Northward to the Moon

by Polly Horvath

  Do my mother’s thoughts and mine tangle in the night? Because I hear her gentle voice say, “Ned, sometimes at night I hear the sound of the ocean.”

  “That’s the wind in the pines,” he says practically, and I hear him roll over and start to snore.

  In the morning Jim takes us to see Mary. My mother wants Ned to go alone first but he wants to bring us all and introduce us. When we get inside her cabin it is dark and a little smoky and close. Perhaps they are keeping it extra warm because she is ill. She is a mass of gray hair on the bed looking exactly the color of one of the white charred logs in the fireplace. I wonder if when you live under these trees for so long you become partly tree. She turns a wrinkled tree bark face to us and then grins. She is missing quite a few key teeth. “NED!” she croaks.

  “Hi, Mary,” says Ned. He looks, all at once, shy. “I wasn’t sure you would recognize me.”

  “I didn’t recognize you. I knew you were coming. You’re changed now. You’re old. Felicity, Hershel, Max, Maya and Jane.” She says our names while looking down the line at us.

  I realize that Jim kept all our names straight when he told her, which impresses me because he only heard them once. I am thinking he is not only brawny but very smart. It startles me that she calls Ned old when she is so ancient herself. But maybe when she saw him he was such a young man. Or maybe she was trying to say older. She talks in a halting way, needing large breaths to complete sentences, straining as if afraid that any second she will lose the ends of words.

  “Whatcha doing here, Ned?” she asks. Then she closes her eyes. As if she needs to rest after sentences too.

  “They said when you were sick you kept calling for me,” says Ned.

  “I don’t remember. I don’t remember the hospital much, Ned. Except the food. Bad food.”

  “Nobody likes hospital food,” says my mother. You can tell she is trying to find consoling things to say. I think she would like to say consoling things to Ned too, this is so obviously hard for him. She rests her hand lightly on his upper arm.

  “Are you in pain?” asks Ned. Somehow this seems kind of personal to me. He hasn’t seen her in twenty years.

  Mary shakes her head and then she lies back with her eyes closed and we all glance at each other. Now what?

  “So you don’t remember calling me?” Ned tries again.

  Mary shakes her head.

  “Oh.”

  It is hard to know where to go with this. I look at Maya anxiously. I am afraid she is going to burst out with some explosion about how we came all this way to see a dying person who doesn’t know what we’re doing here. But Maya is just looking cowed by circumstances. The boys are getting fidgety, though.

  “Well, maybe I will take the boys outside,” says my mother, but doesn’t.

  “Uh, I don’t know what to say,” says Ned. “I mean, I came because they said you called me.”

  “How many years has it been, Ned? Since you lived here.”

  “Oh, about twenty, I guess,” says Ned. You can see everyone deflating. It is very hard to know how to feel when you’ve been feeling noble and now it turns out you’ve done a completely unnecessary thing and wasted a lot of gas to do it, not to mention tossed a family out of their nice warm cabin so you could sleep there.

  “Twenty years,” says Mary. “Goes by fast. But Jim told you …” She stops and breathes again loudly with a whispery sound as if her lungs are full of old paper.

  Ned waits. We all wait. It seems the polite thing to do but she doesn’t say anything and we get twitchy. You have no idea how long a few minutes can last until you have stood next to a dying woman politely waiting for her to finish her sentence.

  Finally Ned says, “Jim told me what, Mary?”

  “Jim told you … who … came to us,” she gasps.

  “Someone I know?” prompts Ned.

  Mary nods and then there is another long wait while she breathes her rattling breath. I am sorry but at this point I want to shout, What is this? Twenty questions?

  We wait some more. Nobody even moves in case it distracts her.

  “Who came to the camp?” asks Ned when it is clear Mary needs another prompt.

  There is another long wait while she slowly opens her eyes. She shifts herself slightly upward on her pillows and looks into Ned’s eyes for a long time before she says, “Your brother.”

  Back on the Road

  Well, that’s a conversation stopper, as you can imagine. Finally Ned says, “My brother?”

  Then Mary croaks, “Your brother.”

  Then Ned looks astounded again and says, “My brother?”

  Then Mary says, “Your brother!”

  They go around a few times this way with long pauses between question and answer as Mary gathers her strength to speak again. I am worried she will use up all her energy on this one answer and we’ll never find out anything else. My mother must be worried about this too because she suddenly leaps in and asks, “Which brother, Mary?”

  “Yeah!” says Ned. “Which brother?”

  “Says his name is John,” says Mary. She is paling with the effort of the interview and my mother, Ned and I all have our hands clasped, hoping we will get the end of the story before she expires into sleep … or worse.

  “John?” asks Ned.

  “John,” says Mary, but it is unclear if she is confirming or just repeating.

  “John?” says Ned.

  “Can we go out and play with our trucks?” asks Hershel.

  This draws Mary’s attention to him for the first time and she turns her head and looks straight at him as she says, “The Amazing John!”

  This freaks out the usually unflappable Hershel, who takes two steps back.

