The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  Once they both found their footing, Cameron felt the damp spot on his back. He yanked her champagne flute out of her hand and downed half of it in three gulps, which was exactly the punishment she expected.

  “Did you transfer off your flight?” she asked.

  “No. I can’t stay long. A friend got me a seat on a commuter flight to LAX, which will get me there just in time.”

  “But you’re drinking?”

  “I don’t fly the plane, Meg.”

  “Still.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “I’ll take first break and sleep it off somewhere over Alaska. I wasn’t going to miss this for the world but I wasn’t going to experience it sober either.” She followed him down the hallway to where his cocktail was resting on the stone frame of the wrought-iron grate he had been standing behind when she first noticed him. The carpeting underfoot was so thick she felt like she was walking on mud: expensive, limited-edition mud.

  Cameron had clearly been spending time at the gym. His walk seemed more centered and determined, and the spread of his upper back beneath his white oxford was broader than it had been the last time she had seen him. Up until recently, he had looked like a lanky adolescent posing as a young adult, but now that he was filling out, he looked like something closer to a grown man.

  But the onset of physical adulthood hadn’t eroded his good looks. She had to admit that his long, almost feline blue eyes were his best feature, even if they had come to him from their father, and his strong jaw gave him a look of constant masculine determination, even when he was impersonating Cher. Megan was confident the Peninsula Airlines ad had raised his stock in the West Hollywood club scene, but if it had led to an increase in viable suitors, he hadn’t mentioned it. When it came to discussing his own sex life, he could be far more demure than Megan would ever dream of being about her own.

  Cameron took a slug from his drink as he gave her a long, skeptical once-over. “Tell me Mom made you wear this.”

  “Don’t be a jerk,” she whispered.

  “Have you met me?”

  “Seriously. We reached a compromise—”

  His eyes lighted on the brooch. “Is that a giraffe?”

  “It’s a sea horse. Shut up. You have no idea what it replaced and I don’t want to go into it.”

  “Whatever. Mom’s starting to look like Suze Orman anyway. Wouldn’t that be funny if she turned out to be a lesbian?”

  “Apparently she had another face-lift no one told me about.”

  “Yeah,” her brother responded. He turned away from her and stared down at the living room below as he sipped his cocktail. She waited for some smart remark about his experience of their mother’s latest procedure. But he either didn’t have one to make, or the drink in his hand had put a damper on his quick wit.

  “She thinks you’re mad at her because she was such a nightmare on the drugs.”

  Cameron’s laugh came from his chest and it sounded like there was a lot of life in it. But he doused it with a swallow of what she guessed was vodka tonic.

  “I don’t want to be the mediator here, Cameron. I’m just sharing information. Consider it a warning.”

  “Now that you’re here, I’m not driving down for the next one. Face-lift duty is all yours, babe.”

  “I don’t know if I’m up for being in the room when they peel the bandages off. It sounds creepy.”

  “Not as creepy as all this,” he said, gesturing to the assemblage below.

  “Everyone thinks the place they’re from is a little creepy.”

  “We are not from Cathedral Beach, OK? We got stuck here by a bad marriage.” She was startled by the assuredness with which he issued this dismissal. In the past, Cameron’s opinion of their hometown had always seemed as ambivalent and conflicted as her own feelings about the place. True, for as long as they had lived there, they had felt like tourists on an extended visa, but whenever they discussed their years here, Megan felt obligated to point out the opportunities that had been made available to them during their stay and Cameron almost never argued with her.

  “What? You think Mom should have moved us out of here after Dad left?”

  Cameron turned to face her. He rested his shoulder against the wall, which Megan could now see wasn’t actually stone at all but plaster painted to look rough and weathered. She tried to determine from his coloring how much alcohol he had consumed, but there was too much shadow between them. It was clear he was in some kind of mood. She had almost forgotten about the look he had just given their cousin, or the absence of any kind of look at all.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how much shit Joe gave you for moving back here, and I know how hard things have been for you. To be honest, if I was in your position, I probably would have done the same thing. But please, Megan. Tell me this is temporary. I don’t want to lose you to these people.”

  “Oh God, Cameron, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Of course it’s temporary. A year tops. I need to build up some savings, pay off some debt, and then that’s it. Trust me. Mom knows this.”

  “It’s not Mom I’m worried about. It’s Lucas. Do you know how galling it was for him when you moved to San Francisco? It was like you betrayed your lineage by not applying to Dartmouth. He’s on a mission to get you back. Trust me.”

  Hadn’t she had pretty much the same thought when she realized who had been invited to this little soiree? But hearing it come out of her brother’s mouth made her want to debate it. She resisted the urge. When Cameron got on these dark spirals, she just had to let them play out. The good thing was that they didn’t usually last longer than a few minutes. But it wasn’t the duration of this one that bothered her; it was the depth.

  “You know, if this were another time, he probably would have tried to marry you.”

  “Gross, Cameron. Please. Come downstairs with me. I’ve forgotten how to talk to people who think climate change is a myth.”

