The Moon Sisters (31 page)

It was no surprise to me when he didn’t respond. Red Grass being forthcoming all of a sudden would be too great a change.

“Are you working for Hobbs’s father?” I pressed my ear against the wood, squinted as if this might improve my hearing. Still, nothing. “All right, then, stay quiet. But I’m not sticking around. See ya.”

“Wait a gosh dang minute,” he bellowed. “You can’t just leave me here!”

“See now, you can talk just fine when it suits you, but you don’t give a thing. That’s not how it works, old man.”

“You’ll ruin it all,” he grumbled.

“What will I ruin, exactly?”

He turned the subject. “You got my knife?”

“Why? You don’t think I’m actually going to hand it over, do you?”

“Oh, come on, missy. Have a care for an old man. They tied my ropes too tight and cut off circulation to my feet,” he said, and I felt a double pinch of guilt. But I also knew that Red could fabricate
a truth when it served, and I had a hard time believing that J.D. would tie anyone’s ropes too tight.

“Are you working for Hobbs’s father?” I asked, and this time he responded without a threat or bargaining chip slid across our mental table.

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

His tone was all poker, though, too even to give anything away. Without being able to see his face, I couldn’t scrutinize his expression for dishonesty.

“You’d better hope not,” I told him. “Otherwise you’re no better than one of the devil’s minions. From what I learned about that man last night, he’s about as bad as a person can get.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, and this time his voice cracked.

I repeated what J.D. had told me about the way Hobbs was raised, the abuse he’d suffered. There was more to Hobbs than anyone could know from a glancing look at him and his life, I said, recognizing and giving voice to the stark shift in my feelings.

I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be a part of Hobbs’s downfall anymore.

And though I might not approve of him as a partner for my sister, neither did I want to play Orin in this scenario—trying to keep two people apart who liked each other. Burning bridges and birthing dysfunction by forcing Olivia to make a choice that wouldn’t be necessary with a little more tolerance thrown into the mix.

“You’ve hardly shut up a second as long as I’ve known you, and now you have nothing to say?” I asked, when silence loomed after I told the story.

“Just one thing.” He raised his voice. “I can’t feel my fecking feet!”

“Here’s my best advice: Wiggle your toes.”

He howled when he realized I wouldn’t give him the knife, but that’s how it would be, even if I did still feel a double pinch of guilt.

“I’m sorry, Red,” I said. “I just can’t help without understanding the truth of what’s going on.”

He didn’t respond. And then I walked away.

T
he realization that I’d spent two hours in the woods hit when I saw that J.D.’s house was empty of life—and checked my watch. Maybe the others were out looking for me. Wherever they were, I felt sure they’d be back. I didn’t believe Olivia would run off again, not after the last time.

In the bathroom, I traded my borrowed sweatpants for shorts, then stalled when my eyes met themselves in J.D.’s mirror. Physical and mental exhaustion reflected back at me, along with the swirl of questions I still had to answer.

Time for some choices.

I would not tell my sister about our grandfather’s obituary, not until I had a better sense of her mind-set and could have a rational conversation with her about the letter she’d found.

I would stop questioning Olivia’s trek to see—and
taste
—a will-o’-the-wisp. It seemed important to her, wrapped up in her processing of our mother’s death. I’d try to respect that, even though I felt as incapable of understanding it as of how she’d fallen for the likes of Hobbs.

I’d try to control just two things today: our trip to the glades, and our trip back home.

A stranger’s face appeared in the mirror beside mine, and I swiveled around, my heart like a battering ram against my ribs. Then I realized …

“Hobbs?” His skin was free of color and, despite a few bumps that I recognized as scars, appeared utterly normal. “How did—? You removed your tattoos?”

He smiled, revealing a dimple. “Not exactly.”

As it turned out, he’d had the art on his face covered with makeup by a local tattoo artist. “Less painful, and I didn’t have a month to lose,” he joked, though I couldn’t find my voice to respond. He hadn’t covered his arms, but those, he explained, were easy enough to conceal with a shirt.

“Chances of running into my old man down there are slim to none,” he said, “but if there’s one poster, there could be more, and I’m not stupid. Posters show a guy with color, though. No one’ll blink at this guy. This guy”—he gestured to himself—“is clean and smooth, lived a good life. This guy’s figured out how to wear an invisibility cloak.” He dipped his eyes, then locked them on mine. “And it means a lot to her, right?”

A swell of emotion I’d never be able to dissect flooded over me, made my nose tingle. I spun around, turned on the faucet, and splashed water over my face, hoping he hadn’t seen it.

After soaking her foot, Olivia had gone to sit alone in a shaded slingback chair near J.D.’s cabin, unaware of all that Hobbs had done. He was the first to close in on her, as J.D. and I watched from a few feet away. Disbelief morphed into joy on my sister’s face as Hobbs filled her in on his new appearance, and his intentions.

“Come on, Wee Bit, and look. I know you want to,” he said, then bent his head until his face was all but on her shoulder.

