Valley of the Moon

by Melanie Gideon

  I knew exactly the room he was talking about.

  “I can help you,” I said.

  He cried out and bent over, hiding his face from me, a hank of his thick, black hair falling over his forehead, like an unruly schoolboy. My heart swelled with tenderness for him, for the motherless child he once was.

  “Let me help you,” I whispered, sitting beside him.

  He didn’t push me away, so I put an arm around his heaving shoulders as the sounds of his agonized sobs filled the parlor. We time-traveled back to that night. Back to the room in which Martha had died, was still dying for him.

  He knelt on the floor of that room, riding waves of shock. Unable to absorb what was happening. Martha’s body, lying still and rigid on the bed.

  “She’s gone?” he croaked.

  “Yes.”

  “It happened? The worst has happened?”

  “The worst has happened,” I confirmed.

  Saying the unsayable was a sort of magic. An incantation. It lifted the binding spell and released him. He got himself up from the floor of that room. He walked backward until he was standing in the doorway next to me.

  I stood there with him for a long time, until he was able to look upon the scene not without emotion, but without being undone by it.

  Time spun forward again. We floated out of that room and into this one.

  He looked up at me, his eyes red and swollen. “The worst has happened to you, too.”

  It had. I’d lost Benno.

  “Let me help you,” he said.

  I hadn’t admitted even to myself how truly horrendous this past year had been for me. I’d screwed up so royally that I didn’t deserve to think about my own feelings. I’d left them in that examination room, too, the moment Friar told me it was past midnight and the reality of what I’d done began to sink in. I’d been stuck in that room as well. I needed Joseph to rescue me as much as he needed me to rescue him. Each of us held the power to release the other. To shove the other back into the present. Back to life.

  “Tell me everything,” he said.

  The boy clattered down the stairs early in the morning. I’d been up for an hour already and was on my second cup of mint tea. He ran into the kitchen, banging into a chair with his hip.

  “Oh Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t think anybody else would be up.”

  He sounded exactly like his mother. Jesus this. Jesus that.

  “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “Do you have any hot chocolate?”

  “This is not a restaurant.”

  “Tea would be great,” he amended.

  “Teacups are in the cupboard, kettle on the stove.” I wasn’t about to wait on an eleven-year-old.

  “That’s all right. I don’t really like tea.” He sat across from me at the table, his hands tucked under his thighs. “So, you’re the leader?”

  “Everybody here has a job. Everybody is the leader of something.”

  “But you’re the leader of everything.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because everybody looks to you.”

  I took a sip of my tea.

  “How long has my mother been coming here?”

  “That depends. If you’re talking our time, she’s been coming here for a year and a half. If you’re talking your time, she’s been coming since 1975.”

  “I was only five in 1975,” he gasped.

  “Yes, and as I remember it, the first time she came you’d just gone to Newport to spend some time with your grandparents. So it wasn’t as if she up and left you.” I felt the need to defend Lux.

  He chewed on his lip. The wounds of his abandonment were fresh, right below the surface.

  “What did you think when she didn’t come back?” I asked.

  His face clouded over. “Sometimes I thought she was dead. Sometimes I thought she’d just moved somewhere else. Got bored with life, with me. Most of the time I just tried not to think about it.”

  I could see the boy was fighting back tears.

  “Your mother has been coming to Greengage for six years now. Every time I’ve seen her, all she talks about is you. What you’re doing. What things you’re interested in. She never would have intentionally left you.”

  “But how could she have missed the full moon?” he cried. “How could she have let that happen?”

  He was a handsome boy. He and Lux had the same full mouth; it was quite disconcerting.

  “She hasn’t told you everything about that night.”

  He visibly startled. He was not expecting me to be so candid.

  “I knew it!” he cried.

  “What do you know?”

  “That she lied to me.”

  “She didn’t lie. She just didn’t tell you the whole story.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she probably felt it wasn’t her story to tell.”

  Benno pressed his lips together in frustration.

  “And she didn’t want to use what happened as an excuse.”

  “Jesus. What happened? Tell me already.”

  I took a breath. “My wife, Martha, died.”

  Talking with Benno, I was crossing some border, making good on a promise I’d made to Lux last night to rejoin the world.

  “If you want to blame anybody, you should blame me. I should have ensured she left. But she couldn’t bear to leave, not until she knew Martha was all right.”

  “But she wasn’t all right.”

  “No. She died just after midnight.”

  “I’m really sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  He gulped. “That’s terrible.”

  “Yes, it is. It was.”

  A not uncomfortable silence ensued between us.

  “Do you have kids?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I figured.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you treat me like an adult.”

  “You are almost an adult.”

  “Not where I live.”

  “From what your mother has told me, it seems children are trapped in childhood long past the time they should be in 1981.”

  Benno exhaled shakily. “My father was a soldier. He was killed in the Vietnam War.”

  “Yes. Your mother said.”

  “I have a grandmother I’ve never met. She doesn’t want anything to do with us. With me.”

