Carolina Moon

by Jill McCorkle

  Mack sits on the porch and watches the lights go out in the houses around him. The house to his left has long been dark, the children who run screaming all afternoon tucked into their beds and sleeping peacefully. He imagines the tired mama with her feet propped up, belly swollen, dim lamp swaying overhead. Even the college kids have turned in for the night, the only window lit being the stark white bathroom that glares in full view. Sarah used to wonder why they didn’t get a shade, a curtain; instead, there was an all-day parade of young men with their backs turned to the world outside.

  Mack sits and sips his wine. He’s had far too much tonight, and about an hour ago he was even contemplating going and buying a pack of cigarettes. Why not? What’s the worst thing that happens? Of course, then he might wind up in that redneck two-bit Smoke-Out trap on the edge of town that is being advertised on the local radio station along with constant bulletins regarding the whereabouts of one Jones Jameson. That was the topic that got him through the rest of the night with June. They were actually able to spring back to life and laughter after a near collapse.

  Even now when he thinks of standing there in the doorway with her his heart quickens. Was it excitement or guilt? All of the doctors and nurses who he’s met in passing have stressed he should assume that Sarah can hear him and does know what is happening around her. There are even cases where people are locked in what looks like a coma but respond with blinks—open, close, open. But Sarah’s eyes are always closed, aren’t they? He leans his head against the porch post, drains his glass and reaches for what’s left in the bottle, the second bottle, that is. June was pressing closer and closer, and he knew in one awful moment that she could feel him pressing back, that she could feel him. It’s the kind of story most people, at least people with any moral tact, never tell, and yet it is exactly the kind of story that June would tell Sarah or vice versa. “We were just standing there,” he can hear June’s voice, Sarah’s eyes wide with anticipation, “and then like all of a sudden the guy has an erection.” She would whisper the word and then they would both fall out laughing as they always did—literally, physically, dramatically lying back on the floor or a bed, with feet in the air.

  But June didn’t react at all tonight. She fell silent—froze—and waited for him to speak first, to do what she said he never did. And all the while he imagined Sarah there behind him, opening her eyes, stretching her arms, rising up behind him like a ghost.

  “June,” he had started, but then there was a ring of the bell and a whirling of action like a storm blowing in and there was Sarah’s mother, clean linens clutched in her arms, a plastic grocery bag slung over her arm. When she came down the hall, Mack and June were apart but he knows that they both looked guilty. They both were flushed and breathless; he had to turn and adjust his belt, thrust his hands deep into the loose pockets of his pants.

  “What happened?” she asked them, eyes wide and moist as she rushed to Sarah’s bed. She leaned over her daughter, kissing and talking and smoothing. “Why are you here in the hall?”

  “Talking,” Mack whispered, and entered the room to stand beside her. “June brought dinner.”

  “Oh. So did I.” She handed him the bag filled with deli containers, placed a fresh box of baby wipes under the table by the bed. “June, you seem to be here every time I come.”

  “Yes,” June said. “I check in, but I’m leaving now.”

  Mack turned suddenly, disappointed and grateful at the same time.

  “Oh, I hope I didn’t shorten your visit.”

  “No, no, I have a date,” June said. She was still in her cut-offs and big shirt, moss-green Birkenstocks.

  “Really?” Sarah’s mother had turned her full attention on June then. “Someone Mack and I might know?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she shook her head. “He’s a teacher from out in the county. We met at a workshop recently.”

  Mack had wanted to participate in her lie, but he suddenly found himself unable to participate. He couldn’t help but wonder if there was any truth whatsoever to her story. He walked her to the door, all the while feeling Sarah’s mother’s eyes on his back, feeling her ears straining on the other side of the porch wall. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said, trying to read her response, but she was looking everywhere except at his face. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’m sorry.”

  “For?” Now she looked up, her eyes red, jaw clenched. He shrugged and she smirked knowingly. “For wishing I was Sarah?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I feel guilty, too,” she said and walked out to the curb, away from the house, and he followed. There were cars lining the street. It looked like a pre-formal gathering, all the kids coming and going in ridiculous-looking tuxedos and strapless cocktail dresses. The children from next door sat in the middle of their yard watching, oohing and ahhing with each sparkly dress. “I feel lonely and confused.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?” She opened her car door.

  “So do I,” he said and then on impulse, “I’m sorry for what happened just now. I can’t explain it.”

  “I can,” she said and put her key in the ignition. “I can explain it a hundred different ways. But you know what, Mack?” she rolled down the window and pulled her door to, faced straight ahead as she spoke. “I just don’t want to.”

  “Mack?” Sarah’s mother was out on the porch then. “Can you come and help me?”

  He lifted his hand to her and then patted June on the shoulder. In all of the years before, he would have leaned in and kissed her, hugged her, but now all he could do was pat her at arm’s length. He stood watching her drive down the street, turning the corner just as he mounted the porch steps.

