The Moon Sisters: A Novel

by Therese Walsh

  “You like her,” I said. The idea didn’t bother me as much as it had twenty-four hours before.

  He didn’t deny it, and even though he didn’t confirm it, either, he lingered beside her and moved wayward strands of hair off her face, tucked them behind her ear.

  “I’ll miss her,” he said. “Her and those big eyes.”

  “Eyes she messed up pretty good,” I said, watching his face for a reaction. But he surprised me.

  “She told me about that. Must’ve hurt like hell to stare at the sun. Tells me it hurt even more not to.” He kissed her forehead one more time, then stood. “She says she doesn’t even know why she did it.”

  He noticed when I swallowed hard.

  “Do you know?”

  I shook my head. There was no room in my head for that question just then. “I need to get to a phone.”

  “I’ll take you.”

  It was well into the afternoon by the time we arrived at a gas station, which was more than thirty miles away.

  “There has to be a closer station,” I’d said when we first started to travel, and he’d given me an E.T.A.

  “Welcome to the hills,” he said. “You should’ve used the phone at the Visitors Center.”

  I didn’t bother arguing, because he was right. I’d been wrapped up, thinking about prisons and West Virginia on the walk back. Living in Tramp had always seemed like my lifetime sentence, regardless of what my mother said or what she might’ve wished for me. But maybe what I wanted to escape was all in my head and not so much about West Virginia, with all its hills and layers. Maybe I wasn’t so stuck. All those prisoners stayed put, after all, when they could’ve run. Because they were safe where they were, or because leaving was a risk.

  I’d never spent so much time thinking as I had over the last few days, but I had to admit—as inconvenient as it was now—that maybe having all those thoughts was worth missing the chance to make a phone call.

  When we arrived at the station, Hobbs donned his usual sweatshirt and pulled up the hood. Some of his tattoos were beginning to bleed through the makeup, enough that it might make someone look twice. He followed me inside to size up the junk food while I went to get change. I was ready to go back out and call home when I saw him filling a cup with coffee.

  “You want one?” he asked when my gaze lingered on the rising steam.

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Whatever the hell this was, Hobbs and I were not becoming friends. We were just tolerating each other because we knew we’d only have to do it for a while longer. Still, I cracked a smile when he held the door open for an old woman a minute later, while I spoke with my grandmother.

  The call started well enough. Babka was happy to hear from me, and to let me know that the bus had been repaired and was ready to take me to my job. My father, too, had been doing much better, she said, though I’d believe that particular report when I could see evidence of it with my own eyes. When I told her that we’d be coming home later today, that we’d found someone to drive us, that we’d visited the glades but hadn’t seen anything and that Olivia wasn’t all that happy about it, her voice turned heavy.

  “This is going to be a thing, I just know it,” I told Hobbs on the ride back to J.D.’s. I couldn’t shake my grandmother’s disappointment, even though I should’ve felt good about it all—that I’d done what was expected of me, and that I could finally go home again.

  “What do you mean, a thing?”

  “I mean the sort of thing that keeps coming up every damned day for the rest of the year.” My chin settled into the palm of my hand as I leaned against the door. “About how Olivia made it to the glades, fulfilling one of our mother’s lifelong ambitions, but was unable to see a wisp. There will be dreams and wishes and all sorts of bullshit my family insists on when things don’t happen the way they want. My grandmother will be right in the middle of it, too, maybe even my father.”

  It began to drizzle.

  “You know,” Hobbs said, turning on the wipers, “I used to see ghost lights all the time up at my old house.”

  I turned to stare at him. “What?”

  “Not a bog up there, it’s swampland,” he said. “But the lights are common in the summertime as long as you’re looking for them with peeled eyes. I never bothered to mention it because Livya stressed how important it was to go to Cranberry Glades in particular, because of your mom’s story. But if it’s lights she wants to see, well … I could take her. Take you both.”

  “By old house, do you mean the one you shared with your father?”

