June Connor knew that she was going to die today.
The thought seemed like the sort of pathetic declaration that a ninth-grader would use to begin a short-story assignment—one that would have immediately elicited a groan and failing grade from June—but it was true. Today was the day that she was going to die.
The doctors, who had been so wrong about so many things, were right about this at least: She would know when it was time. This morning when June woke, she was conscious of not just the pain, the smell of her spent body, the odor of sweat and various fluids that had saturated the bed during the night, but of the fact that it was time to go. The knowledge came to her as an accepted truth. The sun would rise. The Earth would turn. She would die today.
June had at first been startled by the revelation, then had lain in bed considering the implications. No more pain. No more sickness. No more headaches, seizures, fatigue, confusion, anger.
No more Richard.
Until now, the notion of her death had been abstract, an impending doom. Each day brought it closer, but closer was never too close. Always around the corner. Always the next week. Always sometime in the future. And now it was here, a taxi at the foot of the driveway. Meter ticking. Waiting to whisk her away.
Her legs twitched as if she could walk again. She became antsy, keenly aware of her pending departure. Now she was a businesswoman standing at an airport gate, ticket in hand, waiting to board the plane. Baggage packed. Luggage checked. Not a trip she wanted to make, but let’s just get it over with. Call my row. Let me onto the plane. Let me put back my seat, rest my eyes, and wait for the captain to take over, the plane to lift, the trail of condensation against the blue sky the only indication that I have departed.
How long had it been since the first doctor, the first test, predicted this day? Five and a half months, she calculated. Not much time, but in the end, perhaps too much to bear. She was an educator, a high school principal with almost a thousand kids in her charge. She had work, responsibilities. She hadn’t the time or inclination for a drawn-out death.
June could still remember going back to work that day, flipping through her calendar—standardized testing the following month, then the master schedule, which no one but June understood. Then the winding down of the school year. Grades due. Contracts signed. Rooms cleaned. The school was to be repainted this year. Tiles replaced in the cafeteria. New chairs for the band room. Lockers needed to be rekeyed.
“All right,” she had said, alone in her office, staring at the full days marked on the calendar. “All right.”
Maybe she could fit it all in. If she could last four months, maybe she could get it all done.
So June had not taken her dream vacation to Europe. She had not gone skydiving or climbed a mountain. She continued to work at a job she had grown to despise as if what she did made a difference. Suspending students. Lecturing teachers. Firing a slovenly gym coach she’d been collecting a file on for the last three years.
Clumps of hair fell onto her desk. Her teeth loosened. Her nose bled. One day, for no obvious reason, her arm broke. She had been holding a cup of coffee, and the heat from the liquid pooling on the carpet in front of her open-toed sandal was the first indication that something was wrong.
“I’ve burned my foot,” she had said, wondering at the dropped jaws of the secretaries in the front office.
What had forced her on? What had made her capable of putting on panty hose and pantsuits every morning, driving to school, parking in her spot, doing that hated job for four more months when no one on earth would have questioned her early retirement?
Willpower, she supposed. Sheer determination to finish her final year and collect her full pension, her benefits, after giving thirty years of her life to a system that barely tolerated her presence.
And pride. After all this time, she embraced the opportunity to show her suffering on the outside. She wanted them to see her face every day, to watch the slow decline, to note the subtle changes that marked her impending death. Her last pound of flesh. Her last attempt to show them that they were not the only ones who’d sustained damage. Jesus on the Cross had made a less determined departure.
There was no best friend to tell. No family members left to whom she could confide her fears. June announced it in a schoolwide e-mail. Her hand had been steady as she moused over to the icon showing a pencil hovering over a piece of yellow paper. Compose. Send to all. No salutation. No tears. No quibbling. She was fifty-eight years old and would not live to see fifty-nine, but a sentence of death did not give her license to lose her dignity.
You should all know that I have inoperable stage-four lung cancer.
The first thing people asked was, Are you a smoker? Leave it to June to get the sort of disease that had a qualifier, that made strangers judge you for bringing on your own illness. And even when June told them no, she had never smoked, never tried a cigarette or even thought about it, there was a glassy look in their eyes. Disbelief. Pity. Of course she’d brought this on herself. Of course she was lying. Delusional. Stubborn. Crazy.
It was all so eerily similar to what had come before that by the end of the day, June found herself laughing so long and so hard that she coughed blood onto her blouse. And then the horrified looks had replaced the pity, and she was back in those dark days when her only comfort was the thought that the sun would rise and set, the years would go by, and, eventually, she would die, her shame taken with her to the grave.
Irony, June thought now. An incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
The lung cancer had quickly metastasized. First to her liver, which gave her an alarming yellowish pallor, then to her bones, so brittle that she was reminded of angel hair pasta before you put it into a pot of boiling water. And now her brain, the last thing that she could truly call her own. All cancerous. All riddled with tumors, cells multiplying faster than the palliative radiation and chemotherapy could keep up with.
The doctor, an impossibly young man with a smattering of acne on his chin, had said, “The metastasis are quite pronounced.”
“Metastases,” June had corrected, thinking she could not even have the luxury of dying without having to correct the English of someone who should clearly know better. “Five months.” He’d scribbled something in her chart before he closed it. “Six if you’re lucky.”
Oh, how lucky June was to have this extra time.
The tumors in her brain weren’t impinging on anything useful. Not yet, at least, so it would seem not ever. This morning, she imagined them as similar to the shape of a lima bean, with tiny, round bottoms that fit puzzle-piece-like into curving gray matter. Her speech was often slurred, but the gift of brain metastases was that oftentimes she could not hear her own voice. Memory was an issue, though maybe not. She could be paranoid. That was a common side effect of the myriad medications she ingested.
Short-term-memory loss. Palsy. Dry mouth. Leaky bowels.
Her breathing was borderline suffocation, the shallow gulps bringing wheezing death rattles from her chest. She could no longer sit up unaided. Her skin was cold, the constant temperature of a refrigerator’s vegetable crisper, and, in keeping with the metaphor, its texture, once smooth and even, was now entirely wilted.
