Iona Moon (11 page)

He stared at her quilted blue coat, trying to remember his hands on her belly. “I just want to talk.”

“My father'd beat me if he caught me with you.”

“Then get in and put your head down.” Jay was surprised to hear himself say it, and even more surprised when Muriel walked around the back of the car and did what he asked.

He hadn't worked it out this far, had no plan of where he'd take her, but he drove toward the river, as if by going back to the place it all started, he could begin again and change the past.

Already the white winter sun sank through thin clouds near the horizon, leaving sky and river the same metallic gray streaked with gold. The far shore was black, and the line of trees appeared in the perfect mirror of water. Jay thought everything could be turned upside down and still look exactly the same. The river could open above them, and the sky could flow toward the dam at South Bend. Whether trees grew upward or hung from their roots made no difference. He wanted to explain this to Muriel so that she would understand how solid things could be made insubstantial and the past could be washed away.

“What do you want?” she said. She leaned into her door and rolled down the window even though the air was frigid. He rolled his down too, to show her that anything she did was okay. Anything. And he would do the same. Whatever she wanted.

“What?” she said. He was staring. He saw now that she was scared. Her voice quavered. Her nose was red as if she held back tears. He was sorry. He didn't want her to be afraid of him. He reached for her hand, but she jerked away and held her own hands in her lap, fingers tightly laced.

Jay thought about the slivers of glass in his cheek, how they worked their way to the surface for months after the accident, how they made hard knots before bursting through the skin and dotting his face with blood. “I don't want anything,” he said.

“Then take me home,” said Muriel, “and stop waiting for me. You don't know. You don't know what my father will do.” Tears welled and her eyes glistened.
I'll kill you and go to hell without regret if you ever come near my family again
. Jay knew what Francis Arnoux would do to him. He moved toward her. He wanted to kiss the tears from her cheeks and say,
I
hurt too
. He wanted to touch the back of her neck, under her hair.

But when he put his fingers on Muriel's face, she pulled away, as if his hand burned. She looked at him, eyes wide, mouth tight. He forgot how sorry he was. His touch was vile to her, he saw that now.
Look, baby, I don't have all night
. And to her too, Jay thought, to all of them.
Mommy has a headache
. He wanted to slap her. He wanted to kiss her hard, force her lips apart. He thought of the river at the end of winter, ice heaved up on the shore, great broken chunks, the relentless river, green and black and slow. He'd brought her here to make everything all right, and now she had ruined it again. He had thought of her so tenderly, like a child. Now he wanted to grab her legs and pull her toward him. If he repulsed her, all the better. She was cruel to make him behave so badly, to make him see himself this way.

But his hands were shaking. He was afraid too, and the tears streamed down his face though he didn't know why he was crying. Once his mother had shown him a tree in the woods that had been cleaved and burned by lightning. There was a wound in the trunk, and the tree had two trunks after that, growing out of the scar, forever joined and forever separate. He didn't understand then, but he did now.

He thought there were two kinds of people. The distance between who he was before the accident and who he was after was insurmountable. He had crossed a boundary. He wanted to tell Muriel that she was here, on the other side, with him, that they couldn't go back and be what they were in the past, that the people who loved them then couldn't love them now, could barely see them, in fact; so they should try to love each other because they were twin trunks of the same tree, their lives scarred by the same wound.

What do you want?
She despised him.
Nothing
. She wasn't even pretty anymore, and never would be again.
Nothing
. He headed back to town. It was just past five but already dark.

“Christ was whipped thirty-nine times for a question he couldn't answer,” Muriel said.

He laughed, a loud bark from the chest. “I'm no Jesus,” he said.

“I was thinking about myself,” she whispered.

It was only after he'd dropped her three blocks from her house that he realized what she meant. He imagined her father waiting behind the closed door. He heard the insistent, unanswerable question:
Where the hell have you been?

