The Moon Sisters (38 page)

My skin prickled as pieces of the night before returned to memory. The soup. The obituary. The lights. My despair. Everything Jazz had told me. The slick-butter feel of the limb under my hands. And then I remembered what had come before even that: the
Bill bell
. Danger at the house. “Where’s Hobbs?”

“I think he’s still with the police,” Jazz said, resting her hand over my shoulder when I struggled to pull myself upright. “Trust me, it’s better to hear this lying down.”

The coins Hobbs had taken from Bill
had
been stolen goods, she said, and when Hobbs tried to sell them he triggered the long memory of one West Virginia shop owner. The theft, though it happened more than a dozen years ago, had been big news because it also involved murder, arson, and the kidnapping of a young boy.

“The boy was Hobbs,” Jazz said before doubling my shock. “Red Grass is his grandfather.”

Reginald Guthrie was his real name, a retired insurance salesman who’d never given up hope that his grandson, whose body hadn’t been recovered from the fire that had killed Reginald’s son and daughter-in-law, was still alive somewhere. When the shop owner saw the coins Hobbs brought into the store in April—the combination of rare treasures too unique to be coincidental—he contacted not the police to share his shop’s footage but the man whose grief
and well-publicized frustration with the authorities had touched so many of them: Reginald. The kid, the shop owner had told him, looked like a train tramp. And the shop, as it turned out, was close to the rails.

“Red made posters out of that footage, plastered them in train towns across the state,” said Jazz, as a nurse settled a cold cup in my hands. “Finally, a train worker called to say he’d seen Hobbs. That’s when Red knew he’d do anything to make contact with the kid who’d tried to sell his son’s coins. Anything.”

He read two books on train hopping, grew some scruff, and adopted a less polished vocabulary. He bought light camping gear, a dependable flashlight, and a tracking device. It was May when he infiltrated the train community, and he admitted that he nearly killed himself on his first few runs. He thought it would take a week, at most, to find Hobbs; it took a month. Harder still was trying to get a look at the coins, proving the link to his son’s murder. And because of some confusion about Hobbs’s real birthday—and the fact that he used to be a plump, blond child and not a thin, dark hopper—it wasn’t until Reginald escaped the outbuilding that he knew for certain that Hobbs was family.

“I don’t have all the details,” Jazz said, “but after we left, Red contacted that expert we met with, to verify that the coins matched the set stolen from his son. When he learned they did, he drove back to J.D.’s in his own car to find out where we’d gone. That’s when he saw the coat.”

“Coat?” I asked around the ice in my mouth.

I leaned close as Jazz explained how J.D. had pulled Hobbs’s baby coat from a trunk of Alice’s old things while looking for a pair of sweats for Jazz. It was still out when Red went back to the cabin—a link to Hobbs’s old life that he recognized. J.D. found Red crying with the coat in his hands, and after hearing the story he led the way to Bill’s place himself.

“No one was hurt,” said Jazz, as I crunched through my ice. “Bill was asleep when they got there, so I don’t know, maybe Red
sat on him. However it happened, it sounds like there wasn’t even a fight. Hobbs learned it all after Betty rang the bell, and he ran to the house.”

“Poor Hobbs.” My fingers dug into the cup. “He must be so overwhelmed.”

“He wasn’t exactly open to what Red had to say, I guess. He walked out after hearing the story, even though Bill didn’t deny any of it, then minutes later found you lying like the dead at the bottom of a tree. What a mess he was for a while, holding you before the medics arrived, threatening you with beyond-the-grave curses if you dared die. I thought you were already gone.”

I pictured this: Hobbs rocking me back and forth, so like Papa with Mama before the ambulance took her away. The memory of falling from the tree came to me then. The fear that I might die. The absolute recognition that I didn’t want to, regardless of how I’d felt minutes before, when I learned a truth that had made my insides wither and ache.

My grandfather was dead. Dead before my mother by a week.

He had to have been on her mind as she sat with her pages that morning, when she’d spoken about wrong hopes and wrong dreams and alluded to a wasted life. Had she been steeped in regret over not sending those letters?

Maybe Mama never sent the letters not because she feared that her father might not forgive her but because she knew—with ninety-nine percent of herself—that he never would.
That’s
what she believed, believed, why she never could bring herself to take action and why it might have hit her so hard when he died—when that one percent chance dropped to zero.

If she’d felt such a loss of hope that there seemed no other option …

Could she have?

Would she have?

Did she imagine, even for a moment, that a world without her parent in it was too bleak a world to face? That he was waiting for
her at the tree? That the oven was there, right there, and all she needed was an absence of light, of fire, to make the pain go away? It took just one desperate moment to do something permanent. One desperate moment when everything felt black, when it seemed all hope was gone.

And what if it had happened—this worst thing? Did that mean she didn’t want us? Didn’t love us? That we weren’t, never had been, enough?

Hadn’t she wanted more for her life than to reconcile with her father? I knew she had. She wanted to learn how to speak French. She wanted to send one of Papa’s songs to Nashville. She wanted Tramp to set up a town newspaper, even if it came out only once a month, and she wanted to help run it. She wanted to get her license back if she could. She wanted Jazz to go to college. She wanted Babka to start baking pepperoni rolls. She wanted to paint the kitchen pink. She wanted grandchildren someday. Lots of them.

