Pack Up the Moon (28 page)

Rachael Herron
received her MFA in English and creative writing from Mills College, and has a popular Web site at RachaelHerron.com. She is the author of the Cypress Hollow romance series,
as well as the memoir
A Life in Stitches
. She is an accomplished knitter, and lives in Oakland with her wife, Lala, and their menagerie of cats and dogs.

A CONVERSATION WITH RACHAEL HERRON

Q. How did you come up with the idea for
Pack Up the Moon
?

A. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a teacher. I got my master’s in English and spent approximately eleven seconds teaching writing in an arts college. I hated every second of it. I couldn’t sleep for worrying about the next day’s class, I was a stuttering wreck in front of the students, and I hated the bureaucratic red tape. So one afternoon while waiting for my milk shake at a burger joint in the Oakland hills, I picked up a trade magazine and started looking for trucking jobs. I thought it would be romantic to be a truck driver, my long hair (I’d grow it) flying out the open window, my dog in the passenger seat, both of us wearing matching red bandannas. I’d write fiction at truck-stop counters. I’d drink very bad coffee. It would be amazing.

Instead, though, I noticed an ad to be a 911 dispatcher. Oh! Wouldn’t that be a window on the human condition?

I’ve never been more right.

Every time I answer the phone at my 911 job, it’s a new story. Or rather, it’s a new spin on very, very old stories. I don’t take notes—I don’t steal people’s lives that way. First, it would be unethical. And second, I don’t have to. Some calls have stuck with me over the years, word for word, and nothing I do can shake loose the curses and promises and screams I’ve heard.

The focus of life itself has shifted for me over the fourteen years I’ve been dispatching. When I got out of grad school, I had stars in my eyes. Everything was going to be perfect, for everyone. I just knew it.

I know now that life is hard, more difficult than I could have imagined, and that this is true for everyone. But I also know that people love harder than I ever imagined was possible. Everywhere.

I hear it.

I’ve talked desperate great-grandsons through giving their 103-year-old grandmother CPR, thinking the whole time,
Let her go; isn’t this her time?
, only to hang up and realize I’ve just heard a whole family rallying around an incredibly old woman, all of them cheering, “Come on, Gran! You can make it! You can do it!” What a brilliant, stubborn love that is. What a gorgeous brute optimism people possess.

And I’ve heard so many times—way too many times—parents fail in doing CPR. Blowing too hard in an infant’s small, fragile lungs, breaking their baby rather than fixing him. I’ve heard them pump their six-year-old’s chest while knowing the damage from the fall their child just took is too great, too much to heal.

There is no sound worse in the whole world, I think, than listening to a mother realize for the first time that she is losing her child forever. And there is no greater honor than bearing witness to that moment—being strong enough to know how to direct her—even as she feels her child’s life seep through her hands.

I finish the call, clicking my release button when the ambulance arrives and takes over. I don’t have any more instructions to give. I’m done with my part of it. It’s time for lunch, and I make my salad. I laugh with my coworkers about something funny that’s just happened down the hall.

As dispatchers, we’re conditioned to let it go. To move on. But periodically, I think about the families. How is the sibling doing? Will today be the funeral? How is the mother now, a year later? What about this Christmas? This Mother’s Day?

They aren’t questions I can ever get answered. My minuscule part in their story ends when the line disconnects. I’m witness to the beginning of the worst part of their lives, and they will (rightfully) never remember my voice. I have no idea how their lives go after that. And it’s none of my business. Literally.

But I wanted an ending, a real one, one I could control. So I wrote
Pack Up the Moon
. The hardest part, Robin’s death, is already over when the book begins. That fateful call to my imaginary coworker about the fictional situation has already been made. Kate has felt her son’s chest rise and fall under her hands, and she’s seen her attempt fail.

Then we get her story. We see her today, as she lives in the aftermath of that nightmare. I wanted to give her the hope I can’t promise anyone else. I wanted to give her peace.

Q. You’re not a mother. Was writing a book about motherhood daunting?

A. Very much so! But there are two things I know how to write about. The first is the mother-child relationship. It seems as if everything I write, whether it’s a romance or a personal essay, has a theme of motherhood. This is because my own mother, who I counted as my best friend, was perfect. By that, I don’t mean she got everything right or that we even understood each other well. Over the course of years of writing about her after she died, I ended up realizing we were both flawed. But no matter what, she was perfect at loving, even when I was very hard to love.

