Pack Up the Moon (4 page)

Sunday, May 11, 2014
11 p.m.

A
thol House was, apparently, having a party they’d forgotten to tell Pree about. When she pushed open the front door, a cloud of sweet-scented smoke drifted onto the porch.

“We’re hotboxing! Shut the door!” yelled a girl Pree had never seen before. She wore a short batik skirt and a glittery-sequined blue bra. She looked like a Vegas hippie.

“You’re hotboxing in a room the size of the grand canyon?” Pree muttered.

“What?” said the girl brightly as she was picked up and thrown over the shoulder of a punk Pree recognized from the co-op down the street.

“Nothing. Good luck.” Pree pushed past five people she didn’t know and raised her hand in semigreeting at a cluster of people sitting on the floor behind the piano. It looked like they were working on pulling together a drum circle, but only one guy tapped his bongo desultorily as they laughed at a joke Pieter had just made. The smell of nag champa was mixed with the scent of weed and curried lentils. Pree felt her stomach churn.

“Pree! Get over here, girl,” said Jamón, one of the housemates whose nickname came from his huge hamlike hands and feet. He waved a joint the size of a Cuban cigar at her. He was a good guy, one of her favorites in the house. Usually he trailed two or three girlfriends behind him, somehow managing to make the women okay with it. Sometimes the women became friends in their own right, and even though Pree was California born and bred, it was still something else to see three or four people wandering off to bed together night after night. One night she’d fought with Flynn badly, and she’d ended up sleeping—nothing else—with Jamón on the couch (the women had ousted him that night in favor of each other, and he was okay with that). He’d held her tightly as they slept, and it had felt wonderful to be in his thick, heavy arms. His breathing was hot, rasping on the back of her neck, and he snored, something Flynn never did. Pree had liked the sound and feel of it, the shaking she felt in her chest as he breathed. In the early morning, as his cock hardened in his sleep—she
hoped
it was in his sleep—she’d sneaked away and into the bathroom, where she got ready for work, ignoring her disappointment.

Now Pree waved at him. “Not right now, thanks. I’m tired.”

“Big day?” He rested his hand casually on the inner thigh of a woman with hot pink streaks in her short dreads.

“The biggest.”

“Niiiiiice.” He drew the word out, slow and long.

Pree made her way up the wide, dark staircase—the lighting in the hallway was on the fritz again. She skirted the boxes of old magazines that had been there since she and Flynn had moved into the collective. No one knew who had owned the old issues of
Life
and
National Geographic
, but not one person of the thirteen who shared the house wanted to take responsibility for getting rid of them. What if the owner came back? Most of the house agreed that would be a bummer, so the boxes sat, gathering dust along with the records in the hallway built-ins, the seven almost-empty jars of pickles in the fridge, the collections of glass bottles in the basement. Personally, Pree thought they were all just lazy. But she went along with the house majority vote, as she normally did. The only thing she’d fought hard for was the pest removal when the flea problem had become so out of control that she’d seen bugs jumping out of her backpack at work. It had turned the house into a war zone for a month with Tiffany and Bryony the most outspoken in their hatred of any pesticides, including all-natural green ones. They thought that using cucumber rind would do it. It wasn’t until Bryony came down with full-body hives, a flea bite sensitivity flaring into an uncontrolled allergic reaction that sent her to the hospital with eyes puffed shut and lips double-sized, that they let Pree hire the guy to spray the hundred-year-old carpets with nontoxic bug killer. Tiffany still occasionally hissed at Pree in the hallway, but Pree ignored her the way she ignored the raccoons scrabbling outside next to the trailer.

A home. A family, they all said. They were making something real.

Sometimes it felt like they were making nothing but a mess.

At the café, Kate had asked Pree more about where she lived. “It’s a group artists’ collective,” Pree had said. “We have communal meals three times a week and we grow a huge garden. I’m in charge of the tomatoes.”
Spoken out loud this way, it sounded idyllic, as it had sounded before they’d moved in. Before they’d realized that a matter as small as which pan meat was cooked in could start a full-fledged house war. Pree had enjoyed telling Kate about the collectiveness, the cooperation. Maybe she was bragging, maybe just a bit.

Then Kate had asked about
her
art. The art that had brought her to an artist’s collective. Pree, her fingers inside the backpack on her lap, peeling the back of a sticker, had mumbled something about the game company where she was a junior concept artist and changed the subject as fast as she could.

