To See the Moon Again

by Jamie Langston Turner

  “And they were the ones who told you she had died?” Julia asked.

  Carmen nodded.

  • • •

  EARLY the next morning Julia was lying in bed, the hotel room dark, only the palest line of light at the window. Carmen spoke into the quietness. “Those miners in Chile didn’t have it so bad,” she said. An odd remark to start any day with, but especially a day like this, after the confession of the previous night, the long hours of talk that followed, the short hours of sleep between then and now.

  Julia knew, of course, that she was referring to the Chilean miners trapped for months underground—news that was several years old now, but nevertheless fascinating to the girl. A few weeks earlier she had read a book about the ordeal and talked about it endlessly. She knew all the miners’ names and ages, the hierarchy among them. She was especially intrigued by the structured life they had managed to live over two thousand feet below the surface of the earth.

  “They had each other,” she continued now, “plus they knew people were working to get them out even if it might take a long time.” She rolled over on her side and rose on one elbow to face Julia. “When I first started reading that book, it was like, yeah, I know that feeling. Buried in a place you can’t get out of.” She sighed. “But they got rescued in the end.”

  Julia thought of something that had eluded her the night before, a point that needed to be made. “Why should there be pardon for my taking a child’s life,” she said, “yet none for yours of giving birth to one?” She turned toward Carmen. In the dimness she could see only the shape of her, not her face.

  “Yours was an accident,” Carmen said at once. “Mine wasn’t.”

  Julia pushed the covers back and sat up. It was too early to have to choose words so carefully, but she had to say this right. She was glad there was so little light in the room. She could think better in the dark. “It’s no more an accident,” she said slowly, “to lose your temper and act in anger than it is to violate your conscience and act in passion. Both qualify as sin, in your terms. And whether death or birth, the consequence of each sin was unintended.”

  Carmen didn’t move for a long moment and then flung herself onto her back again. “Oh, Aunt Julia, how do you come up with stuff like that?”

  “Well, think about it,” Julia said. “It seems to me that causing the death of a child is a far more serious crime than giving life to one. In my case, there’s never a way of bringing that little boy back.” She paused. “If your dream was true, at least your child is alive somewhere. At least we can find her.”

  Julia could hardly believe what she had just said. She certainly hadn’t meant to say it. For one thing, she had little confidence in Carmen’s dream. But the words were spoken. Not we might be able to find her, but we can find her, as if it were a plan already laid, not a mere potentiality. In all of their talk the night before, neither of them had mentioned such a thing. They had gone through the girl’s confinement at the Shelburns’ house, the birth, the following days, every part Carmen could remember, some of it multiple times, but had looked only at the past, not the days to come.

  • • •

  THEY both knew the original purpose of the trip had evaporated, of course. The drives from one author’s home to another, the reservations for lodging along the way, and then the flight home—it all seemed totally trivial now, though the irony was not lost on Julia that they were scheduled to fly out of Hartford, of all places.

  In the planning stages, Hartford had been a point of some mild contention between them, yet one Julia wouldn’t concede for some reason. Carmen had tried to dissuade her by saying Mark Twain’s house “wasn’t really all that much to see,” but Julia said leaving Mark Twain out of an American authors’ tour was like leaving red out of the color wheel. Besides that, she said, she wanted to see that carved headboard Mark Twain used as a footboard.

  But now these words: At least we can find her. Julia had opened her mouth, and out they had fallen, without a single thought as to how the two of them could ever do such a thing.

  The room was growing lighter, and Julia could see Carmen better now. It didn’t take long to realize what she was doing. Still on her back, she was turning her head slowly, deliberately from side to side on her pillow. And when she spoke, her words, too, were deliberate, and full of feeling: “She would be two years old now. Part of a family. I couldn’t barge in and interrupt their lives. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t.”

  “Let’s back up,” Julia said. “You’re forgetting something very important. If you were lied to, the baby was stolen from you. That was a crime in every sense of the word.”

