June
She knows now where this will end. Where the land runs out and there is only sea, and between the two, a room. The pages of the letter are tucked into the orange notebook that sits on top of the other two in the passenger seat next to her. At the Super 8, she read each word, again and then again, until the manager demanded she leave immediately or pay for another night. The handwriting was familiar, undeniably Lolly’s, but the words were not. They were from someone she only dimly remembered, from before she and Adam told Lolly they were divorcing. After that, Lolly was never as candid or open or as affectionate with June. She could see in the letter Lolly’s conflicted attempt to describe a future she had yet to occupy. She never got there, June thinks, remembering the cold exchange with Luke on the porch the night before the wedding. But she was trying. Wherever she’d been by the time she died, it was much closer than June knew. To be given a glimpse now was a bitter miracle, a ghostly caress that left more regret than solace.
As she crosses out of Idaho into Washington State, she breathes in Lolly’s scent. She’d sniffed it earlier, wafting off the pages, faintly, the strange perfume that smelled like hot chocolate that Will gave her during their semester in Mexico and continued to supply her with after. June rummaged through Lolly’s bag and found the small, brown-and-white bottle and sprayed her wrists, lightly, and the pages, before folding them into the notebook and leaving the Super 8. The smell of cocoa and cinnamon fills the car. How could she have allowed so much distance between them?
She hears Luke’s voice, yelling, as if in answer, Jesus, June, throw it! He is running away from her in the lawn behind the house. Throw it! Throw it! He is shouting to her as she kneads the hard plastic rim of the Frisbee in her hands. What are you afraid of? He calls, standing still now, arms crossed against his chest. It was the second summer, the one after he moved in, and he’d insisted they go outside and toss the Frisbee. They’d made it as far as the lawn, but something in her refused to throw it. She can’t remember what it was—the childishness of the game? That he had asked for something, demanded it, and she had the power to refuse? After a while he walked off, chilly and disappointed. There were moments like this when she could not be what he wanted and yet he would insist. It was like a game of chicken and she always won. She never blinked, and as with the Frisbee, he usually stormed off in a huff. Just like Lolly had so many times. She remembers how that yellow Frisbee sat in the lawn for weeks, neither of them willing to retrieve it. Luke even mowed around the thing and let a little thicket of grass grow up in a rough circle where it lay. He never mentioned it; nor did she. And then one day it was gone.
Her right hand strays from the steering wheel and rests on the notebook next to her. Her fingers brush the worn surface of the cover and then she pulls it to her lap, where she lets it rest. She breathes in Lolly’s scent and relaxes her foot from the gas pedal. She is careful to maintain precisely the speed limit, as she does not want anything to stop her from getting to the Moonstone. If she stops for gas only, she will be there before evening. There is no reason to rush other than the feeling she’s had since reading the letter: that she needs to see the inside of that room, hear the wind howl and the waves crash as Lolly described, see the same stars and moon, breathe the same salt air. It is not her daughter she is driving to, but it is as close as she will ever get.
She is hours away. She will drive until the road runs out, and she will find that room, and she will stay.
Dale
Our plan had been to wait a year before heading up from Portland to Moclips with Will’s ashes, but after the first gentle day in February, when the cold rains slowed and the relief of spring was, if not actually near, imaginable, Mimi said it was time. I called the Moonstone and asked if Room 6 was free the following weekend, and the woman who answered said it was not and that likely it wouldn’t be for a long while. Someone had checked in at the beginning of July and never left. I thought it was strange, since the Moonstone is hardly the kind of place you imagine someone calling home, but I was disappointed, too, as Room 6 meant something to Will. It was where he proposed to Lolly, and where he stayed when he returned to attend Joseph Chenois’s memorial. It would have been nice to stay in Room 6, see what Will saw during those trips back to Moclips, but it wasn’t the reason we were going.
Will never told us where he wanted to be buried or have his ashes scattered—why would he at twenty-three years old?—but we knew. A stretch of beach, no longer than a mile, runs between the Moonstone and the Quinault reservation, the ocean on one side and the small, gray house where he grew up, with us, on the other. There was no place he loved more. No place he felt as safe. It was his home and it gave us some comfort to think of him there. So for the first time since we’d lived there together as a family, we returned to Moclips.
When we arrived at the Moonstone, the dusty black wagon parked by the Dumpster looked like it hadn’t been driven in years. The blue license plate below the back hatch was hardly visible, but we knew right away it was from Connecticut and we knew it was June’s. My first instinct was to stop the car, put it in reverse, and drive away. I felt like we had stumbled upon something too personal to barge in on. I assumed, since this was where Will and Lolly got engaged, she had come to be close to her daughter, just as we had come to be close to our son. Unsure what to do, we parked the car next to the office and sat silently for a long time. Eventually, Mike and Pru said we were being ridiculous and that maybe it wasn’t even June’s wagon. So we went into the office, met the new owners, and got keys to two rooms. Rooms 5 and 7, the only two left and of course on either side of Room 6. None of us mentioned to Rebecca and Kelly that we knew June. Not even when Kelly apologized again about Room 6 not being available. We didn’t decide on this in the car or even signal nonverbally to each other in the office; it was just something we all understood. If she was there, we’d leave her alone as best we could, though given the steps she’d taken to avoid us and everyone else it was hard to imagine she’d stay once she knew we’d arrived.
