Goodnight June: A Novel (3 page)

Sure, I don’t have a husband, kids, a dog. But how many thirty-five-year-olds can say they purchased their own two-bedroom Manhattan apartment with parquet floors, a chef’s kitchen, and windows with peekaboo views of Central Park?

I throw my coat on the upholstered bench in the entryway—
take that, Mr. Clark
—and set my keys on the glass table against the wall (the decorator insisted on it, and yet every time I hear my keys click onto its surface, I hate it all the more), then sort through the mail. I recognize the handwriting on the letter atop the stack and inwardly wince. Why is
she
contacting me again? I have nothing to say to her. I walk to the kitchen, where I toss the envelope, unopened, into the recycle bin. It’s too late for I’m-sorrys.

I slump down onto the couch and sort through the rest of the mail: bills, a few magazines, a postcard from my old friend Claire, in Seattle. She and her husband, Ethan, and their baby son, Daniel, are in Disneyland. “Greetings from Cinderella’s castle,” she writes. “Sending you lots of sunshine! xoxo”

It’s sweet, of course, but if I’m being completely honest, sentiments from blissfully happy friends only feel like daggers in my heart. I stopped going to weddings, and now I only send presents to baby showers. My assistant wraps them beautifully with lots of ribbons and bows. It’s easier this way, managing friendships from afar. No one gets hurt, especially not me. The only person outside of work I keep in touch with anymore is my accountant friend, Peter (smart, kind, handsome, and, I might add, very gay). And I can’t even take credit for our continued friendship; Peter does all the calling.

I sigh. Beneath a Victoria’s Secret catalog is a manila envelope from the Law Offices of Sherman and Wills. It looks official. I tear open the edge cautiously, the way I always do when inspecting legal papers, and pull out a small stack of pages with a cover letter paper-clipped to the top:

The Law Offices of Sherman and Wills

567 Madison

Seattle, WA 98101

TO: June Andersen
RE: The Estate of Ruby Crain

Dear Ms. Andersen,

By now, I’m sure you have heard that your great-aunt Ruby Crain has passed away. Let me express my deepest condolences for your loss.

I pause and place my hand over my heart. Ruby? Gone?

We were retained to handle the distribution of her estate, and I am pleased to tell you that your aunt has left her entire estate, including the children’s bookstore, Bluebird Books in Seattle, to you. Enclosed you will find the attendant paperwork. Please sign the flagged pages and return all to my assistant. You might consider coming out to Seattle to get things in order. As I’m sure you know, Ms. Crain was quite ill for the months before her death. In any case, I trust you will find it a great pleasure, as Ruby did, to own the store. If I can be of help to you in any way, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.

Best regards,

Jim Sherman, attorney

I set the letter down on the coffee table and shake my head.
Ruby died? How did I not know?
Tears sting my eyes, and then I feel a surge of anger. Why didn’t Mom tell me? Probably too busy with her new boyfriend to even think to mention it. And yet, I realize the person I’m really angry at is myself. I could have written Ruby. I could have visited her, but I was always too busy. And now it’s too late. Now she’s gone.

I stare at the paperwork in disbelief. Of course, we were close, at least when I was a child, but I had no idea that Ruby would choose me as her heir, bypassing my mother and sister, Amy, even.
Amy.
How will she feel about this? It still feels strange not to be able to pick up the phone and call her. We shared everything growing up (everything except a father, though neither Amy’s nor mine was ever in the picture). I think of her face, that blond hair, just like our mom’s, her plump, pouty lips that always drove boys crazy, her cerulean blue eyes. It’s been five years since the incident, and yet the memory of it still smarts, so I turn to the past instead, when Amy and I were rosy-cheeked girls, skipping hand in hand to Green Lake.

I catch my reflection in the window and I do a double take. What happened to me? That curious little girl with blond braids and her nose always in a book has grown into, I hate to admit, a woman who has little time for family, much less books. I rack my brain and try to remember the last time I even spoke to Ruby, and then I hear her voice in my ear. She called on Christmas Day last year. She’d attempted to organize a Christmas dinner at the store. There’d be a burnt turkey in the oven and a platter full of sugar-dusted cookies. Just like old times. I couldn’t make it, but she called on Christmas Day just the same. Mom and Amy were there. I could hear them laughing in the background, and it made me tense up. Ruby sensed that.