  Carmen’s answer was firm. “But let’s back up even further. Here’s something else important. I broke God’s law. Do I want to break a family apart, too?”

  Forget God’s law for just a minute, Julia wanted to scream, but she gritted her teeth and said nothing. It was maddeningly clear that the girl had thought this through and made up her mind. And she was right up to a point. If the child was indeed alive, she had surely been adopted. And if there had been a legal adoption—well, as legal as it could be given the heinous lie—or even if by some other technicality it wasn’t legal, the transfer had been made. The child was part of a family.

  Julia rose from the bed and walked to the window. She pulled back the draperies and saw the shadowy outline of Boston beneath a pale amethyst sky. She wondered if they would even notice the clear skies today. She turned and went into the bathroom. Maybe a hot shower would help her think.

  • • •

  THEY were downstairs by eight o’clock, sitting at a table in the small dining area with their complimentary breakfast. While Julia stirred brown sugar into her oatmeal, Carmen bowed her head. And just what, Julia wondered, would she be saying to God this morning? Help me to feel sufficiently unworthy again today, not to forget for a minute what I did, and not to let Aunt Julia offer me even a smidge of comfort?

  They ate without talking for a while. “If nothing else, you need to find out the truth,” Julia said at last.

  Carmen had finished her yogurt and was opening her pint of milk. Her eyes looked even bluer today. She was wearing a turquoise corduroy shirt that used to be Julia’s, along with a brown-striped sweater. Certainly nothing Julia had ever worn together, but as always the clothes looked better on Carmen than they ever had on Julia.

  She glanced at Julia. “And the truth shall set you free.”

  Julia pondered her words. They sounded promising. She repeated them: “Yes, and the truth shall set you free.”

  “Look not every man on his own desires,” Carmen added. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Do not use your freedom as a cloak of evil. You were called to be free, but not free to indulge your sinful nature.”

  Oh, only more double-talk from the Bible. “Setting aside your sinful nature,” Julia said, “let’s think about this logically.”

  Carmen didn’t look like she wanted to talk about logic right now. She was having trouble getting the carton open and had taken a plastic knife to it.

  Julia leaned forward. “If you never know for sure,” she said, “you will always wonder. Your mind will always be unsettled, your nights full of more visions and voices, your soul a slave to uncertainty. You will never be able to give yourself wholly to any task because part of your heart will always be off somewhere, wandering about the hills and dales of possibility. Despair will surely come to darken all the days of your life.”

  Part of her believed everything she was saying, though another part recognized the little speech for what it was: windy oratory. It was exactly the kind of thing that used to issue forth in the middle of one of her class lectures, totally unplanned, rendered with a slight loftiness that could easily earn a professor a reputation among students as “out of touch.”

  At first Carmen showed no sign of having heard a word. She had succeeded in forcing a ragged opening in the top of the carton. She poured the milk in a small trickle over her Cheerios, th
en picked up a spoon and slowly lifted her eyes to Julia’s. Sometimes, as now, when she was most serious, she set her mouth in such a way that her dimple showed. She took a deep breath. “It’s been over two years,” she said again. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you know where she was born,” Julia said. “We can start there.”

  Carmen shook her head. “I . . . just couldn’t, Aunt Julia. You said something that day in your car, when you came looking for me. I asked you a question, and you said, ‘I forfeited my right to motherhood.’ Do you remember that? Well, okay, I can say the same thing.”

  “I have a plan,” Julia said. “Hear me out. You need to know for sure. If she really did die, you need to know that, but if she didn’t, we can find her and you can at least see her. From a distance. No big scene to call attention to yourself or make anybody uneasy.”

  The plan was still under construction, maybe completely improbable, most likely imprudent. But if they could only observe the child, maybe happily involved in play, might that not help Carmen in time come to terms with her guilt?

  At least she had the girl’s attention now. She was chewing slowly, her head cocked, her brow furrowed, clearly thinking over what Julia had just said.

