The Last of the Moon Girls

by Barbara Davis

  Andrew caught her eye, as if hoping to stave off the scene he knew was coming. Lizzy met his gaze without apology. After years of not knowing whether Rhanna was alive or dead, she’d been blindsided by her sudden return. She was entitled to a scene.

  She pushed back her plate, swiveling her attention back to Rhanna. “Do us all a favor and skip the clever banter. You might have been too stoned to remember how things were—how you were—but my memory’s fine. Shoplifting from the drugstore. Passing out drunk at the Fourth of July parade. Picketing the VFW on Veterans Day. Every time I turned around, you were doing something to embarrass us.”

  Rhanna met her gaze, shoulders hunched. “Lizzy, please—”

  “Please what? Please don’t shame you like you shamed us?”

  “I never meant—”

  “Why don’t you tell us what you’re really after, Rhanna? Because we both know you weren’t homesick. You took off and never bothered to let anyone know you were alive. Now, you show up expecting me to roll out the welcome mat. Did you really think that’s how this would go?”

  “Of course I didn’t. I know what you think of me—what everyone thinks of me.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  “I told you . . .”

  “I know what you told me. Now I’m telling you—if you schlepped halfway across the country with your guitar on your back because you thought your ship had come in, you wasted your time.”

  Rhanna looked as if she’d just been slapped. “That’s what you think? That I came here for money? You know me better than that.”

  If Lizzy hadn’t been so furious, she might have laughed out loud. Know her? In what world would such a thing have ever been possible? When she was usually too drunk or high to remember her own name, let alone the name of her daughter?

  Lizzy pushed her chair back and stood. “That’s where you’re wrong, Rhanna. I don’t know you at all. I’ve never known you. You made sure of that.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Bloody hell.

  Andrew stood at the edge of the orchard, his gut knotted like a fist. He had smelled the ash long before reaching the scene, had even imagined what he would find when he arrived, but nothing Evvie said had prepared him for what he was looking at: blackened trees, scorched ground, a heap of charred timber where the shed once stood.

  Arson. Evvie had whispered the word out in the garden, explaining that the investigators had discovered a pair of kerosene torches among the rubble. The thought made his blood run cold. It could just as easily have been the house.

  He’d touch base with Guy McCardle first thing in the morning. Randall Summers might not take his job seriously, but Guy was a straight arrow. If there was something to know, he’d know it.

  He turned and headed east, the setting sun at his back as he walked the perimeter of the orchard, peering down each row as he went. Lizzy was here somewhere. He had known it instinctively when he left the house, ignoring Evvie’s suggestion that he let her have some time to herself. They needed to talk, now, and not just about the fire.

  He found her ten minutes later, sitting cross-legged with her back against an old stump, head bent, eyes closed. Was she crying? Praying? Did she pray? He’d wondered a lot of things about her over the years, but never that.

  His chest tightened as he approached her. He’d run through a dozen conversations in his head on the way here. Now, suddenly, he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t lift her head, but he could tell she knew he was there. “Lizzy.”

  She looked up, fixing him with a withering stare. “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you about this.” He waved an arm, indicating the scorched ground and blackened trees. “Evvie gave me the Reader’s Digest version while we were in the garden. I assumed you’d fill in the blanks at dinner, but you didn’t say a word.”

  “Sorry, I was a little busy. Some guy decided to drop my mother on my doorstep without warning.”

  Andrew sighed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “What was I supposed to do, Lizzy? Let her keep walking? She would have gotten here eventually. You realize that, right?”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  “It is, actually. She’s not some drifter I just picked up. She’s your mother.”

  “Stop saying that!”

  “Okay. Okay. There’s some bad blood between you two. I get it. I also get that this isn’t really any of my business, but at the risk of stepping over the line, maybe it’s time to work through your issues. For Althea’s sake, if nothing else. She’d want the two of you to work things out.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because we talked.”