  “Yeah.” He squinted, and I wondered about his thoughts, which horror he might’ve been remembering. Then decided I didn’t want to know.

  “I haven’t heard the best of things about him,” I said, with as much care as I could muster.

  “There’s a neighbor, Betty, whose land butts up against ours. You can see the lights as well from her place, and Bill would never know we were there. Trust me, she hates him, too.”

  I ran my thumb nail along the foam cup in my lap. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “No?”

  “We’re delaying the inevitable. Better Olivia deal with her disappointments now. She may not like it, but she needs to face reality.”

  The truck buzzed when we rolled over the edge of a rumble strip, and I realized that he’d been looking at me.

  “What? Watch where you’re driving.”

  “You feel that way, do you?” he said, turning his eyes back toward the road. I was unable to read his expression.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I do.”

  We traveled down one road, then another, on the way back to the cabin. Soon we’d veer off these roads altogether, and onto rutted paths. Reaching a place wasn’t always a neat undertaking.

  “Besides,” I said as an afterthought, “I have important things coming up next week, and plans to make.”

  “Yeah, I know. Congratulations on your job with the funeral home. I’m sure the competition was stiff.”

  “Hysterical. You could have a career as a stand-up comedian.”

  I turned away from his smirk and back toward the window, as we passed a mail-delivery truck, a man blowing leaves across his yard, and a child selling stones alongside the road.

  J.D. met us on the packed-dirt drive behind his place as Hobbs shut down the engine, his hair ruffled and his jaw set.

  “Something’s wrong,” Hobbs said, and we leaped out, my first thoughts on Olivia.

  But this wasn’t about Olivia.

  Red Grass was gone. Sometime between breakfast and lunch, he’d freed himself and left through a cracked window, J.D. explained, digging his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  “You’ve got to get the hell out of here, man,” he told Hobbs, his thick brows furrowed. “Disappear for a few months. I don’t know how long Red Grass has been out or what he’s been doing. Bill could be on his way right now.”

  A guilty heat swept through me. Though the situation with his father was real enough, Hobbs didn’t have all the information. Not yet. Maybe some prisons were, as he’d said at the glades, a state of mind. I didn’t want any part of that. Not when I might hold the power to set someone free from their own personal Oran, point out the absence of bars.

  This. Was the right thing.

  “He might not be working with Bill,” I said, and their attention locked on me.

  I spilled it all. How Red Grass had come up with the plan for me to arrive on J.D.’s doorstep with the gun in his side. How he’d forged that plan so that I could be with Olivia again, and how I hadn’t cared about his personal motivations then because I’d wanted my sister back. How it was Red Grass’s phone number on the poster, not anyone else’s. I pulled it from my pocket and showed them.

  Hobbs snatched it from my hands. “This picture didn’t come from my old man.” His eyes flickered between us. “This was me at a coin shop a few months back.”

  He described that brief visit, how
he’d brought the coins there after taking them from Bill, which had mostly been an act of defiance. He’d long suspected that his father had stolen the coins once upon a time, but he’d never understood his refusal to sell them; it wasn’t as if each one was labeled with a UPC code. But that day Hobbs began to understand. The shop owner disappeared behind a door for a few too many minutes after asking a few too many questions. Hobbs knew a setup when he felt one; he took the coins and fled before the cops showed up. Everything he’d imagined about the coins changed after that. If his instincts were right, they were more than stolen goods. They were linked to a graver crime—something that could land Bill in more trouble than he’d ever seen before.

  And Hobbs, too, if he wasn’t careful.

  “You think Red Grass is working with the law?” J.D. asked, and I remembered the older man’s flashlight; Red Grass had said it was the kind used by the police.

  “I asked him yesterday if he was a bounty hunter. I asked him if he was working with your father,” I told Hobbs. “He said no.”

