SPRING Moon
Mary Ellen Courtney
Books by this Author
Spring Moon
Wild Nights
Praise for Wild Nights
2013 Winner Indie Excellence Award for Fiction
2013 Silver Medal Global eBooks Award for Fiction
2013 ForeWord Review Finalist Best New Fiction
“What a page-turner! If you’re looking for a book that is both tremendously entertaining and also insightful, sensitive, and thoughtful, Wild Nights is the ticket.” –– Carol Costello, Author of “Chasing Grace”
“I spent all day yesterday wrapped up in Wild Nights and reluctantly finished the last page late last night, Hannah and Jon and the rest of the characters peopling this work still alive and fresh in my mind. This is an extraordinary work.” –– Jack Magnus
“In Wild Nights, by Mary Ellen Courtney, readers are taken on a journey of personal understanding. From the first page, I found myself totally captivated by Wild Nights. Humor is interspersed between intense situations and vividly described scenery. I enjoyed having the opportunity to read a great fictional novel. This is definitely a novel that will be savored by the reader.” –– Paige Lovitt
“Mary Ellen Courtney is a new talent to be reckoned with in the writing industry.” –– Lit Amri
Spring Moon
Copyright ©2014 by Mary Ellen Courtney
No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by an information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the author.
This novel is a work of fiction. Any reference to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
First edition, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9889536-1-1
Porter Chance Books
Friday Harbor, WA
www.porterchancebooks.com
For WRF … always
“New love is the brightest and long love is the greatest.
But revived love is the tenderest thing known on earth.”
Thomas Hardy
“I got gaps; you got gaps; we fill each other’s gaps.”
Rocky Balboa
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
A Note About The Author
ONE
The crackpot living in my head thinks she’s watching a documentary. She’s not. It’s a high-concept drama. The actor is so convincing she could be Meryl Streep. Totally sucks me into concept as reality in full length, high-def Dolby surround sound, and it’s interactive. For example, I knew I wasn’t having a Woolly Mammoth, it was a baby boy named Chance. If he’d really been a Woolly Mammoth we would have named him something more robust. Maybe Chance Dodge Durango With Tan Leather Seats in honor of where he sparked to life.
The curtains in our room at the birthing center were closed to filter the Hawaiian sun. Silky cotton, flowered orange and yellow, sailed softly in the honey breeze coming through the open window. A compilation CD played low with Adele, slack key, and Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig In The Sky.”
I was in the birthing tub great gig moaning through labor. When I wasn’t thinking about the concept of pain, I was thinking about reincarnation. Jon, my husband and the man responsible for all the moaning that got the baby in, and now out, wiped my brow.
“Who do you think he is?” I asked.
“No idea,” he said. “Unless he’s the next Dalai Lama, we’ll probably never know. You want an ice chip?”
“Please. Well, Meggie sure came fast.”
“We don’t know that Megs is Margaret. She could be Grandma Ella. She could be Bambi.”
Meggie was our daughter, named after my surrogate mother Margaret. He slid an ice chip between my lips. Jon had been a deer in his previous life. Either that, or he’d misunderstood the Buddhist astrologer who cast his horoscope in India. The way he loved his paddleboard I thought he’d been a gondolier. He was sure he’d heard deer. The astrologer even waved his fingers over his head to indicate antlers.
The idea that he’d been a deer was curious. Before I met Jon the Deer, I’d had a brief bout of wild sex with a guy who drove a John Deere truck who I met, no surprise, at a truck stop. Not my usual hunting ground. I still had no idea how to interpret the Deer-Deere crossroad in my life.
Meggie was conceived in India the same week Jon found out he’d been a deer. We’re almost certain it was the same night I lit the fire under Margaret’s funeral pyre, an experience that is oddly intimate with the cosmos. Jon was only there a week, but as we say in the film business, it was action-packed. I thought that Meggie might be Margaret on a return trip to earth. She was strong-willed enough for it, they both were.
∞
A contraction hit me, but not even my moan could drown out Jon’s phone vibrating and flashing in circles on the nightstand like an angry bee missing a wing. He dove and caught it just before it went over the edge, glanced at the screen, frowned, and put it in the pocket of his drawstring pants. He sat down again, rinsed off his hand, and wiped my brow as the contraction passed. I looked at my kneecaps sticking out of the water while I waited for the next mind-erasing wave.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Nobody. You need anything?”
I started to say no, but a new contraction turned it into a long guttural moan as good old Mother Nature put the squeeze on me. I’d watched an actress do some unbelievably convincing seizures once. She said it was easy; she just called up being in labor. It wasn’t that bad. I’d spent many days behind the scenes watching actors ply their trade.
Margaret and I were production designers on a film just finishing on the banks of the Ganges when she died. She enlisted the help of her husband, Ed, who is like a father to me. He made sure her wish was fulfilled, that it was I who lit the fire. He turned it over to the Director. I did it. Nobody bucks the Director.