Now upstairs, their bedroom door was wide open, dance music by Moby pouring out of the speakers that Flynn had found in the back room of an abandoned meth warehouse in Emeryville. Pree sighed. Moby on the stereo meant Flynn had had a bad day, creatively.

“Hey,” she said, dropping her backpack onto the coffee table already piled high with their shit.

Flynn was draped across the bed, his head hanging off the end. He opened one red eye and smiled. “Babe.”

“How are you?”

“You look pretty.”

“You look upside down.”

He flipped onto his stomach. “Still look pretty right side up.” His consonants were softened, just the slightest bit slurred. Obviously, he’d hit the bottle along with the weed.

“How was your day?” Pree bent to undo the zippers on her boots.

Flynn groaned. “Awful.”

“Why?”

“The Crucible denied me a place at the Fire Arts Festival.”

“But you’ve been working at American Steel for months. You
know
all those people. I thought you were in for sure.”

“Right?” Flynn took a huge swallow from the rye that sat on the floor at the edge of the bed. “And they loved my work. Said my ironwork is ‘daring.’ Or maybe that’s what they say so you don’t freak out when they say no. Bastards.”

“You had enough money to pay the vendor fee?” The last time he’d mentioned it, he’d said he didn’t.

Flynn smiled up at her, his eyes dreamily unfocused. “My girlfriend loves me. I thought, if they accepted me, that I might ask you for a
tiny
loan. Just for a little while, because then I would have sold and been able to pay you back. But it doesn’t matter now, because they hate me.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” said Pree. And she was. But Jesus, it’s not like she was loaded. Far from it. She just worked, which was more than you could say for the rest of the house . . . She looked around the room. “God, why is there so much shit in here?” She pushed a pile of clothing off the chair. Looking at the bottle he held, she imagined asking for a sip, thought about how the burn would feel as it went down.

“Want some?” Flynn held the rye out to her.

“Nope.” Pree shook her head, feeling her stomach lurch again. She curled her fingers into her still-flat belly.

She looked around the room. With its two pocket doors on adjoining walls, it was enormous, an old parlor that had been converted into a bedroom years before. She remembered how it had echoed when they’d moved in. How had they accumulated so much
stuff?
They’d come here only a year ago, right after Pree graduated from art school. Everything they’d owned at that point fit in their teardrop trailer, which was still parked out back. Now if they moved, they’d have to hire a U-Haul. Not even one of the small ones—they’d need the medium-sized truck.

“This is ridiculous. Do you really have to keep
all
your tools in here?”

“I told you. If I leave them in the workshop, they walk away. And I spent a lot of money on them.”

You didn’t spend a lot of money.

Pree took a deep breath and released it through her nose. She loved Flynn. Her bright, beautiful boy. She’d fallen in love with his sweetness, the blond hair that brushed his shoulders in waves, his sleepy, smoky eyes. His hands, roughened by heat and fire, were gentle on her skin. He made her feel beautiful. Cared for. Safe. She didn’t
need
him—they weren’t like that together. She wanted him. He wanted her back. It worked.

“I found her,” Pree said. “Kate.”

Flynn sat straight up, his eyes finally focusing on her face. “You did? Where? What happened?”

Pree tugged off her tights and sat on the bed cross-legged, pushing her knees against his. This was why she loved him, right here. He listened. “She had this big art opening. I thought it would be easy to meet her there, in the open, you know.”

“What’s she like? Oh, my god, did she freak
out
when she saw you or what?”

“If you count running away with me from her own opening, then yeah.” Pree grinned. “I guess she did.”

“And then what?”

“Then we just talked.”

“What color was her voice?” Flynn was fascinated by the way Pree saw colors in voices—he saw it as some kind of divination tool. To Pree, it was just the way she heard things. Flynn’s voice was pink and pearlized like the inside of a shell. It was similar to Pree’s mother Isi’s voice, but his was a paler salmon pink, a more watered-down shade than Isi’s vibrant coral.

“Red. Her voice was red.”

“Huh,” said Flynn. “Wish mine was red instead of stupid pink. Not too many red voices, huh?”

He was right, there weren’t. “I guess it was more burgundy, if I had to narrow it down, with a deep plum base.”

“Red could be happiness, or passion, or fear . . .”

