Grief had turned everything black as coal for weeks after Mama died. Even my inner calendar shut down then, when everything tasted like ashes and dust. No one knew. Not about that, and not about my eyes. Not until late May, when Jazz made me go with her to the bakery and asked me to list what was low on the pantry shelves but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t read the labels.
Maybe Jazz wanted to be with dead people because she was in a dark place—so dark you sometimes forgot yourself and did things you normally wouldn’t do. Like drink half a bottle of vodka in the middle of a workday. Like stare at the sun.
I turned my head, tried to see the sphere of fire in the sky, catch a hint of Mama’s scent, but it was too far over the bus and I would never see it straight on again anyhow. The dark blot was there, though—to remind me of what happened, what I’d done. The eclipse of my central vision.
The lime static disappeared as Jazz turned off the radio with a curse. Papa had put that radio in the bus years ago, when it was still used for deliveries, but he’d learned pretty quick what we all knew now. It wasn’t the quality of the receiver that mattered in our neck of the deep woods; nothing ever sounded quite right near Tramp. I tried to make my voice light as I quoted a saying as well worn by our father as his shoes.
“The mountains of West Virginia—can’t live with ’em, can’t imagine living without ’em.”
“How could you when they’re all over the damned place, crowding around us like buildings ready to collapse?” Jazz said, which made me think of dead folk again, hollow of their organs and crowding the ground with their bones.
“Will you have to do anything at all with the bodies at the funeral home? What will you have to do there, exactly?”
“I’m in charge of the glitter nail polish.”
Not even my inner five-year-old could miss that sarcasm. I asked the question that got to the heart of the matter.
“Why do you want this job, Jazz? Why now?”
She flung the question back like a grenade. “Why do you want to drag us to the glades, Olivia? Why now?”
I lost track of where I was in my braid, started another.
Why now? Because this was something I could do in a sea of things I couldn’t.
Last night I’d found Papa disassembling Mama’s desk in their bedroom, the tablecloth stripped off the crates and plywood, like flesh off old bones.
Don’t throw it away, I said. That was her altar, remember? It gave her so much hope.
I was glad not to be able to see the details of his face—the grooved lines near his mouth, the shallow pools that made his eyes, once deep puddles of blue. It was hard enough to see his voice, its edges frayed like butchered thread.
There’s nothing to hope for anymore, Liv, he said. Your mother’s gone, and there’s no undoing that. No way to wish or hope or pray it undone. She killed herself.
She didn’t kill herself, I said, as my insides twisted in my chest—my heart pulled over my lungs, my liver tugged up and turned, a braid of organs. It was an accident. And then I hugged him, kissed the top of his head, thick with the scent of alcohol and unwashed hair, and he buckled over and began to cry.
Maybe it’s because my mother’s altar sat beside me all night that I dreamed of the bogs. I stepped over a wriggling and saturated earth until I found one: a will-o’-the-wisp, full bright, darting here and there.
It smelled so strongly of hope that I could taste it.
Hope that Mama hadn’t killed herself.
Of course I wanted to catch the wisp. I wanted Mama’s dreams to have meant something, couldn’t bear the thought that she’d died believing the opposite about that or her very life. But when I turned to tell my family, who were nearby but in that weird way of dreams also in a long, dark hall, they would not run with me to follow the wisp. And they smelled atrocious—like a stew of alcohol and unwashed hair, sadness and fear and confusion, and ellipses that went on forever, circling them and rattling like a snake. I ran from the ellipses, because running eased the pain of the letter jabbing at me through my coat. I ran for three days before I found the light again, and I swear it looked like someone smiled at me from within all that bobbing bright.
Mama.
I woke before I could reach for her, opened my eyes to find a light still dancing like a grin in my blind spot. Impossible; I would never see anything in that spot again, Dr. Patrick had said so. Yet there it was.
The sensation faded within a minute, but for the first time since my mother died I felt glad. Expectant. It had seemed like a sign.
