Girls in the Moon

by Janet McNally

  “That line’s been in my head all day,” he says, “and it’s not even set to music.” He smiles. “Yet.”

  I shake my head, but I’m smiling. This is another secret: that Archer and I are friends, or something. I don’t even know what we are. We’ve been texting since I saw him in February, but I haven’t told Luna. Somehow I know she won’t like it.

  “All right, Fifi,” Luna says. “Let’s go home.” She’s hand in hand with James, but she grabs my hand too, and starts to pull me toward her apartment. I turn back toward Archer, who’s standing next to Josh, smiling at me.

  I lift my hand, palm flat, in something like a wave. I smile back.

  “See you around?” I ask. But when I say it, it doesn’t really sound like a question. It sounds like I’m sure.

  thirteen

  BACK IN THE APARTMENT, Luna sits in a gray flannel armchair in a tank top and shorts, her legs over the side of the chair. Her hair is pulled into a messy topknot and she has already washed off all her makeup. She’s flipping through her copy of Rolling Stone. I’m lying on the couch with my head on the pillow she gave me, looking up at the cracks running like rivers and tributaries through the ceiling plaster. The fan near the window drifts from side to side, pushing hot air around.

  James is in the shower and I can hear the water running, plus little bits of him singing “Nowhere Man” from time to time.

  “What’s new at home?” Luna asks.

  I think about it a moment. “I’m pretty sure Mom’s sculptures are getting spinier.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, pointier.” I try to make the universal gesture for pointy by stabbing my index finger into the palm of my other hand. “More dangerous.”

  “That could be bad for business,” Luna says. “Some rich guy could lose an eye.”

  I shrug. “I’m sure that’s the least of Mom’s concerns.”

  When she was gone on tour, I tracked Luna through her Instagram account, those little squares of softly lit scenes I would never see in real life. Here was Luna drinking beer on a boat off Cape Cod with the water rippling behind her, one sundress strap falling off her shoulder and her mouth open, midlaugh. Here was Luna holding her sandals in her hand on a beach in Maine, stepping through the sand in her bare feet. Here was Luna, smiling in the window of their band van, a blue Plymouth Voyager from sometime last decade. Here was Luna, inscrutable but always happy.

  I caught my mother looking at the pictures once, late at night when she thought I was asleep. I came down the back stairs to get a glass of water before bed, and she was on her laptop on the couch, bathed in silvery light. She had headphones over her ears so she didn’t hear me, and since the kitchen lights were off, she didn’t see me in her peripheral vision either. I watched her watch Luna for a minute, and wondered if she were listening to Luna’s music too, streaming from the Moons’ website, maybe, or her own iTunes.

  Here in Luna’s living room, I can hear people laughing down on the sidewalk, each group getting louder and then quieter again as they pass by.

  “You could have called more,” I say.

  Luna looks at me. “I did call.”

  Three times in three months, I want to tell her. Always when you knew Mom would be teaching her summer class. But I just nod.

  She tosses the magazine on the coffee table next to my mother’s sculpture. “We text all the time.”

  “But that’s not the same as actually talking,” I say right away, without even thinking about it. Because it isn’t. You can be so careful what you say when you’re texting, and the other person might never know what you’re thinking. You can be whoever you want to be.

  She shrugs. “I think it’s fine.” She pulls lip balm out of her pocket and runs it over her lips.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” I say. She looks at me.

  “What?” she asks.

  “To give up school,” I say. “To be famous.”

  “We’re not famous yet,” Luna says.

  “But you’re trying to be.”

  She shrugs. “Everyone wants to be famous. I’ll worry about it when we get there.” She picks her phone up off the table and stares at the screen for a second, frowning.

  “Dad’s living in Brooklyn now, you know.” She looks at me, waiting for a reaction. “He got an apartment near the studio.”

  I take a quick breath, surprised she brought him up. “Have you . . . seen him?” I’m trying to test the waters here, before I tell her that I want to.

  “No,” she says, and then adds, “Of course not.”

  “Right. Where is he?”

  “Williamsburg, I think.” She scoffs. “Trying to pretend he’s twenty-five.”

