by Deborah Reed
“Everything needs to be the same,” read another, this one attached to a photo of the living room fireplace. Her grandmother was there, too, her right hand clutching one of the large round sandstones of the mantel. Jameson sifted through the rest and found it odd that no matter the room, every photograph included June’s grandmother. And now Jameson was starting to feel a little odd, a little weak with the familiar. Some of the images were a bit too gray and grainy to make out all the facets of the room, and he held them to the sunlight and wondered what June had meant for him to see.
The woman. Jameson couldn’t help but stare at her classic, old-world face—wide cheekbones and large almond eyes. The feeling that he somehow knew this face crept through his chest and throat. His ears went hot. He blinked and swallowed, but he could not think of who she might be, and he wondered if it was only that she might be reminding him of someone else. Most likely hers had been a face he’d seen around town when his children were still alive.
He was meant to be studying the rooms, not the woman, to get a feel for the vision June had for the place. He didn’t need the photographs, but having them prodded his curiosity. He glanced around and knew what to do. He set the photographs down and patrolled the kitchen and dining room and living room. He dragged the half-open pocket doors out from their dusty slots in the walls and found the wood on both sides with barely a scratch. Her grandparents had indeed taken good care.
Offhand, he didn’t see anything that could be considered an add-on, as June had said, something not part of the Sears kit that she claimed her grandmother changed. Nothing struck him as unconventional or slapdash; everywhere he looked appeared true to form. The clear-oak floors were original and dull but in fairly good shape. The softer fir in the bedrooms might not have held up so well, but he expected that.
He went back and lined up the photographs on the counter in the order he thought would match his timeline. After that, he imagined what it would have been like to live here. “The best room in the house,” the sticky note read on the photo of a young girl eating an apple at the dining room table. The child looked to be around five years old and was most likely June, ankles crossed and dangling above the floor, barefoot in a white, cottony dress. June’s skin, eyes, and hair were darker than her grandmother’s. Her gaze was one of pure joy, turned up in affection while her grandmother’s hands cupped toward her. The two of them appeared to have been caught in the moment right before her grandmother must have held June’s cheeks and kissed the top of her head. The child was grinning behind the apple in her mouth. Jameson could barely see the room fading out around them. What had June wanted him to see? Joy? Innocence?
Instinct is a strong negotiator, his father used to say, and his mother used to say, Did you run all the way home from school to tell me you love me? All this way, she would say, and he understood, even then, that she held for him a strange and almost unpleasant kind of love, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love him.
Jameson could back out of this job before it began. He could tell June he’d come down with something or had a family emergency. He could leave the check and walk away. But he would not leave. He could do no such thing.
He gazed once more at June’s grandmother, in the Polaroid taken on the front porch while she snapped green beans into a bowl. He guessed it to be the most recent picture, and Jameson could practically hear the clink of beans against the white metal bowl in her lap. He carried the photo into the living room and looked out the front windows at the view she would have seen from the porch. The world looked to him now as it would have looked to her—the downhill slope of road, dunes in the distance, the ocean churning, the lighthouse, the soon-to-be-setting sun over the ridge into the sea.
When he glanced to the left he felt a deep stillness over June’s house, and he did not fight the feeling coming over him that he had seen her grandmother before. He had known her in some context, and he was certain that something had gone wrong in this place. He hoped he would know all the right things to do, so that this particular part of the past was not here to stay.
He began by removing the orange signs that warned others to keep out.
19
Within days of June’s discovering the pink piece of paper with the phone number from Heather Atkinson’s mother on her father’s desk, she woke in the night to what sounded like a woman’s laughter. Then weeping. June scrambled from beneath her quilt and stood in her doorway, looking down the hall. Dim light from her father’s bedside lamp shone on the glossy planks beneath his bedroom door.
Then other sounds, like misery, a man’s misery. Her father’s groans and a sob-like cry.
June put on a pair of wool socks and padded across the wooden floor to her father’s room. The keyhole was large enough to make out the nightstand and lamp alongside the bed. The gap beneath the door allowed her to see the floor at the foot of the bed and shadows shifting in the lamplight. There was someone in there with her father. This had never happened before. June felt hot, her mouth grew moist, and she swallowed so loudly she feared he might hear. Through the keyhole she saw a woman lying sideways on the bed, her blond hair draped over the side in front of the nightstand. June’s father crawled on top of her, was kissing her lips and cheeks, her throat and forehead, and June reared back and lowered herself to her knees. She placed her head on the floor and looked under the door again, and her heart could not be contained. White sneakers with green half-moons on the back of the heel. June had seen them on the wet asphalt at the bus stop. The pink slip of paper passing into her father’s hand.
When June told Niall what she’d seen that night, and what she’d done the next day to Heather Atkinson, he held her and told her, in the same way she’d been told by more than one therapist in her life, that whatever she had done back then she did as a seven-year-old girl, and she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. True, true, June said to them. But the crimes did not end there, and besides, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know the facts. The problem was that the facts didn’t feel true, and that other people insisted they were true wasn’t helpful. That kind of talk only served to make June feel worse, defenseless against a different kind of truth that was shrewder than anyone seemed to know what to do with. “Your mother hates you,” June had said to Heather. “She came to my house and told me she hates being your mother.”
