by Bill Clegg
I remember the last call Pru made from that house. It was the night before we flew East. She would be joining us at the Betsy Motel once we arrived. Lolly’s father was arriving in the morning, she told us, and there had been a fuss about where he was staying. Lolly had insisted he sleep at the house with them, and June, that afternoon, asked her to reconsider. It led to a big fight and Lolly of course won. But before it was over, it got heated and Pru went for a walk to clear her head and get a little distance from the tension. Later, on the way back to the house, she said she found June sitting on a fallen tree in the woods with her arms holding her sides, gently rocking. Pru didn’t want to alarm her but it was too late to walk away. When June saw her, she waved her over and wiped the tears from her face. Pru asked if she was okay, and June answered with a question that seemed to Pru more of a comment on June’s struggles with Lolly: Did you ever have a family? Pru said she sounded completely wiped out, at wit’s end. She asked June if she wanted to walk back with her to the house, but she politely declined, saying she needed to be alone a little while longer.
Pru told us that night that she’d never felt as grateful. That her answer to June’s question had been yes, but not as a commiseration, or an explanation of fatigue, as it seemed to be for June, but both as an acknowledgment of great fortune and a prayer of thanks. With Mike on the line from Tacoma, and Mimi and I huddled over her iPhone on speaker in the kitchen, Pru whispered to us, Thank you.
Kelly
It’s a relief to finally find where you’re meant to be. I always thought it was Seattle. I was born there. I grew up there. I met Rebecca and lived with her there for more than fifteen years. I never questioned where I was supposed to be, but from time to time I got curious. Or maybe I was just restless for something new. I remember reading up on Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the year or so before I met Rebecca. Never got there, but it looked like a place to live. I even made a few phone calls about hotel jobs, but aside from summer business there isn’t much in the way of hotel management. Holiday Inn had been good to me, and, then, it was unimaginable to leave Seattle for a job that wasn’t with them. The nearest they had on the Cape was almost an hour from Provincetown, closer to Boston, which was no place that interested me. It always seemed to me like an East Coast Seattle but with more colleges and universities. Acres of Irish in both places, which is what I am and whom I’m from.
Few people are from where we are now. Moclips has less than two hundred year-round residents, and one way or another Cissy’s family is related to most all of them. Not that Cissy has ever told us a thing about any of them, or herself. Whatever we know about her we’ve pieced together from her sisters, who clammed up quick, or folks in Aberdeen, who are not exactly what you’d call loose-lipped, especially about one of their own to a couple of city dykes who will always—no matter how long we’re here—be outsiders. Cissy is either a mystery or the opposite. All shadow or light. Either way, she lets us know what she wants known, and the rest is none of our business. She goes her way, we go ours, and we coexist as employer and employee.
Still, every so often she’ll surprise you. Like a few months ago, when a film crew from a cable show set up cameras just down from the Moonstone. It was quite a production. They ran cords from generators in our parking lot out to the beach and parked a food truck alongside the road to feed the cast and crew. For days they filmed underwater divers walking in and out of the surf and shot footage of actresses dressed in mermaid costumes fanning their rubber tails in the waves. There were five girls, all young. Late teens, early twenties, and they stood shivering in bathrobes between takes, chain-smoking. On one of the nights things got rowdy in Room 5. The crew guys and the actresses were whooping it up, and we got calls not only from the guests in one of the two rooms not occupied by people from the TV show, but from the Sweeneys, the retired couple who live next door, who have never once complained to us. It was just past ten at night when they called. Rebecca and I were watching an episode of some British series on DVD, so I hit pause, put on my boots and coat, grabbed my flashlight, and headed for where the noise was coming from. I could smell the pot smoke long before I reached the door and hear the loud reggae music broken by the occasional burst of screaming laughter. As I approached the door, I could see the door to Room 6 open. I expected Jane to appear, but instead it was Cissy, wearing her Carhartt canvas jacket buttoned to the top and her long silver braid tucked inside. Someone who didn’t know her might have seen a tall, stern-looking man emerge from the door of one motel room and step quickly to the door of another. Cissy did not bother knocking but instead pulled out her master key and opened the door right up. I could hear her yell OUT! just the one time. Right away, the music stopped. I stepped back to the side of the building to watch. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want Cissy to see me. One by one the girls began to stumble out, some alone, others with guys from the crew. Eventually, everyone made it back to their rooms. Once Cissy was satisfied, she walked down the path toward the office, and turned left onto Pacific Avenue toward her sister’s house. Had Jane called Cissy? Or had Cissy been in Jane’s room when the racket started? I stood in the shadows of the motel building wondering whether to check in on Jane or call Cissy. Neither seemed right, so I walked toward the beach and watched the waves crash for a little while. The moon was not visible that night, so the only light came from the motel, the few houses along the beach, and farther down, where 109 cuts close to the sand, the dim and infrequent twitch of headlights. I tried to imagine how it was two hundred years ago, when only the Quinault tribe walked the beach. Cissy’s sister Pam told us that this land was where the tribe brought their teenage girls to be safe after they reached puberty and before they married. Who guarded them? I wondered. Surely not men, the very thing the girls were being protected from. I wondered, too, how many of them never married, either by bad luck or by choice. Did they have a choice then? I doubted it. Did those women stay on and help protect the younger girls? Or were they sent back to the tribe at some unmarriageable age to live out the rest of their years as spinsters?
