Did You Ever Have A Family (7 page)

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than half a year since that morning Cissy pounded on the door of Room 6, sounding like some cop on TV
. Ma’am, I have a key so my knocking is just a formality. Ma’am, I’m reaching for my key and this door will open whether you want it to or not
. And just as she went for the key, the door opened and
Jane stepped out.
Thank you,
she said, her hand waving a kind of apology as she pulled her tan coat on. She hurried away, down the steps toward the beach, where she stayed most of the rest of the day. Since then we’ve seen her wander down the beach for hours, barefoot, with her lace-up tennis shoes in one hand, the other arm usually wrapped around her waist. One morning at the end of the summer we thought she might have spent the night out there, because there was no light coming from her room, no clanking of water pipes or flushing toilet as there usually is. Her lights came on that evening and we saw the usual shadow passing across her curtains, so wherever she’d been the night before she made it back in one piece. I think she mainly lives on Cissy’s cookies, because I’ve only twice seen her carrying bags from Laird’s General Store into the room. Maybe she squirrels packets of nuts or candy bars in her jacket pockets when she goes down to the gas station ATM for cash each month, but if that’s what she’s doing, I’ve never seen any of it. What I have seen is Cissy lugging around a large thermos, the kind you carry soup or hot chocolate in. What’s inside I don’t know, but neither Kelly nor I ever saw that thermos before Jane came along. We’ve seen it out on the front stoop of Jane’s room in the mornings, too. Cissy isn’t one to gossip in general, but when we’ve tried to talk to her about Jane, she won’t say more than that she keeps a tidy room. Even though it’s well within our rights to want to know about the only long-term resident
of the Moonstone—especially one who checked in under an alias and without ID—we always feel ashamed when we mention her in front of Cissy, and so we don’t anymore. We just accept her as part of our lives, a quiet woman named Jane from somewhere east of here.

The first call from Winton came in December. There are a few things to remember about that day, and she’s tried, but the one thing she doesn’t struggle to recollect was that the phone hadn’t rung for weeks. It’s an old, beige thing with thick buttons that make loud beeps when you press them, mounted on the wall by the door in the kitchen. It came with the rental she’s living in, and carved into the doorframe next to it are phone numbers. She recognized a few when she moved in a little more than six years ago. Gary Beck’s, for one; he had a funny relationship with her mother and would come by every once in a while with schnapps they’d drink in the kitchen. They both loved country music and listened to a station out of Hartford that played Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty songs. When Lydia was a teenager, and even later, she thought their nights in the kitchen were the grimmest she could imagine. Smoking cigarettes, drinking peppermint schnapps, and turning up the radio when some sad song came on. Funny, she thinks now, remembering those nights, how things change when you look at them with older eyes.

She wonders if Gary Beck is even still alive. As far as she can remember, he never had a wife or kids or any relations. He wasn’t involved in the volunteer fire department or church or any of the organizations that host spaghetti-and-meatball dinners at the elementary school to raise money. She never saw him outside of her mother’s kitchen. He ran the post office in town until he had a stroke and was put in a state home for the elderly in Torrington. That all happened sixteen years ago, the year before her mother died. She’d told Lydia about Gary one morning on the phone but didn’t convey any emotion, just enough interest to relay the facts. She doubts her mother ever went to visit him in Torrington. She never could quite figure out what their relationship was, but as attractive as her mother had been, and as much as she always dolled herself up each morning for work at the bank, she was pretty sure she’d shut the door on men after Lydia’s father died. Still, she and her mother had never been what anyone would consider close, and so she wondered if anything more than companionship had gone on with Gary. He was harmless and he brought booze and always had a flattering thing to say when her mother opened the door to let him in.
Looking good tonight, Natalie
was as specific and flirtatious as he ever got. He was still coming around when Lydia and Luke moved in with her mother the year he was born, but after that she never saw him. It was hard for her to imagine who might have needed Gary Beck’s number often enough
to carve it into this wall. Maybe someone who worked at the post office. Maybe some other old gal he’d bring schnapps to and listen to country songs with. When she looked at the numbers gouged into the pine doorframe, she hoped so. She hoped he had a different one every night.

