The Moon Sisters: A Novel

by Therese Walsh

  “That’s the nicest way anyone’s ever told me that I stink.”

  “It’s a good smell,” I said with a laugh. “Like you’ve picked up layers from all the places you’ve visited. I like that, too.” I just barely resisted the impulse to push my nose into his skin and sniff.

  He settled his hands on his head. I couldn’t tell what that meant—if he was hiding himself all of a sudden or feeling boastful that I’d named so many things to like. Another thing to figure out.

  “How do you decide where you’ll go next?” I asked, getting back to exploring his head instead of vice versa. “Do you trust fate to put you wherever you need to be?”

  This had been one of Mama’s primary philosophies, one that had always felt like a comfort. That all of life’s twists and turns might be analyzed at some later date, shown to be necessary in order to arrive at some other point in the future—a point that would end up being important in a life.

  If fate hadn’t intervened, I might never have tripped on my heels, dug my teeth into your father’s shoulder, and fallen in quick mad love, Mama had said more than once.

  But Hobbs wasn’t an enthusiast.

  “I don’t believe in fate,” he said.

  The dicelike imagery from the fire came to mind. While Papa had never been one to downplay fate, he’d been more vocal about the power of luck.

  Lucky for me the side entrance to the store was locked when I arrived at the college the morning I met your mother, or I never would’ve had to take the back way or the stairs, Papa would say.

  Maybe men preferred luck over fate, even if they were two sides of the same coin.

  “Luck, then?” I asked.

  “Knew a guy named Lucky once,” Hobbs said. “He was a hopper, same as me, but one night he got drunk and fell asleep near the rails. Too near. Train went over his legs, took ’em both right off his body but left him living. Don’t know where he is now, but I have a feeling he’s not calling himself Lucky anymore.”

  I tried to shove the image of a man sliced like a pizza by a train out of my head. “Do you believe in anything at all?”

  “My own two feet.” He flicked his hands over his pants.

  I stood to face him again. “And what if you didn’t have those feet anymore? What would you do if you were like Lucky, and they were taken from you?”

  “Probably wrap my mouth around the barrel of a gun.”

  My insides wrenched as a vision of him in our kitchen with an open oven door filled my head. I wanted to denounce what he’d said, convince him that he could survive without feet the way I’d survive without perfect vision and that life would still be worth living. Instead, I stood strong within my illusion of the not-quite-weakest-thing-in-the-forest and said, “Don’t rely on anything but yourself.”

  Luck or fate. Prayers or dreams. Another person. “That’s your guide to life?”

  “Living in the now and following instincts keeps me alive.”

  “I get that,” I said, and felt a thread of steel in my spine again.

  “Instincts are what made me pack a bag with my mother’s ashes, leave my family and all I’ve known to take this trip in the first place. They’re what tell me even now that what I’m doing is the right thing, no matter who thinks I’m stupid for it.”

  “That’s it,” he said, coming closer. “That’s freedom. Tastes good, doesn’t it?”

  I licked my lips, tasted sweetness in their dry cracks.

  Hobbs laughed. “Maybe you’ll live the life of a hopper yet, Wee Bit. All the best livin’ happens on the edges.”

  My fingers flexed over the bark. “Does it?”

  “It’s like that saying: ‘Beyond this place there be dragons.’ Those dragons aren’t out there for nothing,” he said, and the curve of his voice gleamed like gold. “They have secrets hiding under all that loot of theirs, and they’re worth finding. And the dragons at the edges of the map are friendlier than the ones at home, at any rate.”

  I wanted to ask him about that. Home. His parents. The loot he’d taken. But something inside—instinct—said not to probe anymore there now, that Hobbs would shut down on me just as he’d begun to open. Instead, I said, “So you think all of life’s answers are out there for the taking. But where do the questions come from without dreams to pull you along?”

  “I smell ’em on the wind.”