Rainbow gods and goddesses with twenty arms, elephant trunk noses, and monkey faces populate an ephemeral Indian world of billowing incense and piles of marigolds. It’s strange and beautiful even if, like me, you have no idea what it all means. Letting Margaret go was wonder-full. I thought maybe I’d wake up one day shocked that I had done it, but so far it still felt as natural as it had on that afternoon of my life.
I took time off work to have Meggie, a sure way to never work again in my business, but the story of lighting the fire made the front page of the film trade papers and gave me a reputation for grit that was hard to ignore. I was still offered work.
“Oh, Jon,” I moaned. “I think he’s stuck too.”
He went for our midwife, Johanna, who put a baby monitor on my belly.
“He feels like a Woolly Mammoth,” I said.
“That’s not likely, Hannah,” she said, in her soft Birkenstocks voice.
“It’s reality as a concept,” I said.
She nodded and smiled. Johanna’s concept of birthing is a fun day, kind of like sex in reverse. Every
one says that, like everything else in life, it will be more fun in direct proportion to the number of years between reality and memory. They may be right. Meggie was four, and I’d forgotten how that went. We rock tumble memories in our brains, polishing the dull spots and blurring the embarrassing bits, to stupidly keep alive the better-than-now, worse-then-now, realities of our life. While now slides by.
Johanna told me to hop out of the tub. Hop? Jon helped me wallow out of the tub and assume the position, hands and knees on the floor. Johanna got on the floor behind me, plunged her hands into me to turn the Mammoth’s shoulders, and put her feet up on my ass. She’d perfected the maneuver getting Meggie out. Jon said it looked exactly like something a barn vet would do.
“This is so embarrassing,” I said. “Turn around, Jon.”
“I need the leverage,” grunted Johanna. “He is really stuck. Okay, Hannah, I need you to push.”
“Meggie looked like an alien with just her blue head sticking out,” said Jon.
I burst out laughing.
“Oh my god, Jon. She was oxygen deprived. They’re your broad shoulders.”
“Okay,” said Johanna. “Laughing worked.”
I looked back over my shoulder. Johanna was on her butt, shooting away from me on a slip ‘n slide of slush, holding tight to the baby’s shoulders. He looked like he was flying. I crawled backwards as fast as I could to keep up with them. Jon was keeping up next to us in case Johanna lost her grip and he needed to catch Chance. His phone buzzed away in his pocket next to my ear.
∞
He cradled his slippery son, and gazed at the new Moon with the same look he’d had when Meggie was born, pure rapture mixed with instant worry.
He carefully handed Chance to Johanna and helped me up just as the afterbirth made its appearance. He held my hand as we slid our feet through slippery smush and off the plastic. It reminded me of one especially crash prone day we’d had skiing. He smiled at me.
“Getting off the chairlift?” he asked.
“Exactly.”
“Chance looked like a rocket ship,” he said.
“Once he was launched,” I said.
Johanna smiled peacefully as she checked us over. Babies made the transition from inland-sea-to-air in gentle hands. Nobody got turned upside-down and butt slapped at the birthing center.
“Woolly Mammoth,” said Jon. “That really is reality as a concept.”
“It was that bad melting glaciers movie you rented,” I said.
I might never have heard about reality as a concept if it weren’t for day one of 8th grade English. The teacher, aka The Toad for his protruding eyes and standing room only facial warts, announced that he would be teaching reality as a concept. I made the mistake of mentioning it to my mother when I got home.
She was punishing a calculator at the dining room table, a pencil so chewed she had lead on her teeth. She looked crazed under her bright desk light, like she was only seconds away from confessing to hit and run. My father had just died and she was studying financial planning to ward off old age living out of a shopping cart. She had a bleak concept of reality. In her defense, it was before high-concept Goldman Sachs and the reality-bending Bernie Madoff. Mom’s new husband called that dispiriting, though hardly novel, period in U.S. economic history circa GSBM.
Mom claimed that by the time c.GSBM rolled around she’d lost her virginity more than once, a claim few women bother to make, investing in schemes that were more 1960s than twenty-first century. She called them granola investments. She finally stopped trying to guess what my father would want her to do and went full throttle into companies that make stuff in multiples of a million, most of it in China. She said all the junk was made in Japan when she was a girl.
My father always said that Japan shipped their generation pieces of radioactive Hiroshima, one piece of junk at a time. He used to kid, at least I think he was kidding, that it was a miracle none of his kids had two heads. I had my father’s offbeat take on life, some of the time. A trait my mother had loved in him, but seesawed over in me. Whatever. Mom’s Chinese junk sailed her through the stormy economic meltdown.
After my father died, Mom spent twenty years drunk, alone, and blaming herself. She finally met Arthur at a walking group. He is honorable and honest, and older man handsome. It helps that he’s tall. He not only puts up with her, but he revived her sex life, which made her the envy of her friends. He was in AA; she joined. It was nonnegotiable.
