To See the Moon Again

by Jamie Langston Turner

  Julia spoke before she could stop herself. “I could go with you.” She knew it was her heart talking, not her head. She also knew Carmen would be kind as she said no.

  “This is something I need to do by myself, Aunt Julia,” she said. “But thank you.” She laid a hand on top of Julia’s.

  Julia nodded. Another irony of life. A year ago, she had tried her best to talk the girl into going back to Wyoming, and now she would give anything to keep her here. But maybe this was the best time for a visit after all. She could get it out of her system and be back in plenty of time to get enrolled at Millard-Temple for the fall. This time next year she could have a year of college under her belt.

  • • •

  CARMEN said, “I prayed so hard a year ago that God would help me find you. And he did. And you let me stay. I’m thankful for that. I was so tired of being a . . . peripatetic. Is that the right word? You’ve taught me so much, Aunt Julia. You’ve helped me face some hard things, even when I didn’t have the courage.” She laughed and put a hand on her jaw. “The latest one being that dentist appointment. Ouch.”

  Julia knew Carmen was only trying to soften the blow of rejecting her offer to go along. She also knew the girl had ten times the courage she had.

  Carmen was looking at the magazine in Julia’s lap. “Cool,” she said, pointing to the title. “There’s a Green River in Wyoming. It’s not far from Painted Horse. Is that a magazine about Wyoming?”

  Julia shook her head. She would show Carmen the stories in the magazine sometime. She owed it to the girl to honor her father by admitting what she had done. “No,” she said. “There must be a lot of Green Rivers. This one happens to be in Kentucky.”

  There was a question she had to ask, of course. “When are you going?”

  “Soon,” Carmen said. “I have to help out with something at church on Sunday, but as soon after that as I can. I need to check flight schedules and all that.”

  “I’ll buy your plane ticket,” Julia said. “You need to save your money.” Carmen started to protest, but Julia waved her off and kept talking. “Pamela says Butch is a whiz at hunting down good airline tickets, so I’ll call him right away and . . . wait a minute—there are airports in Wyoming, aren’t there?”

  “Ho ho, very funny,” Carmen said. “Aunt Julia tells a joke.” She got up from the floor and half crawled to the attic ladder. “Tell him the nearest one to where I live is in Rock Springs.” She let herself down two or three steps and stopped to look back. “But I’m going to pay for my ticket. You need to save your money for your own. You can come visit me in July, and I’ll take you to Frontier Days in Cheyenne. We can go every year. It can be like our . . . family tradition.”

  Julia stared at her. Come visit her? What was she talking about?

  “Oh, and Aunt Julia, the South isn’t all bad,” Carmen said. “I mean, I did find out how much I like sweet tea and grits.” She laughed and disappeared. Julia heard her whistle her way down the hall and through the kitchen. She heard the back door open and close.

  For a long time she sat there without moving. All this time she had been assuming it was only a short-term visit Carmen was talking about. But it was a one-way trip, and one she meant to take soon. Julia couldn’t think of anything as sad as that.

  • • •

  IT was late the next morning when Julia finally came to the kitchen to get her coffee. The washing machine was going, and the ironing board was set up by the kitchen table. Several shirts and pairs of pants were hanging on the door of the laundry closet. Carmen was on the back porch, sitting cross-legged on the glider, talking on the cell phone. Or holding it to her ear. She didn’t see Julia. There was an occasional “uh-huh” or “right,” then a long period of nothing, then another “uh-huh” and “well, yes, maybe so.” With her free hand, she was plucking at her hair, stretching out curls to their full length, then releasing them to spring back into place.

  “I don’t know, probably not,” she said now. She looked up and saw Julia in the doorway. She pointed to the cell phone and mouthed Aunt Pamela, then made a face that said, Wow, she’s on a roll. “Oh, sure, except for . . .” she said, but was evidently cut off. Another long wait, then, “Hey, but think of this—bluegrass music doesn’t stop at the Mississippi, you know, so you and Uncle Butch can just . . .” Another apparent interruption.

