Girls in the Moon

by Janet McNally

  My mother continues. “So Luna’s still doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Leaving.” It’s a weird way to put it, I think, because in a lot of ways, Luna has already left.

  “She’s still planning to go on tour, if that’s what you mean. In September.” The door opens and I look toward it, thinking it might be my sister. But it’s a blond girl with a tattoo of a butterfly covering her collarbone, its ink lit up in navy and dark pink under the club’s neon sign. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to her about it much yet.”

  My mother stays quiet, and I press the phone closer to my ear. I want to hear the sounds of our backyard during a summer night, the cicadas’ rattling hum, the mockingbird that tries on a dozen other birds’ calls. But I can’t hear anything, not even my mother’s breathing, over the noise from the club and the street.

  “Their show was pretty packed,” I say. “They’re . . . a little bit famous.”

  “The best kind,” she says, but I don’t really know what she means. I’m about to ask her when I hear a voice in the background, deeper than my mother’s and farther away. I can’t make out what he’s saying.

  “Jake’s there?” I ask. Jake is my mother’s best friend from the university, the one who named her Goddess of the Forge. He makes huge sculptures out of old things that have something to do with the sea. He’ll stack a bunch of rowboats, or stretch sailcloth in strips across a whole park. He was in Germany a month ago installing a big, open-weave box made of oars in a town square.

  I’m glad he’s there with her. It means she’s not alone.

  “Just got here. He brought me Chinese from May Jen,” my mother says. “He thinks I’ll wither away without you.” I hear the rustling of something—a paper bag, or the long red sleeve of a pair of chopsticks. “He might be right. It’s so quiet in the house.”

  “I am known to be an exceedingly loud person,” I say.

  “Cacophonous.” She’s joking, but she sounds sad.

  Both of us are silent. I want to ask her about my father, or Shelter, what it was like when she was the one onstage. I thought it might be easier to talk about things like this on the phone, where we could avoid looking each other in the eyes, but it’s still not easy to speak to my mother now, here on the street, even though she can’t see me and I can’t see her. It’s like I don’t know where to start: the beginning or the end. And where do I fit in?

  “I’ll let you go,” I say, though I know my mother hates that phrase. If you want to get off the phone, just say so, she always says. In fact, I say it because she hates that phase, because I want her to tell me to not to say it. But she doesn’t notice.

  “Okay, Fee,” she says. “I love you and I’ll talk to you soon. Give Luna my love.” Then she hangs up—I hear the tiny click, the empty air—before I can say good-bye.

  twenty

  MEG

  FEBRUARY 1995

  KIERAN TOOK MY HAND AND I stepped out of the limo. We were blocking traffic and I heard a taxi’s horn behind us, a long thin peal. I looked up toward the slate-blue sky and saw three pigeons flutter down from the building above us.

  Dan slammed the door and Kit took my other arm. Behind me, the limo drove away to circle the block until we were done. It made me a little dizzy to think about it, but that might have been because the five of us had split four bottles of champagne on the way over there. We’d had a ball. I normally didn’t drink, but I felt so happy-nervous—my lungs were fluttery and my heart thumped off-beat—that I’d had three big glasses. Now, when I stepped into the foyer, I realized that I might be drunk.

  “Shit,” I said. I wobbled on my heels and leaned hard on Kieran’s arm.

  “Babe,” he said, “are you okay?”

  I laughed. “Um, I think so.” The world was tilted, I swore, because I couldn’t stay straight up. Thank god my parents weren’t flying in until dinner. Somehow I convinced them that the courtroom would be too small for all of us. I loved them—I really did—but it was too much pressure.

  Kieran steadied me and slipped his hand onto the small of my back.

  “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d say you were drunk.”

  “But you do know better,” I said. I tried to tilt my head coyly, but it just made me lose my balance. I held on to Kieran’s arm. Who had invented high heels? A man, Kit always said, but hers were even higher than mine that day.

  Kieran smiled. He looked so handsome in his dark gray suit that it almost hurt to look at him.