  “I want to bathe her, and I need you to help turn her,” her mother said as soon as he entered the house. “You know she has to be turned on a regular basis.” There was accusation in her voice, anger in her eyes.

  “I know that,” he said. “The physical therapist was supposed to come today and then didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “I really want her with me, Mack,” she said, grabbing his sleeve to keep him from entering the bedroom. She pulled him off into the living room where she continued to stand while talking. “We can do better for her until . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked like she was going to cry, but then with a firm shake of her head, she looked back up. “There is a very good chance that she’s aware of everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you remember that.” She was staring at him then, and he wanted so badly to look away. “She’s a very intelligent woman and a sensitive woman. She knows things.” He couldn’t tell at this moment if she was talking about Sarah or about herself. Was it possible that Sarah sent her mother messages, emotional pleas in the very air she breathed?

  “I know that,” he said. “I’m doing the best that I can.”

  “Yes,” she lowered her voice. “But her father and I can do better.” She turned and went back into the bedroom and stood waiting for him to join her at Sarah’s thin body rolled to one side, a pillow—his pillow—propped under her back to keep her from rolling into the same position. He thought then of King Solomon entering the room and offering to rip Sarah in half. He had no idea what the right answer was.

  And now, in the middle of the night, he still has no answer, and no excuse for his behavior with June. Right now he feels only anger and hatred. He feels robbed. He understands the mood that might send someone out into the streets not giving a damn about what happened—not giving a damn about the consequence of actions. He hates what has happened, despises his life, and yet still, in all of this feels a flicker of hope. In all of this, he knows that he won’t start smoking, that he won’t get this drunk every night, that he will get up in the morning and go to work. He will do everything that is expected of him and then some, and the goddamned insane question behind it all is why? Why will he continue to do such normal things?

  MARCH 1994r />
  Dear Wayward One,

  What an odd dream I had last night. I dreamed of your feet. I came into your house and the wind was ferocious, like hurricane weather, I came to tell you to get out, to run. I was screaming your name but you never answered and then I stepped into your room and I knew with one quick look that you were dead. I knew it was you by your feet. The big toe was so obviously your big toe. It was like I had super-vision; it was like I could see the fine little white circles of your print, your genetic code like a road map. I wanted to scrape away the cells from your toe and then grow you, cultivate the life back into you. I wanted to grow you like a little test-tube baby and I said as much, even knowing that that would never be enough for me. I needed the man, you. And as I was standing there taking in your toe, the wind suddenly blew everything away and I was left squatting near a creosote post with a scrap of paper in my hand. It was your handwriting, your last words written to me. And isn’t that funny, how reality enters in. There in that dream I saw a bit of my life played over like a movie. That foot part would be right up your alley. You’d say, “Ooh, foot fetish,” or something like that. Well, you know why I thought it. I mean didn’t I always give the best foot rubs now? Was it you who said there was nothing sexier than a woman with great big feet? No, no I guess it wasn’t. It seems that lately sometimes I confuse you two and it’s so odd. I can’t help but wonder if you ever confused me with somebody else. But how could you compare me to your wife? I wish I could see your toe right now, foot, hand, neck, thigh; I would recognize and welcome any part of you.

  Sometimes when Tom is out on the beach he thinks he sees his father; he might bend to pick up a stick to toss to Blackbeard, and there, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a flash of white like a shirt. Now he sits back in the damp sand and watches the water. It is low tide, and the beach is peppered with people, their voices offering the droning kind of background noise that Quee has with that noise machine of hers. The sand is warm to his hands and feet. The warmth pulls him into lying back and closing his eyes against the sun.

  The first time he saw the ocean, his instinct had been to run out into it, to give in and let it pull him, suck him away from the shore. He still wonders why his father didn’t choose that as the way to die; he could have simply let his lungs fill with the warm salty liquid. He could have taken in the water, breathed in the water. Drowning would have been much more natural. But no, he had to leave something, a wine-stained piece of paper shredded to bits, pieces that Tommy should have left in the wastebasket where his mother found and then returned them. “He couldn’t even leave a real letter,” she said when she called Tommy away from the bedroom of the small beach house his father had been renting. “This is what I meant to him.” She shook the pieces of paper and then let them go. “All the pieces aren’t even here.” She waved her hand, saying she would have nothing else to do with his filthy sheets and clothes, his filthy life. She told the policeman standing there that she didn’t even know why she had been invited to this lovely house party. She walked out with that remark, the screen door slamming on rusted hinges, and while the policeman followed her with apologies Tommy ran and scooped up all the pieces of paper, or what he thought was all. As he sat up late that night piecing the letter with scotch tape, he realized that he was missing something, and the following Saturday when he mounted his bicycle and rode the twelve miles to the ocean, he found the house locked tight, every window, every door. Even now he wishes he could just let go of it, that he could toss the remains into the water; instead he has it in his wallet neatly folded, the ink is smudged, the paper is the texture of worn cotton.

