Falling for June: A Novel (8 page)

But this laugh she seemed to contain as much for David’s wounded pride as she did for her own vanity, and when it had passed, she said, “Don’t feel too bad. That Billy’s a five-gaited horse: he’s got Gallop, Stop, Turn, Buck, and Drag. Our comrade Sebastian put you on him for some fun, I suppose. You just have to get back on and let him know who’s boss.”

“Oh, I plan to,” David said, trying his best to sound rather brave. “And if he tries to buck me again I’ll play a round of horseshoes while he’s still wearing them.”

June laughed, out loud this time.

“You should put that line in your newspaper article,” she said.

His hand was still on the filly’s head and June’s hand was still on top of his, and she looked up at him with a closed-mouthed grin, waiting for a response. Did she recognize him from the roof? he wondered. Or was she only aware that he wasn’t the reporter he had claimed to be? He couldn’t be sure which; she was impossible to read.

He decided to risk it, although what he ended up saying sounded more cryptic than he had planned.

“It wasn’t just a cry for help, you know.”

“Oh, I know, darling,” she immediately replied. “Who would have heard you from way up there anyway?”

So, she did know
.
She knew and she had just been waiting this whole time for him to say something; she’d been watching him follow her around from barn to barn with his seemingly
endless need for lead ropes and halters and bits, but knowing all the while that what he really wanted was to speak with her about that day on the roof.

“I’m glad you’re keeping your promise,” she said.

She even remembered their conversation.

David nodded. “I guess I’m lucky you were there.”

Her smile deepened, this time making its way down to her mouth. “Maybe lucky. Or maybe you were exactly where you were supposed to be that day, and perhaps I was too.”

A moment of understanding passed between them. At least David thought it did. But then she removed her hand from his and stepped over and turned on the hose to fill the watering trough of a neighboring stall. His hand was still on the filly’s velvet head, but June’s was gone, and he felt as though she were gone too.

He turned to say something to her, something more about that day on the roof, but her back was to him now, and in addition to monitoring the water, she was busy scooping grain into feed bins. It was almost as if she had gone directly back to work, forgetting their conversation as quickly as it had happened, forgetting that he was even there.

David lingered for an awkward half minute or so before he took up the halter from where he had hung it and eased out of the stable without a word. He thought about their conversation a great deal that night. He would have thought about it more the following day too, except that was the day the busload of hippies with a wounded ostrich arrived, and the day he first learned what it felt like to really fly.

9

I
T WAS A
terrible place to leave off telling the story, it really was, but I’ll be damned if the old man hadn’t fallen asleep right there at the kitchen table in midsentence. He had just segued quite eloquently from his encounter in the stable with June to telling me about a bus full of young hippies who had arrived to drop off an injured ostrich they’d been traveling with—you’ll have to wait for the story; I was just as curious as you are—when his chin dropped to his chest and he started snoring.

I was worried at first, before I heard him snoring. Like maybe he’d up and kicked the bucket on me or something. I’ve had a lot of crazy stuff happen on these pre-foreclosure visits, but no one’s ever died. One guy in our office had a homeowner set the house on fire, then try to lock him in it. But that’s a story for another day.

With Mr. Hadley snoring, I didn’t know what to do. I noticed he had hardly touched his sandwich, although a drying ring of tomato soup clung to the white whiskers surrounding his lips. Sleeping like that, with the soup around his lips, he looked more like a little boy than an old man. I decided I’d try to clean up the kitchen, if I could do it without waking him. It was kind of out of character for me, but I really had wanted to help when I’d offered before.

I carried our dishes to the sink and began washing them, stealing glances at my sleeping host and being careful not to make too much noise. There was a window over the sink and it looked out on an apple tree beside the house. If you had to wash dishes it was a nice view. I was looking at the tree, focusing on being quiet, when the phone rang. I nearly dropped a plate. I turned around, but Mr. Hadley had not woken so I stepped over and caught the phone off the wall midway through the second ring.

“Hello.” I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece to muffle the sound.

“Yes, hello, Mr. Hadley,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “I’m calling from the department of planning about your cemetery inquiry.”

“Oh, no. I’m not . . .”

