The Moon Sisters: A Novel

by Therese Walsh

  “The light was in my blind spot. It was—” She lifted her arm, then slapped it back to the limb when her body slipped.

  “Careful!”

  “I can’t hold on,” she said. “The tree’s made of butter.”

  “Yes, you will fucking hold on! There is no other option than you holding on!”

  This was not going to happen. I would not lose more family. I tested the weight of the branch under my foot, but didn’t dare try it when the wood turned to water before my eyes.

  It’s just the soup, I told myself. There’s still a branch there. It’s not water, or butter.

  “Olivia, you need to move back slowly, okay?” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “Move little by little, and I’ll help—”

  “Mama’s out there somewhere.”

  “If she is, she’d want you to come over here right now.” I felt a surge of anger, of desperation. “Right now, Olivia Moon. Do you hear me? Move.”

  The pressure in my chest eased when her feet began to edge toward me. One inch. Another. I did my best to ignore the green things above her head, buzzing around her like dragonflies on mushrooms.

  “That’s so good, Olivia, keep doing that,” I said as she made her way closer. Branch water splashed my arm when she gave a small kick. “Careful. Careful. Keep coming.”

  It happened when I tried to stretch a little more, to latch on to her ankle or any available part of her. My bag caught on something. I reached behind me until I felt the marbles, and then I pulled off my bag. Let it drop. Fall toward grasses that seemed a hundred miles down.

  A huge blast of energy rose up in waves of light and Olivia reeled back, let go, fell and fell and fell away from the tree to follow the bag.

  I screamed.

  The ground stopped breathing.

  And whatever was left of the sun went dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Hope Chest

  OLIVIA

  Goodbye wasn’t as simple as packing up clothes and furniture and deciding in your head that that’s the way it was going to be. Goodbye wasn’t a thinking thing; it was a feeling thing. Goodbye was hard. Goodbye took time.

  Sometimes the best way to say goodbye was to say it as if it wasn’t forever. Goodbye, I’ll see you again soon. Goodbye, see you tomorrow, maybe—or next week, or next year. Goodbye, see you at the tree.

  Mama never said goodbye, not ever. Instead she’d say, There’s a long way to go before the end. That made it easier, somehow.

  Chicks, chirping. Yellow birds, full of feathers, fluttering around their nest. They surrounded me, noisy. I shushed them with my eyes clenched.

  “You’re awake! Good,” someone said. This was a voice I didn’t know, a tunnel with streamers hanging from the top.

  I tried to open my eyes, and failed. Sank back into the darkness.

  The next time I heard the birds, I realized they weren’t birds at all; they were squeaky wheels.

  I willed my eyes open, heard the tunnel-streamer voice again.

  “There you are.” She leaned over me—a plump dark-skinned woman. “Don’t be afraid, sweetie. You’re in the hospital. You’ve been asleep for a good long while—half a day. You had a nasty fall and broke a rib, but try not to worry. We’re going to take care of you.”

  Warm blankets covered my body, and it felt as if there were a few stuffed inside my head, too. Something tightened around my arm, and I jerked back.

  “That’s just a machine taking your blood pressure. I’ll take it off in a minute,” the woman said. “You’ll be able to see your family soon, once you do a few things for me. Can you follow this light with your eyes?”

  “No,” I said, “I can’t.” And then I started to cry.

  A short while later, Papa, Babka, and Jazz came to see me. Jazz cried, said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life. I thought you’d died!” Babka kissed me a hundred times with her dewy lips and draped rosary beads over my chest. Papa leaned his head against mine, said, “I can’t believe I let you go … could’ve lost you both … was such a bad father.” His voice curled through the air like smoke rings from a pipe, and he smelled like cut grass again instead of vodka.

  A nurse poked her head around a curtain, asked if I’d like some ice chips. I nodded. My throat hurt. My chest ached. Light streamed around me. How many hours had I lost?

