June Read Free Page A

once, twice, as if for good luck, as if, like Lindie, she was memorizing the moment.
    Lindie thought, hoped, there would be more. But June turned and nestled into sleep.
    Imagine them then, two girls curled in a corner bedroom of Two Oaks, breathing in the metal fan’s whir. The floorboards shift and moan. The pocket doors hiccup. Lindie lays her arm across June’s warm hip. She keeps her eyes propped open as long as she is able, fancying herself on a still night aboard the
Pequod,
her shipmates at rest, the great white whale fathoms below. Her mind trades the tush-tush-tush of the Ohio crickets for the thrash of a wild ocean she’s yet to hear. Her eyelids succumb to the darkness. Only then does sleep steal her.

Cassie was already halfway to the bedroom door when she properly awoke. The world was shrieking. She knew the horrible sound wasn’t coming from inside her head, but it was already doing damage in there, clawing at the quiet she’d stored up. She could guess what would come next: an anxious headache, a churning stomach, maybe even the sharp urge of diarrhea, tingling palms, the light too bright even with the blinds and curtains closed, with the eye mask on, with a pillow over her head. Until only moments before, she’d been so sweetly nestled in the palm of that dream of those two girls, which she realized had taken place in the very same bed she now called her own, although the room had been full in the dream, of ribbons and watercolors, and also of a succulent devotion that made her ache now that it was out of reach.
    The modern world clawed in. The house howled a dreadful, screeching protest. Cassie couldn’t bear it. She grasped at the floor for clothes, coming up with a dish towel. She realized she didn’t have her glasses on—of course, that was the first problem, she was awake enough now to realize that she was blind—and grappled at the side table and cursed aloud when she heard her glasses crash to the floor. All that time the vicious noise continued. She understood, once she found her glasses and the room crisped into view, that the sound was one only a place as old as Two Oaks could make, as though it were clearing its throat of ancient, thick phlegm, coughing and groaning in the process. But that didn’t mean she knew what it meant, why it had begun, or that she liked it.
    Then, for a fleeting moment, the clamor ended. Cassie experienced a blessed instant in which the house was just as it was supposed to be—not exactly silent (the dog barking down the street, the rattle of the windows atop the porch line as a breeze scuttled west), but contained. Her eardrums buzzed against the silence. She looked around the bright corner bedroom—the chenille bedspread she’d kicked aside in her sleep, the dust-filled lace valances framing her view like fancy sideways parentheses, the glass of water she had managed not to push off the scratched side table—and remembered herself: she was naked, but not insane. She could resist her body’s desire to break at the threat of the world.
    But then the sound came back, eight million times worse than fingernails on a chalkboard, and infinitely louder. Cassie wrapped the bedspread around her body and blinked her way out her door and into the upstairs hall. Out here, the clang rattled her jaw. She could feel the sweet residue of the dream sifting off her. She momentarily considered going back into the bedroom to try to grasp the last golden bits of it—two girls, was it? Two girls, both churning with their future prospects—but already she knew it was futile, that the dream was lost. The air on her twenty-five-year-old skin let her know she was all the way back into herself. Released. And if she stood here much longer, she felt certain she would lose her sense of hearing.
    She stepped down the stairs, sun refracting through the stained-glass window and casting a green patch onto her right pinkie toe. The house blared on. In the same moment she realized that it