Losing the Moon

by Patti Callahan Henry

“How . . . ?”

  “I have my ways.” He laughed. She didn’t.

  “You can’t just come here.”

  “Why not? You were waiting for me.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I always come out here . . . to read, grade papers.”

  Nick swept his hand over the empty bench. “Did you forget your work today?”

  She moaned and dropped her head back down on her knees.

  “I wanted to tell you before I told the OWP. I had the plant analyzed and it is definitely a buckthorn. Norah can take it to the Heritage Preserve,” Nick said.

  “I thought Brenton was doing that.”

  “Well, I had a lab that could get to it faster—owed me a favor.”

  “Nick, that is awesome news, but you could’ve called me.”

  “I know. I tried not to come—” He leaned down and looked directly in her eyes. “It’s terrible, you know, fucking terrible to need to see someone as much as I need to see you.”

  She looked up now. “You smell like whiskey.”

  “I told you . . . I tried not to come. I stopped at McNalley’s for a few with the guys after work, but I couldn’t sit still—couldn’t find anything to talk about—and I knew you were thirty minutes away. Thirty minutes. Christ, for the past twenty-five years you’ve been on another planet, and today you were thirty minutes away. How could I not come?”

  “Nick.”

  He couldn’t read what she meant in that one word, but the sound of his name on her tongue, in her mouth, was worth the embarrassment of showing up at her school looking like he was stalking her.

  “I really can’t believe I’m sitting here looking at you,” he said.

  “It’s like some weird half-dream,” she agreed without looking up. “Or nightmare.”

  He laughed. “You know, I used to dream about seeing you. I don’t anymore. I wish I would, but I can’t . . . they don’t come to me. I used to have them all the time—bizarre dreams where I couldn’t get to you.”

  “What do you mean?” She sat up now, swung her feet to the ground.

  “You’d be in a restaurant, in a crowd, across a room . . . and I would try to touch you, but the closer I got, the farther away you’d go. You never saw me in those dreams. I only had two dreams where you saw me. One time was when I saw you across a restaurant at a bar that looked like it was made completely of glass and silver. You were holding a bottle of tequila.”

  “I don’t drink tequila.”

  “I don’t think that was the point of the dream.” He pinched her nose.

  “What was the point?”

  “You saw me. Noticed me. You waved and walked over. But you never said a word and we walked outside, drove off in my truck.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I carried that dream around for years. You saw me. You left with me. Then I had my last dream about you . . . it was years ago. You were floating on top of the ocean, on your back. You’d look at me once in a while, wave, then tuck your head back on the waves. I yelled at you to return to shore—there were sharks. I tried to swim after you, but in that weird dream way when you can’t swim or walk or run, I couldn’t get to you. I screamed, I tried to swim, I crawled through the sand, but you just floated and floated. You couldn’t see what I saw: the sharks.”

  Amy lifted her head. “I had a dream recently about floating in the ocean. Well, it wasn’t really a dream—it lasted ten seconds before Carol Anne rang the living hell out of the doorbell.”

  “Always count on Carol Anne to ruin a good time.”

  “Carol Anne is the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  Nick took a deep breath. “Have you told her about . . . all this?”

  “Yes. Yes, I have. Well, a little. I kept some . . . specifics to myself.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “What really happened to you, where you were—the jail.”

  “What did she say?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Amy smiled.

  God, he loved it when she really smiled, a God-save-his-soul smile. “Oh, but sure I want to know what our friend Carol Anne had to say.”

  “She said that she thought you were down in Costa Rica the entire time getting more ass than a toilet seat.” Amy’s smile widened. Then she laughed.

  “She is such a delicate Southern flower.”

  “The funny part is, she is. She is kind and sensitive and wise.”

  “Well, did she have any advice?”

  “Do you mean before or after I drove off with the hose from the gas pump still in my car and sat on the pavement in front of half the old biddies in town getting their hair done?”

  “What?”

  She amused him with the tale of the gas pump, and Nick felt such a release of laughter and joy at her storytelling, at her obvious preoccupation with him.

  “It’s not that funny. I’m a mess.”

  “So, really, after all that, what did Carol Anne have to say, advice-wise? I’d love to hear it.”

  “To stay as far away from you as Costa Rica. Farther.”

  “Ah, she’s still jealous.”

  “No, just protective of me.”

  “I’m obviously joking about the jealous part, but you don’t need to be protected from anything . . . or anyone. I believe you know how to take care of yourself.”

  “No, I’m not sure I do anymore.”

  “Don’t you dare let that happen to you—you were always able to be whatever someone wanted of you—the small-town good-girl syndrome. But you’ve always known what you wanted—always taken care of yourself.”

  Amy stared at him. He reached out his hand for hers. She shook her head. “Did you come here to tell me your version of who I am, or just to tell me your dreams?”

  “I came to tell you about the plant, to hear your voice, even if you were mad at me. I came to see you, to touch your face, to hear you tell me what you’ve been thinking.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He lifted her chin, ran his finger down her neck and let it rest at her throat. “It’s me. Talk to me. You don’t have to make any sense, just talk to me.”

