Nick and June Were Here

by Shalanda Stanley

  “They won’t shut up. They keep talking and I can’t think.”

  He was quiet for a long moment and I gripped the doorknob harder.

  “They’re not real,” he said finally.

  “They sound real.”

  “I know,” he said, “but they’re not.”

  “I don’t know what’s real.”

  “You do. I’m real. Focus on my voice. I’m real, June.”

  He was right. There was no one more real than him.

  “Do you believe me?” he asked. He did sound scared now. “I know you know I’m real. Tell me what you know.”

  Pressing my forehead against the door, I said, “I know you’re real.”

  “Yes,” he said, relieved. “Tell me what else you know.”

  “I know that we have plans this summer.”

  “What are they?” he asked.

  “We’re going to see your uncle, and John will be there.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to show me where you and John camp.”

  “Yes,” he repeated.

  “It’s going to be perfect,” I said.

  Nick had told me about the shade of purple he’d seen only when the sun rose over the Ozarks and I was going to see it and it would be perfect. Maybe the voices wouldn’t follow me to the mountains.

  We will be in the mountains, they said, and tears fell.

  “I can’t promise perfect,” he said. “But it’ll be better because you’ll be there. Now, either you come out of the bathroom or let me in. Please.”

  Nick rarely begged.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I turned off the water in the shower and sink. I smoothed my hair.

  It didn’t help.

  There was too much evidence of all that was wrong with me and not enough time to hide it all.

  I opened the door.

  “Damn, June,” Nick said, his hands going to my face. “What did you do? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

  I had been.

  “I can’t hold it back anymore,” I said.

  I thought I’d have to explain but he nodded. He understood. We’d been holding it back together, the three of us. Bethany stood next to him, her face a mixture of concern and fear. She had bags under her eyes. How long had they been there? How long had my problems been taking a toll on her, too?

  Bethany noticed my tears and she started crying. “You’ll never cry alone if I’m in the room,” she’d said to me once. Our tears wouldn’t stop. The dam had broken and we were all going to drown.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Nick said.

  We walked back through the house, a train with me in the middle. They held my hands and Nick led us. It was the same way we’d walk through any crowd. It didn’t matter if we got lost, as long as we didn’t lose each other.

  We were in Nick’s car, knee to knee. Bethany still held my hand.

  I felt better in the car, away from the party and all the noise and the heat from all those bodies. It was safer here. I could breathe.

  “Let’s go to the barn,” I said, too scared to go home right away. “We can use the lamps that your dad gave us,” I said to Bethany.

  Her dad owned the hardware store and he’d given me and Bethany these battery-powered lamps for when we camped in our backyards.

  She didn’t say anything, though, just squeezed my hand tighter in hers. Her eyes held apologies and I didn’t know why.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I told both of them. “I’m feeling much better now.”

  They didn’t look convinced and we rode in silence. Bethany’s phone rang. I was sure it was my mom.

  “I know I’m in trouble,” I said. “I’m in more trouble than I’ve ever been in.”

  Bethany silenced her phone.

  “But that’s exactly why we need to go to the barn. You can’t take me home right now.”

  My parents couldn’t see me like this.

  “I need more time to get myself together and my parents are probably seconds away from calling the police. Once they get their hands on me, y’all may never see me again. We should make the most of tonight. Let’s go to the barn,” I pleaded.

  Nick’s phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it,” I said.

  I wouldn’t put it past my parents to lock me away in my room, Rapunzel-style. They’d take away the ladder this time.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” I said to Nick. “We should’ve turned back there.”

  It was rare that I knew where to go and he didn’t. He acted like he didn’t hear me.

  “Nick?”

  We rode in silence and I thought about how many times we’d ridden in Nick’s car just like this. We always sat three in the front seat, because it never felt right to put Bethany in the back.

  The car pulled to a stop in front of my house. Nick put it in park and Bethany started crying again. Now I knew why she was sorry.

  My face heated up. “When y’all said you’d never tell, you were lying?” It hurt to swallow. My hands shook again. “When you said you’d help me. Those were lies?” I asked again.

  Neither one of them would look me in the eyes.

  “This is how we help you,” Nick said, staring straight ahead.

  We sat there for a while before anybody moved. It took a few minutes to digest broken promises.

  “What time is it?” I asked Nick.

  The clock on his dash had been broken for a while, so he leaned forward and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “2:17,” he said.

  2:17.

  I wiped my eyes.

  It was time to tell the secret.

  There were things I knew for sure. There were three bedrooms in my house. It was a two-story house with seventeen steps on the stairs. My house had six plants in it, all in different stages of dying because my mom couldn’t keep plants alive and my dad wasn’t aware we had plants. My backyard had a trampoline I hadn’t jumped on in two years and next to it was a doghouse that had never had a dog in it, because we couldn’t decide which kind we wanted. It took twenty-six of my steps to get from Nick’s car to my front door. Nick and Bethany would never leave my side. My front door was heavy and wooden and made the exact same noise every time it opened, like it was exhausted from opening. My parents would be standing in the kitchen. They loved me. These were the things I knew for sure.

