Pack Up the Moon

by Kristan Higgins

  “Yeah, absolutely.”

  They sat in amiable silence for a minute or two.

  “How’s the weather where you are?” asked Rory.

  “It’s beautiful,” Josh said, having no idea what the weather was like at the moment.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Hawaii. Kauai,” Josh lied.

  “Oh, man, you’re lucky! What’s it like there?”

  It would be seven o’clock there. The sun would be starting to set, and he’d be sitting on the deck of their house, and Lauren would bring him a glass of ice water with a sprig of mint in it. She’d have a glass of rosé, and she’d curl up next to him.

  “It’s beautiful. It’s Hawaii, right? Um . . . our house is up on a cliff. It rained a little while ago, but it’s gorgeous now. Sunset will be soon.” Those sunsets had been incredible, better than any movie.

  “Must be amazing.”

  “Oh, yeah. A real nice place to live.”

  “Kauai, that’s the little island, right?” Rory asked.

  “One of them. It’s called the Garden Island, because it rains so much. Really lush. They filmed part of Jurassic Park here.”

  “Oh, cool. Were you born there?”

  “Yes.” Like every person who visited Hawaii, he and Lauren had talked about living there someday. She wanted to raise their kids close to their families, so living in Hawaii would be down the road a bit, once the kids were in college, but when he and Lauren were still young enough to snorkel and surf and hike.

  Yep.

  The images were so clear, he could smell the plumeria. He’d wear a Hawaiian shirt every day, and their kids would learn the language and be good stewards of the land. Lauren would manage to get a little tan. She’d work on developing parks and help preserve Hawaiian cultural spots and—

  “So if I was gonna go to Hawaii, which islands should I see?” Rory asked.

  “Well, definitely Kauai,” Josh said. “Natural beauty, the prettiest beach in the world at Hanalei Bay. My wife loves to bodysurf, and she says that place is the best.” Which was true. She had. “Maui is fantastic, too. Great hotels and restaurants, plus Haleakalā National Park. You have to see the sunset from there, man. Bring a coat, though. It gets cold. For volcanoes, go to the Big Island.”

  If the medical engineering didn’t work out, he could become a tour guide, maybe. This other version of himself was quite talkative. Full of information.

  On the phone with Rory, he didn’t have to be Josh in gray Rhode Island. He could be Josh who lived in Hawaii and went fishing and knew a sushi chef who’d make you a roll before the catch was even an hour old. He was outgoing, rather than socially awkward, this Josh who sat in the dark and lied. He sure as hell wasn’t Josh Whose Wife Died.

  “Where do you live, Rory?” he asked.

  “I live in Montana. Also really beautiful, but totally different, I’m sure.”

  “Are you near the mountains?”

  “Sure am.”

  “Do you get to Yellowstone at all?”

  “Oh, yeah, I love Yellowstone. Hayden Valley is my favorite part.”

  Josh and Lauren had planned on going there. My God. They never would. They never would.

  “My wife and I hope to get there,” he said around the tightness in his throat. “Maybe this summer.”

  “Wait for September if you can. Fewer tourists.”

  “Cool,” Josh said. “There are bison, right?”

  “Absolutely. Big as a truck.” Josh could imagine it. Lauren would shriek if they came too close. Nah. She’d be brave. He wondered if they could see a wolf. She loved wolves.

  The companionable silence stretched on.

  “How are we doing with the download? Almost there?” Rory asked.

  “Um . . . yes! Seems like everything’s back to normal.” Shit. Guess he’d have to hang up now, since he’d been on the phone for an hour and thirteen minutes. “Thanks so much, Rory.”

  “You bet. You’ll get an email survey about how we did, and if you have any other issues . . .”

  “No. I’m fine. Uh . . . thank you.”

  Thank you for being a voice in the middle of the night. Thanks for letting me be someone else for a little while. Thanks for working the night shift. Thanks for never knowing how much I lost.

