Saving June

There used to be a third picture on the wall, an old family portrait. For their tenth wedding anniversary, my parents rented this giant tent, and they hosted a festive dinner with a buffet and music and all of our family and friends. June and I spent the evening running around with plastic cups, screaming with laughter, making poor attempts to capture fireflies, while my parents danced under the stars to their song—Frank Sinatra’s “The Way You Look Tonight.”

Toward the end of the night, someone gathered the four of us together and took a snapshot. June and I were giggling, heads bent close together, our parents standing above us in an embrace, gazing at each other instead of the camera. It always struck me in the years after how bizarre it was, how two people could look at one another with such tenderness and complete love, and how quickly that could dissolve into nothing but bitterness.

That photo hung on our wall for years and years, staying the same even as June’s and mine were switched out to reflect our progressing ages. Now it’s gone, just an empty space, and June’s will remain the same forever. Only mine will ever change.

I stare at June’s photo and think: This is it. I’ll never see her face again. I’ll never see the little crinkle in her nose when she was lost in thought, or her eyebrows knitting together as she frowned, or the way she’d press her lips together so hard they’d almost disappear while she tried not to laugh at some vulgar joke I’d made, because she didn’t want to let me know she thought it was funny. All I have left are photos of her with this smile, frozen in time. Bright and blinding and happy. A complete lie.

It hurts to look, but I don’t want to stop. I want to soak in everything about my sister. I want to braid it into my DNA, make it part of me. Maybe then I’ll be able to figure out how this happened. How she could do this. People are looking to me for answers, because I’m the one tied the closest to June, by name and blood and memory, and it’s wrong that I’m as clueless as everyone else. I need to know.

“Come on,” says Laney gently, taking my hand and squeezing it, leading me toward my bedroom.

I drag my feet and shake her off. “No. No, wait.”

I veer off toward June’s room. The door is closed; I place my hand on the brass knob and keep it there for a moment. I haven’t been inside since she died. I try thinking back to the last time I was in there, but racing through my memory, I can’t pinpoint it. It seems unfair, the fact that I can’t remember.

Laney stands next to me, shifting from foot to foot. “Harper …”

I ignore her and push the door open. The room looks exactly the same as it always has. Of course it does—what did I expect? Laney flicks on the light and waits.

“It doesn’t feel real,” she says softly. “Does it feel real to you?”

“No.” Six days. It’s already been six days. It’s only been six days. Time is doing weird things, speeding up and slowing down.

June’s room has always been the opposite of mine—mine is constantly messy, dirty clothes and books littering the floor. Hers is meticulously clean. I can’t tell if that’s supposed to mean something. She’d always been organized, her room spotless in comparison to the disaster area that is mine, but I wonder if she’d cleaned it right before, on purpose. Like she didn’t want to leave behind any messes.

Well, she’d left behind plenty of messes. Just not physical ones.

“Do you know what they’re going to do with—with the ashes?” Laney asks.

The lump that’s been lodged in my throat all day grows bigger. The ashes. I can’t believe that’s how we’re referring to her now. Though I guess what was left was never really June. Just a body.

Thinking about the body makes me think about that morning, six days ago in the garage, and I really don’t want that in my head. I look up at Laney and say, “They’re going to split them once my dad picks out his own urn.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s—”

“I know.”

Screwed up, is what she wanted to say. It makes my stomach turn, like it did when Aunt Helen decorated the mantel above our fireplace, spread out a deep blue silk scarf, and set up two candleholders and two silver-framed black-and-white photos of June on each side, leaving space for the urn in the middle.

“It should be balanced,” she’d said, hands fisted on her hips, head tipped to the side as she studied her arrangement, like she was scrutinizing a new art piece instead of the vase holding the remains of a once living, breathing person. My sister.

Laney hooks her chin over my shoulder, her arm around my stomach. I don’t really want to be touched, my skin is crawling, but I let her anyway. For her sake.

“There wasn’t a note?” she asks, soft and sad. I shake my head. I don’t know why she’s asking. She already knows.