  I only know the Brooklyn I’ve seen so far with Luna, so I don’t really know what she means about Williamsburg. But I don’t want to ask straight out. “So what are you trying to pretend?” I say instead.

  “What?”

  “If every neighborhood means something, what does Brooklyn Heights mean?”

  Luna thinks for a second, furrowing her brow. “Babies, I guess. The sidewalks are clogged with strollers.” She shakes her head. “That’s not me, though. I’m not Mom.”

  Except in all the ways you are, I think.

  “You could try giving Mom a break,” I mutter.

  “What?” Luna says, but I know she heard me. Then, “Why?”

  “Because you can’t be mad at both of them at once,” I say. “Right?”

  Luna gets up then and steps onto the rug in front of me. She sets a folded sheet on my stomach.

  “Sorry it’s so hot,” she says. “You might still want some kind of cover. I hate sleeping in just the air.”

  She drops her hand to the top of my head and lets it rest there for just a moment. I think of the little girl in the airport who tried to touch her skirt and the way Luna turned her full attention to the girl for a moment, and then walked away. Here in the living room, Luna takes her hand back and walks to her bedroom. She shuts the door.

  I unfold the sheet and flip it out over my legs in one quick motion. It’s an old sheet from our linen closet in Buffalo, one with tiny blue flowers scattered over a white background. I lift the hem to my nose to see if it smells like home, but it doesn’t. It smells like dust and someone else’s detergent.

  Luna’s copy of Rolling Stone is just out of my reach, so I roll closer to it and stretch out my fingers. Beyoncé is on the cover, and at first glance, no one I’m related to seems to be anywhere within. It’s a Ferris-free issue, and I’m glad of that. It’s only a matter of time before Luna and the Moons end up in there, and it wouldn’t be her first time.

  Luna first made it into Rolling Stone a few months after she was born, in a four-inch square photo with my parents, taken by Aunt Kit. The clipping was cut out and tacked to a bulletin board in our kitchen for most of my childhood, and I know there’s a whole box of copies of that issue in our attic. In the picture, my mother holds Luna half-wrapped in a dark blue blanket, Luna’s skinny arms and starfish hands free. She’s sitting next to my father on a gray velvet sofa in their old West Village loft, one of his arms slung over my mother’s shoulder. They look tired but happy. The headline reads, Their Little Moon.

  This was five years after Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love had Frances Bean, when it seemed like the new cool thing was for rock stars to have babies. It was three years after Kurt, the world’s most famous rock-star dad, shot himself. I suppose my family’s story isn’t so bad, compared to that. My parents just broke up: their marriage, their band. Other than that, everyone survived.

  Now I want to text Archer—actually, I want to talk to him—but I’m not sure what to say. Here’s the thing: Archer knows the girl who sends lyrics by text message, some other version of me. I’m not sure I can even be that girl in real life. But I’m going to try.

  I’m nothing but a shadow, nothing but a silhouette. I lose all my certainty the farther away I get.

  I wait a moment, and
then send another. I don’t even know what that means.

  His reply comes a few seconds later: Sometimes that’s okay.

  I fall asleep with a smile on my face.

  fourteen

  MEG

  OCTOBER 1995

  IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN Kieran came in. I was in the bedroom with a spool of twenty-six-gauge copper wire glowing like spun fire in my lap. I’d been trying to make a tree, an oak, a plan for a larger sculpture I wanted to make someday. If I ever had the time.

  Kieran sat down on the bed next to me and kissed my forehead. He smelled like a distillery.

  He leaned back on the pillows. I formed another copper branch with my hands, looking at him. “Hello, gorgeous,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m so late.”

  “And that you’re drunk?” I said, but I tried to sound playful. The metal was warm between my fingers, and I bent it, curved it, all without looking down.

  Kieran nodded, smiling. He fell heavily on his elbow.

  “Yeah, I’m a little drunk,” he said.