In the early days of her diagnosis, she’d had many questions about her impending death but could find no one to answer them. There were plenty of tracts in the doctor’s office on keeping a good attitude, eating macrobiotic diets, and making your way back to Jesus, but June could find nothing that spoke frankly of the actual act of death itself. There must have been information online, but if June wanted to read endless paragraphs of poor-me navel-gazing, she could walk down to the reading lab and start grading creative-writing assignments. Besides, she could not overcome her long-held belief that the internet was designed to render human beings functionally retarded.
Years ago, when June had had gallbladder surgery, she had talked to other patients to find out what to expect. How long was the recovery? Was it worth it? Did it take care of the problem?
There was no one to talk with this time. You could not ask someone, What was it like when you died?
“It’s different for everyone,” a nurse had said, and June, still enough life to feel the injustice of her situation, said, “That’s bullshit.”
Bullshit, she had said. Bullshit, to a perfect stranger.
Five years ago, the air conditioner at the house had finally given up the ghost, and the repairman, a former student of June’s who seemed disproportionately fascinated with the minutiae of his job, had described in great detail where the fatal flaw had occurred. Condensation had rusted the coil. The Freon had leaked, depriving the system of coolant. The hose to the outside unit had frozen. Inside the house, the temperature had continued to rise rather than fall, the poor thermostat not understanding why cooling was not being accomplished. Meanwhile, the fan had continued on, whirring and whirring until the motor burned out.
Cause and effect.
And yet, while June could easily find a semiliterate HVAC repairman to explain to her the process by which her air conditioner had died on the hottest day of the summer, there was no medical expert who could reveal to June the minutiae of death.
Finally, on one of the last days that she was able to leave the house unaided, June had discovered a book in the dusty back shelves of a used-book store. She had almost overlooked it, thinking that she had found some New Age tripe written by a pajama-clad cultist. The cover was white with the outline of a triangle inside a solid circle. The title was an idiotic wordplay she could have done without—How Do You Die?—but she found comfort inside the pages, which was more than any living being had offered her.
The following text will serve as a guide to the physical act of dying, Dr. Ezekiel Bonner wrote. Though every human being is different, the body dies in only one way.
“Well,” June had mumbled to herself. There, finally, was the truth.
None of us are special. None of us are unique. We may think we are individuals, but in the end, we are really nothing at all.
June had taken the book home, prepared a pot of tea, and read with a pen in her hand so that she could make notations in the margins. At points, she had laughed aloud at the descriptions offered by Dr. Bonner, because the physical act of the body shutting down was not unlike that of her dying air conditioner. No oxygen, no blood flow, the heart burning out. The brain was the last to go, which pleased June until she realized that there would be a period in which her body was dead but her brain was still alive. She would be conscious, able to understand what was going on around her, yet unable to do or say anything about it.
This gave her night terrors like she’d never had before. Not believing in the afterlife was finally getting its own back.
How long would that moment of brain clarity last? Minutes? Seconds? Milliseconds? What would it feel like to be suspended between life and death? Was it a tightwire that she would have to walk, hands out, feet stepping lightly across a thin cord? Or was it a chasm into which she would fall?
June had never been one to surrender to self-pity, at least not for any length of time. She considered instead the day ahead of her. She had always loved making lists, checking off each chore with a growing sense of accomplishment. Richard would come soon. She could already hear him downstairs making coffee. His slippers would shuffle on the stairs. Boards would squeak in the hallway. The hinges would groan as the door was pushed open. Tentatively, he would poke his head into the room, the curiosity in his eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.
Her eyes were always open. The morphine wore off in the early-morning hours. The pain was like thousands of needles that pricked her skin, then drilled deeper and deeper into the bone as the seconds ticked by. She lay in bed waiting for Richard, waiting for the shot. She would stare at him as he stood at the door, his hesitancy a third person in the room. He would not look at her face but at her chest, waiting for the strained rise and fall.
And somehow, she would force air into her constricted lungs. Richard would exhale as June inhaled. He would come into the room and tell her good morning. The shot would come first, the sting of the needle barely registering as the morphine was injected into her bloodstream. He would change the catheter. He would wet a rag in the bathroom sink and wipe the drool from her mouth as she waited for the drug to take away the gnawing edge of pain. He would ignore the smells, the stench of dying. In his droning monotone, he would tell her his plans for the day: fix the gutter, sweep the driveway, paint the trim in the hall. Then his attention would turn to her day: Are you hungry this morning? Would you like to go outside for a while? Would you like to watch television? Shall I read you the paper?
And today, as always, he did these things, asked these questions, and June checked each item off her mental list, shaking her head to the offer of food, to the trip outside. She asked for the local paper to be read, wanting him here, unreasonably, after wanting him away for so long.
Richard snapped open the newspaper, cleared his throat, and began reading. “ ‘A severe weather pattern is expected to hit the county around three this afternoon.’ ”
His voice settled into a low hum, and June was consumed with the guilty knowledge of what the day would really hold. It was a secret that reminded her of the early days of their marriage. They had both been children of loveless unions, parents who hated each other yet could not survive in the world outside the miserable one they had created. In their young fervor, June and Richard had promised each other they would never be like their parents. They would always be truthful. No matter how difficult, there would be nothing unsaid between them.
How had that facade cracked? Was it June who had first lied? The obfuscations had come in dribs and drabs. An ugly shirt he loved that she claimed had been ruined in the wash. A “forgotten” dinner with friends that she did not want to attend. Once, June had accidentally dropped a whole chicken on the floor and still put it in the pot for supper. She had watched him eat that night, his jaw working like a turning gear, and felt some satisfaction in knowing what she had done.
Had Richard done that to her as well? Had there been a time at the dinner table when he had stared at her while relishing the knowledge of his crimes? Had there been a night when he made love to her in this bed, his eyes closed in seeming ecstasy, as he thought not of June but of others?
“ ‘The school board has decided to renew the contract with Davis Janitorial for the maintenance of both the elementary and middle schools,’ ” Richard continued.
Early on in this process, June had felt much derision for the simple stories told by the Harris Tribune to the twelve thousand residents of the small town. Lately, the articles had taken on the importance of real news—The Renewed Maintenance Contract! The New Bench Erected in the Downtown Park!—and June found herself thinking of all those foolish stories people told about near-death experiences. There was always a tunnel, a light up ahead they chose to walk toward or away from. June saw now that there was, in fact, a tunnel—a narrowing of life, making a story as simple as what the elementary school was serving for lunch that week take on infinite importance.
