A Million Junes

  “Maybe you break up and it sucks, but then you heal and move on and fall in love again. Or maybe this is it, the last person you’ll ever have butterflies for, your last first kiss, but you get to grow up together, start your life together sooner. And you know what else? You don’t have to be afraid to walk away either way, because you, Jack O’Donnell IV, are amazing and my best friend, and there’s no expiration date on soul-love. And if you and I want to go away to college, dammit, we’re going to go away to college, and it’s not going to stand in our way of finding love or happiness, and it’s definitely not going to amount to leaving each other behind. We need to chase our dreams, Junie, and I don’t know about you, but in my best and brightest dreams, you’re always there.”

  There are tears in Hannah’s eyes, and she doesn’t blink them away. And then I’m crying too, because it hits me, hard. The words crack as they pass through my lips: “You’re gonna move to California, aren’t you?”

  Hannah wraps her arms around me, and we stand there in the parking lot, crying, holding on to each other. “You’re my first great love,” she tells me. “I won’t lose you.”

  “I don’t know how to be without you.”

  “You won’t be. Not really. Never.”

  I want to believe that, but I can’t. No one is forever.

  Twenty-Two

  I wake to a tickling on my face as Feathers floats over me toward the window, a tangled blob of warmth and sadness. The clock glows green: 4:44.

  She ripples there, beckoning me, and I stand to look across the yard. Dimly illuminated Whites thread through the cherry tree’s branches and bounce against the window frame.

  Feathers seems to nod, a gentle Go on.

  “I don’t want to,” I tell her.

  Her warbling seems to say, I know.

  “I have to. Don’t I?”

  She bobs.

  I slide the pane up, and three Whites alight on the veins near my wrist. They melt like snow, and Feathers drifts toward the hall.

  I follow her downstairs and out the back door, the world changing infinitesimally when I step through. It could almost still be tonight, except for Dad.

  Alongside the ache to be cradled by him, I feel a brutal, helpless frustration I can’t exert anywhere. He’s younger than when I saw him in the ice cave, no older than twenty-five, the patchy scruff I’m accustomed to seeing on his jaw shaved clean and his hair swept neatly back.

  He sits in a lawn chair beside an older man with the same wide mouth and square jaw, his body spotted with age and sun damage. The man is staggeringly tall, but something about the slump of his shoulders makes him look insubstantial.

  My grandfather Jack II. I’ve seen pictures but never met him. He died months before my parents got engaged.

  Dad didn’t talk about him much, except to say he was a Jack, that he craved adventure but always came home, was quiet but brave. He probably meant absent, an abandoner.

  Mom’s reviews of Jack II were mixed. Sometimes when Dad talked about him, she’d stab her broccoli extra hard or go from casually wiping the counter to scrubbing a spot no one else could see. But other times she’d stare out the window over the kitchen sink and say, “We all do our best. God rest his soul.”

  I asked her once, when Dad wasn’t around, whether she liked Jack II. “He loved your father” was all she’d said. “I believe that.”

  Now he sits in front of me, sallow, drawing a cigar to his square, O’Donnell mouth for a puff. “Winter’s coming,” Dad says. Jack II exhales.

  They’re silent awhile. “You gonna marry that girl or just let her live in my house forever?” Jack II says gruffly.

  Dad studies him. “I love Léa.”

  Jack II coughs, never once looks at Dad. “Then you’re as stupid as I thought. A girl like that won’t be happy here.”

  Dad watches Jack II for a long minute, then stands and goes inside. My grandfather stares at the ground. He throws the half-smoked cigar down and stamps it out, then pushes to his feet, his hulking form still hunched, and looks into the kitchen through the back window. Inside, Dad pulls Mom into a waltz, the gold light splashing across her teeth, throwing rusty streaks through her hair. He spins her, dips her low.

  When he pulls her close, he sings in her ear. There’s no sign on his face of the conversation he just had.

  I never saw them like this, never saw them dance.

