Saving June (25 page)

I feel like someone just sucker punched me in the gut. It takes a while for me to do anything other than gape at him, stunned. Finally I find my voice long enough to choke out, “Why? Why would you do that?”

Jake pushes back his chair and walks over to me. “You said I was hiding something,” he says. “You were right.”

“What are you talking about?”

Something in his expression is scaring me. Rattling me down to my bones.

“The last time I saw June—it was the day before. before everything. She was helping me study for finals, and I ended up taking one of her notebooks home by mistake. I was going to give it back to her the next day, and then…”

He trails off, like he can’t bear to say it, and he doesn’t have to, because of course I know what happened. Why he didn’t have the chance.

“Anyway,” he says, “I found this in it.”

Suddenly he shoves something into my hands. I look down. It’s an envelope—slightly bent from being pressed in pages, a crisp white except for my name, written along the back in careful, pretty cursive.
Harper.

It’s June’s handwriting.

“I should’ve given it to you earlier,” he continues. “I meant to, at the wake. It’s why I went. But when we talked outside, it didn’t seem right. I even went back to find you, upstairs, and that’s when I overheard you and Laney talking about California. I thought maybe…maybe coming out here, it’d be a good way to do it, I guess.”

I can’t speak. I can’t breathe. The envelope is heavy in my hands as I run my thumb across where she’d put the pen down and etched out my name. “And you waited until now to tell me?”

“I meant to say something earlier. A million times I meant to, I just. There was never a good time.”

“Never a good time,” I echo, my voice hollow in my own ears. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“I knew you’d be mad.”

“Shut up. You don’t know anything.” Least of all me.

“I knew June,” he says, and it hits me harder than anything, because I don’t want it to be true.

He has to be wrong about that, too. Because he didn’t know June. None of us knew June. If we had we wouldn’t be here right now.

“So what? Were you, like, in love with her?” My voice shakes as it rises. “Did you fuck her, too?”

“Not everything is about sex, Harper.”

“That is so not an answer.” I reach out and shove his shoulders, hard. He rocks back on his heels but doesn’t move. Shoving him feels good, being angry feels good, easier, easier than being sad, than having my heart crushed, so I hold on to that and push him again, harder, until he stumbles back a step. “Tell me, goddammit! Be honest with me, for once in your life!”

I am beyond mad. I am beyond furious. I can’t believe I was such an idiot, to think Jake was different, to trust him with my secrets, with my body. With my
heart.

“No!” he says vehemently. “Of course not. I told you already, nothing happened.”

“But you wanted to, didn’t you?” I ask. “Did you—did
you only want me because I was the closest you could get, or something?”

He looks so betrayed and disgusted that for the briefest of seconds my anger falters. “I can’t believe you’d think that. After everything.”

“What am I supposed to think? Seriously, tell me. Because I really don’t know.”

“You’re nothing like your sister,” he tells me. “She meant a lot to me, okay? It’s true. But the things I like about you have nothing to do with her. You—you are so strong and stubborn it drives me crazy. You’re the one going through all this and you still put Laney first every time, instead of throwing yourself the pity party we both know you deserve. You call me out on my shit, and I like that, because sometimes I need someone to call me out on my shit. And you
get
Johnny Cash, and you take these incredible photos, and everything about you makes me hurt, in a good way, and it blows my mind that someone can be so amazing and not even see it.”

I’m shaking too hard to answer. Is that how he really sees me?

“If I wanted a replacement for June, it could never be you,” he says. “The only thing you have in common with her is the fact that she didn’t treat me like I was stupid, and she wasn’t scared of me, either. I was never in love with her. We were friends, and that’s it. But she treated me like I was a decent person. Like I mattered.”

“Well, isn’t that great for you,” I snap.

“You don’t know what it’s like! You have Laney, and your family, and you hate them for having these expectations, but at least they want things for you. Do you know what I would give for that? No one in my life ever expected anything from me except for me to screw up. But June did. She was the first person to believe I could be somebody, and I needed that.”

“You
needed
that?” I mimic spitefully. “Well, you knew what
I
needed. You knew how I felt, how it killed me that she didn’t say anything. You
knew.
And still, you had this the whole time. You’re nothing but a coward. You were too scared to give me this, you’re too scared to write your own music, you’re too scared to get off your ass and do something with your life. Other people didn’t push you? No one there to pat you on the back or hold your hand? Boo-fucking-hoo. That’s just an excuse for you being a fucking coward.”

