Mending the Moon (24 page)

She's standing now. Somehow she's gotten to the front of the room. “That woman had a name and a birthday and family and friends, but once she's a dead body none of that matters, does it? Because the violence is the point. But it does matter. How are her family and friends going to deal with her being murdered? What are they going to do on her next birthday? Do any of you even
think
about that?”

“Professor Bellamy?” That's Amy, looking worried. “Are you all right?”

Veronique's not all right. She's crying. She's crying in class, but she's also telling the truth. A great surge of energy pulses through her. She glares at them and says, voice breaking, “
None
of you are thinking about the right story, and probably you can't because you're too young and not enough has happened to you yet, and I guess I have to hope it never does, but what you saw on that screen isn't the real story. It's not even close to the real story. Let me tell you the real story.”

*   *   *

Jeremy's adding whipped cream to a skinny mocha-caramel soy latte when Amy comes up to the counter. He's been working at Emerald City for a month now; it's close to the house, but far enough away from campus that he doesn't see people he knows very often. That's both good and bad. He misses his friends, but he doesn't know what to say to them and they don't know what to say to him, and he can't go back to the time when everything was simpler. He's a different person now than he was at the beginning of November.

The clientele of Emerald City is mostly older people, thirties and forties: parents with little kids, businesspeople on lunch break. Most of the customers tip well, and the café has a decent menu and also does catering. Jeremy's thinking he might like to get involved in that, at some point, but he's trying to make his mark as a barista and waiter first.

It's ironic that he's here making fancy coffee, since he always made fun of Mom for drinking the stuff. She'd laugh at him, if she were still alive.

He was afraid making coffee would be boring, but he enjoys it: the hiss of the espresso machine, the smell of the grinding beans, the ridiculous complexity of the coffee menu. He likes memorizing the favorite coffees of his regular customers, which leads to larger tips. The work's involving enough to get his mind off Mom for at least part of each day—especially important today—and simple enough not to task his limited concentration and patience.

Aunt Rosie says the limited concentration and patience are normal. He hopes she's right.

At any rate, he doesn't miss school, which made him feel both bored and stupid. He doesn't even know if he wants to go back, although he supposes he'll have to, at some point. He can't be a barista his entire life, can he?

Another thing he likes about being a barista is that it doesn't leave him too much time for stressing about his future, or beating himself up for leaving school. Seeing Amy, though, snaps him right back into defensive inadequacy mode. She was absolutely the best thing about his first semester at UNR, the only bright spot in VB's class. She's smart, pretty, and into
CC,
and she's not obnoxious smart, either, not I'm-smarter-than-you'll-ever-be smart, which is VB's brand. She's the kind of smart person who makes everybody around her feel smart, and even though this rather miraculous trick works on Jeremy as well as it does on everybody else, he knows that she's about twenty times too good for him.

She's from Tonopah, middle-of-nowheresville Nevada, and the last he knew, she was living in the dorms, all the way across town. What's she doing here?

“Hey,” she says, eyeing the whipped cream. “That looks good.”

“I'll make you one, if you want. After this. This one's for someone else.”

“Huh. You mean you didn't read my mind while I was walking in the door, and know what I wanted?”

“Nope,” he says. “Back in a sec.” He carries the drink to Lucy, the lawyer in the corner who orders one of these every lunchtime, and has the belly to prove it. If you met her somewhere else, you might think she got that gut from drinking beer, but Jeremy knows better. The whipped cream, which she always requests specifically even though Jeremy's made this concoction for her a million times, more than cancels out the skinny and the soy.

When he gets back to the counter, Amy's still there, blushing. “Jeremy, I'm sorry. That was stupid.”

“Huh?” He starts to wipe down the counter with a damp cloth, one of those chores you do whenever you have a free second in a busy place like this. “What was stupid?”

“Making that dumb joke about the coffee.”

“Don't worry about it. How are you, anyway, and what brings you to this fine establishment?”

