The Moon Sisters (17 page)

“You tell me something first,” I said.

Metallic mist came from his mouth when he made a sound like a deflating tire. “I hate my old man. Those coins are the one thing he cares about.” A pause, and then, “Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know why,” I said. Truth.

“Don’t you?” he asked. “People give a lot of fancy reasons for the things they do, but I’ve found it always comes down to one of two things.” When I stared off to the side of him, I noticed a blur of art on his neck. “They’re getting something for doing it, or they’re avoiding something by doing it. Pleasure, or pain.”

He made it sound so simple. As if the truth had to be a clear and accessible thing. As if it might never be as elusive as ghost breath.

I pushed myself, tried to find an answer. Why had I done it? How could a person not understand why she had done something like that? But there was little about that time—that repeated act—that I understood or wanted to remember.

March sunlight.

Dead grass under my legs.

My eyes watering for more than one reason.

A vague sense that I was doing a wrong thing. A bad, messed-up thing. A truly dysfunctional thing. Despite that, it seemed I had no choice but to do it, that my sacrifice would help in some way.

It had not helped. Why had I ever imagined that it would?

“There was no pleasure in it,” I said, which was about the only thing I could say for sure.

“What were you thinking about when you did it?”

I hugged the small pile of brush in my arms, and a stick jabbed at the raw skin beneath my bandage. “Dreams.”

“What sort of dreams?”

It wasn’t comfortable having someone pick through your brain matter, I decided. Especially matter you hadn’t already picked through yourself in a satisfactory way—that, frankly, you wanted to avoid.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I said, and walked away from him, farther from camp, catching stray beams of late-day sun between tree branches, losing them again in an erratic parade of shadow and light.

“Hey.” He tossed branches onto the ground and followed behind me. “Nothing brings on pain like a dream. You don’t need ’em.”

“No?” I bent to gather more sticks. “I can’t imagine life without ’em. Not any more than I can imagine living without the hills of West Virginia.”

“I’ve lived without both just fine. Mountain after mountain out
there to explore,” he said, coming to stand beside me again, bringing that scent of his. “Plenty to life beyond what you see here.”

I could picture this: Hobbs, walking for forever and a day. And despite my need to step away from a conversation that had become a little
too
real—or maybe because of that—I smiled.

“I like you,” I said.

“You mentioned that once before.”

“Some things are worth saying more than once.”

“You don’t know me to like me. That’s worth repeating, too.”

“I know enough, and I know what I like,” I said. “I like your name. I like that you say what you think without caring too much how it comes out. I like that you help others, even if you don’t like thanks for that help. I like your tattoos, even if I can’t see them as well as I might. I like that you’ve traveled all over, that you move all the time to see new things and meet new people. It’s probably why you smell so interesting.”

“That’s the nicest way anyone’s ever told me that I stink.”

“It’s a good smell,” I said with a laugh. “Like you’ve picked up layers from all the places you’ve visited. I like that, too.” I just barely resisted the impulse to push my nose into his skin and sniff.

He settled his hands on his head. I couldn’t tell what that meant—if he was hiding himself all of a sudden or feeling boastful that I’d named so many things to like. Another thing to figure out.

“How do you decide where you’ll go next?” I asked, getting back to exploring his head instead of vice versa. “Do you trust fate to put you wherever you need to be?”

This had been one of Mama’s primary philosophies, one that had always felt like a comfort. That all of life’s twists and turns might be analyzed at some later date, shown to be necessary in order to arrive at some other point in the future—a point that would end up being important in a life.

If fate hadn’t intervened, I might never have tripped on my heels, dug my teeth into your father’s shoulder, and fallen in quick mad love
, Mama had said more than once.

But Hobbs wasn’t an enthusiast.

“I don’t believe in fate,” he said.

The dicelike imagery from the fire came to mind. While Papa had never been one to downplay fate, he’d been more vocal about the power of luck.

Lucky for me the side entrance to the store was locked when I arrived at the college the morning I met your mother, or I never would’ve had to take the back way or the stairs
, Papa would say.

Maybe men preferred luck over fate, even if they were two sides of the same coin.

“Luck, then?” I asked.

“Knew a guy named Lucky once,” Hobbs said. “He was a hopper, same as me, but one night he got drunk and fell asleep near the rails. Too near. Train went over his legs, took ’em both right off his body but left him living. Don’t know where he is now, but I have a feeling he’s not calling himself Lucky anymore.”

I tried to shove the image of a man sliced like a pizza by a train out of my head. “Do you believe in anything at all?”

“My own two feet.” He flicked his hands over his pants.

I stood to face him again. “And what if you didn’t have those feet anymore? What would you do if you were like Lucky, and they were taken from you?”

“Probably wrap my mouth around the barrel of a gun.”

My insides wrenched as a vision of him in our kitchen with an open oven door filled my head. I wanted to denounce what he’d said, convince him that he could survive without feet the way I’d survive without perfect vision and that life would still be worth living. Instead, I stood strong within my illusion of the not-quite-weakest-thing-in-the-forest and said, “Don’t rely on anything but yourself.”

Luck or fate. Prayers or dreams. Another person. “That’s your guide to life?”

“Living in the now and following instincts keeps me alive.”

“I get that,” I said, and felt a thread of steel in my spine again.

“Instincts are what made me pack a bag with my mother’s ashes,
leave my family and all I’ve known to take this trip in the first place. They’re what tell me even now that what I’m doing is the right thing, no matter who thinks I’m stupid for it.”

“That’s it,” he said, coming closer. “That’s freedom. Tastes good, doesn’t it?”

I licked my lips, tasted sweetness in their dry cracks.

Hobbs laughed. “Maybe you’ll live the life of a hopper yet, Wee Bit. All the best livin’ happens on the edges.”

