Mending the Moon (31 page)

Amy laughs, softly. “To be continued. The third element could be Archipelago, sure, although I don't see how either. It could be time. It could be us, the observers. It could be God.”

Jeremy shakes his head. “Trinity crap? I'm not going there. Hen can't even figure that stuff out. Okay, so look, here's my question. Here's why I've been reading
CC
all these years, I think. What do you do when you feel like Entropy's won? What—”

But he remembers the answer, or an answer. That program. Mom said it talked about mass extinctions on Earth. There've been at least two of them, she said, cataclysms that killed ninety percent of everything alive. But that desolation made room for new forms of life: for complex organisms after the first cataclysm, and for mammals after the second.

“Are you okay?” Amy's peering at him, looking concerned. “Jer? You just stopped talking.”

“Fine. I'm fine.” But he doesn't think he is. All right, so new life develops, but it takes millions of years. Even if he lives to be older than Mom was when she died, he doesn't have that long.

*   *   *

“You're doing
what
?” Veronique says. She knows she's being rude. She doesn't care.

“We're going to Percy Clark's memorial service.”

“We?” Rosemary showed up unannounced at the house five minutes ago. The spot checks have gotten worse since the Planet X expedition, even though the police easily found Veronique at the guesthouse and called Rosemary to say she was all right.

She hadn't disappeared. She hadn't even tried to leap across ice floes; no one had needed bloodhounds to find her. She'd left a paper trail a mile wide: credit-card receipts at the Nixon convenience store, at Bruno's—the famous Gerlach diner where she treated herself to dinner—at the guesthouse itself. She wasn't even
trying
to disappear. She was just getting away. The only thing she'd done wrong was not returning Rosie's call, and then turning off her cell phone. Well, all right: two things.

But now Rosemary's become even more intrusive than she was before. It would serve her right if Veronique did disappear. “We who? You and Walter? Is he fit to travel?”

“No, of course not. I meant you and me, and Hen and Tom, and Jeremy. Oh, and Jeremy's girlfriend. Amy.”

“Amy?” Veronique squints. “Amy Castillo?”

“I don't know her last name. Tiny, redhead. Cute. She's into that comic book he loves. You know her?”

“She was one of my students last semester. They met in my class.” She was one of my students this semester, and saw me fall apart. And she's twenty times smarter than Jeremy is.

Veronique knows better than to say any of this. She wonders what Amy's doing with Jeremy. Pity, maybe. Should she tell Rosemary that Amy saw the incident? No. Too embarrassing, and it would just make Veronique look vulnerable again, which would defeat the entire project of getting Rosemary to treat her like a grown-up.

They're sitting at the kitchen table, where Veronique keeps the Planet X sea-urchin pot as a centerpiece. She picks it up now, cradling it in her lap. It's her reminder that she is in fact an adult who can make her own decisions. “Rosemary, I don't want to go to Seattle. I don't know why in the world Jeremy would want to go either, but that's his business. I'm not an infant, and I'm not in any danger. I wasn't in danger in May, either.”

“I think,” Rosie said briskly, “that it's important for all of us to go. Percy's family reached out to us. We should reach back.”

“Fine. We'll send them a tree.”

Rosemary sighs and looks away, out the window. “Will you come to support Jeremy, at least? Or to support me? Vera,
please
.”

Vera was Melinda's nickname for her. That's a low blow, but Veronique finds herself responding anyway. She tries to imagine a long car ride with Amy Castillo, and finds herself awash in dread. Dread and mortification. Amy saw her disintegrate into a sodden, shrieking mess. She never wants to see Amy again. What can she say to get out of this?

“If I go,” she says, clutching the pot so tightly that later she'll find the pattern of the ceramic pressed into her palms, “I will curse that monster aloud and spit in his coffin. Is that what you want?”

“Hen's spoken to his mother. He's been cremated, so no coffin, only an urn. And Hen has a free place for all of us to stay. Some priest friend of hers up there has a huge house.”