  “What do you smell on the wind, exactly?” I twisted my lips, enjoying myself more than I ever could’ve thought possible. “Wait, don’t tell me. Dragons. Adventure.”

  “Ladies in need of saving.”

  And, just like that, I was over the slippery grip wall that was Hobbs. He wanted to matter, to be impactful. The scent of dragon was in truth the scent of human connection. He might not call it a dream, but it was wanting just the same, and semantics, to my way of thinking.

  “Well, there is that, isn’t there?” I said, giving him what he needed and what was true at the same time. “You are saving me—helping me, at any rate—and when I need you the most. Don’t you think that’s an argument in favor of things happening for a reason? One for the folks who’d like to believe in the helpful hand of fate, or at least luck?”

  “Maybe,” he said, and then his tone darkened in a way I could only describe as plush. “But what makes you think I’m here to rescue you and not just devour?”

  “I might still say it’s luck,” I said, my voice taking on a darkness all its own.

  There were no snapping branches or movements between us then. Only a sense of seeing that went beyond what anyone might perceive with eyes.

  He’s uglier than sin, you know.

  I doubted I would believe that even if I weren’t living life on the periphery and bound for a further edge, if I could see Hobbs’s dragon-camouflage skin with all its details. Liking him felt more honest than anything I’d experienced before, too, maybe because of its quick-form, raw-wound beginning and lack of clarity, its sheer instinct, and the fact that neither of us had turned yet to run in the other direction.

  “You don’t scare me, Hobbs.”

  “Said the girl who stared at the sun.”

  I imagined I could feel the gentle tug along the hairs of my arms as he breathed me in, assessing my need for saving, right before Jazz called out that she’d found a dead animal.

  “We’d better check that out,” I said, responding to the jittery pitch of my sister’s voice, though I hated to move.

  Hobbs gathered the wood he’d dropped to the forest floor before we made our way back to camp, as I wondered over the trails left by dragons, the remnants of their kills.

  June 1, 1997

  Dear Dad,

  I am having one of my up-and-downs. This is a down, a black hole, worse than it’s been in a long time. Drahomíra moved out of the house a few weeks ago, which has upset us all—most of all Branik, who avoids conflict at all costs. It was because of me, Dad—a fight she and I had over a piece of my past. Our past.

  Do you remember that old wooden chest I hauled to the dorms at Kennaton? It must’ve been Mom’s, because when I first claimed it for my own I discovered a few of her things. I think you must not have known about it at all, or those things would’ve made their way out of the house along with all the rest of her “bling and glitz,” as you called it. There was a scarf in there, purple and breezy, with clear beads on the fringe that might’ve chimed like bells but (sadly) did not, because they were made of plastic. There were some garter belts in there, too—black with metal clips on the ends—and a bra that never would’ve fit me because I’d never be endowed like Mom. But none of those things attracted me as much as the coat.

  The coat that hugged the bottom of the trunk took up too much room and weighed as much as a small child. It was a bell of a black fur coat, maybe more like a cape. Despite the omnipresent scent of mothballs, slipping it on made me feel like a diva extraordinaire. I kept it all, because there were so few parts of Mom to keep, and those things opened a window into her life—a life that I came
to feel was nothing short of mysterious and, at times, scandalously appealing.

  Now, imagine my six-year-old finding the trunk, and seeing it as the jackpot of all dress-up bins. I found her wearing the lot of it. The purple flounce of a scarf kissing up against her black hair. The obscenely pointed bra and matching garters sagging like elephant skin over her white panties and pink-bowed undershirt. And the black coat, floating despite its weight around her shoulders, sweeping the ground like the cape of a queen.

  Drahomíra laughed nearby as Jazz put on a show, dancing like a showgirl.

  I hollered. Out of that stuff. Out of the trunk.

  Naughty girl.

  I swatted my daughter’s bottom once I’d pulled the clothes off her, and she ran to her room, crying.

