Love Hurts

One usually meets women like Lindy Jain, the protagonist of Ashley Warlick’s second novel, only in the glare of television lights, handcuffed, haunted by some singular obsession that drives them to steal another woman’s child. They seem desperate, pitiful if not downright evil, but never people we could or would want to unrstand.

Warlick must have known the emotional odds were against her and her protagonist as she wrote “The Summer After June,” an amazingly wise if painful account of a 25-year-old Charlotte, N.C., woman who commits and must come to terms with this heart-wrenching crime. But Lindy confounds our expectations of such women from the start. Rather than an emotionally stunted loner, Lindy is an emergency room nurse whose specialty is the important albeit macabre task of harvesting organs for transplantation. The reader meets her as she is preparing the body of her sister June for burial. June, we learn, has been murdered in her home under suspicious circumstances, her infant son the only witness. The horror of that death comes to the reader slowly, as does the depth of Lindy’s despair, hidden as it is in her final act of love for June: “She stitched June’s eyelids . . . kissed the center of her chest, where her heart had been . . . held back the flesh, slipped off her [own] engagement ring, and let it fall inside.”

The casting off of her engagement ring is only one of many ways Lindy loses her bearings after the murder of her sister. Initially wandering about her house in anger and sorrow, Lindy is ultimately overwhelmed by an inconsolable grief that seems to sap her interest in her life with fiance Cott, her job, her own well-being. Warlick relentlessly plumbs Lindy’s depression as if it were solitary confinement, finding new patches of gloom to trick the eye, making the reader wonder if Lindy, or we, will ever see the light of day.

When Lindy’s painful, increasingly self-destructive musings lead her to the notion of staging a fake carjacking and taking her sister’s baby from her parents, worshiping him “as if he were a tiny shrine she kept because he reminded her of June,” it seems a decision both darkly inevitable and uncomfortably familiar. One wonders: Will Lindy and the baby be the source of a nationwide search, led by a stock lawman-with-a-mission? Will innocent men be harassed as suspects while the culprit goes free? Will Lindy, who hides out in her grandmother Esther’s abandoned house in Galveston, Texas, be held accountable for her crime?

Had Warlick answered any of these questions, “The Summer After June” would have veered into the terrain of genre fiction, with its predictable landmarks and pat endings even when laid out by a writer of formidable talent. But Warlick (whose first novel, “The Distance From the Heart of Things,” was praised for its maturity and eloquence) has more ambitious aims in mind: to illuminate the lives and hearts of those whom love has damaged, to discover whether healing and transformation can occur despite, or perhaps alongside, the presumed finality of death.

The complicated dance among love, life and death is a persistent theme throughout the novel. Foremost among the dancers is Lindy, whose fully (and at times overly) wrought despair is gradually diffused in the swirl of memories in her grandmother’s house, in her contact with Esther in an offbeat nursing home and in her rediscovery of Orrin, a former playmate of Lindy and June’s, now a 20-year-old who tends the gardens at Esther’s and who is trying to make peace in his own way with death and separation.

Orrin’s appearance in many ways rescues both Lindy and the novel, opening both up to a more dynamic exploration of the central issues of how we come to terms with death and loss, how we connect and disconnect from those we love, how we find the strength to go on after we’ve made a complete shambles of our lives. Both a mysteriously wise and sensual young man, Orrin is at first the “benefactor, a slayer of dragons” whom Lindy feels she needs and later her lifeline to emotions she’s initially too bruised to acknowledge.

Even so, “The Summer After June” is not the typical Southern novel, no fallen-woman-rescued-by-a-good-man piece, despite its reliance on a force-of-nature denouement or its sometimes annoying distancing from the reality of Lindy’s crime. What sets the novel apart is Warlick’s writing, quietly haunting, infused with a knack for the unexpected image and an understanding of the core of human nature, which subverts what we think we know of women like Lindy and men like Orrin and the complex choices they make in the name of love.