Girls in the Moon

by Janet McNally

  I can even remember my father playing his guitar on the couch when I was a kid and he’d visit, singing Beatles songs, with Luna and me curled next to him on the cushion. But I’ve never seen my father live, playing in front of people besides me at an official show.

  When my father enters the stage, he walks forward to stand in a pool of light, that same Fender Jazzmaster I saw at the studio slung over his shoulder. He waits for the current of applause to die down, and he smiles steadily and sincerely. There’s a really beautiful backup singer standing to his left, her skin lit red and gold by the lights, her Afro surrounding her head like an aura. Farther back on the stage is another guitarist and the drummer behind his sparkly blue kit. The bassist has a dark red Fender, and it seems to me that’s where Archer is looking right now.

  I stand there and wonder if my father will say something about me. I wonder if he’ll say my name.

  “Hello, New York,” he says. A cheer rises up from the crowd, rippling through the room like a wave. “We’re so happy to be here.” He’s smiling, and he glances back toward the drummer, who raises his sticks. “There’s no place I’d rather play than my hometown, even though it’s true that almost everyone here comes from somewhere else.” He steps forward and touches the mike in its stand. “I came from somewhere else,” he says, “but it was so long ago I can’t remember where that was.”

  “Not so long!” someone yells out.

  My father laughs, a clear sharp sound in a room full of hum. “I think it was,” he says, drawing out the last word. “But it doesn’t matter. The best thing is when the people you love show up right where you are, right?”

  I glance at the people on my left, but they’re looking up at the stage and my father. I feel like I might be glowing, as if there were a sign over my head, but no one knows I’m his daughter except that guy at the door. I’m not sure if I want anyone else to know or not.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” my father says, and I turn my head back to him. “Get to the point, Kieran. Okay, okay.” He strikes a chord on his guitar. Without thinking about it, without looking at him, I take Archer’s hand, lacing my fingers through his. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, smiling at me.

  I know the songs. I know all the songs. I’ve listened to them on my iPod while running with Dusty and on our turntable when my mother is at work. So even though I’m standing in the same room as my father now, even though he’s playing right in front of me, the songs still sound a little lonely to me in a way that they most likely don’t to anyone else in the room. They sound a little sad.

  Everyone else is here to see a show, to see this guy they might have loved when he was in a band called Shelter twenty years ago. Maybe they’ve followed his career through the decades and bought each album, on vinyl and tape and CD and vinyl again. But for me, this is just field research, helping me to understand my father. This is the part where I watch him, and I watch other people watch him, and I listen to these songs in a room with the guy who made them.

  Luna’s music seems to be in a hurry, trying to get somewhere, trying to fill all the space around you. My father’s songs are different. They take their time. They’re just moving around the room, filling it up the same as Luna’s, but so slowly you don’t really notice.

  I look at the crowd when I’m not looking at my father. The light from the stage reflects on their faces in shades of gold and silver. They bob their heads in rhythm with his songs, or they sing along, sometimes loudly, opening their mouths wide and smiling while they sing, and sometimes quietly, doing not much more than mumbling the words.

  It occurs to me that he can do no wrong onstage in his favorite city. There’s a kind of safety to what my father is doing, going up there to be supported. He knows everyone here loves him. It doesn’t seem as brave as what Luna does now, since plenty of people seeing her are seeing her for the first time. I guess she’s seeking the same thing, and she’s confident enough to know she’ll get it too, eventually. They have something, my father and my sister, and I know my mother has it too.

  He plays a long time, close to an hour and a half. I stand there and I hold Archer’s hand. I shift my weight, but I don’t sing along. Then finally he plays one more song and says, “Good night,” softly and directly into the microphone. He leaves the stage so quickly I’m certain it isn’t really the end. Applause starts up around me like the roar of the ocean when you first get out of your car and step out on the beach. It comes from nowhere in particular, but still it’s everywhere at once. People shout his name, shout names of his songs, and they clap as if they’re trying to call him from very far away. Archer and I start clapping too, softly at first and then just as hard as the rest of the crowd. Three minutes of this and he’s back, and the applause settles into something satisfied, punctuated with cheers.