  My grandfather’s eyes are glassy, his fists clenched. He looks over his shoulder at the woods. A darker-than-dark blemish billows there. “You’re always there, aren’t you?” Jack II whispers. “You’ll never let me go, I know that. But what about my boy?”

  The memory ends.

  Twenty-Three

  “YOU know what we should do?” Hannah says, sprawled out on my bed.

  “Duct tape the boys’ mouths shut,” I guess. Downstairs, my parents are helping Grayson host a slumber party, and a half dozen voices keep sprinkling our conversation with screams of bloody murder.

  When I messaged Saul this morning about what Jack II said to Nameless, he’d been eager to pass back through the thin places—figure this out and maybe take a break to redecorate the sunroom, he wrote—but a spontaneous Friday-night tutoring session would definitely raise a red flag for my parents, so Hannah and I decided to hang out instead.

  “Duct tape, absolutely,” she agrees. “And I think you and I should go to homecoming together.”

  “What about Nate?”

  “We could go as a group, but you’d be my date. We’d get each other corsages and coordinate our dresses and mostly dance together. Halfway through we could get into a screaming fight, and you could throw punch in my face or whatever.”

  “Let’s be real, Han. If one of us is going to get face-punched, it’ll be me.”

  “True,” she allows. “Isn’t it weird how Stephen and Nate are like the boy versions of us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. Stephen is, like, this shy bookworm type, and Nate is, like, a little louder, smart but uninterested in school, pretty content with Five Fingers.”

  “Oh my God, I’m Nate in this scenario?”

  “Hey!” Hannah throws a pillow at me. “That’s my kind-of boyfriend you’re talking about! And it’s not like I’m thrilled to be Stephen—my archnemesis.”

  “Oh, whatever. You guys love competing with each other.”

  “Anyway, if you were planning on taking Saul to homecoming, I get it.”

  “Only if Ms. deGeest is chaperoning. I want this dance to be as awkward as possible,” I say. “No, I’m all yours for homecoming. Anyway, I’m pretty sure last year they made it a rule that your date’s not allowed to be older than nineteen.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Hannah says. “There’s always that one girl with, like, a forty-five-year-old boyfriend she met at the Fry Shack.”

  “Barf. About the guys, not the Fry Shack. The Fry Shack is the best restaurant of all time.”

  “True.” Hannah’s phone chirps, and she smiles enormously as she checks it. “You know, I think my favorite parts of life are the things I didn’t know I wanted.”

  Ping! Your father was a liar. Ping! Everything you thought you were and wanted to be was based on a person who didn’t exist. Ping! You’re just like him.

  Hours later, Grayson and the boys settle down, and the house quiets. Hannah and I climb into bed and turn off the light, whispering a list of our favorite things back and forth: corn mazes and pumpkin carving; picnics on the frozen lake; walks through the rainy woods and tulip fairs and cherry festivals and lying in the sun; getting tipsy on coconut rum and Diet Coke; houseplants and sunny kitchens; blueberry salads and goat cheese and deep-fried pickles; falling in love; kissing and sometimes more; sunsets and fog and jumping into the deep crystalline teal of the lake; laughing until our stomachs hurt, until we cry, until we can??
?t breathe; and the water itself, always the water.

  Hannah’s breathing falls into a peaceful rhythm, and I’m left alone to stare at the ceiling. My phone illuminates with a text, and I tip it up to read.

  Has your magic house mentioned anything about giving you a doorway to me? Saul says.

  House isn’t that nice. Why do you only text me at two in the morning? Am I your quarter-life crisis?

  Two A.M. is when I lose all my inhibitions and say yes to everything I want. I also just ate a shit-ton of Taco Bell.

  Ah, I’m in good company then.

  It’s also about twenty minutes after New York Times best-selling novelist Eli Angert stops watching the Game Show Network and goes to bed. And I think I’m having less of a quarter-life crisis and more of a “my dad keeps forgetting my mom left him and my sister’s gone” crisis, and if you’re entangled in that it’s only because you’re you and I’m me and I want you.

