The Moon Sisters (18 page)

I think I told her to get out, though it’s hazy to me, like a faded nightmare. Get out. Of her own home. The home she’d made in Tramp with her husband before I was ever even born. The home she’d opened to me when Branik and I married, when I carried her first grandchild. Get out. She left. She is staying with a friend down the road and says she’ll remain there until she can find another place to live
.

The next morning, Jazz decided to get out, too; she sneaked out of the house and down the road to see her grandmother. She knows I don’t allow her out of the house without permission, and though this was the first time she’s ever broken the rules, I was furious when I found her crawling back in through a window and learned what she’d done. I spanked her until we both cried. I know you believe a spank every now and then is okay, but I’d never laid an angry hand on her until the trunk incident, until I saw her glorying in Mom’s old skeletons and awakened to the lure of their bones
.

I will never hit her or anyone ever again. I swear this to you now, and, even more, I swear it to myself. Still, I feel … fractured, as if I’ve beaten my own bones and lost a piece of myself in the process. Branik says we can’t change what’s done, that he trusts me not to hit Jazz again, and that the well of despair I feel growing deeper is all in my head
.

I know you always thought I let my emotions have too much control over my actions, Dad, that I needed to learn how to rule life with my brain. But I’ve never figured out how to suppress
feeling
when it surges in me like a tsunami, destroying all the sensible structures I’ve built up over time
.

How do you suppress a tsunami?

I cannot control the shifts of land that cause them, or predict when those shifts will happen or even how they’ll be triggered
.

And Jazz … I don’t know why I let it bother me so much that she’s attached to Drahomíra. I think she would move in with her grandmother if I let her, and then her future would be limited to running the bakery and making scratchy blankets out of squares of yarn. Is it so wrong to want more for her when she could do and be anything she set her mind to? If you knew her, you’d see what I mean. You’d find a way to hone her potential, because there’s so much within her—a drive I never had, along with a brain and an ability to set her priorities in line and stick to them. She is so much like you
.

I can’t tell yet who Olivia resembles the most, though she is attached—wholly, thankfully, to me. And she is such a happy toddler. I can hardly bear to look at her sometimes, because the light of her brings tears to my eyes, like staring at the sun. Sometimes she’s even able to pull me out of an up-and-down just by being herself. Sometimes not. Sometimes the tsunami takes me, and I can’t even walk to the grocery store for milk or eggs, or stay awake. I suppose some wells of despair are too deep for even a light as bright as Olivia to fill
.

Overly dramatic and self-pitying. That’s me right now. Unfit company for even a paper father
.

Beth

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A History of Oran

   JAZZ   

M
y mother’s service was held at Rutherford & Son Funeral Home in Kennaton, with a handful of people in attendance—some I recognized and others I didn’t know at all. Maybe the strangers were friends from some other life, from college. My eyes swept over them once, like dust under a rug.

My father was trying to hold it together, I could tell. Olivia and Babka cried openly. They had the same bone structure, the same heart-shaped face, the same arch to their eyebrows. They wore the same
how-did-this-happen, this-can’t-be-happening
expression, as if they expected someone to wake them any second, pinch them into reality again, because this was not a thing that was possible.

Beth Moon could not be dead.

Beth Moon was a mother.

Beth Moon was a wife.

Beth Moon had been teacher to Olivia.

Beth Moon had a story to write.

Beth Moon could not be dead.

She could not have killed herself.

I watched it all from a strange position—beside my grandmother
and my sister but somehow not there at all, like an arm out of joint, waiting for something to snap me back into place. I did not cry. I did not feel. I didn’t want to, either.

Classical music played around us, soft and somber and low. I recognized piano. Violins. Three couches and eight chairs spanned the room. I noted their arrangement, the way each was decorated with pillows to be as aesthetically pleasing and as comfortable as possible. These were the things I thought as I tried not to look into my mother’s open casket.

Dear friends
, said someone—a priest, maybe—and I stood there and didn’t listen.

Funerals were expensive; I wasn’t sure how we would afford this. A random thought. I let it go.

The man stopped speaking.

The day ended, and we went home, and I crawled into bed but couldn’t sleep.

Later, during that time when my father drove Olivia and me around with him in Kennaton, when my skin didn’t feel like my own, when I walked the city and collected obituaries, I found my mother’s death notice in the library.

BETH MOON

Beth Moon, 43, passed away the third Tuesday of February at her home. She is survived by her husband, Branik Moon; her two children, Jazz Marie, and Olivia Francis; and her mother-in-law, Drahomíra Moon. Funeral services will be held this coming Wednesday at 1:00
P.M
. at Rutherford & Son Funeral Home, 245 Main Street, Kennaton, with calling hours held an hour before, from noon to 1:00.

Short and impersonal. Nothing about her parents, or any of that pain. Nothing about how she died. Nothing about her story or homeschooling my sister or the secrets she’d hidden under the
floorboard—these things that filled the years and months and days of a now finished life. There was a person and now there was not a person. Now there was this piece of paper, and memories of a priest droning on in a smokescreen place about a woman he’d never known, and none of it made sense.

