The Exact Same Moon

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  “Maybe Skippy thought I was putting the orange on him so he could go and hang out with the hunters. Do you think that’s possible?”

  Alex looks at me with the uncomfortable look you reserve for, say, a lunatic. “No,” he says. “No, I do not think that’s possible.”

  I let out a big sigh.

  “Honey, he’s safe,” he says. “No hunter is going to aim at something with blaze orange on it. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  I cup my mouth, yell, “Hey, SKIP!”

  “Heeeey, SKIP!”

  Nothing.

  Nothing except two hunters waving at us from up over the rise on George’s side of the fence. Hello! Hello! It’s like seeing the rescue team arrive.

  It’s orange and, wow, orange. Sometimes the orange on these orange outfits is so bright, it’s hard to make out any of the details of the person wearing them. But soon enough I recognize them: Joe and his son Joey. We know them well. In fact, Joe and Joey were the first people I met the day we moved to the farm three years ago. As it happened, moving day was opening day of hunting season. There I was just innocently walking with Betty to the mailbox, hum dee dum. And then, just like today, I came upon two guys all done up in bright orange. They introduced themselves. They were nice enough. Mostly they were concerned that I was wandering around without an orange hat on. They were pretty adamant about the hat thing.

  “Um,” I said. “I don’t have an orange hat.”

  “You don’t have one?” Joe asked.

  But I was busy with my own culture shock. I’m supposed to have an orange hat? Here I was moving to the country, to the land of fresh air and sunshine, and I had to be wary of gunfire? I couldn’t wander around on my own property without worrying about getting shot? Wasn’t this more of an urban-type worry?

  I remember going home and telling Alex. He was busy talking to a man about how to stop the driveway from washing away, and also how to save the barn from collapsing. I remember we sat and talked about the gunfire. Oh, there were so many facts of country living smacking us in the face in just our very first few hours of country living. “How hard can it be?” That had been our motto. Now it was more like: “Help!”

  A few days later Joe and Joey showed up at our house bearing gifts: two orange hats and a package of fresh venison. Well, that was … sweet. The hats were big, foamy polyester caps bearing the insignia of Hoss’s Family Restaurant. These are the hats we still wear for two weeks each year, beginning with the Monday after Thanksgiving. These are the hats we are wearing today, as we greet Joe and Joey on our hill.

  “Hey!” I say to them.

  Joe is all smiles. He’s tall and handsome in a boxy Eastern European way, with a square head and chiseled features I’ve always found to be particularly beautiful. Like if you were a sculptor, you probably couldn’t resist doing a sculpture of that head.

  “What are you two doing out here?” Joe says.

  “Oh, we just shot a twelve point!” I say.

  He laughs. He knows me well enough by now to know how preposterous the claim is. “And I suppose you sighted him from five hundred yards,” he says.

  “A thousand,” Alex says. See, it would be good if he could spit some tobacco juice at this moment. But, well, he can’t.

  “Amazing,” says Joey with a wide grin. He looks nothing like his father. He’s smaller, and tidier, with the neat black beard of an Englishman.

  That’s the thing about Joe and Joey; I like them. I consider them friends. And isn’t that amazing? I’ve befriended two … hunters?

  One day a few years ago I got the nerve to say, “I really don’t get the whole dead deer thing, guys.” I told them about my experiences as a teenager with the deer at Springton Lake. I told them about how I took it upon myself to scare the deer, to teach them to never trust a human, thanks to humans like them. I told them I felt angry about the rift they had created between man and animal. I was prepared for a debate.

  Joe and Joey tried to explain. About meat. About being out in the woods. About the thrill of the hunt. But I still didn’t get it.

  So I told them, I said, “I’ll never get it.” And that was when Joe invited me to go hunting with him. “Maybe you’ll appreciate it,” he said. I told him I doubted it. But at the same time I was curious. No, of course I didn’t want to shoot anything. I didn’t even want to hold a gun. But I wanted to understand. And I didn’t want to be accused of being judgmental about something I really knew nothing about. So last year I did it. I went through an entire hunting season with Joe and Joey. I sat in the woods with them for two freezing cold weeks, waiting for a deer to come by, trying to understand. It felt like an enormous personal challenge. Like a Muslim taking Holy Communion maybe, or a cat deciding to learn how to swim.

