Did You Ever Have A Family (13 page)

Local legend has it that one night all the sleeping girls were swallowed by the sea. Rebecca and I have heard at least half a dozen variations on the tale—one involves a sea witch who cast a spell, another a falling star that crashed into the ocean and caused a mighty tidal wave, and one starts with a terrible fire that drove the animals from the hills into the ocean, carrying the girls with them in the stampede. But in every version of the story, the sleeping girls end up underwater, where they somehow transform into mermaids, enchanted protectors whose
magic keeps the Quinault virgins from harm. No doubt some scrap of this story must have made its way to the producers making the silly television show.

I walked toward the water to make out the shape of the waves in the pitch-black night. The wind was rough and I pulled my turtleneck up above my face just below my eyes. I stood a few feet from the surf and imagined the chain-smoking actresses as real-life mermaids, gorgeous and fierce, their scales shining. Who wouldn’t want to be protected by such creatures? I thought of Penny and Rebecca, who looked after each other as kids and later, too, as adults. For most of their lives they only had each other. I always had older brothers and cousins and uncles, and even though my being gay was not anyone’s first choice (including mine, initially), after I came out in high school anyone who made fun of me or worse was swiftly dealt with by my family. After a while, because they had to, the kids in my school accepted me. I wasn’t prom queen or anything, but I was cocaptain of the field-hockey team, vice president of my senior class, and I organized a volunteer soup kitchen on the weekends my junior and senior years. What I’m saying is that I wasn’t on my own. I felt different, unsure of how to make my way romantically, but I felt safe. My family gave me that, and the older I get, the more I see how lucky I was. All but one of my brothers moved East, my parents aren’t around anymore, and I have one uncle in a nursing home in Olympia. Rebecca is my
family now. She has me and I have her and it’s where we belong.

Penny didn’t have anyone the night she died. No mermaids, no Rebecca. Before that night on the beach, I had never considered just how alone Penny must have felt. How completely on her own in that danger she was. I turned back toward the Moonstone and started walking home. The only lights on now were from Room 6. Jane. Probably the most alone person I’ve ever met. I’d seen plenty of lonely travelers at the Holiday Inn in Seattle and even here, but no one like Jane, who seemed half in the world and half out of it. She has been, in the few times I’ve actually seen and spoken with her, nearly without life. Still, she has Cissy. How exactly, we do not know, but it is clear she has in her a formidable ally. I wonder if she sees it that way, is aware how far this stranger has taken her under her wing.

A few weeks after Jane checked in, Rebecca and I noticed that Cissy was coming and going from Room 6 just a little bit more than was usual. We then began to see her carrying around a giant green thermos, the kind you see on camping trips with a big silver, screw-off top that doubles as a bowl or cup depending on what’s inside. We’d never seen her with it before, but not long after Jane checked in we saw that thermos in Cissy’s hands most days. Rebecca and I eventually pieced together that she was dropping it off at Room 6 in the morning when she started cleaning the rooms and picking it up at the end
of the day. At first, Jane would leave it outside the door on the cement stoop, but after a while we noticed that Cissy would step inside to pick it up—usually for only a minute or two but occasionally for longer.

This business with the thermos has been going on for over seven months. What those two could possibly speak about or have in common I can’t imagine, and I’ll admit at first it irked me to be excluded from whatever bond they’d developed, but now when I see Cissy heading to Room 6 with that giant green thermos, I just think, Thank God that sad woman pulled up to our motel, and not some other godforsaken place. Thank God she has someone to look out for her. Thank God any of us do.

He’s explained it all before and it still makes no sense. In that voice of his that rises and falls and swoops like a song.
You are a lucky lady, Lydia Morey. Lucky, indeed. This lottery you have won is over three million dollars and is only awarded once every two years.
At times she does not hear a word he is saying, just his voice. She has fallen asleep with the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, his voice a lullaby, spinning tales of millions. The prize, he says, has never before been given to an American, and technically it cannot be, but Winton is offering to help her, putting himself on the line to steer her through the red tape so she can receive her money.
This,
he says with an ocean of warmth in his voice,
is what I will do for you.

