Book Read Free

The Hunger Moon

Page 18

by Suzanne Matson


  “Mrs. MacGregor!” June pulled the covers back to expose the older woman’s body curled into a semifetal position. June pressed her fingers to the cold neck to feel for a pulse. Nothing. Felt for a breath. Nothing.

  “Oh, God, God, God, God.” She needed to call a doctor, or EMT, or something, but her mind was going blank. She punched in the number for the downstairs front desk; Mrs. MacGregor had it taped to the phone.

  Owen answered pleasantly.

  “Owen! Call 911. Mrs. MacGregor’s sick or something. I can’t make her wake up.”

  “Wait there. I’ll call them and bring them up when they come.”

  June hung up and stood there in the quiet dark. When the shades were drawn, you couldn’t tell whether it was night or day in this room. Mrs. MacGregor liked it that way.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, frightened, but also strangely still inside, now that she knew help was coming. This wasn’t happening; Mrs. MacGregor was surely sleeping, look at her—as whole and real as she had been this morning when they had had a conversation. She fixed a stray wisp of Mrs. M.’s white hair, which had unloosened a bit from the hairpins. Mrs. M. liked to be neat.

  She should call Janice; the number was right there on the phone. She would, in a few seconds. She couldn’t speak out loud again yet. Mrs. MacGregor looked beautiful and calm. She didn’t have her makeup on today though, which made her look more fragile than usual. That was probably because June had woken her up early, and Charlie hadn’t given her a chance to put it on.

  The implications of this dawned a little at a time. She had pulled Mrs. MacGregor out of bed and thrust the baby in her arms, knowing full well that she was frail, knowing firsthand that Charlie was heavy, knowing that it was her own job to stay with the baby. She had killed her out of pure selfishness, to get to her class. In the distance she could hear the sirens coming, and her thoughts started crying Run, run, run, but June continued to sit immobile on the edge of the bed, as breathless and silent as Mrs. MacGregor.

  THEY HAD A LOT TO TALK ABOUT. They kept talking without even putting Charlie down for a nap because Renata forgot. He dozed in Bryan’s arms and they were content to let him sleep like that, so they could look at him as they talked.

  She was less afraid of Bryan’s presence now that he was actually here. From the beginning she had imagined him as someone who would come between Charlie and herself, though now that she was with the two of them together, she didn’t feel as possessive as she thought she would. A part of her even enjoyed the sudden perspective of seeing Charlie separate from herself, but held by someone who was—after all, it was true—his own flesh and blood.

  Renata tried to explain her reasons for leaving. She needed to run away, she said, because it would have been bad luck to stay. Only by starting her life over as if it were the first page of a book could she give Charlie his own future. But Bryan didn’t understand it, kept trying to argue with it, until finally they were exhausted and empty, and decided to go get some breakfast. Charlie woke from his nap and Renata changed him, and then they walked out past Owen, who always had a greeting for Charlie. Charlie seemed to enjoy the higher view that he had from Bryan’s arms. He kept grinning at Renata from his position of being eye-level with her as if he were proud of himself and wanted her to see.

  They went to the coffee shop across the street, where Bryan said he had sat and watched the two of them. He had seen them two days ago, he said, walking out. Charlie had been sitting up in the stroller, bundled in a white blanket and wearing a dark blue knitted cap. Bryan said it was all he could do to keep from running over to them then and there, but he didn’t want to surprise Renata like that. So he had watched them turn a corner, until their profiles disappeared behind a hedge.

  They got a table and Renata put Charlie in a high chair. The waitress who came to take their order probably assumed they were a family. They looked like a family.

  “Where do we go from here?” Bryan asked her after the waitress left.

  “I don’t know; I need time to think.”

  “I want a chance to be in his life. Put yourself in my shoes, Renata. If you were me, and you knew you had a kid, how could you just go back to California and pick up where you left off?”

  There was no answer to that. Maybe if she let Bryan play out some of his paternal urgings, they would go away. Maybe the less she resisted, the quicker he would see that he belonged back in California, not here with them. After all, he had no idea, really, what he was asking for.

