Mending the Moon (5 page)

Voices, discussing. Jeremy doesn't want to go back to the dorm tonight, doesn't want to go back to the house. He'll stay in Hen's guest room; Hen calls her husband Ed to instruct him to make up the bed. When she gets home, she'll activate the parish phone tree used in emergencies, which before now have never been more serious than a service canceled because of snow.

Tom, Hen, and Veronique talk logistics. Melinda would want to be cremated, but should that happen in Mexico, or the States? Less expensive to have her cremated there if no one objects, but does Jeremy—or anyone else—need to see the body for closure? Will the body be fit to be seen? Won't someone have to go down to Mexico to make arrangements? And if the police catch Melinda's murderer and there's a trial, what then? Would she have wanted them to be there? Would there be any reason for them to be there?

“She didn't believe in the death penalty,” Jeremy says. It's the first thing he's said since hearing how Melinda died. Rosemary's heart twists. Does Jeremy agree with his mother's position now, if he ever did?

Does Rosemary?

Tom shakes his head. “Mexico doesn't have the death penalty. They won't even extradite Americans who might face it for American crimes.”

“We could go down there and kill him ourselves,” Veronique says, and hearing the rage in her voice, Rosemary thinks she just might be capable of it.

Tom grunts. “Tempting, but hardly advisable. I don't think life in a Mexican prison is any fun. We need time to absorb this. We need sleep. We're all in shock. We can figure out next steps tomorrow.”

Tom and Hen leave, flanking Jeremy. Veronique goes into the kitchen and comes back out with a cup of tea that Rosemary didn't ask for and doesn't want. “You need to stay hydrated,” she says, putting it clumsily on the table next to Rosemary's chair. Some tea has slopped into the saucer. Rosemary hates that.

Veronique and Rosemary have never been close, not as close as either of them was to Melinda. Vera's trying to do the right thing. Rosemary knows that.

Rosemary stays in her chair, paralyzed. She wants Walter. If Walter were here, he'd know what to do.

There's nothing to do. She knows that.

The phone rings. It's Beth Adams from church, shocked and horrified, needing to talk, but Rosemary can't talk. She can't be a chaplain right now. Melinda was her best friend.

She hangs up. The phone rings again. She ignores the call and turns the ringer off. No more. No more tonight. No.

Veronique, hovering, trying to help but inept at it, and she needs help herself now; Rosemary knows that. She's grieving too. Rosemary drinks the tea—herbal, peppermint—and lets Vera, lead her upstairs, lets Vera wait while she undresses and puts on a nightgown, lets Vera tuck her into bed like a child.

What time is it? Early, too early. The clock on her bureau says it's only nine o'clock. It feels like three in the morning. It feels like a different year than the one she lived in this morning.

Veronique sees her looking at the clock. “Do you want the alarm set?”

“No. Thank you. I doubt I'll sleep much, anyway.” A small, distant part of her brain knows that giving Veronique ways to be useful is the most healing thing she can do.

Rosemary herself can't be useful. Even if she knew a way to be useful, she couldn't manage it, and there's nothing.

Veronique leaves. Rosemary closes her eyes, trying to block out the day, but instead she sees a bruised face, teeth missing, one eye swollen shut, a swathe of blond hair torn out, blood from a shoulder abrasion seeping onto a “Hello, Kitty!” T-shirt.

What was her name? Rosemary doesn't remember, but she remembers the face and the story: the pretty young woman, attacked and abandoned in a downtown parking garage, who made her way to the hospital only to learn that she couldn't be treated. Not here. Only one hospital in town was authorized to do rape exams.

Rosemary remembers a nurse ranting about the situation. “It's horrible! They have to have someone specially trained, so they've decided to keep one ER staffed with those people twenty-four/seven. But I know how to do rape exams! I'd be happy to be on call just for that! How can they put this poor girl through that?”

Rosemary came home and told Walter about it. They didn't know he was sick yet, although in retrospect the signs were there. Greater reliance on Post-it notes. More trouble with names. But that evening, Walter seemed completely himself. He listened to her story about the rape victim, and then he put his arms around her and hugged, rocking.

