The Hunger Moon (6 page)

“Good catch,” he told her. “Now let me buy you a drink.”

She allowed them to join her. The three of them drank pitchers of margaritas and she laughed at their jokes. Finally she stood up to go.

“You shouldn’t drive,” he told her, catching her arm and sitting her down again. “Listen, Rod’s house is just up the beach. What do you say we leave your car here and go grill something on his deck for dinner?”

She stared doubtfully.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m a nice guy. Look.” He pointed to his eyes. “Use your intuition.” She stared into his blue eyes, remembering that Ted Bundy was a nice guy; the Hillside Strangler was probably a nice guy. The sun was going down and she was floating on waves of alcohol and ocean breezes that carried wood-burning scents of charred meats and garlic. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt a quick thrill at the surprise of the new haircut. She felt fantastic. She felt reckless.

“Great hair,” he told her, petting her like a cat. “Really great hair.”

From that evening when she stayed over at Rod’s Malibu house, wearing her dress to bed with Bryan on the futon in the living room, her bare legs twined around his jeaned ones, they were a couple. It was a week or two before they finally made love, though they slept together every night from the day they met. From the very beginning they loved just to curl up together, almost like children.

M
ARCIA CALLED HER TO SAY THEIR FATHER
had been in a serious car accident and was not expected to live; would she fly home? The day Renata received this news she had been seeing Bryan about a month. She almost said no, hating to leave town at this moment of heady physical addiction. It was Bryan who told her to go. “You only have one father,” he said. “You don’t have a choice about this.”

As soon as she was on the plane she realized the wisdom of his advice. She hardly remembered her mother’s funeral, so dazed and tired had she been, but she could vividly recall the calm, restored look on her mother’s face in the coffin. Neither the ravages of drinking and smoking nor the toll of the cancer had destroyed her looks. She was buried looking like the mother Renata wished she had always been: self-possessed, faintly amused, beautiful. Her father that day had dressed in his best black suit, the one he had been married in, and had combed his dark hair back until it gleamed. Seeing him bending slightly over her mother’s body, which wore the green dress she always put on for special occasions, Renata believed he mourned her.

Marcia met her at the airport and drove them to the hospital where their father lay in a coma. Renata sat with him while Marcia went home to her kids. There was nothing to do but stare at his bruised and puffy face, and his shaved head where he had needed dozens of stitches. If he was going to die from this accident, Renata was sorry that it would be looking like this. He had been a vain man, with a lean frame and white skin that she had inherited. It didn’t seem fair that the one thing in life he had been lucky with—
his looks—should be taken from him at the end.

She tried, and failed, to feel some grief during her vigil. As it was, she sat and read magazines for two days in the intensive-care ward while nurses came and went, adjusting the IV that dripped something into her father’s veins. She stood outside to smoke, and ate in the hospital cafeteria off Styrofoam trays. She didn’t call Bryan, because she could hardly remember Bryan’s face. And although she was staying at the house she grew up in, she found she could remember practically nothing about her childhood even when she was staring at the familiar varnished bookcase that still housed all the
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
her mother had once collected. She was in a limbo of nonfeeling; she knew only the present tense, and it gleamed with the coldness of hospital chrome.

When their father died during the middle of the third night of her visit, Renata was ashamed for feeling relieved. He never regained consciousness, never had any last message or advice or apology for her. She stayed in Springfield just long enough to help Marcia arrange for the cremation and empty the house to prepare it for sale. Marcia kept a small cherry desk that her mother had used to pay bills, and a silver tray, their parents’ nicest wedding gift. Renata chose a small gold locket of her mother’s. There was no picture in the locket. She looked through her father’s dresser for a keepsake, finally settling on a silver-plated cigarette case stamped with his initials: FJR, for Francis James Rivera. She liked to think that the locket and cigarette case were presents her parents had given each other. She hunted for some photographs from her childhood, but discovered that her parents had not taken many, and the ones they had were blurry and out of focus. She kept them anyway, along with a photograph of her parents’ wedding, the colors of which had turned bilious. A dealer was summoned to give them a flat fee for the rest of the furniture and haul it away.

Surprisingly, Frank Rivera had left a will. Even more surprising, his job had provided him with life insurance, so although he
had never earned much in his lifetime and had no savings, the sisters suddenly found themselves with the proceeds of a small ranch house worth about seventy thousand dollars to split, as well as thirty thousand each in life insurance. The lawyer in Marcia’s office who was handling the probate for them said that in a few months they would have checks.

Renata didn’t know why, upon returning to California, she never mentioned the money to Bryan. She certainly didn’t think he’d try to get his hands on it, aside from his usual casual sponging of movies and meals. He seemed never to actually want for money; he always had enough cash somehow to produce a few lines of coke when he wanted to get them high before bed. But she decided to pretend, even to herself, that the inheritance did not exist, except for allowing herself the indulgence of monthly trips to get her hair cut at the Santa Monica salon, where they always greeted her with a glass of lemon-scented mineral water. The lawyer in Eugene helped her invest the bulk of the money, and then she stopped thinking about it.

It was the money, really, which gave her the courage to have the baby on her own. Though, looking at Charlie now, she told herself that no matter how poor she would have been without her father’s death, she still would have had him. Surely she would have. Wasn’t Charlie her fate, her future, this one particular boy?

But since the incident in the park, the sole responsibility of him was beginning to weigh on her. She slept fitfully, with dreams of Charlie accidentally locked alone inside the car, Charlie left behind at a roadside stop in a moment of amnesia, or Charlie stolen from her motel room while she slept. The dreams never ended with tragedy; Renata woke just before something horrible happened, her heart pounding from the effort to rescue him. Then she would raise herself up on her elbow, waiting for her baby to take shape out of the nothingness as her eyes adjusted to the dark. He would be there beside her in the bed, protected from the edge by a barricade of pillows, protected from drafts by a zippered sleeper, protected from the outside world by a single door chain.

