In the video for this song, the band plays in a field at night under a smudgy, glowing moon. This footage is cut with scenes of them playing on a stage in an empty auditorium, its red velvet curtains open, but no one’s home. In both places, my mother wears laced-up Doc Martens, black tights, and a supershort skirt. Her skin glows and her hair is loose. My father is in jeans and a T-shirt, as usual. They’re either happy or good at pretending.
Who needs water? my parents sing, together, on my phone right now and also somewhere in the past. We can still pretend it’s an ocean. Because so much of life is about pretending, right? Pretending that you know what you’re doing, pretending you’re happy, pretending things are okay. But that’s not the way I want to write.
The song ends and I take my earbuds out. I’ve had enough musical therapy for tonight. There’s also the fact that I have four texts from my mother, increasing in freak-out level. I click to the last one.
Girlie, the text says, answer me or I’m driving down there.
So I type out a reply, finally. The last thing I need is her showing up right now, when I’d have to talk to her about all of this face-to-face. I don’t know what to say in a text, even, and I’m still so pissed at her. She knew what Luna said to my father, and she said nothing. I’m sure she wanted to try to insulate Luna from his fame, from that whole world my mother decided to leave, but honestly? That’s not a good enough reason. And now she expects me to keep Luna from taking the same path she took, and it’s not my freaking job.
Sorry, I say. We’re so busy. Trying to fit a whole summer into a few days. Having fun. Will call tomorrow. I turn off my phone and put it into my bag before she can reply.
Let’s take an inventory here, just for fun. Just a quick list of the Things Wrong with Phoebe Ferris’s Life. 1. My sister has been lying to me for three years. 2. My mother has been lying to me for just as long. 3. My father is just living his sort-of-rock-star life in Williamsburg, for god’s sake, pretending it’s fine that he hasn’t talked to me in three years because, oh look, I’ve just showed up on his doorstep. 4. Neither the sweet, adorable bassist nor the sweet, adorable lacrosse player will ever call me again.
I turn toward the street and see a figure walking toward me down the sidewalk, moving between the circles of lamplight. When he gets closer, I see that it’s James. He doesn’t look upset anymore, only a little surprised to find me out here.
“Phoebe,” he says, when he gets close enough, “were you out?” As usual, his perfect British accent makes him sound like a character in a movie, not a person in my life. Yet here he is. He sits down next to me on the stairs.
I nod. “I was with my dad.”
“Really,” he says. He looks at me and waits to see what I’ll say.
“Yeah,” I say, shaking my head a little. “Don’t tell Luna. It’s no big deal. I was just bored.”
James nods, as if this is perfectly understandable. “And Luna?” he says. He points upstairs. He’s asking for something like a weather report.
I don’t know even how to begin to explain how Luna is.
“She’s fine,” I say. “She fell asleep pretty early.”
“She tires herself out,” he says. He reaches out and touches the leaf of a potted petunia next to the stairs. In the lamplight, the white petals glow as if they’re lit from inside.
“She’s like my mom,” I say. “Though Luna gets much more furious.” I give him a sideways glance and a halfway smile. “You sure you’re up for that?”
He smiles too. “Yeah,” he says, shrugging. “I’m sure. But you’re different, aren’t you?”
“I’m different from all of them,” I say. “I came from the aliens.” I think about what Luna said about wishing for some different father. “Or maybe from Paul Westerberg. If I’m lucky.”
James looks out toward the street. There’s a small cat—I hope it’s a cat—sniffing in the shadows next to some bushes. “It was a shit thing for me to do,” he says. “Walking out like that.”
“In my experience,” I say, “everybody does shit things once in a while.”
I wonder if Luna will tell him about the pregnancy tests, or if they will stay hidden at the bottom of the kitchen trash can until James tosses the bag into the garbage can outside. And if Luna will always remember tonight, when things could have gone either way. When she let one of her secrets go and kept the other one. Because that’s the thing. She could have been honest with me, up there on the couch. And she decided not to.
“When you said Luna should tell the truth,” I begin. It’s not quite a question. “You were talking about my dad.”
James looks at me. “Yes,” he says.
“She told him not to call us,” I say. “Three years ago.” I feel that same anger again, pulsing through me like heat. James nods. “When did she tell you about it?”
“A few months ago.”
He looks down at the petunia pot and I look at my hands. I peel the leftover gold nail polish off my thumbnail and then look up at him. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I don’t think it was any one thing. I think she wanted him to start being there more.”
“So she told him not to be there at all?”
“I think even Luna would admit that it wasn’t the best method.” His voice is soft.
He’s quiet, and we sit there without talking. The wind ruffles the branches of the spindly tree by the street. I blink hard, and I can feel that my lashes are wet. My nose starts to run.
“It’s ridiculous,” I say. “I’m so angry at her, and here I am, crying.” I sniffle. Very glamorous. “It’s like I don’t even know how to be mad at her the right way.” I’m about to wipe my nose with the back of my hand—yuck, I know—when James hands me a handkerchief from his pocket.
I take it and wipe my nose, and then I just look at him. “You carry a handkerchief?”