  Lizzy’s eyes narrowed. “About me?”

  Andrew suppressed a wince. He hadn’t intended to mention his conversations with Althea. Especially the one they’d had about Lizzy’s tortured relationship with her mother. He’d known instinctively that she wouldn’t appreciate being discussed, even by her grandmother, but he’d opened the door now, and maybe it was time.

  “Yes,” he said carefully. “Sometimes we talked about you. We talked about Rhanna once too. About what happened before she left, and the effect it had on you. She made a lot of messes, that’s for sure, but she did come back. That’s got to mean something. Maybe she wants another chance. And maybe deep down you want to give her one.”

  Lizzy cut her eyes at him. “The only thing I want to give Rhanna is a ticket back to wherever she came from. Don’t look at me like that. You know what she’s like. You saw her that night in the fountain, making a spectacle of herself. That’s who you picked up and brought here.”

  Andrew blew out a sigh. Yes, he’d seen her. Half the town had seen her. And the half that hadn’t seen her had certainly heard all about it. And about every other damn thing she’d ever done. But he’d also seen Lizzy’s face when Rhanna stepped out of his truck, that instant of recognition, of relief, before she’d retreated behind her outrage, and he couldn’t help wondering if all that anger was masking something deeper, something she wasn’t willing to acknowledge—pain. The kind people lived with when their hearts had been broken. Yes, there was history, and, no, he didn’t know all of it, but surely thumbing three thousand miles across the country—even for a self-professed gypsy—counted for something.

  “Maybe she isn’t that woman anymore,” he said quietly. “Maybe she’s changed. People do, you know?”

  Lizzy cocked an eye at him. There was a smear of soot on her right cheek, like an angry bruise. “She just hitchhiked across the country with a knapsack and a guitar. She had to sell her van to pay off some debts. She tells fortunes and crashes on couches. Does it sound like she’s changed to you?”

  “I think it’s too early to tell. And she is here. I know you have every right to be angry, but I also know you’re not the kind of person who could just toss her mother into the street. For starters, she’s broke. And this is her home. She came home, Lizzy.”

  Lizzy kept her eyes on the ground as she scraped a streak in the soot with her bootheel. “She gave up the right to call this home a long time ago. And she’s never been my mother. She had me when she was sixteen and handed me over to Althea before the midwife was done cleaning her up. We shared a house, toothpaste, shampoo. We were never mother and daughter.”

  “Maybe she thought she was doing what was best for you.”

  “Now you sound like her.”

  Andrew shrugged. He was annoying her now, and that wasn’t why he’d come. He dropped down beside her, picked up a stick, and began to trace a circle in the ash. After all these years she was still an enigma, a puzzle he felt driven to solve.

  “That bit before,” he said finally. “About the dream. You asked how she knew Althea was dead and she said she had a dream. What did she mean?”

  Lizzy’s eyes slid away. “Nothing. She didn’t mean anything. She just says things.”

  “I saw your face when she said it, Lizzy. It wasn’t nothing.”

  He could see the wheels
turning as she weighed her response, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Finally, she looked at him squarely. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  The question caught him off guard, or maybe it was the way she’d asked it, as if she were testing him. “If you mean do I think some part of us remains after we die, then yes, I guess I do. For a while, after my father died, I used to think I could hear him up in his room, crinkling the pages of his newspaper.”

  “You don’t think it’s just wishful thinking?”

  He took his time with this one, sensing a new and more critical test. “I don’t,” he said at last. “I think most of us leave this world with unfinished business. Things we never said, chances we never took, wrongs we never righted. Maybe they keep us here. Like Jacob Marley and his chains, we’re tied to this world by our regrets. We can’t move on until we’ve cleaned them up, or at least made our peace with them.”

  There were tears in her eyes suddenly, trembling on her lashes, threatening to fall. She tried to blink them away, but it was too late. They spilled over, tracing a path through the streak of soot on her cheek. “Sometimes I wonder . . .” She shook her head and glanced away, letting the words dangle.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “Talk to me, Lizzy. You wonder what?”

