This morning a bald eagle snatched a seagull, a juvenile, right out of the sky, and June looked up from the beach in horror and wonder as the young bird’s companions dive-bombed the powerful predator in vain. The eagle continued to fly gracefully with its prey, its wings streaking across the sky above June. What shocked her as much as seeing the capture in midair was how the eagle made a wide turn like a jetliner and swooped through the center of the frantic gulls with the juvenile dangling motionless in its talons. For a moment June had to look away. All her life she had witnessed how brutal nature could be, but she had never seen such calculated cruelty as this. The eagle headed north at what appeared to be full speed, and June watched until it disappeared into the trees along the cliff. She wondered if it had the capacity to feel pleased with itself, or if she had simply misunderstood what the bird had set out to do. She wondered what Jameson might have said had he been standing there with her.
It had been six months since he drove away, but June continued to see the world through his eyes, and in this way a part of him remained. She often wondered what he might say on any given day if she pointed out to him the things she saw, like the burst of yellow salmonberries on the ridge where she walked nearly every afternoon. She wondered what he might think if she baked a marionberry pie just to let the scent of buttery crust fill the kitchen before giving the pie away.
Days ago she had come upon a baby seal, white with black spots, sleeping on the shore. She kneeled in the sand several yards back, far enough so as not to disturb it, yet close enough to warn tourists to keep their distance. This wasn’t the first time. They would think it was injured or beached and try to “rescue” it, somehow lift it back into the water. She knew that its mother had left it for safekeeping while off on a hunt. June waited for the sun to lower and the tourists to stop coming, and that’s when the tide lapped at the sleeping pup, and it woke at the movement. Its eyes, round and black and unblinking, fixed immediately on June. The tide rocked the pup harder, and the rocking became a swaying that buoyed its body up, until suddenly its head snapped around as if a loud noise in the ocean had caught its attention. June heard nothing, but sensed the mother must be nearby. She watched as the pup hobbled into the water, struggling at first when the tide pulled away, until finally it was deep enough to dive into the curl of a wave where the pup disappeared. Jameson, June thought. You would have loved this. Your children would have loved this. Jameson, she thought, all through the day.
Six months since they had said goodbye, a mild winter come and gone, and here it was the start of another spring. They hadn’t had any contact at all. The days were beginning to get longer, the sun traveling farther from the horizon, the shadows shortened across the lawn and kitchen and porch. In all these months, June recalled, often, the words that came to her the day she first saw Jameson.
Long after the sky lowered its gray blanket onto her skull and the rain fell without end and the air turned to thin, stringy wool in her lungs, long after her body became heavy upon rising and her mind slipped into dark, familiar places, she would recall his fluid shape in the sun on the hill exactly as it was in this moment, and the memory would take over like branches rupturing her heart, sprouting stems of white heat, and she would welcome the pain, all she had left of him, even as her ribs seemed to crack with every breath, she would smile while drinking her morning coffee, and she would smile at the unrelenting rain.
The morning Jameson left, June had slipped out before dawn and placed a blank postcard on his windshield. The photograph was of the beach, taken from atop Neahkahnie Mountain. Where June’s house was located she’d drawn a tiny red circle, the way her father had done on the maps. After that she remained inside the carriage house behind closed blinds, sitting very still on the sofa in her robe, kneading the hem, remembering to breathe, and she listened to the sounds of Jameson in reverse of that first day, until finally the truck door closed, he backed out of the drive, and the sound of his engine faded. She had gone on sitting there long afterward, afraid to move, feeling the threat that whatever was holding her together might suddenly tear loose.
It wasn’t until later that afternoon that she’d gathered the courage to step inside the bungalow.
The rooms still held his presence, the feel of his body cut the air, and she recognized the scent of his hair and the coffee he had drunk that morning. The spaces shone beyond the reflection of the wood, everything plumb and square and warm in the way of memory, of something known and true, and to stand there was to be wrapped in the arms of someone who loved her.
The garden was sprouting with color, and the front porch, with its bright strips of pine, took her breath away: it was where she and Jameson had shared a picnic, and where she had sat between Grandmam’s knees while Grandmam braided her hair. To stand in the house was to be filled with a belief that a world full of sorrow was also a world full of grace.
But it was the manila envelope on the kitchen counter that changed everything that day. Across the front, Jameson had written: I found these in your grandfather’s work shed, tucked inside a false drawer. They are something you may have been looking for all your life.
Inside the envelope were two field notebooks that June had never seen.
On this 21st day of April, the world, our world, is bursting with spring and rain alike, the primroses spreading color was our first sight of the day, mine and Maeve’s, and it gave us hope for all things, including that our Finn would someday find his way to being well. He’s been slipping so far so fast. Even I am willing to admit that this is true.
It is now after the fact, the 25th day of April. It has taken several days to comprehend how one is supposed to hold a pen in hand, how to write down words, how to breathe. Maeve asks where I find the wherewithal, and she says it like she’s cross with me, as if I don’t feel what she feels, as if I have somehow escaped being ravaged by the loss. I tell her I write because I do not want this time to pass unnoted. I do not want to behave as if these days were not the most grave and perilous of our lives. It’s just, poor Maeve. If I could take her pain and add it to mine, the entire world would feel a little lighter. She was the last person Finn spoke to. “Promise me that you and Da will take care of her. Promise me you won’t let June grow up to be like me. She’s her mother through and through, Ma. Please keep her that way.”