  This was the third night this week he’d been out with industry people. Guys from the label tonight, a couple of editors from Rolling Stone on Friday, and last Wednesday, two-thirds of the band we’d tour with that fall. I swallowed a sigh and looked down at my metal tree. I imagined it so much larger, as big as a real tree, maybe, two stories tall. If I could figure out how to use a blowtorch, and how to cut copper pipe.

  “Hey,” Kieran said. “Are you mad?”

  I shook my head, but I didn’t look up. I wasn’t mad, not exactly, but I had thought he’d be home hours ago.

  “I was with Carter and Dan,” he said, his voice smooth around the edges, slow as syrup. He slid his hand up my thigh. “I missed you the whole time.”

  “Really,” I said.

  It wasn’t that I was jealous. I knew the way girls got around him, their eyes widening, leaning into his airspace like they were crossing a border. But he wouldn’t cheat on me. The truth was right there in the lyrics he wrote, the ones that were too sweet and sentimental for Shelter. Kieran liked to love. And the one he loved was me.

  And, anyway, if he even thought about cheating, Carter and Dan would beat him within an inch of his life.

  “You said you’d be home early tonight,” I said. “It was just a party. Why couldn’t you just tell them you had to go home?”

  “Because I couldn’t. We have to be a part of this world, Meg. Or at least I do.” There was a sheen of anger on his voice, but it faded. “I told the label guys you weren’t feeling well,” he said.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Well,” he said, but he didn’t finish his sentence. He slipped his watch off his wrist and laid it on the bedside table. “We wanted you there, but you always want to stay home.”

  I could remember when Kieran had asked me to start a band with him. “We would be so good together,” he said to me. I told him I wouldn’t leave Carter and Dan, my friends since I was sixteen. “You’ll have to be good with me and Carter and Dan at the same time,” I said. “I can be that,” he’d said. And he had been, ever since.

  “Listen,” Kieran said. “When we’re on tour you say you wish we were at home. Now we’re home, and this is our job when we’re here. Making connections, keeping things solid with the people at the label.” His voice was low, but there was an edge to it. “I don’t know what else you expect me to do.”

  I looked up at him, and his face softened. “I’m sorry you’re upset,” he said.

  “It’s okay.” I tried to smile.

  He leaned forward and kissed me then, soft and slow, and when we parted he lay down on his back.

  There was something I wanted to tell him, but when I looked down his eyes were closed. I watched him breathing, his chest rising and falling, and by the time I looked away I couldn’t even remember what I was going to say.

  fifteen

  “HEY, SLEEPYHEAD.”

  Luna’s voice pokes through my dream and for a moment, I’m fifteen again, sleeping past my alarm, and we’re going to be late for school. That happened all the time when Luna was at St. Clare’s with me. I’d pull myself out of bed at the last minute, brush my teeth and my hair, and eat a granola bar in the car while she drove. Luna, on the other hand, woke as soon as the sun poked through her curtains, showered, and usually had time to do her eyeliner, even.

  She leans over me, throwing a shadow with the curtain of her hair.

  “Seriously, Fee,” she says. “Let’s get moving!”

  “No,” I mumble, and pull the sheet over my head. I keep my eyes open, though, and the tiny blue flowers look like dark stars sprinkled over a white sky.

  “Okay,” she says, her voice a little farther away. There’s a clattering sound, then metal scraping metal. Dishes, maybe? Pots and pans? I sit up, pulling the sheet tight around my knees. From my spot on the couch, I can see Luna in the kitchen, holding a skillet in one hand.

  “Just trying to prove that I use the stove.” She points with her free hand. “Sit down at the table. There’s no breakfast in bed served at Chez Luna.”

  I move over there, but under protest, with the sheet still wound around me. Luna fusses in the cupboards and I hear butter sizzle in the pan.

  When she brings me the plate, her expression is triumphant.

  “Maple toast!” she says. Our mother used to make this for us when we were little. It’s just wheat bread toasted in a skillet with butter and cinnamon, then drizzled with maple syrup.

  “Real syrup,” she says. “James tried to buy that fake stuff and I said no way.” She wags her finger. “I think it cost at least a quarter of our grocery bill, though. It’s expensive.”

