To See the Moon Again (11 page)

It was too early to tell whether Carmen was naturally talkative or if she was only forcing herself to be friendly. Either way she was full of questions, some uncomfortable, some merely strange: “What was your husband like?” “Do you wear contacts or are your eyes really that green?” “Have you ever seen an armadillo?” “Have you ever been to an opera?” “Do you ever look at doors and wonder who first thought of
hinges
?” And this one: “Isn't
eating
a funny thing? I mean, putting stuff into your mouth and . . . masticating it, then
swallowing
it?”

Brief answers, or none, instead of discouraging her, only left time for more questions, more random comments, often as if talking to herself. One morning, between bites of oatmeal, for example, she said, “Exchanging the truth for a lie and worshiping the creature more than the creator.” Whatever that was supposed to mean. Another time, “A rider named Faithful upon a white horse.” Though Julia felt no obligation to respond to such things, it was unsettling not to know what might come next. She could have tolerated the girl's presence better had the two of them silently occupied their own spaces within the house, as this was a way of living already familiar to her from the years of her marriage.

They went to Target to get Carmen more socks and a second pair of jeans. Julia had no intention of outfitting her completely, but, on the other hand, you couldn't expect someone to keep wearing the same things day after day. When they carried the bags into the house afterward, Carmen said, without looking at Julia, “Thank you for these, but I don't like to live off other people's generosity. I'll pay you back.” Julia had merely shaken her head dismissively. She couldn't really say what she was thinking:
The best payment will be when you leave.

She had no idea what was going through Carmen's mind concerning the weeks ahead. She wanted to ask her point-blank if she was making any progress with long-term plans, but she was too afraid of the answer she would get. Things certainly couldn't continue like this, Julia knew that, but she had promised a week, so she would hold on till Saturday before taking further action, though she couldn't imagine what kind of further action was even possible if the girl refused to leave.

As for Pamela, she had little to offer. A reversal had taken place. Because she had suddenly stopped calling every day, Julia had taken to calling her instead. Every time they talked, however, Pamela spoke in a hasty, absentminded way, claiming that she needed to get back to the new baby, who was usually crying in the background. According to Pamela, he wasn't taking to breast-feeding and had lost too much weight since they brought him home, so the doctor had instructed them to feed him formula with a dropper every two hours. They were all having trouble sleeping, she said, and her daughter-in-law, convinced that everything was her fault, was crying almost as much as the baby.

Before the end of each conversation, Pamela rushed through the same advice concerning Carmen: “Just tell her you have somewhere you have to go, so she
has
to leave.” She reminded Julia that the invitation to come to her house for a visit was still open. “I'll be home on Sunday. Just say you can't change your plans, somebody's counting on you.” It was the kind of advice easier to give than to follow, to tell someone to leave your house, especially someone related to you, someone with no car, no money, no home, no job, not even a suitcase.

•   •   •

N
O
more sounds came from down the hall, so apparently Carmen was done crying—for there could be no question that that was what she had been doing. Julia turned on her bedside lamp and got back into bed. Another tip for sleeplessness was to turn on the light and do something until you started to feel sleepy, reading being at the top of the list of recommendations. She had a novel on the table, one with a dense meandering opening. So far she had found nothing in it to interest her, though the book had been a fixture on the
New York Times
bestseller list for weeks. She kept having to reread the same pages each time she picked it up. Lean, clean story lines didn't seem to be in vogue these days. Even now she couldn't remember anything about this one except that the main character was a U.S. senator who was in a hospital in Russia for some reason.

She opened the novel, read the sentence
Medieval Icelandic sagas had been Saul's passion since before the Cold War ended
, and immediately closed it again.

She took another book from the table, titled
From Life to Fiction
, its premise being that a writer didn't need anything but his own familiar experiences to write fresh, unforgettable stories. She let it fall open and read a sentence:
Tap into your parents' stories—the ones you've heard since you were a child.

