A Million Junes

by Emily Henry

  My lungs stutter until they’re on fire. It won’t end here, Abe, I think with all my might and keep swimming. I’m fixing it.

  I ignore the voice that says it’s already over. I repeat in my mind: Saul will be okay, you will be okay, everything will be okay, even as my muscles stop responding to my commands and my lungs twitch and cold dread tangles around me.

  Now other memories crash over me—not from the Whites but from my own mind: Mom’s hands in my hair, Toddy’s chin resting on her head, Grayson and Shadow wrestling me in the yard, Hannah pulling me close in the school parking lot as snow falls on our hair, Saul looking into my eyes and saying, “I can hear all of you, rushing around in there. A million Jacks and Juniors and Junes, a city of them,” bees awake beneath my skin, buzzing eagerly toward him.

  I DON’T WANT TO DIE.

  I think it like a scream, like a battle cry. Even if it means seeing Dad, I don’t want to die. There, I admit it and fight a losing fight against the water, thrash, scream with my body as I can’t with my mouth, and fight.

  I WANT TO LIVE. I WANT TO LIVE. I WANT TO LIVE.

  My toes graze something solid.

  Sand. The valley beneath me starts sloping upward to meet the shore in the distance. I kick, and soon my feet hit ground. My knees hit ground. I’m crawling up the shore.

  And then there’s air.

  Shocking, hot, abundantly dry.

  My face is above water. I collapse onto my stomach, greedily gulping oxygen. I’m shaking, unable to stand. I curl into the fetal position, too tired to acknowledge the girl sitting behind me, and dig my hands into the sand.

  It’s not sand at all. It’s cool on my hands but doesn’t melt. Warm on the soles of my feet but doesn’t burn. I let a fistful sift through my fingers. It floats to the earth like trillions of Whites crushed to bits. The ground is made of crumbled memories.

  Every spare inch of me has been dusted chalky white, as if I’ve rolled in a vat of flour. I wipe at it, but it doesn’t even smear.

  Craning my neck, I look at the sky. Out over the water it’s a gray-blue, but past Issa, the sandy shore extends into a desert plain, and billowing mist forms a high wall in the distance, blocking the horizon from sight. The Whites are coming from the haze, carried by the wind. I’m closer than ever to wherever they come from.

  In a way this place is familiar. I imagine this is what you see when you open your eyes after a plane crash or car accident, in that moment before you register the truth of wreckage, blood, and rocks. This is a place you see as you’re falling asleep, and you think it must’ve come from your brain, but you have no clue where you got the idea.

  I’ve crossed through the veil.

  Hot wind batters me, loud but strangely calming. I struggle out of my coat and stand, forming a visor with my hands to shield my eyes from the light and the whip of my hair.

  “He’s not dead.”

  Issa’s voice startles me. She’s standing now, water lapping at her feet. She dusts the white stuff off her skin; it doesn’t cling to her as it does to me.

  “Saul?”

  She tips her head toward the wall of mist. “Walk with me.”

  My muscles groan in protest, but I fall into step beside her, her copper curls lashing her creamy face and pink lips like streaks of sunlight. “What is this place?”

  Her shoulders barely hitch in a shrug. “It doesn’t need a name, does it?”

  “Everywhere else has one.”

  “Then call it the place that isn’t everywhere else. Or perhaps the other place.”

  “Is it an afterlife?”

  Issa laughs, a sound not dissimilar to the wind in its crisp, vital quality. She sets her hand against a twisted tree that grows out of the sand, casting slight shade. “It’s just a place,” she says. “Like any other. This world is outside your world. If your world is the womb, this is the person it belongs to. It carries you everywhere, but you don’t see it until you’re born.”

  “You mean until you die.” My voice shakes. “I drowned, didn’t I?”

  “You don’t have to die to get here,” Issa says. “Most do, but your world has cracks in its walls. Sometimes things get in, sometimes they get out. It takes a great amount of luck or coincidence for a person to squeeze through.”

