Three Junes

by Julia Glass

  “Ma’am, can we have a look at your back windows?” asked the officer with the pad.

  Fern stepped away from the kitchen window; there were also two in the living room. All three were open, as they had been when she came home. It was early September, still summer by day, but the air cooled fast after dark. This was about the hour she would have closed those windows, happy to feel the sly chill. Stavros saw her shiver.

  “You need to sit down.” As he steered her into the living room, he said, “I’m a useful guy by training, so let me be useful however I can.” He guided her, as you might guide a tiny elderly woman with porcelain bones, to the couch. She told him he could make himself useful by sitting there with her, anywhere was fine, while she made the phone calls she had to make.

  As she listened to the futile ring of Jonah’s mother’s phone (it was bridge night; even Fern knew that by now), she examined the green damask on the cushions beneath her and remembered how she’d admired this sofa in Jonah’s mother’s house and how, to her surprise, it had become abruptly hers, a disconcerting gift—just as Jonah had become on a night when she drank one too many margaritas and joked that they were both so hopelessly square they ought to be married.

  SLEEP ELUDES HER, but she likes having the silent house to herself, lying naked under crisp expensive sheets in this pretty bedroom, watching clouds blow listlessly, one by one, across six panes of blue. She spreads her hands on either side of her taut stomach, waiting for movement. There, and there again. When she lies down, the baby goes to work, limbering up, rehearsing for life. She is like a greenroom.

  Fern had known that, given the chance, she would find out the sex of the fetus (in her life, there were plenty of mysteries already), but when the sonographer asked, her yes came out like a panicked yelp, a surge of superstitious doubt. The sonographer said, “Ordinarily, I don’t like to say unless we’re doing an amnio, but seeing what I’m seeing, I’d say there’s very little chance it’s not a boy.” He pointed to something inscrutable on the screen.

  It took her several seconds to understand. Then all she heard was boy, a formerly short unremarkable word that seemed to burst above her body like a volley of fireworks, that suddenly seemed as bright and complex as a pomegranate or a coral reef. When she left the hospital, she looked at her male counterparts walking the streets as you might consider a swarm of migrating butterflies, one eye empirically curious, the other plainly awed. My son, my son, she kept thinking, unable to move her hands away from her center. She hailed a cab; inside, she began to laugh. How in the world would she do this thing—not give birth to a baby but raise a boy? A boy. Seedling of a man.

  Carrying that otherness inside her, everywhere and all the time, she thinks of Stavros and his features, so different from hers. Will her baby be dark, outwardly defying her genes? Could he inherit that small appealing mole on his father’s left eyelid? Before she even slept next to Stavros, when she would examine it at leisure, Fern asked him to close his eyes for a moment so she could see what caused that strange flash of color whenever he blinked. The mole was honestly blue—cerulean, she thought. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, and was immediately embarrassed. They had not even kissed.

  Stavros spared her by laughing quietly. “My father thinks I should have it removed. He says it looks like cancer.”

  “What a terrible thing to say.”

  Stavros shrugged. “He’s my father. Fathers say what they like.”

  “You approve of that?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “But I accept it. It isn’t something I’d waste the energy trying to change. Not in my own father.”

  His last postcard from Greece came enclosed in a small package. On the card, he told her that his grandmother had finally died, in her sleep as everyone had prayed she would, and that all sorts of ancient ceremonies were unfolding. There would be the dividing of her few possessions, he said, and he and his mother would spend a few days in Athens, where she liked to shop. He told her when they would return. He ended by saying how much he missed her and signing off with his usual thousand kisses. But along with the card was a small flat present wrapped in Greek newsprint and tied with black yarn. Inside was a beaded change purse with a zippered closure. The primitive image made by the beads was the figure of a naked woman. Her body wrapped around the purse so that she appeared waist-up on one side, waist-down on the other. Because of the limited medium, she had owlish black-and-white eyes and large pink breasts that stood out left and right, a single red bead for each nipple. Her ample yellow hair hung down her back; on the flat black ground, it looked as if she were lying on a beach towel on volcanic sand. Fern knew enough Greek letters to be able to read the word that ran, like a banner, beside the body: on the side with her torso, alongside her legs. Aphrodite.