“What’s that?” Richard was staring at her, expectant. “What did you say?”
She shook her head. Had she actually spoken? She could not remember the last time she’d participated in a real conversation beyond her grunts for yes or no. June was capable of speech, but words caught in her throat. Questions caught—things she needed to ask him. Always, she said to herself, Tomorrow. I’ll ask him tomorrow. The Scarlett O’Hara of dying high school administrators. But there would be no tomorrow now. She would have to ask him today or die without knowing.
“ ‘Harris Motors has asked for a side setback variance in order to expand their used-car showroom. Those wishing to speak either for or against the proposal can—’ ”
His shirt was buttoned to the top, the collar tight around his neck. It was an affectation he’d picked up in prison. The pursed lips, the hard stare—those were all his own, conjured during the lead-up to the trial, when June had realized with a shocking sense of familiarity that for all their attempts, they had become the one thing they’d set out not to be: two people trapped in a loveless marriage, a cold union. Lying to each other to make the day go by quickly, only to get up the next morning and find a whole new day of potential lies and omissions spread out before them.
She remembered glancing around the prison visiting room, seeing the other inmates with the stiff collars of their blue shirts buttoned snug around their necks, and thinking, You’ve finally found a way to fit in.
Because Richard had never really fit in. Early on, it was one of the things she loved about him. Friends joked about his lack of masculine pursuits. He was a voracious reader, couldn’t stand sports, and tended to take contrary political views in order to play devil’s advocate. Not the ideal party guest but, to June, the perfect man. The perfect partner. The perfect husband.
Before her cancer diagnosis, she had never visited Richard in prison, not once in the twenty-one years since he had been sent away. June was not afraid of losing the hate she felt for him. That was as firmly rooted in her chest as the cancer that was growing inside of her. What scared her most was the fear of weakness, that she would break down in his presence. She didn’t need a Dr. Bonner to tell her that love and hate existed on the same plane. She didn’t need him to tell her that her bond with Richard Connor was at once the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
So it was that the day she drove to the prison, not the day that she was diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, was the worst day of June Connor’s life. Her hands shook. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Standing outside the door to the visitors’ area, she let the fear take hold and imagined all the horrible things that could make her weak before him.
The feel of his lips when he kissed her neck. The times she had come home from school, exhausted and angry, and he had cupped her chin with his hand or pressed his lips to her forehead and made everything better. The passionate nights, when he would lie behind her, his hand working her into a frenzy. Even after decades of living apart, after loving him and hating him in equal measure, she found the thought of his body beside her still brought an unwelcome lust.
He never closed drawers or cabinet doors all the way. He never put his keys in the same place when he got home from work, so every morning he was late for school because he couldn’t find them. He belched and farted and occasionally spat on the sidewalk. He took his socks off by the bed every night and left them there for June to pick up. There was not an item of laundry he knew how to fold. He had a sort of domestic blindness that prevented him from seeing the furniture that needed to be dusted, the carpets that needed to be vacuumed, the dishes that needed to be washed.
He had betrayed her. He had betrayed everything in their lives.
This latter bit was the only reason June was able to walk through the visitors’ door, force herself through the pat-down and metal detector, the intrusive rifling of her purse. The smell of prison was a slap in the face, as was the realization that five thousand grown men were living, shitting, breathing the same air in this miserable place.
What was she worried about—her nose wrinkling, her hand going to her mouth—that she’d get lung cancer?
And then Richard had shown up, a shuffling old man, but still much the same. Stooped shoulders, because he was tall but never proud of it. Gray hair. Gray skin. He’d cut himself shaving that morning. Toilet tissue was stuck to the side of his neck. His thick, black-framed glasses reminded her of the ones he’d worn when they’d first met outside the school library, all those years ago. He was in two of her classes. He was from a small town. He wanted to teach English. He wanted to make kids feel excited about learning. He wanted to take June to the movies that night and talk about it some more. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her about the future they would have together.
There was nothing of that excited eagerness in the old man who’d sat across from her at a metal table.
“I am dying,” she’d said.
And he had only nodded, his lips pursed in that self-satisfied way that said he knew everything about June before she even said it.
June had bristled, but inside, she understood that Richard had always known everything about her. Perhaps not the dropped chicken or the ugly shirt she’d gladly sent to the town dump, but he could see into her soul. He knew that her biggest fear was dying alone. He knew what she needed to hear in order to make this transaction go smoothly. He knew, above all, how to turn these things around so that she believed his lies, no matter how paltry the proof, no matter how illogical the reasoning.
“I’m a good man,” he’d kept telling her. Before the trial. After the trial. In letters. On the telephone. “You know that, June. Despite it all, I am a good man.”
As if it mattered anymore. As if she had a choice.
The secret that horrified her most was that deep down, part of her wanted to believe that he was still good. That he cared about her, even though the hatred in his eyes was so clear that she often had to look away. She could snatch the truth from the jaws of a tenth-grader at twenty paces, but her own husband, the man with whom she’d shared a bed, created a child, built a life, remained an enigma.
June turned her head away now, stared out the window. The curtains needed to be washed. They slouched around the window like a sullen child. Her hands still remembered the feel of the stiff material as she had sewn the pleats, and her mind conjured the image of the fabric store where she had bought the damask. Grace had been eight or nine then. She was running around the store, in and out of the bolts, screaming, so June had finally given up, quickly buying a fabric she wasn’t particularly fond of just to get the annoying child out of the store.
And then came the horrible realization that the annoying child would be in the car with her, would come home with her and continue screaming the entire way. Outside the store, June had sat in the blazing-hot car and recalled stories of mothers who’d accidentally left their kids unattended in their cars. The children’s brains boiled. They died horrible, agonizing deaths.
June had closed her eyes in the car, summoned back the cool interior of the fabric store. She saw herself browsing slowly down the aisles, touching bolts of fabric, ignoring the prices as she selected yards of damask and silk. No child screaming. No clock ticking. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but please herself.
