Did You Ever Have A Family (8 page)

It turned out later that Luke had a life insurance policy and Lydia was, inexplicably, the beneficiary. He also had a will, the kind you download from the Internet and get notarized, which he did. He left Lydia what he had—his savings, his landscaping company, and his belongings, which, because he’d been living at June’s, were destroyed. Between the insurance and the savings and the twenty thousand the Waller brothers paid her for the landscaping business—two trucks, a few wheelbarrows, a
backhoe, and a pile of tools—she could exist as she lived now for a long time without working. For most of her life she had dreamed of the day she wouldn’t have to stoop and scrub and haul and shine for other people. And so it came. One more demon replacing another.

June never called, not once. She hugged Lydia briefly at Luke’s funeral but left town before she could say anything. Lydia wasn’t surprised given how she behaved the morning Betty Chandler called. She’d done what Betty had instructed her to do and went straight to June’s. She dropped the phone and in her slippers and robe drove the three miles to Indian Pond Road. June was squatting next to the mailbox, doubled over and away from the house, just at the top of the short, curving asphalt driveway. Lydia got out of her car and went toward her. Around them swarmed what looked like hundreds of firemen and police officers and EMTs. As she came closer, June turned her face away as if avoiding a hot flame and, as she did, held her arm up and flicked her hand toward Lydia, the way you wave away an unwanted animal, or a beggar. It was chilling, even in that unreal scene, to be greeted this way by a woman who had only ever shown her kindness. It is that gesture she remembers most clearly from that morning. Not Betty Chandler’s heartless phone call, not the red flashing lights, not the army of stunned emergency workers, not the police officer telling her that her son was dead. It was June’s hand, sending her away, the first signal that everything
was about to change, had already changed, and that she was about to find out how. Those flicking, flapping fingers still jump before her eyes like a black flag snapping in the wind, commemorating all that was over. But Lydia never blamed her. Not only were her losses greater than Lydia’s that day, if losses are measured in people, but June was the one who saw it happen. Whatever she had gone through, whatever she had seen, meant that Lydia was no longer bearable.

She assumed that June blamed Luke, like so many others had. But the truth was she had no idea. What Lydia knew was that in addition to the agony of losing Luke, there was a hard and recurring stab of pain from missing June—so strange to miss another woman—this woman who she never believed she could relate to or like, let alone love. And Lydia still loved her. She had given her back her son. When June met Luke, Lydia had not spoken to her son in over eight years. Not a word since that afternoon in the freezer section of the grocery store. One year and then eight. And then June.

She appeared on Lydia’s doorstep. After no one answered her knocking, she waited on the front porch. When Lydia came home that afternoon, she saw a woman, roughly her own age, or older, who looked like every woman she’d ever worked for. Faded jeans, fit, simple but tailored cotton T-shirt, blond hair with streaks of silver pulled back in a ponytail, flashes of expensive metal at her wrists and throat and ears. She thought at
first she was some weekender from the city looking to hire a housecleaner. When she introduced herself as the woman in Luke’s life—
We’ve been living together this year,
she said—Lydia immediately asked her to leave. She knew about June Reid. She knew where she lived and where she was from. She’d even once driven by her old stone house on Indian Pond Road between the apple orchards and the fields that led to the Unification Church property. It was surrounded by old pine and locust trees, and in the winter it looked like a Christmas card. She’d overheard people she worked for, people who knew June Reid from the city, mention how she’d taken up with a local guy, much younger. And then Bess Tuck, one of her employers who lived in the city during the week, asked her point-blank whether Lydia knew whom her son was dating. When Lydia answered that she did not, Bess told her the woman was someone who’d had dinner
in this very house
, she emphasized, as if it were the most spectacular and impossible coincidence.

Lydia knew about June Reid but had never seen her. And here she was. As much as she’d wondered how Luke was and what he was doing and whom with, she knew right away she couldn’t bear this woman telling her about her son. It was as if she had taken her place or succeeded where she had failed. But even if the kind of love they had was a totally different kind of love than a mother and son’s, she didn’t want it rubbed in her face by someone whose motives for being with a man so young could not be good.
Leave,
she said to her as she struggled to unlock the door to her apartment.
I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to. Go away
.