Sometimes she hangs up on him, leaves the receiver off the hook and turns out the light. But he always calls the next day. Usually between nine and ten in the morning and then again after six o’clock, after she’s mailed her bills, shopped for her few groceries—toilet paper, cans of Progresso soup, English muffins—and had her coffee at the coffee shop. Often, when she is unlocking the door to the apartment, she hears the phone ringing.
The few times it hasn’t, she’s been disappointed. It’s a scam and she knows it. He is flirtatious and personal, warm and bullying, and she understands that she is being drawn in, manipulated, made dependent. She knows all this but still she picks up the phone. Occasionally, like a teenager who tells her mother to tell the boy she has a crush on that she’s not home when he calls, she will let it ring. But she will pick up the next day and she knows it. Winton knows it, too, because he always calls again.
Lydia Morey, I missed you yesterday. You must have been out cutting a rug or breaking some poor boy’s heart.
After a month of the calls and the talk of prize money and red tape and risk, Winton begins to apply a little pressure, set a clock to the proceedings. The three million dollars will go to someone else if she does not pay the international prize taxes. The first tax is $750, pennies compared to what she will have, and it is a sum the prize committee reimburses. They would pay it directly for her but it is not allowed. She must pay first and then the committee will send her that amount right away. Paying this tax, Winton says without music, is necessary to continue.

She pays. She drives to Walmart in Torrington, puts $750 on a money card as Winton suggested, and mails it to an apartment in Astoria, Queens, where a designated representative from the lottery lives. Walmart, Queens, money cards, reimbursements—she is amazed he thinks she will believe any of it. And still she’s not ready to step
away. Not prepared just yet to come home in the evening each night knowing there will be no phone call. As well, there is also a thin, far-off hope that somehow the ludicrous scenario Winton has described is true. She has even allowed herself the fantasy of sending him money after she wins to pay for his schooling, to help him support his family. But it’s all a farce and she knows it will expire or she will end it soon, but not just yet. So she allows herself to think of the $750 as a test. A test she knows he will fail, and because he will, the farce will end and all will return to being as it was. She deliberately does not think this through, actively protects herself from recognizing how wasteful this is. She will see this to its end and she does not ask herself why.

And so she puts the money card in an envelope addressed to Theodore Bennett in Astoria, Queens, the prize official Winton mentioned. Winton also told her there should be no note inside and no return address on the envelope. And though the idea of $750 floating out there without a return address is intolerable, she still complies and drops the untraceable envelope in the mailbox in front of the Town Hall.

In the days that follow, the calls from Winton continue and she settles back into their established routine. A morning call she mostly avoids, an evening call she takes. She listens to him talk about his last girlfriend, who cheated on him and left him crushed, the son she never lets him see, his sick mother, his sister in jail. His
world blinks to life over these calls. He is a jilted boyfriend, a dutiful and worrying son. He is twenty-eight, he says. He is taking classes at night to get a degree in accounting so he can quit his job with the lottery, which pays poorly and is only part-time. He would have quit months ago but he’d like to steer this year’s prize to Lydia before he goes. Just do this one last thing because he’d like to see a good woman like Lydia get the money. Not some European asshole, the type who usually takes the prize.

Over time his sister in jail becomes his cousin, his aunt, his niece. The class at night is for engineering, for hotel management, for graphic design. The girlfriend’s name is Carla, Nancy, Tess, Gloria. He is twenty-eight, twenty-four, thirty. The inconsistencies alarm Lydia at first and then amuse. Further proof that she’s right, that the whole thing is a hoax. But then Winton begins to ask again about her life. Questions he asked in the beginning but she deflected. Is she married, what does she do for work, does she have children? And now, because something else must begin on these phone calls for them to continue, she tells him about Earl Morey, her ex-husband. The redheaded boy who was a lot of fun and then none at all. Who called her Snacks and pinched her leg and butt and left small purple-and-yellow bruises. Who knocked her in the head with a phone book one night so hard it made her lose her balance the whole next day. Who stayed at the Tap with his brothers and cousins and uncles
most nights and would come home drunk and, if she was lucky, sleep on the couch of their small apartment. She was nineteen and married, and within the year she hated him and his whole family and she could do nothing. When she finally confessed what was going on to her mother, she told her daughter to zip it and be grateful she’d found a man from a good family. She tells all this to Winton, and as she talks about this time, it’s as if she’s reading a bedtime story to her son when he was a boy, about a girl who made the wrong turn in the forest and had no way out. She talks and talks, just as Winton had in the beginning, and she hears him breathing on the other end of the phone. Only rarely does he ask a question or comment on anything she’s said, and if he does, it is punctuation and no more.
What a fool, that stupid man,
he has said.
A drunken fool
. She does not mention other men, the ones who pursued her until they slept with her and then stopped calling. Nor does she mention Rex. And Luke, she says nothing about him.