Just then the old man opened his eyes and looked at me. I felt more than a little awkward standing in his kitchen on his phone speaking to someone who thought I was him. He looked down at the table, as if searching for the missing dishes. Then he looked back at me.

“Hello . . . ,” the phone said in my ear. “Mr. Hadley?”

I hung it up. I’m not sure why, but I just did. I guess I panicked.

“Who was that?” Mr. Hadley asked, fully awake now.

I didn’t want to lie so I answered as honestly as I could. “I don’t know, he didn’t say his name. I didn’t want to wake you. I’m sorry I answered your—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “I get wrong numbers calling almost every day. And people selling siding or awnings or Lord-knows-what. They really are pushy. Sometimes I talk to them if I’m bored. You might be surprised to know that you can keep one of those time-share salespeople on the line for a good four hours before they’ll give up and call someone else.
She never did send me my prize, now that I’m thinking about it. Say, where’d my sandwich run off to?” he asked. “I hadn’t touched it yet.”

After we had finished cleaning up the kitchen together, despite his trying to shoo me off again, he softened an apple in the microwave and chopped it into slices. I was worried that they were for us—I’d had quite enough fiber already—until he squeezed on a little lemon juice and said, “She’s blind as a beetle and can’t really tell if they’re brown, but I prefer them to look nice when I feed them to her.”

Then I thought maybe they were for June—since her whereabouts were still a mystery to me. But he dried the apple slices in a paper towel and handed them to me to carry, then grabbed his cane and walked me out to the barn.

The barn was across the drive and down a bit, at the edge of a field. It was even more weathered than the house, with only a few remaining flakes of red paint clinging to its exterior walls. The big door was already slid half open on its tracks and I followed him inside. It was dim and smelled of hay and moist dirt. Shafts of sunlight filtered in through old skylights that had been mended and covered over with green tarps.

“I don’t bother to turn the lights on anymore, since Rosie’s the only one left and can’t see a thing anyway,” he said. “I came out here once in the middle of the night to check on her in a storm, and every bulb was burned out, it had been so long since I’d turned on the switch. Have you ever heard a thunderstorm from inside an old, empty barn? You don’t know whether to feel awestruck or forsaken. It’s quite a sound. June and I spent the night in a barn once, waiting out a rainstorm. But I’ll get to that later.”

By the time he finished talking we had arrived at the last stall. He hung his cane on a hook and slid the stall door open, almost without thought, as if he had done it a hundred times
before, even though the effort appeared to take a lot out of him. An old black mare was lying on her side in the back of the stall. Her head was lifted, as if she’d heard us coming. Her eyes were milky white. David entered the stall and signaled for me to follow. I held the apple slices out on the towel and he took one and fed it to the old horse.

“Not exactly the crunch of a fresh-picked apple, is it?” he said, feeding her another. “But then she hasn’t got many teeth left, have you, you old dame, you? Just like your partner here. Gumming up our boiled apples until we return to fertilize a new crop.”

Then something happened to me: a revelation of sorts, or, more accurately, a massive realignment of the world as I knew it, occurring in just an instant. It had only happened a few times before. One of them being when my father opened that package from my mother, the one with her picture, and I suddenly knew, even at that young age, that she wasn’t ever coming home. The other being when my father died and I stood looking at him in his casket. There have been very few moments as momentous as these in my life, but this was one of those times.

I was standing there with that paper towel and those apples in my hand, watching Mr. Hadley feed them to Rosie, and I suddenly knew this was the yearling filly that June had laid his hand on in his story, and I knew this was probably that same barn too, maybe even the same stall. Now here they were, all these years later, the old man and the old horse. It was the first moment I truly grasped that time will catch up to each of us, as it must with all things, and I wondered where I would be standing thirty years on, what I would be doing.

I stood in the trance of this epiphany, this revelation swirling around me with the stirred-up dust, and when I came to my senses, the old man had his hand on Rosie’s head and they were both watching me, although she could not see.

“Here, you feed her one,” he said, nodding toward Rosie.

