Mending the Moon (18 page)

In the end, he survived the month between Christmas and New Year's simply by putting his head down and barreling through. He did a lot of cooking for himself, splurging on good meat and expensive olive oil, losing himself in recipes and aromas. This is the best thing about being back home; he couldn't cook in the dorms. He watched movies, even had some friends over to watch with him—although they all scattered the second the movies were over, because they had no idea what to say to him about Mom—but he barely turned on the TV or radio, because he knew he'd be buried under Christmas commercials and jingle-bell kitsch, endless exhortations to shop. Instead of shopping, he got the last stuff out of his old room and cleaned like a demon.

On Christmas Day itself, he went to Rosie's house for brunch. Tom was there, too, and Hen and Ed, and VB. He didn't want to go, but he couldn't say no, and staying home would have been worse. Aunt Rosie had told him very firmly that he didn't have to give anyone gifts, but he would have felt crappy if he hadn't, since he had a strong feeling he'd be getting stuff. And it was a chance to give away more of Mom's things that he didn't want, anyway. They were nice things, or at any rate things she'd loved, and someone should have them.

So he gave Aunt Rosie a bunch of Mom's old flowery teacups, and she cried. She gave him a nice Lands' End down vest, one of Uncle Walter's, “because he can't use it in the nursing home, and he'd want you to have it.”

He gave VB the
Little House on the Prairie
books Mom had read when she was a kid and had lugged around with her ever since, and VB cried. She gave him an Amazon.com gift card.

He gave Tom a bunch of Mom's books about geology, because Tom likes rocks, too, and Tom didn't cry but cleared his throat and coughed and stammered a bit and finally managed to say thank you, he'd enjoy these very much. Tom gave Jeremy a gift card to Emerald City, the café two miles from the house.

Jeremy gave Hen Mom's
Book of Common Prayer,
even though he supposed that Hen already had ten million of the things, and Hen cried, and then he gave Ed some of Mom's seed packets, because Ed's a gardener, too, and Ed didn't cry—thank God—and then Hen and Ed gave Jeremy a nice woolen hat and scarf, with a card saying that they hoped the gift would feel like a warm hug and remind him he was loved, and to his absolute humiliation, he cried, and everybody else cried too this time, even Ed, and it was by far the soggiest Christmas Jeremy had ever experienced, and he hated it.

And then, finally, they were done with presents, which was a little awkward because Jeremy didn't have anything for Uncle Walter. He felt rotten about that, but he had no idea what the guy could use. Everybody told him not to feel bad: anything Walter needed, he already had. But Aunt Rosie cried.

Then they all stopped crying and ate, which was the only decent part of the day. Jeremy had baked some beer bread and made a cheese soufflé, and bread pudding for dessert. He hadn't had the energy to cook anything for Thanksgiving, so he tried to make up for it at Christmas. Everyone said how delicious his food was, and seemed to mean it, which made him as happy as anything could.

The week between Christmas and New Year's was a blur. He listened to a lot of music. He pigged out on a gift basket Mom's coworkers at the library had sent, which was really damned comradely of them, and even roused himself to write a thank-you note. He watched DVDs, including all three of the extended editions of
The Lord of the Rings,
which made an entire day vanish in a surfeit of clashing swords, hairy hobbit feet, and travel-brochure vistas of New Zealand. It was a perfect way to lose a day, but he could only do it once. The four
Comrade Cosmos
movies are the only ones he's ever been able to keep on infinite loop, but he saw the first one with Mom, and refused to see the second one with Mom, and got the DVDs of the last two from Mom, so he can't watch them right now without thinking about her even more than usual, which means he can't watch them. He wonders if he'll ever be able to watch them again.

Mom's a constant background buzz in his brain. White noise. TV static.

That week between holidays always felt like dead time even when Mom was alive. This year, it was torture.

And then New Year's Eve: a quiet dinner at VB's, old movies like
Bringing Up Baby
and
North by Northwest
until midnight, and then apple cider, because VB doesn't like champagne. Jeremy actually agrees with her on this, although he doesn't like the cider either. It's too sweet.

