The Moon Sisters (4 page)

That’s how “Silent Night” looks!
I’d said, excited to share what I saw every time I heard the song. I grabbed the lamp, but it slid out of my hands and broke, spilling all those little dancers onto the kitchen floor.

When my parents walked into the room seconds later to find Jazz boring holes into my skull with her eyes like some medieval torturer, Papa covered one of his own eyes to remind us that there were two ways to look at everything.

It’s not the end of the world
, Mama said.
Maybe Santa will bring you an even better lava lamp next Christmas
.

Jazz’s eyes flicked away from me and to my parents, where they stayed for a long second before she stormed away.
I hate your synesthesia. And there’s no such thing as Santa Claus
, she said, already halfway up the stairs.

I might’ve cried for a week over the death of Santa, but my mother pulled me onto her lap and reminded me of one of her life truths: It was okay to believe in things that others didn’t believe in. It was okay not to believe, too.

I leaned my forehead against the rattling window as Jazz merged onto the highway on the way to the glades, my nose raised to catch the slim breeze sneaking in through the permanently stuck window. The world was still an interesting place to see, even now that I was blind in the legal sense of things, unable to clearly make out expressions on faces or my colored letters. Being left with only the periphery made you look at life in a unique way, consider its exhalations and auras—like the deep, deep green of the forested hills on either side of us and the secrets it might hide. And in many ways I could still see more than most: The red-streak sounds left by passing trucks and cars looked like rubber eraser bits on paper, and a clear blue sky always smelled of warm chocolate and adrenaline.

If I’d been in the bus with anyone else, I might’ve shared that the day was like a cup of chocolate coffee, but I knew better than to bother with Jazz, especially when everything down to her clothing choice of gray shorts and a black T-shirt revealed her storm-cloud mood. She was driving us to the glades against her will and better judgment, she’d said, which meant I would get the mostly silent treatment from her for the duration, with a few snippety snap comments thrown in for good measure. How was I supposed to know she’d come home today with a job in her back pocket? It’s not like my sister told me anything. And now I couldn’t get it out of my head.

A funeral home.
The
funeral home.

I recalled my mother in her casket with her eyes closed, how
I’d stood beside her with my hand on her hair. They’d covered her cinnamon-sugar freckles with wrong-colored makeup, and I wanted to rub it off her face.

I want to see Mama’s eyes one last time
, I told Missy Finnegan, one of Babka’s oldest customers from Tramp, who’d stepped up to pay her respects.

She’d lifted her glasses off her nose, looked at me with her tiny black eyes, and wiggled her teeth.
They take the eyeballs out of ’em before now, child. Hang on to your memories
.

“Will you have to do the eyes?” I asked the back of my sister’s head.

“What?” she said, the word like a bite.

“They take the eyes out of corpses, don’t they? You won’t have anything to do with that, will you?”

“We don’t remove the eyes, only the tongues.”

“Really?” I asked, before my brain kicked in.

Maybe it was because Jazz always treated me like a five-year-old that I sometimes felt like one with her. She was the only person who’d ever made my mouth run off out of nerves. Sometimes I wished I were still five when I was around her. My five-year-old self never cared what my sister thought of me, or knew that what she thought of me didn’t amount to much.

I twined my fingers through a section of hair, started another braid, as Jazz ended our not-quite conversation by turning on the radio. A familiar lime static appeared as she searched in vain for a station. I was glad to see that static—glad to have it back.

Grief had turned everything black as coal for weeks after Mama died. Even my inner calendar shut down then, when everything tasted like ashes and dust. No one knew. Not about that, and not about my eyes. Not until late May, when Jazz made me go with her to the bakery and asked me to list what was low on the pantry shelves but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t read the labels.

Maybe Jazz wanted to be with dead people because she was in a dark place—so dark you sometimes forgot yourself and did things
you normally wouldn’t do. Like drink half a bottle of vodka in the middle of a workday. Like stare at the sun.