Her childhood wasn't anything she wanted to think about, especially not in the deepest part of night. Her parents hadn't been the kind to tell stories anyway. Her father's only references to the past were for the purpose of pointing out how soft and lazy children today were compared to when he was their age, when he rose at dawn, walked five miles to school, worked in the fields, and all the rest. Julia had never gotten a new pair of shoes without having to hear all over again about the cardboard cutouts he had put inside his shoes as a child when his soles wore out.

Behind his back, and a few times to his face, Jeremiah had made fun. “And did you put gravy on the rest of the cardboard and eat it for supper?” he had asked one time. There had been no end of shouting and things being flung about that night. Julia remembered it clearly, for that was the time her father had gotten Jeremiah in a choke hold. And who knew what might have happened had her mother not fallen on the floor, weeping and praying aloud?

There were no bedtime stories growing up, though sometimes at night Jeremiah and Pamela would crawl into bed with Julia and she would read to them, very quietly, with a flashlight.

There was the one story her mother told her, however, that summer day in the kitchen while they were snapping, blanching, and freezing green beans. In the living room Julia's father was sounding notes on the piano, working as always on his endless compilation of folk songs, his only pastime since his accident.

Her mother had lifted her gaze from the pot of boiling water and stared at the doorway through which the tune of “Listen to the Mocking Bird” was stopping and starting. “He was traveling with that evangelist,” she had half whispered, “leading the music and singing solos and playing his accordion, and I sat in the front row between my parents every night that whole week. I remember how my heart fluttered every time I thought he might be looking at me. I was only seventeen.”

She had spoken with a tone of utter bewilderment, as if trying to figure out how she could have gone from a beginning like that to her current state of slipping out to attend church by herself on Sunday mornings, though not every week. She must have planned those Sundays with great forethought, spacing them out and steeling herself for what would follow, for experience had taught her, had taught them all, what was to be suffered afterward—first, specific grievances about the quality of Sunday dinner that day, followed by more general ones about women who failed to put their families first, about the weakness of character evidenced by anyone who leaned on a “religious crutch,” about the place in hell reserved for hypocritical, slick-haired, fire-and-brimstone preachers. All of this bellowed by their father, between large mouthfuls of the dinner he had just pronounced unfit for human consumption, and endured mutely by their mother, who had risen early to prepare it. Going to church was, in Julia's memory, the only step her mother ever took outside the rigid boundaries set by her father.

She looked back at the book she was holding now. How odd, and inexpressibly sad, she thought, that her mother had told but one story. And what a story—that her father could have ever been young and dashing, her mother seventeen and in love with him.

Julia closed the book and stared at the black-and-white photograph on the cover—a man walking down a dirt road holding the hand of a barefoot child. Julia recalled only a single time she had felt her father's approval. She wasn't yet old enough to go to school, and Jeremiah was only a toddler. Pamela hadn't been born yet. They were in a yard somewhere, not their own. She was playing tag and hide-and-seek with other children while the grown-ups talked. One of the adults called to her father, “Your girl is a fast runner. Look at her go.” And her father had swung her up to his shoulders and sung a few bars of “Yes, Sir, That's My Baby” in his perfectly pitched bass voice while everybody laughed and clapped.

One morning sometime later he went to work like always but didn't come home for weeks. Her mother told her there had been an accident on the assembly line, and her father was in the hospital. After that he never held a job again, never lifted her up on his shoulders again, or sang or laughed. It was as if another father had come home from the hospital.

•   •   •

J
ULIA
looked at the clock. Though there was no good time to be thinking about her father, this had to be one of the worst times. She ran her finger over the title of the book before setting it back on the nightstand.
From Life to Fiction.
She marveled again that Jeremiah had been able to write such beautiful fiction. He had borne the worst of their father's wrath, had wandered for years without a place to call home, yet somehow had risen above it all to write not just passably but brilliantly.