“Your mother is dead,” Heather said. “And you’re a liar.”
June’s mind had disappeared, her small body lost inside a clenched rage, thoughts snapped off and disjointed, though she would understand this only much later. In memory she had looked around the room and saw the chalkboard smeared in layers of arithmetic, the four rows of desks with five desks each, the coat rack in the corner with thick metal hangers and her own red sweater dangling on the end, the top yellow button closed to keep it in place, the long wall of paned windows facing the hemlocks and Neahkahnie Mountain, a bald eagle with a small catch in its talons flying above it all—June had seen everything exactly this way. And she had seen Miss Cassandra. That puzzled look, her mouth falling open, eyes gazing at the two girls in the second row, then on just the one, just June, standing three desks from the back.
Apparently June had reached for the closest thing at hand, and she would be asked again and again why she had done it, and there was no answer, none ever given. In memory it happened slowly, but it must have gone off at great speed, with Heather shoving herself away from her desk in front of June’s and turning to run, while June’s arm, like a trap coming down, sent the scissors slicing through the air, shearing the back of Heather’s lilac blouse. Blood ran in a straight line, then bloomed like algae into odd shapes of purple, spreading here and there in the fabric. June cut from neck to tailbone, and Heather did not scream. No one screamed, not even Miss Cassandra, and thinking back, this was why it appeared at first as if nothing too serious had happened. Even after June was sent home, she wasn’t thinking about Heather or the blood or anything of the sort; she had shut it all out and was thinking inst
ead about finishing her two library books that were due in three days. After putting the primroses in the jam jar, she had sat in her room, and no one disturbed her for hours while she read. And when she emerged it was to ask Grandmam if they could have BLTs again, and it was only with Grandmam’s quiet shake of her head that flashes of the day would return to June, yet she still couldn’t think of why the principal had stuck her in his office alone and closed the door until Granddad arrived to take her home.
It wasn’t until months later, when June was living at the Infirmary of Innocents, that she would learn how suffering could bring about such deadening silence. It could turn one’s voice to dust, crush thought and reason, cause memories to go dormant until the body carrying them around would no longer recognize from where an incessant humming continued to spring.
Who was June fooling? She knew exactly why she drank.
“I hope you live long enough to regret this,” her father had said to her, and then he’d walked out the back door, across both yards, and into his parents’ house, where he’d been born and raised, as if traveling his life in reverse. He stepped out the front door and across the road and straight into nowhere, which was somewhere—that is, the rocks below—while back up on the ridge, sitting safe at the table, was June with her glass of chocolate milk, the swirl of sugared cocoa and raw milk on her tongue, and across the way a view of misty rosemary and sun on the wet leaves, dangling.
Part Three
20
A week passed before he finally saw June. The only visitor had been the warbler, and on that first day Jameson had bent and crimped a scrap of copper gutter into a bowl-shaped birdbath, wedged it into the ground so that it would not tip, and filled it with water. The warbler jumped right in, and Jameson wandered beneath the shade, entertained by the bird’s spastic bath, a small act offering them both an oversized pleasure, that day and every day since.
Now here it was midafternoon, and Jameson felt the day’s heat at the workbench, even in the shade, his vinyl safety earmuffs damp and dripping perspiration down the sides of his neck. The table saw ran through a strip of yellow pine trim when some kind of movement caught his eye. The warbler had returned to his bath, and directly beyond him, into June’s backyard, lay June.
Jameson lost his grip, slipped forward, and came within inches of severing his hand at the wrist.
June was dressed in jean shorts and a white tank top, braless—from twenty yards away he could see through her sheer white shirt, see that she was tall with long, tanned legs, her knees bent, feet flat on the ground. Sunglasses covered her eyes, her hair a dark round mass beneath her head, and she reached back and scooped it off her neck and to the side so that it lay halfway off her blanket on the grass. Then she crossed her thighs and swung her dangling foot like she was waiting for something, or losing patience in the waiting.
Jameson closed his eyes and swiped his hairline. When he looked again, June had dropped both legs flat, crossed her ankles, and spread her arms out to the sides like wings.
Evenings, he’d noticed the lights on in her kitchen and upstairs bedroom, and the shadows behind the blinds appeared to belong to only one person. He understood the need for privacy, but how hard could it have been for her to step out of her house for five minutes and say hello? Now here she was in the wide open, and there was no way for her to think he couldn’t see.
