Nightingale Read online

  “You said the green matched my eyes,” June replied in a flat tone, walking out the door first so her mother couldn’t see her face. If she did, she would certainly know June was lying, and then June wouldn’t get to make her mother feel embarrassed for being insulting, even if it had been accidental.

  You’re an awful young woman, she thought to herself with a little smile. Just awful.

  Mom’s Buick was roomy and noisy. June didn’t have to talk much on the drive to the supermarket and was grateful for the excuse to let silence fall between her and her mother. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other; sure, Mom always had things to say about June’s personal habits and traits, but there were also times that they were able to share perfectly pleasant evenings playing cards or sitting on the sofa while June read and Mom knitted.

  At the same time, though, Mom would never support June in her thoughts and ambitions. June knew that now. In a way the discovery was freeing, if not a bit sad. Sometimes acceptance was a bad thing, but sometimes it was good, and it was for that reason that June pointedly ignored the hurt that lingered from the realization. It was simply for the best.

  But if you ignore it, will it fester? June often wondered during quiet or dark hours. In the end, she always decided that she liked to believe she had more control than that.

  “So the first thing that I want you to understand,” Mom said after parking the car and leading June into the enormous, brightly lit supermarket, “is that as far as taking care of a family goes, falling into the trends of the time is the worst thing you could do to yourself or to them.”

  “What trends?” June asked, already bored.

  “Drive-through hamburgers,” Mom said with a frown, her brow furrowing as her eyes scanned over the produce section. “And shortcut foods. No good cake mix comes out of a box. And no good breakfast does either. Those sugary cereals are trash.”

  “Why?” June answered, trying not to sound whiny. “You know the entire point of that stuff is to save time, right? It gives mothers more time to do what they like instead of cooking for hours every day, or having heart palpitations over making multiple dishes at once!”

  “That’s exactly it,” Mom said in distaste, pushing the cart over to the onions and gesturing for June to grab a few of them. “What in the world is worth letting your children eat out of greasy wrappers that are dripping with ketchup? There are better ways to cut corners. It’s shameful. It’s disgusting!”

  Disgusting was not at all the word June would use to describe the smell that took over her senses whenever they drove past a drive-through restaurant. It wasn’t even the hamburgers that called to June, it was those french fries. Hot and crispy-salty on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside. She licked her lips at the thought.

  “The smart thing to do,” Mom continued, selecting some bananas, “is take advantage of all the wonderful machines instead of giving in to garbage foods. With a good dishwasher, a clothes washer and dryer, a deep freezer, and a vacuum cleaner, you can save a whole lot of time, not to mention effort. You can keep your household clean and put a hot and fresh dinner on the table every night, and look good doing it. Grab some apples, please.”

  June did as she was told, although when she wasn’t as gentle as she could have been putting the produce into the cart, Mom made her empty it out and get all new ones that wouldn’t have bruises on them by the time they got home.

  “You don’t even know how lucky you are to have all of this available to you,” Mom went on as they finally left the produce aisle. “Any food you could imagine, right here at your fingertips. I don’t need to remind you of what my parents had to feed us during the Depression.”

  “No,” June agreed. “You’ve told Fred and me about it a hundred times over, Mom.”

  June knew that’s why her mother hoarded cans and boxes of nonperishables, and jarred and canned her own tomatoes and jam every summer. After going through years of never having enough, it was like she was personally ensuring that it’d never happen again. They never ate it all, never came close, and even after giving away freebies to friends and family throughout holidays and the rest of the year, there was still always enough food kept in the house to feed a family of ten for months. Especially ever since Dad and Robert’s father first cemented their business deal—Mom had arranged for men to wheel an enormous deep freezer into the garage, filling it with meat and vegetables and fruit.

  “Please grab that bag of rice,” Mom instructed, pushing the cart, which was getting fuller by the minute. “And we need to get more eggs before we go.”

  “When we get home, I think I may write for a while,” June said, already dying to leave. She felt like they’d been there for days. “And then I’ll come down when it’s time to make the meat loaf.”

  “No, June Hardie, you will not.” Mom stopped wheeling the shopping cart and narrowed her eyes at her daughter. “You are not going to lose any more time learning how to keep a house. You graduate high school in just a few months, and you aren’t even close to ready.”

  June said nothing but felt her ears grow hot. “Besides,” Mom continued, satisfied at the lack of back talk, “the type of writing you do won’t get you anywhere. It’s a complete misuse of the brain God gave you.”

  June remembered how Robert had reacted after reading her story, so dismissive and condescending. She knew in her gut that they were wrong. People loved stories, and if June was especially interested in the kind that were unsettling and strange, she knew that other people must be, too. But where were these people? How would she be able to find them if she was played through her own life like a puppet, her mother and father the ones pulling the strings? Here she was, growing up in the supposed land of the free, and freedom was what she didn’t have.

  Once again, June said a quick little prayer begging God to let her win that writing-retreat scholarship, even though it’d been weeks by that point. Regardless, it genuinely felt like the distant opportunity was her one and only hope.