I turned my head, tried to see the sphere of fire in the sky, catch a hint of Mama’s scent, but it was too far over the bus and I would never see it straight on again anyhow. The dark blot was there, though—to remind me of what happened, what I’d done. The eclipse of my central vision.

The lime static disappeared as Jazz turned off the radio with a curse. Papa had put that radio in the bus years ago, when it was still used for deliveries, but he’d learned pretty quick what we all knew now. It wasn’t the quality of the receiver that mattered in our neck of the deep woods; nothing ever sounded quite right near Tramp. I tried to make my voice light as I quoted a saying as well worn by our father as his shoes.

“The mountains of West Virginia—can’t live with ’em, can’t imagine living without ’em.”

“How could you when they’re all over the damned place, crowding around us like buildings ready to collapse?” Jazz said, which made me think of dead folk again, hollow of their organs and crowding the ground with their bones.

“Will you have to do anything at all with the bodies at the funeral home? What will you have to do there, exactly?”

“I’m in charge of the glitter nail polish.”

Not even my inner five-year-old could miss that sarcasm. I asked the question that got to the heart of the matter.

“Why do you want this job, Jazz? Why now?”

She flung the question back like a grenade. “Why do you want to drag us to the glades, Olivia? Why now?”

I lost track of where I was in my braid, started another.

Why now? Because this was something I could do in a sea of things I couldn’t.

Last night I’d found Papa disassembling Mama’s desk in their bedroom, the tablecloth stripped off the crates and plywood, like flesh off old bones.

Don’t throw it away
, I said.
That was her altar, remember? It gave her so much hope
.

I was glad not to be able to see the details of his face—the grooved lines near his mouth, the shallow pools that made his eyes, once deep puddles of blue. It was hard enough to see his voice, its edges frayed like butchered thread.

There’s nothing to hope for anymore, Liv
, he said.
Your mother’s gone, and there’s no undoing that. No way to wish or hope or pray it undone. She killed herself
.

She didn’t kill herself
, I said, as my insides twisted in my chest—my heart pulled over my lungs, my liver tugged up and turned, a braid of organs.
It was an accident
. And then I hugged him, kissed the top of his head, thick with the scent of alcohol and unwashed hair, and he buckled over and began to cry.

Maybe it’s because my mother’s altar sat beside me all night that I dreamed of the bogs. I stepped over a wriggling and saturated earth until I found one: a will-o’-the-wisp, full bright, darting here and there.

It smelled so strongly of hope that I could taste it.

Hope that Mama hadn’t killed herself.

Of course I wanted to catch the wisp. I wanted Mama’s dreams to have meant something, couldn’t bear the thought that she’d died believing the opposite about that or her very life. But when I turned to tell my family, who were nearby but in that weird way of dreams also in a long, dark hall, they would not run with me to follow the wisp. And they smelled atrocious—like a stew of alcohol and unwashed hair, sadness and fear and confusion, and ellipses that went on forever, circling them and rattling like a snake. I ran from the ellipses, because running eased the pain of the letter jabbing at me through my coat. I ran for three days before I found the light again, and I swear it looked like someone smiled at me from within all that bobbing bright.

Mama.

I woke before I could reach for her, opened my eyes to find a
light still dancing like a grin in my blind spot. Impossible; I would never see anything in that spot again, Dr. Patrick had said so. Yet there it was.

The sensation faded within a minute, but for the first time since my mother died I felt glad. Expectant. It had seemed like a sign.

Talking to Babka about it decided me. I told her of the dream, how vivid it had been, like it was speaking to me, and how I didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.

Twice?
she asked.

I described the visions I’d had the night before Mama died, with the sun dying in the sky and mirrors turning to ice.

Maybe my dreams are trying to tell me something
, I said.
But I’m not sure what they want me to do
.

Babka nodded.
Maybe you won’t understand it until later, but here is something I know for sure: Dreams like feet better than knees. What do your insides tell you?