  “What’s amazing about him?” asks Ned.

  “No, no, his name …,” says Mary. Her voice becomes thinner and reedier. She is definitely losing lung power now.

  “Yes,” says Ned, encouragingly, “John is his name.”

  “No …,” says Mary, her hands clenching with the effort, “Amazing …”

  “John is amazing?” asks Ned.

  “No, Ned,” says my mother. “I think she is saying ‘Amazing’ is part of his name.”

  Mary nods emphatically or clearly means to although actually it’s just a limp neck bend.

  “The Amazing John?” asks Ned.

  Mary nods again but this time the movement is barely discernible. “John the Amazing,” she croaks.

  “What kind of a crackpot name is that?” asks Ned in normal tones and not the hushed reverential ones we use for the sick and dying.

  “Well, a stage name, maybe, Ned,” says my mother helpfully.

  Mary nods again. She opens her eyes. You can tell she is gathering strength for the home stretch. “Vegas,” she whispers.

  “John has an act in Vegas?” asks Ned.

  “Magician,” says Mary.

  “John is a magician?” says Ned. “But he was never any good with his hands!”

  Mary just stares at Ned. And really, I think, weak or not, there is no other appropriate reaction. After all, what is she supposed to do—John is Ned’s silly family, it’s got nothing to do with her.

  “Well!” says Ned when it is apparent he is getting no help with this. He sits down in a chair next to her bed.

  My mother takes the boys outside. How can she stand to leave at this most interesting moment? But I guess that is what it is to be a mother. Max has had to have a dreamcatcher taken from him and Hershel, it turns out, has been busy shredding a corner of the blanket where a thread is loose. Duty calls.

  “Did he say what he was doing here?” asks Ned.

  “Looking for you. Under bed.” Mary’s eyes are closed again.

  “He was looking for me under the bed?” asks Ned. Talk about amazing!

  But Mary just jabs downward with one birdclaw hand. I look down. There’s a small duffel bag poking out from underneath. I pick it up. Mary nods at me.

  “Left for you,” she says, a
nd closes her eyes again as if mission accomplished.

  “John came? He left this bag for me?” Ned looks astounded but Mary doesn’t bother answering. Ned takes the bag, stupefied.

  “Open it,” I urge.

  “Yeah,” he says, shaking himself like a dog. “Right.”

  He opens the duffel bag. It is full of money.

  We are back in the car driving south.

  “And another thing,” says Ned, “Jim says John was heading north briefly before returning to Vegas. NORTH! What the heck is north of B.C.? Tundra? Ice floes? He was heading toward an ice floe, taking time off to drop a bag of money in the woods? Does that sound on the up-and-up to you? Does that even remotely make sense? And how the heck would he even find the Carriers?”

  “You found them,” I say.

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t looking for them,” says Ned.

  “So, it must be even easier to find them if you are,” I insist. “What I can’t figure out is why he thought you would be there again. I mean, he knew you left years ago.”

  “Unless he wasn’t really looking for me, he was looking for a remote safe place to drop a bag of money.”

  “If all you want is somewhere to hide something then there’s got to be more convenient remote places than northern B.C. If you don’t think John is capable of larceny then there must be another explanation,” says my mother.

  “I don’t know. People change. People grow old, people die, people get scared, people go away, people have kids, people don’t. All kinds of things change them.”

  “Maybe he was going on vacation,” says my mother.

  “What kind of vacation?” says Ned in skeptical tones.

  My mother thinks for a moment. “A cruise!”

  “A cruise?”

  “People go on those Alaskan cruises. I think they leave from British Columbia.”

  “On the coast. He wasn’t on the coast.”

  “Maybe he was making his way to the coast.”

  But Ned goes on as if he hasn’t listened to a word she’s said. “Well, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to think about this. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. This is a lot of money! And I’ll tell you another thing, I want nothing to do with it. It’s going back to John.”

  “Are we going to have to go somewhere else to find your brother before we can go home?” asks Maya in very cranky tones.

  “I don’t know,” says Ned.

  My mother turns to address Maya, who is turning around to face her. “We’re going to do whatever we have to, Maya. We’re a family now and Ned’s family is our family too.”

  My mother is keeping this chirpy and cheerful but I see something in her eyes. Some foreboding. Some glimmer that we are heading south and it will be a long time before fate takes us east and back home.

  The Wild West

  Nobody really likes Nevada.

  We have had a long trip down through Washington and Oregon. Through many different landscapes that didn’t quite jibe with the Outlaw Adventures, as I have come to think of them. But when we hit Nevada we hit the Wild West. Now we are talking. There are tumbleweeds. It is a horrible place, really. Perfect!

  At a gas station outside of some small town, while my mother and Maya use the restroom and Hershel and Max pick out a chocolate bar, I say to Ned, “We’re real outlaws now, with a bag of ill-gotten gains in a vast forlorn dangerous deadly snake-ridden moonscape. Isn’t this cool?”

