My mother is opening her mouth to speak when we hear Ben galloping back at a furious rate and we all run into the yard to meet him.
“There’s a break in the fence,” he says breathlessly. “And wolf tracks.”
“Did you see the wolves?” asks Ned.
“No, it looks, actually, from the tracks like they headed out again the way they came in.”
“I’m saddling up too,” says Ned. “I think we’d better scour the grounds anyhow. Don’t worry, Felicity. I’m sure she’s hiding somewhere in the house where we just haven’t found her. Maybe she fell asleep there.”
We go inside and my mother paces and then she starts checking the house and grounds again and calling for Maya. She can’t seem to stop moving.
When Ned gets back he is pale. They’ve found nothing. But now he has seen the wolf tracks too.
We have gone out to the ring, where Ben has tied up the saddled horses in case they are needed again, and Ned keeps saying, “Darn it, I don’t like seeing those wolf tracks.”
“Shhh, shhh,” says my mother, who is still holding Max, who starts to cry.
For a second I think of Maya’s mangled wolf-eaten body lying somewhere and I unexpectedly tear up and then tilt my head back to hide it. That’s when I see the hayloft.
“Did anyone look up in the hayloft?” I ask.
My mother is already halfway up the ladder by the time the rest of us get into the barn. We follow her up and when we reach the top we see her sitting on the floor in the hay, holding Maya in her lap. Maya’s face is pale and listless and she has her fist halfway in her mouth. She looks miserable. Who knows how long she has been up here like this? Who knows why she didn’t come down when she heard us? We stare at her, our eyes huge, all except for my mother’s, which are closed.
Ned says, “Enough of this. We’re going home.”
After that we all go back to the house. Not even Dorothy comments on us going home or the new arrangements that will have to be made. Or that Ned has changed his mind about Alaska.
We all go to bed. Maya falls right asleep. But I stay awake, thinking about Ned’s new plan. My mother hasn’t reacted to it any more than she did his plan to go to Alaska. They are on the porch swing and I can hear them through my window. But they don’t seem to have much to say. All I hear are things like “Jeez.” “Yeah.” “Christ.” “Yeah.” “Never want to do that again.” “Nope.” And the sound of the porch swing creaking well into the night.
The next night at dinner we sit around the dinner table talking about what has to be done now that we are leaving as well.
“Well,” Candace begins. “You’re still going to have to do something about that money. You can’t just deposit it. Not that amount. Maybe the best thing is to turn it over to the police.”
“Aw, Candace, we’ll be here forever explaining things if we do that,” says Ned.
“Maybe we should split it between us. Not to keep, I mean,” says Nelda in her whispery voice. “Just to hang on to temporarily. In smaller amounts it won’t be so suspicious.”
“I don’t want anything to do with that money, thank you,” says Candace. “That money is trouble. Maybe you should bring it to Alaska, Ned.”
“I’ve already told you that I’m not going to Alaska,” said Ned.
“Never mind the money, any of you,” says Dorothy suddenly, and she is usually so quiet at these meals that it startles all of us. “I’m keeping it. I’m going to stay on at the ranch and use it to pay Ben to care for me. I don’t need nursing, I just need help with things like shopping and driving and cooking and such.”
“Mom …,” says Maureen. “How can you stay on here? We’ve already sold so much of your stuff.”
“Don’t need much,” says Dorothy.
“Since when?” says Candace. “And I thought you didn’t want this money any more than I did. Than any of us did.”
“I didn’t but then was then and now is now. You don’t know how it’s been preying on my mind, having to turn Ben out. He’s been a good ranch hand and he’s been good to me and this is all he knows. It wouldn’t be so easy for him finding another job in these parts. Now I don’t need to sell Satan either. Ben can care for him, do my chores and my shopping, and I can stay here until the money runs out. I figure that money will buy me two more years on the ranch.”
“Well, gee, Mom,” says Maureen.
“I still say it’s risky. You don’t know who is after that money,” says Candace.
