The Moon Sisters (20 page)

“Bridge used to be the color of stone,” Hobbs said, his hand against my spine as we walked through a field, my calves pricked and tickled at once by tall growing things. “But now it’s white with ghostly spirit. Buggers won’t leave, neither.”

I thought about spirits and their ways, and how water was a big mirror.

Afterward, he asked about the chocolate sky I’d mentioned the day before—the way I could see sound in voices, footfalls, even the suitcase bumping against my back—and I explained everything as best I could.

“One?” he asked, quizzing me on my numbers.

“One tastes like warm blueberries.”

“Two?”

“Scrambled eggs, still hot.”

“Three?”

“Raw hamburger.”

“Four?”

“Undercooked spaghetti.”

He groaned. “Torture. Is everything food?”

We were all ready for lunchtime, even though it was hours off yet. “Ask me about five.”

“What is it?”

“Wet sand.”

When I mentioned what music did to me, what it made me see, he stopped and unzipped his bag. Seconds later, I heard the reedy hum of a harmonica, and a bright zip of a song that painted the
sky with dashes of cornfield blue and rich gold. Red Grass clapped and stomped, started to sing about creasy greens. I twirled a time or two myself, and kept to my feet despite a few rolling acorns beneath them.

The break was short-lived, but it was long enough to turn the course of things.

“Can we get going now, or do we want to just forget this whole hiking-to-the-glades thing and have us a concert?” said Jazz, who stood leaning against a tree. I heard the tap-tapping of her foot, out of time with everything else. “I’d like to get where we’re going by nightfall.”

“Hope you packed your broom,” said Hobbs.

That’s when it became clear that assumptions had been made and details lost in the shuffle of hot-and-dusty minutes the day before, and that Jazz hadn’t been told exactly how long the trip would take by foot. She wasn’t happy about the realities when I filled her in, either, her voice piercing the air like a dagger.

“Two more days?”

“Well, now, there’s got to be something around here, Hobbs.” I heard an eager note in Red Grass’s voice, a tremble like a leaf clinging to its tree. “Someplace the little ladies can take a load off, have a burger, something? And you and me, we can do our business.”

“We’d have to redirect to get to someplace like that now,” Hobbs said, “and we shouldn’t if—”

“Yes, we should,” said Jazz.

“We got places to be, people to see,” said Red Grass, patting his wrist as if he was wearing a watch, even though he wasn’t. “Appointments.”

I didn’t know what Red Grass was talking about, what sort of appointments he might have with Hobbs, and it didn’t seem like Hobbs knew what he was talking about, either.

“We don’t have any plans, Red—not a single one. Now settle down,” he said.

“Vittles are fading fast,” said Red Grass, shaking his head. “Got
some noodles for dinner, but we’re gonna need something to stick to our ribs. Should I start hunting for rabbits?”

“You have a gun?” Jazz asked.

“Of course, I do,” said Red Grass. “And no, I’m not gonna give it to you, missy, so don’t bother asking.”

Jazz continued to argue. She needed to call our grandmother, check on the bus, have a real meal, for God’s sake—reminding me that she hadn’t eaten more than granola bars and a biscuit with peanut butter over the last day. If there was a way to make it happen, to get us to a restaurant for food and a comfortable break, she wanted Hobbs to see it done.

“Olivia, tell him to do it. Be reasonable,” she said, even though I’d stayed quiet, taking it all in.

“Your call, Wee Bit,” said Hobbs. “But it means going off course.”

I listened to Jazz’s breathing, and thought maybe it was faster than it should’ve been. I didn’t want her to feel again the way she’d felt last night. A chill skittered over my skin like a stone on water when I recalled how bad it had been for her.

I’m dying
.

What if it happened again?

You’ll have to choose
.

We could go somewhere. Maybe that would be best. Find a restaurant, a phone. A new way to the glades that didn’t involve trekking through the forest.

What do your insides tell you to do?