  The survey came. He gave Rory top marks for everything.

  11

  Joshua

  Month three

  May 1

  THE WHOLE WORLD stops when a young person dies. At least, the world you live in.

  At first, everyone you know rallies around you, stunned and grieving, milling around. The solidarity of loss binds people together. No one can imagine moving forward. No one wants to. Stop all the clocks, as the poem instructs.

  And time does seem to stop. No one in your world can ever see being happy again. It’s an impossibility. Nothing will be the same. Nothing ever should be the same. The world is ruined by her death.

  There are the tasks immediately following. The phone calls. The arrangements. The assignments—you’ll go to the funeral home while her sister goes to the church, and this other one will order the flowers. There is so much to do, thank God, because your brain cannot accept what’s happened, and if you stood still for a second, you might spontaneously explode, like a wineglass shatters with a high note. Your feet are still moving and someone is pushing food and water on you, and another person is coming in now, and your phone is buzzing with texts and calls, and there’s another knock on the door.

  You put together the photo collages, the PowerPoint that will show during the wake and reception. You’ll make the playlist she requested, pick out readings, order food. For a week or two, the world is filled with the details of death. Family huddles close. Her friends are devastated. Her coworkers can barely function. Her doctor calls to check on you. Her nurses come to the funeral.

  For a short time, her death makes you the center of so many lives.

  And then . . . it trickles off. There are children to be cared for, homes to be cleaned, food to be prepared. The coworkers still have jobs to do. The friends start getting on with their lives.

  The stopped clocks start ticking once more.

  Two months and one week after Lauren died, that first day came for Josh. The day when no one called, texted, emailed, dropped by. Not Jen, not Ben, not Donna, not Sarah, not his mother, not Darius, not Bruce the Mighty and Beneficent, not a random former classmate who’d just heard the news.

  The first day of his life when his widowed state went unheralded by anyone.

  It was obscene. Message received, loud and clear. The world was adjusting to Lauren’s absence. Oh, he knew Donna and Jen would never get over her, would think of her every day. But Jen had a husband and two kids. Donna had a living daughter and two grandchildren. They both worked. They had places to go. His own mother ran an entire hospital lab, viewed Sumi and Ben as her siblings, belonged to four book clubs and volunteered through her church. But you think she might have called her only child just to check in. A fucking text, maybe, Mom?

  No. Nothing.

  Josh waited all day in a state of furious, silent martyrdom, hating himself, hating everyone else. Took the dog for a run. Spoke to no one. Checked his phone every ten minutes, then every five, then restarted it in case it had a glitch.

  Still nothing.

  He could, of course, reach out to someone. Ben would go for a walk with him; all he had to do was ask, and they’d be at the Botanical Center or driving to Boston. It would be better than this ridiculous, pointless anger. But this was a test. A test of them, a test of him.

  Everyone failed.

  By 8:37 p.m., he hated them all.

  Fury was creeping into his head like a disease. A red-out was coming.

  The first time it happened, he was six, and the school bully—Sam,
who was bigger and stronger than any kid in class—had thrown Caitlin’s eyeglasses across the cafeteria. Caitlin was a special needs girl and Josh’s friend. Joshua didn’t remember anything about what happened until he was in the principal’s office with his mother, being told that he’d tackled Sam. Josh asked why there was blood on his shirt and why his eye was hurting; it was because Sam had punched him in the face. Josh had hit back, splitting Sam’s lip. Both boys had been suspended for a week, but Stephanie took him out for ice cream that afternoon, and when he came back to school, Caitlin handed him a card with her painstaking printing: Thanks for sticking up for me.

  Another time, when he was ten, his mother had a violently bad reaction to a pepper and had to be rushed away in the ambulance with anaphylaxis. The Kims had come over, but Josh had been like a feral animal, they told him later. It had taken Ben and another neighbor to carry him in the house and hold him down until he came back into himself.