I punctuate the last sentence with a vicious jab of the envelope to his chest. There are tears now, running down my face faster than I can wipe them away. I don’t even try.

Jake starts forward, his eyes like liquid, but I back away with my hand held up to ward off whatever he’s thinking of trying.

“I hate you!” I’m screaming at him, seriously screaming, the words clawing out of my throat like a wild animal.
“Get the fuck away from me! I fucking hate you! You piece of shit!”

His arms drop to his sides. “I know.”

He can’t know, he can’t possibly know. I hate him, I hate him so much, and it’s more real than anything I’ve felt in a long time.

“I’m going to go,” he says, his voice hoarse and tight. “I left her notebook on the table for you. I’m—I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t mean anything, but I am. I’m really sorry.”

He leaves, and I don’t dare breathe again until I hear the front door slam. I hold on to the kitchen table to keep myself from falling over, and when the tears stop, I only stand there, body trembling from head to toe.

Jake’s right. Sorry isn’t enough.

Not this time.

June is over. July dawns bright and relentlessly hot; there’s no escaping it.

Being home again is a shock to the system. Not because I’m returning to chaos—quite the opposite. Everything is shockingly mundane. Even the stupid puppy calendar I stare down every morning in the kitchen is a constant reminder that life goes on, the white squares filled with my mother’s doctor appointments and knitting club meetings and the birthdays of family friends. No sign of June anywhere.

I spend my days sealed inside air-conditioning, sucking on ice cubes and watching reruns of
M*A*S*H.
I wish Laney was around so we could analyze in detail the plain-as-day homoerotic subtext between Hawkeye and B.J., and work on our tans at the park, and drive to Duncan’s
for late-night sundaes. Unfortunately for us, though our return home was met initially with relief and joy from our parents, it didn’t take long for that rush of goodwill to sour into a full month’s grounding for us both.

I know that as far as punishments go, I got off with a light sentence. Being under house arrest isn’t too bad. It gives me a convenient excuse not to interact with anyone, which is good, since I don’t even want to think about when—or if—I’ll see Jake face-to-face again. The worst is worrying about Laney. Mom disconnected my internet and confiscated my cell phone, but I did manage to find the internet cord and connect while she was running errands. I sent Laney an email asking what was going on, in the vaguest terms possible, since I don’t know if her parents are monitoring her account.

Her response was only one line:
Everything’s okay. I’ll talk to you when I can. xoxo.

I miss her the most when I sit alone on the roof, observing the kids down the street as they lick ice cream cones and wage war with water balloons. This is ice cream weather, run- around-in-sprinklers weather, weather meant to be enjoyed with friends.

For my mother, it’s gardening weather. She’s returned to work part-time, easing back into her schedule, and spends her afternoons and evenings digging around in the backyard with cotton gloves and a trowel in hand. I helped her out one weekend with the weeding—there was a lot
to be done, and I found it oddly satisfying, ripping each one out by its roots. We worked side by side for hours on our hands and knees, sometimes talking, sometimes not. She never pushed, but I could tell that when I did talk, she listened intently. Maybe that was why I felt okay with letting some details slip—I told her about Laney and me visiting the arch, Fridgehenge, the Arizona stars, the way the water looked in California when I saw the ocean for the first time.

I didn’t mention Jake. Some things are better kept to myself.

A few things changed during my absence. Aunt Helen moved out, and though she occasionally stops by for dinner, she seems to be consciously holding her tongue. There’s no more booze in the house; I even made sure by checking all the hiding spots, like my mom’s shoe closet and inside bottles of vitamin water. And Mom seems different—she isn’t totally together, and sometimes she still cries, but she isn’t the broken mess I remember. She’s trying. I’ve decided that I need to try, too.

And it isn’t like Mom is the only one who ever gets sad, either. Once the garden was cleared of all the weeds and new soil had been put in, she started coming home from work with a new box of flowers from the greenhouse every day. On the day she brought home carnations, I cried in the shower for an hour, feeling foolish and brokenhearted, and missing June more than ever.

Today, it’s daisies. Daisies, at least, don’t inspire any emotional meltdowns.

“Aren’t they gorgeous?” she gushes as I hand her a tall, frosted glass of lemonade. “They complement the magnolias perfectly.”

I stand back to better admire the row of deep pink flowers, the tips of their petals tinged with white.

“You know, I’m not a big fan of pink,” I say, “but in this case, yes. I approve.”

