Pack Up the Moon (23 page)

She made it sound so simple, and Kate wrapped her arms around her waist as she listened to the girl tromp down the staircase.

Then, without thinking, she went to the kitchen. She opened her computer and composed an e-mail.

Still without thinking, without second-guessing or talking herself out of it, she hit send.

Nolan,

Pree is your daughter. She’s 22. I lied. I’m so sorry.

Love,
Kate

She went into the studio and uncapped her favorite cadmium red.

Friday, May 16, 2014
11:45 p.m.

P
ree is your daughter.

The hollow inside his chest felt as if Nolan had crashed his car, as if he’d veered off the road and flipped upside down, rolling over and over. As he drove, he seriously considered doing it. If he didn’t have Fred Weasley to take care of, he would, and goddamn it, he hadn’t had to fight those urges in a while. Just speed up—that’s all it would take. He’d hit seventy, eighty fucking miles per hour and aim for a light pole in a deserted location. The only ones affected by it would be his buddies at work who would have to clean up the blood and glass after the car and his body were carted away.

This pain—it was so bad, so fucking
bad.
It didn’t have his usual guilt all wrapped up in it, either, the regret that slowed pain into a thick liquid fire. This was sharp and intense, the flames of it whipped up by fury.

Pree was his daughter. He’d never known he had a daughter, and the worst part was that he could never call her that. Kate had stripped that right from him. If he’d known—oh, god. He let himself imagine for one terrible moment a world in which Robin was fine, a world in which Nolan had always known his daughter. A world in which, even without Robin, he would have still been a father . . . Such a different world.

He drove on autopilot. The only thing he was conscious of was steering the car carefully between the yellow and white lines. He felt Fred’s hot breath on his wrist every once in a while. Nothing else. He didn’t even know where he was going until he got off the freeway at Keller. He took the winding road down Fontaine like he was riding a skateboard, leaning back, barely braking on the long hill lined by oaks as old as Oakland itself. At the bottom he went into the treeless flats south of MacArthur. It wasn’t safe here, not this late at night, and he knew it, but he didn’t lock his doors. After all, he wasn’t the target here—he wasn’t young or black, although the groups of kids huddled on the corner at MacArthur and Eighty-second gave him a look like he didn’t need to slow down. According to Rafe, there were two reasons why white men cruised the streets down here, and Nolan was interested in buying neither drugs nor girls. At Dowling he hung a left, dodging two people that stood talking in the middle of the street. They, too, stared. He nodded, and they nodded back, dismissing him.

Rafe’s house was an older bungalow built with Craftsman touches that had all been ripped out by an earlier occupant. It was pale yellow, the grass a little too long, the driveway gate stuck permanently open. The porch light was off. Nolan glanced at his watch: 11:54 p.m. He left Fred in the car.

Nolan rapped on the iron door, sending a hollow, clanging noise inside. There was a pause, and then a twitch of the curtains in the room on the other side of the glassed-in porch.

Rafe, wearing a brown terry robe he was still belting around his waist, opened the door. “What the fuck, man?”

Without hesitation, Nolan punched Rafe across the jaw.

He hit him so hard he thought he’d broken his hand—pain sliced up his arm and he gasped. But it was a good, clean, cold pain. Concentrated.

Seemingly unsurprised by the sudden blow, Rafe held his jaw, stretching it out, his eyes narrow. “What. The fuck.”

“She had a baby.”

“Huh? While you were in?”

Nolan shook his head and his hand at the same time. “Twenty-two years ago.
My
kid.” In his head echoed the road crew’s divorced guys’ lament:
That’s my kid. Mine.
He went on, “A girl. A daughter. I never knew. And she’s a good kid. Nice.” Covering his face with his hands, he said, “I met her yesterday.”

From behind Rafe, Rita said, “Nolan? Rafe? Should I call 911? What’s going on?”

“No, baby. It’s okay. Go back to bed.” Rafe rubbed his jaw some more. “Come in, brother.”

Rafe poured him a shot of tequila—neat, no lime, no salt, just a straight-up shot. He got two bags of peas out of the fridge and wrapped them in red dishcloths. They sat together, frozen peas held to their cheeks. “Throw it back.”

But Nolan still felt frantic, out of control, and the tequila fueled the fire instead of cooling it. “I had a family. Rafe, I had a
family
. I wrecked it. But she wrecked it first, and I never even knew.”

Rafe leaned back slowly in his chair until the front two legs lifted. A shuffling noise behind him in the hall said someone small was watching them, but Nolan didn’t turn his head. They’d go back to bed. That’s what families did. Slept at the same time, under the same roof . . . together.

