Evenings fell like a thick black cloud ever since June gave up drinking, and tonight was no exception. The pressure on her skull weighed in fast. Dusk was the hardest part of the day, sidling up like a friendly drunk offering rounds. Just one beer, so refreshing on a summer evening, watching as the sun slipped into the sea.
Granddad used to say that no matter how long the day, the evening comes. In June’s case, evening was the thing that did her in.
She was teaching herself to step aside at the worst of it, to focus on the things that happened earlier in the day, which wasn’t easy when all she was doing was lying in the sun. She’d kept lounging after the golfer ran off, stayed right there where the clothesline used to hang, allowing memories to break open inside her until she found herself sucking in a breath to keep tears from building in the corners of her eyes. The tears escaped regardless, and pooled in the curves of her ears.
The clothesline. Her grandparents. Her father. Back, back, back before she’d ever known the taste of spirits in her throat, before she’d felt the soft sway of drink inside her limbs and achy heart. Back to hearing her father emerge from his bedroom, to the way she could be certain that when he finally did appear, in the kitchen or the yard or on the front porch, looking out at the rain on the white tips of the ocean, he would be dressed in his custard cardigan and crisp white shirt, faded jeans and black boots, like a uniform. The first words out of his mouth would be “What’s the news, buttercup?” and June might startle from her reading on the braided rug, or doing homework at the kitchen table, or crouched throwing logs onto the fire, but she would feel herself unfold and warm up and brighten when she said, “You’re here!” To which her father would reply, “Here and there and everywhere!” and within the hour the washing machine was churning.
Her father had an oval, lightly freckled face and fair, reddish blond hair that wisped around his ears. Women stared at him for seconds too long; mothers of June’s classmates pinched and prodded their own hair and smiled broadly at him when he accompanied June to the bus stop. When Heather Atkinson’s mother handed him a piece of pink paper torn from Heather’s notebook, June pretended not to see. She looked at Heather, and Heather looked at June, and both turned in the direction of the bus, even though it hadn’t yet arrived. That evening June spotted the crumpled pink paper in the kitchen wastebasket, and she saw it again the next day, its creases evened out on her father’s desk in the living room, on it a phone number written in blue pencil.
For the rest of June’s life the thump of a washing machine would have a way of lifting a dark mood, of peeling off a layer or two of grief, and reclaiming the day in a way that nothing else ever quite could. There had never been room in the carriage house for a dryer before June purchased the stackable set in there now. Back then they’d use Grandmam’s dryer in winter, and in summer they hung everything on the backyard line. Basket after basket, it had felt so good to bear such a weight in her puny little arms, so good to be useful and praised. June’s grandmother watched without watching from next door, her presence as solid and everlasting as the trees. “She thinks we don’t notice,” June’s father once said. “But we know exactly how she looks after us.” June would often glance up to see Grandmam working in the garden or rocking on the front porch, snapping green beans into a bowl. She seemed to sense June looking, and if her father was nearby, Grandmam went easy on the wave, offering a half-hidden one near her ribs and a tempered smile that remained after her hand went down. If June’s father had lived into old age, he would have looked an awful lot like Grandmam; he’d looked a lot like her then. June had waved in the same secretive way, understanding how to model rules that no one spoke. Like the way June never mentioned her mother. No one mentioned her mother. Her father never returned a wave or a smile to Grandmam. He’d shake out the wet laundry in the air before fastening it on the line, and June helped by hugging the cloth sack of wooden pins to her chest behind him, handing them up as needed. “Next, next, next,” her father would say, until the air was transformed into a billowing swell of T-shirts, sheets, and towels. Sunlight filtered through the bright fabrics and onto the blood-red peonies until the petals glowed with a velvety sheen that June’s father once declared had looked delicious enough to eat, right before he plucked a petal, put it in his mouth, and chewed.
That poor golfer coming through the trees—what was June thinking? She wasn’t thinking. Maybe she was.
She was thinking on her front porch at dusk, watching the sunset, determined that tomorrow she would sit at her father’s old desk and not leave the chair until she’d written at least one paragraph. Thinking about tomorrow was as helpful as thinking about earlier in the day, or yesterday, or twenty years ago, other people, characters, anyone real or made up, other than June having to think about herself sitting here on this porch without a drink. One paragraph. How hard could that be?
Earlier today June had lolled her head to the side and opened her eyes to the thin blades of grass, to several black ants crawling inches from her face. They carried what appeared to be crumbs from the toast she’d eaten earlier on the patio, and she watched their microscopic feet, the flicker of each grass strand snapping and releasing from their weight. Then came that smack of the short iron and June’s hands balled into fists. She knew what it was. Nothing else felt quite the same as old anger throwing its weight around. It was Heather Atkinson. All these years later and June had yet to figure out how to lessen the impact of those memories. The ferocity never failed to take her by surprise.
She dropped her chin and scratched her scalp and let out something of a growl. She sucked in a deep breath and then followed the rhythm of the waves. Venus glowed like a bulb in the sky.