“She’s not happy. Well, she was for a little while, when we were talking. Maybe. But mostly she seemed . . . devastated.”

Flynn leaned forward. “Yeah? Did she say anything about that? About the kid?”

Pree had read Flynn the online articles when she’d found them. The headlines came back to her now.
Nolan Monroe Kills Eight-Year-Old Son by Carbon Monoxide. Accident or Mercy Killing?
Months later:
Monroe Found Guilty of Negligent Homicide, Sentenced to One Year.

Then, recently:
Kate Monroe’s First Installation Since Death of Son.

“Not a word. And no way in hell was I asking.”

“But you wanted to.”

Pree wanted to ask about her father like she wanted to breathe. The desire pulsed like an extra heartbeat inside her. She said only, “Yes.”

Flynn took another lazy swallow. “But you will.”

“If I see her again.”

“If?”

“We just left. She got my number. I got hers. I think we both kind of ran away.” Pree paused, wondering if she should go on. “She bought me a piece of birthday cake.”

Flynn’s eyes made a slow transition from sleepy to shocked. “Shit.”

Pree shrugged.

“I forgot last year, too,” he said. “
Shit.
”

Jimmy from work hadn’t forgotten. He’d sent Pree a text earlier in the day. A simple
Happy birthday, you.
She hadn’t responded but she’d reread it six times, willing it to be longer, to have more words every time she glanced at it, willing the
you
to mean more than the pronoun usually did.
“No big deal.”

“Gah!” Flynn jammed his fingers into his hair and dragged them out. “Um. I don’t have . . . You wanna fuck?”

Pree couldn’t help laughing. “That’s your gift to me?”

He opened his arms. “Can you think of a better one?”

“You know what I want?”

“Tell me. You can have anything, babe.”

She stood, stepping into her shower flip-flops. “I want to sleep in the trailer tonight.” It was a wooden teardrop trailer built in 1946 that they’d bought at a farm auction and spent two months making roadworthy. They’d moved up to the Bay Area in it, living in it for weeks, parked in the backyard of a squat in Berkeley. They’d made the rear galley kitchen into a functional cooking space with a propane stove and an actual working sink. Pree had sewed—badly—a duvet cover with thrifted cowboy-covered fabric. She’d made matching curtains. She’d slapped her stickers with her signature, RARE, all over the curved ceiling, and she liked looking at them just before she went to sleep. Her outside art, inside.

Then she’d gotten the job in the city as an artist for a start-up games company, and she’d begun making real money for the first time in her life. They’d parked the trailer behind the collective in the Mission, and she’d opened a credit union account. They’d bought a real bed.

She missed the hell out of the tiny world of that trailer.

Flynn looked as if he was considering her request. Then he said, “You want to fuck in the trailer?”

How was it possible that he could pull off sweet while asking something like that? But he could. “Okay,” said Pree.

Flynn stood, rising tall above her. “I’ma show you some happy birthday, babe. You just wait.”

Things might be different, changing, scary, but some things were still good. Flynn, with all his faults, was good. Safe.

Pree held his hand as he led her down the dark stairs toward the outside. They’d leave the tiny windows cranked all the way open, she decided. She wanted to breathe the night air deep into her lungs and hold it there.

Love

September 1991

I
n math class, first day of her high school sophomore year, Kate had realized she’d forgotten a pencil. Oil pastels, she had. She’d begged her mother to buy them for her, and Sonia grumbled the whole time about how color pencils should do the same job and cost less. Kate had two drawing pads and three erasers nestled against the five new Pee-Chee folders. But she’d forgotten to bring any kind of writing implement, and the class’s first pretest was on Scantron.

“Can I borrow a pencil?” she whispered forward. The boy in front of her had brown, mostly straight hair. Right where it touched the back of his neck, though, it curled softly. Gently. Kate wanted to touch it, right at that curl, and her fingers twitched embarrassingly.

The boy didn’t turn all the way around, just slid sideways in his chair. He looked like the kind of kid who wouldn’t have anything but a skateboard in his backpack, so when he opened it to showcase a neat collection of pencils kept safely in a blue canvas case, she was surprised. Kate could have had her choice of nineteen different kinds of pencils. Little soldiers of diligence. He chose for her, handing her a silver mechanical pencil. “It’s number two lead,” he said. His voice was a dark blue, like new denim.

