A Million Junes

  Feathers recedes into the wall, and Mom lurches to her feet. She reaches for a knife from the block on the counter. Morning light spills through the front door as Dad comes down the hall. He stops, looks at Mom and the knife she’s holding, then walks past and opens the refrigerator without a word.

  “Where have you been, Jack?” she whispers.

  “Went to New Mexico.”

  Mom sets down the knife and folds her arms around herself. “New Mexico?”

  “I was thinking we could go see the ice caves this morning—what do you think, Le?”

  Mom doesn’t say anything at first. Dad smiles sort of sheepishly, and she says, “Okay.”

  “Get your coat.” He grabs an apple from the fridge, swings it shut, and plants a kiss on Mom’s forehead. She closes her eyes, the corners of her mouth tightening like metal twist ties. She pulls away and goes to the coat closet. I chase them through the front door, a White zipping to meet me there, to carry me away.

  Across the threshold, I don’t find myself in the yard. I’m in the cave again, and it’s exactly how Dad described it: a wall of blue-green spears of ice stretching down to the snowy floor. The sun must be mostly up by now, because the whole place glitters as Dad circles it, running his hand along the icy wall. “Isn’t it beautiful, Le?”

  Mom stands with her hands in her coat pockets at the center of the cave. Dad glances at her. Shakily, she draws a folded piece of paper out and scrutinizes it. She holds it out to him.

  Dad crosses to accept it. “What’s this?”

  “You know what it is, Jack.”

  “A plane ticket?” His voice sounds hollow. He storms away from her, then turns back. “Léa.”

  “You’ve been gone three weeks, Jack.”

  “I’m back.”

  “You didn’t tell me where you were going or how long you’d be away.” Her eyes cloud. “You left me there, alone, in your house, and I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

  “I’m back,” he repeats.

  “How could you leave me there?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I was confused.”

  “I miss my family,” Mom says. “And now that your father’s gone, there’s no one here for me. When you’re gone, I’m completely alone, and I can’t keep doing that. I can’t go through this again.”

  Dad starts to cry, hard. Harder than I would’ve thought possible, and Mom first looks stunned, then sad. She goes to him and draws his face up with her hands.

  “I don’t want to feel this way anymore,” he says.

  Mom’s hands skim through his hair. “I know.”

  Dad drops forward onto his knees in the snow and buries his hands and face into Mom’s stomach. “Marry me, Le.”

  She presses her fingers to her mouth, crying. “You know I can’t.”

  Dad’s eyes rove over her face. “I’ll get help.”

  “Jack.”

  “I’ll always come home,” he promises. “I’ll love you when I’m hot and when I’m cold. I’ll love you as much as I do right now, forever, and I’ll always, always come home.”

  “You know I can’t say no,” Mom cries into her hands. He stands, pulling her wrists down to cup her fingers between his.

  “You can,” he says. She twines her hands around his neck, nestling her face into the crook of his shoulder. “You don’t have to believe me, but I’m going to get help. Whether you say yes or not. I don’t want to live like this anymore. You can say no.”

  “Jack.” Mom takes a deep breath. “I’m pregnant.”

  First his lips part. His eyes flick between her eyes and her mouth. A breathy laugh erupts from him. “You’re pregnant?”

  Mom nods, and Dad laughs again, which makes a smile stretch across Mom’s teary face too. He grabs the sides of her face and kisses her. “You’re pregnant.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  And suddenly, they’re happy. So happy they’re laughing, so happy they’re crying, but I can’t breathe. Black splotches speckle my vision. Something heavy is pinned on my chest. The walls of ice are closing in.

  This isn’t how it happened. This isn’t what I came from.

  I wasn’t the thing that made Mom stay. It was love, the thing that made me.

  It was supposed to be love.

  I stumble from the cave, collapsing against the frozen wall. I drag myself toward the shock of daylight. When I cross the threshold, I find myself back in the hallway outside my bathroom.

  Laughter trickles up the stairs: Mom, Toddy, Grayson, Shadow.

  Happy, healthy, living.

  I stagger into my bedroom, wheezing out hot tears. A shapeless dark writhes outside my window, watching me. “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask the house I once called magic. “Why are you haunting me?”

  Nineteen

  MS. DEGEEST looks up from the pages in her hand. She’d insisted on reading them immediately after class so we could discuss. My phone lights up with a message full of question marks from Hannah, who’s waiting for me outside at our table.

  Talking to deGeest, I type. Be out ASAP but maybe wait inside just in case? The temperature’s hovering around forty degrees. We’ll have snow by Halloween.

  “You’re going to be a phenomenal writer someday, Junior,” Ms. deGeest says finally.

  “Someday,” I repeat.

  “Don’t get me wrong—it’s good.”

  “Great. That seems worth not being able to look my mother in the eye.”

  “So this story is true?”

  “Apparently. As of two nights ago, anyway.” It had been surprisingly easy to write, carried out of me in a rush of impotent anger I had nowhere else to exert.

  She points a French-manicured finger at me. “You’ve nailed your problem. Sometimes, when we write about conflicts we’re still in the middle of, we produce great emotion, strong feelings, but the technical aspects of the story fall to the wayside, because we don’t understand the interconnectedness of all the elements of our own narrative yet.”

