Falling for June: A Novel Read online

June had been walking for ten days already, and still she could not bring herself to accept the news that she knew all too well to be true. She took comfort in the solitude of her journey, however, and she had always wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago.

  It was not by chance that she had become such close friends with Sebastian. She had always loved Spanish culture. She met Sebastian on a Hollywood film set and they spent many Southern Californian nights together, sharing chilled wine and talking about the beauty of northern Spain, where Sebastian was originally from. And now here she was, having walked from the French Pyrenees into España, passing through the quiet countryside with only her thoughts and the distant, hollow tonking of grazing goats’ bells to keep her company.

  She had stopped in Pamplona for a day, searching out the ghosts of characters from a great American novel she’d read as a girl, a book that had left her forever fascinated by the dichotomy of human beauty and cruelty represented in the slow artistic torture of bulls by brave and graceful toreros. But it was off-season, at least in Pamplona, and there were no bulls and no ghosts, other than those that had followed her. And these ghosts were equally beautiful and cruel. For such are all our memories, she thought, locked in the grip of the past, the rough edges polished by the tides of time. Is there anything as conducive to nostalgia as walking? she wondered as she strolled the Spanish highlands, thinking about her life.

  “An inward-looking eye sees nothing worthwhile; vain and self-indulgent reflection produces only more suffering.”

  That had been her mother’s favorite saying. And although it may have been the only thing about which her mother had been right, June knew it was high time for her to look at her past if she had any hope of finding the courage to continue on, and if one wants to wrestle with ghosts, what better place to start than with dear old Mom?

  Her mother had nearly been forced into being a whore, or so she would always claim whenever June or her sister would complain about the labor they were made to do. “And working in the field is hardly whoring,” their mother would add. But it wasn’t just a field; it was many fields. The land was leased, the water rights rented, and the tools and machinery mortgaged. Try as they might, their family could not squeeze enough garlic out of the ground to ever get ahead. The only bright spot to these long days laboring were the Mexican migrant workers whom June got to interact with. It was here that her love of the Spanish language had been born.

  Her sister was always in a world of her own, and as far as June knew she never said two words she didn’t have to say to any of the field workers. She hardly said more than that to June when they worked together long into the autumn evenings, peeling garlic side by side. But June loved the migrant workers like she might have loved the brothers and uncles she didn’t have. They’d usually break for lunch in the shade of an oak or an old cottonwood, and June would walk like family among them, swapping her meatloaf and bread for pollo and tortillas, telling them stories she’d make up about talking cloves of garlic that went hunting vampires in the night, learning jokes from them in Spanish as trade. When she was older and had become interested in boys, she had a string of failed first dates and could never understand why until one of the field workers informed her that it might be the scent of garlic. He gave her a bottle of perfume he had planned to send home as a Christmas gift for his sister. She had smelled garlic her entire life; how could she have known?

  For all the hours she and her sister put in, their stepfather matched them hour for hour at the local bar, drinking and gambling away the profits of their labor. And each evening when the girls came in from working, their dinner was waiting. But they would have to eat it alone. Their mother spent her evenings at the old piano, playing melancholy tunes in a minor key that mirrored the mood of their home. For all her lecturing to the girls about not looking back, their mother wasted her life away lamenting a lost chance to play professionally, and the house seemed always to be infused with the soft keystrokes of regret. Some rare nights even now, as June drifted off to sleep, she could hear that piano playing still, just down the stairs of her memory, beneath the sad portrait of her mother that hung forever in her mind as a reminder to live for the moment and to never forget the value of a smile.

  June and her sister were physically close growing up but emotionally a million miles apart. June would have thought their shared suffering would have brought them together, but as she grew she learned that some pain wants to be experienced alone. Her sister was a year older and by far the prettier of the two, and their drunken stepfather would sometimes come to visit her in the sisters’ shared room. June would lie in the dark, listening to the quiet struggle and whispered threats. She cursed him in her prayers, wishing for his death, but would always regret not finding the courage to do something. Especially after her sister had finally run away for good, leaving June to take her place in the darkness that filled that farmhouse bedroom. The eve of her sixteenth birthday she followed her sister’s lead and left. Unlike her sister, however, she never looked back.

  June got a call from her sister years later, while she was living in Southern California, to tell her that their mother was gone. Their stepfather was dead too. Murder-suicide, her sister said, but June never did bother to ask who had killed whom. It didn’t really matter, she figured, although she could probably guess. There wasn’t much in her family’s old farmhouse to leave—debt overshadowed their final tragedy—but what little there was they had left to Ingrid, and that was just fine with June. She was a substitute English teacher three hundred miles away by then and she skipped the funeral, saying she’d make it down some other time to pay her respects. But she never could bring herself to go. Her stepfather did not deserve her forgiveness, and try as she would she could find none for her mother either, for despite her private grief, June was sure that she had known.

