The Moon Sisters (23 page)

I
knew how my sister saw me—like a child, weak. But that wasn’t how I saw myself, and it wasn’t how it was.

My father’s favorite sandwich was peanut butter and jelly, loaded with so much peanut butter that it was as thick as the bread. Sour-cherry jelly was his favorite, the kind Babka made every year herself, but he liked other kinds, too—blackberry, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, orange marmalade, even store-bought grape sometimes. He stopped eating sandwiches after Mama died, though. Started losing weight. Reaching for the liquor cabinet instead of food, and reaching at any time of day.

Jazz liked being alone; she always had. But things changed after Mama died. She was always on the move. Moving away from Papa and me as soon as we appeared. Rifling through closets and boxes in the basement, and then leaving home to take a drive. Staying away.

It took strength to notice things, sometimes, when those things were hidden away in dark places, stuck on the edges of the periphery. Strength to point to them and say
that matters enough that I need to do something about it
, especially when no one else blinked over them or everyone else forgot they were important.

Mama broke her arm once about a year ago. She’d been getting something down from the attic, on the ladder, and she missed a step and landed in a heap on the floor. The bone in her arm pierced straight through her skin. The doctors prescribed narcotics for her, which made her sleep hard. Too hard. She said that drugged sort of sleep was like death, and she said she hated it. I remember that; I’m sure that’s what she said. She took a few pills to get her over the hump, then left the rest in the cupboard. She called them her
just-in-case pills
—just in case she ever felt that much pain again and needed relief. They were there, in the house, but she never used them again.

She never used them.

Hobbs didn’t run when he left Outlanders. Instead, he stood and walked away with his pack on his back. I walked, too, shadowed him across the room, out the door, across the parking lot, to its edge and beyond, into the woods.

The forest at night smelled like secrets, and the violet pinpricks of bug chatter seemed brighter than the evening before. I didn’t say anything, just followed him and the beam of his flashlight as we walked along a path of quiet things—moss and pine needles and dead leaves ground into soft flakes. Strangely, I felt better able to navigate the woods at night than during the day, as my blind spot blurred into the surrounding darkness and my peripheral vision rose to a new level of attention, honing in on Hobbs’s movement.

Minutes passed before I stepped on a branch, loud and revealing. Hobbs’s reaction was immediate. He made sounds that were pieces of words but nothing that made any sense—like
Geeffgahbbuh
, as if he’d whacked his funny bone so hard that his arm went numb but he couldn’t swear because he was standing next to a nun.

“What the hell are you doing?” was the first thing I puzzled out. He marched right up to me, let his bag slide off his shoulder and onto the forest floor.

“Following you,” I said, even though this was obvious.

“Well, don’t,” he said, and pulled down his hood. “Go back.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I need to tell you something,” I said, realizing it was true as the words sprang from my mouth.

There was unfinished business between us, though I wasn’t sure I could pin it down to name it or figure out what to do with it. The only thing that had become clear was that Hobbs was more than a way down to the glades for me, and I wouldn’t let him walk away without knowing it.

“I need to thank you,” I said. A start.

“You don’t.”

“It’s important, what you’ve done for me. I need to thank you.”

“All right,” he said. “You’ve thanked me. Now turn yourself around and go back to Outlanders. If you need me to take you, I will, because I know you’re supposed to be blind, but I have to tell you I’m starting not to believe that story. Blind but following me around in the dark doesn’t add up.”

“You know I’m not all the way blind. And you have a flashlight to go along with a moon that seems full enough in the sky tonight.” I gestured upward. “It’s not so hard to follow.”

He grunted, which I took for reluctant concession.

“And I’m not ready to go back,” I told him. “This, between us, isn’t finished.”

“Livya—”

“It isn’t. We’ve been good for each other, and—”

“Good? See what happened because I let you get to me?”

“I got to you?”

“I told you nothing ever worth a damn comes from dreaming, but you made me think about it.” He raised his hands to his head as he’d done once before—yesterday, while we gathered wood. “You waved those ideas of yours around like a pretty package—how much better life could be if I imagined something different—and look what happened.”

