Losing the Moon

by Patti Callahan Henry

  “Damn. Damn.” She grabbed a paper towel from the rack and wrapped it around her finger. She’d just added to her scars: the one from slicing a bagel for Jack, the one from the scissors when sewing Molly’s Cinderella Halloween costume. Even her finger was a testimonial to family life; even her scars revealed her commitments.

  Our vows are still there, never broken.

  She slammed the dishwasher shut with her foot. Where were Molly and Phil? Eat and run, off to what was important to them while she bled over the sink and was tired enough to curl up on the kitchen floor and sleep until next week. Thanksgiving and Christmas were around the corner, and even the thought of the energy and focus the holidays would require of her made her want to let the blood run from her finger. The thought of the boxes and decorations and parties and gifts and family obligations, of the school . . .

  Our vows are still there, never broken.

  The kitchen ceiling thrummed with the intensity of Molly’s boom box in her bedroom. She did her homework on her pencil-scarred desk while listening to this music, and Amy didn’t understand how. She closed her eyes and leaned over the counter, placed her forehead on the cool granite that she’d installed after the original countertop had cracked under a heavy spaghetti pot.

  She jumped as Phil touched her shoulder. “You okay?” He hugged her from behind, kissed the side of her neck.

  “I cut myself.” She held up her finger for him to see.

  “Look. Where were you and Molly? Someone stuck a knife right-side-up in the dishwasher.”

  “Ow.” He kissed her finger. “I was taking the trash out to the curb, bagging the recycling.”

  She sighed, still not looking up at her husband. Something subterranean began to shift and she made a choice between irritation and guilt; she allowed the irritation to rise like cream: thick, rich, avoiding the guilt that lay directly below it.

  Our vows are still there, never broken.

  She pushed back from the counter, turned to Phil and yanked her hand from him. He stepped back and she saw him as a sketch that she could erase, smudge the edges of his body into the faux finished walls.

  He wrinkled his nose and tilted his head, furrowed his mouth in the concerned expression he saved for illnesses, wrecked cars, bounced checks. “Amy, what is wrong?”

  “I told you, I cut my finger.” She held it up for him to see again. Blood leaked through the paper towel. She pulled off the paper towel and threw it in the trash, allowed the blood to drip onto the hardwood floor. “Hello, can’t you see that?”

  He reached for her hand and kissed the bloodstained finger, then opened the cabinet above her head and pulled down a Band-Aid, some Neosporin. “Here, hon, give me your finger. I’ll fix it.”

  She began to cry.

  “Does it hurt that bad? Maybe it needs stitches,” Phil said.

  “No, it doesn’t need stitches.” She wiped at her face with her free hand. “I’m fine . . . fine.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m just . . . tired.”

  “Why don’t you go to bed early tonight?”

  “I have papers to grade, laundry to fold. I have to print the lineup for the Art Festival. I have to—”

  “Stop it, Ame. Don’t run yourself into the ground. Damn, the holidays haven’t even started yet.” Phil wrapped the Band-Aid tightly around her finger, stayed the bleeding.

  “Thank you, Phil.”

  “At your service.” He kissed her and tousled her hair.

  The touch of his mouth on the inside of her bottom lip evoked the pressing, desperate need of Nick leaning her against the brick wall. Once again, she chose irritation and turned her back on Phil.

  Something flashed pink in her peripheral vision, sent a weakness down her inner thighs—a pink folded paper on the kitchen counter. She didn’t turn to it, but pulled on her Band-Aid.

  Phil lifted the paper. “Oh, I almost forgot, with your near finger-severing . . .” He waved the scrap of paper. “I was taking out the trash, and this was on the floor of your study. I didn’t know if you were aiming for the trash or if it fell off your desk. Do you need it?”

  She felt naked, exposed, like she was going to throw up. “One of my students gave me her number . . . but now I forget who. You can throw it away. If she needs me bad enough, she’ll give it to me again, or call the school office.”

  “Okay.” Phil threw the scrap of paper in the white trash can. Amy turned from watching and poured Cascade in the eye-socket holes of the dishwasher, slammed the door shut and pushed the appropriate black buttons to begin the hum of the machine.

  Phil leaned up against the counter and smiled at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I got a funny call today from Bill’s wife. Said she was getting her hair done and saw you pull into the parking lot with a gas hose stuck in the car—that you sat down in the middle of the parking lot and laughed.”

  She leaned against the same counter, needing its support. So his boss’s wife had seen her and thought the tears were laughter.

  “It was pretty funny, actually. Carol Anne and I were so involved in our discussion I actually left the gas hose in the car.”

  “What did the gas station do? Do we have to pay for it?”

  “No. Believe it or not they say it happens more frequently than you’d imagine.”

  “Where was your head?”

  “I don’t know. I was talking and—”

  “Probably about that project of yours.”

  “What do you mean, ‘project of mine’?”

  “Well, you do seem to be obsessed with it lately.”

  “And you’re not with your job?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why, Phil? Because it’s yours? Because it isn’t my job?”

  “No, honey. This is your . . . project. And I’m glad you’re doing something you love.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, I am. How’s it going?” He took a deep inhale, as if listening to her required a sustaining breath.

