by Deborah Reed
Jameson nodded at the waves.
“Your grandparents weren’t actually hurt, right?” he asked. “We were told they were OK.”
“They were fine. Just shaken. A little bruised.”
“The road was wet. I was speeding.”
“My grandfather shouldn’t have been driving.”
“What do you mean?”
“He felt responsible for the accident. And also . . . your children. What happened to them later that day. If he hadn’t lost control of the car. His vision and reflexes were not what they used to be. I’d told him, Niall had told him.”
“Niall?”
“My husband.”
“You’re married?”
“Was. Not anymore.”
“I have a wife.”
“Of course you do.” June recalled her voice on the phone. What is it you want?
“She’s coming here tomorrow.”
June glanced at the sand, gave a nod. “Has she been back here since . . . ?”
“We moved away within a year. No, she hasn’t been back. This is the first I’ve been here myself.”
“I see. A cabin. Well. That will be nice.”
“I can’t work with the roofers here.”
“No, no, I probably can’t either. They’re going to be ten times louder than you’ve been, which is to say you haven’t been an intrusion in the least, just so you know, but I’m sure the nail guns will be echoing off my house and through the trees. They’ll be yelling for each other from all sides of the house.” What she was saying wasn’t at all what she meant.
“So I’ll just take these few days,” Jameson said.
June raised her head. “My grandmother left so many messages. She kept saying it was all their fault, because the story was, well, I learned later what the story was.”
“I lost control before your grandfather did. How ridiculous for them to believe it was their fault.”
“It was no one’s fault.”
Jameson looked at her sharply.
“I’m not overstepping my bounds here,” she said.
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Never mind.”
“I see.” After a moment June added, “My grandmother brought you a pie.”
Jameson looked at her, his eyes dark and serious, especially as the sun dipped deeply out of sight. “When?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It was a message she’d left. I don’t remember much from that time, but I remember that. She took you a pie and you told her something awful about the sand from your children’s feet still on the floor.”
He stiffened, lips pursed, and he turned away, clearly not wanting her to see him, though he nodded as if to say yes, I remember, yes, that was me. And then he pulled his knees up and held them to his chest. He lowered his forehead onto his arms atop his knees, and June could no longer see his face. The waves and the voices down the beach were not enough to muffle his sobs.
June placed her hand in the middle of his back and caressed him in a small circle, feeling the ripple of muscle and bone.
After a moment he raised his head and laid his cheek on his arms and looked at her, smiling sadly, and she offered the same smile in return. And then she lifted her hand from his back.
“I haven’t cried like that in years,” he said, clearing his throat.
“I can’t begin to imagine your pain.”
“Well.” Jameson leaned back and dropped his knees and swiped at his eyes. “I’m not sure I believe you,” he said.
June could feel the glare in her eyes. She did nothing to soften it away.
“I think you’ve lost somebody too,” he said.
“I have. But it isn’t quite the same.”
“How so?” he asked. “How do you measure such a thing?”
The ocean rolled in and out, stars littered the black sky, the fires along the beach burned brighter in the dark, and June watched as a child’s marshmallow caught flame on the end of his stick. His mother jumped up and blew it out.
“So you’ve got these days free, then,” June said. “For you, and your wife.”
“We have a foster child now.”
June studied his face. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something more. Something he didn’t want to talk about. She stood and brushed the sand from her jeans. “It’s getting late,” she said.
Jameson came to his feet. “What else did Van Hicks say about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t think it was a coincidence that he had you call me.”
“I’m not following you.”
“That guy, who shot my children?”
“Yes?”
“He was Van’s son.”
June stepped back. Held her hand to her chest. “Why would he . . . I don’t understand. Why would Van tell me to call you, of all people?”
“I’d like to think it’s because I do good work. But I’m not sure. I don’t trust him. I took this job because I needed it. I had to take it. That’s just the fact.”
June felt a little sick. All this time she’d been putting Jameson through something of which she had no idea. All this time she’d been a part of something that may have been underhanded.
“He said you were perfect for the house. That you would know exactly what to do, and the quality of your work was—”
“I believe you when you tell me that he said all that.” He narrowed his eyes up into the sky.
“Well.”
“I’ve spent the last three years beating myself up over that day,” Jameson said. “That fucking motorcycle, excuse my language. I was riding too fast. Your grandfather had nothing to do with it, OK? If I hadn’t taken off like that, my children would still be alive.”
“And if it hadn’t rained and Granddad had given up his license and that young man with the gun had not been lost inside a world of insanity . . . Where is a person supposed to draw the line?”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
June stiffened, fury in her bones. She turned for home. “You know nothing about me.”
Jameson walked after her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
June spun around. “Easy for me to say? I’ve lived my whole life retracing my steps, checking off all the false moves that did me in. All the moves that did in the lives of other people around me.”
Jameson started to speak, but June cut him off. “My own mother is dead because I was born,” she said. “You think I give a shit about my birthday? That’s the least of my problems.”
