Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why in the world not? We didn’t come all this way so you could guess at which house they lived in, did we?”

  Julie was going to stop and ask directions anyway, when we came upon it. Both of us knew it was the right one. Me because of the area and the lot number. Julie because she just knew. She pulled the Honda to the soft shoulder of the dirt road and shut off the engine. The silence was sudden and deep.

  “It’s burnt, Bubby,” June said, awake now in the back seat. “Isn’t it burnt, Bubby? Yuck!”

  “Yes, June. It’s burnt very bad.”

  The three of us sat in the car and stared out at the remains of the Greene residence. “Did you know about this?” asked Julie.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  The lot was small like the others, cut off from view of the other houses by untidy stands of locust and pine trees, briar patches, alder bushes and the like. There was nothing directly across the road but more woods and bushes and a small, gurgling culvert that poured dirty runoff from the road into the ditch. The grass on this side had grown long, had browned under the onslaught of winter, and lay in thick, frozen, duncoloured waves all over the lot. The neighbours, it seemed, had been using the place as a junkyard, and tangled up in the grass were the rusted frames of bicycles like steel skeletons, discarded tires, old cans, plastic pop and white-and-blue Javex bottles, broken furniture, an old, yellow refrigerator with the doors safely removed. In the centre of the lot sat the house, or what remained of it. Once it had been a one-storey bungalow. Now the front wall was missing, and the three that were left had been charred black and eaten through in places by the fire that had torn through it. Most of the roof was gone, collapsed in on the house. Inside was a collection of burnt timbers, fallen this way and that, and the occasional glimpse of something recognizable — part of a green Formica kitchen table, a perfectly serviceable wood-grained TV console, floor model, with the screen melted away and its electronic insides exposed. I had seen destruction like this before, on the news on TV when there had been a house fire of note. One look at the green weeds growing inside the house, forcing their way up through the burnt floor boards and the charred wreckage, told you this fire had happened a long time ago.

  Julie didn’t want to get out of the car. “Why bother?” she said. “There’s nothing here.”

  But I wouldn’t listen to her. I got out, careful not to go too near the house in case it chose that moment to come tumbling the rest of the way to the ground, as it should have done years before. I picked through the garbage on the lot, without any real purpose other than a vague, uneasy curiosity. Any clues to the personalities who once lived here were long erased by the fire and the contribution of junk from the neighbours over the years. It was surprising to me that in such a neat little town as Three Rivers, a town ordinance would not have demanded that this place be levelled, even if it was on Mermaid Lane. At a distance from the precarious wreckage, I could get a rough layout of the little house as it must once have been. Small kitchen, living room, and bathroom. (I could see the blackened stump of a smashed toilet peeking out from underneath a jumble of cauterized timber.) Two or three bedrooms on that side. Perhaps a small, narrow hallway. All of it merely a suggestion of a ghost of a memory. By the time I had circled the entire ruined structure and come back to the place where I started, June and Julie had climbed out of the car and stood watching me. There seemed to be no recognition from June, and I was both disappointed and relieved. She was, however, standing without her jacket, hugging herself for warmth. I mentioned this to Julie.

  “Oh,” Julie said. “Sorry.”

  She made June go back into the car and get her parka.

  “So,” I said. “I drove all the way down here for this?”

  Julie only shook her head. “What do you think happened?”

  “How could we know? Electrical maybe? What does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t, I guess,” said Julie. “You weren’t expecting anything, were you?”

  “No,” I told her. “I wasn’t.”

  I wasn’t expecting anyone related or even remotely connected to the Greenes to live here. Still, I expected to see a house still standing. I expected to be able to take June around and show her where she used to live. To see if she remembered anything. But apparently she didn’t. She had found her jacket, but seemed to be having trouble putting it on. I told her to take the jacket out of the back seat before she attempted to wear it. She listened to me, kind of. She drew her arm through the wrong sleeve and the jacket dangled uselessly off her. Julie laughed. June was about to laugh with her, then her smile froze. She stood staring intently at something inside the house. My heart skipped a beat.

  “What is it, June?”

  “Bubby lived here,” June said quietly, and a shiver, light as a trailing finger or a low wave breaking gently across a beach, ran up my back. “This is where Bubby lived.”

  “Yes, June,” I said, suddenly excited. “This is where Bubby lived.”

  June let the jacket fall to the ground, and her head dropped to her chest, the way it always did when she was shocked or upset. Julie looked at June, then back at me, curiously. “What’s this about?” she said.

  “She remembers something. What is it, June?”

  A crow sounded from somewhere deep in the woods, a harbinger of black memory. It cawed again, moving away from us. “I want to leave, Bubby,” June said. “Let’s go, can we?”

  “Sure we can, June,” I answered quietly. “Just tell me what it is you remember.”

  Julie looked uncertainly back and forth between us. “I don’t think —” she started, but stopped as both of us saw that June had begun to cry. Tears were silently slipping down her cheeks. “Bubby hurt me,” said June softly. “Bubby hurt me and they hurt Bubby.”

  “Oh, June,” said Julie, and took a step towards her.

  “Leave her alone,” I ordered.

