We drive for a few minutes in silence until I pull up outside Laurie’s house, a small craftsman bungalow in the east end of town. The lights aren’t on and Dave’s car isn’t in the drive. Laurie frowns. ‘Where is he? He said he’d be home.’
‘Maybe he’s working late.’
Laurie doesn’t answer me. She just gets out the car, pulling her phone from her bag.
‘Call me tomorrow,’ I shout after her. ‘Let’s go for a hike or something. If you’re not too busy,’ I add, remembering she has to work.
Laurie’s not listening. She’s dialing a number – probably Dave’s. ‘Good night,’ she says to me, slamming the car door and hurrying up the path.
On a whim I pull a U-turn and decide to drive by the tasting room on my way to pick up June. I’m hoping I’ll spot Dave through the window sitting at the till, tallying receipts. But the lights are off, the closed sign hanging crooked on the back of the door. It doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself firmly. There’s no point in jumping to conclusions – that’s what the doctors used to tell us after June’s diagnosis. We need all the facts before we can determine the correct path of action.
Chapter 3
June must have been waiting for me, looking out the window, because I haven’t even put the car in park before the front door flies open and out she runs, head down, bag flung over her shoulder. She’s wearing a pair of gym shorts with Hannah’s NYU hoodie over the top. Abby – a friend of June’s since pre-school days – is leaning, scowling, against the doorpost. I wave at her and smile. She gives me a perfunctory wave back before slamming the door shut. Charming.
June gets into the passenger seat, slumping low, and grunts hello at me. At least I think it’s Hello. It could also be Drive. I step on the gas. Sometimes I feel like all I am is a glorified chauffeur, but I don’t say anything. She’s twelve, I remind myself. I need to make the most of it. She’ll be gone before we know it, flying the nest just like Hannah did before her. And then what?
Her hood is pulled up and she turns away from me to stare out the window. I know that I have to let her come to me, not try to push, but the silence eventually gets to me and I cave. ‘How are you feeling?’ I ask.
‘I’m fine,’ she mutters. I catch a glimpse of her face as she says it – that beautiful, heart-shaped face that I used to spend hours staring at as she slept on, oblivious, webbed by tubes and wires. She looks pale, her eyes red-rimmed. Is she sick? That familiar sense of dread creeps through me and I struggle to shake it off. Don’t go there, Ava.
‘You have an OK time with Abby?’ I ask.
She grunts again and I sigh. She used to be so eloquent that adults would often mistake her for being older than she was. It was all that time around doctors and hospitals. I’m not sure switching her to a private school was worthwhile; her linguistic skills seem to have regressed to pre-verbal days.
We could have bought a Caribbean island with the money we’ve spent on June’s education, not to mention the cash we’ve bled to pay for Hannah’s college tuition. But how can I resent it? They’re both happy, healthy, bright, going places. I want their lives to be glorious. I want them to achieve more than I ever did, to be successful and fulfilled and to reach their potential in ways that I was never able to.
As we head up the winding road to our house, I glance surreptitiously across at June, trying to resist reaching over and laying my hand on her forehead to check her temperature.
She’s frowning, her hands working at the cuffs of her hoodie, fraying holes in them. What’s going on in that head of hers? I suppose she’s just entering that awful early teen phase, and I steel myself, knowing what’s coming. Hannah was just the same, though I think I’ll take it worse with June because we have a much closer bond than I ever had with Hannah, who was always so aloof as a child, so self-contained and independent, that at times I felt redundant. I used to long for her to be like the other kids at kindergarten refusing to let go of their mothers. She’d push me out the door and march off to her desk without so much as a bye or a backwards glance.
I’ve often thought that if our family was a circus, I’d be the plate spinner, Hannah would be the ringmaster, Robert would be an illusionist (for his skill at creating invisible worlds that people spend millions of dollars buying unreal real estate in) and June would be the clown. Gene would be the hanger-on who doesn’t earn his keep and who has to sleep under the big top at night.
June always made others laugh. Even when she was throwing up what looked like all her internal organs, the ulcers carving craters into her mouth, she could still somehow find a way to crack a joke. She had a book of them, 10,001 Jokes for Kids, and she’d memorize as many as she could. Every time she saw us looking sad she’d pull one out, and she’d keep pulling them out until we smiled again.
So now, when I see clouds scudding across her face, gathering like an ominous storm front, I worry. I can’t help it. Fear entered my life when the children were born but it fused with my DNA when June got sick. Now I live with it constantly. It whispers into my ear most nights, keeping me awake, seeding nightmares that the cancer will come back and this time we won’t be so lucky.
‘What’s black and white and red all over?’ I ask.
June rolls