“You smell that, June?” her father used to say, standing near the clothesline, looking out from beneath the brim of his straw hat, bearing a striking resemblance to Vincent van Gogh. June would smile at the breezy cocktail of sea salt, bleach, and lavender. Nights when they forgot to bring in the laundry, which was often, June lay listening to the shirtsleeves and bed linens thumping in the wind. Looking back, she thought she should have been frightened by the sounds. Surely most children would have thought of ghosts when they saw the rippling shapes in the dark, but when June got out of bed and looked down from her window, what she saw in the blue light of the Milky Way and the moon was a day when laundry had been washed and hung out to dry, her father having strolled through the yard and kitchen, to the bubbling pots on the stove, and when that happened, what June had felt, looking down in the night, was that the house, even if she didn’t have the words for it yet, had been relieved of melancholia and despair.
This afternoon she’d rolled onto her stomach and immediately felt the pointed wings of her shoulders and the backs of her legs filling with heat, and she’d thought about how her skin, more than anything else, set her apart from her father and grandparents, who were a pale, Easter pink, too tender for the sun from May through October. June’s mother had gifted her this easy season of summer—an undisputed fact, and one of very few of which June could be certain. Isadora Swan was the mother’s name on June’s birth certificate. According to her father, everyone had called her Izzy, and she had been an art student in San Francisco, where she and Finn Byrne met. Izzy Swan died of eclampsia shortly after June’s birth. Izzy had a seizure, slipped into a coma, and died within the hour. “Her brain was bleeding,” her father once said, after waking seven-year-old June in the night to see the cold, shiny stars. He named them off in a rushing stream, pointing with his entire arm while June shivered in her nightgown, her toes going stiff in the damp grass of April. “You’re lucky to have me,” he told her between Hydra the sea serpent and the Big Bear. “Your mother was an orphan. When she died there was no one to mourn her but me.”
There was June, of course. June mourned her mother who had been an orphan, and now June was an orphan, and once June was gone there’d be no one left to mourn, and the idea floated toward her as calmly as a bright yellow leaf. Years ago in college, June had traced her mother’s family online. There was no one left to find. Her search turned up nothing but death certificates, and two living cousins so distant that June didn’t feel right bothering them.
When Grandmam took June to the grocery store downriver to find the freshest produce, strangers glanced from one to the other as if wondering where this creamy-pale woman with freckles and light eyes had found such a girl. A reservation? Mexico? The first day of kindergarten, June’s teacher, Miss Louise, asked June if English was spoken at home. June was as dark as she’d ever been after a long hot summer. “Not the King’s,” Grandmam had said when June told her later that day, and Grandmam laughed at herself while removing her apron at the sink.
Tomorrow, yes, June would turn this ship around. Maybe her lack of drink had nothing to do with her inability to write. Perhaps she’d just written herself into a corner, taken a false turn, and arrived at a place that could not be reached from the horizon she had set her sights on. Perhaps what she needed to do was go against the grain, pull back, take everything in the opposite direction without hesitation, like the way she’d told Niall to leave.
The sun took a final bow, but the legendary green flare June had watched for her entire life was not to be seen. The night her father died she’d looked for it. Several days later, when Grandmam attacked the clothesline with a hatchet, June looked for it while Granddad gripped June to his chest, the crook of his elbow shielding her ear from Grandmam’s awful cries, and said, “Shush now,” into the top of June’s head, “she can do as she needs.” The sun was sinking and sinking and then nearly gone, and then it was gone, and June continued to watch for the green.
Now she studied her hands in the twilight, wringing them, flexing them, knowing how important it was to give them something to do. Her hands were Grandmam’s hands, long, slender fingers fitting for a person of measurable height. Maybe her mother had been tall, too. Maybe her father had closed his eyes when he spoke to June because she looked like Izzy Swan. June had only a single photograph of her mother, though it was grainy and taken from a distance, a street scene with people her parents’ age in what appeared to be San Francisco. Izzy is looking at June’s father, and he is looking at Izzy, while everyone else smiles for the camera.
Izzy had a nose that resembled June’s, though June liked it better on her mother’s face. If June were to assign that nose to one of her characters, she might call it hearty: a nose of proper proportion, not large, but with a bridge that had a slightly high stature when seen from the side. It was the kind of nose that saved a nice face from looking plain, adding interest to the eyes, even if they were already pretty.
“Why do you keep staring at me?” June once asked Niall.
“I’m not staring.”
“You are.”
“I’m trying to understand your face.”
“What on earth?”
“It’s beautiful, but I don’t know exactly how.”
June had thought of Izzy Swan.
“The longer I stare, the more it takes me by surprise. It’s arresting. You arrest me, June,” he’d said, and June felt as if he were talking about her mother in a way that drew a direct line to June.
