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.