  “But Cameron! She’s —”

  “Just leave her!” I said, almost shouting. “This is what we came for!”

  “I thought you came to write your stupid story. Not to torture June!”

  “She’s not being tortured,” I said, more calmly. “She’s just remembering.”

  This time, I took a step towards June. I picked up the jacket she had let fall and held it out to her. She made no move to take it. “Come on, June,” I said. “It’s okay. This is where you and Bubby lived. But you don’t live here anymore.”

  “I want to go home,” said June, with a great, wounded-animal sigh. “I want to go home, Bubby.”

  “We will, June. Let’s just look around a little first, okay. Don’t you want to remember where you and Bubby lived together?”

  Uncertain now, June shook her head, though I thought that I could convince her. Somehow, some way, I guess I thought the process of remembering would be good for June. The way it was supposed to be good for all of us to remember, especially that which was the most difficult or the most painful. It was a noble thought, but pointless.

  I started to force June to look up by reaching out and grabbing her arm. She was still shivering. As soon as I touched her June stiffened, the entire two-hundred-odd pounds of her. And then, with hardly a sound, she dropped to the ground. At first I thought she was just throwing a tantrum. It was Julie who saw that something was wrong.

  “Jesus, Cameron. She’s having some sort of seizure!”

  I stood over June, dazed. Julie knelt down beside her. June lay on her side staring sightlessly down the road along which we had come. It wasn’t a seizure like any I had seen. There was no flopping about, biting of tongues, or anything like that. The only seizures I had ever seen other than on TV were the alcoholic kind, when guys in the centre left detox too early and their brains, denied the lifeblood of alcohol, gave their muscles a roller-coaster ride. Those guys would drop to the floor and their entire bodies would undulate and jerk and flail until the seizure let them go. June had
only stiffened, fallen down, and passed out at our feet.

  “Call someone!” Julie was saying.

  “Who, for fuck’s sakes? And with what?”

  “Try a neighbour! Damn it, Cameron. I don’t know what to do here. This could be serious!”

  Before Julie could say any more I started running down the road to the next lot. The first house didn’t have a phone. The second was occupied by an old couple, drinking tea at their kitchen table. They had a phone next to the wood stove, and they said I could use it. Yet I couldn’t think of anyone to call. I suppose, had I been thinking clearly, I would have called an ambulance. Instead I called the number Dawes had given me. His wife answered. I explained who I was, and she put her husband on.

  “Darrel,” came Dawes’s voice. “What’s happened?”

  I told him about June.

  “Damn,” he said. “Put her in the car when she comes round. Take her to the nearest hospital. Where are you?”

  “Three Rivers,” I said.

  “What?” said General Dawes. “What in the world are you doing there? I thought —”

  I cut him off. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “It’s the BMD,” he said. “I should never have let her go. The seizures are rare enough, at least for now. But we knew June was progressing. It’s only a matter of time before she loses motor function completely and has seizures regularly. This is my fault.”

  “So what the hell do we do?”

  “Take her to a hospital,” said Dawes. “Then bring her home. Darrel. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I should never have let you take June anywhere. I just thought it might be good for her to get to know you and —”

  I had heard enough. I hung up on Dawes. The old couple, she in her kerchief and he in his cap, tea forgotten, were staring at me suspiciously. “Who are you?” the woman asked.

  “No one,” I answered. “Just visiting.”

  “That wouldn’t be June Greene you were talking about by any chance?” said the old woman. “There used to be a June lived round here.”

  “No. It’s not June Greene.”

  “Seems like a terrible coincidence. Same house you’re looking at. Same name.”

  “Her name is June Dodds,” I said. “And we’re just passing through. Thanks for the phone. I’ve gotta go.”

  When I got back to the lot, June was awake and sitting dazedly in the back seat. I told Julie only part of what General Dawes had said — that June sometimes suffered from seizures. Julie shook her head.

  “This is your fault, Cameron. You should have just left her alone. You don’t have any idea what you’re fooling with.”

  Far from being annoyed at Julie’s interference, I was relieved by it. “I know,” I said. “June is more than I can handle, I think. She’s okay now?” I peeked into the rear of the car, where June looked like she was about to fall asleep again.

  “I think so,” said Julie. “She just woke up.”

  “Let’s get her to a doctor.”

  “Let me show you something first.”

  She opened the back door, where June was still sitting quietly, her parka off and laid carefully across her lap. Julie rolled the right sleeve of June’s blouse up to her shoulder. June didn’t seem to mind. Carved there long ago, still visible in faint, fish-belly-white scars on June’s flabby biceps, she bore a deliberate wound. Julie said she couldn’t make out it out. “But it looks like a word, doesn’t it? It looks like someone carved a word there on purpose.”

  “He did it with a rusty screw.”

  “A rusty screw?” asked Julie. “Jesus! Who’s he?”

  “Darrel,” I told her. “Darrel did it to June, because it was once done to him. Darrel had a scar similar to this. It’s in his files.”

  “What does it say? I can’t make it out.”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure Darrel did it.”

  “And you want her to remember that?”

