Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 02 - Spring Moon (2 page)

“Getting off the chairlift?” he asked.

“Exactly.”

“Chance looked like a rocket ship,” he said.

“Once he was launched,” I said.

Johanna smiled peacefully as she checked us over. Babies made the transition from inland-sea-to-air in gentle hands. Nobody got turned upside-down and butt slapped at the birthing center.

“Woolly Mammoth,” said Jon. “That really is reality as a concept.”

“It was that bad melting glaciers movie you rented,” I said.

I might never have heard about reality as a concept if it weren’t for day one of 8th grade English. The teacher, aka The Toad for his protruding eyes and standing room only facial warts, announced that he would be teaching
reality as a concept
. I made the mistake of mentioning it to my mother when I got home.

She was punishing a calculator at the dining room table, a pencil so chewed she had lead on her teeth. She looked crazed under her bright desk light, like she was only seconds away from confessing to hit and run. My father had just died and she was studying financial planning to ward off old age living out of a shopping cart. She had a bleak concept of reality. In her defense, it was before high-concept Goldman Sachs and the reality-bending Bernie Madoff. Mom’s new husband called that dispiriting, though hardly novel, period in U.S. economic history circa GSBM.

Mom claimed that by the time c.GSBM rolled around she’d lost her virginity more than once, a claim few women bother to make, investing in schemes that were more 1960s than twenty-first century. She called them
granola investments
. She finally stopped trying to guess what my father would want her to do and went full throttle into companies that make stuff in multiples of a million, most of it in China. She said all the junk was made in Japan when she was a girl.

My father always said that Japan shipped their generation pieces of radioactive Hiroshima, one piece of junk at a time. He used to kid, at least I think he was kidding, that it was a miracle none of his kids had two heads. I had my father’s offbeat take on life, some of the time. A trait my mother had loved in him, but seesawed over in me. Whatever. Mom’s Chinese junk sailed her through the stormy economic meltdown.

After my father died, Mom spent twenty years drunk, alone, and blaming herself. She finally met Arthur at a walking group. He is honorable and honest, and older man handsome. It helps that he’s tall. He not only puts up with her, but he revived her sex life, which made her the envy of her friends. He was in AA; she joined. It was nonnegotiable.

Mom wasn’t on such solid ground back when I was in 8th grade and announcing that reality is just a concept. She looked up from her textbook, eyes darty with fear to find herself alone in the parenting spotlight without cue cards, or a spouse who grasped the unconventional.

“Reality as a concept?” she asked. “What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re going to make vision boards.”

She called the school principal; it took a few tries before they understood who she was. The next day I was switched from Vision Boards 101 to diagramming dreary sentences and sniffing out split infinitives.

The kids who stayed in the class laughed themselves stupid all year, said it was the biggest skate they’d ever had. Then they struggled, and their parents complained, all through 9th grade English when they were thrown back into reality as a noun. I sure as hell could pick a noun out of a crowd.

I suspected, still, that they all sailed and galloped through life on the racing yachts and studly stallions, equine and human, they’d glued to their vision boards. I skip high school reunions; they spelled my name wrong in the annual. I’m waiting for life to bring them all to their knees a time or two before I show up. Based on Facebook lurking, there are still a few holdouts.

Lucky for the principal, and me, it was Mom’s only foray into acting parent territory at the school, ground that had been held by my father until he died in a plane crash a few months before my 13th birthday. Double lucky me, Mom’s trespass spared me the heartfelt pity and heartless ridicule that only teens can dish out. I could see myself carefully cutting out little Munch
The Scream
heads and sticking them all around the edges of my plane crash vision board. My father’s death was not wonder-full.

I finally escaped high school and went to college for a major in anthropology and a minor in psychology. What Jon calls my binary major in reality as a concept. He majored in math and opened restaurants. I became a film production designer, aka Advanced Vision Boards.

Jon and I lay on the bed with Chance draped naked across our bare chests. He was already nuzzling for the nipple while Jon gently smoothed the skin on his wrinkled feet. Johanna started herbs steeping for a bath and left quietly. Jon couldn’t stop wondering at his son any more than he could when Meggie of India was born.              

