The Moon Sisters (8 page)

I shouldn’t have said anything to Olivia.

Sounds like synesthesia
was her reply.

I took another
kolači
for my plate, and ignored her attempt to find common ground between us.

I was fifteen, and Olivia was eleven. Our mother had made the decision to homeschool her just three months before, so life at home wasn’t much fun. Books lay all over the place. Every spare dime seemed to go into buying them, too. That meant there wouldn’t be a lot under the tree for us, and we knew it going into the holiday.

When the headache came, my mother worried it was because of all that. No big presents. Olivia at home. Jazz wasn’t feeling love, or something like it. I told her she was wrong—it’s not like I would’ve held out any hope for an iPod—but she still sat with me most of the night. Gave me medicine. Brewed tea for me, and watched to be sure I drank it. Offered her pillow when the ice bottle leaked water all over mine.

Good daughter, good mother
, I thought, remembering something I never should’ve read, my teeth ground together.

I tried to ignore her, turned the other way, but I could still feel her there—a warm, worried, and resented presence.
Don’t be here. Go away. I don’t need you, don’t want you looking at me, examining me, trying so hard to care
. My forehead felt balled into a knot over the whole thing, which might be why I was sick in the toilet, my head exploding over the porcelain. Mama stood behind me during all that, rubbing my back.

This, too, shall pass
, she said.

Would feeling like my mother’s personal atonement pass?

How about the way I hated her right then, my
good mother
who never wanted
me
but wanted to control my every move and thought and dictate my future to prove that she was a
good daughter?
Could I purge that emotion into the toilet, too? It’s not like I wanted to feel that way, any more than I wanted a puking headache.

It won’t pass
, I said between heaves.

Of course it will
, she said.
You’ll feel right as rain tomorrow, sweetie
.

Don’t call me that
, I said, and she stopped rubbing my back.
I don’t want to go to college
.

She didn’t say anything.

She helped me back into bed a few minutes later, then reached for the warm ice bag. Time to dump the water.

I won’t change my mind
, I said, when she was halfway out the door.
Don’t bother trying
.

She pretended not to hear me, but I know that she did.

Long minutes passed as I waited outside for Jim, but I didn’t hear the rumbling return of his truck with my bus in tow. Maybe he’d had a problem. Maybe the bus was too big for him. Maybe …

I walked back across the lot and toward the diner, settling my pack over a shoulder. Coffee might, at least, help my headache.

The place was called Ramps, I noticed, and was nicer inside than I’d processed fifteen minutes before, with a polished black-and-white tiled floor, vinyl red booth seats, and a ceiling of ornately pressed tin. Central to the main room was a Snapple beverage cooler, butted up against a wall covered with old doors and knobs. The other walls were stripped to reveal brick and housed a display that reminded me of something from an Early American art exhibit, with everything from tin animal cutouts to signs advertising the cost of live bait
(
CRICKETS—$1, 50/COUNT
)
. On a large chalkboard, a list of specials mentioned things I thought existed only on TV shows and in places like New York City—things like marinated chicken on focaccia bread with sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. And, I noticed with a sinking feeling that originated in my wallet, the people around us wore blouses and jackets, looked more like business professionals on a lunch break than travelers from Tramp hoping for a cheap seat.

Set before Olivia, though, was no more than a drink and a piece of pie, which eased my throbbing head—but not for long. I’d been in
the booth less than a second when she blurted out an idea as absurd as the dog I’d seen earlier on the stairs.

“We can take a train to the glades.”

“Olivia, please let’s not do this now. I need coffee,” I said, using one of my father’s favorite escape lines. Sense trouble? Delay. It had worked for him for most of my childhood. This, however, was Olivia, and with Olivia the rules had always been different.

“No, Jazz, really. We can take a train,” she said, her eyes wide and her body tipped so far toward me that she seemed inches away from sprawling over the table.

“That’s the worst idea you’ve ever had, and I’m including the time you wanted to dye the dog blue to match his name.”