And now, finally, January. He gives one last stretch, rolls out of bed, and goes downstairs to make coffee. It's good French roast—none of that flavored crap Mom liked, hazelnut and peppermint and whatnot—and he has some German stollen from Aunt Rosie to eat with it. After his breakfast, he showers, throws on sweats, and steels himself to begin unearthing Mom's study.

He can't even remember the last time he was fully in the room. When they were both still living here, he'd often stop in the doorway to tell her whatever he needed to say—that he was going out, that he was back in, that he'd finished unloading the dishwasher—but he rarely crossed the threshold. There's only one chair in the room, a rolling office job Mom could scoot wherever she needed to go. Consciously or not, she designed the space to be perfect for her, but not to welcome anyone else.

He stands on the threshold now, bare toes clenched on the hardwood floor, and scans the room. Two windowed walls meet at right angles; Mom staked out the space because of the light. The windowsills are cluttered with rocks and paperweights and plants, mostly cacti, which is good because he hasn't been in here to water them. It's all pretty dusty, but it was dusty even when Mom was alive.

Her desk sits diagonally between the windows. She spent a fortune on that desk. It's a wooden rolltop with ornately carved legs, designed to look old, and Jeremy has always thought it would suit VB better than Mom. It's new, though, and has built-in file drawers and a slide-out keyboard shelf and openings for computer cables in the back. Whenever Jeremy's seen the surface of the desk, it's been a blizzard of papers and stickies and paper clips and Mom's ever-present rocks. Sometimes he thinks she went to library school because it forced her to be organized, but she always said that the beauty of the rolltop was that you could just close the lid on all that.

The lid's closed now. He wonders what he'll find underneath.

Every available bit of wall space has shelves piled with books. Some of the shelves are stand-alone units, often bought at yard sales; Mom always gloated over these, since, chronically short on bookshelves herself, she could never imagine why anyone else would sell them. The books are shelved two and three deep, with piles of more books teetering in front of them whenever there's enough space. There are lots of natural-science books, especially about botany and geology and astronomy. Lots of other nonfiction stuff, especially art and design and local history. There's a whole shelf of church books, a slew of C. S. Lewis and Bonhoeffer and Barbara Brown Taylor, although Mom kept her
Book of Common Prayer,
along with Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her bedroom, which is why Jeremy had those to give at Christmas. There's a fiction section: the Mitford series, the Narnia series, a really battered set of Oz books from when Mom was a kid, Kristin Lavransdatter, George Eliot. And there are at least four shelves of books about kids, about adoption, about Guatemala.

Jeremy knows he has to go through all of it, but he'll save those shelves for last.

In front of the desk, flanked by all those bookshelves, is a round table. Mom couldn't close the lid on this one, and it's heaped with stuff, papers stacked every which way, her checkbook on top of a pile of something that looks like bills—although Tom must have paid them, since the power hasn't been turned off—a bunch of maps and library books, mostly about Mexico. She must have been studying them before she left. Jeremy looks at the teetering pile and nearly despairs. Just cleaning off this table is going to be a nightmare.

All right. Start with the computer. Along with compulsively collecting rocks and books, Mom made constant to-do lists, usually discarded and replaced with new ones before she'd crossed off half the items, or even any of them. When Jeremy was younger, a perpetual drift of lists—lists on counters, on the fridge, taped to walls—was part of the landscape of the house. But about two years ago, Mom started keeping one master list on her computer. It covered everything but groceries; that list still lived on the fridge. If he can get some sense of what her priorities were, maybe he'll know where to start in here. If he's lucky, maybe her reminders to herself will be directions for him.

He takes a deep breath and steps into the room, talking himself through it. Over the threshold: good. Past the table of doom. Quick glance out the window at the dead garden—he has a narrow, fleeting sense that in a few months it will be green and growing again, but the vision vanishes too quickly to be called hope—and then turn to the rolltop desk. Fuss with Mom's chair, a super-adjustable mesh thing that looks like an alien exoskeleton, so it will be high enough and deep enough for you. Fix it so you can lean back if you need to, so you can recline and breathe, take a break from the desk to stare up at the ceiling.