  “I’ve been sleepwalking. How does that make you feel? Better? I can’t be this way. I can’t. I’m burying myself in chores and—”

  “It doesn’t work, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t.” She folded her hands over her face.

  “What are we going to do?”

  She looked out from her hands. “Nothing. We aren’t going to do anything. If you want to talk or . . . but we’re not going to do anything.”

  “We’re going to take a walk. That’s what we’re going to do. Walk down to the river, get some fresh air, a glass of wine, maybe some oysters. Come on.”

  She hesitated, then answered, “That sounds really nice, but—”

  “But nothing. Hell, we’ll call Revvy and the gang—tell them what I’ve found.”

  “Nick . . .”

  “Just let me hear your voice, walk with you. That’s all.”

  “Okay, okay. I haven’t eaten in a while.”

  “Me neither. Come on.” He stood, held out his hand for her. She grabbed it and stood. Dusk surrounded them, just as when he’d said goodbye to her last week, when she’d run from him and left him alone.

  This time she was leaving with him. After she punched a code into the keypad, she opened the gate and he held it for her, bowed, allowed her out first.

  “Mrs. Reynolds. Mrs. Reynolds.” A shrill voice came from the front porch of the dorm.

  Nick looked at Amy. “You know her?”

  “A student. Give me a sec here.”

  Amy moved toward the small freckled girl, but the girl was quicker, reaching them first. “You forgot to grade my essay. You gave it back without a grade or marks or anything.”

  “Oh, Sarah, I’m so sorry. It must have
stuck to the bottom or . . . I’m so sorry. Just slip it under my door inside the dorm. I promise to have it back to you by tomorrow morning’s house tour—extra credit for my carelessness.”

  “Bonus!” The girl giggled and glanced at Nick. “Is this your husband you always talk about?”

  Amy blushed—it began at her hairline and descend to the V of her pearl gray sweater. “No, this is an old college friend in town on business. He’s working on the Oystertip Island project also.”

  “Oh . . . sorry.”

  “No, don’t be. Mr. Reynolds loves coming to Savannah. I’ll bring him to class sometime, introduce him.”

  “Whatever . . . cool. I’ll see you in the morning.” Sarah disappeared through the front door.

  Amy turned back to Nick. “This is a very, very bad idea,” she said.

  Nick felt a rising panic; she would change her mind. “It’s fine. You’re being paranoid. We’re not doing anything wrong . . . taking a walk, talking. I haven’t even heard how your family is, what you’re doing. All we talked about was my damn jail term and the OWP project. Catch me up.”

  Amy ambled across the cobblestone sidewalk; Nick didn’t speed up for fear of her turning back. She watched the ground while she walked, looked to the left, the right, never at him. She wrapped her arms around her chest and rubbed her upper arms.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No. I’m fine, really. So tell me about your family—your brother, your mom, your dad,” she said.

  “Dad died fifteen years ago.”

  “I’m so sorry. How?”

  “Cirrhosis. Let’s talk about something else.” He waved his hand through the air. His dad had made the final descent into the alcoholic’s death. Nick did not want to talk about his dad at all. He had nothing in common with him, never had; the subject of his father embarrassed him.

  “Okay, how about your mom?”

  “Well, Mom’s still in Garvey, her life revolving around her bridge club, her bingo night. But she is actually better than I’ve seen her since . . . well, she’s slowly come out of her shell.”

  “Good for her. Is she still in the old house?”

  He had a mental flash of the house he grew up in, the old rural clapboard house that backed up to a rambling forest. He’d loved the house and the land. Three years after he returned from Costa Rica, a strip mall replaced the woods and his mother was offered a beautiful new view of black concrete and screaming children and their mothers off on a family shopping day.

  “Mama moved after they built a strip mall behind the house. She never loved that house anyway. It had been Dad’s throne, not hers. She lives in a retirement community where she has her own little place, a nice view of a lake and a porch for reading. She’s . . . happy.”

  They walked and talked, catching up on family—who lived where, what had happened over the past twenty-five years. Amy told Nick about her parents’ deaths in a car crash on I-85 on a trip to Atlanta, when the driver of an eighteen-wheeler fell asleep. She told him of the grief and panic that had overtaken her, and how living in her hometown had eased some of the pain—how her children never knew her parents since they were both babies when it happened.

  In broad strokes they began to paint the pictures of each other’s lives—fragmented images meant to convey larger murals.

  Amy took a deep breath; she looked like she was girding herself for the next question. “So what did you do after Costa Rica?”

  He stopped when she asked this; the glow from the gaslight above them licked her hair. He wanted, needed to touch her.

  “I left Costa Rica the instant I could. I don’t think I slept there again—that’s how fast I left.”

  Amy laughed, punched his arm. “You don’t sleep much anywhere.”

  “True. But I left as soon as I could get my papers together—and Eliza was pretty damn organized.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s a long story. Essentially Eliza’s dad had arranged for me to get a job with one of his subsidiary companies in Maine, doing reforestation and corporate development plans. We stayed there for fifteen years.”

  “But . . .” She looked away.

  He turned her face with his hand. “But what?”

  “That’s not what you wanted to do.”