“I’m British,” he says, shrugging.
I smile and press my hands into my eyes.
“I can’t explain everything she does,” James says. “She loves you, though. You should talk it through.”
“I will,” I say, even though I wouldn’t really know how to begin. “Someday.” I breathe out slowly, though my lips.
“Sometimes I think you’re a little too perfect,” I tell him.
“No,” he says, but a smile is starting to turn up the corners of his mouth.
“You take care of her,” I say.
“I try,” he says. “She’s pretty amazing.”
“She is,” I say. “But she’s also a pain in the ass.”
He laughs. “If you tell her I agreed with you, I’ll deny it. To my deathbed.”
I look up at the strip of sky I can see between the brownstones. It’s nearly black and empty of stars.
“Are you sure you want all this?” I say.
James is retying his shoelace. “All what?” he says.
“Venus Moth. Bigger tours.” I take a breath. “It didn’t go so well for our parents.”
“We’re not your parents, Fee,” James says. “I think we’ll be able to hold it together. And if not, we’ll just stop.”
“You could stop?” I say. It all seems so fun, so glittery, that right now I feel that if it were me, it would be hard to walk away.
“For Luna, I would stop,” James says. He stands up then and stands on the sidewalk in front of me.
His phone dings. A text coming in. “Shit,” he says, the word clipped by his pretty accent. “Archer’s still down at the Indian place. I told him I’d let you know that, if you were around.”
My heart flutters and my blood starts to heat up. “I’m around,” I say.
James nods, tapping his fingers on the stair. “So I’m letting you know.”
I hesitate. James shakes his head. “Be easy on him. Most of us are helpless against the charms of a Ferris girl.”
He puts up his hand then, palm out, as if he’s waiting for me to give him a high five. So I do.
> I practically run up Schermerhorn, and when I get to Court Street I’m breathless. Archer is standing outside with a cigarette in his hand, the smoke curling up toward the sky. It takes him a second to notice me, to angle his body my way, and before he does, I watch him.
I don’t say anything at first. I just walk right up to him and kiss him there on the sidewalk. I’ve always hated cigarettes, but in that moment, Archer tastes like campfire, like starlit, sky-cooled summer nights. He tastes like sparks.
When our lips part, I step back far enough that I can really see him.
“Hi,” I say.
He smiles. “Well, hi.”
I press my palms together and bring my fingers to my lips.
“Got a minute?” I say.
Archer and I walk toward the Promenade, not back toward Luna’s apartment, and we don’t even discuss it. It’s like the Promenade is magnetic north and we’re needles loose under a compass glass, helpless against its pull. It’s dark out there, of course, but the lamplights glow like candles, warm and gold. Manhattan opens up before us, across the sparkling river, lined with lit-up buildings. They are more ideas than buildings, really: just tall columns filled with square beads of light.
North of us is the Brooklyn Bridge, strung with white lights across the dusky sky. It looks like it might be magical, as if someone enormous, some giant, were having a party and has hung fairy lights over the river. Archer takes my hand and we walk toward it.
“How about I take you to the airport tomorrow?” Archer says.
“Sure,” I say. “Do you have a car?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “But I know a guy with a van.”
I laugh. “I finally get to ride in it!”
Archer pulls me over to the railing that edges the Promenade, sliding his hand across my lower back. He hooks his fingers around my hip. “You may regret your enthusiasm,” he says.
We stand there and don’t say anything for a few moments. The buildings glitter and a tiny white boat slides across the river like a toy.
“Luna says you’re a mess,” I say.
“And what do you think?” Archer asks. His voice is cautious, soft.
“I think she’s wrong.”
When I turn my head toward Archer, he’s looking at me. He reaches forward, puts his hand on the side of my face, and traces my lips with his thumb. I stay still for a moment, looking at him, and then I move closer. I fit myself into his arms, and my lips find his.
Behind me, all the lamps in all the buildings of Manhattan burn in their windows, placing golden squares in the sky. But I don’t see it, and Archer doesn’t, because we’re not looking at anything at all.
fifty-one
MEG
JANUARY 1993
“LISTEN TO THIS,” KIERAN SAID, coming into the room. He held the Gretsch across his body, his left hand on the frets. I was sitting in the middle of the living room, my notebook open on the floor in front of me. I sat and listened as he played a melody I’d never heard before, clear and bright in the quiet room.
“That’s pretty nice, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I love it,” I said. My voice was scratchy, near hoarse. I had blown it out at our show the night before.
Kieran looked pleased. “Why are you sitting there?”
I pointed out the window. “This is the only spot where I can see the moon,” I said. Our apartment was in a carriage house, which was a fancy way of saying it was above a garage. Cheap Buffalo rent for three bedrooms, one with a bed and another packed full of amps and guitars. The third was supposed to be my art studio, but the truth was, I hadn’t painted or sculpted anything in a few months.
There were trees outside of almost all the windows, so many that the apartment felt as if it were built in a tree. Now, in winter, the branches were bare. From that spot, I could see one square of sky and the moon in the middle like a pearl button.
“I’m trying to write about it,” I said.
