Pack Up the Moon

by Kristan Higgins

  He and Lauren had wanted four. Back when they were unaware of the cruelty of illness and the hubris of that kind of thing . . . as if you could go up to some divine deli counter and just put in your order. We’ll have four kids, please. Two girls, then two boys. All healthy, please. Oh, and could you throw in a Golden retriever?

  “Oh, no, it’s six fifty-two!” Sumi exclaimed. “We have to get home for Jeopardy!”

  “You can watch it here,” his mom said.

  “And get creamed by you and Josh? No, thanks,” Ben said. “A man has to maintain some pride.”

  Josh smiled. He and his mother did tend to get every answer right, except in the pop culture categories. With Lauren, they’d been unbeatable as a team. He’d also told Ben he needed to talk to his mom alone.

  “I also ate too much and have to get out of these pants,” Sumi added.

  “I love you both,” Josh said. “See you soon.”

  “What’s on your mind?” his mom asked the second he closed the door. “Was it their new grandchild?”

  “No. Did that bother you, though?”

  “No,” she lied. “It’s wonderful. Why would it bother me?”

  They stared at each other a minute, the subject of children lurking between them. You can talk about your feelings, you know, Lauren would say. Then again, this was his mother. Feelings hadn’t been discussed a lot.

  What the hell? “Of course, I’m sad Lauren and I didn’t have kids,” he said.

  “Well. That would’ve been irresponsible, given her condition.” She looked at the floor to avoid his eyes. Logic had always been her go-to response for anything. Josh said nothing.

  “Do you want dessert?” she asked. “I made an apple cake. Coffee milk?”

  “Sure.” She was a better baker than cook.

  His mother cut the cake, put a dollop of Cool Whip on the side and cut herself a piece, too, then poured them both coffee milk, Rhode Island’s weirdly delicious state drink. She sat down heavily across from him. She was still a striking woman, his mom, with her blond hair and piercing blue eyes. They had the same nose, the same slight cleft in their chins. Otherwise, he must have been his father’s boy, so to speak. It wasn’t uncommon that, when Josh was a kid, people had assumed Ben was his biological father, given Josh’s straight black hair and dark eyes.

  “So what’s up, Joshua?” She always could read him better than anyone else.

  Except Lauren.

  “Well, Mom . . . I was hoping you could tell me about my father.”

  She flinched and took a hostile bite of cake. “When did you start lobbing bombs in conversation?”

  All his life, when he’d asked about his father, Stephanie had been like this. Cold enough to let him know his questions weren’t welcome. Irritated (or hurt) by his interest. By the age of ten or so, he’d stopped asking. All he knew was that they’d dated briefly, his mother had gotten pregnant, and his biological father left, never to return, call or write.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I know you don’t like talking about it, but . . .”

  “Well, it came out of nowhere, and I’m not prepared to talk about it.”

  He nodded. “Is there some way I should’ve eased into that?” This was his mother. She should know he lacked social dexterity.

  She shrugged and fluttered her hands. “I can’t think of how.” She sighed. “Fine. Eat your cake. I need a minute.” She took a sip of her coffee milk, glaring at him.

  He obeyed. One bite. Two. Some Cool Whip, a staple from his childhood. Three bites.

  “So,” she finally said. “He was tall, dark, handsome, irresponsible. What else do you want to know?”

  “You met in college, right?”

  “Yes. He was in graduate school in Boston.”

  Josh let the silence rest between them. “Anything else, Mom?”

  “Do you have a form I can fill out? It would be more pleasant than this.”

  He almost laughed. “I’d like whatever information you have.”

  “Are you sick? Do you need a family history?” Her forehead crinkled with worry.

  “No. Not at all. Not sick.”

  She sighed. “He left me when I was four months pregnant, Joshua. He knew what he was doing, too. I told him the minute I found out, and he made the choice to—what do you kids call it?—to ghost me. He is not your father. He was an unpaid sperm donor who left us both.”