  They were standing in the kitchen. From the looks on their faces, their worry and fear outweighed their anger. Nick and Bethany were at my side.

  “June, oh my God, where did you go, what happened to you, what happened to your face, I can’t believe you let us worry like this, where did you go, where were you, have you been drinking, how much have you had to drink, are you okay, are you okay, are you okay?”

  Their questions tumbled out of their mouths and rolled over me. There were too many to answer, so I focused on the last one.

  “I’m not okay,” I admitted.

  My mom’s hand was on my face now, turning it toward the light, examining the scratches. She moved me so slowly, checking me over, her movements cautious, like I was a bomb that might go off in her kitchen.

  “Explain,” my dad said. He looked between all of us, finally landing on Nick. My dad looked resigned and a little sad, like he was pretty sure that whatever was going on was Nick’s fault but he really didn’t want it to be.

  “Something is wrong,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, still looking only at Nick.

  I pulled away from my mom and stepped in front of Nick so my dad would have to see me. “Something is wrong with me,” I said.

  He looked at me, distracted.

  “I think I’m sick,” I said.

  His eyes changed. I saw the switch, because I knew to look
for it. He transformed from dad to doctor.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, his hand on my forehead again.

  “Not that kind of sick,” I said.

  My mom pulled out a kitchen chair and motioned for me to sit in it. I plopped down, grateful for the invitation. I couldn’t face this standing.

  I thought of the words I needed to explain this. I’d practiced saying them. I’d written them down in my notebook. It went like this…It went like this…My mouth opened. It went like this.

  Nothing.

  “Someone had better start talking,” my mom said.

  “I can’t think anymore,” I blurted out.

  “She gets lost all the time,” Bethany said.

  “She doesn’t sleep,” Nick added quietly, from his spot by the door.

  Bethany stepped closer to my mom. “She’s sick,” she said.

  It sounded like a train coming, the whistle sound of metal on metal coming faster and faster toward us. The noise was piercing and I clamped my hands over my ears. It was so high-pitched that it hurt my teeth, my jaw locking, making me choke on my scream. I whipped my head around, trying to find the source of the noise, and then I remembered that a tornado can sound like a train. We needed to get to the hall or a bathtub. I tried moving, but the tornado affected the gravity inside my house, because my legs didn’t work.

  Twenty-five tornadoes hit Arkansas last year.

  Twenty-five tornadoes hit Arkansas last year.

  Twenty-five. Tornadoes. Hit Arkansas. Last year.

  My jaw unlocked with an audible pop. No one ran, even though I screamed and screamed for them to do so, my voice burning from my throat, burning, burning.

  “June!” I heard someone yell, my mom maybe.

  Their hands were on me, holding me, and I slammed my eyes shut. We had to hide. But it was too late. We couldn’t hide from this.

  The tornado must have hit the house, because there was the sound of wood splintering, glass shattering, like an explosion, splitting me down the middle, and I died.

  There was only one thing that June had asked us to do for her that was important.

  “Don’t tell,” she’d said. “Please,” she’d begged.

  When she said it, she had the same look on her face that John had had when he’d wanted me to understand why he was leaving. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand or that the idea scared me. I wanted to make her happy.

  “I don’t need anyone else’s help,” she said to me and Bethany.

  I didn’t know about Bethany, but when June said that, I felt like I was twelve feet tall. I knew she wasn’t just saying it to get us to do what she wanted. June wasn’t like that. She really thought we were all she needed.

  I liked being what she needed. I loved it. We thought that we could handle it, that it was some weird phase and it would go away and she’d be fine. We had no idea it would lead us here. To this moment. And I still didn’t know if we’d done the right thing. Even if we had, I had done the one thing I’d promised I would never do, and now she might not ever forgive me.

  We were following her parents in their car. Bethany rode with me. I’d helped June’s dad carry June to their car. It was a two-person job, because June fought us like her life depended on it, like she thought we were trying to hurt her. My face burned and bled from her scratches. Her mom said we should wait for an ambulance, but her dad wasn’t hearing it.

  “No,” he said. “We’re not waiting.”

  Her mom got in the back seat with her so she could hold her. June kept screaming and screaming and I didn’t know what she was saying and then she went quiet. She folded in on herself like a deflated balloon. The quiet was worse than the screaming. Her dad even checked her pulse. June stared straight ahead, not responding.

  I’d never seen her dad scared before. This was a man who always had the answers.

  We were almost there. Bethany had been talking nonstop but only saying five words. Over and over, she kept saying, “She’s going to be okay. She’s going to be okay. She’s going to be okay.”

  I woke up in the hospital in Creed. I’d know this hospital anywhere, because I’d spent my childhood playing in its halls. A nurse was in the room with me and her name was Dorothy. She was friends with my mom. My mom called her Dot, all of her friends did, and her grandkids called her Dottie. She used to bring them to my birthday parties. “Dottie, they have a trampoline. Can we jump on it?” they’d ask. Dottie had always said yes.