  “And this has been another episode of ‘Things You Don’t Know When Your Mom’s Buying Your Groceries,’” I say.

  “Right,” she says. “You want some yogurt and granola too?” She’s already back in the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge.

  “Sure,” I say.

  When Luna brings it over, the yogurt is in a delicate bowl with pink flowers. I recognize the bowl; in fact, I thought it was still in the cupboard at our house back in Buffalo.

  “How did you get these?” I ask.

  Luna sits down, squeaking her chair across the floor. “Mom sent them,” she says.

  “When?”

  “About a month ago.” She’s looking at the bowl, not at me. “It was nice of her.”

  It’s like some kind of code that I can’t figure out how to break, my mother’s sending of objects. What exactly are they supposed to mean?

  That copy of The Catcher in the Rye that Luna picked up yesterday is on the table, pushed up next to the wall. I slide it over and open to the title page. Happy birthday—1976—to Michael, it says on the yellowing page opposite. We come into the world alone. We go away the same. I’m glad that some days of our lives were spent together. The inscription at the bottom reads, Much love, Jackie. The ink is ballpoint-pen blue, and the cursive is careful and small. I wonder where Jackie and Michael are now, and how the book made its way out into that box on the wall. I wonder how many days they got to spend together.

  Catcher makes me think of Tessa, who wrote her AP Lit thesis paper on the carousel.

  “There’s the thing itself,” she told me last spring, trying to explain her idea. We were in physics lab, and I was trying to measure the velocity of a spring-powered toy car. It kept falling off the table and Tessa wasn’t helping.

  “These horses that just go around and around in circles and never get anywhere at all,” she said. “And then there’s Holden, who has been looking for some kind of realness and sincerity through the whole book, looking at his sister on the carousel, feeling so happy, finally. He can’t ride it, right?” She leaned forward. “Because he’s not really a kid. But his sister can, and he can watch and feel her happiness, so it becomes his own.” Tessa stopped and looked at me. I held the car, spring wound tight, in one hand. She smiled. “Plus his sister’s name is Phoebe.”r />
  If Tessa were dropped down in New York today, I know the carousel is the first place she’d go. She’s obsessed. We had plans to come together to visit Luna, maybe after Christmas or next spring, whenever Luna was in town, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anymore.

  Still, Michael and Jackie’s copy of Catcher seems like a good-luck charm. I study the creases in the dark red cover, crisscrossing like a map of roads in a mostly empty space, and then I put it in my bag next to my copy of SPIN. It fits in the pocket perfectly, no space left to spare.

  sixteen

  LUNA AND I SPEND THE day going to her favorite places, some of which I saw on my last visit when she was at Columbia, and some of which are new. It’s a little dizzying, if I think about it. Last year she was a freshman in college and now she’s, what? A musician? A girl in a band? Some kind of grown-up, anyway.

  We sit at a tiny table in Bryant Park for an hour, just like we did last year. We sip what I have to admit are pretty decent iced mochas out of plastic cups with long red straws. We go inside the big library there at Forty-Second Street to say hello to the old and worn stuffed animals that inspired the Winnie-the-Pooh books. They sit together in a glass case, their black eyes shiny. When we come out, Luna makes sure we both give one of the stone lions a pat on its head.

  For lunch we go to a perfect Japanese restaurant the size of a living room and eat cucumber-and-avocado rolls, edamame beans in their bright green, salty shells, and miso soup with porcelain spoons. We sit on the stairs at the Met for a while with a hundred other people and then use the membership my mom bought Luna to go inside and see the Egyptian tomb in its light-filled room. Before we leave we peek in to see Degas’s dancers, which Luna knows I love.

  We used to come to New York together when I was small, in those years where my mother and father were actually trying to coparent. I don’t remember it, but Luna told me there was a time when we’d go together, all four of us, to an Ethiopian restaurant my parents liked on the Upper West Side. I was five, Luna seven. She remembered eating with her fingers, and with spongy pieces of bread that would come in a big basket at the center of the table. She said my parents actually seemed to get along then, that they’d talk about people they used to know and smile in each other’s presence. I can’t remember anything like that.