The other names could be anyone’s—
Lisa
,
Matthew
,
Evelyn
. Only Gary Beck had the honor of his last name carved into the wood. And then there’s the one number she can never forget. Her former mother-in-law’s, Connie Morey. The Moreys must have had that same number since telephones were first installed in Litchfield County. The family had been in their old, broken-down house off Main Street since the late 1800s. They built it themselves, as they were all quick to tell you, and were still there. On the wall it just says
Connie
and those same digits Lydia used to dial when she was in high school, when Earl Morey was, for a short time, the only person she wanted to speak to or see. He was jumpy and mischievous, a soccer player with a big bush of red hair on his head. He loved the Grateful Dead and ice fishing and smoking pot and could mimic anyone he laid eyes and ears on for more than a minute. His favorite target was his older brother, Mike, who had a lisp and was not very bright. He also did a blistering impersonation of Lydia’s mother, which it took her only one time to overhear from her bedroom to run him out of the apartment. Still, she loved him, but more than him she loved the idea of his family, which
was not by any stretch of imagination wealthy—most of them electricians and housepainters and groundskeepers at Harkness, the boarding school just over the town line in Bishop. It was and is their size and longevity that made them formidable.
There is safety in numbers,
Lydia’s mother would say as she blew clouds of menthol smoke through the kitchen from behind the Formica table where she sat each night with her schnapps, like a general at her battle station making speeches to the troops.
I know because I’ve been out on my own for so long. Even before your father died a hundred years ago, it was just us. Just him and me against the world
.

Safety was not what attracted Lydia to Earl Morey. What she loved about him was that he made her laugh. Sometimes she’d laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe, which would egg him on more. In high school, he had a short fuse, was a bit of a bully, and more than a few times was called off the soccer field for instigating fights with players on the other teams. That mean streak made Lydia nervous sometimes, but she told herself he was all talk, harmless, a showboat. And besides, no one could make her laugh as hard as he could. She experienced that laughter as a kind of exorcism. It quieted the voices of the girls at school who whispered behind her back and drowned out her mother’s tipsy rants, and for a brief spell there was nothing but heaving lungs, pounding heart, and tears running down her cheeks.

She laughed with Earl for a while before they got married
and not much after. After high school Earl went to work with his brothers on the maintenance crew at Harkness and joined the volunteer fire department. Within a few months, he stopped coming home for dinner. He’d go straight from work to the firehouse or to the Tap, where he’d eat beef jerky and potato chips. He’d come in after ten, drunk and cranky about something or someone. He’d pinch Lydia’s ass and tell her to lay off the snacks. And soon he just called her Snacks. First at home and then in front of his family. His father thought it was funny.
Toughen up, girl,
he said to her at Christmas dinner that first year,
you know how he is
. And then there were the nights, in the beginning once every six weeks or two months, and then later every weekend, when he’d come home smashed and wake her up, speaking gibberish. Whether she responded or not, sat up in bed or curled into her pillow pretending to sleep, the result was the same. A hard blow either to the side of her head or her body. Usually, it was just one. Two at the most. And sometimes afterward he would grab her by the shoulders and shake her violently. Mostly it would be dark, so she wouldn’t see him, but the few times he turned on a light or the moon outside would brighten the room enough, she would see a face so tortured and far away it was as if he were possessed, like some kind of zombie demon. She knew by then that the only thing capable of driving a demon away was another one; so when she recognized something that could drive Earl and most likely the rest of the town away, she didn’t hesitate. That
their demon would be her son was the awful consequence, but she didn’t think she had a choice. Which was not how other people saw it, certainly not her mother or Connie Morey, who is long dead and whose number is still, like some threat from the underworld, carved into the wood next to Lydia’s phone.

