The Moon Pool

by Sophie Littlefield

  That night she’d gone to bed at ten with a stack of magazines. Andy was reading, his glasses sliding down his nose, the cover of his hardback crackling every time he turned the page. Colleen stared at images of kitchens and living rooms, beautifully decorated, and tried not to think about the wine sitting downstairs in its familiar bottle. The peeling of the copper-colored foil, the swirl up the sides of her bell-shaped glass. The taste on her tongue, smooth and rich, a promise. The first lovely tendrils of numb.

  She didn’t need it. She wasn’t an alcoholic. But when she turned out the light and lay, open-eyed, in the darkness, her heart raced with something like fear.

  Tuesday and Wednesday, she convinced herself she didn’t miss it. It had just been an ill-advised self-soothing spree, a temporary bump in a single-glass-most-nights habit.

  But Thursday, the half glass she allowed herself turned back into several, and now here she was again.

  A text buzzed. Ready to go, meet u in lobby

  She shot her reflection in the mirror a quick, determined smile and ran her fingers through her hair. I’m here for her, she reminded herself. I can do this for her.

  “HOW’D YOU FIND this place?” Shay said, setting her laminated menu on the scarred pine table and looking around the room. The restaurant was small and dim, its walls covered with fake paneling and beer advertising signs. It was called the Honey Do, and they’d spotted the blinking neon chicken from the road, fifteen miles from Lawton and past the turnoff for Turnerville, just as the Yelp review had promised. They’d gotten the last empty table.

  Colleen felt her cheeks flush. “I did a little research,” she said, not adding that in her purse was a neatly folded piece of paper with a list of half a dozen restaurants.

  There was just this to get through. Being there for Shay. It was going to be uncomfortable. Downright painful, even, but Colleen was ready to do the right thing. It wasn’t just that she was the one whose child had survived. She wanted to think that even if their roles were reversed (no, she couldn’t allow her mind to go there, couldn’t imagine Paul being the one under the ice all of those months, Paul thrashing in terror as the darkness closed over his head and the ice water filled his lungs), she would still have felt some sort of...

  What was it, exactly? Kinship was the word that came to mind, but she and Shay were no closer to being kin now than when they first met. They were different in so many ways, and enduring misery together hadn’t changed that. Colleen ducked her head, pretending to read the menu, to hide the twitch in her eyelid. Friendship. That was the word she had been thinking. She wanted to believe Shay was her friend. Even more, she wanted—desperately—for Shay to consider her a friend.

  “We could split the chicken and catfish platter,” she said brightly. “It comes with hush puppies and onion rings.”

  “Jesus, we could just roll our arteries in cornmeal and pan-fry them,” Shay said, but she didn’t object. When the waitress came over to their table, Shay ordered a carafe of house white wine without consulting with Colleen. “I need a drink,” she explained, handing her menu over.

  Colleen abstained until the food came, but when she looked at the sheen of grease clinging to it, she reasoned a glass of the house Chablis didn’t stand a chance against all those calories. She took a sip from the glass Shay had poured. It was terrible, as she expected.

  Conversation had been stilted. Colleen had asked whether Shay had started taking custom orders again (she had), how Robert and Brittany were doing (their house was on the market and they had put a bid on a model in a new development that was ten minutes closer to Shay’s house), what Leila was doing for the summer (camps, mostly, and two afternoons a week with Shay). She’d gotten her old job back and even managed to arrange her schedule around Leila’s afternoons by working four ten-hour shifts.

  Shay answered every question in a monotone. She cut her chicken into tiny pieces with her knife and fork.

  Colleen drank more of the terrible wine. Let the slightly sour, cold liquid sluice down her throat. After a while she felt better. Stronger. Enough to ask the question she had been rehearsing.

  “I just wondered if you would like to talk about it. About knowing, finally... and getting him home.”

  Shay looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You want to know if I feel closure or something like that?”