And then her eyes popped open as Grace’s foot slammed into the back of the seat. June could barely get the key in the ignition. More shaking as she pressed the buttons on the console, sending cold air swirling into the car, her heart stopping midbeat as she realized with shame that it was not the idea of killing her child that brought her such horror, but the thought of the fallout. What the tragedy would leave behind. Grieving mother. Such a sad story. A cautionary tale. And then, whispered but still clear, How could she…
Every mother must have felt this way at one time or another. June was not alone in that moment of hatred, that sensation of longing for an unattached life that swept over her as Grace kicked the back of her seat all the way home.
I could just walk away, June had thought. Or had she said the actual words? Had she actually told Grace that she could happily live without her?
She might have said the words, but, as with Richard, those moments of sheer hatred came from longer, more intense moments of love. The first time June had held little Grace in her arms. The first time she’d shown her how to thread a needle, make cookies, decorate a cupcake. Grace’s first day of kindergarten. Her first gold star. Her first bad report card.
Grace.
June came back to herself in her dank bedroom, the sensation almost of falling back into her body. She felt a flutter in her chest, a tapping at her heart; the Grim Reaper’s bony knuckles knocking at the door. She looked past the dingy curtains. The windows were dirty. The outside world was tainted with grime. Maybe she should let Richard take her outside. She could sit in the garden. She could listen to the birds sing, the squirrels chatter. The last day. The last ray of sunlight on her face. The last sensation of the sheets brushing against her legs. The last comb through her hair. The last breath through her lungs. Her last glimpse of Richard, the house they had bought together, the place where they had raised and lost their child. The prison cell he had left her in as he went off to live in one of his own.
“ ‘A house on Taylor Drive was broken into late Thursday evening. The residents were not at home. Stolen were a gold necklace, a television set, and cash that was kept in the kitchen drawer…’ ”
She had loved sewing, and before her life had turned upside down the second time, before the detectives and lawyers intruded, before the jury handed down the judgment, June had thought of sewing as a metaphor for her existence. June was a wife, a mother. She stitched together the seam between her husband and child. She was the force that brought them together. The force that held them in place.
Or was she?
All these years, June had thought she was the needle, piercing two separate pieces, making disparate halves whole, but suddenly, on this last day of her life, she realized she was just the thread. Not even the good part of the thread, but the knot at the end—not leading the way, but anchoring, holding on, watching helplessly as someone else, something else, sewed together the patterns of their lives.
Why was she stuck with these thoughts? She wanted to remember the good times with Grace: vacations, school trips, book reports they had worked on together, talks they had had late at night. June had told Grace all the things mothers tell their daughters: Sit with your legs together. Always be aware of your surroundings. Sex should be saved for someone special. Don’t ever let a man make you think you are anything but good and true. There were so many mistakes that June’s own mother had made. June had parented against her mother, vowing not to make the same mistakes. And she hadn’t. By God, she hadn’t.
She had made new ones.
We didn’t raise him to be this way, mothers would tell her during parent-teacher conferences, and June would think, Of course you did. What did you think would happen to a boy who was given everything and made to work for nothing?
She had secretly blamed them—or perhaps not too secretly. More often than not, there was a complaint filed with the school board by a parent who found her too smug. Too judgmental. June had not realized just how smug until she saw her own smirk reflected back to her at the beginning of a conference about Grace. The teacher’s eyes were hard and disapproving. June had choked back the words We didn’t raise her this way and bile had come into her throat.
What had they raised Grace to be? A princess, if Richard was asked. A perfect princess who loved her father.
But how much had he really loved her?
That was the question she needed answered. That was literally—and she used the word correctly here—the last thing that would be on her mind.
Richard sensed the change in her posture. He stared at her over the paper. “What is it?”
June’s brain told her mouth to move. She felt the sensation—the parting of the lips, the skin stuck together at the corners—but no words would form.
“Do you want some water?”
She nodded because that was all she could do. Richard left the room. She tilted her head back, looked at the closed closet door. There were love letters on the top shelf. The shoe box was old, dusty. After June died, Richard would go through her things. He would find the letters. Would he think her an idiot for keeping them? Would he think that she had pined for him while he was gone?
She had pined. She had ached. She had cried and moaned, not for him, but for the idea of him. For the idea of the two of them together.
June turned her head away. The pillowcase felt rough against her face. Her hair clung to wet skin. She closed her eyes and thought of Grace’s silky mane of hair. So black that it was almost blue. Her alarmingly deep green eyes that could penetrate right into your soul.
“We’re almost out of bendy straws,” Richard said, holding the glass low so that she could sip from the straw. “I’ll have to go to the store later.”
She swallowed, feeling as if a rock were moving down her throat.
“Does it matter to you if I go before or after lunch?”
June managed a shake of her head. Breathing, normally an effort, was becoming more difficult. She could hear a different tenor in the whistle of air wheezing through her lips. Her body was growing numb, but not from the morphine. Her feet felt as if they were sliding out of a pair of thick woolen socks.
Richard placed the glass on her bedside table. Water trickled from the straw, and he wiped it up before sitting back down with the paper.
She should’ve written a book for wives who wanted their husbands to help more around the house. Here’s my secret, ladies: twenty-one years in a maximum-security prison! Richard cooked and cleaned. He did the laundry. Some days, he would bring in the warm piles of sheets fresh from the dryer and watch television with June while he folded the fitted sheets into perfect squares.
June closed her eyes again. She had loved folding Grace’s clothes. The tiny shirts. The little skirts with flowers and rows of lace. And then Grace had gotten older, and the frilly pink blouses had been relegated to the back of the closet. What had it been like that first day Grace came down to breakfast wearing all black? June wanted to ask Richard, because he had been there too, with his nose tucked into the newspaper. As she remembered, he had merely glanced at June and rolled his eyes.
Meanwhile, her heart had been in her throat. The administrator in June was cataloging Grace the same way she cataloged the black-clad rebels she saw in her office at school: drug addict, whore, probably pregnant within a year. She was already thinking about the paperwork she’d have to fill out when she called the young woman into her office and politely forced her to withdraw from classes.
