Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (27 page)

It was three in the morning, and I-94 was empty and dark, the only traffic an occasional semi passing us on the left, blowing a smoky dust of snow over the windshield. The forecast included the possibility of an early-winter blizzard. By the time we made it to the long, flat stretch of I-57 that runs down through Illinois, blowing snow would occasionally swell up from the endless prairies and obscure our vision. The going was slow. We took turns driving, but neither of us slept. The roads seemed treacherously empty, and the areas around us flat and gray in all directions, and for a minute, I thought perhaps we'd driven off the earth.

When we reached Effingham, it was daylight and the snow had stopped and we were most definitely still on the earth.

THERE WAS A SMALL BOX
of Bunny Slowinski's belongings at the Super 8, in which these things were found: a collection of rough, gray pebbles in a Milwaukee Pickles jar; a handful of dirt in a sealed plastic bag; and an assortment of autumnpainted leaves, pressed dry and flat into the pages of a hardcover copy of
Awaken the Giant Within.
These things were returned to the Slowinskis, along with the remains of Bunny Slowinski.

Also this: an unsealed Super 8 envelope, with Tom's name on it. The envelope sat on top of a blank sheet of Super 8 stationary and a Super 8 pen. The only words on the stationery were
Dear Tom, There's no.

We must have looked exhausted, because the clerk at the Super 8 offered us a free room to sleep in for a few hours, but instead we asked for directions to the funeral home, which was just up the street, sandwiched between a Kinko's and a Dairy Queen. We paid the funeral home director, and he let Tom have a few moments alone with the body before we loaded the casket into the van.

I started out driving on the way home. We stopped at a Wendy's and got some burgers and Cokes, and the mood shifted. As we pulled back on the interstate, even with the body of Bunny Slowinski in a casket behind us, we started to make jokes.

Tom said, "You know, I fucking
tried
to get a job at Home Depot and couldn't. And my fucking dad is down here working for them and nobody knows about it."

We laughed the best we could. We passed a gorgeous red-haired woman in a red pickup truck. She was wearing a red bathrobe, and Tom smiled and waved frantically. He swore to me that she opened her robe and flashed her breasts at him before she gunned her accelerator and left us behind.

"Bullshit," I said.

"You miss everything, Mikey," Tom said. "I swear, she winked and then gave me a show."

The snow had stopped, the sun reflected off the white fields, and we found a classic rock station out of Champaign-Urbana. We had Zeppelin playing. Tom lit a cigarette when he finished his cheeseburgers. If you passed us—the van could barely get up to sixty-five—you might have thought we were on our way to a hunting lodge up north or something. You wouldn't have guessed about the cargo we were hauling back home.

Sometime around the Indiana border, Tom said, "Did you see the rocks he had with him? The bag of dirt?"

"Yeah, what about them?" I said.

"Moon dust," Tom said. "Rocks from the moon."

"Tom," I said.

"It is," he said. "Moon rocks."

"You could take them to the university," I said. "I bet you could have a professor there look at them. Somebody could tell you for sure what kind of rocks they are."

"No way," Tom said. "I'm not trusting some professor with this stuff."

"Tom," I said.

"I believe it, Mikey, and that's that."

We didn't say anything again until we hit Michigan, where the lake effect snow started up and made the air heavy and foggy.

"I can't believe that's my dad back there," Tom said.

"He's not back there," I said, "That's just a body. He's with God now."

"God?" Tom said. "What have you seen to make you believe in that?"

The windshield was dense with mist and outside the snow rushed across the road in a blur. Tom fiddled with the heat and defrost buttons for a minute, which made the windshield fog up even worse.

"Do something," Tom said. "I can't see."

WHEN WE GOT BACK
to Detroit, the snow was falling in great blinding walls and we skidded onto Livernois and fishtailed the van into the parking lot of Salowich and Stevens Funeral Home. Mr. Stevens was waiting for us in a suit at the entrance, his face sober. Some of his assistants helped us get the casket out of the van, and Mr. Stevens assured us the body would be ready for the funeral procession and Mass the next day.

Tom and I headed up Michigan Avenue back to Maple Rock. The streets were still snowy, and that meant Nick was not home. Tom dropped me off at my door. I asked him if he wanted to come in, but he said he'd better go check on Tanya and the kids and his mother.

"Thanks," he said. "For doing this."

