Valley of the Moon

by Melanie Gideon

  “Well, I think his real name was Richard Starkey.”

  Now I put my head in my hands. Countless wars. Prohibition? A bridge spanning the Golden Gate? “You can’t share this information with anybody else.”

  “Uh—sorry. I already have.”

  “What have you told them?”

  “I didn’t volunteer any information. I just answered their questions.”

  “I wish you had asked my permission before you did so.”

  “Why? They deserve to know the truth.”

  “What’s happening out there is nothing but a distraction. They have to focus on their lives here.”

  “Well, how about if I just tell them the bad stuff? About the stock market crash, the Depression, and Hitler?”

  “Yes, yes, well, that would be fine. All right. You have my permission. I don’t see any harm in that.”

  She gave me an incredulous look. “I was kidding. I’m not only going to tell them just the bad stuff. I’ll tell them what they want to know, Joseph. They’re not stupid. They know the world has gone on without them. Wouldn’t it be worse not to know what that world was like?”

  This woman was a continual surprise. I could not predict anything she would say or how she would react. When I was with her, I felt permanently off-balance.

  “And for your information, 1970s San Francisco isn’t so great. I thought it would be, that’s why I came out west. Everything was happening here. It was the epicenter of the counterculture revolution. People were questioning the status quo; they wanted to live a different kind of life where everybody, no matter what race or class, lived happily together. It was a lovely idea, but a pipe dream. Yes, we’ve made some progress, but mostly things have stayed the same. I’ve been living in the City of Love for seven years and there seems to be less and less love. We don’t care for our veterans. The Zodiac killer still hasn’t been caught. The unemployment rate is something like nine percent, and in your country, it’s at least double that. People are suspicious of other people. They judge. They don’t give them second chances. Or any chance.”

  It was early in the morning now. We’d been talking for hours.

  “Maybe you’re the lucky ones. Did you ever think of that?” she asked.

  —

  I tried to climb into bed as quietly as I could. I didn’t want to wake Martha. The floorboards creaked when I lifted my foot off the floor, and I froze in place.

  “Good morning, Joseph Beauford Bell.”

  “You’re up.”

  She reached out and cupped my cheek. “Of course I’m up. It’s nearly dawn. Did you get your questions answered?”

  “It was a Pandora’s box, I’m afraid.”

  “You’ll be sorry to see the girl go, won’t you?”

  “Absolutely not. It will be a relief.”

  “Don’t lie to me. It’s the most excitement you’ve had in—well, in sixty-nine years.” She gave me a smile. “She has a certain irrepressible energy.” She touched her forehead to mine. “Maybe she’ll come back.”

  “She won’t come back. She’ll have the best of all intentions, but the years will pass and she’ll forget all about us, I assure you.”

  Martha sat up in bed. “So tell me. What did we miss?”

  I sighed. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything. Everything.”

  So I curated a list just for Martha: penicillin, Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, the birth control pill, man lands on the moon, the ERA and Billie Jean King.

  She was silent for a good five minutes, then she said, “I always wanted to learn how to play tennis.”

  —

  Two days later, Lux left.

  “Goodbye, then,” I said, extending my hand to shake hers. We stood at the edge of the fog.

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  I blinked at her.

  She threw her arms around me. “Thank you for letting me stay, Joseph Bell. It’s been interesting, to say the least. Magical, really. I won’t ever forget you. All of you.” She stepped back from me and tears streamed down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I know you Brits don’t approve of displays of emotion, but I can’t help it. There’s something about this place. It just burrows its way into you.”

  I handed her a handkerchief. “It’s clean.”

  She wiped her eyes and tried to give it back to me.

  “Keep it.”

  “It looks fancy. It’s monogrammed.”

  “I have dozens more,” I lied. I wanted her to take a piece of Greengage with her.

  “I’ll see you in a month. Well, one of your months.”

  “Very well.” I still doubted I’d ever see her again.