No note. No nothing. Just my sister, curled in the backseat of her car, an empty bottle of pills in her hand, the motor still running.

I know that because I’m the one who found her.

I slip away from Laney’s grasp. She hasn’t asked me for the details of what happened that morning, and I’m pretty sure she knows the last thing I want to do is talk about it, but I don’t want to give her an opening.

Everything has changed and everything is the same. Everything in this room, anyway. The only addition since June’s death is a few plastic bags placed side by side on the desk, filled with all of the valuables salvaged from her car—a creased notepad, a beaded bracelet with a broken clasp, the fuzzy pink dice that had hung around her rearview mirror. The last bag contains a bunch of pens, a tube of lip gloss and a silver disc. I pick it up to examine it when I notice the desk drawer isn’t shut all of the way.

I draw it open and poke around. There are some papers inside, National Honor Society forms and a discarded photo of her and Tyler that she’d taken off the corner of her dresser mirror and stashed away after their breakup. And on top of everything, a blank envelope. I pull out the letter inside and unfold it. It’s her acceptance to Berkeley, taken from the bulky acceptance package and stored away here for some reason I’ll never know. Tucked in the folds is also a postcard, bent at the edges. The front of it shows a golden beach dotted with beachgoers, strolling along the edge of a calm blue-green sea, above them an endless sky with California written in bubbly cursive.

The only time I ever heard my sister raise her voice with Mom was the fight they had when Mom insisted June accept the full scholarship she’d received to State. Mom said we couldn’t afford the costs. It would’ve been different before the divorce, but there was just no way to fund the tuition now, not when Dad had his own rent to pay, and the money that had been set aside was used to pay their lawyers. Besides, she reasoned, June should stay close to home. There was no reason for her to go all the way across the country when she could get a fine, free-ride education right here.

When June was informed of this, she and Mom had screamed at each other, no-holds-barred, for over an hour, until they were too exhausted to argue anymore and June had finally, in defeat, retreated to her room. She didn’t speak to our mother for an entire week, but she accepted the scholarship and admission to State and never mentioned Berkeley to us again.

I turn the postcard over, and it’s like all of the air has been sucked out of the room.

Laney notices, because she lifts her head and says, “Harper? What is it? Harper.”

I’m too busy staring at the back of the card to answer. Written there are the words, California, I’m coming home, in June’s handwriting. Nothing more.

Laney pulls it from my hands and reads it over and over again, her eyes flitting back and forth. She looks at me. “What do you think it means?”

It could mean nothing. But it could mean something. It was at the top of the drawer, after all. Maybe she meant for it to be found.

California was her dream. She wanted out of this town more than anything. She must have been suffocating, too, and we’d drifted so far apart that I never noticed. I never took it seriously. No one did. And now she’s dead.

“It’s not right,” I say.

Laney frowns. “What’s not right?”

“Everything.” I snatch back the postcard and wave it in the air. “This is what she wanted. Not to be stuck in this house, on display like—like some trophy. She hated it here, didn’t she? I mean, isn’t that why she—”

I can’t finish; I throw the postcard and envelope back into the drawer and slam it shut with more force than necessary, causing the desk to rattle. I am so angry I am shaking with it. It’s an abstract kind of anger, directionless but overwhelming.

Laney folds her arms across her chest and bows her head.

“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I don’t know.”

“How did things get so bad?” I whisper. Laney doesn’t answer, and I know it’s because she, like me, has no way to make sense of this completely senseless act. Girls like June are not supposed to do this. Girls who have their whole lives ahead of them.

We stand next to each other, my hands still on the drawer handles, when the thought comes to me. It’s just a spark at first, a flicker of a notion.

“We should take her ashes to California.”

I don’t even mean to blurt it out loud, but once it’s out there, it’s out—no taking it back. And as the idea begins to take root in my mind, I decide maybe … maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

“Harper.” Laney’s using that voice again, that controlled voice, and it makes me want to hit her. She’s not supposed to use that voice. Not on me. “Don’t you think that’s kind of a stretch? Just because of a postcard?”

“It’s not just because of a postcard.”