  He starts to play the song I’ve been waiting for without realizing it, a song called “Lost Girls,” about which I’ve wondered since I first heard it. Maybe he’s lost plenty of girls over the years since he left, but I can’t help but hope that it’s about my mother, my sister, and me. “Lost girls,” he sings, “waiting at the edges of my dreams. I wish I could tell you my love wasn’t what it seemed.”

  I’ve thought a lot about what he meant by those words. Does he wish he could tell the girls, but he can’t because they’re lost? Or is he saying that he wishes his love were different, but he knows it was what it seemed? That it wasn’t enough, the way he loved. I wonder if he’s singing that lyric differently now because he knows I might be here. I can’t tell, but I realize I’m clenching my hands into fists so I try to loosen my fingers, stretching them out into the air at my sides. That’s when I feel Archer take my right hand in his again and I smile without looking at him.

  When my father is done, he doesn’t leave the stage right away. The house lights come up and he bends down to pack away his own guitar and pedals, even though I’m sure he could ask someone else to do it for him. A few people in the crowd press forward and stand at the edge of the stage, talking to him. He seems happy to talk with them, and he manages to mostly keep eye contact even while he’s packing things away.

  “What do you want to do?” Archer asks. It’s still loud in here and his mouth is close to my ear, his breath warm and soft on my skin. He’s still holding my hand.

  I turn toward him. “I don’t know.”

  “We should let him know we’re here, right?”

  I don’t move much closer to the stage, but there are larger empty pockets of space in the room now. I see my father look out over the dwindling crowd, squinting a little in the lights that still shine down on him. I raise my hand into a wave, just above shoulder height, and somehow my father sees it. His mouth breaks into a smile, a real one that goes into his eyes, too, and he raises his hand in return.

  I turn away then, because I’m not sure what else to do. Archer follows me, or maybe I lead him, holding his hand.

  The guy from the door is standing in the hallway where people are milling around. His job must be mostly over, because he doesn’t look too interested in what’s going on around him. But then he sees me and his eyes flash like a light is switching on. He smiles at me and I smile back, pretending I’m the girl he must imagine I am, the one who has just watched a show performed by her (B-list?) rock-star dad and who must, just must, have something like a perfect life. I wave to this guy too.

  Ahead of us the double doorway frames a wide square of incandescent light. I take a deep breath, and I’m still holding Archer’s hand as we step out onto the street.

  thirty-five

  WE WALK DOWN THE BLOCK QUICKLY, finding our way around Kieran Ferris fans still talking in groups on the sidewalk. Archer follows my lead. I feel as if I have to put some distance between the Ballroom and me. At the corner, we stop.

  Sara D. Roosevelt Park is ahead of us, a narrow sliver of green in the middle of the Bowery. It’s dark but the grass still seems to glow, maybe in contrast with the dingy grayness of the st
reets around it, or because the air above it is fresher.

  “Want to go sit down?” Archer asks, squeezing my fingers with his own. I nod and we walk toward the park.

  Most of the space in there is taken up by basketball courts and a soccer field, and both are still full of players even though it’s late. Their shouts and laughter carry straight across the ground to my ears, and the thumping of the basketballs sounds like footsteps, as if a dozen giant people were running across a wide-open floor.

  We find a low wooden bench and I drop my bag down next to me. It feels heavier, as if I were carrying something extra after that show, but I didn’t buy or pick up anything. No one even gave me a ticket stub. It’s just that same copy of SPIN and the one of Catcher, which I haven’t shown to anyone in New York yet.

  “Shit,” Archer says. “That was awesome.” He’s smiling. “I hope we get to play there someday.”

