To See the Moon Again (15 page)

As Matthew talked, Julia kept her eyes on his tie. The stripes wouldn't be still, and the orange had turned into an indiscriminate color that had no name. She knew now what the question was going to be, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. It was coming, as surely as the sun would rise tomorrow and make its way from east to west. And she had no answer ready, none except
No
, which she knew was not the answer he wanted to hear.

He finally stopped talking and leaned forward. “Julia,” he said. He waited till she lifted her eyes, and then it came. “Please, can we talk about children?”

•   •   •

I
WOULD
probably need about thirty, I'm guessing,” Carmen said. She had already laid a dozen or so neckties across the back of a chair.

Julia picked up the last two pairs of shoes from the closet floor and added them to the others beside the desk. She ran a finger over the top of a black loafer and left a trail through the fine film of dust. How curious, she thought, that dust could get inside a closet with the door closed.

•   •   •

I
T
was almost three o'clock in the morning when Julia finally crawled back into bed. Carmen had returned to her bedroom over an hour ago, and the house was quiet, except for the sounds of gentle rain coming from Julia's clock radio. Over the past weeks, she had switched from “Ocean Waves” to “Spring Showers.” There was no evidence at all that the sounds helped her sleep better, but at least they kept her from straining to hear noises down the hall.

She arranged the covers, then rearranged them, then did the same with the pillows, then finally lay still and closed her eyes. A few minutes later she adjusted the volume of the spring showers to make them more like a summer downpour. She waited for twenty minutes before getting up to take a sleeping tablet, but she was still awake an hour later, still thinking about the look on Matthew's face some twenty years earlier, as the light of hope dimmed. No anger, only puzzlement, then disbelief, then resignation, all within the space of a few seconds.

By the time they got home that night, his face was wiped clean of any expression. Not that she studied it at any length, but a sidelong glance at a stoplight a few blocks from Ivy Dale Lane told her all. He had taken in the answer she had whispered fiercely, tearfully over the dessert they left unfinished—
No, I can't, please don't ask that, I can't!
—and now, having seen all the years ahead in light of her words, he had apparently erased a dream. He seemed to know that her answer was permanent, that there were no compromises such as adoption to be considered, for he hadn't pressured her at the restaurant or in the car, nor was he ever to bring it up again.

And he never again mentioned Chet Ambrose and his wife's pregnancy. Over a year later at Mr. Carrier's retirement dinner, Chet was there holding a blue-eyed baby girl in a bright pink romper and matching headband, which she kept yanking off and stuffing into her mouth. All evening Julia avoided looking at them or at Chet's high-spirited wife, who, when she wasn't laughing, was digging around in the diaper bag and pulling out one thing or another. And Julia also avoided looking at Matthew that evening, for she didn't want to see his eyes following Chet and Estella—that was the baby's name—all around the room.

Time and again the thought had come to her since Matthew's death that he had treated her better than she deserved, accommodating her every preference. He saw to it that she never had to state a wish more than once, whether for something requiring a great deal of expense and labor, such as the circular drive, or something more easily granted, such as putting his dirty work clothes on top of the washing machine instead of inside the hamper.

Julia sat up in bed again and turned on the light. She picked up the folded program on her nightstand to look at it once more. It was one of the few things she had found while going through Matthew's clothing. As in most other things in his world, other than his debts, Matthew's pockets were in order.

She had pulled the program, along with a ticket stub, out of the breast pocket of a suit coat. It was only a folded leaflet on plain white paper, obviously a low-budget piece of work. The title on the front—
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
—was off center, and the hand-drawn illustration of a freckle-faced boy in a straw hat and overalls appeared to be the work of a child. Inside, the name Geoffrey Long was circled in the cast of characters, and beside it in labored cursive was a penciled signature—
Geoffrey “Huckleberry” Long
, with a note scrawled beneath it:
Thanks for coming, Mr. Matt.

Julia didn't know anybody named Geoffrey Long, and she had never heard any child call him “Mr. Matt” either. She turned back to the front and studied the program again. The location was an elementary school in Greenville, and the date was on a Friday night in November almost two years ago, the time seven o'clock
P.M.
Once again she was reminded of how little she really knew of Matthew's life.

