June

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  Trucks of equipment had already rumbled into town. All day, covered garment carts had rattled into Memorial High, and notices had gone up on the trees of Center Square, asking for volunteers to appear in costume in the background—“extras,” they were called, as if they were the cherries on top of the ice cream sodas served down at Schillinger’s Drug. But even though the night before, Lindie had overheard her father and his friends discussing the imminent arrival of the film crew, she would only truly believe it when she saw it. Something so good seemed just plain impossible.

  “I’ll put the dress on first thing tomorrow,” she said. A dress wasn’t just a dress anymore. It stood for the lives she saw laid out before both June and herself, on the far side of the Hollywood fantasy. Quiet, adult lady lives marked by sanitary belts held on by metal clasps under rubber underwear, of regular bridge parties and dinner clubs, of loose face powder that smelled like old people. She flopped back onto the bed.

  “What if you try it now?” June asked brightly, turning back to the wardrobe, riffling again through the other options, although she knew the rest had too many adornments for Lindie’s taste, not to mention too much room in the bustline. “We could do your hair. I’ll put some rouge on your cheeks. Just to make sure it all fits together.”

  But Lindie wasn’t budging.

  “We’ll get up extra early, then,” June said, in a tone she liked to imagine she’d someday use to address her children. Lindie smiled, relieved, and June thought to ask how Lindie wanted to do her hair, but instead she just smoothed Lindie’s temple, which sent the other girl’s heart aflutter, then settled down beside her.

  “What do you think they’re like?” Lindie asked in a romantic daze, eyeing Jack Montgomery on the magazine cover that lay at June’s elbow. Before Lindie’d heard of Erie Canal, Jack Montgomery was far down her list of favorite movie stars, well below Cary Grant and Bogie, and she’d have sniffed at the mention of Diane DeSoto—a studio actress who’d never been, until now, in a leading role. But Jack Montgomery and Diane DeSoto were (knock on wood) coming to St. Jude, which meant they were a hundred times better than every other movie star in the world.

  “Do you think Diane DeSoto really washes her face in milk? How tall is Jack Montgomery? Do you think they’re really in love? Will you audition too? You’ll try for it, won’t you, June? I know for sure I’d get cast if I looked like you.”

  “Hush.” June wouldn’t pretend she wanted to be cast. Nor would she tolerate the idea of Lindie crushed by rejection, when all she had to do was dress like a proper girl who washed her face every now and then; how could she be so blind to the advantage of those small improvements? June considered whether she was strong enough to wrestle Lindie into the dress herself, but she knew the other girl would beat her out of sheer cussedness.

  “I heard there might be speaking parts,” Lindie pressed, even though she’d made that up. “I bet you could get one.”

  “I can’t audition.” June rose from the bed and checked her face in the mirror again, an annoying habit she’d been exhibiting in recent months, along with rinsing her hair with apple cider vinegar to give it shine.

  “You absolutely can.”

  “No, Lindie.” June’s voice was firm. “I’m getting married. It’s not appropriate.”

  Lindie sat up. “You are not getting married.” June’s sharp look in the mirror told her to adjust her tone. “I only mean you can’t get married without a groom, June.” Arthur Danvers had been gone for months—since October—and who knew where? Supposedly, he was overseeing his brother’s business interests in the South, but Lindie wasn’t so sure. “And even if he was here, do you really want to spend your whole life looking up at that pasty face?”

  June’s mouth tightened. But now all Lindie could think of was the stiff way Artie Danvers had taken June’s arm back in October before their fateful turn around Center Square. He was a thirty-five-year-old bachelor funded by his older brother. As far as Lindie was concerned, the only way he’d snagged a girl like June was because she had a greedy mother desperate to sell her daughter off to the highest bidder. “Artie Danvers is a nothing! He’s a straight line. He’s a cold bath.” Her arms stuttered in the space between them, hands pulling for the words that would finally make June see sense. “He’s—”

  “Stop.”