And now his daughter was here in Julia's house, making sounds in the night. No doubt it was for her father that she wept. Or maybe for her mother, more recently dead. Most likely for both.

Julia turned off the lamp beside her bed. A grave truth came to her as she laid her head on her pillow. She had given in too easily last week by allowing the girl to stay. She should have hardened her heart and pointed her to the door. Now she was stuck, for how could she ever send her away after hearing her weep in the night?

D
ISTANCE
, N
OT
S
P
EED

Carmen didn't give the impression of a high school dropout. She was smart, not only in an encyclopedic way—offhandedly making reference to things like tectonic plate shifts, Odysseus, and the sixty-two moons of Saturn—but also in the art of ingratiating herself. Though it was subtle ingratiation, Julia suspected she knew exactly what she was doing.

The girl had already opened Matthew's toolbox on the back porch, something Julia had never done, and found a screwdriver, with which she tightened the handles on two saucepans that had been an aggravation to Julia for months. One day she went through the house and reversed the direction of all the ceiling fans, and another day she oiled the glider on the back porch to make it quit squeaking. She washed the Buick and vacuumed out the interior, swept both driveways, scrubbed down the outdoor grill, and rolled the garbage can out to the curb and back.

And then Friday came. That morning Carmen announced that she was going to walk to the library over at the college. When she came back, she ate a sandwich on the back porch and then went to her room and closed the door. She came out three hours later and left again. She didn't say where she was going this time, and Julia didn't ask.

It was early evening now. Though Fridays usually dragged, the hours had flown today. Julia ordered a pizza to be delivered. It seemed like a good thing for a Friday night, hopefully the last Friday night Carmen would be here. After this, she told herself, Friday nights would be normal again. Deep down, however, part of her wasn't so sure she liked what she remembered of normal Friday nights, the same part of her that was getting used to the girl's presence in the stone house.

In many ways it seemed that Carmen had been here much longer than a week, but not because she was a difficult houseguest. She made no clutter, helped without being asked, provided pleasant company when she wasn't asking too many questions.

Julia turned the oven on low so she could keep the pizza warm when it came and then began putting together a salad. Whereas she had once fretted over how to get rid of Carmen—amazingly, only days ago—she now fell to worrying about what was to become of the girl. And more immediately, where was she right now? Over and over she glanced out the kitchen window toward the street. It came to her that if Carmen had some kind of accident, no one would know what phone number to call since, as far as she knew, the girl had no identification on her.

What if she had taken Julia's limit of a week to mean that a Saturday arrival required a Friday departure? What if she was gone for good, leaving the same way she had arrived—with only the clothes on her back? She might be out on the highway right now, hitchhiking again. Julia suddenly felt awash with guilt—this would be a new regret to bear for the rest of her life, to add to all the old ones.

And so when she looked up a few minutes later and saw Carmen turning from the street into the driveway, her relief was great. The girl's head was down, her thumbs hooked inside her jeans pockets. She was walking slowly, as if bearing a weight. Julia reached over and turned off the light above the sink.

By now she knew the girl's face well. Even though she permitted herself only glances, the frequency of them had added up to familiarity. In the past she had noticed that when brothers and sisters looked alike, sometimes even in the case of twins, what was handsome in the boy didn't always translate into beauty in the girl. Or what was pretty in a girl looked weak and unfinished in a boy. Jeremiah and Carmen weren't siblings, of course, but it was hard for Julia to think of them as father and daughter since her last memory of Jeremiah was as a teenager. At any rate, the same smile, the same eyes, the same profusion of blond curls wore equally well on both of them.

It was difficult to see the face of a family member the way others saw it, but Julia remembered how often during his teen years people had spoken of Jeremiah as handsome. When she was younger, she had sometimes resented the fact that her brother had gotten it all. Not that she and Pamela were slouches, but Jeremiah was undeniably the gold medalist among them. He was even a personality at school. Everybody knew who he was and liked him, even though he didn't seem to care whether they did. Julia couldn't remember that he had ever had a best friend. For certain he had never brought anyone home. Pamela was the only one who had ever done that.

