The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  “I think it would be best if you came with us,” I said to Luna. “Really, my dear. It’s the most sensible course. The shelters will be so crowded, and they’re hardly protection. You do realize that.”

  I wanted Luna to stay with us, with me. I wanted to look at the ring around her neck, to ask her questions about her mother. An old ache returned. Age had not lessened its force.

  But Luna shook her head. “My husband, he’s at home with our son. I need to get back to them. But please, Ms. Skinner, tell me what happened. Tell me about the other Luna.” She leaned forward. “I want to know the story so I can tell it to my son someday. The great Fiona Skinner! It will be such a thrill for him when he’s older. I’ve started reading some of your poems to him before bed. ‘The Last Tree’ is his favorite. He’s a climber.”

  Her fingers played with the ring around her neck. So many years had passed, it was impossible to say if it was the same. Perhaps if I looked at it closely, in better light with glasses on my nose.

  “My sisters and I searched for Luna Hernandez,” I began. Henry was turned halfway around in the seat, listening. He had not heard this part before. “I told myself it was because of the ring, but of course it was more than that.” I paused. “Where are you from, Luna?”

  “Oh, around here,” she said, and circled a finger. “About twenty miles north, a small town. But originally, years ago, long before I was born, my great-grandparents lived in the Pacific Northwest. The islands, the ones that disappeared in the western tsunami—”

  “Yes, I remember that storm. Horrible. No one had expected it. And then everything gone.”

  Luna nodded. “Everything.”

  I considered telling Henry simply to drive, to take us away. A desperation seized me. The crowds had thinned enough that he could get through with some care. The doors had driver-operated locks. But of course I couldn’t take her away from her family, I would never do that. I looked at this Luna and thought how much I would miss her when she opened the car door, exited to the street, disappeared. Lost and found and lost again.

  A buzz came from Luna’s pocket, and she retrieved her device. “Excuse me,” she said, and answered, her face breaking into a smile. “Yes, I’m okay. I’m safe.” She listened for a few moments, nodding. “Good,” she said. “I’ll be home soon. I love you.”

  Luna turned back to me. “It’s an elevated practice drill, that’s what they’re saying on the channels. Can you believe it? All this, for practice?”

  Henry looked relieved. “Consider the alternative,” he said, and then regarded me with a short shake of the head: he was telling me to give her up. “Luna, would you like me to drop you somewhere?” Henry asked. “With the crowds gone, I should be able to pass through.”

  And so we drove through the city streets, still busy with people, but their movement had changed. It was relaxed, relieved, almost giddy. Danger confronted and surmounted. The worst had been imagined and now had passed.

  It’s so difficult to let some things go, to watch them walk out a door, get onto a plane, make their way in a dangerous unpredictable world. I didn’t ask more about Luna’s family, I did not reach out to examine the ring around her neck. Questions arise no matter how hard you strive for certainty. On the remainder of our drive, I told Luna and Henry the rest of the story. I told them about Luna, the first Luna, and about the secret I kept from my sisters. Henry listened without comment, though I could sense from the tenor of his coughs, the tension in his shoulders, that he yearned to discuss it. There would be time enough for that; we had a long drive home.

  We arrived at Luna’s address, a narrow old brick building, not one of the newer builds, and sat for a few moments outside. The blue-black sky was just beginning to color with the dawn.

  “Fiona, will I see you again?” Luna asked me.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Though this has been enough excitement for me for a while. Henry and I will stay put in the mountains. You’re always welcome to come visit of, course, but it is a journey.”

  Luna demurred in the polite way of someone with the best of intentions. I would never see her again, this I knew.

  “Good-bye, my dear,” I said as she opened the car door.

  Luna hugged me awkwardly, a grasping sort of hug, the ring pushing painfully into the soft spot at the base of my throat, and then I released her into the morning.

