Did You Ever Have A Family

by Bill Clegg

  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 Ju
ly 7, 2012, is a letter. The first word is Mom.

  Lydia

  She’s warm, feels her skin getting damp under her clothes, so midstride, without slowing, she takes off her fleece pullover and folds it across her left arm. She’s walking quickly. The cool air against her neck feels good. She breathes in deeply and wipes the sweat from her forehead. She remembers the money and double-checks the pocket to make sure it hasn’t fallen out. Seven hundred dollars and the change from the fifty she used to pay for her coffee at the coffee shop. She can’t believe the amount, or that she drove to the Walmart in Torrington to get the cash card Winton asked for and then mailed it away. Thank God, she thinks, it came back to her. She has enough money to live on from Luke’s insurance and selling his business, but only if she lives cheaply, as she does. She squeezes the wad of bills in her pocket and thinks with a pulse of relief, Winton said they’d refund the lottery tax and they did. She starts to let herself imagine the whole ridiculous scheme is real. It’s not so much the money that excites her as the possibility that Winton is telling the truth, that he’s the friend he’s sold himself to be. But so much of what he says does not add up. Is the refunded tax money just a way to get her to trust him? Set her up for a bigger haul? Winton did mention a handling charge a few phone calls before but said not to worry about it now, that it would be nothing compared to her windfall. She runs through the dozens of inconsistencies in his stories. When she challenged him once on the name of his ex-girlfriend, which changed nearly every time he mentioned her, he said, Oh, Miss Lydia, I am not supposed to be getting so personal with you. I color some of the details to keep some privacy and protect you if my bosses ever found out we got to know each other as well as we have. This was only a few nights ago, when the money had not yet arrived and she was beginning to worry. We must be on each other’s side, my friend, for us to get through this maze. For you to get your money and for me to leave this job. Can we be on each other’s side? he asked, and she answered after a short silence, We can.

  Maybe he is exactly who he says he is, Lydia thinks as she quickens her step. Maybe he’s not the enemy. When has she ever been right about anyone? She was wrong about Earl and Rex, and most men in between. And she was wrong about June. She remembers how at first she was sure the woman did not mean her or her son well. She could not fathom what this pampered New Yorker with a blond ponytail and perfectly manicured nails could want from her. And she had no interest in understanding what she wanted from her son. She remembers telling her to go away, to leave both of them alone. She had judged her before knowing anything about her. Had she also judged Winton too harshly? Might he actually be on her side? After all, he’d spent nearly three months talking on the phone to her. His stories kept changing but he kept telling them, kept calling each morning and each night. He did not go away, she reminds herself as she passes Edith Tobin’s flower shop, which is more than she can say for June.

  It is dark now and someone is behind her. She’s heard footfalls but she does not want to stop, does not want to turn around. She is only six or seven driveways away from her apartment building. Her forehead beads with sweat and she can feel her jeans sticking to her legs. She holds her fleece with both hands against her chest. Only five driveways now. She hears a shoe scrape the sidewalk and something—a stick, a pebble—knocks against her calf. Someone is right behind her. She stops, spins around, and before she sees who is there, explodes GET AWAY FROM ME! Standing less than a foot from her is a boy wearing a green, hooded sweatshirt. Up close, she is certain this is Kathleen Riley’s son. Same green eyes. Same thin lips. He looks directly at and then beyond Lydia, just over her shoulder. He begins to say something, I’m . . . um . . . I know you . . . , but stops and rushes past her down the sidewalk toward the end of Upper Main and out of sight.

