It doesn’t take me long to decide.Chapter Forty-TwoLeviI know there are people in the world who can sleep in after an exhausting day or a late night. I know because I long to be one of them. What must it be like, to sleep until ten in the morning? Eleven?
Noon?
The last time I slept past seven in the morning I had the flu and a fever of 103.2. Before that, I’d stayed up for seventy-two hours straight finishing a project in graduate school after my group project partner revealed that she’d done absolutely nothing in the two months since we’d received the assignment.
When I open my eyes, the clock says 5:10. That’s 6:10 Eastern Time, so it’s actually not too bad. I slept in by ten whole minutes.
I stretch, roll over, and realize that June’s not next to me. I have one sickening moment where my heart plummets — I dreamed this, she changed her mind — and then I see her.
She’s sitting at the table, in the dark, almost motionless.
“June?” I whisper.
“Hey,” she whispers back.
I pull myself to sitting. She turned the heat to jungle last night, so it’s warm in here, making everything feel a little stranger, more dreamlike.
“What’s wrong?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she says, and she sounds further away than the six feet between us should allow.
I stand, move through the unnatural warmth, grab some boxers, sit down opposite her.
“Tell me,” I say.
She’s wearing the shirt I had on yesterday, the sleeves six inches too long on her, the shoulders too wide. It’s unbuttoned and in the light coming through the window, sneaking around the blackout shades, I can see her pale skin, the slight curve of a breast and I think, unbidden, of her on my porch that day after the thunderstorm, pointing at her chest, asking who Joe was.
“I’m giving up,” she says quietly. She doesn’t look at me, her fingers knotted together on the table in front of her.
I reach over and take her hand and she finally looks at me, her eyes light in the dark.
“I’m not taking the job and I’m gonna stop looking,” she says.
I rub my thumb over her knuckles silently, because she doesn’t seem finished yet.
“And I have no idea what to do,” she says, her voice quieter, a whisper. “I’ve been doing this since I graduated from college, and even before then I wrote for my college paper and I was the editor, and before that in high school, and for as long as I can remember I loved Murphy Brown and All the King’s Men and His Girl Friday and I always wanted to be there, writing headlines and getting the scoop and telling the truth and it’s just not…”
She trails off, looks down at her hands.
“It’s not that,” she says. “I can’t go back to the Herald-Trumpet. When I went in for an interview the first thing I saw was my boss screaming at a reporter about writing too fancy. Screaming. Right in his face.”
My spine stiffens.
“I can’t do that to myself,” she says, like she’s just realizing it for the first time. “I don’t think my dream is my dream anymore. I think my dream left while I wasn’t looking, and now that I’m finally paying attention again, it’s gone and I don’t have anything to put in its place.”
She swallows hard, takes a deep breath.
“You don’t have to know,” I tell her.
“I don’t even want a different journalism job,” she says, and finally she looks up again, tears brimming in her eyes. “There was a time when I was young and cocky and idealistic and I thought that even being a cub reporter in Elko, Nevada, or Sitka, Alaska or one of these middle-of-nowhere places could change the world but I don’t think that anymore. I wish I did. But I don’t and in its place there’s… nothing.”
I hold her hands and she holds mine back, fingers squeezing, interlaced.
“Can I tell you about a motivational poster?” I finally ask.
“Yes?” June says. I’ve obviously baffled her.
“In the central Forest Service office up in Harrisonburg, there’s this woman who’s the volunteer coordinator. Tammy. That part’s not important. But Tammy really, really has a thing for motivational posters, you know, the kind with a majestic view and then big words underneath?”
“Uh huh,” June says.
“Well, one of them says ‘When God shuts a door, He opens a window,’” I tell her. “And honestly, I’m not really sure about it as an inspirational saying, because doors and windows aren’t the same at all. One’s designed for ingress and egress, the other is really just for letting light and air in—”
“Is that also on the poster?” she asks, laughing even though the tears have spilled onto her cheeks.
“No,” I admit. “That’s just my opinion on the thing.”
“I see.”
“What I’m saying badly is that life is rarely a windowless room with a bolted door,” I tell her. “And, I don’t know, maybe the windows are wallpapered over and you’ll have to search to find them, but they’re there. Or maybe it’s another door. Maybe it’s a bigger door. Or maybe it’s a—"