  A few days later, after talking to his pediatrician, Josh’s mother told him these incidents weren’t uncommon for people with Asperger’s, as they called it then. The trick was handling it. Distracting himself. She’d given him a sentence to chant when he was little—The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. “It has every letter in the alphabet,” she said. “Think about it, Josh. Count the letters.” It had become a mantra when the red started to flare. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

  At the same time, Ben had taught him to box, or at least, the different types of punches used in boxing. Josh never hit any human, but hitting the bag was . . . cathartic.

  Now, at 8:42 p.m., he could see the red rising. Still time to head it off at the pass.

  He went to the always empty gym on the first floor of their building and beat the shit out of a punching bag.

  Barefisted. The smack of his fists against the hard leather, the exhale with the effort, the sting of the punch, the ache radiating up his arm weren’t enough. Harder. Harder. The hiss as he punched the bag turned into exhalations of ha! ha! Sweat poured off his body. The exhalations turned into words—No. No. No. No. Then, into curse words so foul and filthy he should’ve been ashamed. But he wasn’t. He was furious.

  She shouldn’t have died. She should not have died, goddamnit, and the motherfucking idiotic way-behind-the-times motherfucking healthcare system fucked her over and left her for goddamn dead and had motherfucking nothing, nothing, nothing to offer her, the stupid sonofabitch asshole fucking shit, shit shit fuck.

  His fury bounced off the walls, echoing, and his knuckles were bleeding now, his fists sliding as they landed on his own blood, and good, good, the pain felt better than the helpless oppressive nothingness.

  Finally, staggering from exhaustion, sweat running down his bare torso, his hands looking like they’d been through a meat grinder, he staggered to grab a towel and mop himself up.

  Creepy Charlotte, with her pale blue eyes that were too far apart, smiled at him from the doorway. “Want to grab a drink, Josh?”

  “Jesus Christ, no,” he said. He got the disinfectant wipes and scoured the punching bag, distantly noting the burn on his knuckles.

  “Another time, then.”

  “No. Never.”

  “See you soon.”

  And people thought he was bad at reading signals.

  The punching bag had done the trick. He was so tired, he had to take the elevator up the two floors to his apartment. He showered, the hot water stinging his hands. When he was done, he went into their room, closing the door so Pebbles wouldn’t come in and mess up the bed.

  Last week, he’d awakened already knowing she was gone. He didn’t reach out for her. That in itself ripped his heart apart all over again. Two months and one week was all it took for his muscles and instinct to adjust. Reaching for her had been his habit in marriage; now, marriage was over, and his stupid body recognized that.

  He had stopped checking her side of the bed in the middle of the night. Stopped wondering if she was already up. He didn’t call her name. He didn’t check his watch, wondering if it was time for her meds or a walk or some breathing exercises. He didn’t accidentally reach for two plates at dinnertime, whenever that was, and when he realized he didn’t, he deliberately set out two plates, because the acceptance of her absence was worse than the forgetting of her death.

  She was dead. It was a fact now, and that was more awful than walking into a room and wondering where she was. He shouldn’t get used to this. It was grotesque to even consider.

  And now, today. May first, the day he had proposed to her four years ago. He’d gotten down on one knee as the crab apple blossoms rained down gently all around them, and asked Lauren Rose Carlisle to be his wife.

  He went to her bureau and opened her jewelry box, where he’d put her engagement and wedding rings at some point. He didn’t have a clear memory of that, but here they were. He’d give them to Octavia someday, he supposed. Or to Sebastian, for his future wife. Or he could throw them in the fucking ocean, at the beach on Cape Cod, where they’d had so many beautiful days and nights. Maybe he’d just walk into the ocean himself with the rings in one hand, his pockets loaded with rocks to weigh him down. Maybe a passing great white shark would eat him, and he could be dead, then, too.

  Two ghosts drifted around their apartment—Lauren, and the Josh who had been her husband, so much more than this empty bag of bones.