  “You are so lucky to have a man like Robert.” Mom put five cans of creamed corn into the cart, even though June knew for a fact they already had half a shelf full at home. “He’s handsome, he comes from money, and even now that your father’s business deal has been finalized, he still wants you. As your mother, I refuse to let you mess that up, June!”

  “Okay,” June emphasized, crossing her arms over her stomach. “I get it, Mom. How I’m a total and complete ragamuffin, how wonderful you are for putting up with me—”

  “Don’t get sassy,” Mom said, her voice just the slightest bit raised. “Stop acting like a moping four-year-old, and actually pay attention to what I teach you today.”

  The ride home was silent, but not in a good way like the drive there had been. June found herself fantasizing about writing, making up potential sentences in her head. So many possibilities for the unfortunate heroine of The Gift of the Stars. Would June make it so that the aliens pulled out her veins, raveled them around some sort of cold, clean metal torture device? Would she have worms start birthing from the orbital sockets that had been freshly scraped? Only rarely did June consider letting her main character escape. She knew most people would prefer an ending that gave them hope, but June felt almost insulted by such a rule. Hope was not for everybody. Hope was not a constant.

  “Can I ask what you’re thinking about?” Mom spoke up as she pulled onto their street. “You look more serene than I’ve seen you all day.”

  “Just the dinner we’re going to make,” June lied. “Do you mix ketchup into the raw meat or do you wait until the end?”

  Mom paused for a moment, as if unsure if she was being mocked or not. “The end,” she said flatly. “You can mix in some mustard and brown sugar to taste.”

  “Lovely,” June said, and the car jerked as they pulled over the curb into the driveway. “Let me carry the groceries in.”

  “Good girl,” M
om said, smiling a real smile now. “That’s the way.”

  June imagined adding to her story while she carried bag after bag into the kitchen.

  The aliens put her eyes back, but everything looked different. The creatures standing over her were still ugly, but they felt more familiar now. She didn’t like it. She still felt sore, like there were magnets pulling from somewhere deep inside her skull, and when she tried to move her head, she realized she couldn’t.

  June began putting the groceries away, but only made it through a few minutes before her mother slapped her hand away and started doing it to her own specifications. It didn’t bother June any, though: if Mom was going to be particular about it, at least she was doing it herself. June sat at the table, out of breath from all the hauling and fetching, more exercise than she preferred.

  “Are you paying attention?” Mom asked, looking over her shoulder as she resorted cans. “It’s important that you keep everything together like this, with the label facing out, so you can always grab what you need quickly and easily. Organization is your friend, June, and never a hassle.”

  June thought of the shelf in the garage, loaded with perfectly sorted glass jars that would likely never be opened. “Okay, Mom.”

  “Give it a try with the deep freezer,” Mom said, pointing to the bags filled with meat. “There’s a place in there for everything we just bought, so that there’s never any confusion when you need something. Go ahead and take those bags to the freezer, and load it up for me.”

  Suppressing the sigh already rising in her throat, June stood and took the bags, dragging her feet as she made her way to the door leading to the garage. “I’m going to check afterward to make sure you did it right,” Mom called after her, even though June already knew it. “Don’t just pile everything up.”

  June rolled her eyes to herself but had to admit the state of the freezer was nothing short of impressive. There were separate piles for pork roasts, beef roasts, ground chuck, whole chickens, chicken breasts, chicken thighs, sausages, bacon. June unloaded three pork roasts, two pounds of ground chuck, and a whole chicken from their trip to the supermarket. Why did they need so much?

  Maybe the aliens on the ship have a deep freezer full of human meat, she thought to herself brightly, smiling as she shut the lid. “Done, Mom!”

  “Good timing,” Mom said, stepping into the garage. June could see that she’d changed into her slippers. “So am I!”

  Mom gave the freezer a quick check, nodding at everything and only reaching in to fix one thing, a ground chuck package that wasn’t quite straight enough. “Great job.”

  “Thank you,” June said. She made a beeline out of the garage, heading up to her room before Mom could stop her. She had to write that paragraph down as quickly as she could. It was all she could think about: something that was required in order for her to go on functioning unbothered.

  “Where are you going?” Mom demanded as June hurried up the stairs. “I told you before there’s much more to do than just the groceries.”

  “I need to change my dress,” June yelled back without slowing. “I sweat through the underarms of this one.”

  She knew it was the perfect thing to say in order for Mom to let her go.

  days past

  When June was finished adding to her story, she almost forgot to change her dress like she had said she would before going back downstairs. This one was much more her mother’s speed: lavender cotton adorned with light green leaves and tiny yellow birds. When she came back down, Mom nodded in approval before setting her to dust the furniture in the living room. After that, they changed the curtains, shook out the rugs, vacuumed all of the carpeting, washed the kitchen floor, swept the porch, watered the garden, and did Fred’s laundry.

  June was folding undershirts of Fred’s when he came in through the front door, stopping in the kitchen to grab three cookies from the elephant-shaped jar before sinking down into the armchair next to June’s. “How goes it, sis?” he mumbled through a mouthful, crumbs tumbling down his chin and onto his chest. “Not often I see you doing housework.”