  Lydia’s blood is racing and she struggles to control her breathing. She checks the money in her fleece pocket and is relieved to feel it still there. She hurries the short distance to her building and fumbles with the key. Her hands are shaking. As soon as she gets the door open and closes it behind her, there is immediately a loud slamming on the windowpane. BAM BAM BAM. The boy, she thinks, he’s followed her home. She pushes the full weight of her body against the door as she scrambles to lock the dead bolt. STOP! STOP THIS! she screams, her hands slick with sweat, the adrenaline streaking through her body like lightning. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? Her knees have buckled at the door. She cannot stand. As in nightmares from her childhood she has lost the power to move. The slamming returns and she crawls awkwardly away from the door. But when she gets enough distance to look back, she sees it is not the boy. It is a woman with a baby strapped in front of her in some kind of cloth carrier. Lydia closes her eyes and breathes. She calls out to the woman to hold on a second and manages to stand and walk into the kitchen to towel the perspiration from her face. Once her breathing steadies and her heart calms, she unlocks the door. I’m so sorry, she explains, I thought you were someone else. But the woman is unmoved. She is young, with tanned skin, short dark hair, and deep lines around her mouth and eyes. Once the door fully opens she steps forward and with her free hand strikes Lydia, hard, across her right cheek. THAT’s for my father! she yells. She pulls her arm back to strike again but hesitates and steps back outside the apartment door. She looks as nervous as she is angry. Whoever you are, if you don’t give me the money my father sent to you, I will call the police and have you arrested. And don’t deny it. . . . I know who you are and I know from the address those monsters in Jamaica gave him that you’re the one who he sent the money to. You people are destroying him. . . . He’s an old, lonely man and it’s disgusting that you’d prey on an easy target like him. He actually believes there are millions of dollars with his name on it somewhere! He actually believes you people are his champions! Stunned, Lydia reaches into her pocket, her fingers shaking, her mind still processing what she’s just heard. Whoever this woman’s father is must have fallen for Winton’s scam, too, she thinks, handing the woman the seven hundred-dollar bills along with the loose pile of twenties, fives, and ones. He must have believed, as she had, that he was paying the tax to advance closer to the big prize. And this woman, his daughter, has mistaken her to be part of the con and not just like him. An easy target, lonely, someone willing to believe lies and throw money away in order to not be alone. The woman leans in, snatches the money from Lydia’s hand, and tucks it into the pockets of her white corduroy trousers. The baby, who has until now remained silent, begins to cry. Whether it is a boy or a girl, Lydia cannot tell, but the crying becomes screaming—urgent, high-pitched screaming, as if someone has pinched the infant’s skin. Tiny hands, red and desperate, reach up from the swaddle of pale yellow cloth bundled against the woman’s chest. You need to stop what you are doing, she says seriously, oblivious to the exploding child. She holds Lydia’s gaze for one more beat and, as she pulls the door shut behind her, says seriously, You need to stop. The silence that follows is complete. There are no sounds in the apartment. No cars driving past or people hollering anywhere. Lydia stands next to the door, locks it, and leans against the wall. The phone rings and she lets it. It stops for a few minutes and then begins again and the pattern goes on for over an hour. Finally, she crosses the living room into the kitchen and waits. After a minute the phone rings again and she picks up. It is, of course, Winton. He speaks her name, once and then again, but she says nothing. She is not playing games or holding back. She has no words. The boy on the sidewalk, the slap, the screaming child. She has been shocked into silence. Winton speaks again. Lydia, come back to Earth. Come back down here to Mother Earth. She’s heard these words before. Who else said this to her? Rex. The last man she called a boyfriend. Come back to Earth, space cadet, he used to say. Touch down, spacey. Who else but Rex. She can still feel the sting from the woman’s slap on her cheek and something her mother used to say to her bubbles up. One of these days someone is going to knock some sense into you. It is not a happy memory; her mother would only ever say
it when she was angry or drunk, but something about it makes Lydia laugh. She pictures her mother at that kitchen table, wagging her finger, drinking her schnapps, barking her warnings. She cannot help but laugh.

  Lydia? Are you somewhere there? Winton. She forgot for a moment he was on the other end of the line. My dear Lydia, he says, my dear, what is wrong? She hears his concerned tone, the extra careful wording, but it does not soothe her. He continues to say her name, asks what could possibly be the matter. That voice, she thinks, and laughs again. I have sent money in the mail to someone I do not know, and I have been attacked in my own home. For a voice. A stranger’s voice.

  Tell me what troubles you, the voice coos. Tell me. Again, she thinks of Rex. The last man who lied to her as much as Winton has, she thinks, the last man like him who had the power to make her do things she knew were wrong. Again, she is quiet. After a long silence, Winton says again and gently, Tell me what’s wrong.

  Do you really want to know? she asks, feeling, against her will, the desire to tell him about her crazy evening. She holds the receiver to her ear and recognizes that besides Winton there is no one she can tell—about the boy following her home, the furious woman slapping her face, anything. She leans forward and drops the receiver to her lap. The voice in her hands is all she has and it’s nothing. She rocks gently and wishes she could vanish. She feels more alone now than in the weeks after Luke’s death. After a while, she hears Winton’s voice coming from the phone. She puts the receiver to her ear and hears him chanting to himself, almost singing. Oh, Miss Lydia, where have you gone? What have you done and where are you? Come back to me, miss.

  I’m here, she whispers. I never went anywhere. I’m right where I’ve always been.