  Was that June’s mother’s step in the upstairs hall, just on the other side of the door? The girls froze, straining to hear above the purr of the fan blades, waiting for a knock, for the scent of Pond’s cold cream, for Cheryl Ann to discover June had locked herself in, and insist she open the door right this instant, young lady. But no knock came, and, after a good long exhalation, June’s shoulders relaxed. She eased herself onto the bed again, brown hair haloing her face on the pillow.

  Lindie put herself down carefully beside June. “My point is, you can’t marry someone you don’t love.”

  “And how do you know I don’t love him?”

  “Because I know.”

  June smiled again, a weary smile, as if Lindie’s affection was something to be endured. “You’re sweet to me.”

  Lindie gentled her voice. “We can leave right now. On my bicycle. We’ll pedal over to Idlewyld and hide out until we come up with our next step.” As the name of that place slipped off her tongue, Lindie felt the memory of a frog quivering in her hands, out on the edge of that lake five miles away, on the night she’d had June all to herself and allowed herself to dream it could always be just them.

  “Little Bear.” June tucked Lindie’s bob behind her ear and fingered her earlobe. She rubbed it once, twice, as if for good luck, as if, like Lindie, she was memorizing the moment.

  Lindie thought, hoped, there would be more. But June turned and nestled into sleep.

  Imagine them then, two girls curled in a corner bedroom of Two Oaks, breathing in the metal fan’s whir. The floorboards shift and moan. The pocket doors hiccup. Lindie lays her arm across June’s warm hip. She keeps her eyes propped open as long as she is able, fancying herself on a still night aboard the Pequod, her shipmates at rest, the great white whale fathoms below. Her mind trades the tush-tush-tush of the Ohio crickets for the thrash of a wild ocean she’s yet to hear. Her eyelids succumb to the darkness. Only then does sleep steal her.

  Cassie was already halfway to the bedroom door when she properly awoke. The world was shrieking. She knew the horrible sound wasn’t coming from inside her head, but it was already doing damage in there, clawing at the quiet she’d stored up. She could guess what would come next: an anxious headache, a churning stomach, maybe even the sharp urge of diarrhea, tingling palms, the light too bright even with the blinds and curtains closed, with the eye mask on, with a pillow over her head. Until only moments before, she’d been so sweetly nestled in the palm of that dream of those two girls, which she realized had taken place in the very same bed she now called her own, although the room had been full in the dream, of ribbons and watercolors, and also of a succulent devotion that made her ache now that it was out of reach.

  The modern world clawed in. The house howled a dreadful, screeching protest. Cassie couldn’t bear it. She grasped at the floor for clothes, coming up with a dish towel. She realized she didn’t have her glasses on—of course, that was the first problem, she was awake enough now to realize that she was blind—and grappled at the side table and cursed aloud when she heard her glasses crash to the floor. All that time the vicious noise continued. She understood, once she found her glasses and the room crisped into view, that the sound was one only a place as old as Two Oaks could make, as though it were clearing its throat of ancient, thick phlegm, coughing and groaning in the process. But that didn’t mean she knew what it meant, why it had begun, or that she liked it.

  Then, for a fleeting moment, the clamor ended. Cassie experienced a blessed instant in which the house was just as it was supposed to be—not exactly silent (the dog barking down the street, the rattle of the windows atop the porch line as a breeze scuttled we
st), but contained. Her eardrums buzzed against the silence. She looked around the bright corner bedroom—the chenille bedspread she’d kicked aside in her sleep, the dust-filled lace valances framing her view like fancy sideways parentheses, the glass of water she had managed not to push off the scratched side table—and remembered herself: she was naked, but not insane. She could resist her body’s desire to break at the threat of the world.

  But then the sound came back, eight million times worse than fingernails on a chalkboard, and infinitely louder. Cassie wrapped the bedspread around her body and blinked her way out her door and into the upstairs hall. Out here, the clang rattled her jaw. She could feel the sweet residue of the dream sifting off her. She momentarily considered going back into the bedroom to try to grasp the last golden bits of it—two girls, was it? Two girls, both churning with their future prospects—but already she knew it was futile, that the dream was lost. The air on her twenty-five-year-old skin let her know she was all the way back into herself. Released. And if she stood here much longer, she felt certain she would lose her sense of hearing.