  You know what I have, besides a magic house, Saul?

  What? he asks.

  A magic forest that stretches from my door all the way to yours.

  Are you asking me to meet you, June?

  I steer my thoughts away from the last time I walked those woods, searching for the ever-moving tree. I focus on the beautiful moments instead, the day Dad carried me through the rain and stretched out my hand to catch a White in the branches.

  But even that day is tinted differently now. Dad wasn’t who I thought he was; knowing that rewrites every memory I have of him.

  I’m asking you to try, I type. Meet me at O’Dang! Don’t wear shoes.

  Immediately.

  I roll out of bed, stuff my feet into slippers, and creep downstairs to the coat hooks beside the door. I pull a scarf and coat on over my pajamas and step outside.

  A coywolf hunches beyond the porch, eyes flashing, a sentry guarding a tear in the veil. I shed my slippers and set them on the bottom step.

  Maybe I could toss them inside and it would work the same—but if I’m asking the land to take me to Saul, maybe I shouldn’t be stingy.

  The coywolf slinks forward, bows to take the slippers, and dashes off in a blur of silver and red. I hurry past the cherry tree and its circle of growing saplings to the woods beyond the yard, tearing my mind from blue hydrangeas and inky ghosts.

  I step through the first row of eastern pines, and sunlight splashes over everything, the sounds of night breaking open for the song of morning.

  It looks exactly how it did whenever Dad and I went to O’Dang!

  Mist floats in clumps, and jays flit between branches, calling to one another. Ahead, I spot the coywolf trotting toward a shoe pile. She drops the slippers and disappears into the brush.

  “Thanks,” I say as her tail disappears. I’m surprised to hear my voice until I remember this isn’t a memory trapped in a White. It’s the same mysterious forest we used to explore. In this impossible thin place where the sun can shine in the middle of the night, I’m as solid as the birds and squirrels who watch me but don’t scatter.

  There’s no path to follow, no right way to get where I’m going. Soon I turn a corner around a mossy boulder, and there it is: O’Dang!

  Saul’s staring up at the mammoth branches and the bits of ribbon and string and flags tied all over them. Sunlight pours through the leaves and dapples the sleepily dancing Whites, revealing billions of veins and wrinkles.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Saul turns and smiles. “I can hear you.”

  “I can hear you.”

  He’s dressed in the clothes he wore the night we met, minus shoes. He looks different, his details more pronounced, now that I know his face. He makes the leaves twirling in the breeze seem sparklier, the birds bouncing between dew-laden branches happier.

  “You found me,” he says.

  “Jacks have an excellent sense of direction.” Ping! They’re used to leaving.

  “Look what I found.” Saul’s fingers run over one of the thousands of carvings in the trunk, words etched into a living, breathing thing: O’DONNELL + ANGERT.

  “Aw, we have a tree together?”

  “Well, we share it with a bunch of other losers, but yeah, it would seem so.”

  “I don’t understand. Does this mean another O’Donnell and another Angert came here? Before our families hated one another?”

  “I’m a little annoyed,” he says. “We were supposed to be the first to have a forbidden relationship.” His eyes trail back to me, making my heart speed. “Why do you think we can hear each other right now?”

  “It’s not a memory,” I say. “I think it’s a place where the thin place is even thinner. Like it sort of exists in both places, sometimes.”

  Saul nods thoughtfully at the hundreds of Whites crawling over the branches. “Maybe they’re coming back from the other side. Maybe all the magic—the coywolves, the Whites, the ghosts—all slip through here from . . . the other side.”

  I swallow a knot. “Hannah said that too. That maybe Dad’s and Bekah’s memories were coming back from the afterlife because of the thin place.”

  Saul brushes at the trunk. “One of my library books talked about a Scottish town with an old bridge. In the last fifty years, fifty dogs have leaped off it. People think it’s a thin place.”

