Mending the Moon

by Susan Palwick

  And then, finally, they were done with presents, which was a little awkward because Jeremy didn’t have anything for Uncle Walter. He felt rotten about that, but he had no idea what the guy could use. Everybody told him not to feel bad: anything Walter needed, he already had. But Aunt Rosie cried.

  Then they all stopped crying and ate, which was the only decent part of the day. Jeremy had baked some beer bread and made a cheese soufflé, and bread pudding for dessert. He hadn’t had the energy to cook anything for Thanksgiving, so he tried to make up for it at Christmas. Everyone said how delicious his food was, and seemed to mean it, which made him as happy as anything could.

  The week between Christmas and New Year’s was a blur. He listened to a lot of music. He pigged out on a gift basket Mom’s coworkers at the library had sent, which was really damned comradely of them, and even roused himself to write a thank-you note. He watched DVDs, including all three of the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, which made an entire day vanish in a surfeit of clashing swords, hairy hobbit feet, and travel-brochure vistas of New Zealand. It was a perfect way to lose a day, but he could only do it once. The four Comrade Cosmos movies are the only ones he’s ever been able to keep on infinite loop, but he saw the first one with Mom, and refused to see the second one with Mom, and got the DVDs of the last two from Mom, so he can’t watch them right now without thinking about her even more than usual, which means he can’t watch them. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to watch them again.

  Mom’s a constant background buzz in his brain. White noise. TV static.

  That week between holidays always felt like dead time even when Mom was alive. This year, it was torture.

  And then New Year’s Eve: a quiet dinner at VB’s, old movies like Bringing Up Baby and North by Northwest until midnight, and then apple cider, because VB doesn’t like champagne. Jeremy actually agrees with her on this, although he doesn’t like the cider either. It’s too sweet.

  And now, finally, January. He gives one last stretch, rolls out of bed, and goes downstairs to make coffee. It’s good French roast—none of that flavored crap Mom liked, hazelnut and peppermint and whatnot—and he has some German stollen from Aunt Rosie to eat with it. After his breakfast, he showers, throws on sweats, and steels himself to begin unearthing Mom’s study.

  He can’t even remember the last time he was fully in the room. When they were both still living here, he’d often stop in the doorway to tell her whatever he needed to say—that he was going out, that he was back in, that he’d finished unloading the dishwasher—but he rarely crossed the threshold. There’s only one chair in the room, a rolling office job Mom could scoot wherever she needed to go. Consciously or not, she designed the space to be perfect for her, but not to welcome anyone else.

  He stands on the threshold now, bare toes clenched on the hardwood floor, and scans the room. Two windowed walls meet at right angles; Mom staked out the space because of the light. The windowsills are cluttered with rocks and paperweights and plants, mostly cacti, which is good because he hasn’t been in here to water them. It’s all pretty dusty, but it was dusty even when Mom was alive.

  Her desk sits diagonally between the windows. She spent a fortune on that desk. It’s a wooden rolltop with ornately carved legs, designed to look old, and Jeremy has always thought it would suit VB better than Mom. It’s new, though, and has built-in file drawers and a slide-out keyboard shelf and openings for computer cables in the back. Whenever Jeremy’s seen the surface of the desk, it’s been a blizzard of papers and stickies and paper clips and Mom’s ever-present rocks. Sometimes he thinks she went to library school because it forced her to be organized, but she always said that the beauty of the rolltop was that you could just close the lid on all that.

  The lid’s closed now. He wonders what he’ll find underneath.

  Every available bit of wall space has shelves piled with books. Some of the shelves are stand-alone units, often bought at yard sales; Mom always gloated over these, since, chronically short on bookshelves herself, she could never imagine why anyone else would sell them. The books are shelved two and three deep, with piles of more books teetering in front of them whenever there’s enough space. There are lots of natural-science books, especially about botany and geology and astronomy. Lots of other nonfiction stuff, especially art and design and local history. There’s a whole shelf of church books, a slew of C. S. Lewis and Bonhoeffer and Barbara Brown Taylor, although Mom kept her Book of Common Prayer, along with Laura Ingalls Wilder, in her bedroom, which is why Jeremy had those to give at Christmas. There’s a fiction section: the Mitford series, the Narnia series, a really battered set of Oz books from when Mom was a kid, Kristin Lavransdatter, George Eliot. And there are at least four shelves of books about kids, about adoption, about Guatemala.

  Jeremy knows he has to go through all of it, but he’ll save those shelves for last.

  In front of the desk, flanked by all those bookshelves, is a round table. Mom couldn’t close the lid on this one, and it’s heaped with stuff, papers stacked every which way, her checkbook on top of a pile of something that looks like bills—although Tom must have paid them, since the power hasn’t been turned off—a bunch of maps and library books, mostly about Mexico. She must have been studying them before she left. Jeremy looks at the teetering pile and nearly despairs. Just cleaning off this table is going to be a nightmare.

  All right. Start with the computer. Along with compulsively collecting rocks and books, Mom made constant to-do lists, usually discarded and replaced with new ones before she’d crossed off half the items, or even any of them. When Jeremy was younger, a perpetual drift of lists—lists on counters, on the fridge, taped to walls—was part of the landscape of the house. But about two years ago, Mom started keeping one master list on her computer. It covered everything but groceries; that list still lived on the fridge. If he can get some sense of what her priorities were, maybe he’ll know where to start in here. If he’s lucky, maybe her reminders to herself will be directions for him.