  “You will,” I say, and for some reason, in this moment, I think about Ben. Would I have gone to shows with Ben? I know he loves music, but somehow I can’t picture it. So where would we have gone? Lacrosse games? Someplace where there are rules and two sides to choose from. Where there’s a clear winner at the end of the night.

  I lean back on the bench and slip my left foot out of my sandal. I touch my toes to the ground. It’s been dark for hours, but I can still feel the sun’s heat stored there.

  “The pavement is warm,” I say.

  Archer reaches down to touch the concrete with his fingers. “It was hot today.”

  “It takes the pavement hours to forget,” I say. “The day, I mean.”

  Archer is looking at me, waiting.

  “Just . . . It keeps the heat.” I start playing with my purse’s strap to keep my fingers busy.

  “I know what you meant,” he says. A boy on a skateboard slides by in front of us, his wheels rattling on the cracks in the sidewalk. “I liked the way you said it.”

  My pulse is humming in my ears and I have to look away. For the first time since I’ve been with Archer in real life, I feel a little like that girl I was in my texts. I feel like maybe I can make words work for me.

  I look up at the sky, but there’s nothing to see, really. It’s graphite-colored, as dark as it gets here. There’s a small round moon glowing over the other edge of the park, just above the smooth, straight tops of buildings across the street.

  “It’s a little awkward in the city,” Archer says.

  I look at him. “What do you mean?”

  “All the light pollution.” He pointed upward at the charcoal sky, gray and free of stars. “I went to camp when I was a kid, and there were so many stars. It was like someone added them to the sky while we were driving upstate from the city. I just couldn’t believe it.” He’s looking up and squinting as if he’ll be able to spot one if he tries hard enough. “If you ever felt a lull in a conversation with a girl,” he says, “you could just try to find a constellation.”

  The tiny blinking light of a plane comes into view and starts to cross above us. I smile. “Talked to a lot of girls, did you?”

  He laughs, a small laugh that sounds like an exhale. He turns toward me and I feel a catch in my own breath. “I’ve come around since then,” he says. “Polished my conversation skills.”

  I look at him. “I can really tell,” I say. I say it with a flirty edge to my voice, the way I’ve spoken to a dozen other guys I’ve liked, but this feels different. “I thought you meant there are always other people around. So it’s hard to find the right moment—to try to kiss someone.”

  He smiles and looks right at me and I—I lose my nerve.

  So I look up at the sky. “How many constellations can you point out?” My heart thumps behind my ribs. This is the way I’ll regroup. I can point them all out, or all the famous ones, anyway, after a whole childhood of being taught their shapes by my mother.

  Archer laughs. “Mostly I just made them up,” he says. “The Big Platypus, that kind of thing. The Little Toaster.”

  I shake my head. “And here some nice girl thought she was getting an education.” I touch his arm lightly, and I can feel how warm his skin is. “The Little Toaster?”

  “It would be”—he draws a square in the air with his hands—“like this.”

  “We all know how the ancient Greeks loved their toasters.”

  “Big or little, yes.” He pushes a lock of hair away from my face and I hold my breath. “I should have stuck with the Man in the Moon or something,” he says, and points toward the moon in the Manhattan sky, still waiting over the tops of buildings.

  “It’s not a man,” I say, before I even think about it.

  “What?”

  I look down at the bench. Someone has carved the name Audrey into the wood between Archer’s and my knees, and I reach down to touch the letters. “My mother always said it wasn’t a man up there. She said it was girls.”

  “Girls, plural?”

  “Yeah.” I say this and try to remember what my mother used to say. I was seven, nine, twelve, sitting out in our backyard, looking up at a dusty, shadow-covered moon. Those smudgy features weren’t some guy’s face, she told us, and everyone who thought they were was wrong.

  “So what’s up there?” Luna would ask, looking at the moon as intently as I was.

  “Girls,” my mother said. “Girls just like you two.”