  “Okay, Bryan, you can see him, but we have to work this out a little at a time. This is about you and Charlie, not me and you. We’re not a package deal.”

  Bryan accepted this with a nod as he fingered a pack of sugar. Charlie tried to reach the packet, and when Bryan put it on the high chair tray for him to play with, he immediately picked it up and stuck it in his mouth.

  “Bryan, the paper’s dissolving. Get it out of his mouth. He can’t have sugar,” Renata said crossly.

  Bryan extricated the soggy packet, and Charlie screamed with disappointment. Renata felt a gleam of satisfaction. She gave Charlie a spoon and he stopped crying and stared at it, transfixed by the shiny metal. Then he banged it on the tray before jamming it into his mouth.

  Watching Charlie turn off his cry as if a switch had been flipped, Renata felt ashamed of herself for wanting to show Bryan up. Of course she knew little gimmicks to keep the baby happy. Anyone who spent an hour around an infant learned them—look at June. By the end of the first week she had been completely comfortable with Charlie, and had come up with techniques of her own.

  “You know what the hardest part of taking care of him is, Bryan?” she said. “Loving him so much you don’t think you can stand it; you think you’ll break from it. Then getting afraid that something will spoil it, and that it will be your fault. He came to me perfect, and sometimes I’m terrified that I’m going to have a moment when I won’t watch him closely enough, and something horrible will happen.”

  “You never had to go it alone.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I don’t resent the responsibility.”

  They were silent when the waitress came with their plates of food, and they started to eat without speaking. Renata was starved. She had ordered eggs and pancakes and hash browns.

  “You know, sometimes I think I remember my mother, although I probably just invent her from photographs,” Bryan said.

  “I’m sorry, Bryan. I don’t know why I brought that up earlier. It was just crazy talk. I was upset.”

  He shook his head. “In my mind I see her face as closeup as if I’m on her lap. That can’t be a real memory, can it?” Shrugging. “Anyway, when I was watching you feed Charlie, I had this good feeling. It jogged something familiar. Or like it should be familiar.”

  Renata nodded. She was thinking about how taking care of Charlie was a way of repairing her own childhood—as if she were offering the stuffed animals and night lights directly to the thin, speechless child she had been.

  “You don’t have to tell me this,” he said. “But are you going with anybody now? That guy who was with you?”

  “That’s the kind of thing we’re not going to talk about,” Renata said firmly. She couldn’t exactly tell him that she had no idea what her relationship with Bill was.

  Bryan surprised her by reaching for the check as soon as the waitress put it down, waving Renata’s money away. Then they took a little walk to get some fresh air, and their breath made frosty vapor clouds in front of them. The sky was a high, hard blue, and the sun gleaming on the houses and shops made the day look as if it should be warmer than it was.

  “So, who was that lady, anyway, who had Charlie with her this morning?” he asked. “She said she was baby-sitting.”

  “She was doing me a favor,” Renata said noncommittally.

  “Kind of old to baby-sit, isn’t she? She was confused when I found her. She was sitting on the curb. She called me Robert a few times, then she seemed to snap out of
it. I had seen her leave the building with Charlie, and it didn’t even look to me like she could carry him. I was worried, so I followed them, and I think it’s a good thing I did. You don’t use her to baby-sit very often, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” Renata said curtly. “I was in a bind.”

  “Where was she going with him?”

  “Bryan, I said it was an unusual circumstance; did you arrive in Boston to interrogate me?”

  Bryan said nothing, his mouth compressed into a line.

  Renata was more frightened than annoyed; her heart started beating fast at the thought of Eleanor dropping Charlie. And she had no idea what they had been doing outside. Eleanor was confused the night her teakettle had burned, too. What had June been thinking? Bryan must never know the whole story of last night. He was being very humble and low-key now, but who could tell what he might be like once he got used to seeing Charlie?

  They rounded the block back to the front of the apartment building, and Bryan handed Charlie to Renata. A siren approached. It got louder and louder, until Renata had to wrap her coat around Charlie’s head to muffle the noise. The ambulance screeched to a halt under the awning of Renata’s building, and the medics hurried to the door carrying a case of equipment and a folded stretcher. Owen buzzed them in and ushered them toward the elevators.

