The Moth Diaries

by Rachel Klein

  March 17

  I think it would be better if Lucy didn’t come back to school, although I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on her then. I called her last night, and she said she feels fine. She’s already beginning to forget how sick she was. She’s been to the doctor, and he can’t find anything wrong with her. She’s had so many blood tests they can barely get any more blood out of her arm. It’s black and blue from the needles. There’s no sign of any blood disorder or virus. The doctor thinks she may have had severe mono. “I don’t see how I could have had mono, since I haven’t kissed a boy in ages. And I never had a fever or anything,” said Lucy. She went out shopping with her mother for a whole afternoon and didn’t feel at all tired.

  I have to remain vigilant.

  March 18

  So this is what my father was thinking about before he left us. How long had he been doing this? He went through and marked all the passages about suicide. And there are a lot. All that time we were walking together, he was thinking how and when he would end it. He had forgotten all about the girl hanging on his arm.

  Suicides were not buried in churchyards because they could return from the dead and pull others into the grave with them.

  My father left very careful instructions about what my mother was supposed to do after his death. He wanted his body cremated, thoroughly (he underlined that word, I saw the note), and he asked us to go to the top of Mount Washington (where they had recorded the highest winds on the planet, he wrote) and scatter his ashes. “Make sure the ashes scatter to the winds.” His other request was no memorial service. (Also underlined.)

  My mother did everything he asked. He knew she would.

  Lack of a proper burial and not living out one’s allotted years put you in peril. If you die too soon, if you commit suicide or are killed, then your spirit might remain on Earth until you reach what should have been your seventy years. I don’t know if cremation absolutely keeps the spirit from returning, but I’m glad that both Dora and my father were cremated.

  There is a passage in Montague Summers’s book that is blocked off in blue pen. My father never would have used pen in a book, only pencil. He considered it a crime. Usually he didn’t even buy a book with markings in pen. I guess whoever owned this book before my father marked this passage about the Baganda (a tribe in Central Africa):

  The body of a man who has destroyed himself is removed as far from all human habitation as possible, to waste land or to a crossroad, and there is utterly consumed with fire. Next the wood of the house in which the horrid deed has been done is burned to ashes and scattered to the winds; whilst if the man has hanged himself upon a tree this is hewn to the ground and committed to the flames, trunk, roots, branches and all. Even this is hardly deemed to be sufficient. Curiously enough there is a lurking idea that the ghost of a suicide may survive after the cremation of the body, so horrible is this crime felt to be and so eradicated the taint that this terrible deed establishes.

  My mother was completely wrong about my father’s suicide, but I’ll let her think what she wants.

  I’m finally in direct communication with my father, through his books. My own black telephone to the spirit world. He’s telling me things that he never told anyone when he was alive. He didn’t want me to know about them unless I needed to.

  March 19

  This morning, I came into the kitchen and found my mother sitting in front of her bowl of cereal and cup of coffee, sobbing. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders.

  “I’m not crying for myself, darling. I’m crying for him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He’s been visiting me every night, in my dreams. I think he’s lonely. And last night, he was so angry. He couldn’t even speak. He just pressed his face down toward mine, so that I could see his anger.”

  “It’s just a dream,” I said.

  “Is he angry that I’m here? Or does he realize he made a mistake?”

  “You can’t talk like that.”

  I hugged my mother until she calmed down enough to eat her breakfast. I have to go back to school. I remind my mother of him.

  If I told her what’s been going on at school, I know she would get really annoyed and tell me not to talk that way. Other people’s encounters with the spirit world are preposterous. Only hers are real.

  March 20

  Lucy just called me with questions about chemistry. I was on the phone with her for ages, trying to explain orbitals. I think she got it. She told me about all the new clothes her mother bought her and the stuffed animals she got in the hospital. She sounds exactly like Lucy again. It annoys me. If you’ve come that close to death, how can it not turn you into a different person? You’ve had a glimpse of something (who knows what it is, a flash of light or the memory of a flash of light) that it’s impossible for the rest of us to know. That knowledge has all washed off her. Maybe Dora was right, and all these years I’ve made myself think that she’s somehow different from what she really is – a vacant page. She’s not the girl who lived in the light blue room flooded with sunlight.

  All Christians are uninteresting because they will all be resurrected.

  March 21

  Today my mother was much better. No sobbing in front of her cereal bowl. That was yesterday. This morning at breakfast, she asked me why I never see any of my old friends.

  “We don’t have that much in common anymore,” I said. “I’ve hardly seen them for years.”

  “Just last summer you used to call them up.”

  “I’ve gotten a lot closer to my friends at school. You should be glad.”

  “It would be good for you to get out, that’s all,” said my mother. “You spend all your time behind the closed door of your father’s study.”

  “I’ve been working on a project for school,” I said. “I have lots of work to do over break.”

  I have to keep everything hidden from her, especially this journal. She wouldn’t understand it. It scares me to hide things from her. Now I’m doing exactly what she does.