  Drahomíra stared at me with an open mouth. What had Jazz done that was so horrible?

  I couldn’t say, “Jazz can’t be like Suzanne Howell, the worst of all people on the planet. She shouldn’t wear her clothes, dream her dreams, touch any part of her past or glorify her in any way. She shouldn’t be tempted.” I wanted the trunk to stay secret and mine. I wanted my daughter safe from an awareness that had rooted in me like a longing, despite my best efforts to keep those roots at bay.

  Was that so wrong?

  I’m sure there are gaps in my logic. I’m not myself right now, I know that. But however much sense I’m making now, I made much less with Drahomíra then.

  I can’t recall how the conversation spun as it did, into an argument about wasted lives and opportunities. What became clear in those naked moments, garters strewn all over the floor, was that my mother-in-law disapproved of me. I was happy to point out the things that should be different, she said—the need for a town paper, a better sign at the bakery, more money and a family vacation to anywhere—yet I did nothing to create change. Why didn’t I work for what I wanted? There was no one to stop me. Instead, I clung to my discontentment and a moth-eaten coat, and acted the role of mercurial queen whenever I wasn’t indulging in a nap. Is that what I wanted my children to learn from their mother? she asked. How to live like a victim?

  I think I told her to get out, though it’s hazy to me, like a faded nightmare. Get out. Of her own home. The home she’d made in Tramp with her husband before I was ever even born. The home she’d opened to me when Branik and I married, when I carried her first grandchild. Get out. She left. She is staying with a friend down the road and says she’ll remain there until she can find another place to live.

  The next morning, Jazz decided to get out, too; she sneaked out of the house and down the road to see her grandmother. She knows I don’t allow her out of the house without permission, and though this was the first time she’s ever broken the rules, I was furious when I found her crawling back in through a window and learned what she’d done. I spanked her until we both cried. I know you believe a spank every now and then is okay, but I’d never laid an angry hand on her until the trunk incident, until I saw her glorying in Mom’s old skeletons and awakened to the lure of their bones.

  I will never hit her or anyone ever again. I swear this to you now, and, even more, I swear it to myself. Still, I feel … fractured, as if I’ve beaten my own bones and lost a piece of myself in the process. Branik says we can’t change what’s done, that he trusts me not to hit Jazz again, and that the well of despair I feel growing deeper is all in my head.

  I know you always thought I let my emotions have too much control over my actions, Dad, that I needed to learn how to rule life with my brain. But I’ve never figured out how to suppress feeling when it surges in me like a tsunami, destroying all the sensible structures I’ve built up over time.

  How do you suppress a tsunami?

  I cannot control the shifts of land that cause them, or predict when those shifts will happen or even how they’ll be triggered.

  And Jazz … I don’t know why I let it bother me so much that she’s attached to Drahomíra. I think she would move in with her grandmother if I let her, and then her future would be limited to running the bakery and making scratchy blankets out of squares of yarn. Is it so wrong to want more for her when she could do and be anything she set her mind to? If you knew her, you’d see what I mean. You’d find a way to hone her potential, because there’s so much within her—a drive I never had, along with a brain and an ability to set her priorities in line and stick to them. She is so much like you.

  I can’t tell yet who Olivia resembles the most, though she is attached—wholly, thankfully, to me. And she is such a happy toddler. I can hardly bear to look at her sometimes, because the light of her brings tears to my eyes, like staring at the sun. Sometimes she’s even able to pull me out of an up-and-down just by being herself. Sometimes not. Sometimes the tsunami takes me, and I can’t even walk to the grocery store for milk or eggs, or stay awake. I suppose some wells of despair are too deep for even a light as bright as Olivia to fill.

  Overly dramatic and self-pitying. That’s me right now. Unfit company for even a paper father.

