Losing the Moon

by Patti Callahan Henry

  She turned away from him and kicked a pile of clothes from the bottom of the stairs, sat on the bottom step, and dropped her face into her hands.

  “So lost,” she mumbled into her palms.

  He sat next to her, placed his hand on her knee. “I’m here. You’re not lost.”

  “Yes, I am.” She looked up.

  Weakness and nausea enveloped Nick as he saw she was gone from him. “No, you’re not. Us, how we were together, that is not lost—that is found,” he said.

  “How . . . how can it be? How can that be . . . right?”

  “Because we’re supposed to be together.”

  “That is a worn-out excuse for what we did.”

  He touched her face. “Don’t you still . . . want this?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do. I know you do.”

  “This time you’re wrong.”

  “I can’t be. I felt you. I know.”

  “It’s almost like—I don’t know how to explain this—but it’s almost as if in fulfilling all that . . . want, I killed it. And there’s something else. . . .”

  “What is it?”

  She looked up and for an instant her face was alive again, full—and he thought it was for him, of him, until she spoke.

  “You lied,” she said.

  “What? Not to you.”

  “Yes, to me. You didn’t tell me you were . . . drunk . . . the night you ran over that woman. That Eliza protected you.”

  “I was not drunk. I’d been drinking, yes. But I was perfectly capable of driving. That woman walked out in front of the car—drunk as hell. I didn’t hit her because I was drunk or driving crazy. She walked out. In front. Of. My. Truck. I did not lie to you.”

  He panicked, desperate; Amy saw something in him that was not wholly true: that he was a drunk who ran over and killed a woman, that he was a killer because of a bottle of tequila. A long time ago it was what he’d believed of himself too . . . back when Amy didn’t answer the telegrams, when his life had spiraled down to the echoing loneliness of knowing he was responsible for where he was—jail—and why.

  “Amy, I did not—did not—run over her because I was drunk. Shit, I spent a year in jail for it . . . and she was the one staggering across the road. Yes, I killed her. I ran over her. I drove the truck. I spent a year in jail, thinking you deserted me because of it. You don’t think I’ve had enough guilt over that? Enough pain? You want me to relive it—go back to Costa Rica and tell her family, tell the police that I had a little celebratory tequila before driving six students home?”

  “No, I don’t want that. No. I wanted to know everything. God, I just wanted to know everything, and you left that part out. It’s all just so terrible . . . so sad.”

  “Would it have made a difference in your feelings? If it had, it would have been exactly what I thought then, anyway. Just coming full circle twenty-five years later.”

  “No, I don’t think it would’ve made a difference in how I feel. . . . Oh, my God, what have I done? Nothing is what I thought . . . I’m not what I thought.”

  “Yes, you are . . .”

  “No. No.” Her body shook as she wept.

  He touched her hair. “Please don’t cry, Amy. Please. It breaks my heart in a thousand places. I came to make sure you’re okay . . . to tell you I’m here, that I still love you. It was not just a random night in a deserted house to me. . . . You’ve owned my heart since you fell through the doorway at that fraternity party.”

  She looked up and he saw her face broken in as many places as his heart. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her to him; she leaned away.

  “Nick, go home to your family.”

  “I can’t.”

  “The OWP is looking for you. You can’t just disappear—they bailed you out of jail. God, because of me you had to go to jail again. Eliza is looking for you.”

  “I wish you were looking for me. I’ve been camping out on Oystertip—”

  “You’ll get arrested again. Go home.”

  “No, I won’t. I can’t go home.”

  “Are you staying in that cold, empty house?”

  “No, I’m camping out in the woods. Directly underneath a magnificent osprey nest. And every minute I want you there.”

  “If you love me—if you really love me—you’ll leave right now and let me find my own way out . . . of this lost place. I can’t find it with you. . . .”

  He reached into his pocket for the necklace: his last hope. “I brought this back to you.”

  He held it out to her, his hand uncurled, open.

  She stood, backed into the far wall, tripped. “No.” She grabbed on to the hall table.

  “It’s yours.”

  She walked toward the front door, opened it. “You have to leave. I can’t . . .”

  He trudged to the front door, his feet heavy with the burden of leaving. “It’s under there. Under all this pain is what you know and feel for us.”

  She didn’t answer, but held the door open.

  “Say something,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Nick. I’m sorry for all this . . . I am. I’m sorry I brought us to this place. I’m sorry you went back to jail. I’m sorry we lost the island. I’m sorry I was not stronger, wiser.”

  He held out his hand one more time, the pendant dangling between his fingers. “Please take this.”

  “I can’t. I can’t.”

  He released the chain and it slithered to the hall floor. “I’ll be waiting for you. I always have been and I will now.”

  She shut the door; the locks clicked against the door, against his heart.

  “What are you doing? What is all . . . this?

  Amy sat on top of Jack’s old jeans, shirts and unmatched socks, her head buried in her knees. She hadn’t moved from the foyer floor since Nick had left. She placed her chin on top of her knees and looked up at Phil.

