by Deborah Reed
The ocean crashed at his back a hundred feet below the road, and he closed his eyes and couldn’t help recalling the way he used to begin every day for years—with sun, salt, gusty winds or soft rain pattering spongy moss beds beneath the windows. The feel of Sarah Anne’s body next to him, her legs, her feet, traces of sand in the sheets. He did not have the luxury, the immunity, to recall those days without recalling the children, too, the backs of their blond bedheads, their soft pale pajamas, the sound of them whispering down the hall so as not to rouse their parents, who were already wide awake, facing each other, smiling at their children’s clumsy, thoughtful efforts.
What did it take to be here now? Bravery, as Sarah Anne was suggesting with her questions last night?
His ghost children lingered in this wind, these trees, that ocean pulling out and swirling back. They lingered in the Nehalem River where their infant toes had been dipped, the very waters their toddler bodies had unwittingly run toward repeatedly, and every time—just in time—scooped up by their parents. Here was the shore their perfect hands dug into all summer, their clever minds and fingers creating sand castles, bridges, and moats, their legs sprinting over the dunes while tangled kites trailed them the way their parents once had.
Jameson wanted these memories more than anything on this earth. He wanted them in his sleep and in the water he drank, in the mirror when he shaved, and in his hands when he looked down to see how they’d aged. He wanted them crushed, too, into absolute oblivion. He wanted to set them on fire until the flames turned to smoke, and the smoke disappeared in the rain, and the rain into the great blue beyond, where nothing could have ever existed to begin with.
What did he think would happen if he came here?
He remembered Sarah Anne holding Nate next to him, so close he could feel his son’s breath against his arm. Piper was folded against Jameson’s chest, and strands of her hair blew upward, tickling Jameson’s neck and chin. Let this be. Let these twins dangle once more in their parents’ arms. Let them laugh as their parents laughed, and their small hands reaching, she for him and he for her, an instinct they carried from the womb, their secret language of gestures and cues still alive in this world.
He wondered now, as he had not done since the day they died, if they’d reached for each other in that final second. He hoped they did. He believed they knew what was coming in the store that day, that they would have seen the gun pointed at them. Their double dose of mind and spirit like a two-headed creature not meant for this world, a single entity able to see in all directions at once.
Who was it had said to Jameson afterward that at least one of them had not been left behind without the other? Who was it he had slammed to the ground and kicked? It brought Jameson no comfort beating this man, nor the coroner’s explaining that the children had left this world within the same fraction of a second. Was it Van Hicks who had said that? It seemed that maybe it was.
15
The bouts of monomania began after Granddad brought June home, her thoughts snaring and clamping for days or weeks at a time on a singular thing that needed to be taken care of. It lessened a bit as she grew older, and then served her well when she became a writer. The generative nature of such thinking carried one scene into the next, bringing June closer and more clearly to a bigger picture in the end. It had not, however, served her well in relationships. But you said, you said, you said. For you I will not drink, I will not drink, I will not drink. Who are you to tell me not to drink? Who are you? Who. The. Hell. Are. You? June would collapse under the weight of looping arguments, her narrow focus never translating into solutions, impossible when the variable was another person who could not be controlled or predicted or imagined into being. The elusive how and why of what happened would not leap up to her like plot points from her box of obsessions, but remained trapped and feral, viciously rattling the cage.
Niall had been patient with her at first. As kind as he was baffled. But she had not wanted kindness and patience. Who does not want that? What she wanted, what she needed, was for him to make her stop. To take her by the wrists and demand she curb such nonsense, that he tell her she was wrong and unkind and she needed to put an end to the behavior that was destroying them both.
What can I do to make you understand, June? What can I do to help?
She used to get so angry at him that she couldn’t speak or sleep, and she did not even understand who or what she was angry with, so she would take long walks in the Carlow countryside and search for the Seven Nobles to calm her down. Oak and ash and holly were the easiest to find on the trail. The yew was her favorite, with its fleshy red aril surrounding the seeds, ornamental as Christmas lights, even from a distance, and she would think of Granddad, who was still alive and well on another continent, keeping track of that other world without June in it, collecting every last detail as if one day someone might ask to see.
The Nehalem River breached its banks and entered the little town at high tide on this 24th of January, and there was no sign of birds, not even gulls, when I took the johnboat down and ferried the three sisters, Ruth, Henny, and Sonja, to safety at Jack and Mona Henderson’s place. This seems a yearly occurrence now, once or twice in the least. The fierce winds shut down everyone’s light and most everyone’s heat, and here a lone squirrel took advantage of the vacated grass and trees by the time Maeve and I got around to reading the morning paper at dusk, with the aid of candlelight and the hearth.