  “What happened?” I asked my family. The last thing I recalled was kissing Hobbs in the tree house.

  “I couldn’t get to you in time,” Jazz said.

  “Get to me?”

  “You were so far away. I tried, but—”

  I noticed Babka reach for my sister. “There, there, little macka. It is not your fault.”

  “Jazz? Just tell me,” I said.

  “You were on a tree limb,” Jazz started. “Do you remember that?”

  I didn’t remember.

  “My bag dropped,” she said. “You fell right after it, right off the limb. You really don’t remember anything?”

  I didn’t, and said so.

  “It’s all right, Liv. The important thing is you’re safe now.” Papa sat on the bed beside me. “We’re lucky you weren’t hurt a lot worse. We’re lucky you’re both all right after what you’ve been through. So lucky.”

  “You could’ve died,” said Jazz. “You could’ve broken your neck or spine. We were so far up, and it looked farther at the time. It looked like a mile-long drop, though I guess that was from the mushrooms. I will never eat mushrooms again.”

  My skin prickled as pieces of the night before returned to memory. The soup. The obituary. The lights. My despair. Everything Jazz had told me. The slick-butter feel of the limb under my hands. And then I remembered what had come before even that: the Bill bell. Danger at the house. “Where’s Hobbs?”

  “I think he’s still with the police,” Jazz said, resting her hand over my shoulder when I struggled to pull myself upright. “Trust me, it’s better to hear this lying down.”

  The coins Hobbs had taken from Bill had been stolen goods, she said, and when Hobbs tried to sell them he triggered the long memory of one West Virginia shop owner. The theft, though it happened more than a dozen years ago, had been big news because it also involved murder, arson, and the kidnapping of a young boy.

  “The boy was Hobbs,” Jazz said before doubling my shock. “Red Grass is his grandfather.”

  Reginald Guthrie was his real name, a retired insurance salesman who’d never given up hope that his grandson, whose body hadn’t been recovered from the fire that had killed Reginald’s son and daughter-in-law, was still alive somewhere. When the shop owner saw the coins Hobbs brought into the store in April—the combination of rare treasures too unique to be coincidental—he contacted not the police to share his shop’s footage but the man whose grief and well-publicized frustration with the authorities had touched so many of them: Reginald. The kid, the shop owner had told him, looked like a train tramp. And the shop, as it turned out, was close to the rails.

  “Red made posters out of that footage, plastered them in train towns across the state,” said Jazz, as a nurse settled a cold cup in my hands. “Finally, a train worker called to say he’d seen Hobbs. That’s when Red knew he’d do anything to make contact with the kid who’d tried to sell his son’s coins. Anything.”

  He read two books on train hopping, grew some scruff, and adopted a less polished vocabulary. He bought light camping gear, a dependable flashlight, and a tracking device. It was May when he infiltrated the train community, and he admitted that he nearly killed himself on his first few runs. He thought it would take a week, at most, to find Hobbs; it took a month. Harder still was trying to get a look at the coins, proving the link to his son’s murder. And because of some confusion about Hobbs’s real birthday—and the fact that he used to be a plump, blond child and not a thin, dark hopper—it wasn’t until Reginald escaped the outbuilding that he knew for certain that Hobbs was family.

  “I don’t have all the details,” Ja
zz said, “but after we left, Red contacted that expert we met with, to verify that the coins matched the set stolen from his son. When he learned they did, he drove back to J.D.’s in his own car to find out where we’d gone. That’s when he saw the coat.”

  “Coat?” I asked around the ice in my mouth.

  I leaned close as Jazz explained how J.D. had pulled Hobbs’s baby coat from a trunk of Alice’s old things while looking for a pair of sweats for Jazz. It was still out when Red went back to the cabin—a link to Hobbs’s old life that he recognized. J.D. found Red crying with the coat in his hands, and after hearing the story he led the way to Bill’s place himself.

