The Moth Diaries

by Rachel Klein

  “It’s all Ernessa’s fault,” I screamed at her. “She’s turned you completely against me. That’s why you say this.”

  “She’s never said anything mean about you. I’ve just changed, that’s all. Why do you always want to blame her for everything?”

  “Because she’s to blame for everything. If she hadn’t come here, we would have had a wonderful year. She’s ruined everything for me. I hate her so much I would kill her if I had the chance.”

  “You make me sick, the way you talk,” said Lucy, pushing herself up, suddenly energized.

  I grabbed her arm and pulled her off the bed toward the bathroom. She was so light, but I struggled to drag her across the room. We stood side by side, barely able to fit into the narrow mirror on the bathroom door. She leaned heavily against me.

  “Look at yourself,” I shouted. “Tell me that you don’t look sick. You can barely stand up.”

  “Look at yourself,” whispered Lucy.

  In our white shirts, our long blue skirts, with our pale skin and our eyes rimmed with red, we were both ghostly, only partly present. She wasn’t pretty anymore, but her prettiness never really interested me. My face was wet with tears. I didn’t know that I had started to cry.

  “Leave me alone, please,” said Lucy. “I can’t stand having you around me all the time, wanting me only for yourself. You are a fucking drag. You pull me down. All that pain.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “There’s only a month and a half left of school. We should be able to make it without changing rooms.”

  I left her room and closed the door to the bathroom behind me. I’ll never speak to her again. Never. I don’t even understand what happened. She was so sweet the whole time, gazing up at me with that stupid smile of hers.

  I forced myself to go down to dinner. I didn’t want her to see how much she had hurt me. How much she makes me suffer. At dinner, she seemed livelier. My pain has given her strength. I feel desperate. I won’t call her mother. I’ll stay out of the whole thing. I ate dinner without once taking my eyes from my plate. I didn’t want to see Lucy, at the next table, laughing and talking as if nothing had happened. She feels relieved to be rid of me at last. I was just the friend she took under her wing, like an injured bird, because she felt so sorry for her, but who turned out to be too much trouble in the end. I ran up to my room after a quick cup of coffee and sat down at my desk with my journal. But I couldn’t write. I listened to the girls coming up from dinner and going to their rooms. Their voices in the corridor sounded so happy! They weren’t worried about anything. Some of them were laughing. They all left me alone. Lucy only said what everyone else thinks.

  I’ve been here for three years, and I feel exactly the way I did my first week at school, when I hurried up from meals, shut myself up in my room, and listened to the girls outside my door. All the other doors on the corridor were open. Only mine was closed. They inhabited a world I couldn’t enter. How could I ever learn to be like them? I would be locked up in my room by myself, day after day, reading my books, listening to the rising and falling voices, wanting only my father. She had the key, and she unlocked my cell. That was why I loved her so much.

  I cried when I saw our reflection in the mirror because we are both so changed.

  If I am no longer the person I once was, then I no longer know any of the people around me.

  Lights out

  After study hour, I snuck downstairs to the pay phone in the back of the Cloakroom. My pockets were full of change. My fingers shook as I dialed the number. They kept getting stuck in the holes. I prayed that no one would see me. The phone rang four, five times before someone finally answered it. A pause, a heaving breath, a hoarse voice. I didn’t expect him. I was sure her mother would answer. He was standing by the phone in the kitchen in his underwear, panting, his face a deep, glistening red. The dog was jumping up and barking by his side. “Hello. Hello? Hello?”

  I hung up.

  MAY

  May 2

  Seven A.M.

  I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—

  The Stillness in the Room

  Was like the Stillness in the Air—

  Between the Heaves of Storm—

  The Eyes around—had wrung them dry—

  And Breaths were gathering firm

  For that last Onset—when the King

  Be witnessed—in the Room—

  I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

  What portion of me be

  Assignable—and then it was

  There interposed a Fly—

  With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

  Between the light—and me—

  And then the Windows failed—and then

  I could not see to see—

  Why does she keep lecturing me? It’s like a sermon. Preacher Emily converting the Jew. I cover my ears. I close my eyes.

