by Bill Clegg
Winton’s voice falls to a whisper. Tell me a story, my dear Lydia. Take a load off your soul. Tell me the truth because it will set you free.
Lydia hears the creak of footsteps in the apartment above her. She listens to her upstairs neighbor walk across his kitchen, open the refrigerator door, and shut it softly. She hears the pop of a beer bottle opening and the clack of the tossed cap in the sink. She sits up straight, her back against the wooden chair. When she speaks, her voice scratches in her throat. I’ll tell you a story, Winton. The one about where I’ve always been.
Lolly
Mom,
I’m writing to you from the edge of the world. It truly feels like we are in some place between earth and heaven here on the beach in Moclips. We checked in two nights ago after driving for four straight days from New York. Can you believe we got pulled over in New Jersey on Route 3? Right out of the gate, bam, a $125 speeding ticket. I’m sure the cop saw Will’s Washington State plates and said, Let’s get him. Anyway, we thought it was a bad omen for our trip, but instead it turned out that every moment after has been charmed, like we’ve had a lucky star guiding us the whole way. Even when we got lost in Pennsylvania it led us to stay in the most beautiful little town that’s almost exclusively Amish. They couldn’t have been nicer. We’d heard about a group of teenagers who flipped their car—Amish kids getting drunk and living it up in their purgatory year between high school and marriage. The whole town seemed to be shaped around those dead kids. Like if you looked closely you could see each one in the places where they once were. It’s strange to say but I feel like I know them, a little. There was so much talk of them. That town was so sad but it was also beautiful to see a community need each other so much. And their faith. I have never believed in God though I can see how believing in one would help in the aftermath of the kind of tragedy they’d been through.
You can’t imagine how many stars fill the sky here. They are brighter than the moon. Or the sound of the wind and the crashing waves. Like freight trains outside the window. It’s not frightening, because for some reason this simple room at the edge of the world feels like the safest place I’ve ever been.
I know I’m rambling, Mom, but I’m in a mood, as Dad would say. Crossing this country, ending up here where Will grew up—I now understand why it was so important to him to show me—and the crazy wind has me thinking. It’s funny to think that the wind has a shape but it does. It becomes visible every once in a while—in rain being driven to the ground in sheets, or in the snow on the fields behind our house. I remember looking out the window of my room in the winter, watching the wind blow on the surface of the white fields, lifting and whipping the snow into spirals, and in a flash you could see this force that was always there come to life and reveal itself. I think it is this way with children and parents. They are always there and then suddenly through some shock or disappointment or great gesture or absence the child sees this person who was there all the while—invisible to them beyond their function to provide. This is how it’s been for me, with you. I only really saw you once you left Daddy, and I didn’t like what I saw. I couldn’t understand why you would leave him after all those years together. How you could choose your career over both of us. I still don’t understand if I’m really being honest. But it’s only lately that I can see that what I can and can’t see doesn’t matter. I don’t have the right to say who you are with or not and it is not my right to know. With Luke in your life now, you have really snapped into view as a woman, like me, with the full menu of wants and desires as the rest of us. I’m not saying this has been much fun or not embarrassing; I’m ashamed to say it’s both. But it has shaken things up. I’m sorry I refused to meet him in New York. I didn’t want him to overshadow Will. And if I’m honest about it, I think I was worried how I would react and I didn’t want Will to see me out of control.
Speaking of control, I guess Dad has come into view more, too. I’ve known for a long time about his desperate womanizing. It’s always made me sad, but it’s something I never held him accountable for. I blamed it on you, as I have many things. It never occurred to me until recently that maybe his childish way with women preceded your leaving and that it most likely had a lot to do with it. I can’t believe this never really occurred to me before. I also can’t claim to have come to some of these ideas on my own. Early on with Will he told me that it would be a good idea to question everything I thought I knew about Dad, you, your marriage, my childhood, myself even. Actually, he suggested that whenever I was resistant to a differing opinion about anything, I should try this out. Here I think he was talking about politics, him being much more sympathetic to our president than I am. Still, it’s been difficult to pull back the curtain on old stories and old opinions. I’ve been doing it for a while now and it’s humbling to see things more as they were and less as I have felt them to be over the years. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been punishing you for a long time for not making the choices I wanted you to make, and as Will snores next to me now and before the sun comes up in a few hours I just want you to know that I see things a little more clearly now and I hope you can forgive me for being unable to sooner. I still get furious when I think of how you left and the way you made all these decisions without including me. You just announced the new order of things as if none of it had anything to do with me. Can you possibly imagine how that felt at fourteen? Or how lonely it was after you left? Did you even think about me when you made all these decisions? Did you ever think how much I would miss you?
