The Moon Sisters (16 page)

My grandpa saves people
, I told the kids at school.
No, he’s not a policeman or a fireman or a priest. He can fly! He can make a burglar confess just by staring at him long enough, because his eyes can turn to lasers! He wears a bulletproof cape!

Jazz gave me her blackest look in the lunchroom that day, because of course word got around. My father had to leave the bakery before all the work was done to come have a talk with me, too.

Your grandfather isn’t a superhero
, he said, as we sat together in the principal’s office.
He disowned your mother. He doesn’t want to speak with her, not ever again. It’s his heart that’s hard, not his muscles. He’s a banker and an investment expert. A rich one at that. And a bastard
, he added under his breath.

This truth crushed me.

Later, I asked Mama about it, even though I’d been told not to.
Why won’t Grandpa Orin talk to us? Why is his heart so hard? Is that why you keep his picture flipped over like a dead fly so much of the time?

She said something abstract that I didn’t understand and forgot straightaway, and left Papa to make dinner that night. She said she only needed a nap, but she slept until morning.

This was a lesson I’d never forget—the way my mind turned in a day, how what I’d
thought
was opposite of what truly
was
. It became my proof, of sorts, that there were at least two ways to look at things. Even when we didn’t want to consider what those other ways might be.

My curiosity over Mama’s letters never ended, though I didn’t ask her about them or Grandpa Orin anymore after that. Every once in a secret while, I’d check to see if the quantity of envelopes in her room had turned yet from eleven to twelve, from twelve to thirteen. And sometimes I swore I felt their presence in our house. Maybe Mama felt them, too, each letter like grains of sand in her eyes, or a pair of leaden feet. Each letter like a wish.

After Mama died, when I was left with the last letter she’d never sent, I lifted the loose floorboard one final time. I wouldn’t have added the letter I’d found to the others, but I felt it might be important to view them all together just the same, that maybe I’d learn something from their weight and the scent of their secrets.

But the letters were gone.

I couldn’t even ask about them, because I shouldn’t have known about them to begin with. So I kept the one letter in my possession, tucked it into a part of my coat where the lining had come unstitched to make a private pocket. I felt it whenever I wore that
coat, through a winter that lasted into April, its edges as hard as Grandpa Orin’s heart.

Red Grass was still singing his catfish song, and Hobbs had gathered our bottles to refill with filtered stream water, when Jazz pulled me away to stand near a thicket of trees. She’d said it was important, that she needed to talk, but I wouldn’t believe she had anything to say that she hadn’t already said or wasn’t just trying a new tack to make me bend to her will.

As it turns out, I was right.

She used a low, serious voice that chafed like sandpaper. “I thought you’d like to know that your friend Hobbs is a criminal,” she said.

Red Grass must’ve told her this. Maybe this was what Hobbs meant when he called him
an annoying son of a bitch
.

“I know. Hobbs told me himself,” I said, and her voice turned to helium.

“And just what is it that he told you?”

I rested with care against the nearest tree, testing it. It was young; I could tell by its smooth bark and slender frame. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t stable, didn’t mean it couldn’t hold itself strong in a wind.

“He told me he stole something—”

“Coins,” she interjected, but I talked over her.

“—because he wanted to be honest with me, because he wanted me to feel safe, because he’s a good person.”

“Oh, he’s a prize all right. Probably has a blue ribbon tattooed to his ass,” she said, and I straightened. “He’s uglier than sin, you know, or maybe you’re not particular about who you’ll shuck your clothes for.”

“Why do you hate him so much?” I asked. “You’ve never even had a regular conversation with him.”

“Neither have I shown him my underwear, but there are some
things that aren’t worth doing, Olivia. I don’t need to talk with him to get what he’s about. There’s danger written all over his face. And his neck, and his arms, and probably his chest and back,” she said. “Now explain this to me: How is it that you knew he was a criminal and left with him anyway? I’ve always known you had your own hard-to-picture take on life, but I never thought you might actually be stupid before today.”

I winced. I’d known Jazz felt this way about me, but she’d never come right out and said she thought I was lacking in brains. I shouldn’t have been so surprised to hear it now, should’ve had a ready response but didn’t. I expected the familiar rise of my Jazz nerves—the ones that made me burble like a stream—but they were quiet. Too stunned, maybe, to make an appearance.

She found another sore spot to poke, said, “You’re always talking about what Mama would’ve wanted, what would’ve made her happy. You think she would’ve approved of you running all over the state with the likes of Hobbs?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think she would’ve liked him.”

“That’s bullshit,” Jazz said. “She wouldn’t have approved, and you know it. She wanted us safe, at home. That’s why we never went anywhere.”

“That’s not why we never went anywhere,” I said, full of confidence on this point at least. “We never went anywhere because Mama was afraid.”

Brush rustled nearby, and I pictured an animal’s search for food. Not all survival instincts were so clear.

“What do you mean, afraid?” Jazz asked, her voice different now, turned blue and thin like new ice.

I almost said,
Now who’s blind?
but stopped myself.

Mama had mentioned her desire to see the glades often enough, though she’d never made any plans to visit. Two Septembers ago, after the biscuit bus was replaced with the new van, Papa asked Jazz if she’d be willing to take care of deliveries for a few days so he might surprise Mama with the trip she longed to take. The cranberries
would be ripe—it was the perfect time to go. Jazz had agreed, and was already on her way with the biscuits when Papa—who radiated the scent of ripe summer grass even more than normal—gave my mother the news. I stood nearby listening, smiling, expecting elation. Expecting … not what happened.

