Pack Up the Moon

by Rachael Herron

  But it had been him. She’d driven right past him that day. Nolan had known it was her, had watched her go by in the car he’d bought her, the car his son had died in, and had just stood there. Then he’d had to go back to work. As she drove south down Highway 13, she thought about how difficult it must have been for him to do manual labor. He’d always mocked his own soft hands, pointing out the blisters he got when they gardened in the spring. Ten minutes with a shovel and his hands were practically bleeding.

  She bet they were different now.

  Kate exited on Thornhill but there was no crew in evidence. Just orange cones. She almost hit one and cursed as she got immediately back on the freeway, going back west.

  It had been a silly, impulsive thing to try to do, to find him. He’d answered her e-mail, after all. She could tell him when and where. She just needed to figure out how, exactly, she could tell him what she needed to. What she owed him.

  If that was anything at all.

  She headed toward the drugstore, swooping off the exit on Broadway as the roadway threaded itself under the highway and then back up. Kate needed earplugs and sleeping pills. She’d done well for a while, and this last year had almost seen the end of the nightmares, but last night they’d come back as bad as they’d ever been. She’d woken in a full sweat, the feel of Robin’s thin arms clutched around her neck, so real her skin could remember the weight of him. She’d heard his scream in her dream, the sound he made only when he had nightmares, and the bloodiness of it had echoed in her ears for the first fifteen minutes she was awake, as if she’d just heard it, as if it had really awoken her as it had in the early days of his sickness. Those horrible days. (Living, waking nightmares, and sometimes, back then, she’d had bad dreams only to wake to find the day itself was actually worse, more unbearable.) Kate had hardly slept during the last year of Robin’s life, and after he died, she’d slept even less.

  So to go back to that, to feel last night the desperation for sleep, the conviction that it would never come back on its own, was horrible. Over-the-counter sleeping pills would help. So would earplugs; the whoosh of her own breath would lull her to sleep.

  The car was on autopilot. When she stopped at the first red light and looked left toward Lake Temescal and saw the road crew occupying the turn lane, she forgot what she was doing and where she was going. Nolan.

  Kate needed to be there, where they were. Now. Her car shot through the red light and turned left against an oncoming red Taurus, which honked and swerved around her. It didn’t feel like it mattered that the light hadn’t yet turned green. An arbitrary law, that’s all it was.

  Until the siren whooped behind her.

  “Shit.”

  She pulled over exactly opposite the road crew. If this was Nolan’s crew, he’d already seen her, that much was certain. Her mouth was dry.

  The officer was older, with a reddened face. “You know what you did back there?”

  Kate was horrified with herself. “I ran a light. Jesus. I didn’t even think.” What if that car had hit her? What if there’d been a child inside? A child with a specific name and a favorite dinosaur and a blanket his grandmother knitted for him? “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

  “You could have been killed. That red car was going way too fast—I’m amazed it got around you safely.”

  And that would have been something. To have been killed in the front seat of the car in which Robin had died. In front of Robin’s father. Kate felt dizzy with regret.

  Kate, caught in this thought, didn’t notice that the officer was saying anything until he repeated, “I mean right now, ma’am. License and registration. What part of that is too difficult for you to understand?”

  She was so getting a ticket.

  While the officer went back to his patrol car to write up the charges she deserved, she felt the road crew looking at her.

  She checked for bicyclists in her side mirror and then stepped out of the car, shutting the car door carefully behind her. The cop looked up over at her and shook his head. At least he didn’t order her back into the Saab. A taller man with a red beard wearing an orange vest started toward her also, but Nolan, already so close, said, “That’s okay, Johnson. I got it.”

  The denim blue safety of Nolan’s voice. She’d heard it so many times in her mind over the last few years that it felt bizarre to hear it out in the air, actually carried to her ears by physical sound waves and not her own imagination.

