Pack Up the Moon

by Rachael Herron

  Now he looked at her carefully, the way he did. “We don’t have to. There’s nothing we have to do. I love you. I’m not going anywhere. I want to be with you.”

  Kate knew they were balanced on a pendulum with too young on one side, old enough on the other. Her mother told her she couldn’t even get her learner’s permit. Sure, she was too young to vote, or to rent an apartment. But too young for sex? For love? For decisions this big?

  Kate knew one thing, though: she wanted to have sex with Nolan. The lust she felt uncurling in her belly as they explored each other with fingers, lips, and tongues threatened to combust at her hairline. She worried sometimes they would leave char marks on his mother’s expensive linen. They burned together. It didn’t feel like hyperbole.

  So she reached behind her into her backpack on the floor and pulled out—oh, god—a whole box of condoms. The woman at Planned Parenthood had insisted that she take them, even though she’d said they’d never, ever use that many.

  Nolan gave a bark of laughter. “You think we’re good for that?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to tell me that this won’t be enough?”

  “That’s right, baby.” But his voice broke endearingly, and he slid down from the headboard to take her in his arms. “Katie, I want to make love to you, but I want it to be right.”

  She looked around. Low R&B spilled from his surround-sound speakers. His parents weren’t going to interrupt them. “I think most of our friends get it done in the backseats of cars or in the quad behind the auto shop.”

  “How do we know this is it?” His voice was darker blue than normal—it was the color of sunset just before the light died.

  “This is what?” asked Kate.

  “Forever?”

  Her mother said nothing was forever. But then again, her mother had been depressed since Kate’s father died, never managing to come up above the clouds.

  “I guess we can’t know,” she said. But this joy, this hope . . . it had to mean something. Something like always.

  Nolan took her hands and held them tightly. This was the boy she loved. The one who was present with her, looking right into her eyes, not being loud in a hallway, not hooting to friends in class, but the one who was here now, relaxed inside himself. He didn’t posture with her. He didn’t pretend. “I know.”

  “You’re just so you, so sure of yourself, in your own skin.”

  “What?” said Nolan, surprised. “I’m never me.”

  “Except . . .”

  He nodded once, his eyes falling to the dark black silk duvet. “Except when I’m with you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kate did, or thought she did. His parents returned anything that didn’t work, that didn’t perform to the correct standards. When the taillight of his mother’s BMW went out, they’d refused the offered maintenance—a broken taillight! something so easy Kate could have fixed it herself with a screwdriver—and demanded that the dealer exchange the leased car with a new vehicle. They’d gotten Nolan a puppy not once but four times. Every time the new dog had done something wrong, and they’d sent each dog to the pound. The last time they presented Nolan with a three-month-old basset hound, he’d refused to pet it, not wanting to learn to love it.

  Nolan said, “You know I’m not going anywhere, right?”

  “Sure.” A lie.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  The condoms on the bed had changed. Instead of signaling sexiness, they looked like the paper coupons that oozed out of a Skee ball machine. She sighed, the happiness and lust drained out of her. “Everyone leaves. Can’t we just live in today?”

  “Not when what I want is all your tomorrows.”

  “God, stop!” Kate pushed against his chest. “You sound like a cheesy movie. Now we’ll part and meet again when we’re ancient, fifty or something, and I’ll die of cancer while you tell me I was always the one.”

  She’d meant him to laugh, but instead he looked suddenly grief-stricken. “I would tell you that and it would be true.”

  “Oh, Nolan,” she said again, turning around on the bed so that she fit against his length, curling her hips into him. “I know you would. And I love you for it.” She waited for the happiness she felt with him to curl back into her spine, as it always did. And it didn’t let her down. Sometimes she thought he was the sun, that he could fix anything with his warmth. She waited for that heat to creep into her, waited as he breathed steadily next to her ear. Kate relaxed into him.

  Later that night they had sex for the first time. Both of them cried. Nolan laughed in surprise when he came, and even later, when he worked out what Kate needed, he laughed again with joy. Kate grinned, looking up at the ceiling, knowing that this was new, imperfect, and exactly right.