  “Well, or...” Shay wasn’t going to make it any easier for her, which Colleen supposed was fair. “I can’t know what it’s like. Obviously. But I feel like...” She had been going to say that she felt like she knew Taylor a little, from the time she and Shay had spent together and from the things Paul had told her. Not that there were many; he parsed them out only occasionally, in context of other things. Like, “I first heard that band one time when Taylor and I drove to Minot.” Or, on July Fourth, “A year ago Taylor and I were setting off fireworks, you could see them so much more clearly away from city lights.”

  And now she felt cautious, unsure how Shay would respond. “I only thought that you might want to talk about it.” She swallowed. “I wish I could make today even a little less awful for you.”

  “Yeah. Thanks. I don’t really think I can talk about it right now.” Shay picked up a french fry and chewed, never taking her eyes off Colleen, looking not so much devastated as calculating.

  “So, you and Andy must be excited,” she said, after she had taken a delicate sip of her wine. There was a shift in her tone, and her eyes gleamed in a way that put Colleen on alert.

  “About...”

  “The baby. That he’s going to be a boy.”

  Colleen froze, her greasy fingers in her lap, a rime of salt on her lips. “We don’t—they actually haven’t told us yet. They’re keeping it secret.”

  “Oh,” Shay said, and was Colleen imagining it, or was there some faint note of triumph in her voice? “Never mind, I guess I was just—you know how some people have a sense for these things? I’m usually right, but I’ve been wrong too. A girl would be sweet, especially if she got Elizabeth’s coloring.”

  “Wait,” Colleen said. She felt like she was wading out into the undertow. There was a pounding in her ears, the conversations around them blending into a dull buzz. “Wait. Tell me why you said that. About him being a boy.”

  Shay pursed her lips and stared over Colleen’s shoulder at the wall behind her. “Look, I’m sorry I said anything, and I don’t want to—I mean, there’s so much going on, people are kind of stretched to the limit. I don’t want to make a big deal out of something that really isn’t.”

  “Shay.” Colleen leaned across the table and covered Shay’s hand with her own. She squeezed her wrist, as Shay stared at her hand there. “Please. Don’t do this. I need to know. How do you know?”

  “You’ll take it the wrong way,” she finally said, staring directly into Colleen’s eyes. “You’ll read things into it.”

  “Into what?”

  Shay sighed, drummed her fingers on the table. “Okay, look. I thought you knew. Paul wrote me a few times. Just emails, short ones.”

  “When?” Colleen was stunned. Paul never mentioned Shay, or Lawton, and barely spoke about his in-laws-to-be; she and Andy had assumed those subjects were painful for him, and avoided them. “When did he write you?”

  “It was only a few times, like I said. Not like every day or anything.”

  Colleen’s head was filled with a painful rushing, but the only thing she thought to say was, “Do you write him back?”

  “Not much,” Shay said, after a pause. She went on, quickly, “Now look, I know you’re probably mad at me that I didn’t answer your emails or calls. And I’m sorry. But I was counting on you to understand. I just couldn’t. Seriously, it would have taken me right back—and I was trying to move ahead, trying to get my job back, and take care of Leila and I didn’t have...” She waved her hand, not specifying what she didn’t have enough of. Strength? Time? Motivation?

  “But Paul—”

  “He was Taylor’s friend, Collee
n,” Shay chided. “Taylor wouldn’t have wanted me to ignore Paul now.”

  Colleen pushed her plate away; suddenly the grease-sodden pieces of chicken, the crumbling hush puppies, nauseated her. “All of a sudden he’s Taylor’s friend.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The whole time we were trying to find them, you were convinced he was—was some sort of monster. You blamed him. You were ready to cut him loose, him and me both.”

  “That was different,” Shay snapped. “That’s not fair.”

  “Not fair?” Colleen felt the anger inside, which she kept so carefully coiled, the twisted strands of rage she had hoarded with such care, all these years. Her biggest secret, the only one she’d successfully kept. “Not fair? How was any of this fair—for any of us? Did any of us ask for our boys to come here? Did you ask for Taylor to lose his dad? Did I ask for Paul’s brain to work differently from other kids’? Did either of us ask for the ice to give out that day?”