Genes were funny things. Julia didn't know how anyone could use them to argue for an intelligent designer, at least not a fair one—not when the best genes aligned themselves in the same child, the one who didn't seem to appreciate them at all.

There was one exception, however, one wayward superior gene that had somehow shown up in Julia: She could run fast, faster even than Jeremiah, whose track triumphs had been only in distance races.
Only
—a curious modifier for someone who had set a high school record in the state of Alabama for the mile run when he was fifteen. A short time later, however, he had shrugged it all off and dropped out of track, probably because he saw how much his achievement meant to his father, who had been a distance runner himself.

By then Julia had already quit the girls' track team, but for the opposite reason—because her father didn't care enough. Her wins never earned his praise. “Short-wick running,” he called the sprints. In his way of thinking, distance, not speed, was the real test of mettle. She had tried other ways of pleasing him, but anything Jeremiah did eclipsed her best efforts, and after he left home, her father lost interest in life altogether, though he was trapped in it for many more years.

Julia turned the water on and held a colander of mixed greens under it. As she did so, Carmen stopped in the driveway and turned around to look back at the street. She stood there a moment, then lifted one hand as if gesturing, as if conversing with someone, though there was no one else there. But the girl was given to talking to herself—Julia had heard her in her bedroom and caught her at it on the back porch several times. Carmen lifted both hands now and tipped her head to look up, as if to check for rain. But above the trees the sky was a strong, unclouded blue.

From the back, with both hands raised, the girl looked lean and tapered, like a statuette on a trophy. Julia wondered if she had excelled in sports the way her father had. Maybe she was a good distance runner. Or maybe her only distance running had been when she left home at the age of sixteen, which wouldn't have given her much time to set high school records.

Julia knew that if she stood in the driveway as Carmen was doing right now, no one looking out the window would think of a figure on a trophy, not the way her weight was slowly redistributing itself around her waistline these days. She needed to do something physical—more than just a daily walk. Earlier in the summer, before Carmen's arrival had interrupted her list-making of projects for the coming year, she had briefly entertained the thought of joining a fitness club. The idea of spending money to jog on a treadmill or pedal a stationary bicycle didn't interest her, but swimming and water aerobics did, except for the embarrassment of wearing a swimsuit in the company of others.

A few times she had thought about taking up running again. Not long ago she had received a flyer in the mail about an upcoming fall event called Carolina Senior Showdown over in Greenville, in which people fifty and older could sign up to compete in various sports, foot races included. She wondered if there would be paramedics on hand in case one of the runners keeled over. She had thrown the brochure away, but she still thought about it from time to time and wished she had the courage to enter.

•   •   •

C
ARMEN
turned back around and continued walking toward the house, still slowly. It came to Julia that whereas she had doubted the girl's age only a week earlier, she now had no trouble believing her. Her deft and graceful hands, her close observing and listening, the way she quickly changed the subject when she sensed resistance or unease, the turning away of her eyes as if afraid of what might be read in them—all of these spoke of a woman, not a girl. And her words, the colorful ones she slipped in as she talked—words like
decimate
,
cogent
,
moribund
,
vilify
—always used sparingly yet precisely, and always preceded by a slight pause as if reviewing the definition, weighing it against the possibility of error.

She stopped again, then walked back to the circular drive. When she came to the short walkway that led to the front door—the walkway made of stones Matthew had cut with a masonry saw—she faced the house and stood looking at it from one end to the other as if taking in every feature. Neither smiling nor frowning, she studied it the way an architect would, or an appraiser, or a photographer intent on light and angle.