I still wasn’t sure, but I said, “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to get out of the woods for a while. You’ll stay with us, won’t you?” I asked Hobbs. “After we get there?”

When he answered, it was with a voice that lacked its usual curve. “We’ll see,” he said. “I still got both my feet.”

He led the way after that, leaving my hands as empty as before, but chill and wanting.

B
y late morning, it had become a boiling-oil day—so hot and murky it made the bird chatter turn to bursts of popcorn in the sky. My shirt stuck to my body. Everyone but Hobbs complained that their feet hurt and they wanted a nap. We stopped twice more for water. Kept going. Eventually we heard highway sounds.

“Civilization?” asked Jazz, her voice bright.

“It’s life,” said Hobbs. “But it’s just a highway.”

“Life,” Red Grass echoed. “And death.”

Beside the road stood a cross, tall and white. Beyond it, cars drove past in a scatter of eraser bits.

We found a long slab of rock sitting in the shade like a lazy dog and leaned against it as we pulled food from our bags. It was finally lunchtime. We ate cold beans and tuna with plastic forks, and used napkins for plates even though they bled through with juice. Maybe it was because that cross hovered nearby that death seemed to be on all our minds.

“Been a long time since I’ve been to see my wife, Elmira, at the cemetery,” said Red Grass, who’d wedged himself between Hobbs and me. “She’d be right annoyed that I forgot to leave flowers for her birthday. It’s easy enough to forget things like that when you’re on a train most of the time, losing track of your days.” His laugh was like a bark. “
Track
, heh. Get it?”

“Yes, Red. We get it,” said Hobbs.

Red Grass talked about Elmira for a while. Told us how she used to dream of traveling, though not quite the way he was doing now. She never would’ve approved of the turn he’d taken, the way he’d chosen to live life on “a couple of inches of steel.” She was what the train community called a
forty-miler
, he said—a homebody if ever there was one. She’d joked sometimes with their businessman son that she’d have to live vicariously through him, as he went winging off to Europe or Asia. She didn’t like the idea of airplanes, thought they were dangerous contraptions, and had avoided them for sixty-two years.

“What happened to her?” Jazz asked.

Red Grass waited as two trucks passed on the highway, then said, “Had a heart attack on the way to my grandson’s preschool class for grandparents’ day. Left a pan of brownies all over the sidewalk. They were still warm.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to envision Red Grass in a normal sort of life, attending a preschool function, full on family.

“It was hard, but nothing compared to losing my boy,” he continued.

“What happened to him?” Jazz asked again.

“Someone set fire to his place.” Red Grass’s tumble-rock voice grew coarser still. “There ain’t no mercy in fire, neither. Consumes everything. Leaves nothing but ash, and shattered glass, and busted dreams.”

“Oh, Red.” I found his hand, squeezed.

“Long time ago,” he said. “Though sometimes it seems like just yesterday.” He wiped his face against his sleeve. “But listen, death’s no fit topic for lunch, and you kids are too young for tragedies like this at any rate.”

“I wish,” I said quietly. Our panes of glass might not have been shattered, but they were darkened just the same.

It was Hobbs who clarified the matter. “The girls lost their mother a few months ago, Red. They’re taking this trip with her ashes, as a matter of fact. Looking for some closure.”

“That true, now?” The older man grunted. “Well, that’s a shame. I’m sorry for you girls.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Jazz stayed quiet. Maybe her thoughts, like mine, had drifted to the suitcase at my feet.

“I’ll bet this boy Hobbs ain’t never had any sort of loss,” Red Grass continued.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” said Hobbs, his voice as flat as a double yellow line.

“Statistics,” said Red. “Someone here has to have a whole family. That leaves you.”

Hobbs huffed. “Go on and call the Guinness people, then. There are six crosses behind my old man’s house, not so different from this cross here. Sisters and brothers, born dead all. I saw one once, before it went into the ground. Tiny nose and a bow mouth. Bitty eyes shut like it was sleeping. That one was a boy.”

