He pedals furiously until he’s passed the church and turned left onto an old, unused logging road. He can practically taste the smoke in his mouth as he jumps off the bike, unzips his knapsack, and lunges for the bong. His arms are still shaking. What the fuck just happened? he mumbles to himself, remembering the smell of gas. What did I do?
He thinks, briefly, of going back, calling upstairs into the sleeping house to wake Lolly or anyone who will listen. He considers this as he packs his bowl with thick pinches of pot and fishes in the front pocket of his knapsack for a lighter. He settles down in the grass next to his bike and crosses his legs, Indian style. He runs through the consequences — the police, his parents, Luke. He pulls the bong toward his lap, leans forward, and as he slowly fills his lungs, his mind empties. He holds off exhaling for as long as he can, and when he does, pot smoke curls around his head and dances above him like ghost flames. He closes his eyes and pulls his knees toward his chest. The preceding hours, minute by agonizing minute, become less urgent, gradually vanish. He smokes another hit. His body calms, he exhales, and the world is, again, simple: the humming cicadas, the spark of a lighter, and the sound of one boy breathing.
June
Lolly was right. The Moonstone sits at the edge of the world. June has driven as far as she can and this is where she will stop. In this room with white walls and gray carpet and a golden mermaid painted on a piece of driftwood hung above the bed. She will stay here for as long as she needs to, maybe forever, she thinks as she switches the light off and lays her head on the pillow. She hears the ocean outside, pounding the shore, over and over, and for the first time she allows herself to remember that night, does not will it away.
She is standing at the sink, filling the kettle for tea, but she is already boiling. About something that has sat unbudging and blunt between them since New Year’s Eve when he asked her to marry him. She’d responded by laughing; evading the question by pretending he was joking, as if he’d suggested they cross the field behind their house, march up the steps of the main building at the Unification Church, and join the Moonies. Her laugh that night was so dismissive and distant, so effective, that it took him almost a month to bring it up again. He’d built a fire and they were eating bowls of risotto she’d made, left over from the night before when Lydia was over for dinner. She’d asked about Lolly’s wedding in May. Lolly had called after Thanksgiving to tell June she and Will would accept her nearly-a-year-on-the-table offer to have the reception at the house. This now gave them less than six months to rent a tent, June explained, mail invitations, hire a caterer, organize flowers, and all the rest of it. June noticed Luke get quiet around the talk of wedding plans, but he didn’t say anything after Lydia left. He waited until the next night and asked if June’s hesitation had to do with money and the great difference in their circumstances. He was making a decent living with his landscaping business, but he could not compete with what she had in the bank and the house, which had been paid off when she was still married to Adam. He said if that was her concern, he was happy to sign any prenup or contract she wanted. She can’t say the idea of a prenup hadn’t crossed her mind since he’d proposed; it had, but barely. The truth was, she hadn’t considered the option of marrying him seriously enough to think through the financial or legal consequences. The only consequence that flashed through June’s mind on New Year’s Eve, when Luke bent down on one knee and held out an unusual and pretty pink enamel ring, was Lolly. It had only been a few years now that she’d been communicating with her. Less than two since she would even acknowledge Luke’s existence and speak his name. Only a few weeks since she’d accepted June’s offer to have the wedding reception at the house. To barge into all this with the news that she and Luke were getting married would only confirm her fundamental theory about June: that she thought of herself first and foremost and only, and that her actions never took into account the impact they’d have on others, especially Lolly. This is what June thought that night as she tried to make up for her insensitive first response, tried to assure Luke that this was not something they needed to worry about. She did not explain her reasons because instinctively she did not want to pit Luke against Lolly. Position Lolly between Luke and what he wanted. She had finally convinced Lolly to give Luke a chance and did not want to risk his resenting her. But she did not say any of this that night in front of the fire in February. She also did not say she’d laughed when he proposed because she was caught off guard and because it was impossible. What she said was that she loved him and for now that had to be enough. And for that night, and a while after, it was. She kept the ring in its gray box in the top drawer of her dresser with the rest of her jewelry. She told him it was too large, that she would have it sized at a shop in Salisbury; but in truth the ring fit perfectly and she had no intention of wearing it. Not because she didn’t think it was beautiful — it was, in its particular, vintage art deco way — but because she did not want to be wearing the open question on her finger, waving it between them daily. What she wanted was for the question itself to go away.
But tonight the question has returned, and her response is much worse than before. She is frozen at the stove, one hand in a fist on her hip, the other holding the knob that produces no spark, no flame. Luke has just left, and behind him the door to the screened porch has just slammed. With words she can’t recognize, she has driven him away. She fiddles with the knob, twists it all the way left again and waits for the stove to light, but instead there is only the faint smell of gas. Oh, shit, she mutters, thinking the pilot might have gone out again. It was so hard to tell with this stove. Sometimes it would light right away, explode in a fireball, or it would take forever or not at all. She turns the dial all the way right, off, and as usual it sparks — once, twice, again, again… It will quit after a few minutes, or maybe longer, but eventually the ticking will stop. It’s been like this for years. She will replace this heap, she swears to herself every time it fails to light, like now, and keeps ticking long after the burner has been turned off. She will replace it when she fixes the torn screen on the porch and the broken dryer downstairs, but not until after the wedding, not until things settle down. She leaves the stove and rushes through the porch door and out toward the lawn. She pauses to let her eyes adjust, for the blank dark to fill with the shapes of trees, shed, field, tent. Near the far tree line at the back of the field, she can see the bright smudge of Luke’s white shirt above the tall grass. She runs toward it.
On the mown path along the edge of the field she follows his figure to the woods, where it disappears off the nearest trailhead. The moon is nearly full, and the field, the woods, the far-off Berkshires, are lit with a silver light, as if the world were an exposed negative. By the time she steps onto the trail that leads to the Unification Church property, she’s lost him. She scans for any flash of Luke’s shirt and calls out his name as she goes, careful not to trip on a root or rock on the path. She follows the trail they have walked together a thousand times and remembers again the night he asked her to marry him, how unprepared she was for the question and how relieved she was to derail the prospect, at least for a little while. There was no one else she wanted to be with, but even beyond the issues with Lolly the idea of marrying again was difficult to engage. Prenups, the fear that he would resent her for not being able to give him children, the embarrassment of their age difference, the memory of her bitter divorce with Adam — all these things would crowd in and it would be impossible to imagine.