A Million Junes

by Emily Henry

  Jack II’s stare is empty. It’s the face of a black hole, and I recognize it as if looking into a mirror: the grief sucking the world into itself.

  Right then, I know my grandfather lost something. I see it in the twist of his mouth, the tension in his right temple, the hollows behind his eyes.

  What did the curse take from you?

  Zeke twists his hands together. “He lost his mind with grief, Jack. Forty years passed, and he still couldn’t sleep through the night. Not to mention how it all ended. Wasn’t that enough retribution?”

  “And what do you expect me to do?” Jack II demands. “You think I’m a sorcerer? I can wave my hand and bring Abe back, make his mind the way it was before? Sounds like your brother finally paid for his sins. I hope he’s still paying, wherever his soul went.”

  “It wasn’t his fault!” Zeke hisses. “They’d never have even gone to that wretched place if they hadn’t been hiding from your father. So don’t you go acting all high and mighty, Jack O’Donnell. Don’t you dare pretend this started with Abe. Until we both make it right, it’s not going to stop—not for you, not for me. Your father brought evil into this place, and it’s not only Abe who was punished. It’ll be all of us in the end. Your family and mine.”

  Jack II steps forward, forcing Zeke to stumble back. “Do you ever relive it?” he whispers, deadly calm.

  Zeke’s dark eyes widen. “I relive all sorts of things.”

  “But not that night,” Jack II says. “No, you weren’t there, Zeke. You were at home, asleep in your bed. And they don’t come for you, do they? Maybe other Moments, but not that one.”

  “You’re wrong.” He shakes his head. “I see it too.”

  “Then you know I wouldn’t help you if I could. The only curse I see on this land is you, Zeke. You and your damned family. Now get off my property before I make you.” The fire fades from his eyes, leaving Jack II empty and trapped within himself.

  He turns and goes inside, brushing aside the little boy waiting in the foyer and closing the door.

  Zeke Angert stalks toward the woods, his gait lithe and graceful, like his grandson’s. I take off after him, but the memory releases me when I cross into the woods. I’m still in the forest, but Zeke is gone, and my heavy breaths are audible. Dusky sunlight drapes over the foliage, puffs of mist visible in the stripes of gold breaking through the ancient branches.

  I’m not in a memory, but I’m not just in the woods either. I’m in the overlap.

  The answers were all there, cut into a million pieces that need to be placed together.

  Jack the First brought evil into this place.

  As long as we keep this fight going, this is gonna keep happening.

  We were right: The Whites were warning us about the curse. But what’s more, all the Jacks and Angerts that came before us knew about it too. They knew Nameless wandered the woods, disturbing the thin place. They knew the curse robbed us of the things we loved, and maybe—maybe—they even knew how to break it.

  A fire blazes in my chest. Someone must be sending these moments to us.

  He’s down there. On the other side of the veil.

  Thirty

  IF Dad knew, Eli knows.

  I sprint toward Saul’s house. My lungs burn; my feet hammer the earth. I pass O’Dang!, eyes flashing across the names carved into the bark: O’DONNELL + ANGERT.

  The mystery of our families is taking shape, but it won’t be complete until Saul and I are together.

  The forest thins, and the reddish cabin resolves ahead, but as soon as I hit the clearing around it, I’m ripped away again.

  Why? I scream voicelessly. At the Whites. At Feathers. At Dad. At whoever’s leading me. I thought this was what you wanted!

  I’m back at the farmhouse, in the flat dark of night, electric light casting an imperfect circle on the front porch. Mom and Dad sit in patio chairs, wrapped in blankets, their hands loosely knotted. An owl hoots, moths flutter, but my parents are silent.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to put an end to this silly fight?” Mom says quietly.

  “You don’t know anything about it, Le.”

  She shoots him a sidelong glance. “You never used to want to be like your father.”

  “He was a haunted man.” Dad scratches at his pant leg. “Want to or not, I’m like him. It’s his blood under my skin.”