Local legend has it that one night all the sleeping girls were swallowed by the sea. Rebecca and I have heard at least half a dozen variations on the tale—one involves a sea witch who cast a spell, another a falling star that crashed into the ocean and caused a mighty tidal wave, and one starts with a terrible fire that drove the animals from the hills into the ocean, carrying the girls with them in the stampede. But in every version of the story, the sleeping girls end up underwater, where they somehow transform into mermaids, enchanted protectors whose magic keeps the Quinault virgins from harm. No doubt some scrap of this story must have made its way to the producers making the silly television show.
I walked toward the water to make out the shape of the waves in the pitch-black night. The wind was rough and I pulled my turtleneck up above my face just below my eyes. I stood a few feet from the surf and imagined the chain-smoking actresses as real-life mermaids, gorgeous and fierce, their scales shining. Who wouldn’t want to be protected by such creatures? I thought of Penny and Rebecca, who looked after each other as kids and later, too, as adults. For most of their lives they only had each other. I always had older brothers and cousins and uncles, and even though my being gay was not anyone’s first choice (including mine, initially), after I came out in high school anyone who made fun of me or worse was swiftly dealt with by my family. After a while, because they had to, the kids in my school accepted me. I wasn’t prom queen or anything, but I was cocaptain of the field-hockey team, vice president of my senior class, and I organized a volunteer soup kitchen on the weekends my junior and senior years. What I’m saying is that I wasn’t on my own. I felt different, unsure of how to make my way romantically, but I felt safe. My family gave me that, and the older I get, the more I see how lucky I was. All but one of my brothers moved East, my parents aren’t around anymore, and I have one uncle in a nursing home in Olympia. Rebecca is my family now. She has me and I have her and it’s whe
re we belong.
Penny didn’t have anyone the night she died. No mermaids, no Rebecca. Before that night on the beach, I had never considered just how alone Penny must have felt. How completely on her own in that danger she was. I turned back toward the Moonstone and started walking home. The only lights on now were from Room 6. Jane. Probably the most alone person I’ve ever met. I’d seen plenty of lonely travelers at the Holiday Inn in Seattle and even here, but no one like Jane, who seemed half in the world and half out of it. She has been, in the few times I’ve actually seen and spoken with her, nearly without life. Still, she has Cissy. How exactly, we do not know, but it is clear she has in her a formidable ally. I wonder if she sees it that way, is aware how far this stranger has taken her under her wing.
A few weeks after Jane checked in, Rebecca and I noticed that Cissy was coming and going from Room 6 just a little bit more than was usual. We then began to see her carrying around a giant green thermos, the kind you see on camping trips with a big silver, screw-off top that doubles as a bowl or cup depending on what’s inside. We’d never seen her with it before, but not long after Jane checked in we saw that thermos in Cissy’s hands most days. Rebecca and I eventually pieced together that she was dropping it off at Room 6 in the morning when she started cleaning the rooms and picking it up at the end of the day. At first, Jane would leave it outside the door on the cement stoop, but after a while we noticed that Cissy would step inside to pick it up—usually for only a minute or two but occasionally for longer.
This business with the thermos has been going on for over seven months. What those two could possibly speak about or have in common I can’t imagine, and I’ll admit at first it irked me to be excluded from whatever bond they’d developed, but now when I see Cissy heading to Room 6 with that giant green thermos, I just think, Thank God that sad woman pulled up to our motel, and not some other godforsaken place. Thank God she has someone to look out for her. Thank God any of us do.
Lydia
He’s explained it all before and it still makes no sense. In that voice of his that rises and falls and swoops like a song. You are a lucky lady, Lydia Morey. Lucky, indeed. This lottery you have won is over three million dollars and is only awarded once every two years. At times she does not hear a word he is saying, just his voice. She has fallen asleep with the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, his voice a lullaby, spinning tales of millions. The prize, he says, has never before been given to an American, and technically it cannot be, but Winton is offering to help her, putting himself on the line to steer her through the red tape so she can receive her money. This, he says with an ocean of warmth in his voice, is what I will do for you.
Sometimes she hangs up on him, leaves the receiver off the hook and turns out the light. But he always calls the next day. Usually between nine and ten in the morning and then again after six o’clock, after she’s mailed her bills, shopped for her few groceries—toilet paper, cans of Progresso soup, English muffins—and had her coffee at the coffee shop. Often, when she is unlocking the door to the apartment, she hears the phone ringing. The few times it hasn’t, she’s been disappointed. It’s a scam and she knows it. He is flirtatious and personal, warm and bullying, and she understands that she is being drawn in, manipulated, made dependent. She knows all this but still she picks up the phone. Occasionally, like a teenager who tells her mother to tell the boy she has a crush on that she’s not home when he calls, she will let it ring. But she will pick up the next day and she knows it. Winton knows it, too, because he always calls again. Lydia Morey, I missed you yesterday. You must have been out cutting a rug or breaking some poor boy’s heart. After a month of the calls and the talk of prize money and red tape and risk, Winton begins to apply a little pressure, set a clock to the proceedings. The three million dollars will go to someone else if she does not pay the international prize taxes. The first tax is $750, pennies compared to what she will have, and it is a sum the prize committee reimburses. They would pay it directly for her but it is not allowed. She must pay first and then the committee will send her that amount right away. Paying this tax, Winton says without music, is necessary to continue.
