Iona Moon

by Melanie Rae Thon

  Willy nodded. He wondered why she was telling him this. He heard more steps above him, the awkward three-legged gait of a man with a cane.

  “I moved it to the back of his drawer, so he’d know that I’d found it, that I knew he had a girl.”

  She poured her third drink and topped Willy’s too.

  “I thought he’d see what a fool he was, that he’d look at me some night, pregnant with his child, and realize he loved me. The handkerchief would disappear.

  “But that didn’t happen. The next time I put his clothes away it was in the front of the drawer again, right on top. He wanted me to know that he wasn’t going to stop seeing her. This was our life now, our vow.

  “I imagined crying myself sick. I thought he’d come home and find me that way, on my bed, in the dark. That he’d see he’d been a fool. But Andrew wasn’t like that. It’s not in him to be sorry. He would have said, ‘Pull yourself together, darling.’ So I didn’t cry. I made myself a drink and cooked dinner. I got drunk, Willy, and I discovered I didn’t give a damn if he was sorry or not.”

  Willy heard a door open and close.

  “I figured out who she was. The next time I stopped by his office, I knew. His receptionist was wearing red shoes. What kind of girl wears red shoes? As soon as I saw them, I knew.”

  Willy would never understand women. He was sure Delores was right about the girl but couldn’t imagine how a pair of shoes could reveal the truth.

  “I hated those shoes. I wanted to spit on them. I wanted to tear them off her pretty little feet and jump up and down on them till the polish cracked and the heels snapped off.”

  Willy thought of Mariette. Delores was safe. He knew for a fact his sister didn’t own any red shoes. But he remembered her giggling with Lorena. He cornered me by the filing cabinets. Was it true?

  Andrew Johnson Tyler stood in the kitchen doorway and cleared his throat. “Fine thing,” he said, “for a man to find his wife alone in the dark with a policeman.”

  Dr. Tyler put on his southern drawl; policeman was a joke in his mouth, one more thing in which a medical man didn’t believe. He hit the light switch, and Delores covered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that too bright for you?” It’s not in him to be sorry. “What’s for dinner, darling?” He bent down to kiss her cheek. “No, don’t tell me—let me guess: chicken pot pies?” He massaged her shoulders so hard she flinched. “My wife’s a wonderful cook,” he told Willy. “We’d ask you to stay for supper, but I’m sure she doesn’t have an extra pie. Am I right, sweetheart?” He squeezed her shoulder again, and Delores gazed at Willy, a silent plea.

  When Willy stood, he felt the floor tilt and remembered Coach Brubaker circling him, poking him between the shoulder blades, smacking his butt, thumping his chest. You are one sorry sack of shit.

  “I hope I’m not driving you out,” Dr. Tyler said. “I hate to be the spoiler.” He still had one hand on his wife’s shoulder.

  “No, sir. Time for me to get home for supper anyway.” He saw his mother’s table: fried chicken, potatoes, vegetables—something green and something yellow: For my hard-working boy, Flo would say, and he would want to cry. A boy, yes, as long as he ate dinner in his mother’s house.

  Delores Tyler had no intention of cooking dinner for her husband. She wasn’t even going to slide a chicken pot pie into the oven. He knew where the freezer was, could turn on the damn stove. “You made a fool of yourself,” she said.

  “Did I? I thought I was quite congenial. Not as congenial as you, of course.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You had an exhausting afternoon.”

  “I’m going to lie down.”

  “Why don’t you, darling?”

  Delores lay on her bed and wished she were still talking to Willy. She kicked off her shoes. He was a nice boy. She wished she’d explained that she hadn’t always been this way. I could have forgiven him, she imagined herself saying, for the handkerchief, for the girl, for the red shoes. But he wouldn’t let me.

  She thought of the day her marriage ended, a hot Saturday in July. Jay was only three. They all drove down to the river, to a bend where the water eddied into a calm pool. Andrew waded in the shallows with Jay. He didn’t like to swim; he sank, heavy bones and no fat. Delores was a good swimmer, light and strong—buoyant.

  She let the current pull her downstream. When she was a hundred yards away, Andrew called to her to come back. I pretended not to hear.

