Mending the Moon (34 page)

Tomorrow the others will do their sightseeing, since they've arrived a day earlier than Hen thought they might. Veronique doesn't know what she'll do. Maybe she'll go shopping and try to find another pot. Right now, though, she needs to sleep.

*   *   *

“You need to get some rest,” William says.

“After the service.” Anna just blew up at the caterers over the price of salmon canapés. She knows she's being unreasonable. She doesn't care. She's been using this company for years; they always cater the gallery openings. The last time Anna worked with them, the salmon canapés were reasonable. Now they're outrageous, and Anna suspects the caterers don't want to be associated with Percy's memorial service. She thinks they're trying to get fired. She thinks they could at least have been nicer about the price of the canapés. This is her son's funeral.

Is she being paranoid? She doesn't care about that, either.

Standing in the kitchen, looking out at the deck, she rubs her forehead irritably. A few months ago, she craved sunlight. Now it's making her eyes hurt, and she yearns for clouds.

“If you act like that at the service, no one will stay.” William's voice is bland, but kind enough; she gives him a sharp look anyway. He's been completely silent on the subject of the memorial, giving her total creative control, and this is the first hint she's gotten that he may share her anxiety about the social aspects of the event, about the importance of the service as a way to restore or maintain their reputation in the community. This is, Anna knows, a completely selfish motivation, but right now she feels entitled to behave selfishly.

It's not like it matters. Nobody's going to come, except immediate family and the people from Reno. Anna's anxious to meet them, but they can't help with the local situation, and they can't eat more than a bit of the food she's ordered. Most of the salmon canapés will go uneaten. The flowers will wilt and die. The family reputation will remain ruined.

Entropy will conquer all.

“Take an Ambien,” William says. Some small part of her brain knows he's right; she hasn't slept for two days.

“I'm afraid of Ambien.” She's begun to have obsessive dreams about Clarke Beach, dreams in which she's the one wading into the water, Bart straining against his lead to try to save her. “People sleepwalk on that stuff. They open the fridge and eat everything inside, and then get into the car and drive to the supermarket and buy every pint of ice cream in the place.”

William lets out a long, dramatic sigh. He's mocking her. “Okay, so take a Valium. Drink some scotch. Jesus, Anna! This thing was your idea, and it's too late to cancel now.”

“I don't want to cancel.”

“Then try to hold it together, all right?”

She walks to the kitchen table and sits down. She knows she needs to sleep, but she isn't tired. She's never felt less sleepy in her life. There's too much to do. This is too important.

“What are we going to do with Percy's ashes? Afterwards? We haven't talked about that.”

“I have no idea. Let's talk about it then.”

“Do you have any ideas? I thought maybe the Cascades—”

“I said let's talk about it then.” William's voice has gone quiet with warning. “After the memorial, all right? One thing at a time.”

She swallows bile. “He's your son.”

“Do you think I don't know that?”

Anna puts her hands flat on the table and presses, as if this will keep her voice from rising to a shriek. “Don't you care?”

“About his ashes?” William's standing in the kitchen doorway, his face a mask of controlled fury. “No. I don't care about his ashes. His ashes are dirt. They aren't him. They don't mean anything. I cared about him when he was alive. If he were still alive, in prison, I'd be doing everything I could to help him, whatever horrors he committed. He was my son. But he's not alive. He's gone. The ashes don't matter.”

She swallows again. “Do you care about the memorial?”

“It's the right thing to do.”

Which doesn't answer the question. She closes her eyes and sees Percy with Bart, sees Percy helping her over the tree roots. Images from photos. It occurs to her that of all the photos she's looked at, she's found none of the three of them together. William doesn't approve of family portraits. He thinks they're tacky. She believes his parents may have, must have, some photos of all three of them, but they haven't given her copies.

Marjorie and David will be arriving at Sea-Tac in a few hours. If Anna had thought of this earlier, she'd have called and asked. It's too late now. What they've brought with them is fixed now, unalterable, unless a neighbor could FedEx—

No. Too complicated. And maybe not important.