  She pushed back her hair, leaving a fresh soot mark on her forehead. “Sometimes I wonder if Althea . . . if some part of her might still be here, trying to clean things up.” She hesitated, eyes darting. “I feel her sometimes. I turn around, expecting her to be there. She never is, though.”

  “Just because you can’t see her doesn’t mean she isn’t here.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I do,” he said matter-of-factly, because somehow it rang true for him. It would be just like Althea to hang around, to make sure the people she loved were okay, and, if possible, to put the broken pieces of her family back together.

  “The thing Rhanna said on the steps—the perfume thing—it’s happened to me too. Not always, but every now and then. And then there’s this journal she left, with all these herbs and flowers pressed between the pages, like lessons she left for me. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like she’s still here, talking right to me.”

  “It doesn’t sound crazy at all. It sounds like Althea. She loved you. And if you ask me, there’s no better reason to stick around than that.”

  The corners of her mouth trembled, not quite a smile. “Thank you for that. I thought you came out here to scold me about being a bad hostess. I wasn’t expecting . . . this.”

  Neither was he. He’d come after her because he wanted to talk about the fire. And maybe about Rhanna, about what might actually lie at the base of all her anger. Instead, she had dropped her guard and, for the first time, allowed him to see her stripped of her armor. But now that she had, he found himself on shaky ground.

  She was still looking at him, waiting for him to say something, her face all angles in the gathering dusk. She was a Moon through and through. Porcelain skin, hair the color of midnight, luminous quicksilver eyes. Like something from a grown-up fairy tale, but real enough to touch.

  “We’d better go,” he said, pushing to his feet. If he sat there much longer, he was going to say something stupid, something he couldn’t take back.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was full dark by the time Lizzy returned to the house. Dinner had been cleared away, the dishes washed and left to dry in the rack. She was glad, though she did wonder where Rhanna had gotten to. Perhaps she realized the Lazarus act wasn’t going to fly and was already on her way back to California.

  But a burst of muffled voices from upstairs put a quick end to that hope. Lizzy mounted the stairs with growing dread. The light was on in what used to be Rhanna’s room, and whatever was going on didn’t sound pleasant. The voices grew more distinct as she approached the landing: Evvie growling about hippies and flophouses, Rhanna snarling about being bossed around in her own room. Their heads turned in unison when Lizzy walked in.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  Evvie’s chin jutted like a sulky child’s. “I’m trying to clear a place for her to sleep in all this mess.” She paused, waving an arm at the stacked boxes and discarded household items crowding the room. “I finally get the bed cleared off, tell her there are sheets in the closet—”

  “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks,” Rhanna bristled, matching Evvie sulk for sulk. “I don’t need sheets. I need to crash.”

  Evvie folded her arms, eyes narrowed. “In this house you need sheets. Just like in this house we wash the dinner dishes and put them away when we’re through.”

  Apparently, the battle had started in the kitchen. Not surprising, given Rhanna’s aversion to all things domestic. Evvie had almost certainly made her opinion known. It wasn’t in her DNA to hold back when something needed saying.

  Lizzy closed her eyes, sighing. “I’ll take care of it, Evvie.”

  Evvie shook her head. “No, ma’am. You’ve had enough for one day. You look . . .” Her eyes narrowed on Lizzy’s sooty jeans and streaked face. “You’ve been out to the orchard, haven’t you? I thought the man from the fire department told you not to bother anything?”

  “I didn’t. I just—”

  “Wait.” Rhanna held up a hand, cutting Lizzy off. “Why was there a fireman here?”

  Lizzy swallowed a groan. She didn’t want to get into this tonight. And she didn’t want Evvie getting into it either. She shot her a silent plea to let her handle it, then turned back to Rhanna. “The shed burned last night. And part of the orchard.”

