Did You Ever Have A Family

Lydia

The road to Moclips from Aberdeen hugs the shore, but nothing is visible through the fog. The heavyset, young woman driving the cab said it would take forty-five minutes, but with zero visibility she’s slowed to a crawl and they’ve been on the road for over an hour. The girl introduced herself as Reese and wears a brown bandanna wrapped simply around what looks like a shaved head. The cab smells like cigarette smoke and oranges, and Lydia feels nauseated. Madonna is singing one of her first pop songs, about dressing someone up in her love, all over, all over. Is it possible she heard that song for the first time over thirty years ago? At the Tap with Earl? Later? Outside, the world is as gray and white and featureless as it was when she got on the bus in Seattle after taking a cab from the airport. It never occurred to her to rent a car until Reese asked why she hadn’t. Lydia wonders if everyone who flies in airplanes rents cars when they land. Has her life been so sheltered in Wells that she has no idea how the world actually works? Guess so, she thinks as she runs her hand over the top of her suitcase, where the folders with Luke’s report cards and photos and newspaper clippings are tucked into the front pocket. The suitcase is one she bought the day before at the hospital thrift shop. It was three dollars and has wheels and a collapsible handle, and besides the chubby stars drawn across the top in gold Magic Marker, it’s as good as new. It’s the first suitcase she’s ever had, and rolling it through the Hartford airport gave her an embarrassed but giddy feeling of playing the part of a stewardess on a TV show or movie. The bus driver in Seattle asked her to store the case in the luggage compartment, but she refused and said she’d hold it in her lap if she had to, which is what she did for three hours as the crowded bus rattled down the coast to Aberdeen. Though she had been drowsy on the bus, she was afraid to fall asleep for fear someone would steal it or lift her purse. But alone now in the back of the taxi, with the familiar bubblegum sounds of Madonna in the eighties, she drifts in and out of sleep. She sees Silas dragging rocks from the woods behind the fields at June’s house. He lays them on vast blue plastic tarps, the kind that people in Wells use to cover woodpiles, and drags them across the high grass toward the charred site where the house had stood. She sees the enormous pile of large rocks he has amassed. It must be three stories high and nearly as wide. There are clearly more than enough rocks to build a house, but Silas is not satisfied, and after he tosses a new load from the blue tarp onto the pile, he goes back across the field and into the woods to find more. Lydia calls out to him but he cannot hear her. He is determined and he is deaf to the world, and the blue tarp flaps behind him like a great cape.

Almost there, Reese says gently from the driver’s seat, Annie Lennox now barely audible in the speakers. Lydia brushes lint that has gathered on the front of her dress, a black wrap she found at Caldor’s in Torrington almost fifteen years ago and which she’s worn only three times: to Luke’s graduation from high school, his hearing in Beacon, and his funeral. This trip felt formal, serious, like the other occasions, and so she wore it. Also, it is her best and there is still a leftover desire for June’s approval from the first few times they met. Lydia had never seen June in anything more formal than jeans and khakis and skirts, but she imagined her having lived a fancy life in New York and London with dresses and jewelry and elaborate shoes. The more lint she picks from the dress, the more she sees, so she stops and looks out the window. It has been less than a week since she read Mimi’s note, which started, Dear Lydia, We thought you’d want to know where June was living, and only a few days more since Silas appeared at her door. Maybe if these events had happened months or even weeks apart she might have felt less urgency about seeing June, maybe she would have flown to Washington after seeing George in Atlanta and not the other way around. But from the moment Lydia folded Mimi’s note after reading it, she knew the only thing that mattered was finding June.

She knew if she dialed the number on the motel stationery and asked to speak to June, she risked losing her again. The only thing she could do was turn up at her door, just as June had at hers three years ago.