Talking to Babka about it decided me. I told her of the dream, how vivid it had been, like it was speaking to me, and how I didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.
Twice? she asked.
I described the visions I’d had the night before Mama died, with the sun dying in the sky and mirrors turning to ice.
Maybe my dreams are trying to tell me something, I said. But I’m not sure what they want me to do.
Babka nodded. Maybe you won’t understand it until later, but here is something I know for sure: Dreams like feet better than knees. What do your insides tell you?
That’s when I packed my bag.
That’s when I decided I wasn’t going to take the trip alone, either, though my thoughts weren’t on my sister. I found the blue jar with a small portion of Mama’s ashes—the part of her we hadn’t buried—next to my father’s side of the bed. Mama had always loved the jar’s vibrant hue, a match for Papa’s eyes. Now it leaned against the wall beside an empty bottle of vodka.
We’ll do this together, I told her. You’ll get to the bog yet, and we’ll finish some business. Believe, believe.
I leaned my leg up against my suitcase, where Mama’s ashes now lay inside a sealed plastic bag. “Jazz?”
My sister grunted in reply.
“You’re not doing the cremating, are you?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” she said.
That marked the end of her mostly silent treatment, when she let me know what she was really thinking. This trip was ridiculous. If I thought we’d stumble upon a will-o’-the-wisp when they were the definition of unpredictable, then I was ridiculous. Waste of time. Driving around in this stupid bus. Daddy would drink himself into oblivion while we were away, because Babka wouldn’t do a damned thing about it, and I knew it. One night. One night at the most, because we were going to be back in Tramp by Thursday, and then I was going to sit at home and behave, because she had a new job to worry about. Real money. Stop haranguing her about the funeral home. She knew I didn’t like it, and that was too bad. And if I thought she wanted to sleep in this friggin’ antique when it was so hot and unventilated, I had another thing coming.
Thursday tasted like disappointment, like dry Cheerios without the sugar.
She swore then with more conviction, and I could tell it wasn’t at me. The bus buzzed, and my ears filled with the sound of tired brakes straining to slow, to stop, of tires riding over the rumble strips on the highway. I thought I saw a green sign to my right, the kind that tells you the name of the town off an exit ramp, but then it was gone and I couldn’t have read it anyhow.
“Hang on!” Jazz said, too late.
The bus lurched, and somehow I landed on my belly, the floor heaving beneath me.
“Are you all right?” I felt her beside me, her hand on my back. “Move something.”
I lifted my head. “I’m all right.”
“Good,” she said, her voice thready with adrenaline. “I’ve got to check the bus. You stay put.”
“What happened?” I asked, but then I heard the door open in a shimmer of amber starbursts, and knew she was already gone.
I flipped over and opened my eyes. Decade-old flour motes floated all around me, shook up like the rattled specks inside a snow globe. It was beautiful, the way they coated my inner calendar of numbers, days of the week, months of the year. There was a veritable blizzard of motes over July. July, which was now, this month.
&
nbsp; Catch them, Olivia, I imagined my mother saying, as I lifted my palm and smiled.
August 13, 1990
Dear Dad,
What can I say? That I miss you? Because I do. So much. That I’m sorry? I am. I’m sorry for getting into trouble out of wedlock. But I would never have quit college. I would never have chosen one over the other: you or Branik, college or motherhood. Those things were your doing. It’s not too late to undo them. We can raise this baby between the three of us, can’t we? We can raise him or her to appreciate music and dance and literature and fine food. Under your influence, this child will strive for greatness.
I will do better with your grandchild, Dad, than I did with myself. I promise. I promise I’ll be a good daughter from now on, the perfect daughter. Just take me back into your life. Let me have another chance, and you’ll see. I’ll prove to you that I can do this, do it all! If only you’ll open your heart and let me try!
