The Moon Sisters (26 page)

Mama took a hard look at Jazz’s dress and my scuffed shoes, then decided that she only needed one knife—a big chef’s knife she had tucked under her arm in a plastic case—and that the others could
wait. Instead, we bought new shoes for me and for Jazz, and a bunch of shirts on sale.

We never did go back for those other knives, though. Begonia’s closed five days later, and Mama slept more after that. But we kept the chef’s knife, and used it for cutting meat and vegetables, and mincing herbs, and smashing garlic. While I wouldn’t say it made Mama a great chef, I think it made her glad to hold it in her hand and use it every day, knowing she’d bought it with money she’d earned herself.

A few months after that, I saw her with her hands pressed together at her desk, using it just then like an altar. I asked if she was praying for those other knives. She said no, that wasn’t what she hoped for, and then she hugged me, drew me nearer to the beat of her hollow heart.

The house might’ve been invisible. I couldn’t see it at all until we were inches away from the dark-wood door. Hobbs said it wasn’t just me, wasn’t just the night, either. The cabin had been built into a hill long ago, and its log roof was covered in thick moss. Music filtered out from the inside, full of round color, like airy bubbles of blue and orange and yellow, drifting together, floating apart again. It reminded me of the love sounds my parents used to make, the door to their bedroom closed, their minds turned off to the possibility that their two daughters might be near, ears pressed against the thin wall.

Hobbs knocked—“J.D., man, it’s Hobbs”—and seconds later the music cut, and the door swung open to reveal a thin man with dark hair, dressed all in blue.

“There’s a face I know,” this man—J.D.—said, and the two embraced.

“I hope you don’t mind us showing up at your door like this,” said Hobbs. “I would’ve given you a heads-up that I was coming to visit, but things have happened, and now … We need a place to crash.”

We stepped inside as the sky cracked with thunder, and all that I saw was coated for an instant with mustard-gold fog. Fresh guilt
pinched at me when I thought of Jazz, wondered where she was and what she was doing. There was something else, too. Something that asked for my attention, even as I asked for it to wait so that I might focus on the here and now.

The area beside the door was bright thanks to a solitary oil lamp, but everything beyond lay in shadow. I could make out a rose-colored chair and an instrument leaning against it—a fiddle, maybe, though it hadn’t sounded like a fiddle on the other side of the wood.

“J.D., this is Livya,” Hobbs said. He pulled something out of my hair—a leaf, I think.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, and held out my hand. J.D. took it.

“Your girl?” he asked. Hobbs didn’t say anything or nod that I could tell, but maybe he smiled, because J.D. squeezed my hand. “Good for you. Be happy.” His voice yielded like bread straight from the oven or the ground after a hard rain. He wasn’t from West Virginia, but I couldn’t say where he
was
from. He spoke in a way that was different from anything I’d heard before. Maybe he’d lived awhile in a foreign land. Maybe he was someone Hobbs had met at the edges.

I pointed at the instrument. “Is that a violin?”

“It is,” he said. “Please, sit. I’ll light more lamps.”

Within a minute, the room filled with a brighter glow, revealing another chair, and—farther on—what looked like two beds and a woodstove. Other parts of the room remained dark.

“It’s not much, I know,” J.D. said.

“We’ve been in the woods for days, man, and on the rails before that.” Hobbs led me to one of the beds. The mattress creaked under us, and my body wanted to puddle down, become one with the soft comforter. “This is like the plushest suite at the Holiday Inn. Besides, electricity’s overrated.”

“You must be hungry,” said J.D. “Let’s see what I can do about that.” He disappeared from the ring of light, into the shadows of the room.

“It’s not right to be hungry so soon after we ate, is it?” I asked Hobbs.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m hungry again.” He made the mattress bounce, bumped his arm up against mine. “Next time, it’ll be a bed,” he whispered, and I hummed.

We talked as we ate herbed eggs over greens, welcoming food even though we’d hardly digested our burgers. Hobbs spoke of things he’d done since the last time he’d been to visit J.D. He’d gone to Maryland, he said, and seen the sea—all by taking trains and walking. He’d had a bad experience with a hitch, driving around with a guy high on something who wouldn’t let him out when he asked, and decided after that to give it up. (That explained that.) In the end, he said, he’d missed the mountains.