  Chapter Seven

  Monday, May 12, 2014

  10 p.m.

  Kate had promised herself today would be the day she spring cleaned. Really. This time she’d actually do it. It wasn’t just because in the middle of the night she’d imagined what it might be like to hear Pree moving around in the room down the hall. That would be crazy, so it wasn’t that. It wasn’t just that, anyway. The commission for the lymphoma auction was due next month—if she ever figured out what the hell she was going to do for them, she’d be busy working soon, trapped under layers of paint, and before she rolled herself back into the work she had to get some practical things done. God knew the whole house could use a good clean out.

  Kate looked at the stack of sneakers and heels that collected like piles of leaves in the hallway, gusting across the wooden floor. The shoe pileup matched the stack of coats and sweaters on the chair just inside the door. Mail slanted across the hutch in drifts. She usually opened the letters that looked important, and most of the time she remembered to pay the bills on time. Not always, but usually.

  The clutter didn’t normally bother her. She didn’t notice until something was missing and then she’d look around with surprise to find that nothing was in its rightful place. The milk used to live on the door of the fridge—now she’d spend two minutes rooting through the fridge until she finally found it shoved into the vegetable crisper, a trail of sour liquid pooled underneath it. She’d find her sunglasses in the junk drawer and the screwdriver nestled among the potholders.

  It just wasn’t . . . important. Most of it.

  She sat at the kitchen table and put her bare feet up on Nolan’s chair. She still thought of it as his, even though he hadn’t sat in it for three years now. Once she’d pulled it out with the intention of sitting in it, and instead had gotten a headache so intense she’d had to lie down.

  She checked her cell. Stared at it. Clicked the button and scrolled right. Left. She pulled up the entry for “Mom” and pushed call. It rang once; then the recording said, as it always did, “You’ve reached a number that has been disconnected or changed. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.” It wasn’t that she’d even ever called her mother that much, anyway. Sonia hadn’t liked the phone and always made an excuse to hang up quickly. But once upon a time Kate could call her. In the year since her mother had died, Kate called the number at least twice a week.

  Kate pushed the disconnect button and stopped the recording. Someday someone would answer the phone and she’d know that the number wasn’t hers to call anymore, but until then, it was. Life, she had to admit, running her finger along the edge of the wooden table, was simpler now. But not easier. Never easier.

  Five days from now, on Saturday, Kate was supposed to go out on a boat and send her mother’s ashes to meet her father’s in the bay. One full year—it was time. Of course it was. And she should take the rest of Robin’s ashes, too. She glanced through the open door into the living room at the mantelpiece. Only two things in the house were kept spotless and dust-free: those two boxes. One, the dark walnut one, held Sonia. The other, the cedar one, held half of Robin. (She hadn’t been able to inter all his ashes at Mountain V
iew—it hadn’t been physically possible. She’d kept half so he’d continue to be close, not caring if it was macabre. Kate needed him more than a cold cemetery did.)

  Kate dreaded the impending boat trip so much she felt sick to her stomach every time she thought of the event pulsing in red on her calendar. She didn’t actually know if she’d be able to do it. The week before, she’d picked up her mother’s box and had taken it into the backyard in order to pantomime the action of strewing the ash. She’d wanted to practice. But she couldn’t even do that—she’d ended up clutching the box to her stomach, her eyes closed in fear.

  No practicing today. She would clean. Tidy. Put things away. Today she would do it. Kate would make space for what might come, whatever form that might take, even if the very thought was one of a very possibly deluded, grief-stricken woman who should probably get more sleep.

  The first time Kate had worked on clearing out Robin’s room was the month after he died. While Nolan lay in his temporary jail cell, refusing the bail his parents offered, she’d been packing everything up. Compartments. Kate had wanted boxes to hold what she felt so she could put them away, forever if possible. Friends she’d made at the hospital, friends who also had sick kids, friends she loved, had asked to help. But she’d told them she was fine, that she didn’t need them. She’d pushed her mother out of the house almost bodily. Alone—she would do it alone. By herself, she would remove every single trapping of sickness from her son’s perfect room.

