The Moon Sisters: A Novel

by Therese Walsh

  “Did she?” Ruby asked, as if strangers spilled their sorrows to her every day.

  “No.” I pulled one section of hair over the other—right over middle, left over middle—and felt the stretch of skin beneath the bandages on my arms. “She didn’t.”

  I remembered, then, things I’d forgotten about that day. I’d turned off the gas. I’d opened the window and the doors. I’d pushed at my mother’s chest, pounded the skin over her heart when nothing happened, when she didn’t breathe.

  Mama, Mama, please wake up!

  Later, I threw up in the bathroom sink—a sink that had often been littered with my mother’s hair. Less than a year ago, I’d found her staring into the mirror above that sink, holding such a mound of strands that they looked like a dead mouse in her hand.

  I’m getting old, Olivia, she told me. Sometimes I feel as ancient as a tree with a thousand rings.

  I stopped myself from saying, I still need you, Mama, because maybe it was coincidence that I’d finished my high school requirements a week before that, and I didn’t want to set off an up-and-down. But I did hug her, and she didn’t say anything more about it.

  “It’s too bad we didn’t hook up before today,” Ruby said, bringing me back. “I would’ve liked hanging with another girl.”

  “Yeah, it’s too bad.” Things happened for a reason, Mama always said. “You’re not headed in the direction of Cranberry Glades, by any chance, are you?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “South of Levi, where the train’s headed.”

  “Gotcha. But nope.” Her voice contracted like a shrug. “Jop and I are leaving West Virginia today, as a matter of fact. It’s time. We’ve never seen the East Coast.”

  “Oh,” I said, deflated.

  “But, hey, Hobbs said he’s walking on to see a friend after the next stop. He might tag with you if I tell him about your eyes.”

  “He has a thing for handicapped girls?”

  She laughed. “I think he has a thing for challenging Darwin.”

  I wrinkled my nose.

  “You know, helping with the survival of the weakest—like trapped dogs and lost travelers.”

  She told me the story, then, about how they’d met Hobbs. They’d just crossed into West Virginia and were looking for a jungle—a sort of home base for train folk—when they found him trying to free a dog’s leg from a trap. The dog had belonged to a guy named Ran, a hopper who’d decided not to help his dog, because that morning the mutt had stolen his last package of cheesy crackers. Ran called it karma, and abandoned his faithful friend in order to catch the next train. Jop figured out how to open the trap, and the dog latched on to him after that. Jop and Ruby latched on to Hobbs, who had helped the right side in a desertion scenario and had a good heart, despite what you might think about his looks.

  “What’s wrong with his looks?” I asked, and she leaned close, told me that most of Hobbs’s face and body was covered with tattoos—swirls of green and blue running along his cheeks and near his lips in thin lines, like a network of rivers. They traveled down his neck, giving wide berth to his eyes and nose and forehead. That might explain the hood, I thought, but what I said was “I don’t care about looks,” and meant it.

  “Cool,” Ruby said, “because I’m telling you, he’s the person to know out here. He’s taught us more in two weeks than the three months we had on our own before that. Dude might have a past—I mean, who doesn’t—but whatevs. He gets it. He’s, like, everything my parents wanted to be and never were. Free.”

  I wondered if such a thing was possible—to give up your past, start something so new there was no trace of what you were before. Erase it all. Be free. My mouth watered.

  “Too bad his walls are so high up, and I’m such a lazy climber,” she said with a silver-rain sigh.

  I smiled. “You like him.”

  “Mad crush. Not reciprocated. This,” she said, “is the story of my life. I’ve always had a thing for inaccessible men. Maybe if I had your lashes.” I fluttered them at Ruby, and she laughed. “Yeah, do that when you ask him for help. You know, this could work out. You can’t stare at him, which he’ll totally love, and hanging with you will give him an excuse to ditch Red Grass, which he’ll consider a huge bonus.”

  “Who?”