  Dear Betty, Here at the end I beg your forgiveness. I know that you will probably never give it to me but I beg nonetheless. Here I finally tell the truth for once. Don’t you see that

  wish I’d seen sooner. We have a nice boy. I wish we had had a nice life.

  “No, Dad, tell me what she doesn’t see,” Tom thinks now as he lies there. Maybe she didn’t see that he never loved her? Maybe she didn’t see that his type, that “gifted” type, couldn’t afford to be tied down. How many times as an eleven-year-old had he looked out at the world and the other fathers and thought of his own: “Why doesn’t he just fuck himself and die?” And he did. He up and fucked himself or somebody else and died. It was a hard thing to forget, this image of his father in that bed on those sheets. “You should have seen it all,” his mother had whispered to a friend. “Filthy, filthy. An old rag of a mattress thrown on the floor and it looked like he had drawn all over the wall behind his head, marks like a prisoner might mark off days.”

  Tommy had imagined it all many, many times. His dad got up from the bed, the sheet wrapped around his waist and dragging the sticky dusty floor. He stood at the window in full view of anybody on the strand. He thought he was a regular “Brethren of the Coast.” Aye, matey, you’ll never catch me. I’ll run myself in so that you don’t. He fired the pistol and when he did his head went through the big window and was sliced clean from his neck and the hair on his head, the neglected facial hair, burst into flame just like in the story about Blackbeard.

  This is how Tommy had described the scene to the school nurse when she asked him what he knew about his father’s death. He told her that his father’s head burned and rolled a path to the sea. He told her that if you go to the beach late at night you would see his father walking the shore, a headless gray figure in search of his head.

  “Really, Tommy.” The nurse sat frozen and pale, tears in her eyes. “That sounds more like the Blackbeard story your teacher says you’re always telling, that and the Maco Light.”

  She waited, but he made no response. He watched his mother as she stood on the other side of the glass partition of the principal’s office, her back to them.

  “If you do want to ever talk,” the nurse said, “you know where I am.”

  “He was drinking and fucking,” Tommy said to the nurse. The words out of his mouth felt good like a rush of cool clean saltless water. “Always drinking and fucking.” He rapped his knuckles on the glass where his mother and the principal were staring, faces white, mouths open. Not so soundproof after all. The principal offered to handle this discipline problem so that Tommy’s mother wouldn’t have to. They had already had such trouble with him, splitting the lip and smashing the nose of Jones Jameson, who wouldn’t tell what he had said to prompt such a beating. He had sat there in the school office and lied, said that Tommy attacked him for no reason except maybe jealousy. Tommy wasn’t involved in all of the school activities that Jones was, after all, and he guessed the girls didn’t like Tommy like they liked Jones.

  “Your old man was a fucking loser” is what Jones Jameson had said right up in Tommy’s face. “People say all he did was fuck whores.” And even though Tommy hated his father and had thought those same thoughts, he would not hear it from somebody else, not from somebody like Jones Jameson. He would have killed him if the assistant principal hadn’t come and pulled him off Jones. He spit in Jones’s bloody face, and then he punched him, over and over until the blood and spit mixed and smeared like thick paint.

  Then the principal went for him, ten swats with a wooden board with holes in it that had been a gift to him from some fraternity. Boys who had gone on to graduate had signed their names there like it was some big deal to have had your ass beat by some shitty principal who had to show he was tough. Tommy took the paddle, his face like fucking stone with every swat, while Jones Jameson and a crowd of boys watched. It was like a public hanging, there in the hall right in front of the cafeteria, girls hiding their faces with every strike. The one time he dared look out into the crowd he saw Sarah there, her shoulders hunched, arms hugged tightly to her own chest as she watched. He had known who she was from the first day everybody poured into the junior high school from various elementary schools around the town and county, but chances are this was the first time she had noticed him. He wanted to impress her that day, and so he took it without a flinch. But he
wasn’t going to take it again, not the next time, not in front of his mother, and when that son of a bitch got his little fratty paddle off the wall, Tommy went for him with all he was worth. “I’ll beat the shit out of you big man,” he screamed. “You’re so tough aren’t you, what a tough shit man?” The principal motioned for his assistant and another male teacher to come and help, but Tommy got in one hard swing to the side of the bastard’s head before they each grabbed an arm and forced him face first into the cinder block wall. The school nurse stepped in to beg, but they pushed her away with a wave of the hand. Tommy’s own mother said she couldn’t bear to watch and turned and walked down the hall and outside, the large blue door slamming behind her.

  “Now what did you say?” the principal asked.

  “I said I hate your rotten guts,” Tommy spit. “I said that you are a hateful son of a bitch.”

  The first crack landed above the belt, stinging his lower back and knocking the breath out of him. “Some places this is illegal,” he gasped.

  “But not here,” one of the men said. “Not in this school, son, and not in this whole big state.”