by Deborah Reed
34
Jameson slipped in mud, gripped the trees and shrubs, and screamed Sarah Anne’s name. He couldn’t see where she’d gone, but he pleaded with her to come inside, unable to see or hear anything through the downpour and rumble of thunder. He fell near the car, got up, smeared clear the driver’s-side window, and looked in, but Sarah was not behind the wheel. Ernest was not in his seat. The car was locked and empty.
She had gone into the woods with Ernest in the midst of a storm, had thought this safer than being in the cabin with him.
At the front door, he cursed and called her name. He was still wearing his flannel shirt, and it stuck to his ribs in the rain the way his shirt had stuck to him on his first date with Sarah Anne, when she’d said how glad she was that he had called, her words so carefree and warm, as trusted and true as any there would ever be between them.
He began to cry, swallowed it back with the bitterness and anger rising to his throat. He punched the front door with the side of his fist and regretted it immediately.
Part Four
35
It was nearly noon on the Oregon coast, the air damp and fifteen degrees cooler than the days leading up to this one, when June returned from Wheeler with two bottles of Irish whiskey. While out she’d seen a blue heron near the bay, brown rabbits flittering across the meadow, and a red-tailed hawk being chased by crows. Like watching someone else’s life on a screen. She couldn’t quite penetrate it, couldn’t quite accept that it was real.
She arrived home and did not succumb to second-guessing or guilt. A flock of gulls squalled above the yard as she filled her favorite mug and stepped out onto the porch, set the bottle down, and screwed back the lid. The breeze was gentle, clear of tidal rot, the storm having washed everything out to sea. The sun was shining again, and June drank without ceremony. Like turning on the lights in the dead of night. Like opening windows after a season of cold rain. It was like that down the back of her throat, so sudden and clear.
She refilled her mug three times in the hour, listening to the blast of classic rock from the radio on the roof next door. Sometimes the men sang along, sometimes they switched stations. No one liked Steely Dan. One of them didn’t like the Eagles and was told he could leave, to which he laughed and said they better be careful what they wished for.
Two hours passed in this way, mug after mug, the pummel of nail guns, the music, the laughter, those hard-working men accomplishing all they’d set out to do, the gulls busy above the house and shore in search of their next meal. June marveled at how smooth a day could be, how the roofers were likely to finish in two days as they’d promised, not four as Jameson had predicted, leaving two days of silence before he returned.
June drank.
She gazed into her beautiful mug from Ireland, held in both of her hands. She looked over at the grass, soaked like in Ireland, its parched color already turning a shade of green overnight. She was wearing her father’s old cardigan over a T-shirt and jeans. When the roofers arrived at seven a.m. she’d been awake and dressed for hours, pacing, chewing her cuticles until they bled, thinking about Jameson.
The storm had scattered the empty cardboard boxes across the yard, catching several between the railings on the porch. June leaned over and tried pulling one loose, but it was heavy as a wet blanket and she lost her balance, slipping sideways down the steps. She landed in the grass below, looked down and saw the front of her T-shirt, soaked in whiskey. Her mug had rolled into the grass.
“You OK?” someone yelled.
June looked up. A man stood on the roof with what appeared to be a nail gun. She guessed he was the one who’d spoken.
She waved an arm and nodded. She was fine. She said she was fine.
A quick flash of memory that she’d started the washing machine at some point, though she could no longer remember what she’d put in there. Eyes closed, she listened now to the churning through the open front door. She got to her knees and felt the seat of her jeans, cold and damp from the grass.
“You sure?” the man called out.
June nodded, leaned forward, braced her hands in the grass, and rose onto all fours.
The men next door were laughing. At her? She didn’t care. She put her weight on her left foot, and a pain, sharp and hot, struck her ankle. She fell back onto her rear and lifted her foot. More laughter from next door. Her ankle appeared to be swelling.
The euphorbia next to her head was in bloom, its tiny red dials of color reminding her of the ornamental yews. She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek against the bulbous shoots. She could hear bees floating near her throat and eyes and hands, and somewhere across the yard a squirrel was chirping, and she realized after a time that the men were singing again with the radio and blasting the roof with nails.
Then a car pulled into the bungalow’s driveway. June tried once more to stand, mindful of her foot, bracing herself on the side of the steps. She glanced up to see Jameson getting out of the car; and it confused her. The driver’s side door hung open as he went around for something in the trunk.
They had left only yesterday. Was that right?
“What on earth?” she said, feeling the full measure of her drunkenness, as if suddenly seeing it through Jameson’s eyes. She knew enough to know that she could not stand on that ankle without damaging it further. She knew enough to know she was having trouble standing at all.
When she looked again, Sarah Anne was now behind the wheel, the car door still open.
June rubbed her forehead. Had she somehow missed a day?
Sarah Anne tried pulling the car door shut, but Jameson stepped up and put his hand out to stop it. Sarah Anne didn’t look at him. She stared straight ahead.