Jay knew that Muriel thought he'd ruined her life.
No one will marry me now
. That's what she said. She was planning her spinsterhood at fifteen. She was going to live at home, take care of her parents, nurse them in their old age.
I
can't ever make up for the pain I've caused
. He thought they should be grateful to him for what he'd done; now she'd stay, humbled and ashamed, forever their servant—no, slave.

He drove back to the place where they'd parked. A light snow was falling. Jay Tyler reviewed his crimes. He thought of the frog he'd caught when he was seven. He whacked it on the head to stun it, torched a wad of papers and threw the frog on top to see it explode.

He remembered things he'd seen that he had no right to see: Everett Fry's hat blown off his head; Sharla Wilder sitting half naked on her bed; Roy Wilkerson curled into a ball on the sidewalk.

Once, when no one was home, Muriel had led him through her house. In every room there was a different image of Christ: a blue Jesus hanging in the bathroom, hands nailed to the cross—even his blood was tinted blue; Jesus opening his own chest in the living room to reveal his throbbing sacred heart; scattered crayons and the Jesus coloring book spread on the kitchen table: Jesus rolling a stone from a tomb, calling to a man four days dead; Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes; Jesus talking to his disciples at the last supper—
one of you will deny me, one of you will betray me
.

Jay had laughed about the coloring book, but now he thought how good it would be to sit with Muriel's little brother and sister, trying to stay within the lines, how peaceful to come to some understanding as the pictures emerged, as color gave them shape and sense.

There was so much he didn't understand. Why didn't the frog explode—why did it only hiss and shrivel and turn black? Why did his mother touch him so tenderly, then go away? What good did it do to lock herself in the bathroom and let the water run and run? What had Iona Moon told him about winter on the Kila Flats—
Absolute zero, no degrees
. Frozen pipes. Her mother's frozen legs, no, only swollen: she couldn't walk. Same thing. The outhouse. Don't sit down all the way—your ass might freeze to the seat. Don't stand up. You know what will happen.

There was a place in the center of his body that was this cold. Absolute zero. He wanted to lie down with Iona now, to drift without moving, rest without sleeping, to feel the hard bones of her chest against his chest, skin against skin. He didn't understand this either, didn't know how she would heal him, or why, except that she was the only one who wasn't afraid. If he'd had any courage at all, he would have gone to her and tried to explain.

Iona saw the boy as he ducked out the henhouse door. Even in the half light of the January morning she knew the skittish shadow was Matt Fry. He sprinted across the white field, hugging a small bundle to his chest.

A thief has to steal, she thought. A hungry boy doesn't give a damn about what other people say they own. Better to come here. Al Zimmerman or Jack Wilder might shoot first and ask questions later. Matt Fry's own father would shoot for sure.

She heard Hannah say:
All your kindness is never going to change him
. Now she saw that this was true. If her brothers found out about the eggs, they'd go up to the shed and slap Matthew around—
Teach the little shit a lesson
—as if they'd forgotten he was once their friend. But their meanness wasn't going to change him, either. One more blow to the head wouldn't knock any sense into him.

Iona thought it was unfair that her brothers sat around all day waiting for the ground to thaw, while she had to go back to school. They weren't up early enough to expect her to make their breakfast, but they still counted on dinner—even if all they'd managed to do during the day was drive to the dump.

The worst of it was the fact that she'd flunked every class in the fall. That meant summer school with dummies or an extra semester next year. Thinking about it as she stood on the road waiting for the bus made Iona want to forget the whole thing. What good was a high school degree to a girl like her? She wasn't going to college and she could already read.

The bus rolled up before she had a chance to decide to go home, and as she climbed the steps she figured going to school was better than staying in the house with her brothers. Sometimes she was afraid to be alone with them, afraid of what she'd do. She might stick the knife in Leon's belly this time instead of throwing it in the river.

Jeweldeen hadn't saved her a place. Why should she? School had started three weeks ago. She didn't know Iona was coming back. Jeweldeen had been at the funeral, but they didn't talk. Iona couldn't remember if she'd spoken to anyone that day. All she could recollect was being kissed by ladies she knew and ladies she didn't. They smelled of face powder and waxy lipstick. They said she was a good girl to take care of her mama the way she did. She nodded and they squeezed her arm, dabbing at their noses with white handkerchiefs.

