A Million Junes

by Emily Henry

  “June, you just said that girl appeared and told you you would drown.”

  I swallow a knot that scrapes like it’s made of thorns. “She also said that we both had to go in to break the curse. I saw more memories, Saul. The dark ghost didn’t just kill my dad; it killed Jack the First too. And your grandfather Zeke—he came to see my grandfather, like my dad went to see yours. Zeke had a dead rabbit—he knew, Saul. Our grandfathers knew about Nameless and the curse, and I think—Saul, if we don’t fix this, I think we’re next.”

  Saul trains his eyes on me. “How does going into the water fix it, June? What if that was Nameless trying to drown you? What if he’s using your dad’s and Bekah’s voices to—”

  “The girl told me, Saul.”

  “And who is she? How do we know she’s not part of the curse? That she’s not helping Nameless kill us?”

  I massage the space between my eyebrows. I’d been sure I’d be able to convince Saul to go into the water with me. Not only because we need to break the curse, but because I know he must want to see Bekah again as badly as I want to see Dad, and we can get to them.

  “We can’t rush this, June,” he says. “If we’re going back there, we have to know for sure. We have to let the memories take us to the beginning.”

  “I don’t care about the memories. I want to go through the veil, to where the memories come from, and see him again.”

  He takes the back of my head in his hand and draws me into his rain-soaked chest. “The past is what it is, June. Can’t the present be enough for you? Your mom and Todd and your brothers and Hannah. Me.”

  I close my eyes and breathe him in. He’s safe, I tell myself. We’re safe. Focus on that. “I don’t understand how it can be enough for you.” I open my eyes again and watch the rain slide down his face. “How did you close up your black hole? How can you move on?”

  The corner of his mouth inches up, and he cups my face. “Because I have to. The sun keeps rising, and the seasons keep changing, and there are still people here I don’t want to lose.”

  Focus on that. There are still people here I don’t want to lose.

  “We need to find out about Abe Angert,” I say.

  “Abe?”

  “You grandfather Zeke told Jack II he thought the curse was Jack the First’s fault. But Jack II said it was Abe’s—is that your great-grandfather?”

  Saul shakes his head. “Abe was Zeke’s brother, my great-uncle—I don’t know much about him.”

  “We need to talk to someone who does.”

  Saul grimaces as he anticipates where I’m heading.

  “Saul, every O’ Donnell and Angert who came before us knew about the curse. We need to talk to your father.”

  He folds my fingers into his. “I never know what to expect when I get home. He may not remember the curse, or Abe. He may not even remember me.” He looks poised to go on, but instead he rests his mouth against my forehead.

  “I’ll be there with you,” I tell him. “If Eli doesn’t remember you, I’ll still be there.”

  His eyes move back and forth across my face, reading me. He nods and turns, leading the way through the woods.

  Thirty-Two

  THUNDER crackles, shivering the foundation of the Angert cabin.

  It’s never had quite the mythos of our farmhouse, but people do talk about it, guess what kinds of oddities hang on the walls or sit on dusty bookshelves. Because for all intents and purposes, this log cabin was the beginning of Five Fingers.

  Before Jonathan Alroy O’Donnell arrived, the Angerts had already built their cabin and opened the sawmill that put Five Fingers on the map. For a long time, they’d owned most of Main Street, but they’d been selling it off for generations now. When Eli hit it big with his first novel, he sold the rest—everything except the Cape Cod–style house they bought on the water and that rickety cabin in the woods.

  When Rachel and Eli split up, they sold the Cape Cod too. The original Angert cabin is all they have now, just like the farmhouse and the lone Jack’s Tart tree are all we have.

  Saul steps inside and runs a hand through his hair, shaking out the rain. I follow him past a staggeringly disorganized office piled with books and maps and old cassette tapes into a conjoined kitchen and living space, whose rear wall of windows reveals long swaths of storm gray and lush forest.

