Mending the Moon (30 page)

“The hell they don't,” Veronique says, looking up from the chair cushion. “They're teenagers, which means they're acutely self-conscious about every aspect of physical appearance. I'm not saying they're racist. I'm saying that if they were color-blind, they'd never know when to cross the street. Color-blindness is a lovely ideal, but it doesn't exist.”

Melinda shakes her head. “That's cynical even for you, Vera.”

“It's not cynical. It's realistic. I'm sure they're all lovely children who'd never dream of being mean to anyone based on ethnicity, but that doesn't mean they don't notice it. And they'd never admit to any of this, especially in church. Kids learn what not to say.”

“I still think you're overanalyzing, and I really don't want to talk about this anymore.”

Now both of their eyebrows rise. “Mel?” Rosemary says. “What happened?”

“Oh, for Pete's sake! I brought up the subject so I could vent, not to be subjected to group therapy! Can we talk about something else?”

Rosemary laughs. “How about another game of Scrabble? I'm determined to beat
one
of you, at least once.”

She brings out her board, and they play while the moon, huge and orange, rises over the mountains to the east.

Veronique wins easily, as usual. Melinda comes in dead last, which isn't usual, but Rosemary seems more concerned than pleased. After the game, Vera goes home, pleading fatigue, and Rosemary and Melinda clean up.

“We shouldn't have gone to Arizona,” Melinda says, putting another glass in the dishwasher. “I shouldn't have made him go. He wanted to go camping with the Clemonsons, but I told him he could do that later in the summer—they go camping almost every weekend—and that it was important to go on the youth group trip.”

“Hmmm,” Rosemary says, and then, “He's thirteen. You brought him home when he was a toddler. If he hasn't learned what you've tried to teach him by now, he never will.”

“I know.”

Rosemary laughs and touches her shoulder. “He'll forgive you, Mel. Don't look so miserable.”

“We had a fight,” Melinda says quietly. She's glad they're by themselves. Vera will hear about this eventually, maybe even from her, but she isn't here now, and Melinda's in no mood for more lecturing. “A horrible, horrible fight. I said awful things, Rose. Unforgivable things.”

“That's not like you. What triggered it? Do you know?”

“The heat, maybe. And—when we got home I was going to tell him the truth. About his parents.”

“That they were killed in that mess in Guatemala. The war.”

“The civil war. The genocide. Yes. I thought he was old enough to know that. I was worrying about how to say it. But now I can't. Not after what else I said.”

“All right, Mel. Shoot: what was the worst thing you said?”

Melinda stares out the window over the sink so she won't have to look at Rosemary. She watches the moon, smaller now and whiter, lovely and diminishing. “I asked him,” she says, “how he could refuse to help these kids after I'd snatched him out of a hellhole in Guatemala. I asked him where he'd be if I'd refused to help him. I called him an ungrateful little shit.”

“Ouch,” Rosemary says. “Yeah, that's pretty bad.”

“But it wasn't just the words, Rosie. It was the tone! I said it—I screamed it—hatefully. I shamed him. I wasn't just guilting him for not working, which would have been bad enough. I shamed him about who he was, where he'd come from. I put myself above him, and not just as his mother.”

Rosemary grunts. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I'll go back there if I'm not good enough for you.'” Her voice only breaks a little, repeating the words that have stung her every moment for the past week. “And then he started to cry, and glared at me, and ran outside. And he wouldn't speak to me the rest of the trip, Rose. He barely speaks to me now.”

“Mel,” Rosemary says, and gives her a hug. “It's bad, but you'll work through it. All parents lose their tempers. You're human.”

She means to be comforting, Melinda knows, but nothing can comfort her right now. If only she'd thought before speaking. If only she'd never uttered the judgment she can now never unsay.

They finish the dishes, and Melinda goes home. And eventually Melinda's irritation with Vera fades, and she tells her the story, too, and Veronique says, “Well, if I said that, I'd get fired, even with tenure, but mothers have more job security than professors do. He'll be fine. You'll be fine. There'd be bumps in the road right now even if he weren't adopted. It's going to be all right.”

