I have is sorry.”

  “I’m sorry about your shoes,” I murmur.

  He exhales a throaty laugh. “Forget the shoes.”

  “I think Dad saw the ghost watching him. I think . . .” My voice breaks off.

  “What?” Saul presses gently.

  “I think he knew. That he was going to . . . you know. That ghost is like an omen. Bad things follow it. What if he knew?”

  “I don’t know.” Saul’s eyes sweep over the lawn. “Maybe . . . maybe he’s trying to tell you something. You know, like, from . . . beyond?”

  My chest constricts. When he died, I spent months watching for Dad’s ghost. I lay awake praying, begging the house, the woods, the coywolves, whatever would listen to let him come back. I would’ve taken a blob of color, an amorphous rendering of him—anything.

  But in ten years, no new feathery presence arrived. No secret messages or mysterious warmth wrapping around me like his arms. Just the pink sheen and the black one and the tufts of floating white, like always. I pull free from Saul. “I think it’s the Window Whites—the tufts that look like dandelions? Like, somehow when you touch them, you . . . see things.”

  “You think . . . that could happen again?”

  “It’s not the first time.”

  “This is . . . impossible.” He surveys the yard once more. I follow his gaze out across the lawn, toward a flutter of pure-black shadow receding behind a pine tree. Fear shoots through me, icy and jagged. My pulse speeds and my vision tunnels until the shadowy patch of woods is all I see. The shadow shifts as a deer picks its way out from behind the pine.

  Just a deer. Nothing else. I repeat it until the wave of dizziness passes, until the darkness recedes to the corners of my eyes, but still I don’t totally believe myself.

  That thing, Nameless, was watching Dad.

  I swallow a knot. “Saul, you should go.”

  “Are you kidding?” he says. “We have to try more. I mean, maybe the Whites are holding memories, but whose and why? That must’ve been your d
ad’s, right? And you said they all hang out in the windows and doors—maybe they’re trying to get inside.”

  “Saul,” I begin.

  “And if they are, then why? June, maybe there’s something they, or he, want you to see.”

  My heart leaps against my ribs, and I glance toward the woods again. “You have no idea what you might see if that happens again,” I tell him. I think of one day in particular, the day . . . and yet I already know I’m going to try to make whatever just happened, seeing him, happen again, regardless of that risk.

  “Look, Junior,” Saul says, “I know what it’s like to lose someone. I promise I won’t pity you or try to give you something more than sorry just so I don’t feel useless. In fact, I promise to be useless—but let me be useless with you, while you figure this out.”

  “It’s not a good idea.”

  “So you’re not going to try to make it happen again? You’re going to pretend we didn’t just slip into the past or your family’s memories or some alternate reality where you’re still a kid and your dad is alive?”

  “That’s not what I mean, Saul,” I say. “This isn’t a good idea. I don’t think we should be hanging out, period. I think you should go.”

  “I wasn’t trying to . . .” He opens his mouth, closes it, nods. “Okay.” He turns and stuffs his books into his canvas backpack, then pulls it on and looks from his shoeless feet to me. His eyes are so dark I feel like I’m falling into them. “You should rewrite that story. It could be really good.”

  He slips into the kitchen, sending me one last organ-melting look before turning to go. “Night, June.”

  When he’s out of sight, I sit on the chaise, every cell in my body simultaneously buzzing and drained. Feathers resurfaces from the wall. “What?” I demand of her.

  She’s silent and, I think, sad.

  “Do you think Dad’s trying to tell me something?”

  She sways cryptically.

  “Yeah, I don’t know either.” I search the windows for Whites but find none.

  I pull my notebook onto my lap and start to write. This time I tell the whole truth as I know it. The story about a girl named Jack and the magic house she lived in and the man she loved more than all the water in every lake.

  How one day they listened to the heartbeat of a golden hen and the slow groaning of the earth. How when she went inside, he stared out at the darkness and began to cry.

  How two weeks later, he was gone forever.

  Or maybe not quite.

  Fourteen

  IN the middle of the night I wake myself up crying, tangled in my quilt, face wet, hair stuck to my cheeks. A cool rain blows through my window, speckling my bare legs.

  I was dreaming about Dad, but the details flit away like a school of tiny silver fish, darting out of reach before I can grab hold of them.

  I cross the floorboards to shut my window, and I find a White skating across the frame’s chipped paint. It comes toward me as I extend my hand, bouncing against my palm. I close my hand around it, willing it to show me Dad again.

  It slips between my fingers. I catch it once more, and it breaks apart, squeezing between my knuckles and reconvening as a single entity outside my grasp.

  “No,” I whisper. “You have to work.”

  The White ignores my plea. Feathers shifts sadly in the corner. The moon stares down at me, and I’m still in my unlit bedroom, aching for impossible things.

  • • •

  Grief is an unfillable hole in your body. It should be weightless, but it’s heavy. Should be cold, but it burns. Should, over time, close up, but instead it deepens. The pain of missing Dad these last ten years pales in comparison to the pain of having seen him again only to have him ripped away once more.

