A pallet on the floor? How odd he was. How odd that she’d laughed like that, making jokes at her own expense. He had lived here while she was abroad, but having lived here wasn’t enough to make him feel so familiar. Not enough to put her so at ease. I’m a dry drunk, she’d said. Heaven help her.
Was it the one a.m. phone call, the strange dreams that had her acting this way?
Niall was moving on.
After a third cup of coffee her hands were trembly and damp. She missed her mug and she missed her pillow, and she missed Niall with a goddamn fury that pressed so hard it seemed as if the bones in her chest might crack if she didn’t shorten up her breath. She sat at the table and kneaded the velvet hem of her robe.
A flash of Leigh and Cordelia flittered at the corners of her mind. June stood, looked around as if spooked. She lowered herself back into the chair, stood again, unsure what to do, as if doing the wrong thing might jinx her.
They could keep their beer, she thought. No rewrites on that. Hadn’t they been through enough? Weren’t they about to go through much worse before things took a turn for the better? June could appease those young women; it was the least she could do. They could have their drinks, and she would get them off the kitchen floor, get them standing, at least one of them, for starters, could hand the other a beer. June’s problems were not their problems. Mostly they were not. One of them ought to enjoy a cigarette, too—nothing like a kitchen filling with clouds of thin blue smoke on a hot summer day.
June poured the rest of her coffee down the sink, not quite ready, though certainly on the verge of taking up the pen, as it were. It was at this table all those years ago where she’d sat across from her father while he smoked, and here where she’d tried so hard not to cough, and tried harder still to gather her thoughts for what to do. Excuse herself and run next door? Or do nothing at all, and her father might tire and get up and return to his room. Trouble had gotten on everything. “The music so loud in there you couldn’t hear your own voice,” he’d said. “You couldn’t hear your own thoughts.” He laughed and shook his head, and June asked what he was talking about. And then the washing machine clunked to a stop, like a signal for him to stub his cigarette in a coffee mug. He rose without a word, piled the wet drapes into the laundry basket, and carried them, barefoot, out into the rain. When he began hanging them on the line, June started to cry. “Where are the pins?” her father asked. June remained paralyzed at the back door, shivering as the warm air from inside pulled the smell and heat of the fire past her legs in exchange for the cold. She searched across the yard for Grandmam—and here she came, suddenly at her father’s side, and Granddad too, exchanging glances behind her father’s back. “Get inside, love,” Granddad called out to June, and then, as if at the sound of his own father’s voice, her father collapsed in a heap.
June had stepped back out of the rain. “One, two . . .” she whispered, counting her footfalls to make sure she’d done it correctly, as if everything needed to follow some code to keep the whole of it from breaking.
Her grandparents held her father on each side, and the three of them stumbled into the kitchen. Everyone was crying now, her father worst of all, sobbing like nothing June had ever heard, a wild misery that, to this day, caused her eyes to well up at the thought. Every bit of what was happening was happening because of the trouble with June.
Grandmam remained upstairs with June’s father while June helped Granddad warm up yesterday’s soup and potato bread, or rather watched him from a distance. His energy seemed to have been dialed down to the end of the gauge. He was upset with her. Everyone was upset with her, and how could they not be? June had overheard Granddad on the phone with the principal the day before, agreeing to pay for Heather’s medical expenses. But Mr. Oliver, a man her father’s age, was asking for something more. “But you’re telling me the cut was superficial,” Granddad had said. “The girl didn’t need any stitches. OK, several. All right. Yes, Heather. I do know her name. Of course it matters, son, but to not allow June to return to school . . .”
By the time Grandmam came downstairs an hour had passed, and June and Granddad were reading quietly in the living room in front of the fire. “I could use a little something to eat,” Grandmam said, and she sighed loudly, and Granddad sighed too, and together they met in the kitchen and spoke Irish, and June had never felt so alone in the world, and that was before she knew the full extent of what it was to be cast aside and forsaken.