Ten days after she mails the letter, a padded manila envelope with a Newark, New Jersey, postmark arrives, and in it are seven hundred-dollar bills and a fifty. No note, no paper of any kind. Just the money. Later that day, she tucks the roll of bills in the pocket of her fleece pullover and walks to the coffee shop. It is early February but Christmas decorations are still taped to the windows. They are the kind you buy at the drugstore or the supermarket: thin, cardboard Santas, plate-size snowflakes,
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Along the ceiling and at the top of the windows are strung small, white lights, and on the counter by the register is a miniature artificial Christmas tree wrapped in a silver garland with a plastic angel on top. The money in Lydia’s pocket gives her an unfamiliar energy, a lift. She knows it’s hers, that she’s been given nothing, won nothing, but still the large bills and the way they arrived give her a surge. She drinks her coffee quickly, and when the check comes, she pays with the fifty. The waitress, Amy, who now looks like she is well into her eighth month, picks up the bill and returns the change without comment or any evidence of interest. Lydia leaves a five-dollar tip, pulls on her fleece jacket, and starts home.

Before she reaches the sidewalk, she notices a boy in a green sweatshirt circle the parking lot on his bike and cross in front of her. She’s seen him before. Hanging out on the green with his friends, smoking. He worked for Luke, but dozens of kids in Wells between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two worked for Luke at one time or another. What did June call them? Pickpockets and potheads? Lydia winces at the memory of June’s teasing and watches the boy swoop in tight circles with his bike.

Could this be Kathleen Riley’s boy? she wonders, and imagines what he’s heard his mother spewing about her. Lydia reminds herself that Kathleen’s name is no longer Riley, that it’s been Moore for many years. Kathleen married a contractor from Kent who built her a big house
on Wildey Road and was a nurse at the hospital before she started having kids. Funny, Lydia thinks, to think of Kathleen Riley as a nurse and a mother. Her sharpest memory of Kathleen is from high school, when she accused Lydia of stuffing her bra. Lydia was the first in her seventh-grade class to noticeably need a bra, and so by the time she entered high school she was more developed than any of the other girls her age. On the second day of high school she was given the nickname Lactadia. No one claimed credit for the name but it stuck, and soon the older boys were writing her lewd notes and slipping them into her locker, asking to go for a walk behind the bleachers at school, catcalling when she got on the bus.
I’m thirsty,
they’d yell from the backseat in the mornings, and in the afternoon from the open windows once she got off at the bus stop at the end of the town green. By the second week of school many of the girls in the higher grades, Kathleen Riley among them, took a fierce disliking to Lydia. Being younger than Kathleen by two years, Lydia had been invisible to her in elementary school. Now that they were in high school, Kathleen not only saw her, she waged war against her.
Lactadia has no milk
was her favorite chant, and in the stairwell once between classes she and her friends cornered Lydia. Kathleen demanded she lift her shirt to prove she wasn’t stuffing her bra with tissues. Lydia was so frightened that instead of walking away or telling Kathleen to fuck off, she slowly lifted her blouse above her head and exposed her very
real breasts. Lydia remembers standing there, shirt up, covering her face, hearing kids pass her on the stairs and one of them grabbing her right breast and squeezing it hard. She couldn’t see whose hand it was and she was too stunned to respond. By the time she lowered her blouse, Kathleen and the others had turned away and were rushing down the stairs. Lydia could hear the word
freak
echo as they descended in a storm of cackling laughter. There were other humiliations, and thousands of half-heard whispers, but the memory of being exposed and mauled before the accusing eyes of Kathleen Riley and her friends is the most mortifying. Not until the older girls had graduated and Lydia began dating Earl, who was popular and feared and came with a force field of protection, did the terror she felt approaching school each day begin to lift. Now, every few weeks or so, Lydia will see Kathleen coming down the aisle at the grocery store or standing in line at the pharmacy, and when she does, she is always careful to keep her head down and avoid eye contact. As if they were still in high school, she gets out of the way, becomes invisible.