Lydia knew about June Reid but had never seen her. And here she was. As much as she’d wondered how Luke was and what he was doing and whom with, she knew right away she couldn’t bear this woman telling her about her son. It was as if she had taken her place or succeeded where she had failed. But even if the kind of love they had was a totally different kind of love than a mother and son’s, she didn’t want it rubbed in her face by someone whose motives for being with a man so young could not be good. Leave, she said to her as she struggled to unlock the door to her apartment. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to. Go away.
June came back a few weeks later and again Lydia rushed inside. But the next time she came, Lydia didn’t duck into her apartment or tell her to go. She stood on the porch and let her speak. It embarrasses her to remember, but she was flattered this elegant woman was so determined to spend time with her. After a little while, she asked her in. She stayed and she talked, and she came again, and after that again. Eventually, Luke came with her. The first few times he barely spoke, and Lydia, terrified she’d say the wrong thing and cause him to storm out, kept quiet. Lydia remembers June teasing Luke about the kids he hired—Perverts, pickpockets, and potheads, she’d chant—and each time would get a reaction. He’d try to get mad, but when he did, she would poke him in the stomach or under his arms and he would, against his will, melt. During those first few sessions, June’s light joking was the only sound to break the silence, and as difficult as it was to see Luke so at ease with a woman her own age, she was grateful. Slowly, after a few visits, he began to talk about work, even ask Lydia questions about the people she cleaned for. And then one morning, before Lydia left for the day, he showed up alone. They sat on the bottom step of her porch, mostly in silence, and watched two teenage boys scrape paint from the fence of a house on Lower Main Street. Eventually Lydia turned toward Luke and cautiously placed her hand on his shoulder. She began to speak, Luke, I . . . but he interrupted her, rushing his words, which sounded as if he’d rehearsed them. We’ll be okay. . . . I don’t ever want to talk about it because there’s nothing you can say to change what happened. And I don’t want you to try. I’ll never understand. I don’t want to. But we’ll be okay. Before she could respond, he hugged her—quickly, the first time in years, his neck against her face, his smell, his skin, all of a sudden so close. He stood, and as he turned toward his truck to leave, he stumbled awkwardly and nearly fell. I have to, he started to say, righting himself, then pausing a beat, stop drinking in the morning, a smile flaring, his eyes bright. This was less than one year before he died. Nothing, and then so much, then nothing.
After those first few weeks following the accident, Lydia stopped picking up the phone. Sometimes she’d leave the apartment, walk down to the town green and back to avoid it. Other times she’d just let it ring and ring. She’d turn the volume up on the television to drown the sound out, or if someone kept calling, she’d get in the shower and turn on the radio that hung from the showerhead. Eventually, the phone went quiet.
When the first call came from Winton, she picked up. It was the day she ran from the women at the coffee shop. When she came home that night, she sat down at the kitchen table. That first flash of anger when she’d heard the women gossiping frightened her, and panic drove her home. But the longer she sat in the kitchen and the more she replayed what she’d heard, the more that anger returned, and she felt again the hot violence from before. Something about those women—no more careless or cruel than anyone else she’d ever come across, and probably less so than many—something about what they said and how they said it that made her want to hurt someone. That anger and the ugly fantasies it fueled had her shaking in the dark kitchen. She sat there for so long and so still that when the phone rang, she jumped to her feet. Even at its lowest volume it startled her, and she rushed across the kitchen to pick up. The voice on the other end was a man’s, a younger man’s. She was relieved it was no one she knew. He sounded British but with a lilt or swerve in the accent that she couldn’t place. He asked if she was Lydia Morey, and when she said yes, he said, Miss Lydia Morey, you’ve won the lottery. Silly, she knew. Obviously some kind of scam, but she was caught off guard. I don’t win anything, she said without thinking, then told him he must have the wrong person because she hadn’t entered any lottery. As if anticipating her response, he said, Sometimes we enter lotteries and do not know; for example, if you have a magazine subscription or a Triple A membership, you may have automatically been submitted for a lottery. She told him she didn’t have any magazine subscriptions and was not a member of anything, and then he laughed. A big, wide warm laugh. After that, he said her name, slowly. Miss. Lydia. Morey. He just said her name, the same one when spoken out loud at the coffee shop earlier had caused her to flee. As he said it, heat rippled across her chest. A funny bone she didn’t even know was still there had been tickled, and something like a smile wrinkled her lips. Before she let him speak another word, she slammed the phone in its cradle.
