The Moon Sisters (34 page)

For maybe ten minutes after my fight with Olivia, I walked. Off the bog, past bushes that smelled of rosemary, until I reached
solid land again. There I stopped beside a tree, a tall and twisted variety that I couldn’t name, my head still full of my sister’s words.

I miss her more, and I loved her better! You didn’t even like to be in the same room with her when she was alive!

I wouldn’t be mad at Olivia for what she’d said, even if she deserved it. My love for our mother was different, more complicated than my sister’s, and not comparable because of that. Besides, I’d known Olivia would react emotionally as soon as she realized the glades weren’t about to offer up a vision of enlightenment. I understood how a fusion of uncertainty and disappointment could settle into anger. Besides, an angry Olivia was preferable to a depressed Olivia any day of the week. Depressed Olivia was like being stuck behind a tractor on the backroads; you knew you’d get beyond it eventually, but Jesus Christ.

That didn’t mean she hadn’t cut me at all with her new sharp tongue. And that letter. How would I ever see it now?

If you think for one second I’m going to hand it over to you, think again! I’m keeping it!

Keeping it. But not in her bag. So where would she have—?

All my thoughts aborted as I realized that I’d left my pissed-off sister with
my
bag, home to all of our mother’s other letters. But she wouldn’t. Would she?

The obituaries.
Orin’s
obituary.

I barreled with high inefficiency across the bog, panting as water splattered up my body and onto my face. And there they were, Olivia and Hobbs, just where I feared they’d be—beside the tent with my bag open between them.

“Get the hell out of there!”

I snatched up my canvas pack and stuffed the scattering of letters and the book back inside. But where were the obituaries? I peered inside the bag’s yawning mouth and, after shuffling things around, saw them there at the bottom.

Relief. Olivia hadn’t seen them. Hadn’t seen it. Not that she would’ve been able to read it if she had, but still …

I avoided Hobbs’s glaring eyes; this wasn’t any of his business. Olivia—though I would’ve expected her to argue or at least condemn me as a hypocrite for having those letters in my bag all along—didn’t say a word.

It would be the silent treatment, then. Fabulous.

“We should get out of here,” said Hobbs, still staring at me. “Before folks start showing up for the day.”

Olivia turned whiter than normal and, despite everything, I felt a pang of sympathy for her. But she’d have to say goodbye to Hobbs at some point; it wasn’t as if we were going to be able to bring him home and adopt him like a pet. And we couldn’t chase after foolish fires forever. None of this craziness would erase what had hurt our family the most. None of this would bring our mother back.

“Yes.” I zipped the bag. “Let’s go.”

Describing things in vivid detail started as my version of a peace offering to Olivia, as we began the hike back to J.D.’s truck, walking through the field we’d stayed in the night before.

“I know things didn’t happen the way you’d hoped,” I told her, “but Mom did want to come here, and I want you to try to see it—really see it, and try to remember.”

“I thought you weren’t a tour guide,” she said.

It started as a peace offering, but it became something else. In a strange way, it seemed I was seeing it all for the first time as I relayed the sights. The Christmas-tree evergreens, gray-barked beeches and broken-barked black cherries, the thorny hawthorns, and tall oaks. The penny-colored yellow birches, and the curved branches of the sugar maples.

Wild geraniums,

and a cloak of buttercups.

So much beauty here.

When Hobbs pointed out some bear scat, my lips curved into a
reluctant smile. “Right,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to forget the bear scat.”

Olivia didn’t smile.

“Stop a sec.” I put my hands on her stiff shoulders and made her turn around before we left the field, my eyes on the closest bank of hills. “There are layers and layers of green in the mountains, different from the way we see it at home. Vibrant, forest green, fading to a near-fog, like an overexposed photo. And there’s a sort of blue-gray line off in the distance, before it fades to silver. After that, it just ends.”

“Doesn’t end,” said Hobbs. “The mountains of West Virginia, they go on and on. Sometimes seems they go on forever. But I’ve been beyond that blue-gray and silver, and I can tell you there’s plenty more to see. Somehow, though—” He gave a shake of his head, a wry smile. “Somehow this place gets in your blood.”

We stood there for long minutes, as something like pride welled up in my chest. This state, this land, was mine, and I’d forgotten how to love it.

“Can’t live with ’em, can’t imagine living life without ’em,” Olivia said.

I squeezed her shoulder, unable to find words to respond as I took it all in: how big the world seemed to be, how I’d forgotten that as well.

Later, when we passed the old prison grounds again, we stopped to read signs that we’d ignored the day before. The Mill Point Federal Prison, where you could still see the remains of stairs, had never been gated. Six thousand prisoners were able to roam free, and had rarely left.

“How the hell did they get away with that?” I asked.

“Prison’s a state of mind,” Hobbs said.

It was something I thought about the rest of the way back.

T
he sleep of the dead had long been my sister’s specialty, so it was no surprise to me that she not only dozed off on the return trip to Miner’s Barren but when we arrived she was immovable. Unwakeable. Unshakeable. Beyond walking with her own two feet. Honestly, I didn’t know if hers was a true sleep, since she hadn’t slept all night, or a faked one, because I knew how desperate she was not to part ways with Hobbs. But it didn’t matter; I’d let her have her nap. The time to take her home would come soon enough. Today. Finally, today.

Hobbs carried her inside and put her on the bed they’d shared the night before. I stood watching like a voyeur as he pulled a sheet up around her, kissed her forehead.

“You like her,” I said. The idea didn’t bother me as much as it had twenty-four hours before.

He didn’t deny it, and even though he didn’t confirm it, either, he lingered beside her and moved wayward strands of hair off her face, tucked them behind her ear.

“I’ll miss her,” he said. “Her and those big eyes.”