Jon had stayed in India a week; long enough to knock me up. Then he went home to Hawaii to nip at the heels of his three restaurants, and help his daughter Chana make the move to college. He’s an irons-in-the-fire kind of man.

“Chance Jon Moon,” he said. “That still sound okay to you?”

“I love it. Three good names.”

Chance was my father’s middle name. Margaret was Margaret Spring Moon, because Spring is my last name. We hadn’t planned on Chance, so the double entendre amused us. Jon was 46 and I was 37, we would have stopped at Meggie.

“I think we better do something,” I said. “That stuck shoulders thing could be the end of me.”

“I’ll call next week,” he said.

“I think we’re done, don’t you?”

“I am, but I’m older. It’s really up to you.”

“Will we still do the fun part?”

“Oh yeah.”

He’d stashed his phone in the nightstand drawer, but it still buzzed and clattered like a handful of Mexican jumping beans. Someone was always calling from one of the restaurants. He pulled it out, looked at the number, and frowned.

“I need to turn this off,” he said. “I’ll have Chana call on your phone.”

“I don’t have it. I didn’t plan to take calls during labor. Just turn it off.”

“She needs to be able to reach us.”

He looked tense while he laid it on a towel in the drawer so at least it wouldn’t clatter around. He put on a shirt and flip-flops and left to ask Chana to take Meggie for some lunch and give us time to bond with Chance. His phone buzzed on for attention.

I got into the herbal salt bath and Johanna handed me Chance. He stretched out and relaxed in the familiar mineral soup. Ed had called her for a progress report. I was excited that he was seeing someone for the first time since Margaret died. Jon planned some rare time off so he could be home for their visit in a few months. He’d been island hopping more over the last few years, juggling five restaurants.

We hadn’t planned on five restaurants either. Jon was married long before me, to Celeste. I’d only seen pictures. She was beautiful. Damn it. Jon said she was lucky to be pretty, because she was tear-your-hair-out stupid. She couldn’t be that stupid, she’d worked at the restaurants with him and his former partner Glen, a complicated arrangement. I always got the impression she was what Homer Simpson would call, stupid like a fox.

Jon and Glen opened five restaurants together. Celeste had been involved romantically with Glen, and then switched to Jon, which produced Chana, then marriage. It seemed everyone had adapted to their new reality, until Jon showed up unexpectedly at one of the restaurants before they opened for Sunday brunch, and went in back to get a case of champagne for mimosas out of the walk-in cooler. Celeste and Glen, wedged in a booth with her flowing skirt up and his pants yanked down, might have survived unnoticed, except that Chana was planted in a high chair next to them, in the dark, and chose that moment to gurgle a delighted, “Dada” for the first time ever, when she saw her fair-haired father lit up in the storeroom light. Dada didn’t take it well.

Jon kept the small restaurants on Maui, Oahu, and Kauai, which is where we lived, next door to his best friend Victor and his wife Kaia. Glen and Celeste kept the two restaurants on the Big Island, and Chana.

Chana ended up living with Jon not too long after the divorce. She was in college on the mainland by the time we were married. Soon after we married, Glen and Celeste sold their restaurants back to Jon and moved to Santa Barbara. Celeste said she wanted to be closer to Chana. Chana said her mother was upset that Jon was having more children. Apparently Celeste was still burnishing some old reality, and blanking on the booth part.

Jon came in and watched his life spool forward as his baby floated around.

“Your phone has been buzzing like crazy,” I said. “Are your parents coming?”

Jon’s parents, and his younger brother Jack, lived in Santa Barbara where Jon grew up. His parents would come for a few weeks to help out with Meggie.

“Few days,” he said. “He looks just like you when you float.”

“Chana okay going to lunch?”

“Totally. Megs sneaked a bag of gummy bears. She’s out of her mind on sugar. Let’s hope she doesn’t try to kill him.”

“She wouldn’t do that, would she?” I asked.

“I tried to kill off Jack.”

“Maybe it’ll make a difference that he’s a boy.”

“Doubt it. I’m pretty sure our bed is going to be crowded for the next year.”

“Are we going to end up in her room in a pile of stuffed whales?” I asked.