I tried not to picture the dead baby, and failed.

“That’s too bad for your mother,” said Red Grass. “You, eh, got a father?”

“Guess so. That’s how it happens, right? Man meets woman, they bang, make a kid.”

“You sure know how to paint a romantic picture, boy,” said Red Grass. “Sure your old man would appreciate that.”

“Ain’t nothing romantic about Bill. His wife, Alice, was the only mother I ever had,” said Hobbs. “Those kids behind the house—they were hers. Hers with him. She never did have a kid of her own, and my old man reminded her every chance he got that I wasn’t her blood. And then she left him, and that was that. Must’ve had a real mother at some point, but I don’t know a thing about her. Maybe she left, too, or maybe she’s under one of those crosses behind the house. If there’s one thing Bill learned how to do well, it was build a cross.”

We sat without words for a long time, listening to the highway noise.

“How old is your grandson, Red Grass?” I asked, trying to land on a lighter subject.

He pushed off the stone and walked away without a word.

The fire. Of course. It had taken the whole family. His son. A daughter-in-law, most likely. And a grandson.

“I don’t like it here,” I said. I wanted to walk, get away from this view and the conversation. “Can we leave?”

“Life sucks no matter where you go,” said Jazz. “You can’t escape it.”

“Life doesn’t suck,” I said.

“Tell that to Red Grass,” said Hobbs. “No wonder he’s a hopper.
Wife and son and grandson, all gone. What else was left? That’s how it happens, a lot of the time, how folks end up in this sort of life. They’re just trying to replace something they’ve lost. They never succeed, but they keep on. Anything’s better than facing the void left by all that absence.”

A desperation I could not stop to dissect filled me, as I pushed myself off the rock and faced him.

“You talk like there’s no hope at all, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” I said. “You’re young and smart. Those two feet of yours could walk you to whatever life you want, onto a path that means you don’t have to hop until you’re old and gray like Red Grass.”

“Not everyone can afford to dream as big as you, Wee Bit.”

“Truth,” said Jazz.

I ignored her, focused on Hobbs. “Isn’t there anything out there you can imagine, at the edges or not? Try. Try now,” I said with more force than I should’ve, considering Hobbs’s life was not my life. But I couldn’t quell the ferocity of my need just then—to have him acknowledge another way, make him see that there were two ways of looking at things.

He must’ve picked up on that, because he didn’t brush me off or mock me, just stayed quiet for a while, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe I could try for a new start somewhere. Sell some assets.”

For half a second, a smile broke over my face. And then Jazz opened her mouth.

“The assets you stole, you mean?”

“Jazz!” I started, but Hobbs was already up and walking away with his bag in hand. “Hobbs, wait. I didn’t say anything, I swear I didn’t—”

He disappeared among the trees.

“That’s brilliant,” I told my sister, turning on her. “Now he’s going to think
I
told you, when you and I both know I didn’t. What if he keeps walking? What if we’re left out here with no direction?”

“He won’t leave,” she said, pushing my hand away when I reached out to give her a pinch. “Not when he’s staring after you the way he
has been. Even if he did leave, it wouldn’t be the end of all options. We’re here, right beside a highway. We could hitchhike. I wouldn’t love it, and we’d have to look for a woman to ride with, but we could—”

“It’s not even the point, Jazz. Hobbs has gone out of his way to help me—to help our whole family—and you’ve gone out of your way to be as horrible as possible. You don’t even know him at all as a person. You’re judging him on his tattoos.”

“I’m judging him on thievery,” she said. “Real thievery.”

“Thievery you learned about from who? Red Grass?” I asked her. “Because Hobbs never told Red Grass, and I, for one, believe Hobbs. Why would you trust Red Grass? Do you know something I don’t know about him? Because if you do, now’s the time to fill me in.”

She didn’t answer. “Fine, keep your secrets. But I think I understand now why you want to work in a funeral home. You don’t get on so well with folks who live and breathe.”

“And you say
I’m
mean.”