  So Pamela knew she was leaving. Julia wished she didn’t—she wouldn’t have told her until after the fact. For one thing, she couldn’t have spoken the words without breaking down, which would have brought Pamela flying to her side—a prospect she couldn’t face right now. For another, she knew Pamela, true to her way of handling any setback, would want to talk the subject to death, as she was obviously doing now.

  “Yes, I’ve thought about that,” Carmen said. Then another lengthy pause. “No, that’s not going to happen.”

  It struck Julia that she had been in such a trance after coming down from the attic yesterday that she had forgotten about calling Butch about a plane ticket. Even if she had remembered, she knew she couldn’t have gotten the words one-way ticket out of her mouth. Nor had she ever returned Pamela’s call, which was probably why Carmen was on the phone right now. Pamela’s motto concerning phone calls was always “If at first you don’t succeed, leave a long, long message and then try, try again.”

  Julia took her cup of coffee and left the kitchen. Looking into Carmen’s room, she saw a few items laid out on the bed, neatly folded. One of the suitcases from the attic was sitting on the floor, unopened. There were only four books on the bedside table now, the journal on top. Besides the shame of it, Julia wouldn’t have thought of opening it now, for she knew it would hurt too much to see what the girl had written over the last few days: Finally, I’m leaving the South! Wyoming is where my heart is!

  She took her time getting dressed, stopping often for non-essentials: straightening a lampshade, removing empty hangers from her closet, picking something up and setting it down again. She pulled a navy sweater over her head and then realized she was wearing black pants, so she changed pants. She dabbed a little makeup on, tried to fluff her hair with a brush. No examining of the brush this time—she couldn’t do anything about hair loss anyway. She noticed in the mirror how pale and tired she looked. She needed to decide sometime soon whether to keep coloring her hair herself or give it over to a hairdresser. Or just forget it and let it go gray.

  She opened the draperies and immediately felt resentful that everything outside looked like any other spring day. The sun was shining, the leaves on the trees were green, the clouds white in the blue sky. She saw the bits of yarn tied around the iris stalks under the window and couldn’t imagine ever caring again what color her flowers were.

  She finished the last of her coffee, which had already cooled off. Before leaving her bedroom, she looked in the mirror again for a long time. “You are an adult,” she said aloud. “You will be mature about this. You will not play the victim and try to make her feel guilty.” On the chair beside the dresser, she saw the two Green River magazines she had brought down from the attic yesterday.

  The door between the kitchen and back porch was still open, and Carmen was still on the phone. “No, money’s more important than time,” she said. “I’ve waited this long, I definitely don’t need a direct flight.” She paused, then, “Well, thanks. Aunt Julia said you were the best.” So she must be talking with Butch now. “I’ll give you the money when you come.”

  Julia’s heart sank. When you come? There was only one thing that could mean.

  Carmen came into the kitchen when she got off the phone. “Guess what? Uncle Butch says he has some connections with a couple of airlines. He thinks he can get a discount price on a plane ticket.”

  A clever way to put it, Julia thought. It probably just meant he was using credit card points or frequent flier miles. “Well, that’s good,” she said. Natural and sincere—that was how she hoped she sounded. Neither miserable nor falsely cheerful. “They�
�re not planning to come down, are they?” It was an old habit of hers—posing a negative to verify the affirmative.

  “Oh, yeah, Aunt Pam wanted to talk to you, but I told her you weren’t handy, so she’s going to call back later. They’re leaving on Saturday to visit Butch’s sister in Memphis—I think it’s for a nephew’s graduation—so they might swing by here first to say bye.”

  Swinging by South Carolina on the way from Virginia to Memphis—that was a joke. But Julia knew there was no use fighting it. If Pamela had it in her mind to come, nothing would keep her from it. She poured another cup of coffee, then busied herself with cream and sugar, and much stirring, so that she didn’t have to turn around. “What day are you thinking of leaving?” she asked.

  Carmen was pulling clothes out of the washing machine and putting them into the dryer. “Next Thursday or Friday,” she said. “That’ll give me a whole week.”

