Penny had gone back to the living room. She knocked over a tower of blocks—they clattered to the floor and she clapped her hands joyously and whispered to herself, “Again.” That had been Benno’s favorite word when he was Penny’s age. Again, again, again.
“How am I going to explain where I’ve been? They looked for Greengage, they know it’s not there.”
“Maybe you could tell them the community moves around. Say you got swept up. It’s like a cult. You went on the road with them. They brainwashed you but finally you came to your senses and got out.”
“But they’re not a cult. And it’s my fault I stayed, not theirs.”
“Look, if you want to get Benno back, then I think that’s your only choice.”
—
My apartment was exactly as I’d left it, only cleaner. Rhonda told me my father had hired a maid to come once a month and he’d continued paying the rent. He’d also stocked the cupboards with canned and dry goods.
This made me feel even guiltier. How would I ever face him? It would have been better if he’d just let my apartment go to shit. I didn’t deserve to have people keeping my home fires lit. And the fact that it was my father who’d kept vigil, the most unlikely person to be looking out for me, was stupefying.
I showered and then crawled into bed. My flight left at six in the morning. I hadn’t called home; I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Rhonda was going to phone once I was in the air and let my parents know I was on my way.
—
The next day my taxi barreled down I-95. I sat in the backseat with the windows open. The closer I got to Newport, the more panicked I became. Labor Day weekend. The traffic was backed up half a mile to the tolls on the bridge. We inched alongside cars filled with teenagers and families. On weekends Newport’s population doubled. They came for the beaches, to tour the mansions, and to party. The restaurants and bars on Thames Street and Bowen’s Wharf would already be packed, the line for Dairy Queen dozens of people long.
My parents lived in a middle-class neighborhood. Not glamorous by any means, no historical society placards on the clapboards, but well-maintained houses, the gutters clean, the driveways re-tarred like clockwork every ten years. Houses on my street rarely changed hands, and when the taxi pulled up and I saw the blue light of the TV in the house next door to ours (that TV had been on twenty-four hours a day since I was a girl), I was bowled over with nostalgia. Nothing, nothing had changed.
—
“You’re late,” said my father when I walked in the door.
That was an understatement.
He and my mother were sitting side by side on the sofa.
“Benno?” I gasped.
My mother got up and embraced me. I held myself stiffly against her, not deserving of her affection.
“Benno’s not here,” she said. “He went to see The Empire Strikes Back with his friend Billy. He’ll be back in a while. We thought it was best if he was out of the house when you arrived. Give us time to catch up.” She stepped back and gave me the once-over. “You look starved. Did they have you on some sort of a special diet? Were you even allowed to eat?”
How could she be talking about diets? I was so desperate to see Benno—I couldn’t think of anything else.
My father looked at me like a stranger, dry-eyed and emotionless. “Did you contact the police?”
“I haven’t had time yet. I came straight here.”
“You’ll have to tell them everything about this Greengage. Where they are. How they operate. Were there others trapped there like you? Other outsiders?”
“No, it was just me,” I said, cringing at the word trapped.
“Just you? Really? You’re the only one they recruited?”
I thought of Joseph, cradling Martha in his arms. The animal sound he’d made as he wept.
“I wasn’t recruited. I—joined. Voluntarily.”
My father gave me a stony look. “I suggest you leave out the ‘voluntarily’ part when you speak to the police.”
“But then they made you stay, right?” asked my mother. “You wanted to come back, but they wouldn’t let you.”
“It’s not that simple, Mom. They didn’t force me to stay, I could have gone, but I didn’t want to.” I was trying to have it both ways. A little lie and a little truth.
My mother whispered, “You could have come back?”
“No, no, no, that’s not what I meant. Let me try and explain. Being with them, being there—”
“Where?” interrupted my father. “Exactly where were you? We searched the Valley of the Moon, every square inch of it. There were no encampments, no buildings, nothing. Those woods were empty.”
“Where doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let me finish. Being with them—it was like I was under a spell. Like I fell through time.”
My father snorted. “Are you hearing this, Miriam?”
My mother waved her hand at my father, shushing him. “Are you under this spell now?” she asked.
Did she think I was high?
“Of course not. Look at me. I’m perfectly lucid.”
My father got up from the couch. “I can’t listen to this anymore. She went somewhere, God knows where or with whom, some drugged-out hippies, a bunch of losers, it doesn’t matter. She left her job, her friends, her family, her son behind. She’s an unfit mother, she’s—”
“Mom?”
Benno stood in the doorway, his face drained of color.
—
“You didn’t tell him I was coming?”
“Look who’s here, Benno. Look who’s come back. It’s your mom. We’re so happy she’s home,” said my mother.
“Benno,” I murmured. “Sweetheart.”
He shook his head, almost like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“It’s me. It’s really me.”
He ran across the room straight into my father’s arms. This was a punch to my gut, but I held in my emotions and took inventory of him.