  Even now Julia was formulating a larger point she could make, something that would resonate with a person like Carmen: If your God is merciful, as you claim, she would say, then surely he would show mercy to an innocent child. And surely he would allow you to see his mercy in her life. And she would push it further. And if he is the master of the universe, as you also claim, can he not repair as well as create? Can he not mend your sad heart? And somehow she would link that thought with this: Sometimes the same thing can bring good and ill. Take rain, for example. Floods can destroy things, but sometimes after rain, good things happen, too. Crops can grow and flowers bloom and rainbows spread across the sky. Oh, yes, she could wax eloquent with a thought like this. A little bit of metaphorical lace to pretty up the speech, to draw attention away from the fact that she was touting the power and goodness of a God whose very existence she had never avowed.

  But she would wait for all that. The breakfast room was starting to fill up. A couple with a sulky-looking teenage girl set their plates down at the table next to theirs. The girl had a silver ring in one nostril and straight, stiff hair the color of a radish.

  “And what if . . .” Carmen started, but a yowl of dismay rose from another table nearby. Someone had just dumped a whole plate of scrambled eggs and hash browns on the floor. A worker appeared to help clean it up.

  Carmen and Julia fell silent and finished their breakfast quickly.

  • • •

  SOMETIME later that morning they were headed west from Boston on Highway 20—the same basic route as the turnpike, but without the tolls. It wouldn’t be a long trip to Danforth, under three hours.

  Julia put in a CD titled Solely Slowly, a collection of adagio pieces—something that should make an easy background for thought as well as something to imply that she didn’t want to talk. It was evidently a sentiment Carmen shared, for she put her seat back and closed her eyes.

  As she drove, Julia’s mind went over and over the same thoughts. She wished she knew more about the legal aspects of adoption, how the whole process worked, where the records were kept, who had access to them. There were probably different laws for different states. She had heard about open versus closed adoptions, but in a case like Carmen’s there wouldn’t have been such a discussion.

  Even if they somehow managed to find out where the child was, no small if, the plan was still fraught with danger. What if they saw the child happy and healthy, well provided for by doting parents? Wouldn’t Carmen be likely to feel even more keenly the loss of what could have been hers?

  Or what if they saw the child but she didn’t seem happy and well cared for? Or what if their search ended with the discovery that Carmen had been told the truth, that the baby had died at birth? Another very real and unhappy possibility, one sure to reignite Carmen’s thoughts about the wages of sin.

  These were all questions for which there were no answers. Not on this side of the journey. Like everything else in life, you couldn’t know what was at the end of the trip unless you packed your bags and set out.

  They had driven less than half an hour when Carmen sat up and said, “Hey, I thought I was supposed to drive after we left Boston. I’m going to forget how if you don’t let me. Besides, I can’t just sit here, I need to do something.” Julia had gotten behind the wheel out of habit, but she didn’t mind trading places. The route was easy, and traffic wasn’t bad, certainly nothing the girl couldn’t handle. So she pulled off and Carmen took over.

  The CD of adagios and largos was still playing. Maybe it had helped to discourage conversation, but it certainly hadn’t provided a very soothing background, for today Julia was hearing things she had never noticed before—a flute obbligato that wailed like a cold wind down a chimney, a ponderous bass line that labored like an aging heart, a percussive effect like the whirring of bat wings, a trumpet with a scalpel edge. Even her favorite pieces—Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, Massenet’s Meditation—failed to steady her this time. Off and on for no good reason, she kept imagining a scene out of Edgar Allan Poe, a deathly slow masquerade ball with an evil presence floating among the dancers. Strange sensations for the dazzle of a perfect October day.

  The plan began to seem less feasible with each passing mile, Julia’s responsibility for error more profound. She wondered if Carmen’s mind was full of the same doubts. More than once she came close to raising her voice above the music: Stop, this is all wrong. Let’s rethink this.