I sit back down on the porch steps, arms folded over my knees. Mom stands up, brushes the dirt off her jeans and joins me. I don’t mean to but I can’t help but stare at her. I’m still getting used to this new incarnation of my mother, this woman who is trying to be so careful with me, who isn’t falling apart, and while she isn’t completely together, she’s rebuilding herself, day by day. She’s so much stronger than I ever gave her credit for.

I thought she’d be angry with me when she found out what I’d done with June’s ashes. My father was. He didn’t say it to my face, but he called me the day after I came home, and he came by that night to take me out to dinner. He wanted to know what had happened. I supplied him with evasive answers over Chinese, never saying more than I absolutely had to. I could tell he was frustrated by my reticence, but he didn’t call me out on it. Our awkward silences hung heavy with all the things we didn’t dare say.

When he took me home, he walked me to the door,
and before I opened it he asked me if I was okay. I told him yes without knowing if it was an honest answer or not; I knew it was what he wanted to hear. He didn’t ask again. He waited until I’d gone upstairs to talk to Mom in the foyer. I sat on the floor at the top of the steps, hidden behind the banister like a little kid as I listened to the two of them talk.

“I can’t believe what she did. I had a right, you know,” he said, and the anger in his voice was more emotion than I’d heard from him in a long time. “She was my daughter.”

I knew from the way he said “daughter” he meant June, not me, and that he meant what I had done with her ashes. It was something I hadn’t considered much—what, exactly, I was taking away from him by stealing the urn. It was another thing to feel bad about, on top of everything else.

“I know,” Mom said to him. “She was mine, too.” Neither of them spoke for a moment, but I knew what they must be thinking. That this was a pain the two of them shared that no one else could touch. Not even me. And they would share it for the rest of their lives, even if they weren’t together. I couldn’t think of a more terrible thing to bind two people.

“I wish I’d known,” he said. “I would have stopped her. You should have stopped her.”

I expected the conversation to escalate into another one of their arguments, but all Mom said was, “It’s over. What’s done is done. You’re going to have to let it go.”

Now she sits beside me with her eyes to the sky, wistful. “It’s a beautiful day,” she says.

I look at her for a long time. “Did you read the letter?”

I know the question will ruin the moment, but I have to know. And when my mother’s eyes meet mine, I know. She did.

I haven’t. I almost did, on the plane ride—but I couldn’t bring myself to tear open the envelope while crammed in a seat in coach, with Laney nodded off in the seat next to me. I did flip through the rest of her notebook; nothing was there except for calculus notes. I did notice they stopped a few days before she died. Maybe she’d made up her mind by then, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

I held on to the letter until Mom and I got home. When she threw her car keys onto the kitchen counter with a sigh and just stared at them, rubbing her temples, I slid the envelope next to the key ring and said, “June wrote this,” before walking out of the room.

We haven’t discussed it since.

“I think you should read it,” she says.

“Why? It won’t change anything. It won’t change what she did.”

I thought taking her to California would fix things. Would allow me to make peace with what she did. But I know now that it isn’t that easy. Nothing is. I understand June a little better, I think, but I feel like some part of me is
going to be angry at her for the rest of my life. And angry at myself.

I stare down at my shoes; they’re covered with rich black soil. “Do you think I’ll ever be able to forgive her?”

“I don’t know, baby. That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

I fight back the tears welling up behind my eyes. When did I turn into such a fucking faucet? It’s ridiculous.

“Hey.” Mom reaches out and touches the side of my face. I try to turn away, embarrassed, but she makes me look at her. She’s got little lines by her eyes, and lines by her mouth. Laugh lines? Frown lines? I’m not sure. “I love you. You know that, right? I love you.”

I nod, put my hand over hers and draw it away, but I keep holding it. It feels weird, being this openly affectionate when we never really have before. But at the same time it’s sort of nice, too. I figure I should enjoy the maternal affection while it lasts.

Mom turns toward the garden again, her head tilted to one side appraisingly. “It’s a little late in the season to be planting. You think it’s too late for the daisies to make it?”

I look at them, that splash of bright color, the stems that extend into the thick soil. Held down by the roots.

“Nah.” I shake my head and smile a little. “It’s not too late.”

On the Fourth of July, Mom goes out with Aunt Helen to meet up with their knitting group for a barbecue. She
offers to let me shed the ball and chain and tag along, but I opt instead to sit on the roof with a tuna sandwich and watch the kids across the street play with sparklers on their front lawn. Soon enough their parents will probably be carting them off to the park by the lake, where the whole town always gathers to see the fireworks.