“Well, life’s a risky business,” says Dorothy. “Besides, for all we know no one is after that money. All we really know about it is that John left it for Ned to take care of. I’ve made up my mind. I made it up the second you told me Ned wasn’t going to Alaska.”
Ned and his sisters look at each other around the table and then Ned shrugs. “Okay, then, suit yourself,” he says. “Go tell Ben.”
“Already have,” says Dorothy complacently. “Pass the peas.”
The rest of the week is spent preparing to leave. Ben is going to move into the house when we go. Ned gives him his new cell phone number. He gives it to Dorothy too.
“May come in handy after all, Bibles,” he says to me, but I am still ignoring him.
Ben has been going back and forth doing airport runs with the sisters, who leave one by one until it is just us.
Finally we say our goodbyes. Everyone is dry-eyed and overly cheery but Maya, who lingers behind when the rest of us go down to the car. She looks sad but I know that she is as anxious to get home as the rest of us. Finally she comes down too.
Ben is outside piling leftover tack and tools into the truck. He will probably try to sell it in town.
“He seems very reliable,” says my mother reassuringly as we drive away.
“I think he is,” says Ned. “I sure hope so.”
“I still feel kind of bad about leaving Dorothy after we said we’d stay,” says my mother.
“Aw, she’s okay,” says Ned. He is going into his meditative driving state. You can always tell. His answers get shorter and he begins to sound far away.
“It seems so odd. I was mentally prepared to be here for the summer and suddenly we are leaving. I haven’t quite digested it. I feel like we didn’t give Dorothy time to digest it properly either.”
“She won’t mind, I’m telling you, she’s not attached that way,” says Ned, and we drive quietly after that.
It is a subdued ride across the country.
One night as we drive and Maya and the boys sleep, my mother says to Ned that she keeps thinking about when Dorothy said to him not to worry about her, to “get that little girl home.”
“It’s so funny,” says Ned, “how different she is with Maya than she ever was with us as kids. How she puts her first.”
“Well, they say people are different with their grandchildren,” says my mother.
“Stepgrandchild at that,” says Ned, shaking his head.
I make a mental note of this, more evidence that he isn’t Maya’s biological father.
When we get back to the beach it is a wonderful salty homecoming. The moist air makes me come alive. I can feel it seeping into all my pores, which were shriveled in the desert dryness. It is as if I can finally breathe all over my body again, in my skin, my blood vessels, my brain. The first few days we do nothing but hang out on the beach. It is like a miracle to hear the waves crash and recede, crash and recede as they have been doing all this time while we were gone. It felt oddly that we stopped their movement by going away but we never did.
I love everything here with renewed vigor. The salt marshes. The loons serenely paddling through the long grasses. The crickets at night. The stars over the ocean. The village with its whitewashed buildings. Our tiny two-room church with its pointy steeple. The air-washed salt-faded colors of the clothes of people who live by the shore. Our laundry line. The creak in the floorboards on the left side of the porch. Waking up to luminous dawn.
Ginny is still at camp but I am p
atient, knowing I will see her before long and be able to tell her everything.
The house is immaculate and it is soon apparent why. Mrs. Merriweather, a woman from our church, comes over when she hears we are returned.
“My dear!” she says to my mother, sitting happily across the table from her and shoveling in my mother’s freshly baked cookies. “How happy we all are to find you safely back. The place was not the same without you. Not the same at all!”
“What happened to the Gourds?” asks my mother. “You wrote that they had vacated our house but you didn’t say why.”
“Did no one tell you? Well! Therein lies a tale. While Mr. Gourd was in prison, Mrs. Gourd took up with a young muscleman—really, I know no other term for him—from Lincoln. Lifted weights all the livelong day. Worked somewhere, I don’t know where, but he’d come around here in his souped-up Trans Am with the engine running, revving it in the parking lot while she and those children hurried across the beach to him. The fumes, my dear, the fumes! And the noise! Well, anyhow, they were dating for only a month or so and the week before Mr. Gourd got out of prison, they left.”
“What? They left town?”
“Yes. She pulled those children right out of school and loaded them into that Trans Am and off they took. And to where, do you think?”