Can’t live with ’em, can’t imagine living life without ’em
.

I indulged myself then, a moment of imagining life without ’em. A life of waves and sand. Standing on a shore and looking beyond this place and clear across to the other side. Lying on a beach with Hobbs, kissing his tomorrow mouth, tasting all the colors of his body as he surged inside me like a wave.

Hobbs, unaware that I’d disrobed and was having my way with him in my mind, seemed to feel a rare ease with J.D. And so I wasn’t surprised when he brought up the coins he’d taken from his father, or the situation he found himself in because of them. What surprised me was how easy he was with
me
being in the same room when he talked about everything, as stripped down and honest as could be.

He trusted me. The wall? Gone. Not because I’d scaled it but because he’d removed it himself.

He explained to J.D. how he’d need to get to Red Grass—“that two-faced ass flea”—long enough to learn how to connect again with Beckett, who’d taken some of his coins and made him believe they might be worth something, a new future. He avoided the word
dream
.

“This Beckett must have a business somewhere,” J.D. said. “I’ll drive you into town tomorrow if you want, and we’ll find a phone book, try to track him down. If that doesn’t work, I’m sure someone in Porktown knows about him and his reputation. Appraisals, and buying and selling art and all of that, are part of their world.”

J.D. worked as a builder on some of the rich houses in Porktown—which wasn’t really the town’s name, he said, just what the locals called it because every rich person in West Virginia seemed to own a home there.

“It’s good that you’re doing this,” J.D. said. “About time you all were rid of those coins.”

There was a long pause.

“What’s that look about?” Hobbs asked, and I tilted my head, tried to get a sense of the expression on J.D.’s face but came away with nothing.

J.D. said, “Your father was here last week.”

“Bill, here? There’s only one reason he’d drag his sorry sack down here. Looking for me, wasn’t he?”

“He was looking for you,” said J.D. “I didn’t know you’d taken the coins, and he didn’t say, but now it all makes sense. Madder than I’ve seen him in ages. You should avoid him, if you can.”

Another clap of thunder echoed through the house, and the door rattled with wind. I reached for Hobbs’s hand. He squeezed it.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to put you out or bring trouble your way,” he said, but J.D. shushed him.

The coins, I learned, were thought to be valuable, with names like Double Eagle and Flowing Hair. Some were minted during wartime. But the coin they talked about the most was a silver dollar from the 1800s. That coin might’ve been worth a true fortune, J.D. said, but Bill never wanted it touched or seen, and never would’ve allowed it to be cashed in. Instead, Hobbs and his family lived a life defined by hunger, ill-fitting clothes, and broken things. Instead, Bill started to lose his mind. Instead, Bill’s second wife, Alice—who, it turned out, was J.D.’s sister—had left them both.

I didn’t ask where the coins had been kept, and it didn’t matter, but I was sure they’d been hidden away somewhere. Hiding was what you did when you were afraid, and Hobbs’s father was afraid; I was sure of that, too. Maybe he’d buried them under a cross in his backyard, beside one of his dead babies. Maybe he’d put them under a loose floorboard, or under an altar. Or maybe he’d stashed them in the secret pocket of an old coat.

They continued to speak of the coins, but carefully—like they were a sort of sickness. A plague.

We hadn’t been with J.D. for long before it hit me—the realization of what I’d done, what I’d forgotten, what I’d felt tugging at me like a wanting child. I’d left behind my suitcase and my mother’s ashes. Shame swept through me like a fast-growing cancer, and a dull ache radiated in my chest.

“We’ll go back tomorrow,” said Hobbs, perched on the arm of the chair I dropped myself into. “Maybe your bag’s right where you left it, or maybe someone stuck it behind the bar.”

I nodded but couldn’t dredge up any optimism. It wasn’t Hobbs’s fault, but just then the air tasted strongly of regret.