She tried to imagine what that particular Friday night would have been like. Had the two of them eaten dinner together at home before he went to the play? Friday suppers were usually paltry. A good one might include both soup and sandwiches, but most often it was one or the other. Or had he called her, as he often did on Fridays, and said he was working to finish up some things in the office and would grab something to eat on his way home, if she didn't mind? Which she never did.

And what had she done that evening? Graded another stack of papers? Or watched a movie? Maybe she had turned on the gas logs in the living room against the November chill and listened to the radio.

By that point in their marriage, Matthew had learned not to ask if she wanted to go anywhere on Friday night. The answer would always be the same. She was tired. She wanted to stay in. Many Friday nights she lay on the sofa, television muted, a CD playing softly, and read until she fell asleep, usually long after Matthew went to bed. When she woke, sometime in the early hours of morning, she would get up and move to her bedroom.

But what about when Matthew had come home that night? He always greeted her kindly if she was awake, asked her the standard polite questions. Was she feeling all right? Was she tired? Had it been a good day? Could he get her anything from the kitchen? And if she pretended to be asleep, which she often did, he always stood by the sofa for a moment, then touched something belonging to her—the blanket, her book, her sleeve, occasionally her hair—before walking back to his bedroom. He never disturbed her by speaking, never presumed to turn the television off. But even if she had been asleep that night, or pretended to be, why hadn't he told her the next day about going to Geoffrey Long's school play? Or had he mentioned it and she simply hadn't paid attention?

Well, enough of all that. She slapped the printed program back onto the nightstand. The Tom Sawyer play was over and done. The curtain had come down, the audience had applauded, and Matthew had dropped dead in the flower bed less than a year later. Why should she be lying awake full of pity for him that he had gone by himself alone one Friday night to see a children's play?

But that brought up another question:
Had
he gone by himself? She had turned his pockets inside out to check for another ticket stub, but there was only the one. What would she have done if she had found two? What
could
she have done, besides wonder for the rest of her life who had gone with him? And even if she had found incriminating evidence—a lipstick smear on a handkerchief, an earring, a note written in a feminine hand—what then?

She picked up the play program again and smelled it—no scent of perfume there. She put it down, turned out the light, and lay back down. And who would have blamed Matthew for wanting the companionship of a woman who desired his company, who listened and responded to whatever he said, who welcomed his touch? At the time Julia might have flown into a fit and played the victim, but she'd had a year now to reflect on what it must have been like for the man who was her husband. She had no idea how he had coped in a marriage like theirs, and, to be truthful, it was easier not to know.

But she couldn't get the picture out of her mind. Matthew, sitting among parents and grandparents in a school auditorium on a Friday night, watching an amateur production of
Tom Sawyer
, smiling and laughing at all the right times, staying afterward to talk to the boy named Geoffrey, asking him to sign his program, then driving home to the stone house, silent and empty except for Julia.

She flopped over and repositioned herself among the covers and pillows. She hated it when she did this—wallowed in regrets she couldn't do a thing about. And right now it was more than the play, of course, though that discovery had added weight to the memory of Matthew's question at the restaurant, put to her with such deference and hope:
Please, can we talk about children?
Matthew, always the gentleman.

It was a perfectly fair question for him to ask—a man married five years and well into his forties by then. They had never talked about having a family before they married, though she had known from the way he observed and interacted with other people's children that he wanted his own someday. For that reason, if for no other, she should never have married him. At the very least, she should have disclosed her intentions regarding children and allowed him to give her up. But selfishness had won. The thoughts of a husband and the security of marriage had been suddenly appealing in a way that caught her by surprise.

She had made no outright promises, but she knew she had led him to believe they could be as happy as other couples, as she indeed had hoped they could. She was almost thirty when they married, he eight years older. “Mystery Woman” was what he called her during the months of their courtship.