  “And which brought me here?” I say.

  “I did. And you did.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “I hoped you would choose to come here as you did,” she says. “Alive rather than dead.”

  “I didn’t make a choice. I came to find Saul.”

  “Yes.” Her lips lift a blaze of smile. She keeps walking, guiding me through the Whites and wind. The gray overhead never changes. I see no sun or moon or stars, only the white underfoot, the shifting mass of water molecules ahead, and the Whites blowing past us. Sometimes I hear seagulls, distant and blithe.

  “Can we go back?” I ask her. “Home, I mean.”

  “Perhaps.” She doesn’t go on.

  “What about the curse—is it broken now?”

  “Our house sits in a special place,” Issa says. “Things were meant to be better there. Quiet, peaceful, good. Grief tore through it. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I saw what happened at the falls, what your father did when Abe brought you to him.”

  She squints into the wind. “Grief isn’t a curse, June. Pain affects us all, even those of us who live a little closer to paradise than the rest. But my father’s grief turned into poison. It ate through his heart and changed our family: his son, his son’s son, you. And Abe’s shame destroyed him. Shame, many say, was the first curse.”

  “Abe isn’t cursed,” I argue. “He is the curse. He killed my father and your father. He even killed Bekah.”

  “What you saw between Abe and my father,” she says, “was one haunted man trying to find solace in revenge against another. What you saw happen to your father was the nameless thing that used to be Abe lashing out when he saw what was happening to Bekah. He never hurt her. When you saw him linger near her, when she was ill, you witnessed a haunted ghost remembering what it is to weep.”

  “You’re saying he was justified?”

  “He has been our family’s curse—exerting his pain, exacting his idea of justice—but this didn’t start with him. And he’s not the only one to blame, just as our family isn’t the only one cursed. What my father did to Abe broke something in him, June. Abe lived with it until the day he ended his life. His curse—Saul’s curse—is different from ours but every bit as real. Shame steals from them. It eats at their vast, vivid minds until they become small and shadowy, trapped alone in a dark, wordless place.”

  “What about Bekah? The cancer?”

  “That wasn’t the curse. That was life, all its brightness and its dark. But the way the Angerts forget—that, I think, is a little of both: life and the curse. Life has made them want to forget, conditioned their bodies for it. The curse takes every tendril of memory, pulse of life, every touch and whisper and golden moment from them while Abe watches and, in his pain, strikes out. The only way to end this is to release the past. To be the one who lets go first, with no guarantee the other will follow.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?” I demand. “Why did you show me all that? If we need to let the past go, then why haven’t you moved on?”

  She smiles wordlessly.

  It seems like we’ve been walking for hours. There are no signifiers for time or distance, and my body never gets more tired than it already was—absolutely wrecked with fatigue. My mind feels empty as when morning draws you from a dreamless sleep, but my throat feels swollen and dry.

  It’s hard to hold on to the truth here, even harder to remember the outside world. I try to picture my father, my mother, but their faces are blurry. I picture Saul’s eyes. I hold on to them as we wal
k.

  “Saul?” I manage to ask her.

  She smiles and walks onward. I have to believe she’s taking me to him.

  I keep moving, moving, moving. At some point I must have fallen without noticing. I’m on my stomach, dragging myself forward. Issa walks evenly alongside me.

  Coywolves pass us, their keen eyes watching me, belly-down and crawling. Ahead, blurs of color in the roaring wall of mist become squiggly silhouettes. Wind sprays water against my face, and I open my mouth to swallow it, but it’s not enough. Even without the sun, my skin feels raw and scorched.

  My mind slithers toward the moisture, its tongue lolling, praying for a drink, but my limbs won’t listen, and the mist remains out of reach.

  At its edge, small white tufts whiz like snowflakes.

  I focus on Issa’s ankles and keep moving.

  My skin begins to burn, as if the dust on it is poison. I scratch at it, tear into it with my fingernails trying to get it off me, more desperate with every passing second of white-hot pain.