Here I go. It takes so little to go back to all that. But I suppose that’s why I’m writing to you now. To be completely honest, it’s something Will suggested I do. To write to you without worrying about you reading the words. To just say what I feel without risking being held to any of it. He told me to do this months ago but every time I tried I couldn’t. But tonight feels different. Something about this place. And Will. I want with you what he has with his parents. It’s so uncomplicated with him! He just loves them and it’s so easy and affectionate between them. I want that but I don’t know how to get it. It’s like if I just let you off the hook for everything, I’ve betrayed myself. Or the self I was. And that’s when I get stuck. But as Will and I move ahead together, I’m feeling like it’s getting easier to let go of some of the stuff I’ve been hanging on to.
What I want to say is that I don’t want to go back to or stay stuck in the way things have been between us. Everything seems so delicate and brief and I don’t want us to be so apart anymore. I don’t know how to say any of this to you, which is why I am writing it down. I hope I give you this someday.
Love,
Lolly
Silas
He is pedaling as fast as he can out of town and toward home. He cannot shake the frightened look on her face, her voice yelling. He has imagined them meeting many times but never once the way it went tonight. When he’s pictured it, she is warm, comforting, tucking him into her large bosom and stroking his head. He has imagined her without her clothes, kissing his chest, holding his dick. He has imagined her cutting his dick off, too, to punish him, and throwing it in Indian Pond. He has imagined Lydia Morey every which way, but never how he saw her tonight. She was terrified, and maybe in one of his fantasies it would have turned him on, but this time it did just the opposite. It rattled him. Exposed her beyond the limited versions of her he’d been working with. This was not lonely or angry or lusty or grieving. This was human. And it’s much more than he can handle.
He turns off Tate Lane down a dirt road. Once he’s out of sight of passing cars, he jumps off the bike and let’s it crash to the ground. He unhooks the knapsack from his shoulders, the yellow canvas hardly visible. He cannot see his hands or fingers clearly, but he knows the surfaces and shapes of his stuff: Tupperware container, bowl, water bottle, bong, and lighter. He sloppily packs an untidy hit and lights it. He smokes it down and quickly packs and lights a second. The pot is a mix of some old stuff from Charlie and a few n
ew buds he stole from a neighbor who hides his plants in plain sight along the back row of his vegetable garden. It’s a strong blend, and soon he feels a thick film rise between this moment and the last few hours. He regards it all now, dimly, as through a foggy snow globe, and for that he is grateful. He leans against a tree and sees Lydia’s face again. He can now slow the incident down and watch her eyebrows rise, her mouth widen as she yells at him. She’s covering her chest with her coat, but now that he’s in charge of the scene, he has her drop it and he looks down her low-scooped T-shirt as she bends to pick it up. Now the T-shirt is sweaty and soaked, and through the translucent cloth he sees pink skin, dark, wide nipples. The vision relaxes him, helps him shake off the feelings from before. He packs up his gear, zips the knapsack, and throws it over his shoulder. He walks his bike back to Tate Lane. Above him, the moon is nearly full and glows pink in the chilly night. Thin clouds inch slowly across the sky, and on the surface of the moon he begins to make out a face. At first it is a rough mask with uneven eyebrows and lopsided whiskers, the mouth and nose disfigured and huge. Then it comes alive. He knows this face. It’s the dragon he saw last May on his way home from June Reid’s house. Back then, his ruby wings and infinite tail filled the sky, but now they are invisible, cloaked in the blue-black night. Only the snout, the devil eyes, and the smoke pouring from its throat are visible. It’s him. He knows he is hallucinating, but still, his hands shake as he pulls his bike toward him. As he gets on, he hears something. A voice, a growl, a barking dog. He cannot tell. But in that noise he hears GO as clear and precise as anything he has ever heard. He begins to pedal and looks up at the moon. The dragon’s face is fully articulated: snout high, mouth wide. The eyes do not shift their gaze from him. He looks behind the moon and begins to see the outline of its mammoth body, the silhouette of its batlike wings etching the sky. He is in the middle of the road, pedaling slowly and looking up and behind him at the same time. When he starts to trace the ridges on its epic tail, the handlebars twist in his hands, the front tire jerks to the left, and the bike collapses onto the pavement. As he falls, landing on his side, he hears a crack underneath him, the loose arrangement of bong and Tupperware breaking his fall, and then the bong, he can feel as well as hear, breaking to bits. He sits in the road, checks his limbs to see that everything still works. He feels along his side and shoulders to make sure none of the glass has speared him. He can detect no serious injuries, but he’s scraped the skin off his palms, and the exposed flesh begins to sting. Sitting in the middle of the road, he dares to look up, and sure enough the dragon is beaming, amused, directly at him. What the fuck? What! he calls out, half crying from frustration and fear. GO? Go where? WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GO?
