The Slow Moon (6 page)

“I don’t think tuna fish is the best thing for someone who needs a
bland
diet.” Louise’s words came out of her mouth like swords. She hadn’t meant to sound quite that sharp, but as she went back upstairs and noticed that the laughter had stopped, she was glad she’d said it in just that way.

Ava had come back to town every summer since that summer of illness, and Louise, along with everybody else, had seen Carl and Ava driving around town together, eating at the diner, or with Helen going to a movie. Louise always wondered if Helen knew—if she knew and turned her head, if she knew and didn’t care, if she knew and thought it would end by itself. The affair had begun when Crow was four; now he was sixteen. Ava had never married, and George liked to say that Carl Davenport’s luck was going to run out one of these days.

“So you think it’s a
lucky
thing to have two women, do you?” Louise asked.

“I
would
think so,” said George. “If I didn’t have you.”

“Oh, baby, that is a
fine
answer. At least I
think
that’s a fine answer.”

George let well enough alone.

Ten

A
VA GOT OUT
of the car and brought her suitcase to the porch. She walked into the hallway where Helen was holding Carl like he was a tree. “Helen,” she said.

Helen startled out of herself and turned. “Ava.”

“Carl thought I should come,” Ava said quickly. “He thought you might need me.”

Carl jerked with embarrassment. “I’m going upstairs,” he said.

Helen turned toward Ava. She let herself be held by her sister, trying to think how Ava might be able to help her. Growing up, Helen had always been the responsible one. As they climbed the stairs to the guest room, Helen carried Ava’s suitcase.

During visits to her sister’s house—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and several weeks in the summer—Ava worked hard to make her presence felt. She cooked and served dinner. She baked pies and cakes. Now she got busy washing clothes, and within a few hours she was folding Carl’s underwear and T-shirts carefully on his dresser. She avoided talking about Crow unless Helen brought it up. Earlier, upon arriving, Ava asked Helen if she was going to visit Crow in the jail or wait for him to come home tomorrow. Helen ignored the question. She didn’t even lift her head.

“You don’t have to do laundry,” Helen told Ava. “Ginna comes in three times a week.”

Ginna, a teenage girl whose mother had a neurological problem, came after school to earn money. Helen paid her handsomely and often gave Ginna something to take home to her mother. She sent flowers and food, and once, after Ginna mentioned that her mother couldn’t get downstairs very well, Helen bought a tray that propped easily on the bed.

“Well,” said Ava, “Ginna will have an easy time this week. I like to do it, Helen. I don’t have anybody to take care of at home.” Ava could feel Helen watching her lower backbone. She could feel her older sister’s judgment about her choices in life.

“Seems like you could’ve found somebody to be with by now,” said Helen. She began to put away Carl’s clothes into drawers. Ava sat on the bed and watched her.

“Yes, it does.” Ava sighed wistfully.

“I mean, at some point, you’ve got to get tired of just having affairs.” She turned to look at Ava. “Anybody new?”

“Not really.”

“What’re you waiting for?”

“Something like you have.” Ava stood and strode toward the door.

“Listen,” said Helen, “you think it’s all been roses? Look at what we just went through, Crow accused of some awful thing.”

Ava turned around and saw tears in Helen’s eyes. She wondered if Helen knew about the times she spent with Carl. She rushed to comfort her sister.

“No,” said Helen. “Don’t touch me. I feel worse if I’m comforted.”

“It’ll be all right, Helen,” said Ava. “Things’ll get back to normal in no time.”

“I don’t think things will ever be back to normal,” Helen said. She pushed the last drawer closed. “Let’s make some dinner. Want to?”

They ate dinner, speaking of small things, then sat silently at the kitchen table. “Sometimes,” Helen said, “you seem to want to
be
me, to have the life I have; but you don’t know how this life is—you see it only in your imagination. You only dream it.”

Ava didn’t know what to say.

Ava did love to dream. She loved dreams more than her life, and at age thirty-five, she thought her dreams
were
her life. Helen accused her of building idle fantasies instead of trying to make real change. She said Ava refused to grow up. Ava knew that she did prefer her own particular state to the grown-up burdens that seemed to come with Helen’s life.

When Ava was young, she kissed men in order to be kissed back. Helen’s strategy was to wait for someone to express affection first, or to take her hand. The men in the family paid more attention to Ava because of her buoyancy and affectionate nature. Helen stood back, beautiful but aloof.