  She leaned back against the door and watched as he approached. Still those broad, sharp shoulders. He was so much skinnier now. His body looked lean, the way it had when they were in high school. The hard hat cast an indigo-sepia shadow over his face but she could see he hadn’t shaved that morning. He could usually get away with one day before he got his caveman look.

  Kate drank him in for one wonderful second before she remembered she wasn’t allowed to. She gathered the anger—cold as always—around her like a wet sheet.

  “Nolan.” She hadn’t even said his name out loud, not to anyone, not since the trial ended three years before. It sounded round in her mouth and tasted sweetly familiar.

  “God. Kate.” He took off the hard hat, then took off his sunglasses so she could see his eyes. They were still beautiful, the color of dark honey, a deep, heated ocher.

  No way in hell was she taking off her sunglasses yet.

  “You—” He broke off for a second. “I know I told you I was out here, but I didn’t think you would actually find me.”

  Kate said, “I looked but I didn’t see you on Thornhill. I gave up, but then . . . here you were.”

  It was too simple, too easy. It should have been hard to find him—she should have been looking for months, in torrential downpours and icy frost, to find him. It shouldn’t have been in the sunshine, when she pulled off the goddamn freeway to go to the drugstore.

  “I wonder how many times I’ve passed you,” she said.

  Nolan shook his head. His hair was longer, shaggier than it had ever been when he was a lawyer. “Just once.”

  “You see every car that drives by?”

  “Pretty much.”

  And maybe he had. “It’s an easy car to recognize,” she said, and then realized how it must sound to him. She’d thought about selling it, of course. But then, to that person, it would have been just a car. A mode of transport. To her, it was a small rolling shrine, made more special in that everyone else thought it was just a car.

  “Ah,” he said. The sound was heavy and dropped between them like a stone thrown in a river.

  Why, again, was Kate here? Yes, to tell him about Pree. To fix what she’d broken so many years ago. She’d thought she owed him nothing, not after he’d been responsible for losing Robin, but she owed him this truth. Finally.

  “So,” he said. He looked down at the hard hat in his hands, and Kate noticed that even the tops of his knuckles looked rough now, scraped and used.

  “We have to talk,” she said, and the look of hope that crossed his face, just for a second, made her want to sob, an ugly feeling that she bit back. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she went on. “It’s not good. Or at least, it’s not bad. It’s . . . oh, god.”

  “Are you getting married?”

  “No!”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “No.” How could he ask her that?

  “Then tell me.”

  Kate opened her mouth. She could . . . she would do it. He would just have to understand where she was, how she felt back then. She’d been fifteen and stupid. He’d left and broken her heart. She hadn’t known anything about the world, and had thought there was no chance they’d ever get back together. People didn’t do that. Kate had known that, even as young as she’d been. She’d thought she’d been making the most intelligent choice.

  “Nolan, you have to—”

  But he wasn’t meeting her eyes. He was looking over her shoulder, at something behind her.

  “This is important. I can’t do
it here—is there someplace—? Will you look at me, please?” And just like that, she was thrown back to when he wasn’t listening to her, the days when she could talk until her breath ran out about blood counts and compatible marrow donation, and he’d never hear her, lost in his own grief. “Nolan?”

  He was careening past her before she knew what he was doing, shoving her out of his way, running faster than he ever could have five or even ten years earlier.

  Behind her, at the open door of his patrol vehicle, the officer lay on the gravel. Nolan was almost to him by the time Kate realized the cop’s face wasn’t red anymore, but blue.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wednesday, May 14, 2014

  11:10 a.m.

  It didn’t happen the way it had in his Red Cross class—the cop didn’t look anything like the dummy, and he certainly wasn’t as lightweight. This guy had gone down hard and fast.

  “Rafe!” he yelled. “Call 911!”

  Think. Think. Head tilt—that was it—then chin thrust. Nolan put his ear next to the cop’s mouth. He didn’t think he could feel anything, but it was so hard to tell with the traffic still whizzing by—fuckers barely slowed down—and the wind coming up off the bay. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “No service!” yelled Rafe. The damned thing about this affluent neighborhood was there were so many trees that sometimes none of their phones worked.