  Bryan and Renata looked at each other.

  “What’s that about?” he asked.

  She shrugged. The image of Eleanor flickered briefly. But after all, the building was full of people she didn’t know, people who might have had a chest pain or cut a finger slicing tomatoes.

  “You going to be okay?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. They stood facing each other in a moment of uncomfortable silence.

  “So, you’re staying around,” she said.

  He nodded. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Can I visit then? I’d like to take Charlie out in his stroller.”

  “Call in the morning. It’s my day off. We can all do something together in the afternoon if you want.” She was not about to let Bryan take Charlie off by himself.

  “That’s great.” He kissed her cheek stiffly, and left her standing there, watching him. Bryan didn’t seem the same away from Venice and out of his uniform of baggy shorts and T-shirts. Maybe it was the winter coat, but he looked more substantial than she remembered him, as if held by some stronger tie to earth.

  AS SHE RODE UP THE ELEVATOR, Renata was trying to absorb the fact that she had apparently just agreed to let Bryan into their lives. Now that she was away from his engaging manner, that idea seemed absurd, crazy, dangerous. In an hour everything had changed; everything she had tried to do in the past few months to establish their independence had just collapsed.

  When she stepped out on the seventh floor, she saw that Eleanor’s door was open; she would stop by and thank her for watching Charlie, and apologize for the inconvenience she had put her to. But, as she approached the apartment she saw Owen standing in the living room, and beyond him the stooping white jackets of the medics. They were lifting something.

  Eleanor.

  Just then, June appeared in the tableau. Time stopped as Renata tried to make sense of what she saw. Then she cried, “June!” which startled Charlie, and unfroze the scene in front of her.

  June walked over, and half-leaned against Renata, her face buried for a second against her chest next to the baby. One part of Renata’s brain registered how pretty June was in her dancing clothes and skirt. Charlie reached out to grab June’s hair, but she had it pinned up in a chignon. He tugged at a strand experimentally, testing its resistance.

  “Where’s Eleanor?” Renata said.

  “They think it was a stroke, Renata. She’s dead because of me. Because I had to go to a stupid dance class this morning when I should have known she wasn’t up to carrying Charlie around. And then I forgot to leave him a bottle, so she probably tried to go out and get him something to eat, and it was all just too much for her.”

  Renata was staring in a daze at the narrow, white-sheeted form passing her by on the gurney. Eleanor, in her apartment, telling her to get herself a baby-sitter so she could have some time to herself. Eleanor, confused, sitting on the sidewalk this morning holding Charlie. Eleanor, dead. Because she, Renata, had gone out last night to get herself drunk and laid, leaving others with the responsibility of her child. “Thank goodness for this young man. He appeared like my guardian angel. I don’t feel at all well right now”

  “Oh, June,” she finally managed to say, reaching one hand up to stroke the head of the sobbing girl. “June, it’s not your fault.”

  BUT IT WAS HER FAULT, and even when Eleanor’s daughter Janice explained that according to the medical examiner, the massive stroke that had taken her quickly and painlessly could have been triggered by anything, at any time, June still knew that it was her fault. The stroke could have come at any time, but it hadn’t; it came the morning June woke Mrs. MacGregor out of a sound sleep and handed her a burden she couldn’t possibly deal with.

  June didn’t know what to do with a grief and guilt so large. She told her mother about it. Her mother consoled her, and tried to reassure her that she had done nothing irresponsible. She suggested that if anyone had been irresponsible, the baby’s mother had been. June knew Renata bore some fault, but she also knew that she had had charge of the baby, and the direct consequence of that was Mrs. MacGregor’s death.

  But even Mrs. MacGregor’s children wanted to spare her. They were each very nice—Helen, with her faint Texas drawl and frosted hair and motherly tones; Peter, with his sober, quiet manner, like a minister, balding with a neatly trimmed gray beard; and Janice, who looked the most like her mother, and who was so nice to explain to June what had happened medically. Janice even tried to take some of the responsibility upon herself; she said she had noticed that her mother was getting mixed up at times, and kept meaning to call her doctor to discuss it, but hadn’t managed to get around to it. It was possible that a series of small strokes had recently been causing her mother to have spells of confusion, brought about by episodes of reduced oxygen to the brain. But this only made June add to her own store of guilt, remembering the banking incident, and how she had thought then of calling Janice. At the time, she had decided against it, feeling somehow complicit with Mrs. MacGregor, who didn’t want her children interfering. Now, of course, she saw it differently.

