Did You Ever Have A Family

June

There is no lake. She has been inching along this rock-strewn dirt road for hours, and there has been no sign of water, no cars, no humans, no evidence that she took the right exit after Missoula, or pointed the car in the right direction each time the almost-road forked. She is lost and alone and it does not matter. Nothing does, she thinks, not for the first time. She circles the idea again and again — that no choice she might make would have any impact on her or anyone else. Before now she would have felt exhilarated by the idea of existing without obligation or consequence, but the experience is nothing like she once imagined. This is a half-life, a split purgatory where her body and mind coexist but occupy separate realities. Her eyes look at what is ahead — the road, a fallen tree — but her mind scours the past, judges each choice made, relives every failure, roots out what she overlooked, took for granted, and didn’t pay attention to. The present scarcely registers. The people she sees are not the ones pumping gas into the Subaru, passing her on the highway, or making change when they sell her bottles of water and peanuts at mini-marts and gas stations. Instead it is Luke, pleading with her in a kitchen that no longer exists; Lolly, shouting at the top of her fourteen-year-old lungs from across a restaurant table in Tribeca; Adam, looking up at her, shocked, a young girl’s hand in his; Lydia stepping toward her that morning, before she knew what had happened, and the confusion and hurt on her face as June waved her off. She returns to these memories and replays them over and over, scrutinizes every remembered word, witnesses again each mistake. When she exhausts one, another appears. Another always does.

Her mind leaps to her childhood friend Annette. Annette lived two streets away in the same neighborhood in Lake Forest, and they spent their Saturday nights at each other’s house, playing with Annette’s collection of porcelain horses, listening to Shaun Cassidy and Jackson 5 records, making lists of where they would live when they grew up, what car they would drive, and what their husbands would look like. She remembers convincing Annette to come with her to sleepaway camp in New Hampshire the summer between fifth and sixth grades. Annette was timid, a careful creature who was reluctant to agree. For both it would be their first time away from home without parents, and Annette cited plenty of reasons not to go — the high school boys who lifeguarded at the club pool, an Arabian-horse show coming to Chicago. But June kept at her over the Christmas holiday, even convinced her mother to call and explain to Annette’s protective mother the place where she herself had gone as a girl. June can’t recall why it was so important she come with her, but remembers clearly the triptych of cousins from Beverly Hills who naturally and without ceremony established themselves at the top of the social pecking order from the first day. They had glamorous names — Kyle, Blaire, and Marin — and all three had the same feathered, shoulder-length, light brown hair.

On the second full day at camp, the Beverlys, as they had come to be known, asked June to switch her bunk with a chunky, gravel-voiced girl named Beth from Philadelphia. Beth and the Beverlys had been assigned the same cabin four down from June and Annette’s, and Beth, the cousins explained, not only smelled like garlic but stared at them when they were changing. June’s face prickles with heat as she remembers sneaking her sleeping bag and duffel to her new cabin while Annette ate lunch with the others in the lodge. Later that night, one of the counselors showed up at June’s cabin with Annette and insisted on speaking to June. She hadn’t believed Beth when she explained that June had asked her to switch bunks. June remembers Annette’s face relaxing as she entered the cabin. She imagines what must have raced through her head in that moment — here was June, her best friend, the girl she traveled halfway across the country with, who knew everything there was to know about her and who was wearing the rope bracelet Annette made for her birthday two years ago. Here was June and she would clear everything up. June remembers how she attempted to be casual, to pretend that nothing important had transpired or changed. But as she stumbled through a rehearsed explanation that it seemed like a good idea to give each other space and meet new people, Annette’s face froze. She looked at June as if she were regarding a complete stranger. It was not anger or hurt that registered on her pale, blank face. It was horror. June had, in that instant, transformed into someone she didn’t know. June can see Annette shaking her head as if she had been hit from behind by a thrown rock. She can see her turn toward the cabin door and walk away as the Beverlys snickered from their bunks. Annette went home the next morning. They were twelve years old and the two girls never spoke again. That fall, when they returned to Lake Forest Country Day for the first day of sixth grade, Annette would not look at her.

