The Moon Sisters: A Novel

by Therese Walsh

  What do you mean, lost? my mother said when I told her. I could tell from the quirk of her mouth that she thought Olivia had hidden well and I had given up too easily.

  I opened every refrigerator and freezer, and every oven and dishwasher, I explained, my voice rising to convey significance. Strangers turned to stare. What if she’s out on the street? Will she find her way home like that dog and dog and cat in The Incredible Journey? Maybe she has a map inside her head along with that calendar of dates.

  That reached my mother. Her eyes stumbled over the store as her voice cracked. You were supposed to watch her! This is why I say … this is why!

  We found Olivia, of course, on another floor of the store after a woman called my mother’s name over the loudspeaker. And though we all mostly recovered from the moment via a rare session of retail therapy, I couldn’t let go of the look in my mother’s eyes at the thought of losing my sister—as if life without her would lack something vital. For a handful of seconds after seeing that look, I hoped my sister might be gone for good, that my family would be all mine again. This made me a bad girl, a bad sister and daughter, a bad person. I didn’t tell anyone.

  If the shame I felt then could translate the way it did for my sister, morph into one of the five known senses, it would have sounded like a train.

  I left Jim’s and my bus, ran down a long rutted hill and toward a train that seemed to be vibrating, creating an unreality of noise, a slam of sounds that drowned out my shouts as if they were nothing. From a distance I could see that a domino effect of movement had begun, each car jolting to attention, pulled to attention by the car in front of it, as sections of the train began to inch away, foot away, yard away, away.

  But not the car my sister leaned against. Not yet.

  She stood too far from me at the base of the hill, looking tinier than ever in our mother’s shirt. Before I could reach her, though, faceless strangers with enormous backpacks emerged from the surrounding woods. Pushed her into the car. Hauled themselves in after her as that section of the train began to move.

  Men. Men, and a dog.

  Bad girl, bad sister, bad daughter, said the blood in my veins. Your fault. Do something. Stop her.

  What else could I do? Go home? Tell my father and grandmother, I’m sorry, I lost her. Sorry, I wouldn’t stay with her. Sorry, I don’t know where she is, when she’ll be back, if she’ll wind up dead somewhere.

  I couldn’t catch them, though I tried. Instead, I roared along with the train, ran until I reached another car. Not a boxcar. A car that was enclosed except for a rail-edged platform on the end, and a ladder I might catch if I pushed myself and didn’t trip on the stones nearest to the train, if I—

  I leaped, surged forward against the ladder, and somehow landed a foot on the lowest rung. No small feat, considering the pack on my back. The train accelerated as I moved with careful steps—one foot to the left, then the other—until the opening to the platform was right there. I stumbled through it, onto something mechanical—not hot, at least not yet. All around me were things I couldn’t name, cylinders and curved pipes. Behind me were the ladder rails I’d traversed—and all that stood between me and the tracks. There was no way inside the car itself that I could see; I would have to stay on this half-guarded rim.

  I grabbed hold of the ladder and shouted my sister’s name, threatened to kill the men if they hurt her, to kill them even if they didn’t. But I couldn’t even hear myself above the tremendous scream of the train.

  Sometime after the second hour, as we snaked through the backsides of towns decorated with adolescent weeds and yesterday’s appliances, I vomited. The pain in my head had grown until my entire body ached. My fingers from gripping the ladder. My ears from the noise. My back and thighs from maintaining my balance as the car joggled from side to side. My eyes and face from the whip of wind and dust, which I couldn’t escape, because standing with my back to the airstream left me dizzy.

  I was afraid to lean against anything behind me.

  I was afraid to lean against the ladder in front of me.

  I was afraid, most of all, of what might be happening between my sister and a group of strangers. I couldn’t know, couldn’t control, what happened out of my reach and sight.

  The fear made me hot, made me shake, swelled my brain.

  They were train people—vagrants—and desperate, I was sure.

  Stabbed. Filleted. Robbed. Assaulted. Raped. Murdered.