Melinda had helped Rosemary move Walter into the nursing home: had stood with Rosemary while they loaded him into the ambulance, had helped Rosemary unpack Walter's things in the bleak pale room. And afterward, back here, Melinda had put her arms around Rosemary and hugged, rocking.

Shivering in her bed, Rosemary hugs herself. There's no one else left to do it.

*   *   *

When Jeremy is eight or nine, Melinda reads
Charlotte's Web
to him, one chapter each night before bed. He can read, but he'd rather listen, and she treasures the connection the ritual provides. She thinks he does, too. She delights in the rhythms of E. B. White's language, the sheer joy of reading his prose aloud. She never smells cut grass without remembering White's description of the barn, which “smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows.” Jeremy doesn't care about poetics, but he's enthralled by Charlotte's determined quest to save Wilbur.

Melinda's read the book so often that she hardly needs to look at the pages. The edition she holds now, its pages foxed and wrinkled and spotted with miscellaneous stains, is the one she read during her own childhood, the title almost worn away on the cover and binding. Melinda was seven when White's classic was published, nine when her parents gave it to her for Christmas. She spent months reading the book to the end and then turning back to the first page. Like Jeremy, she loved Charlotte's quest, as improbable as mending the moon.

Of course she and Jeremy both cry when Charlotte says good-bye to Wilbur. Melinda thinks that anyone who can read the book without tears must lack a soul. “No one was with her when she died.” As well as she knows the story, Melinda's voice cracks on that line, at the image of the deserted fairgrounds and the small gray spider, all alone.

And then the happy ending back at the farm, Charlotte's descendants thriving and adopting Wilbur, although none of them “ever quite took her place in his heart.” Melinda knows the last chapter is necessary, but it never moves her as deeply as Charlotte's death.

After Melinda has read the last sentence, Jeremy starts to suck his thumb—a habit he mostly broke a long time ago, but still slips into when he's sad—and says, “Mommy, you're never going to die, are you?”

Melinda takes a deep breath, savoring the fragrances of fresh sheets and wool blankets and newly-bathed boy. She's known this topic would come up sometime. “Everybody dies, Jeremy. But most people don't die until they're very, very old. I hope I won't die for a very long time.”

He was two and a half when she adopted him; he still dimly remembers the long plane trip from Guatemala. She's always told him the truth about his adoption. Now he says, “Did my first mommy die?”

“I don't know, sweetie. All I know is that she was very poor, and she wanted you to have a better, safer home than she could give you, so she gave you to the people who gave you to me. I don't know what happened to her after that.”

In fact, Jeremy was found wandering in the rubble of a wrecked village, and his parents are almost certainly dead. But she won't tell him that, not yet.

“Maybe she died, and you're Wilbur. 'Cept you didn't carry me in your mouth.” He giggles, but then grows pensive again. “Charlotte would have been happy that Wilbur took care of her babies after she died. So they'd be okay.”

“Yes, that's right.”

“And my first mommy wanted somebody to take care of me.”

“That's right. So you'd be okay.”

He reaches for her hand, his thumb moist against hers, but wrinkles his nose and looks away to show that the gesture belongs to some other, younger Jeremy. “If you die, who'll take care of me?”

“Our friends. Aunt Rosemary and Uncle Walter and Aunt Veronique. But I don't think I'll die for a very long time, Jeremy. People live a lot longer than spiders do.”

He lets go of her hand, the thumb returning to his mouth. Around it, he says, “Katy killed a spider at school the other day. It wasn't hurting anybody.”

“A lot of people are scared of spiders.”

“The teacher said some spiders hurt people, but this spider wasn't one of those kinds. It was just building a web, but it wasn't writing anything. I guess it wasn't as smart as Charlotte.”

“I've never seen a spider as smart as Charlotte.”

“I was sad when Katy killed the spider. But the teacher said that if it was a bad spider, then we'd have to kill it, so it wouldn't hurt anybody. Would a bad spider's mommy be sorry if it died?”

“All mothers are sorry when their babies die. Jeremy, are you afraid you're bad?”

