To See the Moon Again (2 page)

“Will you have a seat?” Julia said, nodding toward the old library chair she used for student conferences. Julia sat back down at her desk and swung her chair around to face the girl.

“I can't stay long,” Kelly said. “I need to be at work soon.” She pushed her dark hair behind one ear. Unlike the disarray so many girls favored these days on the tops of their heads, hers was a neat, tidy hairstyle from an earlier era—longer than a bob but not quite a pageboy. She took a deep breath and continued. “I came to tell you something about the short story I wrote for your class. You probably don't remember which one was mine, but it . . .”

“Of course I remember. It was about the father and his teenage son, whose driving lesson was a fiasco.”

The girl's eyes widened. “Yes. That was it.” She looked directly at Julia and swallowed. “Well, I need to confess something. It . . . wasn't really my work.”

She could have no way of knowing what effect her words would have. For a long moment Julia stopped breathing but never took her eyes off the girl. “What do you mean?” she asked at last.

Kelly sighed and shook her head. “Well, I turned in that story for a class called
Creative
Writing, but I didn't really create it. The whole conversation in the garage really happened, almost verbatim. It was my own father and one of my brothers. And the part about the paint buckets and the garden hose—that really happened, too. And the spare tire and the bag of flour and the scorched hot dogs—those, too. I'm ashamed to say . . .” She trailed off and looked down at her hands, then added softly, “. . . well, I never even told them I was using them for my story. I just did it.”

Julia was afraid the girl might be crying, but when she lifted her face, her eyes were dry, her voice steady. “I keep remembering what you said before we ever started writing our stories about how important it was to
transform
a real-life experience before trying to use it in fiction, and . . . well, I didn't—and so I'm not sure I deserve the grade you gave me. I feel awful—I don't know what to call what I did. Exploitation or plagiarism or . . .” She broke off again.

Such innocence and probity astounded Julia. And shamed her. She swiveled her chair around to face the bookcases, and after a brief silence she spoke. “Kelly, that's not called plagiarism or exploitation. It's called being smart enough to recognize good material when you see and hear it.” She swung her chair around again to face the girl. “You don't need to confess. You simply need to be grateful that your father and brother did and said those things while you were nearby and that you had the good sense to remember them and to realize what a fine story you could make out of them.”

A smile of disbelief slowly spread across the girl's face. “You have no idea how much I've dreaded this. I was prepared to . . . well, I was prepared for the worst.” She glanced at her watch, then stood up. “Thank you, Dr. Rich. This is a very happy ending to what I was afraid might be a very sad story.”

Julia stood also. “Writers get their ideas from many places, Kelly—sometimes right under their noses. So stay alert—and keep writing. Please keep writing.”

Kelly nodded. “I will, I promise.” At the door she turned around. “I hope you enjoy your sabbatical, Dr. Rich. And I hope I can take another class from you after you get back.”

After she left, Julia thought of other things she could have said to her. But it was too late now. Like so often in the past, words she should have said were left unspoken. But this time maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. If she had talked longer, it would have only given Kelly more time to stare at the smear across her chin.

•   •   •

J
ULIA
looked away from the mirror now. She turned on the water at the sink and ran it till it was hot. Then she lathered her hands with soap and rubbed her face for a long time, then scrubbed her chin hard with a washcloth and dried it with a towel. No mild cleansing foam today. It didn't matter anyway. All the little lines and wrinkles would keep coming regardless of how she washed her face. More and more of them. You could buy every age-defying cream on the market, but not one of them was a match for time. She picked up her brush and examined it, something she did more often these days, for her hair was not only graying at an alarming rate but also thinning. Once a month she colored it herself, but nothing could be done about replacing what fell out.

She and Marcy Kingsley had observed old Dr. Kohler in the cafeteria recently. Dr. Kohler, her hair a frail white web, had taught Shakespeare at Millard-Temple since time immemorial. She liked to joke that her students thought she had known Shakespeare personally. Very deliberately she had made her way down the cafeteria line that day, then had taken her tray to a table by the window, where two rookie English teachers were already seated. Within minutes they had excused themselves, and Dr. Kohler had eaten her lunch alone, staring out the window.

“She must've spent a lot of time in the sun when she was younger,” Marcy had said. “When I start looking like that, I don't think I'll have the nerve to go out in public. Especially not to stand up in front of a class of
college
students.” Julia hadn't said anything, but her sympathies were with Dr. Kohler. Marcy was only forty-three, but it would dawn on her sooner or later that a woman couldn't stay inside and hide her wrinkles from the world. There wasn't a thing you could do about growing old. You just had to keep going.

•   •   •

T
HE
microwave was finished when Julia got back to the kitchen, so she reset it to cook on low and started it again. She poured a glass of sweet tea, took a long drink, and then refilled it. She knew she shouldn't drink more than a single glass, since caffeine kept her awake if she drank it this late in the day. But tomorrow was Saturday, so she could sleep later. If she could sleep at all—that was often a problem, caffeine or not.

She walked back to the living room to get a magazine and brought it back to the kitchen. It was an issue of
The Atlantic
from months ago that she had never even opened. Only one of many things that had gone unattended since last August.

She stopped at the counter beside the blinking telephone. As much as she wanted to ignore it, she knew she couldn't much longer. She briefly considered deleting the message without listening to it, but she knew there would always be the niggling thought that Pamela might actually have said something important this time. The only way to get rid of it was to go ahead and play it.

She sighed and pressed the button.

But it wasn't Pamela. “Hey, Aunt Julia,” a voice said, just short of a shout. “This is Carmen.” There were crackling, popping sounds in the background like distant gunfire. “I know you're probably surprised to hear from
me
. It's been a long time. Like almost forever.” She laughed. “Well, okay, more like never.”