Sharla Wilder sobbed as hard as she had the day they'd buried Everett Fry, and Jeweldeen dragged her weepy sister out to the car.

Iona didn't care. She was sick of being kissed, sick of being told she was a good girl. What was so good about sliding a bedpan under your own mother's bottom while she yelled that she couldn't stand it, that the metal felt like a razor, that she'd piss in her bed before she sat on that damn thing again. What did the powdered ladies know. What right did Sharla have to carry on that way while Iona stood outside her own body, dry and thin as air, feeling nothing.

Maybe Sharla thought they had something in common: she'd watched her own mother die. But Maywood Wilder had had the good sense to go fast from pneumonia. She still had all her hair when they buried her. Sick as she was, Maywood Wilder stayed plump.

Mrs. Wilder's casket would have been left open. People must have passed and whispered about how lovely she looked, how serene, dear Maywood gone to her Maker with the smile of an angel on her face.

Hannah Moon's face could offer no peace of mind to the living, so the pine box stayed closed. Her wrinkled mouth would have said that no one leaves without screaming. Her twisted hands would have made the rosy ladies rub their own joints; her withered breasts and swollen feet would have made the men look at their wives too hard.

Iona wanted to push the women away when they bussed the air near her cheek.
You haven't seen her
. But her father stood beside her, holding her hand so tightly that the tips of her fingers went numb. She thanked the ladies for their kindness. Did she really say that? Liar. Only one person knew enough to say something true. Flo Hamilton had stripped Hannah Moon at the funeral home, had sponged the skin with alcohol and dressed her again. “You took good care of your mother,” she whispered. Flo Hamilton said the same words as a dozen others, but she'd seen the sores and knew Iona had tried to keep them clean. She saw the ribbon Iona had tied in her mother's brittle hair; she saw that each toe had been washed.

Jeweldeen sat with Bonnie Zimmerman on the bus. Bonnie was the only other high school girl who came from the Flats. They waved to Iona, but Iona pretended not to see. Kids quieted down when she passed, as if they were afraid of her. She found an empty seat near the back, hunched down and stared out the window at the ripples of snow that had blown across the fields and frozen in hard waves.

Iona was the last one off the bus. She figured she'd go straight to homeroom and wouldn't have to talk to anybody all day. But Jeweldeen was waiting.

“Fetterhoff's gonna be glad to see you,” Jeweldeen said.

“I can hardly wait.”

“I can hear him already: ‘Miss Moon, how good of you to honor us with your presence.'”

“Sonuvabitch.”

“Fetterhoff never had a mother—he's just a worm that crawled out of a hole.”

“We could cut,” Iona said, “go hang out at Sharla's.”

“You wanna be in high school till you're twenty?”

Iona shook her head. It was bad enough to be in school at seventeen.

In February the cold broke for three days in a row. Iona and Jeweldeen and Bonnie Zimmerman sat on the concrete wall at the edge of the parking lot trying to smoke as many cigarettes as they could before lunch break was over.

“Chicken?” Iona said.

“No way,” said Jeweldeen.

“Then roll up your sleeves.”

“I said,
no way.
”

“I thought you meant you weren't a chicken.”

“I meant no way I'd play chicken with someone as crazy as you.”

“What's with you two?” Bonnie said. She was short and pudgy, cute in a little-girl way.

“Iona plays this stupid game,” Jeweldeen said.

“
We
play this game,” said Iona. “We play lots of games.” She nudged Jeweldeen, thinking of the summer they were ten years old, the summer they locked themselves in the cellar and took off all their clothes every day for a week. They rubbed against each other and rolled on the dirty floor. They kissed and pinched each other's nipples. Sometimes it felt good and sometimes it didn't. The last day Jeweldeen said,
You have to touch me
—
here
. But when Iona did what she asked, Jeweldeen didn't want to play anymore.