She wanted to collapse into the world that had belonged to her grandparents. Like falling backward into a feather bed tucked with fine pillows and soft cottons and everything smelling line-dried in the sun.
After June finished speaking to Jameson she began to write. It wasn’t much, a few pages, but it was something, and more than she’d written in a month.
But then her thoughts turned to the kissing gate, to the idea that Jameson would travel all this way only to wrestle with the latch in the midst of getting his heavy things in and out of the backyard. It was a thought too irritating to bear, and June dressed and headed to Granddad’s shed, where she found a chisel and hammer, tools she’d never used in her life, but she used them now to chip away the frame on the gate. Like some clumsy sculptor, she shaved and splintered the lopsided wood that had prevented the latch from hitching. Her touch was mild at first, amounting to little more than nicks on the grain’s surface. Then she slammed with a force that removed a large chunk of the frame. When she pulled the latch toward herself, it would not attach to the opposing hook, did not even come into contact with it anymore. The gate swung on its crooked hinge in either direction, and June’s anger returned.
Those safety scissors were dangerous. She didn’t know. When she’d snatched them up and held them open, one blade had turned into a knife. She didn’t know. She was seven years old and maybe she should have known, but she didn’t. She didn’t even know what was in her hand, what it was she’d actually raked down Heather’s back, until after, long after, because at first everyone was so quiet. When Miss Cassandra finally spoke, she said, “Dear girl. My dear, dear girl.” She was speaking to June in that whispery tone, not to Heather. The tenderness was the shocking thing, the look of mercy in her eyes even more so, and it caused June to stagger. Miss Cassandra sat Heather down and checked her back, then asked Jennifer Catton to stay right there with Heather, hold a painter’s smock against her wound while she whisked June to the principal’s office and sent back the nurse. In the hallway, her touch was light around June’s shoulders, the scissors still in June’s hand until Miss Cassandra stopped halfway to the office and asked if she could have them.
All right, then. Jameson could swing the damn thing open with his hip, swing it like a saloon door and push on through. He could remove it, too, of course. He should remove it. She should have just told him to remove it. June breathed the way Niall had taught her to breathe in all of his patience, and for the first time in a long time June wondered if she was, after all these years, going to lose her mind.
After that she focused on slipping a check inside a large manila envelope containing the blueprint and manual for next door. She added several photographs of the house from during its prime and made handwritten comments on sticky notes, which she attached to the back of each. She pulled off more than half the notes and rewrote them, believing each draft was more accurate than the last, though none seemed accurate enough by the time she walked across both yards in the same line of grass her father last walked, and she placed the envelope on her grandparents’ counter. Then, just like her father, she went through the house and out the front door to the porch, though she did not cross the road and throw herself into the sunset.
She went home to the carriage house.
Now she was fresh from the shower, and she heard what sounded like the slam of a car door. It was too early for Jameson to have arrived, wasn’t it? Had she taken so long writing and fixing the gate and rummaging through the shed? Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he’d sent someone ahead to drop off supplies, maybe Van Hicks to help haul something up the hill.
She stood in the kitchen in her underwear and bra, wet hair dripping a steady stream down the curve of her spine. She shivered and searched the drawer for the binoculars she was sure she’d returned the day she saw the elk on the golf course, certain she had put them back right here, where they could always be found, and where suddenly they were not.
If it was Jameson, then he’d driven too fast, well above the speed limit.
Where were the binoculars?
She searched the cabinet behind her, shelves stacked with a food processor, hand mixer, Grandmam’s holiday bowls, candle holders, and a gravy boat. She searched the drawer below the first and found pencils and pens, two kinds of tape, a ruler. She looked in the third and it was full of her father’s maps, which she’d temporarily forgotten, and slammed the drawer shut. She returned to the first drawer, and there, as pretty as you please, lay the binoculars, atop a pile of rubber bands.
She peered through the half-closed blinds until she caught the lean shape of a man in faded jeans and a dusty black T-shirt. He had a mess of dark hair, jaw prickled with whiskers, a smattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose. His eyes were dark—Spanish eyes, Grandmam would say—serious and focused and intense. He was tanned—the desert, she assumed—and the corners of his eyes were creased and weathered, though the whole of him was quite the bee’s knees—Grandmam again. His truck was the same model as her father’s, in her driveway, but much newer, at least a decade and a half newer, and baby blue.
She grabbed her cell phone and sent a text to Jameson, asking what time he thought he might arrive. She watched as the man outside reached into his pocket. I’m here, came the reply.
And so he was. A stranger come to spend the summer next door, three months practically living with June. This morning he’d woken in the high desert, with scorpions and avalanche lilies and dormant volcanoes, and now he was here, a world away, in the lush, moist green of the Pacific coast. June wondered what he was thinking as she gazed at him through the binoculars, and those thin rings beneath his eyes, were they caused by not sleeping last night in anticipation of today? Maybe this was how they always appeared, maybe he had a history of insomnia that reached well beyond the days leading up to this one.
