Valley of the Moon (28 page)

I
was torn. Should I go with Joseph or should I stay with Benno? Benno was putting on a good face as Fancy brought him from table to table, introducing him, but I knew he must be stunned. I'd just told him he'd traveled back to 1908. What must he be thinking?

“Go,” said Joseph, making the decision for me.

“Are you sure? You're okay?”

“It didn't happen yesterday. It's been ten months, Lux,” he snapped. “How long are you here for?”

Oh God, he was furious. In the years that I'd known him, I'd seen him worried, anxious, despairing, but never enraged. Was I responsible for this? Had I failed him?

“How long?” he repeated.

“Just the afternoon.”

Should I have tried to make it back to Greengage? For a brief check-in, just to let him know I was there, I was thinking about him, I hadn't forgotten about him?

He gave me a clipped nod.

“Can we talk later?” I asked. “After Benno's settled?”

He shrugged. And that shrug—his attempt to look as if he couldn't care less—told me everything. How bottomless his grief. How broken he still was.

“I stayed away too long,” I said.

He looked at me, his eyes pooling. “I am—” He couldn't finish the sentence.

“I know,” I whispered. “I know. Me too.”

I trailed Fancy as she showed Benno around the kitchen and got him a plate piled high with his favorite breakfast foods. The dining hall quickly emptied out.

“Where are they all going?” asked Benno.

“To work,” said Fancy.

“What kind of work?”

“They have all sorts of different crews, Benno,” I explained. “Kitchen, garden, animals, building, fields. That's just some of them. You can choose wherever you want to work.”

“Come be on my crew,” said Fancy. “Entertainment.” She winked at him. “It's the best crew. You don't have to get all mucky. I'm thinking about mounting a play.
Much Ado About Nothing.
Yes, I know Shakespeare is ambitious, but I'm certain we will rise to the occasion. You would make a lovely Don Pedro, Benno, by the way. You're a little young, but I think you could pull it off. With the proper costume you'd be rather dashing.”

“How far along are you?” I asked Fancy.

“Eight months.”

“And how are you feeling?”

She beamed. “Good. Better than good, actually.” Her hands drifted down to her belly.

“I'm so happy for you!” I cried.

Fancy nodded at me and swayed back and forth, as if listening to some internal music.

She smiled at Benno. “My, you are a handsome young man. Look at that face. So expressive. Tailor made for the stage. So. Will you join my crew?”

“I don't think we'll be here that long,” I said.

Fancy pouted.

“Please, Mom. Can we stay? Just for a while,” Benno pleaded.

If I had any misgivings about him being able to handle the reality of Greengage, they were rapidly diminishing. He looked positively gleeful as he shoveled a big piece of pancake into his mouth. I remembered what it was like to be his age. How I courted impossibility, as if it were only a matter of seducing it, convincing it to come out of hiding and reveal itself to me. It was the same for Benno. He had a satisfied, almost smug look on his face, as if something had been resolved.

“Benno, do you have any questions?” I asked.

Déjà vu. That long-ago day at the airport.
Mama, I'm busy. Doing what? Leaving.

He shook his head.

“Let the poor boy eat,” said Fancy.

After breakfast, Fancy and I brought Benno back to the house and gave him a quick tour. Then Fancy passed him off to Magnusson, who immediately put him on a horse. We sat on the porch while they trotted by, Benno's expression shifting between terror and joy as he struggled to keep his seat.

“Isn't that horse too big for him?”

“A baby could ride Apollo,” said Fancy.

“Where are they going?”

“Who knows? Up to the springhouse? Lars has been doing maintenance up there all week.”

“Should I go with them?”

“Whatever for?”

“I'm just—shouldn't I be there when Benno experiences all this for the first time? See what he sees? See how he reacts?”

“How do you think he'll react?”

“I don't know. I hope it's a positive experience for him.”

“What was it like for you?”

“Good. Centering.”

“Do you feel that way at home?”

“Sometimes.”

I gazed out at the lawn. Martha's flower clock was completed—every section planted.

“You finished. You found the flower for the eleventh section,” I said.

“Joseph found it. It's sweet alyssum,” she said.

I could smell it even from the porch. Its scent was like newly mown hay mixed with honey.

“And it works? Each flower opens on the hour?”