I don’t know why or how, but through all these months of June’s not returning our phone calls or responding to the letters we mailed to her, care of her lawyer in New York, I knew she was okay. Mimi had wondered if we shouldn’t make a greater effort to locate her: call the artists she’d represented, interrogate the lawyer, track down relatives, though there was never any mention of uncles or aunts or cousins. A few weeks after Christmas, I called information and asked for Lydia Morey’s phone number and got it right away. I didn’t know who else to call, and at first, maybe because of the speculation that her son, Luke, may have had something to do with the accident, I’d put it off. But she was the only person from that town we knew who might know where June was. Besides Luke, June was not a terribly connected person. She had no friends who we knew to be close to her. She had left her job at a gallery in London years before, and whatever work life she had was, to us, invisible. By the number of people who’d turned up at the church that morning and by the pictures on June’s bookshelves and walls, it appeared she had lived a full and peopled life, but it didn’t seem like anyone, besides Luke, had stuck. Including, unfortunately, her daughter, who, according to Will and from what we could see ourselves, mostly stayed away. Given this, it’s maybe not so surprising that Lolly clung to our family. Will often joked that she settled on him only so she could get to us. And it’s true, I did notice how she would sometimes watch Will with Mimi or with Pru and Mike. She would watch them like her nose was pressed to the glass wall of an aquarium, watching exotic fish move in water, or how a scientist would observe rare bats in the wild. She said to us when we first met her in Mexico City that her parents didn’t know how to do it, and when we asked her what, she said, Everything. It was sad to hear a child speak so frankly and judgmentally about her parents, and for a while Mimi worried that Lolly was too cynical, too tough-minded and negative for Will. I worried, too, but Will was clearly in love, and I knew that nothing could be done if someone felt that way about another person, especially your child. Lolly was different, certainly on the self-centered and selfish side, but she was at her core kind and she adored Will and we could do nothing, so we embraced her. I think Will sensed that despite her girlish manner, something was broken in her. Mimi says wounds can sing a beguiling song, and for Will—who from boyhood felt compelled to fix and help and take care of nearly everything and anyone in his path—Lolly’s song was irresistible.
Outside the subject of her family, Lolly was lighter and more open, so we tended not to bring them up, so when we finally met Adam, and later, June and Luke, we knew little about any of them. Mimi and I had pieced together that relations were difficult between June and Adam. He had various girlfriends whom Lolly didn’t respect; and once June began her relationship with Luke, Lolly at first refused to acknowledge him and for the most part avoided her mother. She talked to Pru about it the week before the wedding and, of course, Will, but I don’t really know what went on between Lolly and her mother. Clearly they had much to resolve, and according to Pru, among the many sad things about what happened is that they had, in those months leading up to the wedding, just begun.
When I spoke to Lydia in January, she told me June had been gone since early summer and that she had not seen or heard from her since the funeral. She said that what remained of the house had been demolished, and a chain now blocked the driveway from the road. She reported the news dispassionately, as if she had little to do with any of it, or with June, which surprised me, since the two of them, from what I could see in those few days before the wedding, seemed close. At the rehearsal, June fixed Lydia’s hair and both of them laughed secretively, like old friends. I can still picture them, side by side, talking in the church, on the lawn, at the sink, on the porch. I remember them more with each other than apart. They were a funny pair, very different in superficial ways—one sleek and blond, the other earthy, with long, dark hair falling down everywhere; one poised and stoic, the other needier, less sure. Still, they were much the same in how they approached their children: formal and timid, careful, as if they had only just met them. But with each other they appeared relaxed, natural. So to hear Lydia talk about June with such distance was a surprise, but then I remembered June at the funeral and the days before. She didn’t speak. Not to us, not to Lydia, not to anyone. I remember how she pivoted away from each of us when addressed, and if hugged, she held still, hands at her sides, until it was over. We reached out to her as best we could, but we were in shock, and instinctively we closed ranks among ourselves. We were out of our minds and away from home. Our boy was gone.
There had been rumors right away about Luke causing the explosion. The day we left Wells, the woman at the front desk at the Betsy told us she always knew something terrible was going to happen the moment she heard Lydia Hannafin’s boy moved into June Reid’s house. Bound to end badly, she said, shaking her head and sounding perversely satisfied. The four of us stayed quiet and left the small lobby as quickly as possible.
We chose to believe that what happened was a horrible accident, nothing more and nothing less. Anyone who had ever been in that kitchen knows it had to have been something to do with the stove. It looked like something from the Depression era. Rusty and white, tilting at an angle. I remember the afternoon before the rehearsal watching June fussing over one of the burners to boil water for tea, muttering when it wouldn’t light right away. If I blame anyone, it’s June. She should have taken care to replace that treacherous appliance. It was so clearly not safe. She had the means, and the rest of the property was well maintained, meticulous even. I try not to think about it, but at times I catch myself wondering how on earth could she have missed this one thing. How could she have been so careless? Knowing that June must agonize over these same questions dulls with pity, but does not eradicate, the anger I can still feel.
