Losing the Moon

by Patti Callahan Henry

  She groaned and remembered staring out the window of her home, telling her mother she was sick, too sick to come down to dinner—again. She had been desperate for someone, anyone to call and tell her where Nick was, why he hadn’t returned to her. She hadn’t given up and, dear God, neither had he.

  The third paper was ripped diagonally, but it didn’t matter as there were only five words on it.

  Amy,

  I love you.

  Nick

  The date was six weeks from the first telegram, and if she remembered time correctly, a year before he was released, eleven months before she became engaged to Phil.

  For the second time that night she sobbed. Even when he thought she didn’t come, when he believed the worst of her, he’d written of his love.

  In her need to survive the agony of abandonment, she had deserted her love for Nick. Her concern about these telegrams should have been buried when she said the words “I do” to Phil; guilt flooded her mouth with leftover acid from the Christmas champagne.

  Loud knocks came from beyond the commode stall, from the other side of the bathroom door.

  “Amy . . . are you okay?” Phil’s voice sounded muffled, underwater.

  She stood and opened the commode door, called out, “I’m fine. I’ll be right out.”

  She shuffled to the sink, washed her face, brushed the guilt from her mouth with toothpaste. Then she shoved the letters back into the tampon box—safe. She wondered dully whether the guilt she felt was from not being there for Nick—for abandoning something she would never have left behind—or from her betrayal, meager as she conceived it at that moment, of Phil. She was too tired—too damn tired—to figure it out now.

  She opened the bathroom door and almost knocked Phil over.

  “Babe, you okay?”

  “I think the crab puffs were . . . bad or something. I never want another crab puff again in my life. Ever.” She moaned and fell into bed. “Are Jack and Molly okay?”

  “Yes. Molly is sound asleep on top of the bed in her clothes. All that coat-hanging wore her out, I guess.”

  “That or the champagne I saw her sneak.”

  Phil laughed. “She wasn’t the only one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you . . .”

  “It wasn’t the champagne.”

  It wasn’t the champagne. It was Nick Lowry—how do you like that?

  “Okay, hon.”

  “How’s Jack . . . Lisbeth?”

  “We got her all set up in the guest room. She’ll drive home in the morning.”

  “Hopefully before I get up.”

  “Not a lot of love lost between you two.”

  Amy didn’t answer, rolled over.

  Phil reached over and rubbed the top of her forehead. “Well, it was a great party except for your buddy Rebel spouting his Greenpeace agenda to my boss.”

  “His name is Revvy and it wasn’t a Greenpeace agenda. It was . . . God, I do not want to talk about this again.”

  “Oh, so now you don’t want to talk about it.” He laughed; she didn’t think he was funny. “It’s all you’ve wanted to talk about for months.”

  “Phil, drop it, okay? All you care about is what your boss thinks of you.”

  “Uncalled for. And not true. And Revvy. What kind of name is that anyway?”

  “His name, I guess.”

  “Okay, Amy. Get some sleep.”

  “I will.” She closed her eyes and prayed for the blessed absence of consciousness, knowing it would be a long, long time in coming as the approaching dilemma of right and wrong, of inevitability and destiny intertwined.

  What was right? What vows were made? She shoved the questions away, along with the burden of comprehending the agony she’d caused Nick, the grief she could cause Phil. She couldn’t look directly at any of this mess and she used the telegrams as a solar eclipse—blocking out what she knew was there, but couldn’t yet see or feel.

  PART III

  The only joy to be trusted is the joy on the far side of a broken heart.

  —Alfred North Whitehead

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The commode closet seemed to be where Amy spent most of her free time these days. Pitiful, but it was the only place where she could sit and reread Nick’s notes. The days were endless without borders on her feelings. Christmas had passed and Molly had started school, but SCAD didn’t start until mid-January. Amy sat and read—attempting to find what haunted her. An unfulfilled longing gnawed at her and she wanted something from these notes, or they were preparing her for something. She felt that if she just read them over and over she’d discover what it was. Only reading the notes brought her close to understanding the emptiness she felt. At the same time the notes conveyed a nauseating pain.

  There was a certain sense of destiny within the messages. She hadn’t brought Nick back to her present life, and whatever came next wouldn’t be her choice either—it would come of its own volition.

  Christmas had, paradoxically, been one of the most peaceful and quiet they’d ever had as a family. She thought it due to her own stillness, which she used as a survival mechanism. Her usual hubbub—running around, fixing, re-fixing, cooking, cleaning, wrapping—had decreased in both intensity and volume. She felt as she had right before the children were born—a conserving of energy, a withdrawing into her own body that allowed only the most necessary activities outside herself.

  She sent Phil to his office party alone. Their unresolved disagreements over both the identity of the Oystertip buyer and her guest list at the open house ran beneath the surface like a sharp-edged danger they didn’t go near. Talking about any of it would only lead to what she really felt and she could not voice her emotions, much less explain them. Evasion of discord seemed to be in the best interest of their family.

