A Million Junes

“No.”

  Mom lifts an eyebrow. “Then what makes me different?”

  “I see you,” Dad says. “I see you, and somehow, from across the room, you convince me I know who you are. And if I’m wrong, you’ll break my heart. And if I’m right, you’ll break my heart too. A person shouldn’t be so pretty it hurts to look at her.”

  Mom tips her head back and laughs again. “Jack, what are you doing back here?”

  It’s not the night they met. They already know each other.

  Dad’s gaze dips. “I was restless.”

  “I know you were,” Mom says. “And I’d rather not get too attached to a man who has to up and leave because he misses a body of water, despite the ocean of it right outside that door—”

  “Not that, Léa,” he interrupts. “When I got home, I was restless for you.”

  She gives a derisive laugh and rubs at her sweat-dappled forehead. “I thought a dozen times about coming to find you,” she says. “But I didn’t. Because I know that’s not how this works. You can’t split your love between a woman and a lake. I don’t want someone who can walk away like that, Jack.”

  Pain slices through my chest. That’s what you got.

  Dad takes Mom’s hands in his. He kisses the backs of them one at a time. “Dance with me,” he says.

  “You don’t dance.”

  “For you, I will.”

  She gives a closed-mouth smile, draws him onto the dance floor. A crackling Dean Martin song swells to life as Dad holds Mom close, rocks her side to side. “Did you know me when you saw me?” he asks.

  She rests her mouth against his shoulder. “You know I did.”

  “And what did you know?”

  “I knew you were full of shit.”

  Dad laughs, and Mom’s smile spreads rapidly. This is how I want to remember her always—glowing beneath his eyes, not wilting. Not aching. Not staying because she had to, because of me.

  “I was?” Dad says.

  “You’re a magic man who lives in a magic house and has magical adventures all around the country,” Mom says. “Probably only half of what you say is true, but that’s what I learned from talking to you.”

  “What did you know from looking at me?”

  Mom glances at her sandaled feet as Dad twirls her. “Our whole lives,” she says. “I saw it all, Jack. But I saw the best version of it, and that’s not what we’ve got.”

  “No,” he agrees. “We’ve got the broken one. We’re all crooked and taped together. Especially me. Maybe if Jack the First hadn’t done what he did, I could be better for you, Le. But I’m cursed. I’m destined to hurt you every time we collide, and we’re gonna collide, because that’s destined too.”

  If Jack the First hadn’t done what he did? Cursed?

  Mom steps clear of him. “Yeah, that’s right, Jack. What you’ve got is a curse. It’s not your fault you tore my heart up.” She turns to walk away, and Dad catches her wrist but lets her go free when she tugs it. “I want what I saw when I looked at you. I don’t want this. Get help, Jack.”

  She walks out the door, into the storm, and Dad stares after her. “I am,” he says to himself. He sets a stack of bills on the bar and walks out into the pouring rain and heat-ridden wind.

  Whites seethe in front of the door. There’s no getting home now without passing through them.

  Did the red-haired girl lead me here on purpose?

  Stepping through the door, I’m returned to my yard. It’s dusk, and a stringy teenager with a wide mouth and a gap between his teeth stands on the driveway wearing a bulky canvas pack.

  Here, Dad’s even younger than he was in the bar. He stands with his mother, my grandmother Charmaine, who wears her raven hair pinned back, its first gray streaks visible. In her plaid wool skirt and pearls, she looks like an aging Elizabeth Taylor, like Old Hollywood glamour hidden under rural dust and the callouses of hard work. She touches his shoulders lightly and draws him into a hug.

  The front door opens, and Jack II ducks out, his hands in the pockets of his wool trousers, his button-down tucked and sandy hair cropped close. Standing on the porch behind his son and wife, my grandfather’s height is more obvious than ever. The man I saw watch Mom and Dad dance in the kitchen light is hidden behind stern eyes and a flat, indifferent mouth.

  “Jacky’s going now,” Charmaine tells him.

  Jack II regards his wife and son.

  “Bye, Dad,” my father says.