June had always dismissed these children as damaged, halfway between juvenile delinquents and adult perpetrators. Let the justice system deal with them sooner rather than later. She washed them out of her school the same way she washed dirt from her hands. Secretly, she thought of them as legacy children—not the sort you’d find at Harvard or Yale, but the kind of kids who walked in the footsteps of older drug-addled siblings, imprisoned fathers, alcoholic mothers.
It was different when the errant child, the bad seed, sprang from your own loins. Every child had tantrums. That was how they learned to find their limits. Every child made mistakes. That was how they learned to be better people. How many excuses had popped into June’s mind each time Grace was late for curfew or brought home a bad report card? How many times did June overlook Grace’s lies and excuses?
June’s grandmother was a woman given to axioms about apples and trees. When a child was caught lying or committing a crime, she would always say, “Blood will out.”
Is that what happened to Grace? Had June’s bad blood finally caught up with her? It was certainly catching up with June now. She thought of the glob of red phlegm that she’d spat into the kitchen sink six months ago. She had ignored the episode, then the next and the next, until the pain of breathing was so great that she finally made herself go to the doctor.
So much of June’s life was marked in her memory by blood. A bloody nose at the age of seven courtesy of her cousin Beau, who’d pushed her too hard down the slide. Standing with her mother at the bathroom sink, age thirteen, learning how to wash out her underpants. The dark stain soaked into the cloth seat of the car when she’d had her first miscarriage. The clotting in the toilet every month that told her she’d failed, yet again, to make a child.
Then, miraculously, the birth. Grace, bloody and screaming. Later, there were bumped elbows and skinned knees. And then the final act, blood mingling with water, spilling over the side of the bathtub, turning the rug and tiles crimson. The faucet was still running, a slow trickle like syrup out of the jar. Grace was naked, soaking in cold, red water. Her arms were splayed out in mock crucifixion, her wrists sliced open, exposing sinew and flesh.
Richard had found her. June was downstairs in her sewing room when she heard him knocking on Grace’s bedroom door to say good night. Grace was upset because her debate team had lost their bid for the regional finals. Debate club was the last bastion of Grace’s old life, the only indication that the black-clad child hunched at the dinner table still belonged to them.
Richard was one of the debate-team coaches, had been with the team since Grace had joined, back in middle school. It was the perfect pursuit for two people who loved to argue. He’d been depressed about the loss, too, and covered badly with a fake bravado as he knocked, first softly, then firmly, on her door.
“All right, Gracie-gray. No more feeling sorry for ourselves. We’ll get through this.” More loud knocking, then the floor creaking as he walked toward the bathroom. Again, the knocking, the calling out. Richard mumbled to himself, tried the bathroom door. June heard the hinges groan open, then heard Richard screaming.
The sound was at once inhuman and brutally human, a noise that comes only from a mortal wounding. June had been so shocked by the sound that her hand had slipped, the needle digging deep into the meat of her thumb. She hadn’t registered the pain until days later when she was picking out the dress Grace would be buried in. The bruise was dark, almost black, as if the tip of June’s thumb had been marked with an ink pen.
The razor Grace used was a straight-edge blade, a relic from the shaving kit that had belonged to June’s father. June had forgotten all about it until she saw it lying on the floor just below her daughter’s lifeless hand. Grace didn’t leave a suicide note. There were no hidden diaries or journals blaming anyone or explaining why she had chosen this way out.
The police wanted to know if Grace had been depressed lately. Had she ever done drugs? Was she withdrawn? Secretive? There seemed to be a checklist for calling a case a suicide, and the detectives asked only the questions that helped them tick off the boxes. June recognized the complacency in their stance, the tiredness in their eyes. She often saw it in the mirror when she got home from school. Another troubled teenager. Another problem to be dealt with. They wanted to stamp the case solved and file it away so that they could move on to the next one.
Washing dirt off their hands.
June didn’t want to move on. She couldn’t move on. She hounded her daughter’s best friend, Danielle, until Martha, the girl’s mother, firmly told June to leave her alone. June would not be so easily deterred. She called Grace’s other friends into her office, demanded they tell her every detail about her daughter’s life. She turned into a tyrant, firing off warning shots at anyone who dared resist.
She studied her daughter’s death the way she had studied for her degrees, so that by the end of it all, June could’ve written a dissertation on Grace’s suicide. She knew the left wrist was cut first, that there were two hesitation marks before the blade had gone in. She knew that the cut to the right wrist was more shallow, that the blade had nicked the ulnar nerve, causing some fingers of the hand to curl. She knew from the autopsy report that her daughter’s right femur still showed the dark line of a healed fracture where she’d fallen off the monkey bars ten years before. Her liver was of normal size and texture. The formation of her sagittal sutures was consistent with the stated age of fifteen. There were 250 ccs of urine in her bladder, and her stomach contents were consistent with the ingestion of popcorn, which June could still smell wafting from the kitchen when she ran upstairs to find her daughter.
The lungs, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas were all as expected. Bones were measured, cataloged. The brain was weighed. All appeared normal. All were in the predictable margins. The heart, according to the doctor who performed the autopsy, was unremarkable.
How could that be? June had wondered. How could a precious fifteen-year-old girl, a baby June had carried in her womb and delivered to the world with such promise, have an unremarkable heart?
“What’s that?” Richard asked, peering at her over the newspaper. When she shook her head, he said, “You’re mumbling a lot lately.”
She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was annoyed or concerned. Did he know that today was the day? Was he ready to get it over with?
Richard had always been an impatient man. Twenty-one years in an eight-by-ten cell had drilled some of that out of him. He’d learned to still his tapping hands, quiet the constant shuffling of his feet. He could sit in silence for hours now, staring at the wall as June slept. She knew he was listening to the pained draw of breath, the in-and-out of her life. Sometimes she thought maybe he was enjoying it, the audible proof of her suffering. Was that a smile on his lips as he wiped her nose? Was that a flash of teeth as he gently soaped and washed her underarms and nether regions?
Weeks ago, when she could still sit up and feed herself, when words came without gasping, raspy coughs, she had asked him to end her life. The injectable morphine prescribed by the doctor seemed to be an invitation to an easy way out, but Richard had recoiled at the thought. “I may be a lot of things,” he had said, indignant, “but I am not a murderer.”
There had been a fight of sorts, but not from anything June had said. Richard had read her mind as easily as he could read a book.
