The Hunger Moon (2 page)

Now that she had Charlie, she wondered why having a baby used to mean to her that she would be creating a small replica of herself. Charlie was so much his own person. If pressed, she could see in him some of Bryan’s mouth, and maybe a little of the comically sloping brows of his father above his wide blue eyes. But having a boy now, she couldn’t imagine anything different. Already she felt they were comrades, pals, in a way that suggested a jolly soldiering forward. Raising a boy meant that she would have to respect some essential difference between them: it would have been too easy to assume that a daughter would be feeling all her feelings.

There were times she thought she might have made a mistake in running away from Bryan. Perhaps he could have risen to the occasion; being a father might possibly have allowed him to go inside himself and shut off the infant’s memory loop of gutters and shingles and tree branches rushing by. This might, in fact, have been his chance to grab hold of some real person, instead of just the ghost of a person, but at the time she discovered herself pregnant, Renata didn’t think she could risk it, and it was too late to second-guess herself now.

She had lived with the secret of her pregnancy for three months; being as slender as she was, her jeans and sweatshirts continued to fit just fine. One day, though, when they were lying on the beach, Bryan rubbed his hand over her stomach above her bikini bottom and teased her about having had too big a lunch. That was when Renata began making plans.

She had never set out to become pregnant and certainly had not intentionally missed a couple of days of her pill cycle. They had driven to Santa Barbara to spend the weekend with one of Bryan’s friends when she discovered that she had not packed her birth control pills. She shrugged it off, thinking to herself that two days probably would not make much of a difference since she had been taking the pills faithfully for years. As soon as she missed her period, she knew. She also realized, much to her surprise, that
she had no doubts about having the baby. It was as if she had been waiting all these years for life to deliver some compelling role for her, some decisive turn of events that she could embrace with her whole self. Though she would not have pictured herself a mother at this stage—if anything, would have laughed at the thought—once the test came out positive, and she realized with a shock that the baby was already with her, made from her, and tied to her, she loved it with a startling passion.

Bryan had been surprised when she announced that she wanted to break up, but he took it well. Too well. He sat there watching her talk with a funny half-smile, and he didn’t even press for explanations beyond the weak ones she offered about needing more freedom and time to herself. Renata took this as a confirmation that she had made the right decision: why provide a child with a father who would give up on people so easily? She still remembered feeling his eyes on her back as she moved to the door of his bedroom, her small knapsack bulging with the few articles she had to pack—a toothbrush, a pair of flip-flops, a short fake-silk kimono that she used to throw on when she had to use the shared bathroom down the hall. If he had spoken then, there’s no telling how things might have worked out, because at the moment when her hand turned the doorknob, she felt a grief inside so large that she would have welcomed the chance to share it, to turn around and pour some of it into his arms.

But he had said nothing. Without turning to look, she pictured him sitting on his sandy mattress on the floor watching her go, and at that moment she could honestly say that she hated him. She stayed in Venice another month, and then, just when she would have needed to buy a new set of waitressing skirts, she packed everything in her car and drove north, leaving only her sister’s post office box number in Oregon with the manager of the restaurant.

The first motel she stopped at on the way to Eugene was called the Piney Bower, and had a horseshoe-shaped yard with picnic tables right in back of the mint-green motel building. She pulled
in after driving eight hours, queasy from the fast-food hamburgers she had eaten. In the office of the Piney Bower she used the name Mrs. John Rivera to sign the register, even though her pregnancy didn’t show much yet, and if really married, she never would have referred to herself in such an old-fashioned way. “John” was nobody, the beginning of the phantom husband she would invent for strangers.

Taking a cup of Sanka from the Piney Bower hospitality bar with her to her room, she undressed and stood under the cool shower. One thing about traveling, even from one county to the next, was that the smell of the water kept shifting with you, reminding you that beneath the freeway exits with their identical Denny’s and Howard Johnsons, water ran so deep it could not be made to resemble anything but its original self. Sulfur or sweet, or tangy like rain, water revealed its true nature right away, unlike people.

She loved passing through places with her secret, knowing that as she dipped her feet into the icy snow-melt waters of Lake Shasta or climbed out of her car to take a breath of astringent air in the Siskiyous she only looked as if she were traveling alone. She talked to the baby regularly, asking if it needed a refreshment break, or if it liked the Magic Fingers bed massager she had turned on for a quarter. She was almost to Medford, Oregon, a cowboy town where boys still wanted boots and saddles for their eighth birthdays, when she first thought the baby answered back. Just as she was moving up in line to order a soft vanilla cone at the Dairy Queen, she felt something like a ripple, as if brushed by the tiniest minnow in a still lake. Surprised, she looked over her shoulder, and saw only teenagers hanging out in the parking lot in the weak March sun, their oversized sweatshirts knotted at their waists. Then she looked down at her stomach, and, as if in confirmation, the minnow moved again. After that, Renata was careful about what she tuned in on the radio; she made sure that the music was not harsh, or the voice talking not overheated with opinion. She sang all the pretty songs she knew to the baby, and when lying in
bed at night, massaged her barely rounded stomach in even, comforting circles.

Her sister, a legal secretary eight years older than Renata, had been glad enough to see her, as she herself was recently divorced and had two preschool children whom she was able to take out of day care while Renata was living with them. Renata lived at Marcia’s house for six months, taking care of Jess and Tommy and helping with the housework and cooking. The two sisters got to know each other better than they ever had growing up, since the age difference had pretty much guaranteed that they were never interested in the same things at the same time. Now, however, they had Renata’s prepared-childbirth breathing to practice together, and a layette to assemble, and Marcia’s failed marriage to dissect as they sat up nights on the patio with chilled white wine for Marcia and seltzer water for Renata. When they brought Charlie home from the hospital, and Marcia pulled the bassinet her children had used close beside Renata’s bed, bringing meals to her on trays for the first couple of days, Renata felt like she was living in the first home she had ever known.