The second thing I know how to write is grief. Because of all that time I spent grieving on the page, both personally and publicly, I know how to achieve catharsis through the written word—and isn’t that release what we’re all looking for in books or movies that make us cry? So I figured if I put those two things together, I could have a shot at making this book work.

That said, it was something I never took lightly. I ran the book past the best mothers I know to make sure I got those feelings somewhat close to reality. I interviewed adoptees and adopters to make sure I wasn’t missing anything there, either.

But research is one thing. Real life, another. I know how a mother loves—because I had a mother who loved me hard. I would have fought an army of men armed with nuclear weapons with only my hands and my teeth if I could have saved her, and I wouldn’t have cared for a second if I’d died. In my mind, if you multiply that urge by a million, you get a mother. I hope I’m somewhat close to getting that right.

Q. What’s your writing process?

A. Hoo boy. I write all the time. I work long shifts (forty-eight hours at the firehouse, with nap breaks). I write on some of my breaks when I’m not too tired. Our strange schedule means that I work for two days straight and then I have four days off, which is great for a writer with no kids.

I usually go to the café so I don’t end up doing the dishes or scrubbing grout to get out of doing my writing. We have three cats and three dogs, and keeping those off my lap and out from under my feet is almost a third full-time job. At the café, I turn off the Internet in forty-five-minute bursts. Sitting there, alone with my Internet-free laptop, I finally get bored enough to work. Then I take a fifteen-minute e-mail/Twitter break, and then I do it all over again. And again. And again.

I’m pretty obsessive about many things (ask me about my knitting sometime) and writing is one of those things. I write a lot. I wrote this book you’re holding twice. Literally. I’m not talking about the umpteen drafts I produced along the way. I mean there are more words in the trash file than there are, total, in the remaining book. They are unused words, words that didn’t make the cut. I learn what I know, what my characters need to know, by dancing around subjects, getting closer and closer to them until I know not only what I believe about the topics, but, more important, what my characters think of them. That takes a while. I’d love it if I were more of a planner. I’m working at getting better at that.

But I also love the not knowing. That’s the adventure of being a writer. Never being able to predict what’s going to come flying out of your fingers next. Mostly, it’s stuff that makes your eyes roll, stuff you know you’ll have to cut later. But sometimes, you look at the words and say, “Yes. That’s what I meant. Hell, that’s
better
than what I meant.”

I try not to forget what Stephen King said about writing being telepathy. I’m writing these words, and you are reading them. We’re not in the same room, but you’re hearing my actual thoughts. We are connected, right now. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

That’s what keeps me writing. That magic. The fact that Kate is at once a made-up, fictional character and, at the same time, a stand-in for anyone who has ever grieved. Which is, of course, every one of us. We are the same.

We are connected.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Pree’s first real question to Kate is “Why did you give me away?” Kate says she didn’t have any other options. Is this true? What different roads could Kate have taken? How would her life be different now?

2. The neurological condition of synesthesia can present itself in many forms: some people see colors in numbers, see time three-dimensionally, or hear music when they look at letters. The author of this book sees gender and color in letters and numbers, which inspired her to give Kate and Pree their own form of this condition. What does Kate and Pree’s shared synesthesia mean about them as characters? Do you have any form of it yourself, or know anyone who does?

3. Kate feels guilt about not telling Nolan about Pree the first time she sees him again as an adult. How much guilt do you think she
should
feel, given that she and Nolan weren’t together when she gave up the baby for adoption? How does the fact that they had another child together change this?

4. What effect does Kate’s mother, Sonia, have on her? How has it shaped her own experience of motherhood?

5. Nolan has formed a new road crew family in the time since he got out of prison. How does this shape his character throughout the book?

6. How would Kate’s life have been different if both Nolan and Robin had died that day?

7. What is Pree really looking for during the course of the book?

8. Can you forgive Kate for using the search window she confesses to opening?

9. Related to the last question, can you forgive Nolan for his decision in the garage?

10. Do you think Kate will be able to move forward now? Do you see the ending as happy or sad? Or something else?

11. Should Kate and Nolan have answered the e-mails Nolan received? What should they do next?