  At first she thought she would work her way back to shore, but the thought passed. The cool water numbed her limbs. Even now, lying on her bed all these years later, she remembered how good it felt just to drift, to stop fighting. I knew I could get back to the bank. She saw the rushes sweep past her. Anytime.

  Andrew ran along the river with Jay in his arms. She heard her name bouncing on the water and saw herself as he did, a head bobbing in the distance.

  The flow grew swifter; the riverbed was strewn with boulders. Sometimes a whirlpool sucked her under and she thought she’d be smashed against a rock. She pictured her own body popping up hundreds of yards downstream, nothing but a bruise on her forehead, like a boy she’d known as a child, a boy whose brother had killed him with a stone, an accident. There was no blood, no open wound, just the swollen place above the brow, the pale violet bloom on his white face.

  Slowly she worked her way toward the bank, swimming at an angle, not fighting the current, letting the river do the work, being swept farther and farther downstream.

  Soon she sat among the rushes along the shore. I didn’t mean to hide. Andrew was barely fifty feet away. But I was hidden. Jay clung to his chest. I let them pass.

  Andrew knew he had to turn around. If he waited too long there would be no hope. I knew what he was thinking. He was imagining the long ride to town, his own muddled explanation, the shame of it all, the way other men look at you when you admit you’ve lost your wife, when you say: She swam away from me. He envisioned the men in boats, dragging the river till dusk drove them to shore. He’d worked with such men before, peering into cloudy water. He knew how terrible it was, how every clump of weeds looked like a woman’s hair, how the nets and hooks dredged up all that should stay at the bottom of a river: a rusty fan, a child’s shoe, a punctured inner tube.

  She was sitting on her towel when he came into the clearing. She saw him before he saw her, his chest streaked with the white trails of salt sweat, as if his whole body had been weeping. Jay toddled beside him, rubbing his eyes.

  “There you are,” Andrew said, fear already turned to fury.

  “Yes, here I am.”

  “I was looking for you.”

  There was still time, Willy. I thought he might say the right words, that he might drop to his knees beside me.

  Jay rushed to her open arms and she hugged him tightly, too tightly, until he squirmed and fussed and tried to get away.

  “Time to go,” Andrew said, the words hard and precise, three pellets spit on the ground.

  Why couldn’t he tell me he was afraid? Then I could have said I was afraid too. Every time I opened his drawer I was afraid. She thought that the great sorrows of life were all the things you imagined saying but didn’t, all the fears you carried alone, the words unspoken that day at the river, this story untold even now.

  Delores Tyler drifted on her white bedspread and saw herself through all the long evenings of that hot summer. She imagined standing in the kitchen after supper, listening to the moths as they fluttered against the screen door. They hung on the mesh, their bodies fat and gray, their pale wings tattered.

  16

  Willy Hamilton got the news on Halloween. He was on his way home, wondering if his mother had bought enough Tootsie Rolls and M&M’s to last the night. He’d already stopped at the store once today—for a Dracula mask with fangs. Now Fred Pierce’s voice cracked over the radio with the word that Matt Fry had busted out of the hospital in South Bend. “He’s bound to head this way—sooner or later. If he’
s got two brain cells left to rub together. Keep your eyes open, Willy.”

  Willy. He’d tried to be Bill, but what good did it do if everyone he knew still called him Willy? A light snow had begun to fall. It was going to be a cold night for the kids. Damn Pierce. Why tell him at the end of his shift? A policeman never goes off duty. That’s what Horton would say. Did they think Matt Fry might put a sheet over his head, stand on the stoop of the Hamilton’s house, and ring the bell? Maybe a boy who was already a ghost wouldn’t bother with a costume. He’s one of our own, Willy. His mother was always reminding him. Better to be a policeman in Spokane or Seattle—even Boise. Here in White Falls everyone was one of your own: your neighbor, your cousin, a bad girl you knew in high school, your best friend—everything happened to you.

  He slipped in the back door of his house, wearing the mask. Flo sat at the kitchen table. He bent down, nibbled at her neck with his plastic fangs. She neither yelped nor giggled. Her cheeks were red, her eyes brimming. Horton had called, so she already knew that Matt Fry was out there alone, wandering in the dark.