  Beth

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A History of Oran

  JAZZ

  My mother’s service was held at Rutherford & Son Funeral Home in Kennaton, with a handful of people in attendance—some I recognized and others I didn’t know at all. Maybe the strangers were friends from some other life, from college. My eyes swept over them once, like dust under a rug.

  My father was trying to hold it together, I could tell. Olivia and Babka cried openly. They had the same bone structure, the same heart-shaped face, the same arch to their eyebrows. They wore the same how-did-this-happen, this-can’t-be-happening expression, as if they expected someone to wake them any second, pinch them into reality again, because this was not a thing that was possible.

  Beth Moon could not be dead.

  Beth Moon was a mother.

  Beth Moon was a wife.

  Beth Moon had been teacher to Olivia.

  Beth Moon had a story to write.

  Beth Moon could not be dead.

  She could not have killed herself.

  I watched it all from a strange position—beside my grandmother and my sister but somehow not there at all, like an arm out of joint, waiting for something to snap me back into place. I did not cry. I did not feel. I didn’t want to, either.

  Classical music played around us, soft and somber and low. I recognized piano. Violins. Three couches and eight chairs spanned the room. I noted their arrangement, the way each was decorated with pillows to be as aesthetically pleasing and as comfortable as possible. These were the things I thought as I tried not to look into my mother’s open casket.

  Dear friends, said someone—a priest, maybe—and I stood there and didn’t listen.

  Funerals were expensive; I wasn’t sure how we would afford this. A random thought. I let it go.

  The man stopped speaking.

  The day ended, and we went home, and I crawled into bed but couldn’t sleep.

  Later, during that time when my father drove Olivia and me around with him in Kennaton, when my skin didn’t feel like my own, when I walked the city and collected obituaries, I found my mother’s death notice in the library.

  BETH MOON

  Beth Moon, 43, passed away the third Tuesday of February at her home. She is survived by her husband, Branik Moon; her two children, Jazz Marie, and Olivia Francis; and her mother-in-law, Drahomíra Moon. Funeral services will be held this coming Wednesday at 1:00 P.M. at Rutherford & Son Funeral Home, 245 Main Street, Kennaton, with calling hours held an hour before, from noon to 1:00.

  Short and impersonal. Nothing about her parents, or any of that pain. Nothing about how she died. Nothing about her story or homeschooling my sister or the secrets she’d hidden under the floorboard—these things that filled the years and months and days of a now finished life. There was a person and now there was not a person. Now there was this piece of paper, and memories of a priest droning on in a smokescreen place about a woman he’d never known, and
none of it made sense.

  None of it made sense.

  But when we got home that night and my father and sister went upstairs to sleep, it was I who stayed behind to check that all the lights were off, that the door was locked, that the gas was not running in the kitchen.

  Finding an animal dead on the stream bank pushed me over the proverbial edge. A raccoon, Hobbs said, and probably rabid, considering how emaciated it looked, how dehydrated. So close to what it needed yet unable to take it in.

  The anxiety I’d felt all day didn’t care whether or not I understood it. It swelled inside me, consuming reason, leaving me with nothing but a bunch of irrational thoughts and skittery nerves. And so while Hobbs tended to the fire, while Olivia hummed a song, while Red Grass griped that I’d done a piss-poor job of preparing the fish, while somewhere my grandmother and father were at their homes, eating (or drinking), or taking a nap under familiar roofs and in familiar beds, I struggled to breathe.

  It was almost as if my body had forgotten how to do it, my mind too busy racing from one thought to the next to remember: in and out. I’d wondered many times over the last few months what it might feel like to die. Now it crescendoed in me, a certainty that this was it, that I would die then and there.

  Lost.

  Homeless.

  Wild.

  Chaotic. Emotional.

  Reckless.

  Mad.

  Unbalanced.

  Unreasonable.

  Uncontrollable.

  Unwilling.

  Unthinking.

  Unsafe.

  Shaking.

  Crushing.

  Sweating.

  Hot.

  Freezing.

  Tingling.