Pack Up the Moon (14 page)

It had been another thing to like about Esau, that he thought of her as strong. He said she was resilient and that he knew she could handle anything. He admired her for it, and said it to her in the night, the time she needed it most. Kate used to like Nolan’s dirty words whispered in her ear, but when she was dating Esau, she craved his phrasing: “You’re strong as a bull, as strong as steel.” When he said she was like a fortress, she actually got wet.

Once, as he moved against her and in her, Kate had wished for one horrible moment that the condom would break. She was only thirty-seven; it wasn’t like her time had run all the way out. He would never know because she wouldn’t tell him. She pushed away the forbidden thought and considered whispering to him to go faster, harder, but she didn’t whisper things like that to him. She never said much of anything when they made love. She didn’t need to. Esau was attentive, and smart. He knew what to do to make her come. Esau was reliable.

The same night of her shameful condom wish, Kate had felt something build in her chest. She’d cleared her throat, trying to get rid of it, and then, with Esau’s arms firmly around her, on the solidity of his chest, the thing that was building finally broke and tears came, fast and violent. In surprise Esau said, “Hey, now,” but there was a pale yellow undertone to his voice that Kate recognized—he had been as happy to have her crying on him as she was horrified. This wasn’t what Esau was for, but it was what he wanted to be. “Hey, now, you. I’ve got you, Katie.”

No one had ever called her that but Nolan, and she hated Esau for it, pushing her face farther into his neck and letting the tears soak the edge of his pillow.

“I’m sorry,” she said what felt like but probably wasn’t hours later.

“For what? Crying? It’s good for what ails you. Talk to me.”

Kate snuffled and reached behind her for a Kleenex, not caring that she sounded like an elephant, knowing that she had to find the right words to make him leave that night. She wished he were the kind of person with whom she could just have a good, massive, no-holds-barred screaming match that ended in broken china, kisses, and the absolute knowledge of the strength of flawed but true love.

The last time she’d seen Esau, he’d said earnestly (with a sheen of tears in his eyes that Kate wished she could also summon, if only to make him feel better) that he wanted her to find happiness again someday.

(Happiness had been Robin’s sweaty fingers twisted into her hair while she read Harry Potter to him. Happiness had been Nolan’s long legs sleep-heavy, her own feet asleep under his in their shared bed under the wide-open window.)

Now she consciously relaxed her ears, which had been pulled back as if she’d been about to smile, or grimace. She couldn’t hear Pree, nothing at all. The girl was probably asleep as she herself should be.

She continued to stare at the ceiling. She’d painted all the other ceilings in the house—why not this one? Nolan had always said they should put up those silly glow-in-the-dark stars like they’d put in Robin’s room. Nolan loved those damn things. They would pretend they were making love outdoors. He’d have brought her a night picnic in bed. She knew he would have.

Marriage

October 1996

W
hen Kate saw Nolan for the first time four years after their breakup, she was wearing a pale pink dress that looked like the inside of an oyster’s shell. She was the pearl inside, naked and exposed. It was nothing she would have ever chosen to wear, all plunging neckline and taffeta flaring at the knee, but the host of the Halloween party, Josie, had insisted that all the women wear thrifted bridesmaids’ dresses.

At twenty, Kate was in her junior year at Berkeley, finally feeling as if she might make it. She’d almost flunked out in her first year, going on academic probation twice. She’d spent way more time drinking than painting or studying, and she’d tried coke more than a few times, liking it so intensely it frightened her. She’d slept with too many men—boys, really—so many she didn’t remember some of their faces.

She’d been on the edge of failing at everything that mattered, but one morning she opened her eyes at three a.m., fully awake, her roommate snoring on the other bed.

It was her daughter’s third birthday. Somewhere, a child might be laughing, a child who didn’t know her at all.

What if, someday, that child wanted to find her?

It would never happen, she told herself firmly, believing it.

Kate made it to class on time that morning for the first time all semester.

Now she had her own apartment, a small, damp, extremely cheap cottage in Oakland pressed against the side of a hill, and Sonia had given her an old VW Bug that ran most days. She went to most of her classes (except economics) and never missed Painting 307 (emphasis on abstract portraiture—she was in the middle of painting herself as a wooden chair). Greg Jenkins probably thought she was his girlfriend.

At Josie’s party, Nolan stood across the room from Kate, better-looking than ever, finally grown into his breadth. He wore a deep purple shiny suit with a pearl-colored bow tie.

How . . . ?
Shit, it didn’t matter how. He was there. Ten feet away. Less. She felt as vulnerable as she’d been that day she’d hung up on him for the last time. She was as brokenhearted as when she’d kissed their baby girl good-bye. And she was about a million years older.

B is for baby.

Careful not to look directly at him, Kate kept her eyes on the back of Don’s head as he primed the keg.

Then Josie turned up the music as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something came on. Heads bobbed, and people Kate barely knew started to dance. One guy wearing a pink ruffled tux danced as if he were fighting off a swarm of bees, and a girl rushed out onto the porch to vomit in the bushes.