June wonders what became of Annette’s vast collection of porcelain horses. She took fastidious care of each one, dusting and polishing their glazed coats, gently brushing their manes and tails. There were dozens, maybe hundreds. Annette was an only child and had a playroom lined with white bookshelves loaded with those horses. She and her mother made special trips to antiques dealers in Springfield and Bloomington and Chicago to expand her collection. She had a real horse, too, a dark brown, gelding quarter horse she named Tilly, who was kept at a stable in Winnetka, but June was never invited there after school or on weekend mornings when Annette rode. June cannot remember the father clearly, only that he smoked a pipe, always wore a tie, and was rarely there.

After eighth grade, Annette and Tilly went East to a horsey boarding school in Virginia and June lost track of her. More than two decades later, after her divorce from Adam and after she’d moved to London, June was having lunch with a client, the American wife of a British banker, and when June’s childhood in Lake Forest came up, the woman asked her if she remembered a girl named Annette Porter. She’d been a sorority sister of hers at Butler University in Indiana. Great girl, the woman said, and though it stung to hear Annette’s name even all those years later, it was a relief to know she had been welcomed into a sisterhood somewhere and in that circle was considered great.

It never occurred to June before now what might have happened to Annette’s mother when her daughter left home. She imagines the poor woman taking up Annette’s duties dusting, polishing, and brushing the manes of each figurine. June pictures her now, all these years later, muttering to them, bringing them up to speed on the little neighborhood traitor who used to visit, the one who lured Annette to sleepaway camp and how she finally got what was coming to her.

Streaks of blue flash between the pines, and for a moment June struggles to remember where she is. She traces an imaginary map as she slows the car to a stop. Montana. Glacier National Park. Bowman Lake. She turns the engine off and watches the lake appear between the spaces in the trees. It reminds her of when Lolly would see a jumping light through the windows of the house in Connecticut at night and be convinced it was a UFO. She wouldn’t rest until they’d gone outside to see, and of course it was always just a star above the trees, beyond the house, blinking in and out of view. Still, she would insist that she’d seen something extraordinary.

June gets out of the car and looks for a path. The pine forest is dense, and though it is early afternoon and midsummer, the air is chilly under the branches. She fetches her coat from the car and wraps it around her shoulders before stepping off the road. Pine needles crunch softly beneath her tennis shoes and birds holler as she makes her way toward a clearing that overlooks a narrow strip of rocky beach. From there she can see the entire lake, which is much longer than it is wide and swerves gently to the left as it stretches toward its end. Impossibly straight pines cover the low hills that swell from the waterline, and beyond them rise hulking stone mountains. The landscape reminds her of northern Scotland, though these hills are younger, she decides, less worn-out.

The sun dazzles the wind-chopped surface of the water and the effect is blinding. There is, briefly, nothing but light. She squints from reflex, but the rest of her surrenders, waits to be erased. It is a quick oblivion, snuffed out as swiftly as it arrives. A cloud barges across the sky and returns color and shape to the trees, the hills, the pebbled shore. She waits for the sun to flare again, and soon it does. She feels its heat — enormous, perfect — and shivers as it recedes. She stands and waits for the radiant nothing to return and, as she does, remembers a motel shower four or five days ago in Gary, Indiana, with water pressure so forceful she saw stars as she let it pummel the back of her neck and head. She stood there until the water went cold. She thinks of the morning in her car days ago, just over the North Dakota state line, when she woke to the sound of idling school buses and shouting. Stiff from sleeping in the front seat and only half-awake, she blinked toward children in T-shirts and shorts dragging backpacks and lunch boxes. She had no idea where or who she was or what she was seeing. She looked at the light brick building, the buses, the American flag dangling from a white pole. Nothing was familiar. She was empty of memory, and instead of being frightened or upset, she was, dimly, without yet understanding why, relieved. The spell broke when she noticed her linen jacket bunched between the driver’s seat and the car door. It took nothing more than the sight of the wrinkled fabric for every last memory to return, including pulling off the interstate late the night before, looking for a motel and instead finding a quiet spot in the parking lot next to the school.

