This is another one of my father’s songs, and it doesn’t surprise me that they’d play it where Tessa works, at a store for skaters and snowboarders. The music in there is relentlessly peppy and energetic, trying to push people to buy gloves and hats and two ski jackets when they need only one. Or, when it’s warm out, two skateboards, or two plastic pairs of kneepads. “Summerlong” would fit right in since it sounds happy—most people don’t realize the message is sad.
The song came out on that same first solo record as “Secret Story” the year after Shelter broke up, but they still play it on 92.9 FM Hot Mixx Radio (“Heat up your day with a mix of your favorites!”) from May to September. Last month I heard it at the grocery store. I was in the cereal aisle, and my mother was in the frozen section, and as a result we have more Rice Krispies and raspberry Popsicles than a household of two can use in a year. We both had the same strategy: keep picking up items, slowly and deliberately. Read the ingredients, make a show of trying to make the right choice, then choose both. It was fine grocery shopping theater, but nobody was watching. The main point was to avoid each other until the song was over so we wouldn’t have to talk about it. She had the cart, so I was the weirdo carrying a half dozen General Mills boxes. My arms so full that I could barely see around them. By the time I found her, Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” was playing and my mother just looked at my box tower and nodded, like It’s totally normal that you have selected six boxes of cereal. I dumped them into the cart.
I think about telling Tessa this story, but I don’t.
“I’m sorry,” I say, in a mock-serious voice, “on behalf of my whole family.” For a moment, I see a shadow of a smile pass over Tessa’s face and I think maybe things are going to be okay. Then she shakes her head.
“I’ve learned to tune it out at this point,” she says. She crosses her arms, her posture a kind of fence, a border protecting her from me. One of the things I’ve always liked best about Tessa is that she’s willing to be uncertain. She’s not always so sure of everything like my mother and my sister are. Or at least, she wasn’t before. She looks pretty sure now.
It isn’t supposed to be like this. Tessa is supposed to understand. She’s the one who came up with the Horizon Theory in the first place.
My father dropped out of my life three years ago the way the evening sun slides behind the horizon line: you know it still exists, but you’re not sure exactly where. It floats back into view from time to time; in his case, in the pages of Rolling Stone or performing a song on a late-night talk show. And Tessa’s the one who Google Mapped my father’s studio in Williamsburg and helped me find the magazine—the magazine I’m bringing to show Luna—on eBay. She let me use her credit card. I don’t think I ever paid her back.
Now Tessa glances over her shoulder at her house, but there’s no one there that I can see.
“The magazine came,” I say, “um, a while ago. Do you want to see it? I could get it.”
“That’s okay,” she says.
“I think I still owe you eight bucks.”
“I’ll add it to your tab,” she says, taking a step backward, but she doesn’t walk away. She keeps standing there, though now she’s looking up toward the top of the oak tree above us so intently I almost turn and look too.
A sudden desperate feeling runs through me like a shudder. I’ve wanted all summer to have the chance to talk to Tessa, but now I’m here and she’s sort of listening and I can’t remember what I wanted to say. This whole mess happened because of a secret—a secret I kept in hopes of protecting her, but now I know you can’t keep a secret safe. You can try to treat it carefully, like an eggshell or a tiny cocoon. But secrets aren’t hollow. They have heft and weight. They orbit us like little moons, held close by our gravity, all the while pulling us with their own.
I want to tell her this, but I can’t get my mouth to form the words.
“Tessa, I’m sorry.” I can feel my voice start to shake. “I—I thought I was doing the right thing.”
She’s looking somewhere to my left, so I end up saying this to the side of her face.
“I know,” she says. Her voice is soft. “But you weren’t. I really liked him, Phoebe,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and then some kind of Honesty Demon gets inside my mouth. “So did I.”
Her eyes narrow a little then, and she bites down on her bottom lip. She nods, not as if she’s answering a question, but as if she’s made up her mind.
“Good luck in New York,” she says. “Have fun with your famous family.”