  “June,” Issa says.

  “My skin,” I rasp, “it hurts.” I slash and scrape at my arms and legs, tears pouring down my face, but still the coat of Whites won’t smudge. “It won’t come off.” The pain hits me in waves, sending grotesque images through my mind: a pool of blood overflowing my cupped hands, spreading up my arms, covering my body.

  I scream and rub at my arms, seeing nothing but red now where white was. Red all over, blood covering me, and I know—somehow I know—it’s Abe’s.

  I’m bathed in it. The memories of that night on the hill flap against me like a thousand angry bats.

  “I didn’t do it,” I gasp as I try to writhe away, but I can’t escape the memory. It’s everywhere; the blood is everywhere.

  Issa crouches and gingerly frees my hands from my hair. “What’s happening?” I sob.

  “You were supposed to have cherries that tasted like sunlight, a house full of love, and a peaceful forest,” she says. “But instead, this is what was passed down to you, and I’m sorry for that, June, but you can’t get it off yourself.”

  I see it all: I’ve inherited the man who swept his daughter from the water, laughing, and who held her empty body, weeping in dew-slicked grass.

  The little boy who watched it happen, the man he became, who learned to turn invisible, who saw ghosts and feared love because he knew what it was to lose.

  My legacy is the little boy who grew up haunted, who thought his father couldn’t see him. Who left me and my mother whenever the house became too crowded with ghosts of his childhood. The man who abandoned me again and again and didn’t know how to stay, no matter how badly he wanted to.

  My birthright was Issa’s death, Abe’s assault, Jack the First’s refusal to forgive.

  Two ghosts: vengeance and grace.

  The blood on my hands may not be real, but I was born with it all the same.

  My inheritance is grief and sunlight, and the ability to choose which to hold on to.

  “How?” I sob, the pain of my own skin becoming unbearable. “How do I make it stop?”

  “I’m taking you to the one who can,” Issa says.

  Forty-Two

  ISSA helps me to my feet. The burning still sears through me, but her arm is strong under mine as she guides me onward.

  We’re closer to the mist now, and the blurs of color take on the shapes of people. Peals of laughter, snippets of conversation, slip through the wind.

  “When you come here, you’re meant to wash time off. To let your past settle.” Issa kicks one foot through the not-sand underfoot. “Your Moments are meant to rest. But our two families live in a place riddled with cracks, and instead of crumbling when I washed, my Moments were drawn back through the holes by someone who hungered for them. I was free to move on, but I stayed. For Abe.

  “When he arrived, he wasn’t ready to let go. He didn’t wash himself, so the pull on his Moments drew him back through the veil too. For four generations, our families’ inability to let go has brought Moments back. The hate between our families has anchored Abe, has allowed us to stay.”

  “They weren’t being sent to us,” I whisper. “Saul and I were bringing them?”

  “In a way, the memories belong to you—they’re pieces of what made you—so when you longed for the things you’d lost, the Moments came, as they had for your father and for his. All of you were born already holding on to the pain of the past and hating Angerts, because my father had.”

  Genetic memory. Memory passed through DNA. I shake my head. “But I never hated the Angerts. Not really.”

  “Not all coyotes dislike wolves,” Issa says. “In another life, perhaps your lack of hate might have been enough to let our family’s darkest memories rest. But you and Saul were each looking for the person you’d lost. And there were fragments of those people—shared DNA—in the Moments that came to you, and within Abe and me.”

  “I thought . . . I hoped my dad was sending them.”

  Issa’s cerulean eyes flick across my face. “Whenever I could, when cracks and thin places in your world and this one aligned, I came through. I didn’t bring the Moments, but I guided you to those I thought you needed. Abe—the thing that used to be Abe—he guided your father and grandfather to the Moments that hurt most.”

  “It all hurt, Issa.” Tears squeeze from my eyes from the effort of holding in the screams of pain. I focus on the meager relief the mist brings my sizzling skin. “The happy memories hurt just as bad, maybe worse.”

