The Moon Sisters (27 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Scars

   JAZZ   

W
hen I was a child, I dreamed of being a writer one day like my mother, and there was no one more excited over her book. The end of the story loomed like a mysterious doorway—the portal to Narnia or the passageway to the world of the will-o’-the-wisps that my mother wrote about.

The fairy-tale nature of her writings made it easy to dream big back then. My mother would be an author, and we’d take grand trips, buy a fancy house, and drive the best cars built. We’d hire a maid, and a cook. We’d wear designer clothes and shoes, and everyone in school would be envious of me for once. As I grew, the idea of her finishing appealed on a more philosophical level. Finishing one story would mean being able to start another. It would mark both the completion of a cycle and an evolution. Be a proof, of sorts, that you could overcome difficulties and that perseverance paid off.

The End. What would happen when we reached The End?

But every time my mother faced the final chapters she’d grow sleepy, need to take another nap. Finding her bent over the typewriter, her eyelids drooping and with a blank page before her, was not an uncommon sight at any time of day.

As the years passed, I hated more and more that I felt any disappointment over this, that I was still capable of caring. Hated, too, that every once in a while my mind still tried to write—sometimes when I was at the shop, kneading bread, or when I was at home, boiling water for pasta, or about to drift off to sleep. I’d think up a new premise for a play, or have a thought and not realize I’d formulated it as a haiku.

Knead it, let it rise.

Roll it, fold, and roll again:

Journey of the dough.

In this small way, I understood her, though. Not the specifics, like how she thought finishing her book might initiate a reunion with her father. How he would enter, stage left, and present her former life to her like a prize. How the puzzle pieces would fit together with gratifying perfection. How, then, everything would be forgiven. What I understood was the bigger picture.

Old habits died hard.

Old dreams died harder.

We walked in the rain and dark for two miles. My Band-Aids fell off, and the fatigue I’d felt throughout the day hit me full force. Red Grass said more than once that his idea was crazy, but I hadn’t realized how crazy it would seem until I had to press a gun into his side.

Everyone stared at me—my sister in her half-cocked sort of way, Hobbs right behind her, a stranger beside him, and Red Grass—as rain dripped off my nose. My back burned with the need to be rid of my pack, but I couldn’t do it. Not yet. It was time for my line. I had to say this right, or I’d ruin everything.

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here,” said Hobbs. I glanced at him, the anger in his eyes as clear as the array of tattoos on his skin, and everything I’d threatened him with earlier came back to
me with all the comfort of wet socks. “How the hell did you even find us?”

The perfect segue.

“He was tracking you.” I cleared my throat, repeated myself with more assuredness, and didn’t squirm as I looked into eyes that labeled me
detestable
. “He has a fancy device; I can show it to you. He planted the tracker somewhere on your water filter, I guess, put it there one day when you—”

I had more lines—a whole Oscar-worthy story of how a smallish woman might snatch a gun from a biggish man—but it didn’t matter just then. Hobbs and J.D. pushed by, took Red Grass by the arms.

“Don’t hurt him,” I whispered, which wasn’t one of my lines, as the men walked off together into the night.

“Come in,” Olivia said like a hostess, and I retrieved her suitcase from beside the door. She gasped, pulled it into her hands and to her chest, and thanked me half a dozen times before leading me inside.

Archaic oil lamps cast a flickering radiance on the wooden walls. Around the room lay a random assortment of odd furniture, including a table and chairs made of leather-lashed tree parts, a solitary canoe paddle in a corner, and two mattresses covered with patchwork comforters. At the line where the room was lost to darkness sat a woodstove with a flat top for cooking; I half expected Ma Ingalls to appear with a spoon in her hand.

The door closed behind us, and I spun around, looked past my sister. It was beyond sense to be worried for Red Grass, of all people. If anyone could take care of himself … And it was his turn to say the right lines now. I’d done my part.

“They won’t hurt him,” Olivia said, as if sensing my thoughts, tasting them on her tongue. “They just want answers.”

Shadows bobbed around her, made her fierce, a giantess. Her braids were untangled. Her skin glowed. And maybe it was because of what Red Grass had said to me about how I chased people away that I couldn’t even summon a proper scold for what she’d put me
through. What I asked, I asked without anger, because I needed to know.

“Why do you keep running away like this? Are you testing me? Do you hate me?”

“No, Jazz. I love you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. It was wrong, what I did, and my heart felt hollow for it.”

I cried for the first time in years, a warm berry still cradled in my hand.

An hour later, Olivia and Hobbs sat together like Siamese twins in a frayed mauve chair, with her head nestled into his shoulder and his arm slung around her in a show of couplery. Whatever tension had existed between them earlier? Gone. Which left me and my desire to go home at a distinct disadvantage.

I needed to be with him
, Olivia told me earlier when I pressed her about why she’d left. For once I didn’t question her dangerous attraction, was grateful in that moment simply to have found her and too welled up with emotion to say much anyway.

It was a different story altogether when Hobbs and his friend J.D. returned without Red Grass. So after Hobbs found the disk on the bottom of his water filter and J.D. left to flush that disk down the toilet—which worked somehow, though there didn’t seem to be any electricity in the house—I asked plenty of questions.

Where’s Red Grass? What have you done with him?

Red Grass was locked up somewhere for the night.

Where?