  “Not so cool, Bibles, not so cool,” he says. He is already peeling the paper off a Nestlé Crunch bar. The candy bar decision is never a long debate for Ned. He just grabs the first one he sees. I think this is very telling but I’m not sure exactly what it tells.

  “How do you pick a candy bar so fast?” I ask, thinking out loud. “It takes me forever to decide whether I want a Snickers or a PayDay.”

  “First off, never get the PayDay,” says Ned.

  The thing about having two adults in the family now is that you get a whole other frame of reference. My mother would never be able to pontificate on candy bar selection.

  “I like nuts,” I say.

  “Yes. But nuts are optional, unlike chocolate. What is the point of a chocolate bar without chocolate?” asks Ned.

  “We could buy a lot of candy bars with our outlaw money.” I keep hoping to rekindle his excitement. Ever since we left the Carriers he has looked haunted more than wild and free and roguish.

  “This is a bag of real money, Jane,” he says. “I don’t want to play games with this. I certainly don’t want to spend it all on chocolate bars. I just want to return it and go back to Massachusetts like we promised your mom, okay?”

  Suddenly the guy behind the cash register looks real interested.

  “Pick a candy bar, Jane!” says Ned.

  I startle. He usually doesn’t call me Jane unless he’s irritated with me. So I grab a Three Musketeers, which I don’t even like, which goes to show that his technique of snatching the first one at hand doesn’t work for everyone, and he pays for all four candy bars and hustles us outside.

  I peer at him questioningly and he relents. “Look, I just wish I knew more about this money. You understand I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family for twenty years? I don’t even know where they are anymore. And now I find myself carrying money that came from who knows where. And why was John going north of northern B.C.? The whole thing makes no sense.”

  “But I like it,” I say. “It’s an adventure. It’s an outlaw adventure.”

  “Well, it makes me nervous,” says Ned.

  “Does it make Mom nervous?” I ask.

  “Sometimes I think nothing makes your mother nervous,” says Ned, and just then my mother and Maya come out of the washroom. They see us eating candy bars and go inside to get a couple for themselves with Ned’s toes tapping.

  “You sure are fidgety,” I say.

  “Did you see that cashier’s ears perk up when you mentioned a bag of money?”

  “Oh, you’re just being paranoid,” I say.

  “Uh-huh,” he says in an unconvinced voice, and gets the boys into the car and buckled in so we can set off the second my mother and Maya return.

  “I think you ought to try deep breathing,” I say when we are rolling along again. “Although don’t do it too obviously or no one will take you seriously as an outlaw.”

  “Why should Ned try deep breathing?” asks my mother.

  “Jane thinks I’m too nervous,” says Ned.

  “Oh well, I suppose we’re all a little nervous …,“ says my mother vaguely. She is leafing through the Nevada guidebook she bought at the gas station. Now she looks up and points out the window into the scrubby desert. “Look at that! Wild burros!” She finds the section about them and reads it. Hershel and Max are leaping up and down in their seats even though my mother is the only one who saw the burros because we are whizzing by so fast.

  “Should I turn around and see if we can find them again?” asks Ned, but he looks pale and strained. His neck muscles are tight and corded.

  My mother glances over at him. “Don’t bother,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll see more.”

  Then everyone goes back to reading or playing games or trying to grab my feet and beautify them and it is quiet the rest of the way to Reno.

  Reno is full of casinos. We come in as the light is fading and the bright casino bulbs shatter twilight.

  Money is what a lot of people seem to think about in Nevada. Ned explains that people rarely win at gambling. That some win but mostly the casinos know they will always take more money than they lose. I don’t understand how this works but if it is true I feel sorry for all these gamblers who don’t seem to know this.

  The first hotel we stay in in Nevada is a casino in Reno. To get to the elevator you have to pass this big dark gambling place full of mirrors and flashing lights and slot machines. It is very disorienting. I think if people come to this place on purpose they must be trying to disappear because when you are inside it,
it is as if no part of your life has ever existed. There seems no way out to your future, your past is not here, all there is is the dark present with the flashing lights and the money going clink clank clunk. John has chosen to live in Nevada. Is it just because that’s where he could make a living as a magician or does he like it? I want to ask him when we see him but I don’t know how to do it without sounding rude.

  The next morning we leave Reno at the crack of dawn.

  On the way down to Las Vegas we barely pass another car except when we come to small towns and sometimes not even then. We see large military installations and what I now know to be legal whorehouses because I asked Ned what all the double-wides with names like Cat House were and he explained it at the next rest stop. Maya is furious with Ned for not telling her and I want to but it would mean having to explain so much else.

  Finally, when she won’t leave me alone, I just say to her, “It’s for ladies of the night, okay?”

  “Oh,” she snorts. “Ladies who only come out at night. More fairy tales.” She and Mrs. Gunderson are having a good snort over that.

  For no reason I can figure out this makes me furious. That she can be so contentedly wrong because she has such preconceived notions about everything.

  “You know, you’d better stop having such a closed mind, Maya,” I say. “You’d better stop assuming you know everything or you’ll be ignorant your whole life.”

  “Then tell me what a lady of the night is,” says Maya.