The Moon Sisters (10 page)

I dug my hand into my hair, drew a clump over my shoulder, and separated it into three pieces. “I’m not meeting anyone. But my sister knows I’m here. I have a sister. She thinks our mother committed suicide,” I said without meaning to.

“Did she?” Ruby asked, as if strangers spilled their sorrows to her every day.

“No.” I pulled one section of hair over the other—right over middle, left over middle—and felt the stretch of skin beneath the bandages on my arms. “She didn’t.”

I remembered, then, things I’d forgotten about that day. I’d turned off the gas. I’d opened the window and the doors. I’d pushed at my mother’s chest, pounded the skin over her heart when nothing happened, when she didn’t breathe.

Mama, Mama, please wake up!

Later, I threw up in the bathroom sink—a sink that had often been littered with my mother’s hair. Less than a year ago, I’d found her staring into the mirror above that sink, holding such a mound of strands that they looked like a dead mouse in her hand.

I’m getting old, Olivia
, she told me.
Sometimes I feel as ancient as a tree with a thousand rings
.

I stopped myself from saying,
I still need you, Mama
, because maybe it was coincidence that I’d finished my high school requirements a week before that, and I didn’t want to set off an up-and-down. But I did hug her, and she didn’t say anything more about it.

“It’s too bad we didn’t hook up before today,” Ruby said, bringing me back. “I would’ve liked hanging with another girl.”

“Yeah, it’s too bad.” Things happened for a reason, Mama always said. “You’re not headed in the direction of Cranberry Glades, by any chance, are you?”

“Where’s that?”

“South of Levi, where the train’s headed.”

“Gotcha. But nope.” Her voice contracted like a shrug. “Jop and I are leaving West Virginia today, as a matter of fact. It’s time. We’ve never seen the East Coast.”

“Oh,” I said, deflated.

“But, hey, Hobbs said he’s walking on to see a friend after the next stop. He might tag with you if I tell him about your eyes.”

“He has a thing for handicapped girls?”

She laughed. “I think he has a thing for challenging Darwin.”

I wrinkled my nose.

“You know, helping with the survival of the weakest—like trapped dogs and lost travelers.”

She told me the story, then, about how they’d met Hobbs. They’d just crossed into West Virginia and were looking for a jungle—a sort of home base for train folk—when they found him trying to free a dog’s leg from a trap. The dog had belonged to a guy named Ran, a hopper who’d decided not to help his dog, because that morning the mutt had stolen his last package of cheesy crackers. Ran called it karma, and abandoned his faithful friend in order to catch the next train. Jop figured out how to open the trap, and the dog latched on to him after that. Jop and Ruby latched on to Hobbs, who had helped the right side in a desertion scenario and had a good heart, despite what you might think about his looks.

“What’s wrong with his looks?” I asked, and she leaned close, told me that most of Hobbs’s face and body was covered with tattoos—swirls of green and blue running along his cheeks and near his lips in thin lines, like a network of rivers. They traveled down his neck, giving wide berth to his eyes and nose and forehead. That might explain the hood, I thought, but what I said was “I don’t care about looks,” and meant it.

“Cool,” Ruby said, “because I’m telling you, he’s
the
person to know out here. He’s taught us more in two weeks than the three months we had on our own before that. Dude might have a past—I mean, who doesn’t—but whatevs. He gets it. He’s, like, everything my parents wanted to be and never were. Free.”

I wondered if such a thing was possible—to give up your past, start something so new there was no trace of what you were before. Erase it all. Be free. My mouth watered.

“Too bad his walls are so high up, and I’m such a lazy climber,” she said with a silver-rain sigh.

I smiled. “You like him.”

“Mad crush. Not reciprocated. This,” she said, “is the story of my life. I’ve always had a thing for inaccessible men. Maybe if I had your lashes.” I fluttered them at Ruby, and she laughed. “Yeah, do that when you ask him for help. You know, this could work out. You can’t stare at him, which he’ll totally love, and hanging with you will give him an excuse to ditch Red Grass, which he’ll consider a huge bonus.”

“Who?”

“Older dude over there. Pushy and, I don’t know.… With Hobbs, you have to be real. It’s like he can smell pretense or something.”

“Be real,” I said, as if I was taking notes, committing something important to memory, though in truth I was always pretty real. It was one of the things my sister disliked most about me.

“I’ll go ask now. I may not be able to feel him up for me, but I can feel him out for you,” she said, and moved over to the rest of the group.

There were always two ways to look at things.

Either I’d made the worst mistake of my life, getting on this train, or this was right where I was supposed to be—closer than ever to the glades, and about to get closer.

The feeling in my chest might be anxiety over the whooshing world outside this car, or it might be excitement.

Every part of me felt as tight as my toes against my shoes, or maybe that was just a sign that I needed to loosen up a little.

What was it Jazz had said? Things that were meant to be slipped into your life without a lot of effort. Sort of like being tossed onto a train.

I took off my sneakers and flexed my toes.

A
s it turned out, Hobbs’s trip wasn’t going to take him close to the park, and there wasn’t another train I could hop after this to get me any closer, either. But if he could take me nearer to my destination by foot, that would be a lot better than me wandering around alone. I’d worry about the rest of it later—a strategy that had worked for Scarlett O’Hara most of the time. The challenge would be to get him to agree.

“Why Cranberry Glades?” he asked, sitting an arm’s length away.

“Because the glades inspired the setting of my mother’s story. It’s where she wanted to see a ghost light,” I told him. “You know about ghost lights, don’t you?”

“Course I know wisps,” he said, and I nodded. Sometimes I thought West Virginia must be the ghost-story capital of the world. “But why do you want to go with me? You can’t trust me.”

One of my braids caught the wind, hit me in the cheek, as the train rumbled on. “Why can’t I trust you?”