What was left of that old stove, the house, and any clues to what exactly caused the explosion were destroyed the day after the accident, bulldozed and dragged away by the state, though no one knew why. Our family is certain that Luke did not set out to hurt anyone. He was a decent man, and despite tensions in the house that night and even the days before, he was no killer. If it was due to some carelessness on his part, the boy paid a high price and God bless his tortured soul. His time in jail and his being black made him an easy scapegoat in that town, which you could hardly call racially diverse. Will, who planned on becoming a public defender in communities that didn’t have adequate representation, would have been livid to see how swiftly the finger was pointed. So with so much unknown, our family chose to follow Will’s lead and let go of any theories or blame. This doesn’t mean we haven’t suffered, we have. And it doesn’t mean we’ve found peace.
After we returned to Portland, there was a period when Mike wouldn’t speak to us because we hadn’t pressed for more of an investigation right after the accident. He insisted we hire a lawyer to sue the fire department, or the town, I can’t remember now exactly who he had in his crosshairs. Maybe we should have. But when I question our choice to walk away, I realize that whatever punishment we might have unleashed on the clumsy small-town officials responsible for destroying our chance for answers, or even if through some great show of force or determination or luck we actually found out what happened that night, there would be no changing the awful truth: Will is gone. We will never again see or hear or be with our magical son.
Mike has come around, but it’s still not easy. We see him less, but Mimi and I know it’s just for now. Pru has taken time away from graduate school and moved back home. Her friends from Moclips and college call and occasionally drop by, but she keeps to herself, reads novels she’s read before at the kitchen table until after midnight and sleeps in late. For now, we just give her space and let her be. And Mimi and I still teach—her third grade and me fifth—and we do what we’ve done for years: encourage and discipline, scribble what needs to be learned on chalkboards, and keep watch as the young people who come under our care for a short while hurry by on their way to the world.
We talk less now. There are car rides and Sunday mornings and entire meals when Mimi and I don’t speak a word to each other. Not out of anger or punishment, but we’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.
I’m ashamed to remember that we did not reach out to Lydia sooner than we did. Good reason or not, we kept our distance from her in those unreal days between what happened and the funerals. She lost her son the same way we had, and still we had no words for her. When we spoke in January, I told her I was sorry it had been so long since she’d heard from us, and that she had been and would continue to be in our prayers. I asked her to let us know if June turned up, and she said of course and I promised the same. We stayed on the line for a few breaths of uncomfortable silence, and then we said good-bye.
A month later, from the Moonstone, Mimi dialed Lydia’s number again, but it just rang and rang. We tried a few more times but each time it was the same. This was the day after we checked in, when we first saw June. It was early, and Mimi and I had been up and showered and getting ready to go for a walk down the beach and around the old neighborhood. Just before we left the room, we saw June cross like a ghost in front of our window. She was wearing the same clothes she wore the night of the rehearsal and the unreal days after. It was just a moment, but she looked the same, only thinner, less animated. We didn’t see her again until that evening, just after the sun had gone down. The four of us had walked to the water’s edge at sunset to spread Will’s ashes. The surf was rough and the cloud cover was thick, so there was no grand ceremonial sunset as we’d hoped. Just the chilly surf and a pewter sky and Pru, knee-deep in the ocean, shaking the small ceramic container where we’d kept Will’s ashes all year. Once the last bit of ash had finally disappeared, Pru came back to where we stood on the beach. We circled her and, with Mike, threw our arms around each other and we wept. We stood together for a long time. I’ve never been one to go to church, but I’ve always believed in a creative intelligence behind the ongoing riddle of the world. To that great force I prayed to guide Will’s soul wherever it was and to protect my family. The second prayer was a selfish one. Shoulder to shoulder on that beach I couldn’t bear the idea of losing any of them. Yet I knew we would, one by one, lose each other. Life never felt so gifted. Mike let go first and nudged us away from the encroaching water. Reluctantly, I let go, too, and we began to make our way back to our rooms.
A light mist was in the gusting wind, and by the time we reached the Moonstone we were drenched. The lights in Room 6 were on, and as we neared the building, we saw Cissy step out the door, shut it behind her, and head toward home. Before the door was closed all the way, we could see June, arms across her chest, standing very still. She did not see us, nor did Cissy. How strange it was to see such a significant figure from Will’s past, from ours, leaving June Reid’s room. And how strange that Cissy hadn’t come by to see us since Rebecca and Kelly must have told her we’d checked in. Whatever her reasons, when Mimi and I got back to the room that night, we tried Lydia’s number one more time, only to hear it ring without answer. Mimi pulled a pen from her purse and began writing a note on the small pad of Moonstone stationery. We’d get an envelope and stamp from Kelly the next morning and post it to Lydia with an address no more specific than Main Street, Wells, Connecticut. We hoped it would find her.