The Moon Sisters (14 page)

“I grabbed that catfish by the snout, Lord I pulled that catfish out!”

“But he’s got a tent you’d like,” Hobbs said, “and you’ll never go hungry with him around. Red, he knows how to fish.”

“Olivia. Now,” said Jazz, closing in on me.

There had to be some truth in it somewhere—a kind of rule or law of physics. Two control-freak types together would keep each other occupied, would need to define the alpha and the beta of it, and so would have something to say to each other. Probably a lot of somethings. Which meant a lot less of those somethings directed toward me.

“I’m fine with Red Grass,” I said. “Really, I am.”

November 11, 1995

Dear Dad
,

I thought you should know that you have another granddaughter! Olivia Francis Moon was born this past June, with a wisp of blond hair that turned black almost overnight and a look in her eye that said, “Hello, I’m trouble.” She does not sleep, and would prefer to wear her dinner than eat it. Despite all of that, I’ve fallen madly in love with her
.

Jazz is four now, and I can trust her to behave for short spans of time when I put Olivia down for a nap so that I can catch up on sleep or do some things for myself. This miracle can only be achieved because she’s a good listener and as serious as a soldier when I ask her for help. My mother-in-law, Drahomíra, says I’m lucky because most four-year-olds are the opposite of accommodating. (Was I difficult at that age? Do you remember?)

One day you’ll meet them and see that I’ve made two healthy grandchildren for you, and become the daughter you always wanted me to be. I’m calmer now, Dad, and saner and more responsible. I know that was always your greatest worry—that my impulsivity would be my undoing, that I’d self-destruct like Mom. But you’d be wrong to worry. I’ll bet you’re calmer, too, and that soon you’ll be ready to put this behind us. Then you’ll see that Branik, despite a great lack of money, is a very good man
.

Olivia’s crying, so I’ll close now
.

Thinking of you
,

Beth

CHAPTER NINE

A Fascination with Death

   JAZZ   

B
abka replaced the biscuit bus with a modern van late last year. She had a friend who refurbished totaled vehicles, and that guy—Smitty—came into the store one day and told her he had a beaut he’d sell her “for cheap,” because her creaky old bus was living on borrowed time. Smitty was a retired body-shop worker, so he knew a thing or two about fixing cars. The van had air-conditioning, he said, and fabric seats and a CD player and cassette slot both, so it didn’t matter that the radio wouldn’t work well. Smitty got his biscuits free after that, because of course she took him up on his offer.

Dad brought Olivia and me along on deliveries in that van for two solid weeks after our mother died. Maybe he was afraid for us, even though we could’ve stayed with Babka. Maybe he was afraid for himself. Maybe it was Babka’s idea that we all stick together. I don’t know, and can’t recall if I ever did.

It was on the fifth day that I said I wanted to walk awhile on my own in Kennaton.

You all right?
my father asked.

I had a flash then of my mother asking me that same question,
countless times, trying to brush hair out of my eyes while I dodged her hand. Sometimes I’d walk past her without a word, just leave her there in the kitchen she’d die in one day, not realizing that I was giving up a moment I might’ve had or a conversation or a revelation or something. Never bothering to process that there were a finite number of possible moments, and I was skirting away from them as if they were a pile of dog heapings in the grass.

That first day alone in Kennaton, I walked until I ached, my head full of nothing. I watched a woman step into a grocery store laughing, smiling, and wondered
How?
The world had ended, didn’t she know? My guts had been ripped out through my throat; couldn’t she see? How could anyone feel … joy? Dad picked me up about two hours later, and we drove home.

The next day, I asked to be let out again, and walked until I found a shop. Didn’t even have a sign, just a banner advertising coffee and a bagel for $1.25. I ate a plain bagel and drank three cups of coffee without tasting anything. And then I opened a newspaper on the countertop of a stained bar. No one else was there that day to see me flip to the death notices.

Marilyn Wilcox, age ninety, died in a nursing home.

Stuart Babcock, age eighty-one, died at home.

Alex Dimmock, age fifty-nine, died, who knew where.

Sandra Weber was only twenty-seven. No one said what happened to her or where she died.
A heart of gold stopped beating, two willing hands at rest
, went a poem. She was survived by her father as well as a sister, and a brother. She was predeceased by her mother.

At that point, I didn’t have a copy of my mother’s obituary. I hadn’t seen or read it. Hadn’t cut it out to keep or heard any discussion of it. Maybe she didn’t have one at all, considering how she’d died, because what could it say?

Beth Moon killed herself. The end.

