Pack Up the Moon

by Rachael Herron

  Kate hardly noticed the ceilings anymore, but she felt them. They warmed rooms that had desperately needed warming once she was so alone. But when she’d gone back to her real work, her painting was monochromatic, as if she’d used up her allowance of color on the house.

  “I was wrong about that,” Nolan said. “It looks great.”

  Kate inclined her head. “Thanks.” If she held up her hands, she’d be able to feel the invisible, unsaid words, to push them around, move them out of her way. Banal. Stick to banal. “How are your parents?”

  Nolan looked at her and she could almost read on his face the words he wanted to say. You lied to me. You never told me about her. You lied. But instead he said, “Fine. Still in Maui. Dad had gout, but it’s better. They don’t e-mail you?”

  “I haven’t even gotten a Christmas card in years.”

  “Oh. Well, they never were—”

  “No,” Kate agreed. Her feelings had been crushed when Robin’s grandparents were so heartbroken they couldn’t even return an e-mail, but she tried never to dwell on it. “They weren’t.”

  “How’s Sonia?”

  She felt a sudden, stabbing pain behind her right eye. “She died. Last year.” There had to be a better way to say it, but there it was. “I’m going to spread her ashes on Saturday. I’m not sure how I’ll . . . I’ve hired a boat.” Tell him about taking the rest of Robin’s ashes, too. Tell him. Tell him you’ll be able to do it. Make yourself believe it.

  “Christ, Kate.” His eyes went wide, filled with real sorrow. “I’m so sorry.”

  She shrugged. “It happens. She fell and got a bleed in her brain. Or maybe the bleed made her fall. They never did figure it out. She was in the ICU for two months and she didn’t wake up again.” Her casual words were belied by the way her voice shook.

  “Kate.”

  She would not let him make her cry. “Anyway.” A silence hung in the room for a long, crystalline moment. On an exhale, she said, “I’m taking Robin, too.”

  Nolan’s body became absolutely still. “You did the first funeral without me.”

  Nervous chills danced along Kate’s spine. This was important. Maybe this was why he was here. “That’s why I’m telling you. Meet me at the Berkeley marina at ten, and you can come. I mean, I’m inviting you.”

  “Mighty big of you.”

  Anger snapped through her, unbidden but welcome. “Oh, I was supposed to wait years to bury my son? For you to get out of prison?”

  His voice was soft, but strong. “You can start by telling me how I never fucking knew you had a daughter.” She’d never heard this particular tone of voice from Nolan, and she would have sworn that she’d heard every color his voice could possibly take over the years. This was different, the cold confusion an iridescent blue-gray like the cold winter fog when it crept over the hills.

  Panic spread through her veins. He’d have to learn the truth sometime, but Kate wasn’t ready yet. Not ready, not ready.

  “Does he know? That Greg guy?” His tone was darker gray with blackened edges.

  “No.” A pounding started at her temples. God, she was bad at lying. But the consequences of not lying were too terrible to contemplate. Fear gripped her, the same fear she’d felt so long ago. “I never saw him again.”

  Nolan kept his body still and his voice low. “You got pregnant, gave the baby away, and never, ever once thought to mention it to me? Even when you were pregnant with our son? Why should I believe that you didn’t lie about every other thing we had together?” Nolan blinked hard, lines gathering at the corners of his eyes and disappearing again as he fixed her with his bewildered stare.

  But there it was—she saw it. He believed her. Relief filled her.

  Nolan went on, “How could you do that to us? Pretend like that? Your pregnancy was the happiest time of my life until Robin was born, and then everything got even better.”

  Kate realized she had lied to Nolan, in the most fundamental way possible, for many years. She wasn’t a bad liar then; she was a good one. A small weight lifted. “In my mind, Robin was my first. I tried to forget that whole chapter of my life. We had started a new life.” How could she make this clearer to him? Their new life was the end of her old one.

  “But Robin . . .”

  “Had a sister. Half sister,” she corrected herself quickly. “I know.”

  “He would have loved that. He was always asking—”

  “I know,” Kate repeated. She picked up a ballpoint pen from the coffee table and twisted it in her fingers, loosening it, then tightening it back up. A piece of metal dropped from it, skittering across the carpet noiselessly.

  “How could you not tell me?”

  Kate said nothing. She was at bottom. This was the lowest she could go. And maybe that was why the question she’d never quite been able to ask him, the one that had filled her mouth so many times until she could have chewed the words, finally—finally—came out as if torn from her body. “How could you take him from me?”

  Nolan gasped, and then said, “My son, Kate. Robin was my son, too.”

  “That makes it better?” God, why hadn’t she asked him this then? Why hadn’t she railed at him, beating him with her fists back then? She’d wanted to. More than anything, she’d wanted to. Nolan had lived. She remembered wishing through her blinding fury that he hadn’t. That he’d finished the terrible job he’d started. He’d tried to leave her. He’d wanted to leave her all alone in her pain. Alone. Which he’d done anyway.

  Nolan said, “He was dying.”

  “But he wasn’t dead.”

