The Moon Sisters (19 page)

In the distance, a small tent sat beside a low-burning fire. Hobbs twirled a long stick in the flames. Someone snored. The only disaster, then, had been in my mind.

Olivia crouched beside me. “You were dreaming, I think. Do you remember what about?”

Oran, gun shots, and ghost lights. Our mother’s face. I didn’t
want to talk about any of it, especially the feelings I’d had. These were not Olivia’s realities or her nightmares.

“Nothing you’d understand.” I wiped at my eyes, clearing away a rim of crust. “You’ve never felt trapped in your life.”

“You have?”

There was genuine surprise in her voice. Which genuinely surprised me. Couldn’t she see how different our lives had been growing up?

“Here’s a wake-up call,” I said. “We had different mothers. You had a buddy who let you wander through whatever subjects you felt like studying for your so-called school, and let you wander all over town, too, to have fun and do whatever the hell you wanted. I was made to take a different road. Stay in school and study everything like all the other kids, and stay at home instead of roaming around—unless it was to find you, of course. Learn to make some money if I could, or at least learn to make a good meal for the family.” I slapped at my leg, sure that I’d been bitten by at least a hundred mosquitoes. “I was forced to do what was right and sane and sensible.”

“Forced? Was what you would’ve done
not
right and sane and sensible?” When I didn’t answer, her wide eyes went wider still. “Do you still feel trapped? Maybe working at the funeral home isn’t—”

“Jesus Christ, here we go,” I said. “Do me a favor and don’t start with this right now.” I took a breath—a long one—and let it out slowly.

After a minute, she said, “What happened to you earlier happened to Mama sometimes. She always said it was getting her breathing under control that was the key.”

I stared at her. “I don’t remember that happening. When did that happen?”

“At home,” she said. “During the day most of the time, when it was just the two of us. It was always pretty quick. Has it ever happened to you before tonight?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re all right now.”

She told me that I’d been asleep for a few hours and missed a dinner of fish and beans, then brought me a handful of granola bars. Red Grass and Hobbs had made an inventory of the food we had between us earlier—biscuits and peanut butter, beef jerky and trail mix, tuna fish, more beans, oatmeal, Ramen noodles, and a block of cheese—before slinging the food bag over a tree limb to keep it from the bears. Olivia had kept a secret stash for me, but if I hadn’t woken up before she went to sleep she would’ve eaten it herself and buried the wrappers until morning. She wouldn’t risk bears.

Common sense. Foresight. What a surprise.

As I chewed on the last bite of the first granola bar, sitting across from my sister on that scratchy blanket, I struggled to find words to express what I needed to say. I wondered if Olivia sensed that, because she stayed rooted there, quiet, as if waiting. The first part, at least, was easy.

“Thank you for everything you did earlier,” I said, brushing crumbs from my mouth. “You were there when I needed you, and I won’t forget that anytime soon.”

She nudged my foot with hers. “Sure.”

I stumbled ahead. “There were a few seconds there, when all of that was happening, when I couldn’t see anything.” A handful of moments when everything went black, when fear peaked, when I thought for sure I’d die—or at least pass out. I knew it wasn’t the same for Olivia, but it seemed the same enough. “I want you to know … I want to say that I’m sorry about your eyes.”

I’d never said that before—that simple sentiment of regret for what was and couldn’t be changed—but it seemed important, somehow, to say it now. And, regardless of how or why it had happened, I meant it.

“Thanks,” she said. “That means a lot.”

The fire popped. Red Grass continued to snore. I glanced at Hobbs, who sneered back at me.

“Do you still have that knife?” I asked Olivia, and she handed it over.

She lingered awhile longer, then joined Hobbs by the fire. I lay on my back, and while I traced the bumps on the knife’s handle with my fingers, I traced the bars of Oran in the stars with my eyes. I didn’t like thinking about it—my mother in a cage or a casket.
Just a dream
, part of me said, but another part said,
Maybe not
. She’d killed herself. And Olivia said she’d experienced the sort of anxiety I’d felt tonight, more than once.

Had our mother felt … trapped? Not just right before she turned on the oven gas but before? How often? What was going through her head when she felt that way? What had she done to make sense of it all? Or didn’t she know herself any better than I knew myself?

Beth Moon, forty-three, passed away on the third Tuesday in February at her home after living a miserable life
.

Unsatisfied
.

Unhappy
.

Smothered
.

Fading
.

Failing
.

Detaching
.

Decaying
.

Declining
.

Turning to dust
.

Later, when I looked back up at the stars, I didn’t imagine the bars of Oran. I saw the freckles that had covered my mother’s face.

After I ate, and drank the rest of my water, I pulled the rough blanket I’d slept on toward what remained of the fire.

Olivia, at some point, had curled up beside the sleeping criminal. Just as I looked at him, his eyes opened, like I’d set off some sort of radar or something.

“Keep your hands off my sister,” I said.

He smiled, said, “Can’t help my draw with the ladies.” So close to getting punched in the face for a second time.

A rattling snore came from inside the tent. I looked at it, then back at Hobbs.

He shrugged. “Red Grass wasn’t about to let a good tent go to waste after you girls didn’t seem to want it.”

I kept my voice low. “How noble of you to step in and try to change his mind. You know we would’ve used it. I was just … indisposed.”