  Jack II nods curtly, sways on his feet, then goes inside. Charmaine rubs Dad’s upper arm. She grabs his cheeks and pulls his head to eye level. “We love you, Jack.”

  “You do,” Dad says.

  “Your father’s a haunted man,” she answers. “But he loves you.” Dad kisses the top of Charmaine’s head, then takes off down the hill. As he goes, she shudders and eases herself onto the porch steps. Silently, she starts to cry. “I never asked for this,” she whispers into her folded arms. “I’ve been a good person, haven’t I?”

  She sniffs hard, dabs her eyes with her skirt, and settles her face into a placid expression. Then she goes inside, and the memory freezes.

  I want out, I say. I’m tired of this.

  Whites surround the house in a circle; they block every door and window. They won’t let me go, not until they’ve had their say.

  I mount the porch stairs and accept the memories waiting at the front door.

  I’m back in the woods. Ahead of me, massive Jack II has shed even more years. He walks alongside a freckly boy with a gap between his teeth, his jeans cuffed to show off red rubber boots. My grandfather’s and father’s chins are down, hands stuffed into pockets in an identical gesture.

  The world is quiet, drenched in the last remains of a piercing sunset and the deep blue shadow in its wake. The dead fall leaves crunch under their shoes, life disintegrating into death. The air is cool, their noses dripping. Their cheeks are rosy with cold as they amble through the silence. Jack II reaches out and squeezes the back of the boy’s—my father’s—neck. He pats him on the back. The boy looks up at him, the last harsh spurt of sunlight glancing off his irises. His father smiles. He hangs his arm loose over his son’s shoulders. The stiff leaves crunch. The sun glows. They keep walking.

  Until they’re so far off the memory fades.

  I step back. I’m alone in my dark house. My phone vibrates, a message from Saul: Did you see what I saw?

  That depends, I tell him. Did you see Love?

  Twenty-Four

  “A curse?” Hannah gasps. She brings the blush mug to her mouth and lets steam swirl up her nose. Her hair lies on her shoulders, glossy and untangled as though freshly flat-ironed rather than slept on.

  “That’s what Dad said,” I confirm. “And my grandmother called my grandfather a haunted man. I think they were talking about Nameless. Mom didn’t believe it, though. After she and Dad met, he went back to Michigan without telling her he was leaving, and she thought he used the curse as an excuse for hurting her.”

  Hannah lifts an eyebrow. “A fair assumption.”

  “Sure, but it wasn’t an excuse—Saul saw a memory too, one from a couple of nights before my dad died. Bekah had just gotten her diagnosis, and that same day, the coywolves had killed one of our chickens. My dad found the dead bird and took it to the Angerts’ cabin to show Eli. Dad said they both knew what the coywolves’ behavior meant: that the curse was about to strike. According to Saul, my dad was really freaked out—crying, begging. He was afraid I’d be next unless he and Eli ‘made things right.’”

  “What, like you were gonna catch Bekah’s cancer?” Hannah gasps.

  “You know what people say: When something bad happens to an Angert, the O’Donnells are next. I think Nameless does it—like somehow we’re tied together, and if something happens to one of us, it attacks the other. I think Nameless is the curse.”
br />   “So what did your dad expect Eli to do?”

  I shrug. “Saul said Eli was pissed—said even if he could help, he wouldn’t. That if the curse was anyone’s fault it was ours, and if something happened to me, it’d be fair.”

  “God. That’s messed up.” Hannah takes a careful slurp and hoists the blankets around herself again, forming a protective shell.

  “I think the Whites were warning us about Nameless.”

  “Have you asked your mom about any of this?”

  “She doesn’t believe in it.”

  “But she knows what your dad thought.”

  “She’s lied to me my whole life. I doubt she’ll be any more forthcoming now.”

  “Why not? The jig is up.” Hannah climbs out of bed and starts trading her pajama T-shirt and shorts for jeans, a top, and a thick sweater. “Even if the Whites are guiding you, it couldn’t hurt to ask your mom about all this.”

  “I don’t want more lies, Han. The memories have the truth.”