  “Should I bring somebody back with me?”

  Over the past few days, I’d thought carefully about her offer to seek out help. Martha, myself, and the heads of all the crews had discussed it among ourselves, and had come to the conclusion that it was not a safe option for Lux. I didn’t know all of Lux’s history, but I knew she was a single parent and the sole provider for her son. If she returned to 1975, raving about having traveled back in time to 1906, she would at best be considered a drunk or a drug addict, and at worst, mentally unstable. I couldn’t ask her to take that risk on our behalf.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Can I tell anybody?”

  She must have been thinking of her son. “It’s not safe. For you, or for us. Keep us a secret for now.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “What can I bring you back? You must want something.”

  I mentally recited a list of everything I wanted her to bring back: electricity, ice, television, Marilyn Monroe, a yo-yo, an eight-track stereo tape player, a bottle of good scotch, coffee, a Ford Mustang—in other words, everything she’d told me about. All of it. The modern world in its entirety. Of course I would never admit that.

  “As you’ve seen, we have everything we need right here.”

  “Fine. It will be a surprise, then,” she said.

  As I walked through the fog, back into the future, I made a list of everything I wanted to bring back with me: the heartbreaking indigo of a Greengage night sky, the sugared almonds I’d eaten in the dining hall, the hawing sound Fancy made when she laughed, the smells of freshly cut clover, sponge cake, and loam, Martha’s steady gaze, the swish of my borrowed skirt.

  The years streamed by; it felt like I was driving down the coast with my head stuck out the window. I was in the fog for seconds. I was in the fog for hours.

  Finally I stepped into my campsite. It was morning. Everything looked exactly as I’d left it. The tank top was still draped on the bush. The Hobbit next to my sleeping bag along with Rose’s joint.

  A soft hissing sound briefly filled the clearing. The fog was gone. It had completely dissipated. I could see a thousand feet into the woods. A thousand feet of nothing but forest.

  Greengage had receded into the past.

  “You’re back early,” said Rhonda.

  She stood at the stove stirring a pot of Rice-A-Roni. I dropped my pack on the floor, ran across the kitchen, and hugged her.

  “You were only gone for five days, Lux.”

  “It felt like years,” I cried, seized with happiness at the sight of her familiar denim wrap-around skirt and knobby ankles. “How are you? Tell me everything. What’s going on?”

  How was I going to keep such a secret from her?

  She looked at me suspiciously. “Are you high?”

  “No, I’m not high. I’m just happy. Be happy for me, Rhonda.” I beamed at her.

  Rhonda took the pan off the stove. “Okay, Miss Happy, did you have any epiphanies out there in the wild? Benno didn’t call, by the way.”

  Instantaneously, the pleasant, he’s-in-good-hands-with-Mom feeling dispersed and was replaced by a dull, throbbing pain, the pull of the emotional umbilicus. I’d missed Benno while I was at Greengage, but I’d stopped thinking of him every other minute. I realized now what a lovely break that had been—
to take care of only myself.

  “Don’t look so glum. That’s a positive thing, Lux—it means he’s not homesick. He’s having a good time.”

  “Did you send the cards?”

  “Yes. I still have one more. You can mail it yourself tomorrow.”

  “Maybe I should call him tonight.”

  Rhonda got the wine out of the fridge and poured each of us a glass. “That was a quick fall to earth.”

  I rummaged through my pack. I pulled out the joint and waved it at her.

  “You go ahead, I have to be in early tomorrow,” she said.

  “How early?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “What’s happening at seven-thirty? You can’t be seeing patients that early.”

  She smiled shyly. “I’m meeting somebody for breakfast.”

  I’d never seen that shiny look on her face before.

  “Oh my God, who is it?” Rhonda was so picky about men. She had a lot of first dates, but second and third dates were rare.

  “He’s a doctor.”

  “A doctor!” That explained why it was a breakfast date, anyway.

