Did You Ever Have A Family

Lydia

The truth will set you free. Funny, she thinks as the flight attendant demonstrates how to buckle the seat belts and breathe through the oxygen mask, how it would take a con artist and a kid destroyed by secrets to set her on this path, put her on an airplane for the first time in her life. The truth will set you free, dear Lydia, Winton said in his singsong way on that last phone call. Because it is the only thing that can. He was only trying to engage her in conversation that night, but he nudged to an end what had gone on too long. The truth was something she had hidden or bent all her adult life, and she had suffered and caused others to suffer because of it. Silas, that poor tortured boy, showed her by telling the truth that this was no longer a life she could live. Silas, who she at first wanted to strangle for being so stupid, for making the choice he did to save himself; but as painful and senseless as what he told her might seem to anyone else, she understood. She understood bad choices made from fear, acted on out of a misguided sense of survival. She would never call the police to tell them what he told her. What he did he can never take back, and that will be punishment enough. He’d carried his secret as far as he could and then let it go. It was time she did, too.

She has gathered everything and organized it chronologically in folders wrapped in red rubber bands: report cards, letters to Santa, articles in newspapers about breaking state records, getting the scholarship to Stanford, photographs of shaking hands with the governor, dressed up in a tuxedo for the prom, shirtless on a summer day washing his car. There is, too, the one article in the local paper about Luke’s arrest. Why she cut it out at the time and saved it all these years she does not know. But it is folded neatly with the others, the headline Wells Swim Champ Arrested for Drug Trafficking above a few short sentences reporting how Luke was taken into custody after more than a pound of cocaine was found in his car and in the apartment he shared with his mother. This, too, she will show to George and explain her part. The only picture of Luke with June is one she took in the parking lot of the church the night of Lolly’s wedding rehearsal. She kept the film in her camera until this week, when she walked it to the pharmacy to be developed. Only three pictures were on the roll: two of Will and Lolly and one of Luke and June standing in front of his truck — him smiling into the camera, her serious, distracted by something to the left of the frame. Then there are the articles of what came after, which she printed at the library from the computer. These she did not read or look at, but folded quickly as they spooled from the printer and later tucked in with the rest. It is not everything, but she has gathered as much as she can to tell George the story of their son.

The morning after Silas stood on her front porch, Lydia walked to the library and sat down at a computer to see what she could find. She typed into the Google search box the letters that spelled George King, the name on the business card she kept for years and eventually threw away. She kept it through the pregnancy, which she did not expect, but when she found out she was three months along, she knew who the father was. Earl was in a nightly blackout so he had no idea they hadn’t had sex in more than six months. No man ever crowed louder when he found out he was going to be a father. She let him carry on, but she held on to that business card, tucked it deep in her wallet, and waited for the storm that was coming. She knew it was going to be rough, that most likely it would be clear to everyone right away that Earl was not the father, but she knew on the other side there was a strong chance she’d be free and she’d have a child. She held on to that card through the expected divorce and the first lonely years after, with no alimony or support of any kind from Earl, no support from anyone but her mother, and even that was at arm’s length, with conditions, and scornful. Many times she almost called that number. But she didn’t want to complicate a life she knew was already complicated. Not until Luke started swimming was it clear her baby could do something better than anyone else, was going to be all right on his own someday without his mother, and without the help of a father he never knew. This is when she ripped up the card; the only-in-an-extreme-emergency button she never pushed.

George King. After a few pecked letters on the computer keyboard, she had an address, an obituary for his wife — cancer, eleven years after he’d been in Wells — a business address, and a number, which she later called. After three rings the line clicked to an automated outgoing message, and she listened for an option that would confirm he still worked there. For George King, press one, the generic voice spoke. For Rick King, press two. Over thirty years later and George King was right where he was then. Working with his brother in Atlanta, Georgia. It seemed too easy to find him. She played the message again and pressed one. She had no intention of speaking to him but wanted to see what would happen. A young Southern woman answered brightly, George King’s office. Hello? Heart thumping, Lydia immediately hung up. After a few more keystrokes at the library, pictures appeared on the screen. Here was the man she knew for less than three weeks, who asked her questions, listened to the answers, and who was, then, as lost and fearful as she was. He looked much the same, but thicker and balding, gray now dominating what remained of his coarse and closely cut hair and beard. In one of the photos he had won a golf championship at a country club, and another was a group shot of a high school reunion. Both were photos taken in the last three years. It surprised her to see him handsome, tall, and distinguished. He had been, then, in his midthirties, a young father, panicked about the future — money, his wife, his troubled son, his pushy brother — but here he was a successful man nearing retirement. He wore the sort of clothes worn by the men from New York Lydia worked for, and in his eyes was none of the startled and still-clinging youth she remembered. Yet the kindness she found there when she needed it, this she could see. Looking at these few photos, the first glimpses she’d had of George King since that last morning at the Betsy, she could see the same high forehead, wide smile, and thin, almost feminine, eyebrows. Here was Luke if he had grown to late middle age, the man who would have grown old with June and who would someday, maybe, she thinks for the first time now, have met his father. Lydia’s deal with Luke was that she’d tell him when he was twenty-one, and as a kid and in high school it became an every-so-often, light running joke between them. Denzel’s going to want me to change my name to Washington after we meet, right? he’d joke. Because that may cost him a few dollars. He’s got some years to make up for, don’t you think?

At twenty-one, Luke wasn’t interested in anything she had to say, and later, in that first year after June brought them back into each other’s lives, they tiptoed around it, were moving cautiously toward the heavy subjects. They were being careful with each other, taking their time. We’ll get there, Lydia told June once when she’d pressed about it, but there’s no rush now, we have the rest of our lives.

The day after she called George’s office, she called a 1-800 number for American Airlines that she found in the back of a travel magazine at the library and asked for a flight from Hartford, Connecticut, to Atlanta, Georgia. This was the first plane ticket she’d ever purchased, the first time she would travel in anything but a car.

Three days later an envelope with a Washington State postmark arrived in her mailbox. After she opened it and read Mimi Landis’s short note on motel stationery to let her know where June was living and the contact details there, she called the airline again. She read her confirmation number over the phone and when she finished asked if she could change the ticket to fly somewhere else first. The impatient woman on the other end asked where, and Lydia answered, Seattle, Washington.