Did You Ever Have A Family (17 page)

Maybe he is exactly who he says he is, Lydia thinks as she quickens her step. Maybe he’s not the enemy. When has she ever been right about anyone? She was wrong about Earl and Rex, and most men in between. And she was wrong about June. She remembers how at first she was sure the woman did not mean her or her son well. She could not fathom what this pampered New Yorker with a blond ponytail and perfectly manicured nails could want from her. And she had no interest in understanding what she wanted from her son. She remembers telling her to go away, to leave both of them alone. She
had judged her before knowing anything about her. Had she also judged Winton too harshly? Might he actually be on her side? After all, he’d spent nearly three months talking on the phone to her. His stories kept changing but he kept telling them, kept calling each morning and each night. He did not go away, she reminds herself as she passes Edith Tobin’s flower shop, which is more than she can say for June.

It is dark now and someone is behind her. She’s heard footfalls but she does not want to stop, does not want to turn around. She is only six or seven driveways away from her apartment building. Her forehead beads with sweat and she can feel her jeans sticking to her legs. She holds her fleece with both hands against her chest. Only five driveways now. She hears a shoe scrape the sidewalk and something—a stick, a pebble—knocks against her calf. Someone is right behind her. She stops, spins around, and before she sees who is there, explodes
GET AWAY FROM ME!
Standing less than a foot from her is a boy wearing a green, hooded sweatshirt. Up close, she is certain this is Kathleen Riley’s son. Same green eyes. Same thin lips. He looks directly at and then beyond Lydia, just over her shoulder. He begins to say something,
I’m
 . . .
um
 . . .
I know you . . . ,
but stops and rushes past her down the sidewalk toward the end of Upper Main and out of sight.

Lydia’s blood is racing and she struggles to control her breathing. She checks the money in her fleece pocket
and is relieved to feel it still there. She hurries the short distance to her building and fumbles with the key. Her hands are shaking. As soon as she gets the door open and closes it behind her, there is immediately a loud slamming on the windowpane.
BAM BAM BAM.
The boy, she thinks, he’s followed her home. She pushes the full weight of her body against the door as she scrambles to lock the dead bolt.
STOP! STOP THIS!
she screams, her hands slick with sweat, the adrenaline streaking through her body like lightning.
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
Her knees have buckled at the door. She cannot stand. As in nightmares from her childhood she has lost the power to move. The slamming returns and she crawls awkwardly away from the door. But when she gets enough distance to look back, she sees it is not the boy. It is a woman with a baby strapped in front of her in some kind of cloth carrier. Lydia closes her eyes and breathes. She calls out to the woman to hold on a second and manages to stand and walk into the kitchen to towel the perspiration from her face. Once her breathing steadies and her heart calms, she unlocks the door.
I’m so sorry,
she explains,
I thought you were someone else.
But the woman is unmoved. She is young, with tanned skin, short dark hair, and deep lines around her mouth and eyes. Once the door fully opens she steps forward and with her free hand strikes Lydia, hard, across her right cheek.
THAT’s for my father!
she yells. She pulls her arm back to strike again but hesitates and steps back outside
the apartment door. She looks as nervous as she is angry.
Whoever you are, if you don’t give me the money my father sent to you, I will call the police and have you arrested. And don’t deny it. . . . I know who you are and I know from the address those monsters in Jamaica gave him that you’re the one who he sent the money to. You people are destroying him. . . . He’s an old, lonely man and it’s disgusting that you’d prey on an easy target like him. He actually believes there are millions of dollars with his name on it somewhere! He actually believes you people are his champions!
Stunned, Lydia reaches into her pocket, her fingers shaking, her mind still processing what she’s just heard. Whoever this woman’s father is must have fallen for Winton’s scam, too, she thinks, handing the woman the seven hundred-dollar bills along with the loose pile of twenties, fives, and ones. He must have believed, as she had, that he was paying the tax to advance closer to the big prize. And this woman, his daughter, has mistaken her to be part of the con and not just like him. An easy target, lonely, someone willing to believe lies and throw money away in order to not be alone. The woman leans in, snatches the money from Lydia’s hand, and tucks it into the pockets of her white corduroy trousers. The baby, who has until now remained silent, begins to cry. Whether it is a boy or a girl, Lydia cannot tell, but the crying becomes screaming—urgent, high-pitched screaming, as if someone has pinched the infant’s skin. Tiny hands, red and desperate, reach up from the swaddle of pale yellow
cloth bundled against the woman’s chest.
You need to stop what you are doing,
she says seriously, oblivious to the exploding child. She holds Lydia’s gaze for one more beat and, as she pulls the door shut behind her, says seriously,
You need to stop.
The silence that follows is complete. There are no sounds in the apartment. No cars driving past or people hollering anywhere. Lydia stands next to the door, locks it, and leans against the wall. The phone rings and she lets it. It stops for a few minutes and then begins again and the pattern goes on for over an hour. Finally, she crosses the living room into the kitchen and waits. After a minute the phone rings again and she picks up. It is, of course, Winton. He speaks her name, once and then again, but she says nothing. She is not playing games or holding back. She has no words. The boy on the sidewalk, the slap, the screaming child. She has been shocked into silence. Winton speaks again.
Lydia, come back to Earth. Come back down here to Mother Earth
. She’s heard these words before. Who else said this to her? Rex. The last man she called a boyfriend.
Come back to Earth, space cadet,
he used to say.
Touch down, spacey
. Who else but Rex. She can still feel the sting from the woman’s slap on her cheek and something her mother used to say to her bubbles up.
One of these days someone is going to knock some sense into you
. It is not a happy memory; her mother would only ever say it when she was angry or drunk, but something about it makes Lydia laugh. She pictures her mother at that kitchen table, wagging her
finger, drinking her schnapps, barking her warnings. She cannot help but laugh.