R
ENATA SIGNED THE LEASE
on an apartment in Brookline just before Thanksgiving, but was not able to move in until the first of December. Overwhelmed by Boston, she and Charlie drove to Cape Cod for the holiday, finding a room in Hyannis. The Cape and Hyannis were places she had heard of before, associating them with blueberry pie and white-sand beaches, but she was disappointed. She knew the weather would most likely be cold and possibly wet, but she hadn’t expected the relentlessly grim rain of the Cape and the ugly asphalt sprawl of Hyannis. And she couldn’t find the beaches. Every time she followed a road that was supposed to lead to the shore, she found either a tiny stretch of seaweed-strewn sand that soon became private on either side or a boat dock. She was homesick for California, where the weather would be cool but sunny now, and if you wanted ocean you just pointed yourself west until you came upon the vast, straight line of me Pacific.

On Thanksgiving, she propped Charlie up with pillows on their motel bed, his arms encircling a bright pumpkin almost as large as himself, and snapped pictures. Renata wanted him to have holidays. Her mother and father observed them erratically when she was growing up. On a good year, her mother would be up dressing
the turkey by six
A.M
., and have pies ready to bake by ten. Her father would be jovial with his beer and chips in front of the football games on television. With luck they would make it through dinner before the drinking her parents had done that day either started them fighting or caused them to pass out in the living room.

On a bad year, the drinking would be so heavy the night before the holiday that either the arguing would have cast its bitter pall over everything and her mother would refuse to cook, or her parents would still be sleeping at noon, both of them so hung over that when they awoke her mother was not able to cook, or it would be too late. The raw turkey would sit for days in the refrigerator, its watery pink blood collecting at the bottom of the plastic wrapper, then they would throw it out. One year, when Marcia was twelve, she cooked the turkey herself, sitting Renata on a high stool in the kitchen to watch her. She read the cookbook to get the right oven temperature and set the timer to baste the turkey at regular intervals. When she was struggling with the weight of the pan as she tried to slide it back into the oven, some fat splashed over the side of the roaster. A few minutes later the burning fat set off the smoke alarm, waking their father, who ran to the kitchen in a foggy confusion, saw Marcia in a panic at the open oven door waving away billows of black smoke, and Renata in the middle of the kitchen, crying. Without asking any questions, he shoved Marcia aside and reached for the roaster without a pot holder. He burned his hand, cursed, and slapped Marcia hard across the cheek, yelling that she was burning the house down. Marcia and Renata ran to their bedroom, and clung and sobbed together under the covers of Marcia’s bed. That Thanksgiving they ate nothing until nine P.M., when their mother finally put on a robe and ordered a pizza to be delivered.

Renata always had a week of feeling sick to her stomach when her friends at school talked excitedly about their families’ holiday plans. She would make hers up, fabricating grandparents who came over with pies and cookies, uncles who teased her and gave her money, cousins she would play catch with in the backyard while her
mother and aunts cooked. After Christmas vacation in the third grade, when her classmates came back to school with stories of gifts they had received, Renata told them that a fire had burned all their Christmas presents. At first kids were shocked and sorry for her. Then, after school, some of them rode their bikes past her house and came back to school the next day to say that Renata Rivera was a liar. If fire had burned her presents, why not her house, too, or at least part of it? Renata wished that a fire
had
burned the house to the ground, so everyone could see that she wasn’t making things up. In fact, she longed for the house to burn. She knew it could easily happen, that fire started quickly if you held a cigarette lighter to paper. That was how her mother had burned the Christmas presents in the bathtub after her father had gone out by himself on Christmas Eve and not come back until the next day.

C
HARLIE WOULD HAVE HOLIDAYS
, beginning now. The place she picked to have Thanksgiving dinner was crowded with retirees, and the hubbub and warm, steamy atmosphere put him to sleep in his carrier the minute they were seated.

“Darling baby,” the waitress said.

“Yes.” Renata felt the waitress’s implicit question hanging in the air. Why weren’t they with their family on Thanksgiving? Where was the darling baby’s father? Now that Charlie’s hair was lightening to a straw-colored blond, and his eyes had remained their startling blue, he looked more like Bryan than ever. People never failed to tell her that the baby must look like his daddy. Just because it was true didn’t mean that Renata wasn’t annoyed by the suggestion that they weren’t a complete unit themselves, Charlie and Renata, without reference to any third party.

She ordered a turkey dinner, the first she would be eating since her mother died. When she lived with her first boyfriend, she made a joke of Thanksgiving, saying she didn’t do holidays, and though he was a little disappointed, he humored her, and they always made it a point to eat something weird on that day, like corn dogs or chow mein. The one Thanksgiving she had shared
with Bryan, they went hiking in the mountains and slept in a tent, drinking champagne and eating Ritz crackers and Raisinets. But this was Charlie’s first Thanksgiving, and in his honor she would eat turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie—all of it.

Charlie slept through the whole meal, allowing her to eat slowly and look around. She wasn’t sorry to be single. The old couples looked like sleepy cows munching away, two by two. Some hardly talked to each other. They probably knew every thought the other had, had heard every possible conversational gambit the other could offer. Maybe they held virtual conversations in their heads, or virtual arguments, or replayed a Thanksgiving scene from years ago. One woman cut her husband’s meat for him as he placidly looked on. Another couple had brought paperbacks, and read silently across the table from each other as they chewed. It was pathetic, really.