Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

M., A flawless place. The first so far. Back in NY early August. Until soon, L.

The photo on the postcard had shown snow on the surrounding mountaintops, but now, under the summer sun, they are bare rock. This difference aside, the lake looks the same. Nothing changes here, June thinks, but then remembers an article she’d skimmed years ago about global warming and the gradual disappearance of the glaciers from Glacier National Park. Looking at this lake and these mountains, she wonders when the glacier that made this place was last in residence, how long it lasted. Did some trace of it still remain when Lolly was here?

Lolly was eighteen years old when she looked at this lake. Eighteen and angry and newly free. She had lived with her father in New York the last three years of high school. Her choice to stay with him after the divorce was never questioned or challenged, though it took the wind out of June when Adam, not Lolly, told her. It never occurred to her that Lolly would stay in New York. But when June spoke to her the next day, Lolly made it clear that just as June had made her decision to leave them for London, she had in turn made hers. They spent Christmas together at the house in Connecticut the first year after the divorce, but it ended abruptly with Adam driving back to the city on Christmas Day after Lolly opened her presents. There had been no fight, no dramatic blowup, just Adam’s restlessness and Lolly’s hostile quiet. She begged her father to take her back to the city, but he insisted she stay since June would be in the States for only two weeks and they should spend time together. Lolly retreated to her room upstairs and she and June spent the remaining days silent and on separate floors. Lolly refused to eat with June and would instead take bowls of granola and cup after cup of coffee upstairs. June stayed in London the following Christmas, and in the years when Lolly was at Vassar, June and Adam worked out alternating Christmas Eve and Christmas Day custody.

Lolly never came to London. In five years she never saw the gallery June opened. Never saw the small carriage house in Islington where she lived. Never accepted any of June’s invitations to join her in London and travel on to Europe or Scotland or Ireland. She returned one out of every seven or eight phone calls, just enough to keep from creating a crisis and instigating a serious discussion. She hardly ever wrote e-mails before texting came along, and even then the missives either explained her silence or signaled more. Will call this weekend. Buried. Can’t make it to NY next week when you’re there. Sorry. There were a lot of sorrys.

The sun returns, the lake shines again. The birds have stopped yelling and June hears Lolly’s voice rise above the noises of a restaurant the night she and Adam explained what was going to happen. June had just finished calmly describing how she and Adam were getting divorced, would remain friends, and that she would be opening a gallery in London for her boss. Lolly, June explained, could come with her or stay in New York to finish high school. Liar! Lolly shouted from across the table of the restaurant on Church Street where they ate most Sunday nights after returning from Connecticut. The whole place went silent. You lied to us! You did, you lied! You promised to be a mother and wife and now you are choosing to be neither. Lolly glared in silence before running to the bathroom. June can see her, the table between them, Adam at her side, mute, Lolly’s eyes tearless, desperately scanning her mother’s face for something familiar, anything she could recognize. June knows these eyes. They are Annette’s, Luke’s, Lydia’s. People who when they last looked at her saw a stranger.

June never argued custody with Adam. She never told Lolly how Adam had been accused of sexual harassment at NYU, how they had to settle and by doing so wiped out their savings and nearly half of the inheritance her father had left her when she was in her twenties. The only thing June hung on to was the house in Connecticut, which she and Adam had paid off only the year before. It was the unexpected financial setback, June told herself then, that kept her pushing for bigger and bigger sales at the gallery, landing more lucrative artists and needing to fly around the globe for both. But she knows now she couldn’t face what was happening at home, what was going on with Adam. She knew a fire was behind the smoke of accusation even though she wanted to believe him when he insisted the student who’d filed suit was unstable. Lolly had been a kid at the time and June chose to believe Adam. For that belief to sustain, Lolly could never find out, which she never did. Or if she had, she never let on. June wonders if all the secret-keeping back then explained why, years later, she covered up for Adam again. Had it become second nature? Lolly also never knew about the call June received from her friend Peg, who was, she whispered, at that moment watching Adam hold hands with a young girl at a restaurant in Long Island City. Stay out of sight, June told Peg before scribbling down the address and beelining out of the gallery and onto Fifty-seventh Street to hail a cab.

The restaurant was on the roof of an old loft building on Jackson Avenue, near PS1. As June entered the freight elevator, she tried to imagine how Adam had found his way here. How he must have thought it was another planet, this stomping ground for young hipsters and musicians. A frontier for the creative and the broke, but most important, a place where no one knew him and where he’d never get caught. June spotted Adam right away and was relieved that Peg hadn’t made a mistake. The relief was, at last, the absence of the doubt she’d had for years, even before the lawsuit. The relief was that he would now get caught in a manner that left no room for explanation or double-talk. Before approaching the table, June saw the months ahead. A divorce with terms she would dictate, accepting the long-on-the-table offer from her boss, Patrick, to open a gallery in London that she hadn’t until now allowed herself to take seriously. She watched Adam stare at the girl while she tapped on her PalmPilot with her free hand, and for the first time June could see him in his natural state. Not the one he fashioned to keep family harmony. He looked old, surrounded here by flannels and tattoos and full beards, hunched over this distracted girl who was only a few years older than their daughter. This was her husband. The man she’d once loved and wished to build a life with. The man she still loved, despite years of resenting him. This, she recognized, was her freedom. She could see it all as she stepped toward the small table along the wall. The girl with the wide face and black hair, Adam’s fingers on the inside of her wrist, the table covered in corn bread.

She could see the future that day, but she failed to see Lolly. Failed to think through the next steps carefully. Failed to resist Adam’s desperate plea not to tell their daughter about the affair and failed to see how not telling her the truth would shape everything between them after. She moved too fast toward that table and she moved too fast after — to court, to agree with Adam, to London. She knows that if she could retrace her steps after that phone call from Peg, rethink every decision that followed, she would not be standing on the shore of a lake in the middle of nowhere. And everyone would be alive.

June takes a few steps back from the lake and leans against the closest pine. Near its trunk patches of thick green moss cover the ground like tossed pillows. She tries to imagine Lolly in this place five years ago. Did she stand right here? Did she stop at the first sight of water, too, and find her way to this clearing? Did she rest on this moss? Did she look to the lake and see her mother as she now sees Lolly? Is this where she began to forgive her? And if she were alive, could she possibly forgive her now?