The Moon Sisters (37 page)

I rubbed my fingers along the straps pressing into my shoulders. Marbles. The bag’s straps felt like marbles.

“After Mom died, I didn’t say anything because it didn’t matter,” I said. “Because her being gone took priority.”

And everything was falling apart, I added silently. You were falling apart. Staring at the sun. Losing your eyes. Dad with his booze.

“I didn’t think much about him after that until yesterday,” I continued, “when I realized the truth might hit you hard.”

“Why did you think it might hit me hard?” she said, with a voice that seemed—looked, somehow—clumped. Like curdled milk.

“It’s such a clear connection, Olivia.”

“That she killed herself, you mean?”

“Yes. That she killed herself.”

Her cry grew blue tentacles that dribbled down the counter and puddled onto the sleeping floor. “It’s my fault.”

“What? That’s not—”

“I knew she was in one of her up-and-downs that morning, and hardly tried to help,” she said. “I knew it, and I left her anyhow. It was my job to pull her out of her funk and be there when she needed to—”

“It was
not
your job, it was—”

“Before I left, I told her to stay warm, Jazz. What if she turned on the stove because I told her to stay warm? I can’t remember if it was on before I left or not, and I told her—”

“Olivia Moon, you stop it right now, do you hear me?” I got to my feet, strained to get a glimpse of her face, connect with her however I might, but again I couldn’t see past her toes. “You can’t believe what happened is your fault!”

“I saw the way her voice looked, so low down, but I told myself she’d be okay because I had plans and … Why did I ignore what she said?”

“What did she say?” Why had I never asked that?

“She said, ‘If you live your whole life hoping and dreaming the wrong things, what does that mean about your whole life?’ ” A spiderweb sensation crawled over my arms and up the back of my neck. “Maybe Hobbs is right. Nothing brings on pain like a dream. Grandpa Orin was the dream. He was everything. She knew he was gone that morning—that’s what she meant, why she was so upset. She was in pain, and I—I left her!”

She gave another blue-tentacle cry, and I met it with one of my own.

“I left her, too—the day she found the obituary, I left her in the kitchen!” I said, and felt something dark and dormant crack open inside of me, like my own private tomb. “Don’t think it doesn’t slay me to remember that, because it does.”

That I hadn’t made her talk to me, hadn’t dug any deeper.

That I hadn’t told anyone.

That, if I had, maybe none of this would’ve happened.

It was all there, under my own loose floorboards—my slow-boil pot of water.

“You’re not the only one with regrets, Olivia Moon. You’re not the only one with grief issues. You’re not the only one who misses her, either, even if you think it’s true,” I said, and I swear I felt dirt on my tongue.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, her voice quieter than it had been.

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll never know if Mama and I might’ve been friends one day. And now I have to figure my shit out alone.”

“Is that why you took her letters?” she asked. “To figure things out?”

Maybe. Maybe that was the reason.

The letters on the refrigerator changed colors; even the
A
turned purple.

“Those notes are tied to my life,” I said, as I blinked back at the message. “They’re what she wrote because I was conceived. That’s why he disowned her, you know, because I existed.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe it or not. It’s true.”

“Have you read them?”

“No.” I corrected myself, focused again on my sister’s toes. “I read a few, but that was years ago.”

Why hadn’t I read them already? All of them, start to finish?

The answer shot through me with a stunning suddenness: I was afraid to read about all the ways that I might’ve ruined my mother’s life—turned her into a person who couldn’t complete things, who slept too much and couldn’t face her days with any regularity, who’d left her children an inheritance of abandoned dreams. Not opening those envelopes left me with the slimmest hope.…

It’ll taste like hope
, Olivia had said.
The will-o’-the-wisp
.

Olivia needed hope because she feared what the letter she’d found would say, too, that it would prove that our mother had committed suicide.

Mama’s life meant something—dreams and hopes are worth something!

Of course Olivia would want to believe that, because if your own mother decided life wasn’t worth living, and dreams and hopes weren’t worth having, what did it mean for you? What did it mean when you were just eighteen? If you thought it was your fault? If you felt that fear confirmed in your grandfather’s obituary?

The room gave a little spin.

Olivia wasn’t on a counter at all—of course she wasn’t!—and the reason I faced her feet was that she was laid out on a branch. I was not standing on a table; I straddled a wooden tree-house window—one foot on the floor, the other on the same branch as my sister’s body. Behind me was a simple tree house. Gone was the intricate staircase. Gone were the stove and the typewriter. The refrigerator and its letters.

Gone, finally, were my marbles.

“Olivia, what the hell are you doing out there?”

“The light was here earlier. I saw it. I thought I smelled Mama, but now everything tastes like ashes again.”

“Olivia, the soup we ate is making us sick,” I said as evenly as I could while my heart beat triple time in my chest. “It’s making us see things that aren’t there, do you understand me? You’re on a limb, an actual tree limb, and the ground”—I looked down, felt even more nauseated—“is not close. For God’s sake, be careful!”