  “Because dog suicide screams pathway to heaven?”

  “Well, some townspeople think it’s haunted, like something bad happened there and the memory was preserved, and animals pick up on it. But the optimists think maybe the dogs are chasing something to the other side, to something people can’t see.”

  “Dogs don’t wear shoes,” I point out.

  Saul laughs. “I guess that could explain it. Maybe they wandered into some other place when they crossed the bridge, but their bodies were still physically with the owners? I don’t know—most of the thin places I’ve read about are cathedrals Jesuit priests take pilgrimages to, or natural landmarks where artists experienced inspiration. Believe it or not, the books don’t have much about dead relatives sending messages via memory-spheres.”

  “It has to be them though, right?” I say. “Trying to warn us about the dark ghost—” Something stirs in my periphery.

  My lungs catch.

  We’re not alone. A barefoot girl stands in the distance, watching us.

  Saul follows my gaze to her. She’s dressed in a butter-yellow dress, her coppery hair tangled over her shoulders and crowned by a flutter of downy Whites.

  It takes me a moment to place her as the girl from the cave.

  Her stare worms into my chest as she lifts her hand.

  “She sees us,” Saul whispers.

  “It’s not a memory.” I lift my voice: “Hello?”

  The girl turns. She begins to hum as she wanders along a stripe of sunlight. “Wait a second!” Saul calls.

  Her gaze snaps back to us “Hurry,” she says, grabbing either side of her skirt. She takes off running into the woods.

  We sprint after her, through low-hanging branches and thorny brush. “Wait!” I scream.

  “June!” Saul calls from behind me.

  I lose her around a bend, then catch a flash of strawberry blond cresting a ridge ahead. “Who are you?” I shout, suddenly sure the memory we saw of her was neither random nor accidental.

  We’re almost out of the woods now—I can see the bare expanse, the steep hill slowing the girl. I burst through the edge of the woods and come up short.

  A White must have jerked me away.

  I’m in a dimly lit bar packed with bodies and lazy music. It’s swelteringly hot, thatched fans spinning overhead and plastic ones plugged into every outlet around the narrow wooden-floored room. The breeze does nothing to prevent the sweat dripping down shoulders and foreheads and the necks of beer bottles. There’s supple laughter, silky conversation.

  From t
he bar, Dad watches the ebb and flow on the crowded dance floor. He looks younger than I’ve ever seen him, smooth-faced with hair that manages to be both short and messy. He absentmindedly spins his damp bottle, eyes following a woman with shoulders so tan they make her white halter top glow, and dark curls that stick with sweat to the edges of her round, lovely face.

  Mom looks young and playful, gorgeously inelegant, blissfully sunlit, and little more than a teenager. The man she’s dancing with whispers something in her ear that makes her throw her head back in laughter. Her reply gets lost in the music coming from the jukebox in the corner. As the song ends, they part ways, Mom shaking his hand and coming to lean across the bar beside Dad. His beer suddenly absorbs his attention.

  Miami, I realize. Where Mom used to live. Where she and Dad met.

  Is this when it happened?

  “You know,” she says to him. “The staring would’ve been less unsettling if you’d spoken to me.”

  “That would’ve depended on what I said,” Dad answers.

  Mom turns to rest her elbow on the bar. “Would you have said something unsettling? You should know I’m friends with everyone in this bar. You would’ve been pulp.”

  Dad takes a swig, and a rivulet runs down his throat. “I wouldn’t have said anything. That’s the point.”

  Mom reaches out and catches the drop, eyeing it in the light. Somehow, it contains every color of the rainbow. Her eyes widen and narrow on it, as if she’s seeing a miracle. She closes her forefinger against her thumb. “Why not?”

  “You’re too pretty,” Dad offers. “You would break my heart.”

  “What a strange and backward view of women,” Mom tsks. “There are plenty of beautiful women in here. You think they would break your heart too?”