  Instead of peeling himself off the wall, he reached out and took one of her hands in his. “Come work with me, Meg. We’ll take to the skies together. I’ll show you the other side of the world and introduce you to a nice Asian billionaire who will solve all your problems for you.”

  “There aren’t any billionaires left.”

  “Seriously, we’ll be the world’s first brother-and-sister flight-attendant team and you’ll never have to be bothered with Lucas’s bullshit and Mom’s brooches again.”

  “What about the fact that I don’t like flying?”

  “I’ll teach you to love it. You know, it’s really just floating on the upper atmosphere. When you think about it, it’s the same thing as being on a boat.”

  “On a boat, you can step outside for a breath of fresh air.”

  “On a plane, you can touch the stars.”

  “Oh my God. You are loaded.”

  “I am not loaded. I just love my job.”

  “If you get fired tonight, you’re going to end up living right next door to me, aren’t you?”

  “We’ll end up living together. In L.A.!”

  “Seriously. Come downstairs with me. I need you for this.” When she pulled on his hand, his entire arm went rigid and his feet remained planted on the carpet.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to leave for the airport in five minutes. My stuff’s up here. Come talk to me while I change.”

  They slipped into one of the guest bedrooms, where Cameron emptied out his pants pockets onto the bed, dropping his keys and iPhone onto a comforter already strewn with purses and backpacks belonging to the waitstaff. The room had been stripped of personal belongings, leaving behind modern furnishings of dark wood with steel trim that had a nautical feel. Cameron’s flight bag was standing next to the open bathroom door. He pulled it inside with him and began to change without closing the door all the way.

  “So what are you actually going to do?” Cameron asked her.

  “For work, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lucas
and I have a meeting set up tomorrow. I don’t know. I think he’s going to give me something basic to do at the firm, like filing. Just to get me started.”

  So I can work off the portion of my rent that he’s paying, she almost said. She kept this detail to herself because she didn’t want their last five minutes together to be marked by another burst of Cameron’s unusually strong disapproval. Even though she knew it wasn’t logical, she got butterflies in her stomach every time Cameron took to the air, as if by showing up for work her brother was doing something reckless, like driving up Interstate 5 on a motorcycle with no helmet after downing a six-pack of beer.

  She was trying to come up with some way to fill the awkward silence her reticence had caused when her brother’s phone let out a loud series of chimes. On reflex, she plucked it off the comforter and started for the bathroom door. A picture of her father lit up the phone’s display underneath the word Dad. Cameron had taken the shot from the other side of a table at a crowded diner where the two men had just enjoyed a meal together.

  How many nights as a child had she been roused from sleep by the smell of gin and rolled over in bed to see those familiar blue eyes staring down at her? In the years following his departure, she had been desperate to ask him about those long silences. Had he wanted to apologize for spending another night at one of the Indian casinos, or had he been trying to summon the courage to tell her that eventually he would walk out the door altogether? After almost two decades of not having him in her life, she didn’t want to believe she needed a damn thing from Parker Reynolds. But her burning curiosity about those silences had returned along with her memories of them, thanks to one slightly out-of-focus digital snapshot.

  She didn’t notice that Cameron had closed the distance between them until he pulled his phone from her hand. He silenced the ring and ignored the call, his eyes on the floor between them.

  Megan expected to be hit by the icy sting in her chest that had come when she had discovered one of her first college boyfriends had been cheating on her. But this was a different kind of shock: it affected the head instead of the chest. The room seemed crooked and her right leg seemed slightly longer than her left.

  Dad. That was the real shock; that Cameron had given the title back to the man so casually that if a new friend scrolled through the directory on his phone, they would never know that Parker had walked out on them without ever saying goodbye, had never once asked for the right to visit them, had sent a few birthday cards the first few years after he left, and then none at all.

  “I knew you’d be mad,” Cameron said.

  “He left you too. Don’t act like I own this. I’m just confused, OK?”

  “I understand.”

  They had turned their backs on each other, she realized. She was sitting on one side of the bed and he was sitting at the foot, facing the bathroom door. When she tried to turn around so she could see him, she shifted her weight, causing the purses all around her to start sliding toward her in a loose jangle. She got to her feet and walked around the foot of the bed.

  Cameron was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, the iPhone cupped in both hands as if it might try to fly away at any moment. He had slipped into his gray polyester uniform pants before the phone rang, but his white oxford was still unbuttoned, revealing the red splotches of a recent chest wax.

  “I’ve told you about no-man’s-land, right?” he asked.

  He most certainly had. Most of the details he had shared with her about his job served to soothe her fear of flying, but this one had only fueled it. But she was too rattled to answer his question. And she wasn’t about to start putting words in his mouth; he needed to explain himself.

  “Most of the time when planes fly across the ocean, they’re usually within a hundred miles of a diversionary airport, so they can land fairly quickly if something goes wrong. Different planes have different requirements for how far they can be from one. … But anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that there isn’t one between Hawaii and Los Angeles. A lot of people don’t know that, but if you lose engine power between here and Hawaii—good luck. You’re ditching in the water.