  Nine P.M.

  I can’t find the right pen to write this. Nothing feels comfortable in my hand. I picked up my fountain pen, but it’s clogged. The nib scratches the paper and makes little tears. I can’t write quickly enough to keep up with my thoughts. I went through my desk and my book bag and tried every pen. Nothing is right.

  I’m going to write the words: Lucy is dead.

  She’s been dead for more than a day.

  Finally, I understand my part in the tragedy. Is it a tragedy? Or a story that came to a close while I was still telling it? I have so few blank pages left anyway. I’ve almost filled my journal. That was what I set out to do.

  I am still alive. My hand holds my crimson pen, my most treasured possession. And it moves. I am amazed by that. My hand trembles, but it still moves. The blood continues to flow through my body, without my having to tell it what to do. I breathe in and out.

  They’ve taken her body away. The dead body. The no-longer-alive body. Her mother sobbed uncontrollably as she hugged me. The nurse, the doctor, everyone has questioned me, over and over, about what happened. Lucy had another attack, and this time she stopped breathing. They don’t need me to tell them that. They have ordinary truth. What would they do with my extraordinary truth?

  If only her mother had answered the phone.

  Lights out

  I passed Mrs. Halton in the corridor, and she was so excited. She knows how much I am suffering, which makes it even better for her. She has so many details to take care of. She’s incredibly busy. She has to talk to all the girls and comfort them, to help Lucy’s mother with the wake, to arrange for all of us to go, to order flowers, to bring her trunk up from the basement and pack up her room. There’s so much to be done.

  May 3

  I open the urn with my father’s ashes. White bones are sticking up out of the soft gray ash. I throw out the ashes in handfuls. I am eager to be rid of them. The wind blows them back in our faces. My mouth is full of his ashes. They dissolve on my tongue. My hands and mouth are stained black. “Get rid of the bones,” shouts my mother. She is impatient with me. She grabs the urn from me, pulls out a long bone, and hurls it up into the sky. Then another and another. The white bones fly up and out into the sky in an arc. They don’t come down.

  After they took Lucy away from me, I got in bed and went to sleep. I slept for most of the day. I had no trouble sleeping. At the end of the day, I went down and ate dinner. I didn’t cry. All the girls huddled together in the Playroom after dinner. It was a different kind of silence this time. No one knew what to say. From time to time, someone began to whimper a little, and then a few others started up. Everyone took turns crying. I didn’t even cry when Lucy’s mother hugged me. I whispered in her ear, “Cremate the body.” She looked at me in amazement, then she started to sob again.

  I’m sure Ernessa didn’t cry either. Lucy’s special friend. I saw her this morning in assembly. She was red and swollen, like a pregnant woman.

  Sofia and I helped Lucy’s mother pack all her clothes this afternoon. Her mother needed to do something to keep herself occ
upied. Before she put Lucy’s jewelry box in the trunk, she opened it and held it out to us.

  “I want each of you to pick out something of Lucy’s.”

  She began to cry as Sofia and I emptied the box on the bed. Those were the only sounds in the room: the soft sobbing and the tinkling of silver and gold. It embarrassed us to disentangle the necklaces and bracelets and pins. Sofia chose a silver charm bracelet. Lucy was just the kind of person to have a charm bracelet. She had probably been adding to it for the last ten years. Bells, hearts, stars, horses, dogs, skates. I took her gold cross. It had been resting on the dark green velvet of her jewelry box all this time. She could have put it back on anytime. The girl who went to church every Sunday and dressed up on Easter with her hat and little pocketbook and matching patent leather shoes knew where it was.

  May 4

  Dawn

  I thought I would do anything to save her life. That was before I was put to the test.