  “I went back out there a couple weeks ago. Nick found an endangered plant that could change everything. Brenton is pretty sure it’s a tiny-leaved buckthorn, a very rare shrub. Norah is taking it to the Heritage Preserve with all the other information Reese and Revvy have about the wildlife.”

  “That’s nice, honey. Really. I hope it works out for you.”

  “I’m gonna try to grade some papers.”

  “Okay.” He kissed her again, moved toward the living room.

  She waited, then watched to see him slump on the couch, humming, reading his Wall Street Journal—preoccupied once again with stock prices. Only then did she go back into the kitchen, lift the top of the trash can, pick out the small pink paper and tuck it safely into the back pocket of her pants.

  She rounded the corner from the kitchen to the living room and watched Phil leaf through his Journal. He was a dedicated stockbroker, unappreciated by his boss at Stevenson and Sons, eager for a promotion. He loved analyzing straight rows of numbers and diagnosing monetary ills. She walked up behind him. Why could he not, for just one minute, pretend to care about her project? He’d flunked what she considered a listening test—if he was really paying attention, he would have heard Nick’s name.

  She walked to her sunroom office with its rolltop desk. Eighteen years before, when the moving truck had pulled into the driveway of the house—a home she’d been watching and admiring—she’d placed the box labeled AMY’S OFFICE in the sunroom before anyone else could claim it, before a box labeled LIVING ROOM or MOLLY’S NURSERY or JACK’S TOYS landed on the antique brick floor. The minute the real estate agent had ushered her into the house, she’d gravitated to the sunroom she’d stared at for months, knowing she belonged in it.

  The house had never had a FOR SALE sign in the front yard. Before they’d moved in, they’d lived in a qui
et town house on the other end of Magnolia Avenue, the main street trimmed down sides and center with trees. Every day she’d take a walk down that street, first pregnant, then with a stroller, then with a double stroller, and stop in front of the 1800s house with the glazed and peeling iron gate, the brick with its crumbling mortar, the tilted front porch, yearning for something unnamed surrounding the house. There was a separate longing that accompanied the desire for the house—a longing for a home, a real home with creaking floors and marks of the kids’ heights on the kitchen doorframe, with scraping screen doors that didn’t close properly and probably never would.

  One day on her walk, while Molly screamed (as she had through the first seven months of her life), Amy picked her up out of the stroller and stared again at the house—imagined herself in the sunroom: typing, writing, drawing, reading . . . God, even sleeping, which it felt like she hadn’t done in months.

  As she cooed ineffective words of solace into Molly’s ear, a silver Cadillac pulled up to the curb next to her, increasing Molly’s head-thrown-back screaming. Amy reached down and touched the top of Jack’s sleeping head in the stroller and pulled Molly closer. A woman in a navy blue suit— obviously well rested, with her coiffed hair and carefully applied makeup—popped from the car looking much too happy for Amy’s frame of mind. The woman reached into the backseat and pulled out a briefcase. She looked up, and Amy was embarrassed to be still standing, staring, her own hair not brushed since the day before, her mascara at least two days old and surely creased below eyes that had not closed for more than three hours at a time in the past week.

  “Well, hello there.” The woman’s perky voice matched her skipping step.

  “Hello,” Amy answered. This was her hometown; one must never be rude. You might actually be related to the person on some branch of the family tree. She laid the still-screaming Molly back in the double stroller.

  The woman curled her mouth in a sympathetic smile. “Oh, I do remember those days. But honestly, you live through them. You really do.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “One morning you’ll wake up and realize you slept through the night . . . at least until they drive.”

  “When is that? Next century?”

  “It feels that way, I know. But Lordy, all mine are grown and gone. I babysit now for their kids. But don’t tell my clients”—she gestured toward the house and bent to whisper—“that I’m a grandma.”

  “Well, you don’t look like a grandma, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m a”—the woman laughed and stood straighter—“a real estate agent.”

  A slow tingle began below Amy’s breast and she wasn’t sure if the sensation came from Molly’s time to nurse, or the words “real estate agent” right in front of her dream house.

  Amy whispered, “Are you selling?” She gestured toward the house. “Are they selling this house?”

  The woman formed another sympathetic smile. “Unfortunately, the sweet woman who lived here . . . well, she died.”

  In her blurred fatigue, above Molly’s now dwindling screams, Amy found the words she wanted to say but normally would have swallowed. “This is my house.”

  “What?”

  “This is my favorite house . . . on the street, in town.” She swept her hand through the air.

  “Well”—the woman seemed to hesitate now, her perkiness fading—“it is rather . . . expensive, you know, being on Magnolia, and it’s a Historic Preservation home, protected by the city, and—”

  “I know. I know.”

  Amy and Phil’s arguments about buying the house were sedate, but genuine. She always understood Phil gave in not because he loved the house, but because he loved her. His interest was remote at best, nonexistent at worst. If there was any work or renovation to be done to the house, it was her domain. He never said it, but she read it in his eyes: You wanted this house. You take care of it. And she did.