  It was that same year when she had first met Samuel. He was a teacher too: history and home ec, which seemed a strange combination to June. But what wasn’t strange was the way his dark eyebrows arched perfectly above his kind and gentle eyes. He had been just the man June had needed to meet, and they were engaged before he could even save enough for a ring. June said she’d marry him right then without one, that they should save the money for a home. But he insisted they wait and build a nest egg first. He taught that summer and all the others to follow, driving a berry bus to supplement what he already had set aside, until he could buy her a proper ring and a home. Both were simple but perfect, a small rambler in the burbs and a small princess-cut diamond set in a plain gold band. He had put that ring on her finger, saying, “Until death do us part.” It was on her finger when his motorcycle went off the road and she found him in that awful ditch. It was on her finger when she jumped off Yosemite’s tallest cliff. And it was still on her finger all these years later as she walked the Camino de Santiago, wondering if she had denied her heart love all these years to honor his memory or to keep herself from having to truly live. For death had parted them, hadn’t it? And had she not been chasing her own death a little with every jump, with every stunt?

  The funny thing was, she could no longer remember his face. She couldn’t be sure when it had finally faded. It had just stayed there in the past as her life went on, his features polished smooth by all that time until his memory was just a feeling. She had to laugh a little at her own sentimentality. If he were still alive, she mused, they could probably run into one another on this very path and neither would recognize the other, she having forgotten his face, he not knowing how much hers had changed. But here his death had haunted her all these years. It seemed strange how something so brief could cast a shadow so long.

  These were a few of the many thoughts keeping June company on her walk. She was desperately trying to prevent them from adding up to something that felt like regret. She refused to fall into her mother’s brooding trap. Not me, she thought. I’d risk love over loneliness every time. I’d choose life instead of death, wouldn’t I?
Isn’t that what I preach?

  She stopped for the night at a roadside albergue. Here at least she could stave off her loneliness by sharing a meal with fellow pilgrims, renting a soft bed to rest her weary head.

  David was so out of place it almost made sense that he was walking the road in reverse. But still the faces of the pilgrims he passed hid little of their confusion over his direction of travel. It didn’t help, of course, that he was stopping each of them and making them look at June’s picture, asking if they had seen her anywhere along the way. Most just shook their heads. A few younger men, mostly from European countries, smiled and said they wished. “She’s a foxy older lady, mate. I’d remember running into her.” But none had seen her on their travels.

  He ran into what would become a repeated problem the very first night. The roadside refugios and albergues were meant for pilgrims traveling the Way of St. James, and they asked for a credencial, which David understood to be a sort of passport that was stamped at each township or village along the route. The trouble was he didn’t possess a passport, not having departed from a traditional starting place, and because he was walking in reverse it likely would not have mattered if he had. It took many pesetas, much pleading, and lots of awkward translating from his pocket dictionary, but they would usually find space for him after waiting for the last of the pilgrims to arrive.

  Surprisingly, he was little fazed by the hard cots and close quarters, having become accustomed to the sounds and smells of other sweaty bodies sleeping nearby during his weeks at stunt school. Since he was the last to be given a bed each night, before turning in he crept through the rooms peeking at each sleeping face with a flashlight cupped in his hands. This led to a few uncomfortable encounters but no sign of June.

  The farther he traveled along the path, the sparser the pilgrims he encountered, and he found himself walking for long stretches of time with nothing to do but question his having come. What if June didn’t want to see him? he wondered. What if she wanted to face things alone? Wasn’t that her right? Who was he to come all this way just to interrupt her journey?

  But Sebastian had seemed worried enough to beg David to go. He said she would welcome his company. And even though she had initially rejected it, he thought she’d also accept his having paid off the mortgage at Echo Glen as a bit of welcome good news. So David had agreed, but he had not told Sebastian his other reason for wanting to come and find her. You see, with paying off Echo Glen out of the way, there was something else David wanted to propose.

  24

  YOU WENT ALL the way over there to find her and propose marriage, didn’t you?”

  He looked at me from his chair with a twinkle in his eye. “I may have,” he replied. “But you seem awfully interested for someone who doesn’t believe in love.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s not fair. What I said was I didn’t believe in it for me. But I’m curious why June left to walk the Camino to begin with. I mean, why was Sebastian so worried about her? Was something wrong? You have to tell me.”

  I wasn’t trying to cut him short, but his storytelling had been punctuated with coughing fits, and I feared he would wear himself out before he got to the end.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You add some wood to the stove there, then give me a hand up out of this chair before I fall asleep, and I’ll show you.”

  I looked out the window. It was fully dark now.

  “Maybe going on another field trip isn’t such a good idea.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I think I can make it down the hallway where we’re going without falling.”

  After I had stoked the stove back to life, I helped him from his chair. It was clear his energy was waning, as he could no longer rise by himself, even with the aid of his cane. I wondered what he would have done had I not been around. Slept right there in his robe, I guess. Once on his feet, however, he shuffled quite quickly down the hall on his slippers.