Julia couldn't have been more stunned if the telephone had suddenly caught fire. Carmen? Her brother's Carmen? The little girl he had fathered with some waitress he'd met at a truck stop out west? She didn't know of any other Carmen. She tried to calculate how old the girl would be now, but she was having trouble thinking. The last she had heard, Carmen had dropped out of high school, left her mother's trailer in Wyoming, and fled to Canada with her boyfriend. That must have been five years ago now. Maybe not that long, maybe longer.

“Anyway, I hope this is the right number!” the voice said. Now it sounded like someone was shaking a large piece of sheet metal right beside the telephone. “I called information. Hang on, I can't hear.” There was the sound of clomping footsteps, then a whooshing sound like a high wind through a tunnel, then the slam of a door, and the voice was back. “There, now, that's better. Anyway, I've been riding around on a sailboat for a little bit with this friend I met, and we docked down here in Charleston. So now the ride's over, and I said to myself, hey, I've got an aunt somewhere down here, so why don't I call her up and tell her I might come see her. So that's what I'm doing.” She laughed, a single hoarse “Ha!”

Julia felt a sudden panic. If this indeed was her niece Carmen, she didn't want to see her, not now or ever. She had no desire to be reminded of her brother, Jeremiah, who had made more than his share of mistakes during his life, impregnating a waitress in Wyoming being only one of many. And neither did she want to be reminded of her own poor choices in regard to Jeremiah.

“I don't know
when
exactly I can come,” the voice said. “But maybe next week. I need to work out some things first. I got your address from Lulu a while back, so if I . . .” There was a burst of static, and Julia missed the next words. Then came a muffled shout in the background. “In a minute!” the girl said. “I'm on the phone!”

By now Julia was convinced that the voice belonged to her niece, for Lulu had been the name of the waitress in Wyoming—exactly the kind of name a truck stop waitress would have, the same kind of woman who would let her daughter call her by her first name. What a horrible thing if this girl really did show up on Julia's doorstep next week. She couldn't let that happen.

The voice continued. “Sorry, I need to hang up and help somebody, but maybe I'll see you soon. I need to get some ducks in a row before I . . .” There was a loud bump and another shout, not a happy one. Carmen sighed into the phone. “I've got to go now.” And that was the end. She hung up without saying good-bye.

Julia quickly reviewed the call log, but the only entry read
Unknown Name
, with no phone number. Dismayed, she stood staring at the phone. This couldn't be happening. She hated the thought of having company, period—someone invading her space. But she especially hated the thought of this particular company.

When the microwave beeped, she was still rooted in the same place, still looking at the telephone, her hand over her mouth. The call had come at a little past two that afternoon. Almost four hours ago. What if Carmen was already busy getting her ducks in a row?

Julia replayed the entire message, her sense of foreboding increasing every second. She had seen a picture of Carmen only once—a snaggletoothed child with a pale, sweet face, a dimpled smile, and wildly curly blond hair. But that had been many years ago now.

Slowly she walked to the microwave and took out the dish. It was only lukewarm, so she put it back in. She couldn't think of what to do next. Maybe Pamela had a phone number for Carmen, though Julia knew that was highly improbable. Pamela had never wanted anything to do with anyone in Wyoming, their own brother included. She had told Julia not to respond to Lulu's first letter twelve years ago, the letter she had received not long after Lulu's phone call claiming that Jeremiah had died of a gunshot wound from a stray bullet while hunting.

“She just wants money,” Pamela had said. “How do we know she's telling the truth? People like that are always looking for a handout. We don't know how Jeremiah died or even
if
he died—she might be making the whole thing up. Why would we take her word for it? Somebody like that, she probably doesn't even know who that child's father really is.”

But one look at the picture Lulu had enclosed with the letter, and nobody could deny Jeremiah was her father. No judge with eyes in his head would have bothered ordering a DNA test. After Pamela saw the photo for herself, she never again expressed doubt, though she continued to urge Julia not to write Lulu back.

But something in the letter had compelled her to answer. For one thing, Julia had truly loved her brother, more than she loved her sister if the truth were known. For another, Lulu's mention of Jeremiah's “papers” had intrigued her. Julia had written back and sent her money for shipping. A thousand times since then she wished she hadn't, but she had. And just like growing old, there wasn't a thing she could do about it now. The box had eventually arrived, and what was done was done. Other letters had followed over the years, but Julia had never again written back.

Quickly she walked back to the phone now and punched in Pamela's number. It rang six times before the answering machine turned on. Of course—wasn't that the way life went? Pamela was always interrupting Julia's life to talk about absolutely nothing, but the one time Julia actually wanted to talk to her, she wasn't home. “Call me right away,” she said testily and then hung up.

She walked back into the living room and saw on the television screen a building engulfed in black smoke. Part of her took it as an omen that something catastrophic was about to happen in her life right now, yet the other, more rational part of her argued that a phone call from a niece she had never met was no cause to overreact.

She went back to the kitchen and tried to collect her thoughts. First she would sit at the table and eat her supper. That was a starting point. And as she ate, she would listen to the rest of the
Slavonic Dances
and try to read a story in
The Atlantic
as she waited for Pamela to call back. Then she would watch something on television, make a tentative list of things to do during her sabbatical, and eventually go to bed.

She walked to the window above the sink. The stone house was laid out in a modified L shape, the two ends extending slightly perpendicular to the middle of the house so that from where she stood now, she could see all the way across the front yard to the iris bed beneath her bedroom window at the opposite end—the same flower bed where Matthew had collapsed one day late last summer.

There was a time when she had thought of her house on Ivy Dale as a lookout on the world—at least all she wanted to see of the world—but lately she had begun to feel that her view of life was diminishing into something the size of a postcard, and not one bearing a cheerful message either.