"You'd have done it for me," I said.

"That's what you think," he said.

"Fucking Polack," I said, and shut the door of the van.

It was after midnight, but Ella was still awake. I held her, and she buried her face in my neck and started to cry. She was not a crier, and I worried that something bad had happened while we were gone.

"What is it?" I said.

"I'm just glad that you're home."

"Any word from Nick?" I said.

"None," she said.

"How's Sunny?"

"Not good. Your mother and Maria are over there with her."

"Huh," I said.

"Michael, you don't know where he is, do you?"

"No," I said. I had an idea, sure, a great fear of where he might have gone, but it seemed too ridiculous and painful to say it.

We went into Rusty's room and watched him sleeping in his bed, his covers kicked off, his arms wrapped around Lucky the Dog, who looked up at us and thumped his tail on the bed. It still sometimes was odd to me to see another young boy in what used to be Kolya's room. I'd see Rusty in there, and I'd feel like I was a teenager again, looking at my kid brother.

Ella and I went into our room, and watched Nina sleeping in the crib next to our bed. A mobile hung above her bed, and I watched the blue-and-green light it cast rotate on Nina's tiny face. She sighed in her sleep, kicked one foot and then the other, and was still again. At that moment, with Ella's small frame slumped against my body, it was almost impossible for me to imagine the feeling that my father or Bunny Slowinski or Nick had in their hearts on the nights they slipped away.

***

THE NEXT MORNING
we arrived at the funeral home in our dark suits and overcoats, me and Tom and two of Tom's uncles from Toronto and Pete Stolowitz and J.J. Dempsey. In the chapel, we hoisted up the casket and loaded it into the hearse. We followed the hearse in our old Fords down the snowy streets, past the alleys full of garbage and the abandoned cars and the boarded-up and burned-out houses. We turned on to Clippert and passed a family of Mexicans bundled up against the cold, and they stopped and bowed their heads and made the sign of the cross. We drove across the potholes, and our cars shook and our hearts rattled like there was gravel in our chests.

When we got out of our cars, we could hear the crying of the women already, my mother and Aunt Maria and Mrs. Slowinski dressed in black and headed up the slick concrete steps of the old church. They wept when they saw us stepping out of our cars into the cold morning, wept with a decade's worth of despair, as if whatever was happy in their present lives had disappeared that morning.

The domes of St. John's looked flat and cold in the sky above us, and the red brick of the church was the color of rust. In our dress shoes, we slipped and struggled to hold our footing, the heavy casket pulling on our arms and shaking because Tom could not stop shaking. In the church, the light was dim and the smell of candles and incense and damp wood and cough drops made us dizzy. We walked down the red carpet to the altar, the priest in his robes ahead of us, the tired gold of the icons shining in front of us. The choir began to sing, "Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy." We set the casket at the front of the church, and Mr. Stevens, walking behind us, opened the top half of it, and I saw for the first time, for the first time in almost thirteen years, the face of Valentine "Bunny" Slowinski.

The choir droned from the balcony, and the seraphim and cherubim swirled around the head of Jesus above us. Ella and Rusty and Nina sat in the pew next to me and my mother and Mack, and Aunt Maria sat behind us, holding her Rosary, with Sunny and the kids next to her. It was hard to look at any of them, and I started to feel light and my head spun and I thought maybe I would black out and start to float up along with the blue smoke of incense to the icon of Jesus in the Jordan River.

The priest sang in Ukrainian, in the relentless and pleading voice of the divine liturgy: "With the just spirits who have reached their end, give repose to the souls of Your servants, O Savior, keeping them in the happiness of life in Your presence, O You who love mankind. In Your abode, O Lord, where all Your saints repose, give rest also to the souls of Your servants, for You alone love mankind. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit."

Just as I was about to pass out, I thought I heard Tom's moaning cry, and I stood up and walked out along the side of the church to get some air.

There was still no sun. The snow kept falling, piling up in high drifts along the road, tinted black from the exhaust of passing cars.

The priest sang behind me: "Christ, our true God, who has power over the living and the dead, through the prayers of His immaculate Mother; of the holy, glorious, and allpraiseworthy apostles; of our venerable and godly fathers, and of all the saints, will place the soul of His servant Valentine Slowinski which has departed from us, in the mansions of the just, and will give him rest in the bosom of Abraham, and number him among the just, and will have mercy on us, for He is good and loves mankind."