“Because you don’t know me, and you can’t go around trusting people you don’t know. Not on trains.”

There was a scent to him that I couldn’t place. I might’ve thought
earthy
, but this wasn’t any earth I’d known. His hood was still raised up around his cheeks, and I found myself wanting to push it back, put my face right up to his and see those tattoos. Strange to hide something you’d done to adorn yourself.

“I could be a serial killer, waiting for my chance to cut you into chunks,” he said. “You don’t even know my real name.”

I liked his voice, the way it turned up at the edges.

“So Hobbs isn’t your real name?”

“Train name,” he said. “Can’t trust anyone with your real name out here, Wee Bit.”

I smiled at this. “Well, I doubt a killer would try to warn me off. Besides, you’ve been with Ruby and Jop for weeks and they still have their limbs. And Ruby had plenty of good things to say about you. You helped rescue Kramer over there from a trap, right? It sounds
like you’re a natural hero, which is what I need. Without you, I’ll be lost in the wilderness.”

I resisted the impulse to bat my eyelashes.

“I’m anything but a hero, and I’m not going where you’re going,” he said, introducing me to that wall Ruby mentioned. “Just how blind are you?”

For a second, I thought about painting myself as blinder than a bat and the very definition of Darwin’s weakest creature. But it was a slim second. I knew I couldn’t live with that picture, and I didn’t want anyone to see me that way, either. So I told the truth.

“I’m not
blind
blind,” I said, then tried to describe what I could see—life as a smear—and what I could do, which included walking just fine. It wasn’t like he was going to have to carry me around or anything.

“Maybe
I’m
blind here,” he said, “but it doesn’t look like you’re decked out for sleeping in the woods. I’ve got a tarp and blanket, but I’m used to this life and—”

“I can sleep anywhere,” I told him, and it was true. “But we shouldn’t need to, right? The waitress I spoke with said the glades are just thirty-five, maybe forty minutes away from Levi.”

Hobbs had an uncommon laugh, a ho-ho like Santa that made the curve of his voice ripple like a wave. “It is, if you’ve got a car stuffed in that suitcase or if you’re planning to hitch a ride. That’s not for me. I use my feet when I’m not on a train, and it’ll take three days of hiking to get down to the park.”

“Three days?” I may have gulped.

Why hadn’t I asked Rocky to clarify her estimate back in the diner? But then I realized it wouldn’t have mattered; I was so mad then that I would’ve run to the train anyhow. And, at this point, what else could I do? Throw myself at the mercy of the bull, beg for a phone and call home? What did I have to go home to? More arguments about what I should and shouldn’t think, what was worth my time, what was stupid or not? More lectures from Jazz on
the work of a woman who’s no longer with us, it’s time to grow up, bitch?
More watching my father drink and cry and forget about us? More stagnancy and unanswered questions and feeling like I’d burst if something didn’t change? More dreams of the death of the sun, of frosted mirrors, and lights beckoning, beckoning me on?

More
suicide, suicide, suicide
.

Hobbs had started to talk about hitching, how I could head up near the highway with Ruby and forget all this walking-and-sleeping-in-the-woods business, when I interrupted.

“I’m in,” I said.

“You’re what?”

“I’m in,” I repeated. “I’ll walk with you.”

He was silent for a minute, and then he did something I didn’t anticipate. He pulled back his hood. I knew he expected a reaction of some kind, that I’d see his face full of tattoos and call the whole thing off. Truth was, I couldn’t see much besides a blur of color, swirls or patterns without detail. What did it matter?

“I’m still in,” I said. “I can’t go back home. Please don’t force me to do that by taking away my one other choice. Please.”

Something shifted in him after I said that; I could feel it like a substantive thing.

“You’re ready for a three-day hike?” he asked.

I nodded, said, “I am if you are, if you’ll have me. If you’ll help.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I might have to—” He looked up and around, like he had a calendar in his head, too, and was checking to see if he had any appointments, any previous engagements, if he could spare the time. He was quiet for so long that I felt my hope wane again. Truly, I couldn’t succeed alone. I needed his help.

“I stole something from my father,” he said out of nowhere. “Something valuable. Now you know something to protect you.”

“Protect me?”

“You have something on me.”

“I don’t need anything on you.”

“Of course you do,” he said. “You have something on a person
and they act trustworthy even if they aren’t, since they don’t want you calling them out over whatever it is you have on them. Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not stupid,” I said. “What did you steal?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not if we have a deal.”

He didn’t say anything, which I took for a
yes
. In my mind’s eye, I circled today on my calendar in fluorescent yellow. Somehow it would be important in the long scheme of things. And because trust meant a lot to Hobbs, and because I wanted to seal the deal, I held out my hand.

“I’m Olivia Moon,” I told him. “Looks like you have something on me now, too.”

And then I batted my lashes.

March 22, 1993

Daddy
,

It is three in the morning, and I just woke from a nightmare. You know the one—the same old one. I don’t know why I’m here writing to you when I swore I never would again, except that the dream gets to me every time, and it’s about us, you know
.

We were camping at the lake again, and again I was lost, as I truly was lost back when I was six—the year Mom left us. You remember that summer, how mad you were, always, how you couldn’t even look at me. Then one day you said it was enough, that you were still my father and we’d have to learn to make it work between us because we were stuck with each other. You pulled our stuff together and decided we were going to go camping and I’d learn to like it (goddamnit) if it was the last thing you did. The drive was long, longer because it was so quiet, I think. I was scared. I remember wondering if you might take me out into the woods and kill me. I don’t know why I thought that! Maybe because I was Suzanne Howell’s daughter and she’d been so horrible, and maybe I felt that you wanted to kill her, but because you couldn’t I would be the next best thing
.