This last part comes out not as mean but almost sincere. Is it possible to say something like that and not be sarcastic?
She turns around and walks up the driveway, her flip-flops making a thwacking sound on the concrete. She disappears into the dark cave of her garage and I stand there, still watching, as the automatic door lowers slowly until it kisses the concrete.
Dusty looks up at me, her head tilted like she’s listening to something very carefully, as if to ask me, What the hell is up with her? I drop my fingers to her head and she presses her ear to my thigh. I’ll go inside in a second, but I can’t seem to move my feet yet. And just then, when I’ve let my guard down, the words to “Summerlong” come marching back into my head. The light will trap you, the light will catch you, but summer’s not long. Summerlong.
I’ve never understood what that means. Is he saying it’s long or it isn’t? Maybe it’s a special kind of long. As in, not long—Summerlong!
Whatever.
I’m sure my father meant for it to be a metaphor for the end of his band or his marriage or some other thing he screwed up, but right now, it’s hard for me not to take it literally. In a few weeks, this white-hot sunlight will fade into amber and summer will slip into fall. I’ll have to go back to school and face everything I’ve been avoiding since June. But there’s a week between now and then, and some questions I plan on getting answered. Good thing I have plenty of audio-visual aids, and I’m willing to start here and work backward.
three
MEG
JUNE 2001
THE KEY WAS STUCK IN the lock. I was trying not to see it as a sign.
“Everything all right?” my sister asked from behind me, and I answered without turning around.
“Perfect,” I said. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and wiggled the key to the left. When I turned it back, it clicked. The door unlocked.
I left it closed, though, and hopped back down the stairs to the lawn. Kit was there with the girls, standing next to the little garden that lined one side of the yard. Phoebe was picking dandelions and Luna was talking to the rosebushes, I thought. Above us, a silver maple arched toward the sky. This was one of the things I liked best about the house the first time I saw it: the tall tree on the front lawn, the big bushes next to the sidewalk. It was an old farmhouse in the middle of the city, but it was like a fairy-tale cottage. You could barely see it from the street.
Luna had taken off her shoes in the soft grass, and she was counting her steps between two rosebushes: one-two-three-four. She’d taken half a year of ballet classes and was a natural, leaping across her mirrored dance studio and across our loft’s living room floor. Not our loft anymore: the loft we sold a week before to a banker and his pregnant blond wife. I thought about it—that place that was until very recently home—and my breath caught in my lungs. Then Phoebe crashed into my legs with a handful of dandelions, laughing, and I could breathe again. She looked up at me, smiling and squinting into the sun, and I was almost certain about this decision I’d made. Almost.
“All right, girlies,” I said, taking Phoebe’s hand and twirling her once over the grass. She laughed and sat down hard in a patch of clover. I picked up a cardboard box from the driveway, the only thing I’d brought in the car besides our suitcases. The movers wouldn’t bring the rest until tomorrow, and I’d have to remember then what things I’d taken and what I’d left behind. “Let’s go inside and see our new hous
e,” I said.
“New house!” Phoebe repeated. She’d be two in a couple of months and she was just starting to put sentences together, though I knew she understood almost everything.
Luna stopped counting, turned back my way. “Can I see my room?” she asked.
I nodded. “Of course you can.”
She reached out to take my hand, and Kit swung Phoebe onto her hip. We stepped up five stairs to the narrow porch, and I stood again in front of the heavy wood door.
“What if there are squatters in there?” Kit said, shooting me a lopsided smile. She’d given herself a pixie cut a month earlier in a hotel room in Chicago, during the last week of our last tour. It made her eyes look enormous, but it suited her.
“There aren’t any squatters,” I said. I opened the door and kicked the box over the threshold.
“Raccoons, then.” Kit touched the weathered wood of the door frame. A long scratch ran the length of the trim, and I wondered when in the last hundred years it had happened.
“What’s a squatter?” Luna asked. She looked up at me, blinking her long eyelashes.