After Silas told her what he had to say early that morning, more than feeling relieved to discover that it was not anger or blame that most likely drove June away, she felt ashamed. She’d assumed June believed what most people in town believed: that Luke was to blame. She imagined into her dismissal and flight everything but the one thing she knew best: guilt. Knowing what weighed on top of June’s grief made Lydia feel close to her again. She knew what it was like to take responsibility for calamity. She knew what it was like to live with regret. But what June carried now was much heavier; so heavy that when Lydia read Mimi’s note, she knew she had to leave immediately. What she had to tell June would not replace the losses, but it would make clear what had happened and let her know that neither she nor Luke had been at fault. That Lydia could do this for June gave her something she had not felt since Luke was an infant: a clear purpose, a fierce protective love that ran on adrenaline and eliminated all other concerns or desires. She would go to June and nothing else mattered.

Reese pulls off a two-lane road into a short, sand-covered driveway that opens to a parking lot. Fog hides the place, and the only thing Lydia can see are dim white lights on either side of a door. They glow as if underwater. As the cab pulls to a stop, she has a feeling of arriving somewhere she will be for a while. A flight was booked a week from now to Atlanta, but she knows she will not be going there soon. George will be there as he has, miraculously, been all these years and eventually she will find him. In the meantime, she will stay in this foggy motel for as long as she is needed.

After she’s paid Reese the fare and checked in at the office, a red-haired, middle-aged woman tells Lydia to follow her. She rolls her suitcase behind her as they walk down the cement path along a white, one-story building. Once they stop at a gray door with a black number 6 painted on it, the woman from the office lingers. Lydia can’t tell if she’s being protective or nosy or both. Eventually she walks away, and as she does, she reminds Lydia that if she needs anything at all, she’ll be in the office.

Lydia steps forward and knocks lightly on the door. There is no answer, no movement or sound coming from the room, so she knocks again, this time with force. A creak of bedsprings is followed by silence, then a slow clicking and unlatching of locks. The door swings open and there she is, June. Lydia’s legs tingle and she exhales an unexpected breath of relief, as if a part of her had secretly believed she’d made this woman up, that all of it, the life that had preceded this very moment was something she’d invented. But here was June. Proof of something, even though the woman in the doorway of this motel room was a faded version of the one Lydia remembered. Despite wearing precisely the same clothes she’d worn the last time she saw her, rushing from the church after Luke’s funeral, June is almost unrecognizable. She is smaller than every memory Lydia has, and seeing her now is like what she’s heard about seeing celebrities in person, how they are diminished by real life. Her arms are still and at her sides, and she looks at Lydia as if she has been caught breaking something fragile and costly. She lets go of the door, steps back. Lydia struggles to speak. June, she whispers, almost as if she’s convincing herself of her identity. June places one foot behind her and then the other and half steps backward to the edge of the bed. She sits down, slowly, and pulls a white pillow to her lap. Lydia steps inside the room — it is neat as a pin, dark, and appears as if no one has lived here. She crosses to the bed and sits next to June. She smells the faintest lilac and remembers asking her over a year ago what perfume she wore, and June smiled and answered, It’s a little scent called menopause. That June, the one who could occasionally, though not often, shake off her seriousness with a joke, and who could do the same for Lydia, was nowhere near this somber motel room. The one in her place, the one who has not spoken since she opened the door, sits and pinches the ends of a pillow with fingers that have clipped but unmanicured nails. Strangely, for Lydia, the silence between them is not awkward. It is a comfort to be so near June, to have found her, and that she hasn’t run. For the first time, Lydia hears the ocean. It is as if a stereo switch has just been thrown and from speakers blare the sound of crashing waves. She smells the sea air and breathes it in, deeply. The nausea from before has gone and with it her fatigue. She turns to June and looks at her. Her hair is longer than she’s seen it before and pulled loosely behind her in a knot of tumbling blond hair that is now dominated by silver at the roots. She is thinner, her face is gaunt, and at the edges of her tightly shut mouth, frown lines curl and splinter toward her jaw. Lydia tries to remember June’s voice again but cannot. Tears begin to fall from Lydia’s eyes, the first since the days just before and after the funerals last year. Over the sound of the ocean, she says to herself as much as to June, I’ve missed you. She carefully puts her arm around June’s thin shoulders and they both startle from the shock of physical contact. It has been a long time since either has touched anyone. They are gone, Lydia says without thinking, surprised to hear the words. They are gone, she says again, more loudly, as if saying it with June, now, makes the fact official, finally true. For a long while, they are silent. Lydia eventually finds the bathroom, and when she returns, she gently pulls June’s closest hand from the pillow to her lap.