  “Wait here.” Saul turns to a brown leather couch draped in a set of red bedsheets, a dull plaid blanket, and some pillows. “I’ll check the bedroom.”

  As he treads down the hall, I realize how tiny the house is. It’s the kind of place you might rent for a long weekend with one or two friends, and judging by the bedding on the sofa, there’s no spare bedroom for Saul. I imagine him and Bekah camped out on the couches, telling ghost stories and watching the windows for the glint of coywolf eyes.

  There’s sadness in this house—a fireplace overflowing with soot, counters littered with orange pill bottles, and the kind of quiet that feels less like peace and more like absence—but the warmth isn’t gone entirely. A crayon drawing is still stuck to the fridge door, four stick people swimming under the lake, and notches in the back door record changes in Saul’s and Bekah’s heights. As miserable as they were when Bekah was suffering, I bet there still was softness and love in these walls. Moments, at least seconds, to feel bone-breaking crushes of happiness at being here together.

  Beneath the coffee table, my feet bump a hidden cardboard box, eliciting a metallic rattle. I drag it forward and move aside the crumpled newspaper to find a stack of picture frames. I slide one out and stare into the black-and-white image: the gleaming eyes of a toothy girl whose dark freckles sprinkle her cheeks like constellations. Pollen and leaves cling to the sweat streaks in her messy bangs.

  She can’t be much older than fifteen, but she’s got the crow’s-feet and fine wrinkles of someone mid-laugh.

  It’s absolutely beautiful.

  I set it down and keep riffling. Many are portraits; some were taken at wide angles; all are of kids: siblings, parents with their children. They’re uniformly tender, saturated in the many shades of gray and black, eyes shining and endless, freckles and wrinkles holy.

  They all have the same candidness of real living moments captured.

  My chest twinges when I reach the last photograph. A girl lies in a hospital bed, tubes in her nose, dark hair a mess on the pillow. She’s lifting herself up and pointing across the room, an open-mouthed smile ablaze across her face. Her unruly eyebrows are lifted in surprise.

  You can’t see what she’s pointing at, but it doesn’t matter. She is the sun. She is what matters, not whatever brought her that overflowing happiness.

  Her eyes and hair are dark, her skin fair and jaw sharply angled. She looks like her brother, only three years younger, permanently seventeen.

  “He’s sleeping.” Saul’s voice is low as he returns to the living room. I set the frame down. The sound and the sight of him, here in this place, breaks my heart. Not the way that losing Dad did, a constant, ever-deepening spiral into all the things I hadn’t realized I’d lost right away. No, this is a sharp break, a flood crashing through a dam, because Saul has—and his father and mother and Bekah have—hurt more than any person should.

  He sits beside me, taking the photograph in his hands. A crease burrows between his eyebrows. I touch the camera inked onto his skin. “Is this what the tattoo was about?”

  His eyes barely reach mine before turning back to the photograph.

  “They’re beautiful,” I say. “They’re alive.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Yeah. Can’t do anything that’s not ironic, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His fingers splay on the glass, touching Bekah’s teeth. “All these people, they’re all dead.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, not all. But someone from every pictu
re. So if there’s only one person, then, you know. I started this . . . um, not technically a business, because it was free . . . but this thing in college where I’d take pictures for families who had kids or partners with terminal illnesses.”

  I look at the open-mouthed girl again, expecting to see the haze of death, some kind of emptiness printed over her. She’s obviously ill—medical equipment visible all around her—but she’s still full of life, this indescribable twinkle I can’t imagine ever being stamped out.

  Dad had that too. Maybe some people die gradually, move away from their bodies over time, but others—people who shine—go in an instant. You can see their souls in their eyes until the last possible second, feel the gap in the world the second they’re lost.

  “They’re incredible, Saul.”