  “The interconnectedness?”

  She opens the gray filing cabinet against the wall and pulls out one of those metal ball pendulums—a Newton’s cradle, I think they’re called. She sets it on the desk, lifts the metal ball on the right, and lets it drop, sending a shock wave through the three center balls that results in the far left ball swinging outward, then back in, where it sends the shock back again.

  “I meant to use this for a lesson, but I totally forgot,” she says. “Your work tends to create snapshots of powerful moments. But often it reads as a series of events. This happens, and then this, and then this, and then this. What we’re looking for is: This happens, therefore this happens, but then this happens, therefore this happens.

  “This scene you wrote works, but it might work better as part of a larger piece, once you’re further off—when you can put things into perspective. I think you should consider working in the realm of fiction for a while. You can always come back to family history later.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t know I can always come back. No one gets that guarantee. That’s the whole point.”

  Ms. deGeest shakes her head. “The whole point of what?”

  “That’s why I have to piece this all together.” I snatch the papers. “Because usually, when a person goes, the truth goes with him, and someday even the stories—the lies he told—are forgotten, and there’s no way to recover them.”

  There’s no way to recover him.

  “Junior, wait!”

  I’m already out the door.

  “What’s wrong?” Hannah asks as I brush past her.

  “Everything,” I choke. “It was all a lie, Hannah. He wasn’t who I thought he was. I’m not who I’ve always thought I am.”

 
Not the child of two adoring parents tragically ripped apart, but the child who made Mom stay when she should’ve left.

  Not a house overlapping with heaven; an endless tunnel of bad memories.

  Not a magic house, but a haunted one.

  I’m a lie.

  • • •

  Hannah offers to take a night off from violin and studying to comfort me, but the look of trepidation on her face as she does is enough to make me decline. Instead, when she drops me off at home, I slip upstairs to “study,” and spend the night staring at Feathers’s lava-lamp burbling.

  What’s one white lie when Mom and Dad lied to me my whole life? I feel so stupid for everything I used to believe. Who thinks it’s normal for her dad to be gone for weeks at a time with no phone calls, no texts, no postcards? How naïve do you have to be to convince yourself your mom doesn’t mind that kind of instability, that she’s happy with it?

  Leave June alone. She’s not like us. Leave her alone.

  I wrap myself in blankets, but I’m still cold and shuddering. What did he mean? What does any of this mean?

  “Some help you are,” I whisper to Feathers, and she withdraws.

  Minutes pass. Hours pass. The sun goes down and the moon glides up. The stars twinkle and the crickets sing, voices thin, starting to die off in the cold. Still I stare at my dead-starred ceiling, unable to get warm.

  After what the Whites showed me in the ice cave, everything’s different. If Dad’s stories weren’t true, that changes everything. Who he was. Who I am. What his rules mean.

  Maybe that’s what the Whites wanted me to see, what they started telling me the night Saul came back.

  I shove aside thoughts of Nameless and open Saul’s last e-mail: June. When I read it, I can hear his voice, warm and rattling and close. I see slivers of his teeth glowing in the dark, moonlight across the slight dent in his nose as he drove me down the forested lane, snatches of his hands cupped around his eyes as he looked at me through the extraordinary light of the sun on the waves in Bekah’s memory of the beach that day. His dimple shadowed purple, his mouth moving silently inches from mine: Hi.

  It’s nearly two in the morning when I send my reply: Saul.

  He answers immediately. June, at last.

  I attach my last story and send a blank e-mail back. Twenty minutes later, my phone buzzes again. It happened again? You saw this?

  Yeah, I answer.

  Are you okay?

  No.

  I’m useless, but I’m here.

  My pulse quickens and blood warms. I’m running out of reasons and willpower to avoid him. Tomorrow? I say.

  What about it? You’ll have to be more specific.

  I wonder if we’re the first people since 2001 to have a real-time conversation via e-mail.

  I like how permanent it feels, he says, then a minute later: So you’re not going to clarify about “tomorrow”?

  Nah.

  Yes to tomorrow, he says. What time?

  I have to go to high school during the day, because I’m in high school. So after that.

  Can you pick me up from the nursing home after?

  No, you’re the only old person I’m not afraid of. You come to me.

  June.

  Saul.

  You’re incorrigible.

  How does it make you feel to know I just had to look that word up?

  It takes so long for him to respond that I’m almost asleep when I feel the vibration beneath my hand. Strangely charmed/appreciative that you need a tutor.

  Twenty

  AT lunch the next day, feeble sunlight lances through the cafeteria windows, striping Hannah’s face, and wind thunks angrily against the glass as she asks suddenly, “Are you going to try to make it happen again? See another memory?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I’m so overwhelmed by all of this.” She nods understanding, and I ask, “Do you think it’s possible what I saw in the cave wasn’t real? Like, maybe some kind of ancient mold has been giving me and Saul shared hallucinations.”