•   •   •

T
HEY
first met at a concert of the Brahms
Requiem
sung by the Greenville Chorale. Matthew arrived at the last minute, shortly before the lights went down, and hastily took the seat next to her because it was on the aisle and empty. But not twenty seconds later, the rightful seat holder arrived—a tall black-haired woman in a mink stole, the kind where the little mink encircled her neck, its jaws clamped onto its tail—and as the lights were dimming said, quite loudly, “You, sir, are in my seat.”

They had laughed about it afterward, when he caught up with Julia in the lobby and introduced himself as “Matthew Rich, ejectee of the seat next to yours.” They went to a McDonald's between Traveler's Rest and Greenville and sat across from each other while they had soft-serve ice cream sundaes.

Almost a year later, at a much nicer restaurant, after another concert for which he held a legitimate ticket for the seat next to hers, he made a winsome speech starting with “We make a perfect pair, you know. Mystery Woman and Rich Man.” He had a ring in his pocket, and somehow before they parted for the night, the ring was on her finger.

She should have told him then, or a dozen times before or a dozen times after. But she kept silent and allowed plans to go forward for a small, private summer wedding. And one thing followed another, as they always do in a marriage, until one day five years later her thoughtful husband arranged a dinner date. Once again they sat at a table in a restaurant, and this time he asked, “Please, can we talk about children?”

And she gave her answer, which must have shocked him for only an instant before it settled into his mind as a confirmation that theirs had never been and would never be a marriage made in heaven, that the Mystery Woman who was his wife had turned into a cold case with no clues.

T
HE
S
EVENTH
P
ICTURE

Sometime later, still in the dark of early morning, Julia awoke with tears on her face. It was an old dream she knew by heart. No sound at first, only images. Not a movie kind of dream, but an old slide show.

The pictures always flashed into her mind in quick succession. The first was the house where she grew up, a two-story gray-shingled house in Nadine, Alabama. It was an August afternoon, and she was on her way from Texas, where she had just defended her doctoral dissertation, to her new teaching position in South Carolina. She would soon be twenty-eight years old.

She was sitting in her car in the driveway, staring at the house she hadn't seen for almost nine years. It had a neglected, vacant look, though she knew her parents had occupied it every day since she had last been here. And now she was returning to lay her academic trophies at her father's feet. At last she had achieved something that outshone anything Jeremiah had ever done, as far as she knew. By then Jeremiah had been gone almost as long as she had, without a word of communication.

The second picture in the slide show dream was her mother's face, wrecked by time and toil, her eyes filled with fear to see who might be knocking at the kitchen door, beside which still grew the old rosebush, one spent rose dropping wilted petals. She peered out from behind the dingy, gauzy curtain, and for a moment Julia thought it was someone else looking out at her, a hired housekeeper perhaps. And then the door slowly swung open and she saw it was her mother—unkempt hair, empty eyes, a woolen scarf wrapped around her neck in the hottest part of summer. Barely fifty, yet the face of an old woman. It was like looking at a familiar building that had been vandalized.

The third picture was even worse, for it precipitated all the horror that followed. Her father's face showed the same signs of ruin as her mother's, though in his case it was a building not only vandalized but also boarded up, long deserted. Deep depression was what ailed him, according to her mother. That and his bad back and his crippling arthritis, which had worsened to the point that he had given up everything, even his compilation of folk songs. Most days now he didn't get out of bed.

Suddenly the slide show had audio. Her father's voice was unimpaired, a fact Julia perceived as soon as she stepped across the threshold into the kitchen that day, for she could hear him roaring from another room about what he was going to do to her mother if she didn't bring him a glass of orange juice right then.

He was still shouting when Julia approached his bed a few moments later. When she saw his face, contorted by rage and pain, she knew immediately that this trip home was a doomed effort. He stopped midsentence, his eyes pitiless as death, and when he spoke again, it was clear that there was still no favor to be found in his sight. Turning his face to the wall, he said, “Oh, it's you,” as if he couldn't stand the sight of her, though she knew it was more likely only disappointment that Jeremiah wasn't the one standing by his bed.