June felt lightheaded, the room a little hazy when she glanced up and took hold of the counter. She closed the notebook, in need of air. She walked out and sat on the back steps and stared across the yard into the white trees, feeling her father nearby, feeling Jameson looking over her shoulder.
June turned the page.
Maeve said she could see in his eyes what he planned to do and she just kept calling for me, but I was out of earshot in the work shed. “I cannot bear the love mixed so deeply with the loss,” that poor boy told his ma. “She looks just like her mother. What a gift. What a beautiful, heartbreak of a gift.”
June gasped.
Maeve called for me once more and I believe this was the time I heard her, her frightened tone, calling me Cronin when she had only ever called me “Love,” but by then Finn had already walked out the front door with Maeve racing at his back, begging him to stay, even as he crossed the road, Maeve screaming his name, screaming for me, and causing a ruckus with the crows. It was there in the road where I found her, crouched and wailing the way a mother wails when she’s lost a child, a sight no one should ever have to see.
June’s tears fell quickly. How she longed for Grandmam in this moment. How she longed for them all with an ache that doubled her over.
Still she read.
He was never as happy as the day Izzy went into labor. I recall it here as I recalled it then. Finn running around the house, saying she was on the way, on the way, on the way, and though he meant both midwife and baby, it was clear to us that the baby was the one who made him run and shout like that. Poor Izzy. In between labor pains she found the strength to laugh at him, and he wiped the sweat from her forehead and told her so tenderly how sorry he was for the pain.
June was in the room with them, feeling the love, feeling the weight of so much possibility.
Then the awful seizures, the quick collapse before the doctor arrived, and the last word she ever spoke was JUNE.
June’s hands shook so badly she could barely read the words before her. She wiped her eyes and set the notebook on her knees and she read through the blur of tears.
We’ll never know if she was just calling out the month in a delirium or if she’d meant to name her daughter June, and it never would matter one whit because it was the last thing she ever said, and from that day forward we would all continue to speak her final word, day after day, year after year, June, June, June.
June stood, feeling something like anger. She’d had no idea she was born at home. Born in the bungalow just like her father. Her birth certificate has Nestucca Beach as the place, and the midwife’s name and signature, but June had always assumed she was born at the clinic several miles south on the highway. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her? Did they think she would blame them for her mother’s death? Did they feel responsible because June had not been born in a hospital? June knew enough to know it wouldn’t have made a difference. Not if her mother hadn’t been diagnosed beforehand. Not if what had happened came on as suddenly as it appeared to.
June wiped her face and drew a breath that smelled faintly of fall, of something brittle on the wind, and when she glanced inside the other notebook she saw the date of her birth and the outline of the same story, written there as it was remembered by her grandfather in the days after her father’s death.
June immediately returned to the carriage house and packed up her belongings. Several days later she moved into the bungalow, the place where she was born, among the people who had loved her, who had wanted her so much, the place where all had spent their final moments on earth. June felt their presence around her, not as ghosts but as threads here and there, as lively and real and true as a bird knowing where her springtime nest lay, even when returning from thousands of miles away.
A steady stream of writing followed in the bungalow, and June finished the novel within weeks of moving in. Leigh, the sister who’d needed love the most, found it, as love is so often found in books.
June had not taken another drink since the day Jameson wrapped her in a blanket and let her say the thing she needed to say. It helped, too, to have a neighbor who’d become such a good friend to June. Elin was her name, and June had liked her from the minute she saw her standing in the center of the wool rug with a grin on her face. With a single clap of her hands, her accent softly Floridian, she said, “Let me make an offer you can agree to right now.”
She bought the carriage house the week it went on the market, and a kinship wove between them, as June could sense that Elin, too, had been shellshocked by this world, and had found that here, among the Pacific evergreens and rain and the brightest summer sun, was her true-north home.
Now, six months and two weeks after June had placed the blank postcard on Jameson’s windshield, it was returned. Elin walked it over with a lopsided smile, fanning the card as if to ward off its heat.
June recognized the card and snatched it up. She held it to her chest and went inside the bungalow and shut the door before she read what was written on the back.
A long and strange tale for another time. Love, Jameson.
June propped the card on the mantel, where she could see it when she crossed the room, the small red circle a reminder of who she was, where she was, the place she was meant to be.
That same evening, Elin began telling June stories about her sister and mother back in Florida. It was as if the postcard, arriving by mistake at the carriage house, where Jameson believed June to be, had broken through another dimension, and each was able to step across and speak her truth. Elin told June about her nieces and their father, and how everyone’s life had been shaped again and again by tragedy. They made the best of what they had, she said, and she also told June about her divorce. Then slowly June revealed pieces of her own life, sitting next to her friend in the Adirondack chairs, feeling part of a life she could not have imagined months ago, or ever—watching the waves, drinking Elin’s sweet iced tea. “You can steal my story if you want,” Elin told her, and June smiled and said how people often said this to writers, believing novels were based on somebody’s real life, as if only the names were changed and the rest was laid out, ready for the taking, like that. “But all right,” June said. “I just might.”