June woke at six-thirty a.m. to the buzz of her cell phone.
Victory International Shipping was apologizing for the early call, apologizing for having taken so long to get back to her, apologizing for the short notice: the truck with her belongings would be arriving early this afternoon.
“Today?” she sat up.
“We’re pleased to confirm you’ll be home to receive the truck, and we want to thank you for your patience.”
June cleared her throat. “There has been no patience here.” She glanced at the Polaroids on her nightstand. Here was Jameson caught off guard at his workbench, and there crouched over the rotted floor with the pry bar in his hands. In the latter he appeared to be looking into the near distance where June was standing. He seemed to be looking at her feet. What was wrong with her, taking her camera over there like that? He must think her insane.
“We appreciate your business.”
“You people are quite something.” June hung up and realized that she’d mostly forgotten about the boxes, and now their arrival felt like an intrusion. The day was already taking off like a train without her. The hammering had begun next door.
Sixteen parcels from her other life were about to arrive, and she would need to make room, and there was no room to be made. She would have to shove the boxes into her father’s bedroom, and the stacks would fill all the free space in the room. She could barely recall what she had packed. And after everything was dumped out, what then? Where was it all supposed to go? She had lived for months without any of these things.
She pulled open the blinds. The ocean was calmer than she had seen it in months, the horizon a tight, steady blue line. Today was set to be as hot as all the others, and June, to her surprise, was beginning to tire of the heat.
As far as she could tell, Jameson worked nearly every daylight hour of every day, and she wondered if he was drinking enough water. Niall used to ask June that very question, and it had gotten under her skin. She took it to mean that she’d had too many martinis the night before, and it sounded like an accusation, as if he were simply calling her a drunk, calling her a child, too, in need of a minder. June thought she was probably wrong about all of that. Niall was often driven by kindness; he had only ever been kind, for the most part he had. June grabbed her robe and cinched it tightly around the guilt rising in her gut.
Last night she’d lain awake replaying her conversation with Jameson, running through the beginning, middle, and end, recalling all the details, the sticky give of her soles on the dusty floor, the crash of the pry bar, the way he had said they would take good care.
We really need to take good care, she had told him. The stonework around the mantel is vulnerable in places not visible to the eye. What could have prompted her to say such a thing to a man who knew better than anyone what was called for? She’d felt the blood rush to her face as he looked away, and again minutes later when he nodded at the bedroom floor where he’d ripped out the wood that could not be saved, and she blushed again with the memory. A good portion of the wood could not be saved. This was what he’d told her in the bedroom, and he’d removed his glove and covered his mouth and sighed as if thinking of a way to tell her that it could be saved, a way to change the truth staring up at him. The gold ring on his finger was dull and scratched, a little loose in fit, and she couldn’t help but think he had brought it to his face so that she might see it and consider what it stood for. But the chimney, he’d said, and when he lifted his eyes to her, he seemed to be thinking of something other than a chimney, something other than a floor that could not be saved.
I’ve worked this way ever since my wife and I were in college.
Her mug. Her pillow. What else had she packed?
Last night she’d listened to Jameson working up until the final ray of light, around ten o’clock, the same as he’d done since he arrived. But when she saw the shadows from his lantern, she imagined being inside the house with him, sitting knee-to-knee on the dining room floor. She imagined leaning close to his ear to say all the awful details she’d never said to anyone, not even Niall. The way the blood had run down Heather’s back from the scissors in June’s hand, and the sight of scrawny little Claire being led through the dark while June lay safely beneath her blanket. There was more than that. Much more, and June could feel the words forming in her mouth, feel the air of freedom as if she were being let out of a cage.
“My God, the theater of your mind, child,” Grandmam once said, and looking back, June guessed she had meant that there was now something wrong with her. Something ruined and beyond repair. Grandmam’s side glances when June spoke or ate, as if looking for the weary signs of instability like that of her own son. Before June was sent away, Grandmam had laughed with her whole body. She would hold June close and kiss the top of her head. When June returned from Salem, it was different. “She does not have the constitution to overcome all that has happened in her short life,” she told Granddad when June was supposed to be out of earshot. “She’s a lionheart, Maeve,” he’d said. “More her mother than her father.”
Victory International Shipping had said early afternoon, but the roar of the moving van was echoing up the ridge before June had a chance to finish her coffee.