He’d as good as killed her two decades ago. Why was his conscience stopping him now?
“You can still be such a bitch,” he’d said, throwing down a towel he’d been folding. She didn’t see him for hours, and when he came upstairs with a tray of soup, they pretended that it hadn’t happened. He folded the rest of the towels, his lips pressed into a thin line, and June, in and out of consciousness, had watched his face change as if she were looking at it through a colored kaleidoscope: angry red triangles blending into dark black squares.
He was an old man now, her husband, the man she had never bothered to divorce because the act would be one more reason for her name to appear beside his in the newspaper. Richard was sixty-three years old. He had no pension. No insurance. No chance of gainful employment. The state called it compassionate probation, though June guessed the administrators felt lucky to get an old man with an old man’s medical needs off their books. For Richard’s part, June was his only salvation, the only way he could live out the rest of his life in relative comfort.
And she would not die alone, unattended in a cold hospital room, the beep of a machine the only indication that someone should call the funeral home.
So the man who had robbed her of her good reputation, her lifelong friendships, her comfort in her old age would be the man who witnessed her painful death. And then he would reap the reward of the last thing, the only thing, they could not take away: the benefits of her tenure with the public school system.
June chuckled to herself. Two birds with one stone. The Harris County Board of Education would remit a check once a month payable to Richard Connor in the name of June Connor. They would be reminded once a month of what they had done to June, and once a month, Richard would be reminded of what he had done to her.
Not just to her—to the school. To the community. To Grace. To poor Danielle Parson, who, last June had heard, was prostituting herself in order to feed her heroin addiction.
June heard a loud knocking sound, and it took a few seconds for her to realize the noise was conjured from memory, something only she could hear. It was Martha Parson banging on the front door. She’d pounded so hard that the side of her hand was bruised. June had later seen it on television; Martha held the same hand to her chest, fist still clenched, as she talked about the monster in their midst.
Grace had been dead less than a month, and the police were back, but this time they were there to arrest Richard.
Whenever June heard a child make a damning statement against an adult, her default position was always disbelief. She could not be blamed for doing this at the time. This was not so many years removed from the McMartin preschool trials. False allegations of child abuse and satanic sexual rituals were still spreading through schools like water through sand. Kern County. Fells Acres. Escola Base. The Bronx Five. It was a wonder parents didn’t wrap their children in cellophane before sending them into the world.
More girls stepped up for their moments in the spotlight: Allison Molitar, Denise Rimes, Candy Davidson. With each girl, the charges became more unbelievable. Blow jobs in the faculty lounge. Fingerings in the library. He’d let them watch adult movies. He’d given them alcohol and taken suggestive photographs of them.
June immediately pegged them as liars, these former friends of Grace. She thought with disgust about the fact that she’d had these girls in her home, had driven them to the mall and the movie theater and had shared meals with them around her dinner table. June had searched the house, the car, Richard’s office at home and school. There were no photographs. The only alcohol in the house was a bottle of wine that had sat in the back of the refrigerator since June’s birthday. The cork had been shoved down into the open bottle. She’d pried it out, and the smell of vinegar had turned her stomach.
If June Connor knew about anything, it was teenage girls. Half her school day was spent settling she-said arguments, where rumors and innuendo had been used by one girl to tear down another. She knew the hateful, spiteful things they were capable of. They lied as a way of life. They created drama only to embrace the fallout. They were suggestible. They were easily influenced. They were spiteful, horrible human beings.
She said as much to the detectives, to the media, to the women who stopped her at the grocery store. Anyone who met June Connor during that time got the same story from her: I know these girls, and they are all lying for attention.
For his part, Richard was outraged. Teaching was his life. His reputation was sterling; he was one of those teachers students loved because he challenged them on every level every single day. He had devoted himself to education, to helping kids achieve something other than mediocrity. The previous year, four of his kids had gone on to full scholarships at Ivy League schools. Twice he had been voted teacher of the year for the district. Every summer, former students dropped by his classroom to thank him for making them work harder than they had ever worked in their lives. Doctors, lawyers, politicians—they had all at some point been in one of Richard’s English classes, and he had done nothing but help them prepare for their exemplary lives.
That first week was a blur; talking to lawyers, going to a bail bondsman in a part of town June had not known existed. There was an entirely different language to this type of life, a Latin that defied their various English degrees: ex officio, locus delicti, cui bono. They stayed awake all night reading law books, studying cases, finding precedents that, when presented to the lawyer, were dispelled within seconds of their meeting. And still, they went back to the books every night, studying, preparing, defending.
There is no bond tighter than a bond of mutual persecution. It was June and Richard against everyone else. It was June and Richard who knew the truth. It was June and Richard who would fight this insanity together. Who were these girls? How dare these girls? To hell with these girls.
June had often lectured Grace about responsibility. Like most children, Grace was a great subverter. Her stories always managed to shift blame, ever so subtly, onto others. If there was a fight, then Grace was only defending herself. If she was late with an assignment, it was because the teacher’s instructions had not been clear. If she got caught sneaking out in the middle of the night, it was because her friends had threatened her, cajoled her into being part of the group.
“Which is more possible,” June had asked, “that every single person in the world is conspiring to make you seem a fool, or that you are only fooling yourself?”
But this was different. June was vindicated. One by one, the girls dropped away, their charges dismissed for lack of evidence. The parents made excuses: The girls were not lying, but the public scrutiny was too much. The limelight not what they had expected. All of them refused to testify—all but one. Danielle Parson, Grace’s best friend. Richard’s original accuser.
The prosecutor, having tremendously lost face when the bulk of his case fell apart, would have sought the death penalty if possible. Instead, he threw every charge at Richard that had even the remotest possibility of sticking. Sodomy, sexual assault, statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, providing alcohol to a minor, and, because the debate team had traveled to a neighboring state for a regional tournament, child abduction and transporting a minor for the purposes of sexual concourse. This last one was a federal charge. At the judge’s discretion, Richard could be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“It’s come-to-Jesus time,” their lawyer had said, a phrase June had never heard in her life until that moment. “You can fight this and still go to jail, or you can take a deal, serve your time, and get on with your life.”