Lydia? Are you somewhere there?
Winton. She forgot for a moment he was on the other end of the line
. My dear Lydia,
he says,
my dear, what is wrong?
She hears his concerned tone, the extra careful wording, but it does not soothe her. He continues to say her name, asks what could possibly be the matter. That voice, she thinks, and laughs again. I have sent money in the mail to someone I do not know, and I have been attacked in my own home. For a voice. A stranger’s voice.

Tell me what troubles you,
the voice coos.
Tell me.
Again, she thinks of Rex. The last man who lied to her as much as Winton has, she thinks, the last man like him who had the power to make her do things she knew were wrong. Again, she is quiet. After a long silence, Winton says again and gently,
Tell me what’s wrong
.

Do you really want to know?
she asks, feeling, against her will, the desire to tell him about her crazy evening. She holds the receiver to her ear and recognizes that besides Winton there is no one she can tell—about the boy following her home, the furious woman slapping her face, anything. She leans forward and drops the receiver to her lap. The voice in her hands is all she has and it’s nothing. She rocks gently and wishes she could vanish. She feels more alone now than in the weeks after Luke’s death. After a while, she hears Winton’s voice coming from the phone. She puts the receiver to her ear and
hears him chanting to himself, almost singing.
Oh, Miss Lydia, where have you gone? What have you done and where are you? Come back to me, miss.

I’m here,
she whispers.
I never went anywhere. I’m right where I’ve always been
.

Winton’s voice falls to a whisper.
Tell me a story, my dear Lydia. Take a load off your soul. Tell me the truth because it will set you free
.

Lydia hears the creak of footsteps in the apartment above her. She listens to her upstairs neighbor walk across his kitchen, open the refrigerator door, and shut it softly. She hears the pop of a beer bottle opening and the clack of the tossed cap in the sink. She sits up straight, her back against the wooden chair. When she speaks, her voice scratches in her throat.
I’ll tell you a story, Winton. The one about where I’ve always been
.

