To See the Moon Again (23 page)

“So now you know,” Carmen said. “I'm not the good girl you thought I was, if you ever even thought that. That's not what kept me from telling you, though. There's something about admitting a sin out loud that gives you a little . . . reprieve, you know? And that's what I couldn't let happen. I needed to feel the weight of it right here every day.” She thumped a fist over her heart. “I didn't want anybody's sympathy making it easier. It's a sin I need to feel the full force of. So I'll never forget.”

Julia studied the girl's face before speaking. “I thought forgiveness was something religious people believed in.”

Carmen answered promptly. “I do. God forgave me. Totally.”

“So if God forgave you, why can't you . . .”

“Forgive myself?” Carmen said. “I don't even know what that means. You can
acknowledge
your sin, which I've done. The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. That's straight from the Bible. I don't want to forget what I'm capable of. So if that's what you call not forgiving yourself, then, okay, I guess I can't forgive myself.”

Something was wrong with such stark, relentless reasoning, but Julia couldn't put it into words. She said the only thing that came to her mind, the same words Carmen had said to her not long ago. “You're too hard on yourself.”

Carmen nodded. “I need to be. It scares me sometimes when I see a family like the one we met in the elevator. I want that so much, but it has to come the right way. No cheating or shortcuts. For now that means waiting. And praying.”

“And rubbing your nose in your sin whenever you get to feeling too hopeful?” Julia said.

The girl frowned. “I guess I haven't explained it very well. Hope is something you can't ever have too much of.”

•   •   •

C
ARMEN
got up from the bed and walked to the window. She stood looking out, her hands in her back pockets. “You want to know who he was?”

“If you want to tell me.”

She came back and sat on the edge of the bed. “He came to eat at Paco's a lot. On Sundays mainly. His father preached at the church next door. The one that used to be a drugstore. It still smelled a little . . . medicinal.” She wasn't trying to be funny, didn't pause for effect but kept right on talking.

The boy's name was Stephen. He played the piano at the church. He was twenty-two. He'd been to college for three years and wanted to be a music teacher but couldn't finish because of money. So he was living at home again, working for a paving company and teaching a few piano lessons to earn enough to go back.

Before long Carmen started going to the church since it was so handy. She liked the people, liked the singing and preaching.

Julia said, “And this was the church where they let you clean every week and work in the nursery?” She tried not to emphasize the word
let
, but Carmen must have picked it up.

“I volunteered,” she said quickly, defensively. “They were good people. A lot of young families. They made me feel like I belonged, and I hadn't felt that way for a long time. Stephen's father was a good preacher. The way he explained Scripture—it was so clear and powerful and beautiful.”

They had a little choir, and they asked her to sing a solo one Sunday. So she asked Stephen to meet her at church to practice. “And that's how it all started,” she said. “Fast-forward a couple of months, and . . . well, you know. It happened two times.”

Julia shook her head. “Please, you don't need to . . .”

Carmen raised her voice and kept going. “After the first time, I made up my mind to leave Hartford, just to make sure it didn't happen again. I told Paco I had an emergency and needed to quit my job, and that night I went over to clean the church so it would be ready for Sunday.” She looked away, toward the window. “Stephen showed up before I finished cleaning, and he helped me get the chairs set back up. And we talked a little while, but I didn't tell him I was leaving. We even prayed together, and then . . .”

Julia stopped her again. “I don't need to hear it,” though what she really meant was
I don't want to hear it
. That it must have happened at church struck her as appalling. She had a question, though. “If you loved each other, why didn't you just get married?”

Carmen dropped her head. “That's another part of it. He was going to marry somebody else. He was
pledged
to her. That's what they called it. Their families had known each other forever. It would have destroyed her, and their parents, too. She already had a wedding dress.”

Julia didn't believe it for a minute. The boy had undoubtedly played on Carmen's gullibility, inventing an excuse for why he couldn't marry her—a very far-fetched one. Surely there weren't arranged marriages in the United States these days, unless the Amish or Mennonites still did that sort of thing.

“And so it happened again,” Carmen said. “I was so ashamed. Not just because it was a sin but because I . . . wanted it to happen. I loved him. And I wanted him to love me. Even if it meant breaking somebody else's heart.”

“There's nothing wrong with love,” Julia said.

“No, there's not,” said Carmen quietly. She closed her eyes. One knee was jerking up and down. “I still dream about him sometimes.” A few moments of silence, then, “I left the next morning before the sun came up. Came to Boston. Figured I could get lost in the crowd until I got back on my feet.” She was speaking more slowly now. “I never went back to Hartford. He never found out about the baby.” She opened her eyes and looked at Julia. “So now you know.”