  “Radio it in to dispatch, then.” Nolan had to get this guy jump-started, at least. Their dispatch would call the fire department and start an ambulance, but that might take a minute or two to relay.

  He unclipped the cop’s radio mike that sat on his shoulder and clicked it, waiting for a second to compose his thoughts. How did someone do this? “Mayday,” he said. “Mayday!”

  A female’s irritated voice came out of the speaker at the cop’s hip. “Last unit, identify.”

  “You got a cop down, just off Broadway at Highway 13, maybe a heart attack.”

  There was a startled clicking from the speaker. Then, “Which officer?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Car number, badge number?”

  Nolan leaned forward to read the silver pin. “Collins. I’m starting CPR now.”

  A flurry of radio traffic that he couldn’t understand started after that, but Nolan ignored it all as he pumped the cop’s chest. Fucking bulletproof vest. He took a precious second to rip open the officer’s shirt, but Nolan couldn’t figure out how the hell the vest was attached, so he just pumped harder.

  Kate stood beside him. He remembered when she’d bought those shoes—with their brown leather and red straps, he’d thought they wouldn’t go with anything, but she’d been right as usual, and they ended up being one of her favorite pairs. Eight years later, she was still wearing them. Nolan felt sweat bead along his hairline and start trickling down his face.

  He gasped for breath. “When do I mouth-to-mouth?” They’d taken the same CPR course when Robin first got sick. Just in case. Ironic, really.

  She fell to her knees, putting her hand under the cop’s chin. “I’ll do it. I took a refresher class last year. I’ll count for you. Keep going.”

  Kate counted to thirty and told him to pause while she gave two deep breaths. Nolan felt the man’s ribs rise under his palms. “Pump,” she said.

  Kate kept counting as the sirens grew louder. Nolan felt, rather than heard, the sickening crunch below the heel of his palm as the cop’s ribs gave way under the vest, just as his instructor had said they would if he was doing the compressions right. Holy shit.

  They’d done eight cycles of compressions by the time the paramedics moved him to the side and took over, slicing the cop out of his vest, putting him on some kind of pumping board that did the work for them, hooking up the shock box. They said something about finding a rhythm on him, and the other four cops who were already with them on the side of the road sucked in deep, shuddery breaths. More sirens blared, all of them screaming toward them. One officer shook Kate’s hand, tears visible. Another one ran at Nolan so intently, so fast, that Nolan’s fists came up, as if he were back on C-block. But instead of knocking him over, he hugged Nolan, thumping the breath out of him. Nolan gave his name and a brief statement to another cop, who looked like he couldn’t even legally drink yet, and then turned around to look for Kate.

  Both she and her car were gone. Nolan breathed heavily, wiping the sweat from his upper lip and forehead, staring at the overpass above him.

  She’d slipped away, and he still had no idea what the hell she’d been trying to tell him. She’d saved a man’s life, and then she’d disappeared. Colors around him—the white scudding clouds, the wet green hills, the bright gold poppies—looked surreal, as if he were standing inside an oil painting. Maybe none of this was real. Maybe she’d painted it. Maybe he was still behind the razor wire, in his single-wide cot, surrounded by concrete walls, dreaming.

  Then, just to the left of the officer’s car, flapping in the wind, he saw the cop’s ticket book. He’d filled out just her first and last name and half of her date of birth. Not even her license was written down. He looked up to see what the other cops were doing, satisfied to see them all busy with things, pointing, directing traffic, talking to the second paramedic unit that had pulled up for god only knew what reason.

  With one smooth tear, Nolan ripped away the top part and the two copies of the ticket. He folded all three and put them in his pocket, keeping his eye on the guy who looked like he was in charge, the sergeant maybe. When the man walked back toward his patrol vehicle, Nolan approached him.

  “I found this, sir. Didn’t know if it was important.”