They had shared one phone call since he arrived, when she rang to ask if there was anything he needed, anything she could provide, and made no mention of her absence. He said he couldn’t think of what was lacking, though in truth he’d thought of a mini-fridge filled with a few cold beers. He didn’t dare say it, even as a joke, and in thinking about it he wondered if maybe she had fallen off the wagon and this was the reason she hadn’t left the house. Then he guessed such thinking was the go-to when something went wrong, or right, with a person getting sober, everything stemming from a singular cause. People had thought such things about Jameson and Sarah Anne: no matter their moods or actions, their lives became defined by a single event. The looks, the sighs, the I admire you two after all you’ve been through, as if Jameson and Sarah Anne could never be motivated by anything else, never be anyone else, other than the couple whose children had been gunned down in a gas station convenience store.
As she lay there, he thought a person with a hangover wouldn’t want to be out like that in this heat.
“Are you sure I can’t put you up at the San Dune while you’re here?” she had asked again during the phone call. “I’d be relieved—”
“I’ve already made my pallet in the dining room. I’m comfortable as can be.”
“The dining room?”
“Is that all right?”
“Of course. But it’s so warm with all that direct light. I’m sure the whole house is warm. And you don’t have a fan. Oh, I should have gotten you a fan!”
“It’s not bad at all. The air cools things off by ten o’clock.” In fact, sometimes that didn’t happen until one o’clock in the morning. He had slept on top of his sleeping bag in nothing but his boxers, and did wish he’d had a fan. “I don’t need anything,” he told her, unable to accept, once again, her offer of kindness. “I’m right as rain.”
He could ignore her now, he would ignore her, by returning to other work inside the house. But it was hotter inside than out, and after trying to nail down trim with salty sweat in his eyes, he returned to the yard and looked again for the sole purpose of seeing her, and she was there as before, lying on her back, arms spread wide as if waiting for something or someone to drop out of the sky.
He had told her on the phone that he was doing just fine, and it was true. A week in, and not nearly as bad as he’d feared it might be. He began each day with the sun devouring that old-growth grain of the walls and floors, surrounding him with a radiating, cadmium orange, a glaze of color like a cast-iron pot that his mother once owned. His sleeping bag lay along the far wall, and mornings arrived like an alchemy of senses, a yellow dawn behind white trees, chattering songbirds, a steady crash of waves. His arms and legs filled with the kind of low-grade satisfaction he’d had no name for in his youth, a way of moving through the world untroubled. It was gratifying to boil water on the propane burner for pour-over coffee to drink with his morning banana bread from Helen’s Bakery. Gratifying to be right there and nowhere else.
June had gone quiet on the phone when he didn’t accept her offers. Jameson worried he’d offended her. “I prefer it this way,” he said. “You understand that, right?”
“I cannot say I do. But if you insist, I can certainly go along.”
“I insist,” he said. “And thank you.”
“Certainly not, don’t thank me,” she said. “But I do like hearing what you’ve said about the dining room.”
“The colors—”
“Oh. Well. Yes. And the view of the trees. As a child I would sit in there and . . . just, well, sit, I don’t know. I would sit and think and feel, I suppose, if that is what children do.”
“I’d say they do just that,” he said, and closed his eyes and prayed she would not ask if he had children.
“Anyway . . .” she said.
“So was this before or after you moved away?” he asked.
“What do you mean, moved away?”
“Your accent. It didn’t come from Nestucca Beach.”
“Oh. Oh. Yes. I’ve one foot in and one foot out my entire life, I suppose. The Irish think I sound American. Everyone here believes I’m foreign. A citizen of nowhere and everywhere.”
“Sure,” he said, and though he wanted her to go on, he didn’t know what else to say. “Well,” he said after a time. “I guess I should get back to work. I’m not getting paid to make conversation.” It was a stupid thing to say.
“I shouldn’t like to dock you,” she said.
“I shouldn’t like that either,” he said, sounding a bit like June.
“Are you mocking me?” she asked, in a tone that meant she was m
ocking him.
Jameson gave a small laugh, and then, perhaps it was the way her voice fell on the last word, he felt a sudden seriousness. “Goodbye, June,” he said.
“Goodbye, Jameson,” she’d said.
That was days ago. Now he was looking right at her, with the heat nearly tropical and his perspiration streaming as if he’d been dunked into a vat of hot steam. And then she lifted her phone, plucked a finger around, and brought it to her ear.
His phone vibrated on the workbench. He glanced at her, then the phone.
“Jameson here,” he answered, and she said, “Hello, Jameson,” with a tone of such familiarity that he wondered again if she might be drunk. “How’s it going up there?” she asked, a little more American than usual.
“June. It’s going. About what I expected. No surprises. Not yet, anyway.” He took several steps back, stuck his free hand in his front pocket, pulled it out, and scratched behind his ear.
“Well,” she said. “Good. Good.” Her knees were back up, one leg was thrown over the other, and her foot was swinging and swinging. She lifted her head slightly and ran her hand through her hair, then she loosened the whole of it again so that it sprawled from her head like a dark and twisted tail. “I’d like to pop over if that’s all right.”
Jameson turned in a half-circle, looking up at the house and down into the yard, which was full of junk piles, the mess rising before him as if it had just appeared out of nowhere. “Of course.”
“I know you don’t like to be disturbed.”