Jameson took her hand. He held it tightly at her side.
June began to cry. “Oh good Christ.”
“I had no business saying such a thing,” Jameson said.
The breeze lifted the campfire smoke and now the singing and laughing was louder, mocking them, standing as they were, facing each other’s grief.
Jameson squeezed her hand. “I am cracked and broken in more ways than I know how to fix,” he said.
“I understand,” she said, and then Jameson wrapped his flannel shirt over her shoulders to help stop her shivering, and he told her it was time to go home.
26
Morning, and Jameson would not work today, did not even feel like working, and that was new. He’d rolled up his bedding and placed it and his duffel in the hallway closet, and he filled the pail from June with water and wedged it in the ground beneath the birch that the warbler favored most. He would ask the roofers to leave it be.
He swept the finished rooms clear of sawdust, wiped down the walls with a damp rag. He mopped the newly laid wooden floors, then rolled out brown builder’s paper from wall to wall, to protect the flawless planks, and taped the paper in place around the perimeter. The window guy would arrive in a few weeks to fix the broken sashes, and by the end of July the electrician would have finished updating the circuit panel and wiring, and Jameson would replace the walls. By the end of August he would paint th
e interior, and a house painter would scrape off the exterior trim and give it a fresh coat and stain the shingle siding, and the new gutters would go up. The house would stand solidly against the rain and wind to come. Jameson was saving the kitchen for last, and by the start of September he would have finished replacing the fixtures and sanding and staining the wooden countertop and cabinets, the latter to be painted a fresh white at June’s request. His final act would be screwing in the green glass cabinet knobs and wiping every trace of himself away.
And then the market would do its thing.
That was how it worked.
Jameson had done this time and again, and yet he stood looking out at the backyard, the white trees, the glimpses beyond the fairway, and had a hard time picturing where to go from here. He was like a house himself, refurbished and retrofitted with metal bars, a homestead of a man whose leg leaned a little, and sometimes ached more than a little with winter rain, a man still rising from beds and chairs and floors, heading to and from places he needed to go, and was forced to go, but it had been so long since he was headed to a place he wanted to be.
Those piles in the yard needed to be dealt with. It was past time to call Van Hicks. It could be taken care of while Jameson was away, but first he’d have to make the call.
He glanced up at the mountain, turkey vultures trailing each other in slow, deliberate circles in the distance. A heron swooped toward the bay on its giant, prehistoric wings, and here in the yard, in spite of the mess, a fleet of golden-crowned kinglets darted into the pines like hummingbirds—stationary one second, zipping in a flash the next on their tiny, rapid wings. Strange feeling to not want to work. Stranger still to think about what he’d said to June.
He was raised near a clear blue lake in the center of Oregon, and now he thought how nice it would be to sit on a grassy bank along a river with a fishing pole and a beer. He was raised on the virtues of work, and it did not easily shake loose from his mind. He no longer knew how to relax the way he used to when he and Sarah Anne first got together. To lie in a bed and read a book had become as foreign to him as a language he’d never learned to speak.
He arched his back and shoulders and drew in a breath of briny air, and he felt calmer than he’d felt in years. He dialed the old number from years ago.
When the line picked up, Jameson heard wheezing, coughing, a man trying to get a word out.
“Is that you, Hicks?” Jameson asked.
“With whom am I speaking?” Hicks could be a smartass. Whom was not a word he normally used, just a kind of inside joke he played with himself when he thought he was speaking to a stranger.
“Jameson Winters. I’m calling on behalf of Ms. June Byrne.” Two could play the fake-eloquence game.
Hicks wheezed like a man who shouldn’t be on a phone but on oxygen instead. When he finished he said, “So you came. You’re here.”
“Not for long. I’ll be begging out for a few days starting today, and I would appreciate you coming by to haul off this load of scrap while the roofers have the house.”
Hicks sounded as if he were swallowing something. The cough and wheeze subsided.
“Are you up for working?” Jameson asked. “Doesn’t sound like it. If there’s anyone else in town, I’d be glad to call him.”
“I’m up. I’ll do it. Go ahead and beg out.”
“Good deal,” Jameson said, and hung up.
His hands were shaking. He looked at the one that had held June’s last night, turned it palm-up as if expecting to find something there. He opened and closed his fist several times and it calmed him.
From where he stood behind the house, he couldn’t be certain if the tide had gone out or if the widened shoreline was glossy and mirroring the sky, with white gulls and black cormorants and the immense wingspan of a bald eagle, but Jameson knew without seeing that it was exactly as he pictured. His ears were as attuned now to the rhythm of the waves as the days when he’d lived on this coast, and if he were to walk down the footpath of the ridge, he would see that he was right about the tide and the sand reflecting everything above. His children would be ten years old now, taller and changed in ways he could only imagine, other ways he could not. Might their hearts have already been broken by crushes? What books would they have fallen in love with? What quarrels might they have had with each other? Would they have continued to look so much alike? He could not picture how they might have changed. The color and texture of their hair, the clothes they would have wanted to wear, Halloween costumes they might have chosen. Would there ever be a year when children came to the door that Jameson didn’t wonder if one or the other of his own children might have worn that same costume? And yet he couldn’t help but imagine the ways his children would have been devastated had they lived long lives, the kinds of people in this world who could have hurt them, including those who claimed to love them. What indelible sorrows were they protected from now? Of course it made no sense. The worst thing that could have happened to them had happened.