In an outbuilding on J.D.’s land. Somewhere he wouldn’t cause more trouble while everyone got a good night’s sleep, Hobbs explained, as J.D. reappeared with a blanket and water in hand, then went out the front door once again.

I relaxed a little. It seemed, at least, that Red was being treated humanely.

Hobbs sat in the worn chair, said it was time to figure me out
because I was just full of surprises, and I was reminded, strangely, of my interview with Emilia Bryce. Olivia climbed into the chair beside him as the lines came back to me, the story Red Grass had asked me to tell. How I’d seen him with the tracking device at the restaurant and recognized it for what it was. How I knew that following him was the only way I’d see Olivia again. How I’d trailed him in secret for a while before realizing that handing him over would be the only way to prove myself trustworthy again. How a golden opportunity presented itself when he tripped hard, and I was able to snatch his bag—and the gun inside it. How he’d been a surprisingly good listener with a pistol pressed into his side.

Two ways to look at things.

I held my breath. Waited to see if they’d buy it.

Hobbs held out his hand. “I’ll take that gun,” he said.

I closed in like the hills of West Virginia over the Kennaton U pack resting against my legs—home now to Red Grass’s knife, gun, and phone, which lost reception somewhere in the woods. How opportune it would’ve been to call home if it had worked,
insist
that my father come to get us,
make
him remove us from these people who were turning us into stranger-selves. I should’ve done that in the first place—insist my father step up and take charge of my sister. This never should’ve been my responsibility. Would the world crash down around us if he let go of his grief—and his booze—for one day? He was the damned dad.

He was the damned dad.

And I’d tell him that now if I could, if the damned phone worked.

“I’m keeping the gun,” I said. “Call it insurance. Two men and—”

“—two women together,” Hobbs finished. “Isn’t that how you got Red Grass to give you his knife? But a gun and a knife aren’t the same thing by a long shot, are they? No pun intended.”

Maybe not, but he wasn’t getting it—or the opportunity to realize that the Smith & Wesson was bullet-free, that Red Grass had taken the ammunition out himself.

“You’ll just have to trust me,” I said.

“Will I?” His eyes sharpened. “And what’s my insurance? How do I know you didn’t call me in and that my father’s not already halfway here?”

Father? I didn’t show my surprise or tell him that he was wrong—that it was Red Grass’s phone number on the poster, that there wasn’t anyone to call but him. As I watched my sister’s hand land on Hobbs’s chest, I decided to respect Red’s request and say nothing about those truths. The poster had made Hobbs run and hide, therefore the poster was power. Besides, this was interesting. Why had Hobbs stolen from his father?

“I didn’t call you in. I won’t do that now, either, as a goodwill gesture for you taking care of Olivia,” I said. “I just wanted to be back with my family.”

He brushed a hand over my sleepy sister’s hair, and she burrowed closer to him. This had turned into more than something to watch; this had become something to worry over. And, from the look in his eyes, he knew that I knew it, which gave him a sort of power, too.

“So you’ll play the good girl now?” His eyes dared me to reveal myself, as rain battered the cabin’s solitary window. “That’s what you want me to believe?”

I knew that nothing more would happen tonight, as long as I agreed. Tomorrow I’d have to deal somehow with the man locked in an outbuilding. Tomorrow I’d have to tear Olivia away from all this, and it wouldn’t be easy.
I’d
be the blind one not to see how this life suited her—the wild adventure of it all, even the bad boy she’d latched on to. But tonight? All I had to do was agree. Easy. Still, every part of me felt like a clenched fist when I did it.

I’d be a good girl.

For now.

Anyone would examine the devil if presented with a safe opportunity, which is why I studied Hobbs once he’d climbed into bed
beside my sister, left me with the empty mattress. I wasn’t stupid. I waited until I knew he was asleep—his breath sounds deep and even, his features smoothed over like stained glass. He lay across from me, and the light from J.D.’s reading lamp, cast from the other side of the room where he would sleep, hit him just so.

The devil had a bump toward the bridge of his nose; no surprise that I hadn’t been the first to punch him. Too-long brown hair flung over his face like dirty mop strands. He had a cleft in his chin. I wasn’t sure how I felt about those, but it worked with his tough-guy image, and was one of the few tattoo-free parts of his face. There were other tattoos, I knew, along his arms: faces that disintegrated, shapes that were half-man and half-beast, boats and birds and mountains. He wasn’t horribly ugly, I guess.

I closed my eyes, felt the sting of salt and dirt and exhaustion behind my lids. Tried to tally the amount of sleep I’d had since leaving home. Couldn’t honestly recall. Breathed. Counted to a hundred. Shifted my legs. Opened my eyes. This, at least, was normal. I rarely had an easy time falling asleep, even when I was dog-tired. Olivia, on the other hand, could sleep anywhere, at any time, as if she’d dipped into the genetic pond that was our mother’s tendency for constant sleepiness enough never to be troubled by insomnia.

I got up, walked past Hobbs on light feet. J.D. sat in his shabby chair, reading a book. Lonely or content, I couldn’t tell.

“J.D., I’m sorry to bug you,” I said as quietly as I could, “but can I get a glass of water?” Sometimes it helped bring sleep, sometimes it didn’t.

He set the book aside—“Of course”—and returned in short order with a tall glass, which I drank in a way that would best be described as hungry. My throat opened, and I gulped, eager for the water. He refilled the glass.