  The object reminded Fern of crafts she had practiced in camp (gimp necklaces, macaroni bracelets, paperweights made with tiny pinecones and plastic goop in an ice cube tray). Yet it was wonderful, too—crude yet classical, made with earnest labor and a respect for tradition. It would be empty, of course, but she opened it by reflex. Inside was a slip of paper on which Stavros had written three words in Greek. And then, in parentheses, For my goddess.

  SHE WAKES TO THE SAME SKY, so ardently blue, but to a different set of sounds: voices, outside but nearby, and a steadier, rhythmic sound, not tennis this time but . . . digging. A shovel assaulting the earth. Two voices—men’s voices, subdued and private. She cannot hear the words, but she can tell that neither one is Tony’s. The conversation stops. Soon after, the digging stops.

  Fern rises onto her knees and looks out the window beside the bed. Clasping the sheet to her chest, she unhooks the screen. With her head outside, she hears more distant sounds: lawn mowers, seagulls, children shrieking on the beach. She scans the entire lawn. There: at a back corner, in an elbow of privet, a hole in the ground, a spade on the grass. Just as she spots it, she hears the door to her room open behind her.

  “Oh I’m—God I’m sorry.” The door closes again, but she saw the man briefly. His arms, face, and clothing were streaked with dirt, but he looked genteel despite the grime. Irrationally—defenseless, naked in a bedsheet, alone in a stranger’s house—she isn’t afraid. Embarrassed, but not afraid. She assumes this must be Tony’s “third,” however peculiar his entrance.

  From outside the door, he explains himself. “I know Tony’s here, I saw the car, I didn’t stop to think there’d be anyone else. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right, just wait a sec, Tony’s at the beach,” says Fern as she pulls on her dress. She opens the door. “Hi.”

  He continues to apologize: for walking in without knocking, for frightening her, for failing to call ahead. Fern takes in the details she missed: He is dressed, impractically for digging, in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled back. He is slender, well-kept but unmuscled, neither short nor tall. His hair, a reddish blond, is fading to the color of desert sand, refusing to gray. Tony’s age, but without the insistence on youth—and certainly without the sylvan boyishness of Tony’s usual consorts. His face is intelligent, even attractively lined. Etched in the gray film on his cheeks are threads of pink skin, pathways left by tears. Only his bare feet are clean.

  “I’m a friend of Ralph’s—Fenno McLeod. I’ll just go wash up downstairs and then I’ll explain,” he says. So this is the hanger-on with the funny name. Fern recognizes his alluring accent as Scottish; this, she supposes, is why he did not alarm her (as if Scotland doesn’t have its share of psychos).

  After brushing her hair and putting on sandals, she goes down as well. She pours two glasses of lemonade. She finds him on the front porch, rapping his sneakers against a stair to dislodge clumps of soil.

  He glances up. His hands and face are clean. “I’m not behaving logically. I’m sorry. I’m used to making myself at home.”

  “Oh go ahead. I’m like a guest twice removed. I don’t even know your friend Ralph, so please. Save the explanations.
” She hands him a glass.

  He thanks her. “Well, not for Tony I won’t.”

  Fern laughs. She sits on a white director’s chair (too much of the furniture here is white, she decides; it feels like a test of some kind). She would ask this man how he knows Tony—through Ralph? and just who is this Ralph?—but he does not laugh along with her. He sits on the top step and stares at his hands on the glass of lemonade, then toward the driveway, at an old Volkswagen bus. Sky blue and white, it looks remarkably new.

  Fern hasn’t seen one of those cars in ages; it’s like a postcard from her childhood. There’s a silk sunflower wired to the antenna and, on the driver’s door, a large reflective Celtic cross. Scattered along the side are several bumper stickers. Three are bold enough to read from the porch:

  IF YOU WANT PEACE, WORK FOR JUSTICE.

  PERPETRATE PHOTOSYNTHESIS.

  LIFE. WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE. (This one twice, front and rear.)

  She looks again at Fenno McLeod, the man who drives this highly declarative vehicle. Seeing her amusement, he says, “I’m not—it’s not mine.”