  Chapter 13

  After we returned to Bexley from Miami, after we organized Joe’s memorial service and wrote thank-you notes and assured ourselves that Noni was okay—she was attending the grief support group, she was meeting regularly with her doctor, she was going to be okay—Caroline and I agreed to contact Luna. Our plan was to meet her—possibly in Miami, possibly bring her to Bexley—and give her the ring in person. We wanted to watch her open the blue velvet box and see for the first time the brilliant diamond that Joe had intended to place on her finger. It seemed important that Caroline and I be there to witness Luna’s reaction. To stand, in a way, in Joe’s place. I imagined the scene as well lit, cinematic, dramatic gasps and happy tears.

  After that day in the restaurant, Renee wanted no part of it. She refused to discuss Luna Hernandez. Joe had died alone, Renee said. This was the truth, and it was all that mattered. This was what we, his sisters, had to live with.

  Renee and Jonathan began to travel. Work, it appeared, was her antidote to grief. They went first to Chiapas, Mexico, where Renee volunteered at a rural medical clinic and Jonathan apprenticed with a seventy-four-year-old master carpenter who built intricately carved retablo altarpieces that stood taller than a man. Jonathan learned how to inlay mahogany, teak, and bone into oak, to bend the wood into fantastic and sacred shapes. At the clinic Renee conducted routine exams, set broken bones, and administered vaccines, but primarily she taught local doctors how to perform corneal-transplant surgery. Ocular surgery wasn’t her specialty—she worked with lungs and kidneys—but she’d received training in New York, and the procedure was fairly simple: cut, lift, slide, suture.

  Renee’s patients arrived from distant, remote villages, on horseback, tractor, or foot. Causations varied: untreated infections, vitamin-A deficiency, trauma. But whether the patient was child or adult, female or male, the reaction to the bandage removal was always the same. The patient would blink, blink again, and reach out a hand to touch Renee’s face. The new eyes would fill with tears. Gracias. Gracias.

  “I’m not sure when we’re coming back,” Renee said on a scratchy call from Mexico. “Some days the line at the clinic stretches so far I can’t see the end. The transplants—it’s like recycling. Tragic, intimate recycling.”

  The idea of good arising from bad had always appealed to Renee. The senseless imbued with sense. After Joe it became for her an urgency. Luna she saw as a coward, possibly even a criminal. Nothing would be gained from meeting her, in Renee’s view, only regret.

  Caroline and I believed otherwise. Why did Luna become our focus? Perhaps because we needed something to do. We could not return to the normalcy of our old lives, the stupid luxury of believing that Joe would always be there on the other end of a phone line. Luna gave us a focus, a distraction, but one that did not strike me as false. We were not hiding from anything; we were seeking.

  Or perhaps it was the trace of what came later that prompted our search for Luna. A shiver of future knowledge that I did not understand, not yet. All I can say is that Caroline and I pursued Luna with a sense of unreasonable purpose. Luna was the answer to a question we did not yet know how to ask.

  Day after day I called the Miami phone number given to me by Detective Henry, but it rang and rang. No answering machine, no voice mail, no Luna.

  “No, we haven’t heard from her,” the detective said when I called him from New York. “She’s supposed to notify us before she leaves the state.” He paused. “But now that we’ve completed the investigation, I can’t devote any resources to finding her.”

  I searched online with Google, visited Myspace and Beb
o. The year was 2006, when an escape from the Internet was still entirely possible. The name Luna Hernandez gave me teenagers in Texas and Massachusetts, middle-aged women in Ohio and Arizona; none was the Luna from Joe’s Polaroid.

  I called Revel Bar + Restaurant, but the hostess said that Luna Hernandez no longer worked there. How long had it been? I asked.

  “Oh, two months?” she said. “Maybe three.” She didn’t know how to reach Luna, and no, she could not give out any personal numbers. “I need to go now, ma’am,” the woman said. “It’s a Saturday night.”

  Caroline’s theory was that Luna’s inadvertent role in Joe’s death had provoked in her an inconsolable sadness. “She’s hiding,” Caroline said. “We have to go find her. Remember the Pause?”

  In my apartment I was broiling a tuna melt in the toaster oven. In Caroline’s house in Hamden, she was picking the woody needles off a rosemary stalk for the chicken she would roast that night. Both of us with phones pinched between shoulder and ear.