Nearly nine months later, Granddad burst through those dreaded double doors in Salem and found June coloring at a table with two other girls in a room so quiet June could hear the breath of each girl next to her, smell the oil on their skin and hair. Every girl had her own coloring book with pages of empty houses and trees, even the teenagers. Every girl had a set of five crayons. Granddad called out for her, and June startled and stood as if she were about to be disciplined. But it was Granddad, not the director, taking June by the wrist. They scuttled out with several of the staff following in protest. Granddad didn’t look at them, not once. His brogue was thick and loud when he said, “Do not go near this child. And you best not come anywhere near me.”
He brought June home to the carriage house, to her old room, her father no longer upstairs, no longer anywhere. Grandmam was in the kitchen—a version of her was, stiff and hollow, a stranger, really, compared to the person June had known and loved all her life. Here was a much older woman greeting June with a cursory hug, looking around at everything other than her grandchild. When her eyes finally did meet June’s, it was June who turned away. To be seen by Grandmam made her chest ache. She, above everyone, seemed suspicious of the secret corners of June’s mind and heart, Grandmam’s eyes like spotlights aimed at every bad deed, and there were plenty. More than before she’d gone away.
That first night back home, she had asked in a trained tone of politeness if she could sleep in her own bed, if she could go on living there, because to let it go, though she did not say so, was to let her father disappear completely. Her mother, too. Her grandparents spoke to each other in Irish before they agreed. For years after, until June was sixteen, they slept in the carriage house with her—Grandmam in June’s father’s old bed, Granddad on a cot next to his wife. The nights were no longer filled with the sound of a clicking typewriter or the scent of grilled cheese and tea and tangerines. No more Buttercup Byrne or What’s the news? No maps, no plans, and all the laundry was done next door, as were the hours of homeschooling with Grandmam and a tutor named Mrs. Crowley, who came twice a month to see that June was keeping up with the state requirements.
June had spent entire afternoons cradling her knees to her chest on the lounger in the carriage house yard, her eyes closed to the sun, when there was sun. She must have appeared lonely, bereaved, and disturbed, or at least bored and dulled by a lack of social interaction and friends. June was some of those things but not all of them, and not all at once. She was grateful to be home, if grateful was the word. It wasn’t, but she could think of no other. She was where she wanted to be, and yet everything ached. She hurt when she climbed the hazel tree, hurt when she looked up at the window and her father was not watching for her, not sitting sideways in the stuffed green chair that matched the set at her grandparents’ house. She hurt not seeing his eyes seeing hers, his small smile matching her own.
Happiness had confused her ever since. It pulled like an adhesion across her chest, had no give, and burned. It made her anxious and fazed, and only afterward, when some distance was afforded her, could she feel pleasure in the form of relief. Joy was no better, coming for her with a deep roiling in the gut. The idea that she was not entitled to anything good had taken hold.
Heather Atkinson’s mother told Grandmam that Heather was afraid to go to school, that she couldn’t trust the other children not to hurt her, and Mrs. Atkinson herself was having nightmares, which she expressed to Grandmam in a high-pitched stream of emotion at the front door a few days before June was sent away. And how was it possible for things to get worse from there? June never even tried to save the girl who slept closest to her when Mr. Thornton came around in the night. Did he touch you? Granddad later asked. Did he lay a hand on you? Claire Young was the girl’s name. She was two years older than June but smaller and quieter, and June had not made a sound when Mr. Thornton sneaked her away. Mr. Thornton liked to hit the girls. He’d chosen only the sweetest girls, the ones who shared their crayons and cookies and socks and who cried when they saw others cry. He took them into the storage room down the hall and smacked them with his bare hand while their pants were down, and he forbade them from making a noise or he would take them into the cellar, where they could scream all they wanted and no one would ever hear. The other girls, those who, like June, had not been touched by Mr. Thornton, girls who had been at the school for years, told her the full story on the first night she arrived. These were the mean girls who fought and stole and kicked the staff, and more than once it occurred to June that if anyone deserved to be hit, it was them, but they were not the ones Mr. Thornton chose, and he did not choose June, and she understood this to mean it was because she was as bad as the others, and of course this was true, given the way she pretended sleep when Mr. Thornton came for Claire.
Here’s to seeing you or not seeing you.
June stood and wrapped her hair into a knot.