  I spend the next few nights doing my homework in the sunroom, constantly checking the windows for Whites. There’s an itch under my skin, a restlessness, especially whenever I see the shapeless pink sprite or the coywolves slinking through the grass, watching me as if I should be doing something I’m not. I see no sign of Nameless, but every motion in the corner of my eye makes me jump. Every innocuous shadow haunts me.

  Nameless was watching Dad, and then he died. The thought is a constantly deepening pit in my stomach, but somehow that’s not enough to drown out thoughts about Saul: Saul’s smile glowing in the dark hall of the mirror maze, Saul’s gravelly laugh in a dim movie theater, Saul in my house, sitting beside me.

  I sleep terribly for the next two nights, and in the middle of the third, after hours of tossing and turning, I give up on sleep entirely and head downstairs. I’m hunched over a coffee mug in the sunroom, watching the fog roll across the yard, the pinks and oranges of sunrise peeking through, when I hear Mom croak, “Junior?”

  She squints at me, then reties her powder blue robe and shuffles to the coffeepot. “What are you doing up so early, baby?”

  “Homework.”

  “Oh.”

  In truth I’d been writing. Not a story, just words—thoughts, snatches of conversation. About Dad, about Hannah, Shadow and Grayson, Mom and Toddy. About Saul too. Since ignoring him for the past few days hasn’t eased any of the pressure in my chest, I thought maybe pouring out my thoughts about him would.

  I swing the notebook shut as Mom eases into the chair across from me. “You’ve been taking schoolwork pretty seriously lately.”

  “I guess.”

  “You like to write?”

  “Mhm.”

  She takes a sip, then smooths the thick locks of hair that have escaped her ponytail. In the soft gray light, she looks young, less like a mother and more like . . . a girl who couldn’t sleep.

  “Do you miss Grandma and Grandpa?” I ask her.

  “Grandma and Grandpa Girard?”

  I nod. I’ve only met Mom’s parents a handful of times, the first at Dad’s funeral. For a while, Mom thought they might move here, but they ended up staying in France, in the same town Mom grew up in, running the same bakery where she’d learned to make buttercream macarons and apricot tarts.

  “Sometimes,” she says. “A lot of times. It’s hard being far from the people you love. In a way, you never stop feeling like a child, even after you have your own.”

  “Really?”

  She smiles at her mug. “When I’m sick, all I want is my maman.”

  “What would she do?”

  “She’d take care of me.”

  “Doesn’t Toddy take care of you? Didn’t Dad?”

  She hesitates. “Of course. But no one’s perfect, Junior. There are times when someone hurts you, or falls short of what you expect, and you remember what you used to have. Only in memory it looks shinier than it was. You understand?”

  “Sometimes it would be easier to be someone’s daughter than someone’s mother?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What about dancing? Do you miss dancing?”

  She smiles, delicate, wispy. “I think life is about learning to dance even when you’re sitting still. You learn to dance when you cook and clean, when you bite into cherries, and when you lie in clean sheets. It’s easy to believe that if you could do it all over, you’d do everything different.”

  “But would you?”

  “No,” she hums, standing. “Most of the time, when you regret something, you haven’t seen what the thing you regret can lead you to, if you let it. Some of the worst things that have happened to me have led to some of the best.”

  I try to see how losing Dad could have possibly brought anything good into the world—for me or anyone else. Okay, so my brothers were a pretty direct result of losing him. Two lives for one, more than fair of the universe or whatever orchestrates it, but this morning it doesn’t feel like enough. Nothing could.

  I force a smile. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “I’m proud of you, June.” She
sweeps a trail of kisses across my forehead and slips away to get ready for her morning.

  • • •

  “That’s all we have time for today.”

  Ms. deGeest slides a stack of papers off the table and starts her twice-weekly parade around Room 204, setting stories facedown as she goes. “For Monday, I want you all to try one of the poetic forms we discussed, and do so fearlessly. The forms are meant to spread your water droplet into an ocean.” She pauses in front of Stephen and me and flashes a smile. “You’ll be surprised by how much smarter the form is than you. Not that you aren’t already brilliant, of course.”

  The class laughs politely; she’s got even the Problem Students whipped by now.

  She sets Stephen’s assignment down on the table. “Aim high. Class dismissed.” The bell rings, and she places my story in front of me. “Stay for a minute after class, Ms. O’Donnell?”

  Stephen shoots me what can only be described as a grimace of apology as he shovels his books into his messenger bag and mock-salutes on his way out the door. Ms. DeGeest starts wiping the whiteboard down, and I nervously flip the story over, bracing for the worst grade yet.

  There’s no mark on it. Maybe I’m about to be forcibly transferred from the class?

  “Ms. deGeest?”

  “Would you close the door, please?” she asks without turning around.

  That can’t be good. And why do I care? Why does it matter if I have to transfer into seventh-period gym? I’ve never planned on going to college. I’ve always planned to follow in Dad’s footsteps.

  It’s not that I want the perfect grade, but I realize then that I do want the perfect story. I want to feel that unfettered rush of writing again, and I want to learn how to get everything I feel onto the page. To make the stories sing like they did whenever Dad told them.

  And just as I’m realizing I want that, I might be losing my shot to have it.