That’s when I packed my bag.

That’s when I decided I wasn’t going to take the trip alone, either, though my thoughts weren’t on my sister. I found the blue jar with a small portion of Mama’s ashes—the part of her we hadn’t buried—next to my father’s side of the bed. Mama had always loved the jar’s vibrant hue, a match for Papa’s eyes. Now it leaned against the wall beside an empty bottle of vodka.

We’ll do this together
, I told her.
You’ll get to the bog yet, and we’ll finish some business. Believe, believe
.

I leaned my leg up against my suitcase, where Mama’s ashes now lay inside a sealed plastic bag. “Jazz?”

My sister grunted in reply.

“You’re not doing the cremating, are you?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” she said.

That marked the end of her mostly silent treatment, when she let me know what she was really thinking. This trip was ridiculous. If I thought we’d stumble upon a will-o’-the-wisp when they were the definition of unpredictable, then
I
was ridiculous. Waste of
time. Driving around in this stupid bus. Daddy would drink himself into oblivion while we were away, because Babka wouldn’t do a damned thing about it, and I knew it. One night. One night at the most, because we were going to be back in Tramp by Thursday, and then I was going to sit at home and behave, because she had a new job to worry about. Real money. Stop haranguing her about the funeral home. She knew I didn’t like it, and that was too bad. And if I thought she wanted to sleep in this friggin’ antique when it was so hot and unventilated, I had another thing coming.

Thursday
tasted like disappointment, like dry Cheerios without the sugar.

She swore then with more conviction, and I could tell it wasn’t at me. The bus buzzed, and my ears filled with the sound of tired brakes straining to slow, to stop, of tires riding over the rumble strips on the highway. I thought I saw a green sign to my right, the kind that tells you the name of the town off an exit ramp, but then it was gone and I couldn’t have read it anyhow.

“Hang on!” Jazz said, too late.

The bus lurched, and somehow I landed on my belly, the floor heaving beneath me.

“Are you all right?” I felt her beside me, her hand on my back. “Move something.”

I lifted my head. “I’m all right.”

“Good,” she said, her voice thready with adrenaline. “I’ve got to check the bus. You stay put.”

“What happened?” I asked, but then I heard the door open in a shimmer of amber starbursts, and knew she was already gone.

I flipped over and opened my eyes. Decade-old flour motes floated all around me, shook up like the rattled specks inside a snow globe. It was beautiful, the way they coated my inner calendar of numbers, days of the week, months of the year. There was a veritable blizzard of motes over July. July, which was now, this month.

Catch them, Olivia
, I imagined my mother saying, as I lifted my palm and smiled.

August 13, 1990

Dear Dad
,

What can I say? That I miss you? Because I do. So much. That I’m sorry? I am. I’m sorry for getting into trouble out of wedlock. But I would never have quit college. I would never have chosen one over the other: you or Branik, college or motherhood. Those things were your doing. It’s not too late to undo them. We can raise this baby between the three of us, can’t we? We can raise him or her to appreciate music and dance and literature and fine food. Under your influence, this child will strive for greatness
.

I will do better with your grandchild, Dad, than I did with myself. I promise. I promise I’ll be a good daughter from now on, the perfect daughter. Just take me back into your life. Let me have another chance, and you’ll see. I’ll prove to you that I can do this, do it all! If only you’ll open your heart and let me try!

Who will water the bamboo? You always forget. Who will pet Fat Lizzy when she cries, wandering the halls and looking for attention? You will never dust—you know you won’t—and your eyes will turn pink and watery because of it. And what will you eat? You will have to hire a cook if you’re ever to eat anything but canned soup again. You need me. You may not want to admit it, but you need me, and this has to hurt you as much as it is killing me
.

Did you hear that, Daddy? I am dying. I will die here in this town, without my life, without you, without college and my future! You have no idea what it’s like in Tramp. I am crying again, so hard that I am ruining this letter! I will have to fetch a clean piece and start over!