  Dead. Dead. Dead.

  I vomited a second time.

  Hours passed like a slow torture, until my headache ran its course. I did what I could for myself. Drank water from my bottles. Ate half a biscuit and managed to keep it down. Wrote haikus in my head about how a normal-seeming day could turn into a nightmare in a matter of hours, how sisters were the most distressing creatures on earth, how I would make it my life’s goal to repay Olivia for all this stress if we got through this. (Please let us get through this. Let her be okay.)

  I didn’t realize the end had come until it was on me, and even then I didn’t realize it was a normal end and not a disaster of some sort. The brakes wailed like a banshee, random crashes could be heard all around, we slowed. In the near distance, I saw groupings of barrels, stockpiles of wood, pieces of old railroad cars, and a tall building overlooking it all; we were in a train yard.

  My car jolted when the train came to a stop, knocked me forward and then back onto one of the pipes. I eased one hand off the ladder rail before me, stretched my fingers, touched my face. Numb. Coated in sand or silt. My gaze snagged on a single flip-flop deserted in a sparse grass in the distance, and I swallowed hard. Let her be okay. And then the air cut from the train, and I knew it was over.

  After hauling the pack once again onto my back, I found my way off—at first edging along the railed perimeter, then stepping down the ladder. My limbs felt like ghosts of my normal limbs, but eventually I put both feet on the rocky ground beside the train.

  I saw Olivia right away, ten or so feet away from me, carrying her red bag. Alive and whole and fine.

  Not filthy and exhausted. Not sick and numb and terrified.

  Fear morphed into anger, an exact transfer of emotional energy, part for part.

  And amplified when I saw him.

  A stranger, holding one of those huge backpacks I’d seen earlier, stepped out of the gloom alongside the tracks. Most of his face dyed in a labyrinth of tattoos. Free-flowing brown hair. Angular jaw. Tall. An expression that said, definitively, Bite me. He gripped my sister’s shoulder, steered her toward the woods beside the train.

  No way.

  I dropped my bag, rushed at them. Struck the stranger’s left shoulder with one hand, swivel-turning him to face me. Waited for our eyes to connect. Punched him in the face. His jaw didn’t just look hard; it was rock solid. My knuckles screamed. So did Olivia.

  “What the fuck?” he said, eyes blazing.

  Olivia sounded frantic. “Hobbs, wait! That’s my sister!”

  He touched the corner of his mouth. Looked at the blood on his fingers, then back at me. Fierce eyes, lighter than the markings on his face. My age, probably.

  “Sister? Well, sister, if you weren’t a woman—”

  I squared up with my still tingling arm, ready to hit this Hobbs again, but an echoing shout stilled me.

  “Bull!”

  A duo materialized out of nowhere and took off with a dog. Hobbs followed.

  “Hurry,” Olivia said. “Jazz, let’s go!”

  In the distance, a white pickup approached. I guessed from the way the others had run that the truck held an official of some sort. I walked to where I’d left my backpack in the grass, picked it up, and made my way out of the yard like a civilized human being who’d just punched a guy in the face. Olivia stayed by my side.

  A voice crystallized behind me—“See you here again, I’ll have you fined!”—and I ignored it.

  As soon as our feet hit a forest trail outside the yard, Olivia said, “I’
m glad you’re here, but also”—she pinched the inside of my arm—“I’m really mad at you.”

  “Stop it!” I said, nudging her away.

  “How?” she said. “How did you even get here?”

  “How do you think? I sucked fumes and dust for six hours, clinging to a train ladder. You should try it sometime,” I said, as we stepped into a large clearing where the rest of the group stood at a distance. I put my hand out to stop my sister’s advancement, shushed her.

  A woman—a twentysomething with a disastrous tangle of red hair and several face piercings—stood on tiptoe inspecting Hobbs’s mouth, her hands on either side of his jaw, tilting his head one way and then the other.

  “Where’s Red? Was he caught?” said a rail-thin boy who seemed overwhelmed by a mass of blond dreadlocks and his own colossal backpack. A familiar dog panted at his feet.

