The Moon Sisters: A Novel

by Therese Walsh

  I twined my arm around his denim-covered knee and squeezed, my heart so heavy that it hurt. Hobbs sat up and looped his arms around me, kissed the side of my head.

  “I’m sorry, Livya,” he said. “What do I know? Maybe hoping is too close to dreaming anyway, and you know how I feel about that.”

  Through long hours, I sat and watched for lights, and hoped. But the night reeked of doubt. And the lights never came.

  The sun rose over fog-coated mountains as morning bird chatter swelled around us. Behind me, Hobbs rubbed my back through the blanket he’d settled over my shoulders hours before.

  “Can we stay one more night?”

  The soothing motion stopped momentarily after I asked, then started again; Hobbs knew the question wasn’t for him.

  Jazz stood in front of me, her arms crossed over her chest. “You know the answer to that.”

  “But I had a dream. Babka said something would happen on Saturday.” I consulted my calendar to be sure. “That’s today.”

  “Something is going to happen today, all right. We’re going home,” she said, and I clenched my jaw. “It’s going to take me a week to recover from the mosquito bites I got last night, which will make a real nice look for my first day of work as it is, and I won’t—”

  “Oh, of course you won’t,” I said. “I don’t know why I bothered to ask.”

  For all we’d shared over the last few days, the moments of closeness and new understanding, you’d think we wouldn’t have been able to argue with such easy ferocity. But a mouth says things it shouldn’t after a night without sleep, and as I rose to my feet the blanket around my shoulders fell away like a boxer’s towel before a fight.

  I couldn’t tell you how the argument evolved to encompass everything, from Jazz’s job at the funeral home (“All you care about is that horrible job!” “Maybe I’m sick of being around people who don’t know how to shut their pie holes!”) to Mama’s book (“You don’t believe in anything!” “It’s a fairy tale, Olivia. Grow up!”), but it ended on the topic of the sleeping dog lying between us since yesterday: the letter I’d found the morning Mama died.

  “I think you have that letter you found with you right now, don’t you?” said Jazz. “I think it’s in your suitcase, and that’s why you don’t want me to look in it, why you’ve been so careful not to let me so much as—”

  I lifted my bag, opened the latches, and overturned the whole thing in front of her. Out rained shirts and shorts, socks and underwear, a toothbrush and paste, and an empty water bottle. And then I dropped the case itself, let it fall like a gavel. It hit the tarp in a blood-red splat.

  “Turn out your pockets,” she said, and I roared back.

  “Stop obsessing about that letter! If you think for one second I’m going to hand it over to you, think again! I’m keeping it! I found her that morning! I miss her more, and I loved her better! You didn’t even like to be in the same room with her when she was alive, you didn’t—”

  “You’re making it really hard to be sensitive!”

  “This is you being sensitive? You missed your calling, Jazz. Maybe you should be working for world peace or something instead of working with dead people, because you’re so very good at being sensitive.”

  “Oh, fling you, Olivia Moon! Fling you!”

  “Nice curse that doesn’t even make sense!” I yelled at her retreating back. “Hey, we’re not through here!”

  She stayed silent as she walked off across the bog.

  “Wow,” said Hobbs, still on the tarp. “Maybe I should be glad I never had sisters.”

  “Be glad you didn’t have her for a sister.”

  “Um.”

  “What?”

  “The ashes, Livya.”

  It wasn’t clear at first, but then I realized: My suitcase had bounced on the bag of ashes when I dropped it. The bag’s seal had broken. And most of what remained of Mama had spilled beyond the seam of the tarp to where the grass grew thick and long, bled into the soggy ground, and was gone.

  Maybe it’s what she would’ve wanted, I told myself. Maybe this was how she’d see her wisp one day. Still, I curled into a ball and wept, feeling the acute loss of my mother all over again.

  Recovery was slow. Hobbs lay beside me, let me be, which was what I needed him to do. Jazz stayed away. In good time, the tears stopped, and my brain settled on something it hadn’t before. Jazz’s assuredness that the letter was in my bag might be a sign of how she thought. What she’d do.