  “Of course. But why don’t you take this anyway?” He handed me a mint from his pocket. “Just so we don’t give the judge the wrong idea.”

  “She’s not drinking whiskey,” Kit said. She fixed her hat, dark blue felt with netting and a bird. It was vintage, ridiculous and fabulous at the same time. “If anything,” Kit said, “she’ll smell like a fancy French lady.”

  Kieran smiled and shrugged. “Okay,” he said.

  Dan shook his head. “I think fancy French ladies smell like perfume,” he said. “Not booze.”

  I ate the mint.

  Carter was reading the signs in the hallway. “This way,” he said. Kit grabbed his hand and tried to get him to skip, but he couldn’t quite do it, so she let go and twirled in the middle of the hallway, laughing. Carter just looked at her, eyes wide-open like he was bird-watching or something. Kit was wearing a blue-gray skirt suit from the sixties, found, as usual, in one of her favorite vintage shops in the East Village.

  “Thirty years ago, I bet some girl wore this to her sister’s wedding,” she told me when she bought it. “And now I’ll wear it to yours.” Kit was always doing this: seeing stories in her clothes. But Carter saw only Kit. He’d had a crush on her for years. Too bad for poor, sweet Carter that Kit’s own crushes were on women.

  Now, I saw a bathroom.

  “I have to pee,” I said. Kit turned around, curtsied to the guys.

  “That’s my cue!” she said. She took my hand and pulled me in.

  Inside, it was all gray tile and wide mirrors, and this didn’t do much for my vertigo.

  “The world is spinning,” I said. We stared at each other in the mirror, smiling.

  “Not the world,” Kit said. “Just the bathroom.”

  “Same effect,” I said. I locked the stall door behind me. I sat for a moment and the world settled, coming to a stop beyond the door. For the first time all day, I felt a wave of panic rise up through my belly. What was I doing here? I’d wanted to marry Kieran since I accidentally became Meg Ferris, when a reporter for Rolling Stone got my name wrong. He thought we were already married, heard Ferris when I said Foster. He read my mind, or my wishes. And we let everyone think it was true.

  But on my wedding day, this felt like some kind of time travel, because if we were already married, why were we there? And if we weren’t married, then why did everyone think we were?

  Drunk thoughts, I knew. But I still had that flickering feeling in my chest, and I couldn’t quite catch my breath.

  I got up and flushed. When I came out of the stall Kit was reapplying her eyeliner. I looked at her in the mirror. She looked at me too, sideways, without moving anything but her eyes.

  “What if this is a mistake?” I said. Kit turned toward me.

  “Margaret Maeve Foster,” she said. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Katherine Deirdre Foster,” I said. “I am not.” I shifted my weight to my other foot and held on to the sink for balance. “Everyone already thinks I’m Meg Ferris anyway.”

  She put her hands on my shoulders, still holding an eyeliner in the right one.

  “Meg, you love him. He loves you. He can be a jerk and you can be a weirdo, but I’ve never doubted the love.”

  “Geez, Kit,” I said. “You’re really good at sentimental talk. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

  She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. She put her eyeliner back into her tiny purse.

  “Everything is going to be fine,�
� she said. “Breathe.”

  So I did.

  Kit took my arm and we walked out the door and down the hallway. In the room where we would get married, Kieran stood next to the judge, a tall man who looked like a soap opera star. In a good way.

  “Wow,” Kit whispered. “I would hop on that train if I were more into men.” I laughed then, and so did she, and I could feel my shoulders relax.

  Kieran smiled at me and without even trying, I smiled back. Kit and I started to march up the middle of the floor. Carter and Dan came up on either side of us and we all linked arms.

  “Aren’t you going to ask who gives the bride away?” Dan asked.

  The judge blinked at him. “It’s not required,” he said. There was a woman sitting at a desk next to where he was standing, and she giggled.

  “Well,” Dan said, “it’s all three of us.”

  “Noted,” said the judge. “You have to sign some paperwork first, anyway.”