  “No one was hurt,” said Jazz, as I crunched through my ice. “Bill was asleep when they got there, so I don’t know, maybe Red sat on him. However it happened, it sounds like there wasn’t even a fight. Hobbs learned it all after Betty rang the bell, and he ran to the house.”

  “Poor Hobbs.” My fingers dug into the cup. “He must be so overwhelmed.”

  “He wasn’t exactly open to what Red had to say, I guess. He walked out after hearing the story, even though Bill didn’t deny any of it, then minutes later found you lying like the dead at the bottom of a tree. What a mess he was for a while, holding you before the medics arrived, threatening you with beyond-the-grave curses if you dared die. I thought you were already gone.”

  I pictured this: Hobbs rocking me back and forth, so like Papa with Mama before the ambulance took her away. The memory of falling from the tree came to me then. The fear that I might die. The absolute recognition that I didn’t want to, regardless of how I’d felt minutes before, when I learned a truth that had made my insides wither and ache.

  My grandfather was dead. Dead before my mother by a week.

  He had to have been on her mind as she sat with her pages that morning, when she’d spoken about wrong hopes and wrong dreams and alluded to a wasted life. Had she been steeped in regret over not sending those letters?

  Maybe Mama never sent the letters not because she feared that her father might not forgive her but because she knew—with ninety-nine percent of herself—that he never would. That’s what she believed, believed, why she never could bring herself to take action and why it might have hit her so hard when he died—when that one percent chance dropped to zero.

  If she’d felt such a loss of hope that there seemed no other option …

  Could she have?

  Would she have?

  Did she imagine, even for a moment, that a world without her parent in it was too bleak a world to face? That he was waiting for her at the tree? That the oven was there, right there, and all she needed was an absence of light, of fire, to make the pain go away? It took just one desperate moment to do something permanent. One desperate moment when everything felt black, when it seemed all hope was gone.

  And what if it had happened—this worst thing? Did that mean she didn’t want us? Didn’t love us? That we weren’t, never had been, enough?

  Hadn’t she wanted more for her life than to reconcile with her father? I knew she had. She wanted to learn how to speak French. She wanted to send one of Papa’s songs to Nashville. She wanted Tramp to set up a town newspaper, even if it came out only once a month, and she wanted to help run it. She wanted to get her license back if she could. She wanted Jazz to go to college. She wanted Babka to start baking pepperoni rolls. She wanted to paint the kitchen pink. She wanted grandchildren someday. Lots of them.

  I wish I could go back in time and tell her that maybe hope was no more than a foolish fire, but that maybe it could lead you to your heart’s desires if you took a chance. I wish I could tell her that she could believe in her dreams with one percent of herself or ninety-nine percent or any percent in between, and she could believe whatever she needed to about her parent’s last thoughts before dying.

  So could I.

  I felt it inside me like a flame, a pilot light that would never go out. Hope. Felt, too, the tingling of my feet, ready to climb me back into a tree, even if it meant I’d fall out of it again.

  “I hope Mama knows she made it to the glades,” I said to my family. “I hope she’s happy, that she knows we love her no matter what. And we’ll miss her, and never forget her.”

  Babka squeezed my hand.

  “I can’t believe you live in that mushroom-soup world all the time,” Jazz said, her voice a wobbly line. “With all those shapes and colors flying around in your head. I don’t know how you get anything done at all.”

  I would’ve said something about all of that, but the squeaky wheels came back. Chicks, chirping. Yellow birds, full of feathers, fluttering around their nest.

  And I wanted to listen.

  It was late in the afternoon before Hobbs arrived, and I knew right away that something was wrong, because he wouldn’t come close. Maybe he didn’t want to hug me because he was afraid he’d hurt my rib. When the nurse came in to check my blood pressure and talk over my discharge instructions—there wouldn’t be any tree climbing for a while—he stood at the window with his back turned. And, after she left, he said what we were both thinking.

  “You’re going to have to go now. So am I.”

  But everything had changed.

