Did You Ever Have A Family (24 page)

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 confirmation 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
.

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.

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.