I wish I could go back in time and tell her that maybe hope was no more than a foolish fire, but that maybe it could lead you to your heart’s desires if you took a chance. I wish I could tell her that she could believe in her dreams with one percent of herself or ninety-nine percent or any percent in between, and she could believe whatever she needed to about her parent’s last thoughts before dying.

So could I.

I felt it inside me like a flame, a pilot light that would never go out. Hope. Felt, too, the tingling of my feet, ready to climb me back into a tree, even if it meant I’d fall out of it again.

“I hope Mama knows she made it to the glades,” I said to my family. “I hope she’s happy, that she knows we love her no matter what. And we’ll miss her, and never forget her.”

Babka squeezed my hand.

“I can’t believe you live in that mushroom-soup world all the time,” Jazz said, her voice a wobbly line. “With all those shapes and colors flying around in your head. I don’t know how you get anything done at all.”

I would’ve said something about all of that, but the squeaky wheels came back. Chicks, chirping. Yellow birds, full of feathers, fluttering around their nest.

And I wanted to listen.

It was late in the afternoon before Hobbs arrived, and I knew right away that something was wrong, because he wouldn’t come close. Maybe he didn’t want to hug me because he was afraid he’d hurt my rib. When the nurse came in to check my blood pressure and talk over my discharge instructions—there wouldn’t be any tree climbing for a while—he stood at the window with his back turned. And, after she left, he said what we were both thinking.

“You’re going to have to go now. So am I.”

But everything had changed.

I slid out of bed and stepped beside him, my feet covered with blue hospital slippers. It seemed that it might be a chocolate coffee day outside—the sky was bright, the sun shone—but the glass was cold under my fingers.

“It’s not goodbye,” I told him.

“Maybe it should be,” he said. “I’d be no good for a girl like you. Your sister sees that, has from the start. And you’d get over it—that taste in your mouth.”

Once upon a time, Stan had pulled away from me, too, when things got hard. But I hadn’t cared enough to fight for that relationship. Now I cared. Now I’d fight.

“Stubborn hopper.” I took his hand, made him face me. “I won’t get over it, because I don’t want to. And you can’t scare me off with talk of damage or whatever you’ve done in the name of survival or however much ink you’ve put on your skin, either. That’s love. Tastes good, doesn’t it?”

He tipped his head, and I thought I might’ve noticed a flick of his tongue, a lick of lips. When I hugged him, his fingers settled on the seam of my gown, spread against my back.

“What is it that you want?” I asked. “I mean, deep down.”

He pushed his face against my neck. “I don’t even know what I’m
supposed
to want anymore.”

I knew he must be thinking about the kidnapping and who he was in truth—Christopher Guthrie. Hobbs didn’t want to talk about any of that, he’d said, or about Bill or Red Grass, either.

“Forget about wanting, then.” I pulled back enough to set my face just beside his, and looked at him as best I could. “What do you hope for? Not just the hopper who wants to find dragons but all the layers that you are, Hobbs and Christopher both.”

“You know I don’t hope,” he said, but the upturned edges of his voice cracked and I knew he was thinking about it. Thinking
family
, thinking
a home
, thinking
someone I can trust
, thinking
love
, thinking
someone to wait for me to figure it all out
.

“Well, I do. I hope you see you have a choice now.” I put my right hand over his left eye. “You can focus on the past”—then shifted it to his right—“or the future. It’s up to you. I’ve already made my choice, and I can wait for you to make yours. Just don’t make me wait too long. I know we’re young and all that, but I’m not so good at waiting.”

“I’d never guess that about you.”

He let loose a sound that might’ve been the start of a laugh, or a cry. I kissed him after that—a kiss so full of want that it was like a hundred slips of Christmas Eve paper.

“Livya,” he said. “Don’t attach.”

I shook my head—
too late
—though I knew already I’d set him free if that’s what he needed, and hope he’d come back around in time, like the sun. But I wouldn’t say goodbye. Instead, I borrowed a line from Mama. “There’s a long way to go before the end.”

A
UGUST

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Undying

   JAZZ   

A
t one point when the soup was still in my system I thought I understood all the secrets of the universe, but once the mushrooms wore off all that knowledge evaporated out of my head, which just figures. What I did know—what took me twenty-two years to learn—was that life was what you made of it. Perception was everything. And lying to yourself wasn’t always a bad thing.

I guess I should be glad it didn’t take fifty.

Our family doctor confirmed that my sister was “fit as a slightly fractured fiddle” three weeks after she’d fallen from a tree. She was lucky, he said, that she hadn’t broken her neck in that fall. The light Olivia said she’d seen shining like a will-o’-the-wisp in her blind spot that night in the tree—the one I’d hoped was a sign of her vision coming back—was a photism. All the visuals created by Olivia’s synesthesia were photisms, too—things forged by her brain that only she could see—and they were exacerbated by the mushroom soup. Dr. Patrick, who might’ve become West Virginia’s expert on the matter, said that synesthetes with partial loss of sight often reported seeing things in their blind spots. I couldn’t believe
that finding a synesthete with a blind spot was common enough to generate this knowledge, but what did I know? Maybe they all stared at the sun.

Olivia, though, wasn’t interested in science, and insisted she knew what that light had been and didn’t need a doctor to tell her what she saw. I let it go. Despite her bill of good health, she’d been tetchy in the last few weeks—probably because she’d given Hobbs our phone number before coming home and he hadn’t called.