He smiled.

“We still have the Durango.”

“Oh brother.”

“We’ll lock the bedroom door and ignore them,” he said. “They can claw around under the door until they pass out.”

“The way I look now, you probably won’t even want to.”

He looked up at my insecurity.

“Hand him over, H. Sounds like you need a nap.”

I handed him Chance, then we climbed into clean sheets with a blonde fuzzy head and pursed, nipple-ready lips between us. Baby arms were at the ready, fingers curled in fists. Jon wrapped his arm around us. Chance was startled, his legs kicked straight, his fingers opened and closed, and then he settled again. We made a tent of warm air over him. His half-open eyes peeked their first look at the voices he’d been listening to underwater for nine months.

“Seventeen inches,” I whispered. “We didn’t make a basketball player.”

“Figures.”

Even at a whisper, Jon’s voice had a beautiful rumble. Chance looked at him. Jon opened one new hand and closed five translucent fingers around the tip of one of his. That’s right lucky little bug, that’s your old man.

“You okay with this?” I asked.

“I’m way beyond okay. You?”

“I didn’t expect two. You really can’t leave me now.”

“Can I go to sleep?” he asked.

Our drifting dream world of baby breath mingled with our own was interrupted by Jon’s phone buzzing. Chance jumped and made his first unhappy baby squawk. Jon frowned.

“That was fast,” he said. “I was counting on a couple of hours.”

He looked at his phone and his frown deepened to tension. It buzzed again, he ignored it, but Chance squawked. I soothed Chance while Jon stared at his phone and then put it on the nightstand.

“Maybe you should answer it,” I said.

He stroked Chance’s head.

“Nope. It’s not important.”

“They think it’s important. There might be a problem.”

“It’s Celeste,” he said. “Probably looking for Chana.”

We looked at each other across our new son.

“She has Chana’s number,” I said.

“I guess she’s not answering either. Let’s take a nap while we can.”

“Why is she calling?”

“No idea.”

“Then turn it off. Chana will call Johanna if she needs us.”

He turned it off and wrapped around us again.

“I think he looks like you out of the water too,” he said.

“He’s got your hair. That’s exactly how Meggie looked. Fuzz bomb.”

“I hope he looks like you,” he said.

We slept until Meggie burst through the door with a huge smile on her face.

“Papa!”

Chana was in hot pursuit. Meggie climbed halfway up on the bed before she saw Chance naked between us. Her face crumpled into a look that will haunt me to my last breath. She understood in an instant that she wasn’t the center of the universe. Four years of our undivided attention, of storing up all that sureness, was crushed out of her. She started sobbing from the bottom of her feet, the middle of her heart, the core of her existence.

Jon sat up and reached for her but she slid off the bed and rolled into a sobbing mass on the floor. He put on pants, picked her up, and wrapped her in his arms. She stuck her thumb in her mouth for the first time in a year. Her legs were tucked up against him in the fetal position, only the bottoms of her truly filthy little feet showed. She looked like she’d shrunk. She buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed. He kissed the top of her springy curls and said, shush shush shush.

“It’s okay, my Megs,” he said. “It’s okay.”

He sat in the rocking chair and rubbed her back and kissed her curls. I handed Chance to Chana, got dressed, and then opened the curtains to let the breeze sweep in sunshine and more cheerful light. I switched places with Jon. His chest was covered with tears. He put on a shirt while I rocked the sobbing Meggie. Her hair smelled like French fries, and she still had telltale ketchup between a couple of her fingers. Chana sat on the edge of the bed with Chance and watched Meggie. We were all heart broken for her. She thought she was the It girl. Oversleeping had blown our careful plan to be up, dressed, and feigning mild indifference during their first meeting.

“I’m sorry, she got away from me,” said Chana. “I couldn’t get a hold of Johanna, so I left you a voicemail.”

“It’s okay, CC,” I said. “Your mother was calling nonstop, we had to turn off the phone to get some peace.”

“She’s so crazy,” she said. “I told her what was happening.”

Meggie was running out of steam. I kissed the side of her wet eye.

“Did you have some lunch, Angel?” I asked.