The Moon Sisters (2 page)

An accident.

Ghosts sometimes visited from the other side, Babka always said; they breathed on glass as a sign of their discontentment. It was only later that I noticed frost on the bathroom mirror.

J
ULY

CHAPTER
ONE

The Foolish Fire of Olivia Moon

   JAZZ   

M
y sister began staring at the sun after our mother died, because she swore it smelled like her. For me, it would always be the scent of oven gas, since that’s how Mom went—fumes pouring out, her breathing them in. Like Sylvia Plath, my father said, because my mother was a tortured writer, too.

Olivia’s actions were just as purposeful. Burned her retinas out over a period of months, made it so she couldn’t drive or even read. Well, she could’ve, if she’d used the glasses the doctor gave her—those big things that look like telescopes on her face—but she wouldn’t. So no reading. No driving. Instead, she lived with her head always tilted to the side, with an oil smudge in the center of everything she might want to see.

My sister’s reality had always been bizarre, though, with her ability to taste words and see sounds and smell a person on the sun. So when she decided to toss our dead mother’s ashes into a suitcase and go off to the setting of our dead mother’s story to find a ghost light, I wasn’t all that surprised. She’d never been the poster child for sense.

There were dozens of tales about ghost lights, or will-o’-the-wisps,
as they’re sometimes called—those slow-blinking lights that folks claim appear over bogs and swamplands. Some say they’re the spirits of dead Indians or disgruntled miners, even unborn children. They’re lost souls trying to find their missing parts. They’re mercurial sprites who’ll lead you to hidden treasure or danger if you follow, which is why they’re also called
Foolish
Fires; trusting in them is not a sensible thing. Scientists say they’re just swamp gases blinking to a strange pseudo-life now and then. A reasonable explanation, if you ask me.

Olivia did not ask me.

She woke up one day determined to find them. As if she might see with her blind eyes just when she needed to see—notice those lights hiding in a mushroom ring, or hanging alongside a thousand leaves in a hickory tree, or drowning with a bunch of cranberries in a bog. As if finding them might matter somehow, when our lives had been upended and nothing could ever be the same again.

I knew better.

“I’m not a cripple, Jazz, and I can see well enough to walk around without falling into a ditch. I’ll be just fine.”

Olivia stood at the end of the lane, a small tattered suitcase in one hand and a bag lunch in the other. Dirt swirled around her ankles when Old Man Williams rattled by in his pickup.

I pulled as close to the curb as I could and glared out at her from the small window of the biscuit bus. The shame I’d felt having to drive the ancient red-and-rust beast, which my grandmother and father didn’t even use anymore but which seemed unwilling to quit, had been worth it in the end. I’d won the job in Kennaton. I’d won it, and I couldn’t even enjoy it. Not when my eighteen-year-old, legally blind sister was about to do another stupid thing.

“And what happens when you get thirsty?” I asked.

“I’ll buy water.” She rattled her pocket. Coins jangled from within.

At least those denim shorts were hers. The bleach-streaked blue
V-neck she wore—like so many of the things she wore now—had been our mother’s. Taking her things was Olivia’s latest obsession, as was trying to braid her hair the way our mother did for her when she was young, when her hair was an artful mix of curls and waves. The opposite of the nest of neglect on her head now, with braids wound so tight they jutted from her skull like worms with rigor mortis.

“What if you’re not near a store?”

“There are streams all over the state,” she said. “I’ll find water.”

“You’ll get giardia.”

She didn’t blink.

My fingers dug into the cracked plastic steering wheel as the bus coughed. “And what happens when you’re tired?”

“I’ll sleep.”

“Where?”

She shrugged. “Wherever I am.”

“And where are you going to find these ghost lights, Olivia? Do you even know?”

She looked sidelong at me with big, blue, broken eyes set in a pale face, and said, “Cranberry Glades,” as if I’d asked her the time of day.

I was sicker than I could say of hearing about the bogs and ghost lights of the Monongahela Forest. Our mother had talked about them a lot over the years, always in relation to her book.
One of these days I’ll visit that bog, see those wisps, and figure out the ending—you’ll see
, she’d say.

I might’ve asked her how that could matter, tried to impress upon her the impossibility of finding the end to a fictional story out in the real world and that she didn’t need a trip so much as dogged determination and hard work to finish. But logic wasn’t my family’s strong suit, and my mother had never been one to actualize a dream—even one as straightforward as
Visit Cranberry Glades
.

“That trip isn’t for you to worry about, Olivia. It isn’t anyone’s to worry about anymore,” I said, giving logic a try despite what I knew about my blood. “We need to let it go.”

“It’s unfinished business,” she said, and sounded for a moment like my grandmother—a woman I respected for being both a dreamer
and
a doer, even if she was far too superstitious for my taste.