People didn’t like to talk about that. Few had sent cards. Sometimes I caught sidelong, suspicious looks from people in town.
How horrible are you
, some of those looks asked,
that your mother committed suicide?
Others dripped pity, or wondered in loud silence,
Why did she do it?
I hated them all equally.

After that, I stole the obituary section every day we were in Kennaton. Later, in the privacy of my room, I removed the best essays, laid them across my bedspread, studied them, shuffled them around in search of something. A pattern, an answer.

When I was little, I used to play with marbles in the small room behind Babka’s kitchen.

All the secrets of life are in that bag
, she would tease.

What is it?
I’d ask, and she’d say that she couldn’t tell me, that I needed to figure it out for myself.

I believed her. I played, I watched. Red hits the blue, hits the green, hits the yellow. Red hits the blue, hits the yellow, hits the black. Red hits the blue, hits the white, hits the yellow. If there were answers in the marbles, I never found them, and whenever I put them away I felt disquieted.

That’s how I felt after studying the obituaries as well, before I shoved them all inside my mother’s old backpack. As if something significant had eluded me.

It happened while Olivia and Hobbs were in the stream. Everything changed after that.

I’d walked farther than I’d meant after my sister told me to leave her alone, past vines that scratched my arms, ankles, and calves, talking to myself the whole time: “You want me to go? Fine, I’ll go all the way home, how’s that? Leave you to figure it all out or die trying, which you seem set on doing with these ass-brained ideas. I will not be led around by the nose through the forest over bat-crazy bullshittery.”

Eventually I reached the end of my invisible tether and stalled beside a huge dead tree, ancient and hunched as an old woman. A crow stared down at me from the branches.

“What are you looking at?”

It continued to stare.

Quiet minutes passed, as I thought through my meager options. Abandon her. Continue. There was no real choice. The anxiety I’d kept at bay by bitching and walking swelled like a bloated fish in my throat.

Why do I feel this way?

The sun had hitched itself across the sky, but I wasn’t nervous over the approach of night, in and of itself. I wasn’t afraid of the dark; it never promised anything, was never false. I wasn’t afraid of the forest, or of sleeping without a bag or blanket or tent. I’d stay awake with one eye on Hobbs the whole time anyway, though I was not exactly afraid of him, either; we both knew I had a killer right hook.

What, then?

I dug my fingers into the tree’s battered hide, full of dark grooves and bleached, flaking bark—its dead skin and hard-earned age spots. Some things were meant to fly, and others were bound by their roots.

This, I knew, I’d learned from my mother.

No matter how her life ticked on, she was always thinking about her roots—and her atonement. Raising us on a short leash. Our particular educations. Her transplanted dreams. The book she never finished, and its related trip to the glades. I had no doubt about what she prayed for, if she prayed at her altar. And all of it was sacred ground, not to be interfered with.

I shucked the pack from my back, remembering the last day my grandmother tried to help my mother with her story. I might’ve been ten or eleven years old. Babka had come over for Sunday dinner, as she always did, and was offering suggestions for my mother’s story, as she always did, because my mother was always stuck. The heroine of the story—a sun fairy named Esme—had been kidnapped by a power-hungry warlock and made to forget herself via a curse of amnesia. There were plenty of twists and turns in store for Esme, but what was never clear was how she’d ever find her way back to
her true self and the sky, which grew darker and darker without her presence. This was the crux of that night’s debate.

The sun fairy’s soul is in a teapot
, Babka had said, drying dishes in our kitchen as my mother washed. Behind them, with my bare toes pressed against the refrigerator and the rest of me hunched over a piece of paper, I drew a teapot and decorated it with hearts.
If Esme finds the pot and removes the cover, her soul will be freed, and then she’ll remember herself
.

There is no teapot
, my mother said.

Then let the soul be hidden in a needle—everyone has a needle
, said my grandmother, as I crossed out the teapot and drew a long needle with an oval eye.
The needle is in an egg, and the egg can be found in a rabbit, which lives in a chest that is buried under an oak—

My mother pulled a wet cup out of the water and set it on the counter with a slosh. I pulled my toes off the refrigerator and swiveled around to find my mother’s angry eyes.

I’ve already told you that I don’t want to re-create Slavic fairy tales, Drahomíra
, she said.
Esme has lost her memory, not her soul. This is my story. Let me finish it my way
.

If my mother had listened to my grandmother, the story might’ve been finished years ago. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been in the kitchen that morning with her work, wouldn’t have—

The crow cawed when I swore.

“Oh, fly off!” I said, and, surprisingly, it flew away.

“Bird whisperer, are you?”

I jerked around so fast that I would’ve fallen if not for the tree. The fuzzy-haired, dough-faced man from the restaurant steps stood a few feet from me, wearing an oversized backpack and a holstered knife around his waist.