“So this daughter. You met her.”

“Not
as
my daughter. Kate said she was someone else’s. And I believed her. Fuck, now that I think about it, she has my nose. My shoulders. She looked so much like Robin I could hardly bear to look at her, and when Kate said she wasn’t mine, not the same combination of genes, I just believed her.” He leaned forward so that Rafe met his eyes, held them. “I was a father. It was the most important thing to me, and I was so fucking good at it. And then I couldn’t be one anymore. But . . .”

“If you’d known, you would have still been one.”

Nolan gave a short nod. “We were just kids, but we could have raised her together. I’d have been the father of a full-grown daughter now, not just some dead boy’s dad.”

Rafe shook his head and after a long, considerate pause said, “She should have told you.” He poured another shot for both of them, and when he passed it to Nolan he thumped him on the shoulder before picking up his frozen peas again.

Silence fell and, with relief, Nolan fitted himself into it. He belonged in this kitchen, next to the laundry on the dining table and the pile of clean dishes. Rafe sat with him. Together. Rita, awake and waiting for Rafe, would forgive him for hitting her husband eventually. At least if he had nothing else in the world but his dog, who was probably howling right now out in the closed-up car, he had this. A tiny, refracted shard of a family, but one that saved him a chair.

Death

November 2011

K
ate didn’t believe it until the very last minute. Until what felt like the last second, actually, although they still had a week. Had she known that then, she wouldn’t have been able to move a single muscle.

As it was, she was still able to smile at Miss Evelyn when she entered Robin’s room at the hospital. She was his favorite nurse, and the only thing that made leaving her okay was the fact that he was going home.

Going home.
It had been presented as an option, and Kate had grasped at it with both hands, as if it were the life preserver that would pull them all up out of the river of pain that was carrying away her whole family.

“Yes, we want him at home.”

The hospital’s social worker, who went by the perky and very young name of Brittani, said, “Hospice at home for a child is a huge undertaking. We can talk about what that would mean for you, but let’s talk about your other options now, too. There’s a group house for end-of-life children in Hayward that does amazing things, for example. Your insurance would cover it.”

Kate clutched Nolan’s thigh through his jeans. Her fingers were claws, but she couldn’t help it. “A whole house?”

“It’s lovely, with a big garden, and the people who work there are—”

“A
house
full of children who are . . .” She couldn’t say it. She hadn’t said it once yet. If she didn’t utter the words, it made them stay not true. For a little while longer, at least.

Brittani nodded. “Or he could stay here at the hospital. That’s an option.”

The hospital where he was woken every three hours to do something, take something, get something drawn. It was one of the best children’s hospitals in the western United States, but Kate was furious about the fact that nothing could be done to get rid of the smell. Sick children shouldn’t have to inhale that soul-crushing, antiseptic, singed-plastic scent.

“Home.
Our
home.” She impressed herself with the firmness of her voice. Its solidity.

Brittani looked at Nolan, who nodded once. She brought out a pamphlet, flipped it open, and began to talk about hospital beds and ventilation needs.

Kate split herself again. One half—no, perhaps an eighth—of her was listening intently. At the time the bed was delivered, she would remember what Brittani had said about it. She would have already bought the supplies from the hospital store Brittani had recommended. She had the name of the bedside potty chair memorized, and she understood the catheterization process for when the hospice nurse wasn’t available to help.

But the rest, seven-eighths of her, wasn’t in the room. This part wasn’t surprising to her. What unnerved her was that the rest of her wasn’t with Robin, either. She didn’t imagine that she was tucked up next to him, although that’s what a good mother would do, probably. That part of her wasn’t even painting, something she’d been completely unable to do since he got sick. She imagined painting now—yes, she imagined her darkest, her most frightening work. She knew that if she could get to the canvas, it would be the best work she’d ever done. But she couldn’t. Every time she picked up a brush, she felt as if she were drowning, her head pushed and held under a mile of dark water. She knew that for every tiny piece of emotion she might be able to capture, she’d be holding a thousand—no, a million—times more in her heart, in her blood. How could she even dream of painting when her son was dying? And all the emotion that wasn’t going anywhere while she
thought
about the paintings was just circulating in her body like the cancerous cells that circulated inside Robin. As he got sicker, she knew she was failing as a mother. Why would she try to succeed at something that so obviously didn’t matter to anyone? It was just paint piled on a static canvas. Who the fuck cared? For the first time in her life, she wasn’t an artist.