  “A pediatric orthopedic surgeon.”

  Somehow I knew then with utter certainty that she would fall in love with this man and she would leave me.

  “My mother is going to kill me. You’ll have to help me break the news.”

  “A surgeon? She’ll be thrilled, are you kidding?”

  “No, she won’t. He’s white, Lux. As white as they come.”

  Rhonda had never dated outside of her race; she was the poster girl for black pride.

  “Jesus. Give me your lighter.” I lit the joint, took a big puff, and handed it to her.

  “Where did you get this?” Rhonda was as picky about her weed as she was about men.

  “Rose and Doro.”

  She sighed and took a drag.

  It got worse. The doctor was half Italian and half Irish. His name was Patrick Signorelli, but everybody called him Ginger because of his red hair.

  “No, no, no, no, no!” I shouted, banging the table with my fist. “You are making that up. Please tell me you’re making that up.”

  “Stop talking,” Rhonda panted, clutching her stomach. “I’m going to pee my pants.”

  “Does he have freckles?”

  “Of course he has freckles!”

  We exploded with laughter again.

  A pounding came from the ceiling and we heard Doro’s muffled voice. “Girls, you’re having entirely too much fun.”

  I yelled, “And it’s entirely your fault! We’re smoking your weed.”

  A second later we heard both Doro and Rose echo, “Marvelous!”

  —

  “Don’t leave me, Rhonda,” I said an hour later. We sat in front of the TV, stoned out of our minds, watching Kojak. I’d have to rethink the whole bald-men thing—Telly Savalas was pretty sexy.

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just having breakfast with him.” She tucked her feet beneath her on the couch. “Is my ’fro smushed?”

  “Want me to fix it?”

  She bent her head toward me. I fluffed her Afro and started to cry.

  “And this is exactly why you should never smoke pot,” said Rhonda.

  Also, because it was like a truth serum for me. Before I could stop myself, I said, “I have to tell you something, but it’s a secret—you can’t tell anybody. Something happened when I went camping.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rhonda went limp whenever somebody ran their fingers through her hair.

  There were two reasons I was about to spill my secret. The obvious one: What had just happened to me was beyond belief. Who could keep quiet about something so world-changing? And the less obvious: I wanted to draw Rhonda in. She was my best friend. I couldn’t bear the thought of keeping something so important from her.

  “There was this weird fog…”

  —

  “But how did you find it?” asked Rhonda, twenty minutes later. “Don’t you think somebody would have stumbled upon it before you? If it’s been there for sixty-nine years.”

  Rhonda was an X-ray technician. She believed only in what the films told her. Sprained, broken, splintered, a tumor the size of an orange.

  “It’s been there for sixty-nine years, yes, but the only way to get there is through the fog. And the fog appears once every 13.8 years on the full moon. You’d have to find yourself exactly in that spot, in those woods at just the right time.”

  “Really?” she drawled. “This sounds awfully complicated.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Well, Lux, I’m sorry, but that is a pretty far-out story—and I’m stoned! You miss Benno. You’re emotionally exhausted, I know. I sympathize.”

  “I don’t want you to sympathize with me, I want you to believe me, and I’m not emotionally exhausted, look at me, I’m emotionally full. This is me being emotionally full!”

  She pursed her lips. “Do you have any proof?”

  “Wait. I did bring back something.” I dug in my pocket and pulled out Joseph’s handkerchief. I showed her the monogram JBB. “He gave it to me just before I left. Joseph something Bell.”

  Rhonda examined the handkerchief. “Looks old, but you could have picked it up in any thrift store.”

  “Christ, Rhonda! Why would I make something like this up?”

  “I don’t think you made it up. I don’t doubt that you stumbled upon some sort of commune in the Valley of the Moon. So they wear weird clothes. They eschew the modern world. They’ve probably been out there for years.”

  “No, you’re wrong. It’s real. And it’s not a commune. Don’t say that. It’s a farm.”