  “Okay, sure. You can walk into an imprint of the past, look around, smell the roses—but don’t you think the truth is a little bigger than a play-by-play of events?”

  “Meaning?

  “The Whites told you your dad left your mom for three weeks. They told you your mom was pregnant and considering leaving him—so what? Don’t you care what your mom has to say? I mean, I get that it’s your origin story, but it’s your mom’s story story. Doesn’t she get a say in it?”

  “I can’t ask her, Hannah!”

  “Why not?”

  “I can barely look at her!”

  Hannah falls silent. She reaches out and touches my hand. My face burns. “June.”

  “I trapped her,” I say. “I trapped her here, and my whole life, all everyone’s ever told me is how much like him I am, what a Jack I am to my core.”

  “She loved him,” Hannah says.

  My mind hearkens to Ms. deGeest’s mini-speech: I want you to consider what you want from life. “All I used to want was to be like him. To live this big, untethered, rule-breaking life.” I meet Hannah’s eyes, tears flooding my own. “He wasn’t having adventures, Hannah. He was running. He should’ve been here, trying to fix this, and instead he ran. He ran from us.”

  She pulls me into her arms, holding me tight around the neck, and kisses my head fiercely. “Know something great about your dad?”

  “What?”

  “He helped make you. And even if he was stupid enough to leave, he was smart enough to come back.”

  When you’ve been as lost as I have, as many times as I have, you get good at finding your way home, June-bug.

  How is it possible to be so angry with someone you miss so much?

  • • •

  “Tell me about Dad,” I say at the breakfast table.

  Mom’s eyes dart to Toddy, then to where the boys are watching cartoons in the living room. “What about him, baby?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know—why’d he travel so much?”

  “For work.”

  “Always?”

  Mom laughs. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m working on a story for creative writing,” I lie. “There’s a character who can’t stay in one place for too long. He tells people it’s because he’s too curious, and it’s true, but it’s not the whole truth.”

  “Huh.” Mom lifts an eyebrow.

  “You know,” Toddy says, “your dad saved my life once.”

  “Really?” A memory nudges the corner of my mind. Dad told me this story too. It got lost in a sea of similarly heroic and untrue tales, like Jack the First saving the kids in the Boston Molasses Explosion, or Jack II keeping Henry Ford and a couple of traveling entrepreneurs from turning Five Fingers into a live-in industrial compound by beating all three of them in an arm wrestling match—at once.

  “We were fourteen,” Toddy says. “We were down at the falls one day, jumping into the pool. Your dad, he wasn’t allowed to be there—for good reason—but he was sitting down on the rocks, watching.

  “It was my turn, and I stepped up, and for a second, I saw this piece of gold. I swear, a big gob of it, down in the water, and I took a step to get a better look, but the rocks were wet. I slipped. It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but it was getting dark. I leaned forward to catch myself, and my head hit the rock. Fell unconscious in an instant and tumbled right off the falls.

  “Next thing I knew, he’d dragged me onto the shore. Started mouth-to-mouth until I woke up, coughing water. Your dad always insisted I said, There! Knew I’d get you in the water, Jacky.”

  “Well, my dad had a bit of a lying problem, didn’t he?” I say. I feel stunned, not by the story but by the glinting gold, the connection to the falls again. All these memories have to be connected, and somewhere within their web is the curse.

  “No way, Jack.” Toddy goes rigid. He’s never called me Jack. It hurts in a way—that I’m not quite Toddy’s, that I belong to the man who gave me his name. “Your dad wasn’t a liar, and if anyone tells you that, you ignore them. He embellished, sure, but he never lied. He saw the truth of things.” He looks at Mom and sets his hand on hers. “He looked at your mom and saw her beautiful heart even before her eyes, and I was there when he held you for the first time, and you know what he said?”

  Mom’s eyes sit low on the table. They lift heavily to mine.

  “My life has been so small. And now it’s finally big. Look at her. Look at my world.” She stands from the table and turns away. “It was like he saw your whole life right then. He didn’t miss a moment. He wouldn’t have dared.”