  “I know that, Mom.” He sighed. “The thing is, I have too much time on my hands. I miss Lauren.” His voice broke. “I don’t have that many . . . people. Outside of you and Ben and Sumi, I have two relatives that I know of—your cousin, and her daughter. I’d just like to . . . see where I came from, genetically speaking.”

  “Oh, so you do want to meet him! I see!” She tossed down her fork, and it hit the plate with a clatter. “You think after thirty-one years, he’s going to take you to a ball game and teach you to catch?”

  “No. I would just like to meet him. One time.” He hadn’t been sure of this until the words left his mouth.

  She said nothing, though she may have hissed. Then she anger-ate her dessert, stabbing her fork through the innocent cake like she was murdering it, chewing fiercely. She chugged her coffee milk.

  “Mom,” he said gently, “you are the person I most admire in the world. You and my wife. That will never change. What you did, having me alone when you were still a college student, graduating, working in a highly competitive field, raising me to be a good person . . . it was remarkable. You are remarkable.”

  Her face softened just a little. “That’s true.”

  “The way you loved and took care of Lauren . . . and me . . . don’t think for a second that I will ever, ever forget that.”

  She looked away, her mouth trembling a little, her equivalent of a sobbing wreck.

  “But I’d like to meet my father. It won’t change anything. I just want to . . . know.”

  She wiped her eyes on her napkin. Took another bite of cake, a sip of coffee milk. “You know his name.”

  “Yes. Christopher Zane.”

  “He was from Indiana. His parents had a farm. He was getting his degree in . . . gosh, what was it? Environmental engineering. Or agricultural engineering. Something like that. He was at MIT, I was at Harvard. He went to Notre Dame for his bachelor’s, and on our first date, he got mad at me because I didn’t know who the Fighting Irish were.” She rolled her eyes.

  Josh’s head was buzzing, even as his brain memorized the facts. That was more than his mother had told him about his father in his entire life.

  “We dated for six weeks. I was a strict Lutheran, remember, and I thought premarital sex was for slutty girls, got carried away and had unprotected sex. I was stupid, I was in denial, so I told myself I had just skipped a period or two.” She sighed. “I knew, though. I kept hoping I wasn’t.” Her head jerked up. “Don’t get me wrong, Joshua. You’re the best thing in my life. I don’t regret you for one second.”

  “I know that.”

  “Good.” She patted his hand, then resumed stabbing her cake. “So when I couldn’t pretend anymore, I took a test and voilà! Pregnant. I told him. We fought. Abortion wasn’t on the table, not for me. We talked for about two seconds about getting married, but it was already clear we weren’t going to work. He said he’d ‘pay his share.’” She made air quotes around the words. “Then he went off on a project of some kind, some summer program, said he would call me when he got settled, and I never saw him again. I sent him a letter at his MIT address, which was the only one I had. It came back. His email address was defunct. I called him at his last known phone number. It was disconnected. That September, I called MIT, and they said he was no longer enrolled there.”

  Silence settled over the kitchen. Outside, sleet started pattering against the window.

  “And that was it, sweetheart,�
� she said, her voice gentler than when she’d started.

  There was an unpleasant pressure in Josh’s chest. What kind of person turns his back on his unborn child and just disappears? For decades?

  “Is he still alive?” Josh asked.

  “I don’t know.” She sighed. “I put his name on the birth certificate because I wanted evidence, I think.”

  “Why didn’t you try to track him down and ask for child support?”

  “I didn’t want it. Honestly, I would’ve lived in a box on the street before doing that.” She shrugged. “But my father was still alive back then, so he made sure we didn’t have to. I transferred to Brown, and they gave me a stipend, and between that and what Papa gave us, we were fine.”

  “Did you ever Google him? Just out of curiosity?”

  She pulled a face. “Yes. Once, when you were about ten. He was teaching at Northwestern and lived in Chicago. Or he did twenty years ago. So there it is. Everything I know. He completely abandoned us. Never looked back. So there you have it for when you plan your joyful reunion.”

