Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

Nine months ago, this same hand forbid her to speak, but now, here, Lydia caresses it softly. There is so much I want to tell you, she says, and as she does, she remembers Winton, the only person she’s spoken to for more than a few moments all year. She describes that first phone call, how aware and yet how stupid she was, and how lonely. I am a weak woman, she whispers, and then repeats the words softly a few times. Always have been . As the words leave her, she can see out the window to the ocean. The last time she saw waves on a beach was when she and Earl went to Atlantic City for their honeymoon. These are taller, more majestic and powerful. She watches them rise and collapse in bursts of white foam, and as she does, she feels something leave her. She can’t name it, but it was with her always, and with the words she has just spoken, it has gone.

Lydia remains still and matches her breathing to June’s. They sit side by side on the bed and Lydia can feel her hand, with June’s, dampen with sweat, but neither of them let go. Before she says anything about Silas, she remembers him at her apartment a week ago, speaking too fast, without inhaling, making no sense. It would take almost an hour before she truly understood what he was so desperately trying to say. When she finally did understand, she was furious — at him, for letting everyone blame Luke, for not going back in the house; at June, for not fixing that stove years before; and at herself for never insisting June do so even though Lydia had stood before the old thing herself many times shaking her head when it refused to light or to stop ticking. They were all to blame, she thought, trying to calm down. She and Silas sat on her couch for hours. She stood to go to bed several times, but each time he did not budge. So she sat with him in the bright living room, quiet. There was too much to make sense of, too much to say, so she said nothing. Eventually, she fell asleep, and when she woke and saw him curled against the sofa cushion, she could hear him sobbing. She pulled him toward her, shook his young shoulders gently, and told him it wasn’t his fault, that it wasn’t anybody’s. She remembers his terrified eyes searching her face. It was between midnight and dawn and the day before had been a doozy, but nothing surprised her more than what she felt in that moment: needed. It was the last thing she expected. Through a mess of tears and mucus and yawning, Silas mumbled, I’m sorry, over and over. After a while, he slouched into the sofa, tucked his chin against his chest, and slept. Lydia watched his body rise and fall with his breathing, the lightly pimpled skin of his face agitate and twitch in response to whatever he was dreaming. Here was someone she understood. Someone alive but destroyed. She knew she could do nothing to bring her own boy back, stop him from turning whatever knob he turned or flipping whatever switch he flipped that morning, nor could she undo the mistakes she’d made when he was alive, but she might be able to help this boy. And with what he had just told her, she might be able to do the same for June.

And so she came here. There is someone I want to tell you about, she says. June does not move, nor does she signal in any way that she is listening. Still, Lydia continues. She tells her about Silas — who he is, who his parents are, that he worked for Luke, how he followed her, and what he said the night he turned up at her door. She tells this last part slowly, carefully, with as much detail as she can remember.

June does not respond to anything Lydia says, but when she finishes speaking, she pulls Lydia’s hand slowly toward her face. June extends each finger and presses the palm against her cheek. She covers Lydia’s hand with both of hers and presses gently at first and then with more pressure. As she does, June’s torso and head glide downward, her feet curling behind her onto the bed, her head and shoulders resting in Lydia’s lap. Neither speaks. With her free hand, Lydia gently strokes the top of June’s head, brushes a few strands of hair from her face, one, then another, and then spreads her hand across her clear brow. June’s breathing slows, her body loosens, and soon she is asleep. A black plastic alarm clock ticks the seconds with a blue wand. Lydia hears every one.

I said I’d marry them and I did. I’d done it twice before: once for my nephew and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, and the other time for a couple my sister Pam sold a house to in Ocean Shores. Rebecca and Kelly had been together a long time, but now that it was legal in the eyes of the governor, they wanted the piece of paper. Fine with me.

Compared to some weddings I’ve seen, Rebecca and Kelly’s was small. Just the two of them; Will’s family: Dale, Mimi, Pru, and Mike; Kelly’s brothers and nephews and a few cousins. June was there, too. She came with Lydia, who showed up a month before. She landed in Seattle and took a bus to Aberdeen and hired a taxi to take her from there. When I saw Kelly walking a busty, dark-haired woman rolling a carry-on suitcase behind her toward Room 6, I knew right away who she was. June didn’t tell me much about Luke’s mother, just that she’d had a rough road with men, including her son. She described her once as a small-town Elizabeth Taylor, which is exactly what the woman heading toward Room 6 looked like. I stayed away from June’s room for a couple days. Eventually, I came around to clean and bring a thermos of split pea, which is the only thing she eats besides those bags of peanuts she gets down at the gas station.

When Ben died, I went to my sister’s kitchen and stayed there for months. I roasted everything I could find at Swanson’s Grocery — hams, chickens, turkeys, pork roasts, potatoes — you name it. I baked dinner rolls and popovers and ate my way through cakes and pies and cookies I’d bake in the morning and eat at night after dinner. When my clothes started to pinch and I couldn’t button my jeans anymore, I asked Ellie Hillworth for a job at the Moonstone. She and Bud were well into their seventies by then and had been trying to sell the place, so another hand on deck was welcome. Cleaning rooms and running trash to the Dumpster got me out of the kitchen, at least between the hours of nine and three, and after a while I settled into making pots of soup on the weekends and now and again a batch of orange drop cookies. That’s how it’s been for years.

Not long after June showed up at the Moonstone, half-dead and ready to go all the way, I brought her a thermos of squash soup. Never asked if I could. Just left it on the dresser in her room with a spoon and a folded paper towel for a napkin. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t touch the split pea I left a few days later either. But I kept on leaving the thermos, and after a while I could tell a little bit was missing when I’d pick it up the next morning. It never came back empty, but I took what was gone as a sign; that even if she didn’t know it herself, she was choosing to live.

Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it’s to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won’t see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to let him help clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don’t think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.