  What she hid. Where.

  “Let’s go,” I told Hobbs, hopping to my feet.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, but I didn’t answer, already two steps ahead.

  I ducked into the small tent Hobbs had erected the night before, and pulled my sister’s bag out onto the grass—the old college pack that had once been my mother’s, that my sister had adopted. I unzipped it; the bold black ladder reappeared for a moment, then was gone.

  “You think that’s a good idea?” Hobbs asked from behind me.

  “Does it look like I care if it’s a good idea?”

  “Huh. You’re kinda cute when you’re mad, Wee Bit.”

  He sat beside me as I plunged my hand inside of the canvas. I felt them within seconds; my fingers grazed over envelopes lining the bag like coins at the bottom of a well.

  “I knew it,” I said, but pulled one out anyway and held it near my right eye. I could almost make out Mama’s handwriting, but not quite. “She had them all along.”

  “What are they?”

  “My mother’s letters to her father, my Grandpa Orin. She never sent them, because he disowned her a long time ago.”

  “Sounds like your grandfather and Bill might be soul mates.”

  Hobbs sat beside me when I made room for us at the tent’s entrance, and then I returned to the bag, felt around a water bottle, then brought out a book along with several newspaper clippings and a folded sheet of paper. “Help me, Hobbs. I can’t read these, and I want to know what they are.”

  He took the clippings and opened the closed sheet, as I pulled one of the letters Mama had written herself up to my nose.

  “This here’s a job offer from Rutherford and Son Funeral Home,” he said. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “The others are obituaries.”

  “Obituaries?” I dropped the letter into my lap. “Whose?”

  He went through them one by one, naming people I’d never heard of before: Janie Wolf, Carl Books, Seneca Fine, James Conover. Why would Jazz keep obituaries of people we didn’t know?

  “Beth Moon. Is that your mother?” Hobbs asked, another piece of paper in his hand.

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and handed it to me, as if he was giving me back a piece of her. I took it and put it on top of the letter in my lap.

  “What about the book?” I asked.

  He lifted it—“It’s called The Plague”—then turned it over. “Story about rats. Death.” He huffed. “Your sister sure likes light reading, doesn’t she? Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Obituaries. Funeral homes. Plagues and rats and death, death, death.

  “I’m worried about her,” I said, and he laughed a quiet ho, ho, ho. “What?”

  “You two are so strange together. You’re worried about her, but you bit her head off and shoved it down her throat two minutes ago.”

  “I know.” I pursued my lips. “I know, I’m just …”

  Exhausted. Backed up against a wall. Finished. Sorry, too, for all I’d said to Jazz. Sorry, even though I hadn’t been able to help myself.

  “You’ll be all right, Livya,” Hobbs said, and I pulled more of my mother’s letters out of the bag until at least a dozen sat in my lap like a giant puddle of loss.

  “Do you know I’m going to have to leave you today?” I asked. “I don’t want to leave you. I love you, you know.”

  Silence. It’s not that I’d necessarily expected him to say it back, but I still felt di
sappointed when he didn’t. I’d never told anyone other than family that I loved them before, never felt that way to say it. And now I wondered if I’d made a mistake, been wrong about … everything. Because there seemed to be something palpable in Hobbs’s silence, almost as if it had formed a physical presence in the air, a hand, of sorts, that wanted to push the words back into my mouth. I wished I could look at his eyes, try to figure out whatever it was that he felt. But he gave nothing away, didn’t move an inch. When he did speak, he avoided my declaration altogether.

  “All those letters are to this Orin, from your mom?”

  I hugged the letters to my chest, and tried to keep the hurt out of my voice. “Yes, he’s my grandfather—Orin. There was a lot of pain between him and my mother. I thought maybe we could send all the letters to him now that she’s gone, and at least we’d have some closure. Jazz disagrees, of course, and says I’m stupid to suggest it. But I think I’ll—”

  The sound of running feet filled my ears. Wet. Urgent. Streaking my vision with colors like a fresh bruise. Jazz.

