• • •
JULIA looked at the clock. Though there was no good time to be thinking about her father, this had to be one of the worst times. She ran her finger over the title of the book before setting it back on the nightstand. From Life to Fiction. She marveled again that Jeremiah had been able to write such beautiful fiction. He had borne the worst of their father’s wrath, had wandered for years without a place to call home, yet somehow had risen above it all to write not just passably but brilliantly.
And now his daughter was here in Julia’s house, making sounds in the night. No doubt it was for her father that she wept. Or maybe for her mother, more recently dead. Most likely for both.
Julia turned off the lamp beside her bed. A grave truth came to her as she laid her head on her pillow. She had given in too easily last week by allowing the girl to stay. She should have hardened her heart and pointed her to the door. Now she was stuck, for how could she ever send her away after hearing her weep in the night?
• chapter 8 •
DISTANCE, NOT SPEED
Carmen didn’t give the impression of a high school dropout. She was smart, not only in an encyclopedic way—offhandedly making reference to things like tectonic plate shifts, Odysseus, and the sixty-two moons of Saturn—but also in the art of ingratiating herself. Though it was subtle ingratiation, Julia suspected she knew exactly what she was doing.
The girl had already opened Matthew’s toolbox on the back porch, something Julia had never done, and found a screwdriver, with which she tightened the handles on two saucepans that had been an aggravation to Julia for months. One day she went through the house and reversed the direction of all the ceiling fans, and another day she oiled the glider on the back porch to make it quit squeaking. She washed the Buick and vacuumed out the interior, swept both driveways, scrubbed down the outdoor grill, and rolled the garbage can out to the curb and back.
And then Friday came. That morning Carmen announced that she was going to walk to the library over at the college. When she came back, she ate a sandwich on the back porch and then went to her room and closed the door. She came out three hours later and left again. She didn’t say where she was going this time, and Julia didn’t ask.
It was early evening now. Though Fridays usually dragged, the hours had flown today. Julia ordered a pizza to be delivered. It seemed like a good thing for a Friday night, hopefully the last Friday night Carmen would be here. After this, she told herself, Friday nights would be normal again. Deep down, however, part of her wasn’t so sure she liked what she remembered of normal Friday nights, the same part of her that was getting used to the girl’s presence in the stone house.
In many ways it seemed that Carmen had been here much longer than a week, but not because she was a difficult houseguest. She made no clutter, helped without being asked, provided pleasant company when she wasn’t asking too many questions.
Julia turned the oven on low so she could keep the pizza warm when it came and then began putting together a salad. Whereas she had once fretted over how to get rid of Carmen—amazingly, only days ago—she now fell to worrying about what was to become of the girl. And more immediately, where was she right now? Over and over she glanced out the kitchen window toward the street. It came to her that if Carmen had some kind of accident, no one would know what phone number to call since, as far as she knew, the girl had no identification on her.
What if she had taken Julia’s limit of a week to mean that a Saturday arrival required a Friday departure? What if she was gone for good, leaving the same way she had arrived—with only the clothes on her back? She might be out on the highway right now, hitchhiking again. Julia suddenly felt awash with guilt—this would be a new regret to bear for the rest of her life, to add to all the old ones.
And so when she looked up a few minutes later and saw Carmen turning from the street into the driveway, her relief was great. The girl’s head was down, her thumbs hooked inside her jeans pockets. She was walking slowly, as if bearing a weight. Julia reached over and turned off the light above the sink.
By now she knew the girl’s face well. Even though she permitted herself only glances, the frequency of them had added up to familiarity. In the past she had noticed that when brothers and sisters looked alike, sometimes even in the case of twins, what was handsome in the boy didn’t always translate into beauty in the girl. Or what was pretty in a girl looked weak and unfinished in a boy. Jeremiah and Carmen weren’t siblings, of course, but it was hard for Julia to think of them as father and daughter since her last memory of Jeremiah was as a teenager. At any rate, the same smile, the same eyes, the same profusion of blond curls wore equally well on both of them.
It was difficult to see the face of a family member the way others saw it, but Julia remembered how often during his teen years people had spoken of Jeremiah as handsome. When she was younger, she had sometimes resented the fact that her brother had gotten it all. Not that she and Pamela were slouches, but Jeremiah was undeniably the gold medalist among them. He was even a personality at school. Everybody knew who he was and liked him, even though he didn’t seem to care whether they did. Julia couldn’t remember that he had ever had a best friend. For certain he had never brought anyone home. Pamela was the only one who had ever done that.
Genes were funny things. Julia didn’t know how anyone could use them to argue for an intelligent designer, at least not a fair one—not when the best genes aligned themselves in the same child, the one who didn’t seem to appreciate them at all.
There was one exception, however, one wayward superior gene that had somehow shown up in Julia: She could run fast, faster even than Jeremiah, whose track triumphs had been only in distance races. Only—a curious modifier for someone who had set a high school record in the state of Alabama for the mile run when he was fifteen. A short time later, however, he had shrugged it all off and dropped out of track, probably because he saw how much his achievement meant to his father, who had been a distance runner himself.