Rosie's deliberately misunderstanding her. “I'll curse his parents,” Veronique continues, desperate and implacable. “I'll tell them that they must be monsters, to have raised such a child. I'll stand up and scream in the church.”

“Hen says that Anna says no one will talk to them. They've been shunned. She might even welcome screaming.”

Veronique shakes her head. “I don't care. Percy's parents are not my problem, and I don't want to go.” She wouldn't want to go even if Amy were staying here.

Rosie turns back to face her now. Veronique sees that her face is wet with tears, that her hands are clenched as tightly around each other on her lap as Veronique's are clenched on the Planet X pot. When she speaks, though, her voice is still steady. “I'm not treating you like an infant. I'm the infant. Vera, I've lost my husband and one of my best friends, and I can't lose you, too. I know we wouldn't even know each other if it weren't for Melinda, and I know we'll never be as close to each other as either of us was to her, but you're the only other person I know who remembers her the way I do. I know you hate me right now, but will you please, please come to Seattle? For me?”

Veronique blinks. The universe spins, revolves, resettles itself with an almost audible thump. Rosie hasn't been stalking her because she thinks Veronique's needy. It's Rosie who's the needy one. She's just admitted as much.

Vera opens her mouth and then closes it again, riding a sudden rush of feeling. She's so used to people pulling away from her—her students, her colleagues, Sarabeth—that she feels as if she's been given a gift.

Hell of a gift, she thinks. There have to be less annoying ways to be needed. Ways that don't involve student witnesses.

Still.

She eyes Rosemary, noting almost clinically that Rosie's hands are still clenched, while Vera's own have relaxed somewhat. “I'll think about it. I'll let you know in a few days. But only if you promise, from now on, that you'll give me some warning before you show up at the house.”

*   *   *

Rosemary is mortified. She's always secretly considered herself saner and stronger than Veronique. Until the scene in Vera's kitchen today, she didn't even know that her own motives were so—childish? Selfish? She doesn't even know what word to use.

Until today, she honestly believed that she was hounding Vera for Vera's own good. She believed that the situation had been created by Vera's weakness, not her own.

No, not weakness. She catches herself; this is a bias she corrects often enough in her ER patients, too many of whom believe that needing anyone else is a personal failing. We all need other people. We're designed to need other people. We're healthiest and happiest around other people.

This isn't just theology. It's science, neurotransmitters and psychology labs. Orphaned monkey babies, given a choice between two kinds of surrogate-mother doll, will pick the one covered in soft terrycloth every time, even when their food's dispensed by the cold wire mother-mannequin.

Mammals need connection. We don't live by monkey chow alone. Rosemary knows that. Shame wraps around her like a shawl anyway.

And she thinks, once again, of Walter. She's been visiting him every week in the nursing home; she's managed to distance the beloved body who lives there from the beloved person who no longer seems to be inside, or who, at any rate, no longer knows her. Sometimes Walter remembers that she's visited before. Once, gently, he patted her hand and said, “My dear, it's kind of you to come see me, but I don't know if my wife would like it.”

Her breath had snagged in her throat. “Does it bother you, that your wife isn't here?”

He'd frowned, and then his features had smoothed again, as if he'd found peace. “No. It's better for her not to come. It would hurt her too much to see me like this. She's too tenderhearted. I never told her, but I think she'd have been happier if she'd been able to hold back more of her heart.”

Rosemary had blinked at him, vision swimming. What else hadn't he told her? She briefly entertained the notion of asking him this, but quickly recognized it as both unethical and dangerous. What would she do if she learned something devastating, that he'd had an affair or considered divorce or even simply loathed some piece of her?

No. Let him keep his secrets.

She wonders now, though, if he's ashamed of needing help, of needing the care of the people—women, almost always women—who tend to him every day, and who are strangers almost every time they enter the room.

She'll say good-bye to him before they leave for Seattle. She'll tell him that she won't be there that week, but that she'll be coming back. And she'll hope that, even for a little while, he'll remember that promise.