I stepped closer and squatted to feed an apple slice to the old mare. She slurped it up, then licked me as if to get familiar with this new hand delivering her treat. Then she sighed a heavy, hollow-sounding sigh, and I could see her ribs in the low light, beneath the slick black coat.

“This is the same horse that June was caring for, isn’t it?” I asked. “All those years ago. The filly in the stables.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “She was just a yearling then.”

I was suddenly curious about June again—maybe because I was getting impatient; maybe because that call I’d answered about the cemetery was still on my mind—and I turned to Mr. Hadley and said, “Is your wife . . .” I almost said
dead
, but I caught myself and changed it at the last second: “I mean, is she still around?”

The old man closed his eyes for a moment, sighing, not unlike the horse. “Sometimes I think so,” he finally said. Then, as if suddenly very tired from standing, he stepped over and reached outside the stall for his cane and used it to lower himself onto a bale of hay in the corner. He looked as though he wanted to speak, so I sat on the hay next to him. It was quiet for a minute. Dust swirled in the dim light. The horse let out another heavy sigh.

“She really was something,” he said. “My June was. I wish you could have met her.” He had his hands folded over the cane where it stood in front of him, his moist eyes turned up to the skylight. “I wish everyone could have met her. She had a contagious optimism.”

“What happened after your conversation with her here in the stables?”

“Is that where I left off telling the story?” he asked, glancing over at me.

“Actually you had just started to tell me about a busload of
hippies with an injured ostrich. But mostly I was curious about you and June.”

He laughed. “I’m not surprised. Even hippies with an ostrich are hard-pressed to compete for attention when it comes to June. Everyone who ever spent five minutes in her presence was ready to follow her to the end of the Earth. Or, I should say, off the edge of a cliff, as was the case with me that night those hippies arrived . . .”

10

S
UNDAY WAS WILD-CARD
day at stunt camp and the students had voted to do high jumps. A young woman they called Hollywood Heidi was up on the scissor lift and saw it first. She pointed and said, “There’s a pink bus tearing up this way.”

They all turned to watch as the bus barreled up the drive in a wild rush of spitting gravel, followed by a cloud of dust. It came to a rocking halt in front of the house. The windows were covered over with old curtains and cardboard signs with slogans like
LOVE IS A WAY OF LIFE
, and you could not see inside. But you could sure hear.

There was a wild ruckus emanating from the bus’s interior. It sounded like someone was being murdered. The noise progressed from the rear of the bus toward the front, and the students all stood watching the door and wondering what on earth would emerge, David among them. As the noise grew even more absurd, Sebastian stepped in front of his students and held out his arms, as if he would protect them. His courage, as it turned out, was not just talk.

When the bus door finally opened, a man popped out with a kicking ostrich in his arms. Although from David’s point of view, it appeared more like an ostrich popped out with a kicking man clinging to its back. The bird was that big. The man had
long dreadlocks and was dressed in a tie-dyed robe with tassels, and he came away from the bus turning in wide circles like some kind of carnival dancer, trying to keep ahold of his crazy catch. Several pale and dirty faces appeared in the bus’s doorway, looking out. “Help him,” one of them called. “That giant turkey’s tryna kill him.”

There was blood on man and bird alike, although it was hard to tell from which it had come, and David didn’t understand why he didn’t just set it loose. He was about to suggest as much when Sebastian said, “This is our time, comrade. Men of courage must act when called upon.”

The next thing he saw was Sebastian rushing in to save the day. He came alongside the hippie, getting his arms into the mix and helping to subdue the fighting ostrich. Of course, as so often happens when one tries to help, the hippie took advantage of the offered aid by passing off his problem entirely, and he let go and stumbled back toward the safety of the bus, leaving Sebastian holding on to the wild bird.

“Help, comrade!” Sebastian cried. “Help me!”

David looked around at the other students, but he knew it was him Sebastian was calling. Oh, what the hell, he thought; it can’t be worse than being dragged by a horse through manure. But in that he was wrong.

Just as David stepped up to lend a hand, Sebastian unknowingly spun a half turn and brought the ostrich around to face him. Sadly, it was a very frightened bird, and David was met with two kicking claws that shredded his pants and opened a nasty gash in his thigh. Fortunately for all involved, the door to the house opened and June came rushing out.

