by Deborah Reed
I’ll just put them up here for safekeeping.
Niall had made her feel safe.
“May I join you?” he’d asked the first time she saw him, at a cocktail reception in Dublin in honor of a writer June had studied with in college, Eleanor Black. June was already three martinis in when he approached her, as she stood alone with her back to the rose-and-white floral wallpaper. It was a garden party, and June wore a violet sundress and leather sandals with a small wooden heel. She couldn’t wait to go home.
She held up her glass and he chinked his to hers and said, “Thank you for coming. I’d like to talk to you about your work.” He was serious, his round eyes a beautiful glassy green, cheeks the ruddy red of the Irish. He had locks of shiny brown hair, or would have had if he’d let them grow, but as it was, the waves were cropped rather short, and he wore light tortoiseshell glasses. Everything about him said smart, kind, and confident.
“My work?” she said.
“I hear you’re a writer.”
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” she said, and it shocked her that she’d said it, but it didn’t seem to shock Niall.
“Just to be clear, are you saying tonight? Or ever?”
“Tonight. I’m not going home with you tonight.”
“When, then?”
“Let’s give it about a week.”
They laughed and chinked their glasses again.
He introduced her to other people in the room as “June Byrne, a colleague of Eleanor’s from the States.” He offered her cheese and crackers, and she offered him a glass of sparkling water when she got one for herself. When she sobered up enough to drive, he walked her to her car. Midway across the lot, he lifted her hand into his, and she was happy for it. When he kissed her at her car door, she regretted what she’d said about tonight.
“I want you to know I’m not in the habit of kissing my writers,” he said.
“I’m not your writer.”
“No, but I hope you’ll consider me. I got a wee peek at your book from Eleanor.”
June stepped back, feeling stricken. She didn’t like for people to know more about her than she was aware. It unnerved her beyond reason.
“Oh, dear,” Niall said. “Clearly I’m making a complete mess of this.”
June turned, opened the car door, and sat without closing herself in.
Niall kneeled next to her. “I have no idea what I’ve said to upset you.”
June got hold of herself, rubbing her arms as the evening chill slipped in. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I didn’t know. You should have said something right away.”
“I didn’t want to scare you off.”
“How would that scare me off?”
“You’re right. That’s not what I meant. I meant I didn’t want you to think of me as a publisher first instead of a man wanting to have a conversation with you at a cocktail party.”
“But you wanted to have a conversation with me because Eleanor gave you my book. Without my permission, I might add.”
“She said you were shy. So shy, you weren’t sending it out.”
“Still.”
“And anyway, it isn’t true—that isn’t why I wanted to talk to you. I saw you from across the room before I knew who you were, and I wanted to know you immediately.”
June was published first in Ireland, and Niall had been the one to usher in her career. Their relationship had been a little lopsided from the start, though on some things they solidly agreed. Neither had wanted children. June could never picture herself having the patience for someone who might turn out to have a disposition similar to her own, some small version of the person she used to be. Children struck her as capricious creatures, grabbing things off grocery shelves, or being pushed around while strapped down like the mentally ill. They were hot little beings full of fits and tears, their tantrums ready and warbling just below the surface, full of violence too large for their bodies, a ferocity that erupted through moody and confusing demands. Perhaps June hadn’t changed at all. Maybe she was still every bit of those things, only now it was worse, downright dangerous in the body and mind with the strength and power of an adult. Maybe this was the reason June was shy. Maybe this was the reason she drank.
What was certain was that, several years in, the life they’d made together left them with chronically tight, achy knots in their shoulders. Hectic. Everything was hectic. Deadlines and meetings and book tours. June started having blackouts, and Niall was taking more and more calls in his study.
Then one Friday morning he found June weeping in her coffee for reasons she would not talk about and saw no reason to explain, and Niall had suggested a picnic. A Sunday picnic. There were so few openings on their calendars. They needed sleep, that was the problem. That was what they said about everything that went wrong. Sleep! In the end it turned out to be true, in a way. But back then they hadn’t yet hurled blankets in the night, or gripped their hair, gripped a windowsill, or smashed a fist through the glass. They were on their way, but back then they didn’t yet know about weeping till dawn. They spoke of being tired as if they had a clue. We’re so tired all the time, they repeated to each other while sighing up the stairs for bed. They didn’t know anything any longer, it seemed.
June had awakened early that Sunday to prepare the basket, and to leave behind the annoying scraps of sleep that had come for her in the night. Back then, she often dreamed of falling off a rooftop, or being shuffled into unfamiliar rooms with a sea of others she did not know. But that night she’d been shoved onto a stage and was meant to dance for hundreds of people. She tripped and could not find her way up from her burning knees. Jeers lingered in her ears long after she’d opened her eyes to Niall sleeping wide-mouthed and facedown beside her. She lay without moving, thinking how life, her life, had become a series of missteps, of faltering and righting herself back into the rhythm of the person she’d once been, or had thought herself to be.