The last time she was at the airport was to pick up Percy. When he came home from Mexico.

Anna takes a breath, feels a shiver of premonition down her back. When she speaks, she hears her voice break. “William. Do you care about me?”

If this were a movie, a book, a graphic novel, even, he'd come and knead the knotted muscles in her neck, speak loving words of reassurance, promise her that together, they'll get through this. But they're in real life, in uncharted territory.

“Anna, please.” His own voice is frayed now. “I'm almost as tired as you are. Can't we talk about all this after the service?”

He doesn't wait for her answer. He turns, whistling for the dog, the old escape route. She hears the rattle of the leash, hears the front door open and close. He could so easily have said, “Of course I do,” even if he didn't mean it, even if she wouldn't have believed it. How hard would it have been for him to mouth any of the conventional phrases, to say the Right Things? How hard would it have been for him to throw her the smallest of bones?

Too hard, apparently. She can't imagine what all of this is like for him: can't even begin to, because he hasn't told her, hasn't let her in. She realizes with a sliding sensation in her bones that her marriage is over, another casualty of Percy's violence. It's been over for months, maybe even since before Melinda Soto died, but that brutality broke it irrevocably, and made the wreckage visible.

For a moment rage sweeps through her. If only Percy hadn't gone to the bar that evening. If only he hadn't met Melinda Soto. If only he hadn't lost his mind. If if if.

But he did.

July 24 will be his twenty-third birthday. That morning, she decides, she'll get up and have a private birthday moment, before the fiasco of the memorial service. She'll take her coffee and a bran muffin out onto the deck, and she'll put a candle in the bran muffin, and she'll sing “Happy Birthday.” Not to the killer, no. To the sweet child she knew before that, the sweet child Percy would somehow still have been, or could have become again, if he were still alive now.

The rage is gone, and for the first time in days, she feels bone-heavy fatigue, aches with it. William's right; she needs sleep. She doesn't think she'll have to take drugs to achieve it.

 

18

The Rock, Paper, Scissors Tourney is being held in a large, pseudo-elegant Hyatt where Archipelago feels as out of place as she would in Buckingham Palace. The place is clean and shiny. She's neither. She assiduously and regularly washes herself with baby wipes; for this occasion, she even sneaked into a gas-station bathroom to apply some shoplifted sample-size shampoo to her hair. She's wearing her least grungy jeans, a new-to-her black pair she lifted from a thrift store a few months ago. Even with all that, she can't pass here. She tries, ambling through the lobby to the conference registration area, until she notices two things at once: a matron to her left moving away from her, nose wrinkled, and a security guard to her right moving toward her, jaw set.

She skedaddles. This is too important. She has to do it right, and she can't afford to risk getting eighty-sixed from the place before she's even seen Cosmos. “Don't do this to me,” she mutters aloud to the Emperor. “You're supposed to be helping me now, remember?”

But the mess that's complicating her position is hers, not the Emperor's or anyone else's. She acknowledges the justice of the situation—of
course
the Hyatt doesn't want the Wild Woman of the Midwest dropping dirt all over its carpets—even as she manages to snag, from a table in the lobby, a conference schedule someone left there.

Then she's outside, plotting her next move. Her best chance of getting close to Cosmos is probably the banquet, and that's tomorrow night. The ticket's a whopping fifty bucks, which would ordinarily seem preposterous since she has only one hundred left. On the other hand, this is a special occasion. She grits her teeth and resolves to spend the money. But first she has to get presentable, which means somehow finding something appropriate to wear to a banquet. She strongly suspects this won't be Buckingham Palace territory—she's in geekland, not high society—but she still needs to move a step or ten up from her usual attire.

She's brought everything important with her: the money, Erasmus, a few crickets. She calculates. She has to wash up, or no place will have her. Down the road from the fancy Hyatt, she finds a no-tell motel where twenty dollars gets her a room for an hour. The clerk wrinkles his nose at her, but doesn't otherwise comment. She doesn't have to sign anything. She doesn't need to proffer a credit card. Thank God for the underworld.