It’s more than that. It’s about what she wanted for herself but didn’t think she’d ever have, for whatever reason. It’s about how there is so much I didn’t know about my sister, and this is as much as I’ll ever have of her. College acceptance letters and postcards. Reminders of her unfulfilled dreams.

“Your mom would totally flip,” Laney points out, but she sounds more entertained by the prospect than worried. “Not to mention your aunt.”

I don’t want to think about Aunt Helen. She’s just like everyone else downstairs, seeing in June only what they wanted to see—a perfect daughter, perfect friend, perfect student, perfect girl. They’re all grieving over artificial memories, some two-dimensional, idealized version of my sister they’ve built up in their heads because it’s too scary to face reality. That June had something in her that was broken.

And if someone like June—so loving, kind, full of goodness and light and promise—could implode that way, what hope is there for the rest of us?

“Who cares about Aunt Helen?” I snap.

Laney hesitates, but I see something in her eyes change, like a car shifting gears. Like she’s realizing how serious I am about this. “How would we even get there?”

“We can drive. You have a car.” Not much of a car, but more than what I have, which is nothing. Laney’s dad is loaded but has this weird selective code of ethics, where he believes strongly in teaching her the lesson of accountability and made her pay half for her own car, and so after some months of bagging groceries, she’d saved up enough to put half down on a beat-up old Gremlin.

“My Gremlin is on its last leg. Wheel. Whatever. There is no way it’d make it from Michigan to California.”

“Yeah, but still—” I’m growing more convinced by the second. “That’s what she wanted, right? California, the ocean?”

Laney just stares at me, and I wonder if this is how it will be from now on, if I am always going to be looked at like that by everyone, even my best friend.

I don’t care. She can stare at me all day and it won’t change my mind. There were so many things I’d done wrong in my relationship with my sister, but this. I could do this. I owe her that much.

“I’m going to do this,” I tell her. “With you or without you. I’d rather it be with.”

I expect Laney to say, “It would be impossible,” or, “I know you don’t mean it,” or, “Don’t you think you should go lie down?”

Instead, she glances down at the postcard, brow furrowed like if she stares hard enough it’ll reveal something more.

When she looks back up, her mouth has edged into a half smile. “So California, huh? That’s gonna be a long drive.”

chapter two

Aunt Helen is the last to leave that night. Laney leaves because her mother forces her, and even then I have to all but shove her out the door.

“I can stay,” she says. She has her arms around me, clinging to me like a life preserver. I’m getting the idea that she needs to give me comfort way more than I need to be receiving it. “For as long you want. I don’t want you to be alone.”

It would be nice to have her here, but I know this is something I’m going to have to handle on my own. Better get used to it now.

I eventually pry her off and try to force a smile, but it’s like my lips have forgotten how. I sigh. “Go home. Seriously, it’s fine. I promise.”

I know she’s not convinced, but she squeezes me once more, kisses my cheek and lets her mother drag her out the door.

Before Laney it was my father, who hadn’t spoken at great length to any of us all day, but as he left, he grabbed me in a stiff-armed hug. In that second I had this feeling, the kind that grabs you by the throat, a desperate desire for him to stay, because he knows Mom so much better than I do, because he might know how to fix this.

When he pulled back, he ruffled my hair the way he did when I was a kid. Except now the gesture felt unnatural, like he was out of practice. And I knew he couldn’t fix anything in our family. Not anymore.

“I’ll be in touch, kiddo,” he promised, but promises from my father never meant anything before, and I don’t expect them to mean anything now.

As always, Aunt Helen can’t leave without making a fuss, telling my mother to get some rest, and that she’ll be over later the next morning, and gushing about how beautiful the service was.

“I know she was looking down on us,” she sniffs, dabbing her eyes with the wrinkled tissue she’s been clutching in her hand for hours. “She would have been so touched.”

It’s pretty much the most clichéd thing anyone could possibly say, not to mention the most untrue, but apparently it’s enough to start her waterworks again, which in turn makes my mother cry. Aunt Helen reaches for me, and I brace myself for another hug, but she stops halfway, her hand awkwardly wound around my shoulder. The way she’s looking at me is the kindest it’s been in days.