  “Mom’s making me,” June replied flatly, adding a pair of underwear to the pile beside the socks. “She’s teaching me how to become a ‘better young woman.’”

  “Good,” Fred said, and June squeezed the shirt she was folding to keep from throwing it in his face. “You need to get yourself in order if you want Robert to marry you.”

  He started looking for something to watch on the television; June protested when he passed Space Patrol in favor of The Ed Sullivan Show, but he acted like he didn’t hear her.

  “I don’t want to marry Robert,” she said after he sat back down. “I want to move away.”

  Fred cast a sideways look at her for just a moment. “You don’t know anything about anything. You can’t even take care of yourself living at home. Your bedroom is disgusting. You’re not the independent type, June.”

  “Yes, I am.” She crumpled the next shirt into a ball, seeing if he’d notice, but he didn’t. “I’ll show all of you.”

  “What you’ll do is make Robert run away, once he learns what you’re really like.” Fred’s voice had taken an unpleasant and sharp turn. “You’d better start paying attention to what you need to do.”

  Mom came in from the kitchen, out of breath from moving the chairs back to the table from when they had washed the floor earlier.

  “We have about two and a half hours until your father gets here with Robert and Mr. Dennings,” she said to June, dabbing her damp forehead with the back of her wrist. “Let’s take a half hour to freshen up, and then I’ll meet you in the kitchen to start on dinner.”

  Yes! June thought excitedly, already heading up to her room. She shut the door behind her and sat at her desk, reading over what she’d written earlier and making a few tweaks. By this point, she felt very connected to her story, almost profoundly so. The heroine had gone through a lot, but June knew she’d have to go through much more.

  Would June let her live? She hadn’t decided yet. After everything was said and done, death would seem like a mercy to the poor woman. June felt like killing her off would be the expected ending, though; who could endure all that orbital scraping and terrifying experimentation without shutting down?

  She can, June thought, and just like that she decided that her heroine would live. Even if she’s a completely different person than before the abduction, and even if she never returns to Earth, she will adapt. She will continue.

  Whether or not June’s heroine would be able to accept her new fate was the question now, but already she could hear her mother calling for her from downstairs, so she’d have to figure it out later. With an exasperated huff, June neatened her stack of papers and left them on top of the rest of the manuscript.

  She never had a chance against the aliens, June thought of her character as she went down the stairs with lively little steps. There’s not a single thing she could have done to anticipate the ship capturing her during her walk in the woods, no amount of strength or smarts she could have used to help her escape or fight back.

  And that was what scared June the most about her story, the thing that made her head light and her heart flutter when she imagined reading it from someone else’s hand. She loved stories like that: the ones that made you realize how very created our ideas of safety and basic rights were. Everyone alive should know the truth. It was ugly, but it was there.

  And it was terrifying.

  “What were you even doing up there?” her mother demanded once June entered the kitchen. Fred was still seated in the armchair in the living room, staring blankly at the television, a sweating bottle of beer in his hand and a bowl of potato chips in his lap, which June knew her mother had brought to him. “It doesn’t look like you freshened up at all.”

  “I powdered my nose,” June lied, using her fingers to shake out her tangled c
urls. “Waiting to redo my lipstick until the meat loaf’s in the oven.”

  “Well, come on already,” Mom said, already turning back toward the counter, where a variety of ingredients were scattered. “We need to get the Jell-O mold in the fridge to set if it’s going to be ready in time for dessert.”

  And that’s how June found herself using a heavy, long knife to cut up bits of apples and carrots and celery, while her mother went on and on about how important it was to make sure that dinner was well under way by the time your guests arrived, because there was nothing more inviting than a house fragrant with cooking and nothing more rude than making your starving guests sit around waiting for too long. (June could think of many things that were more rude.)

  When she was almost finished cutting the last of the celery, June nicked her finger with the knife and gave a quiet little gasp that wasn’t heard over the sound of Mom’s voice. June watched as blood trickled into the little pieces of vegetable, spreading itself through the watery, green veins, soaking into every piece it touched. June sucked her finger and poured all of the celery, including the bloody pieces, into the gelatin mold that Mom had already filled with bright red liquid.

  Red and red, June thought absentmindedly as she tossed the knife into the sink. She knew Mom hadn’t seen her do it, and it was just a few drops of blood anyway, so who cared? June only pondered the nature of why she’d make such a decision for a moment before she was distracted by Mom’s instruction to help start the meat loaf.

  Mixing it with her bare hands was just as bad as June had imagined. She felt embarrassed to be relieved by the idea that her blood was secretly tainting it all, leaving tiny traces as she squished the soft gooey pink into itself along with the eggs and breadcrumbs: sickly revenge.

  June thought about what Fred had said to her, while she was folding his laundry earlier, about Robert running away once he knew what she was really like. As much as she didn’t want to be insulted by the idea, she couldn’t help it. If Robert left her at this point, her parents would never let her hear the end of it and would lose any hope for her, if they even had any to begin with.