None of it made sense.

But when we got home that night and my father and sister went upstairs to sleep, it was I who stayed behind to check that all the lights were off, that the door was locked, that the gas was not running in the kitchen.

Finding an animal dead on the stream bank pushed me over the proverbial edge. A raccoon, Hobbs said, and probably rabid, considering how emaciated it looked, how dehydrated. So close to what it needed yet unable to take it in.

The anxiety I’d felt all day didn’t care whether or not I understood it. It swelled inside me, consuming reason, leaving me with nothing but a bunch of irrational thoughts and skittery nerves. And so while Hobbs tended to the fire, while Olivia hummed a song, while Red Grass griped that I’d done a piss-poor job of preparing the fish, while somewhere my grandmother and father were at their homes, eating (or drinking), or taking a nap under familiar roofs and in familiar beds, I struggled to breathe.

It was almost as if my body had forgotten how to do it, my mind too busy racing from one thought to the next to remember:
in and out
. I’d wondered many times over the last few months what it might feel like to die. Now it crescendoed in me, a certainty that this was it, that I would die then and there.

Lost.

Homeless.

Wild.

Chaotic. Emotional.

Reckless.

Mad.

Unbalanced.

Unreasonable.

Uncontrollable.

Unwilling.

Unthinking.

Unsafe.

Shaking.

Crushing.

Sweating.

Hot.

Freezing.

Tingling.

Floating.

Smothering.

Fading.

Failing.

Detaching.

Decaying.

Declining.

Turning to dust.

“Jazz?”

Olivia stood below me somehow; I felt outside of my own body, looking down on us both. And though I appeared alive there in the weeds beside her, I also seemed more beast than human. Panting, red in the face, so close to what I needed yet unable to take it in.

Hobbs and Red Grass closed in around us.

“The hell?” Hobbs said.

“Scared of bears or somethin’?” said Red Grass. “You see one, you stand up tall and pound your chest.” He provided an example, growled.

I watched myself hold up my palm.

Go. Go away. If I was going to die, it would not be with two train hoppers hanging over me. I heard my heart pound double time in my chest, like I’d been running with a murderer on my tail.

“I’ll take care of her,” said Olivia. I watched her sit close to me, put her arms around me, put her palm against my head and rest it on her shoulder. “You guys go back to the fire.”

“I’m dying,” I heard myself say.

“You’re not. I’m here. You’re here.”

“I’m not here.”

“Feel this?” She rubbed her hand against my head. I felt it. “You’re here, and you’re going to be okay. Breathe slow breaths instead of quick ones and you’ll feel better. Try.”

“I think”—breathe—“my heart”—breathe—“is going”—breathe—“to explode.”

“It won’t,” she said, and rubbed again. “Take a long breath this time, like this.”

She breathed. I breathed.

It might’ve been fifteen minutes. It might’ve been seventeen hours. But we sat and breathed together until my heart slowed and I came back to myself, to weak muscles and heavy limbs and a dry mouth.

“You’re exhausted,” said Olivia. “Why don’t you try to sleep? I’ll take care of you.”

I didn’t have the will to argue.

The last thing I remember, before I closed my eyes and lay against a blanket I’d never seen before, was that I handed my sister the knife.

I dreamed of a city under siege. A pigeonless, treeless, gardenless city, forced into a state of quarantine after the rats came and the plague hit, its dying and scrambling citizens made to do without the railroad or contact with loved ones on the outside.

I stood inside the gate of this doomed place with my hands on the bars, begging for someone to let me out as blood-eyed vermin bit
at my bare toes. Dozens of fellow citizens stood beside me, crashing against the bars as well. Their lips moved as if they, too, cried out, yet they made no noise. I continued to yell, they continued to hit. No one came.

Finally, another’s cry—a real sound. I turned to find a closed casket behind me, which was not so strange in a city full of the dead, but saw no one.

“Help me, help!”

The plea came from inside the coffin.

My fingers curved around the lip of the wood, ready to lift the lid, when a shot rang out and the casket jolted.

“And stay dead!” said a man I couldn’t see.

The silent people turned thin, then faded to ghost lights and disappeared like smoke. The casket became a bird cage, its bars narrower and narrower until I could see that inside it lay a mound of person with brown hair and freckles.

A hand landed on my shoulder, and I swung out at it.

“Jazz!”

I opened my eyes to find a night sky and a dim form over me.

“Are you all right?” Olivia asked.

Where was I? I felt like I’d been hit by a small biscuit bus. I pushed up on my elbows, reorienting myself. Oh, right. In the woods with my sister and two strangers; I’d left her alone with these men after my body forgot how to breathe. Left her, to dream about a place I’d read about in a book.

Again.

For whatever reason, my mind didn’t seem able or willing to leave the city of Oran.