June wanted to disappear.
She couldn’t avert her eyes as Jameson leaned his arm on the top of the car’s doorframe, dropped his head, and said something to Sarah Anne that June couldn’t hear. Sarah Anne reached in front of him for the door, and this time Jameson stepped back and the door slammed shut while he stood there looking through the window at her. Then he glanced back at Ernest, and again at Sarah Anne.
June tried again to get up and into the house, sliding her rear onto the first step and placing her good foot on the ground. She heaved up and back to the next step, though it had taken more effort than she’d expected.
Now Jameson was headed across the lawn toward her.
“I was just going inside,” June said.
“June,” he said, his voice nearly cracking, his face puffy, as if he had not slept.
“You look like hell,” she said. His hair had not been combed and his eyes were red and she wondered if he’d been crying. “Sorry.”
“You don’t look so great yourself,” he said.
“Well.”
Sarah Anne was driving away, and June raised her hand but could no longer see inside the car against the glare.
Jameson appeared to be examining the mug on the lawn. He picked it up and brought it to his nose.
“Listen,” June said. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you.”
Jameson set the mug on the porch. “How about you get inside?”
“It wasn’t as if I haven’t thought to offer you the spare room. It’s occurred to me since you got here, and I just, you know. And now you’re back and the roofers are still here, and my goodness, what is going on? ”
“Let me help you get inside.”
“Just this morning I was thinking: how many more times am I going to wonder if it’s appropriate before I finally offer? How many times before the work is done and I no longer hear the racket, or, I mean, the very, very quiet of you next door? Or I no longer see you from the kitchen with your arms covered in sweat reaching for one thing or another?”
“June . . .”
“How soon before summer ends and you’re gone from this place and the question is never asked?” She stood and put her foot down on the step. “Oh, that one smarts.”
“Did you fall off th
e stairs?”
She glanced around the porch and lawn. “Your friend is supposed to get these boxes. Not your friend. I know he’s not your friend.”
“You’re not sober, June.”
“Oh, Jameson. Do you think I’m . . .” Laughter bubbled inside her. “Drunk? This is nothing,” she said, trying to contain herself, suddenly recalling the stark, fierce sound of her scream last night, the feel of her skin. “This is nothing. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
36
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” she repeated, and it enraged him. He picked her up like some goddamn hero—this woman nearly as tall as he, picked her up and carried her laughing up the stairs and into her house.
He put her down on the sofa and asked if she’d mind if he had a look at her ankle.
“It’s right there. What do you mean?”
“It’s swollen,” he said. “June,” he said, and looked at her with a seriousness she couldn’t bear. She squinted at the sun.
“Your day away didn’t turn out so well,” she said.
“Yours didn’t either.”
He thought she might cry. She bit her lip and sucked in a breath as if gathering resolve.
“I lied to you,” she said.
“Hmn.” Jameson lowered himself next to her. “Is that right.”
“And not just to you. To everyone I’ve ever known in my life.”
“Can I get you something? Some water or tea or something?”
“No.”
“How much have you had to drink?”
June drew a long breath. “I was his favorite,” she said. “Mr. Thornton liked me best of all the girls. I was the quietest and most compliant. I did everything I was told. I didn’t trust myself after what I did to Heather. You understand?”
Jameson studied her. “How much?” he asked.
“I was seven years old, so what did I know about who I was or wasn’t, but I certainly didn’t know I could do something like that to Heather, so I made a point to try twice as hard to follow the rules when I was sent away.”
June was shivering now. Jameson lifted the throw off the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her legs and up around her shoulders.
“My father was a bit mad. I get that. I always got that. Even as a child I understood that he wasn’t right, but he was also just my dad, you know?”
Her teeth chattered.
“It’s all right,” Jameson said, wondering if there was someone he should call.
“And I understood that it was my fault that he killed himself. I mean, I believed it was, that I was the one who, you know, pushed him over the edge.” June shoved her hands out in front. She grinned wildly. Jameson tried to smile.
“I made that glass of chocolate milk myself,” she said. “I remembered in the middle of last night. I was awake. Were you awake? I got the feeling you were awake.”
Jameson gripped his hips. “Yes.”
“The wind was atrocious here, and the rain was crashing down and the electricity went out and I felt, I felt . . .”
“What?”
June looked at him closely. “Utterly helpless. You understand?” She gazed at the sofa. “I sat right here and I remembered. I allowed myself to remember that I was the one who made that glass of chocolate milk. Me.”
“I’m not sure I understand. Are you sure I can’t get you something?”
“It was my little act of defiance.” She was laughing now, eyes closed, chin to her chest, until her laughter quietly turned to tears. She lifted her head abruptly and went on.
“I asked my father for some chocolate milk and he turned on me and said, ‘I hope you live long enough to regret what you’ve done,’ and then he went next door. I suppose it was to say goodbye to his mum and dad, which was more than he had said to me, and then the bastard killed himself. So I made my own glass of chocolate milk. You understand? I made it myself.”