  “It’s just curiosity, Mom. And something to do.”

  “You could dig ditches. You could clean toilets. Volunteer at a shelter for battered women.”

  “Okay, okay. I get it. And I do volunteer at the Hope Center. Also, I just got my red belt in karate. Everyone else’s mom was there for the belt ceremony. I was sorry you couldn’t make it.”

  There. She smiled. She’d laughed so hard when he told her about his kiddie karate classes.

  Her smile faded. “Josh . . . I kept my old post office box in Cambridge for ten years. You know. In case he wanted to contact me and hear about you.” Her eyes filled. “He never did.”

  He inhaled slowly, held it for a second, then exhaled. “He sounds like quite a dick.”

  “Can’t argue that point.”

  “Do you know anything else, Mom?”

  “No.” She shook her head and wiped her eyes. “His loss, Joshua. You are the best son in the world.”

  He got up and hugged her, his fierce Viking mom. “I love you, Mom.” She hugged him back hard, then kissed his cheek soundly.

  “I love you, too. Do what you have to do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Finish your cake.”

  * * *

  JOSHUA FOUND CHRISTOPHER M. Zane with four clicks on Google after entering his father’s name, educational history and the word engineer.

  And there he was. A photo and everything.

  Christopher M. Zane had graying dark hair, olive skin and brown eyes, a square solid face, aquiline nose and a crooked left incisor that showed clearly when he smiled. Josh’s left incisor was also crooked. Identically crooked.

  Objectively speaking, Josh could admit his father was handsome. A bit like George Clooney, but not as pretty, as Lauren would say.

  He stared at the picture.

  He looked a lot more like his father than his mother. A lot more.

  Josh was always surprised to be noticed for his looks, given that he spent so much time in his own head. His sloppy, pre-Lauren, pre-Radley attire was chosen for comfort, and when he did put in the effort—like buying the suit he’d worn to propose to Lauren—he was pleased. He cleaned up nice, as Sumi told him.

  But now, looking at his future self on the screen there . . . maybe he didn’t like the way he looked so much anymore. Not that this man had done anything significant in Joshua’s life other than ejaculate. Well, that and walk away.

  Christopher M. Zane, now a PhD, taught civil and environmental engineering at the University of Chicago. A graduate from Notre Dame, he had “studied at MIT,” got his master’s from the University of Chicago, a doctorate from Northwestern, was now tenured at the University of Chicago and a frequent guest lecturer. He’d taken a sabbatical in South Africa three years prior. He was married and had three children.

  So Joshua had siblings. Noted.

  Josh didn’t let emotion get in the way. As when he worked, his tunnel vision served him. He signed up for a record-finding service, and several minutes later, got his father’s address, phone number, previous addresses. Christopher M. Zane had gotten a speeding ticket in 2018. He’d been a part owner of a now-closed café in Wicker Park. Here was a picture of him at the opening, his arm around his wife, three kids. “Christopher Zane, his wife, Melissa, and their three children, Sawyer, Ransom and Briar”—apparently, they wanted their kids to join the rodeo—“at the opening of Deep, Dark and Delicious, the latest café to open in Chicago’s funkiest neighborhood.”

  A half brother and two half sisters with cowboy names. He studied their faces. Melissa was blond and blue eyed, and two of the kids were as well, but Ransom looked like her father.

  And like Josh.

  How strange, to see someone who undeniably looked like him after thirty years of being an only child. Thirty-one, to be precise.

  The café had closed two years later. Ah, well.

  He Googled his father’s address, hit street view and saw that his father lived in a gracious old Victorian in Oak Park. Lovely neighborhood. A real estate search let him see the old listing and all the rooms inside. He saw the windows in the master bedroom, the smaller, cozy bedrooms his half siblings had. The kids had had to share a bathroom, and he could imagine the bickering that took place there. Big kitchen. A sunroom overlooking the backyard.