  She had ordered the remainder of the Christmas gifts on the Internet and skipped the school arts alliance party and the neighborhood block party. She kept listening to the same Christmas CDs she’d installed for the Christmas party; the thought of picking new ones, changing them, pushing the tray back in, exhausted her. She felt she was sleepwalking until life brought to her the next link in this chain of events.

  She believed her lethargy existed in her own private bubble, in her own commonplace world—that no one noticed her slipping fortitude, her sense of an impending destiny over which she had no control. Yet her son came close to detecting her confused state of mind when he and Lisbeth broke up a few days after Christmas.

  For the thousandth time Amy sang “Winter Wonderland.” The kids were both home, usually sleeping till noon, eating at odd hours, and she was never sure whether she was cleaning up breakfast or lunch. She’d already put away all the laundry.

  The phone rang and she moved toward the living room, searched for the portable that never seemed to reside in its cradle when Jack was home. “Where is the phone?” she called from the kitchen, swinging the door open.

  Jack and Lisbeth sat on the couch, holding hands, gazing at each other. Lisbeth was crying—again. Amy rolled her eyes just in time for Lisbeth to turn and see her. This opened the water works once more.

  “You okay, darling?” Amy thought she’d better ask.

  “No, your son just broke up with me. I know it’s because you told him to.”

  Jack held his hand up to his mother—a warning not to speak. But Amy felt free-floating, able to say anything within her own warped time and space. It didn’t really matter what she did or said—circumstances just played out the way they wanted to, didn’t they?

  “Jack?” Amy asked. She looked at the side of Lisbeth’s face, seeing Nick’s defiant chin.

  “I’m not breaking up with her.” He touched Lisbeth’s arm. “We’re not breaking up.”

  “I call seeing other people breaking up.” Lisbeth spoke clearly, consi
dering the effort it took to cry so hard.

  “I don’t,” Jack said, and motioned for his mother to leave the room. She tried to move her feet, but couldn’t.

  “Now why would you two break up?” Amy waved her hand around in the air.

  “Mom. Please.” Jack looked up, opened his eyes wide.

  Lisbeth wiped at her face.

  Amy plowed on. “Really, hon. Why would you break up when there’s no reason to? Why would you leave each other, when no one has left or gone away or done . . . anything? It’s not like you’re in love with someone else . . . or moving.”

  Lisbeth released Jack’s hand, turned to Amy. “What?”

  Jack stood and pulled Lisbeth from the couch. “Let’s go.”

  Lisbeth opened her mouth, shut it and turned. Jack grasped her hand and they walked to the French doors to the backyard, obviously to continue their discussion without Amy. Then Lisbeth stopped, turned again. “Why did you ever break up with anyone you said you loved?”

  “What?” Amy asked.

  “You . . . Why did you ever break up with anyone?”

  “I don’t think I ever did.”

  “You broke up with my daddy.”

  “No . . . no, I didn’t.”

  Lisbeth came toward her. “Yes, you did. Mother told me you did. Now you want Jack to do the same to me. But Jack loves me.”

  “Stop. Now.” Jack headed toward both of them.

  “I did not break up with your daddy. He went . . . away.”

  “Stop!” Jack yelled and Amy saw the word in capital letters, slanted, lopsided.

  She hadn’t heard her son shout at her since he stood in his crib, shaking the bars and wailing for a bottle.

  Amy backed away from Jack into the kitchen. What had she just said, done? The kitchen door shut and she sat down on a bar stool and dropped her face in her hands as she listened to the opening and shutting of the back door, then the swish of the swinging kitchen door.

  She looked up. Jack stared at her.

  “I’m sorry I shouted at you, Mom.”

  “That was completely disrespectful.”

  “I’m sorry. But what were you talking about?”

  “I was just answering her.”

  “Mom.” He hesitated, looked out the kitchen window. “Did you really used to date her dad . . . seriously date?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you talked to him? Kept up with him all these years?”

  So that was what her son was worried about—whether she’d kept in contact with an old boyfriend for twenty-five years.

  “No. If you wanted to know, you should’ve asked.”

  “Lisbeth thinks that you—”

  “I said goodbye to him twenty-five years ago and didn’t see him again until the day you brought Lisbeth to meet us.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Okay.” Jack turned to leave the room.

  “Where is she?”

  “Waiting for me in the car. Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please don’t ever do that again. That was so embarrassing.”

  “I just wanted—”

  Jack walked toward her, hugged her. “You just don’t seem like yourself lately.”

  “I know.”

  Her son walked out the side door to the driveway, where his car waited with the sobbing Lisbeth. Amy ambled aimlessly through the house, then finally to her sunroom, where she sank onto her desk chair. She still waited, not knowing what she waited for; she was impatient, frustrated. She opened the top-left drawer, as she had a thousand times since the Christmas party, and lifted the scrap of pink paper from below the phone bills. Surely she needed to talk to Nick after reading the unsent telegrams; he must also want and need to talk to her.

  She opened the slip of paper and stared at the phone number. She’d memorized it by now, but she still gazed at the numbers scribbled in his handwriting. She reached for the phone, placing her hand on the receiver and tapping her finger on the curved handset.

