In the Shadow of the Moon

by Karen White

  Stuart didn’t look up but bent over the horse’s legs, examining the shoes. A brisk wind struck us, making Stuart’s hair dance and scattering leaves about our feet. I stared at the mass of dark hair, realizing how much like Couper’s it was.

  Couper slid down off my back and stood beside me. He looked up at me with piercing blue eyes and I nodded. Slowly, he walked toward Stuart and stood directly behind him. My heart skipped a beat as I saw them next to each other for the first time, father and son.

  Stuart picked up a bucket of water and began emptying it into the grass.

  “Excuse me.” Couper’s little face looked up at Stuart as Stuart swung around, splashing his boots and pants with the water.

  I stepped back behind the tree, leaning out only enough to see.

  Not expecting to find anybody behind him, Stuart nearly tripped over the little boy. He caught himself and looked at the child, his brows knitted tightly together. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Couper.” He peered out from around Stuart’s legs. “Is that your horsie?”

  Stuart’s eyebrows lifted. “Couper?”

  “Yeah. Can I pet your horsie?”

  Stuart kneeled in front of the child, a hand on each shoulder. “Couper, who are you?”

  He wouldn’t take his eyes off the big black horse. “I told you. I’m Couper. Now can I pet your horsie?”

  Stuart lifted him up in his arms and approached Endy. “Be very gentle. You can pat him right here,” he said, and indicated the neck with the mane blowing in the breeze.

  Stuart moved his head back to get a better view of Couper’s face. “Where are your mother and father?”

  Couper’s pudgy fingers were busily entwining themselves in the thick horse’s mane. He tilted his head as if he didn’t quite understand the question. “I don’t know about my daddy, but my mommy’s over there.” He stuck out a sturdy arm in the direction of the oak tree.

  I stepped out from my hiding place as Stuart turned, his son in his arms. I saw the color drain from his face, and then he started to shake.

  I rushed forward to take Couper, afraid Stuart might drop him. Stuart moved away, shaking his head, clutching the child tightly.

  “Laura.” His voice was barely more than a whisper.

  “Hello, Stuart. It’s been a while.” My voice was barely stronger than his.

  His eyes widened, but I saw a ghost of a smile around his pale lips. “Yes, you could certainly say that.” He looked at Couper and his expression changed suddenly. It was as if he were looking in a mirror for the first time. “Are you this handsome young man’s mother?”

  I gave a small laugh. “Yes. I’d like you to meet your son, Stuart Couper Elliott the Second.”

  Stuart glanced from me to Couper and back. His face was still handsome, but there were deep creases in his cheeks that hadn’t been there before. “I can’t believe this.”

  I walked closer to him, my eyes searching his. “Believe it. We’re here to stay.”

  He opened his arms to me and I walked into his embrace, smelling the autumn air in his clothes and feeling the beloved scratchiness of his cheek.

  Couper squealed, his active three-year-old body rebelling at being hugged so tightly. “Hey, stop! You’re mushing me!”

  Stuart squeezed us even harder as I felt his tears on my head.

  The wind picked up momentum, whipping my hair around my husband and my son and sending the fallen leaves airborne once again in the direction of the beautiful white house. It stood, strong and silent, still beckoning me. The sun made shadows of the front columns on the lawn, like arms welcoming me back.

  I had come home.

  Read on for a preview

  of Karen White’s next novel,

  THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT

  Available in April 2017 from Berkley

  MERILEE

  Sweet Apple, Georgia

  2016

  If there was one thing that Merilee Talbot Dunlap had learned in eleven years of marriage, it was the simple fact that you could live with a person for a long time and never really know him. That it was easy to accept the mask he wore as the real thing, happy in your oblivion, until one day the mask slipped. Or, as in Merilee’s case, when it fell off completely and you were forced to face your own complicity in the masquerade.

  No, she knew she hadn’t made Michael have an affair with their daughter’s third-grade math teacher. But she had allowed herself never to question any discrepancies in her marriage, content in her role as suburban wife and mother, until the props and scenery were pulled away and she was asked to exit stage right.

  “Mommy?”

  Merilee turned toward her ten-year-old daughter, Lily, blond and fine boned like her father but with a perpetually worried expression that was all her mother’s. It seemed Lily already had a permanent furrow between her brows from the worry she’d been born with. The last months since the divorce and the stress from the upcoming move hadn’t helped.

  “Yes?”

  “What if I don’t meet any friends in my new school? And what if I don’t have anybody to sit with at lunchtime? And I’m thinking I shouldn’t be in the accelerated English class, because what if I’m not smart enough?”

  Merilee carefully snapped down the lid of the plastic container she’d been filling with her collection of old maps. She’d been collecting them since she was a little girl, when she’d been in an antiquarian bookstore with her grandfather and he’d shown her an ink-drawn map. It had sketches of horses and cows and fences, and a cozy log cabin with smoke curling from its lone chimney.

  “That’s where you live,” he’d said, pointing to the cabin.