  She looked at me sweetly. She looked at me like she looked at the babies in the nursery. I was confused, because I was sure I’d died and I was not a baby.

  “It’s good to see you awake,” she said.

  They must’ve resuscitated me, sewed me back together. I flung the sheet off myself and looked under my gown for any evidence of this, but there wasn’t any.

  “Don’t get upset, baby,” she cooed.

  “I’m not a baby,” I said.

  “Be still,” she said, covering me back up. “You’ve had a rough go of it. You still need to rest.”

  “There was a tornado,” I said. “It hit my house. Is everyone else okay? Where are my parents? Have you seen them?”

  Where were Nick and Bethany?

  “There wasn’t a tornado,” Dot said, her face a picture of calm.

  “There was. It hit my house. It was bad.” My voice shook.

  “Shhhh. It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t cry.”

  She tried to hold me, her fingers cold on my arms.

  “Please stop,” I said, pushing her away. “I’m not crazy. There was a tornado. Can you get my dad or my mom? Where are they?”

  “You calm down and I’ll go get them. They haven’t been home since you were admitted.”

  “How many people died?” I asked, but she was already walking out of the room. “How many people died?!” I screamed.

  She didn’t come back with my parents but with another nurse and a big man. His name tag said CURTIS.

  “Where are my parents?”

  “They’re on their way. We’re going to need you to stay calm, though. Mrs. Odom is going to give you something to relax you.”

  “I don’t need to be relaxed. This is no time to be relaxed.”

  They didn’t listen, their hands on me, holding me down.

  “Please stop. You need to call the police, or the National Guard.”

  People needed help.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t do this. I don’t want to be calm right now. Where’s my dad?”

  The needle pricked my skin and burned into my veins.

  “No!” I screamed. “No, no, no!” I’d never screamed at adults before. “I need my dad!”

  And then I heard him. “It’s okay, June Bug,” he said, out of breath, his voice right next to my ear. “The medicine will help you rest. You’re going to be okay.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Whatever they had given me worked fast. “There was a tornado,” I said.

  “Those won’t be necessary,” my mom said. She was here now, too. “Steve, tell them not to use them.”

  “Those won’t be necessary,” my dad said to someone else, his voice stern. “No, we won’t need them. I’ll stay with her. It’s okay,” he said to me.

  He rubbed my arm and I concentrated on the feel of it.

  “It’s okay. I’m with you,” he said. “I’m with you. I’m with you,” he kept saying.

  I wished I could see him. I’d never heard him cry before.

  * * *

  There was no tornado. My parents showed me pictures of our house with the date on them and my house stood just as it always did, looking like it always did. There should have been a gaping hole down the middle that had ripped through the kitchen, but there was no hole, no rip, nothing.

  The tornado was me.


  My dad ran every test imaginable on me, trying to find something to explain what was happening. I was a problem he had to solve. It killed him that he didn’t know what was wrong with me. I saw it in his eyes every time he came to check on me. He was a doctor, so he felt like he should’ve realized something was wrong.

  When my CAT scan came back normal, I thought he was actually disappointed. Not that he wanted me to have a tumor or anything, but I knew it’d make him feel better if whatever was going on was something he could point to on a scan.

  “See, right here,” he’d say, and point. “This is the problem.”

  He’d pulled some strings and gotten a doctor to come down from Little Rock. They’d gone to medical school together. Everyone kept calling her a specialist instead of a psychiatrist, but I was pretty sure she was a psychiatrist. I didn’t know why they were hiding that word from me. If the problem wasn’t physical, then it had to be mental.

  I had permission to tell her everything.

  “Be honest with her,” my mom had said. “Unburden yourself. She can’t help you if she doesn’t know everything.”

  Maybe it’d be good to tell someone everything.

  The night before she came, I’d been moved to the fourth floor of the hospital. I’d never been on that floor. You had to have a special key to a special elevator to get to the fourth floor. None of the other elevators in the hospital stopped there. Their numbers skipped right over it: 1, 2, 3, 5. This had intrigued me when I was little and visited my parents at work.

  “Where do they keep the fourth floor?” I’d asked my mom.

  “Right above the third floor.”

  I hadn’t believed her, though. I hadn’t believed it could be that simple. I was sure that they were hiding it, that it was like something out of Alice in Wonderland. I imagined a sideways fourth floor with doors that opened out instead of in and people who walked on ceilings. The nurses wore uniforms with purple stripes and all the medicine was candy. There were no shots.

  To say that the actual fourth floor was a disappointment was an understatement. I knew I shouldn’t have been so excited, but I’d held my breath when I’d stepped off the elevator, just in case. There was something special in seeing something that not everyone else was allowed to see. It looked like all the other floors, though. The nurses wore regular scrubs, and not even in fun colors. There were shots, and I got one.