Did You Ever Have A Family

by Bill Clegg

  The town is silent, every light is off besides the streetlamps that light their usual circles. It is late but Silas is awake, and he is not nervous. He steps across the front porch of Lydia’s apartment building and knocks on the door. Soon, she is in front of him. She is standing behind the glass window in the door, a gray robe folded across her chest, her hair falling around her face and catching the light from the kitchen behind her. She will not unlock this door, she is saying, but he is not bothered. She will call the police, she warns, but he does not budge. He will wait until she trusts him. He will stay as long as he has to this time. And then he will tell her.

  Lydia

  The truth will set you free. Funny, she thinks as the flight attendant demonstrates how to buckle the seat belts and breathe through the oxygen mask, how it would take a con artist and a kid destroyed by secrets to set her on this path, put her on an airplane for the first time in her life. The truth will set you free, dear Lydia, Winton said in his singsong way on that last phone call. Because it is the only thing that can. He was only trying to engage her in conversation that night, but he nudged to an end what had gone on too long. The truth was something she had hidden or bent all her adult life, and she had suffered and caused others to suffer because of it. Silas, that poor tortured boy, showed her by telling the truth that this was no longer a life she could live. Silas, who she at first wanted to strangle for being so stupid, for making the choice he did to save himself; but as painful and senseless as what he told her might seem to anyone else, she understood. She understood bad choices made from fear, acted on out of a misguided sense of survival. She would never call the police to tell them what he told her. What he did he can never take back, and that will be punishment enough. He’d carried his secret as far as he could and then let it go. It was time she did, too.

  She has gathered everything and organized it chronologically in folders wrapped in red rubber bands: report cards, letters to Santa, articles in newspapers about breaking state records, getting the scholarship to Stanford, photographs of shaking hands with the governor, dressed up in a tuxedo for the prom, shirtless on a summer day washing his car. There is, too, the one article in the local paper about Luke’s arrest. Why she cut it out at the time and saved it all these years she does not know. But it is folded neatly with the others, the headline Wells Swim Champ Arrested for Drug Trafficking above a few short sentences reporting how Luke was taken into custody after more than a pound of cocaine was found in his car and in the apartment he shared with his mother. This, too, she will show to George and explain her part. The only picture of Luke with June is one she took in the parking lot of the church the night of Lolly’s wedding rehearsal. She kept the film in her camera until this week, when she walked it to the pharmacy to be developed. Only three pictures were on the roll: two of Will and Lolly and one of Luke and June standing in front of his truck—him smiling into the camera, her serious, distracted by something to the left of the frame. Then there are the articles of what came after, which she printed at the library from the computer. These she did not read or look at, but folded quickly as they spooled from the printer and later tucked in with the rest. It is not everything, but she has gathered as much as she can to tell George the story of their son.

  The morning after Silas stood on her front porch, Lydia walked to the library and sat down at a computer to see what she could find. She typed into the Google search box the letters that spelled George King, the name on the business card she kept for years and eventually threw away. She kept it through the pregnancy, which she did not expect, but when she found out she was three months along, she knew who the father was. Earl was in a nightly blackout so he had no idea they hadn’t had sex in more than six months. No man ever crowed louder when he found out he was going to be a father. She let him carry on, but she held on to that business card, tucked it deep in her wallet, and waited for the storm that was coming. She knew it was going to be rough, that most likely it would be clear to everyone right away that Earl was not the father, but she knew on the other side there was a strong chance she’d be free and she’d have a child. She held on to that card through the expected divorce and the first lonely years after, with no alimony or support of any kind from Earl, no support from anyone but her mother, and even that was at arm’s length, with conditions, and scornful. Many times she almost called that number. But she didn’t want to complicate a life she knew was already complicated. Not until Luke started swimming was it clear her baby could do something better than anyone else, was going to be all right on his own someday without his mother, and without the help of a father he never knew. This is when she ripped up the card; the only-in-an-extreme-emergency button she never pushed.