  The funeral was Tuesday. June and Renata went together with Charlie, although there was an uncomfortable feeling growing between them, since neither could be around the other without thinking of the events that had led to Eleanor’s death. June was astonished at the number of mourners who showed up. The Mrs. MacGregor she had known had been so solitary. Yet here were more than a hundred people; Janice told her a lot of them were judges and lawyers and doctors whom either Mrs. MacGregor or her husband had worked with. June had known that Mrs. M. had been a judge, but that had been an abstract, distant fact to her until she saw the number of important-looking people climbing out of limousines, coming to pay their respects.

  A WEEK AFTER MRS. MACGREGOR DIED, June still couldn’t go to any of her classes. She wasn’t eating. She didn’t waste time consulting Miriam, because she already knew that her aura was poisoned. Maybe she no longer even had an aura, or if she did, it was a halo of pure black. She and Renata didn’t talk about Mrs. MacGregor at all. Renata came right home after her shift every night, and they talked about Charlie and how he had acted, and then June left.

  One night when June was baby-sitting, she had been horrified to hear noises coming from Mrs. MacGregor’s apartment next door. She pressed her ear to the wall and was positive she heard thumps and bumps, and the sound of something being moved. She felt suctioned to the wall like a limpet, until she heard a voice, which broke the spell of fear. Of course, someone needed to move Mrs. M.’s stuff out. June looked out the peephole in the door. Janice and Peter were hauling boxes into the hall. June didn’t go out to say hello. She couldn’t face t
hem again. They were carting out Mrs. M.’s boxes, all labeled and sealed, that she had kept stored in the spare bedroom. It was funny how easy Mrs. M. had made the job for them by leaving her boxes closed like that.

  Tuesday and Friday afternoons were the hardest. Instead of hurrying to catch the train after her classes to make it to Mrs. Mac Gregor’s, June spent her time lying on her unmade futon with the shades in her apartment drawn. Sometimes she played music and sometimes she didn’t. Mostly she stared at the ceiling. For the first time in years, she didn’t think of food. She couldn’t even feel her stomach anymore. As she floated through the afternoons, it was as if her body were not there.

  At four, she had to drag herself out and go to Renata’s. When she got a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she didn’t even recognize herself: dark, hollow eyes; sharp cheekbones. A month ago, she really wanted to have cheekbones like that. Now she didn’t care.

  Owen greeted her these days in hospital tones, asking her with quiet concern how she was doing. She couldn’t bear to talk to him. But no matter how clipped her response, he was always waiting to greet her the next time she passed, like one of those inflatable clowns that bounce back upright and smiling every time you punch them.

  JUNE WAS LATE AGAIN, and she was wearing the same dirty T-shirt and jeans she had on yesterday. Renata didn’t care whether June could be cheerful for her sake, but she worried about the atmosphere that June was creating for Charlie. Of course they both felt horrible about Eleanor; of course they both felt guilty. But Renata would not allow herself to be depressed for Charlie’s sake, and, damn it, she wouldn’t hire depressed baby-sitters for him.

  The whole question of keeping June on was up in the air, anyway. Bryan had found a job tending bar at a downtown hotel during the lunch shift, and he was pressing her to let him take care of Charlie when she worked at night. The idea was tempting, although she didn’t know if she was ready to give Bryan so large a share of Charlie so soon. She had to admit that he was developing a knack for handling the baby. At first she had held her breath at the different style he had of picking him up, tickling him, jabbering in his face. Everything Bryan did seemed so loud and rough compared to the way Renata handled Charlie. But there was no denying that in Bryan’s hands Charlie squealed, laughed, and generally acted totally delighted. Charlie might need a little of that kind of play.

 

‹ Prev