  It looked nothing like the white-columned brick house in Sandersville, Georgia, she’d lived in all her life and she had told him so, only to be made to understand that the cabin and everything around it had been plowed under to make room for her house and their neighbors’ houses in the twenties, when he and Grandma weren’t even born yet.

  For a long time it had given her nightmares, thinking she could hear the cries of the people from the cabin, not completely sure they’d been removed before the demolition. It scared her to think of how temporary things could be, how your life, your house, your family, could be erased like a sand castle at the beach. And when her little brother had died, she’d known for sure.

  Her grandfather had bought her the map, unaware he was fostering what would become a lifelong obsession. Merilee wasn’t sure whether her love for old maps was because they reminded her of the grandfather she’d loved more than her own parents or because she’d needed proof that things changed. That no matter how good or bad things were, they were never permanent.

  Merilee knelt down in front of Lily, silently cursing her ex-husband one more time. As if making her feel extraneous and unwanted weren’t bad enough, his inability to keep his pants zipped and his eyes from wandering had added an extra layer of vulnerability to their daughter.

  Gently holding her bony shoulders, she looked into Lily’s pale blue eyes. “You’ve never had problems making friends. You’re a nice person, Lily, and that’s why other girls like to include you. Remember that, okay? It’s who you are, and if you stick with that, you’ll be fine. And Windwood Academy is much smaller than your old school, which is a nice thing when you’re the new kid. You’ll know everybody in all of your classes pretty quickly.”

  “And if they don’t like me?”

  A little bit of the old spark lit her eyes, making Merilee inwardly sigh with relief. “I’m going to make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

  Lily laughed her sweet laugh, a sound that evoked champagne bubbles popping, almost eradicating the guilt Merilee felt over having left The Godfather in the DVD player one night. It had been right after she’d learned of Michael’s affair, when she’d felt the need to watch violent movies with lots of blood and bad language
after the kids had been tucked into bed. Lily had flipped it on the next day thinking it was The Princess Bride, and in the five minutes it had taken for Merilee to realize what was happening, Lily had been exposed to more violence than she had seen in her entire ten years. After much apologizing and lectures about the difference between movies and real life, it had become a secret joke between them. For weeks Merilee had watched her daughter for any signs that she might need counseling, glad for once that her daughter had always had the maturity of a forty-year-old rather than that of the young girl she was.

  Merilee stood, her right knee popping, yet another reminder of why her husband had wanted to trade her in for a younger model. “As for the accelerated English class, they put you in there for a reason. You’ll do great. And if you find you don’t like it, we’ll move you—just give it a try. That’s all I ask, all right?”

  Lily’s small chest rose and fell with an exaggerated sigh. “All right. Should I tell Colin to finish packing his suitcase?”

  “I asked him to do that three hours ago. Where is he?”

  Lily twisted her mouth, unsure of her role. She wasn’t a tattletale, but she also liked to keep to a schedule. “He found a hole in the backyard and has been sitting in front of it waiting to see what might crawl out.”

  Merilee swallowed a groan of frustration. Her eight-year-old son had always moved to his own clock, content to study his world at its own pace. Merilee found it endearing and frustrating at the same time, especially on school mornings when Colin wanted to study how long it took for toothpaste to fall from the tube without his having to squeeze it.

  “Would you please run out and remind him that I told Mrs. Prescott we’d meet her at three o’clock and it’s almost two thirty? She’s ninety-three and I really don’t want to keep her waiting in this heat.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Lily ran from the room, blond hair flying, calling her brother’s name with the harsh, authoritative tone Merilee recognized as her own. She bit her lip to prevent herself from calling out to remind Lily that Colin already had a mother.

  She picked up the stack of plastic containers and moved to the garage, empty now except for the used Honda Odyssey minivan she’d bought with her own money. She’d let Michael keep the Mercedes SUV and his Audi, wanting the excision of him from her life to be a clean cut, even if it meant not having heated seats or a state-of-the-art stereo system. It was the principle of the matter. And at the moment, the only thing she had in abundance were principles.

  Through the open rear door, Merilee spotted the jewelry roll she’d tucked into a back corner of the minivan. It was her brother’s Lego figures. She’d taken them from his room without asking, knowing her mother would never have let her have anything that had belonged to David. Deanne had wanted to claim the grief as her own, dismissing anyone else’s as not big enough to count. So Merilee had taken them and wrapped them in her Barbie jewelry roll and kept them hidden, taking them out only on the anniversary of David’s death, as if somehow that might bring a part of him back. It had been a while since she’d done that, but still she kept them, hidden in her sock drawer as if afraid her mother might find them and ask for them back. As if David were still the precocious boy of seven instead of the twenty-nine-year-old young man he should be.

  After tucking the last of the smaller boxes and their suitcases into the back of the Odyssey, Merilee made one final pass through the rooms of the now-empty home she’d lived in for less than two years. The rental house was already furnished, so it had almost been a relief to let Michael have all the furniture they’d accumulated over the past eleven years, and she’d felt a pang of regret only when their four-poster bed had been hauled into the moving van. It had been the bed where both of their children had been conceived. She imagined that if she ever had to see Tammy Garvey again, after the woman had been sleeping on that bed with Merilee’s husband for a while, she’d mention that to her.