  The pleasure of killing. I didn’t get how two gentle people like Joe and Joey, two kind-hearted characters with nothing but goodwill on their minds—two guys I had really come to like—could aim a gun at one of God’s innocent creatures and steal its life.

  So I sat there in the woods, mostly with Joe. Joey would often be on foot, walking the trails and driving the deer toward his father. At least that was the plan. After two weeks of this, Joe and Joey killed not one deer. “This is ridiculous!” Joe said. They are avid hunters; they had killed antelope in Montana and bear in Alaska and elk in Canada. And here at home, during deer season, they always got at least one deer each.

  But this. This was an off year.

  It was weird the way I felt bad for them on that last day. Even though I felt good for the deer. It was hard to reconcile all of this. But I told them, I said, “I’m really sorry you didn’t get anything.”

  “Well, that’s deer season,” Joe said, with a shake of his head. “It’s really not about killing.”

  Now I really didn’t get it.

  He was rubbing a rag over his rifle. “It’s more about loving the deer,” he said.

  “Loving?” I said. “Killing something you love?”

  He tried to explain, but the words fell flat.

  Like so many words you hear, only the echo made sense. Some words you have to just sit and wonder and wonder about before you can hear. Killing something you love? Joe said it was about nature, about loving nature, a most primitive form of love.

  I came to understand that the hunter, through the act of killing, becomes a part of nature. He becomes a hawk or a mountain lion or a robin yanking a worm out of the ground. He becomes the animal side of man. He is bound by a covenant between man and animal that is as old as man and animal itself. Killing the animal is not a personal act. It’s a ritual act. You participate in the death of the animal whose meat becomes your life and whose death you have brought about. The ritual links you to the larger truth, the larger organism. The ritual allows you to recognize that you are of nature, an organ of the larger organism.

  I came to understand. The understanding did not, of course, make me want to hunt. It didn’t convert me. But it was understanding, all the same.

  The thing about understanding is, it opens the floodgate of forgiveness. I felt so much easier about my friendship with Joe and Joey after that.

  So now here we are, with Joe and Joey on this hill. “Either of you get your deer yet?” Alex says to them.

  “We saw a six point,” says Joey. “Couldn’t get a shot at it.”

  “Aw,” I say. But see, they know I’m still rooting for the deer.

  “So what the heck are you doing out here?” Joe says again. “Is there a problem?”

  “Funny you should ask,” I say.

  “You seen a mule around?” Alex asks.

  “He’s wearing an orange scarf,” I say.

  “You know, I did see something peculiar this morning,” Joe says. “It was like around daybreak.” He says it was foggy, far away, hard to see. But it looked to him like a man in orange chasing a school bus. “But then I noticed that it couldn’t have been a man, because it had four legs.”

  “A mule we
aring an orange scarf perhaps?” I say.

  “Could be!” he says. And then he points. “He went that-away.”

  So Alex and I say good-bye to Joe and Joey, wish them luck, and head back home. We get in our truck, head that-away on Spring Valley Road, which is where we spot Debbie, the mail lady, coming toward us in her little white car with the flashing yellow strobe light on top. Her car is roaring loud as a Harley. We wave her down, tell her our problem. “They were just talking about that up at the hardware store!” she yells over the motor, explaining that she was in the hardware store to get some wire to hold up her muffler. She’s looking up at us from her car, holding her hand raised to block out the morning sun. “The guys in the store were talking about a mule wearing orange,” she says. “I didn’t get the whole story.”

  We thank Debbie and head to the hardware store. We wonder why on earth Skippy would go to the hardware store, let alone chase a school bus.