  I didn’t even have time to zip the bag.

  September 21, 2011

  Dear Dad,

  Yesterday Branik did something for me. He took the day off from work, an unprecedented thing in the middle of a non-holiday week, and surprised me with a plan. He wanted to take me to the glades. He wanted to take me, because he’s known that I’ve wanted to go for ages. At some point he must’ve decided to drive us there despite my hemming and hawing, my usual response to him bringing it up, because this morning he appeared with my purse flung over his shoulder and said it with a huge smile on his face: “Let’s go, baby. Let’s have an adventure. The cranberries are ripe. Let’s find the end of that story of yours.”

  Do you know what happened? I had a panic attack, and we stayed at home.

  Maybe I should try again, force myself to take the trip. But this was something we were supposed to do together, Dad, and the idea of doing it without you?

  It makes me feel like that pathetic little girl lost in the wilderness all over again.

  Which frustrates me so much, like I’ve been asked to walk forward into an empty space but keep hitting up against invisible walls. There is no sense here, and it makes me angry! Angry with you, yes, but even angrier at myself. I am stronger than this. And you may never agree, but I am wealthy in all the ways that matter, even if I don’t have a lot of money stored away in a bank account, or a retirement fund, or stocks and bonds, or college funds. I am wealthy in better ways, because of my family and the love in my house, and the ability to laugh and dream and be accepting of people’s differences. Yet something like this happens, and it’s as if I’ve been asked to turn out my pockets only to find holes in the cloth. My family deserves better than this damaged-pocket woman I sometimes am, even if I don’t know what more I can do to fix her. Even if I am angry, so angry that she needs fixing.

  Beth

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Regrets

  JAZZ

  The last conversation I had with my mother was nothing special. We didn’t argue. I didn’t tell her to close the kitchen door or anything dramatic like that. Closing the door was what you had to do if you wanted to be warmed at all by the oven heat, and it was a cold February morning, I remember.

  We didn’t argue. It was worse than that.

  She asked if I’d mind picking up a quart of milk on the way home. I didn’t even answer her with words, just nodded and left her there.

  That was it. Our last interaction. The last time I saw her alive.

  I’d bought the milk before heading to Susie’s to work. I thought to take it home when I saw and followed behind the ambulance later that morning. Nothing much mattered after that.

  The milk curdled on the kitchen counter. Later, I emptied it into the sink in a solid clump.

  I couldn’t recall the last time I told her I loved her.

  For maybe ten minutes after my fight with Olivia, I walked. Off the bog, past bushes that smelled of rosemary, until I reached solid land again. There I stopped beside a tree, a tall and twisted variety that I couldn’t name, my head still full of my sister’s words.

  I miss her more, and I loved her better! You didn’t even like to be in the same room with her when she was alive!

  I wouldn’t be mad at Olivia for what she’d said, even if she deserved it. My love for our mother was different, more complicated than my sister’s, and not comparable because of that. Besides, I’d known Olivia would react emotionally as soon as she realized the glades weren’t about to offer up a vision of enlightenment. I understood how a fusion of uncertainty and disappointment could settle into anger. Besides, an angry Olivia was preferable to a depressed Olivia any day of the week. Depressed Olivia was like being stuck behind a tractor on the backroads; you knew you’d get beyond it eventually, but Jesus Christ.

  That didn’t mean she hadn’t cut me at all with her new sharp tongue. And that letter. How would I ever see it now?

  If you think for one second I’m going to hand it over to you, think again! I’m keeping it!

  Keeping it. But not in her bag. So where would she have—?

  All my thoughts aborted as I realized that I’d left my pissed-off sister with my bag, home to all of our mother’s other letters. But she wouldn’t. Would she?

  The obituaries. Orin’s obituary.

  I barreled with high inefficiency across the bog, panting as water splattered up my body and onto my face. And there they were, Olivia and Hobbs, just where I feared they’d be—beside the tent with my bag open between them.

  “Get the hell out of there!”