“I'm fine. I'm here because–well, a couple of things. I wanted to tell you.”

He blinks. He thinks this means she's here to see him, which goes beyond slightly miraculous into highly improbable. “How'd you know I even work here?”

“Kevin told me.”

Yeah, that's right: he ran into Kevin at Raley's, and they chatted in the checkout line, talked about cars and bands, promised they'd get together sometime, yada yada. Jeremy'd forgotten about it the second he walked out of the store. That was, what, last week, and he was fretting about Mom's birthday today, wondering how he should handle it, if he should call in sick from work and try to do something special, or have Aunt Rosie and VB over for dinner or something. He can't believe he forgot it last year. He thought he'd be able to make up for that this year, do something really nice.

In the end, this year, he decided to do almost nothing. He woke up this morning, lit a candle for Mom, and propped her photo up in front of him while he ate his breakfast, talking to her until he felt silly enough to stop. “Hi, Mom. So, well, I wish you were here. I wish you were alive. I wish Percy were alive, too, so I could kill him, or so you could, although I guess you wouldn't. If you were still alive, you wouldn't have to.”

When he was little, Mom told him she did that on her own birthday, talking to a picture of her parents. She said it helped, and now that she's dead, family tradition suddenly seems important instead of stupid. This tradition, though, just seemed empty and awkward, so Jeremy put the picture away. Then he showered, dressed, and came to work as usual, which turned out to be the right thing to do. Today, especially, the job's the perfect combination of busy and mindless.

“So, uh, did you hear about Professor Bellamy? I mean, I don't know how you could have, it only happened an hour ago, but I thought maybe—”

“No,” he says, to cut her off. How can girls talk so much? “I haven't heard anything. What are you talking about?”

Amy slides onto one of the bar stools at the counter. “She kinda had a meltdown in class. Because today's your Mom's birthday.”

“Meltdown?” Jeremy squints. “What kind of meltdown?”

“Well, she—she ranted for a while, and then she started crying, and then she started yelling at us for being young and not knowing anything, which is when it really got bad. For us. I mean, it must have been bad for her, before, but that was the part she'll get into trouble for, I'm guessing.”

Jeremy's stomach knots. He doesn't like VB, but he doesn't want her to get into trouble. She and Mom were real friends. “So somebody reported her?”

“Well, when she started crying, Sandy Askew slipped out and went to get somebody from the English Office, and some other professor—the head of the department, I think—came in right after she started yelling. And he tried to calm her down, and she lost it at him, too, except she kept crying the whole time.” Amy shakes her head. “You know, the kind of crying where you can't catch your breath, but she was yelling through it, and I don't think anybody could even understand what she was saying. It was pretty horrible. The other prof wound up calling the campus police.”

“The po
lice
? Holy crap! What'd they do, arrest her?”

“I don't know. At that point, the other prof told all of us that class was over and we should leave now, please, and most people couldn't get out of there fast enough. I wanted to stay and talk to her, but the cops asked me to leave. I mean, they were nice about it. One of them took my name and number, said he might be calling me to get my account of what happened.”

“Jesus.”

“I know.” Amy draws a shuddering breath—Jeremy realizes she's on the verge of tears herself—and says, “Anyway, since she was friends with your mom, I thought you'd want to know. And I—it has to be hard for you, too. Your mom's birthday. And I just wanted you to know that if you need to talk, I—”

“That's nice, Amy. I mean, thank you. But I'm okay.”

She's looking down at the counter, tracing the wood grain with an index finger. The other hand's clenched so tightly that her knuckles are white, which Jeremy always thought was a total cliché. “I kept meaning to call you after your mother died, I did, I even planned to go to the funeral but then I chickened out at the last minute, but I should have written you a card, anyway, and I'm sorry, and—”

“Amy. Stop.” She looks up now; her hand stops moving. “I'm okay. Really. Not all the time, but right now I am. And there were so many people at the funeral I felt like I was suffocating, so just don't worry about it. It was really nice of you to come tell me about Professor Bellamy.”