He is demanding answers from the enchanted arrangement of cloud and night and moon, but he knows where he has to go. He has not been back there since May when he ran across the lawn and up the driveway to the road. Fuck, he mumbles, pulling the bike from the road and wiping the loose asphalt from the cuts on his hands. He rides in the direction of home but passes Wildey Road, where he lives, and continues on Indian Pond. He refuses to look up at the night sky until he gets there, and as he passes the pond, he can see the pattern of blues and grays and blacks reflecting in the water. He cannot help but look, and the kaleidoscopic pattern shimmering there is both ominous and beautiful. Oncoming lights from up the road break the spell and he slows his bike until the car passes. By the time it does, he is beyond the church, and soon he is at the top of the driveway.
June
She knows now where this will end. Where the land runs out and there is only sea, and between the two, a room. The pages of the letter are tucked into the orange notebook that sits on top of the other two in the passenger seat next to her. At the Super 8, she read each word, again and then again, until the manager demanded she leave immediately or pay for another night. The handwriting was familiar, undeniably Lolly’s, but the words were not. They were from someone she only dimly remembered, from before she and Adam told Lolly they were divorcing. After that, Lolly was never as candid or open or as affectionate with June. She could see in the letter Lolly’s conflicted attempt to describe a future she had yet to occupy. She never got there, June thinks, remembering the cold exchange with Luke on the porch the night before the wedding. But she was trying. Wherever she’d been by the time she died, it was much closer than June knew. To be given a glimpse now was a bitter miracle, a ghostly caress that left more regret than solace.
As she crosses out of Idaho into Washington State, she breathes in Lolly’s scent. She’d sniffed it earlier, wafting off the pages, faintly, the strange perfume that smelled like hot chocolate that Will gave her during their semester in Mexico and continued to supply her with after. June rummaged through Lolly’s bag and found the small, brown-and-white bottle and sprayed her wrists, lightly, and the pages, before folding them into the notebook and leaving the Super 8. The smell of cocoa and cinnamon fills the car. How could she have allowed so much distance between them?
She hears Luke’s voice, yelling, as if in answer, Jesus, June, throw it! He is running away from her in the lawn behind the house. Throw it! Throw it! He is shouting to her as she kneads the hard plastic rim of the Frisbee in her hands. What are you afraid of? He calls, standing still now, arms crossed against his chest. It was the second summer, the one after he moved in, and he’d insisted they go outside and toss the Frisbee. They’d made it as far as the lawn, but something in her refused to throw it. She can’t remember what it was—the childishness of the game? That he had asked for something, demanded it, and she had the power to refuse? After a while he walked off, chilly and disappointed. There were moments like this when she could not be what he wanted and yet he would insist. It was like a game of chicken and she always won. She never blinked, and as with the Frisbee, he usually stormed off in a huff. Just like Lolly had so many times. She remembers how that yellow Frisbee sat in the lawn for weeks, neither of them willing to retrieve it. Luke even mowed around the thing and let a little thicket of grass grow up in a rough circle where it lay. He never mentioned it; nor did she. And then one day it was gone.
Her right hand strays from the steering wheel and rests on the notebook next to her. Her fingers brush the worn surface of the cover and then she pulls it to her lap, where she lets it rest. She breathes in Lolly’s scent and relaxes her foot from the gas pedal. She is careful to maintain precisely the speed limit, as she does not want anything to stop her from getting to the Moonstone. If she stops for gas only, she will be there before evening. There is no reason to rush other than the feeling she’s had since reading the letter: that she needs to see the inside of that room, hear the wind howl and the waves crash as Lolly described, see the same stars and moon, breathe the same salt air. It is not her daughter she is driving to, but it is as close as she will ever get.
She is hours away. She will drive until the road runs out, and she will find that room, and she will stay.