“I was six. This will work. I—”

“Stop. I have a headache,” I said. “Jim isn’t back with the bus, and I have no idea how we’re going to get—”

“But it’s the answer to all our problems,” she said, looking somewhere in the vicinity of my left ear. “The train down there is heading to Levi, and Levi’s close to the glades.”

I followed the direction of her thrown-back thumb and noticed the train in the distance, the line of baby-blue Levi Pike cars. “Jesus, Olivia, that’s not a passenger train. It’s a freight train.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “People can ride and—”

I shushed her, shut down her jabberfest before it could begin, then waved my hand when I spotted the waitress two tables away. “Coffee, please,” I said when she arched her brows in question. “Black.” She nodded, and was off.

I tried another of my father’s favorite tactics: diversion. “I don’t suppose you have anything sensible in that bag of yours, do you? Aspirin? Tylenol? Anything?”

“No,” she said, then veered back to the track of her choice. “It’s fate, Jazz, don’t you see? Why else would the train be right there, pointing in the right direction, going right where we need it to go?”

Obviously my father’s techniques weren’t going to work; I’d have to do it my way.

“First of all,” I started, “it isn’t ‘right where we need it to go.’ Levi is not Cranberry Glades.”

“Rocky said it’s real close, and—”

“Second of all, why the hell are we having this conversation? The answer is no. I can’t and won’t let either of us be carted all over the state in a dirty freight train. I won’t chase after you, either, and you have to stop doing things that mean someone
does
have to chase after you. I mean that. I can’t do it anymore, Olivia, I have a real job now. And Dad wouldn’t have a clue how to rein you in.” I watched with satisfaction as the light in her eyes faded away, then for insurance added, “You think harping on things that meant so much to Mom is good for him? He needs to let it go.”

“There’s more than one way to let something go.”

“Yeah? Well, this isn’t one of them.”

Her gaze shifted from my ear to the window.

“There you go, sugar,” said the waitress, setting a steaming mug of coffee in front of me, only one of her blond curls out of place. “Can I get you anything else? There’s a menu right over there.” She indicated where the menus lay, wedged behind a chrome napkin holder.

I didn’t want anything, I told her, and seconds later she disappeared through a set of swinging doors. Mad, maybe, that I wouldn’t be adding substantially to the bill or her tip.

I regarded my sister again. Pale skin—too pale for summer. Cracked lips. Thick black lashes I’d coveted for the better part of a decade. Unruly eyebrows. Fingers busying themselves with a new braid.

“Olivia, listen.”

“I get it, all right?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think that you do. You’re talking about doing stupid, dangerous, illegal things here.”

“It’s only illegal if you get caught,” she said.

I leaned closer, lowered my voice. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t just hear you consider becoming a criminal over this bullshit trip.”

“It’s not a bullshit trip,” she said. “It means something to me. And it was everything to Mama.”

“Why does it seem that you can’t hear me? Maybe those braids of yours are too tight.”

She dropped her hands, made small fists on the table.

I took a breath. “Listen, Olivia, I think even Mom knew life wasn’t going to imitate
Field of Dreams
—‘If you visit the glades, the end of the story will come’—even if she wanted it to. And even if she didn’t, we know better, right?” I said, including her as a person of reason despite her nature, hoping she’d like feeling part of the club. “It’s pointless, taking a trip like this for a woman who’s no longer with us.”

“A woman who is no longer with us?”
Her crazy brows jammed together. “What is that, funeral-home-speak? How can you be so cold? That’s Mama you’re talking about. Mama.”

Right. But one of us had to be practical. Sober.

“Look, I know things have been hard since she died,” I said, “especially considering
how
she died, but—”

“She didn’t kill herself. Don’t say she did.”

Heat spread through my spine at this—my sister asking again that the world bend to her perception of things, even if she shut her eyes to reality.