She bent briefly over David to check his wound—he was now sitting on the gravel drive, bleeding—then she stripped off his shoe and peeled his sock from his foot. He was wearing knee-high cotton tube socks and he thought at first that
she was going to use it as a tourniquet for his leg, but she left him sitting there and turned instead toward Sebastian and the still-thrashing ostrich. She threaded the sock quickly over her hand. Then she reached and nabbed the ostrich’s writhing neck and pulled its head down to her level, snatched its beak, and slipped the sock over its head. Almost instantly the hooded ostrich went still. And just in time too, because at that very moment Sebastian succumbed to exhaustion and sat down with the giant bird trembling in his lap. The pair of them made such a peculiar sight that David couldn’t help but forget about his injury long enough to laugh.

“What’s going on here?” June asked, turning toward the bus and addressing the faces peering out. “Where did you get this bird and why are you molesting it?”

“We were only trying to help,” a quiet voice replied from the shadows of the bus interior. “Tell her, Clarence.”

Then the man with the dreads and the tie-dyed robe stepped, or more likely was pushed, out into the light.

“Yeah, man,” he said. “We didn’t know. We just found it lying on the side of the road. We thought it was dead, you know, but I guess it was just knocked out or something. It woke up and went bat-shit on us, man. Right while we were rolling down Springer Finch Road. Beatrice there was driving and she knew about your place. Her mom lives in Arlington and she said you saved a baby fox or something once.” Then he turned to look back into the bus. “Was it a fox, did you say?”

“No,” the voice from inside the bus replied. “It was a pig. From Teddy’s farm.”

“Well, I was close anyway,” he said. Then he turned back to June. “So, can you help it? I think maybe it fell out of a truck or something.”

“Isn’t he a lucky bird to have had you come along to save the day,” June said.

David did not entirely understand her sarcasm, but he would later when he learned why they had picked up the ostrich to begin with. But as it turned out, the ostrich had done more damage than it had received, and by the time Sebastian and David got back from the urgent-care clinic—David sporting six fresh stitches, Sebastian just a bandaged needle prick and an earful about the dangers of tetanus—June had the big bird penned and peacefully eating sunflower seeds from the palm of her hand.

“I thought for sure you’d have gone home,” she said when David joined her at the fence to watch. “Maybe given up on the idea of stunt camp altogether.”

“And let my comrade Sebastian down?” he replied. “No way. And besides, I thought you said there was nothing to be afraid of.”

She laughed. “I said there was nothing to be afraid of with horses. I never told you to try to ride an ostrich.” Then she reached into her other pocket and handed him back his sock. It was bloodstained and torn. “Sorry,” she said.

“They come in packs of six,” he said, shrugging. “But it reminds me,” he added a moment later, “I’ve got a pair of yours at my apartment in the city.”

“Is that right?” she asked. “You kept my socks.”

He didn’t tell her he’d been sleeping with them for months.

“And a pair of your boots too,” he answered. “At least I think they’re yours. They were a men’s size nine . . .”

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

The ostrich was pecking at her empty palm now, and she scooped another handful of seeds from her pocket.

“You want to feed him?” she asked, offering the seeds to David. “Kiss and make up maybe.”

David held up his hands and shook his head. “No way. I’ve had enough wildlife encounters for a few days.”

She laughed and tossed the seeds into the pen. Then she turned around and leaned against the fence.

“I know you’re not a newspaperman,” she said, looking at David. “And I’m assuming you don’t have any real aspirations to be a Hollywood stuntman either, even though Sebastian tells me you’re getting quite skilled at high jumps.”

“No,” he said. “I’m just an accountant.”

After several quiet seconds had passed, she said, “Well, I think it’s a pretty safe bet you didn’t end up here because you wanted to return my boots . . .”

He sighed, looking at the ground. “I know I haven’t . . . well, I just didn’t . . . I mean, okay . . . you want to know the truth, then?”

“Is there ever anything else worth knowing?” she asked.

“The truth is I’ve been trying to find you since that day on the roof. I even hired a sketch artist. Here. Look.” He pulled the sketch from his pocket and unfolded it. The paper had been worn as soft as thin cotton and the ink was already fading. “I know it’s just a pair of eyes mostly, but doesn’t it look like you? I mean, kind of, right?”