We’ve never gotten along. Aunt Helen is really into church and prayer and Jesus; she doesn’t approve of my black hoodies and black nail polish and my admitted penchant for excessive swearing. And ever since I announced in the middle of last Easter’s family brunch that I’m not sure I believe in God at all, she’s treated me like I’m some kind of heathen. Maybe it wasn’t the best timing on my part, but I did get a kick out of the horrified look on her face.

Of course, back then, questions of God and the afterlife weren’t really relevant to my life like they are now. I think Aunt Helen is hoping I’m going to have this moment of revelation where I’ll declare myself a born-again Christian who sees the light of Jesus’s love. But June dying hasn’t given me any spiritual clarity. It’s just made everything even more confusing.

“Take care of your mother, okay?” she says to me now. “She needs you.”

I nod. “I know. I will.”

“I’ll be over tomorrow to help with things. Feel free to call if you need me.” She pauses and sniffles a little before giving my shoulder an awkward squeeze. “I love you, sweetie.”

My eyes snap up to hers in surprise. I can’t remember the last time she said that to me. The confusion must show on my face, because she clears her throat awkwardly and takes her hand off my shoulder.

“All right then.” She nods quickly and hurries to the front door before I can fully react. With her back to me, she says, “Remember—this too shall pass.”

I don’t know if she is saying it to me, or to my mother, or to herself. As the door closes behind her, I figure it doesn’t really matter.

In some ways I admire Aunt Helen’s unwavering certainty in God’s divine plan. It must be comforting, to have faith like that. To believe so concretely that there’s someone—something—out there watching guard, keeping us safe, testing us only with what we can handle. I’ve never believed in anything the way Aunt Helen believes in God.

I don’t really know what’s supposed to happen now that everyone’s gone. I’m pretty sure my mother doesn’t know, either, because we look at each other for a long time in silence.

“Well,” she says after a while. Her mouth hangs open like she’s mid-sentence, but she doesn’t finish whatever thought was on her mind. She just turns and wanders into the living room. I’m pretty sure she’s still a little drunk. The last time she drank this much was right after Dad left. I hope this isn’t going to be a repeat of those days.

I follow her and watch as she drops onto the couch and slides off her heels. Flowers and cards are everywhere. I step over a heart-shaped wreath, scrunch in at the other end of the couch, and turn on the television to some formulaic sitcom. The sudden wave of canned studio laughter is startling to my ears. A few minutes later I turn it back off. Mom doesn’t seem to notice.

“Do you need anything?” I ask. I keep my voice low, like I’ll scare her if I talk too loud.

“No.” She doesn’t move. “Did you eat?”

“A little.” All I’ve had today is an apple from this morning, but I can’t stomach the thought of eating anything more.

“You should eat.”

“I will.” I stand. “You’re sure I can’t get you something?”

After a moment, she shakes her head. I hesitate, wondering if I should press, and then give up and go to the kitchen. Dirty plates and silverware are stacked on the counter, so I rinse them off and stick them in the dishwasher. The methodical process of sponging the dishes off and stacking them is a nice distraction. I like having something to do with my hands, kind of like how it was when I smoked in the garden earlier with that weird boy.

And really, what was that about? What was he even doing here? Did he know June? Probably he was just someone in her grade. Most of the graduating class attended the service, but only her closest friends came to the wake. June was friends with everyone, always had invites on the weekends for movies and shopping and parties, but she didn’t really have one single best friend. Not like how I have Laney, and only Laney.

Still, there was something off about that boy. He wouldn’t have been there if he was just some passing acquaintance. It bothers me, the idea that he might have had some role in her life and I didn’t know about it. I can’t stop thinking about the look on his face. That open display of hostility. All of June’s other friends either kept their distance or wanted to cry on my shoulder. At least this guy didn’t bother hiding his true feelings. It was sort of refreshing, really.