  For the first time since the night she’d gone into the hospital with the pneumonia that killed her, Josh lay on their bed. Not in it . . . just on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling. He’d had to wash the comforter after Pebbles and her Korean chicken adventure, but Lauren’s pillow had been untouched by the sticky sauce. He leaned over and inhaled, smelling her, and the invisible fist of grief slammed him in the heart.

  He lay on his back, cradling the pillow, worried that it would lose its Lauren smell. Don’t move, he told himself, so tired that the thought made sense. Don’t move, and it won’t find you. If he could stay empty, he wouldn’t wind up on the floor, howling. He prayed for sleep, for a dream about his wife, but his eyes stayed open.

  12:14 a.m.

  1:21.

  2:07.

  3:38.

  4:15.

  5:03.

  5:49.

  Light filtered into the room. He could get up now. He made coffee. Opened the fridge. Closed the fridge. Took Pebbles out to pee. Came back up to drink the coffee.

  He went onto the online forum for young widowers and widows and asked how people survived this. Drink lots of water, people reminded him, his fellow amputees, fellow husks. Congratulate yourself on getting out of bed or eating something. Get some exercise. Be kind to yourself. Process the trauma, the forum people said, whatever that meant.

  He tried to remember if he’d taken the dog for a run yesterday. Maybe? He could go for a run now. It was drizzly and gray outside. He might have to give Pebbles a bath afterward. That would kill some time. So he pulled on his running shoes and out they went.

  People were on their way to work. Lots of raincoats, lots of umbrellas, lots of fast walkers going into buildings. Josh kept running, turning at the river, running at the base of College Hill. His earbuds were in, though he had forgotten his phone, or left it behind subconsciously. Still, the earbuds would protect him. Providence was a small city, and he’d grown up here, gone to two colleges here. He didn’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone. They’d blown their chance yesterday.

  It was a shock, this continuing world. So many people were happy. Didn’t they know what was in store for them? Look at me and despair, he wanted to tell them, like Jacob Marley’s ghost. I was once you. He wanted to grab one of those happy assholes and shake them.

  He stopped at a red light, then ran when it changed, stepping into an ankle-deep puddle of tepid water. Pebbles’s belly was wet and dingy.


  God, he missed being married. Coming home to someone. Someone to ask where his other sock was. Someone to tease. Someone to touch. He was alone in a sea of people, all of them connected, it seemed. He had his mom. The Kims. Somewhere out there, the biological father who had deserted him before he was born, so what good was he? He had Lauren’s small family.

  That was it.

  What a shit idea it had been to work for himself, by himself. Well, it had been incredibly lucky when Lauren was alive and fighting, but it was shit now. He could get a job somewhere, but the thought of leaving the house every day, coming home to it . . . no. Not yet. The literature said not to make big decisions the first year of widowhood.

  He eventually found himself running on his own street, having circled back, unsure of how long he’d been gone. Pebbles was panting and filthy. He took the stairs to their apartment, opened the door and looked at the kitchen clock.

  11:09.

  Jesus. It was, impossibly, still morning.

  Wash the dog. Towel her dry. Take a shower. Get dressed. Clean the bathroom of wet dog fur. Eat. Drink.

  12:13.

  He sighed and closed his burning eyes. Lay down on the couch, but was tormented by visions of Lauren’s last hours. He sighed again, got up and headed for his computer.

  Pebbles came trotting over, but she was wobbly, favoring her left back leg. “What’s the matter, pooch?” he asked, the sound of his voice too loud for his own ears. “You okay?” He ran his hand down her leg, and she whimpered.

  “Great, Josh,” he said out loud. “Now you’ve ruined the dog.” Pebbles turned to lick his face. “I’m sorry, honey. I’ll take you to the vet, okay?”

  Yes. Even if she was just a little sore from too much exercise, it would give him something to do. If there was one thing he was good at, it was doctor’s appointments.

  He called the vet’s office and gave his name.

  “Pebbles? An Australian shepherd mix?” the receptionist asked.