“I have no idea!” says my mother.
“None other than Venice, California. And why? Because Mr. Muscleman wanted to lift weights on Muscle Beach. Have you ever? Have you ever heard of a sillier reason for moving an entire family cross-country than that?”
My mother shakes her head no.
“Of course, people say it was also to avoid Mr. Gourd, who was bound to come back for her. But she had complete custody of those children, so she could do as she liked. I’m afraid she found in the new boyfriend all the qualities she thought she’d left behind with Mr. Gourd. Really, it makes you wonder if people ever learn anything.”
“Yes, it does,” says my mother, round-eyed, eating another cookie herself.
“Well, as soon as I heard they’d flown the coop I came right over here and, my dear, the mess. It would have broken your heart.”
“Mess?” says my mother. “The place is immaculate.”
“Yes, after we got done with it. Some of us from church showed up with our mops and buckets and soon put things to rights, no thanks to those messy Gourds. Jam everywhere!”
“And peanut butter, I bet,” I say, pulling up a chair.
“Oh, you may be sure,” says Mrs. Merriweather, nodding at me. “Peanut butter everywhere! Oh, and you’ve not heard about Mrs. Spinnaker either, I suppose?”
“I notice she doesn’t seem to be here this summer.”
“No. Nor anywhere. Her sister has been frantic. She’s gone and Horace is gone. They’ve been missing six months now. Her sister is putting the cottage up for sale. She fears”—and here Mrs. Merriweather whispers even though it is clear she would like everyone in the world to hear—“that Mrs. Spinnaker has come to a bad end!”
“No!” says my mother. “What kind of a bad end?”
“Well, my dear, the last anyone saw of her was during the winter storms. We had some doozies around New Year’s. Waves fifteen feet high. Mrs. Spinnaker showed up for the holidays—something she has never done before, and that alone created talk, of course. What was she doing here? And she was seen running down the beach with Horace. Running! Well, folks thought she’d gone mad. Neither one of them should have been on the beach with the surf like that. Anyhow, as I say, that’s the last anyone saw of her and it’s our opinion that she drowned going after that little dog. You know I always think small dogs are a mistake. So easily mislaid and I have it on good authority that Horace couldn’t swim.”
“No, I know,” says my mother, looking appalled and shocked.
“My mother saved him from drowning once,” I say.
“You don’t say, dear? Well, it appears Mrs. Spinnaker was not so lucky herself. And terrible for the sister because you know she’ll never know for sure. Of course, none of us but you knew her well. She kept to herself, that one.”
“Yes, I can’t say we knew her well. We knew Horace rather better,” says my mother. “He used to come for dinner now and again.”
“Yes, well, she would have done better to have kept him fenced in. It appears such freedom was what did him in, did both of them in. Of course, there’s always people who will say it was suicide.”
“It would have to be a suicide pact,” I say.
“How do you mean, dear?” says Mrs. Merriweather, leaning forward, always happy to speculate on the misfortunes of others.
“Because of Horace, of course,” I say.
“I see! I see!” she says with increasing interest.
“Oh nonsense, she’d never allow Horace to kill himself,” says my mother, and Mrs. Merriweather and I turn to her, happy to argue this point, when Maya comes up with a catalog and wants me to help her design a whole paper-doll village, so we go onto the porch and cut them out and occasionally the wind lifts one up and flies it out to sea.
“We should rescue them!” says Maya as we watch a woman in a long dress fly into the waves.
“Never mind,” I say to her. “They’re only having adventures.” And then I think of Mrs. Spinnaker blown out to sea and the possible adventures she may be having but it gives me goose bumps. Mrs. Spinnaker just doesn’t seem to me like the type of person to disappear at sea. She was so pragmatic. You can’t see her coming to such a romantic and untidy end. I think things sometimes don’t turn out the way you think. We construct these little ideas of how things are but they’re like stage sets, they don’t really mean anything at all. There are plans in motion that have nothing to do with your tidy little ideas. I’m sure Dorothy never expected to end up in a home in Ely all by herself and yet she will in two years when the money runs out. I think she thought she would die in the saddle.