“Is everything all right, June?” she asked.

“Yes,” I lied, “everything’s fine.”

“I know you’re so busy in New York, June,” she said. I could hear the hurt in her voice. I still hear it. “But I really hoped you could visit.”

“I just couldn’t break away this year; I’m sorry.” I said, staring at my lonely apartment, bare of holiday decorations. A Christmas tree for one seemed like such a waste.

“Are you ever going to come home, June?” she asked. Her voice sounded older than it ever had. It was airier and it crackled a bit around the edges. That frightened me. The passage of time has always frightened me, but it especially did in that moment.

“I don’t know, Ruby,” I said honestly, wiping a tear from my eye. The truth is, I didn’t know if I could ever go home to Seattle. I hadn’t thought about my home in a long time. When I left, I left for good. Laura Ingalls Wilder said, “Home is the nicest word there is,” but as the years passed, I began to feel that those sentiments didn’t apply to me.

Though we always lived in Seattle, our little family of three moved from apartment to apartment when I was a child. Mom, Amy, and me. To her credit, Mom was good at finding jobs, just not very good at keeping them. She waited tables, worked the night shift at a 76 station, and punched tickets at the movie theater, but all were short-lived. She’d call in sick too many times, or forget her shift, or arrive late, or
something
. Eventually Mom found work at a little grocery store down the street, and I’m not sure if her boss was just really nice or maybe she’d learned from her mistakes, but she wasn’t unemployed anymore after that. On summer days, Amy and I used to sit on the curb outside the store and munch on sunflower seeds. We’d crack the shells open with our teeth and then toss them in the storm drain beneath us. Every few minutes the automatic sliding doors would open and close, sending a blast of icy, scrubbed air-conditioned air onto our skin. I still remember the way that air smelled: slightly sweet, like the skin of ripe bananas, with a tinge of cleaning solvent.

Mom worked hard at the grocery store, and on her days off, she played hard. There was a never-ending stream of boyfriends with names like Marc, or Rick, or Mac. Many of them played the guitar, and Mom would always go out to watch them in bars around town. My sister and I would stand in the doorway of the bathroom and watch her style her long blond hair. She was an expert with a curling iron, setting her bangs in thick rolls before feathering and teasing them back with her teal green pick. She’d finish the look with a thick layer of hair spray, then apply green eye shadow to her lids and pink blush to the tops of her cheeks. She was beautiful, and she knew it. A spritz of Jean Naté, and she’d be out the door.

The lemony, musky scent of her perfume would linger for hours after she went. The familiar smell comforted me when it was stormy out, or when the back door creaked in the wind. I knew I couldn’t cry, even at eight years old. It was my job to take care of my little sister. Amy was only four.

Standing on the step stool to reach the stove, I’d manage to open a can of SpaghettiOs or a box of Kraft mac and cheese. I didn’t know how to make the latter, so I guessed and boiled the noodles with the powdered cheese sauce. I remember the time I found a hunk of old cheddar in the fridge and threw that in too. The result was a soupy, gooey mess that Amy and I ate anyway. I’d usually dish our dinner up in mugs (because the bowls were always dirty and piled high in the sink), and together we’d watch TV until Amy got sleepy. I’d help her into her pajamas and tuck her into bed, then read her a story. We didn’t have much, but we always had books, thanks to Aunt Ruby, who brought over boxes of them. And because of her, we learned of entire worlds that existed beyond the walls of our drab apartment. We followed Madeline through the streets of Paris and made pumpkin pie with Laura and Ma in
Little House in the Big Woods
. And every night, I read Amy her favorite book,
Goodnight Moon
.

It was my favorite too. I came to love the nursery with its green walls and striped curtains, the sense of love and warmth. The old woman (the mother? grandmother? a great-aunt like Ruby?) hovering near as the child nestles into his bed. She doesn’t leave her child like Mom left us. She stays and knits, rocking in her chair as he sleeps, as the nursery darkens ever so slowly and the stars sparkle out the window. To me, it seemed the epitome of love.