  Kate had no clear memory of how she’d gotten the hospital bed down the stairs by herself—it had taken three men to get it up there. She’d remade Robin’s old bed in the right place with his favorite Harry Potter sheets. She threw out the little bedside commode along with the low table covered with objects she had needed on a daily basis—wipes, masks for visitors, antiseptic. She threw out all the morphine, pushing the droppers and vials deep into the outside trash can, deliberately disobeying the dictate that she dispose of them at a medical waste site. Screw medical waste. Did anyone really think that her child’s leftover twenty ounces of morphine were going to contaminate a landfill?

  Now, this morning, Pree’s face in her mind, she set her cup in the sink. She was only able to half remember those days, as if they’d been a feverish dream. Her hands were shaking. Maybe she’d had too much coffee, too fast.

  Kate walked upstairs. She pushed open Robin’s door. And then everything was too difficult all over again.

  It still smelled like Robin’s room. The door was always closed—she hated to let the scent get into the house, not wanting it diluted by normal house smells of cleaning products and sautéed garlic. It didn’t smell exactly of Robin, thank god. He’d smelled of dust and bubble bath, of outside air and grass, of little boy farts and blue bubblegum. At the end, he’d smelled god-awful; Kate couldn’t bear to think of the rubber and alcohol smells of hospital things: tubes, vents, machines. Those weren’t Robin. They never were.

  But this perma–crayon scent—this was his. A sweet waxiness, and a smell of plastic toys, things that were probably made in China and toxic as hell but who cared? They weren’t what killed him. It was the scent she’d stepped into thirty, fifty times a day when he was alive, every time with a sense of joy, of excitement, that she got to see her boy again. That precious scent was escaping into the hallway, where it would mingle with the rest of the normal household smells.

  Kate bit her lip. Already it smelled more normal in here, even though normal, she knew, was never coming back.

  But now there was Pree. Instead of just someone, a girl out there somewhere, Pree was a very specific one, and so close.

  Of course, it was completely possible Kate would never see Pree again even for an afternoon. Perhaps their meeting had been a one-off. Maybe it had satisfied every question Pree had. Kate had no rights, obviously.

  But she had hope. Goddamn it, she shouldn’t let herself dream like this—but if Pree ever did want to stay, what if she had a place of her own? What if she had a room that wasn’t scented with a little boy’s life? This new, burgeoning feeling made Kate feel like she could fly. Or at least as if she could stay upright, tearless, in Robin’s room, which was as miraculous as flying itself.

  The walls, of course, would have to be painted. Kate pulled the furniture out from the edges and into the middle of the room so she could get a good, clear look.

  She and Nolan had spent an entire Saturday (while Robin had been at an all-nighter birthday party) painting the Harry Potter backdrop. Nolan, organized as usual, was in charge of purchasing supplies, marking colors off his list as Kate piled her arms with rollers and brushes of all sizes, stencils they’d never need. At home, Kate had been in charge of penciling in the artwork on the plain beige walls. It was exciting, to draw like that, to know she was doing something that would make her son over-the-moon happy. He’d been so thrilled when he got his “official” Gryffindor robe in the mail that he hadn’t taken it off for days, begging to sleep in it at night until they got him matching pajamas.

  Once she’d drawn the design of the cliffs and castle on the walls, Nolan followed up with the prosaic tasks—the black outlines, then colors, then shades. They’d done it all, the raised green and gray cliffs around Hogwarts with their jagged drop-offs, the castle’s soaring battlements under blue skies complete with little puffy white clouds. A path led out of the room with a sign that pointed in one direction to the Forbidden Forest, the other, to Hogsmeade. In the distance was Hagrid’s cottage, where friendly beasts lurked, their eyes peeking over the thatched roof. Robin had been set to start his first round of chemo the next week, and no one knew how he’d react to it. They wanted him to love his room.

