The Moon Sisters (24 page)

“You kids watch yourselves,” the man said as we slid out of the seat and onto pavement.

“You bet,” said Hobbs, and the truck drove off in a spray of red eraser bits, left us to the dark. He turned on his flashlight, reached for my hand, which was trembling a little. “Those stories scare you?” he asked me.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Nothing to be afraid of, Wee Bit.” I heard a smile in his voice. “I’ll take care of you.”

He led us down an overgrown path until the sound of running water grew louder. This stream sounded small, but angry, and I could barely make out the bridge even with Hobbs’s flashlight. We ducked under a barrier and began to walk over the old structure, staying close to the side Hobbs said was best.

“Tiny steps, Livya,” he said as I followed behind him.

There was one moment when there might’ve been trouble, when my left foot slid through a gap in the bridge that Hobbs hadn’t noticed to warn me about. But he caught me up, and I caught myself up.

“Careful,” he said, breathless.

“Maybe the ghosts want me.”

“Maybe they can’t have you,” he said, and I grabbed the back of his shirt.

We kissed once we’d made it across to the other side. It was a different sort of kiss from the first kiss. This kiss, the low noise Hobbs made, burst on my tongue like sprinkled sugar. Said
hunger
, said
I know what I want: you
, said
now
. When I touched his face with my hands, he pulled them away, encouraged them lower, and the heat and humidity still held in the air by the boiling-oil day felt exactly right.

“Who needs a bed?” Hobbs said, and I agreed as we sank to our knees. Just two more animals on the forest floor.

September 12, 2001
Dear Dad
,

The most horrific thing happened yesterday, as I’m sure you’ve heard. Everyone has heard. The Twin Towers are gone. I couldn’t sleep last night thinking of everything that happened, all the lives that were lost, all the people left behind. I thought especially of the people who jumped—how they made a choice to escape fire and smoke and the destruction of stairs and elevators and sprinkler systems, like a last moment of freedom. And because there was nothing better to hope for. Nothing at all
.

I will write more when I am feeling less
.

Beth

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Long Memory of Old Dreams

   JAZZ   

T
he last time my mother mentioned college to me was the day a catalog for Kennaton State arrived in the mail with my name on it. I hadn’t asked for it, and the sight of it brought me to within a degree of furious. I’d finished my junior year of high school the week before and was looking forward to a summer free of my peers, most of whom I disliked. I couldn’t wait to be out of school altogether and working with Babka in the one environment that had ever made me feel at ease. The only expectation at the bakery was to make dough, roll it out and shape it, watch it brown, then see it sold. This was not an expectation I minded, and, in fact, was one I enjoyed. Here was a beginning, middle, and end—a complete process. I felt a keen appreciation for the crisp of a well-made crust, and the resilience of a well-made dough—the way it bounced back when poked with a finger, as if to say, “I’m perfect the way I am; don’t try to change me.” A lesson my mother could learn.

I found her slouched, asleep in a hard plastic chair alongside the house, her hair pulled back with a white-and-red striped scarf, her bare knees dirty, and a trowel stuck in the ground at her side. Her freckled nose looked sunburned. Behind her were four scraggly
tomato plants, each with one or two yellow buds, and an herb bush I could not identify. Heaped beside them lay a pile of wilting weeds. A line of delineation marked where her efforts had stalled, between the second and third plants, after which the weeds were thick and hearty and positively in control.

I tapped the catalog against my leg and stared at her. Surely she had to feel me there, my anger. Still, she slept. My mother is lazy, I thought. She is so lazy, sleeping while her plants choke, asking them to grow and produce even when they’re smothered in weeds.

I glanced up for a few seconds when a plane flew overhead, and when I looked back at my mother her eyes opened. She noticed me and what I held, and had the audacity to smile.

The catalog came
, she said after a yawn.
Good. We can go through it—

I told you I won’t go to college
, I said.

You don’t mean that, Jazz. You’re so bright, you—

I won’t go, no matter how good my chances might be of getting in
, I said.
I don’t want to go
.

She nudged her body upright, rubbed the back of her neck with one hand.
But you don’t mean that. Of course you want to go. Who wouldn’t? It’s a wonderful opportunity, and you should—

You’re so high on it, why don’t you go back?
I said.
You’re one semester short of your English degree, right?

She looked down at her dirty fingers.
That was a long time ago
.

Who cares how long ago it was?
I said.
Why don’t you just go back and finish, be a teacher, or whatever it was you wanted to be? Is it because of money?

Money doesn’t have to stand in your way, if that’s what you’re worried about
, she said, her eyes on me again.
You can get a scholarship, and loans. You’re a smart girl
.

So I go to college, and then what? Come back to work as the most overqualified baker in Tramp?

She sat straighter.
No. You can do better
.

Why would I want to?

Why wouldn’t you?

I shook my head, angry because my grandmother had built something our whole family relied upon, and it seemed like my mother was almost ashamed of it. Angry, too, because I could not forget the letters I’d read, what my mother had written about Tramp, about me, about her father.