  “Don’t put me on the same level as you,” Shay hissed. “I didn’t have any problem with Taylor coming here to work. He was old enough to take a man’s job and that’s what he did. Paul too. You never seemed to get that he was just trying to go out there and do something of his own. Maybe if Paul thought you and Andy supported any decision he ever made, he’d tell you things more often.”

  The knotted fury twisted painfully, making Colleen gasp. “You can’t—”

  “I can’t what? Challenge you, Miss Perfect? You and Dr. Spock? I guess you did every damn thing by the book. Probably nursed him until he was three and made homemade baby food and washed his diapers with organic detergent. But you never let him grow up. If you’d let him off his leash with the other kids, instead of putting the poor kid through hell with all your tutoring and assessing and psychologizing, he would have figured out how to deal with his frustration the way normal kids do.”

  “Stop,” Colleen said, almost begging.

  “I won’t stop. I’ll tell you what, you were right: I did misjudge him. For that I’m sorry. I read about what he did to that kid and I jumped to conclusions. But you know what I think now? I think that was your fault as much as his.”

  “My fault?” Colleen was shocked, not bothering to keep her voice down.

  “Yeah. Look what happened when he came out here. Sure, he had a few tough days, a lot of them do. And then he got his balance and he did fine—because there wasn’t anyone here to prop him up. Maybe a few guys gave him a hard time, but for the first time in his life he didn’t have Mommy to come and make them stop. And he figured it out. That’s what you can’t forgive him for, Colleen, he was able to do just fine without you. And you can’t stand that.”

  “You have no idea,” Colleen said, her voice trembling. Around them, a few of the other diners had noticed the argument and were casting them glances. “His mind doesn’t work the way other people’s do, you’re oversimplifying—”

  “Oh, you are so full of shit, Colleen!” Shay smacked her hand on the table, making their silverware jump. “He is like the others. Or wants to be, if you’d stop smothering him. Oh, maybe he’s got ADHD or anger issues or whatever the fuck you want to call it, but so do half the kids these days. Haven’t you noticed that? Taylor went to a speech therapist in preschool, he had a thing where he didn’t say the end of his words. I thought it would clear itself up, and they were trying to convince me that since I didn’t go to a specialist right away, he was going to end up with a permanent defect or some bullshit. And you know what, by the next year you’d never know he ever had a problem.”

  “Don’t you dare compare a mild speech impediment to what Paul had to deal with!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Colleen, I’m not. I’m just saying that if you had just backed the hell off, he might have learned to deal with some things on his own. And it wouldn’t even matter—and I should know that better than anyone, because no matter what happens my son will still be dead—but you’re still doing it.”

  She was digging in her shoulder bag for her wallet. Colleen pushed back her own chair and picked up her purse. “You don’t say something like that to me and then just leave,” she said. She was so angry that she thought she might pick something up and throw it. She could imagine it—she longed to pick up a glass and hurl it, to grab the stainless coffeepot off the serving cart and throw it against the wall, to knock over the chairs.

  “Say what? That you’re still treating your son like a child? Even though he’s got a baby on the way and a family he needs to provide for?” Shay pulled out two twenties and threw them on the table. “He might have grown from everything that happened. God knows he’s trying to. You know what he told me in the hospital?”

  Colleen had been reaching for her own wallet, to throw more money down. To make sure there was enough for the bill and then some; she couldn’t afford to give up even this thin advantage, of always paying. But Shay’s words stopped her. She had never asked Paul about Shay’s visit. Like so many things, she’d been waiting for it to fade from her memory.

  Shay leaned across the table. “He asked me if I thought it would make things even for him to kill himself.”

  Colleen staggered, her heart lurching. She grabbed the back of the chair to support herself. “Stop it,” she whispered.

