The Moon Sisters (5 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Square Pegs

   JAZZ   

T
he quirks in my family weren’t easily swept under the rug, and not just because of Olivia and her synesthesia or her burning her eyes out. Our father liked to play his fiddle on the roof—or did before my mother died. Yeah, like the Broadway show and the movie. He’d stand out there, on the flat part above the garage, and fiddle around sunset. His name is Branik. His nickname among my peers at school was Breakneck, for obvious reasons. He had a passion for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and considered the grilled version one of his specialties. (I’d never understood my mother’s pledge to work a mention of a PB and J into the end of her book. Was it a bizarre sort of dedication? I didn’t bother to point out that the characters in her tale—witches, warlocks, will-o’-the-wisps, and a sun fairy—probably wouldn’t have access to modern-day convenience foods. Why waste my breath?)

When she was alive, my mother used to fall asleep at random moments, and couldn’t drive for as long as I could remember. After the fifth accident—plowing over Sherry Wilson’s mailbox because she’d fallen asleep again—her license had been revoked. She couldn’t work like a normal person, not even with my grandmother—the only
baker in West Virginia who refused to make pepperoni rolls, even if they were as much a part of our state as black bears and brook trout, because it wasn’t a recipe from the Old Country.

Babka’s obsession with the Old Country, even though she came over from Slovakia in the early 1960s and was in truth far from an Old World immigrant, had marked our family life for as long as I could remember. Recipes from Slovakia, traditions from Slovakia, superstitions from Slovakia. How was I supposed to know that not every family in the world celebrated Christmas by setting a place for the dead or throwing walnuts into the corner of a room? How was I supposed to know that not every family ate pierogi the way most ate fries?

The kids at school had asked often enough,
So, Jazz, what’s wrong with you?

I decided early on that nothing would be wrong with me.

I strode around the front of the bus to find a dark streak of blood across one of the headlights, then looked at the tree line beyond the highway. No sign of the deer I’d clipped, which had come careening at me from some unseen periphery. I hoped it was all right. Not in too much pain. Not carrying broken bones. Not dying somewhere. The bus looked fine, not that that was any surprise to me, as it seemed to have been granted eternal life. I recited a prayer for animals that Babka taught me long ago, then touched my bent fingers to my forehead and kissed them, let them go. It seemed like the right thing to do.

When I stepped back inside the bus, I found Olivia still on the floor, curled on her side like a spent bug. “Why aren’t you up yet?” I said. “You hit your head real hard or something?” I put my hand beside her face, where I knew she could see it, and made a peace sign. “How many fingers?”

“Two,” she said.

“Well, are you hurt?” I asked.

“No, just … hanging out,” she said, running her index finger
through the flour residue around her before flopping onto her back. Between the old bleach stains and the new coating of bus grime, her shirt looked like a molding blueberry.

“There’s dirt in that flour, you know. Probably spiders and mites, too. Might not be your smartest choice to play in it.”

She shifted her face, which could’ve been an attempt on her part to see the grit I mentioned. A failed attempt. I stood there for a few seconds more before finding my seat again, suddenly exhausted.

Blind. For months she’d been partially blind and said nothing, and I hadn’t noticed.
I hadn’t noticed
. My father—her parent—should’ve noticed. My mother would’ve. Babka would’ve, too, if she’d seen more of Olivia, if Olivia hadn’t stopped going to Susie’s.

What could I have done about any of it? Was I supposed to take on all of Olivia’s issues with my own head in a whirl? Was this my responsibility now, my charge? Because I didn’t think I could do it. I felt gorged on life and death and drama. Stalled out over processing it all.

I waited for Olivia to take her seat, then restarted the bus. As I eased us back onto the highway, I watched carefully for deer, for all the animals that might come crashing out at me, reckless or wanting.

Some people were in tune with their feelings. They watched self-help TV shows, bought
The Oprah Magazine
, talked with their girlfriends and therapists. I was not one of those people. It was difficult enough for me to name my anxieties under the best of circumstances—when all was quiet, when I was alone and might come close to an answer when asking myself,
What’s the problem here? Why the lump of discomfort in my chest?
It was all but impossible in the midst of one of my sister’s jabberfests.

Olivia was like a CD with only three tracks. My job at the funeral home, track No. 1. Ghost lights and the bog, track No. 2. And the latest track in the Olivia Moon collection, track No. 3: the trip itself.

“Jazz, what’s the last town we passed?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, as I began to shift the bus into another lane. A horn blared out at me, and I pulled back, wondered when the car had surged into my blind spot.

From behind me I heard, “Careful.”

“I
am
being careful,” I snapped, as my anxiety ratcheted up another notch and a pain was born in my forehead. I rubbed it with two fingers as the driver of the car drove past and graced me with a finger of her own. This wasn’t what bothered me.

Why do I feel this way?

My apprehensions increased with every mile, as we continued our drive south, past small towns, and back and forth over switchback roads. When we rounded a bend, the sun stabbed at my eyes. I tried turning my face to avoid it, sat taller, but it was no use. I couldn’t even wear my crappy sunglasses—the ones with the lens that popped out at random times—because they made it harder to see through the bugs splattered all over the windshield. White bugs, yellow bugs, green. The wipers didn’t help; they just spread those bugs around the glass like insect frosting on a cake inscribed “Jazz’s Shitty Day.” I was out of wiper fluid.