  Rhonda sighed. “Okay, go to the library and do some research on this Greengage. If the place just disappeared and hundreds of people—whoosh!—were just gone, somebody must have missed them. Is it like the lost city of Atlantis? Are people still looking for it?”

  “Fine, if people are still looking for it, then will you believe me?”

  Rhonda bobbled her head.

  “Rhonda!”

  “Yes, yes, if you find proof that Greengage existed in the early 1900s, then I’ll believe.”

  —

  “Spell it again for me,” said the librarian.

  “Greengage. Like the plum.”

  I’d spent the following morning at the San Francisco Public Library and had come up with nothing.

  “Well, there were more than a few colonies operating in that area at the time: Icaria-Speranza—but that was in Cloverdale; Point Loma; Fountain Grove in Santa Rosa. Are you sure the location was the Valley of the Moon?”

  “I’m positive. And it’s not a colony. It’s a farm.” Every time I made that distinction, I thought of Joseph. I might be betraying him by researching Greengage, but I wouldn’t betray his vision of the place.

  “There’s nothing here,” she said, looking up from a reference book, “but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Was it small?”

  “About three hundred people?”

  “Not that small, then,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you. It was definitely a fertile time for those kinds of communities, and it makes sense that it would be in Sonoma County. You know, sometimes folks just walked up in the hills and squatted, built their homes and lived their lives. If it was isolated enough, they probably wouldn’t have bothered—”

  “That’s just the thing. They weren’t isolated; they were well known. They sold their produce to restaurants and grocery stores in Glen Ellen and San Francisco.”

  “Strange. You’d think there’d be some record of them. You say your grandmother lived on the farm?”

  “Um, my great-grandmother.”

  “Perhaps we could come at this in another way. What was her name?”

  I hesitated. “Martha Bell,” I said.

  “Do you know her middle name? It would help to have a full name.”

  “No, but she was married to a British man, Joseph
Bell. He had a sister named Fancy Bell. They all lived there. Does that help?”

  The librarian scribbled down the names on a pad of paper. “Anybody else you can remember?”

  “Lars Magnusson…and Elisabetta Sala. And her husband, Matteo Sala. They had a son named Nardo, too. Must have been short for something—Bernardo?”

  The librarian slid a form across her desk. “Fill this out. Your name, address. We’ll contact you with our results. Give it a week; it might take even longer than that. Most of the census records before 1925 aren’t on microfiche.”

  —

  “It’s your mother!” my mother sang into the phone. “Come say hello, Benno.”

  I heard rustling. The sound of little feet climbing on a stool.

  “Mama, I am having a great time,” he said robotically. Obviously my mother had prompted him, which wasn’t to say he wasn’t actually having a great time.

  “That’s wonderful, Benno. You got my cards?”

  “Yup.”

  “Good, good, that’s good.”

  There was a long silence in which I could hear him chewing and swallowing something. He rarely spoke on the phone. He didn’t know how to carry on a conversation.

  “So what have you been doing with Grandma?”

  More silence.

  “Tell her what we’ve been doing, Benno. We went to Second Beach. We saw a play at Theater-by-the-Sea,” my mother said in the background.

  “The other grandma brings me jelly doughnuts in the morning,” he said.

  “The other grandma?”

  Benno dropped the phone on the floor.

  “Sorry about that,” said my mother after a few seconds.

  “What’s he talking about—the other grandma?”

  “Benno, I think Truth or Consequences is on. Go ahead, darling. Turn the TV on. You can watch it while I speak to your mother for a few minutes.”

  “You’re letting him watch Truth or Consequences?”

  “What’s wrong with Truth or Consequences? It’s really quite educational, he’s learning—”

  “Mom, who’s the other grandma?”

  My mother paused. “Your father.”

  —

  “Lux, before you say anything, I have to tell you your father has simply fallen in love with Benno.”

  “You have got to be kidding me, Mom.”