  He sets the frame down. “You know, back when I used to pray, all I ever asked was to be able to tell stories. So I could be like my father.” He juts his chin toward the box. “Telling stories never came naturally to me, but I was good at capturing moments. When I was a kid we had my photos hanging all over this place. When I left, I’d mail prints home for him—didn’t tell him about the whole sick kids thing, just sent them along. I never expected that when I got home they’d all be in a box. Even the ones that used to be hanging. I guess that’s the thing about moments. They always pass.”

  I thread my fingers through his. “You know what my least favorite thing is?”

  “What’s that, Jack?”

  “When people find out you’ve lost someone and they get uncomfortable and embarrassed and pitying and weird.”

  “It’s the worst.”

  “But not because I hate being pitied. I do, but it’s more than that. When people pity you, it’s like they honestly don’t realize the exact same thing’s coming for them. And then I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable and have to pity them, because, like, do you not realize it’s always someone’s turn? You haven’t noticed everyone gets a few blows that seem so big you can’t survive them? And then here is this person looking at you and dramatically murmuring, I’m sorry for your loss. And you have to look at them and hope your eyes aren’t saying, Don’t be too sorry. You’re next. You have to spend all this energy making your face say, Yes, it’s horrible, and extremely rare. I can’t believe I was the person who lost my father. You certainly won’t lose anyone. You’ll die first, out of everyone you love, on the eve of your hundredth birthday.”

  “June.” Saul says it so gingerly my eyes well with tears. He pulls me against his side and rests his chin on my head.

  We both know that pain comes for us all.

  It’s almost a relief. Because if all of us are going to someday lose the people we love most, or be lost by them, then what is there to do but live? But that doesn’t seem like a good enough answer. The answers to the hard questions never seem good enough.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t want to cry about someone who wasn’t mine to lose. I feel like I’m co-opting your grief.”

  His hands stop tracing idle circles on my back. “I think once you’ve felt grief, it’s hard not to catch someone else’s. Especially when the person grieving is someone you love.”

  The word, love, swells painfully in my chest. “Or maybe when you’ve felt grief, it’s hard not to love someone else who has too.”

  Saul eases my shoulders back to look me in the eye. “No,” he says. No declarations or arguments or speeches. Just no, and it’s all I want, all there’s room for in this tiny house of ghosts.

  “I’m so sure we can get to them,” I tell him. “Like they’re right there, on the other side, trying to help us.”

  “I know it feels like that. But our parents told us to stay away from the water for a reason, June. Nameless was there.”

  “I don’t think I can stay away.”

  His fingers graze my spine and stop against my neck, where he knots them through my hair. “I know you think my dad can tell us what really happened between our families. But, June, some days he doesn’t know what shoelaces are. Sometimes he doesn’t remember how to ask. If he can’t help us, promise me you won’t go back to the falls until we’re sure that’s what we need to do.”

  My chest cinches. I can’t wait that long. “He’ll remember.”

  “Just in case.” Saul goes to the mahogany liquor cabinet on the wall and pulls a notepad and pen from the bottom drawer.

  “Still hiding your diary?”

  “You know what I like about you?” he says.

  “My bite.”

  “Precisely. Being mocked by you mere moments after holding you in my arms restores my faith in humanity.” He sets the notepad on the ottoman. “If you must know, my dad uses this to take notes on different scotches. I figured we could write down—” He drops off.

  “What?”

  “Um.” He stares down.

  I pull the notebook from his hands and look at the shaky handwriting there: Your son is Saul. Your daughter is Bekah. Bekah is dead. I flip through the pages and find more notes: This is your house. You live here alone.

  The name Rachel alone on one page; on the next, Rachel is gone.

  Eggs go in the refrigerator.

  Your laundry room is in the cellar.

  Your agent’s name is Miriam.

  Saul pulls the notebook out of my hand, avoiding my gaze as he flips to an empty page.

  “Saul.”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t, June,” he says, voice phlegmy. “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Okay.”