June came back a few weeks later and again Lydia rushed inside. But the next time she came, Lydia didn’t duck into her apartment or tell her to go. She stood on the porch and let her speak. It embarrasses her to remember, but she was flattered this elegant woman was so determined to spend time with her. After a little while, she asked her in. She stayed and she talked, and she came again, and after that again. Eventually, Luke came with her. The first few times he barely spoke, and Lydia, terrified she’d say the wrong thing and cause him to storm out, kept quiet. Lydia remembers June teasing Luke about the kids he hired—
Perverts, pickpockets, and potheads,
she’d chant—and each time would get a reaction. He’d try to get mad, but when he did, she would poke him in the stomach or under his arms and he would, against his will, melt. During those first few sessions, June’s light joking was the only sound to break the silence, and as difficult as it was to see Luke so at ease with a woman her own age, she was grateful. Slowly, after a few visits, he began to talk about work, even ask Lydia questions about the people she cleaned for. And then one morning, before Lydia left for the day, he showed up alone. They sat on the bottom step of her porch, mostly in silence, and watched two teenage boys scrape paint from the fence of a house on Lower Main Street. Eventually
Lydia turned toward Luke and cautiously placed her hand on his shoulder. She began to speak,
Luke, I . . .
but he interrupted her, rushing his words, which sounded as if he’d rehearsed them.
We’ll be okay. . . . I don’t ever want to talk about it because there’s nothing you can say to change what happened. And I don’t want you to try. I’ll never understand. I don’t want to. But we’ll be okay
. Before she could respond, he hugged her—quickly, the first time in years, his neck against her face, his smell, his skin, all of a sudden so close. He stood, and as he turned toward his truck to leave, he stumbled awkwardly and nearly fell.
I have to,
he started to say, righting himself, then pausing a beat,
stop drinking in the morning,
a smile flaring, his eyes bright. This was less than one year before he died. Nothing, and then so much, then nothing.

After those first few weeks following the accident, Lydia stopped picking up the phone. Sometimes she’d leave the apartment, walk down to the town green and back to avoid it. Other times she’d just let it ring and ring. She’d turn the volume up on the television to drown the sound out, or if someone kept calling, she’d get in the shower and turn on the radio that hung from the showerhead. Eventually, the phone went quiet.

When the first call came from Winton, she picked up. It was the day she ran from the women at the coffee shop. When she came home that night, she sat down at the kitchen table. That first flash of anger when she’d heard the women gossiping frightened her, and panic
drove her home. But the longer she sat in the kitchen and the more she replayed what she’d heard, the more that anger returned, and she felt again the hot violence from before. Something about those women—no more careless or cruel than anyone else she’d ever come across, and probably less so than many—something about what they said and how they said it that made her want to hurt someone. That anger and the ugly fantasies it fueled had her shaking in the dark kitchen. She sat there for so long and so still that when the phone rang, she jumped to her feet. Even at its lowest volume it startled her, and she rushed across the kitchen to pick up. The voice on the other end was a man’s, a younger man’s. She was relieved it was no one she knew. He sounded British but with a lilt or swerve in the accent that she couldn’t place. He asked if she was Lydia Morey, and when she said yes, he said,
Miss Lydia Morey, you’ve won the lottery
. Silly, she knew. Obviously some kind of scam, but she was caught off guard.
I don’t win anything,
she said without thinking, then told him he must have the wrong person because she hadn’t entered any lottery. As if anticipating her response, he said,
Sometimes we enter lotteries and do not know; for example, if you have a magazine subscription or a Triple A membership, you may have automatically been submitted for a lottery
. She told him she didn’t have any magazine subscriptions and was not a member of anything, and then he laughed. A big, wide warm laugh. After that, he said her name, slowly.
Miss. Lydia. Morey
. He just said her
name, the same one when spoken out loud at the coffee shop earlier had caused her to flee. As he said it, heat rippled across her chest. A funny bone she didn’t even know was still there had been tickled, and something like a smile wrinkled her lips. Before she let him speak another word, she slammed the phone in its cradle.