  I slid out of bed and stepped beside him, my feet covered with blue hospital slippers. It seemed that it might be a chocolate coffee day outside—the sky was bright, the sun shone—but the glass was cold under my fingers.

  “It’s not goodbye,” I told him.

  “Maybe it should be,” he said. “I’d be no good for a girl like you. Your sister sees that, has from the start. And you’d get over it—that taste in your mouth.”

  Once upon a time, Stan had pulled away from me, too, when things got hard. But I hadn’t cared enough to fight for that relationship. Now I cared. Now I’d fight.

  “Stubborn hopper.” I took his hand, made him face me. “I won’t get over it, because I don’t want to. And you can’t scare me off with talk of damage or whatever you’ve done in the name of survival or however much ink you’ve put on your skin, either. That’s love. Tastes good, doesn’t it?”

  He tipped his head, and I thought I might’ve noticed a flick of his tongue, a lick of lips. When I hugged him, his fingers settled on the seam of my gown, spread against my back.

  “What is it that you want?” I asked. “I mean, deep down.”

  He pushed his face against my neck. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to want anymore.”

  I knew he must be thinking about the kidnapping and who he was in truth—Christopher Guthrie. Hobbs didn’t want to talk about any of that, he’d said, or about Bill or Red Grass, either.

  “Forget about wanting, then.” I pulled back enough to set my face just beside his, and looked at him as best I could. “What do you hope for? Not just the hopper who wants to find dragons but all the layers that you are, Hobbs and Christopher both.”

  “You know I don’t hope,” he said, but the upturned edges of his voice cracked and I knew he was thinking about it. Thinking family, thinking a home, thinking someone I can trust, thinking love, thinking someone to wait for me to figure it all out.

  “Well, I do. I hope you see you have a choice now.” I put my right hand over his left eye. “You can focus on the past”—then shifted it to his right—“or the future. It’s up to you. I’ve already made my choice, and I can wait for you to make yours. Just don’t make me wait too long. I know we’re young and all that, but I’m not so good at waiting.”

  “I’d never guess that about you.”

  He let loose a sound that might’ve been the start of a laugh, or a cry. I kissed him after that—a kiss so full of want that it was like a hundred slips of Christmas Eve paper.

  “Livya,” he said. “Don’t attach.”

  I shook my head—too late—though I knew already I’d set him free if that’s what he needed, and hope he’d come back around in time, like the sun. But I wouldn’t say goodbye. Instead, I borrowed a line from Mama. “There�
��s a long way to go before the end.”

  AUGUST

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Undying

  JAZZ

  At one point when the soup was still in my system I thought I understood all the secrets of the universe, but once the mushrooms wore off all that knowledge evaporated out of my head, which just figures. What I did know—what took me twenty-two years to learn—was that life was what you made of it. Perception was everything. And lying to yourself wasn’t always a bad thing.

  I guess I should be glad it didn’t take fifty.

  Our family doctor confirmed that my sister was “fit as a slightly fractured fiddle” three weeks after she’d fallen from a tree. She was lucky, he said, that she hadn’t broken her neck in that fall. The light Olivia said she’d seen shining like a will-o’-the-wisp in her blind spot that night in the tree—the one I’d hoped was a sign of her vision coming back—was a photism. All the visuals created by Olivia’s synesthesia were photisms, too—things forged by her brain that only she could see—and they were exacerbated by the mushroom soup. Dr. Patrick, who might’ve become West Virginia’s expert on the matter, said that synesthetes with partial loss of sight often reported seeing things in their blind spots. I couldn’t believe that finding a synesthete with a blind spot was common enough to generate this knowledge, but what did I know? Maybe they all stared at the sun.

  Olivia, though, wasn’t interested in science, and insisted she knew what that light had been and didn’t need a doctor to tell her what she saw. I let it go. Despite her bill of good health, she’d been tetchy in the last few weeks—probably because she’d given Hobbs our phone number before coming home and he hadn’t called.