  “Then she’s a damnable idiot.”

  He smiled shyly. The hours drew me back into their arms.

  I interrogated Benno on the way home.

  “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Greengage!”

  “I think it’s cool.”

  “You think it’s cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s it—cool?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  I wanted him to tell me he forgave me. Tell me he understood now why I’d been gone for a year. And to share in my love of the place.

  “Can you please stop staring at me and look at the road while you’re driving?”

  “You seem different.”

  He sighed.

  “I’m not kidding. Going through the fog changed you. It does that.” I took a quick glance at him. “You look older.”

  “Stop it, Mom,” he said, but I could tell he was pleased at the “older” part of my comment.

  He was silent until we went over the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he hugged his knees to his chest and said, “I feel bigger. Like there’s more room inside me.”

  “Really? That’s an interesting way to put it. What else?”

  “I don’t know. Peaceful, I guess.”

  I felt peaceful, too, although I knew the high wouldn’t last. I’d crash tonight and tomorrow morning I’d have to drag myself to work. I paid for my visits. Every time I went, it was a little harder to return to the modern world.

  —

  That weekend, all the occupants of 428 Elizabeth Street caravanned to
Stinson Beach. It turned into an impromptu welcome-back party for Benno. He played host, setting up the volleyball net. He distributed ham sandwiches and made sure everybody got an even share of strawberries, the last good ones of the summer.

  The peacefulness he’d described to me in the car had lasted. He was still riding a long, slow wave of contentment.

  “Throw the Frisbee to me, Penny!” he yelled.

  Penny ran to him with the Frisbee and slammed it into his stomach, then grabbed him around the thighs, toppling him into the sand. He took her down with him and she shrieked with delight.

  “I said throw it to me, not bash it into me!”

  She clung to him even tighter.

  “That’s it. He’s officially ruined her. She’s never going to get over him,” said Rhonda.

  “Rhonda, Penny is four.”

  “So? She’s in love with him.”

  “She’s a baby. She’s too young to be in love.”

  “You have no idea what it’s like with girls. She may as well be fifteen.”

  Benno jumped up, grabbed Penny by the hands, and swung her in a circle.

  “I should have listened to you and brought him to Greengage years ago. He wants to go back on the next full moon,” I said.

  “What day is it on?”

  “A Tuesday.”

  “How are you going to manage that with his school?”

  “I have no idea. How many days a month can you miss before you become truant?”

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me that question.”

  “Well, he’s not going to let me go alone.”

  And honestly, I didn’t want to go alone anymore. Going without him was out of the question.

  “Goddamn, what I wouldn’t do for a beer.” Rhonda was pregnant with her second child.

  I handed her my can of PBR. “A sip won’t kill you.”

  She took a furtive sip and sighed. “Even warm, it’s the nectar of the gods.”

  “I saw that!” yelled Ginger. He ran across the sand to our blanket. “How dare you ply my pregnant wife with alcohol?”

  “She begged me.”

  “It’s true, I begged her,” said Rhonda.

  “You are a very bad influence,” said Ginger. “Give me that beer.”

  I handed it to him and he drained it. “Benno, my boy!” he shouted, his other hand raised. Benno leapt into the air and the yellow Frisbee arced across the sky.

  —

  School started and we fell back into our regular routines. I never realized this was a privilege, to know what the day would bring. To wake every morning, sit up in bed, look through my open door across the living room and see Benno, bleary-eyed and pajama-bottomed, searching for a clean shirt in his dresser drawer.

  Before, this might have made me feel trapped. The tedium. The same thing every day. Now that I’d introduced Benno to Greengage, my life expanded. Here on the other side of the fog, time was pliable and elastic. It bulged and kicked, like Fancy’s unborn child. Possibility and hope bled into my world, our worlds. Benno and I were in on it together. This changed everything.

  On the full moon we’d leave right after I finished work. We’d stop at McDonald’s before getting on the highway, and Benno would do his homework in the car. After that I’d usually lose him to the Walkman. Van Halen or the Stones. He’d stare out the window, his fingers tapping the beat out on his thighs, and I’d listen to public radio, collecting the news of the day for Joseph. Finally we’d pull into the lot of Jack London State Park, get our backpacks out of the car, and make the trek to our campsite. I’d set up the tent. He’d start the fire. At five in the morning we’d wake, pack everything up in the car, and drive back to San Francisco, just in time to get him to school.

  We performed this ritual for four months before the fog returned.

  I didn’t realize how I’d been waiting for their arrival and how slowly the weeks had passed, until I saw them standing in the meadow.

  “How long has it been?” I called out to Lux when they drew near.

  “Four months.”

  Benno lifted his chin at me and held up a red package. “Brought you some Skittles.”

  “Candy,” translated Lux.

  Benno tore open the package, poured a few into his palm, and offered them to me. I chose the least offensively colored piece and popped it into my mouth. I spat it out immediately.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “It’s appallingly sour.”