“The light was in my blind spot. It was—” She lifted her arm, then slapped it back to the limb when her body slipped.

“Careful!”

“I can’t hold on,” she said. “The tree’s made of butter.”

“Yes, you will fucking hold on! There is no other option than you holding on!”

This was not going to happen. I would not lose more family. I tested the weight of the branch under my foot, but didn’t dare try it when the wood turned to water before my eyes.

It’s just the soup
, I told myself.
There’s still a branch there. It’s not water, or butter
.

“Olivia, you need to move back slowly, okay?” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “Move little by little, and I’ll help—”

“Mama’s out there somewhere.”

“If she is, she’d want you to come over here right now.” I felt a surge of anger, of desperation. “Right now, Olivia Moon. Do you hear me? Move.”

The pressure in my chest eased when her feet began to edge toward me. One inch. Another. I did my best to ignore the green things above her head, buzzing around her like dragonflies on mushrooms.

“That’s so good, Olivia, keep doing that,” I said as she made her way closer. Branch water splashed my arm when she gave a small kick. “Careful. Careful. Keep coming.”

It happened when I tried to stretch a little more, to latch on to her ankle or any available part of her. My bag caught on something. I reached behind me until I felt the marbles, and then I pulled off my bag. Let it drop. Fall toward grasses that seemed a hundred miles down.

A huge blast of energy rose up in waves of light and Olivia reeled back, let go, fell and fell and fell away from the tree to follow the bag.

I screamed.

The ground stopped breathing.

And whatever was left of the sun went dark.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Hope Chest

   OLIVIA   

G
oodbye wasn’t as simple as packing up clothes and furniture and deciding in your head that that’s the way it was going to be. Goodbye wasn’t a
thinking
thing; it was a
feeling
thing. Goodbye was hard. Goodbye took time.

Sometimes the best way to say goodbye was to say it as if it wasn’t forever. Goodbye, I’ll see you again soon. Goodbye, see you tomorrow, maybe—or next week, or next year. Goodbye, see you at the tree.

Mama never said goodbye, not ever. Instead she’d say,
There’s a long way to go before the end
. That made it easier, somehow.

Chicks, chirping. Yellow birds, full of feathers, fluttering around their nest. They surrounded me, noisy. I shushed them with my eyes clenched.

“You’re awake! Good,” someone said. This was a voice I didn’t know, a tunnel with streamers hanging from the top.

I tried to open my eyes, and failed. Sank back into the darkness.

The next time I heard the birds, I realized they weren’t birds at all; they were squeaky wheels.

I willed my eyes open, heard the tunnel-streamer voice again.

“There you are.” She leaned over me—a plump dark-skinned woman. “Don’t be afraid, sweetie. You’re in the hospital. You’ve been asleep for a good long while—half a day. You had a nasty fall and broke a rib, but try not to worry. We’re going to take care of you.”

Warm blankets covered my body, and it felt as if there were a few stuffed inside my head, too. Something tightened around my arm, and I jerked back.

“That’s just a machine taking your blood pressure. I’ll take it off in a minute,” the woman said. “You’ll be able to see your family soon, once you do a few things for me. Can you follow this light with your eyes?”

“No,” I said, “I can’t.” And then I started to cry.

A short while later, Papa, Babka, and Jazz came to see me. Jazz cried, said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life. I thought you’d died!” Babka kissed me a hundred times with her dewy lips and draped rosary beads over my chest. Papa leaned his head against mine, said, “I can’t believe I let you go … could’ve lost you both … was such a bad father.” His voice curled through the air like smoke rings from a pipe, and he smelled like cut grass again instead of vodka.

A nurse poked her head around a curtain, asked if I’d like some ice chips. I nodded. My throat hurt. My chest ached. Light streamed around me. How many hours had I lost?

“What happened?” I asked my family. The last thing I recalled was kissing Hobbs in the tree house.

“I couldn’t get to you in time,” Jazz said.

“Get to me?”

“You were so far away. I tried, but—”

I noticed Babka reach for my sister. “There, there, little
macka
. It is not your fault.”

“Jazz? Just tell me,” I said.

“You were on a tree limb,” Jazz started. “Do you remember that?”

I didn’t remember.

“My bag dropped,” she said. “You fell right after it, right off the limb. You really don’t remember anything?”

I didn’t, and said so.

“It’s all right, Liv. The important thing is you’re safe now.” Papa sat on the bed beside me. “We’re lucky you weren’t hurt a lot worse. We’re lucky you’re both all right after what you’ve been through. So lucky.”

“You could’ve died,” said Jazz. “You could’ve broken your neck or spine. We were so far up, and it looked farther at the time. It looked like a mile-long drop, though I guess that was from the mushrooms. I will never eat mushrooms again.”