“Eyes she messed up pretty good,” I said, watching his face for a reaction. But he surprised me.

“She told me about that. Must’ve hurt like hell to stare at the sun. Tells me it hurt even more not to.” He kissed her forehead one more time, then stood. “She says she doesn’t even know why she did it.”

He noticed when I swallowed hard.

“Do you know?”

I shook my head. There was no room in my head for that question just then. “I need to get to a phone.”

“I’ll take you.”

It was well into the afternoon by the time we arrived at a gas station, which was more than thirty miles away.

“There has to be a closer station,” I’d said when we first started to travel, and he’d given me an E.T.A.

“Welcome to the hills,” he said. “You should’ve used the phone at the Visitors Center.”

I didn’t bother arguing, because he was right. I’d been wrapped up, thinking about prisons and West Virginia on the walk back. Living in Tramp had always seemed like my lifetime sentence, regardless of what my mother said or what she might’ve wished for me. But maybe what I wanted to escape was all in my head and not so much about West Virginia, with all its hills and layers. Maybe I wasn’t so stuck. All those prisoners stayed put, after all, when they could’ve run. Because they were safe where they were, or because leaving was a risk.

I’d never spent so much time thinking as I had over the last few days, but I had to admit—as inconvenient as it was now—that maybe having all those thoughts was worth missing the chance to make a phone call.

When we arrived at the station, Hobbs donned his usual sweatshirt and pulled up the hood. Some of his tattoos were beginning to bleed through the makeup, enough that it might make someone look twice. He followed me inside to size up the junk food while I went to get change. I was ready to go back out and call home when I saw him filling a cup with coffee.

“You want one?” he asked when my gaze lingered on the rising steam.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

Whatever the hell this was, Hobbs and I were not becoming friends. We were just tolerating each other because we knew we’d only have to do it for a while longer. Still, I cracked a smile when he held the door open for an old woman a minute later, while I spoke with my grandmother.

The call started well enough. Babka was happy to hear from me, and to let me know that the bus had been repaired and was ready to take me to my job. My father, too, had been doing much better, she said, though I’d believe that particular report when I could see
evidence of it with my own eyes. When I told her that we’d be coming home later today, that we’d found someone to drive us, that we’d visited the glades but hadn’t seen anything and that Olivia wasn’t all that happy about it, her voice turned heavy.

“This is going to be a
thing
, I just know it,” I told Hobbs on the ride back to J.D.’s. I couldn’t shake my grandmother’s disappointment, even though I should’ve felt good about it all—that I’d done what was expected of me, and that I could finally go home again.

“What do you mean, a
thing
?”

“I mean the sort of thing that keeps coming up every damned day for the rest of the year.” My chin settled into the palm of my hand as I leaned against the door. “About how Olivia made it to the glades, fulfilling one of our mother’s lifelong ambitions, but was unable to see a wisp. There will be dreams and wishes and all sorts of bullshit my family insists on when things don’t happen the way they want. My grandmother will be right in the middle of it, too, maybe even my father.”

It began to drizzle.

“You know,” Hobbs said, turning on the wipers, “I used to see ghost lights all the time up at my old house.”

I turned to stare at him. “What?”

“Not a bog up there, it’s swampland,” he said. “But the lights are common in the summertime as long as you’re looking for them with peeled eyes. I never bothered to mention it because Livya stressed how important it was to go to Cranberry Glades in particular, because of your mom’s story. But if it’s lights she wants to see, well … I could take her. Take you both.”

“By
old house
, do you mean the one you shared with your father?”

“Yeah.” He squinted, and I wondered about his thoughts, which horror he might’ve been remembering. Then decided I didn’t want to know.

“I haven’t heard the best of things about him,” I said, with as much care as I could muster.

“There’s a neighbor, Betty, whose land butts up against ours. You can see the lights as well from her place, and Bill would never know we were there. Trust me, she hates him, too.”

I ran my thumb nail along the foam cup in my lap. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“No?”

“We’re delaying the inevitable. Better Olivia deal with her disappointments now. She may not like it, but she needs to face reality.”

The truck buzzed when we rolled over the edge of a rumble strip, and I realized that he’d been looking at me.

“What? Watch where you’re driving.”

“You feel that way, do you?” he said, turning his eyes back toward the road. I was unable to read his expression.

“Yes,” I told him. “I do.”

We traveled down one road, then another, on the way back to the cabin. Soon we’d veer off these roads altogether, and onto rutted paths. Reaching a place wasn’t always a neat undertaking.

“Besides,” I said as an afterthought, “I have important things coming up next week, and plans to make.”

“Yeah, I know. Congratulations on your job with the funeral home. I’m sure the competition was stiff.”

“Hysterical. You could have a career as a stand-up comedian.”

I turned away from his smirk and back toward the window, as we passed a mail-delivery truck, a man blowing leaves across his yard, and a child selling stones alongside the road.

J.D. met us on the packed-dirt drive behind his place as Hobbs shut down the engine, his hair ruffled and his jaw set.

“Something’s wrong,” Hobbs said, and we leaped out, my first thoughts on Olivia.

But this wasn’t about Olivia.

Red Grass was gone. Sometime between breakfast and lunch, he’d freed himself and left through a cracked window, J.D. explained, digging his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“You’ve got to get the hell out of here, man,” he told Hobbs, his thick brows furrowed. “Disappear for a few months. I don’t know how long Red Grass has been out or what he’s been doing. Bill could be on his way right now.”

A guilty heat swept through me. Though the situation with his father was real enough, Hobbs didn’t have all the information. Not yet. Maybe some prisons were, as he’d said at the glades, a state of mind. I didn’t want any part of that. Not when I might hold the power to set someone free from their own personal Oran, point out the absence of bars.