Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

She is hours away. She will drive until the road runs out, and she will find that room, and she will stay.

Our plan had been to wait a year before heading up from Portland to Moclips with Will’s ashes, but after the first gentle day in February, when the cold rains slowed and the relief of spring was, if not actually near, imaginable, Mimi said it was time. I called the Moonstone and asked if Room 6 was free the following weekend, and the woman who answered said it was not and that likely it wouldn’t be for a long while. Someone had checked in at the beginning of July and never left. I thought it was strange, since the Moonstone is hardly the kind of place you imagine someone calling home, but I was disappointed, too, as Room 6 meant something to Will. It was where he proposed to Lolly, and where he stayed when he returned to attend Joseph Chenois’s memorial. It would have been nice to stay in Room 6, see what Will saw during those trips back to Moclips, but it wasn’t the reason we were going.

Will never told us where he wanted to be buried or have his ashes scattered — why would he at twenty-three years old? — but we knew. A stretch of beach, no longer than a mile, runs between the Moonstone and the Quinault reservation, the ocean on one side and the small, gray house where he grew up, with us, on the other. There was no place he loved more. No place he felt as safe. It was his home and it gave us some comfort to think of him there. So for the first time since we’d lived there together as a family, we returned to Moclips.

When we arrived at the Moonstone, the dusty black wagon parked by the Dumpster looked like it hadn’t been driven in years. The blue license plate below the back hatch was hardly visible, but we knew right away it was from Connecticut and we knew it was June’s. My first instinct was to stop the car, put it in reverse, and drive away. I felt like we had stumbled upon something too personal to barge in on. I assumed, since this was where Will and Lolly got engaged, she had come to be close to her daughter, just as we had come to be close to our son. Unsure what to do, we parked the car next to the office and sat silently for a long time. Eventually, Mike and Pru said we were being ridiculous and that maybe it wasn’t even June’s wagon. So we went into the office, met the new owners, and got keys to two rooms. Rooms 5 and 7, the only two left and of course on either side of Room 6. None of us mentioned to Rebecca and Kelly that we knew June. Not even when Kelly apologized again about Room 6 not being available. We didn’t decide on this in the car or even signal nonverbally to each other in the office; it was just something we all understood. If she was there, we’d leave her alone as best we could, though given the steps she’d taken to avoid us and everyone else it was hard to imagine she’d stay once she knew we’d arrived.

I don’t know why or how, but through all these months of June’s not returning our phone calls or responding to the letters we mailed to her, care of her lawyer in New York, I knew she was okay. Mimi had wondered if we shouldn’t make a greater effort to locate her: call the artists she’d represented, interrogate the lawyer, track down relatives, though there was never any mention of uncles or aunts or cousins. A few weeks after Christmas, I called information and asked for Lydia Morey’s phone number and got it right away. I didn’t know who else to call, and at first, maybe because of the speculation that her son, Luke, may have had something to do with the accident, I’d put it off. But she was the only person from that town we knew who might know where June was. Besides Luke, June was not a terribly connected person. She had no friends who we knew to be close to her. She had left her job at a gallery in London years before, and whatever work life she had was, to us, invisible. By the number of people who’d turned up at the church that morning and by the pictures on June’s bookshelves and walls, it appeared she had lived a full and peopled life, but it didn’t seem like anyone, besides Luke, had stuck. Including, unfortunately, her daughter, who, according to Will and from what we could see ourselves, mostly stayed away. Given this, it’s maybe not so surprising that Lolly clung to our family. Will often joked that she settled on him only so she could get to us. And it’s true, I did notice how she would sometimes watch Will with Mimi or with Pru and Mike. She would watch them like her nose was pressed to the glass wall of an aquarium, watching exotic fish move in water, or how a scientist would observe rare bats in the wild. She said to us when we first met her in Mexico City that her parents didn’t know how to do it, and when we asked her what, she said, Everything . It was sad to hear a child speak so frankly and judgmentally about her parents, and for a while Mimi worried that Lolly was too cynical, too tough-minded and negative for Will. I worried, too, but Will was clearly in love, and I knew that nothing could be done if someone felt that way about another person, especially your child. Lolly was different, certainly on the self-centered and selfish side, but she was at her core kind and she adored Will and we could do nothing, so we embraced her. I think Will sensed that despite her girlish manner, something was broken in her. Mimi says wounds can sing a beguiling song, and for Will — who from boyhood felt compelled to fix and help and take care of nearly everything and anyone in his path — Lolly’s song was irresistible.

Outside the subject of her family, Lolly was lighter and more open, so we tended not to bring them up, so when we finally met Adam, and later, June and Luke, we knew little about any of them. Mimi and I had pieced together that relations were difficult between June and Adam. He had various girlfriends whom Lolly didn’t respect; and once June began her relationship with Luke, Lolly at first refused to acknowledge him and for the most part avoided her mother. She talked to Pru about it the week before the wedding and, of course, Will, but I don’t really know what went on between Lolly and her mother. Clearly they had much to resolve, and according to Pru, among the many sad things about what happened is that they had, in those months leading up to the wedding, just begun.

When I spoke to Lydia in January, she told me June had been gone since early summer and that she had not seen or heard from her since the funeral. She said that what remained of the house had been demolished, and a chain now blocked the driveway from the road. She reported the news dispassionately, as if she had little to do with any of it, or with June, which surprised me, since the two of them, from what I could see in those few days before the wedding, seemed close. At the rehearsal, June fixed Lydia’s hair and both of them laughed secretively, like old friends. I can still picture them, side by side, talking in the church, on the lawn, at the sink, on the porch. I remember them more with each other than apart. They were a funny pair, very different in superficial ways — one sleek and blond, the other earthy, with long, dark hair falling down everywhere; one poised and stoic, the other needier, less sure. Still, they were much the same in how they approached their children: formal and timid, careful, as if they had only just met them. But with each other they appeared relaxed, natural. So to hear Lydia talk about June with such distance was a surprise, but then I remembered June at the funeral and the days before. She didn’t speak. Not to us, not to Lydia, not to anyone. I remember how she pivoted away from each of us when addressed, and if hugged, she held still, hands at her sides, until it was over. We reached out to her as best we could, but we were in shock, and instinctively we closed ranks among ourselves. We were out of our minds and away from home. Our boy was gone.