  Mom lets out a long sigh. “You know, at some point you have to decide whether it’s more important for you to be a Jack or to be happy.”

  She stands and goes inside, leaving him on the porch. He leans over his knees and eyes the sky. “What do you think, Issa?” he murmurs.

  Issa?

  “You think I should let it go? You ready to get out of here for good?”

  He pushes on his legs to stand and walks inside.

  A thousand Whites converge in front of the door, and I burst through them, my skin alive and hot as, all at once, memories hit me in sharp fragments, overwhelming my senses with kaleidoscopic color. I force myself to stay upright as the competing memories focus into something comprehensible.

  I’m alone in a dark maze of mirrors. Some of the mirrors reflect me, as I am right now, but others show me as a toddler, as a preteen with braces, as an eight-year-old with a bloody knee. I stop in front of a mirror that shows my father.

  He stares blankly out at me, doesn’t react when I touch the glass in front of him. Other mirrors show Mom and Toddy, Shadow, Grayson, Jack II and Charmaine, Jack the First and his tiny flaxen-haired wife, Annie. In some, my Grandma and Grandpa Girard stare out, and others show people I don’t recognize, women with Mom’s nose and shoulders, men with her chin. People who are pieces of her, like she’s a piece of me.

  Off to one side, I see the strawberry-blonde from the cave. She blinks slowly, then steps sideways from her mirror, disappearing in the gap between that one and the next.

  I turn, searching for her, and face a whole new set of mirrors. Front and center, as if he’s the immediate reflection of myself, I see Saul. Spreading out behind him, I see Sauls with missing front teeth, with sunburns and bowl cuts. I see a man in a tweed coat with a face as brutal as winter, Saul’s father, Eli. Lean and elegant Zeke, and another Angert patriarch I don’t recognize, with the same angular jaw and captivating eyes. I see Bekah, her crooked smile and thick eyebrows, and a curvy brunette with deep-set eyes—her and Saul’s mother, Rachel.

  And then I see the boy.

  The dark-haired boy who held the red-haired girl in the cave.

  He presses his hands to the glass, his nose flattening against it. He begins to scream. His fingernails claw at the surface of the mirror. He thrashes against it.

  I hit the glass too, trying to free him. His eyes are wild and fearful. Whites are alighting all over the mirror, and he’s still screaming.

  I’m trying, I say.

  I throw myself at the glass, and it shatters in every direction, leaving me tumbling onto the hill where my house should be. There’s no one here. Just a wolf and coyote and robin asleep in a yin and yang formation, and a springy green cherry sprout dancing in the breeze.

  Now the scenes unfold around me, another carousel of moments.

  I focus first on one that shows Jack II, middle-aged and hunched. He sits in a high-backed chair in a room lined with lilac wallpaper speckled by vines and plump golden fruit—the room Mom now shares with Toddy.

  The man lying in the bed beside Jack II has a sickly yellow tint to his skin, and his breaths rattle in his lungs. Where Jack II is shadowy and insubstantial, this man is all intensity and sharp lines, despite the trembling of his puffy fingers against the quilt.

  I recognize Jack the First from his one and a half eyebrows. According to Dad, my great-grandfather lost the other half over in France during World War I, when he threw himself between a friend and a grenade. Shrapnel had lodged its
elf in Jack the First’s left knee, which never worked quite right after that, and in his left eyebrow, which had never fully grown back.

  He’d been beloved in Five Fingers before that; afterward, he was a hero.

  A clock ticks on the wall, and dust floats through spears of sunlight.

  “You can leave,” Jack the First coughs. “Don’t need nobody watchin’ me die.”

  Jack II rocks forward over his knees. “I’m not leaving, Pop.”

  The clock ticks onward; the dust drifts.

  Jack the First clears his throat. “Why not?” His glassy eyes roll toward the corner as an inky darkness materializes there, twisting hatefully. “You find anything dead in the yard?”

  Jack II’s chin lifts. “No, Pop.”