  She stepped down the stairs, sun refracting through the stained-glass window and casting a green patch onto her right pinkie toe. The house blared on. In the same moment she realized that it was the doorbell she was hearing, it occurred to her that it might be someone from the bank who was ringing it. Anxiety swooped over her as she thought of all that mail she’d watched the blue-suited mailman stuff through the slot in the front door day after day: past-due notices, letters from the bank, from the legal firm that had handled the transfer of the estate. She marveled at her own irresponsibility. The broken furnace, the leaky roof, the cracked foundation. To be the person who lost, or destroyed, the family home after more than a hundred years seemed inevitable and tragic. But then, she was an orphan, her grandmother was dead, and she had no siblings; could she really be faulted for being a screwup if everyone had abandoned her?

  Cassie’s ankles were briefly patchworked in a rosy bit of light from the stained glass as she stepped down toward her fate. The bank, the bank. Fourteen thousand dollars had sounded like enough money back in November, when she’d gotten the check and the deed, but she hadn’t opened any of the cellophane-paned notices, and the phone had been ringing off the hook since yesterday. Shit. It had to be the bank.

  By the time Cassie descended the stately home’s quarter-hewn oak staircase, slippery from a century of floor wax despite the grime, the bell—it was laughable to call it a bell, really, but there was no such word as doorblast—had shut up. Wrapped in the old bedspread she’d pulled from the bottom of the four-poster, Cassie squinted down the ample foyer—dark no matter how sunny the day—and out the front door. She saw movement, but it was far away, and hard to make sense of through the lace curtain that sat against the thick, leaded glass. In between her and the door lay a great heap of envelopes, delivered in manageable daily bits by the whistling mailman, whose face she’d never managed to see; she usually spied on him from the second-story window.

  She hesitated for a moment. Thought of going back to bed. But then the phone started up, relentless and desperate as it had been since yesterday morning. The touch of outside—first the doorbell, then the phone—unsettled her in the way little had since she’d moved to St. Jude. Maybe they were repossessing the house. Maybe she hadn’t paid enough taxes. Maybe maybe maybe, and as Cassie’s mind swirled with the day she feared she’d be having—sweaty palms, dry mouth, pulse scurrying away from her—the anxiety charged up and changed, like quicksilver, into bold anger. Cassie strode through the foyer, kicking the tangle of envelopes out of her way. Screw the bank. Screw whatever they, or anyone else, thought they could take from her. Her grandmother had left this house to Cassie and Cassie alone, and Cassie was allowed to do whatever she wanted here, even sleep until noon in order to spend more time with imaginary people.

  Cassie’s footsteps sent the crystal chandelier rattling above her. The framed watercolor still lifes quaked as she strode to the heavy oak door. She threw it open.

  Summer buzzed.

  It hit her like a hammer, a day like this, too much light and color, too many wild roses with too many insects drinking from their hearts. Jogging away from her, down the front walk, was a man in a gray suit, smartphone to his ear. The faint dulling of wind chimes, a tractor roaring up the road, wisps of clouds across the sky like lace netting over a blue dress. Her first impulse, even after six months, was to reach for her camera, to think aperture and focus and light, which way to shoot, what to place at the center of the frame. Her palms itched, her mouth watered; it would be a good picture, or at least the chance to make one. But no; she pushed that desire away. She didn’t do that, didn’t believe in it, anymore.

  To distract herself, she focused on the stranger moving away from her. He was compact. His shoulder blades stretched against the slate gabardine, as though advertising how a jacket was supposed to fit a man. He was nearly to the sidewalk.

  “What?” she yelled after him. She regretted the word the instant it slipped from her mouth. She was naked, after all, and wrapped, like a toddler, in a bedspread. Cassandra Danvers was no prophet, but, as the man turned, she instantly understood that she’d just taken the first step to dismantling her hard-won solitude. It was the direct way he looked at her, as though they already shared some kind of binding contract, one from which she would not easily escape.