*   *   *

Wincing, Jeremy wipes down the counter at Emerald City. He burned himself on some steamed milk this morning, and even though he iced the spot right away, it still hurts. The pain's making him irritable. He doesn't want to chat with customers the way he usually does. He finds the roar of the espresso machine as unbearable as screeching brakes.

He doesn't want to be here. He doesn't know where else to go, though. He's come to a standstill at home: halfway through Mom's study, the sheer volume of her stuff defeated him, and he gave up. He did unwrap his Christmas presents, in June, and he's cooked a few of the dishes from
The Tra Vigne Cookbook,
but he feels like he's living in a museum instead of a house. Or in one of those cemetery houses, what are they called, mausoleums.

And it
is
a mausoleum, because Mom's urn is sitting in the living room. Some of the ashes are at church now, in the columbarium. Jeremy still plans to scatter some in the desert, the scoured landscape his mother loved. He still really wants some in the garden, too—he thinks they belong there—but if he puts them there, he feels like he won't be able to leave the house, even if he also keeps some for himself. And all of this feels like scattering Mom in too many places, anyway.

Between yearning to be somewhere else and not knowing where he can go, or how, he can't sit still right now. It's like his own skin hurts him even without burns, a coat of nettles he yearns to shed.

That's probably why, when Hen called to tell him about Percy's funeral, he only thought, or didn't think, for about twenty seconds before saying yeah, sure, he'd go. A road trip! Seattle's one of the cities he's wanted to check out anyway, and there's a science fiction museum there, with a CC exhibit. Amy's coming, too. She says it's for moral support, but he thinks it's really for the museum. He doesn't dare believe that it might be for him.

And here she is, grinning as she walks through the door of the coffeeshop, waving the latest
CC
issue. She's taken to stopping by at the end of every shift, and sometimes they go out for a bite afterward. It's not dating, exactly. They haven't even held hands yet. Jeremy still feels shy around her, because he doesn't know how much of this is pity. A lot of the time, he's not fit to be around anybody, anyway.

Grouchy bear. That's what Mom always called him, when he was in a bad mood. He hasn't been in a bad mood with Amy yet, hasn't let himself be, but sometimes it's a lot of work, and he doesn't have the energy to sign up for more of that by becoming even a provisional couple.

But she's here, smiling at him. “Read this yet?”

“Nope. I should, I take it?”

“Yep. It's fantastic. Here.” She hands it to him.

Well, all right. He's still at work, but the place is slow right now. He can take a few minutes to flip through the issue. He checks to make sure the counter's dry; Amy's not one of those human-hands-must-not-touch-my-issue collectors, but he still doesn't want to get coffeehouse spill on the thing.

Oh, man. Is this ever dumb. The Midwest Regional Tourney of the World Rock, Paper, Scissors Society is in turmoil. A maverick judge has declared the rules null and void and is rewarding players who invent new throws. The flick of a Bic previously concealed in a palm—Fire—burns paper, melts scissors, turns rock to molten lava. “That's some fire,” Jeremy says. “What, a Bic's the flames of Mount Doom?”
CC
's usually more realistic than this, although he knows there's been some controversy about how it's gotten too serious and real-worldy and needs to be more fun, to return to its pulp roots.

“Just go on,” Amy says. She's taken a seat at the counter, resting both elbows on it and leaning toward him.

In another match, someone uses a shaking hand to signal Earthquake, which shatters rock and buries both paper and scissors. Elsewhere, a gyrating index finger, Tornado, again trumps all the other throws, which it spins and scatters in its wake.

“Okay,” says Jeremy. “I get it. Obviously the mad judge is EE.”

“Yes, of course.” Her laughter's a breeze against his cheek. “But you aren't finished. Go on.”

“I dunno, Amy. Does this have a good ending?” He flips to the back of the issue. Water. Water everywhere, flooding the convention hall, players desperately trying to swim to safety, as the Emperor of Entropy, unveiled, hangs cackling from the ceiling. “Water destroys all!” he chortles. “Flood banishes order! Entropy always wins!”

That's the last frame, with a
To Be Continued
panel underneath. Jeremy blinks at it. “Okay. I know you're smarter than I am, but I don't get it. How is this fantastic?”