  Another demonstration of a youthful perspective. A whole week. Spoken as if it were an eternity.

  • • •

  PAMELA and Butch pulled up in front of the stone house two days later around eleven in the morning. Thankfully, they truly were just stopping by since they needed to make it all the way to Memphis that evening. It was clear from the moment Pamela stepped into the house that she was still full of alarm and disapproval that Carmen was going “back there to that place,” which turned out to be the only way she would allow herself to refer to Wyoming.

  Carmen had prepared an early lunch, which they ate together in the kitchen. Sandwiches, chips, drinks, grapes. Butch had found a plane ticket for her, of course. He gave her the boarding pass and itinerary he had printed out but wouldn’t take the money she tried to give him. “No lie,” he said, holding up both hands, “it was free. I got a deal. I know people in high places.” And though Pamela was still mad, she mustered enough momentary good cheer to say, “That’s the honest truth. Butch can pull more strings than . . . a puppeteer.” She even managed to chuckle over her little witticism.

  Smart girl that she was, Carmen had Googled all the upcoming bluegrass festivals in Wyoming. Armed with this information, she permitted no opportunity during lunch for dead time, which she must have known would be seized upon by Pamela for argumentative purposes. The girl rattled off the names of bluegrass groups—Stringdusters, Long Way Home, Big Hollow Band, Haunted Winds, Bearfoot Boys—and told exactly when and where in Wyoming they were scheduled to sing during the summer.

  And it worked. Both Butch and Pamela were drawn in. “Rosebud and the June Bugs are going to be there?” Pamela exclaimed at one point. “I love them!”

  After lunch Carmen walked them out to their car. When she came back to the kitchen, she emitted a long whistle. “You would’ve thought I was about to die instead of just move to Wyoming. Wow, I’m sure glad you’re not falling to pieces over this like Aunt Pam is.”

  Julia was shaking out the place mats over the sink. “She does know how to carry on, doesn’t she?” she said, adding a little laugh for a breezy effect.

  • • •

  SUNDAY came and went, and then they were down to four days. On Monday Julia went back up to the attic and brought down the boxes full of useless things she had weeded out. She set them by the back door. One of her errands today was to drop them off at the Goodwill donation center.

  “Hey, what’s this for?” Carmen said, pulling out the fondue pot. It was avocado green with a wooden handle and Teflon interior.

  Julia explained the concept of fondue, showed her the long-handled forks of different colors, told her about the fondue parties Matthew loved when they first got married, well past the fondue craze of the seventies.

  Carmen laughed. “Cool. Can we try it out one night before I go?”

  So Julia set it aside. That would be their last supper together. A trip back in time for herself, a novelty for Carmen. Maybe it would brighten up what could be a difficult meal.

  The last few days were filled with odd sensations. It was curious how a bland, tuneless word like departure could suddenly turn onomatopoetic; say it aloud and it sounded like something ripped in half. And there was no explaining how she could feel both heavy and empty. Warring wishes were another mystery: one minute, wishing she could have more time to prepare herself for Carmen to leave and, the next, wishing it were already a thing of the past. The waiting was terrible, yet she clung to each day. She felt a dread that was nearly tangible, as was her relief upon waking each morning and thinking, Not today, not yet.

  And hopes collided with hard truths. Her dreams for Carmen to stay with her, go to college, distinguish herself as a star student, be like a daughter to her—all of that set against the realization that a twenty-one-year-old didn’t need a supervisor like the one she would be, caring too much about every aspect of the girl’s life.

  There were other contradictions: one day, watching Carmen intently across the table or room or yard, trying to memorize every gesture, every vocal nuance, every comical thing she said and did, and, the next day, turning her head, refusing to even look at her. Or one day, drawing near to listen to her play and sing through all the verses of a song and, the next, leaving the house as soon as she heard the first few notes.

  One of the songs Julia never walked away from was “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” That one made her go still every time, for she somehow felt closer to Jeremiah every time she heard his daughter sing one of his favorite songs.