We had a beautiful little girl.
Jeremiah had been right about that. Not a description Julia had ever heard applied to herself. Hers were average looks, from head to toe—she knew that. Average everything. Even her weight was right in the middle of the recommended range, something Pamela often complained about. “You don't even try!” she would say. “It's not fair. I can walk by a plate of cookies and feel another roll around my middle.” Pamela would scoff if Julia were to share her concerns about her waistline.

She pulled back from the window and returned to her cutting board to slice into a green pepper. She wondered what Carmen was thinking as she studied the stone house, whether she was saddened by the thought of leaving it. Most likely she was sad about other things that had nothing to do with Julia and the stone house. Maybe her chief sadness was that she was all alone in the world.

There had been no more sounds of weeping in the nighttime, not after Julia remembered that her clock radio had sound effects. For the past three nights, she had chosen the sound of ocean waves when she went to bed. Maybe that was the reason she had dreamed about being on a whaling ship the first night, a dream she remembered the next morning and mentioned to Carmen over breakfast. Carmen had smiled and asked if they had run across the Great White One.

A pizza delivery car slowly approached the stone house and turned into the circular drive. Julia wiped her hands and picked up the money she had set out. When she opened the front door, Carmen was talking to the driver. The back door of the car stood open, and several pizzas were stacked inside zipped bags beside a child's car seat. There was a child in the seat, but all Julia could see was two little feet kicking up and down.

The delivery woman grinned as she handed Carmen the pizza. “Better check it,” she said. She jerked her head back toward the car. “He's bad to sneak bites.”

•   •   •

L
ATER
,
at the table, Carmen was quiet. She ate a few bites of pizza and nibbled halfheartedly at her salad. Finally she put her fork down. “I'll be out of your hair tomorrow,” she said, her tone neutral, light. She didn't look at Julia but addressed the door leading into the living room.

How strange it was, Julia thought, that these were words she would have welcomed only a few days ago. Now she could think of nothing to say.

Carmen took a drink of her Coke. “I can be gone by noon if that's okay.” Her words were deliberate, almost rehearsed, but courteous, with no trace of hard feelings. “I appreciate your hospitality. It's been a very nice . . . respite.”

“Where will you go?” Julia said. She heard the combative tone of her voice and tried to moderate it. “Do you have a plan? Something specific, I mean? A friend or another relative somewhere? I can help you with plane fare.”

“Oh, I've got some things in mind,” Carmen said. “Some waters to test, some tracks to follow. A man to see about a bull. I'll be okay.”

“A bull?” Julia said.

Carmen gave a half smile. “It's something Daddy used to say. He'd say he was off to see a man about a bull, and then be gone for a few weeks. He could do almost any kind of work. Lulu would always cry when he left, but she knew when he came back he'd have money, and usually a nice present for her.”

Julia knew the girl was trying to divert her, that she had no plan. “Where will you go?” she said again.

Carmen shook her head. “You think I'm going to tell? No, thank you, I don't want to be followed.”

They stared at each other for a long moment.
This is a face you'll miss seeing,
Julia thought.

Carmen was the first to look away. She picked up the piece of pizza on her plate and started talking. “I think this is the best pizza I've ever had except for one time in . . . I think it was Minnesota.” She took a small bite and chewed as she continued talking. “It was in the middle of winter, and this old Indian woman made it from scratch at this place called Mister Luke's. Just a hole in the wall in this little town I don't even remember the name of.” She peeled off a piece of pepperoni and ate it by itself. “Ojibwa—that was the tribe she was from.” She said the word again: “
O-jib-wa.
Isn't that an interesting word? Sure not something you'd expect to see—an old
Ojibwa
woman twirling a pizza crust around her head.” A yap of laughter and she hurried on. “The place was close to a lake—all frozen over, little kids sliding on it. Or maybe it was in Wisconsin, I don't know. I've been around, seen a lot of places.” She took another quick bite. “And maybe it wasn't Mister Luke's after all—that might have been a different town. It could've been the Snack Den in Iron River—that one was by a lake, too, I'm pretty sure of that, but . . .