  “Don’t lie to me, boy,” my great-grandfather spits. “You think I don’t know? It’s been watching me ever since that little shit finally drowned. It wants revenge, son.”

  Jack II winces and sits back, putting space between him and his father. His eyes have that vacant look again, as if his soul has walked off for a coffee break.

  “I don’t care, son,” Jack the First says. “Don’t give a damn how this spirit tortures me. I don’t have any regrets, except that I didn’t kill him myself.”

  Jack II’s eyes lift. “You did.”

  “What’s that?”

  Jack II shakes his head.

  “Speak up,” his father demands. “You got something to say then talk like the fucking man I raised.”

  “You did kill him.”

  Jack the First tries to scoff, but his throat’s too weak to let anything but a cough through. “You pity that piece of shit? After what he did to us?”

  Jack II studies the floor. “You don’t have any regrets? Not one?” His eyes glimmer, light reflecting against their abyssal surface.

  His father regards him, mouth juddering open like a fish gasping for water and finding only air. He jams it shut. If the first Jack had any regrets, they’re trapped within him for good. “Get me a drink, would you, son?”

  Jack II tips his head toward a porcelain bowl resting beside the bed. “How about some cherries, Pop?”

  “Scotch,” his father replies. “Neat.”

  Jack II hesitates, as if considering pointing out that a man inches from death, skin jaundiced and hands shaking, shouldn’t shoot liquor. He shakes his head and unfolds his great height from the chair, crossing toward the door.

  Jack the First’s eyes shut, and he groans. “I’m coming, honey,” he whispers. “Not long now.”

  Jack II pauses in the doorway. I see something then, a kind of caving in, as if everything on the outside of him is collapsing inward, creating his black hole. He tries to say something. His wide mouth presses tight. He walks into the hall.

  Jack the First opens his eyes as Nameless approaches him. “Do your damnedest,” he growls at the ghost. “Show me anything you want. I’ll be with her soon, and you’ll still be trapped here.”

  The thing folds over him. Jack’s eyes close, and a smile curves up his lips. The anger leaves his body, the tension abandoning hundreds of muscles at once, finally permitting them a moment of peace. The memory freezes as the sounds of others push forward.

  I turn toward the memories circling me. A long-legged, sandy-haired child who must be Jack II barrels through the front door and scampers down the hillside. He pumps his arms, gasps for breath, bare feet pounding the wet grass. Jack the First stumbles out the front door, the bottle in his hand knocking the doorframe and his left leg swinging stiffly. “Come back, you little coward!”

  Jack II keeps running, eyes blinking against sweat. “Take me away,” he hisses, breath frosty as he sprints for the woods. “Take me away. Take me away.”

  He hits the edge of the woods and vanishes, the memory stilling.

  I turn to the next and see Jack the First’s wife, Annie, holding her only son atop her knees. She kisses his forehead, smooths his sweat-streaked hair. She murmurs, “He doesn’t mean any of it, my love.”

  “He does,” little Jack II says. “He hates me.”

  Annie presses her lips to her child’s head again and stares at the wall of the bedroom where Grayson and Shadow’s bunk beds now sit.

  “Was it my fault?” Jack II looks at her. A smile blossoms then withers on her painted lips. She pulls a green-jeweled pin from her yellow hair and closes his hand around it.

  “You are blameless, my love.” Her eyes become distant. If Jack II grew up to be a collapsed heart, a black hole, his mother was a meteor hurtling through space: beautiful but burning out, screaming but kept silent by the vacuum. “Go to sleep, angel.” She maneuvers her son from her arms into his narrow bed, then pulls the blankets to his chin and kisses him once. She hesitates, kisses him again more slowly.

  He seems to know this means something—that tonight, she kissed him again. Annie hurries, crying, from the room. She glances backward one last time before she cups her hand over her mouth and escapes.

  The memory stops, and I dread the one that comes next even as I turn to it.

