Page 34 of What You Never Knew

He shakes his head, then reaches out and gives my knee a squeeze. “Of course not. We all do things in life we regret. Mistakes we wish we could take back” His eyes shift away, and for a split second I get the sense that a secret is sitting somewhere in there. “My philosophy is that if you learn from the mistake, then it’s not really a mistake anymore.” His eyes meet mine again. “And you learned from it, right?”

The hopefulness in his voice makes me cringe. “Oh, I learned from it all right. Self-sabotage and fear of commitment are just a couple of my issues.” Ezra pulls his hand away in mock disgust. And once again manages to make me laugh when I feel anything but happy on the inside.

“Well, then we’re good,” he says. “Forty-year-old virgin living with his mom and forty-year-old divorcée afraid of commitment living alone on an island. Wasn’t that how you described us?” I wince at the memory of my bluntness the first night we saw each other.

He gets up off the blanket and holds out his hand. “Come here.” I take it, and he pulls me up beside him and then leads me to the wall of windows. Outside the sun has started to set and the sky is tinted with thick bands of color—red, orange, and purple. We stand there in silence for a while, holding hands, staring out at the calm lake and kaleidoscope sky.

“You’ve experienced a lot of loss in your life, June.” His words catch me off guard, sending a lump of emotion up into my throat. “Maybe it’s time to cut yourself some slack and just be for a while. Stop taking inventory of your supposed failures and fuck-ups and just appreciate who you’ve grown to be from it all.”

“Ezra Keen, are you turning into a life coach on me?” It’s good advice he’s giving me, but instead of saying that, I go to my default and use sarcasm.

He bumps me with his hip. “Seriously, June!”

I bump him back. “Okay!” I yell, and it echoes through the massive space. “I’ll do my best.”

He gives my hand a squeeze. “Good.”

We take our time packing up the picnic, and I do one more twirl around the dance floor before we leave. It’s dark outside now, but the moon casts the whole deserted island in an eerie white light.

Ezra takes his time driving back to Avril Island. The moon is full in the sky and reflects off the water, which is now inky black in the darkness. We pass cottages lit up from within, the light glowing warm, reflected off wooden walls, the dark silhouettes of their occupants moving around inside. This was always my favorite time to go for a boat ride—sliding through the night, being a voyeur, catching glimpses into other people’s cottage lives.

Nearing the dock, Ezra tells me he arranged to stay over if I want him to. I do. The thought of having company through the night is very appealing, and I’m relieved that my confession didn’t scare him away.

We’re in no rush, since we have all night, so we sit on the end of the dock with our legs in the water and drink some more wine. We hurry to fill each other in on all the years we missed. His are stories I’m hungry to hear, and he leans into mine with the same interest. When we were kids and we saw each other for the first time at the beginning of summer, we didn’t run off to play. We found some quiet place to sit and caught each other up on everything that had happened over the winter, and it’s the same now, only this time we have thirty years to cover.

The wine has long been finished and I’m suddenly desperate to get out of my mother’s dress and into something more comfortable, so I suggest heading up to the cottage.

It’s dark and quiet inside, but I don’t rush to turn on any lights or music. The stillness wraps us up in it and makes the rest of the world suddenly disappear. Without saying anything, I take Ezra’s hand and lead him upstairs to my room.

We move up against each other, and lips brush lips. He unzips the back of my dress, and as soon as it hits the floor, I kick it away. He slides the underwear free of my hips, and I reach around and release myself from the black bra, pulling him toward the bed as he divests himself of his own clothing, I don’t think of my mother or the things she did. I think of nothing but Ezra.

No words and no light make everything slow right down, infuse every detail with intention and meaning. The creak of the bed as we lower ourselves onto it, the exhale of breath, the soft whisper of skin against skin, the wind through the trees just outside the window. Our years of friendship and separation suddenly culminate into something so much more.

MAY

When I materialize, it’s in the upstairs hallway. I’m alone, but I know June is on the other side of her bedroom door. It’s the first time I’ve arrived apart from her. The cottage is quiet, but there’s a sense that it’s the stillness after an event. The air still pulses with the electricity of action. Not details I would have noticed when I was alive, but dead you feel it all.

I remember a time just like this one, standing on the other side of June’s door in the middle of the night. I turned the key and locked her inside her room. The details around it are hazy. There was a fight between my parents, and I know I had left June so I could go hide at the bottom of the stairs and listen in.

I can’t remember what the fight was about or how long I stayed down there. All that’s surfacing is the moment I locked June in her room. Why would I have done that? The question causes another shift in the deep, dark place where the memory lies. As though it’s preparing to rise up, as though it’s only a matter of time before I will remember.

I realize, in this moment, that it was me who buried the memory deep down. Deeper than any of my other memories, which is why it’s taking so long to surface. That’s because it’s not just a memory—it’s a secret. A secret so dark that I had to bury it deep down, deep enough that even June wouldn’t know about it.

JUNE

“May.” I call out her name, and it wakes me from my horrible dream. She was here, in the cottage, standing outside my door, and she was scared. I tried to get to her but could only move in slow motion, as though I’d been drugged with tranquilizers. When I finally made it to my door, it was locked. I tried to kick it in, but I was so weak and slow that I barely even made contact.

I’m sobbing, the stress and fear of the dream locking into my grief and overwhelming me. “May,” I say, as some kind of explanation.

Ezra holds me from behind and makes gentle shushing sounds. “It’s okay. It was a just dream.” His grip is tight, and it slowly brings me back to reality.

My crying stops as the embarrassment at my open display of raw grief sets in. Our first night together, and he ends up holding me as I sob after crying out from a bad dream.

I gently move his arm off me and sit up. “I’m okay.”

“Are you sure? It sounded like a horrible dream.” He eyes me doubtfully.

I give him a weak smile. “It was bad, but it’s over and I’m fine,” I lie. The feeling of the dream lingers strong. I can’t get rid of the sense that May was right here and I couldn’t reach her.