  “No idea,” said the woman. “I’m more worried for—”

  A series of staccato barks pierced the air.

  “Kramer!” said the boy, and the dog aborted his run to greet or eat us, and returned to his side.

  Hobbs’s eyes turned dark and slitlike when he saw me, and I had to admit he looked ominous in the shadowed woods. Pissed off. Almost as pissed off as I felt.

  “Maybe we should start over,” the woman said when Hobbs threw down his pack—a good indication that he was ready to forget I was a female. “Olivia, maybe you can introduce us to—”

  “Touch my sister again and die,” I said, pointing right at him with one hand and wrapping the other around Olivia’s arm.

  She yanked it back. “What is wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you, Olivia Moon? It’s like you’re hell-bent on setting yourself on a path of destruction! How can I take care of you if—”

  “You don’t have to take care of me,” she said. “I’m not your job.”

  “How typical of you to be delusional.”

  For the first time, I took a hard look around and realized there wasn’t any sign of a town, just woods, woods and more woods. A finger of fear returned to trace my spine. We were in the middle of nowhere. Lost. Outnumbered by the sort of strangers you’d see decorating a police lineup on the evening news. A knife hung from the boy’s belt.

  I averted my eyes, worked to control my voice. “Which way is town?”

  No one responded. I looked at the woman in need of a brush.

  She shrugged. “Not my state,” she said. “Hobbs?”

  With reluctance, I regarded the ink-dyed freak. “Which way is town?” I repeated.

  He tried to stare me into dust, but I refused to blink. Finally, he said, “That way,” and pointed back in the direction of the tracks. “About half mile north of the yard, not that there’s much to it.”

  There’d be a phone. That’s all I needed.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Let’s go.” I made to grab Olivia’s arm, but this time she evaded me.

  “Which way to Cranberry Glades?” she asked.

  “In the opposite direction,” said Hobbs. “You coming?”

  “I am,” she said, and took a step toward him.

  “You’re not.” This time I did grab her, pulled her back with my cold hand. “This game ends now.”

  “Game?” Her shoulders squared, and her wide blue eyes narrowed. “I know what I’m doing, Jazz, and I’m a legal adult. I can and will do what I want.”

  “I don’t care how old you are on paper, you’re reckless!” I said. “You’re irresponsible! You’re—you’re like a two-year-old out here, devoid of any sense of logic or reason, and this—” She squeezed my shoulder until I let go of her arm. “This proves it! Riding a train? Running around in the wild with strangers? Are you trying to kill yourself?” I hadn’t meant it literally, but now the words hung in the air between us, dangling like a noose. Made me even more afraid, even angrier. “How can you just blindly trust him?”

  “Trust me? You see me going around punching strangers?” said Hobbs. “But at least now it all makes sense. Why she’d rather stay with the likes of me than go back home. Why she’d choose anything else over having to return. No one would want to have to deal with the likes of you.”

  “I’m her sister,” I said with a snarl.

  “You’re a bitch,” he said.

  “Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” Olivia said quietly, as a crow cawed high above us. “Listen, Jazz, you never wanted to do this in the first place. I get that—how you think this is a waste of time, stupid, how you have a job to get ready for, all of it. That’s your point of view, but I have a point of view, too, and it’s just as valid, even if it’s different. I need to keep on and finish what I set out to do. It’s what I need. Hobbs has said he can take me closer to the glades, and I’m going to let him. I’m going to trust him, and I’m going to trust me. I have to trust me.”

  A breeze blew up when she dropped her hand, and my panic spiked. This was a change. Not a jabberfest. There was something different about my sister, as if she wasn’t trying to bait me to follow. As if she’d grown an inch taller, her skin a millimeter thicker. As if her heart had become sufficiently calloused, and now she was not only ready but determined to walk on without me.

  “I will take you once the bus is fixed, okay?” I found myself saying. “I’ll take you and Dad and Babka, and we’ll scatter Mom’s ashes together so she can see whatever wisps she wants whenever they decide to come around. Isn’t that a fair compromise? We’ll do it on a weekend, when I’m not working.”