The light outside that Sunday morning was gray. She dismissed it as fog, and peeled the quilt from her body and let go her heavy thoughts. “A Sunday picnic,” Niall had said two days before, and placed his arms across her shoulders and ducked his head in close for a kiss. She’d swallowed her own longing, stifled all signs of the pang from that achy, constant yearning for something other than what she had, as she closed her eyes. The feel of his lips on hers did nothing to close the gap between them.
A picnic. Yes. “It’s only going to get worse,” she’d said about their schedules.
They didn’t know about worse when June placed plums and cloth napkins in the picnic basket. She was still grateful that Niall often kissed her and took hold of her hand, that he was still turned on by her after eight years together, though there didn’t seem much time for sex, which made his arousal more theory than fact. They should force themselves to make time for it, tonight, perhaps, and by forcing June meant encouraging each other, which meant talking about it, and the idea was already losing its appeal.
A breeze had rippled the half-curtain above the sink, and when June turned to the yard a light rain was misting the lawn. It was not supposed to rain today. She continued with the cheese and bread and wine in the basket. She added dark chocolate, and the homemade applesauce she’d stayed up late making from their own apples.
By late morning, rain was lashing the glass door in the kitchen where June found herself standing—slapping at her face as if to mock all attempts to save her marriage. She stiffened when Niall appeared in the kitchen, and they turned toward the rain, and June shook her head and pursed her mouth to mean that they must not give up this day for anything. This was how people lost their minds, she thought. A rising desperation formed into tears ready to fall when Niall came to her and said, “Here love, here,” and brought her into the living room, where he spread a wool blanket on the floor. He took her hand and kneeled with her and set the basket between them and said, “What does it matter if there are no trees?”
The living room picnic had infu
sed them with something fresh for a day, a week perhaps, before they fell back into the same pattern, with Niall whispering and laughing on his phone behind the closed door of his study, and June pouring another drink in the kitchen, and Grandmam’s alarming voicemails beginning to pile up.
The wake for her grandparents in Nestucca Beach followed Irish tradition, a celebration with music and drink—and there had been a child in attendance, a young girl no more than eight years old, with long red hair and a clear love of music. June didn’t know to whom she belonged or with whom she’d come, but the girl was intently watching the fiddle player, a young man who nodded and smiled at her while playing Irish folk songs—“Danny Boy” and “Flowers of the Forest,” the only ones June recognized. Everyone was drinking, and with a big open bar, people were starting to fall down. But not Niall. Niall was June’s caretaker, the designated driver of her life.
He’d noticed the girl too, and while everyone was doing a jig, Niall asked her to dance. June watched them from a folding chair along the wall near the cake and whiskey. When the girl nodded and tucked her head shyly, Niall took her by the hand and showed her a couple of steps. The girl was hesitant, though smiling, and June rose from her chair. She set her drink on the table without taking her eyes away, her hands trembling. She knocked over the glass, spilling whiskey across the lopsided table and onto her dress and down her bare leg into her heeled black shoe. She remembered very little after that.
Later, at the carriage house, Niall had tried to calm her, at least that was how he’d explained it the next day. June could flash on scenes, but they didn’t add up. She and Niall shed their clothes and crawled into bed, where they lay on their backs looking into the dark, listening to the cold hard rain, saying nothing. Then Niall asked June to follow him into the living room. He took her hand and pulled her from the sheets, not a light on in the house and not a stitch of clothing to cover them. This June remembered. And the outline of his chest and ribs in the dim light, his lean arms in the fused glow of the fire he’d made earlier and now stoked back to life. He tuned the radio to the “Cocktails and Crooners” station, and June shivered while Niall pushed the chairs out of the way with his knee and swiftly pulled her toward him, as if his moves were all part of the same dance.
The locals at the wake had been charmed by his warmth and Monty Clift good looks. June had watched the way people responded to his voice, his touch, his compassion. Others wanted to be near him the way she wanted to be near him; they stared long after he walked away. At their wedding Granddad had told June that Niall was the right man with the right woman. “You two remind me of us,” he’d said. There had been no bigger compliment.
June remembered Roy Orbison playing on the radio while they’d swayed naked in each other’s arms. She never cared for his voice, the desperation it gave off, and she never cared for that stillness he had while singing; his eyes, hidden behind dark sunglasses, giving nothing away, unnerved her.
It was during “Crying” that Niall held up a finger and went into the kitchen while June waited with her bare back to the fire. Her shadow filled the wall opposite, and she lifted her arms up and down like a swan or an eagle, for how long she didn’t know, because suddenly Niall was there, laughing at her. He held a bowl of strawberries and a can of whipped cream, and June cupped the bowl with both hands while Niall squirted the cream over the top, and they swayed and ate the berries and cream with their fingers while the sounds of Tom Jones and Ray Charles filled the room.