A breeze cut through, slapped leaves on trees, rattled branches
in a quick swirl of cinnamon heat, then was gone. Left was the scent of my own desperation.

“I’m sorry about Jazz and Red Grass, and whatever else is going on with those coins, even if I didn’t know about any of it,” I said. “But I’m not sorry that you started to think about more for yourself. If it makes you feel any better, you’ve done the same for me.”

“Stop.”

The word tasted like bricks, like I was right back where I’d started with Hobbs, with a wall that touched clouds standing between us. When I reached for his arm, he took a step away.

“People aren’t dragons, Hobbs,” I said, my voice leaking a sadness that I couldn’t quite contain. “Who made you think that way? Not everyone is out to hurt you. Not everyone would. I wouldn’t.”

He cracked a knuckle, but his voice lacked toughness when he answered; in fact, he sounded abashed.

“None of that can matter right now. Right now I’ve got some serious baggage chasing after me, and others need to be where I am not. You.” He shifted. “You, Livya Moon, need to be where I am not,” he said, which is when I decided that dragon slayers might make loyal mates after working through their trust issues.

“You can handle Red Grass,” I said.

“I’m sure I can, but it’s not him I’m worried about.”

“Aren’t you?” I had questions—lots of them—but first I had to tell Hobbs what I knew. “Red Grass was going to turn you in for some sort of reward money. That’s what Jazz told me just before she went off on you.”

He swore under his breath. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised Red would throw me over for a chunk of change. I wonder how much my old man is paying for a lump of my flesh?”

“Your dad?”

“It’s him behind the posters, I’m sure of it. He wants his coins back, wants me gone.”

It was Hobbs’s father who’d made him so fearful, so angry sometimes, so eager to kick back at friends and shut doors.

Those coins are the one thing he cares about
.

Pride made a poor friend, I decided. Time to set things straight.

“You didn’t think much of me earlier,” I said, fingering a newfound hole in the hem of my shirt. “You seemed almost glad to believe I’d stabbed you in the back. Maybe you don’t know me well enough yet to know I don’t do things like that, but here’s the truth for you to believe or not. I didn’t tell Jazz about you taking those coins. I didn’t tell her or anyone what you told me. She knew it, somehow, after meeting Red Grass. My guess is he’s known for a long time, since before we came along anyhow.”

“All right.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “I believe you. But it doesn’t change anything. You have to go back, and I have to go on. That’s the simple truth of it.”

“It’s not simple, and it’s not a set truth. It’s a choice.” A crossroads. “And a different choice could change everything if you let it. You need a friend you can trust. I need a friend I can trust, too, someone to help me get to the glades. We can help each other. And I don’t want to go back. I won’t go back,” I added, and my voice grew bristles. “I want to stay with you. And I want you to take me to that bog like we planned.”

“That wasn’t the plan, if you remember,” he said.

I did, of course. He was going to take us only so far, then go his own way. But things had changed.

“I started to say this earlier, and I’d like to finish now. I’m not the same person I was when I first met you,” I told him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be stupid, you know I don’t mean it like that,” I said, and felt the threat of ellipses that went on forever, like a line of stammering people who didn’t take chances or make choices or say what they meant. So I’d say what I meant, before it all erupted out of me like the stuffings in an overfilled closet. “Talking to you about the importance of dreams made me realize that I was struggling, too, not trusting one hundred percent even after I told myself I had to. You helped me see that maybe that’s okay, and that people can’t
count on fate or luck, even if they do want to believe things happen for a reason. You reminded me that we hold a lot of power in our own two feet, and that we have to use those feet to face the edges sometimes, and take risks. And dream a dream bigger than sauce—even if you might not exactly like the word
dream
.”

“Sauce?”

I tipped my head, wondered if Hobbs liked pizza. He would. Of course he would. Especially with my sauce all over it.

“Forget the sauce for now,” I said. “The point is you made me think I needed more in my life, for myself. And I know we haven’t known each other for long in hours, and maybe you don’t like me that way, but you made me dream of walking to the edge. With you.”