June
There is no lake. She has been inching along this rock-strewn dirt road for hours, and there has been no sign of water, no cars, no humans, no evidence that she took the right exit after Missoula, or pointed the car in the right direction each time the almost-road forked. She is lost and alone and it does not matter. Nothing does, she thinks, not for the first time. She circles the idea again and again—that no choice she might make would have any impact on her or anyone else. Before now she would have felt exhilarated by the idea of existing without obligation or consequence, but the experience is nothing like she once imagined. This is a half-life, a split purgatory where her body and mind coexist but occupy separate realities. Her eyes look at what is ahead—the road, a fallen tree—but her mind scours the past, judges each choice made, relives every failure, roots out what she overlooked, took for granted, and didn’t pay attention to. The present scarcely registers. The people she sees are not the ones pumping gas into the Subaru, passing her on the highway, or making change when they sell her bottles of water and peanuts at mini-marts and gas stations. Instead it is Luke, pleading with her in a kitchen that no longer exists; Lolly, shouting at the top of her fourteen-year-old lungs from across a restaurant table in Tribeca; Adam, looking up at her, shocked, a young girl’s hand in his; Lydia stepping toward her that morning, before she knew what had happened, and the confusion and hurt on her face as June waved her off. She returns to these memories and replays them over and over, scrutinizes every remembered word, witnesses again each mistake. When she exhausts one, another appears. Another always does.
Her mind leaps to her childhood friend Annette. Annette lived two streets away in the same neighborhood in Lake Forest, and they spent their Saturday nights at each other’s house, playing with Annette’s collection of porcelain horses, listening to Shaun Cassidy and Jackson 5 records, making lists of where they would live when they grew up, what car they would drive, and what their husbands would look like. She remembers convincing Annette to come with her to sleepaway camp in New Hampshire the summer between fifth and sixth grades. Annette was timid, a careful creature who was reluctant to agree. For both it would be their first time away from home without parents, and Annette cited plenty of reasons not to go—the high school boys who lifeguarded at the club pool, an Arabian-horse show coming to Chicago. But June kept at her over the Christmas holiday, even convinced her mother to call and explain to Annette’s protective mother the place where she herself had gone as a girl. June can’t recall why it was so important she come with her, but remembers clearly the triptych of cousins from Beverly Hills who naturally and without ceremony established themselves at the top of the social pecking order from the first day. They had glamorous names—Kyle, Blaire, and Marin—and all three had the same feathered, shoulder-length, light brown hair.
On the second full day at camp, the Beverlys, as they had come to be known, asked June to switch her bunk with a chunky, gravel-voiced girl named Beth from Philadelphia. Beth and the Beverlys had been assigned the same cabin four down from June and Annette’s, and Beth, the cousins explained, not only smelled like garlic but stared at them when they were changing. June’s face prickles with heat as she remembers sneaking her sleeping bag and duffel to her new cabin while Annette ate lunch with the others in the lodge. Later that night, one of the counselors showed up at June’s cabin with Annette and insisted on speaking to June. She hadn’t believed Beth when she explained that June had asked her to switch bunks. June remembers Annette’s face relaxing as she entered the cabin. She imagines what must have raced through her head in that moment—here was June, her best friend, the girl she traveled halfway across the country with, who knew everything there was to know about her and who was wearing the rope bracelet Annette made for her birthday two years ago. Here was June and she would clear everything up. June remembers how she attempted to be casual, to pretend that nothing important had transpired or changed. But as she stumbled through a rehearsed explanation that it seemed like a good idea to give each other space and meet new people, Annette’s face froze. She looked at June as if she were regarding a complete stranger. It was not anger or hurt that registered on her pale, blank face. It was horror. June had, in that instant, transformed into someone she didn’t know. June can see Annette shaking her head as if she had been hit from behind by a thrown rock. She can see her turn toward the cabin door and walk away as the Beverlys snickered from their bunks. Annette went home the next morning. They were twelve years old and the two girls never spoke again. That fall, when they returned to Lake Forest Country Day for the first day of sixth grade, Annette would not look at her.