He was facing her house now, facing her, looking to see if she was home, no doubt, and expecting her to open the door and greet him, the way any decent person would greet someone who’d traveled a long way at her request. June could see close enough to sense a history in his eyes, crammed and impassable, and she took a step back into the shadow of her kitchen and adjusted the binoculars. Her face was warm while the rest of her filled with gooseflesh.
He appeared to be . . . what? Looking into the cab of his truck. Now up at her grandparents’ house and . . . No. What? Crying? Was he crying? She couldn’t see actual tears, but he held his bottom lip between his teeth, and June wondered if his tears had dried earlier, before she’d found the binoculars. Maybe he’d already wiped them away. Wait, he was wiping his eyes this very moment. A gold band on his finger caught the sun.
June lowered the binoculars.
I’ve never met anyone more selfish in my life, Niall had told her when she’d first asked him to leave. Every bit of his patience used up. Her entire body softened with relief.
She zeroed in on Jameson again, the thin scars on his hands and arms, and she was struck with the feeling that she might know him, or had known him, at some point in her life. Was that possible? Surely she would have remembered his name. But she didn’t, and couldn’t recall where she would have seen his face. And yet she couldn’t ignore the familiar shape, and the recognition, or whatever it was, tugged at her with the feel of an actual memory on the rise.
I’m guessing I would have liked your grandfather.
Then I’m guessing you would have, too.
June watched as his lips fell slightly open, a little puckered as if he were drawing deeply on the air to regain his breath. She could see his chest rising and falling, the expression he wore like a man aroused, encountering something sensual, or something dire. There was no way to tell on which side he was falling. But falling he was.
Maybe she had written a character like him, a man who lived in her imagination, as alive as the real world for all the time it took June to know these people, years of intense study before she could understand and sympathize and forgive them all their sins, years before she could predict what it was they were likely to do, in a way she had never been able to with people in her own life story.
His mouth went slack, his eyes lightly closed, and after a moment June’s own breath began to mimic his. She stared and stared, and he didn’t move, and it felt like she was inches from his face, close enough to smell the scent of his clothes and hair. The way he stood, the way he breathed, so close to something and someone she knew.
June returned the binoculars to the drawer.
With the windows open and the crosswind drifting from the front porch to the kitchen, she could easily hear the sound of the truck door opening and closing, and June sensed that this would be a summer of sound and movement and a stranger’s presence, even when he went unseen. She closed her eyes to the faint echo of boots on gravel, the clap of wood being tossed into the yard, listening like writing—coming to her, at her, for her, on streams she had never understood and never questioned. What was true and what imagined? Were they not one in the same?
She opened her eyes to a knowledge of something she did not yet understand.
Long after the sky lowered its gray blanket onto her skull and the rain fell without end and the air turned to thin, stringy wool in her lungs, long after her body became heavy upon rising and her mind slipped into dark, familiar places, she would recall his fluid shape in the sun on the hill exactly as it was in this moment, and the memory would take over like branches rupturing her heart, sprouting stems of white heat, and she would welcome the pain, all she had left of him, even as her ribs seemed to crack with every breath, she would smile while drinking her morning coffee, and she would smile at the unrelenting rain.
16
An older model of Jameson’s truck was parked next door in June’s driveway. It had lost its luster, but
Jameson knew it had once been a beauty: two-tone orange and cream. It seemed the kind of truck that suited an old man. June had said she might not be here to greet him, but she never said one way or the other if someone else might be around instead.
He studied the sunlight hitting June’s shingles, the ravens cawing in the trees above her roof. The blinds in the windows were tilted at nearly identical angles, just enough to block out the world, and raised several inches from the bottom to allow for a breeze through the screens. He couldn’t see any movement, but he knew houses better than he knew people, and as staged as it all might appear, her house did not feel empty.
When the terrible storm she’d spoken of had battered the hillside, a giant spruce—the stump still there—had heaved from the saturated soil, taking a wide and pointed swing at the house as it crashed into the yard. Jameson could picture it clearly, how it’d wrenched the gutter free of the entire south side, and the immense weight continued to snap it loose until it came undone like the seam of a dress, the rusty nails splitting one after the other, weak and fragile as thread. It was a wonder the roof had not caved along with it.
The roof shingles were swollen, misshapen, waterlogged from rain and moss, especially along the front pitch of roof where a wet and relentless wind had slammed into it for years. He knew what to expect before he entered the dank cave of that house, wondering, sight unseen, if it would have been better to raze the place, send it into oblivion, which was saying something coming from him.