Instead, now, in the office with chipper talkative Brittani, desperate to be anywhere else—
anywhere
in the world—she thought about trips she’d taken to Europe, before he was born. Once she’d gone with Nolan, and twice she’d gone alone. These were the trips she lived in now. Walking in a soft, surprisingly warm spring rain late at night in Barcelona when sleep wouldn’t come, the streets full of young people like her who apparently had no place better to go than the cafés and bars that lined the old streets. They stood inside looking out at her, probably wondering why she had no umbrella and yet wasn’t walking quickly. But she didn’t mind getting wet. The smell of the paving stones mixed with the scent of tobacco and wine. The sight of damp coats cheered her. In a high window, she saw an old woman in an orange kerchief gazing down, as if looking for someone. Kate waved, and the woman waved back nervously before drawing back out of sight.

And there was the time she spent in Venice. A whole week, by herself, in a tiny rented apartment. She remembered the cold, echoing marble stairs that led up to the fourth-floor rooms, and the way the stone felt harder than any tile under her bare feet in the bathroom. A terrace not even five feet wide gave her a view of all the roofs in Cannaregio, and when she slept in the flat, flat bed, she counted how many different sets of bells she could hear. Seven. Maybe it was nine. During the day, she sat at the canal’s edge at a café and listened to the water slapping the walls as the boats passed by. Once, she saw a UPS boat, as brown and blocky as their American four-wheeled counterparts, and she laughed so hard the waiter raised an eyebrow.

A pub in London. A bridge in Prague. A train in France. Anywhere but here. The pain was too bad, the fear was too much. Anywhere else, maybe it would be bearable. It wouldn’t, but she let herself have the fantasy.

When Brittani said, “Do you have any other questions?” Kate didn’t. She’d already asked them and she’d been given the answers. But most of her hadn’t heard them. Most of her wasn’t even a mother. She wasn’t a painter. She wasn’t even here, because if she wasn’t here, if she’d never been here at all, her son, the person most important in the whole world, wouldn’t be dying.

•   •   •

On the worst day of her life, Kate had been headed to San Francisco to meet a friend at the De Young. Everyone had been nagging her, Nolan included, to get out of the house, if only for a couple of hours, and she’d finally agreed, exhausted from arguing about it. Then the friend had canceled, citing a family emergency that later turned out to be a sick cat. On learning that, Kate had almost laughed.

So Kate went home. She looked for the boys. Robin rarely got out of bed then—it hurt too much—but sometimes Nolan would talk him into being carried downstairs and placed in his wheelchair, then rolled around the house and the garden. Lately, though, he’d been saying he didn’t want to go outside. When he looked out the window into the backyard, at the tetherball pole, out at the pond where he liked to lie on his stomach and watch the koi swim up at him, their mouths begging for food, instead of pulling toward the out of doors, he turned his face to the wall. Kate wondered with sick despair if it was because he knew he didn’t have many more days left, but when she’d tried asking him, he’d closed his eyes and asked her to read more of
The Deathly Hallows
instead.

“Oh, honey. What about the part in
The Philosopher’s Stone
when they’re playing Wizard’s Chess?”

“Do too many people die at the end, Mom? Is that the reason you won’t finish reading it to me?”

She’d shaken her head at him, momentarily unable to speak.

“I figured. Who dies?”

“I can’t—” Kate choked.

“Remember when Cedric dies in
The Goblet of Fire
? And Harry sees him and talks to him before he carries him back to Hogwarts?”

“Yeah, baby.”

“I like that part. I like that Harry can see his parents in the Mirror of Erised. I just wanna know one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Is it real?”

“That Harry can see his parents?”

Robin said, “You see your greatest desire in the mirror, right? So a desire isn’t really real. So maybe they’re not there?” He paused to cough. Then he said, “I know what I’d see in the mirror.”

It took all her courage to ask, “What?”

I’d see myself healthy. I’d see myself as a teenager. As an adult. With my own children.

“I’d see myself playing Quidditch. And
winning.
” Another pause. “Does Ron die?”

“No,” she could answer truthfully. She’d never tell him about Fred Weasley. Tonks and Lupin. She couldn’t read aloud Dumbledore’s line, “Never pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love.” Nor could she tell him about Harry dying. And then his returning, alive, which was the most terrible part of all.