June wonders what became of Annette’s vast collection of porcelain horses. She took fastidious care of each one, dusting and polishing their glazed coats, gently brushing their manes and tails. There were dozens, maybe hundreds. Annette was an only child and had a playroom lined with white bookshelves loaded with those horses. She and her mother made special trips to antiques dealers in Springfield and Bloomington and Chicago to expand her collection. She had a real horse, too, a dark brown, gelding quarter horse she named Tilly, who was kept at a stable in Winnetka, but June was never invited there after school or on weekend mornings when Annette rode. June cannot remember the father clearly, only that he smoked a pipe, always wore a tie, and was rarely there.
After eighth grade, Annette and Tilly went East to a horsey boarding school in Virginia and June lost track of her. More than two decades later, after her divorce from Adam and after she’d moved to London, June was having lunch with a client, the American wife of a British banker, and when June’s childhood in Lake Forest came up, the woman asked her if she remembered a girl named Annette Porter. She’d been a sorority sister of hers at Butler University in Indiana. Great girl, the woman said, and though it stung to hear Annette’s name even all those years later, it was a relief to know she had been welcomed into a sisterhood somewhere and in that circle was considered great.
It never occurred to June before now what might have happened to Annette’s mother when her daughter left home. She imagines the poor woman taking up Annette’s duties dusting, polishing, and brushing the manes of each figurine. June pictures her now, all these years later, muttering to them, bringing them up to speed on the little neighborhood traitor who used to visit, the one who lured Annette to sleepaway camp and how she finally got what was coming to her.
Streaks of blue flash between the pines, and for a moment June struggles to remember where she is. She traces an imaginary map as she slows the car to a stop. Montana. Glacier National Park. Bowman Lake. She turns the engine off and watches the lake appear between the spaces in the trees. It reminds her of when Lolly would see a jumping light through the windows of the house in Connecticut at night and be convinced it was a UFO. She wouldn’t rest until they’d gone outside to see, and of course it was always just a star above the trees, beyond the house, blinking in and out of view. Still, she would insist that she’d seen something extraordinary.
June gets out of the car and looks for a path. The pine forest is dense, and though it is early afternoon and midsummer, the air is chilly under the branches. She fetches her coat from the car and wraps it around her shoulders before stepping off the road. Pine needles crunch softly beneath her tennis shoes and birds holler as she makes her way toward a clearing that overlooks a narrow strip of rocky beach. From there she can see the entire lake, which is much longer than it is wide and swerves gently to the left as it stretches toward its end. Impossibly straight pines cover the low hills that swell from the waterline, and beyond them rise hulking stone mountains. The landscape reminds her of northern Scotland, though these hills are younger, she decides, less worn-out.
The sun dazzles the wind-chopped surface of the water and the effect is blinding. There is, briefly, nothing but light. She squints from reflex, but the rest of her surrenders, waits to be erased. It is a quick oblivion, snuffed out as swiftly as it arrives. A cloud barges across the sky and returns color and shape to the trees, the hills, the pebbled shore. She waits for the sun to flare again, and soon it does. She feels its heat—enormous, perfect—and shivers as it recedes. She stands and waits for the radiant nothing to return and, as she does, remembers a motel shower four or five days ago in Gary, Indiana, with water pressure so forceful she saw stars as she let it pummel the back of her neck and head. She stood there until the water went cold. She thinks of the morning in her car days ago, just over the North Dakota state line, when she woke to the sound of idling school buses and shouting. Stiff from sleeping in the front seat and only half-awake, she blinked toward children in T-shirts and shorts dragging backpacks and lunch boxes. She had no idea where or who she was or what she was seeing. She looked at the light brick building, the buses, the American flag dangling from a white pole. Nothing was familiar. She was empty of memory, and instead of being frightened or upset, she was, dimly, without yet understanding why, relieved. The spell broke when she noticed her linen jacket bunched between the driver’s seat and the car door. It took nothing more than the sight of the wrinkled fabric for every last memory to return, including pulling off the interstate late the night before, looking for a motel and instead finding a quiet spot in the parking lot next to the school.
More clouds gather and the surface of the water darkens. She can now see more clearly the long, rectangular shape of the lake. It is just as Lolly described to her in a postcard once. Flawless. That was the word she used. She had found a flawless place, the first on her journey across country after her freshman year in college, perhaps the first ever. She’d been gone for more than a month when the postcard arrived, the first and the last she would send June from the trip. It was one of just four missives Lolly had ever mailed to her and the only one June saved. The postcard had been in the house, tucked away in one of her address books, but June remembers clearly the image of the lake, the Kalispell, Montana, postmark, the stiff closing, the clipped, telegram-like sentences wedged between the postcard’s edge and her London mailing address.