  How quickly, Fern thinks, we can fear we’ve been politically typed: by a word, a pair of shoes, a haircut, a bumper sticker on a borrowed car. “Well, whoever owns it has to be a character of some kind. Someone who doesn’t mind about the zeitgeist.”

  Now he does laugh. “Yes. That’s absolutely true.”

  “A woman,” says Fern. “Your mother?”

  “Not mine, but mother to a horde of people who desperately need a mother. Or need a good one.”

  “Including you?”

  Fenno McLeod smiles at the bus as if at an irrepressible secret. “To me, she’s more like a well-intentioned mother-in-law. She acts as if I’m hers, but she treats me well.” He drains his glass and sets it down.

  Silently, both of them look at the glass. The moisture on its surface is gray with dirt that must have remained in the fissures of his palms. He says, “I came here to bury my dog. If you don’t mind, I’m afraid I’d better finish. The heat . . .” He looks again at the bus.

  “I’m sorry,” says Fern. Then the screen door slams behind her.

  “Well what a surprise!” Tony stands above them in his bathing suit and T-shirt. He looks ruddy, as if he’s had too much sun. “Fern, meet Fenno. Fenno, Fern. Hey, I sound like Letterman botching the Oscars.”

  “We’ve met,” says Fern.

  “I’ve just driven out from the vet’s,” Fenno says. “Rodgie’s kidneys failed.” He pauses, as if to give Tony a chance at another bad joke. But Tony looks suddenly attentive, even sad.

  “Poor Rodge,” he says.

  “Ralph always said I could bury him here, next to Mavis. Absurdly sentimental, but I couldn’t just consign him to the surgery rubbish.”

  “Poor old Rodge.” Tony sighs, but he moves no closer to Fenno.

  “Yes, very old. The last of my mother’s collies. The last of Mum, I kept thinking in the midst of all that traffic. Well.” He stands.

  The men exchange warmer smiles. Fern feels a stale, tiresome envy stir. Fenno goes to the bus, opens the back, and lifts out a bulk wrapped in a blanket. He heads around the back of the house.

  “Need anything?” calls Tony.

  Fenno calls back, “In about fifteen minutes, Ralph’s Glenfiddich. I’m sure you know where it’s kept by now.”

  “Well,” Tony says to Fern, “good thing I bought two dozen ears and the family-size barbecue pack. . . . And hey, now the party’s complete.”

  A small, nondescript car pulls in behind the bus, and out springs (there is no other word) the boy Fern has been dreading.

  “Look at you, look at you, all shiny from the beach!” the boy calls to Tony. “Hello hello,” he says melodically to Fern. He bounds up the stairs and holds out his hand. “I’m Richard. And I love your shade of yellow.”

  Fern looks down at her dress. “Sun,” she says idiotically. Looking up, she sees the kiss planted on Tony’s cheek and the sharp flicker of Tony’s eyebrows, as if a protocol’s been breached. But he does not pull back.

  “Which we all worship, don’t we?” Richard replies to Fern with a genuine smile. He is immediately likable, never mind his nubile glow and exhibitionist energy. He has that riveting saffron-haired, blue-eyed coloring, freckles like shrapnel but muted by a careful tan, teeth incandescent, chest too perfectly smooth and shapely. He might be twenty-four. (Didn’t these boys make Tony feel old? This one makes even Fern feel stiff in the joints.)

  When she stands, Richard exclaims, “Oh, and expecting too! Wowie! Congratulations!”

  “Thank you.” Fern picks up the empty glasses and takes them into the house. She runs water to rinse them, to drown out any insinuating words between Tony and Richard.

  But like a puppy, Richard has followed her into the kitchen. “I’m ready to chop or whatever. Put me to work!” Tony stands behind him, looking amused and annoyed.

  “It’s five-thirty,” he says. “This isn’t Nebraska.”

  “Oh I can wait. Just want to be sure I’m helpful!” says Richard. His tank top (tight) advertises a dog walk to fund cancer research. He wears tiny gold crosses in both ears and, on one wrist, a band of braided rope. When he sees Ralph’s dog (looking woozily up from his bed), he cries out, “There he is!” and rushes over to kneel and fuss. “What’s his name?”

  “Druid,” Tony says with a smirk. “Like whatever happened to Spot and Rex? Good old doggy-dog names.”