I have the letter with me. Mom must have sneaked into my room while I was sleeping, because this morning I woke up to find it placed on my nightstand. I keep turning it over in my hands, fingering the torn edge of the envelope, but I’m too scared to open it. I know it’s stupid to be so freaked out by a piece of paper. I know I should get over myself and just read it already. But before I can talk myself into opening it, I’m interrupted.

“Hey, stranger.”

Laney’s voice makes me jump about a mile high. I turn to see her head popping through the window, and I surreptitiously slide the envelope out of sight.

“You know, you really shouldn’t sneak up on someone perched precariously on a rooftop,” I point out.

“Whatever. If you fell you’d survive. You’d probably break a leg, maybe crack some ribs, but you’d survive.” She climbs through the window and pushes me to one side. “Move over.”

I scoot over to make room as she settles in beside me. She hands me a Popsicle, then unwraps her own and sticks it in her mouth.

“So what is this? Your parents let you out on parole?” I ask. I peel off the wrapper of my Popsicle—it’s one of those triple-flavor tiered ones: red, white and blue. Very patriotic.

“More like I’m AWOL,” she confesses. “They’re having dinner at the steak house, then they’ll be at the fireworks display and probably go out for drinks afterward, so I’ve got a few hours. I figured I’d make the most of my one night of freedom.” She glances down at her Popsicle. “Hey, what flavor do you think the white is supposed to be? The red’s obviously cherry, and the blue is blueberry, but they never say what the white is.”

“White lemon, maybe?” I guess. We sit there eating for a little while, and then I look right at her, unable to hide my worry. “Laney. How are you? What happened? Did you—?

It takes her a minute to answer the unspoken question. She shrugs and says, “I’m not pregnant.”

“What? How—”

“I lost it.”

I freeze. “You did?”

“It didn’t look like anything. It was just…like, like I had really bad cramps, and I bled a little, and I sort of completely freaked, but I snuck out and took the bus to the free clinic on the west side, and they told me it happens a lot. They said some women don’t even notice when it happens.”

“Oh,” I say. “Laney, I’m…” Sorry? Glad? No. Relieved, mostly, but also sad—sad that this had to happen in the first place.

Laney seems to understand. “Yeah, I know,” she says. “It happened the day after we got back. My parents don’t have a clue.” She goes quiet for a moment. “I just keep thinking—what if this is karma? What if I’m being punished?”

I stare at her, incredulous. “Punished? For
what?
”

“For slutting around. For not wanting it.”

“You’re looking at this the wrong way. Aren’t you the one who’s always saying everything happens for a reason? Maybe this was supposed to happen. Like, it was fate or something.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But it doesn’t really matter what I think, does it?”

Laney considers this as she sucks on her Popsicle and watches the kids below, screaming and chasing each other in dizzying circles with their sparklers in hand.

“Have you talked to Jake?” she asks. The question makes my stomach twist; I was wondering when I’d be forced to have this conversation. “No. And I don’t plan to,” I tell her. “Why? Have you?”

“Only once,” she admits. “He called and asked if I still needed any money, so I explained to him why I didn’t. And then I told him off for what he did to you.” She pauses.
“I may have at some point referred to him as a douche nozzle.”

I can’t help but laugh. “You did not! A
douche nozzle?
I don’t even know what that is!”

Laney starts giggling, too, and it’s like it’s contagious, because soon enough we’re falling all over ourselves with laughter.

“You know,” she says breathlessly, a few minutes later when we’ve composed ourselves, “I get why you’re mad, and don’t get me wrong, I’m totally on your side. I’ll hate him till the day I die if you want. But I think he’s pretty broken up over this. I’m not saying he was, like, crying tears of man pain over the phone, but he sounded upset.”

I don’t look at her as I lick the melted Popsicle juice off of my sticky fingers. “Good. He should be.”

“All right, I’ve said my piece, so I’m staying out of this, forever and ever amen.” She raises her hands in a conceding gesture before biting off the rest of her Popsicle. “Hey, I meant to ask you—have you decided what you’re going to do with all those pictures you took? You must have a ton.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, no, I haven’t really thought about it.”

Laney licks her Popsicle stick clean and squints at it. “Say, what do you call a piece of wood with nothing to do?”

I think for a moment. “Board?”