  “It’s not like anyone needs to give her away,” Kit said, punching Dan in the arm. “She’s a free woman.”

  We finally reached Kieran, and he pulled me close and kissed me.

  “This is out of order,” Carter—the romantic—said. “Kiss the bride is later. After you’re married.”

  “Sorry about that,” said Kieran. “Couldn’t help myself.”

  “Right,” said the judge, but finally he was smiling a little. “Let’s get down to business.”

  I didn’t even care that we were making a spectacle of ourselves because now, standing next to this boy I loved, I felt really, truly okay.

  twenty-one

  WHEN I COME IN OFF the street, Luna is sitting on a stool near the front, holding a brown beer bottle between her knees. The second band has finished. I completely missed their set while I was talking to Archer and then my mom.

  “Hey, Fee,” Luna says. Her eyes are a little wider than they were earlier, her mouth softer. Her makeup is smudged, but on her it looks smoky. She tucks her hair behind her ear. “What did you think?”

  “I thought it was amazing,” I say. “Really.” Luna smiles.

  “Do you want a beer?” Josh asks. He’s standing behind Luna, leaning on the bar. Even though I try not to, I look at Luna, and she is already looking at me. She’s waiting for me to answer.

  “Just a seltzer with lemon,” I say. I figure that way it will at least look like I have an actual drink in my hands.

  I sit down next to Luna, on a stool covered in beat-up brown vinyl. James is standing so close to my sister that their shoulders are touching. They fit together like a two-piece puzzle that snaps in the center.

  “I talked to Mom,” I tell Luna. “She wanted to hear about the show. I told her it was great.”

  A flicker of a smile crosses Luna’s face, but that’s as far as it goes.

  “I’d kill to have seen your mom in action,” Josh says. “Bonus points if it included your dad.”

  “Even we’ve never seen that in real life,” I say, “and we’re their daughters.”

  Luna looks at me and blinks. Then she opens her mouth and says something totally surprising. “You know, I used to pretend that my real father was someone else, someone from one of the other bands they used to play with. Paul Westerberg, I hoped. Maybe Dave Grohl. Hopefully not Perry Farrell.” She wrinkles her nose.

  “Just you?” I notice that I’m leaning toward her, and I pull myself back so I don’t fall off the stool. The boys are watching Luna, rapt, like they’re sighting something rare, a bird, or a comet streaking its way across the sky. Josh’s mouth is open just the tiniest bit, and Archer’s eyebrows are furrowed. I know then that she must never talk about our parents to them.

  Luna nods, smiling. “Sorry, Fee. You have the same dimple as Kieran, in the exact same spot.” She pokes her finger gently in the spot next to my mouth. “You’re marked. Pure Ferris.”

  “I guess.” The bartender puts my glass down on the bar, where the bubbles glow in the dim light shining above us.

  “Anyway,” she says, the spell over, “it doesn’t matter. He’s my father. I’m stuck with him.” Luna runs her fingers through her hair, separating the waves. “But it’s not like I have to see him.”

  There’s an uncomfortable silence.

  “Does Meg ever see any of those people anymore?” Josh asks. “Carter and Dan, I mean?” This must be the first time he’s asked her this. I wonder how that could be.

  “Once in a while.” Her voice is flat.

  I look at Luna to see if she’ll say anything else, but she’s staring toward the windows.

  When we were little and got mad at our mother, Luna and I would sometimes tell her that we were leaving her, that we were going to New York to live with our father. At that point, we saw him only a few times a year, and most of those times weren’t in Manhattan. He’d come to Buffalo and stay in the apartment over our garage, before our mother built her sculpture studio out there. He’d eat breakfast with us and then take us to the zoo or down to the marina. And then he’d go back to New York and a few weeks or a month might pass before we would hear from him again. When he was on tour we’d get postcards, sometimes, with postmarks from California and Vancouver or all the way from Berlin or Madrid. He didn’t say much in his notes. He might mention the other bands he played shows with, or what he had to eat the night before. Luna would stare at his scratchy, scrawled handwriting for hours, as if she was trying to decipher something more than the words themselves. Then she’d never look at them again. I think I still have them in a drawer somewhere.