  “I don’t know what I want her to remember. I didn’t know about it. Remember. Bubby hurt June and they hurt Bubby. This is what June was talking about.”

  “Holy shit,” said Julie.

  “Let’s get her out of here.”

  Julie drove. I kept my eye on June. We waited three hours in a hospital waiting room, only to have the doctor examine her for ten minutes and then tell us to take her back to the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope.

  “She seems fine now,” he told me. “The sisters will know how to deal with her.”

  I wanted to tell him the sisters were long gone, but restrained myself. When we finally led June back out to the car, intending to drive back right away, she was nearly her old self. “Can I have an ice cream, Bubby?” she asked.

  Of course, I told her. June could have anything she wanted. June could have the world, in what time she had left to enjoy it. Muscular dystrophy, Down’s syndrome, and memories of being carved up by the one person she loved more than anyone else in the world. Jesus, Darrel, I thought. What the hell did you do? And what responsibility had I taken on now that I was Darrel, at least to June. And to Dawes and the nurses. Did Dawes know about this?

  Later, after June had fallen asleep again and it was beginning to get dark on the highway, I found myself telling Julie what Dawes had told me and what I knew from June’s files. Both of us had grown bored with the radio.

  “June has muscular dystrophy boiling in her brain,” I said to Julie. “Dawes says it’s pretty bad.”

  Julie said nothing, just gripped the wheel tighter, clenched her jaw, and continued to drive. We had sailed off the on-ramp and were merging onto the highway that would take us back into the city before she spoke.

  “Poor fucking June,” Julie said softly.

  “Poor fucking Darrel,” I echoed.

  “Poor fucking Dean,” Julie said, catching and killing the sob in her throat.

  “Poor fucking Dagnia.”

  A pause, then a slight smile. “Poor fucking Julie,” said she.

  “Poor fucking Cameron!” I said, smiling myself now.

  And both of us together: “Poor fucking Bubby!”

  We laughed, delirious and insensate with hysterics for a moment. June, oblivious as always to the degeneracies of her supposed younger brother, was still asleep in the back seat. Her head was back, her mouth agape, and she was snoring like a leopard with her seriously deviated septum. Later I told Julie that as soon as I finished this stupid book I was going to seek a little bliss of my own.

  “How?”

  I told her I was going to move to Mexico and become a Muxe.

  M-U-X-E, I spelled for her.

  Giddy-up.

  CLXXXVII

  Dawes was pissed. He sat me down in his office and told me if I ever pulled a stunt like that again he would never let me step outside the building with June.

  “I can do that, you know,” he said. “I can stop you from seeing her, if it comes to that.”

  “I know,” I said. “Are you going to?”

  Dawes sighed. “I thought about it, but decided against it. It would hurt June as much as it would hurt you. I still don’t understand why you would take her there of all places.”

  “Because,” I told him. “I wanted to see if she remembered anything.”

  “She doesn’t,” Dawes said. “Do you remember anything, Darrel?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I don’t.”

  Sometimes, in these sessions with Dawes, I forgot that I wasn’t who I was pretending to be.

  “Well,” said Dawes. “June can’t act as your memory for you. You’ll have to do that for yourself. I think you should seriously consider seeking professional help.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “I have you.”

  “I’m not a counsellor,” answered Dawes. “Or a psychiatrist. I’m only a hospital administrator.”

  “Good enough for me,” I said.

  A long silence ensued. “How are the stories coming?” Dawes asked finally.

  “Good,” I said. Truth and Lies. “I�
�ve still got a ways to go.”

  “Writing is good therapy,” said Dawes. “Keep at it.”

  “I will.”

  I left him in the office, polishing his glasses. I was halfway across the foyer before I remembered that I wanted to ask him the question I’d thought of in the car coming back from Three Rivers.

  “By the way,” I said, going back in and finding him unmoved from his chair, glasses still in hand. “We visited my parents’ house in Three Rivers.”

  “And?” Dawes said.

  “Yes, well. I’m just wondering. Did my father die in that fire?”

  Dawes only stared at me, unblinking. “You mean, you don’t even remember that?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said.

  If he was going to call my bluff, he was going to call it now. “Darrel,” he said finally. “I have to tell you that I don’t think —”

  “Did he die in the fire?”

  “Yes,” Dawes said. “Of course he did. Do you remember anything else?”

  “No,” I said. But I was beginning to.

  CLXXXVIII

  That week I ran across an interesting item in the local newspaper re: Iroquois Pete. Adrian pointed it out to me when he came in for the late shift, just as I was getting ready to leave.

  CLXXXIX

  Local Man Charged With First Degree Murder

  by BIG BAD NEWSPAPERS

  A local native man was charged with first degree murder yesterday, after police arrested him at a tavern on Brighton Street. Thirty-seven-year-old Peter C_________ of ____________ is charged with murder in the first degree, after allegedly breaking into the apartment of an acquaintance and waiting for him with a knife. C_________ stabbed the man seventeen times, and then escaped through the front door. Police believe the incident was drug related. C___________ will appear in a federal courtroom on Friday, December 14 for his arraignment.

  CXC

  “Is that this Friday?” I asked Adrian.