“Call it whatever you want. I never said I was noble.”

“I hate you more than I can express,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and closed his eyes. “I think you’ve expressed it pretty well.”

“Fuck you,” I whispered.

“Fuck you, too,” he said, somehow hearing me. “And sweet dreams.”

I stared after him, but he didn’t open his eyes again. Minutes later, he was snoring lightly beside my sister.

That right there? Was something to watch.

Olivia and Hobbs were strangely alike, both wild as the wind. But whatever had started would end soon enough. Tomorrow we’d find civilization, Red Grass would implement his plan, and it would be over. Until then, I’d close my eyes for a few minutes. I’d breathe.

My hand was still wrapped around the knife when I awoke. The others were already up, had already stuffed the tent back into its pouch and reattached it to Red Grass’s pack, pulled down the food bag, and refilled our water bottles. Olivia stood knee-deep in the stream wearing another of our mother’s old T-shirts, her arms held out like she was the second coming, and whatever had happened between us in the night seemed a million miles away.

The anxiety I’d felt yesterday, that had crescendoed into a sort of personal hell the night before? That seemed better, for whatever reason. The men didn’t ask about it, why I’d felt so terrified and lost and smothered by my own thoughts. This might’ve been an
unanticipated show of politeness on their part or simple apathy, but regardless I was grateful. It might be a new day, but I didn’t understand myself any more than I ever did. I could only hope I never experienced anything like that again, or had to endure another night in the woods. I scratched at my skin, counted twenty bug bites on my right arm alone.

I found a single biscuit beside an open jar of peanut butter on a nearby rock and ate it. Brought my bottle up to my lips and drank as a V of birds flew over us, heading who knew where. It didn’t seem like the time of year for travel.

After we grabbed our packs and gathered the displaced bits of ourselves from the grasses and the bank, I asked Red Grass which way to civilization. I met his eyes and let mine ask,
We’re still doing this, aren’t we? Still on the same page?
He nodded, with his brows creased just enough to tell me what I needed to know, then pointed in a direction that seemed southerly based on the risen sun.

I took the lead. Maybe it was insensible, maybe I didn’t know where we were going, exactly, but if someone had to lead the V, I’d rather be the one to do it. If anyone thought this was a bad idea, they wisely kept their opinion to themselves.

I still had the knife.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Crossroads

   OLIVIA   

A
thin-fingered dawn touched the sky as I woke. The fire had died, and the air had chilled. Babka’s words lingered in my mind like a fog.

You’ll have to choose
.

I’d dreamed again about my family, stuck in a hall. Papa was there, sitting with his legs crossed and spinning the blue jar that held Mama’s ashes. When the jar stopped, he’d kiss it, then spin it again. Sometimes it spun itself into a bottle of Vladimir.

Babka stood before a wall that held the calendar in my mind. She warned me to be careful, then lifted a flaming
S
right off Saturday and stuck it in her pocket.

I didn’t see Jazz, so I ran down the hall, following the sound of hissing ellipses and the fainter note of a drum—an animal-skin call of
wrongdreams, wrongdreams, wrongdreams
.

The hall split, each end bearing a bobbing ghost light. I stopped, unsure what to do, which way to go.

“I’m dying,” someone said with a voice that washed itself of identity and direction.

Jazz?

“Dreams like feet better than knees,” said Babka, her voice somewhere above me. “What do your insides tell you to do?”

I didn’t know.

“You’ll have to choose.”

I couldn’t choose.

Beside me, Hobbs continued to sleep. I shifted until I could see my sister, and braided my hair until the sun rose.

Jazz led the way that morning as we tramped through an especially dry section of forest. The sound of sticks splintering crisply underfoot looked, in my mind, like shimmering Viking ships, with a swoop of features on either end—a curved tail, a crested head with teeth.

Maybe it was because I’d had a decent night’s sleep, but I was getting better at this, tripping less. Avoiding more reliably the stumps and divots and rocks. It helped, too, that Hobbs had made my bag easier to deal with, attaching makeshift straps to the handle so that I could wear it on my back. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, and it swished a broom-sweep of magenta alongside me with every step, but it was light enough and my hands liked their freedom.

“Hey, Hobbs!” my sister would call back on occasion.

“Bitch?” he’d say by way of address.

“This still the right way?”

He’d say we were fine or adjust us a bit, directing us through a patch of cattails or up a hill thick with the scent of warm pine. Once, I asked about the flowers we were passing—red and slight and dotting the land in abundance.

“I don’t know, Olivia,” Jazz said, assuming I was asking her. “I’m not equipped to be your tour guide.”

Hobbs stopped and squatted near the plants. “They’re a type of clover.” He pulled something free. “And here’s a find. You can eat these if you’re hungry.” He tucked half a dozen stems into my hand.

More than once, I felt his arm brush against mine in a way that might’ve been accidental or intentional but that always made
me smile. There was a sort of comfort to having him nearby, this green-eyed boy with a voice that curved like a hammock, that made me want to crawl right into it and lie down. I kept him talking, asked him to tell a ghost story—because every West Virginian worth his salt knew at least a dozen. He didn’t disappoint, told the tale of a man named Earl McGuffin who’d killed his three daughters and his wife by drowning them in a river before flinging himself off a bridge.