  I snatched up my canvas pack and stuffed the scattering of letters and the book back inside. But where were the obituaries? I peered inside the bag’s yawning mouth and, after shuffling things around, saw them there at the bottom.

  Relief. Olivia hadn’t seen them. Hadn’t seen it. Not that she would’ve been able to read it if she had, but still …

  I avoided Hobbs’s glaring eyes; this wasn’t any of his business. Olivia—though I would’ve expected her to argue or at least condemn me as a hypocrite for having those letters in my bag all along—didn’t say a word.

  It would be the silent treatment, then. Fabulous.

  “We should get out of here,” said Hobbs, still staring at me. “Before folks start showing up for the day.”

  Olivia turned whiter than normal and, despite everything, I felt a pang of sympathy for her. But she’d have to say goodbye to Hobbs at some point; it wasn’t as if we were going to be able to bring him home and adopt him like a pet. And we couldn’t chase after foolish fires forever. None of this craziness would erase what had hurt our family the most. None of this would bring our mother back.

  “Yes.” I zipped the bag. “Let’s go.”

  Describing things in vivid detail started as my version of a peace offering to Olivia, as we began the hike back to J.D.’s truck, walking through the field we’d stayed in the night before.

  “I know things didn’t happen the way you’d hoped,” I told her, “but Mom did want to come here, and I want you to try to see it—really see it, and try to remember.”

  “I thought you weren’t a tour guide,” she said.

  It started as a peace offering, but it became something else. In a strange way, it seemed I was seeing it all for the first time as I relayed the sights. The Christmas-tree evergreens, gray-barked beeches and broken-barked black cherries, the thorny hawthorns, and tall oaks. The penny-colored yellow birches, and the curved branches of the sugar maples.

  Wild geraniums,

  and a cloak of buttercups.

  So much beauty here.

  When Hobbs pointed out some bear scat, my lips curved into a reluctant smile. “Right,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to forget the bear scat.”

  Olivia didn’t smile.

  “Stop a sec.” I put my hands on her stiff shoulders and made her turn around before we left the field, my eyes on th
e closest bank of hills. “There are layers and layers of green in the mountains, different from the way we see it at home. Vibrant, forest green, fading to a near-fog, like an overexposed photo. And there’s a sort of blue-gray line off in the distance, before it fades to silver. After that, it just ends.”

  “Doesn’t end,” said Hobbs. “The mountains of West Virginia, they go on and on. Sometimes seems they go on forever. But I’ve been beyond that blue-gray and silver, and I can tell you there’s plenty more to see. Somehow, though—” He gave a shake of his head, a wry smile. “Somehow this place gets in your blood.”

  We stood there for long minutes, as something like pride welled up in my chest. This state, this land, was mine, and I’d forgotten how to love it.

  “Can’t live with ’em, can’t imagine living life without ’em,” Olivia said.

  I squeezed her shoulder, unable to find words to respond as I took it all in: how big the world seemed to be, how I’d forgotten that as well.

  Later, when we passed the old prison grounds again, we stopped to read signs that we’d ignored the day before. The Mill Point Federal Prison, where you could still see the remains of stairs, had never been gated. Six thousand prisoners were able to roam free, and had rarely left.

  “How the hell did they get away with that?” I asked.

  “Prison’s a state of mind,” Hobbs said.

  It was something I thought about the rest of the way back.

  The sleep of the dead had long been my sister’s specialty, so it was no surprise to me that she not only dozed off on the return trip to Miner’s Barren but when we arrived she was immovable. Unwakeable. Unshakeable. Beyond walking with her own two feet. Honestly, I didn’t know if hers was a true sleep, since she hadn’t slept all night, or a faked one, because I knew how desperate she was not to part ways with Hobbs. But it didn’t matter; I’d let her have her nap. The time to take her home would come soon enough. Today. Finally, today.

  Hobbs carried her inside and put her on the bed they’d shared the night before. I stood watching like a voyeur as he pulled a sheet up around her, kissed her forehead.