“It’s hard to explain, sweetie,” I said, “but our house doesn’t have any.”
It was dim inside, with the curtains pulled closed on all the front windows, but a shaft of sunlight fell straight from the dining room window to the floor. It made a perfect gold square on the hardwood, and right then all I wanted was to sit in that spot, forever if I had to, or as long as it took to figure out what I was supposed to do next.
But instead I pulled Luna inside, and Kit and Phoebe followed. We stood for a moment in the cool, dark quiet. The windows were closed, but I could still hear birdsong.
“It’s not exactly the Ritz, is it?” Kit said.
“It’s not,” I said. Luna let go of my hand and walked toward the kitchen. “But the Ritz was never really that great anyway.”
Kit laughed. “I thought it was fantastic.” She shrugged as she said this, but she was smiling and I was grateful because my sister didn’t think I was crazy. Or if she did, she hadn’t told me yet.
“Tell me again,” Kit said, setting Phoebe down on the floor. “Why are we not telling Mom and Dad we’re here?” She crossed the living room and unlocked a window to my left.
I ran my hand over the banister. The wood was dusty but smooth and glossy underneath. “Because Dad is just going to start trying to fix stuff,” I said. Our parents lived maybe fifteen minutes away, still in the house where we grew up. They were kind and quiet, and I loved them, but I needed a day in this house before I invited them into it.
Kit strained to open the window, but it stayed closed.
“Um, I don’t think that would be a bad thing,” she said. “Plus Mom has every cleaning supply ever invented.”
“We have a can of Comet,” I said, “somewhere in that box.”
Kit dragged her toe across the wood floor. It left a trail in the dust. “I think we’re going to need more than that.”
“We’ll call them in the morning,” I said. “The phone should already be connected, if we can find the jack.” I leaned down to dig through my box. I was looking for an olive green rotary phone from the sixties, which I’d had my whole life, or at least since I’d pulled it out of my grandmother’s attic before I left for New York years ago.
“I should probably call Kieran anyway,” I said.
Kit looked at me. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding, even though I wasn’t sure at all. I hadn’t figured out the new rules. “He’ll want to know we got to Buffalo okay. I mean, that the girls did.”
The last time I saw him was two days before, when the movers were packing the last of our things from the loft. Kit had already taken the girls to her apartment in Brooklyn, where we planned to spend the night. Kieran and I walked around the loft awkwardly, supposedly supervising the splitting of our things. I finally sat on the living room windowsill just to get out of the way. Kieran came over and leaned his hip against the sill. I hopped down, bare feet on the floor.
“Are you sure?” Kieran said, his voice low. “We could still fix this.”
Fix what? I wanted to say. Our family? The band? I looked past him and accidentally caught the eye of one of the movers across the room, a dark-haired guy in a bandanna and white T-shirt, carrying a bookshelf. He smiled at me and I wondered what we looked like to him, here in our apartment, breaking up. I looked back at Kieran.
“How?” I asked.
“We’d figure it out,” he said, and looking at me without blinking. He rested his fingers on my cheekbone and traced my lips with his thumb. “You could stay.”
For a second I felt frozen, my feet locked to that space on the floor. I wanted to believe him. I can admit that. I felt myself lean toward him just a tiny bit. Millimeters, maybe. Then I heard the scrape of furniture on the floor behind me. I leaned back onto my heels.
“I can’t,” I said. “This isn’t the life I want for the girls. Or me.”
Kieran shook his head, and I didn’t know what that meant, that he disagreed or that he wasn’t going to start this conversation again. He smiled then, and before he could say anything else, I turned and walked out into the hallway. Down the stairs, to the street, to the subway.
Now I found a phone jack in the kitchen, mounted in the wall above the counter. I plugged in the cord of my grandmother’s phone and lifted the heavy handle off the receiver. Nothing. There was no dial tone, and I felt the hot rush of tears come to my eyes. I shut my eyes tight without turning toward my sister, but I knew she could see.
