The Moon Sisters (39 page)

Last I’d seen of Hobbs was at the hospital. My father and sister were busy with discharge paperwork and instructions, and so I’d taken a moment to steer him into a private corner for some instructions of my own.

Don’t mess with her head
, I told him, as he shoved his fists into his pockets and evaded my eyes.
Don’t call unless you’re sure. I mean it
.

He looked beyond me then, and when I turned I knew why. Reginald was clean-shaven, and wore a pair of plaid shorts and a blue polo shirt to match his eyes. He looked like a golfer. A far cry from a train hopper, in any case.

Red Grass
, I said.
You clean up pretty well
.

He flashed a grin at me before sobering again and regarding Hobbs.

Come on, Hobbs
, I thought.
Give the guy a chance
.

I know you have a lot to think about
, said Red,
but I want you to know I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give, be it a punch in the head or a shake of the hand
. He extended his hand to Hobbs, whose expression was unreadable.

I may do both
, Hobbs said, but he took Red’s hand.

Red broke down then, clasped Hobbs close, and cried right there in the hall of the hospital. I could tell by the stiffness of Hobbs’s shoulders and arms that he wasn’t comfortable, but he didn’t pull away, either.

Maybe Hobbs hadn’t called because he was getting adjusted to being part of a real family again. Or maybe he hadn’t called
because he honestly wasn’t sure what he wanted. Maybe there was no such thing as
sure
in this life. Maybe there was only doing the best we could, hoping that whatever choices we made would land us on the right road in the grand scheme of things. I’d warned Hobbs not to mess with Olivia’s head, but maybe I’d messed with
his
head, and maybe I was starting to wish I hadn’t. Maybe Hobbs deserved a second chance from me the way Red deserved a second chance from him, even the way my mother had deserved a second chance from her father.

Other than that, family life had been calm since our trip. Olivia and I hadn’t spoken again about what happened between us at the tree, what we’d revealed to each other—probably because we were both still processing it all. Our father was doing much better—keeping regular work hours, eating normal meals again, not drinking. Maybe the shock of everything that happened changed all of us. I know I’d never been as appreciative of my rusty bucket since being back home, and looked often at the odometer, grateful not to be walking the 41.2 miles to
Rutherford & Son Funeral Home
, where I worked Monday through Thursday from nine to five.

I was in charge of the paperwork, and answering the phone, and setting up appointments in an office no bigger than a closet. I typed details into a computer. I printed out forms after filling them in electronically, then stored them in locked metal cabinets down the hall. (Emilia Bryce didn’t trust computers, even though she wanted to use them.) At lunchtime I’d walk to the bagel shop I liked, and look at the paper. Sometimes I’d read through the obituaries, but more often I’d fill in an empty crossword puzzle or doodle. Nothing special. Shapes, a stray flower. Once, I caught myself writing out a poem. I left it half-finished.

Sometimes I heard weeping at the funeral home, and edged my way out of the office to bear witness. The other day I saw a couple kneeling before a corpse in a private room full of comfortable green chairs. The kneeling woman was daughter to the woman in
the casket, lamenting the fact that she hadn’t seen her mother in seven years. She’d been trying to save money, she said between sobs, so that she could travel out from her home in Hawaii, but there’d always been something. A broken car. Loss of a job. A dip in the stock market. She went through an entire box of tissues.

I might not know much for sure, but I do know this: Life at a funeral home was as real and honest as it got.

The night after Olivia’s appointment with Dr. Patrick, I had the most vivid dream of Oran. The city gates were open. The rats gone. The streets scrubbed. The casket I’d seen in my prior dream was there, though, the lid lifted. I approached it as my mother sat upright, rubbing her eyes as if waking from a long sleep. When she saw me, she waved me forward. I stepped so close that I could see her freckles and the star shape of her pupils.