“Now I know,” Julia said. She also knew that the preacher's son in Hartford had gotten off much easier than Arthur Dimmesdale.

•   •   •

C
ARMEN
got up and walked to the foot of the bed, then turned around. “But there's another thing I need to tell you. I had trouble sleeping last night. Did you know?”

Julia nodded. “I could tell.”

“There were visions and voices,” Carmen said. She appeared to be perfectly serious. “I guess it started with the baby in the elevator. Later I got to thinking about the baby I lost, and then I started dreaming. I saw a little girl running through a field. And then the wind started blowing hard and she disappeared in the tall grass. But then I heard a voice whisper right in my ear, ‘
I walk the earth.
'” She stopped talking but didn't take her eyes off Julia. “And then I felt a hand on my face.”

Julia felt a sudden deep exhaustion. She had been sitting here for a long time, listening, struggling to take it all in, to keep from discounting the parts until she had heard the whole, but now this. A nighttime chimera reported as reality.

They stared at each other until Julia finally said, “But didn't you say she died?”

“That's what they told me,” Carmen said. “And I believed them. Until now. I heard a voice in my dream last night. It said,
I walk the earth.
As plain as day. It was a child's voice.”

Julia said, “But didn't you . . . see her after she was born?”

“I never did,” Carmen said. She sat down on the bed again. “I wasn't really . . .
with
it. It's hard to remember.”

“Tell me,” Julia said.

“I'll try,” Carmen said. She sat for a moment, kneading her hands together. “I was in labor a long time. The midwife never left me. Her name was Luna—as in the moth. I knew her already, of course. She was sort of shy, but very nice. I trusted her.”

She told the rest briefly, simply, but among the few embellishments she included were the sounds she heard that night—strong winds, heavy rain, claps of thunder. The storm went on and on, like her labor. But at last, another sound. “I heard her cry,” she said. “Finally it was over. I think I must have passed out because all of a sudden I opened my eyes and couldn't hear her anymore. I asked to hold her, but she wasn't there. And Luna wasn't there either. That's when they told me something was wrong with the baby and she had died. And there was nothing they could do. They said
she
—so I knew it was a girl.”

She lifted her eyes and looked at Julia. “I asked to see her, begged to hold her just one time. They said they knew what was best in these situations, they couldn't let me do that.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They said it was too late anyway, that a whole day had passed and I had been in and out of consciousness and they had already . . . had her taken away. They wouldn't say where. They said just to think of her in heaven. They looked so sad and spoke so kindly to me. I thought they were telling the truth. Nobody would tell a lie like that.”

She leaned forward, her eyes still fixed on Julia's. “But I heard her voice last night. God wouldn't play a trick like that on me. I
know
he wouldn't.”

Julia didn't know any such thing. But she did know one thing without a doubt, that their New England trip had suddenly been blown completely off course.

S
UFFICIENTLY
U
NWORTHY

It was too much information too fast, like sitting in a class and having nothing to take notes with. Somehow Julia had to get her thoughts in order, remember the important things, make connections. Now there were new facts to be inserted into the timeline of the girl's snarled history. First, Carmen had had a baby. Second, the baby died, or so she was told. Third, she had a dream that the baby was living. Fourth, she believed the dream to be true. There were other facts, of course, but these were the most pertinent to the trouble at hand.

The clock on the hotel nightstand said 7:04
P.M.
, but it felt much later. Julia looked at Carmen, still sitting on the bed, a picture of depletion, her eyes closed, her shoulders hunched. Julia moved over to sit beside her. She put an arm around her and drew in a deep breath. “I want to help,” she said.

In the months since Carmen's first appearance at the stone house, the two of them had never embraced. Such a thing would have embarrassed Julia to no end. But when Carmen threw her arms around her now, she didn't pull away.

After a few moments, Julia said, “Okay, one question at a time. Where was your baby born?”

Carmen walked over to the desk and picked up the road atlas. She flipped through it, then handed it to Julia. “There,” she said, pointing. “Danforth, Massachusetts. That's where it was. Is.” She traced her finger from Danforth to Boston and back again, all the way across the state, to the western edge. In a state like Massachusetts, however, not that far in actual miles.

“How did you end up there?” Julia said. “And where were you living?”

Long story, the girl said, but she would give an abridged version. From Hartford she went to Boston, where she found work caring for an old woman, bedridden in a back room of her daughter's house. Carmen asked for Sundays off, and one Sunday she walked to a nearby church. It was February now, and there was snow on the ground. Her eighteenth birthday was only days away.