  “They’re supposed to be sour. That’s the point,” he said.

  He bobbed up and down, twitchy. He seemed pent up, as if he’d been counting the days until he and his mother would be let back into Greengage. This pleased me, to know they’d been waiting anxiously on the other side of the fog as well.

  “What should we do now?” he asked me.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  “Thirsty?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, would you like to go on a ramble?”

  “What’s a ramble?”

  “It’s a stroll. A walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever our feet take us. That’s the point of a ramble. You don’t have a destination.”

  “All right. Yeah. Cool, man.”

  “Fancy?” Lux inquired.

  I nodded. “A girl. Gennie. She arrived last week.”

  Lux clapped her hands and squealed. “Everybody healthy? How’s Fancy holding up?”

  “Both mother and child are fine.”

  “Magnusson?”

  “He’s fine, too.”

  She smiled proudly. “My God. You’re an uncle! How does it feel?”

  It felt unnatural, to be honest. I had virtually no experience with infants. Benno, impatient, shook his bag of Skittles in an effort to regain my attention.

  “I assume you won’t be joining us? You’ll want to go straight to Fancy?” I said to Lux.

  “Yes! I’m dying to get my hands on that baby!”

  Lux ran toward the house, her full pack bouncing on her back. She never came empty-handed.

  “She loves babies,” said Benno. “She can’t get enough of Penny.”

  Penny was Rhonda’s daughter: Lux had told me all about her. Lux was a surrogate aunt to Penny just as Rhonda was a surrogate aunt to Benno, part of the makeshift family she’d built for herself over the years.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Benno.

  His head swiveled from left to right as we walked. The boy took in everything with a starved expression on his face.

  “Was it strange when you went back home last month?” I asked.

  “What do you mean—strange?”

  “Was it difficult to comprehend what had happened? Where you’d been?”

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Sort of. But not really. I didn’t think about it. I mean, I didn’t question it too much. You’re here. You’re a reality. I didn’t dream you all up.”

  We walked past the vegetable garden. The gardeners were on their knees, jabbing tiny onion bulbs deep into the ground.

  “They have hundreds to plant,” I said. “They’ll need to last us for an entire year.”

  “What’s the date here?” he asked.

  “April 19th.”

  “The day after the earthquake.”

  Yes, yesterday had been the two-year anniversary. I’d thought of that briefly at breakfast. Should I stand up and say something? Acknowledge it? In the end I’d decided against it. The dining room had been filled with happy chatter. People didn’t need to be reminded.

  I led Benno past the garden toward the chicken coop. I thought we might gather some eggs.

  “My mom worries about you,” said Benno.

  “Does she?”

  “Yeah. You’re always on her mind. She gets this faraway look in her eyes and when that happens I know she’s thinking about you.”

  “About Greengage.”

  “No, you. Jesus, that chicken house s
tinks. You’re not going to make me go in there, are you?”

  I steered him in the opposite direction. “Is your mother doing well?”

  “She got a really good job. She’s a loan officer at a credit union.”

  Lux had shared this news with me last time she was here. “Is she enjoying it?”

  “I think so.” He looked at me, then looked away. “I don’t understand. Why don’t you want anybody to know about Greengage? There could be people who could help you get through the fog, help you get back.”

  “There’s nobody that can help us, and besides, it’s too late for that. We’ve been gone for seventy-three years. There’s no back to get back to.”

  A wagon rumbled past. The field crew. They held up their hands in greeting.

  “So you’ve just given up,” he said.

  “No, we’ve accepted our fate.”

  He gave me a perplexed look. “I know that sounds good and all, like what you should say as a grown-up, but I think it’s bullshit. You could come back. You could adapt. You just don’t want to.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t we want to?”

  “Because you’re scared.”

  Was I? Thanks to Lux, I’d grown lazy, used to having the future spoon-fed to me. Delivered verbally, or through a magazine or newspaper, or the Walkman. Safe in my parlor, I sat and slowly absorbed the news. But actually being there, on the frontlines of the modern world—that was something I felt quite ambivalent about. Perhaps the boy was right.

  “This way,” I said.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Back to the house.”

  “Back to the house. Why, did I do something wrong?”

  “No. I just have the sudden urge to see my niece.”

  That was not a lie. But mostly I realized I wanted to see Lux’s reaction to my niece. How she looked when she met Gennie—the proper way one should look when meeting the baby of somebody you loved for the first time.

  Benno made a face. “Does the baby do anything besides sleep and drool and spit up?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  He groaned.

  “I’ll drop you off at the schoolhouse.”

  He brightened.

  “But you must promise to sit in the back quietly. You mustn’t disturb the lesson.”

  He nodded, though we both knew his arrival would indeed disturb the lesson. His role was to deliver the future to the younger generation, via his clothing (a black and pink harlequin print shirt), his expressions (Cool, man) and sweets (Skittles). They’d enjoy the candy, of that I was certain.