Mom,

I’m writing to you from the edge of the world. It truly feels like we are in some place between earth and heaven here on the beach in Moclips. We checked in two nights ago after driving for four straight days from New York. Can you believe we got pulled over in New Jersey on Route 3? Right out of the gate, bam, a $125 speeding ticket. I’m sure the cop saw Will’s Washington State plates and said, Let’s get him. Anyway, we thought it was a bad omen for our trip, but instead it turned out that every moment after has been charmed, like we’ve had a lucky star guiding us the whole way. Even when we got lost in Pennsylvania it led us to stay in the most beautiful little town that’s almost exclusively Amish. They couldn’t have been nicer. We’d heard about a group of teenagers who flipped their car—Amish kids getting drunk and living it up in their purgatory year between high school and marriage. The whole town seemed to be shaped
around those dead kids. Like if you looked closely you could see each one in the places where they once were. It’s strange to say but I feel like I know them, a little. There was so much talk of them. That town was so sad but it was also beautiful to see a community need each other so much. And their faith. I have never believed in God though I can see how believing in one would help in the aftermath of the kind of tragedy they’d been through.

You can’t imagine how many stars fill the sky here. They are brighter than the moon. Or the sound of the wind and the crashing waves. Like freight trains outside the window. It’s not frightening, because for some reason this simple room at the edge of the world feels like the safest place I’ve ever been.

I know I’m rambling, Mom, but I’m in a mood, as Dad would say. Crossing this country, ending up here where Will grew up—I now understand why it was so important to him to show me—and the crazy wind has me thinking. It’s funny to think that the wind has a shape but it does. It becomes visible every once in a while—in rain being driven to the ground in sheets, or in the snow on the fields behind our house. I remember looking out the window of my room in the winter, watching the wind blow on the surface of the white fields, lifting and whipping
the snow into spirals, and in a flash you could see this force that was always there come to life and reveal itself. I think it is this way with children and parents. They are always there and then suddenly through some shock or disappointment or great gesture or absence the child sees this person who was there all the while—invisible to them beyond their function to provide. This is how it’s been for me, with you. I only really saw you once you left Daddy, and I didn’t like what I saw. I couldn’t understand why you would leave him after all those years together. How you could choose your career over both of us. I still don’t understand if I’m really being honest. But it’s only lately that I can see that what I can and can’t see doesn’t matter. I don’t have the right to say who you are with or not and it is not my right to know. With Luke in your life now, you have really snapped into view as a woman, like me, with the full menu of wants and desires as the rest of us. I’m not saying this has been much fun or not embarrassing; I’m ashamed to say it’s both. But it has shaken things up. I’m sorry I refused to meet him in New York. I didn’t want him to overshadow Will. And if I’m honest about it, I think I was worried how I would react and I didn’t want Will to see me out of control.

Speaking of control, I guess Dad has come into
view more, too. I’ve known for a long time about his desperate womanizing. It’s always made me sad, but it’s something I never held him accountable for. I blamed it on you, as I have many things. It never occurred to me until recently that maybe his childish way with women preceded your leaving and that it most likely had a lot to do with it. I can’t believe this never really occurred to me before. I also can’t claim to have come to some of these ideas on my own. Early on with Will he told me that it would be a good idea to question everything I thought I knew about Dad, you, your marriage, my childhood, myself even. Actually, he suggested that whenever I was resistant to a differing opinion about anything, I should try this out. Here I think he was talking about politics, him being much more sympathetic to our president than I am. Still, it’s been difficult to pull back the curtain on old stories and old opinions. I’ve been doing it for a while now and it’s humbling to see things more as they were and less as I have felt them to be over the years. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been punishing you for a long time for not making the choices I wanted you to make, and as Will snores next to me now and before the sun comes up in a few hours I just want you to know that I see things a little more clearly now and I hope you can forgive me for being unable to sooner. I still get furious when I think of how
you left and the way you made all these decisions without including me. You just announced the new order of things as if none of it had anything to do with me. Can you possibly imagine how that felt at fourteen? Or how lonely it was after you left? Did you even think about me when you made all these decisions? Did you ever think how much I would miss you?