  It was a nice house. Really nice. The kind he and Lauren might have bought.

  A few more search terms, and Joshua learned that his paternal grandparents, Mike and Kerry Zane, owned a huge dairy farm in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. Two thousand cows, all the equipment and buildings necessary, everything very shiny and modern. There’d been a beautiful old home on the property as well, with a wraparound porch, four bedrooms and a six-stall barn for horses.

  The farm had sold for $12.2 million fourteen years ago.

  Funny, to think that his ancestors were wealthy.

  Fourteen years ago, Joshua had been choosing colleges based on their financial aid packages and scholarships. Stephanie was frugal and had started saving money for his college before he popped out of her uterus, but her salary had never been anything more than modest until the past couple of years, when she moved into what might be considered comfortable. Before she’d gotten knocked up, Josh’s mom had planned to go to medical school. She was getting an online master’s degree now, thirty-one years after Josh had been born.

  He clicked back on the two photos of his father.

  He called Cookie Goldberg. “What do you want?” she said by way of answering.

  “I’m going to Chicago tomorrow,” he said. “Book me a flight and find a quiet hotel, okay?”

  27

  Joshua

  Month ten

  Still December

  SEVENTEEN HOURS AFTER calling Cookie, Joshua sat on a bench outside the building where Christopher M. Zane, PhD, was holding office hours. The sun was mercilessly bright, the sky a cold, brittle blue. The bench itself was iron, but Josh barely noticed the freezing temperature. No. He was watching the doors of the building where his father taught and held office hours.

  Thank God Sarah had dropped the letter off early. Otherwise, he might have missed this window, since the semester was ending in a few days.

  Right now, he was hoping that his father would use the main entrance when he left. He’d printed out the university’s photo and the one of his father’s family at the café and kept close watch on the door. Kids came in and out of the building, bundled against the cold. It was cold in a way the Northeast never was—a dry, biting cold that cut through every layer Josh had on. It was fine. He didn’t mind.

  “Can I help you?” someone asked. She smiled and shifted her backpack.

  “I’m waiting for Dr. Zane,” he said.

  “Oh, he’s in office hours. He’s my pr
ofessor.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. He’s great. One of the best in my program.”

  Josh didn’t respond. She tilted her head, and he remembered to speak. “Glad to hear it.”

  “Well. Happy holidays.”

  He nodded. “You too.”

  As she left, he returned his attention to the door, and right then, a man came out, dressed in a heavy winter parka. He held on to the railing, moving a bit stiffly. He was tall and held a briefcase in one hand. His hair was salt-and-pepper gray. He looked like George Clooney.

  The man waved to a student, then took a left and started walking west.

  Josh got up, grabbed his leather bag and jogged up behind him. “Professor Zane?” he said, his voice calm. He felt calm, too. He felt . . . nothing, really. A distant curiosity.

  “Yes?” His father turned. Up close, he looked older than his pictures, shadows under his eyes, the skin on his face starting its downward journey into laxity. Still handsome, though.

  “Joshua Park.” He didn’t put out his hand.

  “Do I know you? Are you a student or alumnus?”

  “No.” He paused. “I’m your son.”

  That expression . . . the blood drained out of his face. Joshua watched as it happened. Christopher M. Zane’s face turned utterly gray. His eyes widened, and he bent over, hands on his knees. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  Josh didn’t offer to help him. He waited, and after a few seconds, his father stood up, breathing heavily. He took a step backward, his breath fogging the air. His eyes were wet, Josh observed, and he was unsteady on his feet.

  Which meant nothing, of course.

  “Hey, Dr. Zane! You okay?” called a student.

  “Yeah. Yep, fine, thanks. Thanks.” He shook his head a little, took a few deep breaths, then looked at Josh’s face. “My God,” he said, and his tears overflowed. “My God.”

  “Can we go somewhere to talk?” Josh asked. “Or do you need an ambulance?”

  “No, I’m fine . . . just . . . my God. I never thought . . . I never expected to . . .”