He’d gotten taller and he’d lost weight. He had biceps. Had my father been teaching him to box? I wondered how I looked to him, if I appeared one year older as well. I felt ten years older, watching my father hold my son as if I were somebody Benno needed to be protected from.
“How was the movie?” my mother said.
Benno grabbed onto her query like a life raft, hauling himself back into my childhood home, back into his new life with his grandparents, where it was safe, where there was supper at the same time every night, where the three of them sat in the living room and watched Truth or Consequences together.
“When they were filming, they made a full-size model of the Millennium Falcon,” he said.
“Really?” said my father. “How do you know that?”
“Billy’s mother read it in People.”
Forty-eight issues of People had been published since I was gone. They were acting like I wasn’t even in the room.
“Did you eat?” asked my mother.
“We went to the mall afterwards. I had a burger and an Orange Julius.”
Benno kept his gaze focused on my parents.
“Well, there’s some leftover American chop suey, if you want it. I made it for your mother. It’s her favorite food.” My mother was trying to find a way to bring me into the conversation.
“That’s right. Grandma made it once a week when I was a kid,” I said.
“I’m tired. Can I go to bed?” asked Benno.
“Of course,” said my mother. “Why doesn’t your mother bring you up? I’m sure you’d like some time alone with her.”
Benno finally looked me in the eyes. “Where the fuck have you been?”
My mother shouted, “Benno!” My father crossed his arms over his chest; he wanted the same answer.
—
Despite the time difference I was up at five the next morning, as was my father. He sat in the dark with a cup of coffee.
“You can put on the light,” he said.
I flicked the
switch. His hair was combed, the creases in his pajama bottoms crisp, his feet shod in his leather slippers with the custom lifts.
I poured myself a cup of coffee.
“There’s no cream. Your mother and I have given it up. Actually, she gave it up for me. Everything we eat is fat-free.”
“That’s all right. I don’t use cream.”
“Since when?”
In high school I couldn’t stomach coffee unless half the mug was cream.
“Since—I don’t know, Dad. What does it matter?”
I sat down at the table with him and took a few sips. My mother bought real coffee beans; she didn’t use Sanka. Every month she made a special trip to the Italian grocery store in Cranston to stock up.
My father’s hands were splayed out on the table. His nails short and groomed. Little tufts of hair on each knuckle. “So just what is your plan?”
“My plan?”
“Yes, why are you here?”
“I’m here to see Benno. My son.”
“Right,” he snapped.
“Look, Dad. You have every right to be angry. I know I fucked up. I know I—”
“That’s what you call this? Fucking up? You left. You just got up and left and didn’t come back for a year.”
I clasped my hands together. A conciliatory gesture. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not the one you should be saying you’re sorry to.” He shook his head in disgust. “I don’t believe your story, Lux. I don’t believe one damn word of it.”
“Well, that’s your prerogative, Dad. You can believe what you want. But it’s the truth.”
He glared at me, and then he slammed his palm down on the table. “This is the life you chose. You chose it, Lux, nobody forced it on you.” He got up from the table and walked over to the sink. He leaned against the counter, breathing heavily. “How the hell did you get so lost?”
As I sat in that kitchen—having driven my father into such a state that he was unable to bring himself to even look at me, his only daughter—a headline ran through my mind. Everybody Who Loved You Is Gone. They were done with me, they’d given up on me. And I deserved it. My precious Benno—bar nothing, the best thing I’d ever done in my life—I’d left him with no word, no explanation. My disappearance had ripped him out of his old life and hurled him into a new one, and he would probably never fully recover from it. And my father? He’d extended many olive branches over the years, and to him it must have looked as if I’d rejected all of them. I hadn’t so much rejected them as felt unworthy of them. And now, I truly was unworthy.
Once, I’d worked with a waitress who’d lost her dad in a car accident when she was in her teens. She’d never gotten over it. Even though her mother had eventually remarried, there was always a hole in her heart that no amount of new paternal love could fill. The world had shown her its cracks. Her protector was gone.
Well, my father wasn’t dead, he was standing in the kitchen not a few feet away from me, but I was dead to him. This was far worse.
I crept silently from the kitchen and walked up the stairs to my old room.
Benno was still sleeping, an arm flung over his eyes. His face was soft and relaxed. As he slept I could imagine he still loved me. I sat on the edge of the bed, fighting the urge to lie down beside him. I’d lost that right, hadn’t I?
A while later he began to stir. He opened his eyes. For a second he forgot what had happened.
“Mama,” he whispered, a look of pure happiness breaking over his face.
“Sweetheart,” I cried softly, inhaling his familiar smell, freshly washed cotton pajamas, the sweet hay scent of his hair.
His face shuttered closed.
“Please,” I pleaded. “Let me explain.”
I’d tell him about Greengage. About Joseph. About Martha dying so suddenly and me doing everything I could to try to help and accidentally staying through the full moon. He was a compassionate boy. He’d understand. He’d forgive me. I just had to give him the truth. He was ten now, old enough to be trusted.