  “Amy, are you okay? What are you doing?” He gestured toward the piles. “What is all this?”

  She stared at him.

  “Get up.”

  She stood and faced him. There was so much she needed to say to him—so many words of apology and remorse that she didn’t know where to begin. It seemed there were years of words stored below the unheard ones—the silence of being ignored—and she just didn’t know what to tell him first, everything she’d ever wanted to say jumbled together in a screaming crowd.

  “Will you please move back in our room? Please?” Pleading came first and tears formed when she had thought she had no more.

  “No . . . you aren’t ready.”

  “Stop saying that. Stop saying it’s me.” She stood and grabbed Phil’s arm. “That’s not what I meant to say. I just want you to . . . hear me.”

  “Hear you?”

  She sighed and shuddered. “Yes.”

  “Go ahead, Amy. Go ahead.” He turned and his face was set, his teeth rubbing back and forth as his jawline tensed from one side to the other.

  There he was—ready to listen, and when she opened her mouth nothing came out.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  And she resorted to ingrained habit—letting him take care of everything. “What can I do? I just can’t stand this.”

  Phil leaned down suddenly and picked up a neatly stacked pile of clothes, then another, and flung them across the foyer. Clothes scattered on the floor, on the steps, the entrance of the parlor.

  He looked at her. “What can you do?” He reached down into a box of discarded books and grabbed a Stephen King hardcover, heaved it across the foyer. He bent to pick up another book as the first one slammed into the mirror over the hall table. Glass shards flew onto the floor, onto the table, across Jack’s old clothes.

  He turned to her, held a large dictionary above his head. “There is nothing, nothing you can do. You already did it.”

  He
reached his arm behind him like a pitcher ready to release a fastball, tossed the book against the steps. The binding of the dictionary popped and pages fluttered to the floor.

  She stared at the pieces of shattered mirror, broken pieces of her home on the floor: shattered and broken family. Rage washed over his face, his body; the waves of it reached her and she covered her face with her hands.

  “Stop. Just listen to me. Just listen to me.” She spoke the words she’d wanted to say a thousand times, a million times, and like stagnant water released from a cracked dam, the phrases came pouring out. “I’m sorry. I got lost . . . lonely and I didn’t mean to do this. God, I am so sorry and alone. I just wanted someone to listen, to understand . . . to—I don’t know. And there he was. There he was—all listening and helping and understanding, and I got lost in it, in the past. It’s not an excuse—I just want you to hear it. It has nothing to do with how much I love you—or Molly and Jack.”

  “Bullshit.” It was the first time he’d ever cursed at her. “It has everything to do with how much you love us. How . . . how in the hell could you do this to us? To them . . . to me?”

  She was desperate to have him understand what even she did not. “I never told you about Nick.”

  “Why not?” He kicked the base of the stairs.

  “It was a terrible memory . . .”

  “I would’ve listened.”

  “I was . . . scared to tell you. Too much time had passed and it didn’t seem important to . . . us.” She looked away as she began to speak of Nick to her husband for the first time. “I dated him in college—for years. Then he went on a preservation trip.”

  “To Costa Rica.”

  “Yes. And he never came back and I never knew why. That was twenty-five years ago—and it was awful. I dropped out of school that semester.”

  “When we started dating.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was he?”

  Amy told her husband the story—Eliza’s version, and how Eliza saved but also deceived Nick.

  Phil leaned against the hall table as if the story had drained him of his remaining anger. “When did you find out about all this?”

  “When I saw him . . . at the lake, he asked why I never came when he was in jail. Then I slowly learned the story and it all came rushing back at me. All the things I’d thought I’d forgotten or stored away came back.”

  “You love him.”

  “I did.” She’d already lost everything and now only truth remained. “But I love you. I do. I got caught in some whirl-wind, something . . . lost from the past. I’m more than sorry, but I can’t find another word. I don’t know how many times I can say it, but however many times there are, I will. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t plan to . . . I promise. I was feeling so ignored and . . . extraneous and there he was—there was everything I’d thought I lost a long, long time ago.”

  “Ignored? You felt ignored? Give me a break. Don’t I take care of everything? Everything?”

  “Listen to me. This is not about you taking care of everything. This is not about your valor and your responsibility to the family. This is about the horrible part of me that said my behavior was justified because you didn’t care about what I care about—that I felt you never listened to me or took more than the three minutes required for me to tell you the facts and schedule of the day.”

  He held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear the details, the excuse of how you didn’t plan this . . . how it just happened. It’s vulgar.”

  “Please. Please listen.” God, how many times had she asked him to listen? It was sounding pitiful to her own ears.

  “Stop.” He turned and kicked at another pile of clothing.

  “Even now—when it is more important than ever that you listen to me—you won’t. When our family and our life hinges on you listening to me—you still won’t.” She was screaming now. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t plan on this and it is more than I can even understand of myself and—”

  A flash of silver gleamed from under the pile he’d just kicked. Her stomach lurched up, forward: the discarded necklace.