She swallows. She sniffles. “You're welcome.”

“You want a coffee? On the house?”

Amy shakes her head. “I don't think I need caffeine right now.”

“Herbal tea, then? We've got some fancy stuff that comes in funky little cardboard pyramids. Peppermint. Green with lemongrass. Chamomile.” Does green tea have caffeine? Yes. Not as much as coffee, or even black tea, but he shouldn't have offered it to her.

She doesn't seem to have noticed. “Sure. Thanks. Mint, please.”

So he makes the tea, which takes about ten seconds, and as he gives it to her she says, “What are you going to do? About Prof Bellamy? Are you going to do anything?”

He doesn't know what to do, and then he does. “Yeah. I'm going to call my Aunt Rosie. She and Bellamy and my mom go way back.” Even if she and VB don't exactly get along. “She'll know what to do.” He laughs, which makes Amy look at him as if maybe he's having a meltdown, too, and says, “I can't believe you took another class with Bellamy.”

“I like her. I know most people don't, but she's really smart and she cares about this stuff, and so do I, and she just gets frustrated because most of her students could care less. So do I. I get it.”

“You wouldn't have a meltdown, though.”

Amy shudders. “Well, no. Except I might if my best friend had been murdered and it was her birthday and nobody remembered or cared, which is what she was ranting about.”

Jeremy blinks. Crap. Did VB think nobody else had remembered? How could she have thought that? Did Mom tell her what happened last year? Yeah, she must have. But how could VB have thought he'd forget this year, too?

Should he have planned something after all? But he wouldn't have known what to do. That's Aunt Rosie's territory, all that ritual stuff with Martha Stewart place cards.

He'll call her. She'll fix this.

As if on cue, Amy says, “Aren't you going to call your aunt?”

*   *   *

Rosemary stands in the ER, wearing her badge and maroon volunteer vest—pink pinstripes went out in the 1950s—and staring in disbelief at a sobbing Veronique, who's being escorted past the nursing station by two policemen.

“Room thirty-eight,” says the charge nurse, and Rosemary shakes her head, almost protests aloud. That's a psych room. Veronique doesn't belong there. Veronique may belong in a room for neurotic, prickly people short on tact, but she doesn't belong in a psych room. Not in the “we won't let you leave until you're evaluated by a psychologist” room, the room where the suicidal and homicidal patients go. The room where everything's taken away from you, all clothing and belongings, and you're kept under constant observation until someone decides if they can let you go or need to send you to an actual psych hospital for seventy-two hours of observation.

What in God's green earth is going on?

She hears Veronique howling now, something about insurance. “My insurance won't work here, I'm only supposed to go to Fortunata, I can't be here, you have to take me there—”

“Professor,” one of the policemen says, “we called Fortunata. They're full up. This is where we had to bring you. Your insurance will understand that.”

His voice is calm, soothing. He's had practice at this. Rosemary sidles closer—Veronique still hasn't noticed her—and sees that he's a UNR cop.

The bottom of her stomach drops out. She's picturing some version of Columbine, Virginia Tech, but Veronique doesn't seem to be injured, and were there other victims? She hasn't heard a Code Triage, which alerts hospital staff to a mass casualty, and the nurses at the charge desk seem as bored as always, without the slightly manic energy they display when they're expecting something really bad, and if Veronique were the victim of a shooting, how could she walk in under her own power, and why would she be taken to a psych room?

Rosemary turns to a nurse at the desk, someone she knows a little bit and who may be willing to answer questions. “What can you tell me about the patient who just came in? Thirty-eight?” She isn't going to say she knows Vera, because that may send the nurse into I-can't-tell-you-squat HIPAA paralysis.

“Hmmm?” The nurse looks up, blinks, says, “just a sec,” and performs a complicated tacking maneuver with paper and computer keyboard. “Huh. UNR prof. Had some kind of breakdown in class. They're bringing her here for evaluation.”