There were other factors. Money from a second mortgage they had taken on the house would get them through jury selection. Obviously, Richard wasn’t allowed back at work or within three hundred yards of any of the girls. The board had told June they were thinking of “transferring her valuable skills” to a school that routinely ended up in the news for campus shootings and stabbings. Then there were the signs left in their front yard, the burning bag of shit on their front porch. Nasty phone calls. Deep scratches in the paint of their cars.
“It’s like Salem,” June had muttered, and Richard agreed, making a comment that burning at the stake was preferable to being slowly drawn and quartered in front of a crowd of hysterical parents.
June decided then and there to dig in her heels. They would fight this. They would live in a homeless shelter if that’s what it took to clear Richard’s name. She would not let them win. She would not let this lying, cheating whore who had been her daughter’s best friend take another life.
She was certain then that Danielle had had something to do with Grace’s death. Had she taunted her? Had Danielle hounded Grace until Grace felt that picking up that straight razor and opening up her skin was the only way to save herself?
Leading up to the trial, June was consumed with such hatred for Danielle Parson that she could not look at a blond, slight, simpering teenager without wanting to slap her. Danielle had always been mouthy, always wanted to push the limits. Her mother let her dress like a whore. She skipped class. She wore too much mascara. She was a hateful, hateful child.
More obscure Latin: from depositio cornuum, “taking off the horns,” came deposition.
The twenty-one years since Richard’s conviction had given June plenty of time to reflect on what happened next. They were sitting at a table in the prosecutor’s conference room. Richard and June were on one side of the table—he because he was the accused, and June because she would have it no other way—while Danielle, Martha, and Stan Parson sat opposite. The lawyers were in between, lined up like dominoes ready to knock one another over with objections and motions to strike.
June relished the prospect of confronting the girl face-to-face. She’d prepared herself in the mirror that morning, using her best teacher gaze, the one that caused students to stop in their tracks and immediately apologize even when they weren’t quite sure why.
Cut the bullshit, June wanted to say. Tell the truth.
There was no such confrontation. Danielle would not look anyone in the eye. She kept her hands folded in her lap, shoulders drawn into a narrow V. She had that fragility some girls don’t lose even when they cross into womanhood. She was the type who would never have to take out the trash or change a tire or worry about paying her bills because one flutter of her eyelashes would bring men running to her aid.
June hadn’t seen Danielle since Grace’s funeral, when the girl had sobbed so uncontrollably that her father had to physically carry her out of the church. Recalling this scene, June experienced a revelation: Danielle was acting out of grief. Grace had been her best friend for almost a decade, and now she was gone. Danielle wasn’t hurt, at least not in the physical sense. She was mad that Grace was gone, furious at the parents who couldn’t prevent her death. There was no telling what reasons had clogged her mind. She obviously blamed Richard for Grace’s death. She was lost and confused. Children needed to know that the world was a place where things made sense. Danielle was still a child, after all. She was a scared little girl who didn’t know that before you could get out of a hole, you had to stop digging.
In that crowded conference room, a tiny bit of June’s heart had opened up. She understood fury and confusion. She understood lashing out. She also finally understood that the loss of Grace had left a gaping hole in the girl’s chest.
“Listen to me,” June had said, her voice more moderate than it had been in weeks. “It’s all right. Just tell the truth, and everything will be fine.”
Danielle had finally looked up, and June saw in her red-rimmed eyes that she was not angry. She was not vindictive. She was not cruel. She was afraid. She was trapped. The slumped shoulders were not from self-pity, but from self-loathing.
“It’s my fault Grace died.” Danielle’s words were a whisper, almost too soft to be heard. The court reporter asked her to repeat herself as the girl’s lawyers clamored to ignore the declaration.
“She saw us,” Danielle said, not to the room, or to the lawyers, but to June.
And then, with no prodding from the prosecutor, she went on to describe how Richard had seduced her. The longing glances in the rearview mirror as he drove the girls to and from school. The stolen kisses on her cheek, and sometimes her lips. The flattery. The compliments. The accidental touches—brushing his hand across her breast, pressing his leg against hers.
The first time it happened, they were at school. He had taken her into the faculty lounge, deserted after the last bell, and told her to sit down on the couch. As Danielle described the scene, June moved around the familiar lounge: the humming refrigerator, the scarred laminate tables, the uncomfortable plastic chairs, the green vinyl couch that hissed out a stream of air every time you moved.
Danielle had never been alone with Richard. Not like this. Not with the air so thick she couldn’t breathe. Not with every muscle in her body telling her to run away. June did not hear the girl’s words so much as experience them. The hand on the back of her neck. The hissing of the couch as she was shoved facedown into the vinyl. The agonizing rip as he forced himself from behind. The skin shredded by his callused hand when he reached around to touch her.
Why hadn’t she told anyone?
The lawyer asked this question, but June did not need to hear the girl’s answer.
If June Connor knew about anything, it was teenage girls. She knew how they thought, what they did to punish themselves when something bad happened, even if that bad thing was beyond their control. Danielle was afraid. Mr. Connor was her teacher. He was Grace’s father. He was friends with her dad. Danielle didn’t want to lose her best friend. She didn’t want to upset June. She just wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, hope it would never happen again.
But she couldn’t forget about it. She turned it over again and again in her mind and started blaming herself, because wasn’t it her fault for being alone with him? Wasn’t it her fault for not pulling away when he brushed up against her? Wasn’t it her fault for letting their legs touch, for laughing at his jokes, for being quiet when he told her to be?
Slowly, in her little-girl voice, Danielle described the subsequent encounters, each time shifting the blame onto herself.
“I was late with an assignment.”
“I was going to miss my curfew.”
“He said it would be the last time.”
And on and on and on, and finally it really was the very last time because Grace had walked into Richard’s office at home. She’d come to find out if her dad wanted some popcorn. She’d found instead her dad raping her best friend.
“That’s why…” Danielle gasped, looking up at June. “That’s the night…”
June didn’t have to be told. Even if she had wanted to, there was no way she could clear that night from her mind. June had been working in her sewing room. Danielle and Grace were upstairs eating popcorn, lamenting their lost chance at the regional championship. Richard was in his office. Martha Parson called, looking for her daughter. Richard offered to drive her home but the girl chose to walk. Why hadn’t June thought it strange that a fifteen-year-old girl would rather walk six blocks in the cold than get a lift from her best friend’s father?