There is no lake. She has been inching along this rock-strewn dirt road for hours, and there has been no sign of water, no cars, no humans, no evidence that she took the right exit after Missoula, or pointed the car in the right direction each time the almost-road forked. She is lost and alone and it does not matter. Nothing does, she thinks, not for the first time. She circles the idea again and again—that no choice she might make would have any impact on her or anyone else. Before now she would have felt exhilarated by the idea of existing without obligation or consequence, but the experience is nothing like she once imagined. This is a half-life, a split purgatory where her body and mind coexist but occupy separate realities. Her eyes look at what is ahead—the road, a fallen tree—but her mind scours the past, judges each choice made, relives every failure, roots out what she overlooked, took for granted, and didn’t pay attention to. The present scarcely registers. The people she sees are not the ones pumping gas into the Subaru, passing her on the highway, or making change when they sell her bottles of water and peanuts at mini-marts and
gas stations. Instead it is Luke, pleading with her in a kitchen that no longer exists; Lolly, shouting at the top of her fourteen-year-old lungs from across a restaurant table in Tribeca; Adam, looking up at her, shocked, a young girl’s hand in his; Lydia stepping toward her that morning, before she knew what had happened, and the confusion and hurt on her face as June waved her off. She returns to these memories and replays them over and over, scrutinizes every remembered word, witnesses again each mistake. When she exhausts one, another appears. Another always does.

Her mind leaps to her childhood friend Annette. Annette lived two streets away in the same neighborhood in Lake Forest, and they spent their Saturday nights at each other’s house, playing with Annette’s collection of porcelain horses, listening to Shaun Cassidy and Jackson 5 records, making lists of where they would live when they grew up, what car they would drive, and what their husbands would look like. She remembers convincing Annette to come with her to sleepaway camp in New Hampshire the summer between fifth and sixth grades. Annette was timid, a careful creature who was reluctant to agree. For both it would be their first time away from home without parents, and Annette cited plenty of reasons not to go—the high school boys who lifeguarded at the club pool, an Arabian-horse show coming to Chicago. But June kept at her over the Christmas holiday, even convinced her mother to call and explain to Annette’s
protective mother the place where she herself had gone as a girl. June can’t recall why it was so important she come with her, but remembers clearly the triptych of cousins from Beverly Hills who naturally and without ceremony established themselves at the top of the social pecking order from the first day. They had glamorous names—Kyle, Blaire, and Marin—and all three had the same feathered, shoulder-length, light brown hair.

On the second full day at camp, the Beverlys, as they had come to be known, asked June to switch her bunk with a chunky, gravel-voiced girl named Beth from Philadelphia. Beth and the Beverlys had been assigned the same cabin four down from June and Annette’s, and Beth, the cousins explained, not only smelled like garlic but stared at them when they were changing. June’s face prickles with heat as she remembers sneaking her sleeping bag and duffel to her new cabin while Annette ate lunch with the others in the lodge. Later that night, one of the counselors showed up at June’s cabin with Annette and insisted on speaking to June. She hadn’t believed Beth when she explained that June had asked her to switch bunks. June remembers Annette’s face relaxing as she entered the cabin. She imagines what must have raced through her head in that moment—here was June, her best friend, the girl she traveled halfway across the country with, who knew everything there was to know about her and who was wearing the rope bracelet Annette made for her birthday two years ago. Here was June and
she would clear everything up. June remembers how she attempted to be casual, to pretend that nothing important had transpired or changed. But as she stumbled through a rehearsed explanation that it seemed like a good idea to give each other space and meet new people, Annette’s face froze. She looked at June as if she were regarding a complete stranger. It was not anger or hurt that registered on her pale, blank face. It was horror. June had, in that instant, transformed into someone she didn’t know. June can see Annette shaking her head as if she had been hit from behind by a thrown rock. She can see her turn toward the cabin door and walk away as the Beverlys snickered from their bunks. Annette went home the next morning. They were twelve years old and the two girls never spoke again. That fall, when they returned to Lake Forest Country Day for the first day of sixth grade, Annette would not look at her.