I forgot about the coat
, she said, and reached to where a small trunk floated in the air beside her like a cloud. She opened it and peered inside.
And this. How could I have forgotten?
I recognized the orange scythe on the cover when she lifted the book from the trunk with a smile.
It’s a good story. You should finish it. I did
, I told her.

She set the book aside, then reached into the trunk again and pulled out a long cloak of gleaming gold.
No, Jazz
—she settled it around her shoulders—
you should finish it
.

She placed her right hand over her right eye, and I placed my left hand over my left before the huge burst of light came, not unlike what I remembered seeing after Olivia fell from the tree. My mother disappeared.

I awoke to find that it was just dawn but couldn’t fall back asleep, my mind on the dream. My mother’s book might end like that, with something revelatory involving the sun fairy and her stolen gold cloak. I should write down the idea. It hit me then how my dream had probably been inspired by Hobbs and his baby coat. How Hobbs and the kidnapped sun fairy were similar—both stripped of their
identities and left without memories of their prior lives. Yes, the cloak could be the key. The cloak, the coat, the coat, the—

A teasing flash of memory blinked to life, beckoned like a will-o’-the-wisp.

Barefoot and in my nightshirt, I padded over creaky floorboards to find my mother’s wooden trunk where it had always been, in the small space under the stairs. A yearning came over me when I lifted the lid, the same feeling I’d had months ago when I took
The Plague
. Inside were her old college books, layers deep, no room for anything else. But then I moved them enough to find an unexpected depth, and my veins rushed with adrenaline when my fingers brushed over something plush. I pulled books from the trunk three at a time until I caught a glimpse of a rich black
something
below a layer of scarves, and then I lost any form of patience and reached down with both hands, let books spill onto the floor with unquiet sounds as I hauled out the coat.

Gleefully, I tugged it over my nightclothes, ran my hands over its fur. I
remembered
this coat, though details evaded me.

Footsteps on the stairs above my head pounded out, and I cringed. My father appeared in boxers and a T-shirt. He gripped a tread, sighed when he saw me. “I thought we had a burglar.”

I almost laughed—what did we have to burgle?

“Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to make so much noise,” I told him. “I had a dream, and then.… Well, I found this.” I gestured to the fur.

“I forgot about that coat,” he said, so like my dream. “Your mother loved that thing but felt a little guilty for it, I think. Looks like you might, too. You can have it if you want.”

“I can?” I smiled wider than inheriting a faux-fur coat should warrant. “You don’t think she would’ve minded?”

The lines across his forehead deepened when he grimaced, his whole face saying
no
when he shook his head.

“Funny how we don’t let ourselves take hold of the things we rightfully should, sometimes,” he said. “And how we hang on to other things long after it’s time to let them go.”

We stayed as we were for long minutes.

And then we removed all the covers from the mirrors.

Over my bed, I laid them all: dozens of my mother’s letters to my grandfather. My fingers grazed over them as Olivia appeared in the doorway.

“Papa’s going to make pancakes,” she said. “He’s talking about trying to grill them outside.”

“Grill pancakes?” The neighbors would love that. “Should we try to talk him out of it?”

She shrugged. “A pancake is a pancake.” She, too, was still in her pajamas—a yellow nightshirt that flounced along her calves. Her hair dangled in soft ringlets to her chin. She reached up, twisted a strand. “Are those the … letters?”

“Yes. I think I finally know what I’m going to do with them.”

Her big eyes went bigger still, and she surprised me by not asking any questions. I glanced down at my open backpack, and a familiar something caught my eye. “I have a present for you.”

She scrunched her cheek, then stepped into the room and sat on the bed beside me. “What?”

I dragged it out, settled the poster Red Grass had made into her hands. “It’s a picture of Hobbs.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice, as her eyes darted to the page.

Finally, bait she wouldn’t be able to resist.

“Why don’t you get your glasses? You can see him right here and now in a proper way.”

Though the glasses would never fully correct for Olivia’s vision, they could magnify details to a viewable level for her, details that would otherwise be lost.