When their fingers touched, Kate jumped.
So this is why girls like boys.
For the first time, she got it.

“You break it, you buy it,” he said too loudly, as if he had something to prove. His laugh sounded fake, but his wide smile reached his eyes as he showed her where the eraser was stored under the metal cap.

Kate’s crush was in full bloom by the end of the period, but the boy, Nolan, was called out of the room by a vice principal who wore a look of rage. Nolan grinned insouciantly at Kate as he brushed past her, and she felt the inner arches of her feet tighten as she tucked her toes into balls. Her fingers wrapped around the pencil. She knew she’d keep it forever. It was the first thing she ever stole from Nolan.

Kate introduced him to her mother for the first time just before her sixteenth birthday. It was their second date, and Sonia had demanded to meet him before they went out again. Kate expected protest when they met. A wail of some sort. Gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, in a quiet and polite tooth-gritted manner. She knew her mother would look at Nolan and immediately read:
shoplifting, desk-defacing, school hallway fighter.
And worst of all:
loud.
She didn’t have much hope that her unromantic mother would see anything good about Nolan. Sonia wouldn’t see the way this boy kept his cherished pencils in such neat order, the way he hid his A papers with his arm so no one would see his good grades. Sonia would probably tell Kate never to see him again, and Kate would have to begin her teenage sneaking-around years.

But instead, Sonia had opened like a poppy on a sunny morning in the light of Nolan’s smile. Nolan spoke to her quietly, respectfully. As if he had all the time in the world to answer her questions. Sonia smiled and waved as they left, as if she were someone else. Kate was astonished.

In the car, Nolan slanted her a sideways look and gunned the engine. “You ever seen the demolition derby?”

It was louder than anything she could have imagined. Dirtier, too. Kate felt coated in the smell of beer and gasoline by the time they left the noise and exhilaration of the race. Nolan slung his arm over her shoulder and pulled her close against him. “You’re pretty damn tough, you know,” he said. “Hung with the boys tonight. You didn’t trip.”

She
had
tripped, though. She’d been beset by a violent shyness that had been tempered only by the wild joy she felt being near Nolan. The joy had won. “Maybe.”

“No, I know. You’re tough.”

Kate loved that he thought it.

As they drove away from the racetrack, Kate kept the window down and her hand outside the window, letting the wind lift and drop her hand. Rain started, lightly spitting against her arm, and as Nolan’s windshield wipers flapped, she didn’t roll up the window. Nolan laughed, sounding purely happy.

This
boy. This one. Yes. The one who whooped and laid money down on her favorite beater auto, who bought her a cup of beer from a keg in the parking lot but drank bottled water because he was driving, the one who looked rugged when the older guys greeted him, the one who swore louder and better and faster than any of the rest but who held her hand even while they teased him for it. This one.

•   •   •

They’d been careful. Nolan had been as concerned as she about an unwanted pregnancy. Coming up from overheated kisses that threatened to burn out of their control, he’d gasped, “What—should we use?”

Kate had seen enough girls in the hall carrying a load of books on top of their bellies to know she didn’t want to join their prodigal ranks. Not at all used to being thought of as the one in control—that was her mother and, before that, her father—she felt proud. Smart. She was in all honors classes. She was better at grocery shopping than her mother was. She wasn’t quite yet but would very, very soon be an adult. “I went on the pill.”

“How? When?” Nolan’s lips were wet, and she felt her own bottom lip swelling from where he’d nipped it.

“Planned Parenthood. Last week.”

“So we’re good?” Sweat gleamed at his hairline. “Just like that?”

“Well . . .” The clinic had said she needed to wait to start them until she went on her period, but she’d started immediately. Better safe than sorry. “We should use a condom—I mean, are we
really
going to do this? What if it doesn’t
work
?” Her biggest fear: that when they pushed into, against each other, that their bodies wouldn’t fit, wouldn’t work with each other’s. That she would laugh at him on accident or, worse, that he would laugh at something she did.

Nolan pushed himself backward, his arms shaking with the effort, until he was resting on the headboard of his bed. It was safe here—his parents never checked on him. Nolan said they didn’t care about him, that he was just a thing in their collection, and while Kate didn’t totally believe him, in six months of dating she’d seen them only once, and that was in the driveway as they’d been leaving to go to some awards dinner. His mother had waved cheerily and told them that they could order pizza—she’d left the credit card on the hallway credenza. Nolan had grimaced. Then he’d taken them out to the most expensive dinner in the fanciest Italian restaurant Kate had ever been to. She’d ordered risotto, not knowing it was like savory oatmeal. Nolan said his mother had never questioned the charge.