Nine months ago, this same hand forbid her to speak, but now, here, Lydia caresses it softly. There is so much I want to tell you, she says, and as she does, she remembers Winton, the only person she’s spoken to for more than a few moments all year. She describes that first phone call, how aware and yet how stupid she was, and how lonely. I am a weak woman, she whispers, and then repeats the words softly a few times. Always have been. As the words leave her, she can see out the window to the ocean. The last time she saw waves on a beach was when she and Earl went to Atlantic City for their honeymoon. These are taller, more majestic and powerful. She watches them rise and collapse in bursts of white foam, and as she does, she feels something leave her. She can’t name it, but it was with her always, and with the words she has just spoken, it has gone.

Lydia remains still and matches her breathing to June’s. They sit side by side on the bed and Lydia can feel her hand, with June’s, dampen with sweat, but neither of them let go. Before she says anything about Silas, she remembers him at her apartment a week ago, speaking too fast, without inhaling, making no sense. It would take almost an hour before she truly understood what he was so desperately trying to say. When she finally did understand, she was furious — at him, for letting everyone blame Luke, for not going back in the house; at June, for not fixing that stove years before; and at herself for never insisting June do so even though Lydia had stood before the old thing herself many times shaking her head when it refused to light or to stop ticking. They were all to blame, she thought, trying to calm down. She and Silas sat on her couch for hours. She stood to go to bed several times, but each time he did not budge. So she sat with him in the bright living room, quiet. There was too much to make sense of, too much to say, so she said nothing. Eventually, she fell asleep, and when she woke and saw him curled against the sofa cushion, she could hear him sobbing. She pulled him toward her, shook his young shoulders gently, and told him it wasn’t his fault, that it wasn’t anybody’s. She remembers his terrified eyes searching her face. It was between midnight and dawn and the day before had been a doozy, but nothing surprised her more than what she felt in that moment: needed. It was the last thing she expected. Through a mess of tears and mucus and yawning, Silas mumbled, I’m sorry, over and over. After a while, he slouched into the sofa, tucked his chin against his chest, and slept. Lydia watched his body rise and fall with his breathing, the lightly pimpled skin of his face agitate and twitch in response to whatever he was dreaming. Here was someone she understood. Someone alive but destroyed. She knew she could do nothing to bring her own boy back, stop him from turning whatever knob he turned or flipping whatever switch he flipped that morning, nor could she undo the mistakes she’d made when he was alive, but she might be able to help this boy. And with what he had just told her, she might be able to do the same for June.

And so she came here. There is someone I want to tell you about, she says. June does not move, nor does she signal in any way that she is listening. Still, Lydia continues. She tells her about Silas — who he is, who his parents are, that he worked for Luke, how he followed her, and what he said the night he turned up at her door. She tells this last part slowly, carefully, with as much detail as she can remember.

June does not respond to anything Lydia says, but when she finishes speaking, she pulls Lydia’s hand slowly toward her face. June extends each finger and presses the palm against her cheek. She covers Lydia’s hand with both of hers and presses gently at first and then with more pressure. As she does, June’s torso and head glide downward, her feet curling behind her onto the bed, her head and shoulders resting in Lydia’s lap. Neither speaks. With her free hand, Lydia gently strokes the top of June’s head, brushes a few strands of hair from her face, one, then another, and then spreads her hand across her clear brow. June’s breathing slows, her body loosens, and soon she is asleep. A black plastic alarm clock ticks the seconds with a blue wand. Lydia hears every one.