“I guess. To be honest, I don't spend a lot of time watching it. It reminds me too much of Martha.”

“So how have these months been for you?” I asked gently.

“Oh, Lux. It's still impossible to believe that Martha's not coming back. I keep expecting to come round a corner and hear her voice.” Fancy flinched and grabbed my hand. “Golly, she just kicked. Feel.” She pressed my palm to her belly, which rippled beneath my fingers.

She groaned. “I'm scared to death of giving birth. I told Friar he should knock me out. I just want to wake up when it's over. Is that terrible? Does that make me a terrible mother?”

“No. I had anesthesia when Benno was born.”

“You did?”

“Yep. And he turned out just fine.”

Fancy turned to me. “I don't know if Joseph's going to get past this, Lux. He won't speak about it. About Martha. I can barely get him out of the house. It's like he's just given up. And we need him. I need him. I need my brother.”

“I think you just have to give him some time,” I said.

“I know. I know I do.”

“But you're afraid.”

“Yes.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“That I've lost him—that we've lost him for good. Maybe you being here will help,” she said.

Everything about Greengage fascinated Benno: the lanterns, the outhouses, Magnusson's workshop, the one-room schoolhouse with the Walt Whitman quote painted on the wall. I was shocked at how nonchalantly he took it all in.

“Benno, isn't this weird for you?”

“Nah.”

“You just believe all this? The fog? That it's 1908 here? Just like that?”

I expected him to test things. Demand proof, as I had when I first came.

“I thought you'd be happy,” he said to me. “Isn't this what you wanted? For me to see where you'd disappeared to for a year?”

That stung. “A night, Benno. I stayed one extra night here in Greengage.”

His eyes narrowed. “But that one night was a year in San Francisco.”

“I know. I'm sorry, Benno. It was so hideous, not being able to explain. Having you think I'd just abandoned you.”

“So why didn't you tell me?”

I sighed. “I wanted to. I tried, sort of. When I came to Newport.”

He shook his head. “You didn't try very hard.”

“You're right,” I said. “I guess—I was afraid.”

“To share this with me?” He looked wounded.

“No, sweetheart. I was afraid of what this place would ask of you.”

“What will it ask of me?”

“It will ask you to split yourself in two. Because now that you know about Greengage, you'll always live a sort of double life. And there's no way to unknow it, no way to take it back. You'll reside in two worlds now. Half past. Half future. That's your new life.
Our
new life.”

“And that's a bad thing?”

“I won't lie. Often, it's a difficult thing,” I said. “But incredible.”

“Benno!” a girl's voice cried out.

Benno looked impatiently over my shoulder.

Miss Russell had introduced Benno to a group of kids his age, and now they were all going swimming. It was barely spring. The creek must be freezing, but they were children, they didn't care.

“Mom, can we spend the night? Please? I have a bedroom and everything.”

It was Saturday and I had the weekend off—potentially we could.

“I'll think about it.”

He sprinted off.

I finally caught up with Joseph in the parlor just before dinner. He stared at me vacantly.

“I brought you something,” I said. “It's called a Walkman.”

Joseph examined the black and silver square, turned it over in his hands.

“The batteries will last for a while. At least through the month. Provided you don't listen to it nonstop.”

I popped it open and slid in a cassette of the Beatles' greatest hits from 1967 to 1970. I handed him the headphones and showed him how to put them on.

“Ready?” I asked.

He nodded and I pressed Play. I'd cued the tape up to “Let It Be.” The music leaked out of the headphones—I listened alongside him.

When the song ended and he slid off the headphones, tears were streaming down both our faces.

“I can't—” he said to me, “get out of that goddamned room.”

I knew exactly the room he was talking about.

“I can help you,” I said.

He cried out and bent over, hiding his face from me, a hank of his thick, black hair falling over his forehead, like an unruly schoolboy. My heart swelled with tenderness for him, for the motherless child he once was.

“Let me help you,” I whispered, sitting beside him.

He didn't push me away, so I put an arm around his heaving shoulders as the sounds of his agonized sobs filled the parlor. We time-traveled back to that night. Back to the room in which Martha had died, was still dying for him.

He knelt on the floor of that room, riding waves of shock. Unable to absorb what was happening. Martha's body, lying still and rigid on the bed.

“She's gone?” he croaked.