The singer sang,
I think I remember the film.

Kate tried so hard, so very, very hard not to look at Nolan. She tried until she gave up. And there, in that moment, it all came back. All of it. In his face she saw the long nights spent laughing until their stomachs hurt, late afternoons spent watching golden light slip into sunset on the beach, fingers threaded, limbs light with hope. His gaze said the words to her, the same words she didn’t even know she’d been missing.

As I recall, I think we both kind of liked it
.

Kate’s heart flew up toward the skylight open to the moon.

Nolan didn’t break eye contact. His gaze was the apology. The profession.

Kate’s fingers started to shake.

Josie and Don yelled something about the tap on the keg.

Neither Kate nor Nolan even spared them a glance. Inside her chest, a million wishes thrummed and soared, frantic hummingbirds of hope.

And then in front of dozens of people who weren’t paying any attention to either of them, Nolan crossed the room with long strides. He took her face in both his hands—Nolan’s hands!—and kissed her. The red cup of warm beer Kate held splashed into her dyed pink pumps, and she went up on tiptoe, kissing him back. Half her heart rejoiced, soaring to the skylight above, and out to the moonlight. She kept the other half carefully swaddled away, protected by canvas and plywood.
Nothing is this easy,
she warned herself, but then the feel of his mouth, so perfect, so
missed
, pushed everything out of the way.

•   •   •

By the time the song—and that kiss, that perfect kiss— was over, Kate’s powers of critical thinking had come back. This was the man who’d broken her heart when he was a boy.

This was the man from whom she’d kept the biggest secret in the world. She should tell him. The very first words to fall from her lips should be,
I had your child.

But Nolan spoke first. “I found you.” His voice was hoarse.

“You did.”

“I love you.”

And once he said those words, all her courage deserted her. He loved her? Four years and a lifetime later? How
dared
he just show up? She could be living with Greg, for all he knew. She could be
married.

Kate could still taste him on her upper lip.

She took the beer Becky passed her and turned away from Nolan.

“Wait,” he said, putting his hand on her elbow. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

There was so much she
should
say. And yet, her mouth stayed shut, the words locked so far inside her she couldn’t even feel their shape.

He followed her outside, past the pool of vomit, stepping over the legs of the passed-out girl who was now laughing in her sleep. There at the edge of the party, at a dark table that held two overflowing ashtrays and one abandoned bong, Kate sat and kicked off her heels. She undid her hair. As it fell around her shoulders, she watched Nolan’s eyes burn. “Can I sit down?”

“Why?” Kate honestly wanted to know, even though it was the wrong word, not what she should have said.

“Because I love you.”

“How can you know that?” Loneliness felt like an ache, deep inside the marrow of her leg bones.

“I can’t ever start to tell you how sorry I am,” he said, clutching the top of the wooden chair. He swayed, even though Kate doubted he’d had a drink. “But I want to try. I want to tell you for the rest of our lives. I transferred to Berkeley on purpose. To find you.”

“So what? You’ve just been waiting for tonight? For four years? No e-mail? Not one fucking phone call?”

“I didn’t know. Until I saw you today . . . I didn’t know, Kate. I’ve been an idiot.”

Kate sipped her beer and tried to keep her eyes on the people dancing. “We’re twenty. Who knows anything at twenty?”

“My parents were eighteen when they fell in love,” he said, leaning toward her. “And they’re still in love so much they barely see me. How old were your parents?”

They’d been nineteen. Sonia still kissed Kate’s father’s picture every night before she went to sleep. She’d kissed the picture more than she’d ever kissed Kate.

“Anomalous.”

“Or,” he said, “young love is in our blood. Our birthright.”

He was so cocky. The way he tossed the word about, “love,” like it cost the same as all the other words, “chair”
and “floor” and “Tuesday,”
maddened her.

Nolan sat, turning the chair so that he could lean in toward her. She could just make out the wings of his shoulder blades. “I did everything wrong.”

“Yeah,” she granted, trying to pretend she couldn’t hear the ice melting and cracking inside her.

“You never answered, though. I called, again and again. I came to your house a year later, when we were visiting, and your mother wouldn’t open the door to me.”

It was a jolt—Sonia had never mentioned that.

Nolan rubbed his eyes, then took one of her hands in his. The chill left her fingers as soon as he touched her. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making that up to you. If you let me.”

Part of Kate, the part that touched his hand, longed to say,
Yes, yes, yes.
The other part, the part that still mourned for her unknown daughter late at night, the part that was lying to him by keeping quiet, made her say shakily, “No.”

“Will you let me try?”

“No,” she said, but the word hung, untethered, in front of them, about to fall.

“Please, Kate. Let me find you.”