Ruby hated the way Mom raised us. And for years, she didn’t even know how we lived. Mom told her a different story. And she squandered the money Ruby gave her to help pay for our school clothes and necessities (Ruby, though not wealthy by today’s standards, was very generous, and we were her only family). For a time, Mom spent it on booze and tube tops in every color of the rainbow. One evening Ruby showed up on our front steps and saw the house in its state of disarray. Mom was passed out in the bedroom. Amy and I were watching TV. Ruby had tears in her eyes when she took my hand and then lifted Amy into her arms. “Come on, girls,” she said. “You’re coming with me. I won’t let you live like this. Not anymore.”

She gave us a warm bath that night in her little apartment above the bookstore. Mom showed up two days later, sober and apologetic. They went downstairs together, and Amy and I heard a lot of shouting. After that, things were different. Sort of. When Mom was home, she paid more attention to us. She even took us to the zoo one day. We came to spend more time with Ruby at the bookstore, too. We’d stay for entire weekends and sleep in her apartment a couple of nights a week. It was an open, loft-style space, with exposed brick walls and high ceilings. Ruby hated being confined by walls, she said, so she kept her little bed in the living space and set up the bedroom for Amy and me. I loved it there. Amy and I each had our own twin bed with fresh sheets and big comfy quilts. I hated going home. I wished we could live with Ruby.

She’d read to us for hours, feed us picnic dinners by the fire. I feel a funny flutter in my stomach when I think about Bluebird Books. In the mid-1940s, Ruby was a pioneer of sorts, opening the area’s first children’s bookstore on Sunnyside Avenue, just a few blocks up from Green Lake, and building it into a Seattle institution.

I stand up, and without knowing why at first, I walk to my bedroom and open the closet. Far in the back is a box containing the few remaining relics of my childhood: a diary I kept from the age of ten to twelve; the dried wrist corsage Jake Hadley gave me on the night of the homecoming dance; my baby book, in which Mom only bothered to fill out two pages; and a stack of children’s books from Aunt Ruby. When I left Seattle at age eighteen for college on the East Coast, I had just one suitcase. I’d wanted to pack all of my books, every one of them. But Mom wasn’t willing to pay for shipping—even book rate—nor did I have the money to do it myself. So I picked the books that I loved most, and on top of the stack was
Goodnight Moon
.

I pull the book out of the box and hold it in my hands. It’s a full-size hardback, not the tiny board books bookstores sell these days. I flip through the pages, and my heart contracts when I think of Amy’s tiny fingers pointing to the mouse hiding on each page. It was our little game to find him, and we never tired of it.

I sit down on the floor and lean back against the side of my bed. It’s dark, and I can see an almost-full moon outside my window, outshining the city lights all around. I don’t think of work or the stack of folders on the dining room table requiring my attention. Instead I think of Seattle, Ruby, and the life I left behind so many years ago.

I think of Bluebird Books.

“Y
ou’re going
where
?” Arthur demands on the phone the next night. The moon is out, and I’m in a cab destined for JFK. In a few hours, I’ll be on the red-eye to Washington state.

“Seattle,” I say nervously to my boss. “It’s a . . . sort of a family emergency.”

This confession stops his tirade, momentarily.

“
Sort of?
Sort of a family emergency? Did someone die? Because if someone didn’t die, then it’s not—”

“Someone died,” I say.

“Oh.”

“Listen,” I add, feeling my heart beat faster. I riffle through my bag and find the prescription pill bottle I filled at the pharmacy before I left. I pop a blue pill into my mouth, swallowing it with a swig from the water bottle in my hand. “I won’t be long. Just a week, tops. There’s, well, some things I have to sort out.”

The taxi zooms along, weaving through lanes of traffic. Horns honk. City lights blink from the skyscrapers above. I’ll miss the energy of New York. But in that moment, I wonder if it’s leeching mine.

“I left the files with Janice,” I say.

“All right,” Arthur replies. In my eleven years with the bank, I’ve never behaved this way. And I suppose it surprises him as much as it does me.

“I’ll be in touch,” I say.

He’s too stunned to respond before I end the call.

The plane touches down with a bump and a skid at Sea-Tac airport. I peer out the window at the city I left behind so many years ago. The sun is just peeking over the horizon, illuminating the familiar gray clouds, soggy with rain, that hover overhead.

The passenger next to me, a middle-aged man wearing a blue fleece vest and Tevas with socks, lets out a contented sigh. “Good to be home,” he says.