“Helen is always so responsible,” her mother said, then required her to live up to that definition. The only time Helen had been irresponsible was when she got pregnant in college, and Carl had come to the rescue. That was during the time Ava was gallivanting through Europe. When Ava returned home, Helen was already married.

Early this morning, after Crow was asleep, Carl had called Ava and asked her to come to the house, just until things calmed down. He told her to come for Helen, then said, “I need you here, Ava.”

Ava felt acutely aware of the pleasure Carl brought her. She imagined, at times, that she could rationalize loving her sister’s husband. She told herself that Carl was able to remain with Helen
because
he had Ava’s attentions, and that, instead of splitting up a marriage, she was helping to keep it intact. She knew that affairs often worked to the good in this twisted way: a man sometimes went outside marriage to get sex, which allowed him to be affectionate toward his wife, instead of resentful; and the wife, who did not want to bother with sex, seemed content.

Carl was the kind of man who needed a great deal of room, and Ava didn’t know how she could allow him the room he wanted. But not being his wife, she didn’t need to test her abilities.

Carl appeared happy to see Ava. He enjoyed the neediness of her arms and mouth, but he usually didn’t want her to stay for more than a few weeks. Whenever she left town, he seemed glad to see her go. He sometimes told Ava he loved her, but usually he just said that he was “fond of her”—though he said it in a
tone
of love. Sometimes he stroked her face and hair and held her close. “You know that I’m fond of you, don’t you?” He trembled as he spoke these words. Ava nodded, wanting more but not asking.

She knew every part of Carl’s body: his smooth upper arms and thighs, his hairy forearms and chest, his back, with its map of moles that she traced with her finger as if connecting the dots, allowing her hand to move softly over his skin while he slept.

She had fallen for him twelve years ago. And though she had been with other men during those years, and though Carl grew jealous of those men, she couldn’t make him jealous enough to say he would marry her.

He would never marry her, though he never said so. He would never leave Helen, though he never said that either. He wanted to be with Ava when he could. He wanted to love her. Still, if push came to shove, he would renounce her.

Ava would watch Carl eat, paying attention to each mouthful he swallowed. She imagined herself being his food, his breath. She couldn’t get enough of him, and wondered, if they lived together as man and wife, whether her appetite might drive him away.

“I would be so easy to please,” she told him one night a year ago, after they had made love. “I mean if we lived together, if we made it
not
a secret.”

“You’re not suggesting I leave Helen, are you?”

“I think I’ve been suggesting it for years.” She leaned back into the motel chair and smiled weakly. “You don’t believe I understand anything about marriage, do you?”

“Not about married life with children, no, I don’t think you know that. I think you think of it as exciting.”

“To a person who lives alone,” she said. “To someone who knows what it is to come home and not have anyone there night after night, for that person to have someone come in the door at dinnertime, to laugh at a joke, to share what happened during the day—these smallest things would be exciting.”

“You have men in your life.” Carl turned away from her, then got up to shower. He had to go home. “Helen tells me about all the men you go out with.”

“Don’t even start with that,” she said. “Half those men are made up, some are friends, and two are men who care about me. One asked me to marry him. So, Carl, what do you think about that?” She rose and wrapped the sheet around her. She hated what she’d just said. She knew better than to challenge Carl. He always came back with something mean.

“Maybe you should think about it,” he said irritably. They dressed in silence. Carl kissed her before he left.

“It’ll be all right,” he said.

“I know,” she said. But she didn’t know anything.

Helen went to bed early. She had visited a short while at the jail with Crow. Ava offered to go again with Helen, but she said no.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Ava told Carl. They were both still up after Helen went to bed.

“She took a sleeping pill,” Carl said. “I think I’m going to have to do the same.” He offered Ava a pill prescribed by Helen’s doctor. Ava refused.

She leaned against the sink. “Listen, Carl. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. Maybe I should leave.”

“Stay,” he said. “But this time you’re here for Helen. Not me.”

“I thought you said you needed me here.”

“You should be here for her,” he insisted. Something was shifting. Carl smiled, but his body wanted enormous distance between them.