  “Anyway, a couple months ago, we were on a return and we were in no-man’s-land and we were on a triple seven, which means we had two engines. One of them went out, which wasn’t the end of the world, but the pilot ...” He stammered as if the memory were threatening to overpower him. “The pilot thought we might lose the other one. The passengers had no idea, but the pilot warned the purser, who told me, which she shouldn’t have but she was panicked. Anyway, for an hour ... Jesus, Megan. I almost lost it. But then I sat down in the jump seat and started to really think about things, and I realized. My life is good. If I had to go, I can’t think of a lot of regrets that I would have. Except for one thing.”

  “Parker,” she finished for him.

  “Dad,” he said quietly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I knew you’d be upset.”

  “Not about him. About the flight.”

  “Whatever. It was nothing.”

  “You almost died, Cameron.”

  “Obviously I didn’t, and you had a lot going on.”

  She grimaced and turned away from him.

  “Relax, Megan.”

  “This is just what I was afraid of. I mean, just because I was going through all that crap doesn’t mean you couldn’t talk to me about what was going on with you. You didn’t even mention that Mom had another surgery done or—”

  “Look, Megan. You’re clearly deflecting here.” He held up his iPhone in one hand and said, “Can we just talk about the elephant that’s in the room, please?”

  Megan threw up her hands. Once she gave him the floor, Cameron seemed frightened to have it. His mouth opened and closed several times before he found his words. “Maybe you could give him another shot.”

  “Another shot? I didn’t date this man, Cameron. I didn’t break things off with him. I didn’t send him away!” Her voice had gone up an octave and she realized she was holding one hand to her chest as if she could stanch the flow of angry words and painful memories.

  “Well, I know Lucas and Mom might be a little reluctant to bankroll your new life if they knew you were—”

  “Don’t even! You’re working the premium cabin on ultralong-haul flights because the CEO of the airline is one of your cousin’s clients. You said yourself most flight attendants have to have ten years of seniority before they can get that kind of work, and you got it in a week. Don’t play that scorecard with me. We’ll both lose.”

  “That’s fair, I guess.”

  “Does Mom know you’re hanging out with him?”

  “Who gives a shit what Mom knows?” He had whispered these words, but that only served to amplify the anger in them. “Really, Megan. I mean, come on. It’s none of her business.”

  “So the fact that she had to raise us on her own, that’s just sort of irrelevant—”

  “Uncle Neal raised us and he did it with his checkbook. Mom went to long lunches for fifteen years.” She was stunned silent by the contempt that had filled Cameron’s voice when he said the name of Lucas’s father, their devoted uncle, their ultimate savior, who had inquired after their every financial need even during his final weeks of being torn from the world by pancreatic cancer. For an instant, Cameron looked as if he were about to spit on the carpet between them to mark the end of this declaration. He looked down at his phone instead. Was he planning to call their father back right there? Of course not. He was checking the time. He got to his feet and started buttoning his shirt. Once he was done, he looked at her again. “You raised me, Megan.”

  The look on her face must have made her appear skeptical, because he crossed to her and cupped her shoulders in his hands as if he were about to examine her pores. “We raised each other.”

  Her urge was to pepper him with questions about their father. Is he still gambling? Did he remarry? And then there was the worst on
e, the one that beat like a second heart inside of her chest, Does he want me to give him another shot? But giving voice to even one of these questions seemed like an intolerable surrender, and everything about Cameron’s body language said he didn’t have time to answer any of them, which gave her a perfect out.

  “You have to go, don’t you?”

  “I’ll be home soon. I’ll have email the whole time. But I’m getting killed on overseas charges with my cell, so …” He turned away from her before he finished the sentence.

  She felt awkward and foolish as she stood there watching her brother button his shirt all the way up and stuff the last of his belongings in his flight bag, as if they were lovers rushing to conclude a secret rendezvous before one of their spouses walked through the door.

  His bag in hand, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I didn’t want to drop it on you like this. I was going to talk to you about it.” The best she could manage was a slight nod. He kissed her on the other cheek and then started for the door.

  “You’re not going to say hi to Mom?”

  “I don’t want to ruin her party.”

  “And Lucas? What do I tell him?”

  This question stopped him. With one foot out the door, he turned halfway toward her. “About what?”

  “He thinks you’re mad at him.”

  Cameron nodded slowly and tongued his upper lip. “Tell Lucas I’ll be in touch.”

  Then he made another move to leave and Megan said, “Love you.” It had come out too quickly for her taste, but it was enough to stop Cameron in his tracks again. And this time when he turned to face her, his eyes were wide and unblinking, as if she had just told him a secret he had known but never thought she would find the voice to confess.

  “I love you too, Megan.”

  And then he was gone, and she was listening to the familiar sound made by the wheels of his flight bag as they scraped across the carpet outside. After a few minutes it was drowned out by the cacophony of the party downstairs.