  Either tonight or tomorrow, we are going to a movie with my aunt. I think my mother’s doing this to get me out of the house.

  Midnight

  I thought she only existed inside those gates. I used to feel safe here.

  I went to the Met after lunch so that my mother wouldn’t have to think about me shut up in my father’s study with his books. I wandered through the museum until I came to the Flemish painters. I read the names beneath the paintings – Dieric Bouts, Petrus Christus, Hans Memling, Jan van Eyck, Quentin Massys. Those harsh syllables had twisted my tongue years before when my mother dragged me through the galleries on the way home from school. For a while, we went practically every day. They sounded so Christian and so devout. I used to study the feathers of the angels’ wings and the sad, resigned faces of the women.

  I passed by all those paintings. The familiar faces bored me. Instead, I stood in front of a portrait of a young Austrian princess that I’d never noticed before. I stared hard at her face, framed by an ornate scarf and a fringe of brown hair, at her bulging wide forehead and bony nose and pouting red lips. She stood in front of a window, opening onto a long landscape of castles and clumps of trees and blue hills, but her gaze was caught somewhere in between that landscape and me. I thought of Ernessa staring out the window in the Passageway, as if the Science Building and the girls running up and down the Middle Field and the cars going by outside the iron fence were just an illusion she could look right through. Devotion, obsession – try to tell them apart.

  I saw Ernessa on the steps outside the museum. She had on her black coat with the velvet collar, the one I was so envious of when I first saw her wear it. I was jealous of everything about her last fall. She wore a navy blue beret, and a small brown pocketbook hung from her shoulder. I picked her out of the crowd immediately. She turned her head just enough that I could see her face and know that it was her. She told me in that instant that she was in the world, whe
rever I was.

  I want to know if she tracked me through the museum and stood behind me while I studied the head of the young princess and thought about her.

  When I got home, I went straight to my room. I wanted to stay at home, but I had to pull myself together and go out. I couldn’t let them see how upset I was. I kept splashing cold water on my face, but my cheeks burned my fingertips.

  We went to see the new Truffaut movie, Bed and Board. My mother and I love to see those movies together. It’s our romantic side. We both adore Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel. In this movie, Antoine has a job dyeing white carnations. He mixes buckets of dye and fills them with flowers. The dye runs up the stems and into the petals. The plants drink, and they are transformed from the inside out. I wonder how long it takes to turn a flower from white to blazing red.

  I kept thinking about Ernessa all during the movie.

  March 23

  As far as I can tell, apotropaics (from the Greek, to avert) fall into three categories: (1) crosses, (2) sharp objects, (3) strong odors.

  Garlic, incense, perfume, green nutshells, cow dung, feces, juniper. These repel vampires. You can place a silver knife under the mattress or a sharp object under the pillow and draw crosses over doorways. In my drawer, I found a necklace of dried juniper berries that my father gave me years ago, after he visited New Mexico. He told me that they would keep away bad dreams. That’s what the Indians used them for.

  Will I be able to convince Lucy to do any of this? I don’t think so.

  The words used to describe vampires are incredibly sad: a “disconsolate person” who is “inaccessible to salvation.” Why would Ernessa want to turn Lucy into someone like that? Lucy’s a happy person, no matter what happens. Bad things don’t leave a mark on her. That’s why everyone likes her. Why not me? I’m a much better victim. I’m already halfway there. But she won’t touch me.

  Every place and time has had vampires, going back to the earliest times: all across Europe, Assyria, ancient Ireland, Russia, Hungary, Transylvania, Greece, India, China, Java, etc. Do human beings make up the same stories everywhere because they have the same fears?

  March 24

  I called Lucy today. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help myself. I picked up the telephone and dialed the number. She answered the phone. There’s nothing wrong. We couldn’t talk for long because she was going over to her cousins’. The cheery person was back. She’s putting off doing her homework, and school is starting again in a few days. Before she hung up, I asked her, trying to sound casual, if she knew what Ernessa was doing over the vacation. There was a long pause before she answered.

  “No. Why?”

  “I think I saw her a few days ago on the steps of the Met, and I wondered if she mentioned anything about being in New York.”

  “I really don’t know,” said Lucy. “She might have relatives there. Did you talk to her?”

  “No. I only saw her from a distance.”

  “Maybe it was someone else.”

  “I’m certain it was her. I could never –”

  “I’ve got to go now. My mother’s calling me.”

  She hung up without waiting for me to say good-bye.

  Underneath that friendly exterior, she’s suspicious of me. She’s trying to protect Ernessa from me. What did I ever do to Ernessa except complain to Mrs. Halton about her putrid room?