Eleven

B
Y THE FIRST
week in May the sky was blue, with clouds only on the horizon. Crow was indicted for aggravated rape, and today at the arraignment he heard the charge officially stated. He pled not guilty.

When he arrived home from the Jasper courthouse, he did not go inside. Instead, he went to the backyard. Johnny followed him with a tennis ball they used for throwing. They liked to stand in a specific spot in the far part of the yard and throw back and forth—the ball going out like a breath and landing firmly in the other’s hand. They had talked like that, tossing the ball, for as long as they could remember, far enough away so their parents couldn’t hear.

The trial had been scheduled for the first week in June; and though Sophie had not yet described what had happened, the evidence looked damning for Crow. His DNA had been identified from the rape kit, along with clear evidence of multiple attackers. Butler was looking hard for probable cause to investigate other boys at the party.

“Dad says that Butler thinks they don’t have enough of a case,” Johnny said, trying to speak about what was unspoken. “Too many unanswered questions, and not enough evidence to mess up your story about what happened.”

“It’s not a story,” muttered Crow. “What I said is the truth.” He dropped the ball and scurried to retrieve it. “I wish I could talk to Sophie. It feels bad not to be able to talk to her.”

“Not much chance of that though. Right?”

“Right.” Crow threw the ball and heard it smack into Johnny’s palm.

“How was survival camp?” Crow asked. “You haven’t said anything about it.”

“It was okay. I was the best one with the bow and arrow. I was better than anybody. Dad should’ve seen me.”

“God,” said Crow. “You shouldn’t do all that just so Dad will like it.”

“It’s okay.”

The ball kept slapping into their hands.

“Somebody made a 9-1-1 call Saturday night,” Johnny said. “Called to say that Sophie was hurt and where she was. Was that you?”

“No.”

“They have a recording.”

“It wasn’t me. I ran off. I saw the police coming.”

“Maybe that will be a good thing for you,” Johnny said, hopefully. “That somebody else called. Maybe they’ll find out who it was. I heard Dad talking on the phone last night about those construction workers of Mr. Canady’s—they have an alibi?”

“Yeah,” said Crow, grinding his teeth. “Butler told me they were getting drunk at a bar in Chattanooga. Ten witnesses can back them up.”

“Still,” said Johnny. “It’s not a strong case, right? They still can’t get Sophie to accuse you.”

“I wish I could talk to her,” Crow said. He had tried to call Sophie several times, then hung up when her mother answered. And he had seen Sophie once, coming out of the drugstore, almost not recognizable, her hair greasy and pulled back tight. Actually, she saw him first and stopped. He thought she almost waved to him before hurrying off in another direction. He thought she almost spoke.

“Will she be at the trial?” Johnny asked.

“Butler thinks she’ll be there with her mother, but she probably won’t testify.” Crow sucked his teeth, feigned indifference. “I’ll probably have to testify though.”

Johnny looked at his brother as if seeing a future he didn’t want to see. “It won’t be so bad to testify,” Johnny said. “Just tell the truth.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do.” For Crow, to stake his life on that moment of running away, to admit to leaving Sophie alone and vulnerable, was not consoling. He knew this trial would be the end of youth, if not life—the end of that marvelous way of looking at possibility and days to come. Whatever had been steadfast or good in Crow’s life had changed color, had grown dark in his hands.

The wind blew in off the river near the house, a common thing. But today the breeze sent a chill into Crow’s body. “Let’s go in.”

“And stop having all this fun?” Johnny said, smiling, trying to lighten their mood.

As they walked toward the house, both boys felt a damp, wild foolishness; for Crow, even the stones in the yard seemed to be saying goodbye, the trees losing the flavor of earlier times.

Crow was afraid of the trial, and for the next month he would tremble from dreams every night in bed—but on this day, when he had heard the charges read in court, he tried to imagine his whole life. He tried to picture what would come.

That night when spring rain came in a downpour, as if from huge barrels over the door, he had a tremendous thought—imagining his life as a secret train. If this part of his journey was a reaction to that strange time of running away, if the cowardice he knew about now was just his own darkness rising up, then whatever happened would go hurrying down the track on which he was solidly lodged. And even if everything failed, even if he were found guilty, he would persist—but not by running away, not ever again by running.

The threat before Crow enlarged his capacity to wait. Even the light of the day looked to him like waiting—the sun waiting to set, the moon to rise.