  Having gone back inside, she listened to her footsteps echo against the bare walls as she moved from room to room. The house had never really felt like home to her, just as none of their previous four houses had. Michael thought they needed to upgrade every couple of years to keep up with his job success. They had moved into a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood each time, staying within the same school district to make it easier on the kids. And easier for Michael’s affair, Merilee had realized much later.

  Merilee thought she should be thankful for the frequent moves, knowing that leaving a beloved home would be almost as painful as leaving an eleven-year marriage. Or burying a favorite dog. Instead, this parting was as easy as pulling off a Band-Aid—it would sting a little but be forgotten as soon as they’d unpacked the first box in the new house.

  The kids strapped themselves into the backseat of the minivan as Merilee headed down the driveway one last time and drove down the street without looking back. No neighbors came out to wave good-bye. She didn’t know them well, having always worked and not had the time to build relationships in each of the neighborhoods they’d lived in, and hadn’t expected any more fanfare when they left than when they’d arrived.

  She waved good-bye to the guard at the front gate just as the first drops of rain began to pelt the dry asphalt and her dirty windshield, already splattered with the remains of dozens of insects. The rain and bugs were, Merilee thought, a fitting tribute to her old life, the one she couldn’t quite let go of yet had no interest in holding on to, either. She thought of the boxes of old maps shifting around in the back of the minivan, reminding her again of the impermanence of things and how nothing stayed the same no matter how much you wanted it to.

  SUGAR

  Sugar Prescott sat at her dining room table in the front room of the old farmhouse, tapping out a letter to her best friend, Willa Faye Mackenzie Cox, on her 1949 Smith-Corona typewriter, her bottle of Wite-Out sitting nearby. She rarely had to use it but always wanted to make sure it was close by just in case. At ninety-three, she didn’t have a lot of time to waste. And Willa Faye had all the time in the world to sit and wait for a letter. Her daughter had recently moved her to a senior living facility with the improbable name of the Manors. If there was one good thing about not having children, Sugar decided, it was being spared the indignity of being moved into such a place, like a box of old toys that a child has outgrown but doesn’t want to get rid of completely.

  She glanced outside, not wanting to miss the approach of her new renters. She hadn’t met Merilee Dunlap or her children before, but the Realtor, Robin Henderson, who’d been handling the rental of the Craftsman cottage behind Sugar’s farmhouse, had only good things to say about all three of them. Robin’s children had attended Prescott Elementary with the Dunlap children, making Robin privy to the unsavory gossip surrounding the Dunlap divorce. Not one to gossip, but a good listener, Sugar had suggested the cottage as a good spot for the family to land while they decided what to do next. It wasn’t as if she had any desire to befriend anyone, but Sugar had the feeling that Merilee Dunlap, whoever she was, was suddenly and unexpectedly on her own and in need of help. And Sugar was in a position to understand that need more than most. She suspected, but would deny if anyone asked, that she was getting soft in her old age.

  She typed one last word, then drew the carriage back before standing and approaching the front window. The rain had tapered off, leaving a smoking, dripping landscape, her climbing roses on the front porch supports waterlogged, with petals opened as if gasping for breath. The small lake that sat in the front of the property, separated from the road by the white ranch rail fence, was thick like syrup, as brown as molasses because of the rain. She had a sudden image of her brother Jimmy sitting on the muddy bank, fishing for turtles, his feet bare and his freckled nose red and blistered. Although all four brothers were long gone, Sugar now found herself seeing them more and more, as if old age were nothing more than the past and present squeezing together like an accordion until no air was left.
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  She watched as a white minivan turned off the paved road onto the long drive leading around the lake to the farmhouse, winding between the stately oak trees that had been planted by her great-grandfather before the Civil War, their roots as wide as the trees were tall. The road was a ribbon of red Georgia clay, soft and muddy with rain, the minivan hugging the side, where grass gave the wheels some traction. Sugar smiled to herself, thinking that Merilee Dunlap knew something about driving in wet Georgia clay.

  She moved to the front porch and waited for the minivan to pull to a stop. It wasn’t ideal, sharing a driveway, seeing the comings and goings of her renters, but if there was one thing she wouldn’t do, it was have one more strip of her property bulldozed for another driveway. Her brothers had done a good enough job of plowing under all the farmland the Prescott family had once owned, and she would not continue their legacy, no matter how inconvenient it was for her.

  The woman who carefully stepped from the minivan wasn’t what Sugar had expected. She was younger—mid-thirties, Sugar thought—and much prettier. As if men didn’t divorce pretty women. She was surprised to find that she’d thought she’d be able to spot a flaw in her new tenant, something that would explain how she’d ended up in the predicament she was in. As if Sugar didn’t know better.

  “Hello,” the woman said, stepping carefully onto the flagstone walkway before sliding open the side door of the minivan and waiting for two children to emerge. The children were as blond as the woman was dark. She had straight, no-nonsense brown hair, parted at the side, and hazel eyes that looked almost green. Her only makeup was a flick of mascara, a touch of nose powder, and a sheer gloss of exhaustion.