  “Older dude over there. Pushy and, I don’t know.… With Hobbs, you have to be real. It’s like he can smell pretense or something.”

  “Be real,” I said, as if I was taking notes, committing something important to memory, though in truth I was always pretty real. It was one of the things my sister disliked most about me.

  “I’ll go ask now. I may not be able to feel him up for me, but I can feel him out for you,” she said, and moved over to the rest of the group.

  There were always two ways to look at things.

  Either I’d made the worst mistake of my life, getting on this train, or this was right where I was supposed to be—closer than ever to the glades, and about to get closer.

  The feeling in my chest might be anxiety over the whooshing world outside this car, or it might be excitement.

  Every part of me felt as tight as my toes against my shoes, or maybe that was just a sign that I needed to loosen up a little.

  What was it Jazz had said? Things that were meant to be slipped into your life without a lot of effort. Sort of like being tossed onto a train.

  I took off my sneakers and flexed my toes.

  As it turned out, Hobbs’s trip wasn’t going to take him close to the park, and there wasn’t another train I could hop after this to get me any closer, either. But if he could take me nearer to my destination by foot, that would be a lot better than me wandering around alone. I’d worry about the rest of it later—a strategy that had worked for Scarlett O’Hara most of the time. The challenge would be to get him to agree.

  “Why Cranberry Glades?” he asked, sitting an arm’s length away.

  “Because the glades inspired the setting of my mother’s story. It’s where she wanted to see a ghost light,” I told him. “You know about ghost lights, don’t you?”

  “Course I know wisps,” he said, and I nodded. Sometimes I thought West Virginia must be the ghost-story capital of the world. “But why do you want to go with me? You can’t trust me.”

  One of my braids caught the wind, hit me in the cheek, as the train rumbled on. “Why can’t I trust you?”

  “Because you don’t know me, and you can’t go around trusting people you don’t know. Not on trains.”

  There was a scent to him that I couldn’t place. I might’ve thought earthy, but this wasn’t any earth I’d known. His hood was still raised up around his cheeks, and I found myself wanting to push it back, put my face right up to his and see those tattoos. Strange to hide something you’d done to adorn yourself.

  “I could be a serial killer, waiting for my chance to cut you into chunks,” he said. “You don’t even know my real name.”

  I liked his voice, the way it turned up at the edges.

  “So Hobbs isn’t your real name?”

  “Train name,” he said. “Can’t trust anyone with your real name out here, Wee Bit.”

  I smiled at this. “Well, I doubt a killer would try to warn me off. Besides, you’ve been with Ruby and Jop for weeks and they still have their limbs. And Ruby had plenty of good things to say about you. You helped rescue Kramer over there from a trap, right? It sounds like you’re a natural hero, which is what I need. Without you, I’ll be lost in the wilderness.”

  I resisted the impulse to bat my eyelashes.

  “I’m anything but a hero, and I’m not going where you’re going,” he said, introducing me to that wall Ruby mentioned. “Just how blind are you?”

  For a second, I thought about painting myself as blinder than a bat and the very definition of Darwin’s weakest creature. But it was a slim second. I knew I couldn’t live with that picture, and I didn’t want anyone to see me that way, either. So I told the truth.

/>   “I’m not blind blind,” I said, then tried to describe what I could see—life as a smear—and what I could do, which included walking just fine. It wasn’t like he was going to have to carry me around or anything.

  “Maybe I’m blind here,” he said, “but it doesn’t look like you’re decked out for sleeping in the woods. I’ve got a tarp and blanket, but I’m used to this life and—”

  “I can sleep anywhere,” I told him, and it was true. “But we shouldn’t need to, right? The waitress I spoke with said the glades are just thirty-five, maybe forty minutes away from Levi.”

  Hobbs had an uncommon laugh, a ho-ho like Santa that made the curve of his voice ripple like a wave. “It is, if you’ve got a car stuffed in that suitcase or if you’re planning to hitch a ride. That’s not for me. I use my feet when I’m not on a train, and it’ll take three days of hiking to get down to the park.”