By then Julia had already quit the girls’ track team, but for the opposite reason—because her father didn’t care enough. Her wins never earned his praise. “Short-wick running,” he called the sprints. In his way of thinking, distance, not speed, was the real test of mettle. She had tried other ways of pleasing him, but anything Jeremiah did eclipsed her best efforts, and after he left home, her father lost interest in life altogether, though he was trapped in it for many more years.
Julia turned the water on and held a colander of mixed greens under it. As she did so, Carmen stopped in the driveway and turned around to look back at the street. She stood there a moment, then lifted one hand as if gesturing, as if conversing with someone, though there was no one else there. But the girl was given to talking to herself—Julia had heard her in her bedroom and caught her at it on the back porch several times. Carmen lifted both hands now and tipped her head to look up, as if to check for rain. But above the trees the sky was a strong, unclouded blue.
From the back, with both hands raised, the girl looked lean and tapered, like a statuette on a trophy. Julia wondered if she had excelled in sports the way her father had. Maybe she was a good distance runner. Or maybe her only distance running had been when she left home at the age of sixteen, which wouldn’t have given her much time to set high school records.
Julia knew that if she stood in the driveway as Carmen was doing right now, no one looking out the window would think of a figure on a trophy, not the way her weight was slowly redistributing itself around her waistline these days. She needed to do something physical—more than just a daily walk. Earlier in the summer, before Carmen’s arrival had interrupted her list-making of projects for the coming year, she had briefly entertained the thought of joining a fitness club. The idea of spending money to jog on a treadmill or pedal a stationary bicycle didn’t interest her, but swimming and water aerobics did, except for the embarrassment of wearing a swimsuit in the company of others.
A few times she ha
d thought about taking up running again. Not long ago she had received a flyer in the mail about an upcoming fall event called Carolina Senior Showdown over in Greenville, in which people fifty and older could sign up to compete in various sports, foot races included. She wondered if there would be paramedics on hand in case one of the runners keeled over. She had thrown the brochure away, but she still thought about it from time to time and wished she had the courage to enter.
• • •
CARMEN turned back around and continued walking toward the house, still slowly. It came to Julia that whereas she had doubted the girl’s age only a week earlier, she now had no trouble believing her. Her deft and graceful hands, her close observing and listening, the way she quickly changed the subject when she sensed resistance or unease, the turning away of her eyes as if afraid of what might be read in them—all of these spoke of a woman, not a girl. And her words, the colorful ones she slipped in as she talked—words like decimate, cogent, moribund, vilify—always used sparingly yet precisely, and always preceded by a slight pause as if reviewing the definition, weighing it against the possibility of error.
She stopped again, then walked back to the circular drive. When she came to the short walkway that led to the front door—the walkway made of stones Matthew had cut with a masonry saw—she faced the house and stood looking at it from one end to the other as if taking in every feature. Neither smiling nor frowning, she studied it the way an architect would, or an appraiser, or a photographer intent on light and angle.
We had a beautiful little girl. Jeremiah had been right about that. Not a description Julia had ever heard applied to herself. Hers were average looks, from head to toe—she knew that. Average everything. Even her weight was right in the middle of the recommended range, something Pamela often complained about. “You don’t even try!” she would say. “It’s not fair. I can walk by a plate of cookies and feel another roll around my middle.” Pamela would scoff if Julia were to share her concerns about her waistline.
She pulled back from the window and returned to her cutting board to slice into a green pepper. She wondered what Carmen was thinking as she studied the stone house, whether she was saddened by the thought of leaving it. Most likely she was sad about other things that had nothing to do with Julia and the stone house. Maybe her chief sadness was that she was all alone in the world.
There had been no more sounds of weeping in the nighttime, not after Julia remembered that her clock radio had sound effects. For the past three nights, she had chosen the sound of ocean waves when she went to bed. Maybe that was the reason she had dreamed about being on a whaling ship the first night, a dream she remembered the next morning and mentioned to Carmen over breakfast. Carmen had smiled and asked if they had run across the Great White One.
A pizza delivery car slowly approached the stone house and turned into the circular drive. Julia wiped her hands and picked up the money she had set out. When she opened the front door, Carmen was talking to the driver. The back door of the car stood open, and several pizzas were stacked inside zipped bags beside a child’s car seat. There was a child in the seat, but all Julia could see was two little feet kicking up and down.
The delivery woman grinned as she handed Carmen the pizza. “Better check it,” she said. She jerked her head back toward the car. “He’s bad to sneak bites.”
• • •
LATER, at the table, Carmen was quiet. She ate a few bites of pizza and nibbled halfheartedly at her salad. Finally she put her fork down. “I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow,” she said, her tone neutral, light. She didn’t look at Julia but addressed the door leading into the living room.
How strange it was, Julia thought, that these were words she would have welcomed only a few days ago. Now she could think of nothing to say.
Carmen took a drink of her Coke. “I can be gone by noon if that’s okay.” Her words were deliberate, almost rehearsed, but courteous, with no trace of hard feelings. “I appreciate your hospitality. It’s been a very nice . . . respite.”
“Where will you go?” Julia said. She heard the combative tone of her voice and tried to moderate it. “Do you have a plan? Something specific, I mean? A friend or another relative somewhere? I can help you with plane fare.”