 

16

For a year now, Archipelago Osprey has been stalking Comrade Cosmos, and for a year, he has eluded her. Her initial journey to Keyhole was delayed by weather, illness—a bout of dysentery from Dumpster diving—and transportation problems. When she realized that Keyhole was her destination, she ducked into a public library and used Google Maps to get walking directions from Wyoming to Kansas. According to Google Maps, the journey should have taken eight days and eleven hours, although it wasn't clear to her if this figure included time to sleep, to eat, and to trap crickets. In any case, it seemed reasonable to expect that she could cover the distance in a month.

She had no intention of hitchhiking. She wanted to stay alive, and she wasn't sure that even the intimidating sight of an empire scorpion would dissuade the kind of creeps who drive around in trucks looking for female hitchhikers.

From Bumfuck, she walked in what she believed was a southeasterly direction until she reached the nearest largish town, where she not only found an army/navy store but managed to shoplift a compass, a Swiss Army knife, a USA road atlas, several rolls of duct tape, and a sturdy pair of boots in her size. Although this remarkable theft was greatly aided by the fact that the store's proprietor was asleep at the time, snoozing behind his counter, Archipelago was still pleased with herself. Her pride lasted about fifteen minutes, until she realized, after scrutinizing the maps and the compass, that she'd been walking northwest, not southeast. She'd actually
increased
the distance between herself and Cosmos. She'd thought she was navigating by the sun. How had she gotten so turned around?

Setting out in the proper direction from Boottown, she skirted around Bumfuck and was making decent progress until the dysentery felled her. In some other horrid little town, she wound up in a small women's homeless shelter, sleeping on a cot and attending mandatory prayer meetings, which seemed a small enough price to pay for clean laundry, showers, and food. She healed and left the shelter, lifting some bottled water, canned meat, and baby wipes on her way out of town.

After that she walked for three days, cheerfully, until horrible blisters developed from the new boots. At that point, Archipelago liberated a girl's bicycle from the front yard of a moderately large home—at night, when everyone was asleep—telling herself that anybody who left a bike lying in the grass deserved to have it stolen.

The bike was only a little small for her. The larger problem was that it had a purple seat, sparkly fringe on the handlebars, and a pink aluminum frame. Either it had been ridden by a teenager who wanted to return to her carefree youth, or a five-year-old with a growth disorder. In any case, the bike would have been too identifiable even had it been Archipelago's style.

She hid out in a small clump of woods and spent a day covering the bike frame and seat with black duct tape. By now, she was adept at cadging food from stores and fast-food places, and almost equally adept at trapping crickets.

Pedaling was easier than walking, except when she had to go uphill, since the bike had no gears. But she was making better time than she had on foot, and developing buns and calves of steel in the meantime, and honing her hatred of Cosmos, who'd ruined her life.

Weirdly, given her odd conveyance and constant petty theft, she managed to steer clear of police. She began to consider herself a gypsy, a vagabond, the last of the hobos, even if she was on a bike and not stealing free rides on boxcars. She almost started to enjoy herself.

The night she crossed the Kansas border, she celebrated with a chocolate bar she'd stolen miles back and saved for just this occasion. Erasmus got the last of the mineral powder on a free-range cricket she'd snagged for him at dusk. “Soon,” she told him. “Soon we'll find our enemy, and you'll get to sting him, and we'll see if
he's
allergic. Erasmus, I think my hatred of the Mayor is really what ramped up that sting, which means that if you sting Cosmos, he should drop dead instantly. Or not. But anyway, that's the plan, and, uh, after that happens, I'll paint houses again, and get another apartment, and you can have more mineral powder.”

Truth to tell, she hadn't given much thought to what would happen after she found Cosmos. The epic journey to find him was her end-all and be-all. Cosmos was her white whale.

It was cloudy and windy, threatening rain. She hid the bike in some bushes and scouted for a dry space nearby, rolling herself up in a tarp she'd acquired along the way. She woke, some hours later, to the sound of a freight train.