  “Three days?” I may have gulped.

  Why hadn’t I asked Rocky to clarify her estimate back in the diner? But then I realized it wouldn’t have mattered; I was so mad then that I would’ve run to the train anyhow. And, at this point, what else could I do? Throw myself at the mercy of the bull, beg for a phone and call home? What did I have to go home to? More arguments about what I should and shouldn’t think, what was worth my time, what was stupid or not? More lectures from Jazz on the work of a woman who’s no longer with us, it’s time to grow up, bitch? More watching my father drink and cry and forget about us? More stagnancy and unanswered questions and feeling like I’d burst if something didn’t change? More dreams of the death of the sun, of frosted mirrors, and lights beckoning, beckoning me on?

  More suicide, suicide, suicide.

  Hobbs had started to talk about hitching, how I could head up near the highway with Ruby and forget all this walking-and-sleeping-in-the-woods business, when I interrupted.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m in,” I repeated. “I’ll walk with you.”

  He was silent for a minute, and then he did something I didn’t anticipate. He pulled back his hood. I knew he expected a reaction of some kind, that I’d see his face full of tattoos and call the whole thing off. Truth was, I couldn’t see much besides a blur of color, swirls or patterns without detail. What did it matter?

  “I’m still in,” I said. “I can’t go back home. Please don’t force me to do that by taking away my one other choice. Please.”

  Something shifted in him after I said that; I could feel it like a substantive thing.

  “You’re ready for a three-day hike?” he asked.

  I nodded, said, “I am if you are, if you’ll have me. If you’ll help.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I might have to—” He looked up and around, like he had a calendar in his head, too, and was checking to see if he had any appointments, any previous engagements, if he could spare the time. He was quiet for so long that I felt my hope wane again. Truly, I couldn’t succeed alone. I needed his help.

  “I stole something from my father,” he said out of nowhere. “Something valuable. Now you know something to protect you.”

  “Protect me?”

  “You have something on me.”

  “I don’t need anything on you.”

  “Of course you do,” he said. “You have something on a person and they act trustworthy even if they aren’t, since they don’t want you calling them out over whatever it is you have on them. Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid,” I said. “What did you steal?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not if we have a deal.”

  He didn’t say anything, which I took for a yes. In my mind’s eye, I circled today on my calendar in fluorescent yellow. Somehow it would be important in the long scheme of things. And because trust meant a lot to Hobbs, and because I wanted to seal the deal, I held out my hand.

  “I’m Olivia Moon,” I told him. “Looks like you have something on me now, too.”

  And then I batted my lashes.

  March 22, 1993

  Daddy,

  It is three in the morning, and I just woke from a nightmare. You know the one—the same old one. I don’t know why I’m here writing to you when I swore I never would again, except that the dream gets to me every time, and it’s about us, you know.

  We were camping at the lake again, and again I was lost, as I truly was lost back when I was six—the year Mom left us. You remember that summer, how mad you were, always, how you couldn’t even look at me. Then one day you said it was enough, that you were still my father and we’d have to learn to make it work between us because we were stuck with each other. You pulled our stuff together and decided we were going to go camping and I’d learn to like it (goddamnit) if it was the last thing you did. The drive was long, longer because it was so quiet, I think. I was scared. I remember wondering if you might take me out into the woods and kill me. I don’t know why I thought that! Maybe because I was Suzanne Howell’s daughter and she’d been so horrible, and maybe I felt that you wanted to kill her, but because you couldn’t I would be the next best thing.

  That’s not what happened, of course. We arrived, and you set up the tent, and we ate Dinty Moore out of a tin pot and drank root beer. You’d just asked if I wanted to roast marshmallows, melt them over thick slabs of chocolate, when I said I had to go to the bathroom. And I guess you didn’t think about it, that I was six and had never been off on my own before, because it was something Mom always took care of—back when she was taking care of me, of us, before her secret pregnancy and Henry and desertion. I thought it was a sign that you trusted me that you let me go off on my own, and felt tall in my shoes because of that. You gave me a silver flashlight and pointed the way. Follow the trail, you said, and you’ll see it; you’ll run right into the outhouses.

