Did You Ever Have A Family (12 page)

So when Will told us he wanted to go to Amherst College, we were speechless. Tucked away in the hills of Massachusetts, the school might as well have been on Mars as far as we were concerned. Still, Will broke it to us sweetly, and the three of us cried and decided to call his sister and brother together to give them the news. It was the last year we lived in the house in Moclips. When Will left for college, we sold it to a couple who taught at the college in Aberdeen. They were newly married and planning a family, and what better fit could we have found. As teachers ourselves, elementary school, not college, we thought it was a good omen. We had bought the place from a widow who had never had children with her husband, but from what we gathered over the years, they’d been a tight pair, good people. We would still see
her all the time, walking the road between the Moonstone where she worked and her sister’s place, but Cissy was never much for small talk. We thought she was on the rude side of things when we first met her. We imagined that maybe she was holding a grudge against the young family who barged into her home and took over, but once we got to know Cissy, we began to understand that this was just her way. She didn’t have a lot to say. After we moved in, she still came around, flipped the fuse switch when the power blew, jiggled the toilet just so when it wouldn’t flush, even would bring overflow of firewood and kindling from her place to our porch in the winters. The one time I tried to pay her for cleaning the gutters she turned her back to me and walked away.

As a kid, Will was mesmerized by Cissy. It’s understandable: she was over six feet tall and had a long, black braid with silver streaks the size of an anaconda. For a little guy she was an absolute giant. The summer we moved in, Will offered to help her clean the rooms at the Moonstone, and she said sure. He’d asked our permission and we just expected she’d say no, but when he came back from across the road and said he’d be back in a few hours, we couldn’t go back on our word.

She paid him a buck each day. He was ten years old, scrubbing toilets and making beds and hauling garbage. Of course he soon began to give us cleaning lessons. Among other things, he showed us the secret to creasing hospital corners when making a bed and how to fold and
hang towels properly. We’d ask him what he and Cissy talked about.
Oh, nothing,
he’d say.
Cissy doesn’t talk
. Funny that a restless kid like Will never got impatient with that silence of hers. He was precocious, a talkative boy full of questions and opinions. To be honest, it’s impossible to imagine the two of them in the Moonstone rooms—him emptying wastepaper baskets and putting new rolls of toilet paper in the dispensers and Cissy scrubbing the tubs and vacuuming. But the two were quite a pair, and it lasted on and off until the summer Will turned thirteen, when he began to become interested in the Quinault, the Native American tribe that had an active and large reservation up the beach. After that summer, he spent most of his time getting involved in any way he could on the reservation. He did anything they asked. He scraped and painted garages, the canoe sheds, their houses. A guy there named Joe Chenois, an elder, took a shine to Will and told him he’d spend one hour teaching him canoe carving for every week he worked on the reservation. Joe led Will to be interested in the law. Joe had been instrumental in the eighties in leading the fight to reclaim thousands of acres of Quinault land. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he was an organizer and an activist, a leader, and he became expert in Native American laws, and the Constitution as it pertained to tribal sovereignty. Joe was Will’s hero, and when he died of lung cancer in the fall of Will’s freshman year in college, Will flew back to Seattle and drove down the coast to the memorial. We’d sold the
house by then and it was the first time Will would stay at the Moonstone as a guest. Moonstone Beach, Moclips, and the history of the area was always more important to Will than it was to the rest of us. He’d read books on the massacres and the government land steals and tell us the stories with tears in his eyes. On the reservation they called him Little Cedar, a name Joe gave him the year Will carved his first and only canoe.

Lolly Reid was not the kind of girl we expected Will to fall for. We always thought he’d team up with the kind of girls he dated in high school. Outdoorsy, political girls. Earnest girls who were often pretty but unpolished. As disorganized and flighty as Lolly could be, she was polished. More beautiful than pretty. She had long blond hair and was stylish in a New York City kind of way. She read books but not about Indian massacres or fracking in the Catskills. She read novels, modern ones about families and secrets and love. She spoke French and Italian and knew a lot about contemporary art from her mother, who ran galleries in New York and London. After college, Lolly worked in the photo department of a fashion magazine in New York. She was sophisticated culturally but not politically and was the kind of girl who, we thought, was invisible to Will. They met on a study-abroad program in Mexico sponsored by Vassar the spring semester of their junior year. Will went to Mexico because he was fascinated by the government’s stewardship of the Mayan tribal culture, and he also wanted to
refine his Spanish so that he could be a bilingual public defender. Lolly, on the other hand, decided at the last minute to follow her previous boyfriend into the program, but broke up with him a few days after they arrived, after she met our son. She explained this to us the night we met her, at a small restaurant she and Will liked to go to near their campus in Mexico City.

Who knows what draws people together? Lolly seemed unformed to us. Young. She was colorful and chatty, full of stories, but had few questions. She drew you in, but once you were there, you sensed she could vanish without warning. She had a way of telling two stories at once, looking behind you when she spoke. She seemed like someone who covered her bases, kept several balls in the air so she always knew she would have at least one in hand at the end of the day. She was clever, but not careful. She was, we recognized immediately, someone who could hurt our son. Around Lolly he was fatherly, patient, mesmerized. We watched him sweep up tortilla crumbs that had fallen down and around the table in front of her during the meal. He did this not once but three times, and as he did, she continued to talk, animate what she was saying with expressive eyes, passionate tones, and wild hand gestures, all the while absentmindedly spilling crumbs as she took bites of her food between words. Five months after that dinner, from the Moonstone in Moclips, he called to tell us he had proposed.

Lolly was the new Cissy, the new Joe Chenois, the new cause, the new Amherst. She was somewhere Mimi and Pru and Mike and I had not been and could not go. Will always had that knack for frontiers, even if they were in our own backyard. But marrying Lolly felt different, risky and final at the same time.

They both still had their senior years to finish and I’m ashamed to admit that Mimi and I hoped the distance between Amherst and Vassar would be far enough to make their engagement seem like a summer folly. It is true we never got to know her well. Pru spent a week with her before the wedding. She asked Will if it would be okay. She’d only met Lolly twice before, and she said she just wanted to be with them, help in whatever way she could. Pru called us each of those days before we flew East for the wedding. She said she was beginning to understand Will’s connection with Lolly. Twice we patched Mike in on these phone calls. It was like we’d sent an explorer to the new world and we hung on every word she used to describe what she saw and heard and how she felt. She described the old stone farmhouse where June and her boyfriend lived, the wide fields behind the house and the acres of trails on the Unification Church land, which their property bordered. She described everyone: June’s boyfriend, Luke, who was much younger and, she said, beautiful. His mother, Lydia, who was hard to get to know, a bit standoffish but not in an arrogant way, more like a hurt animal would be. And June, who she
said reminded her of Will: strong, competent, organized, but, like Will, a little undone around Lolly, deferential, in awe.

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
.

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?