Is the reason you won’t finish your degree because you’re trapped here with Dad and us anyway?
I said.
And you’d never be able to use it because there isn’t anything to use it for around here and you can’t drive to get to anything away from here, so why bother—

Jazz
. Her warning voice.

But I can, can’t I?
I said.
I can try to do what you couldn’t bring yourself to do. Finish the degree. Have at least the slimmest possibility of making something of myself
.

This was the meanest thing I’d ever said to my mother, and left no doubt that I’d crossed a line into no-rules-here territory. My muscles tautened, and I half expected the air between us to rumble with tension, for words that would be worse, that would roll out like cannons, for all-out war. Instead, my mother slid back down in her chair, a visible sign of defeat.

My mother is weak, I thought. She is the weakest person I know.

Resentment flourished in me like wild weeds, and I used it, sure that I’d never find a more ideal moment to end all this.

Stop shoving your dreams on me
, I said.
I’m not going to do what you want just because you want it. I’m not going to live my life so someone else can live theirs through me. I’m not going to be molded into the family savior, or the feather in the family cap, or whatever it is you want me to be. This is my life. Mine alone
.

I turned and walked away from her, refusing to be shaped like dough according to another person’s appetite.

I prowled the crushed stone lot outside, my eyes stumbling around in the dark.

No Olivia.

I couldn’t comprehend this. I’d been gone for less than five minutes. She and Hobbs couldn’t have gone far, but I had no idea which direction they’d taken. If I chose wrong, I could lose her, maybe forever. Raging streams, wild animals, cliffs, cars, even Hobbs himself. I tried not to think of the many ways Olivia might fall into a bad situation out there in the wild. Even die.

What would I do? What could I do?

Overwhelmed, I leaned against the doorjamb at Outlanders. Moths flew near the bulb beside me, some already caught in the rangy spiderwebs decorating the exterior, the others sure to meet the same end.

Red Grass came through the door and stopped when he saw me there. “ ‘One moment of carelessness can cause a lifetime of sorrow.’ You know who said that?” When I didn’t reply, he answered himself. “Duffy Littlejohn, a train hopper. That man saved my life, and I mean that literally.”

He reached behind him, and a moment later dragged all our bags outside. Including my sister’s.

The bag with our mother’s ashes inside it.

This was worse. This was far worse than I’d imagined.

I took the bag, too overcome with dread even to chew him a new one for his duplicity, his role in this mess. Besides, my role was bigger. I’d told Hobbs I was about to turn him in. I’d birthed this new chaos; I was its creator. Red Grass hadn’t once stuck my nose in that truth, which is more than I would’ve done if it had been my foot in that particular shoe. I’d been stupid. So, so stupid.

“I know what it’s like to lose family,” he said, “and I won’t let it happen here if I can help it. We’ll find them.” He pulled a thin black flashlight out of his bag of tricks. It was the sort of flashlight cops used, he explained, and would help us travel in the dark as we searched.

Questions toppled out of me.

Where did you get that flashlight? Are you a cop?

Why did you let me believe you were after a reward when that wasn’t the case? What is the case?

Did you really make that poster yourself? Scatter it across the state and all the way to Kentucky, even though you knew where Hobbs was well enough? Why?

What do you want with him?

What’s the big deal with those coins?

It seemed obvious that the coins were at the root of everything, as Red Grass was always fixated on them. But it had also seemed obvious that Red Grass was nothing more than a dirt-poor, train-hopping scamp looking to make a quick buck, and not someone who would have a fancy cell phone in his pocket, or a state-of-the-art flashlight, so I wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.

He didn’t answer any of my questions, though, and what he did say failed to ease my nerves.

“I told you I needed more time to verify some things. My friend tonight, he took some of those coins and he plans to do some research. The next phase happens after that.”

“Phase? You’re not seriously asking me to believe this is still on? That you’re still planning to take care of Hobbs?”

“Yes. Yes, I am asking you to believe it.” He looked from the dark sky, back to me, pierced me through with the sort of look I’d usually attribute to Hobbs. “You can’t always read a thing on the surface and understand it all the way through, missy, and you’re driving everyone away because you think you can, with your snap judgments and all that heat.”

Hadn’t Olivia said this same thing to me minutes ago? And now she was gone. Gone like my mother was gone. Had I done something to drive my mother away, too? Could I have prevented … everything somehow? I hugged the suitcase to my chest, couldn’t help a slight tremble.

Red Grass must’ve read the pain on my face, because he patted my shoulder. “I’ll tell you this so you don’t worry overmuch about
finding them again.” He glanced away as a truck in the lot pulled out, beams flashing in his eyes, and then he looked straight at me. “I’ve got a tracking device on that boy.”

I followed Red Grass, as he walked back into the thick of trees and weeds and dark and quiet, and away from Outlanders and all its smoke and light and noise. I would never have left at all, would’ve sat in the lot hoping Olivia would come to her senses and return. But when he showed me the tracking device—about the size of a cell phone but with a map schematic and red flashing light—and how far Hobbs already was from us, I understood the safer bet. He wouldn’t, of course, tell me why he had the device, and was as evasive as ever.