An older model of Jameson’s truck was parked next door in June’s driveway. It had lost its luster, but Jameson knew it had once been a beauty: two-tone orange and cream. It seemed the kind of truck that suited an old man. June had said she might not be here to greet him, but she never said one way or the other if someone else might be around instead.
He studied the sunlight hitting June’s shingles, the ravens cawing in the trees above her roof. The blinds in the windows were tilted at nearly identical angles, just enough to block out the world, and raised several inches from the bottom to allow for a breeze through the screens. He couldn’t see any movement, but he knew houses better than he knew people, and as staged as it all might appear, her house did not feel empty.
When the terrible storm she’d spoken of had battered the hillside, a giant spruce—the stump still there—had heaved from the saturated soil, taking a wide and pointed swing at the house as it crashed into the yard. Jameson could picture it clearly, how it’d wrenched the gutter free of the entire south side, and the immense weight continued to snap it loose until it came undone like the seam of a dress, the rusty nails splitting one after the other, weak and fragile as thread. It was a wonder the roof had not caved along with it.
The roof shingles were swollen, misshapen, waterlogged from rain and moss, especially along the front pitch of roof where a wet and relentless wind had slammed into it for years. He knew what to expect before he entered the dank cave of that house, wondering, sight unseen, if it would have been better to raze the place, send it into oblivion, which was saying something coming from him.
He dragged the larger toolbox and his duffel bag to the edge of the truck bed and considered what a pain it was going to be to haul the table saw and workbench up the side of that hill. It was four p.m., a few good hours left in the day, so he shucked off any trace of whining and trekked on up with the bulky toolbox in tow.
He stopped to catch his breath and ease his shoulders. The extra sunlight of long summer days would be no small grace. From the looks of things, he’d need to make use of every waking minute through September.
He was nearly out of breath when he reached the kissing gate. He set the tools down and placed a hand on top of the gate, and it gave easily beneath his shove, swinging open and shut several times on a crooked hinge before he held it to the side with his knee. He checked the latch and found freshly hewn pieces missing from the wood.
It wasn’t until he looked up again that he realized he had a clear view of the backyard, and a complete view of June’s backyard, too, but it was this yard he was in, the one where his feet were firmly planted, that caused him to step forward in a kind of daze, the gate creaking behind him. He might have sucked in a breath. Surely he would have needed to after trudging up the path. But he was saying “Heavenly hell” right out loud, and gripping the corner of the house, and the wind threatened again to take his hat. He yanked it off and shoved the rolled bill into the front pocket of his jeans. His heart felt as if it were trying to escape his ribcage, banging, banging, banging.
The sight before him blossomed out of the ground like a fairy tale, an enchanted drawing from a picture book he’d read to the children. Columns of paper-white birch, some of them shooting three, four, or five trunks from a single clump, bordered the backyard, and their heart-shaped leaves formed a shimmering curtain that dangled halfway down the trunks. Just beyond this narrow white forest was a blanket of emerald—a golf course, the golf course, the Nestucca Bay Club, stretching into the stark blue horizon.
Tell me about what happened on the motorcycle, Sarah Anne had asked more than once. She had a right to know. But Jameson never cared to speak of it. Never cared to revisit the horror and shame of that day. There had been witnesses. A police report she could read, and did read, but still she asked him to tell her, and so he said he didn’t remember exactly what had gone on in the moments leading up to it, even as it burned vividly behind his eyes on any given day while he worked, and any given night while he slept. It played out in nightmares, and in daydreams while cooking omelets and hash browns at the stove.
He always recalled what had happened with a bird’s-eye view, as if floating in slow motion over Highway 101, while below him a white Pontiac bore down on a motorcycle going twenty over the limit in the wake of a heavy downpour, and that man on the motorcycle was Jameson. He had lost control in the same instant the Pontiac was hydroplaning sideways across the stretch of highway toward him, gliding on wet, glassy asphalt, its silvery chrome and the road each a blinding reflection of the sun. To the west, a golf course, and a hefty man who’d just taken a swing, his arms and club held upward, frozen in the air. Then the full collision with the ground, the snap of bone shearing Jameson’s Levi’s, clean as a bowie knife was what he’d thought, heavenly hell, he’d thought, sliding and sliding as if he’d never stop. His skin was shredding and his leg had snapped in half, but he did not feel any pain, and he did not see his life flash before him, and in not seeing it, he assumed he would live. Seconds before he passed out, he did see his father’s hands, palms patting Jameson’s boy cheeks, patting them even after Jameson would become a young man, his father unafraid to show his son affection, his father saying his name, and then Jameson looked up in time to glimpse the elderly driver behind the wheel of the Pontiac, that moment of reckoning playing out across the man’s face when Jameson collided with his fender.
Back then his existence was still a tightly woven object, a solid piece of something he’d known how to care for and protect. And yet he’d been reckless with the people he loved most, giving in to small-minded grievances with Sarah Anne, speeding away from her, knowing she wouldn’t like it, knowing she would worry, and worse, speeding away from the children. They had heard the fight. They were standing at the window when he tore out of there.
“Their last thoughts of me as a father, Sarah Anne.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It was an accident. And it had nothing to do with anything else that happened that day.”
“I made a terrible mistake.”
“Yes. But not the one that killed our children.”
What he wanted was that anxious hum beneath his skin to go away.
