June often dreamed of colorful, blooming dyes and rocky scapes—land or moon she couldn’t say; they had the feel of porous tints and textures that she recalled come morning, a tactile sense of craggy coral beneath her bare feet. She climbed to get where she was going, and though she was never quite sure where she was headed, it seemed there existed a place she was expected to be. She ate lemons and wild strawberries and Grandmam’s marionberry pie. The air smelled of animal and fermented earth, of salads and cocktails and sweets.
She’d wake after these dreams feeling a little queasy, and now that she was no longer drinking it seemed unusually cruel. The sun hurt her eyes the way it had when she was hung over, and it was all she could do to lie still and not think about the blue and red stains lingering behind her lids, not recall the tart flavors on her tongue. On those days she felt as if she’d already lost the plot before her feet hit the floor, and she would think how nice it would be to have a cup of cinnamon-ginger tea and a tangerine, how nice if there were someone to offer it up. But she didn’t keep tea and tangerines in the house, the way she didn’t keep wine, vodka, or beer.
Last night June dreamed of the hands of a man she’d yet to meet. Hands everywhere she looked, lifting and pulling and holding this piece or that of her grandparents’ house up to the light, to give her an awareness of what was to come, a vision of the past resurrected. “You know I’m going to bring it all back,” this man—Jameson?—said, and June woke in the dark, damp with sweat, and went to the window, her hands fumbling to close the blinds she’d already closed before bed. Was she a sleepwalker now? The world did not operate in a vacuum. Remove one thing, and another rushed in to take its place.
She’d returned to bed after that, hot and unsettled beneath the duvet, which she’d kicked off and laid on top of in her peach pajamas, made of a fabric so soft it was too soft, a silk that somehow left her feeling self-indulgent for wearing them while alone. So she sat up and undressed and lay back down, naked and wide awake for the next hour in the same Milky Way–blue light of her childhood, imagining the linens and shirtsleeves on the line wrestling in the wind. Imagining, too, Leigh and Cordelia in the claustrophobic kitchen where they’d been lingering, neglected, for over a month. She needed to get them out. She would get them out. The hour passed, and June gave up on sleep and went downstairs in her robe with the blue velvet hem to see if there was any chance The Misfits was playing on TV. She kneaded her velvet cuff and paced the braided rug with the remote in her hand, aiming it like a laser gun at the television set from different corners of the room. Infomercials flashed a different kind of blue light, and June wondered if her grandfather might have left a bottle of Jameson next door in one of the old shed cupboards where she’d yet to fully rummage all the way through.