  Rhanna’s face went blank. She looked at Evvie. “Burned?”

  “Right to the ground.”

  “Do they know how it started?”

  Lizzy waved the question away. “We can talk about it in the morning. Let’s just make the bed, okay? You’re not the only one who needs sleep.”

  But sleep didn’t come easily when Lizzy finally slipped into bed. Snatches of her conversation with Andrew kept running through her head. He’d surprised her tonight. But then he’d always had a way of surprising her. Tonight was different, though. He hadn’t batted an eye when she asked if he believed in ghosts. Instead, he talked about regrets and chains, about leaving this world with unfinished business.

  Outside, the moon was high and full, splashing the bedroom walls with thin, milky light. Lizzy’s eyes slid to the nightstand, to Althea’s Book of Remembrances. She turned on the lamp, reached for the book, and flicked the button on the little brass closure. There was a whiff of something like licorice as she turned to the first unread passage, and a square of waxed paper containing a sprig of flattened leaves and tiny purple flowers.

  Basil . . . for the mending of rifts.

  My dearest Lizzy,

  Of all the lessons I’ve recorded in this book, this will surely be the hardest for you to read. You have always been one to hold your wounds close, to chew on a hurt until all the flavor has gone out of it, and then to chew on it some more. But some wounds are more damaging than others. Some wounds sink down into the bone, festering out of sight, feeding on the anger until there’s nothing left to knit back together. You become the wound, and it becomes you.

  But healing comes when you let it. And it’s time, little girl.

  For years, I watched you nurse the rift between you and your mother, watched you feed it, and water it, and help it grow. And then when she left—the way she left—that rift grew some more. It was a betrayal. A final act of abandonment. And it hurt. Because you didn’t think she could hurt you anymore. Believe me when I tell you I understand. No rift in the world runs so deep as one between mother and daughter. But bridges can be built across the widest chasms, even when all we have to build with are broken pieces.

  You may not believe it now, but a time will come when you’ll want to build that bridge, when you might even need to. It won’t be easy, and if I know anything about you, it’s that you’ll
fight it tooth and nail. Sometimes we find it hard to forgive someone else because we haven’t learned to forgive ourselves. I can’t tell you how to do that. But I can tell you there is no peace in blame. We must find a way to lay it down and be free.

  Your mother was always different, from you and from me. From most of the Moons, I suppose. Nothing prepared me for her sullen moods and wild ways. I used to wonder if it was my fault, wonder if unhappiness could be passed down to a child, like blue eyes or a heart defect. She was such a restless spirit, but a sensitive one too. She claimed once to see things. She never said what, so I was never sure it was true, but there were times when she wouldn’t sleep for days. She would wander the house like a ghost. I never knew what to do with her when she got like that. And then she’d come out of it, and go on one of her tangents, making a show of herself in some public place, like she was lashing out at the whole world. I didn’t know what to do with her then either.

  You were easier. But then, mothering isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s meant to stretch us, and Rhanna did that. And before it’s over, I suspect she’ll stretch you as well. Let her. Help her find her way back if that’s what she wants. Maybe she’ll help you do the same.

  A—

  TWENTY-FOUR

  August 9

  Lizzy tossed aside a wadded sheet of Bubble Wrap and began unpacking the supplies for the batch of baby soap she’d promised Louise Ryerson. The FedEx guy had delivered just after nine, and she’d wasted no time marching the box out to the shop, glad for an excuse to be out of the house—and away from her phone. Luc had been texting her nonstop, his messages growing increasingly impatient. At some point she would need to respond. Just not now, when she had a half dozen fires to put out, and no real endgame in sight.

  Evvie had been sullen over breakfast, grumbling about Rhanna between bites of toast and scrambled egg. How sadly mistaken Rhanna was if she thought she was going to sleep till noon and then wander down for breakfast. They weren’t running a hotel.