  Willy lifted the mask and let it rest on the top of his head. He wished his mother had never forgiven his father for what had happened to Matt Fry last summer. He wished Horton still needed to keep his secrets. She was crying now, saying his name, Oh, Willy, but he knew her tears were for the other boy, the one lost in the snow.

  Lorena and Mariette pranced into the kitchen. They were already in costume, matching outfits: black tights and black leotards with glow-in-the-dark skeletons painted on front and back. Their bodies bulged, giving their spines dangerous, unnatural curves.

  “Watch this,” Lorena said. She hit the light and danced with Mariette, bone people, twirling hand in hand. The skeletons did glow, bright and narrow, and the girls disappeared—but Willy heard their heavy feet as they thudded across the room.

  By nine o’clock the doorbell had stopped ringing. All the little goblins and witches had gone home. Snow fell in wet clumps, and the streets were slick and white. Flo fretted. She worried about Horton cruising the side streets. She worried about children darting in front of cars, ghosts in the snow, invisible until it was too late. She couldn’t help seeing her own hands on their sweet, cool faces. Willy remembered how she’d wept the day she washed and dressed ten-day-old Miranda Arnoux and laid her in her tiny baby coffin. He was eight. Horton said, “Maybe this work doesn’t suit you, Flo.” But that only made her cry harder. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You’ve never understood what’s important to me.” Hands deep in pockets, forehead creased, Horton turned and walked out the back door to stand in the yard, looking at the sky before he drove away in the dark.

  Willy knew he had the right to leave just as his father did, without explanation or goodbye. He could drive away through the snow—leave his silly sisters and joyless mother—if only he could figure out where to go.

  Flo would fuss about him, out on these icy streets, and he was glad for that. He took the Chevy. He was Willy Hamilton, citizen, definitely off duty, no matter what Horton said.

  He didn’t realize that the Dracula mask was still on the top of his head till he looked in the rearview mirror to back out of the drive. He tossed it on the seat, stupid thing—he hated it now. Flocks of children fluttered along the sidewalks, scurrying home, clutching bags full of goodies. He saw a horse head with a boy’s body, a sheet that walked, a troll with hair down to her knees. On Main Street, a group of teenage girls clustered on a corner, smoking cigarettes. Snowflakes melted in their long hair. They were in costume too: leather jackets and cowboy boots, thin white faces, black lips.

  He crossed the river to circle the trailer park. There was plenty of space: an irregular border of pines on one side, an endless stretch of field on the other. But the two dozen trailers were packed close together, fifteen feet apart, three perfect rows. Some had pink awnings over the windows or a screened porch built onto the door. But these additions did not disguise the tin boxes, quite the opposite—decoration made them all the more pitiful.

  A stuffed man with a pumpkin head sat in a lawn chair at the edge of the park. He looked human at first but too still, sitting outside in the cold, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, not flinching as snow piled on his shoulders and bare head, as snow fell into his eyes and into the hole of his mouth.

  Willy Hamilton had choices: south to the reservation, north to the wilderness; he could drag Main like the high school boys or head out to the Roadstop and drink like a man. A couple of beers might settle his nerves, but by the time he got to the bar he remembered the last drink he’d had, the vodka with Delores Tyler. That hadn’t calmed him down at all, so he turned around in the parking lot and drove back downtown. Tricksters had vanished but left signs: graffiti soaped on windows, tires slashed, pumpkins crushed against concrete.

  He took a side street and found himself on Willow Glen. Not habit or coincidence, he knew—the thought of Delores Tyler had led him here. He wanted to see her, and for once he knew why: Delores understood failure. He needed to see her weary face and feel her soft hand on his arm. You’re not the only one. Who would say it first?

  He was glad for the mask—a friend after all. There wasn’t quite enough time to feel like a fool before Delores opened the door. “Willy,” she said.

  “Trick or Treat.”

  “We’re out.”

  “Then it’s trick,” he said.

  “I never bought anything.”

  “I just wanted to say hello.” He started to lift his mask.