More clouds gather and the surface of the water darkens. She can now see more clearly the long, rectangular shape of the lake. It is just as Lolly described to her in a postcard once. Flawless. That was the word she used. She had found a flawless place, the first on her journey across country after her freshman year in college, perhaps the first ever. She’d been gone for more than a month when the postcard arrived, the first and the last she would send June from the trip. It was one of just four missives Lolly had ever mailed to her and the only one June saved. The postcard had been in the house, tucked away in one of her address books, but June remembers clearly the image of the lake, the Kalispell, Montana, postmark, the stiff closing, the clipped, telegram-like sentences wedged between the postcard’s edge and her London mailing address.

M., A flawless place. The first so far. Back in NY early August. Until soon, L.

The photo on the postcard had shown snow on the surrounding mountaintops, but now, under the summer sun, they are bare rock. This difference aside, the lake looks the same. Nothing changes here, June thinks, but then remembers an article she’d skimmed years ago about global warming and the gradual disappearance of the glaciers from Glacier National Park. Looking at this lake and these mountains, she wonders when the glacier that made this place was last in residence, how long it lasted. Did some trace of it still remain when Lolly was here?

Lolly was eighteen years old when she looked at this lake. Eighteen and angry and newly free. She had lived with her father in New York the last three years of high school. Her choice to stay with him after the divorce was never questioned or challenged, though it took the wind out of June when Adam, not Lolly, told her. It never occurred to her that Lolly would stay in New York. But when June spoke to her the next day, Lolly made it clear that just as June had made her decision to leave them for London, she had in turn made hers. They spent Christmas together at the house in Connecticut the first year after the divorce, but it ended abruptly with Adam driving back to the city on Christmas Day after Lolly opened her presents. There had been no fight, no dramatic blowup, just Adam’s restlessness and Lolly’s hostile quiet. She begged her father to take her back to the city, but he insisted she stay since June would be in the States for only two weeks and they should spend time together. Lolly retreated to her room upstairs and she and June spent the remaining days silent and on separate floors. Lolly refused to eat with June and would instead take bowls of granola and cup after cup of coffee upstairs. June stayed in London the following Christmas, and in the years when Lolly was at Vassar, June and Adam worked out alternating Christmas Eve and Christmas Day custody.

Lolly never came to London. In five years she never saw the gallery June opened. Never saw the small carriage house in Islington where she lived. Never accepted any of June’s invitations to join her in London and travel on to Europe or Scotland or Ireland. She returned one out of every seven or eight phone calls, just enough to keep from creating a crisis and instigating a serious discussion. She hardly ever wrote e-mails before texting came along, and even then the missives either explained her silence or signaled more. Will call this weekend. Buried. Can’t make it to NY next week when you’re there. Sorry. There were a lot of sorrys.

The sun returns, the lake shines again. The birds have stopped yelling and June hears Lolly’s voice rise above the noises of a restaurant the night she and Adam explained what was going to happen. June had just finished calmly describing how she and Adam were getting divorced, would remain friends, and that she would be opening a gallery in London for her boss. Lolly, June explained, could come with her or stay in New York to finish high school. Liar! Lolly shouted from across the table of the restaurant on Church Street where they ate most Sunday nights after returning from Connecticut. The whole place went silent. You lied to us! You did, you lied! You promised to be a mother and wife and now you are choosing to be neither. Lolly glared in silence before running to the bathroom. June can see her, the table between them, Adam at her side, mute, Lolly’s eyes tearless, desperately scanning her mother’s face for something familiar, anything she could recognize. June knows these eyes. They are Annette’s, Luke’s, Lydia’s. People who when they last looked at her saw a stranger.