Behind me, I heard the choir respond with "Amen," and the parishioners and the priest begin singing the Ukrainian funeral hymn "Vichnaya Pamyat," "Eternal Memory," and without even thinking about it, I stood on the steps of the church, looking out at the hopeless neighborhood, and, as if by rote, softly sang the refrain.

Feeling better, I went back inside the church, walked up along the side, and slipped back into my pew between Ella and my mother. Nina was asleep in her carrier, and Ella could not seem to stop looking at her. Rusty crawled on my lap and whispered, "What's wrong?" in my ear. A few minutes later, Tom and his mother and their family came to the front of the church for a final viewing of the body. You could hear Tom whisper to his sons, "That was your grandfather."

And Tanya whispered, "Thomas. No."

Then the casket was closed.

I got up with the other pallbearers and went to the front of the church. Tom and I took the handles in the front. The choir was singing "Vichnaya Pamyat" again. Smoke from the incense floated around our heads. I nodded at Tom, and he tried his best to nod back. The doors of the church opened, letting in the whitewashed light of the December morning. The walls in the back of the church were lined with men in dark overcoats, glum and slouching, and in the corner, beneath the final station of the cross, I thought—for a minute, I was sure—that I saw Nick standing there, watching us. I was so sure of this, that, after we loaded the casket in the hearse, I spent a few minutes darting around the congregation, looking for Nick's bearded face, his blue eyes, listening for his voice. But he wasn't there.

AFTER THE BURIAL
, after I had stood at a the side of the grave at St. Hedwig's with my wife and my children, after I visited the graves of my long-dead grandparents, after I shook the hands and clasped the shoulders of so many people I might never see again, I found Tom smoking a cigarette by the maintenance shed. The afternoon was already slipping into the evening. The sky had cleared.

Yes, there was a moon. Yes, it was full.

Perhaps you read this now and think of us as fools, consider us naive for believing as long as we believed that you had gone to the moon, for believing that some day you'd come home.

But look:

Is there some happiness in Maple Rock?

Of course, there is!

Still, that doesn't change everything. It doesn't change this:

Like an eye, the moon follows us wherever we go.

I
OWE MANY THINGS
to many people. Here goes. First of all, thanks to my editor, Becky Saletan, for her enthusiasm, intelligence, and vision, and to everybody at Harcourt who helped pull this together, including André Bernard, Stacia Decker, Laurie Brown, Jennifer Gilmore, Patty Berg, and Paul Von Drasek.

Also to the good folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison MFA program, who provided focus, funding, and their amazing instruction in the nick of time: Lorrie Moore, Coach Judy Mitchell, Ron Wallace, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Amy Quan Barry. Also to the University of Michigan, where these people first gave the go sign: Nick Delbanco, Andrea Beauchamp, Daniel Lyons, Janet Mendier, and especially Charles "Pa" Baxter and Eileen "Ma" Pollack who were never too busy to offer encouragement and advice.

Thanks to my brother-in-law, Jeremiah Chamberlin, and my sister, Natalie Bakopoulos, for their friendship, editorial advice, and good humor. To my mother, Luba Bakopoulos, and my grandparents, Gregory and Eva Smolij, who taught me, above all, to live with a big heart. Many thanks to my father, George Bakopoulos, and his wife, Pat, for their unyielding love and support. Also to Chet and Ginny Okopski for their unflagging belief and friendship and to Rachel Okopski for a cheerful willingness to help. And to Madeleine Thien, our dear friend, who's been there for the wild ride and the long haul.

Thanks to Francis Coppola's
Zoetrope: All-Story
and especially to Adrienne Brodeur, who first said yes, and to Holly Rothman who said, "Keep going." To the wonderful people behind the Sewanee Writers' Conference—Cheri Peters, Wyatt Prunty, and Phil Stephens—and to Richard Bausch and Tony Earley for their helpful pep talks. Big bad love to my Murfreesboro pals: Ben Percy, Lisa Lerner, Kathleen Hughes, and Holiday Reinhorn. Thanks to the Vermont Studio Center for a Pleasant T. Rowland Fellowship, and to Jason Bellipani, who made the month dangerous and fun. Thanks to the staff of the Christine Center in Willard, Wisconsin, for spiritual sustenance and the perfect hermitage for a writer.