“Why leave now?” Marcia had asked, shaking her head with disbelief, a month after Charlie was born, when Renata had begun collecting road maps from AAA and circling classified ads for a newer car. It was true that Renata’s urge to drive somewhere distant seemed ill-timed. She had a newborn, and her sister’s family was in Eugene. She couldn’t adequately explain why she needed to be in motion just then, without an address, instead of getting a job down the road at the Sizzler and renting an apartment near Marcia. It wasn’t possible to say out loud that her sister’s life depressed her. Despite the fact that Marcia had been a smiling, lace-and-sequin—covered bride, certain that she was marrying for love and forever, she was now a short-tempered, overtired, divorced mother. Renata saw how the current of her sister’s anger filled the house and passed through her children’s small bodies, and how it made them whiny and uncertain. Just as Renata had needed to insulate herself from what she thought of as Bryan’s damaged
psyche, she now feared contact with her sister’s bitterness. Since her pregnancy, Renata had been cushioned by a sense of peace that was new to her, and she wanted to preserve it away from the corrosive atmosphere of Marcia’s disappointment. Unlike Marcia, Renata was choosing to raise her child alone; no one had failed them, and no one would.

As soon as the baby was safely born and pronounced robust, and Renata found herself miraculously shrinking back to her former shape, her soreness leaving her like the memory of some unrepeatable athletic feat, she began to feel restless. She kept thinking of the highway motels she had stayed at on their way to Oregon, with their racks of glossy invitations to sights and attractions, and the surprise of opening each desk or nightstand drawer to discover printed stationery you could mail to someone or just take with you. Eugene itself began to feel intolerably close and small, just three miles from her childhood home in Springfield. She resolved to leave; and though Marcia wouldn’t understand, Renata couldn’t help that. She left.

When Renata turned down the thin acrylic blankets and stiffly starched motel sheets every night, she felt like she was peeling back the skin of a new life. And every morning, as she heaped their damp towels in a considerate pile for the maid and refolded their slender store of clothes into the duffel, Renata felt her heart lift with the knowledge that once again she and Charlie had left no trace. She liked counting the number of states that Charlie had passed through in his first months of infancy, feeling that as the sum ticked up, she was giving him some kind of insurance policy against the future, much as other parents of newborns invest in mutual funds.

She knew that money was the least important gift she could give to her son, and when she tried to imagine what the ideal one would be, all she could see was the sky in front of her, laden with cumulus clouds one minute, flat and shiny as the blue hood of her car the next.

N
OVEMBER IN
B
OSTON CAN BE INDECISIVE.
Winter posits an arrival with a sudden nor’easter squall or a short, fervent cold snap, and then lapses into stretches of benign autumn warmth, luring people back out of their houses for walks along the Charles, or last strolls without a coat on Newbury Street. Department stores begin to hang garlands although it is not yet Thanksgiving, and hardware stores make prominent displays of snow shovels outside their front doors. Television weathermen grow more animated, knowing the power of suspense they have over their viewers who stay awake a few extra minutes into the eleven o’clock broadcast to see if the weather is about to take a definitive turn for the worse.

This particular November, the good weather brazenly hung on, giving folks a false sense of security. The woolens were unpacked but not yet called for, crowding everyone’s closets and making dressing in the morning a vague, uncertain exercise. College students, already past their mid-semester examinations, pressed the season as far as they could, wearing shorts with their sweatshirts, although the summer tans they brought back to campus had long since faded and their bare legs now looked goose-pimply and pale.

The new year in Boston is measured by the academic clock, and
the sense of initiative the city feels every Labor Day, when moving trucks and station wagons are unloading student goods on every street, begins to abate by November, when it becomes clear to all that the hopeful expectancy of September was just a trick of equinoctial light.

Eleanor was trying to overcome just such a period of high expectations followed by flagging energy. In September she had sold the home she had lived in for fifty years. She had coped with the grating cheeriness of her realtor, battled the wills of her increasingly bossy children, and overseen the sorting, selling, packing, and moving of all her personal effects. During the closing Eleanor met the young couple with a toddler and a baby who were buying her Belmont home; they were nervous and excited the way she remembered herself and Robert at the signing over of the deed. When they bought the house, Eleanor had been pregnant with Helen. The births of Janice and Peter soon followed, so that her first seven years in the house were spent erecting gates across the stairs and putting all the breakable things in the attic. Not that they had much, breakable or otherwise. Eleanor had not yet begun law school, and Robert was just starting his residency at Mass. General. Buying the house had represented a tremendous leap of faith for them, and things had gone well. By the time the last child was out of the house, Robert was chief attending surgeon at MGH and Eleanor was a judge in family court.

When she finally sold the house, Eleanor had been retired seven years and widowed ten. She had had one fall down the cellar stairs, one hip-replacement surgery, and could no longer do her own pruning of the dogwood trees and rhododendrons. She was beginning to fear driving, although she still used her eight-year-old sedan, limiting herself to routes she knew well and trips made before dark and between rush hours. On a day last summer when all her children were in Boston at the same time, they converged at her house for a cookout and what Eleanor later suspected had been a coordinated assault.