Mama sat at the table and leaned against her hand, splayed fingers over her face like a flesh spider.
I can’t, I can’t
, she cried.
I don’t know why, I—

Beth? What’s wrong, baby?
Papa rubbed her back when her breathing turned ragged, his face a patchwork of concern and confusion.

I crouched beside Mama and took her hand, because I knew what to do when this happened, when her shallow sounds filled the house with diagonal sheets of rain.

She caught her breath after a time, but she was in a low mood for three and a half weeks after that. And while I never pressed her over why she couldn’t bring herself to go—and she never again talked about going to the glades, for that matter—I thought about it a lot during my rambles, and came up with an idea that made sense enough to me.

Mama had a dream, a hope that if she went to the glades the end of her story would be inspired by one thing or another. She’d finish writing it, she’d send it to her father, and he’d come back to her. She believed, believed.

But not one hundred percent.

Because what if it didn’t work? What if she wasn’t able to imagine an end even after taking the trip? Or—worse—what if she was, and she finished the story, polished it, published it, made the
New York Times
bestsellers’ list even, and Grandpa Orin still pretended that she didn’t exist? Wouldn’t it be better to stay at home and trust that things would work out when they were meant to, leave it to fate? Wouldn’t it be safer to pray at the desk she called an altar, wedge those unsent letters under the floorboard, and keep hold of hope?

Hope was a powerful thing. Difficult to risk.

“Forget it,” I said when Jazz nudged my shoulder, told me to wake
up. I knew what she’d say about my theory. She’d call me stupid again, call me wrong, then try to derail me with her version of logic.

“Is there any part of you that’s reasonable?” she snapped.

“I’m reasonable enough,” I told her. “You don’t even try to understand.”

“You’re right, I’ll never understand. But, hey, don’t let that bother you. You just go right ahead and take charge, Olivia Moon. That’s fine with me!” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’ll follow wherever you lead, right off the edge of the fucking planet!”

“You swear too much,” I said, right before she told me where I could stick my opinion of her vocabulary.

She thundered away like a black-icicle storm, pushed back at the trees, and made for the stream. Maybe she needed to take her clothes off, too, take a breath. But she wouldn’t, that wasn’t her way—even if she could use a good dunking.

Jazz may have been right about something, though. Mama might not have wanted us to go on this trip at all. She might even have been slam-on-the-brakes opposed. Because wasn’t I risking her dreams by doing this? What if I didn’t see a light? Would she have taken that as a sort of confirmation that she’d had the wrong dreams after all?

No. No, I wouldn’t believe it. And I hated
what-ifs;
they tasted an awful lot like cheese from a can.

If I was going to do this, I had to believe, believe, one hundred percent from now on. No doubts allowed.

Though I expected something to click into place, for the air to vibrate with certainty, I felt nothing. But maybe it was too hard to notice clicks and vibrations when my sister yelled in the distance about getting to civilization and that we couldn’t stop for the night yet. When Hobbs argued back that we were far from civilization and the sun was setting, that this was as good a place as any to sleep and she needed to pull the rod out of her ass. When Red Grass told her to clean the fish he’d caught, since she’d stolen his knife.

I’d listen for that click later, I resolved, when all was still and quiet.

T
he newborn fire that crackled beside the stream looked like a blur of dots after a toss of dice. I couldn’t say why, but I felt unsettled by them, maybe because they made it harder to appreciate the red sky’s promise of good weather for the next day. Whatever the reason, when an opportunity to step away from camp presented itself, I took it.

I followed Hobbs along the water’s edge, stopping when brush snapped underfoot to collect twigs and slender branches already downed by nature.

“You don’t have to help, you know.” He stopped to assess a tree’s black limb.

“I don’t mind,” I said, well aware that Hobbs didn’t need help. It was hard to imagine him as anything other than self-sufficient. But someone had to have taught him along the way. Maybe that’s why he took the time to pull folks up to the next rung on Darwin’s ladder—to pay it forward, or pay it back. “How do you know to do all this stuff, anyhow?”

“Learned it.” He pulled at the limb appraisingly. “Did what I had to do.”

Your friend Hobbs is a criminal
.

Maybe that was something he felt he’d had to do, too.

“Why did you take what you took from your father?” I asked him.

“The coins?” he said, as if I’d already known that detail. “Red put you up to this? He send you on a fishing expedition with me?”

“Red Grass didn’t ask me anything about it.” I crouched, added sticks to the growing pile in my arms. “Why would he?”

“I got stupid one night thanks to Vladimir, told Red I had some coins. Now he won’t shut up about them—how he could sell them, how I could be rich and not even know it. Like I’d ever hand them over.” He wrenched branches from the limb—one, then another. “You’re the only one who knows the whole truth—that I took them and from who—so just keep it to yourself, hear?”

I rose again to my feet. “I will.”

I might’ve told him he was wrong—that Jazz knew he’d stolen the coins, and probably Red Grass, because who else could’ve told her?—but I had a different goal then.

“What I asked, I asked just for me,” I said. “I find you interesting, is all.”

“Stop that.”

“What?”

“Trying to get inside my head,” he said, and continued crack-pop-cracking.

“Why? What’s inside your head that isn’t fit for company?”

He laughed, said, “Plenty. I’d offer to trade you one dark secret for another”
—crack
—“but my guess is you don’t have any dark secrets to trade, little Livya.”

“I blinded myself.”

“What? How?” He turned toward me then, though I couldn’t tell if his look conveyed interest, pity, or anything that might bear a label worth naming.

“Staring at the sun.”

“Why would you do that?” he asked slowly. Interest.

I could’ve told him that the sun smelled like Mama. It might’ve been enough to hear, had been for my family. But even though it was true, I knew it wasn’t the full truth.
Be real
.