Now he looked at her carefully, the way he did. “We don’t have to. There’s nothing we have to do. I love you. I’m not going anywhere. I want to be with you.”

Kate knew they were balanced on a pendulum with
too young
on one side,
old enough
on the other. Her mother told her she couldn’t even get her learner’s permit. Sure, she was too young to vote, or to rent an apartment. But too young for sex? For love? For decisions this big?

Kate knew one thing, though: she wanted to have sex with Nolan. The lust she felt uncurling in her belly as they explored each other with fingers, lips, and tongues threatened to combust at her hairline. She worried sometimes they would leave char marks on his mother’s expensive linen. They burned together. It didn’t feel like hyperbole.

So she reached behind her into her backpack on the floor and pulled out—oh, god—a whole box of condoms. The woman at Planned Parenthood had insisted that she take them, even though she’d said they’d never, ever use that many.

Nolan gave a bark of laughter. “You think we’re good for that?”

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me that this won’t be enough?”

“That’s right, baby.” But his voice broke endearingly, and he slid down from the headboard to take her in his arms. “Katie, I want to make love to you, but I want it to be right.”

She looked around. Low R&B spilled from his surround-sound speakers. His parents weren’t going to interrupt them. “I think most of our friends get it done in the backseats of cars or in the quad behind the auto shop.”

“How do we know this is it?” His voice was darker blue than normal—it was the color of sunset just before the light died.

“This is what?” asked Kate.

“Forever?”

Her mother said nothing was forever. But then again, her mother had been depressed since Kate’s father died, never managing to come up above the clouds.

“I guess we can’t know,” she said. But this joy, this hope . . . it had to mean something. Something like always.

Nolan took her hands and held them tightly. This was the boy she loved. The one who was present with her, looking right into her eyes, not being loud in a hallway, not hooting to friends in class, but the one who was here now, relaxed inside himself. He didn’t posture with her. He didn’t pretend. “I know.”

“You’re just so you, so sure of yourself, in your own skin.”

“What?” said Nolan, surprised. “I’m never me.”

“Except . . .”

He nodded once, his eyes falling to the dark black silk duvet. “Except when I’m with you.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

Kate did, or thought she did. His parents returned anything that didn’t work, that didn’t perform to the correct standards. When the taillight of his mother’s BMW went out, they’d refused the offered maintenance—a broken taillight! something so easy Kate could have fixed it herself with a screwdriver—and demanded that the dealer exchange the leased car with a new vehicle. They’d gotten Nolan a puppy not once but four times. Every time the new dog had done something wrong, and they’d sent each dog to the pound. The last time they presented Nolan with a three-month-old basset hound, he’d refused to pet it, not wanting to learn to love it.

Nolan said, “You know I’m not going anywhere, right?”

“Sure.” A lie.

“You don’t believe me.”

The condoms on the bed had changed. Instead of signaling sexiness, they looked like the paper coupons that oozed out of a Skee ball machine. She sighed, the happiness and lust drained out of her. “Everyone leaves. Can’t we just live in today?”

“Not when what I want is all your tomorrows.”

“God, stop!” Kate pushed against his chest. “You sound like a cheesy movie. Now we’ll part and meet again when we’re ancient, fifty or something, and I’ll die of cancer while you tell me I was always the one.”

She’d meant him to laugh, but instead he looked suddenly grief-stricken. “I would tell you that and it would be true.”

“Oh, Nolan,” she said again, turning around on the bed so that she fit against his length, curling her hips into him. “I know you would. And I love you for it.” She waited for the happiness she felt with him to curl back into her spine, as it always did. And it didn’t let her down. Sometimes she thought he was the sun, that he could fix anything with his warmth. She waited for that heat to creep into her, waited as he breathed steadily next to her ear. Kate relaxed into him.

Later that night they had sex for the first time. Both of them cried. Nolan laughed in surprise when he came, and even later, when he worked out what Kate needed, he laughed again with joy. Kate grinned, looking up at the ceiling, knowing that this was new, imperfect, and exactly right.