The Storm King(89)
“Are you some kind of moron?” June wept. The woman didn’t have stupid eyes, but what she said was nonsense. “I’m June. She’s May.”
“It isn’t what you’re called that matters; it’s what you do that counts.”
“She’s dead because of me.”
“She doesn’t have to be dead. Not really.” Mrs. McHale placed a finger to June’s chest. “You can be May. You can live for her. Live it like you say you would if you could do it all again. Live it like she’d have wanted to.”
“I’m June.” Her voice had shrunk into a mewling thing. The world seemed to tilt.
“June’s the dead one,” Mrs. McHale said, shaking her head. The blue gems of her eyes lit through June like flames through wax paper. “You’re the one who lived. You’re May. And you’re going to make up for it. You’re going to make it matter.” She began to unloop the dirty apron from June’s neck. “It’s never too late to be good.”
June realized that for once she was being the slow one. Mrs. McHale was ten miles ahead, where the country was green and gentler than any June could fathom. She couldn’t imagine it now, but maybe one day she would. Maybe one day she’d make up for the suffering she’d caused.
“I’m May.” She tried the words out to see how they fit. “I’m May.” She heard her new voice, layered with humility and wonder and maybe even the tiniest measure of hope. “I’m May.”
And from then on, she was.
Seventeen
“You’re Just June.” Nate squinted at her. She might as well have confessed to being the Easter Bunny.
“It’s only a name,” the woman said. She waved her hands as if her identity did not utterly rewrite the history of the Lake. “May was as sweet as pie, and her head was about as soft. Had to depend on people’s help for everything. I didn’t know people could be so kind. And after everything June did to this town. So much suffering. And the pain, you know how it ripples?” She pointed to the walls lined with newspaper clippings and webbed with string.
“So, you’re June pretending to be May,” Nate said. “I think I’d know if May, the Night Ship Girl, worked as a janitor at my high school.”
“It was a good job. Quiet at night. Nice to clean things up instead of making the mess.”
Nate tried to picture Just June scrubbing the urinals in the boy’s room.
“But they didn’t call me May. We were born right there on the pier, though old Morton never wanted us born in the first place. Mama was supposed to kill us the second we came out, but she couldn’t. She never even got us birth certificates. That’s how much the Night Ship was our world. When we left it, we didn’t exist. It was well and truly like the lives of May and June had been a dream. Your grandmother helped me. She helped so much. She’s a woman people listen to. At the town hall, they filled out all the forms like I was an adult foundling. Got to choose my new name. A new name for a new life. I was Annabelle Strong. Annabelle, just like our mother. Annabelle, to remember, and Strong so as never to forget.”
Nate didn’t know what to believe. Still, he was sure that the black-red envelopes around the cellar had come from the Night Ship. And he could imagine Grams acting the way the woman claimed she had all those years ago.
“I followed you here from the Night Ship. I saw you swimming away from it. Why were you there?”
“I was following you. And I was watching the children.” She shook her head. “Those poor children.”
“?‘Poor children’? They’re not victims.” The smell of Grams’s burned skin built in Nate’s nose, and he fought the tears that surged alongside it. “They’ve been terrorizing the Lake.”
“But that’s what victims do here, isn’t it? It’s what I did when Old Morton tried to kick me out. You did it, too. You and your friends.”
“Yeah, this is the part where I ask you why my face is in the middle of your wall of crazy. What does any of this have to do with me?”
The woman blinked her huge eyes at him. Nate knew from the stories that Just June was supposed to have green eyes. Even in the basement lighting, he could see that the woman’s irises were the color of a tropical lagoon flecked with gold.
She grabbed his hand, and her old skin was like silk.
“Everything.”
THE DEMON JUNE cannot be vanquished, but the lake quiets her. In its clear waters she forgets the screams from the Night Ship. When she pushes her pace she can almost unhear the grind of a sister’s spine as her head lolls unanchored upon her neck.
June had found the waters intolerably cold, but May adored them. A lap around the lake’s southern bulge helps her become the twin she’s supposed to be.
All the Daybreakers search for something on their morning circuit: fitness, focus, solitude. She both erases and rewrites herself in the mirrored waters. She pursues the tenderness and generosity that will make her worthy of this second chance.
May’s life is a simpler and smaller one than June’s. Though the sweetest of creatures, she cannot hope to leave more than a faint mark on the world. She does her menial work humbly and gratefully, and she spreads kindness where she can. But June erupted a mountain of suffering onto the town along the shore. May’s greatest efforts can only pick at this imbalance one pebble at time. After decades, she knows she’s made only the feeblest of dents.