He recalled their translucent cheeks and lips in the morgue, their matching cold blue hands, and he gripped the nearest birch and dropped his head and prepared to be sick. When nothing came he understood that he’d driven back his rage and despair like so many times before, and he would drive it all back again the next and the next. He understood, too, that he had done this, stuffed it all away from the start, for the sake of Sarah Anne. The only place where he lost control was in his dreams.
He checked his watch. Sarah Anne wouldn’t arrive for a couple more hours. The roofers were already late. There was no sign of movement next door, and he wondered if June had even gotten out of bed, or what she might dream if she dreamed at all, or if she’d lain awake in the night, replaying their conversation the way he had. What he wanted was to knock on her door and ask if she wouldn’t mind having something cold to drink, a lemonade, out front in the Adirondack chairs, the way the movers had done. They wouldn’t have to talk, either, just like the men, but sit side by side, looking west into the blue.
Thirty minutes later, Jameson was still shaken from the sound of Hicks’s voice. He yanked hard on the drawer in the work shed where he planned to stow his cords; the rabbet joints came loose, separated, and a false drawer collapsed into his hand. Two small notebooks tumbled free. “Ah, hell,” he said, setting the pieces of busted drawer on the workbench. This was a complication he guessed June did not need. It was none of his business. He slipped the notebooks into the back pocket of his jeans and left the shed.
After that, he set off on foot down the road, conscious of his leg, the way his foot turned in and his hip gave a little when he came down on that side. She had noticed.
The bakery was the first thing a person came to from this direction, and Jameson had not gone much past it since he arrived. He wasn’t sure how many people in town knew he was here, but Helen had a way of chatting, so he guessed everyone knew, including people who’d never heard of him. And him up there working on their house. Life sure is strange.
Jameson walked down the main street, past the toy shop with the whirling kites on the roof, the taffy shop, the Little Grocer, all the way to the end, where he entered the bookstore beneath an archway of twisted wisteria. He asked the curly-haired clerk, who gave him a second look, if she might have what he was looking for, and she said of course she did, right over there in the local-author section, and she smiled like she knew more than she was willing to say.
27
It was late morning, and aside from the crash of waves it was dead quiet, and June could not think, could not sit, could not seem to breathe as deeply as a body needed to keep from passing out. She’d hardly slept, her neck in a knot, her shoulders, too, and she wondered if Jameson had lain awake as she had. Every time she’d drifted off, she dreamed of being barefoot on craggy rocks, and she woke clutching her feet, searching for open wounds.
She’d been watching him sweep the front porch, carry handfuls of his things to his truck, coil up electrical cords and stor
e them in the shed. He made a brief phone call from the backyard, but his voice was low and curt and she couldn’t make out what he said, but he didn’t seem happy, whatever it was.
She went through the motions of showering and getting dressed, to temper the anxious hum beneath her skin. It did nothing to calm her. She wandered into the living room dressed like a person who had someplace to be. She fought that off by going stiff in the middle of the rug, as if in protest against the drink she imagined having, the dark pub booth she imagined settling into. She was a stock-still statue erected as a symbol of silent battle, while at once counting all the reasons she could step forward and have just one, just today, to move her beyond the feelings taking over, feelings that had nothing to do with needing a drink.
She gathered two of Grandmam’s teacups and matching saucers, the sugar bowl and creamer, set them on a tray, and took them out back, where she arranged the settings across from each other on the patio table. One for Mum, one for me, as she used to say.
How long had it been since she had drawn on her number one comfort? She had forgotten so many things while drinking. Faces, names, entire days and weeks unrecognizably smeared.
She returned to the kitchen for her Polaroid camera. The silver trim on the cups and saucers would glow on the instant film. The chemicals and filtered light would give the illusion of an image that was decades old.
And then, the strangest thing. She startled in the patio doorway.
Raccoons, a mother and three kits, were climbing onto the table, grabbing hold of the tea set. They leapt around like a band of mischievous, costumed children. The smallest snatched a teacup with his tiny paws and looked at June and then the cup he was holding, as if he were waiting to be served.
June rushed forward and the raccoons dropped the cups and saucers onto the table. When they scampered away they sent the tea things flying, crashing to the ground.
She roared with a fury she didn’t know she possessed. She whipped what remained of a saucer in their direction, but they were already free of her, the smallest one trailing, looking back at June, as if he did not understand her or anything that was happening here, and then he, like the others, disappeared in the thicket of trees.