  “Oh but that’s a cool name! Druids were wise and mysterious. They built Stonehenge,” says Richard as he strokes the happy spaniel. “Hello, you’re a handsome boy! . . . And what a beautiful coat you have, Druid. Someone takes good care of you, oh yes!”

  Fern cannot read Tony’s face. He seems to be tolerating these effusions as you would a younger sibling’s naive behavior.

  “Now this is a nice springer, you can tell. Don’t see that often these days,” says Richard. “Sudden rage syndrome just about ruined the breed, you know. All because of one stud back in the seventies, an AKC champion bred entirely for looks.” He shakes his head. “I’m no fan of the AKC, I can tell you that.” He stands and looks brightly toward Fern, apparently unperturbed that no one’s acknowledged his statement.

  “Shall I take it out?” says Fern as she sees Tony take a glass and a bottle from a cupboard. She is afraid of being left alone with this eager guest, afraid he’s the type who will lose no time at probing, in all his burly innocence, toward some murky corner of her heart.

  “You’ll make a better graveside companion,” says Tony. He fills the glass with Scotch.

  As she approaches the hedge, Fern sees Fenno stamping down the surface of the grave. Somehow, she’s disappointed not to have seen the dog before he was buried.

  For the second time, he accepts a glass from her and thanks her. “I should plant something,” he says, looking down. He splashes Scotch on the dark naked soil. “My father, right now, would recite a bit of Burns. Disgracefully, I’ve forgotten every line I ever learned. Proof that I am thoroughly and finally an exile.” He raises the glass toward the grave and drains it.

  “You’re staying for dinner,” says Fern, hoping he’ll take it as fact.

  “I’m not doing any more driving today, that’s certain.”

  “Stay over,” she says. “Tony won’t mind.”

  “I hardly need Tony’s permission. He has the place because of me.”

  “And I get the feeling the room I’m in is yours.”

  “Nothing here is mine; Ralph’s just a very old friend. We work together—practically live together, too. We walk in and out of each other’s lives like a pair of old unmarried sisters.”

  Fern is about to comment that he hardly looks like a spinster when Richard’s voice interrupts her.

  “Hello down there!” he calls out from the porch. “I am so sorry about your dog, about Rodgie! I hear he was truly a fine old soul!”

  Fenno shades his eyes. “Who’s that?” he says
quietly.

  Richard is crossing the lawn at a clip, right hand outstretched, face set in a look of almost tearful sympathy. Fern turns aside because she is about to start laughing. As she turns, a tall man comes through the hedge. He looks at her with expectant pleasure. Another member of the face-lift brigade, she assumes (here to borrow a cup of . . . brandy? dinner mints? dried porcini?), until he says, “I hope you’re taking good care of my brother. He needs it!”

  Richard stands beside Fern, speechless for the first time since his arrival.

  “I thought I’d have to come fish you out of the surf,” says Fenno. Fern recalls now that she heard two voices outside when she woke up.

  “I got a bit carried away and lost track of time. My God but it’s bloody lovely here!” He picks up the shovel with one hand and strokes Fenno’s back with the other. He looks at Fern and Richard again. “Oh dear, do introduce me,” he says, and as Fenno does, there is something about his tone, his expression, that makes Fern wonder if this brother—Dennis (younger, taller, more handsome and joyful)—has somehow deposed or outpaced him.

  “My, my, a real swah-ray.” As one, they look up toward the house. Tony leans over the porch rail, grinning. He looks like a monarch or the Pope, taking for granted that they will applaud.

  SIXTEEN

  SOMETIMES FERN THINKS that she thinks too much about family. She lives, it’s true, in a time and place of rampant psychotherapy (in which she spent several years herself), but even so, she cannot help looking at people in a perpetual context of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Especially brothers and sisters.

  Often, she imagines herself as wearing several leashes, each quite long but held by another member of her far-flung family. She senses various pulls and tugs at various times, never feeling altogether free.

  Though Fern has always been a perfect daughter in her parents’ eyes—they tell her so too often—this status costs her something in the eyes of her siblings. She isn’t the youngest, yet they sometimes make her feel like the least sensible, the least sure, the least anchored. The one who’s squandered her talents, ill used her opportunities.