  That night I went to bed early. My argument with Lucy had exhausted me. It wasn’t even ten o’clock. I could still hear noises from her room. Lucy was talking to someone. I lay in bed and knew that I didn’t want to have to save her. I closed my eyes and fell asleep. My dream started so slowly that it never felt like a dream. I awoke and walked toward Lucy’s room. The bathroom door opened, and I passed through it. Lucy’s bed was empty. The covers were thrown back. The mattress was still warm. I hurried into the corridor, around to the back stairs, down to the ground floor, through the door. It had already been propped open with a stick. I ran down the driveway, past the wide staircase that leads up to the Residence, past the weeping cherry trees that line the Upper Field. The pink flowers were gone; dried brown blossoms matted the ground. The new leaves were a silvery green. Little stones and sharp sticks stuck into my bare feet as I ran over the scruffy grass at the crest of the hill. The moon had just risen full above the tops of the trees on the far side of the field, and it was enormous. Its light was so bright that it threw deep shadows across the grass. It could have been the middle of the day. There was no longer any connection between the two: no way to go from night to day and back again. I stood at the top of the hill. Lucy and Ernessa were on the field. Their white nightgowns glowed.

  “Lucy,” I shouted. “Lucy!”

  I could never make them hear me. Ernessa was behind Lucy and above her. She had grabbed hold of Lucy’s hair and was pulling her up off the ground. Lucy’s hair shone like solid gold in the moonlight. They hovered, as weightless as angels. The carefully arranged folds of the nightgowns hid their feet. Angels don’t need feet. It annoys me when their toes peek out beneath their robes in old paintings. Lucy held her arms out to the side, bent at the elbows, with fingers and thumbs straight, as if she were pressing hard against something.

  I ran down the hill toward them. It took a long time. The air was as thick as water, and it pushed against me. My legs went up and down, but I couldn’t move forward. I’d had this dream my whole life, and I was always too late.

  Lucy’s body lay crumpled on the ground. Ernessa was gone.

  I gathered Lucy in my arms and pressed my face against her. The sound of her breath was a faint gurgle.

  “Lucy, don’t leave me here all alone. I won’t let you do this to me.”

  She stopped breathing, and her mouth became rigid. I began to shake her. A little at first, then harder and harder. I banged her head against the ground. Her hair was a tangled mass. I could still shake her back to life. I was furious at Lucy for being able to die just by closing her eyes.

  Then I searched her neck, the space between her eyes, the skin over her heart, her nipples for marks that would tell me how to go from life to death. There were none. The books were all wrong. The marks are invisible. Not even a microscope could find them.

  I awoke from my dream in my room with the moonlight pouring through the uncovered window. At first, I thought someone had come into my room and switched on the overhead light. Charley had crawled in through the window and was playing a stupid joke on me. But Charley was long since gone.

  I jumped out of bed. I ran into Lucy’s room. The door opened for me. The bed was empty and warm. Everything happened exactly as it had in my dream.

  They found me sitting on the ground with Lucy’s head on my lap. It was just dawn, and the grass under us was damp and cold. My legs were numb.

  After dinner

  This afternoon was the wake for Lucy. Tomorrow they are taking her body back home to be buried. Her father didn’t come.

  The white coffin was all alone in the middle of the room. The people in their dark clothes were pushed back against the walls. At both ends of the coffin stood tall urns with white flowers spilling out of them. She looked dead, truly dead. Her greenish skin would convince anyone that she was dead and not just sleeping. Her eyes were closed, her golden hair beautifully arranged, her face made up, her lips pink, her body perfumed, her hands clasped under a pile of white roses. She was wearing her white commencement dress from last year and the matching white shoes and lying on white satin. Everything was white, white. And all the perfumes thick and dizzying. The embalming fluid had the sickening smell of overripe fruit. I leaned over her for a long time, and no one dared to stop me. I was the one who found her. I felt her last breath. I had her all to myself. From my pocket I took a tiny silver knife and the strip of black and white photos of Lucy and me. I slipped the knife between her stiff hands. I pushed the photos under the folds of her dress. There were four images, and in the last one we were laughing uncontrollably, pushing each other out of the tiny frame. Our arms were wrapped around each other’s necks.

  It won’t keep her from becoming what she’ll become, but perhaps the knife will protect her and the photos will remind her of me in the lonely place where no one feels anything except hunger.