  “He was ready to do it. Your son—your son—would have done anything to make it right. He worked that out on his own, without any of your help. Paul knows right and wrong. I bet he has for a long time. But every time he tries to work it out for himself, there you are, with your Mommy-knows-best shit. Your lawyers.” She practically spit the word. “Your money and your influence. You just made it all disappear. And now he and Elizabeth are stuck in your house, hating every minute, trying to figure out how to get out. He told me, Colleen. He emailed me when he told you they wanted to move to an apartment, that he asked you for a loan just until he could find a job. That you turned him down.”

  “That wasn’t his idea,” Colleen said. “That was her. Elizabeth.”

  Shay was already shaking her head. “Oh, no, it wasn’t. And I know he didn’t ever blame her. You came up with that on your own.”

  “She hates it there, she doesn’t even try to hide it!”

  “And Paul is the one who wants to give her a chance to have her baby in her own home! They don’t hate you, all they want is their own life.”

  “They have the entire upstairs,” Colleen said. “Over a thousand square feet.”

  “Where she feels like she’s in jail. Only she’s too polite to ever tell you, especially after everything you’ve done for her. She knows not everyone would take her in after what she did. So you get credit for that, Col. But I promise you, if you keep playing that card much longer, you’re going to be the mother-in-law from hell. You think I like everything Robert does? You think I was thrilled to have a twenty-seven-year-old man knock up my nineteen-year-old daughter? Hell no. But I found something to like about him because I knew that if I didn’t, I’d never get to see their baby.”

  Shay started toward the exit. Colleen had to race to catch up, after finally getting more money out and adding it to the bills on the table. Shay kept talking as though she didn’t care if Colleen heard her or not.

  “I’d lay odds they’ll be out of your house in a year one way or another. Meanwhile, you want to know the baby’s name?”

  She glanced back at Colleen, then pushed through the heavy wooden door.

  Colleen followed. The warm evening had cooled down, and Shay’s words were lost to the roar of traffic passing on the road. She kept walking, and for a moment Colleen thought she meant to walk directly into traffic, but then she stopped and put her thumb out. Immediately a passing truck put on the brakes and started coasting over.

  “What?” Colleen yelled. “What did you say?”

  Shay turned. Her face was lit in the reddish glow from the brake lights. Her hair was wild around her face.

  “Taylor!” she yelled. “They’re naming him af
ter my son.”

  COLLEEN HAD BOOKED them both on the same afternoon flight to Minneapolis, where they would part, she had imagined, with tearful hugs. That, or she would change her own flights and go with Shay back to California, where she thought she might be able to assist in planning the memorial. She could take a week off—the school volunteer job was over for the summer, and everything else—BodyPump, the cooking class her neighbor had signed them both up for, even Elizabeth’s Lamaze classes—would go on without her. She’d gently steer Shay toward the right choices, discreetly paying for whatever was needed. It was to have been her final gift to Shay, because she suspected that once Taylor was buried, they would slowly lose touch.

  By six o’clock in the morning, when she had been awake for a restless hour and a half, she knew that wasn’t going to happen. She’d drunk both splits of wine, telling herself that Shay could change her mind and call at any moment.

  (There had been an ill-advised call to Paul at around eleven, midnight back in Massachusetts. Colleen remembered asking Paul when he was planning to tell her about the baby’s name. Paul had hung up on her, eventually, but she couldn’t remember everything that she had said first.)

  She showered and dried her hair before texting Shay. When she didn’t get an answer, she tried calling Shay’s room. Finally, she went down and knocked on the door.

  But she already knew. And when Shay texted her, at one thirty, to say Took earlier flight, she didn’t really expect an apology or an explanation.

  All she wondered was how Shay had paid for the ticket.

  ANDY PICKED HER up at the airport. Colleen had been hoping maybe Paul would have come instead. They needed to talk. But it was probably for the better; she had been slightly hungover most of the day, and the six-hour trip hadn’t improved her mood any.

  “How did it go?” Andy asked, taking Colleen’s roll-aboard from her and stowing it in the trunk. He leaned in for a kiss, and Colleen turned away, afraid he would notice the faint trace of her hangover on her breath, despite the fact that she had popped a piece of gum as soon as they landed.