  Here Jack II sits on the same bed in the dark, his lanky legs dangling over the side as he stares at the pulsing pink patina. His fingers roll the hairpin back and forth. “She’s gone,” he tells Feathers. “She’s gone and you’re gone and all that’s left is him, and he hates me.” His fingers lift the pin and press it to his head where Annie kissed him goodbye.

  Feathers encircles him, fluttering, warming. “You promised,” he whispers. “You said we’d get out.”

  I want it to stop. I need it to stop, so I run. I run straight through another memory: Jack the First bending beneath the shade of the first Jack’s Tart, putting his heart to Annie’s stomach, hands gently clasping her waist. “I hear it,” he says, voice soft and warm as sunlight through his smile. “The heartbeat of the whole world, and it’s in my wife’s belly.”

  “Little Jack,” Annie says, touching the side of her husband’s face.

  I keep running.

  What happened to destroy this?

  What took the man I see now and made him into the one I watched die?

  And what’s it going to do to me and Saul?

  Two families.

  Two ghosts—one warm and sad, one cold and hungry.

  Two tears in our world—one at an impossible tree and one in a starlit pool.

  One curse, tying the puzzle together, and infinite memories holding the answer to what created the hungry darkness, the brutal cycle that will eventually swallow Saul or me.

  I run to the end of the yard, right into the ice cave again, right through the bar where Dad stared at Mom in the middle of a monsoon, down a dune past a family napping on the sand, and into the water, and there—

  I’m on the cliff overlooking the waterfall, sunlight-sprinkled mist hanging heavily over everything.

  Whites plop against the surface, sinking under it.

  “June-bug?” one says. “Junie?”

  “Dad.”

  I need him. To tell me how to make the flood of memories stop, how to rewrite a history of grief and break the curse before Saul and I lose any more of the things we love most.

  I need Dad and all the things he never told me, and I need his arms.

  I step to the ledge and study the delicate light beneath the water.

  I take a deep breath and prepare to jump.

  “NO!”

  I spin back and see her: the girl from the cave, the woods, the hall of mirrors. “You’ll drown,” she hisses, her eyes wild. “You mustn’t let him do this to you!”

  “Let who?” I step toward her. “Who are you?”

  “Come away from the water, Jack.”

  The Whites pull at my back, tell me not to walk away. The girl scans the misty forest, her pale arms hanging at her sides. “When are you going to stop
this?” she screams.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  She faces me again. “Someone who has forgotten what it’s like to have a name.”

  “Nameless?”

  Her airy voice shakes. “The water doesn’t lie. But it doesn’t tell the whole truth either. If you want to break the curse, you must both go in. You and Saul together.”

  “But you said I’d drown,” I stammer.

  “Yes.” She smiles sadly, then steps behind a thick eastern white pine. I curve around the tree’s feathery branches, but she’s gone. The mist has lifted, the sparkling sunlight replaced by thunderclouds and rain. I’m soaking wet, as though I’ve been standing out in the downpour for hours.

  Standing there, in front of me, is Saul.

  Thirty-One

  HE rushes toward me and catches me in his arms. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all day,” he says. “I thought you’d—I was scared you’d gone back to the water.”

  “The red-haired girl,” I manage, still searching for her.

  “From the cave?”

  “She came to me—she said I’d drown. I don’t know what they did, Saul, but our great-grandparents caused all of this—everything bad that’s happened to us and our families, all of it.”

  His brow furrows. “June, what happened?”

  My mind buzzes. I try to think back to the beginning. “Allison deGeest called my mom. My parents know I was with you. They know you’re . . . you.”

  He nods. “Your stepdad was at my house when I got home.”

  “Seriously? What happened?”

  He looks up the tree, rubbing his jaw. “He tried to hit me.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I almost felt like I should let him.”

  “Saul,” I say sharply.

  “I can’t blame him.”

  “Look, I love Toddy, but he needs to drop the pee-on-everything-you-think-you-own outlook. This has nothing to do with him. I made my own decision, and besides, we have more pressing issues than he or my mom realize. Something bad happened here, and if we’re going to fix it, we need to go in the water.”