Dale
Our plan had been to wait a year before heading up from Portland to Moclips with Will’s ashes, but after the first gentle day in February, when the cold rains slowed and the relief of spring was, if not actually near, imaginable, Mimi said it was time. I called the Moonstone and asked if Room 6 was free the following weekend, and the woman who answered said it was not and that likely it wouldn’t be for a long while. Someone had checked in at the beginning of July and never left. I thought it was strange, since the Moonstone is hardly the kind of place you imagine someone calling home, but I was disappointed, too, as Room 6 meant something to Will. It was where he proposed to Lolly, and where he stayed when he returned to attend Joseph Chenois’s memorial. It would have been nice to stay in Room 6, see what Will saw during those trips back to Moclips, but it wasn’t the reason we were going.
Will never told us where he wanted to be buried or have his ashes scattered—why would he at twenty-three years old?—but we knew. A stretch of beach, no longer than a mile, runs between the
Moonstone and the Quinault reservation, the ocean on one side and the small, gray house where he grew up, with us, on the other. There was no place he loved more. No place he felt as safe. It was his home and it gave us some comfort to think of him there. So for the first time since we’d lived there together as a family, we returned to Moclips.
When we arrived at the Moonstone, the dusty black wagon parked by the Dumpster looked like it hadn’t been driven in years. The blue license plate below the back hatch was hardly visible, but we knew right away it was from Connecticut and we knew it was June’s. My first instinct was to stop the car, put it in reverse, and drive away. I felt like we had stumbled upon something too personal to barge in on. I assumed, since this was where Will and Lolly got engaged, she had come to be close to her daughter, just as we had come to be close to our son. Unsure what to do, we parked the car next to the office and sat silently for a long time. Eventually, Mike and Pru said we were being ridiculous and that maybe it wasn’t even June’s wagon. So we went into the office, met the new owners, and got keys to two rooms. Rooms 5 and 7, the only two left and of course on either side of Room 6. None of us mentioned to Rebecca and Kelly that we knew June. Not even when Kelly apologized again about Room 6 not being available. We didn’t decide on this in the car or even signal nonverbally to each other in the office; it was just something we all understood. If she was there, we’d leave her alone as best we could, though given the steps she’d taken to avoid us and everyone else it was hard to imagine she’d stay once she knew we’d arrived.
I don’t know why or how, but through all these months of June’s not returning our phone calls or responding to the letters we mailed to her, care of her lawyer in New York, I knew she was okay. Mimi had wondered if we shouldn’t make a greater effort to locate her: call the artists she’d represented, interrogate the lawyer, track down relatives, though there was never any mention of uncles or aunts or cousins. A few weeks after Christmas, I called information and asked for Lydia Morey’s phone number and got it right away. I didn’t know who else to call, and at first, maybe because of the speculation that her son, Luke, may have had something to do with the accident, I’d put it off. But she was the only person from that town we knew who might know where June was. Besides Luke, June was not a terribly connected person. She had no friends who we knew to be close to her. She had left her job at a gallery in London years before, and whatever work life she had was, to us, invisible. By the number of people who’d turned up at the church that morning and by the pictures on June’s bookshelves and walls, it appeared she had lived a full and peopled life, but it didn’t seem like anyone, besides Luke, had stuck. Including, unfortunately, her daughter, who, according to Will and from what we could see ourselves, mostly stayed away. Given this, it’s maybe not so surprising that Lolly clung to our family. Will often joked that she settled on him only so she could get to us. And it’s true, I did notice how she would sometimes watch Will with Mimi or with Pru and Mike. She would watch them like her nose was pressed to the glass wall of an aquarium, watching exotic fish move in water, or how a scientist would observe rare bats in the wild. She said to us when we first met her in Mexico City that her parents didn’t know how to do it, and when we asked her what, she said, Everything. It was sad to hear a child speak so frankly and judgmentally about her parents, and for a while Mimi worried that Lolly was too cynical, too tough-minded and negative for Will. I worried, too, but Will was clearly in love, and I knew that nothing could be done if someone felt that way about another person, especially your child. Lolly was different, certainly on the self-centered and selfish side, but she was at her core kind and she adored Will and we could do nothing, so we embraced her. I think Will sensed that despite her girlish manner, something was broken in her. Mimi says wounds can sing a beguiling song, and for Will—who from boyhood felt compelled to fix and help and take care of nearly everything and anyone in his path—Lolly’s song was irresistible.