“Oh, I’ve got some things in mind,” Carmen said. “Some waters to test, some tracks to follow. A man to see about a bull. I’ll be okay.”
“A bull?” Julia said.
Carmen gave a half smile. “It’s something Daddy used to say. He’d say he was off to see a man about a bull, and then be gone for a few weeks. He could do almost any kind of work. Lulu would always cry when he left, but she knew when he came back he’d have money, and usually a nice present for her.”
Julia knew the girl was trying to divert her, that she had no plan. “Where will you go?” she said again.
Carmen shook her head. “You think I’m going to tell? No, thank you, I don’t want to be followed.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. This is a face you’ll miss seeing, Julia thought.
Carmen was the first to look away. She picked up the piece of pizza on her plate and started talking. “I think this is the best pizza I’ve ever had except for one time in . . . I think it was Minnesota.” She took a small bite and chewed as she continued talking. “It was in the middle of winter, and this old Indian woman made it from scratch at this place called Mister Luke’s. Just a hole in the wall in this little town I don’t even remember the name of.” She peeled off a piece of pepperoni and ate it by itself. “Ojibwa—that was the tribe she was from.” She said the word again: “O-jib-wa. Isn’t that an interesting word? Sure not something you’d expect to see—an old Ojibwa woman twirling a pizza crust around her head.” A yap of laughter and she hurried on. “The place was close to a lake—all frozen over, little kids sliding on it. Or maybe it was in Wisconsin, I don’t know. I’ve been around, seen a lot of places.” She took another quick bite. “And maybe it wasn’t Mister Luke’s after all—that might have been a different town. It could’ve been the Snack Den in Iron River—that one was by a lake, too, I’m pretty sure of that, but . . .
“Carmen, stop it. Stop talking.”
The girl stopped and looked at Julia. She was still chewing.
“I can’t let you leave,” Julia said. “Not yet.”
Carmen frowned. “Why?”
But Julia had no answer, hadn’t even known she was going to say those words. The question hung in the air for a moment. “Well, what I mean,” she said, “is you’re not ready to go anywhere yet. I still need to get some things together for you—like a suitcase for starters.” She was making this up as she went. “You can’t travel anywhere carrying your things in a plastic bag.”
“I don’t need things,” Carmen said. “Naked came I, and naked shall I return. In a manner of speaking.” She flashed a smile at Julia. “I’ve seen Walden Pond, did you know that? In fact, I lived near there for a few weeks last spring. A few very chilly weeks. In spartan simplicity. Henry Thoreau would’ve approved, I think. Wasn’t he the one who said we’re a ruined nation because of too much stuff? Simplify, simplify, simplify, keep your accounts on your thumbnail, strip away everything superficial and . . . superfluous. Reduce life to the essentials. Instead of three meals a day, why not . . .”
“Carmen, stop it. What happened?” It came out much louder than Julia intended.
Carmen stared at her, evidently as surprised by the question as by the intensity.
“What happened . . . when?” she finally said.
But Julia couldn’t begin to explain what she meant. Her mind was in a tumult. She wasn’t referring to a specific incident, of course. It was instead a sudden hunger to know the answers to all the questions she hadn’t asked, and all the ones she hadn’t yet thought of asking, about all the years of Carmen’s life. She was appalled to feel her eyes brimming with tears. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried. She clamped her hand over her mouth and squeezed
her eyes shut.
After a long silence Carmen pushed her chair back and stood. She moved to Julia and stooped down beside her, laying a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry. It’s been too much having me here. I can go tonight. You don’t need to get me anything else. You’ve done so much for me already.”
How can this be? Julia wondered. How can I be sitting here while this child comforts me? She opened her eyes and saw her empty plate on the table, her bowl of half-eaten salad, her half-empty glass of soda. She looked across the kitchen and saw the microwave on the counter, the colored tiles of the backsplash, the sink, all the same things she saw every day and knew so well. But she couldn’t bring herself to look at the girl kneeling at her side.
“Here, here’s your napkin.” Carmen held it out.
Julia took it and wiped her eyes. “I’m okay now,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me. I think I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep much last night.”
Carmen stood up. “Well, it’s my fault. I need to go.”
Julia pointed to the chair. “No, you need to sit down. Please, Carmen. I have some questions . . . they might take a little while. If you don’t mind.”
• chapter 9 •
SHARPER FOCUS
Carmen’s answers were thorough and, to the best of Julia’s judgment, honest. The things that had happened to her were indeed lamentable, and many. She refused to answer no question. If there was a certain sense afterward of secrets undisclosed, Julia took responsibility, for not asking the questions that would have revealed them.
It would be difficult to rank the sadnesses in Carmen’s life if drawing up a “Top Ten” list, though Jeremiah’s death when she was nine would surely be first. That event had sliced her life in two, like a piece of fruit, separating the good half from the bruised. Her mother’s emotional unraveling had begun almost immediately, as well as a sudden influx of loosely connected relatives claiming concern for Lulu. The trailer was soon bursting with people Carmen barely knew, among them Ida and Effie.
To See the Moon Again Page 10