“I have something to tell you,” I said. “A secret. I think when I’m done you’ll understand everything. Why I was gone. Where I was.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Benno?” I said. “Come on, now. Be fair. Give me a chance to explain.”
He turned his face into the pillow.
“Please,” I begged.
Was he going to pretend I didn’t exist anymore, like my father?
His small shoulders began to shake. I immediately began crying. There was nothing that could make me cry more instantly than the sight of my son weeping. It was unbearable. I had to do something, anything, to make it stop, to comfort him, to make him feel better. If he was in pain, I was in pain. Would it always be this way? Would he call me as a fifty-year-old man, weeping about a lost job or a failed marriage, and would a seventy-year-old me begin crying, too?
I took a chance and put my hand lightly on his back. He let it stay there for a minute, and just as my chest began to flood with hope, he said, “Get off me.”
—
A week later my mother drove me to the airport. I was all cried out. I’d accepted the current reality; Benno had refused to come home with me. Our emotional umbilicus had been severed. He treated me like an acquaintance, cordial but distant, clearly counting the days until I left. What else could I do but return to San Francisco and start working on a plan to win him back?
“Will you go back to waitressing at Seven Hills?” asked my mother when she pulled up to the curb.
“I have to figure something else out. Something better. Being a waitress isn’t enough. For me or for Benno.”
She smoothed the pleats on her skirt. “When you were young, Lux, your father and you were so close. Sometimes I used to be jealous of you two. Especially in the summer when you went off to the lake.”
I was shocked to hear this. She’d put on such a good front. Reveling in her solitude. Going off on jaunts with her friends.
“You could have come with us, Mom.”
“No. I wanted you to have that time together. You had such a special relationship—you and him.”
I picked at a cuticle, not trusting myself to speak.
“There are things you haven’t told us,” she said. “Things you’re holding back, right?”
I nodded.
“I don’t understand. We’re your family. Why can’t you tell us?”
“It’s just—I made a promise.”
“I see,” she said coolly.
“Mom, please don’t be mad at me. Everybody’s so mad at me. I couldn’t bear it if you were, too.”
“I’m not mad, Lux, I’m just confused.”
I had to tell her something. “I was gone so long because somebody very close to me died.”
“Somebody in San Francisco?”
“No, somebody at the farm. The place where I was. At Greengage. I’m not making excuses. There’s no excuse I could possibly give you or Dad or Benno for being gone so long, but—”
Her face crumpled up at the sight of my crumpled-up face. She picked up my hand and held it.
“I didn’t tell you to get your sympathy,” I croaked.
“Well, why not? You deserve sympathy, Lux, just like anybody else.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I brushed the tears from my eyes. “I’ve gotta go. The plane leaves in an hour.”
“Don’t give up on your father,” she said. “He just needs some time.”
I opened the car door. “Please don’t let Dad say horrible things about me. Don’t let him turn Benno against me.”
“He would never do that.” She grabbed hold of my arm. “It’s a balancing act now, you understand? It’s the hardest thing about being a parent. Holding on and letting go simultaneously. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of him until he’s ready to come home.”
Twelve hours later I put the key in the lock and opened my apartment door. It smelled of Lemon Pledge and Fantastik.
The maid had come while I’d been gone. My father had paid one last time for my place to be cleaned.
—
The next morning Rhonda knocked on the door. I’d been up for hours already and was wired from three cups of coffee and adrenaline. I didn’t know where to start. How to begin to put my life back together again.
Rhonda looked around the apartment. “Benno didn’t come back with you.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table.
“You’re not surprised,” I said.
“No.”
“Right. Why would you be? Why would he come back with me? How could he possibly trust me? I just disappeared with no word, for a year.”
“Did you tell him it wasn’t your fault? That it was a cult? You were brainwashed?”
“No. I can’t lie to him anymore.”
“So he thinks you just checked out of your life for a year?”
“Pretty much.”
“Christ. So what is your plan?”
“To try and win him back.”
“How?”
“I’m going to start by getting a job.”
—
Rhonda went with me to the police station. I told the truth; that I’d chosen to stay with the Greengage community voluntarily, there’d been no brainwashing, and they were not a cult. The last thing I wanted to do was give anybody reason to try to hunt them down.
I was remorseful. I told the policeman my son was now living with my parents in Newport and I was going to do everything I could to get my life back on track and then bring him back to San Francisco. He took my statement with both disinterest and contempt.
“Well,” said Rhonda, putting her arm around me as we left the station. “The good news is you’ve hit rock bottom. It can’t possibly get any worse.”
—
I called Newport that night. The answering machine picked up and my mother’s voice said, “Hello, you’ve reached the Lysander residence. I’m afraid we’re not here to answer the phone. Please leave a message after the beep.”
“It’s me. Lux. I was just calling to say hello.” I did my best to inject a breeziness into my voice. “I made it home okay. I just wanted—”
“Lux,” my mother panted, out of breath.
“You’re there? Why didn’t you pick up?”
“I was in the basement doing laundry.”
Valley of the Moon Page 22