  George King. After a few pecked letters on the computer keyboard, she had an address, an obituary for his wife—cancer, eleven years after he’d been in Wells—a business address, and a number, which she later called. After three rings the line clicked to an automated outgoing message, and she listened for an option that would confirm he still worked there. For George King, press one, the generic voice spoke. For Rick King, press two. Over thirty years later and George King was right where he was then. Working with his brother in Atlanta, Georgia. It seemed too easy to find him. She played the message again and pressed one. She had no intention of speaking to him but wanted to see what would happen. A young Southern woman answered brightly, George King’s office. Hello? Heart thumping, Lydia immediately hung up. After a few more keystrokes at the library, pictures appeared on the screen. Here was the man she knew for less than three weeks, who asked her questions, listened to the answers, and who was, then, as lost and fearful as she was. He looked much the same, but thicker and balding, gray now dominating what remained of his coarse and closely cut hair and beard. In one of the photos he had won a golf championship at a country club, and another was a group shot of a high school reunion. Both were photos taken in the last three years. It surprised her to see him handsome, tall, and distinguished. He had been, then, in his midthirties, a young father, panicked about the future—money, his wife, his troubled son, his pushy brother—but here he was a successful man nearing retirement. He wore the sort of clothes worn by the men from New York Lydia worked for, and in his eyes was none of the startled and still-clinging youth she remembered. Yet the kindness she found there when she needed it, this she could see. Looking at these few photos, the first glimpses she’d had of George King since that last morning at the Betsy, she could see the same high forehead, wide smile, and thin, almost feminine, eyebrows. Here was Luke if he had grown to late middle age, the man who would have grown old with June and who would someday, maybe, she thinks for the first time now, have met his father. Lydia’s deal with Luke was that she’d tell him when he was twenty-one, and as a kid and in high school it became an every-so-often, light running joke between them. Denzel’s going to want me to change my name to Washington after we meet, right? he’d joke. Because that may cost him a few dollars. He’s got some years to make up for, don’t you think?

  At twenty-one, Luke wasn’t interested in anything she had to say, and later, in that first year after June brought them back into each other’s lives, they tiptoed around it, were moving cautiously toward the heavy subjects. They were being careful with each other, taking their time. We’ll get there, Lydia told June once when she’d pressed about it, but there’s no rush now, we have the rest of our lives.

  The day after she called George’s office, she called a 1-800 number for American Airlines that she found in the back of a travel magazine at the library and asked for a flight from Hartford, Connecticut, to Atlanta, Georgia. This was the first plane ticket she’d ever purchased, the first time she would travel in anything but a car.

  Three days later an envelope with a Washington State postmark arrived in her mailbox. After she opened it and read Mimi Landis’s short note on motel stationery to let her know where June was living and the contact details there, she called the airline again. She read her confirmatio
n number over the phone and when she finished asked if she could change the ticket to fly somewhere else first. The impatient woman on the other end asked where, and Lydia answered, Seattle, Washington.

  June

  Outside, the ocean crashes. She is dressed, her linen jacket is still on, and the bed she lies on is made. Something wakes her, and as her body tenses, she opens her eyes long enough to recognize the room, see the faintest light coming from behind the blinds. I’m here, she thinks, and relaxes again into the mattress. She pulls the pillow closer and tucks her legs toward her chest as she falls back to sleep.

  The screen door slams. It is morning. The wooden folding chair she has fallen asleep on is now covered in dew. She is damp and her bones ache and he has come back. She stands and stretches and steps out of the tent onto the lawn where she met Luke four years ago when he came to clear fallen limbs after a tropical storm had blown them everywhere. It’s a disaster, she said that day, and he stopped and said, amused but with a gentle authority, as if he were speaking to a child, Oh, it’s not so bad. Not really. She remembers seeing his face for the first time and how thrown she was. How she reacted as she had before with a sculpture or installation or painting so exquisite and so stirring that she could not take it all in at once. It was the same with Luke. Eyebrow, forearm, cheekbone, neck, lower lip, eyes, bicep, mole. And the most beautiful brown skin. She had never been so struck by the physical appearance of a man before. Women, on rare occasion. Some collision of hair and skin and angle of light amid an origami of fabric and jewelry. But in faded green T-shirt and worn Levi’s, this man who had come to clear branches away presented a riddle of bone and skin and eyes that left June speechless. Oh, no, it’s a disaster all right, she remembers saying again, and how before he spoke, he smiled.

  Crossing the lawn, she can see them both as they were, standing in a mess of fallen branches, the moment before meeting. Only now, damp with dew and stiff from strange sleep, does she recognize how unlikely and lucky that moment was, how she has until now taken it for granted, remembered Luke’s arrival with a kind of regret, experienced his staying as a disruption, a complication, as if love were an inconvenience thrust on her, uninvited. She had welcomed him as a disaster and she was wrong. She has wasted this time and she has held him away.

  When she has crossed half the distance between the tent and the house, she wants to call out to him and nearly does, but it is early and everyone is still asleep. She will be there soon, she tells herself. Through the porch door and into the house—the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, wherever he is. Soon, she will find him, and for once she will not worry or be annoyed or impatient or afraid.

  She hears him moving quickly through the house. He has shouted something but she is too far away to hear. It sounds like her name.

  She will ask him to forgive her. And she will say yes.

  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.