When he’d gained consciousness in the hospital, it was as if he’d spent years in a coma, though he had been knocked out for only a few hours, and then several more for the surgery on his leg. He woke in the middle of the night with a profound understanding of things that once baffled him, and though he didn’t think he had the language to explain, he’d wanted to try it out on anyone who might listen, especially Sarah Anne. For the first time in his life he’d been completely lost to the physical world, and every part of him had felt sheltered and at peace. But there was no one standing vigil when he’d opened his eyes and said hello. By morning he was relieved to see the staff, though everyone approached him with odd, furtive looks that he did not know how to read. He asked after his wife all morning and was told they’d put in a call to her, but he did not believe anything anyone said.
Sarah Anne had finally arrived near noon, wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day before, trembling and pale, her eyes darkened and more deeply set than he’d ever seen, and he believed it was because of what he’d done, his idiotic lapse in judgment, and he smiled at her while apologizing, and he called her baby, and he said, “No, no, I’m OK, Sarah Anne, I’m so sorry I made you worry.” He went on and on like that while she stared out the hospital window at a tulip tree, and it took a while before the new and unimaginable began to creep in. It wasn’t him at all that was troubling her. Something else had gone wrong. He wasn’t even on Sarah Anne’s mind right now. It was the children. It had everything to do with the children.
The way Sarah Anne spoke when she was able to form the words made it clear that she’d been given some kind of sedative. That’s when Jameson knew, before she’d said those awful things. The unthinkable had happened, it was already done, and it could not be revoked. Sarah Anne mumbled and wept to get the words to come, words that should never be spoken and were not to be believed but she was saying them nonetheless. A gunman had killed their children in the market at the gas station.
Jameson passed out in the hospital bed and seconds later came to. He saw Sarah Anne holding his arm and yelling, and just before he lost consciousness again he realized that she was shouting at him, and others were taking her by the arm, but he heard her say how she’d left Piper and Nate with Chloe, their sitter, so she could race to the hospital to be with him, and while she was sitting right here, watching him sleep and heal, Chloe decided to distract the children from worrying about their father by driving them to the lighthouse to spot whales through the binoculars they’d received for their birthday. Chloe had needed to stop for gas.
When Jameson woke sometime later, he had to be restrained. He’d jumped up and tumbled off the bed, his leg in the cast not enough to stop him, and he managed to tear free his IV before the staff tackled him back onto the bed.
Sarah Anne denied she’d ever said such things. Later, she agreed that it was possible. Later still, she said she’d been heavily drugged and he couldn’t reasonably expect to get an answer.
Two weeks later, Jameson had phoned Chloe. He needed to understand how it was that she had survived and not his children. “The clerk lost his keys,” she said flatly. He guessed she was still in a state of shock, and though it crossed his mind that he had no business calling up this eighteen-year-old girl and forcing her to revisit that day, he could not stop himself from digging in. “ ‘Where did I put my keys?’ the clerk said, and he was looking all around the counter, and that’s when the guy with the gun walked in, and I heard the noise of it, the gun, I think I did, some preparation of it, I don’t know, and people just started screaming and the front glass blew out with a huge bang, and then, I don’t know how long it lasted, but it seemed like a long time before it stopped.”
“Where were the kids?” he asked.
“At the candy. At the front.”
Jameson swallowed. “Where were you?”
Chloe hesitated. He could hear the guilt rising in her voice, and he did not try to make it easier. “Where?” he asked.
“At other the end of the aisle. I was crouched down, getting ChapStick off the bottom shelf.”
For a while neither spoke.
“I’m sorry,” Chloe said, emotion choking her voice.
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he said, but he understood her anyway. Sarah Anne had been telling him the same thing: nothing to be sorry for. Yet his children were dead, and they would still be alive if he hadn’t sped off instead of talking it out with Sarah Anne.
“People keep saying I’m lucky,” Chloe said. “What a horrible thing to say.”
When Jameson hung up, he saw more clearly the scene that day. The two teenage attendants, boys the gunman had gone to school with, both dead near the pumps. The clerk in front of the counter, inches from Nate and Piper, inches from the gunman, who shot himself immediately after. Jameson grabbed his crutches, hobbled into the backyard as far as he could go, and threw a crutch into the trees. He gripped the rope from the tire swing to be sick in the grass, and when Sarah Anne came running out, he told her to get back in the house.
Jameson felt his stomach lurch at the memory. If June was inside her house, he was glad she chose not to come out. He did not want to see another face, not for days if he could help it.
He lugged his tools toward the dining room doors at the back.
A warbler lit on the lowest branch of the nearest birch and watched as Jameson stomped through wiry bunches of lavender tangled in milkweed and ivy and four inches of hemlock cones. The lavender crushed under his feet released its scented oil into the air and onto Jameson’s boots, and everything smelled of Sarah Anne’s bubble bath, of her neck when they’d made love last night, and again when he’d kissed her goodbye at the door, where he’d turned away too quickly from her welling eyes, trying not to read too much into them.
By this time of day they would be taking cover from the heat, dodging scorpions and bees, slathered in sunscreen, Ernest especially, reeking of its chemical scent. Jameson had hugged them both goodbye, Ernest straddling Sarah Anne’s hip, sleepy-eyed and distressed by another in a series of too many farewells in his short life. The two of them were a package Jameson tightly embraced. When he’d leaned back Sarah Anne was looking through him, all the way to the single thought he was sure they both shared: if there was mercy to be found in this world, let it find them now by not taking Ernest away from Sarah Anne, not ever, but certainly not before Jameson got home.
He sat on the rickety back stairs of a stranger’s abandoned house and missed his wife with an ache he had not felt for her in years.