The Moon Sisters (28 page)

“You’re dehydrated. Sometimes it sneaks up on you. You’re cold, too,” he said when I shivered.

“A little damp.” I patted my denim shorts.

He reached into the shadows and opened a wooden chest behind the chair. J.D. at least was no devil, with his ready smile and sociable manner. He wasn’t conventionally attractive—his dark hair threaded through with gray, his nose filling too much of his face, and his brown eyes both close-set and wide—but he was easy enough to look at.

“My sister left the country years ago and asked me to keep a few of her things,” he said, still bent over, rifling through the container. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if … Ah, here we go.”

He produced a pair of sweatpants, which I gratefully traded for my wet shorts in his bathroom—a small room with a toilet and a yellow tub that felt too modern by a mile for the cabin, and a mirror that I avoided. When I returned to the main room, I found J.D. in one of the wooden chairs, holding a child’s coat and with a wistful expression on his face.

He motioned me toward the cushioned seat. “Better?” he asked, as I parked myself.

“A million times.” I nodded toward the coat. “Is that your sister’s too?”

“Alice tried to have children of her own, but …” He grimaced, and I recalled the story Hobbs told about the crosses occupying the land behind his house. “It’s Hobbs’s jacket,” J.D. continued. “Alice married his father and became his sort-of mother for a good part of his life. I guess that makes me his sort-of uncle.”

I raised a brow. “Well, you’re nothing alike.”

“No?”

The question hung in the air as I took another sip of water. “He’s reckless, dangerous, a drifter, and a thief,” I said. “You, on the other hand, seem like a nice person. Sorry, I know you like him, and that he’s sort-of family.”

His expression never changed. He really did have the strangest eyes. Open-diary eyes.

“I wouldn’t say Hobbs is dangerous,” J.D. said. “Reckless?”

My fingers tapped the glass. “You don’t think it’s dangerous to live the life of a train hopper, or reckless to cover your whole body with tattoos? He’s going to regret the hell out of that when he’s eighty-four.”
If he lives that long
, I added silently.

“It wasn’t always tattoos,” said J.D.

“You mean he looked normal once?”

“It used to be pen markings.” J.D. held my gaze. “He’d draw all over his arms and face. Red pen, blue pen, green. He liked green.”

“See now, that’s weird, you have to admit,” I said with a quirk of my lips. “What’s wrong with plain old skin?”

“Nothing, but his wasn’t plain. It was scarred with cigarette burns and worse. The drawings covered the scars for a while. I’d draw them myself sometimes. Eventually he made them permanent with tattoos. I think they make him feel … normal.”

Shame wasn’t something I’d often felt. A few times, but not often. I felt it now, though. Remembered the thought I’d had a few minutes before while looking at Hobbs’s dented nose:
No surprise that I hadn’t been the first to punch him
.

“Who did that to him? His father?”

“He’s not a good man. Hobbs has always said his time with my sister was the happiest in his life. Your sister seems to make him happy, too.”

Now I understood better why the poster had made Hobbs run, what it was that he feared. I could tell J.D. the truth—that it wasn’t Bill’s phone number on the poster, that there wasn’t anything to fear over that at all. I could do that. I could tell Hobbs, too, in the morning. But the poster might’ve been the last power I had left. I’d have to think about it.

My quiet didn’t go unnoticed by J.D.

“I’m sorry. I’ve made you uncomfortable.”

“No, I’m glad you told me,” I said, but didn’t loosen my grip on the glass.

“At least you know the truth. If Hobbs were all bad, would he
have asked that I drive you and your sister to the glades tomorrow
before
trying to find Beckett—this man who has some of his coins?”

“Wait—” I leaned forward. “You have a car?”

“Truck.”

“Oh, my God”—I stood, all but leaped out of my skin—“you can take us home!” I lowered my voice. “Please take us home.”

“I’ll help you, but first he wants to make good on his promise to your sister. He wants me to get her to the glades in his stead, because he can’t do it himself anymore. Isn’t that what you want, too?” J.D. watched me with a curious light in his eyes, his fingers steepled near his chin.

I nodded woodenly, reminded myself that this was progress. This was Olivia at her destination. This was a vehicle, taking us to a place where there would be a working phone. This was the promise of a ride home.

I returned to bed after saying good night to J.D. Turned on my side. Looked again at Hobbs, those tattoos.

Train hopper, thief, devil. Victim.

Every time I thought I knew how to categorize him, something changed; he wouldn’t sit neatly in his box. I reminded myself that I couldn’t afford to care. Tomorrow, control would shift back to me. And maybe it made me a bad person, but I wasn’t above using Hobbs’s fear to end my personal nightmare.

