The Moon Sisters (21 page)

She walked away as well. Left me there with the cross and my charred thoughts—of fire and its uncaring ways, warm brownies capsized on the sidewalk, beautiful babies put into the ground, Mama in the kitchen breathing oven gas.

Of the void left by all that absence.

At first, I didn’t set Hobbs straight on the truth due to pure pride on my part, because I didn’t want to have to beg for anybody’s trust when I hadn’t done anything to betray it. Then he gave me another reason not to talk with him.

We found more crosses, a group of three, close to the highway and up a small hill. I’d heard of these clusters of crosses before, but it was Red Grass who explained about Mr. Coffindaffer—how he’d planted crosses all over America because he claimed God had told him to do it. Spent a fortune on his venture, too.

The heat such a thing provoked was beyond sense in my mind, but Hobbs and Red Grass really got into it—Hobbs yelling about
the craziness of it all, Red Grass yelling back that one man’s crazy is another man’s salvation. Then Hobbs lost all semblance of cool.

“Salvation is for the fucking stupid, and the fucking lazy—people who think someone’s gonna come and rescue them,” he said with a voice full of nettles. “That’s all bullshit, crutches for the weak. I believe in action, in taking care of myself.”

“Your own two feet,” I said.

“Yeah.” I felt his eyes on me. “My own two feet. Can’t trust no one or nothing but that.”

Part of me wanted to leap on him right then, pinch him, tell him and tell him and tell him until he believed me that I hadn’t shared what he’d told me in confidence. But this was about more than that. This was about him ripping my ideas up in my face and calling it done. He needed to chill and so did I, both of us under the effects of a boiling-oil day, so I said nothing. Instead, I pulled a smooth stone out of my pocket, one I’d found earlier, and turned it over in my hand, worrying it the way Babka sometimes did with her religious beads.

Again, I felt the haze of my dream. I might not be ready for it, might not understand it, but it was coming all the same. A crossroads of one kind or another.

And I would have to choose.

February 1, 2000

Dear Dad
,

It’s the year 2000, and I keep wondering what you thought of all the turn-of-the-century insanity! Did you stock up on water and food, just in case? Branik wasn’t worried in the least, though I have to admit to purchasing a ridiculous quantity of peanut butter and bottled water. I had no doubt that if worse came to worst my mother-in-law would still somehow find a way to bake bread, and we would all be well fed
.

Things are quieter here at home, under better control. Drahomíra now lives in a house right next door to her store, which she said was meant to be, since it went on the market when she needed it. Olivia has started school, though she doesn’t seem to like it yet. (She has attention issues, according to her teachers.) Jazz keeps to herself a lot of the time, but Branik says I was probably the same way when I was nine years old
.

The details of my life with you are fading from memory, and that saddens me sometimes. The other day, I thought about the rug we had in the living room. Random, I know, but I used to trace its pattern with my fingers, lying on my stomach while writing English papers and dreaming of my life as a future novelist. You’d think I would have committed it to memory, but now I’m unsure. Was it swirling, or were the shapes angular? Was it cream with green, or green with cream? It’s not important, I know, but not being able to call up the visual still bothers me
.

The nicest part of having a quieter house is having time to write. Yes, I am writing. Are you surprised? Though it’s a far cry from the Macintosh in the study at home, I’m sidling up every day in my kitchen beside an ancient typewriter Branik’s mother gave us. It’s sort of fun to use, and I’ve already written a hundred pages. That’s almost a quarter of a novel, at least according to one of my professors whose class I took so long ago
.

You may think I’m crazy for it, but I feel in my gut that if I can do this—when I do this!—this book will be evidence of the highest order that I’m okay. Not ruined at all. Whole and vital, the person you always knew I could be. Maybe this is the key to controlling those tsunamis. I feel better when I write, more centered. Maybe fiction can put life’s unexplainables into perspective for me
.

Are you curious over what the story’s about? I don’t want to say much yet, because I don’t want to jinx it, but I’ll give you a hint. It involves a bog and ghost lights, and a lost girl determined to be found. I am quite certain that determined lost girls are the most powerful of all forces
.

Well, as Sylvia Plath once said, “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” Time to get to work
.

Beth

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Outlanders

   JAZZ   

C
an you try to find your sister?
my mother would ask me, all too often, because Olivia had a way of landing in trouble. Like the time she climbed the tallest tree in town during a rainstorm because she said she liked the way it sounded when the drops hit the leaves. Or liked the look of that sound, whatever that meant. I didn’t ask for details, only yelled at her until she got down, then dragged her body home, both of us soaked to the marrow.

Like the time she walked alone clear out of town and into the next just to see, in her words, “some old dogs.” I found her at a tiny house huddled beside a wire-haired white mutt, and talking to some old man who had fewer teeth than fingers. My bark won.

Like the time she used a vacated ladder to reach the top of St. Cyril’s steepled roof and sat up there for hours, saying she was testing it out for our father because it seemed the best place in all the world for a fiddle show. I threatened to tell Mama about her trip to see the dogs all by herself if she breathed a word of that nonsense to our father. I didn’t think he’d dare climb a church roof in front of God and all our neighbors to play his instrument, but I never
knew with my family and wouldn’t risk him getting any ideas in his head—or breaking every bone in his body.