Who will water the bamboo? You always forget. Who will pet Fat Lizzy when she cries, wandering the halls and looking for attention? You will never dust—you know you won’t—and your eyes will turn pink and watery because of it. And what will you eat? You will have to hire a cook if you’re ever to eat anything but canned soup again. You need me. You may not want to admit it, but you need me, and this has to hurt you as much as it is killing me.
Did you hear that, Daddy? I am dying. I will die here in this town, without my life, without you, without college and my future! You have no idea what it’s like in Tramp. I am crying again, so hard that I am ruining this letter! I will have to fetch a clean piece and start over!
CHAPTER THREE
Square Pegs
JAZZ
The quirks in my family weren’t easily swept under the rug, and not just because of Olivia and her synesthesia or her burning her eyes out. Our father liked to play his fiddle on the roof—or did before my mother died. Yeah, like the Broadway show and the movie. He’d stand out there, on the flat part above the garage, and fiddle around sunset. His name is Branik. His nickname among my peers at school was Breakneck, for obvious reasons. He had a passion for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and considered the grilled version one of his specialties. (I’d never understood my mother’s pledge to work a mention of a PB and J into the end of her book. Was it a bizarre sort of dedication? I didn’t bother to point out that the characters in her tale—witches, warlocks, will-o’-the-wisps, and a sun fairy—probably wouldn’t have access to modern-day convenience foods. Why waste my breath?)
When she was alive, my mother used to fall asleep at random moments, and couldn’t drive for as long as I could remember. After the fifth accident—plowing over Sherry Wilson’s mailbox because she’d fallen asleep again—her license had been revoked. She couldn’t work like a normal person, not even with my grandmother—the only baker in West Virginia who refused to make pepperoni rolls, even if they were as much a part of our state as black bears and brook trout, because it wasn’t a recipe from the Old Country.
Babka’s obsession with the Old Country, even though she came over from Slovakia in the early 1960s and was in truth far from an Old World immigrant, had marked our family life for as long as I could remember. Recipes from Slovakia, traditions from Slovakia, superstitions from Slovakia. How was I supposed to know that not every family in the world celebrated Christmas by setting a place for the dead or throwing walnuts into the corner of a room? How was I supposed to know that not every family ate pierogi the way most ate fries?
The kids at school had asked often enough, So, Jazz, what’s wrong with you?
I decided early on that nothing would be wrong with me.
I strode around the front of the bus to find a dark streak of blood across one of the headlights, then looked at the tree line beyond the highway. No sign of the deer I’d clipped, which had come careening at me from some unseen periphery. I hoped it was all right. Not in too much pain. Not carrying broken bones. Not dying somewhere. The bus looked fine, not that that was any surprise to me, as it seemed to have been granted eternal life. I recited a prayer for animals that Babka taught me long ago, then touched my bent fingers to my forehead and kissed them, let them go. It seemed like the right thing to do.
When I stepped back inside the bus, I found Olivia still on the floor, curled on her side like a spent bug. “Why aren’t you up yet?” I said. “You hit your head real hard or something?” I put my hand beside her face, where I knew she could see it, and made a peace sign. “How many fingers?”
“Two,” she said.
“Well, are you hurt?” I asked.
“No, just … hanging out,” she said, running her index finger through the flour residue around her before flopping onto her back. Between the old bleach stains and the new coating of bus grime, her shirt looked like a molding blueberry.
“There’s dirt in that flour, you know. Probably spiders and mites, too. Might not be your smartest choice to play in it.”
She shifted her face, which could’ve been an attempt on her part to see the grit I mentioned. A failed attempt. I stood there for a few seconds more before finding my seat again, suddenly exhausted.
Blind. For months she’d been partially blind and said nothing, and I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed. My father—her parent—should’ve noticed. My mother would’ve. Babka would’ve, too, if she’d seen more of Olivia, if Olivia hadn’t stopped going to Susie’s.