The crickets sounded louder when Hobbs went quiet, and for long seconds I stopped breathing altogether.

“Listen, Wee Bit,” he said. “You can’t do this. I can’t do this.”

“Why?” I dug in my heels. “Why are you afraid of this when I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life, when you take more risks in a week than most folks do in a lifetime?”

“Because I’m ruined, Livya,” he said.

Something in his voice nudged my memory toward an ancient misery. I veered sharply away from that, even as my fingers curled around the smooth stone I’d pocketed earlier.

“Well, I’ve been ruined, too, several times over, so we’re even,” I told him, trying for funny.

His voice ruffled like peacock feathers. “Is that so?”

I took a chance and stepped close again. This time he didn’t move away.

“I think you want me around even if you won’t admit it,” I said. “Because under all your tough talk you want to believe, too, and you know you can count on me. We need to stick together, Hobbs.”

He gave a silvery huff of air, like a laugh but not. “You’re either the bravest girl I’ve ever met or the stupidest.”

“Can I pick which?” I smiled. “There’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“This.” I held my free hand out to him, and when he took it I pulled the stone I’d been worrying from my pocket, let it go. It hit the forest floor in a dull ink-like splat.

And, just like that, the choice was made. Yes, Jazz would be upset with me again, even furious. But this wasn’t about Jazz; it was about me and what I needed to do. I felt it in my bones, trusted it; this was right, this would work.

“You’re impossible,” he said.

“You’re not the first to mention that.”

I pulled him close. He tugged at one of my braids. We kissed for the first time, with the moon looking down on us, but I knew right away that it wouldn’t be our last.

He tasted like tomorrow.

We walked awhile longer until we left the forest and found a road. Not the highway. Not anywhere I’d been before, I don’t think. Walking a few miles at night wasn’t appealing to either of us, and Hobbs said there was some rough terrain up ahead. The good news was that we were a few miles from the home of a friend of his, he said, reminding me that he had reasons of his own for making the trip and hadn’t just been wandering in my general direction. It was because we were so close that he was willing to break his usual rule and hitch, trust something other than his own two feet for a few minutes.

We got lucky. After a short time, a pickup came down the road. I stuck out my thumb as Hobbs advised—“A pretty girl always stops traffic”—with him by my side. The truck stopped.

“Where you kids headed?” asked a man with a voice to match his engine.

Hobbs shouted above the sound. “You know the bridge at Miner’s Barren?”

“What do you want to go there for? Bridge is condemned, butts up against nothing but forest.”

“There’s a cottage out there,” Hobbs answered. “And the bridge is safe enough to walk over if you know the right spots.”

“Isn’t there another path to that land? That might be a sounder way to go,” said the man.

“There is,” said Hobbs. “But it’s miles off and more effort than we need if you’re heading in this direction.”

The man hesitated a second. “All right, then. Come on.”

Inside, his truck smelled of cigarettes and a pine that was stronger than anything I’d noticed in the forest. He made a few more inquiries about the cottage. He’d lived twenty miles from the bridge all his life and never knew there was anything still back there. Once, there had been, before homes and families were wiped out overnight. He didn’t name the tragedy that had swept over the land—a fire, a flood, a famine, illness, or even a curse—but now the land was haunted by some of the fiercest ghosts in all West Virginia, he said. So fierce no one wanted to live there. No one but Hobbs’s friend, at any rate.

I’d grown up around stories like these, and because of that I’d grown pretty immune to fear. But this story made my skin skitter. Maybe because ghostly talk reminded me of the story Hobbs had told earlier—the tale of Earl McGuffin and the white bridge haunted by his whole family. Maybe because I was with Hobbs, and my nerves were already bunched as tight as my braids. To calm myself, I started to undo them, one at a time—the braid over my left ear, the one on my right that always flew up and knocked me in the eye.

We were there real fast, which made me think we should’ve tried hitching a long time ago, even if Hobbs wasn’t a fan of wheels over feet.