  “And isn’t that the hell of all this? Just seeing you reminds me of that. I don’t need you to tell me.”

  “I’m sorry. I just meant—I was just curious how you changed goals.”

  “I didn’t change my goals, Amy. The circumstances changed my goals.”

  “Oh,” she whispered.

  He placed his palm on the side of her face. “There are so many things I lost back then. And the worst of it is that I’d almost forgotten what I wanted to forget . . . and then there you were.” She pulled away and stumbled on the cobblestone sidewalk. He grabbed her arm. “I lost you. I lost most of the purpose in my job. The only things I gained were nightmares of women jumping in front of my car and cockroaches under the bed.”

  “I’m so, so sorry. I wish . . . I wish . . .”

  “I wish, too. But it doesn’t do a damn bit of good—trust me on that.” He drew a deep breath. “I was lucky Eliza’s dad arranged a job for me. No one knew anything about the ‘incident’ in Costa Rica. If I’d tried to get my own job, or do it on my own terms, they would’ve found out.”

  “So no one ever found out.”

  “Nope. Never. It’s not even discussed.”

  “That doesn’t make it go away.”

  “It did for a while. It definitely did for a while.”

  “How did you end up back here?”

  “Eliza wanted to come back to the South, badly. After Lisbeth turned ten, Eliza’s need to return to the South overwhelmed her. And her dad, ole Harlan Sullivan, finally deemed me worthy to work for the family company.”

  “Did you decide that research and education weren’t what you really wanted?”

  With that question a doubled-over kind of realization knocked him in the gut—he was still not doing what he wanted, and he’d run out of excuses. His voice came choked, as if his desires were stuck in his throat. “I’d forgotten—really forgotten—until I saw you, what I wanted . . .”

  “What?”

  He leaned into her, grabbed both her shoulders—she must understand this. “Haven’t you ever thought you weren’t hungry, then all of a sudden you smelled something or tasted something you love and you realized that you were starving? Absolutely starving?”

  “Yes,” she said, but he could barely hear her as much as read her lips: Yes, yes.

  “Well, that’s how it is now. I’m starving for all that—for all those things I once wanted.”

  A couple walked past them, bumped them. Amy looked up and down the street. “Come on, let’s walk.”

  “Do you understand?”

  She stopped and turned; she was away from the light now and her face was in shadow, the whites of her eyes shining. “Yes, I understand, but I can’t fix it. It kills me, but I can’t. Maybe then I could have—I don’t even know that. But how can I fill all that . . . hunger in you? It’s always been that way with you.”

  “But you did fill it.”

  “I can’t now. I can’t.” She walked faster and he jogged up behind her.

  “Amy.”

  “Please, stop. Please.”

  He closed his eyes. “Okay.”

  She turned now and reached into her purse, pasted one of those shaky smiles on her face. “Here, call Revvy. Tell him what you found.” She pulled out a cell phone. “Go ahead. You do it. You’re the hero here.”

  “Do you know his number?”

  “I have it back at the dorm. Call information.”

  Two minutes later, the good news had been conveyed, and Revvy said he would call Norah and Brenton and arrange a meeting for the following week.

  They arr
ived at the edge of the Savannah River on a walkway overlooking the water. The sound of clinking glasses, laughter and humming conversation spilled from a café behind them.

  “Let’s sit out here.” He motioned toward the café. “Get that glass of wine and oysters.”

  He touched her sweater-covered arm, steered her through the café’s wrought-iron gate and pointed to an empty table in the far corner.

  “I’ll get us drinks. Be right back.”

  Amy maneuvered her way through the crowd, sat at the round iron table. Nick turned from her to the bar, ordered two glasses of Merlot.

  He carried the wine to the table. “I forgot to ask you what you wanted. Is Merlot okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Tell me about Phil, about meeting him . . . about marrying him.” He sat down and pulled his chair closer to her; their knees brushed.

  “You don’t want to hear all this.”

  “Oh, yes, I do.” He clinked his glass with hers. “Go for it.”

  “Well, the semester you didn’t return . . . I dropped out of school. I was failing anyway—never attended class. Mom maneuvered a doctor’s slip . . . family doc and all that. So I was able to take a semester off without any effect on my oh-so-perfect grade point average.”

  “Wouldn’t want to mess that up now, would we?”

  “No, Mom and Dad were insistent about that. Anyway, Phil and I were friends with all the same people—you know, in school and at home. He was at the local community college, working full-time for an accountant and . . . well, he was there the semester I came home, which also happened to be spring quarter. So then it was summer break and . . . and six months into being home. . . .”

  She took a long, slow swallow of her wine and looked out at the river. A barge slid by exuding a long black cloud of smoke. A couple strolled by, leaning on each other’s shoulders and murmuring. Amy stared at them, tucked her hair behind her ears, twisted it behind her head; it all sprang loose before she even rested her hands at her sides.

  She spoke without looking at him. “I was miserable. He wasn’t. I was on an emotional roller coaster. He was stable. I was tired. He was alive, funny, awake.”

  “So you used him.”

  Her head whipped around. “That is not fair. You’re not giving Phil credit for who and what he is to me. He took—he takes such good care of me. He loves me.”