What could I have done about any of it? Was I supposed to take on all of Olivia’s issues with my own head in a whirl? Was this my responsibility now, my charge? Because I didn’t think I could do it. I felt gorged on life and death and drama. Stalled out over processing it all.
I waited for Olivia to take her seat, then restarted the bus. As I eased us back onto the highway, I watched carefully for deer, for all the animals that might come crashing out at me, reckless or wanting.
Some people were in tune with their feelings. They watched self-help TV shows, bought The Oprah Magazine, talked with their girlfriends and therapists. I was not one of those people. It was difficult enough for me to name my anxieties under the best of circumstances—when all was quiet, when I was alone and might come close to an answer when asking myself, What’s the problem here? Why the lump of discomfort in my chest? It was all but impossible in the midst of one of my sister’s jabberfests.
Olivia was like a CD with only three tracks. My job at the funeral home, track No. 1. Ghost lights and the bog, track No. 2. And the latest track in the Olivia Moon collection, track No. 3: the trip itself.
“Jazz, what’s the last town we passed?”
“I don’t know,” I told her, as I began to shift the bus into another lane. A horn blared out at me, and I pulled back, wondered when the car had surged into my blind spot.
From behind me I heard, “Careful.”
“I am being careful,” I snapped, as my anxiety ratcheted up another notch and a pain was born in my forehead. I rubbed it with two fingers as the driver of the car drove past and graced me with a finger of her own. This wasn’t what bothered me.
Why do I feel this way?
My apprehensions increased with every mile, as we continued our drive south, past small towns, and back and forth over switchback roads. When we rounded a bend, the sun stabbed at my eyes. I tried turning my face to avoid it, sat taller, but it was no use. I couldn’t even wear my crappy sunglasses—the ones with the lens that popped out at random times—because they made it harder to see through the bugs splattered all over the windshield. White bugs, yellow bugs, green. The wipers didn’t help; they just spread those bugs around the glass like insect frosting on a cake inscribed “Jazz’s Shitty Day.” I was out of wiper fluid.
“What do you think the bog looks like?” Olivia asked as my eyes watered.
“I don’t know. A bog.”
“I wonder if it’ll taste like cranberries.”
It hurt to roll my eyes.
Olivia stayed on track No. 2 for a while (“Did you know bodies d
on’t decompose in bogs? There might be a two-hundred-year-old corpse under a dozen feet of soaked plant bits out there, perfectly preserved!”), then skipped back to No. 1 (“Will you be in charge of ordering things like the makeup they use on dead people?”).
“Please shut up,” I said, trying not to think about my mother. The Velveeta-toned foundation on her skin, the pink lipstick and the slash of blue shadow. The deep-green blouse, the black skirt barely visible beneath the shut lower half of the coffin. Her hair straightened, arranged in a smooth fall of chestnut over one shoulder. That day I had to remind myself that she was laid there; she didn’t lay herself there. She was not asleep.
Why would I want to return to that place?
Why? Olivia had asked. Why? Why?
Are you sure this is what you want? Babka had asked. Is it what you need?
I’d driven back one cold, rainy day in late spring—taken the bus without telling anyone, without honestly knowing where I was going. I drove to Kennaton, past the university that always made my skin itch—the scene of my mother’s liaison with my father, and her disownment from her former family—until I found myself outside Rutherford & Son. I parked on the street, right behind a hearse, and didn’t care how it looked. Sloshed through a wide puddle on the walkway, and strode up stairs framed by tall bushes. Stalled at the front door with my hand on the old-fashioned knob.
Need help?
A man stood a few paces away, on a wraparound cement patio. He smoked a cigarette, and wore a fluorescent orange T-shirt coated in short white animal hairs. He didn’t strike me as a cat person.
You here to set up a service? he asked.
No, I said, I’m not here to set up a service.
He opened his fingers, and his cigarette fell. He crushed it against the cement with one booted foot. You here for the job, then?
What job?
He smiled, his brow quirked in confusion. Why are you here?
The Moon Sisters: A Novel Page 3