  March 25

  Today I went into a store and bought straw crosses that look like Christmas tree ornaments. That made it a little less horrible, but it was still queer to buy them. This is much worse than singing hymns in assembly. It must be a sin for a Jew to buy a cross. I’m going to feel uncomfortable walking into my room. I’ll have to keep telling myself that I’m not trying to be a Christian. I’ve always hated that about the girls at school, even Lucy, their smugness and superiority at being Christian, as though I were secretly dying to be just like them. No one really believes in that religion. Saying that you’re a Christian is no different from saying that you like to wear a certain kind of clothes. Their churches are like Mrs. Halton’s sitting room; you’re afraid to sit down or to touch anything, to leave your sweat and fingerprints behind. My favorite churches are the ones that are in ruins, with grass and dirt for a floor and sky for a ceiling.

  March 26

  I’m sorriest for the children who become vampires through no fault of their own, rather through their parents’ guilt. They are the unknowing victims – conceived during holy week, the illegitimate offspring of illegitimate parents, the seventh child, the baby born with a red caul over the head or some other flaw. Children born on Christmas Day are fated to become vampires to atone for their mother’s vanity in conceiving on the same day that the Virgin Mary conceived the Lord.

  Why should children pay for the sins of their parents? Isn’t it bad enough just to be born?

  Lucy gives in to everyone. She’s weak, and now I have to watch over her.

  March 27

  Am I any worse than all those people who go to church and pray to the Holy Trinity? To ghosts? Christ rose from the dead. Believing in something that can’t be proved makes it more beautiful. Even though it’s terrifying, you feel free. Your mind is made up.

  March 28

  I’m furious at my mother. I had wanted to get back to school before everyone else. She had errands to do, a phone call, all kinds of stupid little things. By the time I got back, everyone, including Lucy, was already here. It was too late. Her room was full of girls. Everyone wanted to be with her. Ernessa stayed away. I don’t know if she’s back yet from wherever she went. Do they know that I saw them together that night? Do they care?

  When I walked into her room and saw her, sitting on her bed surrounded by girls, laughing at their stupid jokes, I thought, she is exactly the same as always. But when she got up to go to the bathroom, I realized how wrong I was. She only appears to be the same. Everything about her is faded. Her skin is so pale and smooth that it has a bluish tint. She doesn’t have a single pimple on her face. She moves slowly and deliberately, as if she has to think where to put her foot before she takes each step. It made me impatient to watch her.

  I didn’t have a chance to do anything except give Lucy the necklace of dried juniper berries. She didn’t seem at all interested in it, but I insisted she hang it from her bed. Actually, I put it there myself. I don’t think she would have let me do it, except that I made a big deal out of the fact that my father had given it to me.

  I stayed in her room to make sure she didn’t move it.

  March 30

  The spring has been ruined. Nothing can save it, not even the weeping cherry trees.

  Last year, I looked forward all winter to the time when the trees along the Upper Field bloomed. That was the joy of my first year: the spring. I let it give me joy. I knew my father wanted that. Nature was his religion. One morning, I came out after breakfast, and the cherry trees were all in flower, their tight buds released during the night. That afternoon I went outside and sat under the trees and read for hours. I wanted to spend as much time as possible under the pink veil. I sat there every day, until all the flowers had fallen and the thick mat of pink had turned to a rotting brown. One day it was windy, and the petals fell on my head like pink snow.

  Last year Lucy used to get me up at six to practice lacrosse before breakfast. She was convinced that I could make it onto A squad with her if I practiced because I could run so fast. I never understood how someone like me, who had always had such a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, could leap out of bed and run down the stairs to shoot goals at dawn. Lucy has become so fragile and awkward. I can’t imagine her ever running up and down the field cradling her lacrosse stick, her blond hair streaming out behind her.

  It’s all that new blood in her body. She’s changed from an athletic, healthy-looking person into someone who is weak and hesitant. Everyone has gotten used to this Lucy. They don’t really understand how different she is.

  APRIL
>
  April 1

  Now Sofia is changing, too. When she was skiing in Vermont, she met a boy named Chris. She says she’s not in love with him, but she’s decided to lose her virginity with him. He’s going to come down for a weekend, and she’s going to meet him over at the College and spend the night with him. She asked me if I would come with her to keep watch. Carol’s going to go, too.

  All I could do was shake my head yes. I hope she gets it over with soon. She was always so prudish. Now it’s all she can talk about. I’m disappointed in her.

  I wake up exhausted.

  I can’t sleep at night. I need a pill to make everything go away.

  My first year we crowded into the bath stall after study hour ended, put a towel under the door to the stall, and turned on the boiling hot water. The steam rose from the bathtub up to the ceiling in white gusts. When the room had filled with steam, we lit a cigarette and passed it around. The steam ate up the cigarette smoke. We smoked until we were dizzy. Then, one by one, we opened the door to the stall and ran down the corridor to our rooms. I got into bed, still dizzy. The instant I closed my eyes, I went right to sleep without a thought. It was like taking an oblivion pill.

  April 2

  I couldn’t help getting drawn into an argument with one of the day students this morning. That awful kind of argument where the other person doesn’t even listen to you.