  I stood up and looked around the room. Everybody had turned away. In the corner stood her mother, dressed in a black suit, black pumps, black handbag, talking to Mrs. Halton. She was totally composed. What was she really thinking while she talked and smiled sweetly? About taking Lucy back to the house with her husband’s rasping breaths sucking up the air and the little white poodle that barks all the time? I went over to say good-bye to her. I wanted to tell her mother that it was my fault. I wanted to tell her that Lucy had stopped confiding in me, that we weren’t friends, that I didn’t know her anymore, that I didn’t want to know her anymore. What could I have done to save her when she was so determined to go? I couldn’t bring myself to say a word.

  The girls from the corridor were standing in a corner, clumped together, crying, afraid to go near the coffin. I wanted to tell them that they shouldn’t be frightened. Lucy was beautiful. Even Sofia had come, at the last minute. Someone had talked her into it. Only Ernessa had stayed at school. I know how much she detests funerals, that cloying smell.

  When Sofia saw me near the door, she ran over and grabbed my arm.

  “Are you going now?” she asked.

  We walked back together. The funeral home is only about ten minutes from school. We used to pass it when we walked around town after having French fries and a Coke in the drugstore. We’d joke about Bob being in the back, dressing the corpses. Lucy was superstitious. She loved to look at the flowers in the window of the florist next door, but then she always insisted on crossing the street. She wouldn’t walk in front of the funeral home. It gave her the creeps.

  We walked most of the way in silence. I thought Sofia was too overwhelmed to speak, but she was only working up the courage to confront me.

  “I think you should know what the others are saying about you,” she said. “They think you caused her death.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You dragged her outside in the middle of the night.”

  “I went out to find her. I wanted to save her. You were the ones who kept insisting that there was nothing the matter with her. You told me not to interfere.”

  “They blame it on you.”

  �
��I don’t care what they think. What about you? What do you think?”

  “Honestly? I think you’ve been obsessed with Lucy and with Ernessa for a long time. You couldn’t accept their friendship. I’m afraid you’ll turn Lucy’s death into something that it isn’t.”

  “I’ve known all along what Ernessa was doing to Lucy. I don’t need her death to show me the truth. It doesn’t convince you of anything. You don’t want to know.”

  Sofia made a feeble attempt to smile, but she couldn’t hold on to the smile.

  “I’m trying to help you,” she said.

  I gave her back the smile.

  May 5

  Dawn

  I want to give Lucy back her death. I want to prevent Ernessa from turning her into a creature. Unhappy. Despairing. Without hope. Lucy is floating through eternity with a blank expression on her face. She doesn’t understand what has happened to her. She will be a victim forever.

  I wake up in the morning, go down to breakfast, go to classes, practice the piano, go to gym, do my homework, eat dinner, have a bath, sleep. How can I change it all back? If Ernessa controls the future, can’t I control the past?

  Quiet hour

  This morning I practiced the piano before lunch. I can’t play. I stumble over passages that I used to play without any trouble. My hands tremble when I hold them out in front of me. I have no control over them. They are leaves quaking in the wind. There is no wind.

  The door to the basement was ajar. I pushed it open with the tips of my fingers and walked down the stairs. The strange smell coming from the basement has been gone for a while. Today it was only dry dust. There was a light on, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that lit up a circle of gray cement beneath it and left splotches of darkness in the corners. At the top of the walls are small, dirty windows that let in a weak light. I passed stacks of old furniture. Our trunks are arranged in rows along the back wall. They store them here during the year. Rows of black boxes. Her name was on the front, under the lock, in gold letters: E. A. Bloch. The trunk was covered with labels – Cunard Line, Holland-America Line, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. The red and blue labels were tattered and rubbed away; a skin of paper adhered to the black surface. The newest, brightest label, with the school’s name, was the only one with a legible name and destination, except for one on the side. In faded, sloping handwriting, I could make out most of the letters: Bloch, Brangwyn Hotel. There was dirt in front of her trunk.