She’s turned the ringer down as low as it goes, but she still jumps every time it rings. Ever since the morning when she got the phone call from Betty Chandler.
He’s done it now, Lydia,
is what she said, clipped and cold and distant as if she were reporting that the high school football team was on a losing streak.
You need to get over to June Reid’s house right away,
she added before hanging up. Betty Chandler and Lydia grew up together, went to the same kindergarten, elementary, and high school. They were even best friends one summer and fall when they were twelve—making barrettes with pink and blue ribbons and selling them for a dollar each—but when Betty’s chubby older brother, Chip, tried to kiss Lydia, unsuccessfully, after the eighth-grade dance and then told people she let him go to third base, Betty turned on her and spread rumors that she was loose. Just like that, based on so very little, she became her enemy and managed to stay so for more than thirty years. Later, when Luke was born and Earl had thrown Lydia out, her mother said she’d heard Betty telling people she’d been accepting money to have sex with the migrant workers at Morgan Farm across the state line in Amenia, the ones
who came from Mexico or the Caribbean every season to pick apples, and that’s how she’d gotten pregnant. Her mother asked her if it was true. As painful as that was, Lydia never blamed her mother or any of them. She knew when she realized she was pregnant that if her baby’s skin was even half as dark as its father’s, she would be cast as the hussy. She never refuted any of the stories, never told anyone the truth, not even Luke, and when he was old enough he didn’t want anything to do with her, let alone a father who had been kept a secret all his life. There were good reasons for keeping his father a secret. And if they weren’t good, they were, she believed for a long time, necessary. Only one marriage would be upended by this baby and it would be hers.

Many times she came close to leaving, throwing Luke in her car and driving away. But somehow she got used to the snickering whispers in the grocery store, the nasty gazes from the women, and the lewd once-overs from the men. One year became two, became five, became so many she couldn’t count them. After Earl there were other men, but most didn’t amount to much more than a few boozy sleepovers. Only Rex, who turned up many years later, stuck around long enough to look like a future, but the wreckage he left in his wake cured Lydia of ever again expecting one. After Rex, there was no more going to places like the Tap on weekends, no more men, and no more hope left that her life would ever happen any differently than it had.

Beyond visiting Luke in prison in the Adirondacks the one time and going to Atlantic City for her honeymoon with Earl, she’d never left Wells.
Some trees love an ax,
a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he’d said, she disagreed and thought instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn’t feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what’s left crumbles to dust.

After Luke died, the phone rang a lot. The funeral home, the insurance company, the bank, the police. There were consoling calls, too, but mostly from people in Luke’s life, not hers; people who adored him and worked with him, some who were in jail with him, a few old girlfriends, ones she’d never met, and a few guys who used to swim with him in high school, his old coaches. She heard their voices as if they came from the end of a long tunnel. Their words were like echoes, and often she would hold the phone away until she sensed the talking about to come to an end. She did her best to be polite, but it was hard to hear from strangers about her son’s life, which she barely knew and had only just begun to be included in again.

Everyone she worked for called. The Moodys, the Hammonds, Peggy Riley, the Tucks, the Hills, and the Masseys, who owned the bed-and-breakfast in Salisbury
where she used to drive each day to change beds, clean linens, and scrub the toilets and tubs. Even Tommy Ball called, though she hadn’t seen him in years. All of them offered their condolences and told her to take her time and to please just let them know when she was ready to come back. She never called any of them. But she did take her time,
all of it,
she mumbled to herself more than a few times. From the age of thirteen until the morning Betty Chandler called her, Lydia had worked nearly every day of her life. From that moment forward, she was done. She figured that with the little money she had saved, there was enough to pay her living expenses for a year or so, and carry the minimum payments on her two credit cards if she had to use them to pay for food. Without having to go to work, she barely ever drove, so she didn’t have to pay for gas. Propane and electric were included in her rent, which was only four hundred dollars a month, and the phone and cable bills were the cheapest possible.