When I’m done with the dishes, I go back to the living room, only to find Mom fast asleep. The sight of her curled up in her dress, eyes closed and lipsticked mouth parted, makes me ache. She’s been falling apart ever since it happened. I have to admit, I’m glad Aunt Helen has been around to help, even if her control-freak ways grate on my nerves. I am so not equipped for this. I’ve never been good at the emotional stuff. Except anger. Anger, I’m good at.

Not too long ago, June told me I had the thickest skin of anyone she knew. “Nothing ever gets to you,” she said, like it was a compliment. “You’re like a rock. An island.”

I told her to shut it with the poetic crap. What I didn’t point out was how completely wrong she was. Things get to me all the time—I just don’t see the point in making a big deal out of it. I learned pretty early on that no one, aside from Laney, is interested in hearing about my stupid teenage angst. Venting to her is enough of an outlet for me.

I never knew what June’s coping methods were, if she had any to begin with; I never even thought about it, really. Her life seemed so perfect from the outside—what could she possibly have to be upset about? Sometimes I’d catch her standing in front of the mirror in her room, just staring, like she was looking for imaginary imperfections. I used to think it was pure vanity, but I slowly came to realize it wasn’t that. It was insecurity.

It didn’t make sense to me. How could she be insecure, when everyone—our parents, her friends, her teachers, Tyler—always told her how perfect she was? It pissed me off, if anything. As soon as I learned, early on in life, that I could never measure up to June, I’d made it a point to be her polar opposite. June was unfailingly polite; I’m brash and don’t go out of my way to be nice to people I don’t like, ever. June spent crazy amounts of time and energy on her appearance, the right clothes and the right hair style; my default look includes hoodies, jeans, a ponytail and excessive eyeliner. June made honor roll every semester; I flirt the line between average and below average, cut class on a regular basis and there’s basically a revolving door to the detention room designed specifically for me.

When I was a little kid and used to get in trouble, Mom always used to say, “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” But I wasn’t interested in being like June, and I definitely didn’t want to live in June’s shadow. Even if mine was less impressive, at least it was my own.

I take an afghan off the ottoman and drape it over my mother, who now has one dead daughter and one delinquent. June’s unmatchable goodness and my unmatchable knack for constantly disappointing my parents used to even each other out, but now the scale is tipped, unbalanced, spotlighting my own failures more than ever. No wonder Mom’s such a mess. I tuck the afghan in around her shoulders and place a pillow under her head. She doesn’t stir at all, just keeps on snoring. She always snores after she’s been drinking.

That night, I lie in bed, miles from sleep. Closing my eyes, I think about how tomorrow will be the first day June is gone, really gone. Life will keep going and everyone will return to their usual routines, and it’ll be the first real day of living without my sister. My life is now divided into two periods: With June and After June. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of it.

Laney’s right; it doesn’t feel real. Nothing does.

Sometime between gazing at the ceiling and thinking, I must drift off, because when my eyes open again, it’s not as dark outside anymore. Also, there’s an insistent beeping coming from downstairs. When it doesn’t go away, I sit up and listen harder. It sounds like the smoke detector. I scramble into the hall and down the stairs two at a time.

“Mom?” I call out as I make my way into the kitchen. Okay, I don’t see fire yet, but I can smell acrid smoke. My heart leaps in my chest. “Mom? What’s going on?”

I find her sitting at the wooden table with an open bottle in front of her. At the stove, dark smoke curls up off a flat pan. I rush over and grab the pan handle, shove the whole thing into the sink and turn on the tap. Whatever was cooking has burnt to an indistinguishable black crisp. I drag a chair under the smoke detector and wave a dish towel until the blaring of the alarm silences.

“Mom, are you okay?” I ask. The adrenaline’s still pumping, leaving my mouth completely dry.

Her eyes are glassy and dull, and she doesn’t look at me. “I was making eggs.”

“Oh.” I return the chair to the table and eye the mostly empty wine bottle. “Mom … how long have you been up?”

She shrugs off the question, her slender fingers picking idly at the label. “It’s just us now,” she says. “The two of us.” Finally she drags her gaze off the bottle and looks me in the eye; she looks as tired as I feel.