  “If someone had wanted to find Noni,” I said.

  “They’d go to the gray house,” Caroline finished.

  “Okay.” I straightened up. “I’ll go back.”

  * * *

  And so, three months after that first trip to Miami, I returned alone to search for Luna. I took a cab straight from the airport to the address that Detective Henry had given me. A short, squat apartment building, three stories high, each floor with a small, crowded balcony and windows lit from within. On the second floor, Luna’s floor, I saw slow movement behind a gauzy curtain.

  I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. I carried my suitcase in one hand; the coat I had needed in New York was tied around my waist. It was early evening, overcast, the light low and colored the dull pink that in Miami seemed to infuse everything, all the time. Again I rang the bell, and this time a woman answered.

  “May I help you?” she said. The door opened directly into a small white kitchen. Behind her I glimpsed a man and a boy seated at a table laid for dinner. Tortillas, a plate of beans, one glass of milk.

  Luna Hernandez? No, they had never heard of her.

  “When we moved in, the place was empty,” the woman said. “Very clean. The landlord lives in Ohio. We’ve never met him. Just send the checks.” And then she held up a finger. “Oh—but there were some plants on the balcony. Some tomatoes. Beautiful. Just delicious.”

  I only nodded; I couldn’t speak. I had been so sure I would find Luna here. I didn’t move from the doorway. I couldn’t even remember the name of the hotel where I was staying. This would be the first of many such moments, a hint of Luna, a near miss, a sense that she was close but never found.

  The woman, sensing my distress, said, “Wait here,” and then she was gone, darting from my vision. From his seat in the kitchen, the little boy watched me with wide, gold-colored eyes. The woman returned and handed me a fat red tomato. “See?” she said. “You can eat it, just like an apple. Enjoy.” And then she closed the door.

  Back on the ground floor, I stood on the grass outside Luna’s old apartment building. The tomato felt heavy in my hand, overripe. Just below the window was a large shrub awash with pink flowers that shook and twittered as small dark birds flew urgently in and out, in and out, as though some great trouble were erupting deep within the interior. I ate the tomato as the woman had suggested, holding it in my right hand, biting directly into the flesh as juice dripped down my chin. I didn’t taste a thing.

  The next day I returned to the restaurant where Luna had worked. The manager, Rodrigo, told me that after the scene with Renee, Luna missed her regular shift. He hadn’t seen her since.

  “There was no one to cover for her,” Rodrigo said. “Dima called in sick again. So I fired his ass. I had no bartender for three hours. Three. You know how much money I lost?”

  I asked to speak to any staff who had known Luna. Rodrigo shrugged and looked at me steadily. “What’s it worth?” he said. I realized with a start that he was asking me to pay him, and so I pulled forty dollars from my wallet, then another forty, and he led me into the kitchen. There was the smell of steam and onions and a sense of manic but ordered activity. And then, person by person, I was noticed. A stillness descended, and, person by person, the staff moved away.

  Only one of the chefs waved me over. He remained behind a long stainless-steel table, attending to various pots on three different stoves, and spoke to me without once making eye contact. He told me about Luna’s mother, the sister who had disappeared, and that Luna deserved a fresh start. “I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you should leave that girl alone. Maybe she went home to Nicaragua?” He shrugged. “She talked a lot about home.”

  For the next week, I stayed at a hotel on South Beach not far from Joe’s old apartment. I met again with the detectives; again I went to Luna’s apartment building and wandered the surrounding streets. At sunset I watched the sky shift through a kaleidoscope of color before darkening into night. At dawn I watched as fiery reds and pinks painted the sand and the white sides of buildings and laid a golden path across the top of the sea. I walked the nearby beaches. I visited the Betsy Hotel, where Luna and Joe had stayed. With me I carried the Polaroid.

  “Have you seen this woman?” I asked at every location, to every person who would meet my gaze.

  But everywhere people shook their heads. No, they said. I’m sorry, but no.

  * * *

  After my return from Miami, Caroline began arguing in favor of a private investigator. We needed someone certain, trustworthy, systematic, and skilled.