“Olivia Moon, you need to check yourself,” I said, struggling to keep my voice down. “It’s time to grow up, right now. It’s time to be what Mom would’ve wanted you to be. If you’re not going to do it for yourself or because it’s the right thing to do, then do it for her.”

“I am doing it for her,” she said, with a rare edge to her voice.

We stayed like that, mentally circling each other, until the sound of an overburdened vehicle made it past my black fog. I burned my mouth chugging down the coffee, then slid out of the booth gripping my bag, the backs of my legs sticking a little to the seat.

“Stay here,” I said, looking down at my sister. “I have to tend to the bus, all right?”

She stared off into the seat I’d vacated without a word of acknowledgment.

“Olivia?”

Silence.

“Fine, be a bitch,” I said.

I strode toward the door and somehow slammed right into the waitress, which loosed the metal coffeepot in her hand. It fell as if in slow motion, raining acid all over the pristine black-and-white floor.

I took a seat in Jim’s office to wait for the official word. The stone-and-glass room was air-conditioned, which might’ve made it easier for me to cool off, figuratively as well as literally, and think through what to do next. My bus sat in the lot outside. Though Jim hadn’t had time for a full diagnosis, he thought the problem might be a bad axle shaft caused by the collision with the deer.

But you never know
, he’d said.
Sometimes a thing—after it’s been around the block a couple hundred times—gets tired
.

I’d nodded and looked at the bus—long since the bane of my existence—but my mind was on my mother.

My mother, bent over her story in the kitchen.

My mother, fallen asleep while making dinner, while driving.

My mother, in the casket at the funeral home.

I remembered the day the ambulance arrived in Tramp, how I’d followed it a stone’s throw from Babka’s to find it stopped and silent in front of our house. Olivia sat near it on the withered grass, not wearing a coat despite the season. There was something about her fractured expression and the way her eyes twitched around that told me all I needed to know. That’s when the earth began to spin the other way on its axis.

And not just for Olivia.

Was that what was bothering me? Was Olivia’s need to deny our mother’s suicide another example of her highlighting her experience, as if her grief was deeper and more significant than anyone
else’s? I pressed my palm hard against my forehead. It did feel sometimes—compared with her and my father—that my grief was nothing, that there wasn’t any time for it. Just because my feelings were complicated, though, didn’t mean they didn’t exist. I’d lost her, too. Sometimes I felt that I’d lost the most when she died. Another thing I might not understand.

Not suicide?

What would’ve made Olivia say that? Did she believe it? Denial was a part of grief, I knew. I’d read all about that in a pamphlet I picked up at the funeral home the day I accepted the job from Emilia Bryce. But still. I eyed the bag at my feet. There was something inside my canvas sack that would put an end to my sister’s delusions, if I cared to share it with her. If I cared to share it with anyone.

No, I didn’t think that was the answer, even if I didn’t know what was. I couldn’t avoid her forever, though. And I knew I should probably apologize for calling her a bitch.

Good daughter
.

As much as I didn’t like it, as unfair as it might be, as difficult as it would remain, I’d have to find a way to do better. Olivia was family, my legally blind sister. I would need to be there for her and try harder to identify with her. In many ways, we were all each other had left.

The phone rang, and I leaped up, but Jim was inside by the second ring.

“How’s the bus?” I asked, before he even reached the phone.

“Hang on,” he said, then picked up the receiver. “Jim’s.”

I walked over to the window as he made cursory remarks to the caller—“Yepper. Huh, that’s odd. Sure, gotta pay”—and stared out at the bus.

Let it be all right
, I thought to whoever might be listening.
Send some good luck my way
.

“Well, sure, I’ll let her know,” Jim said, and I spun around. He
hung up the phone, then scratched at his head with the same hand that nudged aside his cap. “Your sister left a note on a napkin at Ramps saying you were here and would pay for the pie and drinks.”

“She’s gone?” I asked, but I knew already, felt the truth of it churn in my gut with all that coffee.

In the distance, the train whistled.

CHAPTER SIX

On Fate. Or Luck.

   OLIVIA