•   •   •

A
FTERWARD
,
she and her mother had quarreled at some length in the kitchen, a quarrel such as they had never had before, all the more intense because it was conducted in near-whispers. With endlessly sad years and troubled memories piled high on both sides, it would have been hard for anyone listening to tell what they were arguing about. Back and forth they went, not waiting for the other to finish. Even now Julia recalled feeling only a vague, unfocused fury over everything—her own physical exhaustion, her father's rejection, both old and new, the fact that he was now bedridden coupled with her mother's failure to forewarn her, the whole dreary atmosphere in this house where intimidation was like another occupant, so powerful that they dared not speak aloud.

“Why didn't you tell me he was getting worse?” This was Julia's first question after stalking into the kitchen from her father's bedroom. Her mother's reply was full of rancor: “Getting worse? He's been getting worse ever since you were old enough to remember. Did you think he might be getting better? And anyway, you never asked. Pam was the only one who ever called or came to visit.” This wasn't the mother Julia had grown up with.

But in other ways she was the same. At this point in the slide show, an image of her mother's Bible appeared, lying on the kitchen table beside a place mat littered with crumbs and stained with old food, her mother's hand resting on the cover as they argued. It was the same Bible she had always had, its cover as limp as an old dishrag.

When Julia's eyes fell on the Bible, she dragged it into the argument, too, her words spiteful, mindless, barely coherent, still whispered feverishly:
“That!”
She pointed to it. “So how much peace has it given you after you sacrificed your own children for a man like
him
? You did this to yourself! You could have gotten out years ago—and now see what he's done to you, to all of us!”

There was more, of course, both given and received, much of it repeated as the argument climaxed and then gradually lost steam.

Julia finally stopped and collapsed into a chair at the table. Her mother came toward her. At first Julia thought she meant to touch her, comfort her, but she only held out a paper napkin, then sat down and laid her hand on her Bible again. “This has been my strength through the years. This was the holy voice that told me to stay true to my marriage vows. I would give my life for this book.” She wasn't whispering anymore, but speaking as if to herself. “It's the same book that warns about an unruly tongue. I'm sorry for all the things I just said.”

Julia stopped whispering, too, but her words were low and hard, spoken from between clenched teeth. “Any book that tells you to subject innocent children to a man like him isn't worth the paper it's printed on.”

“You were all three strong, smart children,” her mother said. “I'm not saying I couldn't have done better by you, but I knew you would all make it somehow.” Her hand was still resting on the Bible. “I knew he wouldn't if I left him.”

Julia didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She pointed to the bedroom. “You call that
making it
?” She stood from her chair. “And
you
—have you
made it
? Is this how your God rewards you for being trampled on all those years?”

She had originally meant to stay overnight, had wished a million times that she had gotten herself under control, had set aside her pride and self-pity and called a truce, had taken her mother in her arms to beg forgiveness for her thoughtless words, had tried to ease her burdened soul for at least a few hours before leaving. But she hadn't. She didn't even tell her why she had come. Her doctoral degree suddenly seemed worthless.

The fifth picture was her mother's face at the kitchen door once more, looking out at Julia, who was sitting in her car again, one fist clutching her keys, the other pressed to her mouth, her breath coming fast. It was a beseeching look on her mother's face, as if she wanted to open the door and call Julia back in but knew there was no use trying.

And then a movement at the bedroom window—the one facing the driveway. It was her father's room. What effort it had cost him to make his way from the bed to the window she would never know, but that was the next picture—no face but a large, knotted hand on the heavy damask drape.

A sudden leaving of her senses followed. Julia fumbled for the right key, inserted it into the ignition, turned it hard. The engine caught; she jammed the gearshift into reverse and shot backward.

At this point in the slide show, she felt a sudden soft resistance against the tires of her car, nothing alarming at first, more like the sensation of running over a thick branch or a garbage can lid. Maybe if she had immediately applied the brakes, had gotten out to see what it was, maybe the rest of her life would have been different. Or maybe not. Maybe the damage was already done by the rear wheels before the front ones struck. At any rate, she didn't stop, not until she reached the end of the driveway and saw what lay crumpled in front of her.