Julia spoke before she could stop herself. “Did this one meet in a storefront, too?” That the girl would have gone to any church at all after Hartford revealed something disheartening about her—some weakness of mind common among people who spend their lives making the same mistakes over and over.

No, it was a stately old brick church with a stained-glass window above the front door, depicting Jesus with open arms and the words
Come Unto Me
written out in chips of colored glass under his feet. A sign from God, naturally. Beside the steps was a large brick marquee bearing the name of the pastor and associate pastor. It was the associate pastor's name that caught Carmen's attention: Harriet Dove.

So much for the abridged version, Julia thought.

By now Carmen had realized she was pregnant, and it was Harriet Dove in whom she confided. And Harriet Dove knew someone who knew the director of a small licensed, nonprofit adoption agency in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who took in “girls in trouble,” placed them in private homes to live, and covered all their expenses. Many of their referrals were from pastors and other “Christian ministries” in New England. The births were home births, attended by qualified midwives, and it was understood that the babies would be adopted.

So that was how she ended up with Babies First Mission. Julia immediately hated the place, starting with the name. What was an adoption agency doing calling itself a mission? It sounded self-righteous, which in itself was cause for suspicion. And
Babies
First? What about the mothers of the babies? Why didn't they come first?

Carmen was assigned to the home of a couple in nearby Danforth—Milo and Joyce Shelburn. Milo was the assistant director of Babies First, and he and Joyce took their turn housing girls, one at a time. The baby had been born in their home.

“And they were the ones who told you she had died?” Julia asked.

Carmen nodded.

•   •   •

E
ARLY
the next morning Julia was lying in bed, the hotel room dark, only the palest line of light at the window. Carmen spoke into the quietness. “Those miners in Chile didn't have it so bad,” she said. An odd remark to start any day with, but especially a day like this, after the confession of the previous night, the long hours of talk that followed, the short hours of sleep between then and now.

Julia knew, of course, that she was referring to the Chilean miners trapped for months underground—news that was several years old now, but nevertheless fascinating to the girl. A few weeks earlier she had read a book about the ordeal and talked about it endlessly. She knew all the miners' names and ages, the hierarchy among them. She was especially intrigued by the structured life they had managed to live over two thousand feet below the surface of the earth.

“They had each other,” she continued now, “plus they knew people were working to get them out even if it might take a long time.” She rolled over on her side and rose on one elbow to face Julia. “When I first started reading that book, it was like, yeah, I know that feeling. Buried in a place you can't get out of.” She sighed. “But they got rescued in the end.”

Julia thought of something that had eluded her the night before, a point that needed to be made. “Why should there be pardon for my taking a child's life,” she said, “yet none for yours of giving birth to one?” She turned toward Carmen. In the dimness she could see only the shape of her, not her face.

“Yours was an accident,” Carmen said at once. “Mine wasn't.”

Julia pushed the covers back and sat up. It was too early to have to choose words so carefully, but she had to say this right. She was glad there was so little light in the room. She could think better in the dark. “It's no more an accident,” she said slowly, “to lose your temper and act in anger than it is to violate your conscience and act in passion. Both qualify as sin, in your terms. And whether death or birth, the consequence of each sin was unintended.”

Carmen didn't move for a long moment and then flung herself onto her back again. “Oh, Aunt Julia, how do you come up with stuff like that?”

“Well, think about it,” Julia said. “It seems to me that causing the death of a child is a far more serious crime than giving life to one. In my case, there's never a way of bringing that little boy back.” She paused. “If your dream was true, at least your child is alive somewhere. At least we can find her.”

Julia could hardly believe what she had just said. She certainly hadn't meant to say it. For one thing, she had little confidence in Carmen's dream. But the words were spoken. Not
we might be able
to find her, but
we can
find her, as if it were a plan already laid, not a mere potentiality. In all of their talk the night before, neither of them had mentioned such a thing. They had gone through the girl's confinement at the Shelburns' house, the birth, the following days, every part Carmen could remember, some of it multiple times, but had looked only at the past, not the days to come.

•   •   •

T
HEY
both knew the original purpose of the trip had evaporated, of course. The drives from one author's home to another, the reservations for lodging along the way, and then the flight home—it all seemed totally trivial now, though the irony was not lost on Julia that they were scheduled to fly out of Hartford, of all places.