  When we got mad and told my mother we were leaving, she never said go ahead and go. But she never said what was true, either: that he didn’t want us, that he never really had.

  “You were the real mistake,” Luna said to me once. I was thirteen. She was fifteen, with a pixie cut and cat-black eyeliner winging out from her lashes like a sixties starlet. Her eyes looked enormous against her close-cropped hair. It might have been one of the first times I realized she was beautiful.

  “What?” My voice was small and a little panicked. Luna sat down on the bed next to me.

  “Well, me, I was an accident. That can happen to anyone. But then they stayed together, and they actually tried to have you.” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe it. “That was really, really dumb of them.” She shrugged her shoulders. “No offense.” She got up then and she walked away.

  Now Luna stands up and puts her bottle down hard on the bar. I can hear the leftover beer slosh around and fizz. It’s still half-full.

  “Time to go,” she says. “So tired.” She leans over to kiss James. “See you at home, babe?”

  “Right,” he says, and Luna turns to Archer and Josh.

  “Don’t forget to pay up the bet.”

  “We’ll make good,” says Josh.

  On the way out, Luna gets stopped by the singer of the other band, a tiny Korean girl with spiky hair and a red-painted mouth, and they hug and start talking. The boys end up loading out right in front of us. Josh borrowed the other band’s drums for the show so it doesn’t take them long: guitar, bass, two amps, a couple of suitcases full of pedals and cables. I sit on a stool while Luna talks and every time Archer passes, he smiles at me.

  When she’s finally done, we push out through the door and the street looks the way I left it, only quieter and cooler. Luna leads me in the opposite direction of the park.

  “Let’s get on at Astor Place,” she says. We turn the corner by the subway stop. The van is parked here near a corner, and Archer stands leaning against the back of it, another cigarette held between his fingers. I take a step toward him without meaning to do it, as if he has his own gravity, and in that moment, I wonder: Have I been acting like I’m a mistake? Like something that shouldn’t have happened? Maybe it’s time to make things happen instead.

  I know right then that I’ll kiss Archer before this week is over.

  “Smoking kills,” I say, because I don’t know what else to offe
r beyond a public service announcement. I hear a train screeching to a stop in the station below.

  “He already knows,” says Luna. She grabs my hand. “Come on. We can make it if we go right now.”

  Archer says something behind us, but I can’t really hear him because we’re running. By the time his voice reaches us, we’re already halfway down the stairs.

  twenty-two

  LUNA AND I RIDE THE train without speaking for five stops. I know this because I’m counting, trying to learn their names and figure out where the different lines meet up. Luna doesn’t notice; she leans her head back on the wall behind her and closes her eyes. Her face looks pale in the fluorescent light. When the train stops at Spring Street, Luna lifts her head and turns toward me.

  “Mom said you and Tessa haven’t been speaking.”

  “You talked to Mom?” I yelp the words in surprise.

  “She told me a couple of months ago, in a text.” Luna makes a phone-and-texting motion with her fingers and her thumb. “You never brought it up, and I forgot to ask you about it. I’m a bad sister.”

  “It’s fine.” I look at the top latch of her guitar case, silver and perfectly square. I have the urge to reach out and flick it open, but I don’t.

  “What happened?”

  I take a breath. “Just a mess with a boy.”

  “The best kind.”

  I hear in those words the echo of what my mother said earlier, about being a little bit famous. They have the same vocabulary, my mother and sister.

  “Not really,” I say. “There’s this guy she’s had a crush on for a long time. She took him to prom, and I went with his friend.” I stop. Something flashes in the dark train tunnel like lightning past the window. “He kissed me.”

  “Her crush or the friend?”

  “Her crush.” My heart beats faster at the memory of it. “But he’s . . . my crush too. I didn’t know she liked him when we met. It was . . . kind of a mix-up. He likes me too.” The train screeches to a halt and the doors open. I can feel the hot, wet underground air flow into the train car.