  I think of Dad, of his own father watching him through a softly glowing window.

  I think of Dad leaving home, of his mother kissing him goodbye. Your father is a haunted man.

  I think of Dad as a boy, in a striped T-shirt and stiff Levis, looking up at his father in the forest, love in his sunlit eyes.

  I wonder if, before he went, Dad remembered that moment. I wonder if he ever realized his father had been watching all along.

  Twenty-Five

  I’M getting ready for homecoming when Feathers’s quivering reflection appears on the wall across from my window. She moves like a sheet dancing in the wind on a clothesline, carrying Whites toward my closet door.

  They’re here for me, as if I called them. As if they know I’m finally ready.

  “Who was he?” I whisper. “Who was Dad?”

  The Whites land along my arms and sink into my skin.

  I step inside.

  This time, it’s different. I’m standing in the middle of a field, and on all sides of me, he’s there. Dozens of places and times, dozens of my father living moments that have passed. Only when I focus in on one does it gain volume, the rest playing out as if muted.

  In the first I latch on to, a gap-toothed little boy pounds down the porch steps and throws himself over a blue bike, pedaling down the hill after two other boys through failing sunlight. Their hoots and whoops echo through the trees as they careen away from the porch, where hulking Jack II stands watching.

  In another, night hangs over the farmhouse, and the boy, my father, walks up the gravel, dirt smudged on his cheeks and blood visible at the knee of his jeans. The porch light flicks on, and Charmaine hurries out. Jack II pushes past her and takes sharp hold of Dad’s string-bean arm, shaking it. “Where have you been?”

  “Sorry,” the boy says.

  “Sorry, what?” Jack II parrots.

  “Sorry, sir,” the boy says.

  “You get into it with the Angert kid?”

  The boy’s eyes stay low. After a beat, he says, “No, sir.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  The boy stumbles over another apology. Jack II claps his shoulder hard, somewhere between affection and anger. His voice mellows: “Get on insi
de.”

  In some memories, Dad’s small and gawky, his auburn-haired head too big for his shoulders. In some, his hands are thrust into soapy water, scrubbing dishes at the sink beside Charmaine while Jack II sits on the sofa, staring at the ticking clock on the wall. Listening to the crackle of the radio. Distractedly tapping a cigarette against a crystal ashtray.

  Dad, tiny and chubby, dressed in pinstriped overalls and carried through a gauntlet of sprinklers by a singing Charmaine. Being lifted to pluck cherries from the tree with plump baby fingers. Lying in the grass, his feet kicking in rhythm with the heartbeat of the earth, as his mother smiles down, tickling his cheek with leaves, and his father watches from across the lawn.

  Dad, awkward and gap-toothed with knobby knees, carrying pellet guns through the woods. Dad escaping the house on bike, a silent Jack II watching from the upstairs window. Dad staring in at his father through a downstairs one, taking aim with an imaginary weapon, one eye closed tight, then dropping his hands and staring through the glass to his parents moving around behind it.

  “You hate me,” he whispers to himself.

  There are older Dads too in the carousel of moments. Dad replacing shingles on the roof. Building the garage, then the sunroom, where in later memories a silver-streaked Charmaine sits with books or knitting spread across her lap.

  There’s Dad in rain-swept bars dense with humidity. Dad dancing and sweating with Mom, pushing her hair behind her ear and whispering to her slick cheek, “I will always love you.”

  There’s Dad how I remember him: scruffy and strong, wrinkled from laughter and sun. He sits on a green chintz couch across from a man in gold-rimmed glasses who asks, “What was your childhood like, Jack?”

  Dad thinks for a long moment, then says, “My father was a haunted man.”

  “Did he hurt you?” the man with the gold glasses asks.

  “No,” Dad says. “He hardly touched me.”

  “No,” Dad says in another memory much like this one. “He was a good man.”

  “No,” he says in a third. “He did his best.”

  “No,” he whispers to himself in the next memory over. He sits in the dark on the bed, Mom asleep behind him. “He couldn’t stand to look at me.”