  Nolan’s hand was careful, steady and sure, as it always was. Kate, on the other hand, got green paint on the old boom box she’d dragged out of the closet, and when she was dancing with the brush to Salt-n-Pepa—a cassette! an actual mixed tape Nolan had given her at the beginning of junior year—she stepped in a pan of green-blue paint that Nolan had just mixed for work on the Whomping Willow. She laughed so hard she had to sit on the floor, and then before she really knew what was happening, Nolan was laughing with her, and they were out of their clothes, naked on the drop cloth on the floor, having sex that was hot and wet and loud, like the days before they’d had Robin.

  The days before.

  Both of them thought about it, Kate knew, as they lay there afterward, sweat still drying, breaths heaving. They didn’t talk about it, and the moment slipped away. Robin would be home the next day, after the party. He again (always) would be their first thought in the morning and their last thought at night. A long time ago, Kate had been Nolan’s most important person, and Nolan hers. It was right that now they weren’t. But linking hands and legs like that with Nolan had made Kate ache with a sorrow that she didn’t quite understand.

  Now, alone in Robin’s room, Kate pulled up the blinds and undid the latch on the window. For the first time in three years, she opened the window. The small sycamore in the front yard, the one that had been a thin sapling when he’d died, was now close and wide, and the shush of the leaves filled the room. It blew the last little bits of her baby boy out of the room, and Kate sat, heavily, on the red braided rug she’d put in the middle of the room.

  “No,” she said, but she wasn’t sure with whom she was disagreeing.

  Releasing herself to her elbows, she uncrossed her legs and lay all the way down on her back.

  If Pree never stayed (and why would she?), this exorcism would be for nothing.

  What if Nolan finds out about her? It was the thing Kate was most afraid of, the thing she couldn’t think all the way through.

  She looked up at Robin’s—no, the guest room’s—ceiling.

  Shit. The stars. She’d forgotten those, the faintly green glow-in-the-dark stars and the crescent moon that Nolan had put up right before Robin came home from the hospital that last time. They didn’t know if he’d be strong enough to go out into the cool, foggy n
ight air, so Nolan said he’d bring the universe indoors.

  And he did. Even she, with her mother’s love that sometimes felt as if it could destroy small planets if necessary—even she knew that Nolan loved harder, stronger, more ridiculously. Kate loved Robin, but when he cried because he didn’t get the French fries that he wanted or because he couldn’t stay up late to watch TV with them, she didn’t mind overmuch. It was just crying. He’d get over it.

  But Nolan—Robin’s tears had always torn him apart. Even when Robin had been a newborn, so small that his squalling still sounded like an angry kitten’s cries, Nolan hadn’t been able to handle the crying. In the middle of the night, when Robin wouldn’t settle down after a feeding, refusing to go back to sleep no matter how much Kate jiggled and rocked him, Nolan would lift the baby from her arms and carry him, still screaming, out to the garage. He’d buckle him in the car seat (so tightly, so securely) and take Robin out for a night drive. It was the one thing that always soothed him.

  As Kate slept, happy to claim a silent house in which to dream, Nolan would drive Robin up Skyline past the thick groves of redwoods and then back down again, twisting and turning, high above the lights of Oakland until they came down into the low rolling streets of Rockridge. The car’s swaying put Robin to sleep, a state so deep that when Nolan pulled back into the garage, almost nothing would wake him up—not lifting him out of the seat, not placing him back in the crib. It usually gave them a good five hours. Nolan’s breath would be easy as he crawled into bed next to Kate—his arms were wide and warm. Those were the happiest moments Kate could remember, those early mornings tangled in bed with her husband as her baby slept peacefully in the next room. Just when she thought she couldn’t love Nolan any more than she already did, he would move his leg forward in his sleep, pressing his shin into her calf. Lying there in the dark, she’d love him as hard and as big as all the world itself, wondering at the marvel that she could hold this much in her heart for one man and one boy. How did it fit? How could it? But it did—it fit inside her perfectly—and she was full.