  Nolan was white around the eyes. “I told you a million times how sorry I was. I’ll tell you a million more times how sorry I am. But I’m not sorry he isn’t in pain anymore. That he got where he was going that much sooner.”

  Kate felt the tears well, and she hated herself for it. She was weak. Exposed, in front of the person who knew her best. You left me, she almost said. How could you want to kill yourself, too? You said you’d never leave me. “Robin didn’t get anywhere. He was just gone.”

  “He comes to me, you know.” Nolan’s voice lost the bewildered gray and was back to its normal dark blue.

  “No.” It was impossible. Too unfair to contemplate. “He doesn’t.”

  “I see him in my dreams.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Kate’s only dreams about Robin had been awful corporeal ones right after he died, fleshy dreams in which she touched his clammy skin, knowing he was dead, moving his arms and legs, giving him CPR, kissing his cold blue mouth. Just a few months earlier, she’d dreamed that she was touching Robin and that, finally, he was warm. She woke in a panic to save him, to find she was wrapped around Esau so tightly he was pulling at the sheets to get away from her. It was the last time she’d slept with him.

  “And it’s like he’s there. Like he’s just been in another room.” Nolan looked directly into her eyes. Now he was lying. She’d always been able to tell—his face became more controlled, almost perfectly still, and he tapped his fingers in that way he did when he was nervous—tap tap tap—on something, anything that was close. “He tells me he’s always around.”

  For a moment there was nothing but the sound of their mingled breathing, as harsh as if they’d been running. Then her cell phone rang. The song she’d programmed it to play, “Blue” by Lucinda Williams, was too intimate, telling him a secret she didn’t intend to tell.

  Kate stood. She didn’t recognize the number. “I have to get this.” No matter who it was, she was grateful to the caller. She walked into the kitchen before hitting the button to answer.

  “Is this Kate Monroe?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Carey Pike, with Channel 7. I interviewed your husband last night. How are you responding to the news about him?”

  “Ex-husband. Pardon?”

  “Did you hear he saved a man’s life yesterday?”

  “I was with him when he did the CPR. I hel
ped him.” She’d helped the man who’d let her son die. And she’d do it again. Of course she would.

  “So you’re confirming that you’ve reconciled with the man responsible for the death of your child?”

  Kate hung up, regretting that all it took was a click of a red button. She wanted to be able to throw it into its cradle, to hang up with fury, with a bang, rather than just a quiet beep. Lucinda’s song was stuck in her head now, I don’t wanna talk. I just wanna go back to blue.

  “I’m sorry,” said Nolan from behind her.

  She hadn’t heard him enter the kitchen. “I’d forgotten what they were like.” We don’t talk about heaven, and we don’t talk about hell.

  “Kate. I’m sorry.”

  “How could you talk to him?”

  “He tricked me.”

  She sighed and leaned against the edge of the stove, the handle squeaking the way it always had. “Remember the time the one woman found me in the locker room at the gym and pretended to need a ride home so she could get in my car and take those photos of the inside? I really thought her car had broken down.”

  Nolan jammed his fingers through his hair and made it stick straight up. She’d always been a sucker for that look of his. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, and she remembered how he used to do that, to hide there, behind his eyelids, as he thought. “I still think we should have sued over that.”

  “Like we needed more time in court. And I would have had to do it alone. Besides, the one thing we learned was that they get tired of the same subject fast. In a day or two they’ll be gone again.”

  Nolan picked up the pink hula girl saltshaker he’d bought her at a barn sale when they’d taken a leaf-peeping trip back east the year before Robin was born. They’d always thought it was funny that a hula dancer reminded them of Vermont.

  “I get e-mails,” he said.

  “What?” Kate didn’t follow the jump in the conversation.

  He set the saltshaker down, making the dancer sway gently. “From people. Like us. Who want advice.”

  It took a moment to sink in. “They want your help?”

  Nolan nodded.

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  “What do you say?” What would Kate say? Fuck off, fuck you, shit, damn, I’m so sorry, so sorry, sorry sorry sorry no one else understands, I’m sorry . . .

  “Nothing. I just . . . put them in a file.”

  “You save them?” Kate rolled the hem of her shirt with her fingers.

  “I want to respond—I just . . . I just can’t.”

  He’d never been able to send the important e-mails or make the essential phone calls. When Robin was sick, she’d had to write the updates to friends and family. Nolan couldn’t physically bring himself to do it. When he’d called his parents in Hawaii to tell them Robin’s diagnosis, he had thrust the phone at her so he could throw up in the wastebasket.

  “But that, Nolan—it’s important.” It had been important that she tell Nolan she’d had another child. Fuck, it was important that she tell him he had a daughter. And she didn’t do it. Surely this guilt would stop her heart soon and she’d fall to the floor, breath gone forever, the last Monroe to die in this house. And she was on him about e-mails.

  Nolan didn’t say anything, just sighed heavily and sank into his old chair at the kitchen table. She hadn’t heard its particular thick-boned creak for years, had forgotten it had one. He scrubbed his face with his hands and then sighed a second time.