“It’s my fault,” Danielle managed between sobs. “Grace saw us, and…” Her eyes were nearly swollen shut from crying. Her shoulders folded in so tight that she looked as if she were being sucked backward down a tube.
There was a long row of windows behind Danielle and her parents. June could see Richard’s reflection in the glass. His face was impassive. There was a glint of white from his glasses. She glanced down and saw that his hands were in his lap.
She glanced down and saw that he was enjoying the story.
By the time the deposition was over, June’s jaw was so tight that she could not open her mouth to speak. Her spine was hard as steel. Her hands were clenched into fists.
She did not say a word. Not when the girl described a birthmark on Richard’s back, a scar just below his knee, a mole at the base of his penis. Not when she talked about the obsessive way he’d stroked her hair. The way he had held her from behind and used his hand on her. The way he had seduced this fifteen-year-old child in the same way he had seduced June.
And June had thought of her words, long ago, to Grace: “Which is more possible,” she had asked, “that every single person in the world is conspiring to make you seem a fool, or that you are only fooling yourself?”
June had left the prosecutor’s conference room without a word to anyone. She drove straight to the school’s administration offices, where they gladly granted her request for a temporary leave of absence. She went to the dollar store and bought a packet of underwear, a toothbrush, and a comb. She checked in to a hotel and did not go home until the newspaper headlines told her that Richard would not be there.
He had left the heat on eighty, he who had fastidiously turned off hall lights and cranked down the thermostat on even the coldest days. The seat was up on every toilet. All the bowls were full of excrement. Dirty dishes spilled over in the sink. Trash was piled in the corner of the kitchen. The stripped mattress held the faint odor of urine.
“Fuck you too,” June had mumbled as she burned his clothes in the backyard barbecue.
The school board couldn’t fire her for being married to an imprisoned sex offender. Instead, she was moved to the worst part of town, a job for which she was routinely called to testify in court cases of students who’d been accused of armed robbery, rape, drug trafficking, and any number of horrors. Her social life was nonexistent. There were no friends left for the woman who had defended a pedophile. There were no shoulders to cry on for the principal who had called the students raped by her husband a pack of lying whores.
Over the years, June had considered giving an interview, writing a book, telling the world what it was like to be in that room listening to Danielle Parson and knowing that her husband had as good as killed them both. Each time June sat down to write the story, the words backed up like bile in her throat. What could she say in defense of herself? She had never publicly admitted her husband’s guilt. June Connor, a woman who relished the English language, could find no words to explain herself.
She had shared a bed with Richard for eighteen years. She had borne him a child. They had lost their child. They had loved together. They had grieved together. And all the while, he was a monster.
What kind of woman didn’t see that? What kind of principal did not notice that her own husband was brutally sodomizing her daughter’s fifteen-year-old best friend?
Pride. Sheer determination. She would not explain herself. She did not owe anyone a damn explanation. So she kept it all bottled up inside of her, the truth an angry, metastasizing tumor.
“Another story about the weather,” Richard said, rustling pages as he folded the paper. “Umbrellas are suggested.”
Her heart fluttered again, doing an odd triple beat. The tightness in her chest turned like a vise.
“What is it?” Richard reached for the mask hanging on the oxygen tank.
June waved him away, her vision blurring on her hand so that it seemed like a streak of light followed the movement. She moved her hand again, fascinated by the effect.
“June?”
Her fingers were numbing, the bones of her hand slowly degloved. She felt her breath catch, and panic filled her—not because the time was here, but because she still had not asked him the question.
“What is it?” He sat on the edge of the bed, his leg touching hers. “June?” His voice was raised. “Should I call an ambulance?”
She looked at his hands. His square fingers. His thick wrists. There were age spots now. She could see the blue veins under his skin.
The first time June held Richard’s hand, her stomach had tickled, her heart had jumped, and she’d finally understood Austen and Brontë and every silly sonnet she’d ever studied.
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
This was the feeling she wanted to take with her—not the horror of the last twenty years. Not the sight of her daughter lying dead. Not the questions about how much Grace knew, how much she had suffered. Not the thought of Danielle Parson, the pretty young girl who could make it through the day only with the help of heroin.
June wanted the feeling from the first time she had held her child. She wanted the bliss from her wedding day, the first time Richard had made love to her. There were happy times in this home. There were birthdays and surprise parties and Thanksgivings and wonderful Christmases. There was warmth and love. There was Grace.
“Grace,” Richard said, as if he could read her mind. Or perhaps June had said the word, so sweet on her lips. The smell of her shampoo. The way her tiny clothes felt in June’s hand. Her socks were impossibly small. June had pressed them to her mouth one day, kissing them, thinking of kissing her daughter’s feet.
Richard cleared his throat. His tone was low. “You want the truth.”
June tried to shake her head, but her muscles were gone, her brain disconnecting from the stem, nerve impulses wandering down vacant paths. It was here. It was so close. She was not going to find religion this late in the game, but she wanted lightness to be the last thing in her heart, not the darkness his words promised to bring.
“It’s true,” he told her, as if she didn’t know this already. “It’s true what Danielle said.”
June forced out a groan of air. Valentine’s Day cards. Birthday balloons. Mother’s Day breakfasts. Crayon drawings hanging on the refrigerator. Skinned knees that needed to be kissed. Monsters that were chased away by a hug and a gentle stroke of hair.
“Grace saw us.”
June tried to shake her head. She didn’t need to hear it from his mouth. She didn’t need to take his confession to her grave. Let her have this one thing. Let her have at least a moment of peace.
He leaned in closer. She could feel the heat from his mouth. “Can you hear me, wife?”
She had no more air. Her lungs froze. Her heart lurched to a stop.
“Can you hear me?” he repeated.
June’s eyes would not close. This was the last minute, second, millisecond. She was not breathing. Her heart was still. Her brain whirred and whirred, seconds from burning itself out.
Richard’s voice came to her down the long tunnel. “Grace didn’t kill herself because she caught me fucking Danielle.” His tongue caught between his teeth. There was a smile on his lips. “She did it because she was jealous.”