Someone once said that adulthood was like losing your mother in the grocery store every day of your life. Yes, well, never mind about that. Two months after Grandmam tore down the clothesline June was sent to a boarding school for “vexed and agitated girls,” as Mr. Thornton called it. He was the thin-haired, ruddy-faced director of the school, who’d come all the way from Scotland to take this job, and he spoke to June and her grandparents from behind an oversized mahogany desk. “A long way from home,” Granddad had said to Mr. Thornton in a tone that sounded like a question to June. “Aren’t we all?” Mr. Thornton had replied. Salem, Oregon, where the air smelled faintly of a dairy farm down the road. For nine months June lived with girls of all ages who cut themselves with razor blades or plucked out their eyelashes, who cried long into the night or never spoke a word, who refused to eat or ate too much. Nine months before Granddad busted in and took June home, in exactly the way she had imagined every night of her captivity—arriving in a fit of strength and anger, shoving people to the side, taking June by the hand as they walked out the front doors, daring anyone to try and stop them. But while waiting for that to happen, June shut out the nighttime shrieks and sobs of the other girls by creating a list of seven comforts that she hid inside her imagination like sweets she could reach for when no one was looking.
All these years later, those seven comforts still held up. June could turn to them, though they embarrassed her. She felt eccentric in the privacy of her own mind. Niall was the only living soul she’d ever told about these things, and how good was he, becoming even more enamored with her. Hot sun on her skin was number three. The scent of horse sweat was number five, especially when tracing the air after a good pat of wool mitten against its neck on a chilly afternoon. This made her sound like an aristocrat, and she was anything but—raised on oatmeal and tea and her Irish Labour Party grandfather’s sense of humor. June would learn later in life that Grandmam, who’d kept the books for several of the shops in Nestucca Beach, had asked each for a loan to help pay June’s board at the home for vexed and agitated girls. June came to call the place the Infirmary of Innocents, and had written a school very much like it into one of her novels, including its old horse, an ancient pony with an arched spine that June had refused to ride, wanting only to pet the poor creature like a dog. Niall once referred to June as a “bit of a lower-class cock up,” someone pretending to be who she was not. It was meant as a compliment, as a way to say that she was fine and good just the way she was—but of course that was before she could no longer pretend to be fine and good. Niall was in no way correct about everything, of course, but he was in the right about her wanting to be someone she was not. It was difficult to remember if there had been a time in her life when some part of her had not been missing. “You’re a bit of a graveyard,” Niall had once said of her, too.
Montgomery Clift came in at number six after June saw the scene of the crippling phone call he makes to his mother in The Misfits. “Ma, Ma, are you proud?” She watched the film for the first time in the days after her father died and before she was sent to Salem. While her grandparents whispered in fierce bouts of Irish in the kitchen, as if afraid June might suddenly understand what they were saying, June sat on the braided rug in the living room, watching the black-and-white film on their small TV, and it was then she began kneading the blue velvet hem of her favorite skirt between her finger and thumb. Kneading blue velvet was strange, she knew. Odd for a child to caress her clothing like a toddler fixated on the satin trim of her baby blanket, but it became a habit, a refuge ever since. It was number seven on her list. To have six and seven at the same time deserved a number all its own, like six and a half. When June turned thirty Niall bought her a robe with blue velvet trim. She’d packed it with the things she brought directly here to the carriage house, knowing better than to take a chance on its getting lost in transit.
It was no secret that Niall had resembled Monty Clift. In the early days of their courtship there’d been a moment when he held her face in his hands, ready to kiss her, and she asked him not to take what she was about to say the wrong way, but up close, she said, he looked even more like Monty Clift, and to be clear, she meant Monty before that awful car wreck altered his face and made him look like Monty’s attractive brother close in age. Did Niall take her compliment the right way? He’d laughed inside her mouth, hearty and quick, with a yes, yes that landed on the back of her throat. Thank you, love, he’d murmured across her tongue, and his words became her words, his breath her breath, and that kiss made them feel like innocents, they both said it, so young and tender, so grand and brave, shivering like high schoolers afraid of getting caught under the bleachers.
Taking instant photographs with the Polaroid was number two. The chemical smell and zip-zip of the ejector was a full circle of satisfaction. Tracing a map with her finger was number four. The thick, nearly cottony paper beneath her sliding fingertip, the smell of dusty, yellowed maps, while searching for a place to go.
And number one? Speaking to her mother. Words strung together, flung together, in ways that didn’t need to make sense. Aperture, fractures, rifts, on her lips in the dark, and then her mother’s whispery replies in June’s ears—poppies, marigolds, fleece, like cradle songs that gathered June safely toward sleep.
June told herself that if she could make it past sundown without taking a drink she would call the contractor and not hang up. She would follow through with asking, or at this point begging, him to restore the bungalow, as she was told his work was like no one else’s, and she would sell the place by fall.
If this guy agreed to do the work, then June would swear to herself to get through the intrusion by drawing on her seven comforts, none of which were a drink, and she would allow these summer days and then the future beyond them to unfold with a new neighbor living close by, and she would not try to control every crease and corner of her life, would not try to be someone she was not, and here she would vow that the season of summer, her season of watermelons and berries and the blue and gold thrush’s return to the yard, could officially begin today, in this first week of June, with Venus and the moon and a warm breeze deepening with the last hint of decay from the by-the-wind sailors.