“There are pay phones up on Elmwood,” Kit said, her voice soft. “Or we’ll meet some neighbors after dinner. I’ll call Mom when we wake up tomorrow, and later tonight, I’ll call Kieran and tell him we made it. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. Once again, my sister saved me.
“Now,” Kit said, walking to the window next to the staircase, “let’s keep looking for those squatters.” She pulled the curtain aside and leaned against the bannister. “They might be holed up on the second floor.”
Phoebe stood in front of me, reaching toward the ceiling.
“Up,” she said. “Up.” I leaned down and scooped her into my arms.
Luna walked over to Kit and put her hands on Kit’s knees. Her hair was coming loose from her ponytail, wisps falling down her neck. She looked so serious, and so grown-up.
“Can we go see my room?” she asked. Kit glanced at me, asking for permission.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s the one right at the top of the stairs. It’s blue now, but we can paint it any color you want.”
“Purple,” Luna said, without thinking about it.
“Okay,” I said. “Purple it is.” I turned to Phoebe. “What about you, girlie?”
“Purple,” Phoebe said.
“No!” Luna said. She twisted toward her sister. “You can’t paint your room purple.” Then, more kindly: “Okay?”
Phoebe frowned and looked up at Luna, her eyebrows drawn together.
Kit ruffled Luna’s hair. “Phoebe can choose whatever color she likes, little bossy,” she said. “Let’s go.”
They walked up the stairs, holding hands, and I looked down again at my cardboard box. That night, we’d sleep on this air mattress, all four of us, and I’d watch my daughters breathe in the light from the street lamps. Then, tomorrow, my mother would come with her caddy filled with Pine-Sol and bleach, and my father would bring his green metal toolbox, the one with his name on the top, spelled out on label-maker tape. They’d try to fix my life in their quiet Foster way, without admitting it’s broken. And then, in the fall, Kit would go to law school in DC and this whole rock-star life would start to feel like a dream.
“Do you want to see your room, Phoebe?” I asked. “You can see the backyard from there. All the trees and flowers.”
Phoebe nodded, her face serious, and I picked her up. She felt so light, this tiny person, and once again I was amazed that Kieran and I had made h
er from scratch. And so glad I had her, even if I hadn’t expected to have two kids—and no Kieran—by the time I was twenty-seven.
At the bottom of the stairs I stopped and turned so we could both see out the window. Phoebe pressed her palm to the glass. I could see our reflection dimly, so I knew Phoebe was smiling.
“Do you like the house?” I asked. Phoebe nodded.
“New-house-our-house,” she said, as if it was all one word. As soon as I heard it, I felt a song taking shape in my mind, building its particular architecture, filling its rooms. And then I shut it down. Stopped the construction before it really began.
I didn’t have to write songs anymore, but someday I was going to have to explain all of this—everything that had happened—to the girls. I could save the words for that moment. Maybe I’d start it at the ending, and tell it like a fairy tale: Once upon a time, we were four girls in a nearly empty house, and I wasn’t afraid.
Or maybe only a little.
four
WHEN DUSTY AND I GET back into the yard, my mother is still missing. I’d left my shoulder bag on the back porch earlier, and I pick it up. It feels light now, compared with my suitcase, but when I slide my hand into the pocket inside, I can feel the magazine in there, hidden away. I take out my phone and text another lyric: Secrets heavy as glass paperweights in our pockets. The answer buzzes back right away: Are you writing about us? (Ha.)
My mother comes out then carrying a small sculpture that looks a little like a flower, if flowers were spiky and futuristic and made of steel. She hands it to me.
“A robot flower,” I say. “How thoughtful. Maybe I can store my toothpaste in it.” I turn it over to look at the underside.
“Hush, you. Flowers and sculpture. I’m trying to meld my interests.” She makes a gesture that I’m assuming is supposed to mean meld, but it looks like particularly enthusiastic taffy pulling.
Girls in the Moon Page 2