  The day they moved in, they made love on the sunroom floor, a threadbare cotton blanket with a picture of the state of Georgia beneath them, while Molly and Jack napped in Pack ’N Plays in the foyer amid boxes blocking the way upstairs. Never once, in their eighteen years of living there, had Phil questioned why she claimed the best room in the house—why her dried flowers, torn photographs, trinkets, papers and books resided in the room with the best view of both the sunset and the side yard with its prolific rose garden and iron fence.

  She now stood in the doorway and nibbled on her Band-Aid. When was the last time she and Phil had made love? She couldn’t think about it now. There were papers to grade.

  When was the last time she and Nick had made love? She closed her eyes and remembered: the night before he left, in the musty third-floor apartment where he lived his senior year.

  A Saxton University banner hung by a thumbtack on the left wall, a clap-activated lamp crouched on a discarded beer keg turned nightstand, next to the mattress on the floor. Why waste money on a bed frame or a real table when they could use the money for another camping trip to a national forest they hadn’t yet explored? The vague scent of soap mixed with toothpaste and a warm spot on the pillow attempted to seduce her to sleep even as she wanted to stay up all night, trace his face, his shoulder blades, the curve of his back. That night was to last three months. As it ended up, that night needed to last forever.

  Our vows are still there, never broken.

  She shook her head, shrugging off the memory. She walked to her desk, realigned her thoughts to the present, to the essays on the field trip. She sat down and leafed through the papers, then lifted and fingered the pink paper with the phone number that Phil had thrown away. She felt like an alcoholic digging a half-empty bottle from the trash, but told herself she would only use this number to ask Nick about the OWP project and the leaf he’d found.

  Our vows are still there, never broken.

  Enough about the damn vows, already.

  She stuffed the paper in the top drawer of her desk, underneath old phone bills she’d meant to claim as teacher’s expenses.

  She started to grade the essays, but found she needed to close her eyes for just one minute. She collapsed into the chaise longue covered in faded pink and yellow chintz, that she’d found at a flea market.

  She awoke with Phil’s lips on her forehead. “Honey, it’s midnight. You need to come to bed.”

  She opened her eyes and looked around the room. “Oh, hell, Phil. I’ll never go back to sleep now. You know I can’t sleep after I wake up.” She rubbed her face.

  “I couldn’t let you sleep here all night. You’ll get cold.”

  “You could’ve just thrown a blanket on me.”

  “Amy, come to bed.”

  “I can’t. I didn’t finish the laundry . . . the papers.”

  “Class isn’t for three more days. Come to bed.”

  She looked up at Phil, at his eyes, and she lifted up her hands, allowed him to pull her to her feet. She fell onto his chest and rested there, knowing for a moment her place.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The building—constructed of brick and tabby, the Lowcountry combination of lime, whole oyster shells and burned, crushed shells—squatted in front of Nick. The sun sank below the tips of the wrought-iron fencing across the top of the building and caused the iron to blaze. Nick looked down to the front door of the building he was not allowed into without a pass. He waited for a student, even one, to exit the dorm so he could walk in as she walked out.

  He’d wrestled all afternoon with the thought versus the reality of coming to Amy’s dorm. He’d imagined her angry at him for coming without telling her, then relieved when he told her what he’d found. Only a few weeks had passed since he’d last seen her, yet another twenty-five years seemed to have dissolved in her absence, as if the recent contact with her elongated both time and pain—again.

  He opened the truck door and st
epped out, walked slowly toward the front of the dorm. A young girl, her ponytail swishing to her flicking head movements as she talked to her friends, opened the door, bringing laughter and the exposed midriffs of undergrads going out for the evening. Nick smiled, nodded and propped the door open for them. They smiled back at him, probably believing he was visiting his daughter. He entered the foyer. The sun setting behind the building glared through the back windows, exposed streaks and handprints on the glass. Nick squinted and turned to the front desk. Everything in the room appeared harsh, overlit by the setting sun.

  He had prepared a speech for whoever sat sentinel at the front desk, but it was empty, a small soundless TV flickering a rerun of Seinfeld. He laughed and glanced around the empty room. A scratched thick wooden door to the left of the desk was propped open half an inch, enough to allow him to see the sunlit grass, a concrete stoop: the courtyard. He sidled toward the door and opened it, walked outside.

  The courtyard seemed empty save for a large blue jay splashing in the birdbath, looking over its shoulder at him, concluding he was of little concern. The corner where he had sat with Amy just a few weeks before was shrouded in shadow, just as he remembered it. He began to walk toward where he knew the bench was, behind the tree, tilted to the left where it sank in moss-soft soil. He’d sit and wait; he had something to tell her and a sleep-depriving need to see her, touch her.

  He walked closer; someone occupied his seat. Behind the curtain of Spanish moss a figure leaned against the armrest, feet on top of the bench, head bent over folded legs. A twig snapped under Nick’s foot. The figure’s head shot up and looked directly at him.

  “Sorry. Sorry.” He stopped, began to turn, then laughed. Amy sat before him, staring at him, her head tipped on top of her knees. He couldn’t see her whole face, but he knew her body, the tilt of her head.

  “Nick?”

  He walked under the moss. “Yep.”