She leaned forward. He did the same. Their eyes closed as their foreheads touched. They breathed together. She peeked through her eyelashes at his face, and the shape of his mouth was so familiar and sexy and at the same time so dear. The planes of his cheeks were higher than she’d remembered and she felt a little shock of surprise as she noticed them again. She leaned forward, sliding her cheek against his until she could rest her head against his shoulder—but what she was really doing was reaching her arms around him, to see if his shoulder blades still felt like the wings were hiding underneath, and yes—she breathed a sigh of relief—there they were.

“I’m not letting you go this time,” he said against her ear, and she trembled.

“Promise me that we’ll never talk about the past,” she said.

“I’ll promise you anything.”

Kate pulled back. “I mean it. If we . . . if we do anything with this, the past is gone. We start again. Here. Fresh. As if we had nothing before.”

“But what we had was perfect . . .”

“We lost everything we had. We start over or we do nothing. At all.”

“I promise. A new start, Katie.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

Nolan leaned forward and kissed her. “I found you.”

He’d found her.
Even more than that, he’d been
looking
.

Under Kate’s worry grew a thin green tendril of hope.

April 1999

•   •   •

Three years later, on a plane somewhere east of the Nevada border, Kate and Nolan made a bet.

“It’s your first trip to Vegas, and it’s important to make a bet early,” Nolan said. “It gets us in the right frame of mind.”

“You’re planning on us being high rollers?”

“I always spend at
least
forty dollars gambling in Vegas.”

Kate sucked in a shocked breath. “That much?”

He nodded solemnly. “Stick with me, kid. I’ll show you the ropes. This is gonna be a fancy wedding.”

“Probably the fanciest ever. I can’t believe we’re not telling your parents.”

Nolan pressed the bridge of his nose. “I know. They’d fly in from Maui in a heartbeat if they knew we were doing it. But taking Dad away from his golf? They’d just be keeping an eye on the time, wanting to get back. Are you sad we didn’t tell Sonia?”

Kate laughed. “No.”

“She used to like me. I know she did. I’ll win her back somehow.”

“I hope so.” Kate looked out the window, seeing nothing. Since Kate and Nolan had gotten back together, she’d barely had contact with Sonia even though they lived half an hour apart. Sonia always claimed busyness at the aquatics center, but Kate knew it was the hundred-foot wall that had grown between them. Sonia had protected her once—keeping Nolan away when he’d come back. And now Kate could feel the disapproval radiating from her mother in unhappy waves, could feel it every time she showed her mother a new painting, every time she heard Sonia
humph
when she talked about the art class she was teaching at the local charter school. Nolan was someone Sonia had dismissed, and once Sonia’s approval was lost, it was almost impossible to get back. No one knew that better than Kate.

Sonia did, thankfully, approve of the fact that Nolan was almost done with law school, top of his class. That was something, at least. Everyone approved of that, even Nolan’s parents. He was doing something right.

And it was fair, wasn’t it? Their parents, both sets of whom had clung to each other more tightly than they’d clung to their respective children, would understand them honoring the same type of relationship, right?

Turning to face Kate, his elbow wedged between them in the cramped seats, Nolan said, “Are you sure you don’t mind? The opposite of fancy. Will you regret it later? That we Vegas’d it?”

She put a hand against his cheek and felt the stubble starting along his jaw. “Even if we were married by a midget Elvis in drag, I would think it was a better wedding than any other in the whole world. And besides, I don’t want momentous.”

“No?”

“I don’t even want romantic, really. I just want you.”

Nolan colored, a deep rose lighting the top of his cheeks, something she knew only happened when he was almost overcome. He cleared his throat. “Okay, so now we
have
to bet something in honor of sighting the city.”

“I bet I can get your clothes off within three minutes of stepping into the hotel room.”

“Sucker bet.” Nolan pointed. “There it is.”

Kate looked outside at the desert, and there, off in the distance, was an enormous sprawl of buildings, the outer lines distinct against the barrenness of the desert. “All of that is Las Vegas?”

“Yep.”

He’d been to Las Vegas a couple of times with friends, and she wanted to ask if he’d come here with another girl while they were apart, but that broke their unspoken rule of never talking about the past. But she’d put her heart back in his hands again, knowing the choice was
hers
, and it felt somehow richer—more true—for it. “It’s big. I bet you can’t throw a quarter across the main drag.”

“Waste of good money. I could probably win a million dollars with that exact quarter in a slot machine.”

Folding her arms across her chest, she said, “So what, big guy? What’s worth betting on?”

“This,” he said, serious again, and so very Nolan. “This is.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Good god, we’re getting
married.
Do we need witnesses?”

“Won’t the chapel provide them? Like in the movies?”

Kate shook her head. “How many weddings have they witnessed? Half those end in divorce, and I don’t want their bad juju.”

“Old witnesses are used up. I can see that.” Nolan fiddled with the tray table lock. “What about this? I bet I can get two people on the street to witness our wedding for us.”

“Total strangers?”

“Why not? We’re not telling anyone else.”

It didn’t feel right to Kate. Not just anyone. “Not a good bet. They could be drunks. Or murderers.”

“Killers on a Vegas binge.”