And then? How many songs had played before Niall’s mood shifted? His eyes narrowing as Leonard Cohen sang about having torn everyone who had reached out to him. Niall’s smile had disappeared. What had June said? Where had she gone? He pulled her tightly against him and held her wrist as if she’d threatened to leave. “Goddamn it, June,” he said, “do you know how much I love you?”
“Of course,” she replied, but she was lost in a fog, and an old rage was making its way to the surface. She jerked free her wrist, her breath coming up short. Then she rested her head on his shoulder and he took her back into his arms. “What did I do?” she whispered. “What did I say to that poor girl?”
“You took her by the arm and told her to get out. You dragged her to the door and told her not to let that man look at her that way. Not to stand there and do nothing.”
That was three years ago, and still June woke in the night and thought of that girl. She was probably out there, nearby, catching a bus to school come morning the way June once had. What if she’d seen June on the street since her return and recognized her? The moon shifted and the bedroom became darker, quieter it seemed, without the light.
It helped to think about other things.
The bungalow would be her priority above all else, with the exception of her sobriety. June would rid the house of any reason a buyer might have to tear it down, leave it as buttoned-up and move-in ready as possible. Too many of the original cottages in the village had been bulldozed in recent years, and cheap replicas made of fabricated materials built in their place. Granddad would rail against her from the grave if June were to let that happen to the bungalow.
“Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,” she whispered, and picked up the phone.
A nineteen-hour time difference between Oregon and Melbourne. She dialed Niall’s number and he answered immediately. “June,” he said. “Is everything OK?”
“No,” she said. “Not really.”
She heard rustling on the other end, and June imagined Niall leaving the room where a wary Angie stood with arms crossed and eyebrow raised, the same look June had given him when he would retreat to his study.
June pulled the blanket over her legs, suddenly chilled and filling with regret. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This was a bad idea.”
“Of course not. What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’m not drinking, if that’s what you mean.”
“I meant nothing of the sort. It’s one o’clock in the morning there, right?”
“I suppose it is. I don’t know why I called. I was just thinking about the time we danced naked in the living room. The next thing I knew I was dialing your number.”
“Those strawberries,” he said.
“You insisted above all that you loved me.”
“I did, June.”
“I know. I mean, I know it more now than I knew it then. Maybe that’s why I called. To thank you.”
“It was a terrible time. But you’re better now. You sound so much better.”
“Why did you call me last week?”
Niall hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for so long. Always fighting it. But now things have changed. Are changing. There’s been talk . . . We’ve been talking, Angie and I, about getting married.”
June felt a tightening in her chest. She flattened her hand against it, and after a moment the feeling began to change shape.
“So you just, wait . . . Oh, bleedin’ hell.” June burst out laughing. “You’re trying to be sure about marrying someone else by testing out any lingering feelings you might have for me?”
“Of course not.”
“Making sure all your skeletons have been cleared from the closet?”
“June.”
“You have my blessing, Niall.”
“It’s more complicated than that and you know it.”
“You have my blessing,” June said, and hung up.
Niall did not call back.
Their house in County Carlow seemed a million miles away, light-years, not even on this planet. June had rented it out to a couple and their three boys—ages nine, six, and four—trailed by an ancient collie named Umpire, and she wondered what they were doing at this hour, and if it felt to them like home. The family had glided along like a constellation on their initial visit to the house: parents in front with the stairstep boys fanned out behind them, Umpire at the rear. When the boys reached the backyard, they broke around their parents as if bursting into their own existence, the oldest chi
ld doing cartwheels, the younger two leaping back and forth over the rill. Their mother warned them not to fall in, saying they would wear their wet shoes home if they did. The youngest boy asked twice if this wasn’t now their home, and June and the couple all smiled. She liked the idea of this family wrecking the place with crayons and purple juice and rocks and broken windows and overgrown weeds and holes in the garden beds, and the hollyhocks pissed to death by Umpire. But the boys had stood shyly behind their parents when they first arrived, politely turning down June’s offer of apple juice, and even more politely accepting her biscuits from a tin, which was a moment June had planned for, the proximity of it, by drinking only vodka that morning so that the children in particular would not back away from the smell of alcohol when she bowed to their level. She had slipped up after hitting the boy on the bike.
She was sure to slip up again.
But not tonight.
Niall was getting married again. Things are changing. There has been talk.
June woke again at dawn, pulled her robe tightly across her chest, and made her way downstairs, where she stood at the kitchen window and stared at her grandparents’ lopsided front porch. Broken lengths of copper gutter were scattered in the yellow weeds, catching the first rays of light when the tall grass swayed with the breeze.
The coffee was ready, but June remained at the window, imagining a stranger strolling the property, the shape of him becoming more familiar with every summer day. She would learn his habits and quirks, his limits on patience and care. She would know how many hours he slept and what he ate, and should he speak a little too loudly on his phone, the sentences would echo down to her, and she would know to whom he spoke most, and she hoped the sound of his voice would be a comfort to her.