June carried a utility knife upstairs to her father’s room. Her limbs were drained of all energy, though it was only midafternoon and she had barely done a thing. By contrast, the air seemed charged, as if the storm that Hicks had mentioned was indeed on the way. But what June felt was more than tired. She had lived a fairly solitary life since childhood, and grew up to spend her working life alone, yet a sense of loneliness seemed attached to everything now. She felt small, vulnerable, as if the world had expanded without warning, everything overexposed and raw, distorted, like looking through a crooked aperture that was meant to remain closed.
The clamor next door had shifted into a harsh crash of wood and metal as loose slabs of what had once been the bungalow were being pulled from the heaps out back and thrown into the drop box, and June could not help feeling that she herself was being dismantled, torn apart in pieces, and stripped to the core.
She kneeled in her father’s room and sliced the seal of tape on the box before her, reached in, and out came blankets and throws and yellow vintage pillows. The air trapped inside was from Ireland, its scent that of her other home, her other life. It smelled of Niall in the kitchen chopping carrots, the concrete floors, and the honeysuckle beneath the bedroom window. June sat back on her heels, squeezing the knife in her hand, feeling the ghosts of her past rising up and closing her in.
The second box was no different. Her waxed field jacket and knit caps and rubber boots and thick sweaters, every object attached to a memory, to a single hour or an entire season, artifacts of a life that had become nothing more than a place in history.
Then the familiar scent of books wafted through the air and landed her back in the present. Box after box was stuffed with her collection: stacks of poetry, novels, and short stories. Books on history, on how the brain works, biographies of painters and writers, tall crooked columns piling up around her like ancient ruins, and she thought of the piles next door that Jameson had made and set aside for someone else to haul away. Van Hicks, a man whose presence seemed to alter the way Jameson looked at the world. And how could it not? What had she seen in his face when she came upon the two of them in the yard? Fear? Disdain? What had they said to one another?
She pulled letters from a wooden keepsake box, warm sentiments from readers, and friends from whom she no longer heard. Eleanor Black used to be in touch, her letters purposely charming, meant to evoke a mood, an idea of who Eleanor was supposed to be. She’d married a Brit and lived in London. One of her letters had said something about June stealing the facts of Eleanor’s life to use in her own work. Have at it, Eleanor had written, not trying to disguise her arrogance. June had done no such thing, and Eleanor should have known as much, being a writer herself. We find what we want to find in others’ stories, see ourselves where we want to be seen, strolling through bright rooms of flattery, steering clear of the dark.
Eleanor was having a great run of success, but June hadn’t spoken to her since the divorce. Their friends had mostly been Niall’s, and the rest, she understood, had tired of her drinking. She’d been drinking when she packed these boxes and did not recall now what her reasoning had been. Two forks from the kitchen drawer. A clay bowl she never much cared for. To look at them in her hand was to look at the drunk who’d tossed all of this in a box. She was sentimental and sloppy. She was pathetic.
The vision of Jameson’s hands returned, and June allowed this much, allowed herself to wonder if he was thinking about her in that cabin with his wife, wondering if she had made any sort of impression on him at all.
And here in a box was the violet sundress she’d worn the night she met Niall. She held it against her chest, expecting to feel some kind of loss, but what she felt was nothing at all. She liked the dress, even now; it was as simple as that. She would make a point of wearing it again.
The violent crack of shingles and plywood being torn away had begun in earnest, and in between the materials being ripped apart, the men yelled to one another while others whistled and sang. June stretched her neck side to side. It was a mistake for her to have stayed home. How perfect a cabin on the river would be.
And now her pillow, her mug, the Ulysses butterfly in the glass box frame she’d forgotten all about, its broad, Prussian-blue wings nearly painful to stare into, so electric and charged, as if chemically concocted in a man-made lab. It had been a birthday gift from Niall, the first he’d ever given her. It would look nice in the living room near her mother’s drawings.
After June put away as many books as she could fit on the living room shelves, she removed the tape from the boxes and stomped all over them, jumping up and down with a great show of grunting that grew harder and louder as frustration built in her bones. What were they doing in their cabin on the river? How desperately had they wanted to get their hands on each other? She had seen the way Jameson smiled at the boy. How easily his heart could be won.
June tossed the flattened cardboard onto the front porch, where the mess spilled out onto the lawn. She would ask that charmer Van Hicks to haul it away.
By dusk the roofers had gone, the ridge was empty of everyone except June, and the whispers began, telling her she would sleep much better tonight if she had a drink, if she had two, in fact, because everyone knew that a little vodka would loosen the shoulders and hands, and June’s hands often clenched in her sleep. You’re a fabulist, she said to her brain. Full of wild notions. And lies.
Clouds were beginning to roll in. The barometric pressure had dropped so quickly that June could feel it in her inner ear. It was going to storm, and summer rain would bring the rich aroma of lavender and grass and jasmine. It would fill the air with “Forest Pete.”
She imagined the shelves of liquor down in Wheeler, all those beautiful glass bottles, such lovely works of art, every one filled with a promise, a story, gifts to be opened and shared in celebration of love and life, holidays filled with peace and joy. How pretty they were, how delightfully they kept company with each other in those colorful rows. The darker stories they housed, like genies, had not been let loose, and at first glance were nowhere to be seen. Where were the blackouts and bruises? Where was the infidelity and depression? Show me divorce and broken bones and lost careers, June thought. Show me the troubled children at the bottom of every bottle.
June didn’t have to drive all the way to Wheeler. She could easily walk down the hill to the Little Grocer and buy wine. They carried a decent selection of deep reds with eloquent shapes, and they came with an actual cork. How she missed the sound of a cork, missed the waft of that old-world aroma, and the taste, that lingering sizzle on her tongue, heat filling her hands and cheeks and ears.
She was going to stay put in the carriage house. She was going to keep company with a bottle of red vitamin water, and the campfires seen from afar like stars. She was going to watch for the flash of green with the setting sun.
Then she recalled the evening her father put Nina Simone on the record player. They had danced together at dusk, fingers entwined—“like this,” he showed her, and their arms went up in an arc over June’s head as she spun. June remembered it that way. She wanted to remember it that way. It was the way it came to her, though she was old enough now to understand how memories could be unreliable. She knew the difference between truth and lies, of course she did, the difference between fantasy and fiction. She had known Jameson for several weeks, but already she had forsworn herself, already abused what little trust in her he might have had by not telling him the truth. We find what we want to find in others’ stories, just as we find what we want to find in our own.