My fingers flexed over the bark. “Does it?”

“It’s like that saying: ‘Beyond this place there be dragons.’ Those dragons aren’t out there for nothing,” he said, and the curve of his voice gleamed like gold. “They have secrets hiding under all that loot of theirs, and they’re worth finding. And the dragons at the edges of the map are friendlier than the ones at home, at any rate.”

I wanted to ask him about that. Home. His parents. The loot he’d taken. But something inside—instinct—said not to probe anymore there now, that Hobbs would shut down on me just as he’d begun to open. Instead, I said, “So you think all of life’s answers are out there for the taking. But where do the questions come from without dreams to pull you along?”

“I smell ’em on the wind.”

“What do you smell on the wind, exactly?” I twisted my lips, enjoying myself more than I ever could’ve thought possible. “Wait, don’t tell me. Dragons. Adventure.”

“Ladies in need of saving.”

And, just like that, I was over the slippery grip wall that was Hobbs. He wanted to matter, to be impactful. The scent of dragon was in truth the scent of human connection. He might not call it a dream, but it was
wanting
just the same, and semantics, to my way of thinking.

“Well, there is that, isn’t there?” I said, giving him what he needed and what was true at the same time. “You
are
saving me—helping me, at any rate—and when I need you the most. Don’t you think that’s an argument in favor of things happening for a reason?
One for the folks who’d like to believe in the helpful hand of fate, or at least luck?”

“Maybe,” he said, and then his tone darkened in a way I could only describe as plush. “But what makes you think I’m here to rescue you and not just devour?”

“I might still say it’s luck,” I said, my voice taking on a darkness all its own.

There were no snapping branches or movements between us then. Only a sense of seeing that went beyond what anyone might perceive with eyes.

He’s uglier than sin, you know
.

I doubted I would believe that even if I weren’t living life on the periphery and bound for a further edge, if I could see Hobbs’s dragon-camouflage skin with all its details. Liking him felt more honest than anything I’d experienced before, too, maybe because of its quick-form, raw-wound beginning and lack of clarity, its sheer instinct, and the fact that neither of us had turned yet to run in the other direction.

“You don’t scare me, Hobbs.”

“Said the girl who stared at the sun.”

I imagined I could feel the gentle tug along the hairs of my arms as he breathed me in, assessing my need for saving, right before Jazz called out that she’d found a dead animal.

“We’d better check that out,” I said, responding to the jittery pitch of my sister’s voice, though I hated to move.

Hobbs gathered the wood he’d dropped to the forest floor before we made our way back to camp, as I wondered over the trails left by dragons, the remnants of their kills.

June 1, 1997

Dear Dad
,

I am having one of my up-and-downs. This is a down, a black hole, worse than it’s been in a long time. Drahomíra moved out of the house a few weeks ago, which has upset us all—most of all Branik, who avoids conflict at all costs. It was because of me, Dad—a fight she and I had over a piece of my past. Our past
.

Do you remember that old wooden chest I hauled to the dorms at Kennaton? It must’ve been Mom’s, because when I first claimed it for my own I discovered a few of her things. I think you must not have known about it at all, or those things would’ve made their way out of the house along with all the rest of her “bling and glitz,” as you called it. There was a scarf in there, purple and breezy, with clear beads on the fringe that might’ve chimed like bells but (sadly) did not, because they were made of plastic. There were some garter belts in there, too—black with metal clips on the ends—and a bra that never would’ve fit me because I’d never be endowed like Mom. But none of those things attracted me as much as the coat
.

The coat that hugged the bottom of the trunk took up too much room and weighed as much as a small child. It was a bell of a black fur coat, maybe more like a cape. Despite the omnipresent scent of mothballs, slipping it on made me feel like a diva extraordinaire. I kept it all, because there were so few parts of Mom to keep, and those things opened a window into her life—a life that I came to feel was nothing short of mysterious and, at times, scandalously appealing
.

Now, imagine my six-year-old finding the trunk, and seeing it as the jackpot of all dress-up bins. I found her wearing the lot of it. The purple flounce of a scarf kissing up against her black hair. The obscenely pointed bra and matching garters sagging like elephant skin over her white panties and pink-bowed undershirt. And the black coat, floating despite its weight around her shoulders, sweeping the ground like the cape of a queen
.

Drahomíra laughed nearby as Jazz put on a show, dancing like a showgirl
.

I hollered. Out of that stuff. Out of the trunk
.

Naughty girl
.

I swatted my daughter’s bottom once I’d pulled the clothes off her, and she ran to her room, crying
.

Drahomíra stared at me with an open mouth. What had Jazz done that was so horrible?

I couldn’t say, “Jazz can’t be like Suzanne Howell, the worst of all people on the planet. She shouldn’t wear her clothes, dream her dreams, touch any part of her past or glorify her in any way. She shouldn’t be tempted.” I wanted the trunk to stay secret and mine. I wanted my daughter safe from an awareness that had rooted in me like a longing, despite my best efforts to keep those roots at bay
.

Was that so wrong?

I’m sure there are gaps in my logic. I’m not myself right now, I know that. But however much sense I’m making now, I made much less with Drahomíra then
.

I can’t recall how the conversation spun as it did, into an argument about wasted lives and opportunities. What became clear in those naked moments, garters strewn all over the floor, was that my mother-in-law disapproved of me. I was happy to point out the things that should be different, she said—the need for a town paper, a better sign at the bakery, more money and a family vacation to anywhere—yet I did nothing to create change. Why didn’t I work for what I wanted? There was no one to stop me. Instead, I clung to my discontentment and a moth-eaten coat, and acted the role of mercurial queen whenever I wasn’t indulging in a nap. Is that what I wanted my children to learn from their mother? she asked. How to live like a victim?