In the planning stages, Hartford had been a point of some mild contention between them, yet one Julia wouldn't concede for some reason. Carmen had tried to dissuade her by saying Mark Twain's house “wasn't really all that much to see,” but Julia said leaving Mark Twain out of an American authors' tour was like leaving red out of the color wheel. Besides that, she said, she wanted to see that carved headboard Mark Twain used as a footboard.

But now these words:
At least we can find her.
Julia had opened her mouth, and out they had fallen, without a single thought as to how the two of them could ever do such a thing.

The room was growing lighter, and Julia could see Carmen better now. It didn't take long to realize what she was doing. Still on her back, she was turning her head slowly, deliberately from side to side on her pillow. And when she spoke, her words, too, were deliberate, and full of feeling: “She would be two years old now. Part of a family. I couldn't barge in and interrupt their lives. I couldn't and I wouldn't.”

“Let's back up,” Julia said. “You're forgetting something very important. If you were lied to, the baby was
stolen
from you. That was a crime in every sense of the word.”

Carmen's answer was firm. “But let's back up even further. Here's something else important. I broke God's law. Do I want to break a family apart, too?”

Forget God's law for just a minute,
Julia wanted to scream, but she gritted her teeth and said nothing. It was maddeningly clear that the girl had thought this through and made up her mind. And she was right up to a point. If the child was indeed alive, she had surely been adopted. And if there had been a legal adoption—well, as legal as it could be given the heinous lie—or even if by some other technicality it wasn't legal, the transfer had been made. The child was part of a family.

Julia rose from the bed and walked to the window. She pulled back the draperies and saw the shadowy outline of Boston beneath a pale amethyst sky. She wondered if they would even notice the clear skies today. She turned and went into the bathroom. Maybe a hot shower would help her think.

•   •   •

T
HEY
were downstairs by eight o'clock, sitting at a table in the small dining area with their complimentary breakfast. While Julia stirred brown sugar into her oatmeal, Carmen bowed her head. And just what, Julia wondered, would she be saying to God this morning?
Help me to feel sufficiently unworthy again today, not to forget for a minute what I did, and not to let Aunt Julia offer me even a smidge of comfort?

They ate without talking for a while. “If nothing else, you need to find out the truth,” Julia said at last.

Carmen had finished her yogurt and was opening her pint of milk. Her eyes looked even bluer today. She was wearing a turquoise corduroy shirt that used to be Julia's, along with a brown-striped sweater. Certainly nothing Julia had ever worn together, but as always the clothes looked better on Carmen than they ever had on Julia.

She glanced at Julia. “And the truth shall set you free.”

Julia pondered her words. They sounded promising. She repeated them: “Yes, and the truth shall set you free.”

“Look not every man on his own desires,” Carmen added. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Do not use your freedom as a cloak of evil. You were called to be free, but not free to indulge your sinful nature.”

Oh, only more double-talk from the Bible. “Setting aside your sinful nature,” Julia said, “let's think about this logically.”

Carmen didn't look like she wanted to talk about logic right now. She was having trouble getting the carton open and had taken a plastic knife to it.

Julia leaned forward. “If you never know for sure,” she said, “you will always wonder. Your mind will always be unsettled, your nights full of more visions and voices, your soul a slave to uncertainty. You will never be able to give yourself wholly to any task because part of your heart will always be off somewhere, wandering about the hills and dales of possibility. Despair will surely come to darken all the days of your life.”

Part of her believed everything she was saying, though another part recognized the little speech for what it was: windy oratory. It was exactly the kind of thing that used to issue forth in the middle of one of her class lectures, totally unplanned, rendered with a slight loftiness that could easily earn a professor a reputation among students as “out of touch.”

At first Carmen showed no sign of having heard a word. She had succeeded in forcing a ragged opening in the top of the carton. She poured the milk in a small trickle over her Cheerios, then picked up a spoon and slowly lifted her eyes to Julia's. Sometimes, as now, when she was most serious, she set her mouth in such a way that her dimple showed. She took a deep breath. “It's been over two years,” she said again. “I don't know where she is.”

“But you know where she was born,” Julia said. “We can start there.”

Carmen shook her head. “I . . . just couldn't, Aunt Julia. You said something that day in your car, when you came looking for me. I asked you a question, and you said, ‘I forfeited my right to motherhood.' Do you remember that? Well, okay, I can say the same thing.”

“I have a plan,” Julia said. “Hear me out. You need to
know
for sure. If she really did die, you need to know that, but if she didn't, we can find her and you can at least
see
her. From a distance. No big scene to call attention to yourself or make anybody uneasy.”