Did You Ever Have A Family

June

There are barely any clothes in Lolly’s bag: one bathing suit, one sundress, panties, flip-flops, flats, two T-shirts, and a pair of men’s pajamas stolen from Adam years ago. There are more vitamin bottles and notebooks than garments.

The man who reintroduced himself as Brody had walked her back to the car and drove her to a Super 8 motel less than a mile down the road. When she said she had no ID, he checked her in with his credit card and driver’s license. He carried Lolly’s duffel bag into the room, scribbled his number down, and told June he’d take the Subaru to his friend’s garage nearby to put on a real tire and check the rest. He’d return it in the morning.

Right away, she collapsed. Curled under the sheets, the first she’d felt for more than a week, and slept until morning. She was awake when Brody came by to give her the car keys. She’d already been to the ATM in the lobby to get him money for the tire and the motel room. It was only two hundred dollars, the maximum she could withdraw. When he pushed it away, she folded the bills and slipped them into his jeans pocket. You got more than you expected when I asked you for help, she said, more words than she’d spoken in weeks.

I’m glad I was the one you asked, he replied, the first wrinkle of flirtation in his voice.

Once he has gone, she sits on the bed next to Lolly’s duffel, which she has filled again, but not before folding and arranging each item carefully. She keeps the notebooks on the bed and sits next to them before pulling one to her lap. There are three, each with the same orange cover Lolly preferred since high school. And just as they had been then, the notebooks are bursting with folded papers, poems ripped from the pages of the New Yorker, illegible memos from the photo editor she’d been assisting at the fashion magazine where she’d started as an intern, crushed receipts, a MetroCard, take-out menus from the city, bills, pages torn from gallery catalogs. Lolly had always used these beat-up old notebooks as a kind of portable file cabinet for her life, but there was no order, no system. The one June holds was nearest the top of the duffel, beneath the light blue towel exploding with vitamin bottles. The cover is unmarked. She opens it, lightly brushes the pages with her fingertips. She remembers cataloging unfinished canvases by a painter she once represented who committed suicide. His family asked her to go through his apartment and studio and organize whatever she felt was important. She remembers finding an old Boy Scout manual filled with precise pencil drawings of animals — bears mostly, some gentle koalas and black-bear cubs, others angry, with teeth exposed and claws out. Very likely no one had ever seen these drawings, and she remembers having the fleeting instinct to steal the book and keep it herself. Something about it was so private and beautiful, so hopeful, even given the situation that would cause her to find it. She did not steal it but instead included it in a show at the gallery in New York and sold it to one of the artist’s long-time collectors. It was one of the last shows she’d organized in New York before leaving for London.

On the first three pages of Lolly’s notebook are floor plans of imaginary houses, each with one bedroom, several large public spaces, and two rooms labeled LOLLY’S STUDIO and WILL’S STUDY. Studio for what? June wonders. Lolly had dabbled in pastel drawings and watercolor painting early in high school, but June hadn’t heard her mention any of that since. The pages that follow are filled with half-written poems, incomplete to-do lists, seating plans for the wedding reception. There are pages of sample menus from Feast of Reason that Lolly kept asking Rick to revise and reimagine. There are pictures of wedding cakes and flowers pulled from magazines; and there are late-bill notices from Con Ed for Lolly and Will’s apartment in the city.

Lolly’s electric bill, the unpaid caterer. This is the first time these neglected responsibilities have occurred to June. A bolt of panic, a feeling of having to take care of things, returns. It is an old, familiar feeling from another life. The one phone call she’d made was to Paul, her lawyer in the city, asking what she needed to do to give him power of attorney over everything — the insurance claims, the bank accounts, outstanding bills. She asked him to consolidate her bank accounts, liquidate her 401(k), pay whatever penalties needed to be paid, sell the property where the house had been, if it could be sold, and transfer any monies she had to her checking account so that she could access it through her debit card. Paul drove to Connecticut with the papers to be signed and brought someone from his office to notarize them. June told him on the phone that she did not want a discussion or to be advised, just this one thing done, and he could take what she owed him from the account he now controlled. She hoped Rick and anyone else she owed money to had found their way to Paul by now. June begins to make a mental list of who these people might be. Rick, Lolly’s landlord in the city, Edith Tobin, the town tax collector. The names buzz like bees. She closes the first notebook and pulls another from the duffel bag. This one has Lolly’s name written across the front and underneath it a date. It’s a sloppy date from two years ago, Summer 2012, which would have been when Lolly returned from her semester in Mexico City; when she brought Will to Boston to meet Adam and then, after, to meet June. The meeting was brief. Dinner in New York. This was before Lolly would agree to meet Luke, so June went to the city alone and drove back the same night. She barely remembers Will. Lolly brought many boyfriends around over the years, so there was no reason to expect this one would be any different. Also, she hadn’t seen Lolly since Christmas. She’d asked both Adam and June not to visit her in Mexico City. To give her a break, she had explained, from being their daughter.