June never argued custody with Adam. She never told Lolly how Adam had been accused of sexual harassment at NYU, how they had to settle and by doing so wiped out their savings and nearly half of the inheritance her father had left her when she was in her twenties. The only thing June hung on to was the house in Connecticut, which she and Adam had paid off only the year before. It was the unexpected financial setback, June told herself then, that kept her pushing for bigger and bigger sales at the gallery, landing more lucrative artists and needing to fly around the globe for both. But she knows now she couldn’t face what was happening at home, what was going on with Adam. She knew a fire was behind the smoke of accusation even though she wanted to believe him when he insisted the student who’d filed suit was unstable. Lolly had been a kid at the time and June chose to believe Adam. For that belief to sustain, Lolly could never find out, which she never did. Or if she had, she never let on. June wonders if all the secret-keeping back then explained why, years later, she covered up for Adam again. Had it become second nature? Lolly also never knew about the call June received from her friend Peg, who was, she whispered, at that moment watching Adam hold hands with a young girl at a restaurant in Long Island City. Stay out of sight, June told Peg before scribbling down the address and beelining out of the gallery and onto Fifty-seventh Street to hail a cab.

The restaurant was on the roof of an old loft building on Jackson Avenue, near PS1. As June entered the freight elevator, she tried to imagine how Adam had found his way here. How he must have thought it was another planet, this stomping ground for young hipsters and musicians. A frontier for the creative and the broke, but most important, a place where no one knew him and where he’d never get caught. June spotted Adam right away and was relieved that Peg hadn’t made a mistake. The relief was, at last, the absence of the doubt she’d had for years, even before the lawsuit. The relief was that he would now get caught in a manner that left no room for explanation or double-talk. Before approaching the table, June saw the months ahead. A divorce with terms she would dictate, accepting the long-on-the-table offer from her boss, Patrick, to open a gallery in London that she hadn’t until now allowed herself to take seriously. She watched Adam stare at the girl while she tapped on her PalmPilot with her free hand, and for the first time June could see him in his natural state. Not the one he fashioned to keep family harmony. He looked old, surrounded here by flannels and tattoos and full beards, hunched over this distracted girl who was only a few years older than their daughter. This was her husband. The man she’d once loved and wished to build a life with. The man she still loved, despite years of resenting him. This, she recognized, was her freedom. She could see it all as she stepped toward the small table along the wall. The girl with the wide face and black hair, Adam’s fingers on the inside of her wrist, the table covered in corn bread.

She could see the future that day, but she failed to see Lolly. Failed to think through the next steps carefully. Failed to resist Adam’s desperate plea not to tell their daughter about the affair and failed to see how not telling her the truth would shape everything between them after. She moved too fast toward that table and she moved too fast after — to court, to agree with Adam, to London. She knows that if she could retrace her steps after that phone call from Peg, rethink every decision that followed, she would not be standing on the shore of a lake in the middle of nowhere. And everyone would be alive.

June takes a few steps back from the lake and leans against the closest pine. Near its trunk patches of thick green moss cover the ground like tossed pillows. She tries to imagine Lolly in this place five years ago. Did she stand right here? Did she stop at the first sight of water, too, and find her way to this clearing? Did she rest on this moss? Did she look to the lake and see her mother as she now sees Lolly? Is this where she began to forgive her? And if she were alive, could she possibly forgive her now?

June sits down on the damp moss and draws her knees to her chest. There is no peace for her here. She remembers the morning in North Dakota two days before when she decided to find this place. Bowman Lake. These two words came to her as she watched what must have been summer-school students filing noisily across the parking lot into the school. Bowman Lake, Glacier National Park, Montana. She saw again the small, black capital letters at the bottom of the postcard spelling the location, and as the school buses shut their doors and lumbered toward the road, she could see the pristine lake, its glassy surface reflecting a cloudless sky. She remembered Lolly’s careful handwriting on the other side, and as she read the short sentences over and over, she understood where she needed to be. A place where her daughter had found no flaw.