  When we get to the store, Jim, the hardware guy, says, “Oh, is that your mule?” He says Joe the trapper, no relation to Joe and Joey the hunters, was just in buying parts for his coyote traps, and he talked about seeing a loose mule down at Sam’s sheep farm. Sam has the farm just over the ridge from George’s. “Those coyotes killed two more of Sam’s ewes this week,” Jim says. “Hard to know why they pick on Sam the most of anybody around.”

  We thank Jim and then head to Sam’s, and we are beginning to feel like characters in a Winnie the Pooh story, yanked this way and that. When we pull up to the sheep farm, we see Skippy standing there with Sam, a skinny man in a cowboy hat, who has him on a rope. “That’s our mule,” I say.

  “Well, here you go,” Sam says. “He was eating the corn I had stored up.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “He might have a bellyache,” he says.

  “Oh, Skip,” I say. He appears neither happy nor sad to see me. He appears to be processing some important mule matters in his head. He’s smacking his lips, looking left.

  I walk up, stroke his soft pink nose. “We’re going home, boy,” I say. “Adventure’s over.”

  It’s funny to think about how circular all of this is. If it weren’t for the hunters scaring the deer, the deer wouldn’t have knocked a hole in the fence, and Skippy wouldn’t have gotten out. And if it weren’t for the coyotes, which were introduced into the area to control the deer population, Joe the trapper wouldn’t have been up at the hardware store buying traps on behalf of Sam. Well, if it weren’t for the fact that the coyotes long ago figured out that sheep are a heck of a lot easier to catch than deer, which is why we still have so many deer, which is why the hunters are allowed to hunt. And if it weren’t for Debbie’s muffler dropping off …

  “It’s probably easier to send a satellite into space than to work all that out on purpose,” I say to Alex.

  “It’s probably easier to teach a mule how to use a cell phone,” he says.

  “Come on, Skip,” I say, snapping the lead rope on his halter. Alex gets into the truck. “I’ll see you back at the house,” I say to him, and we both say good-bye to Sam, thanking him for his kindness.

  And so Skippy and I head across Spring Valley Road, then onto George’s field. It’s pretty muddy, and Skippy’s hooves pierce the ground like giant pencils in clay. “Watch your step, Skip,” I say, and soon enough I am reviewing with him matters of the hunter being connected to the deer connected to the coyote connected to the trapper connected to the hardware store connected to Debbie the mail lady. “It’s like the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone is connected to the hip bone,” I say to him.

  “You know what, Skip,” I say. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe everything is connected.”

  Maybe it’s not all random. It’s not just some wind blowing. Everything’s connected. You just don’t get to see the blueprint most of the time.

  Out my window I now see: horse, horse, mule, mule. And I see that the birch tree has finally let go of its last leaves; winter is closing in.

  In these ways, everything is back to normal—again. Boy, normal sure doesn’t stick around long. Normal, I think, is like a series of blips. Or normal is like a string of stepping-stones. I think some people create lives with the stones all nice and close together, barely any weeds or briars to negotiate as they walk. And then there are the rest of us. We could perhaps use some assistance with our landscape design.

  I’m at my desk, trying to get some work done. Sparky is my footstool. Lying down, curled up like this, he’s just the right height for a footstool. He is, however, snoring. It’s the snore of an old man, sophisticated and confident.

  The phone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello!” says a woman in the cheerful tone of a friend. I’m not sure I recognize the voice. “This is Lori from Great Wall China Adoption?”

  “Oh?” I say.

  “Are you sitting down?”

  Oh! This is it? But—I’m not prepared! I should be prepared! This is not how this is supposed to happen. Um. I was going to be … prepared! How was I going to be prepared? Um. I was going to have a pen, and a piece of paper. I grab a pen. And a piece of paper.

  “I’m prepared!” I say.

  “Well, I’m calling to let you know you have a daughter,” she says.

  I swallow. The D-word. More real than ever now. Good God! I feel it in my throat like a shot of whiskey.