“Yes.”

“It happened? The worst has happened?”

“The worst has happened,” I confirmed.

Saying the unsayable was a sort of magic
.
An incantation. It lifted the binding spell and released him. He got himself up from the floor of that room. He walked backward until he was standing in the doorway next to me.

I stood there with him for a long time, until he was able to look upon the scene not without emotion, but without being undone by it.

Time spun forward again. We floated out of that room and into this one.

He looked up at me, his eyes red and swollen. “The worst has happened to you, too.”

It had. I'd lost Benno.

“Let me help you,” he said.

I hadn't admitted even to myself how truly horrendous this past year had been for me. I'd screwed up so royally that I didn't deserve to think about my own feelings. I'd left them in that examination room, too, the moment Friar told me it was past midnight and the reality of what I'd done began to sink in. I'd been stuck in that room as well. I needed Joseph to rescue me as much as he needed me to rescue him. Each of us held the power to release the other. To shove the other back into the present. Back to life.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

T
he boy clattered down the stairs early in the morning. I'd been up for an hour already and was on my second cup of mint tea. He ran into the kitchen, banging into a chair with his hip.

“Oh Jesus, I'm sorry. I didn't think anybody else would be up.”

He sounded exactly like his mother. Jesus this. Jesus that.

“Do you want a cup of tea?”

“Do you have any hot chocolate?”

“This is not a restaurant.”

“Tea would be great,” he amended.

“Teacups are in the cupboard, kettle on the stove.” I wasn't about to wait on an eleven-year-old.

“That's all right. I don't really like tea.” He sat across from me at the table, his hands tucked under his thighs. “So, you're the leader?”

“Everybody here has a job. Everybody is the leader of something.”

“But you're the leader of everything.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because everybody looks to you.”

I took a sip of my tea.

“How long has my mother been coming here?”

“That depends. If you're talking our time, she's been coming here for a year and a half. If you're talking your time, she's been coming since 1975.”

“I was only five in 1975,” he gasped.

“Yes, and as I remember it, the first time she came you'd just gone to Newport to spend some time with your grandparents. So it wasn't as if she up and left you.” I felt the need to defend Lux.

He chewed on his lip. The wounds of his abandonment were fresh, right below the surface.

“What did you think when she didn't come back?” I asked.

His face clouded over. “Sometimes I thought she was dead. Sometimes I thought she'd just moved somewhere else. Got bored with life, with me. Most of the time I just tried not to think about it.”

I could see the boy was fighting back tears.

“Your mother has been coming to Greengage for six years now. Every time I've seen her, all she talks about is you. What you're doing. What things you're interested in. She never would have intentionally left you.”

“But how could she have missed the full moon?” he cried. “How could she have let that happen?”

He was a handsome boy. He and Lux had the same full mouth; it was quite disconcerting.

“She hasn't told you everything about that night.”

He visibly startled. He was not expecting me to be so candid.

“I knew it!” he cried.

“What do you know?”

“That she lied to me.”

“She didn't lie. She just didn't tell you the whole story.”

“Why not?”

“Because she probably felt it wasn't her story to tell.”

Benno pressed his lips together in frustration.

“And she didn't want to use what happened as an excuse.”

“Jesus. What happened? Tell me already.”

I took a breath. “My wife, Martha, died.”

Talking with Benno, I was crossing some border, making good on a promise I'd made to Lux last night to rejoin the world.

“If you want to blame anybody, you should blame me. I should have ensured she left. But she couldn't bear to leave, not until she knew Martha was all right.”

“But she wasn't all right.”

“No. She died just after midnight.”

“I'm really sorry,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He gulped. “That's terrible.”

“Yes, it is. It was.”

A not uncomfortable silence ensued between us.

“Do you have kids?” he asked.

“No.”

“I figured.”

“Why?”

“Because you treat me like an adult.”

“You are almost an adult.”

“Not where I live.”

“From what your mother has told me, it seems children are trapped in childhood long past the time they should be in 1981.”

Benno exhaled shakily. “My father was a soldier. He was killed in the Vietnam War.”

“Yes. Your mother said.”

“I have a grandmother I've never met. She doesn't want anything to do with us. With me.”

“Then she's a damnable idiot.”

He smiled shyly. The hours drew me back into their arms.