“You’re beautiful,” she said. “But you always were.”

He smiled. “I’d let you kiss me, but you’d ruin my makeup.”

She kissed him anyway.

“It’s like Christmas,” said J.D. beside me, and somehow I knew what he meant.

The afternoon passed in a haze of waiting. We ate sandwiches—ham on hearty rye, drizzled with mustard—and J.D. and I played cards in the grass. The plan was simple enough: Olivia, Hobbs, and I would go to the Visitors Center at the end of the workday, when everyone else would be filing out but we could still grab maps. We’d trek out to the glades, then resume waiting. I pocketed the cards for later; I was a master at solitaire.

When it was time to leave, we made our way to the rough drive beside the cabin. I didn’t notice Hobbs hauling Red Grass’s tent until we were at the pickup, loading our bags.

“Why do we need that?” I asked.

“Because wisps come out at night,” Olivia said, opening the passenger-side door.

“And Red wasn’t about to mind that we borrowed it,” Hobbs added. “I took his bag into custody, you might say, last night.”

“We’re not—” I started, but Olivia cut me off.

“Come on, Jazz,” she said with exasperation. “What do you think we did all this for? You can’t see wisps during the day.”

I had to count to ten, remind myself of my newborn decisions.

Her own perspective
.

Respect it even if you can’t understand it
.

Wisps taste like hope
.

“Fine.” I shoved my bag beside my sister’s in the truck. “But this is it. This is the end of me doing whatever the hell you say. And I want the tent.”

“Okay by me,” she said. “I don’t plan on sleeping.”

It wasn’t until we were on the road that I looked down at my sister’s suitcase, which had been bumping against my leg for the last few miles, and realized it. The letter our mother had written, her last words, might be inside. If Olivia was anything like me, she would’ve kept that close.

Dear Family, I have a message for each of you …

I knew then that I’d do whatever I had to do to get my hands on that letter.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Cranberry Glades

   OLIVIA   

T
ramp’s cemetery was small, but Papa wanted Mama buried there and not in some fancy cemetery out in Kennaton where none of us would hardly ever visit. Mama died in February, when the ground was rock solid, but once spring came some men went out in the cemetery beyond St. Cyril’s Church and dug a fresh hole next to a gravestone that was so old the letters weren’t visible anymore. They put the box of Mama’s ashes in the ground—minus the small amount we’d kept in a jar—then covered it with a fresh mound of dirt. I left her favorite houseplant there, a big thing with wide green leaves that bloomed sometimes with white flowers, which was a stupid thing to do, because it was dead two days later. Afterward, I left things that couldn’t be hurt by weather. I sprinkled tea leaves over her, because she liked tea. I left a heart-shaped rock, a biscuit, and a handful of dandelions.

People grieved in different ways. Jazz wanted to be left alone. Papa got rid of Mama’s things and started drinking. Babka went to Mass twice a week and then again on Sunday. I looked at the sun. And when I couldn’t see it anymore I still went to the cemetery and put my face against Mama’s gravestone, and traced the engraved
letters of her name over and over. These letters would never fade and flatten. No one would ever wonder whose stone this was, with letters that weren’t visible anymore.

The trip was a short one, with Hobbs, Jazz, and me seated side by side in J.D.’s pickup, Hobbs driving with his own two feet on the pedals. I pulled my knees up to my chest and hummed, like a teakettle with too much going on inside to stay quiet, as we drove up and down switchback hills, and past fields full of hay rolls and horses. I kept trying to catch a better look at Hobbs, still not believing what he’d done for me. I wished I could’ve focused, seen every part of him when he walked into the sunlight and under a chocolate-coffee sky with flesh-toned skin. I’d never wished for my glasses before then.

Soon we hit the highway and Hobbs announced the first signs for Cranberry Glades Visitors Center. Fifteen minutes with four wheels or an entire day on two feet—there was no comparison, and even Jazz, who’d been quiet, agreed. (I hadn’t mentioned the letter again. Neither had she. And for now I was glad enough to let that particular sleeping dog lie.)

We found an end-of-the-day scattering of cars in the Visitors Center parking lot when we arrived. While Jazz went inside to grab maps, Hobbs covered himself with a baseball cap, a hoodie, and a pair of sunglasses. And when Jazz returned we had to make our first decision. There was a short boardwalk tour, she reported, that we could take ourselves, set up to display different sorts of plants along the bog. There was also a seven-mile walk along something called the Cowpasture Trail, which circled the glades.

“What do you want to do, Olivia?” she said, and I felt them both staring at me.

What
did
I want to do? I had no rules, no idea what Mama would’ve done if she’d been there herself, other than make her way to the bog and hope to see a wisp. I guess I didn’t think we’d see one of those on a common boardwalk tour. Good thing my foot wasn’t
bothering me after the long soak I had earlier, and the removal of those stingers.

“It has to be the trail,” I said, feigning confidence.