  He sprinted back up the path like she was saving his life. Even though she’d essentially become a hermit, Cassie could still read people like a book. This man coming toward her with a furrowed brow was stressed out. And much closer to her age—couldn’t have been a day over thirty—than she’d guessed when she spotted his professional-looking shoulders from behind.

  He mounted the groaning wooden steps. Her name trembled out of his mouth with a question at the end. He pocketed the smartphone and rushed across the porch. The phone inside the office stopped ringing; the grackles nesting to the left of the front door squawked to fill the silence.

  Sunlight ricocheted off the tiles that still remained on the Two Oaks porch. They were gray now, and wiggled in their settings, like diamonds in an inherited wedding band. Still, even more than a hundred years old, they were lustrous enough to reflect the sun’s beams and make this man approaching appear to glow. Cassie lifted her hand to block the glare. He’d been the one calling since yesterday, she understood in a wave of mistrustfulness; the house phone had stopped ringing the moment he pressed end on his cell.

  “I’m Nick Emmons.”

  His hand was out for a shake, but his eyes darted everywhere but her, assessing. She followed his gaze up to the dry rot along the crossbeams of the roof, then to the chipping column at the porch’s western corner. She felt as she had in the hospital, holding her grandmother’s wilted hand, wanting to shout, “This isn’t her! You don’t even know her!” to the well-intentioned nurses, with their charts and machines. All he saw here was a wreck. She narrowed her eyes at this stranger, imagined his foot breaking through one of the ancient floorboards that lined the porch’s tile. He’d be trapped waist-high, out of reach of the doorbell. She’d steal his smartphone and go back to bed and blame the whole thing on a house with a mind of its own.

  But now a breeze carried the scent of him, which was a bit like woodsmoke and a bit like Speed Stick, the green kind, the kind Cassie’s first crush, the high school student who’d mowed the lawn in Columbus, had worn. Here stood a good-smelling, impeccably dressed man, washed in the scent of Cassie’s early erotic fantasies, the corners of his mouth now pulling up at the sight of her; she couldn’t pretend she didn’t like the way the hushed blue of his tie played off the gray of the suit, or how a cowlick detoured a sprig of hair off his forehead.

  “This place is amazing,” he said, and she found herself delighted by surprise.

  But it was best to rip off the Band-Aid. “You from the bank?” she asked, pulling the bedspread tight, enjoying the nubble of chenille under her fingerti
ps.

  “Eighteen ninety-five? ’Ninety-six?” He sized up the semicircle of yellow brick that framed the front door. “Was this the original entrance? Never seen anything like it.”

  “Uh,” Cassie said, then repeated her question about the bank, which he patently refused to answer. He tapped his foot against the slackened tiles, then turned to take in the view from the front door; she guessed that was his Ford Fiesta out front. A pickup pulled by, the only glimpse of the driver a tattooed arm out the open window accompanied by the twang of the country station. Nick surveyed the roof of the porch again before turning back and asking about the landline. Did she ever pick up? Why didn’t she have an answering machine? Did she have a cell? E-mail? She was incredibly hard to get in touch with, did she know that? Cassie watched this Nick Emmons unconsciously pull his cell out twice, both times punching in his secret code, opening up e-mail and text, before switching it off and slipping it back into its home, the pocket over his heart. He was a man who would not hold still.

  Cassie thought—and told herself not to think—of Jim. Jim, with his oft-disconnected landline, depending on how tight on funds he was that month. Jim, who, when everyone else went wireless, and Cassie mocked and cajoled him to join the modern age, had been resolute. Jim, who never shaved, and was close enough to fifty that she’d never dared ask how many years he had on her, who didn’t own a suit, and showered only when absolutely necessary. Cassie didn’t exactly miss him, and she knew that ending things had been the right, if painful choice. But with the arrival of this well-dressed, good-smelling, nosy, busy man, she found her mind retreating to that unmade bed on the floor of Jim’s studio, his paint-stained fingertips playing scales up her spine.