I hear Ned being greeted by Mrs. Merriweather and his cries of astonishment as my mother tells him about Mrs. Spinnaker, and then Mrs. Merriweather, with great delight, relating all the gossip about everyone all over again.
We are happily settled into our lives, although not entirely, since there is still this awkwardness between me and Ned. Fortunately he is gone a lot, looking for work. Then one morning his phone rings. It is odd. We have given the number to no one in town.
Ned answers it and keeps saying “WHAT? HE WHAT!!!” When he hangs up he says, “Well, I’ll be blamed! I’ll be doggoned. I don’t believe it.”
“What?” says my mother. “What?”
“Ben has flown the coop. That was Candace. Mother called her to say that Ben went into town to deliver the three horses he sold and never came back. And apparently before he left, he turned Satan loose. Mom saw Satan from the bedroom window running across the grasslands by the pond. Candace says she kept asking Mom how she knew Ben wasn’t coming back and Mom wouldn’t tell her, just said that she knew and now she would have to move into the home in Ely. She was having a terrible time. She fell twice on the way to the bathroom and it took hours to get to her feet.”
“Oh no,” says my mother.
“And Satan’s running loose on the ranch. Candace can’t leave what she’s doing. Everyone is back at work but me. I’ll have to go. I’ll have to go, Felicity. What a mess.”
“What could have possessed Ben? He seemed such a nice boy.”
“Nice boy, schmice boy, a nice boy would have taught Jane to ride,” says Ned.
“Can we please not bring that up again?” I shout from the porch, where I have been listening in.
“I’m just saying!” Ned shouts back.
“Well, when are you going?” asks my mother.
“Tomorrow, I guess. We can’t leave her like that. The airfare is going to be horrendous but we’ll just have to take it out of John’s bag of money.”
Maya goes dashing into the kitchen from the porch. “I want to go too,” she says. “I want to see Dorothy. I want to
take an airplane ride.”
“No, Maya, Ned’s going to have his hands full,” says my mother.
“Oh, let her go, Felicity,” says Ned. “It will cheer Dorothy up no end. Much more than seeing me again.”
“But, Maya, you wanted to come home so badly,” says my mother.
“We’re going to rescue Dorothy!” says Maya.
“Maya, she’s not a paper doll,” I say, coming into the kitchen.
“All right, Maya,” says my mother.
I cannot believe it; my mother is letting Ned take Maya. Ned is not exactly reliable. Suppose she has nightmares or sees wolf shadows on walls? Or she has hysterics because they aren’t really rescuing Dorothy, they’re just moving her? Or she ends up terrified on the plane? Or she finds someplace even better to hide than the hayloft?
“Let me go too,” I say to my mother.
“You?” says my mother in surprise, but then it makes her happy. She is surprised I am willing to be around Ned. She sees this as a way to heal the breach, I can tell. She might have had second thoughts about letting Maya go—she knows what Maya is like too—but if I go with them, she wholeheartedly approves the plan. This will bring peace to her little family. I realize offering to go was a big mistake.
“All right, that’s a very good idea, Jane. You and Maya can help Ned and cheer up Dorothy. I’m sure she’ll be sad that Ben has left her in this way.”
“Great. Then it’s me and my girls,” says Ned happily.
Northward to the Moon
The plane ride, the first for me and Maya, is so wonderful that it almost makes me cease regretting saying I would come. I insist on the window seat so that I won’t have to spend the whole flight next to Ned. Also because I think putting Maya next to the window, where she can watch the ground disappear, is a mistake, but it turns out I am wrong, as she spends the whole time leaning over me trying to peer down at the ground anyway. You can just never tell with Maya.
When we get to Dorothy’s house it is too late to try to do anything about Satan. Dorothy doesn’t seem too badly off, just a little subdued. The kitchen is a mess. She has found handling her walker and cooking difficult and has just been opening cans and leaving dishes about. But she is clearly very pleased with herself.
Northward to the Moon Page 12