  The man flipped the book, looking at the copies. Was he comparing the numbers? Was he going to miss the last one? But then he looked right at Nolan and smiled while reaching out to touch Nolan’s shoulder. “We owe you a huge debt, sir.”

  No one seemed to notice when he walked back to the guys—none of the cops, anyway. His guys, that was different. None of them were working; each and every one was staring as if he’d done something impossible, leaped a building or flown across four lanes of traffic.

  “It was just CPR, guys.”

  Delacruz said, “You saved a man’s life.”

  “Maybe,” said Nolan. “You never know. He could just die again in the ambulance.”

  “Aren’t they gonna tell you?” asked Rafe. “Keep you up to date on how he’s doing? You have to find out if he makes it or not, man. You gotta know.” That was so Rafe, always black or white. Right or wrong. Alive or dead.

  Nolan hoped like hell they wouldn’t tell him one way or the other. He didn’t want to know. It seemed too much to handle—the weight of it felt enormous, as if the whole sky were pressing down on him. “Whatever.”

  Rafe said, “Is that her? The ex?”

  Nolan only nodded.

  Rafe’s head swiveled worriedly, looking for the now gone car. “But . . .”

  Mario yelled from inside his truck. “Back to work! I’m not gonna dock your break for that, but we gotta get this segment done before four, you got it?”

  The weight of the shovel felt good in Nolan’s hands even though the way it cracked through the dirt and weeds on the steep side of the road sounded like the cop’s ribs breaking, over and over again. Kate had been there. If he’d wanted to, he could have reached out and touched her. Her cheek looked just as soft. She’d always had the most beautiful, natural creamy skin. Perfect strangers on the street would stop her and tell her how pretty her complexion was. They always had.

  She’d been there. And then she’d gone. He didn’t know if it was a good thing she’d come. She obviously had something difficult to tell him, something she couldn’t just blurt out.

  Then someone had died, at least for a few minutes, while they stood together. First time they’re together since court, and someone else dies. What were the fucking odds? Nolan felt bile rise in the back of his throat and he swallowed it back. He leaned on the shovel and watched an
other cloud chug over the hill toward Orinda.

  Things were moving again. Every time in his life Nolan thought things weren’t ever going to move again, they slid sideways. This time he prayed he’d be able to ride it out. For once.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wednesday, May 14, 2014

  4 p.m.

  Pree held her cold Coke can against her neck and wished for a bucket of ice to shove her feet into. It was hot as hell in the office—the heater was stuck on, and the electrician couldn’t come until tomorrow. She’d known about it the day before and she should have worked from home today, but when Flynn had rolled over to touch her hip, sliding his fingers down her waist—after getting in so late she hadn’t even heard him come in—Pree had been so irritated she’d gotten up without saying a word to him, ignoring his protests.

  As the morning rolled into the afternoon and the building got hotter, Pree’s nerves shredded like wet tissue paper. Heat had never bothered Pree before, but now she was finding it almost unbearable. Just one more thing about the pregnancy that she hated.

  Come on. How were you supposed to know what you’d feel until you did something, anyway? What if you were just a woman who didn’t want a baby? What if you didn’t want to be pregnant? What if you didn’t want to have to make this kind of decision, period? Why should you feel guilty? Pree clicked to the Internet and googled, “Abortion + guilt.” She accidentally clicked on the image search, and immediately wanted to erase the images that filled her vision.

  “Goddamn,” she said. People posted harsh pictures. Pree was someone who didn’t blink when a concept artist sent her porn as reference material when she was working on a character’s clothing, and the pictures of corpses they sent her to work on decomposition were more interesting than anything else, but this stuff was turning her stomach.

  “You sound upset for someone designing walkways.”

  “Shit!”

  Jimmy stood next to her, and Pree hadn’t even heard him approach. “Remember when I asked you if you sneaked up on girls a lot? Apparently you do,” she snapped as she closed the window as fast as she could.