  She studies me. “I know. But that kind of pain teaches you something different, June.”

  Finally, we’re within the mist, each drop cooling the burning of my skin and clearing my mind. It snags on something Issa said. “You said Abe guided my dad and grandfather to the Moments that hurt most. What about me?”

  “Abe’s watched you grow up, June.” Her lips pull into a straight line, the wind lashing strands of hair across her face. “Of the three Jacks I’ve tried to guide, you’re the first who was ready to listen. It was harder, I think, for Abe to hate you. Otherwise he would’ve come for you when Eli lost Bekah. You were too innocent then, even to the thing he’d become. But tonight, I could see it in him. He was going to hurt you.”

  How could he take the thing I loved most but hesitate to hurt me? Didn’t he know he’d already torn out my heart? That he’d hurt me worse than any physical pain could? A coywolf trots past, and I clear my throat of its teary thickness. “And whose side are the coywolves on?”

  Issa almost laughs. “Did you know there’s a fungus that drives everything it infests to spread itself? The fungus infects hosts with a desire to destroy. Evolution—nature—did that.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “The coywolves are the antithesis of nature. They have no capacity for revenge, no instinct to kill. They’re driven by wholeness, the impulse to heal. They try to draw everything here, to be washed clean. They steal your shoes so you can leave your world—you must be barefoot and wide-eyed, just as you entered it.

  “The coywolves weren’t trying to show you memories; they were trying to bring you here. Thresholds are more than randomly chosen divisions between rooms. They’re places where change—transformation—happens, and whenever you slipped through one, barefoot, to a thinner piece of the veil, you saw the memories as we’re able to in this place.”

  “And O’Dang!? That’s here too?”

  “There’s only one of that tree,” she confirms. “Where you live, you might wander through a thousand different cracks to find it. The same with the water you came through—it overlaps with the pool beneath the falls and a hundred others. Our families’ darkest Moments are drawn to that water, because I died there.”

  We’ve reached another shore. Fog hangs thick in the air above us, but ahead, the water is a healthy teal, waves topped by
half domes of refracted light, and the clear sky gleams cornflower blue.

  All around us, people emerge from the mist. Some, like me, are led by dustless people, but most are alone, covered to varying degrees in White-dust.

  “We’re meant to be washed clean, June,” Issa says. “To let our burdens fall away and moments come apart like dandelions. It happened long ago, to the wolves and coyotes and birds who stumbled through, before any human tread on that grassy hill—and it’s still happening.”

  She nods toward an old woman shuffling into the glittering froth of the tide. “Most people, when they come here, are finally free, but what they don’t realize is that they could’ve been all along if they’d just let go.”

  Issa faces the wall of mist, where a shape emerges, its details filling out as a stooped man in a tartan hat limps forward, damp eyes rising and falling to take in the sight. He begins to cry as his gaze locks onto something behind us: the woman bathing in the water. Her layer of white has started to rinse off, and when she sees him, a laugh breaks free from her throat. She runs for him, falling in the water, and he catches her, gripping her tightly.

  “When I first arrived, I waited here for the boy I loved,” Issa says. “And when he came, I saw him, shrouded in mist but so very, clearly, excellently him.”

  She squints across the light-dappled water, and I can recall the feel of her sadness, the feathery warmth.

  “He waded toward me, but he didn’t let time wash off. The stars hadn’t yet burned out. The planet wasn’t cold. And I was waiting. Even then, he couldn’t let go. He turned away—slipped back through, though he no longer had a body to wear there.” She swipes a gold-streaked curl from her eyes. “I know what you must think, but he isn’t lost, Jack. There’s still hope. For you and Saul and for him.”

  I search the freckles on her nose, the glints in her eyes. “How can you say that? He’s tortured us for decades, Issa.”

  “You must be tired from carrying all that Past around,” she replies. “It must be exhausting to live for four Jacks.”