  “I know,” he said. “Why the hell else am I still here? To do road work? To pick up dead raccoons and paint yellow stripes and watch my coworkers jump out of the way of cars like they’re playing dodgeball? I thought my friend Rafe’s wife was sick, and I wondered if that’s why I stayed. To help him. But she’s okay, thank god, and that’s selfish, isn’t it? To think I’m that fucking important? But there has to be a reason, Kate, and I just need to figure out what it is.”

  He rocked back in his chair, just as he’d always done. Robin used to worry he’d fall backward, until one day Nolan had done just that, on purpose, to prove he would be okay and instead ended up breaking his wrist. Robin had refused to sign the cast, saying Nolan didn’t deserve the attention. Then he’d relented and had drawn a small picture of Hedwig the Owl with crossed eyes on the plaster.

  Nolan bowed his head. Then he said, “I’m so sorry, Kate.” She knew he wasn’t talking about the e-mail anymore. He didn’t articulate the full thought, didn’t speak all the words. It was all right. She didn’t want to hear them again anyway.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Thursday, May 15, 2014

  10 p.m.

  It was Flynn’s idea. After he’d held Pree for the ten minutes it took her heart to still, for her to be able to speak to him, he’d listened in that accepting Flynn way as she told him where she’d been for two days. He hadn’t been mad. He should have been angry, and Pree told him so, but he just shook his head, his soft blond hair falling around his face like a piece of sheer, shiny fabric. “Why would I be mad? You’re working some stuff out.”

  The paint box, a true artist’s toolbox, made of steel and oak, was gorgeous. It was a labor of love, everything she’d ever wanted, and nothing she ever would have asked for. It made her love Flynn more desperately, which made her want to run. Pree cursed her own fickleness as she ran her fingers over it again and again.

  She thought of Jimmy and how close she’d come to fucking him. She thought of the fetus. Flynn’s baby. “Yeah.” She pulled the box close to her on the bed again and flicked the clasps. Then she took out a pen she’d already stored inside and reached for her pad. She didn’t think—she just moved the pen around the page. Her eyes were open the whole time, but her brain was somewhere else, and suddenly she realized she had a full drawing in front of her. She could barely remember doing it. Her suspender girl was sitting on top of a brick wall staring down at the ground, where a shattered egg with legs lay. The egg’s legs were wearing combat boots, just as her girl was.

  Pree’s hand stopped moving. Had her girl just pushed Humpty? Or was that another part of herself lying on the ground?

  “Did she tell you where he was buried?”

  Pree started. “What? Robin? Yeah. In a cemetery near her house. Mountain View.”

  “We should go there.”

  She reached out and touched his face. That was so Flynn. “That’s a great idea. We should. We will.”

  Flynn slapped his thighs and unfolded himself into his full height. “Let’s go.”

  “Now? It’s dark. I’m sure they’re closed.”

  “That makes it even better. Let’s go have an adventure.” He challenged her with the words that had never failed before—that particular sentence was how they’d ended up hopping a freight train one spring morning in Tulare, how they’d gotten matching penguin tattoos on their ankles, how they’d spelunked for the first time. Those words had been why Pree had applied to a job so out of her reach, and why she’d accepted it when it was offered to her. Since she’d met him, Flynn had been both her challenge and her reason for trying.

  Pree directed him, and they got lost only once. Oakland was huge, and the roads around Kate’s were confusing as they twisted up and around small treelined hills, but she liked the feel of it, the motion. Flynn, using impressive street smarts, parked in front of a florist shop a block away from the big iron gates at Mountain View Cemetery. “We don’t want the license plate to be on camera,” he said, his voice electric with excitement.

  The gates were high, ornate, and very closed. Pree looked for a security camera, and found it, on the east side. “Let’s pretend we’re just looking for a make-out spot,” she whispered in his ear, and then she realized it wasn’t pretend at all, which made it even more fun. It was hard to tell exactly where the camera was aimed and where it wasn’t, and she was distracted by Flynn’s mouth, his hands . . . Robin, she thought. She was here for a bigger reason, not just to kiss this man. And s
he suddenly wanted to tell Flynn the truth.

  “One thing,” she started, and then stopped, scared.

  He looked at her, and his eyes were all melty and soft and sweet and she almost didn’t go through with it.

  “I’m pregnant,” Pree said.

  He grinned, as if she’d made a joke. Then he looked at her face again and the grin melted away. “Oh, shit.”

  “I know.”

  Flynn folded like a grasshopper and sat on the curb, then looked up at her, his blond hair gleaming white under the sodium glow of the streetlamp. “What are we going to do?”

  Pree loved him fiercely in that moment. He went—always—directly to we. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want . . . ?” he started.

  “I don’t want a baby.”

  “Oh.” Flynn swallowed, his sharp Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “An abortion. That’s gonna be hard, right?” He reached up and took her hand, holding it tightly. “I’m with you. I’ll help in whatever way I can.”

  Pree sucked in a breath. She hadn’t imagined him saying this, hadn’t imagined him going along with her so easily. What if Kate had gone to her birth father back then? What if he’d been this helpful? Would Kate have held his hand as the fetus that became Pree was vacuumed out? Who would have fought for her then? “I don’t want an abortion, either.”

  He frowned. “Adoption?”