  “Means nothing,” said Hobbs. “He could be anything, be working for anyone as well as himself. He’s a liar, sure as I’m standing here.” He threw his head back, and I thought he might howl at the sky. “I should take those coins back to where I found them—right back up to Spades Hallow. If anyone should go down for this—”

  J.D. nodded. “Don’t just think about it. Do it. Keep the truck. Take the girls home, then go and get rid of those coins once and for all.”

  Hobbs pinched at his chin, pinched off his makeup, and left a smear of color in its wake. A day ago, I had a different feeling about those tattoos. Now I knew what they hid, and what they stood for. A badge, of sorts. A badge of survival. Maybe he shouldn’t be so quick to hide it.

  “I could do that,” he said. “Or I could drive up to get rid of the coins, and show Livya her ghost lights before I take them home.”

  Before I could think to respond, I noticed Olivia a few feet away.

  “What ghost lights?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Right Tree, Wrong Dream

  OLIVIA

  Mama and I talked about death sometimes.

  What do you think it’s like? I’d ask, and she’d tell me the same thing every time.

  Her father believed there was a big tree on the other side of life. When you died, it was your job to find that tree. Maybe you had to journey to reach it, maybe it took a long time. But when you succeeded your whole family would be there waiting for you. Not just the people who’d already died, either, but everyone. Because time was immaterial on the other side.

  Will death hurt? I’d ask.

  No, she’d say. I don’t think anything can hurt more than the hardest parts of life.

  Mama had built her story around a tree, but it wasn’t a place of joy and reunion; it was a site of entrapment. It wasn’t anything I put together until after she was gone. But as soon as I made the connection I decided not to wait for Christmas to make a wish. I took out a slip of paper and wrote:

  I wish Mama finds the right tree, a good one, and that it’s better than anything she ever dreamed. I wish I’m hugging her there, right now.

  It’s been under my pillow ever since.

  Betty was crazy, I learned after we arrived at Spades Hallow. Not that I meant to hold that against her.

  “Get outta here!” Her yowl shredded everything around us after we pulled into her drive and Hobbs turned off the ignition. In the shadows before us, I was able to make out the hulking form of a person. “I got me a gun and I’ll be damned if I won’t enjoy using it to splatter that melon on your shoulders all over the yard. Dogs haven’t had a snack in a while,” she said, then added, “haven’t humped nothing in a while, neither.”

  “What the hell?” said Jazz. “Please turn around.”

  “Betty, it’s me, Christopher,” said Hobbs.

  I nudged him in the side. “Christopher?”

  “Hush.” He nudged me back. “That’s classified.”

  “Christopher doesn’t have normal skin,” Betty said. “Who are you really? Mafia? Russian spy? I don’t know the codes.”

  “It’s me, look.” He mopped a hand across his face, and I realized he was wiping off his makeup. “I covered up the art so Satan wouldn’t recognize me.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” said Betty.

  “Satan?” Jazz seemed to sink more deeply into her seat when Hobbs opened his door. “Why am I not liking this?”

  “It’s her name for Bill,” he said, and we slid across the seat after him, as Betty warned us not to step on her fairy rings.

  The pebbled path that wound its way to her house was hard to distinguish in the evening light, and I faltered a few times, too wound up maybe to attend to the business of walking. Hobbs had been optimistic about seeing will-o’-the-wisps there, even as Jazz warned me to keep a tether on my hopes.

  Be careful, Babka had said in my dream, pointing toward Saturday.

  Everyone asked that I hold back in some way, but I couldn’t help my excitement. I felt sure that tonight would bring good things, and that I could be careful enough without needing a tether at all. Jazz hadn’t even complained about making the trip, which in and of itself was a small miracle, a fateful sign that things were on the right track at last.

  “Take off your Mafia shoes before you go inside,” said Betty, as we walked up a set of narrow wooden stairs. “You’ll ruin my soup.”

  “We can stay out if you want,” Hobbs said. “I’d like to show off the dog house before I head to Bill’s.”