  He led me to a door and opened it. When he snapped the light on, I saw it was a small corner bedroom with a window overlooking the creek. It had been converted into a kind of studio, and it was immediately clear that the studio had belonged to June. The walls were hung with more watercolors, and an easel with an unfinished canvas stood near the window. But it wasn’t the easel that drew my attention—it was the wheelchair sitting next to it. It was a power chair with leg and chest straps, and it was parked beside the easel with its seat raised to an almost standing height, as if waiting for June to return any moment to her brushes and paint.

  “You asked about the watercolor of Echo Glen in the kitchen earlier,” David said. “That was one of June’s first. She claimed she took it up because in her condition no one would dare tell her she wasn’t any good, even if it were true. But she was quite the artist, getting better even as things deteriorated.”

  I had been wondering about the wheelchair ramp covering the steps ever since I had arrived that morning, and now I understood. But I was more curious than ever about how she had come to be in the wheelchair. I couldn’t help but think that June had gone off to Spain to do something dangerous and that that was why Sebastian had wanted David to go after her. My curiosity finally got the better of me.

  “Why did Sebastian want you to go after June so badly?”

  “The Gypsy Moths,” he said. “Among other things.”

  “The Gypsy what?”

  He led me over to a closet and opened it, pointing to a blue-nylon suit hanging from a hook. It appeared to be one of those flying-squirrel-looking suits that daredevils use.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’ve seen those wingsuits on YouTube.”

  “Well, this was 1986, so YouTube hadn’t been invented yet,” he replied. “And neither had wingsuits. June worked on a film in the late sixties that involved experimental ideas for flying, and this was a prototype that she had continued to improve on. She took it with her to Spain, along with her parachute. That, combined with the bad news, was why Sebastian was so worried and insisted that I go after her. He would have gone himself, but he had promised to care for the animals.”

  “So, she had planned to jump there?”

  “Yes. At Montserrat, after she had walked the Camino.”

  Then I noticed the matador costume in the closet. The one I had seen in the old photo that Mr. Hadley carried in his pocket—the one he told me she had worn on their wedding day.

  “But you found her, didn’t you? You got married. That’s the matador costume from the photo.”

  He nodded. “I did find her. And lucky for me, we did get married.”

  “And you still let her jump in that crazy bat suit? After you were married and everything?”

  “It wasn’t up to me to let her do anything,” he said. “Married or not, June was her own woman and made her own choices. Thankfully, she chose not to test that crazy suit.”

  “So, she never used it?”

  He shook his head. “It’s just a nostalgic movie prop.”

  I turned around and looked at the wheelchair again, now thoroughly confused. “So, what happened to her?” I asked. “I mean, if she didn’t jump, why bring me back here and show me the wheelchair?”

  “Because you asked me why she went to Spain.”

  “Why did she go to Spain?”

  There was a pause before he answered, during which I saw him looking at the empty wheelchair. When he did answer, his voice contained no emotion that I could detect.

  “Parkinson’s,” he said simply, with an air of acceptance.

  “And that’s why she went to walk the trail,” I muttered, finally understanding. Then something dawned on me. “So, that must have been the bad news she had just found out when she took you up to Echo Glen, wasn’t it?”

  David sighed. “All the help she gave everyone else and she couldn’t bear the thought of ever needing a little help herself. She was just fi
fty-three. That’s young for Parkinson’s, but she was already experiencing tremors and other symptoms. It terrified her. She couldn’t imagine a life without flying, without all the athletic things she loved to do.”

  He turned to look back into the closet at the suit again, speaking now almost to himself.

  “I sometimes wonder if she would have flown that suit if I hadn’t shown up begging her to marry me. I never asked, but I doubt it. It would have been a suicide mission for anyone, let alone someone in her condition.” He shook his head. “And she didn’t want to die. She was more alive than anyone I had ever met.”

  “So, she never jumped again?” I asked.

  “Just one time. The day before our wedding, wearing this.”

  He laid his hand on the matador costume.

  “She jumped wearing that?” I asked. “Okay, now you need to finish this story for real or else I’m going to start calling you Hitchcock instead of Hadley.”

  “What’s a young man like you know about Hitchcock?”

  “I know he’s the master of suspense. Or at least he was until you came along and kicked him off his throne.”

  He laughed, shutting the closet door.

  “Okay. Let’s go back and see if we can’t wrap up this little tale of ours. Sleep seems about all I do well anymore, and with it getting near my bedtime I’d hate to pass out on you.”

  I didn’t bother mentioning that he had already fallen asleep on me twice. Instead, I glanced once more at the empty wheelchair and followed him from the room. On our way back to the living room, I noticed a framed picture on the hallway wall and stopped for a better look.

  “Is that June?” I asked, recognizing her from the photo.

  “That’s my June. And that’s me beside her, smiling.”

  “That’s you?” I asked, leaning closer. “You look different.”

  He laughed. “That’s what age does.” Then he pointed to a handsome Spanish man, holding up a shiny plaque. “That’s Sebastian. This was taken at his induction into the Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame. June never could get them to change that silly, chauvinist name.”