Kieran began to hum “Moon River.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know. The moon has been done before.”
“No,” Kieran said, squatting down next to me to look out the window. “It’s a great idea. You just need a new angle.” He looks back at me. “Write about the empty seas. The Sea of Tranquility.”
I heard the teakettle begin to whistle. Kieran got up.
“The water’s done,” he said. “I’m going to bring you honey tea. We’ll take care of that voice of yours.”
“Yes,” I said. “Bring me some tea, honey.” He smiled and passed through the dining room and out of sight.
The night was so clear and the moon so bright that I could see the dark spaces on the moon’s surface. It seemed crazy to call something a sea when it wasn’t filled with water—when it wasn’t filled with anything at all. But I supposed there was a long time when humans didn’t know that. There’s always so much we don’t know, and we just make it up.
Who needs water? I wrote. We can still pretend it’s an ocean.
I looked out our tree house window. The moon hadn’t moved, as far as I could see. It would stay there all night. At the bottom of the paper, I wrote Kieran Ferris, and above it, my name—my imaginary one—Meg Ferris.
fifty-two
IN THE MORNING, LUNA TAKES me to a crepe place in Cobble Hill for breakfast. We barely talk on the way there, and we sit in the courtyard out back and eat golden crepes with honey and yogurt and jewel-bright berries. Sunlight spills across the table and pansies bloom in a pot next to my chair.
Across from me, Luna sits at the table smiling, as if she’s orchestrated the sun and the crepes and the flowers in their pot. Her hair is pulled into a perfect ballerina knot at the crown of her head and even after eating her lipstick is still flawless, the deep red of crushed cherries. I’m planning to tell her that everything might look lovely, but things are still messed up. A perfect breakfast isn’t going to convince me otherwise. But then Luna says something that surprises me completely.
“James said he told you,” she says.
I squint, furrowing my brow. “Told me what?”
“About Dad,” she says. She presses her lips together. “That I told him not to call.”
I blink. My mind spins in the direction of WTF? for a few moments, but then somehow I know what James was trying to do. He decided to defuse the bomb before I dropped it. He found a way to make Luna talk about it without her really noticing.
Right now, she looks straight ahead, her face and her hands perfectly still.
“I’m not sorry,” she says, but her voice doesn’t sound as defensive as I’d expect. It sounds calm and even. She takes a long breath. “I thought it was the best thing.”
“Do you still think it was the best thing?” I ask.
She stirs her cappuccino with a tiny spoon. “I don’t know.”
The old anger sails in with a perfect summer breeze, and the latter pushes my napkin onto the ground. “Well, I don’t think it was the best thing, Luna,” I say. “And it wasn’t your decision to make.” Luna’s eyes are wide. I’m still holding my fork and I know that’s a little weird. I think of what she said to James yesterday afternoon: “You’ll just have to be pissed.” But that’s not what she says to me now.
“I’m sorry,” Luna says. It’s so unexpected that I set my fork down on my plate with a clatter.
A few petals fall from the tree above us onto my plate. I cover my eyes with my hands for a second and take them away. And then I say, “Okay.” I don’t know what else to say.
A tortoiseshell cat walks across the fence. It stops in the middle and stares at me. It meows.
“Yeah, hi, cat,” I say. I sit still and just breathe. This is when I could tell Luna what my mother wants me to say: that Luna shouldn’t go on tour now, that she should go back to school. But I know that it’s not my job to tell her that. I’m not even sure it’s the right thing for Luna to do.
I reach into my pocket and pull out the MetroCard our father gave me. It’s yellow
and shiny and it’s worth something, but in the end it’s just a piece of plastic. I hold it out to Luna.
“What’s this for?” she asks.
“It still has money on it,” I say. “Maybe twenty dollars.” It’s strange, feeling my father’s words in my mouth.
“Why did you put so much money on it?” Luna asks. She puts her lecture voice on. “You know the unlimited passes are the best deal. I thought you bought one of those at the airport.”
I almost tell her then, that I went to see our father again. I even open my mouth to do it. But something stops me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It was an accident.”
“Well,” Luna says, “you should be more careful.”
I feel a smile spread slowly across my lips. “Yeah,” I say. “I should.”
Luna looks at me carefully. “You saw Archer last night?”
“Yeah.” I can’t keep myself from smiling, but I don’t really care.
“All right, all right,” she says. “You can have the boy.”
I look at her, my beautiful sister, who always gets her own way.
“Thanks, Luna,” I say, “but I don’t need your permission.”
There’s a flash of surprise in her eyes, but then she smiles the smallest bit.
“I have to pee,” she says. She stands up and walks into the restaurant, leaving her purse on the table. I lift the flap and I can see the lip gloss I bought her last night tucked inside.
I look up at the fence but the cat is gone, and there’s no one to talk to. So I pick up my phone, and I dial my mother.
“Phoebe Elizabeth,” she says.
“Hi,” I say. A small brown sparrow drops from the tree in the corner of the yard to eat crumbs on the ground.
“You are a hard girl to track down.”
“I know.” I take a breath. “I needed some space.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I can almost hear her thinking, wondering what I’m talking about.
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