  Julia had never before realized it was a song about going to heaven. Or so Carmen told her. Nor did she know that Michael was one of the archangels and he was rowing the boat across the Jordan River. Or that the song was actually an African American spiritual. For some reason Julia had always associated it with hippies and communes and Joan Baez.

  The way Carmen sang it reminded Julia of a gathering storm. She started it slow and soft, like a friendly rainfall, increasing the tempo and volume ever so slightly with each verse, from the brother lending a helping hand and the sister helping to trim the sail, right on through the mother and father waiting on the other side. By the time she got to the verse about the Jordan River, it was considerably livelier, especially the line “Kills the body but not the soul!” And at the end, when the trumpet was sounding the jubilee, it was like a tempest, though more spectacular than terrifying. She even did some hand thumps on her guitar for a little rhythmic flair.

  And then there was the French folk song Carmen had learned from Dr. Boyer a few weeks earlier. Julia always listened to that one, too, though she didn’t know at first that it was actually a carol about a shepherdess who had been to the manger in Bethlehem, had seen the baby, Mary and Joseph, the animals, the angelic hosts. Julia was no judge of the girl’s French pronunciation, but it sounded convincing enough.

  And then only three days remained. On Tuesday night Carmen sang the French song again on the screened porch. Julia was watching the news in the living room but crept into the kitchen to listen. It was just after ten o’clock, and through the back door she could see the twinkle of fireflies in the cool dark of the yard.

  The girl started the second stanza, more slowly than usual: “Est-il beau, bergère? Est-il beau? Plus beau que la lune, Aussi le soleil. Jamais dans le monde on vit son pareil.” All at once she stopped singing. Julia waited for more, but all remained quiet. She returned to the television and soon heard Carmen in the kitchen, then footsteps in the hallway, then a door closing.

  Sometime the next day Julia found a sheet of paper on the floor in front of the glider. She turned it over and saw it was the French song written out by hand, with the English translations under each line. She looked at the second stanza: Is he fair, shepherdess? Is he fair? And then the answer: Fairer than the moon, fairer than the sun. Never in the world has such a one been seen.

  So that was why Carmen had stopped singing. It was easy to see how one uniquely beautiful child could remind her of another.

  And in Julia’s mind, this was the most perplexing part of the girl’s decision to lea
ve, yet one she couldn’t bring herself to mention. Wyoming had to be more than fifteen hundred miles from Roskam, North Carolina. How could she bear to put so much distance between herself and Lizzy? Perhaps the same question was troubling Carmen, for she grew pensive the next day, disappeared for an extended walk after lunch, and went to her bedroom early that evening. Her guitar case stayed closed up tight.

  • • •

  AND then they were down to the last day. Julia rose early, full of purpose. She had made her plans during the night. She wouldn’t mope. She wanted Carmen’s last memory of her to be something positive and admirable, not pathetic. She got dressed, went to the grocery store and bank, and was home shortly after ten. She set about making a Coca-Cola cake, something she hadn’t done in many years, an idea perhaps triggered by the thought of the fondue supper. While fondue had been Matthew’s favorite supper, Coca-Cola cake had been his favorite dessert.

  The time for interrogating the girl was over. Julia had asked all her questions during the past week, trying to slip them in offhandedly but utterly failing, sounding instead like the middle-aged worry-wart she was. Where will you live? What will you do for money? Do you still have friends in Wyoming? Will you call if you need help? Will you let me buy you some new clothes and shoes? A cell phone? A laptop? The last three were answered with a firm but gentle “Oh, no, thank you, I want to travel light.”

  They both knew that all the questions came down to one: How will you ever make your way in the world? And though the girl offered no specific answers, she gave confident, optimistic ones, always in Old Testament terms: I will follow the fiery pillar, the Red Sea will part, manna will fall, I will mount up with eagle’s wings, angels will attend me.

  Clearly, Carmen had plans for this last day also. Having rallied from the previous day, she showed no signs of sadness, nor anticipation, only good-natured determination to put these final hours to practical use. After lunch she spent a good while outside, cleaning the rest of the windows, climbing onto the roof to check the gutters, tagging the last of the irises, sweeping the front walk.