  But then the words, they just keep spilling out of her, like a river is flowing, which of course a river is supposed to do, but whew, her words are just flowing and flowing and flowing so fast. “Oh, she is just gorgeous … She is eight months old … She’s in a pink dress … She’s bald!… She’s living in the Jiangsu Province, that’s J-i-a-n-g-s-u … We’ll send the package tomorrow … Oh, she’s lovely … Her name is G-u Y-u Q-i-a-n … That’s Goo Oo Chin … It means Pretty Like Jade … Do you have an e-mail address?… Would you like me to e-mail her picture right now?”

  Right now? Daughter-right-now? But … um. I am not prepared!

  “Yes, I have an e-mail address,” I say.

  “Great,” she says. “I’ll send you her photo now, and then when you get the package, just give me a call and we can go over everything, okay?”

  Um. Lots of words. Huh? And, um, daughter-right-now?

  “Hello?” she says. “Okay?”

  “Daughter-right-now?” I say.

  “I’m sending it right now,” she says.

  I hang up. I call Alex at his office in Pittsburgh. Emergency! Emergency! Dr. Bombay! Come right away! Oh jeez, I’m doing Bewitched-talk. I am lapsing in my terror and excitement into old sitcom lingo.

  I wish Alex was here with me. I can’t believe this! This is not at all how I imagined it would be. I imagined the two of us, sitting by the fire on a Friday night, popping open a bottle of champagne. I imagined sitting on the fluffy flowered couch with the dogs curled up by the fireplace. I imagined a big white envelope on the table. The package that would just have arrived from the agency. The package that would contain our first glimpses of a little girl in China who had been chosen to be ours. We would take a deep breath. We would open the envelope. We would reach inside, and we would see her, fall in love with her, fall into each other’s arms, fall all over ourselves with joy and promise and possibility.

  Instead …

  When Alex answers, I tell him to turn on his laptop because the picture is on its way. “Oh?” he says. “Oh!” He is processing this information at approximately my same rate. “Oh, my …” I can hear him fumbling with his computer. I am fumbling with my computer. “Okay, I am downloading,” he tells me. “Okay, I am getting … numbers. Just lots of … numbers. Something is wrong.”

  I’m getting a screen full of numbers, too. Apparently our computers can’t convert this kind of file.

  “Well, I guess this is what she looks like in numeric code,” he says.

  “Right.”

  But—I don’t want to see her in code. I want to see her! Oh, thi
s is not at all how I imagined it would be.

  I sit down, take a breath. Collect myself. Okay. She isn’t here yet. She is just a string of numbers. There is a piece of me, a string of my own numerical code, that is relieved. She isn’t here yet. I still have more time. I still have a few more moments as my old self. My nonmother self. (Inhale.) My free self. (Exhale.) I haven’t thought too much about parenting, and I haven’t thought too much about this either: turning into a parent.

  When Anna comes, I will become a whole new self. Is that correct? A mother self, fully actualized. A self, they say, who will never again sleep. A self, they say, whose career could go belly up. A self who won’t have time to take a shower, let alone brush a mule. A nonself?

  A baby is a beginning, but a baby is also an end. This is what I find myself thinking. This is not what I imagined thinking. This is not at all how I imagined it would be.

  Alex suggests I call the agency back, ask someone to please send the file in a different format. So this is what I do. “Of course!” the woman says. “Oh, she’s such a cutie … She is living in the Kunshan Welfare Institute … That’s K-u-n-s-h-a-n.”

  I call Alex back, say here it comes. I click download. And before I know it, I see a flash of pink. I close my eyes tight. A picture. Yes, definitely a picture came through. I don’t want to see it until he does.

  Alex says he sees pink coming through, too.

  “Close your eyes!” I tell him.

  “Okay,” he says. “On the count of three, let’s look.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But how about the count of ten instead?”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, you count,” I say. “No, you!”

  I am actually trembling. I am digging my feet into Sparky’s armpits, poor dog, but he is sleeping through all of this.

  Five, four, three, two …

  I open my eyes.

  “Oh,” I say, and feel my spine turn to rubber.

  “Oh!”

  I can’t seem to get the rest of the words out.

  “Oh!”

  I feel it in my stomach like a punch. “Oh!”

  The rest of the words?