“Yes,” I manage to say, biting my lip nervously. The truth is, I’ve spent the entire six-hour flight regretting the trip, turning the decision over and over in my mind. On one side, I hear Arthur’s voice, telling me I’m losing my edge. On the other, doctor what’s-his-name at the hospital, saying, “Slow down. Take a vacation.” And then there’s Ruby. Without thinking, I place my hand on my chest, attempting to quiet my rapid heartbeat.

“Live in Seattle?” the man asks, extracting me from my inner dialogue.

“No,” I say. “I mean, I used to. A long time ago.”

He nods, reaching for his bag under the seat in front of us. “Best city on earth.” He takes a deep breath. “Feel that?”

“What?” I ask, confused.

“There isn’t the pressure there is in other cities,” he says. “You can feel the calm.”

I nod politely and almost forget his words entirely, until my cab drops me off in front of Bluebird Books. I take a deep breath, and just as the stranger predicted, I feel suffused with the very sense of calm he described. Or maybe it’s just my blood pressure medication finally kicking in.

The store is just as I remember it, though, like me, I suppose, it’s showing signs of age. The brick facade, always a bit rustic, is shedding its mortar. The big white picture windows in front look like they could use a good scrub. Above the old green paneled door is the sign, still hanging proudly. I eye the familiar lettering:

Bluebird Books

A Place for Children

Established 1946

I reach into my bag and pull out the envelope with the key. The attorney was kind enough to overnight it to me. When we spoke on the phone, he explained that Ruby had been ill for many months leading up to her death. The bookstore had been closed for at least six months, maybe more. “Ruby just couldn’t keep it up,” he said. “But she tried, until the very end.”

Thinking about his words makes my heart sink. The tingling sensation returns in my fingertips.

“Ms. Andersen,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said quickly, taking a seat and reaching into my bag for another blood pressure pill.

I insert the key into the old brass lock now, and the door creaks and jingles as I pull it open. And then I remember Aunt Ruby’s bells tied to the door handle. Jingle bells, she called them. Ruby had a way of making ordinary things seem extraordinary, and I smile as I close the door behind me and venture inside the old store, breathing in the air of my past.

My heels click on the plank wood flooring, and the room before me blurs as my eyes well with tears. There is Aunt Ruby’s desk, covered with files and papers. Books are stacked precariously high, anchored by the old black rotary telephone she refused to replace. Beside the desk rests the store’s Victorian dollhouse. I kneel down and pick up a pint-size sofa that has fallen to the floor. My sister and I sat here for hours playing, imagining a dream world where we had our own bedrooms, nice clothes, and a mother who didn’t leave us all the time. I blow a layer of dust off the roof and rearrange the furniture in the library the way I always liked it: sofa on the right, table on the left, with room for the Christmas tree. Ruby made tiny ornaments for it by painting peppercorns red and gluing them on to the boughs.

I stand and run my hands along the emerald-green walls of the bookstore. The color of pine trees, Ruby always said. The paint is peeling in places, but it’s hard to tell, as the walls are covered with framed artwork. A painting of a cow jumping over a moon hangs beside a signed black-and-white photo of Roald Dahl. He wrote, “To all the children of Bluebird Books, never stop imagining.”

I pull back the faded old green-and-yellow-striped drapes. Once billowy and grand, they are dusty and sun bleached now, tattered at the hem. I smile to myself remembering the time Aunt Ruby showed me a photograph of a circus tent as her inspiration for the drapes. I flip the light switch and the crystal chandelier overhead strains to light the room. It’s missing a lightbulb, or twelve. I make a mental note to replace them.

I walk to the back staircase and climb the steps to Ruby’s apartment above the shop. It’s small, but the high ceilings and exposed brick walls make it feel bigger, grander somehow. And even though I know it’s been several months since Ruby passed, the place has a lived-in feel, as if she might have made eggs and toast this very morning before leaving for a walk around Green Lake. The toaster’s still plugged into the wall, a teakettle sits at attention on the little stove, and the faucet drips quietly into the sink.