“To be continued!” Amy says. “They've never done that before.”

“Yeah? So? It's always continued; come on, you know that. Saying so explicitly is just a marketing gimmick. They're trying to pump up interest in the tree-zine because everything's online now. Scissors cut paper: the scissors are the economy.”

“Paper covers rock,” Amy says. “The rock is the bottom line. Bedrock. But, look, anyway, that's not the point. The point is, the game's circular. It never stops. In Rock Paper Scissors, each element beats another but is beaten by the third. Rock beats Scissors but is beaten by Paper; Paper's beaten by Scissors but wins over Rock; Scissors are defeated by Rock but cut Paper. None of them can be the absolute winner. Are you following me?”

“I think so,” he says, although he's not sure. “I mean, okay. But what about the wildcards? Fire and Water and Earthquake?”

“They replace circularity with dispersion. Typical EE move! Fire's extinguished by water but spreads in earthquakes; think about San Francisco in 1906. That looks like the start of a circular set. But earthquakes—and that's the one of the three that scares us most, because we can't control it at all—doesn't defeat either of the others. It
empowers
them. It spreads fire and makes water more powerful and destructive: dam breaks and tsunamis, yeah?”

“Destructive,” he says, stacking some mugs while he talks to her. He doesn't have enough energy for this conversation. Mom probably would have loved it: all the geology stuff. “Entropy wins either way. That's what EE
wants
. That's why he wins.”

“He
thinks
he wins. But look, earthquakes uncover things, too. Old cities and whatnot. They let us know where our infrastructures are weak and need to be reinforced. And when people are hurt in them, other people gather to help. So they become occasions for knowledge and compassion. And they help build the world; they make mountain ranges.”

Mom definitely would have loved this conversation. Oh, God. Does he have a crush on a girl who's like his mother? “I dunno, Amy. That's a pretty big stretch. And what about water? Water really does trump everything, right? It wears away rock and blunts scissors and dissolves paper. So it's the ultimate winner, like EE said. I mean, I know the people are swimming, so they'll be okay, at least some of them, but—”

“
Right
. Exactly! And rock can also divert water even as the water's wearing it away, and metal and paper can float on it even as it's slowly making them dissolve, and paper can be used for sails or wings or kites to carry things over or along it.
And,
Jeremy, it's the ultimate source of life! We came out of the ocean, and we live in amniotic fluid before we're born, and our bodies are mostly water. So when EE points at all that destruction, he's pointing at creation, too, and he doesn't even know it!”

Amniotic fluid. Jeremy remembers the Mayan women who had their bellies cut open. All that fluid, all that life escaping. All that life escaping from Mom, because of Percy's knife.

He's stopped stacking mugs. He shakes his head to clear it. He refuses to cry. Mom.

Mom. Last Christmas. She was telling him about some TV show, one of those Planet Earth things. Something about volcanoes. He blinks. “Water. My mother told me once that without volcanoes, water would wash all the land into the ocean. She said we need volcanoes and earthquakes so we'll still have continents. She saw it on TV.”

Amy hops from foot to foot, the happy dance he finds impossibly endearing even though it's completely dorky. “Right! There you go! Even when EE thinks he's wrecking things, he's also building them. He can't win. He can
never
win, not ultimately. Because his destruction is always an occasion for renewal, for rebirth.”

“Huh.” That sounds suspiciously like something Hen would say. But in another dizzy, narrow flash of memory, Jeremy sees the buzzard, the Bird that Cleaned the World, circling above the receding floodwaters, looking for carrion. He hears his mother reading him the story. His throat aches. “But the new life will always die, too.”

“And be replaced by still more new life! See? Circular.”

“Okay, so EE can't win. But neither can CC.”

“Right.
Right
. They need each other. It's all about
balance
.”

Jeremy's head hurts. If this were anyone else, he'd cut the conversation short, but it's Amy. “Yeah, I guess. But that's a seesaw, not a circle. I mean, Rock Paper Scissors has three elements. CC and EE are only two. What's the third? Archipelago? How? We've been following her for what, a year now? I think she's only there to break up the CC stories, though, make 'em more interesting.”