June flips through the notebook and sees line drawings of Will. Page after page of profiles, details, his nose, his eyes, his collarbone. They are amateurish, but what strikes her is how detailed they are, how attentive. Lolly was always a bit hyper and distractible, as the bulging contents of her notebooks attested, but she’d obviously been paying close attention to Will. The sustained gaze required to create these drawings is patient, tender, intimate, and June struggles not to look away. She feels a sting of jealousy as she looks at a study of Will’s wavy, brown hair from behind. It is by far the most delicate and intricately drawn. June flips past the images of Will and finds a page covered in dark blue ink. At first it appears like a densely scribbled doodle — a nonsensical mural of shapes and lines. But when she turns the notebook on its side, it becomes clear that Lolly had been trying to create an image of the ocean. Crudely sketched seabirds fly at odd angles in the two-inch gap between the jagged horizon line and the edge of the page. And beneath the birds rise elaborately drawn waves, within which June can make out the shapes of faces, hands, city buildings, a car, a plane, eyes, trees, a door. The effect is mesmerizing and she begins to feel dizzy. June gently shuts the notebook and puts it on the bed, folded papers and clippings jutting from its edges. Here, she recognizes, is a new regret. What she saw in the images of Will and even more clearly in the waves was someone attempting to make sense of the world by re-creating it, refracting and complicating its pieces in order to make meaning. What she saw was that Lolly was something she never imagined her to be: an artist. Maybe not a great one — if great could even be designated with empirical accuracy — but someone with an artistic soul who needed to abstract what puzzled her to find the answers. And June missed it. It didn’t matter that she’d spent her career identifying and nurturing this very instinct in her clients. It didn’t matter that this was the one part of her life where she had not failed. Lolly was an artist finding her way, and June missed it completely. She didn’t know which was worse, that she missed it or that Lolly never shared it with her.

The dizziness gets worse and June places both hands on the bed and steadies herself. She sits very still, her eyes closed and both feet planted firmly on the floor. She waits for it to subside, which, after a few minutes, it does. Eventually, she forces herself to pull the last notebook from the duffel. When she opens this one, she sees nothing is sketched or written on its pages, nothing stuck inside. It is new, its spine uncracked, and its pages blank. She closes the notebook and sees, written on its cover in brown marker, Greece.

June puts the notebook on the bed next to the other two and lies down. Her limbs feel leaden, numb. Her mind dulls. She slept for more than twelve hours the night before but is suddenly, again, tired. Moving slowly, she pulls her knees to her chest and closes her eyes.

There is a loud knock on the door. She has no idea how much time has passed. She notices that while asleep she has pushed the notebooks off the bed, and much of the wrinkled and folded contents have slid out across the thinly carpeted floor. Hello. Hello in there. Checkout was two hours ago. She blinks her eyes to understand where she is. Okay, okay, she calls, not knowing to whom or why. She looks at her feet and sees one of the notebooks faceup, opened to a drawing she hadn’t seen earlier. It’s of a one-story beach motel, scribbled in blue ink, with a sign in front that spells THE MOONSTONE. In front, there is an awkwardly sketched office and a row of cars; behind the building is scrawled a greatly exaggerated depiction of crashing surf, spraying sea and foam to the top of the page. June picks the notebook up from the floor, places it in her lap, and flips to the next page. Written in blue ink, dated July 7, 2012, is a letter. The first word is Mom.