  Phil leaned down and picked it up. “What is this?”

  “He was here today . . . came today.” She had nothing left in her but the truth.

  “Son of a bitch.” He turned to her, the necklace dangling between his fingers. “Some guy from your past comes sauntering in like a beer-drinking frat boy, all cool and tall and suave, and you forget everything. Me, Molly, Jack.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I thought he left . . . and then I found out—”

  “I don’t give a shit. I don’t care what you did or did not know. You allowed him to come in here and destroy us.”

  Destroy us. She heard the words and fought against them.

  “I made him leave. I told him to leave and never come back. He didn’t destroy us. I made him go . . . told him I loved you.”

  Phil looked down at the necklace in his hand and held it out. And for the second time that day, she refused to take it.

  Phil dropped it on the hall table and turned away.

  She shuddered. “Don’t go. . . .”

  “I’ll go pick up Molly from tennis, bring her home for dinner.” He walked away from her.

  “Phil.”

  He stopped. “What?”

  “What can I do? What can I do to prove to you . . . ?”

  “Nothing. There is nothing you can do.”

  And the words were so hopeless, so full of uncompromising authority; she slumped back onto the clothes, empty. If there was nothing she could do . . . what then?

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The emotional elements of the family became more than Amy could face, so she lost herself in the material aspects of their life. Closets, organization, facts—these became her primary concern. She sat on the foyer floor, folding the last strewn pile from Phil’s and her fight three days before—she had been dodging the evidence from the afternoon her husband told her there was nothing she could do. Although she’d immediately cleaned up the broken mirror, she’d been avoiding the rest of the mess in the foyer: the scattered books, the clothes and the necklace. Now she would pack them away. She lifted the necklace from the table and held it up to the light, then opened the drawer to the hall table and stuffed it into the dark.

  The front door opened with the slam of the drawer. She turned to see Carol Anne standing in the threshold, stepping over a pile of clothes and waving the Darby Chronicle in her face. “Look, look at this.” Amy was not in the mood to read the local gossip of who had won the track meet, or how the fund-raising for the new flower bed in front of the courthouse was going. She turned away from Carol Anne. “I’ve got so much to do here.”

  “Take a break, come here. You’ll work yourself to death and nothing will be solved.” She walked into Amy’s office, she sat on the edge of the flowered chaise and patted the seat next to her. “Sit.”

  Amy did. Carol Anne handed her the paper, and Amy looked down at the front page: DARBY WOMAN SACRIFICES TO SAVE DOOMED ISLAND. Amy looked up. “What is this?”

  “Read it.”

  The story told of how she’d been working to save the small island and house from development, and then how she’d gone to the island with a group called the Oystertip Wilderness Protectors and become lost in the maze of marsh while collecting samples to prove the property should be saved. A chart listed the attributes and species of the island.

  She looked up at Carol Anne. “I can’t read any more of these lies.”

  “They’re not all lies. You did try hard to save it. Keep reading.”

  The article revealed that the sale had closed that week and the island was now lost to the development of a personal home and playground for a local descendant of a Darby founder—Mr. Farley, a hometown man.

  She gasped and looked up at Carol Anne. �
��Farley?”

  “Yes. Do you believe it?”

  “God, yes, I do. No wonder he hates me. I thought it was because you were my friend.”

  The article ended by discussing how she’d been working against him without knowing who he was, how she almost lost her life, only to then lose the doomed island. She was painted as a folk hero, while Mr. Farley came across as the evil villain.

  “Good Lord,” Amy said.

  “You should see it. There are demonstrations outside his building—hate mail pouring into the newspaper. He’s a pariah.”

  “Carol Anne—it’s not right. They believe something . . . that isn’t true.”

  “Amy.” Carol Anne touched her face, grabbed her hand. “You did everything you could to save it. It is right. They don’t need to know everything that happened the last time you were out there. You think this town doesn’t have secrets? You think everyone you see on the street or in the market doesn’t have something they don’t want you to know—that would kill them if you found out?”

  “But that is them. This is me and they”—she waved the paper—“have me out to be some bizarre hero, while I cheated on my husband.” She choked on the words and started to sob.

  Carol Anne wrapped her arms around her. “How is Phil?”

  “He’s here, but he won’t really talk to me—just once and it was a disaster. How can I blame him? Damn, he never talked anyway. How could I expect him to listen to me now?”

  “Because it’s important, that’s why.”

  “What if he leaves?”

  “He won’t leave. He’ll do what he considers the right thing.”

  “I don’t want it to be a responsibility, for God’s sake.”

  “He loves you. He’ll stay for that, too.”

  “If he loved me, he’d talk about it—he’d listen to me.”

  “You can’t expect him to change just like that—to hear what you have to say when he’s hurt and pissed off and—”

  “Betrayed.”

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  “What if he never listens? What if he walks around acting cold and fulfilling his responsibilities, but never—”