  My flashlight died before I got there. Maybe the batteries were old, or maybe something shook loose, I don’t know. But all of a sudden I was in the dark, the trail disappeared. I should’ve called your name, but I thought, I’ll find it. I thought, I don’t want to lose Daddy’s trust. I thought, I don’t want to get into trouble, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong; it was just that our nerves then were so raw, and I was confused about everything that had happened—more scared about that than about the forest. So I walked on in the dark, and hoped I’d find the bathroom or make my way back to camp. I wandered for I don’t know how long. Twenty minutes, maybe, before I cried your name, screamed your name, ran and ran. I thought, I have failed my father in every way, that you’d think I’d left you, too, just like Mom. I was afraid then—more afraid than I’d ever been in my life. I curled into a ball alongside a berry bush and wet myself.

  I saw your flashlight in the dark before I heard your voice. I told you later that I thought the dim glow was a ghost and that’s why I’d stayed hidden and didn’t walk toward it or call out to you when I could have. You found me, anyway, somehow. You hugged me close, damp pants and all, my clothes stained with the smilax berries around us, and said you’d never let anything happen to me again.

  But that’s not how it happens in my dreams. Tonight it was a bear who found me out in the dark, who chased me up a tree, his white teeth gleaming like false promises. From my place on a long branch I could see a bobbing light below, but when I called your name the light disappeared.

  Branik woke me. I didn’t realize I’d been crying in my sleep, calling for you. How embarrassing. A grown woman, in bed with her husband; a married mother, crying for her father. I told him, my good husband, that I was all right—of course I was—and left to get a glass of water but found myself sipping Scotch and writing this letter to you instead. I don’t know why, when it isn’t any use at all. Maybe because it still feels as if I’m lost in the dark sometimes and the trail has disappeared.

  You do miss me, don’t you? You must. I have to believe it, that you remember as well as I do how special that moment was—like a commitment ceremo
ny of our own. We would make it without Mom, we would thrive by holding on to each other. I promised to stay close to you and be a good daughter, a good girl, to always listen, and to never wander again. You promised to try harder to be a good father, because we were all the other had left. We stayed awake and ate s’mores until dawn, and you told me silly stories to clear my head of lost mothers and ghosts and darkness.

  That was the start of our ghost stories, wasn’t it? And the start of our joking, too. Broke a glass? Blame a ghost. Slam a door? Damned ghost. And who knew ghosts could belch while watching television? We kept it light, because I still had nightmares that the light was there but you were not, and I couldn’t move because of the ghosts. You told me that one day, when I grew older, you’d take me to see a true ghost light on a bog, and show me that they were nothing to be afraid of, that maybe we’d chase one down and find a pile of treasure.

  We never did that, did we? Because I ran off with a man like my mother did, got pregnant just like her, too. Didn’t listen to you when you told me to stay. Turned into a bad girl in your eyes, who deserved her wet pants as well as her fear. I wonder if you blame yourself for not controlling me better, for not taking the wild out of the child, or if you tell yourself that there was nothing that could’ve stopped Suzanne Howell’s daughter from ruining her shot at a respectable life.

  There are two ways to look at everything, my wise husband says, but you never did see that. And now I am drunk and tired, and I still hate you, Daddy. Nearly as much as I love and miss you (goddamnit).

  Beth

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Good Daughter

  JAZZ

  For as long as I could remember, my mother had called on me to look after my sister, find and rope her in when needed. Only once did I almost lose her for real.

  We were children in a department store in Kennaton. My mother was off looking at something in the kitchen section, so I stayed near the large appliances to look after Olivia. One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t.