  I accepted it when I was small, in the same way you accept the Tooth Fairy and her dental obsessions, Santa Claus with his sleigh pulled by bejeweled flying deer. But now I wonder what she meant. Maybe they’re scooped out like the lunar seas, all those craters that might hold water if there were any water up there. Or are the girls just sitting in the moondust, leaning back on their hands with their legs crossed in front of them?

  Now, sitting on this bench with Archer, something clicks and I finally put together what my mother might have meant.

  “I never considered this before,” I say, “but I think it has something to do with this.” I slip the copy of SPIN from my bag and hand it to him. He takes it from me as if it’s something very fragile. He holds it up to the light coming from the street lamp behind us and looks at it, quiet.

  “This is amazing,” he says, after a few moments have passed.

  “I know.”

  He looks at me. “Where did you get it? Your mom?”

  I shake my head. “No, eBay,” I say. “I used my friend Tessa’s credit card. It finally occurred me that I could just buy it, if my mom was never going to talk about this stuff.” I look at Mom on the cover in Archer’s lap, the so-certain set of her mouth, her wide blue-green eyes. “Though maybe she was talking about it all along.”

  Archer is flipping through to find the article. “Have you shown Luna?”

  “No,” I say. “I want to. I just haven’t found the right moment. I don’t know what she’ll say.” I gather my hair behind my head and twist it so it stays back. The cooling night air on my neck feels perfect, like something I forgot I wanted. “I don’t want her to say the wrong thing, I guess.”

  “I’m going to read it on the train,” Archer says, “if that’s okay. It’s too hard to see in this light.” He hands back the magazine. “Plus, there’s something I want to say.”

  I notice my heartbeat behind my ribs then, as if someone just switched it on.

  “I was just thinking about Luna, before you showed me this.”

  “Why?” I wonder for a moment if I’ve read all of this wrong. Maybe it’s Luna he likes, just like practically every boy who’s ever met her. “Do you have a crush on her?” I ask.

  Archer laughs. “No! Luna’s my friend. And so is James. It’s not that.” He squints a little then, as if he’s trying to see me in the half-light. He takes a breath and I wait. “I keep thinking that she’d kill me if I kissed you.”

  Those last few words give me a tumbling feeling, as if the bench has dropped out from beneath me. But all I’m thinking is that I want to keep falling.

  “So let’s not te
ll her,” I say. My heart feels like marbles in a box, shaking around so hard I’m afraid he can hear it. Another plane, a bigger one, flashes its light overhead. There are a couple hundred people up there reading or eating pretzels or falling asleep with their heads against the window glass, and they have no idea that we’re down here, that this is happening miles below them.

  I turn my face toward Archer. “What about time travel?” I say.

  He looks at me and smiles. “Explain.”

  “Well, it’s a long shot, but if you had already kissed me, then it would be done.” I wave my hand. “Luna would kill you or she wouldn’t, but I’d already be kissed.” I’m looking at his lips, and I don’t care about hiding it. “There’s no taking it back. It’s already happened.”

  He nods as if I just made a serious scientific proposal and he’s mulling it over. “Interesting,” he says. “Seems very logical.”

  “Logic isn’t my strong suit, but I’m making an effort here.” I slip my fingers out of his and turn myself so I can completely face him.

  “I’m convinced.” He says this so softly I have to listen hard to hear him, and he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t lean forward or take my face in his hands. He just looks at me. But then his head tilts slightly, and it’s like I can see what’s going to happen before it does. Maybe this is how time travel works after all. His lips find mine, like they’re searching for something, or asking a question. It makes a racket in me, a hum that starts in my belly and spreads in all directions like sound waves traveling through water.

  The last person to kiss me was Ben, a kiss I wasn’t allowed to want. A kiss that wrecked my friendship with Tessa, the rest of my school year, my summer until now. This time is different. This time, when we pull apart and I open my eyes there are no swirling stars in the sky, just Archer on a bench and a bunch of kids playing basketball somewhere behind him. I’m here on this bench, but some other part of me is spiraling away, time-traveling.