Did You Ever Have A Family (16 page)

I met Lydia the day Robert was moved to the rehab unit and his doctor asked that I come back at the end of the day. For the first time since I’d checked in, I’d returned to the motel before nightfall. I could hear the vacuum cleaner going as I put the key in the door, and for a second I hesitated before opening. I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to see who performed the daily magic of tidying the room and arranging my things so carefully. I enjoyed and imagined into the mystery, so before I turned the key in the lock, I stopped and listened to the hum of the vacuum, the sound of its being pushed along the floor and bumping gently into furniture. I must not
have noticed it turn off because without warning the door opened, and suddenly there she was. In jeans and clinging white T-shirt, a pile of brown hair knotted loosely on her head, at least ten years younger than I was. Young. Beautiful. Lydia.

She rushed off that first day, and neither of us said more than awkward hellos. I came back the following morning after an early breakfast with Robert and she had not yet arrived. For some reason, I felt nervous. I began cleaning up the room and folding my clothes, which is what I ought to have done from the beginning. Her job was to clean the rooms, not pick up after the guests. I stopped short of making the bed and instead made sure the toilet was flushed, and I tidied a pile of hospital paperwork scattered on the desk. She turned up before noon and didn’t bother with knocking. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to her I’d be there, so she just used her key and came right on in. I was sitting in the chair by the bed and remained silent as she set her large plastic bucket with cleaning supplies down on the carpet inside the door. She was wearing the same jeans as the day before and again a T-shirt, but this time light blue instead of white. I said good morning and she screamed.

What happened over the next three weeks is not something I’m proud of, but it is not a regret. Not like so much else is. Lydia Morey was a sad young woman trapped in a bad marriage, and I was a frightened man who knew his wife would soon be dead. There was more—she
was sexy. Young, healthy, and underneath those tight jeans and T-shirts, she had the curvy figure of a pinup. And though she was troubled, she was also tough in ways that let me know she’d be okay. That she’d figure her life out somehow and survive. I hope she did.

Mostly, we just talked. She told me about the father she did not know, her mother’s sharp tongue and how she bullied her to stay with her husband despite his teasing and his violence. She talked about wanting to run away. Driving to some town in the Middle West somewhere where no one knew her and where she could begin again. It was surprising and sad to see someone so young feel so hopeless. I listened but I offered no solutions, no advice. How could I? My life was in tatters and I hadn’t a clue what to do. She listened to me tell my tale of woe, and we were able to laugh at it all, even the overdose, even the cancer. Our lives felt unreal and far away while we were in that motel room. As if we were telling stories of other people’s lives to each other, not our own. Maybe it’s what we both needed then. I don’t know. What I do know is that it didn’t feel bad or wrong. I’d never been unfaithful to Kay in the eighteen years of our marriage. Never been seriously tempted, either. But before I left the Betsy, two days before I returned to Atlanta, I went to bed with Lydia. It started when she kissed me. First on my forehead and then on my lips. We had been sitting on the bed and there had been a long silence. I had just told her I was taking Robert back to Atlanta to a hospital
where he could continue his therapy. There was nothing to say. We both knew I would never come back to Wells, Connecticut, and to the Betsy. Our days together were about to be over. So she kissed me. And I kissed her back.

To this day I remember those hours with Lydia Morey as some of the sweetest and most desperate of my life. I wonder if she remembers them at all.

There are barely any clothes in Lolly’s bag: one bathing suit, one sundress, panties, flip-flops, flats, two T-shirts, and a pair of men’s pajamas stolen from Adam years ago. There are more vitamin bottles and notebooks than garments.

The man who reintroduced himself as Brody had walked her back to the car and drove her to a Super 8 motel less than a mile down the road. When she said she had no ID, he checked her in with his credit card and driver’s license. He carried Lolly’s duffel bag into the room, scribbled his number down, and told June he’d take the Subaru to his friend’s garage nearby to put on a real tire and check the rest. He’d return it in the morning.

Right away, she collapsed. Curled under the sheets, the first she’d felt for more than a week, and slept until morning. She was awake when Brody came by to give her the car keys. She’d already been to the ATM in the lobby to get him money for the tire and the motel room. It was only two hundred dollars, the maximum she could withdraw. When he pushed it away, she folded the bills
and slipped them into his jeans pocket.
You got more than you expected when I asked you for help,
she said, more words than she’d spoken in weeks.

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 July 7, 2012, is a letter. The first word is
Mom.

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
.