Chapter 11
Will put me in my brother Adam’s old room and I had flashbacks of him there – his writing table, his old springy bed that came with the house, his D&D stuff. He’d been such a geek back then, before he buffed up. Now he was all into medieval reenactments, playing knight-errant, wearing real armor and swinging swords. I mean, a grown man, playing King Arthur or something. Real men should take out their aggressions on mature, adult things like football or WWF, right?
If you don’t get the irony, try harder.
Will brought my suitcases in and as I began to hang up my clothes in the empty half of the closet, his mother came in to put fresh linens on the bed.
I felt a catch in my throat and choked back a sob.
Mrs. Stenfield looked at me with concern.
“I’m sorry,” I said and sat down on the bed with a slight butt-wince. “It’s just…” Suddenly the waterworks poured forth. The emotional rollercoaster of what I called PCS, Pre-Change Syndrome, was starting to get me, which really sucked, because it was exactly fourteen days off of my PMS, which meant every damned lunar month I got twice as much insanity as normal women.
And you wonder why I’m a mess?
Will’s mother sat on the bed and held me and rocked me as I cried out my sorrow. All of my longing for family. All of my hunger for belonging. All of the heartache from not being able to feel my mother’s arms around me came rushing back, here in this place. In my home that wasn’t my home anymore, but still felt like it.
“You were very young when your mom died, weren’t you?” she said.
How did mothers know just what to say?
“We were eleven,” I said, my nose running as I blew long and hard into the tissues she pulled from her pocket. See, I thought. Some women were just born to be mothers. I began to cry even harder. “I forgot how much I missed her,” I sobbed, darting glances around the room to see if Mother was going to materialize. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, seeing as how I could still at least talk to her, but I hadn’t realized just how much I missed her presence. The softness of her arms around me, the smell of her hair.
Mrs. Stenfield just stroked my hair and held me, waving Will away when he passed by the doorway.
When I came back to myself, I felt awkward and unkempt.
“Why don’t I just leave you alone for now?” she said, the unspoken “while you pull yourself together” hanging in the air between us.
I nodded and sniffled as she shut the door behind her and left me alone. I could hear murmuring in the dining room, then the sound of the evening news on television drifting from the living area. With the sounds of normalcy gathered about me, I curled up into a ball on the bed and went to sleep.
I woke up later, in the middle of the night. The clock read 2:23 a.m., and I got the impression I had heard something outside. After looking though the windows and seeing nothing, I went into the kitchen to the back door, carefully turning the deadbolt so it wouldn’t make a sound, and left it open. I stood on the screened-in back porch next to the old washer and dryer and stared at the moonlit scene.
Inhaling deeply, I smelled the half-familiar smells of my childhood – wisteria going dormant, wild onions that infested the back lawn, Mexican food from one of the neighbors, damp old rusting steel screens that hadn’t yet been replaced with aluminum.
I looked up at la Luna hanging there in the sky and felt the tug, the pull, the urge to get naked and change and run free through the backyards like I used to do. I realized I could do the basement window trick, do it tonight, but I had never changed this early. A day before, sure, which hurt like a son-of-a bitch for some reason. Once I’d held it off until the night after, which was painful too, but I’d been aboard a cruise ship that got stranded at sea an extra forty-eight hours and didn’t have anywhere to go. Could have locked myself in my cabin but that was its own kind of agony, all that energy bursting from me with nowhere to put it.
If I changed this early, would that mean I was done for this cycle? I really did not know for sure. What if it didn’t really count? What if I ended up with some kind of extra bonus change, or what if it threw my cycle off and I have to start changing mid-moon? No, it was safer to just wait a while, do it when it was easiest and I was sure of the results.
Something moved off in the shadows by the fence where the gate to the next-door neighbors used to be. My eyes narrowed and I squinted,focusing on…what? Something small…a striped piece of fur. A cat. Just a cat, doing a bit of nocturnal hunting. I relaxed. See? Nothing to worry about.
I went back inside, locked the door, and settled back to sleep.
MoonRise Page 11