She pays. She drives to Walmart in Torrington, puts $750 on a money card as Winton suggested, and mails it to an apartment in Astoria, Queens, where a designated representative from the lottery lives. Walmart, Queens, money cards, reimbursements—she is amazed he thinks she will believe any of it. And still she’s not ready to step away. Not prepared just yet to come home in the evening each night knowing there will be no phone call. As well, there is also a thin, far-off hope that somehow the ludicrous scenario Winton has described is true. She has even allowed herself the fantasy of sending him money after she wins to pay for his schooling, to help him support his family. But it’s all a farce and she knows it will expire or she will end it soon, but not just yet. So she allows herself to think of the $750 as a test. A test she knows he will fail, and because he will, the farce will end and all will return to being as it was. She deliberately does not think this through, actively protects herself from recognizing how wasteful this is. She will see this to its end and she does not ask herself why.
And so she puts the money card in an envelope addressed to Theodore Bennett in Astoria, Queens, the prize official Winton mentioned. Winton also told her there should be no note inside and no return address on the envelope. And though the idea of $750 floating out there without a return address is intolerable, she still complies and drops the untraceable envelope in the mailbox in front of the Town Hall.
In the days that follow, the calls from Winton continue and she settles back into their established routine. A morning call she mostly avoids, an evening call she takes. She listens to him talk about his last girlfriend, who cheated on him and left him crushed, the son she never lets him see, his sick mother, his sister in jail. His world blinks to life over these calls. He is a jilted boyfriend, a dutiful and worrying son. He is twenty-eight, he says. He is taking classes at night to get a degree in accounting so he can quit his job with the lottery, which pays poorly and is only part-time. He would have quit months ago but he’d like to steer this year’s prize to Lydia before he goes. Just do this one last thing because he’d like to see a good woman like Lydia get the money. Not some European asshole, the type who usually takes the prize.
Over time his sister in jail becomes his cousin, his aunt, his niece. The class at night is for engineering, for hotel management, for graphic design. The girlfriend’s name is Carla, Nancy, Tess, Gloria. He is twenty-eight, twenty-four, thirty. The inconsistencies alarm Lydia at first and then amuse. Further proof that she’s right, that the whole thing is a hoax. But then Winton begins to ask again about her life. Questions he asked in the beginning but she deflected. Is she married, what does she do for work, does she have children? And now, because something else must begin on these phone calls for them to continue, she tells him about Earl Morey, her ex-husband. The redheaded boy who was a lot of fun and then none at all. Who called her Snacks and pinched her leg and butt and left small purple-and-yellow bruises. Who knocked her in the head with a phone book one night so hard it made her lose her balance the whole next day. Who stayed at the Tap with his brothers and cousins and uncles most nights and would come home drunk and, if she was lucky, sleep on the couch of their small apartment. She was nineteen and married, and within the year she hated him and his whole family and she could do nothing. When she finally confessed what was going on to her mother, she told her daughter to zip it and be grateful she’d found a man from a good family. She tells all this to Winton, and as she talks about this time, it’s as if she’s reading a bedtime story to her son when he was a boy, about a girl who made the wrong turn in the forest and had no way out. She talks and talks, just as Winton had in the beginning, and she hears him breathing on the other end of the phone. Only rarely does he ask a question or comment on anything she’s said, and if he does, it is punctuation and no more. What a fool, that stupid man, he has said.
A drunken fool. She does not mention other men, the ones who pursued her until they slept with her and then stopped calling. Nor does she mention Rex. And Luke, she says nothing about him.
Ten days after she mails the letter, a padded manila envelope with a Newark, New Jersey, postmark arrives, and in it are seven hundred-dollar bills and a fifty. No note, no paper of any kind. Just the money. Later that day, she tucks the roll of bills in the pocket of her fleece pullover and walks to the coffee shop. It is early February but Christmas decorations are still taped to the windows. They are the kind you buy at the drugstore or the supermarket: thin, cardboard Santas, plate-size snowflakes, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Along the ceiling and at the top of the windows are strung small, white lights, and on the counter by the register is a miniature artificial Christmas tree wrapped in a silver garland with a plastic angel on top. The money in Lydia’s pocket gives her an unfamiliar energy, a lift. She knows it’s hers, that she’s been given nothing, won nothing, but still the large bills and the way they arrived give her a surge. She drinks her coffee quickly, and when the check comes, she pays with the fifty. The waitress, Amy, who now looks like she is well into her eighth month, picks up the bill and returns the change without comment or any evidence of interest. Lydia leaves a five-dollar tip, pulls on her fleece jacket, and starts home.