The day she came home early, Kate hadn’t found them upstairs. The wheelchair was in the hall, but she looked in the backyard anyway. Maybe Nolan had taken him out for a drive? It was one of the few things that still made Robin feel good. It was as if they’d traveled backward in time, and Robin was a baby again, and the only way they could get him to sleep was to drive him around and around the hills of Oakland. Nolan would strap him in, careful not to bruise him, and then he’d drive like a little old man: slow to the stop signs, even slower to start. If he saw a pothole, he went around it, and speed bumps he negotiated like land mines. It worked, though—on nights when Robin couldn’t sleep and the medicine wasn’t helping, nights when the drugs backfired and left him anxious and in pain, the drives were the only thing that helped.

Kate normally didn’t go along. Not that she wasn’t invited—it was her car and her child; obviously she could have gone, too—but the care with which Nolan drove Robin, as if he were about to break, made her insane. She wanted speed for her little boy. Ninety miles an hour on a hot summer night with the top down, an arm stuck out to dance in the wind. But Robin couldn’t ride like that anymore.

That afternoon, she’d thought they were driving. Out somewhere. She’d taken Nolan’s car when she’d left, knowing Robin liked hers best.

So when Kate had gone into the garage and smelled the exhaust, when she’d heard her Saab
putt-putt
ing along, when she’d seen the garage door all the way down, she hadn’t panicked. They were getting ready to go. Or maybe they were just getting back; Robin was asleep in the backseat, she could see through the window.

When she saw Nolan slumped at the wheel, though, she couldn’t quite make her brain work fast enough.
Something. Do something
.

Thwack!
She hit the garage door button. She ran through the house and grabbed the portable phone and dialed 911 so quickly that it felt like she’d always had the phone in her hand. The dispatcher asked questions Kate couldn’t answer, and she hung up, hurling the phone into the bushes. While she waited for the sirens, at first so far away, to get closer, she dragged Robin out. She pulled him more roughly than she ever had before, knowing somehow that the tilt of his head was just wrong, and if she could get him out on the lawn, she could get it right. Get him normal again. As normal as he’d been that morning, maybe. Or even better, the week before. Or the month before, before they’d lost what was left of their hope.

Robin wouldn’t go like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It
couldn’t
end this way.

Nolan was still in the garage, still slumped at the wheel. Kate pulled open the driver’s-side door and undid his seat belt. He was heavy, slouched forward as if his spine had softened. She didn’t know how to get him out, only that she had to, so she leaned in and put one arm under each of his and then pulled as if her own life depended on it. He moved more easily than Robin, perhaps because if she looked into her heart to examine it, she cared less, if only by the smallest—almost immeasurable—fraction. She moved faster, with a tiny bit less caution. She was stronger, too. The fear had by then become a raging beast inside her, and she probably could have picked up the car and shaken it over her head if she’d needed to.

She had to move fast with Nolan, because the sooner she dragged the man she loved outside to the good air, the sooner she got to go back to Robin, the boy she loved most.

Nolan on the grass. Faceup. Not breathing. She knew he wasn’t, and there wasn’t anything else she could do, just pray the ambulance got there in time to help him.

She chose Robin.

His mouth was still warm, and the feel of his lips on hers gave her hope. She could taste the banana he’d had for lunch, the food that sat best with him now. And there was the acrid yellow smell of his medicine, the smell that made both of them gag when she gave it to him.

His chest, under Kate’s hands, moved perfectly. She was strong. Nolan always told her how strong she was—it wasn’t even hard to do this, to keep his lungs moving for him, to give him her breath. She willed herself not to use any of the oxygen before she gave it to him. She didn’t need it, and her boy did—she knew that—even though his lips were still pink, his cheeks ruddy, as if he were in the best of health. When Robin was a baby, still healthy, Kate would sneak into his room, convinced he’d stopped breathing. It was only by sheer force of her own will that his chest had risen and fallen—staring at him was what started him breathing again. She knew it was a ridiculous idea, but it was one she believed. She had given birth to him. Her body had made her son breathe. She should be allowed to do it just one last time. For fuck’s sake, she was finally getting good at it.

In between breaths, she screamed for help. From anyone, from God, from Mr. Foster next door. The screams ripped from her lungs, shredded terror that she sent out with nothing returned. While she pressed Robin’s chest again and again, she thought bitterly of the two-income houses they were surrounded by. All their neighbors had fabulous jobs, fantastic lives. Their perfect, healthy children were either in day care or in expensive charter schools. Where the hell, then, was the help? Kate saw maids go in and out of people’s houses, saw their gardeners with their leaf blowers and poison sprays—where were they now? Where was someone, anyone else that she could direct to do CPR on Nolan?