Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

Which is exactly what he does. Three long hours later, after he’s heard the last toilet flush down the hall in his parents’ bathroom. After he’s jerked off twice and slammed a warm Red Bull that he’d forgotten to drink a few days ago. He’s not sure if it’s the caffeine or the adrenaline, but as sleepy as he was before, he’s now awake. He’s ready to get this over with. He steps as softly as he can down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door to where his bike is leaning against the house. He flies down Wildey and Indian Pond and almost overshoots June Reid’s driveway. He skids to a stop, gets off his bike, and throws it in the weeds.

From the road, the house is dark. It is an old, two-story stone house, but the far right section, the oldest, is made of wood, and the only windows in front are on the first floor. People could be awake upstairs and from the road he wouldn’t know. He’d have to sneak down alongside the kitchen before he’d be able to tell. He considers coming from around the back of the house, but thinks about the noise he’d make trudging through the woods to get there. Better to go quietly down the driveway and slip up the side between the kitchen and the stone shed.

The gravel drive crunches beneath his feet even though he is stepping as gently and slowly as possible. It takes what feels like hours to get to the lawn, where his footfalls are nearly silent. By the time he reaches the near corner of the house, he can see a yellow panel of light hitting the stone shed. The kitchen light is on, and by the way it flickers and wobbles, there must be someone in there. FUCK FUCK FUCK, he whispers to himself. He leans against the side of the house and holds the rough wood siding for balance. He cannot go back now. He will inch along the outside and secure a place next to the kitchen window until whoever is in there goes to sleep. He begins to move. What must be a bat flaps the air just above his head, and he collapses to the ground and covers his face. It takes every bit of control he can muster not to scream. He stays down, adjusts his crouch to a seated position, and crab-crawls gradually to a spot out of the light’s path, just to the left of the window. He rests his head against the side of the house and waits. At first no sounds come from inside. The cicadas are everywhere, their sound enormous, but after a while it becomes ambient noise, as elemental and invisible as the dark he is huddled in. Then he hears voices coming from the back of the house. The fucking screened-in porch, he thinks, having forgotten until now that it’s right there, just behind the kitchen at the back of the house. He’s only half the width of the house away. If he sneezes, whoever is in there will hear it. He begins to panic. He’s too exposed, too close. If he attempts to leave now, they will hear him. He tries to control his breathing, but focusing on it makes it sound louder, more erratic. He holds his legs in his arms and squeezes. He is only twenty or so yards from the stone shed where his knapsack is, but it might as well be on the other side of town. He is trapped. There is nothing to do but wait for everyone in the house to go to sleep.

Crouching in the dark, he tries to make out what the voices on the porch are saying. It does not sound like people celebrating the night before a wedding. At the wedding of his oldest sister, Holly, they had a keg on the back porch and everyone stayed up until at least four in the morning. He remembers her fiancé, Andrew, a rich kid from New York whose family has a summerhouse in town, and how he had an eight ball of coke. His buddies from college broke into the pool at Harkness to go skinny-dipping. This was last summer, and Silas’s sisters wouldn’t let him join in. He had to stay at the house watching his parents and uncles get shitfaced and listen to Andrew’s parents fight about who was sober enough to drive home. This scene at June Reid’s is, by comparison, a funeral. He’d seen Lolly around over the years, and she was hot in a rich hippie-chick kind of way, and the guy she was marrying seemed fine, just a bit of a douche bag and a know-it-all. He heard them talking in the lawn earlier that day. Something about flight times and packing bags. It occurs to Silas that Lolly Reid has probably been on over a hundred airplanes and probably to places he’s never heard of. Silas had been on one plane: to Orlando, Florida, with his sisters when he was eleven. Their grandmother met them at the airport, and they spent two days in long lines at Disney World. Silas didn’t think Lolly Reid, even as a kid, was the type to go to Disney World.

The porch door creaks open and he hears footsteps. They are coming around the house. Then he sees a man. It’s Luke. He’s wearing a white Izod shirt and dark pants and walking to the back of the lawn toward the trees. He must be taking a leak, Silas thinks as he watches the white of his shirt hover in the far dark like a ghost. He stays there for what feels like a long time, longer than he’d need to piss. Eventually, he makes his way back toward the house, walking directly toward Silas at first and then veering toward the porch door. The voices kick up but then they seem to move into the kitchen. Faintly, he hears footsteps on the stairs, the water in the second-floor bathroom turn on, and a toilet flush. A door shuts and then the house is quiet.

In the kitchen above him he hears the water in the sink run briefly. Cupboard doors shutting. And a slow ticking. Tick. Tick. Tick . Luke and June are talking and between the words the ticking. She is saying something about beating a dead horse and he is saying her name. She speaks and he simply repeats her name. It’s as if he is trying to talk someone down from the edge of a building or bridge. June, he says, and the ticking stops. She speaks, but Silas cannot hear the words. She is too far from the window. It’s stressful, whatever they are talking about, and Silas can tell by the tones and their volume that it’s getting worse. Shadows block the light from the window above him. They are right there, inches from his head. And now he hears every word.

June, he says, I’m not going to apologize for answering her truthfully. And it’s true: I’ve asked you twice now.

It’s not so simple. You know that. June’s voice is strict, like his mother’s.

But I don’t! Why the fuck is it not simple? I’m missing something here and you need to explain it to me. Silas has never heard Luke sound so upset. At work he can get serious, tense, but not like this.

June’s voice fades and Silas can only hear bits but he catches her last words because she shouts them. Because it can’t!

Luke, still by the window, says, Can’t is a lie and you know it. I love you and you say you love me, and not that I have a lot of good examples, but in my book that means you get married. His voice has risen to near shouting. Silas can hear June; she says something but she’s crossed the kitchen toward the stove and her words are just sound. Sound that ends the conversation, launches Luke across the kitchen and out the back porch. The screen door slaps shut and suddenly Luke is outside, walking swiftly and in a straight line to the back of the lawn, to the field, toward the far tree line, which leads to a maze of trails on the Moon. Silas watches his white shirt glide purposefully into the woods and disappear. He hears movement in the kitchen and then the screen door opens and shuts again. This time it is June, running, not walking, across the lawn, toward the woods. Her blond hair is what Silas sees flash along the same path Luke had taken just a minute before. Against the silver-blue field at night, her hair appears lit by a single beam of moonlight, as if it was following her across a great stage, like a spotlight following a rock star at a concert. When she reaches the dark border where the field meets the woods, she disappears, too.