  He scribbles names in opposite corners along the page’s bottom end. He writes Bekah’s beside his and Shadow’s and Grayson’s beside mine. “Saul, what are you—”

  “Making a family tree.” He starts four generations back, drawing a thin line marrying Jacob Angert to Abigail Marshall Winston. “This is when both our families say the feud started, and even if they’re lying about the farm being the cause of it, Zeke blamed the curse on Jack the First, so it’s a safe bet we only need to look this far back.”

  Beneath Jacob and Abigail, Saul lists their sons, Ezekiel “Zeke” Angert and Abraham “Abe” Angert. He connects Zeke to his wife, Elisa Avila, and beneath them he places their son, Eli. Finally, Saul links his father to Rachel Stolarz, then connects them to Saul and Bekah below. He slides the notebook my way. “Your turn, Jack.”

  As I start filling out my half, I realize how little I know about anyone but the Jacks. Like the Angerts, the O’Donnells are an antiquatedly patriarchal line. I scribble Jack I and Annie at the top, and below that I write Jack II and his wife, Charmaine, who produce a line to Jack III. I connect Dad to Mom, Léa Girard.

  As I scan it, I catalogue all the evidence of the curse: Jack the First seeing Nameless on his deathbed; Jack II splitting his time between watching the dark ghost in the woods and the son he could barely look at through the window; Jack III clutching his chest in a forest clearing as the ghost throttled him and stole my whole world. “That’s all I’ve got.”

  Saul analyzes the web of names, rubbing the wrinkle between his eyebrows. I’m distracted by his hands. Despite our current situation, his arm grazing mine still makes me feel a little like my organs might liquefy.

  For a few seconds, the curse becomes less urgent to me than Saul’s rain-dampened skin. Or the scratch of his fingers against his jaw’s shadow. His eyes slope down my legs then return to the words on the page, and my stomach swelters. He glances my way again, and a slow smile quirks the corner of his mouth. “Why are you grinning?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yeah, June, you are. We’re looking at our cursed family trees, and you’re grinning.”

  I shrug, and he jogs my knee in his hand. I set my hand over his, and his smile widens until he lets out a heavy breath and refocuses on the notebook, leaving me to burn up by myself. I’m about to suggest we take a brief a
nd steamy recess from the History of Grief when a low voice rattles behind us.

  “What is she doing here?” Eli asks from the doorway, his mouth twisted downward. He feebly grips the doorjamb, shaking his gray head. “Can you see her, son?” he chokes out as he takes one stumbling step back, half-supported by the wall. All the heat in me turns icy then, because I see it so clearly in his face: Eli Angert is afraid of me. “Can you see the ghost?”

  Saul rises and approaches his father. “Dad, this is my friend Junior. She’s not a ghost. You’re confused.”

  Eli stumbles, shaking his head frantically, eyes flashing between us in a frenzied corkscrew. “I didn’t do anything,” he cries at me, voice crackling. “Don’t take my baby!” he screams. “Don’t take my Bekah!”

  I shake my head, speechless. I’m trembling as badly as he is. His eyes are clear, homed in on me. He doesn’t look confused; he looks like he sees something dark and brutal.

  “Dad,” Saul tries again, inching nearer to him.

  Eli scrambles for the door. “Leave us alone, Maolissa. You can’t have her—leave us alone!”

  He bolts into the thunderstorm, and Saul takes off after him, leaving me to chase them both.

  When I reach the forest, sunlit mist replaces the rain.

  Ahead, Saul’s gaining on his father. Eli stops shambling from tree to tree and slumps against a trunk, his fingers digging into the bark. Saul gets an arm around him, but Eli’s hysterical now, waving his arms against Saul’s grip.

  When he sees me, his knees sink onto a broken tree limb. His fingers curl into Saul’s leg. “There,” he cries, “you see her too. The dead O’Donnell girl. Issa.”

  Saul registers shock, and I look down at myself, half-expecting to see my clothes covered in blood or some visible evil circling me. But Eli and Saul are staring past me.

  I turn and balk.

  Within Feathers’s rose-tinted aura, crisscrossed by Whites, stands a girl.