  “Working at Rutherford and Son Funeral Home, you mean?”

  I felt the others’ eyes on me but kept mine on my sister, my voice even. “You know that’s what I mean.”

  “Dreams like feet better than knees,” she said.

  “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

  “It means I need to do this now. And I’m going.”

  This time I couldn’t hide the quaver in my voice. “Do you realize I left the bus—just left it—at Jim’s to chase after you? We need to find a phone and call home so they know where we are and—”

  “I have an iPhone,” said the redhead.

  I glared at her. She didn’t look like she could afford a plastic spoon.

  “What?” she said, with a hint of defensiveness. “Just because I’m out here enjoying a hippie moment doesn’t mean I can live without my cell any more than the next American. I charged it in the last town, too, so as long as there’s service—”

  “You’ll have to sleep in the woods, Jazz,” my sister said. “If you come. If you decide to go with me now. We won’t be able to get there today.”

  The air felt like fire in my nostrils as my desperation rose. “Olivia.” I gripped her shoulders again, fighting the urge to shake her into submission, and played the last card I had to play. “I will hate you forever if you do this.”

  But, as always, my sister held the ace.

  “Oh, Jazz,” she said, and her eyes turned sad. “I think we both know that you will hate me forever anyway.”

  I called Babka using a cell phone that looked more expensive than any I’d ever seen. The reception wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. I was able to say what I needed to say, even if I didn’t hear what I wanted to hear.

  She was glad I’d called, glad we were still on the way to the glades. She would take care of the bus, as I would take care of my sister. I was a good girl.

  I wasn’t a good girl, I told my grandmother. I was a stuck one.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Fortunate Thing

  OLIVIA

  The story of how my parents met is a tale of love at first bite. Papa was at Kennaton State, taking a trayful of Babka’s biscuits and rolls down a flight of stairs and to a campus grocery store. Mama, a junior there, lingered behind him with some of her friends, admiring his cute butt and strong shoulders—until she tripped, somehow, on her own heels. She couldn’t catch herself; her feet wouldn’t land right on the steps, her hands cou
ldn’t snag the railing no matter how she tried. She said it was like being a bird flung out of a nest to learn that it had no wings, and that she was lucky someone was there to break her fall. She plowed into Papa’s back, which threw him off balance, too.

  There were ten steps, maybe, to the bottom, which didn’t sound like much but was a lot when you were out of control. I picture them rolling, cartwheeling down the stairs, baked goods everywhere, biscuits raining over them like falling stars. When they reached the end of their tumble, my mother’s body landed over my father’s back in an ungainly sprawl, and her shrieking mouth pierced his shoulder.

  When he turned himself over to face her, like a half-cooked griddle cake, Mama kissed him—despite her throbbing teeth and sprained ankle. Her friends thought maybe she should see a doctor because she was acting so funny, but Mama said the only prescription she needed was the delivery guy’s phone number, which he gave her.

  I asked her once what made her kiss him, and she said it was two things. The first was his eyes; they were big pools of blue, bright and happy to meet her. The second was the taste of him when she bit into his shoulder. He tasted, she said, like tomorrow.

  If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

  The train rattled on in my veins long after we were off it and on the ground, which might explain why my feet were slow to do as I asked—like they’d turned to clay and clay didn’t have to listen to me. The clearing we’d argued in, the one we’d said goodbye to Ruby, her brother, and his dog in, was the last we’d seen of a wide-open space in the forest. The brush became thick as we walked south, the air heavier, greener, the weeds tickling my ankles.

  My stomach cramped with hunger as we moved in a single line, but I wasn’t about to ask for a break when we’d just gotten started. Still, everything I saw and heard seemed to remind me of food. The crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot drifted from the upper reaches like overturned potato chips, while the bag that bumped with regularity against my leg created a staccato of orange splats, like melted cheese dripping onto a counter.