Mom wasn’t on such solid ground back when I was in 8th grade and announcing that reality is just a concept. She looked up from her textbook, eyes darty with fear to find herself alone in the parenting spotlight without cue cards, or a spouse who grasped the unconventional.
“Reality as a concept?” she asked. “What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re going to make vision boards.”
She called the school principal; it took a few tries before they understood who she was. The next day I was switched from Vision Boards 101 to diagramming dreary sentences and sniffing out split infinitives.
The kids who stayed in the class laughed themselves stupid all year, said it was the biggest skate they’d ever had. Then they struggled, and their parents complained, all through 9th grade English when they were thrown back into reality as a noun. I sure as hell could pick a noun out of a crowd.
I suspected, still, that they all sailed and galloped through life on the racing yachts and studly stallions, equine and human, they’d glued to their vision boards. I skip high school reunions; they spelled my name wrong in the annual. I’m waiting for life to bring them all to their knees a time or two before I show up. Based on Facebook lurking, there are still a few holdouts.
Lucky for the principal, and me, it was Mom’s only foray into acting parent territory at the school, ground that had been held by my father until he died in a plane crash a few months before my 13th birthday. Double lucky me, Mom’s trespass spared me the heartfelt pity and heartless ridicule that only teens can dish out. I could see myself carefully cutting out little Munch The Scream heads and sticking them all around the edges of my plane crash vision board. My father’s death was not wonder-full.
I finally escaped high school and went to college for a major in anthropology and a minor in psychology. What Jon calls my binary major in reality as a concept. He majored in math and opened restaurants. I became a film production designer, aka Advanced Vision Boards.
∞
Jon and I lay on the bed with Chance draped naked across our bare chests. He was already nuzzling for the nipple while Jon gently smoothed the skin on his wrinkled feet. Johanna started herbs steeping for a bath and left quietly. Jon couldn’t stop wondering at his son any more than he could when Meggie of India was born.
Jon had stayed in India a week; long enough to knock me up. Then he went home to Hawaii to nip at the heels of his three restaurants, and help his daughter Chana make the move to college. He’s an irons-in-the-fire kind of man.
“Chance Jon Moon,” he said. “That still sound okay to you?”
“I love it. Three good names.”
Chance was my father’s middle name. Margaret was Margaret Spring Moon, because Spring is my last name. We hadn’t planned on Chance, so the double entendre amused us. Jon was 46 and I was 37, we would have stopped at Meggie.
“I think we better do something,” I said. “That stuck shoulders thing could be the end of me.”
“I’ll call next week,” he said.
“I think we’re done, don’t you?”
“I am, but I’m older. It’s really up to you.”
“Will we still do the fun part?”
“Oh yeah.”
He’d stashed his phone in the nightstand drawer, but it still buzzed and clattered like a handful of Mexican jumping beans. Someone was always calling from one of the restaurants. He pulled it out, looked at the number, and frowned.
“I need to turn this off,” he said. “I’ll have Chana call
on your phone.”
“I don’t have it. I didn’t plan to take calls during labor. Just turn it off.”
“She needs to be able to reach us.”
He looked tense while he laid it on a towel in the drawer so at least it wouldn’t clatter around. He put on a shirt and flip-flops and left to ask Chana to take Meggie for some lunch and give us time to bond with Chance. His phone buzzed on for attention.
I got into the herbal salt bath and Johanna handed me Chance. He stretched out and relaxed in the familiar mineral soup. Ed had called her for a progress report. I was excited that he was seeing someone for the first time since Margaret died. Jon planned some rare time off so he could be home for their visit in a few months. He’d been island hopping more over the last few years, juggling five restaurants.
We hadn’t planned on five restaurants either. Jon was married long before me, to Celeste. I’d only seen pictures. She was beautiful. Damn it. Jon said she was lucky to be pretty, because she was tear-your-hair-out stupid. She couldn’t be that stupid, she’d worked at the restaurants with him and his former partner Glen, a complicated arrangement. I always got the impression she was what Homer Simpson would call, stupid like a fox.
Jon and Glen opened five restaurants together. Celeste had been involved romantically with Glen, and then switched to Jon, which produced Chana, then marriage. It seemed everyone had adapted to their new reality, until Jon showed up unexpectedly at one of the restaurants before they opened for Sunday brunch, and went in back to get a case of champagne for mimosas out of the walk-in cooler. Celeste and Glen, wedged in a booth with her flowing skirt up and his pants yanked down, might have survived unnoticed, except that Chana was planted in a high chair next to them, in the dark, and chose that moment to gurgle a delighted, “Dada” for the first time ever, when she saw her fair-haired father lit up in the storeroom light. Dada didn’t take it well.
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 02 - Spring Moon Page 1