The nightmare didn’t end that night, though. Once I finally slept, I dreamed again of the caged city of Oran, but this time Hobbs was outside the gates, dodging hands that meant to drag him through the bars, one set of them mine. And I had a feeling that maybe Olivia, who’d always been the freest bird I knew, was right there beside me.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Wishes

   OLIVIA   

P
laying games after Christmas Eve dinner at Babka’s was one of our traditions. Some of the games were carried over from her childhood in Slovakia, like throwing walnuts into the corner of the room, then opening them with hope that the nut wasn’t fractured or rotten. Other games were invented.

My favorite invented game was called Wishes.

Here’s how it worked: Think of something you’d wish for someone else. Write it on a slip of paper. (While writing, you could not get pen marks on Babka’s white tablecloth or the wish would be void and you would have to wait a whole year before you could wish it again.) Fold the paper in half, exactly. Sleep with the wish under your pillow for seven nights, and dream every night about the wish. If the wish was pure enough, if it was worthy, it would come true.

There was no rule that said you couldn’t share wishes—it didn’t make them void or anything—but, for the most part, Babka was the only person who shared her wish. Every year, she wished that Grandpa Dušan was at peace, and then she’d look at the empty chair she’d put at the table for him in case his spirit came for the meal.

I’d shared my wishes when I was little, but back then they might
not have been called worthy. I wished a Hollywood star would drive through Tramp and try some of Babka’s biscuits, then tell all of her friends so we could become famous. I wished everyone could see voices and colored letters, and taste words. (
That’s impossible
, Jazz said.) I wished Jazz would get married to someone with a big house, and we could all live with her and their twelve dogs. I wished my sauce could win a million-dollar prize in a sauce contest. (I wished I could find a sauce contest.) My wishes turned more serious as time went on, though, and they turned private, too.

Sometimes I wish I could forget him
, Mama said to me once about her father.
I don’t want to miss him anymore
. She fell into a long up-and-down after that. That was the first Christmas I made a wish for her:

I wish Mama would forget about Grandpa Orin, because it’s what she wants, too
.

Every year after that, I made a wish for Mama. I’d put the paper under my pillow—folded exactly in half—and leave it there for seven nights starting on Christmas Eve.

I wish Baby Jesus or Santa Claus would come to our house and take the letters and put them in Grandpa Orin’s mailbox
.

I wish Grandpa Orin would forgive Mama and un-disown her
.

I wish Mama would finish her story and send it to Grandpa Orin, and that it makes him love her again
.

I wish Mama and Grandpa Orin could be reunited
.

It never occurred to me until after Mama died that there might be a danger in the way we went about wishing, by asking a force outside ourselves—be it fate or luck, Santa Claus or Baby Jesus—to make something come true. Maybe wishing made it less likely that we’d try to make things come true on our own. Maybe wishing made something inside us go lax.

The house was empty of people but full of the scent of pancakes when I woke, making me nostalgic right from the start. Papa used to make pancakes every Tuesday, because it was a day that needed
something special, he always said. Huckleberry corn cakes were his specialty, which he said was more about the process than anything else: Heat an inch of oil on the stove, then spoon in the cornmeal-and-berry batter, turn the heat down right away, and wait for the edges to crisp before the flip. There was nothing quite like the first bite of one of those cakes—the crunch as satisfying as the look on my father’s face.

He hadn’t touched the cornmeal tin since Mama died. As much as I hurt over losing her, Papa had to hurt all the worse. How would it feel to lose your lover of twenty-odd years, know you’d never touch that person’s skin again or kiss their lips, share a hug or even a conversation?

I pulled my suitcase up beside me on the bed and opened it. Inside were a few of Mama’s shirts—old favorites that still held her smell. But today felt like an orange-tank day, so I reached for the top that had only ever been my own and did a quick change in the open because no one was around to care.

Before closing the case, I grazed my fingers over the bag of Mama’s ashes. “I’m sorry. I won’t leave you behind again.”

I sat there awhile longer, until the quiet of the house felt too loud, then walked barefoot to the front door of J.D.’s cabin and pushed it open.

“Hello?” I called.

The sun’s rays felt long and welcoming on my arms as I stepped outside and made my way up the dandelion-dotted hill under which sat J.D.’s home. Soft blades of grass and mounds of furry moss cushioned the undersides of my feet as I marked the curve of the land with careful steps. When I sensed that the slope had started to turn down again, I stopped and sat, believing I was just above the front door—unmissable by the masses once they returned from wherever they were.

I spread my palms out on the ground, turned my face up to the sky, and closed my eyes. There was no evil on this land, no matter what folks might believe. I smelled the scent of rich soil, kneaded
by yesterday’s rain, and a hint of worms. Felt the heaviness of the still air, the humidity curling my hair at the ends. Heard the buzz of bees searching for pollen around me—and then my sister’s voice calling my name.

I answered, then heard her approaching footsteps.

“Olivia, good grief.” She cast me in shade as she hovered over me. “I’m in the bathroom for a few minutes and next thing I know you’re gone again.”

“Not gone,” I said. “Here I am.”

She’d changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt that was either pink or light orange, and that I hoped meant she’d shed her storm-cloud mood.