“What do you think the bog looks like?” Olivia asked as my eyes watered.

“I don’t know. A bog.”

“I wonder if it’ll taste like cranberries.”

It hurt to roll my eyes.

Olivia stayed on track No. 2 for a while (“Did you know bodies don’t decompose in bogs? There might be a two-hundred-year-old corpse under a dozen feet of soaked plant bits out there, perfectly preserved!”), then skipped back to No. 1 (“Will you be in charge of ordering things like the makeup they use on dead people?”).

“Please shut up,” I said, trying not to think about my mother. The Velveeta-toned foundation on her skin, the pink lipstick and the slash of blue shadow. The deep-green blouse, the black skirt barely
visible beneath the shut lower half of the coffin. Her hair straightened, arranged in a smooth fall of chestnut over one shoulder. That day I had to remind myself that she was laid there; she didn’t lay herself there. She was not asleep.

Why would I want to return to that place?

Why?
Olivia had asked.
Why? Why?

Are you sure this is what you want?
Babka had asked.
Is it what you need?

I’d driven back one cold, rainy day in late spring—taken the bus without telling anyone, without honestly knowing where I was going. I drove to Kennaton, past the university that always made my skin itch—the scene of my mother’s liaison with my father, and her disownment from her former family—until I found myself outside Rutherford & Son. I parked on the street, right behind a hearse, and didn’t care how it looked. Sloshed through a wide puddle on the walkway, and strode up stairs framed by tall bushes. Stalled at the front door with my hand on the old-fashioned knob.

Need help?

A man stood a few paces away, on a wraparound cement patio. He smoked a cigarette, and wore a fluorescent orange T-shirt coated in short white animal hairs. He didn’t strike me as a cat person.

You here to set up a service?
he asked.

No
, I said,
I’m not here to set up a service
.

He opened his fingers, and his cigarette fell. He crushed it against the cement with one booted foot.
You here for the job, then?

What job?

He smiled, his brow quirked in confusion.
Why
are
you here?

I don’t know
, I said, and sniffed. My nose had begun to run. I bounced on my feet, tried to disguise a shiver as the man in the T-shirt looked at me and shrugged.

All right
, he said.
Let’s go inside. Maybe you’ll figure it out
.

His name was Rat, and I followed him into the house. Music seeped out at us from unseen speakers, as somber and low as the music that had played at my mother’s wake. When we neared the
room she’d been laid out in, empty now, I stepped into it. The air smelled vaguely of flowers, though there were none to be seen, unless you counted the blue flowered fabric on each of the three couches. Scattered among them were chairs of green and gold thread. Tasseled lamps and boxes of tissue adorned every side table, and art decorated each wall—paintings of trees and butterflies, and more flowers. All of it in place to be a comfort, I guess, to counter being left to face the thing that made everyone so uncomfortable. Death. It struck me then that this was death’s home, this house of illusion and faux control.

I asked about the job.

“Was that a town sign, Jazz? What did it say?” Olivia asked as I felt the change; all of a sudden, we had no power. An indistinct rattling sound emanated from all around us, like a beehive full of angry life. I pumped the accelerator pedal. It didn’t matter. We’d been traveling up a hill and wound down real fast. I pulled onto the shoulder for the second time that day and, out of sheer disbelief and frustration, slammed the heels of my hands against the steering wheel, eliciting the bus’s warbling goose-honk warning. We slugged to a complete stop.

“Jesus Christ, we’re cursed!” I hollered. And for the first time all day there was a quiet behind me so comprehensive that I could hear my own breathing.

It was almost worth it. Almost.

We waited in the bus for ten minutes, and when no one stopped to help, and the heat got to be too much, we left to walk alongside the highway. I set myself closest to the white line, between Olivia and the trucks and cars that passed, and settled the pack on my back.

There were no arguments. We were going to the nearest town to find a phone. The bus—was it even towable? How much would it cost to fix? It wasn’t like we had AAA. Whatever it was, I would have to cough it up, because that bus was my ticket to Kennaton.

We were calling for help. And then we were calling home. Eventually our father would be sober again, and then he could pick us up.

Olivia remained silent, her shoulders slumped as she hugged her suitcase to her chest. A crow dropped twenty or so feet from us to pick at something dead or dying.

“Some things aren’t meant,” I said, knowing she had long shared my mother’s trust in fate and ready to lean on that to make a point if I had to. “Things that are meant slip into place like the missing puzzle piece in your life, right? You get the job, you ace the test, whatever. Your car doesn’t break down, you know?”

It was a rabbit, I think. Ten feet away now. Hard to tell, but that looked like flattened rabbit ears. The air buzzed with bugs.

“It’s not the right time,” I continued. “We need to go home and reassess this whole thing.”

There were no arguments, but for some reason I still felt the need to defend the obvious, sensible course of action, the path we were taking.

We followed the shoulder to an exit ramp as cars poured off the highway along with us. Buildings created an irregular skyline in the distance; a city I’d never visited before—Jewel—lay just ahead. And maybe my luck was changing, because there, tucked between a diner and a dry cleaner, was a mechanic’s shop.
JIM’S
, the sign read. There were only a few cars in the lot, too, which seemed promising—an old Chevy, a Jeep with some serious rust issues, and an antique car missing two of its tires.