She took the sketch and looked it over. But whether she saw the resemblance or not, she didn’t say. David thought she looked slightly fearful as she handed it back.

“And you went to all this trouble why?”

Keeping her socks and hiring a sketch artist had not seemed at all excessive or strange to David in his solitude, but now that he had said it out loud and been asked by the object of his obsession why, he felt somewhat creepy.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tucking the sketch away in his pocket. “I guess after you jumped from the roof that day I just had to know who you were.”

“You don’t plan to tell them, do you?”

“You mean tell the papers? The police? Of course not. No
way! You think that’s why I looked you up? Is that what you’re worried about? Oh Lord, no. I’ve been searching for you because I wanted to thank you. You saved my life.”

She was wearing rubber boots and she looked down and kicked some of the dried mud off against the fence. Then she hooked the heel of her boot on the rail and looked up at David again.

“No, you saved your own life,” she finally said. “You’re the only one with that power.”

“Maybe. But until our talk I really did want to die.”

“Oh, darling,” she said, gently shaking her head. “Is that what you think your problem was? You think you wanted to die? That wasn’t it at all.”

“It wasn’t?” he asked.

He had, after all, been standing on a roof ready to jump when they had met, hadn’t he?

“No, dear, it isn’t. If you truly wanted to die, the solution would be easy. There are a thousand ways one can die before breakfast. Your problem is that you want to live, David Hadley. You want to live but you just don’t know how.”

He looked at her quizzically, wondering how she knew so much about him. Then, as if reading his mind again, she answered his unspoken question.

“I once stood on a roof, just like you. I know what it’s like not wanting to go on. Alone in the world, looking for relief.”

“Is that why you jump with a parachute? BASE jump, or whatever they call it? Do you have some kind of death wish?”

“No. I told you already, I jump because it makes me feel alive.”

“It does? But how? I mean, what’s it feel like?”

“Jumping? It’s like life boiled down into seconds. It’s freedom. It’s dying unless you choose to live. And when you do choose life, you value it. I think we all value the things we
choose more than the things we take for granted, don’t you? And unfortunately some people take life for granted. I was one of them.”

The way her eyes lit up as she talked about jumping made David not only want to jump himself, it made him want to kiss her. But he didn’t, of course. Instead, he asked, “Is that what you meant when you said I had to let go of life to truly live?”

“Did I say that?” She asked it as if she were hearing it for the first time. Then she did something so simple and so intimate it made David’s heart skip a happy beat. She reached up and gently touched his cheek. “Whatever I said, I’m glad. Because you lived and you’re here. And that’s what matters.”

The sun was low and orange, about to drop behind the hills to the west, and for one glorious moment David stood in its glow with a warm breeze against his neck and June’s hand on his cheek. Then, as she pulled her hand away, he saw a glint of gold on her finger and noticed for the first time that she wore a wedding ring. He had never allowed himself to consciously imagine a romance between himself and June, except for maybe a moment ago when he had daydreamed about kissing her, but that did not stop his heart from sinking behind the hills with the sun.

“Why don’t you go get changed into some pants that aren’t bloody and I’ll go check on the ice cream and see if Sebastian’s got the bonfire started.”

“Ice cream? Bonfire?”

He was still thinking about the ring on her finger.

“Of course,” she said. “It’s Sunday. We always have lemon ice cream and a bonfire on Sundays.”

He knew he shouldn’t ask it, that it would make him sound needy, but without thinking it through he did.

“Will your husband be joining us?”

She looked down at the ring on her finger for a lingering
moment before bringing her other hand over to cover it. When she looked back up at him, her eyes were moist.

“No,” she said. “He won’t be joining us. Although I’d like it very much if he could.” Then she reached into her pocket and tossed the last of her seeds in to the ostrich. “I’ll see you at the bonfire,” she said as she walked away toward the house.

David leaned against the fence to watch her go. And even though there were fresh seeds on the ground to be eaten, the ostrich stood eye level with David just on the other side of the fence, watching her too.