  “You’ll go and eat some soup while I talk you out of whatever fool idea you have rattling around in that skull of yours,” said Betty. “Don’t argue about it, either, Mister Skin-and-Bones. Got hemorrhoids bigger than you.” She poked him in the side.

  “Dog house?” I asked.

  “Wait and see,” he said.

  The orange crescents that showered over me when Betty creaked open her door reminded me of the art on the novel in Jazz’s bag—which, I noticed, she wore as always on her back.

  “You need surgery to detach yourself from that thing.” I nudged the pack. “It’s like a growth.”

  “Don’t hassle me,” she said. “If I don’t trust that people won’t paw through my things when I leave them behind, you have no one but yourself to blame.”

  I wasn’t interested right then in Jazz’s backpack. I had everything I needed in my pocket—the salvage of Mama’s remains, all that I had left of her after the spill.

  It would be enough.

  My first thought when we stepped inside Betty’s house was that it was funny she’d asked us to remove our shoes. I’d seen pictures of houses being renovated before. Mama used to get a lot of magazines, and one that she sometimes picked up was a home-builder sort of thing—as if we might someday add on or update the kitchen or whatever. Never before had I seen a house torn down to the bone in person, but Betty’s place had been stripped to beams, bare bulbs, and concrete floors, and looked as huge and white as heaven. Her husband had died a decade earlier, as it turned out, and he’d been in the middle of a remodel when it happened. Betty never finished the place. She decided that since the kitchen and the bathroom were functional, and because there were fewer hiding spots for the Russians with the house wide open, she’d leave it the way it was.

  The faint scent of wood married with the stronger smell of good cooking, as Jazz and I sat at a green laminate table. Soon we were shoveling spoonfuls of garlicky, buttery, lemony mushroom soup into our mouths, while Hobbs and Betty debated who would go near enough to Bill’s—or Satan’s Outhouse, as Betty called it—to find out if he was at home. Hobbs didn’t like mushrooms, he whispered to me at one point, but neither did he like upsetting Betty, so he pretended to eat and poured soup into my bowl on the sly.

  “It should be me,” Betty said, ladling more soup into Jazz’s bowl. “That man’s been afraid of me since the time I got him drunk and burned off half h
is arse hairs.”

  “Let’s pause the debate for a few minutes.” Hobbs took the spoon out of my hand, set it on the table, and encouraged me to my feet. “I want to show Wee Bit something before it gets dark.”

  Together we weaved through beams, before Hobbs took us onto what seemed to be a porch.

  “Careful, there’s a loose nail there,” he said. “Gotta fix that.”

  Again, we stepped out into the warm summer air, but this time a new excitement wound through me as I took in the gloaming. “It’s almost dark.”

  “Almost,” he said. “But light enough to make it out. Here, take off your socks. It’ll be better this way.”

  “There aren’t any bees out there, are there?”

  “No bees,” he said.

  A minute later, he guided me sockless up a small hill. I took careful steps beside him, my mind still on bees.

  “Hearing about your mother’s story made me think you might like this,” he said.

  “This must be one impressive dog house.”

  “Just wait.” He stopped at the top of the hill. “All right. Do you see it?”

  I scanned the ground for something stubby and full of fur. “Look up, Olivia,” he said, and pointed.

  Nestled in a tree before us was what looked like a tree house. “Is there a sun fairy up there, gagged and bound and needing our assistance?” I asked with a wry tone as I tried to take it all in—the angles of the slim structure, the way it sat with surety in the crook of the big tree.

  “I built that when I was, I don’t know, maybe twelve, out of old slabs of wood that Betty’s husband, Jake, had hanging around. He helped me build it, too, knew I needed a place to go to get away from Bill sometimes. Most times. That shelter survived plenty of storms, so we must’ve built it well enough. Saved my life a time or two.”

  “Things were that bad?”

  He didn’t answer. I could tell him then what I thought I knew, what I’d guessed from the dark needlework through his voice. But that would be a cheat. Hobbs would have to tear those particular walls down to the bone for me himself, when he was ready. In due time.