  The weather the past two weeks had been incredibly cold, the sky filled with ice-cube clouds frozen over a town shaded beneath its gray shadow. The unusual cold without snow had left the town and all her friends in a quiet mood; most people were hiding in their homes. Even when she ventured out, the streets appeared like part of an empty movie set: cars parked at the curb, empty planters on front porches, vacant Adirondack chairs on lawns, rusted bikes tipped against garages. She remembered the days when this weather would have kept her inside the house with the kids, playing Candyland a thousand times, watching videos and making chocolate-chip cookies.

  Now she slid into the gray days wondering what lay on the other side. She was amazed as the kids moved in and out of the house, as Phil drove to work and came home and she cooked and smiled and even—on a few occasions—made love before drifting off into a sleep that was never really sleep, but clouded images that carried her in and out of consciousness.

  The phone rang, shook beneath her finger. She flung her hand in the air as if the phone were white-hot, burning—as if it knew what she had been about to dial on its numbered face.

  She rubbed her temples and let it ring three times before picking up. The background static of a car phone came before the voice and her heart rolled in the hope that it might be him, calling her at home. Maybe there was good news about the Trust or maybe he just wanted to talk.

  “Hello, my dearest hibernating friend. I’m on my way over and I didn’t want to embarrass you and catch you in bed, or worse—up, but in your pajamas.”

  “Carol Anne, aren’t you the thoughtful one? I am not in my pajamas and I’ve been up since five a.m.”

  “Well, I’m in your driveway, so let me in.”

  She looked out the window and there was Carol Anne pulling into the driveway, waving out the driver’s-side window.

  Amy hung up the phone without saying goodbye and walked to the front door; each step she took required an immense amount of concentration and the thumps on the hardwood floor sounded like tired, tired, tired.

  She opened the front door and walked out onto the enclosed porch, once again amazed at how cold it was. Frigid enough for icicles, if there was any moisture, to hang from her front porch instead of the faux icicles of Christmas lights that Phil had still not taken down, complaining it was too frickin’ cold to climb on the roof—outside, he couldn’t even feel his fingers.

  She looked out the window to the driveway, but didn’t see Carol Anne, who came up behind her, startled her. “The back door was open.”

  “Don’t scare me like that,” Amy said. “Jack must’ve left it unlocked. He just left with Lisbeth.”

  “I don’t mean unlocked. I mean open.” Carol Anne unbuttoned her coat, then laid it over the bottom of the banister.

  “He was a little preoccupied—in the middle of breaking up with Lisbeth.”

  “Good.”

  Amy walked back into the sunroom, ignoring Carol Anne’s comment. Carol Anne followed, flopped down on the chaise longue and laced her fingers behind her head.

  “Oh, yes, I’d love some hot tea.”

  “What?” Amy squinted.

  “I know you meant to offer me some hot tea . . . so I just said yes.”

  “Actually that sounds wonderful. You stay all comfortable right there—in my chair. I’ll be right back.”

  Amy stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to whistle and stared out at her empty bird feeder. She hadn’t filled it since Christmas. What had she done since Christmas? Waited for the inevitability of whatever lay on the horizon that she could not yet see.

  The phone screamed in unison with the tea kettle and she jumped, then shifted back and forth between the wall phone and the stove, not knowing which one to tend to first. She picked up the phone, hearing the same static sound as a few minutes ago.

  “Hel
lo.”

  “Amy . . .”

  “Nick.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Hold on. . . hold on. It’s the kettle.”

  She tucked the portable phone under her chin and reached over, pulled the kettle from the stove, then poured boiling water into the two prepared mugs on the sideboard. She lifted the phone back to her ear. Here it was: the beginning or maybe the end of what she’d been waiting for. She still didn’t know.

  “Nick, hello.” She tried to sound casual as she reached into the refrigerator, pulled out a carton of milk—just a drop in Carol Anne’s tea.

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “No . . . well, yes. Carol Anne’s here to visit and I was just making a cup of tea, and—”

  “I swear, that woman is the bane of my existence.”

  “Stop.”

  “Is Lisbeth there?”

  “No, she and Jack left about twenty minutes ago. I don’t know where they were going. They didn’t say. But they definitely did not look happy.”

  She closed her eyes to hear his response, to hear his deep voice—so deep she felt it vibrate below her belly button.

  “Okay . . . maybe they’re on the way to my house.”

  “Are you home?”

  “No . . . no. I’m in my truck. I had some business. . . .”

  “Oh. Well, if you called to find her, you might want to try her cell phone. Neither one of them ever removes the things from their bodies. I believe they put them on before they put on their underwear.”

  He laughed. She smiled at the sound, squirted some honey in her tea, then twirled it around with a silver baby spoon she’d found at an antique shop with her maiden initials etched on the handle.

  “Well, I guess I could say I was only calling looking for Lisbeth, but you’d see right through that, wouldn’t you?” He sighed; she exhaled with him. “I called to hear your voice.”