Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

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 .