Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

He turns off Tate Lane down a dirt road. Once he’s out of sight of passing cars, he jumps off the bike and let’s it crash to the ground. He unhooks the knapsack from his shoulders, the yellow canvas hardly visible. He cannot see his hands or fingers clearly, but he knows the surfaces and shapes of his stuff: Tupperware container, bowl, water bottle, bong, and lighter. He sloppily packs an untidy hit and lights it. He smokes it down and quickly packs and lights a second. The pot is a mix of some old stuff from Charlie and a few new buds he stole from a neighbor who hides his plants in plain sight along the back row of his vegetable garden. It’s a strong blend, and soon he feels a thick film rise between this moment and the last few hours. He regards it all now, dimly, as through a foggy snow globe, and for that he is grateful. He leans against a tree and sees Lydia’s face again. He can now slow the incident down and watch her eyebrows rise, her mouth widen as she yells at him. She’s covering her chest with her coat, but now that he’s in charge of the scene, he has her drop it and he looks down her low-scooped T-shirt as she bends to pick it up. Now the T-shirt is sweaty and soaked, and through the translucent cloth he sees pink skin, dark, wide nipples. The vision relaxes him, helps him shake off the feelings from before. He packs up his gear, zips the knapsack, and throws it over his shoulder. He walks his bike back to Tate Lane. Above him, the moon is nearly full and glows pink in the chilly night. Thin clouds inch slowly across the sky, and on the surface of the moon he begins to make out a face. At first it is a rough mask with uneven eyebrows and lopsided whiskers, the mouth and nose disfigured and huge. Then it comes alive. He knows this face. It’s the dragon he saw last May on his way home from June Reid’s house. Back then, his ruby wings and infinite tail filled the sky, but now they are invisible, cloaked in the blue-black night. Only the snout, the devil eyes, and the smoke pouring from its throat are visible. It’s him. He knows he is hallucinating, but still, his hands shake as he pulls his bike toward him. As he gets on, he hears something. A voice, a growl, a barking dog. He cannot tell. But in that noise he hears GO as clear and precise as anything he has ever heard. He begins to pedal and looks up at the moon. The dragon’s face is fully articulated: snout high, mouth wide. The eyes do not shift their gaze from him. He looks behind the moon and begins to see the outline of its mammoth body, the silhouette of its batlike wings etching the sky. He is in the middle of the road, pedaling slowly and looking up and behind him at the same time. When he starts to trace the ridges on its epic tail, the handlebars twist in his hands, the front tire jerks to the left, and the bike collapses onto the pavement. As he falls, landing on his side, he hears a crack underneath him, the loose arrangement of bong and Tupperware breaking his fall, and then the bong, he can feel as well as hear, breaking to bits. He sits in the road, checks his limbs to see that everything still works. He feels along his side and shoulders to make sure none of the glass has speared him. He can detect no serious injuries, but he’s scraped the skin off his palms, and the exposed flesh begins to sting. Sitting in the middle of the road, he dares to look up, and sure enough the dragon is beaming, amused, directly at him. What the fuck? What! he calls out, half crying from frustration and fear. GO? Go where? WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GO?

He is demanding answers from the enchanted arrangement of cloud and night and moon, but he knows where he has to go. He has not been back there since May when he ran across the lawn and up the driveway to the road. Fuck, he mumbles, pulling the bike from the road and wiping the loose asphalt from the cuts on his hands. He rides in the direction of home but passes Wildey Road, where he lives, and continues on Indian Pond. He refuses to look up at the night sky until he gets there, and as he passes the pond, he can see the pattern of blues and grays and blacks reflecting in the water. He cannot help but look, and the kaleidoscopic pattern shimmering there is both ominous and beautiful. Oncoming lights from up the road break the spell and he slows his bike until the car passes. By the time it does, he is beyond the church, and soon he is at the top of the driveway.

She knows now where this will end. Where the land runs out and there is only sea, and between the two, a room. The pages of the letter are tucked into the orange notebook that sits on top of the other two in the passenger seat next to her. At the Super 8, she read each word, again and then again, until the manager demanded she leave immediately or pay for another night. The handwriting was familiar, undeniably Lolly’s, but the words were not. They were from someone she only dimly remembered, from before she and Adam told Lolly they were divorcing. After that, Lolly was never as candid or open or as affectionate with June. She could see in the letter Lolly’s conflicted attempt to describe a future she had yet to occupy. She never got there, June thinks, remembering the cold exchange with Luke on the porch the night before the wedding. But she was trying. Wherever she’d been by the time she died, it was much closer than June knew. To be given a glimpse now was a bitter miracle, a ghostly caress that left more regret than solace.

As she crosses out of Idaho into Washington State, she breathes in Lolly’s scent. She’d sniffed it earlier, wafting off the pages, faintly, the strange perfume that smelled like hot chocolate that Will gave her during their semester in Mexico and continued to supply her with after. June rummaged through Lolly’s bag and found the small, brown-and-white bottle and sprayed her wrists, lightly, and the pages, before folding them into the notebook and leaving the Super 8. The smell of cocoa and cinnamon fills the car. How could she have allowed so much distance between them?

She hears Luke’s voice, yelling, as if in answer, Jesus, June, throw it! He is running away from her in the lawn behind the house. Throw it! Throw it! He is shouting to her as she kneads the hard plastic rim of the Frisbee in her hands. What are you afraid of? He calls, standing still now, arms crossed against his chest. It was the second summer, the one after he moved in, and he’d insisted they go outside and toss the Frisbee. They’d made it as far as the lawn, but something in her refused to throw it. She can’t remember what it was — the childishness of the game? That he had asked for something, demanded it, and she had the power to refuse? After a while he walked off, chilly and disappointed. There were moments like this when she could not be what he wanted and yet he would insist. It was like a game of chicken and she always won. She never blinked, and as with the Frisbee, he usually stormed off in a huff. Just like Lolly had so many times. She remembers how that yellow Frisbee sat in the lawn for weeks, neither of them willing to retrieve it. Luke even mowed around the thing and let a little thicket of grass grow up in a rough circle where it lay. He never mentioned it; nor did she. And then one day it was gone.

Her right hand strays from the steering wheel and rests on the notebook next to her. Her fingers brush the worn surface of the cover and then she pulls it to her lap, where she lets it rest. She breathes in Lolly’s scent and relaxes her foot from the gas pedal. She is careful to maintain precisely the speed limit, as she does not want anything to stop her from getting to the Moonstone. If she stops for gas only, she will be there before evening. There is no reason to rush other than the feeling she’s had since reading the letter: that she needs to see the inside of that room, hear the wind howl and the waves crash as Lolly described, see the same stars and moon, breathe the same salt air. It is not her daughter she is driving to, but it is as close as she will ever get.