•   •   •

T
HIS
was the seventh picture, the one so horrible that ever afterward she feared falling asleep and seeing it during the night. And feeling and hearing it. Suddenly the volume on the audio was turned up high. All at once the neighborhood, usually so quiet with such a little bit of traffic, was filled with sound. Sirens keening, people from all directions running, shouting, and then above it all, heart-rending wails.

The child himself made no sound at all. It was too late for that. His plastic three-wheeler lay on its side several feet away, the front wheel only slightly out of alignment, one of the back ones still turning slowly. A fact cruel beyond belief—that cheap yellow plastic was more durable than human flesh.

Now, as always after the bad dreams, her father's old songs came to torment her, always the saddest of them, and always the saddest words of the saddest songs:
Poor boy, you're bound to die. They sobbed and they sighed, and they bitterly cried. Oh, father, father, dig my grave, go dig it deep and narrow
.

•   •   •

J
ULIA
got up, took another sleeping pill, and went back to bed. At last she slept. When she woke hours later, she could tell it was late, but she continued to lie there, marveling that sleep had fallen upon her at last and delivered her once more to a new day.

With the sunshine leaking into her bedroom around the draperies, it came to her again that it was a charitable universe that operated this way, whereby daylight always returned, even after the worst nights. And the fact that after such nights she could rise again and push away enough of her old guilt to function almost normally—this was a gift for which she had no explanation. She always accepted it with gratitude, though she always felt guilty for doing so. There were certain sins one had no right to forget.

She folded back the covers and tentatively set her feet on the floor. Still solid beneath her. Slowly she stood up and walked to the window, then opened the drapes and blinds. And here was her own front yard looking as it did every other morning, except for the garden hose, which was unwrapped from its caddy behind the azalea bushes and stretched to the corner of the house. She walked across the hall to Matthew's bedroom and looked out the window. Everything in the backyard looked the same, too, except for Carmen lying flat on her back in the grass near the creek bank, one arm thrown over her eyes, one knee propped up with her new fishing hat perched on top of it.

The hat was something the girl had run across while clearing Matthew's fishing gear out of the garage. After putting it through the washer, she had decorated it with numbers of colorful lures, jellylike worms, and bobbers, all of which dangled from the brim. She had left a space in front just wide enough for an unobstructed view.

Carmen stirred now and swatted something on her arm. She sat up and squinted at the sun, then lay down again. Apparently she was tending the garden hose, which ran all the way across the backyard to the creek bank, where a few hydrangea bushes still bore blue blooms, stragglers she was coddling. She had to know their days were numbered. Even now, during the last week of September, the mornings and evenings were noticeably cooler, though daytime temperatures still climbed into the eighties. But the first frost would come, as it always did, and then winter.

She moved closer to the window. In the birdbath, a blue jay was fluttering in and out of the water, flapping its wings. A breeze was lifting the leaves of the trees, and overhead the clouds were floating across a sea of sky, robustly blue. Julia looked back at Carmen. Blue jeans and a blue T-shirt. A conspiracy of blue this morning.

•   •   •

C
ARMEN
had been quieter than usual the last couple of days. Perhaps she was dreading the New England trip, which she had finally agreed to, reluctantly. Maybe she was thinking of all those hours together in such close company—in the car, in motel rooms, on a plane. It was certainly something Julia had thought about.

Whatever it was, the girl clearly had something on her mind, again. Yesterday she had cut a dozen red roses from the trellis alongside the garage and had spent a long time arranging them in a white pitcher on the kitchen table. Julia had almost pointed out the bad timing. They were leaving in a few days and would only have to throw them out. But she had said nothing.

Carmen rolled over on her stomach now and crawled over to move the hose to the base of another bush, then lay down on her back again, spread-eagle, her head thrown back, her hat on the ground beside her. She lifted one arm and waved it about. Such a movement could have been entirely void of feeling, or motivated by joy, but Julia interpreted it as despair. She wished she could read the girl's mind.