The room, entirely too reminiscent of the Motel 6 that started all this, is small and smelly and dark, beset by disquieting noises from either side. Archipelago runs hot water to kill the cockroaches in the tub—she should catch them for Erasmus, but she's short on time—and then starts up the shower. Killing the cockroaches seems to have killed the hot water, too, so Archipelago shivers and shakes through an icy shower. Refreshing, she tells herself, teeth chattering. It's refreshing. She scrubs her hair with the remaining shampoo, applies a dollop of stolen conditioner, and rakes at her skin with a tiny bar of hotel soap she acquired somewhere or other.

Afterward, she actually feels better. She dresses, leaves, and finds a thrift store. Inside, she walks up to the counter—none of her usual scuttling through back aisles—and pulls out another twenty dollars as the sales clerk squints at her. “This is what I have to spend. I need some new clothing. Something, well, something a little nice. I have a job interview next week. Can you help me?”

The clerk's face softens. “Bless you, honey. Let's see what we can do.” She's old enough to be somebody's grandmother, although not Archipelago's. “A job interview: that's a big deal. What kind of job?”

“Office,” Archipelago says, the lie catching in her throat despite all the dishonesties she's been committing for months now. “Filing.” She's praying the woman won't ask her where. “I haven't worked in a long time.”

“Lot of people in that position, but you got an interview. Good for you. I'm Lucy.”

“Ethel,” Archipelago says, because she doesn't dare use her real name, and then she thinks,
oh, shit, she'll think I'm making fun of her, fuck.
Archipelago only knows about
I Love Lucy
from a class in pop culture she took in her one semester at community college, but Lucy's old enough to have watched the show. Fuck.

But Lucy just laughs. “Ethel? Really?

Archipelago's spine goes limp with relief. “Ethel Rose. Really.”

“That's pretty. Okay, Ethel Rose, let's see what we've got. You're a tiny little thing. That's good: more in the small sizes.” Lucy herself isn't small, but she flips efficiently through the racks, picking out items, and then shepherds Archipelago through the process of trying everything on.

Lucy initially chose an armful of skirts, but when she sees Archipelago's bare legs, as densely furred as any lumberjack's, she purses her lips. “Y'know, I don't enjoy shaving myself, and it shouldn't make a difference, but in a job interview you don't want to take any risks. Why don't we try some slacks?”

“Fine with me,” Archipelago says weakly. She stays in the dressing room while Lucy, rummaging through another rack, shoots out questions. Does Ethel Rose have a real purse, or only that knapsack? How's she set for shoes? How does she feel about some simple jewelry, or maybe a scarf?

Only the knapsack, alas, and only boots, and Ethel Rose will trust Lucy on the accessories, but are there any biggish purses? Because, uh, well, a little clutch wouldn't look too professional, would it?

“I have just the thing!” Lucy crows. She reappears in the dressing room with a pair of pinstripe slacks, a tasteful white blouse—“If I wore that, honey, tomato sauce would travel from other states to land on the collar, but I think you can carry it off”—a vinyl briefcase that might pass for leather at five hundred feet, and a pair of black pumps. “I'm worried about the shoes. I think the rest of this will fit you, though.”

“All I have is twenty bucks,” Archipelago says.

“I know. Don't worry. You just try all that on. Ooops, forgot the scarf!”

Archipelago tries on the outfit, which, for a wonder, fits perfectly. The shoes are a little big, but she can stuff toilet paper into the toes or something, and Erasmus's jar will fit into the tacky briefcase. She steps out of the dressing room, and Lucy beams approval. “That's great! You look terrific! Here, just one more thing.” She waves a burgundy scarf and fastens it with a shiny silver-plated scarf pin around Archipelago's neck. “
Very
nice!”

“Thank you,” Archipelago says. “But how much—”

“Twenty dollars for the lot,” Lucy says. “Don't give me that look. You go out and get that job, Ethel Rose.”

Archipelago changes back into her grungies while Lucy packs the new outfit into a shopping bag. Then it's outside again. Time to plan next steps.