She curled the page at the edges until it resembled an Old World scroll, then said, “I can’t,” in a rush, as if she’d been holding her breath. “I’m not ready.” She stood and walked across the room with the poster in her hand.

I talked to her back—“If you run away from this when you have
the ability to do something about it, if you take that picture and leave it on Mom’s desk beside your glasses, I swear”—but she didn’t turn.

I pushed the heels of my hands against my eyes, so hard that dots of light appeared beneath my lids.

“A little early for a cookout, isn’t it, Dad?” I stepped off the back stoop and into our yard to find my father stoking flames in the stone fireplace he’d built. The day was supposed to be a scorcher, but the morning air still held a chill.

“I’d say it’s late for a cookout, if anything,” he said, and I knew what he meant. He’d spent many months last summer and fall, even up to the first snow, grilling out there, but the pit had been unattended since my mother’s death. And even though pancakes over an open fire seemed like a bad idea, I was glad to see him there again and wouldn’t try to talk him out of it.

I sat at the brown and splintery picnic table we’d had for longer than I’d been alive, put the letters before me, and waited for him to finish setting a pan up over the pit, balancing the ends on two tall bricks.

Finally, he turned, a smear of ash along his cheekbone, and saw the letters. “What have you got there?”

He sat across from me, listened as I explained what they were—letters that Mom had written to Grandpa Orin, starting way back. I admitted, too, that I’d read a few. I expected to step away after that, leave him with those memories and truths, but he invited me to stay, so I stirred embers for him as he read.

Sometimes he’d share a letter’s details—
Jazz likes apples, and blowing bubbles; she says no even if she means yes. Did you know that
bog
means
God
in Slavic? It also means
fortune
and
destiny—and other times he’d keep a letter to himself. Sometimes he’d laugh—
Olivia Moon, if you’re reading these letters, you should stop right now and mind your own business. Love, Mama
.

Only once did he cry. I stepped to his side when it happened, and slid the letter from his wilted hand. It was dated just last year:

December 25, 2012
Dear Dad
,

It is evening here, on Christmas. I’ve spent most of the day with my family, at Drahomíra’s home. It’s traditional that we all write wishes down on a piece of paper at some point during the day. For the first time, I found that I couldn’t do it. Nothing would come
.

It struck me while sitting there with a limp pen in my hand how much self-blame I’ve felt, like I’ve deserved punishment from you, Dad, because I had done the “wrong thing,” according to you, so many years ago. Then I looked around at my wonderful family and realized that I could never think of them that way. They were the perfect thing
.

What’s wrong? they wanted to know when I left my paper blank. Nothing, I told them, but I don’t need to make a wish. I have everything I need right here
.

Beth

“I always wondered if she regretted keeping me,” I said before I could think not to, then felt the swift rush of blood to my face. We’d never discussed this, not any of us, because it had never been acknowledged that I was conceived before my parents were married; that I was, possibly, the reason they were married at all. That I might’ve been the reason my mother had lost her father.

“Oh, baby, no.” Dad pulled me down until my shoulder collided with his, and when he wrapped his arms around me, I let myself be held. “What she regretted was having to make a choice at all. But that wasn’t her fault, and it certainly wasn’t yours.”

I nodded along his arm. “Why did she miss him so much, for so long? I never understood it.”

“I never did, either, except to imagine they had a powerful strong connection because of the way her mother left them both. They had nothing but each other for most of her childhood. I still feel winded by what he did to her when I think about it, how he could cut her out of his life the way he did.”

He went on to tell me things I didn’t know—that Mom had tried to contact her father after the break, but that he’d threatened legal action if she continued to bother him. She’d tried, at least in the early days. It meant a lot to hear that.

“I wouldn’t care what you’d done,” he said. “I’d never do that to you girls. A father is a father, for better or worse. I’ll give you two more of the
better
from me from now on, I promise.”