“June, you’re shaking. Let me get you another blanket.”
“And I was sent away. Just like that. My grandparents didn’t want me either. Well, that wasn’t true. I’ve forgiven them everything. They were so torn up. Can you imagine? Their son, this nut job, jumping off a cliff, their granddaughter slicing open children at school. Jesus.”
June laughed again and shook her head at her lap, then she held it in her hands and let out a wail that caused a burning ache in Jameson’s chest and head.
“Another blanket?” she said. “Yes. In the top of the closet.”
Jameson came back and wrapped a yellow quilt around her, tucking it tightly behind her shoulders and beneath her thighs. “I think you could use a rest, June.”
“Don’t tell me what I need.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t nice. I see you’re trying to help. The thing is. The thing is . . .”
“Would you like me to help you upstairs?”
“The thing is, Mr. Thornton took me from my room, and I did what I was told. I don’t remember all the sordid details, but I know that I did what I was told.”
Jameson stared at her, gleaning what it was she meant.
“You understand?” she asked.
He said he did.
“He danced with me once.” She looked across the floor, and he could see the troubled memories in her eyes.
“He had a record player in his office. He put on Nina Simone and made me dance like we were just going to dance, you understand? So then there was this time when Niall tried to dance with me and we were naked. He didn’t know. I was drunk. What a mess. He didn’t know.”
“June. Listen to me.” Jameson badly wanted to hold her. She looked at him with the innocence of a child.
“I was seven,” she said.
He slid closer. “Is it all right if I sit here right next to you?”
She nodded. “I didn’t even know,” she said in hardly more than a whisper. “It’s a very complicated thing. A crafty sort of evil.”
She was experiencing some kind of shock. He told himself that if she couldn’t calm down in the next few minutes he would call an ambulance.
“Is it all right if I hold on to you?” he asked, and she reached for him as best she could beneath the blanket as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her closer.
He could feel her crying quietly against his chest. He rested his cheek on the top of her head. “It’s good you told me,” he said. “It’s good you’ve said it out loud.”
The roofers suddenly fired their nail guns into the plywood like a round of bullets, and Jameson startled and gripped June and she held him just as tightly and it went on like that until the men let up.
“May the roof over your head be always strong,” Jameson said into her hair.
June looked up at him with only her eyes, her face so serious and close, close enough to kiss if he tried. “And may there always be work for your hands to do,” she said.
It was only when the washing machine thunked to a stop that Jameson realized it had been running in another room. He looked up and finally saw the living room in which they sat—the botanical drawings and the hearth and the wool rug and the view of the sea through the front windows and open door. He glanced down at the copper streaks in June’s hair. He had read her grandfather’s notebooks in the back seat of the car, where he’d slept last night. He gave her a small squeeze, and he thought he had no right to the feelings in his chest, and he wasn’t even sure if Sarah Anne was the reason.
37
Jameson was standing in June’s kitchen when she came hobbling downstairs, riddled with pain. Her head weighed too much for her neck, and throbbed like her ankle. Worst of all, she was wrung out emotionally and didn’t know what to say, where to begin. Jameson had helped her to bed yesterday, where she’d fallen asleep. He woke her in the early evening and fed her a few spoonfuls of lentil soup from Helen’s. She’d fallen back asleep in the twilight, knowing he was at the end of the hall, listening to the old springs when he sat on her fathe
r’s bed, the creak when he shut the door.
“Good morning.” She didn’t feel like drinking coffee, though the wondrous scent filled the kitchen. What she wanted was another drink.
Jameson stood before the sink, watching the roofers through the window. The bottles of whiskey she’d bought were where she’d left them on the counter. One nearly empty, the other still full.
Jameson looked at her and then at the bottles. He sipped his coffee. “How’s your ankle?” he asked.
“Like my head,” she said, balancing on one foot. “Thank you for making the coffee.”
“Things didn’t go so well at the cabin,” he said to the window.
June hopped on one foot toward the table. “I sort of gathered that.”
“I have night terrors,” he said, still without looking at her. “It’s gotten better over the years, but they still come for me every now and then. I don’t know what’s happening or where I am. I only know I have to save my children.”
June had not yet sat at the table, and she considered going to him, wrapping her arms around him. “Here,” she said. “Sit down with me.”
“I can’t save them, of course,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “But in my dreams I’m willing to die trying.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, thinking she should take his hand, but did not.
He shook his head, glanced out to the backyard. “The thunder at the cabin was as loud as you can imagine. Lightning had to have hit a nearby tree. I thought it was a gunshot.”
June held her hands together in her lap. She lifted her swollen ankle onto the empty chair to her right.
“I started screaming and whipping a fly rod through the dark. I didn’t know where I was. I accidentally hit Sarah Anne in the side.”
June gasped, and Jameson looked away, shook his head at the window.
“She ran out into the storm to get away from me. They were afraid of me. Her and the boy.”