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.
M., A flawless place. The first so far. Back in NY early August. Until soon, L.
The photo on the postcard had shown snow on the surrounding mountaintops, but now, under the summer sun, they are bare rock. This difference aside, the lake looks the same. Nothing changes here, June thinks, but then remembers an article she’d skimmed years ago about global warming and the gradual disappearance of the glaciers from Glacier National Park. Looking at this lake and these mountains, she wonders when the glacier that made this place was last in residence, how long it lasted. Did some trace of it still remain when Lolly was here?
Lolly was eighteen years old when she looked at this lake. Eighteen and angry and newly free. She had lived with her father in New York the last three years of high school. Her choice to stay with him after the divorce was never questioned or challenged, though it took the wind out of June when Adam, not Lolly, told her. It never occurred to her that Lolly would stay in New York. But when June spoke to her the next day, Lolly made it clear that just as June had made her decision to leave them for London, she had in turn made hers. They spent Christmas together at the house in Connecticut the first year after the divorce, but it ended abruptly with Adam driving back to the city on Christmas Day after Lolly opened her presents. There had been no fight, no dramatic blowup, just Adam’s restlessness and Lolly’s hostile quiet. She begged her father to take her back to the city, but he insisted she stay since June would be in the States for only two weeks and they should spend time together. Lolly retreated to her room upstairs and she and June spent the remaining days silent and on separate floors. Lolly refused to eat with June and would instead take bowls of granola and cup after cup of coffee upstairs. June stayed in London the following Christmas, and in the years when Lolly was at Vassar, June and Adam worked out alternating Christmas Eve and Christmas Day custody.
Lolly never came to London. In five years she never saw the gallery June opened. Never saw the small carriage house in Islington where she lived. Never accepted any of June’s invitations to join her in London and travel on to Europe or Scotland or Ireland. She returned one out of every seven or eight phone calls, just enough to keep from creating a crisis and instigating a serious discussion. She hardly ever wrote e-mails before texting came along, and even then the missives either explained her silence or signaled more. Will call this weekend. Buried. Can’t make it to NY next week when you’re there. Sorry. There were a lot of sorrys.
The sun returns, the lake shines again. The birds have stopped yelling and June hears Lolly’s voice rise above the noises of a restaurant the night she and Adam explained what was going to happen. June had just finished calmly describing how she and Adam were getting divorced, would remain friends, and that she would be opening a gallery in London for her boss. Lolly, June explained, could come with her or stay in New York to finish high school. Liar! Lolly shouted from across the table of the restaurant on Church Street where they ate most Sunday nights after returning from Connecticut. The whole place went silent. You lied to us! You did, you lied! You promised to be a mother and wife and now you are choosing to be neither. Lolly glared in silence before running to the bathroom. June can see her, the table between them, Adam at her side, mute, Lolly’s eyes tearless, desperately scanning her mother’s face for something familiar, anything she could recognize. June knows these eyes. They are Annette’s, Luke’s, Lydia’s. People who when they last looked at her saw a stranger.
June never argued custody with Adam. She never told Lolly how Adam had been accused of sexual harassment at NYU, how they had to settle and by doing so wiped out their savings and nearly half of the inheritance her father had left her when she was in her twenties. The only thing June hung on to was the house in Connecticut, which she and Adam had paid off only the year before. It was the unexpected financial setback, June told herself then, that kept her pushing for bigger and bigger sales at the gallery, landing more lucrative artists and needing to fly around the globe for both. But she knows now she couldn’t face what was happening at home, what was going on with Adam. She knew a fire was behind the smoke of accusation even though she wanted to believe him when he insisted the student who’d filed suit was unstable. Lolly had been a kid at the time and June chose to believe Adam. For that belief to sustain, Lolly could never find out, which she never did. Or if she had, she never let on. June wonders if all the secret-keeping back then explained why, years later, she covered up for Adam again. Had it become second nature? Lolly also never knew about the call June received from her friend Peg, who was, she whispered, at that moment watching Adam hold hands with a young girl at a restaurant in Long Island City. Stay out of sight, June told Peg before scribbling down the address and beelining out of the gallery and onto Fifty-seventh Street to hail a cab.