  “I think we should try someone . . . alternative,” I said. “Someone unusual.”

  We were in the Hamden house, the kids at school. I had taken another day off work, the ever-tolerant Homer once again permitting me endless sick days, answering only with a sigh and his wish that I get better soon. Since moving to Hamden two and a half years ago, Caroline had overseen a kitchen remodel, refinished the wood floors, and replaced the downstairs shower stall with a full bath. The front picture window was framed with curtains that Caroline had sewn herself from a colorful print of hummingbirds and fat red dahlias. The couch was low and long, covered in turquoise velvet, bought for a song at an estate sale. The Skinner-Duffys were not rich, but Caroline knew how to spend their money well.

  “Alternative?” Caroline asked.

  I told my sister that I’d been visiting palm readers, clairvoyants, mediums, anyone I could find who would look into my eyes and tell me something new. Women waiting behind beaded curtains and flimsy sliding doors, jewels on their foreheads, henna tattoos, diaphanous scarves, and always the musky, dusty smell of incense. I remembered Joe and his sightings of our dead father. You’ll see him, too, we all will, Joe had told me that day in the deli. I’d been so dismissive, but Joe’s words struck me now as a clue. A promise. I wanted to believe what Joe had believed. If Joe had seen our father, then perhaps I would see Joe. The search for Luna was one messy part of this. We had to give her the ring. It was the fulfillment of Joe’s last wish, the symbol of their love. It was irrational, illogical, obsessive, unhealthy, and absolutely necessary.

  “Oh, Fiona,” Caroline sighed. “This sounds crazy. I don’t like it.”

  I had expected this response. Nathan was a man of science, cause and effect, hypotheses and evidence, and Caroline was, too, in her crafty, practical way. Canned peaches for winter, homemade pumpkin costumes for the twins, beetles kept by Louis in a glass terrarium and released back onto the grass after a night’s observation. She did not teach magic to her children. She did not even take them to church.

  “Please, Caroline,” I urged. “I think there’s something to it. I don’t know how to explain.” My face became hot, I felt my eyes fill. “Please trust me on this.”

  Caroline stood up and pushed the curtain back from the window. It was March. A mammoth pile of dirty, crusty snow sat on the front lawn, build-up from the town plow’s repeated road clearing that winter. The house looked
so different from when I’d first seen it. What, I wondered, had happened to all those cats?

  “Okay, okay,” Caroline said, still looking out the window. “We can do whatever it is you want, psychic woo-woo, medium, whatever. But you’ll have to set it up. I just can’t. Beatrix started seeing a reading tutor. Louis hates junior high. And we need a new roof, did I tell you? I just don’t have any more time, Fiona.”

  “Will you pay?” I asked. My finances remained messy; the money given to me by Noni and Renee kept me afloat, but barely.

  Caroline sighed again, louder this time, then nodded.

  I assured Caroline I would take the lead. I would find someone suitable, brief him or her, handle the communication. Invoices would be sent to Caroline’s home address.

  On TV the clairvoyant Mimi Prince looked wise and kind in a grandmotherly way, with big, wet eyes and a jowly, creased face. She appeared regularly on a cable show that followed a photogenic police team as they searched for missing persons. The show consistently used the same formula: First the detectives met with the bereft family members, lovers, and friends to get an impression of the missing person. An aspiring ballerina who loved her pet cockatoo and homemade pizza. A quirky computer scientist with dreadlocks and a fondness for bridge. The team then employed the tools of science and technology—fingerprint analysis, cell-phone tracking—in the search; these would inevitably fail. And it was always at this point in the program when Mimi Prince arrived. As family members looked on, she would hold an item belonging to the missing person—a sweater, say, or a hairbrush—in one hand, and the other she would place over her heart. The vibrations of love are strong, a voice-over would intone. They travel through space and time. Some say they even connect the living and the dead. The camera would zoom to her fiercely concentrated face, and then a dawning would occur, an epiphany. She would open her eyes with a start, and before the next commercial break the missing person would be found, sometimes dead, sometimes alive, but always with a photogenic ending of tears, catharsis, closure.