  Hannah twirls her hair. “June, this is Five Fingers. Coywolves ignore sleeping chickens to score Old Navy dollar-bin flip-flops, and I’ve run through a feathery ghost, and once when we were playing hide-and-seek in the woods, I swear I saw my Grandma Ortiz climbing a tree. I mean, that woman moved at a nebbish shuffle the last five years of her life and there she was, hair ten shades darker and dressed in overalls, perched in a branch twenty-five feet off the ground. When I got to the tree? Gone.

  “I’m sorry, babe, but the question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s why. You need to figure out what the memories are trying to tell you.”

  “That my life has been a lie?”

  Hannah swishes her mouth back and forth. “Your life hasn’t been a lie. I mean, my parents married for love and my dad still cheated and moved to Colorado and waited three months to so much as e-mail me. Your dad never would’ve done that. He never would’ve left you or your mom willingly.”

  “He did all the time.”

  “No,” Hannah says sharply. “He always came back.” She examines her tray. “Maybe that’s what he wants you to know. That’s a pretty good message from the afterlife, as far as messages from the afterlife go.”

  “I thought maybe it was about the Angerts,” I say. “Like he, or someone, wanted me to forget about the feud.”

  Hannah nods thoughtfully. “You did say it started the night you met Saul.”

  She shakes her head once, and I can guess what she’s thinking. That theory doesn’t explain what I saw happen with my dad and Nameless.

  She’s not like us. Leave her alone. Please show her.

  • • •

  After school Hannah puts off her psych research to come over. We wander the house barefoot for an hour and a half, searching for Whites with no results.

  “Your magic house doesn’t like me as much as Saul,” she groans. “I’ve never felt so betrayed.”

  “It’s kind of a bitch. Don’t feel bad.”

  “Why do you keep looking at the clock?” Hannah asks.

  “I don’t.”

  “Do too. What’s the—” Hannah grins. “Ah.”

  “Just a tutoring session. I can reschedule.”

  “Stop,” she says. “I have a violin lesson anyway.”

  “Oh, is that what you’re calling Nate? And how is ‘violin’?”

  Her cheeks dimple. “Ridiculous. Still pestering me about camping at the dunes with you and his cousin.”

  “Wow.”

  “Acclimated to the idea yet?” she says. “Keep trying. Anyway, he asked me to be his girlfriend.”

  “Seriously?”

  “First he asked me to prom. Then he remembered homecoming comes first, and he asked me to that, and then he got nervous and asked me out for real.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “We’ll see about prom, yes to homecoming, and let’s talk about making it official after homecoming.”

  “Hannah!” I shake her elbow. “Nate Baars!”

  “He’s great. He’s so different than he comes off. I think he gets nervous or something. He’s actually kind of shy, and super sweet, and he just, like . . . likes people.”

  “Weird.”

  “I know, right? Anyway, I feel like he’s kind of rare. I just don’t know if I want a boyfriend this year. Seems like an unnecessary complication.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t want to get so swept up that I blink and it’s time to leave, and I’ve hardly seen you. I already feel like I’ve done that with schoolwork, and those are weeks of weekends I’ll never get back.”

  “You’re not going to lose me, Hannah. Not to Nate, not to school, not to anything.”

  Not even to a curse, I silently vow.

  “Same,” she
promises.

  Mom comes in then, the boys whipping past her straight toward the fridge. “Hey, Hannah!” she sings, giving her a squeeze around the shoulders. “Haven’t seen much of you lately. What are you girls up to tonight? Do you want to come to Shadow’s basketball game with us?”

  Shadow looks over his shoulder at us and blushes shyly at Hannah. He’s had a crush on her since he was born. “Oh, man, I’d love to,” Hannah says. “But I have a paper to write, and I think June has tutoring?”

  “Hey, Mom, did you know Mike has tattoos but he’s not trying too hard?” Grayson calls, popping open a can of Mountain Dew he definitely does not need.

  “I did not, mon chou.” Mom closes the fridge. “And though we would never get tattoos, it’s none of our business that Mike did, right?”

  Grayson runs toward the TV. “I’d get them. They’re cool.”

  Mom shoots Hannah and me an Oh, brother! look. “Gray, there’s no time for video games. We have to be back at school in an hour. Wash your hands and get ready for dinner.” Grayson whines, and Mom turns back to us. “And, Junior, please stay in the living room or sunroom while Mike’s here, okay? I’m not terribly comfortable having him here while Toddy and I are out.”

  “Mom,” I say.

  “Junior, please.”

  “I will.”

  As soon as she’s out of earshot Hannah looks at me and says, “Or don’t.”

  • • •

  Saul shows up fifteen minutes before my family leaves for Shadow’s game, and Mom and Toddy are thrilled to hear he wants to take me to the library. I get the feeling Toddy had planned to (attempt to) veto Mom’s decision to let us have an unsupervised tutoring session and is relieved he doesn’t have to play bad cop after all.

  Saul’s wearing long sleeves again, which I’m fairly sure I catch Mom trying to x-ray for signs of tattoos, but at least the cutting fall wind justifies his clothing choice this time. I, for my part, am doing my best to act politely indifferent to my tutor, instead of like my brain is filling with shooting stars at the sight of him. As horrible as our last day was together, I can still feel the ghost of his arms around me, his hands in my hair.