  “No,” she said, “I like it.” He wondered why she didn’t ask him inside. “Dr. Tyler’s out for the evening, overnight in fact. Boise—on business.” Good, he thought, it was good to be out here, breathing clear, cold air. “I’d offer you a drink,” she whispered, “but I’d rather go for a drive.” She reached for his hand and squeezed his fingers. He’d forgotten his gloves. Her hand was small and warm. “You’re freezing,” she said.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Let me get my coat.”

  He waited in the entryway. They were going for a drive, but he couldn’t remember if he’d agreed to it or not. Puddles formed around his feet as the snow melted off his boots. His hair was damp. He took off the mask and rubbed his chilled hands together.

  “Where do you want to go?” he said when they sat beside each other in the car.

  “Away from the lights.”

  He drove toward the river. She slid across the seat and sat close. “To keep warm,” she said.

  He parked in the clearing overlooking the Snake, the same place where he’d parked with Jay and Belinda and Iona, the same place where he’d come with Darryl and Luke and Kevin the weekend before graduation. He wanted to laugh at his former priggish self. Boot the sucker out of his car and let’s have some fun, boys. Delores pulled a flask from her purse, and he drank greedily, grateful for the way the thick sweet liquid burned all the way down his throat and warmed his stomach. “Cognac,” she said, “for winter nights.”

  She had her hand on his thigh and her head on his shoulder. He wanted to tell her about Matt Fry and his mother, about his friends who got Matthew drunk and dragged him along the tracks before he torched his shed. He knew Delores already and could almost hear her say: It’s not your fault, baby. He thought of driftwood washed up on the bank of the river, how it heaped on the shore like piles of bone.

  Snow fell on the hood of the car and melted from the heat of the engine. Snow fell on the river and disappeared without a sound in the black water. Willy felt a weight against his chest, as if he lay at the bottom of the river. He handed the flask to Delores; she didn’t drink—she screwed the cap back on and kissed him instead, lightly, near his mouth.

  He gasped, but the weight pressed on all sides, the air dense as water, too thick to breathe, so he grabbed her and held her tight, kissed chin, neck, nose, opening his mouth wide to feel her whole mouth inside of his, forcing his tongue between her lips. He tugged at the buttons on her coat, f
rantic lover, impatient child. He had never kissed anyone like this. He thought of Belinda pushing his hands away each time he strayed. No, Willy. A voice from his past told him to stop, warned him about adultery, reminded him of the wages of sin. But Delores wasn’t fighting—she was helping him undo the buttons. The voice muttered but no longer made words. Delores whispered: Yes, baby. Now his hands were inside her coat where it was warm, so warm. He remembered Iona Moon’s torn shirt and small breasts that night by the tracks; he remembered the day he discovered Belinda Beller’s bra was stuffed with tissue. Delores Tyler’s breasts were real, heavy when he cupped them in his hands. He clutched the front of her dress, wanting to rip it open.

  “Slow down,” she said, taking off her coat, guiding his hands to the long zipper down the back. He tugged. No zipper had ever seemed so stubborn. His fingers felt numb, as if his hands had fallen asleep.

  It was impossible to kiss Delores and get the zipper down at the same time, so he focused all his attention on her clothes. Now that her mouth was free, she laughed, and Willy knew the whole thing was a mistake. The zipper gave. She pulled her arms from the sleeves, unhooked her bra, let her breasts spring loose. She lay down on the seat with her dress bunched around her waist. Willy pressed his whole face against her chest. He thought he might smother but didn’t care. He moved hard and fast. There was no time to wrestle with pantyhose, no time to unfasten his belt or wriggle out of his pants. She gripped his balls through his jeans, and he exploded, biting down on her nipple to keep from screaming. She had to swat the side of his head to make him stop.

  Lying on top of the woman in the cold car, Willy Hamilton was already sorry. He covered her breasts with his hands. “I’m half frozen,” she said, so he helped her hook her bra and zip her dress. She pulled her coat around her shoulders. He remembered Iona’s tires spinning in the mud and knew things could still get worse.

  But he wasn’t stuck. Delores had found her flask again. She didn’t sit so close to him on the way home, but she touched his arm and said, “Don’t worry, it’s always like that the first time.”