“I'm talking about the
spider.
What if the bad spider's mommy was dead, like Charlotte? Then she couldn't be sad. But even if it's a bad spider, how do you know if its mommy is alive? Or if it has babies?”

“You don't,” Melinda says, stroking his soft dark hair. “But Jeremy, everything alive is someone's baby. And all parents, whether they're still alive or not, want their babies to live.”

A week later, during an informal get-together at Rosemary and Walter's, Jeremy finds a house spider in the bathroom and sternly forbids anyone to kill it. Walter deftly transfers the creature to a piece of paper and takes it outside, as Rosemary and Melinda praise Jeremy for his compassion. Jeremy stays outside with the spider to make sure it's safe.

When Walter comes back inside, Melinda tells her friends about the bedtime conversation. Walter and Rosemary have already promised to take care of Jeremy if anything ever happens to her. She had a new will drawn up when she adopted him, naming them his guardians in the event of her death.

But of course that's just a precaution. None of them believe that anything like that will ever happen. By the time Melinda dies, surely Jeremy will be an adult with a family of his own.

*   *   *

Veronique splits a can of cat food between two bowls. She's shaking so badly that she can hardly handle the fork. But the cats have to eat, and they can't open the cans by themselves.

She almost asked Rosemary if she could stay there, crash in the guest bedroom, because she didn't trust herself to drive. But she'd driven to Rosie's, so of course she could drive back home. And the cats have to eat.

Has it really only been a few hours since she learned about Melinda?

Sillybeth and Nepotuk wind between her ankles, howling as mournfully as if they've never been fed in the history of the world. If she isn't careful, they'll trip her. All she needs now is a broken hip.

She uses the fork to mash and mix up the portions of cat food; the metal tines scrape loudly against the bottom of the stainless steel bowls. The noise sounds like a scream. Veronique wants to scream. She can feel the scream inside her, building like a sneeze.

But she'd scare the cats. They're innocent; none of this is their fault. No fair to take it out on them.

Melinda was innocent.

Melinda was one of the most cheerful people Veronique ever met, and one of the kindest, and someone who could have smart conversations about books, which was how Veronique met her, at a reading group Melinda facilitated at the library where she worked as a reference librarian. Melinda was younger than Veronique. She shouldn't have died first, and she shouldn't have died that way. No one should die that way.

Except the bastard who did this. There is no death too vile or painful for him, and Veronique would gladly administer it with her own hands, which are still shaking as the fork screams against the metal and her rage screams inside her belly.

She realizes that she's been stirring the cat food for minutes. She picks up the bowls and walks crabwise, stepping carefully around the cats, to the shoe tray where she always puts their food. Her hands are clenched so hard on the bowls that they hurt.

She knew even before Jeremy reminded them that Melinda didn't believe in the death penalty; she knows that Rosemary doesn't, either, and certainly Hen wouldn't. Religious reasons. But Veronique's not religious. Her parents weren't perfect, but at least they steered clear of institutionalized superstition. Rosemary was raised in the church, and Veronique understands habit. She was always more mystified by Melinda's reasons, since Melinda only began attending church as an adult.

She'd just started, in fact, when she and Veronique met. “Oh, I've been going to St. Phil's, but it's still mostly cultural anthropology. Fascinating, though, and there's really good preaching there. Very literate. I think you'd enjoy it.”

Veronique thought not. She learned later that Melinda had helped Rosemary find an obscure article about first-century liturgy, and that Rosemary had invited Melinda to her church, and Melinda had accepted out of curiosity. Six months or so after Veronique met her, Melinda was long past the cultural-anthropology stage, and had gone native. She wasn't pushy about it, though, so Veronique could stay friends with her. It was like learning that a sane, intelligent adult you admired liked to chew bubblegum or play hopscotch or make dress-up clothing for stuffed animals: incomprehensible, and a little embarrassing, but as long as the person didn't insist that you partake of this bizarre hobby as well, friendly relations could be maintained.

She has to admit that the woman priest handled things well tonight; Veronique didn't even find her prayer too offensive. But she supposes priests have a lot of practice at helping people through horror. How they reconcile that with their fairy tale about a loving God, Veronique can't imagine.