I peer through the doorway of the little room off the kitchen where Amy and I used to stay. The two twin beds are still there, as well as the little nightstand. The porcelain lamp with its vintage tassel-trimmed shade holds court on the mahogany side table. I weave my way to Ruby’s bed, through a path lined with boxes of assorted memorabilia and stacks of books, some piled as high as me. The familiar crimson velvet coverlet is pulled taut, perhaps painstakingly so, as if the last time Ruby made the bed she was expecting company. I run my hand along the soft fabric, threadbare at the center, where she sat for so many years, propped up reading a book like she always did after she closed the store at five each evening. She’d wait until eight to eat dinner, “fashionably late,” she’d say.

I study a familiar throw pillow and my eyes well up with tears. I cross-stitched a pink rose on it when I was ten and gave it to Aunt Ruby for her birthday. She kept it all these years. She looked at it every day when she woke up and when she laid her head down each night. Did she think about me? I didn’t mean to, but I forsook Ruby along with the rest of my past when I left Seattle. My heart beats faster. I can no longer suppress the emotion I feel. “Oh, Ruby,” I cry. I feel my chest constrict as a draft of cool air seeps in from the old double-hung windows. I shiver as I glance down at the nightstand, where there’s a small mahogany jewelry box, a framed photo of me and my sister, and Ruby’s old oval locket on its gold chain. I remember it dangling from her neck so long ago. My sister and I would ask her what she kept inside it, but she’d always give us a secret smile and tuck it back beneath her sweater set. “When you’re older,” she’d say. But we never did get the chance to look inside.

I pick up the necklace and fasten it around my neck, but I won’t open the locket. No, I don’t deserve to see what’s hidden within. I’ll wear the necklace, and it will be my reminder of Ruby from this point forward. I’ll never forget her. And I’ll keep her secret hidden away. I’ll guard it.

In the style of Ruby, I tuck the necklace beneath my sweater, and then beside the jewelry box I notice a white envelope inscribed “June” in script that is unmistakably Ruby’s. I sink to the bed and tear open the flap.

My dear June,

If you’re reading this, I have passed. I knew the end was growing near. So I prepared this place for you. They’re taking me to the convalescent home. My God, me in a convalescent home. Can you imagine?

I stop reading, and wipe away a fresh tear, hearing Ruby’s playful voice in my head as I do.

But it is time, they tell me. So, I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed and tidied the kitchen. I’m sorry the floor is in such disarray. These days, it’s hard for me to part with anything, so I tend to keep it all. It would be an honor to me if you’d stay here. Make yourself at home. I truly hope you will. Because it is your home now, June.

Bluebird Books was always to be your legacy. You see, my dear, we share the same sensibilities about life. I knew that even when you were a wee child. Your sister would spend hours with her dolls, but you’d sit in the window seat with a book in your lap, wide-eyed. You loved books as I do. I hope you’ve never lost the love of literature, the sense of discovery and wonder.

It hasn’t been easy for me since you left Seattle. But I understood why you had to go. You needed to spread your wings and fly. And you did. I only wish you’d have flown home every once in a while. I have missed you so.

I trust that you will love Bluebird Books and care for it as much as I have. It won’t be easy. Children aren’t reading the way they did in my day. And I will confess, I worry that the love of books is dying. Children’s literature today is facing a state of emergency. My most loyal customers are straying for the glitz of media, the lure of this thing called the Internet. Two years ago, a little boy named Stuart and his mother Genie used to come into the store often. He would listen to me read at story time with wide eyes, eyes of an active imagination. But he stopped coming as frequently, and when his mother brought him in last summer, I could see that the spark had died out. His mother lamented that all he’s interested in these days is movies and video games. As a result, literature doesn’t speak to him in the way it once did.

I’ve done all I can, all I know to do. And now I leave it to you. It is the problem of the next generation to solve. What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can’t get that from a computer.

I know that keeping Bluebird Books afloat will be a challenge. But I have faith in you, June. If anyone can save this store, it’s you.

So I leave this beloved place to you, and with it, all of its secrets. And there are many, all here for you to discover.

As Beatrix Potter once said, “What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common sense.”

And this is what you will find here, my dear child.

With love, always,

Your devoted Aunt Ruby

I place the letter to my chest and sigh.
She wants me to save the store.
I shake my head.
How can I? I live in New York. I have a job. I can’t stay in Seattle. I can’t do this.

I hear Ruby’s voice then:
Yes, you can, dear.

And for a moment, I believe her.