The dead remain when there’s unfinished business
, Babka had said after the funeral, reciting one of her Old World beliefs and covering the mirrors in our house lest my mother’s spirit reenter our world through a looking glass. They were still covered, too, even though it had been five months since my mother died.
The business is still unfinished
, Babka insisted whenever I pressed her on it.

Maybe my mother’s ashes were scattered in my sister’s suitcase, but I had no doubt that my mother’s spirit had long since moved on. I’d seen the way she looked through magazines, planning trips we’d never be able to afford. I’d heard her gasp with longing over any number of things in
People
magazine: the latest red-carpet dress, elaborate mansions with manicured lawns, even a lobster drowned in a pool of butter—things you’d never find in our hometown.

Dreaming. Always wanting what wasn’t.

No, my mother’s spirit wasn’t hanging around Tramp. She was gone. Free, finally, of the cement shoes that had always been of her own construction. She might’ve worn those shoes right out to the deepest part of the stream running through our town, let nature take its course, but that wasn’t the path she chose when at last she chose.

I knew something was wrong with me.

I should’ve felt something about her death, more than I did—something that I could label and understand, instead of the knot that I couldn’t. All I knew for sure was what that knot
wasn’t
. It wasn’t what I’d believed grief would be. And it wasn’t the desire to memorialize my mother in marble or the stars, or make good on any of the dreams she’d abandoned along with her family.

At the other end of the spectrum lay my father, whose grief was so evident that it hurt to look at him. Sometimes he stood in the bathroom with a portion of the mirror uncovered—staring into his own vacant eyes, his face half-shaved—hoping, praying maybe, that
my mother would sneak back through the glass. He blamed himself for her death, I knew, though I didn’t understand the
why
of that; it’s not like he’d turned on the gas.

A few weeks ago, I came home to find her favorite chair gone. I couldn’t begin to guess the number of naps my mother had taken in that seat, or the number of library books she’d read there, either. Maybe my father thought he’d miss her less if he didn’t see that empty dented cushion every day. But if that was the reason he would’ve done well to get rid of all her things instead of leaving the most significant reminders of her right where they’d been.

The typewriter in our tiny kitchen.

Her manuscript tucked under that.

The makeshift desk in their bedroom.

Maybe it’s time the rest went away, too
, I told him just yesterday, hoping we could be rid of it all, quick and done. But spontaneous, dramatic gestures weren’t his nature.

A dog’s bark brought me back to the present.

“Olivia!” I shouted, when I noticed her start to walk away again—noticed Mrs. Lynch, too, on her porch across the road, staring at the two of us. I pulled the door handle, a snakelike metal bar angled up and out of the dashboard, until the squeezebox doors creaked open. “Get in, Olivia. Right now.”

“Goodbye, Jazz. Try not to worry,” she said, and continued down the lane.

Our hometown of Tramp, West Virginia, had about a hundred homes, all of them old firetrap constructions, and only six businesses: a post office, a liquor store, St. Cyril’s Church, a gas station, a corner store, and my grandmother’s bakery. Everyone in town called the business Susie’s—even though its real name was Sušienka, a Slovakian word for
biscuit
—and they called my grandmother Susie—even though her real name was Drahomíra. She didn’t mind. Not so long as they came in every morning and bought a bag of her warm small cakes. I tried to steer clear of them myself,
since most of my neighbors could probably attribute their potbellies to Susie’s biscuits.

Everything was a stone’s throw from everything else in Tramp, so I drove a stone’s throw and left the keys in the ignition. My grandmother was inside, cleaning a countertop. She stopped when she saw me, her face full of animation and an unspoken question.

“I got the job,” I said.

She pressed her thick lips together and narrowed her wrinkled eyelids. “When will you start? Tell me everything.”

“In a minute, Babka. Is Dad here?”

When she looked over her shoulder, I ducked under the counter and walked past her, into the kitchen, where the scent of bread had long ago been baked right into the walls. Now early afternoon, appliances sat cool and settled from the morning’s work. My father was also settled—bottom in a chair, top slumped over a desk in the corner. There was an open bottle of something beside him—an increasingly common sight this summer.

“Was he drunk for deliveries? When did he start?”

“After lunch. He is just sad,” she said. “Give him time. It has only been five months.”

It felt more like five years.

I took the bottle. Vodka. Walked it over to the wide porcelain sink.

“Don’t,” she said. “He’ll just buy more.”

More of what we couldn’t afford to begin with. Still, I knew she was right. I screwed the cap on the bottle and put it back beside him, then gripped his shoulder and shook.

“Dad. Dad, wake up.” He didn’t stir. “Dad, come on. It’s about Olivia. Olivia’s in trouble.”

One eye squinted up at me. “Liv?” he said. “What?”

“She’s halfway down the street, heading out of town with Mom’s ashes in a suitcase. She’s keen on walking them all the way to the bogs, but with her miswired senses she’ll probably end up in Canada.”