Then came the boys. Even the ones who’d long since labeled my sister the town weirdo were willing to ignore that for an afternoon once she turned thirteen, and developed breasts and long, flirtatious lashes. The town weirdo could still steam up a car. Though in truth I only caught her at that once, making out in a truck at the edge of town with Henry, that tall guy from my grade who, despite having a pretty good head for math, seemed destined to work his entire life at the liquor store his father owned. The Henry who’d asked me out once upon a time.

Asked me, Jazz Moon.

I’d said no.

Why didn’t you go out with that nice boy?
Babka asked.

Because he’s too much like all the things I hate about Tramp
. That’s what I believed but could never say—not to my grandmother, who’d built a business and raised a son here, who’d chosen to stay. I told her I was picky.

Can you try to find your sister?
my mother asked one day after a long nap, and off I went. But I couldn’t find her. After searching the town as well as I could, I went home to report that I didn’t have a clue where Olivia might be hiding.

I found my mother in her bedroom, on her hands and knees, and with her head under her desk. She flushed when she saw me.
Sorry for the wild-goose chase
, she said.
Your sister came home a few minutes ago. She’s fine. But thanks for looking, Jazz. You’re a good daughter, and a good sister, too
.

I strained to get a glimpse of what my mother had been doing, as she shifted the thin cloth that covered the plywood top back into place.

Curiosity warred with decency for the rest of the day, and later, when my mother left for Babka’s with Olivia, I went straightaway to peer under her desk. The edge of one of the floorboards beneath it
lacked nails and jutted up on one side. When I lifted it, I found the letters. Letters that weren’t addressed, only dated beside my grandfather’s name. The first: five months before I was born.

That’s when curiosity beat decency to a pulp.

I opened that envelope with as much care as I could, tugging tenderly on the flap. I made one or two small tears, left behind a few flecks of glued paper. But overall it wasn’t too hard to open; this was an old bond.

I read the letter, learned it just like that: My mother had married my father because she had to. Lost her father. Lost her comfort, her money, her education. She’d had bamboo in her house, and a cat named Fat Lizzy. She’d lost all of it, everything.

Because of me.

I’m sorry for getting into trouble out of wedlock. But I would never have quit college. I would never have chosen one over the other: you or Branik, college or motherhood. Those things were your doing. It’s not too late to undo them. We can raise this baby between the three of us, can’t we?

Under your influence, this child will strive for greatness. I will do better with your grandchild, Dad, than I did with myself. I promise. I promise I’ll be a good daughter from now on, the perfect daughter.…

One letter for nearly every year since that time had been stuffed under the floorboard. I reached for the next one:

Yes, she was born—pink, healthy, crying as she should, and with a wickedly misshapen head
.

Jazz is a good baby, I guess, in the way of babies. She eats well; she is growing. She’s a good baby, but when I look at her I feel nothing
.

She has your eyes
.

I dug my hand into the center of the pile this time, opened a third envelope:

You may think I’m crazy for it, but I feel in my gut that if I can do this—when I do this!—this book will fix us. It will be evidence of the highest order that I’m okay. Not ruined at all
.

I’d read enough.

My mother lived her entire adult life thinking she’d have a reunion someday with her father. That if she finished the book he’d forgive her for sleeping with a man she’d loved and making a baby—making
me
—and getting married without his express consent. She believed it with everything in her.

It was just another fairy tale.

I found a bottle of glue in a kitchen drawer, so old I had to pry the hard seal off the cap with a butter knife. I smeared thick paste along the envelopes’ open flaps, tried to reseal them even though my hands shook with a sort of fever, because I was standing—stupidly—right there in the kitchen, and my mother might’ve returned at any moment and found me there. Who knows, maybe I wanted to be caught. But I wasn’t.

I went back upstairs, returned the letters to their place under the floorboard. And then I, Jazz Marie Moon, age seventeen, called Henry and asked if he wanted to hang out. He said yes. Henry was too much like all the things I hated about Tramp—he was happy enough to grow roots in the shit around him, never question the set course of his mediocre life. But that night I gave him my virginity beside a bougainvillea in deaf Mr. McDuffy’s backyard.

It was the last time I can remember crying.

It didn’t seem like a hard thing: Walk, just walk. We did it all the time without thinking about it. But when you did it all day, in an oppressive sort of heat and humidity, after an unknown amount of shallow sleep, with a bag that felt weightier by the second and sneakers that could’ve been a lot better quality, it wore a body down. My feet ached as if they’d been sandwiched in a vise, and I swear I felt every stone beneath them. My blistered heels were a constant source of misery, even though Red Grass offered two bandages when I mentioned it (a surprise) and I used them both. My face itched, and though I knew that it was probably from pollen, I wouldn’t have ruled out an accidental roll in a patch of poison ivy at some point during the night, either. Not with my luck. I’d also developed an enormous bruise on my arm, and though it didn’t hurt unless I poked at it, it looked like a plum had been buried under my skin.