Open the rolltop desk.

It sticks a little, and for a panicky moment Jeremy's afraid that she locked it and that he'll have to search for the key, a quest that could take years, but then, blessedly, it gives. The top rolls back with a clacking noise, like a stick dragged along an iron fence.

Rocks, stickies, books, papers, paper clips, rubber bands, index cards, file folders. Another map of Mexico. Pens and pencils and scissors and tape, a stapler, a hole punch. He doesn't know how all of this can even fit on the desktop, but it's about what he expected, with the computer monitor plunk in the middle of everything, surrounded by strata of crud. No wonder Mom loved looking at striped cliff faces so much.

He turns on the computer and waits for it to boot up, and then stares in dismay at the screen. “Shit.” The computer's password-protected, and he has no idea what the password is. He doesn't know how many tries he has before the system shuts him out. He could look for it in Mom's files, but he doesn't think even Mom was naive enough to have a file labeled “Computer Password.” If she wrote it down at all, it's probably scribbled on one of the bits of paper in the study. Jeremy could call Tom and ask if he knows it, but he decides to save that as a last resort. Today's a holiday.

He stares glumly at the blinking cursor. Okay. What would Mom pick as her password? He thinks for a minute, and then, on a whim, types his own name: Jeremy.

Logging in, the computer tells him, and then the homescreen appears.

Oh, Mom.

You aren't supposed to use anything as obvious as an only child's name as your password. Mom knew that. She'd done it anyway.

Sighing, he opens the “My Documents” folder and sorts by date. Sure enough, there's “Todolist.doc,” right at the top. Jeremy opens it.

After Mexico: dentist, pick up dry-cleaning, make ALA res, oil change, finish Xmas shopping for J.

Finish. Which means she'd started. Yes, of course she had. As disorganized as she was about everything else, she started her Christmas shopping in January, because of the sales. Jeremy always left his until the last minute, but she was usually done in March. She wrapped stuff as she got it, which meant sometimes she didn't remember what she'd bought. One year he'd gotten two of the same CC action figure. He was surprised that this late in the year, she'd had any shopping left to do at all.

He realizes that somewhere in the house, she must have hidden wrapped presents for him. Of course she did. Why hasn't he thought about that until now? It never occurred to him. He thought about Peanuts and her party and the Christmas Eve service, but not the hidden presents? Why?

Because it hurts too much.

Jeremy sits in his mother's insectoid chair and hugs himself. Should he look for his gifts? Does he want to? They must be in here, in the study. Should he look now, or leave them hidden, a surprise to be discovered in the course of sorting through the monumental volume of crap in here?

But his eyes have already gone to the cabinet doors under one of the bookshelves, which used to be an entertainment unit. His presents have to be there. It's the only place in the room she could have hidden them.

*   *   *

Melinda sits cross-legged on the living room floor, wrapping one of Jeremy's Christmas gifts. It's September, and he's been living in the dorms for a month. As little as they've been talking lately, she desperately misses having him in the house.

She's been watching a popular-science program, BBC's biography of the planet. Last night she learned that the moon is slowly creeping away from the Earth, getting a centimeter farther away every year. This news fills Melinda with melancholy. The moon can't be mended, and it's slipping away, a scarred child trying to leave its parent. Jeremy's doing the same thing, although—given the state of the economy—a centimeter a year may be all he can manage.

Wrapping Christmas gifts comforts her. In a few months, he'll be home for winter break.

She never knows what to get him anymore, though. He's still into
Comrade Cosmos,
but his tastes have changed. For his birthday this year she got him a T-shirt that showed CC standing defiantly, holding up a hammer and nails, while EE loomed as a swirling mist behind him. She thought it was a great image, but Jeremy sneered at it. “Mom, that's Sally Honu's work, and she's a totally second-rate artist. Victor Evans and Erica James are so much better.”

Clearly, she no longer has the chops to choose good gifts, although to be fair, he might have sneered at anything she gave him. “You can return it,” she told him, unable to keep from snapping. “I kept the receipt.” She felt both vindicated and ashamed when he blushed.