In an effort to cheer me up, J.D. picked up his violin and Hobbs pulled out his harmonica. Music had a way of sanding the lumps off a mood, and their bluesy violin-and-harmonica duet did its best. Even distracted, I was able to appreciate the blend of two instruments I never would’ve thought to put together. And though the multicolored whirlwinds they made were worthy of a dance, I couldn’t bring myself to stand. Watching J.D. bow his violin reminded me of Papa and his fiddle, reminded me of Jazz, who might’ve been out there somewhere in the rain.

Wet, cold, and alone.

Afraid. Lost. In danger.

Having trouble breathing.

Why hadn’t I considered any of that before?

Yes, Jazz had made mistakes. Yes, Jazz had made me angry. But
she was still family. Mama would’ve been ashamed of me, and I felt ashamed of myself. How could I have done it?

People give a lot of fancy reasons for what they do, but it usually comes down to one of two things
, Hobbs had said.
They’re getting something or they’re avoiding something
.

I had gotten something: a stronger connection to the man I wanted to be with. But I was avoiding something, too. Running from it, even. I’d allowed myself to become distracted, drawn into another world, because the world I’d inhabited since Mama died was hard, and it felt good to leave it for a while. It was as straightforward as that, not that there was any solace to be had from understanding it.

I felt a strong need for fresh air, and was about to step outside and risk offending Hobbs and J.D., when that whirlwind of color was interrupted by a quick splat of indigo—a knock at the door.

The music stopped. We all froze.

“Shit,” said Hobbs, and I knew he was thinking of his father.

The rain sputtered on. Wind thrashed against the wood. Hobbs came up beside me, seemed to close up and around me like a house.

“Who is it?” J.D. asked through the door.

“I’m looking for my sister,” said someone with a voice that looked at first like a familiar straight line. And then like a cardiac monitor from a medical TV show when the patient comes to life again—“Olivia, are you in there? Please.” A voice full of peaks and valleys, like home, like West Virginia.

I bolted forward and opened the door to find my sister and Red Grass. “Jazz!” Before I could reach for her, Hobbs thrust his arm in front of me.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said. “Put down the gun, right now.”

Gun? I tipped my head, sure that I couldn’t be processing things right. But though it was dark and my blind spot made it impossible to see details, it looked for all the world to be true: an object the size of a pistol was tucked into Red Grass’s side. And held by my sister’s hand.

September 22, 2006
Dear Dad
,

After countless arguments with the school about Olivia’s unique needs, I decided to take her out altogether and teach her from home. That’s right. Me, a teacher. Remember how you once told me I’d make a good teacher? Look, you are a prophet! I joke, but I’m petrified that I won’t be able to do it, that she’ll fail because I won’t be good enough. But I will try my best, and the truth is I love having her at home with me
.

It’s possible I’ve made a breakthrough with my tsunamis, too. I’ve had a lot of high-tide feelings of late—anger at the school, frustration and fascination over Olivia’s undiagnosed (until now) synesthesia—and I’ve managed most of my emotions. But tsunami-fighting takes a toll, which might account for my exhaustion and the fact that I sometimes fall asleep at the worst possible time. I’ve lost my driver’s license and two jobs in the last year. I wasn’t even able to help out at the school. We won’t talk about that, though, or I’ll land myself in the up-and-downs. The “glass half full” perspective is that now I wouldn’t be able to accept an outside job even if I wanted to, because Olivia is my job and my worthier purpose
.

She’s so good for me, Dad. She reminds me of me, but in a different time, when I was still your best girl. She makes me remember what it means to have fun again. And her descriptions of life wrapped in surrealism prove that the gray I sometimes feel is all in my head. I can just close my eyes and imagine things are however I want them to be, a thousand shades of happy—even though this sometimes makes it hard to breathe
.

Things with my firstborn are more challenging, but I’ll find a way to overcome. Jazz is her own person. My charge as her mother is to help her become all she can be, not settle
.

Well, I’ll close now. I have math to teach, and science to remember, and I never did well with geography. Time to get to work
.

Beth

p.s. Funny, but I seem to be writing more despite all this busyness
.