  But each time she held back: No, keep quiet. Stay the course. Besides, if they didn’t continue on their way to Danforth, what would they do while they waited around for their flight home? Or should they pay to change their reservations and go straight home? Or drive to Hartford and sit in a hotel for five days?

  Hartford was another problem, but one Julia couldn’t think about now. She had no idea how Carmen felt about returning there, whether she would want to see her old haunts or avoid them altogether. She had claimed to love the boy; maybe she thought she still did. Regardless, she must be curious about him.

  But Julia could only wonder. She wouldn’t think of asking such things. For herself, she felt the urge to look the boy in the eye—well, he would be twenty-five now, hardly a boy. She wanted to tell him what he had done to Carmen, tell his parents, announce it to the whole church. She couldn’t imagine being so bold, but her outrage was so great she felt she could.

  For now, however, Hartford would have to wait. One town, one weighty memory at a time. First, Danforth, Massachusetts. But as the last piece on the CD played—Samuel Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings—she imagined over and over all the different ways their quest could fail.

  • • •

  AFTER the CD ended, they drove on in silence. Julia’s mind drifted to an article she and Carmen had read weeks ago in which a backpacker across Europe had written about his travels and urged readers to “leave home and watch yourself grow.” She remembered one of the last things he had said—something about the need to take a picture of yourself before leaving home so you would have a record of who you used to be, for you would certainly be someone different when you returned.

  Carmen had made a joke of it at the time, had even taken pictures of the two of them. They were on Julia’s cell phone right now—Carmen, lounging on the glider, clownish, her eyes crossed, tongue sticking out the side of her mouth; herself, sedate and cautious, sitting in her wicker rocking chair with a book in her lap. That day on the porch seemed like eons ago.

  And now Julia had already lost her way to whatever big idea she was trying to reach. More useless woolgathering. It was so exasperating when she needed to be thinking clearly.

  She must have made a sound, for Carmen glanced over. “What? Is something wrong? Are you as scared as I am?”

  “Ther
e’s nothing to be scared about,” Julia said. “We’re just going to see what we can find out.” Calm and confident—that was the tone she was trying for, though she felt neither. She turned the radio on, then leaned her head back and closed her eyes. There was a sudden burst of audience laughter and applause.

  It was a weekly quiz show on NPR called Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! She listened, but not with interest. All the quiz questions seemed silly: Which product did Vincent Price’s grandfather invent? Tootsie rolls, contact lenses, or baking powder? A year from now who would remember what the answer was? Or care?

  But the radio stayed on anyway. The program ended, and another followed, called Whad’ya Know? More trivialities, including an interview with a professional chef who had worked at the White House for twenty years. The chef told about finding Richard Nixon in the kitchen one time making himself a sandwich at two A.M. “Another one of those late-night break-ins he liked so much,” the host quipped. All the repartee was too pat, the audience laughter too quick, probably prompted by a lighted sign that read Laugh now. The whole thing was like a rehearsed skit.

  Yet she left the program on all the way to the end.

  • • •

  THEY stopped for gas in Springfield, Massachusetts, and ordered a sandwich for lunch at a place called Friendly’s, where the waiter, ironically, wasn’t. As she had done at every restaurant on their trip, Carmen asked for sweet tea, knowing what the answer would be but interested in the waiters’ various responses. This one pointed to the packets of sugar and sweetener on the table and said tersely, “We have those.”

  They ate quickly and were done within half an hour. As they were getting back into their car outside the restaurant, a black van pulled in beside them, and a swarm of children spilled out the side doors. A big, jolly man got out of the driver’s seat and started corralling them while a woman leaned into the backseat and unbuckled a toddler and a baby. Carmen waited until the way was clear and backed out slowly. Across the rear window of the black van, twelve stick-figure decals were lined up side by side—two parents, eight children, and two dogs. Julia knew Carmen saw the decals, was probably even counting them. Maybe she had a contest going and this was some kind of record.