  He takes a deep breath and steps into the room, talking himself through it. Over the threshold: good. Past the table of doom. Quick glance out the window at the dead garden—he has a narrow, fleeting sense that in a few months it will be green and growing again, but the vision vanishes too quickly to be called hope—and then turn to the rolltop desk. Fuss with Mom’s chair, a super-adjustable mesh thing that looks like an alien exoskeleton, so it will be high enough and deep enough for you. Fix it so you can lean back if you need to, so you can recline and breathe, take a break from the desk to stare up at the ceiling.

  Open the rolltop desk.

  It sticks a little, and for a panicky moment Jeremy’s afraid that she locked it and that he’ll have to search for the key, a quest that could take years, but then, blessedly, it gives. The top rolls back with a clacking noise, like a stick dragged along an iron fence.

  Rocks, stickies, books, papers, paper clips, rubber bands, index cards, file folders. Another map of Mexico. Pens and pencils and scissors and tape, a stapler, a hole punch. He doesn’t know how all of this can even fit on the desktop, but it’s about what he expected, with the computer monitor plunk in the middle of everything, surrounded by strata of crud. No wonder Mom loved looking at striped cliff faces so much.

  He turns on the computer and waits for it to boot up, and then stares in dismay at the screen. “Shit.” The computer’s password-protected, and he has no idea what the password is. He doesn’t know how many tries he has before the system shuts him out. He could look for it in Mom’s files, but he doesn’t think even Mom was naive enough to have a file labeled “Computer Password.” If she wrote it down at all, it’s probably scribbled on one of the bits of paper in the study. Jeremy could call Tom and ask if he knows it, but he decides to save that as a last resort. Today’s a holiday.

  He stares glumly at the blinking cursor. Okay. What would Mom pick as her password? He thinks for a minute, and then, on a whim, types his own n
ame: Jeremy.

  Logging in, the computer tells him, and then the homescreen appears.

  Oh, Mom.

  You aren’t supposed to use anything as obvious as an only child’s name as your password. Mom knew that. She’d done it anyway.

  Sighing, he opens the “My Documents” folder and sorts by date. Sure enough, there’s “Todolist.doc,” right at the top. Jeremy opens it.

  After Mexico: dentist, pick up dry-cleaning, make ALA res, oil change, finish Xmas shopping for J.

  Finish. Which means she’d started. Yes, of course she had. As disorganized as she was about everything else, she started her Christmas shopping in January, because of the sales. Jeremy always left his until the last minute, but she was usually done in March. She wrapped stuff as she got it, which meant sometimes she didn’t remember what she’d bought. One year he’d gotten two of the same CC action figure. He was surprised that this late in the year, she’d had any shopping left to do at all.

  He realizes that somewhere in the house, she must have hidden wrapped presents for him. Of course she did. Why hasn’t he thought about that until now? It never occurred to him. He thought about Peanuts and her party and the Christmas Eve service, but not the hidden presents? Why?

  Because it hurts too much.

  Jeremy sits in his mother’s insectoid chair and hugs himself. Should he look for his gifts? Does he want to? They must be in here, in the study. Should he look now, or leave them hidden, a surprise to be discovered in the course of sorting through the monumental volume of crap in here?

  But his eyes have already gone to the cabinet doors under one of the bookshelves, which used to be an entertainment unit. His presents have to be there. It’s the only place in the room she could have hidden them.

  * * *

  Melinda sits cross-legged on the living room floor, wrapping one of Jeremy’s Christmas gifts. It’s September, and he’s been living in the dorms for a month. As little as they’ve been talking lately, she desperately misses having him in the house.

  She’s been watching a popular-science program, BBC’s biography of the planet. Last night she learned that the moon is slowly creeping away from the Earth, getting a centimeter farther away every year. This news fills Melinda with melancholy. The moon can’t be mended, and it’s slipping away, a scarred child trying to leave its parent. Jeremy’s doing the same thing, although—given the state of the economy—a centimeter a year may be all he can manage.

  Wrapping Christmas gifts comforts her. In a few months, he’ll be home for winter break.

  She never knows what to get him anymore, though. He’s still into Comrade Cosmos, but his tastes have changed. For his birthday this year she got him a T-shirt that showed CC standing defiantly, holding up a hammer and nails, while EE loomed as a swirling mist behind him. She thought it was a great image, but Jeremy sneered at it. “Mom, that’s Sally Honu’s work, and she’s a totally second-rate artist. Victor Evans and Erica James are so much better.”

  Clearly, she no longer has the chops to choose good gifts, although to be fair, he might have sneered at anything she gave him. “You can return it,” she told him, unable to keep from snapping. “I kept the receipt.” She felt both vindicated and ashamed when he blushed.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry, Mom. It was nice of you to try. It’s one of Honu’s better panels, really.”

  He liked the chocolate she gave him, and he really enjoyed their meal at Fourth Street Bistro, an extravagance she allowed herself because it was his last birthday before he left for school. He savored the food, exclaimed over the seasoning, asked smart questions when the owner stopped by the table to see how they were enjoying their meal. He’s never liked Melinda’s cooking—with the notable exception of her lasagna, which she cooks for him but won’t eat herself, since it contains meat—but it turns out that he loves nouvelle cuisine.

  Today at Sundance Books she saw a cookbook from Tra Vigne, a swanky Northern Italian restaurant in Napa she and Rosemary and Walter went to once during a winery tour. She bought it for Jeremy and wrote on the inside cover, Their food’s a little like Fourth Street’s; maybe you can learn to cook your own! Happy eating! Love, Mom.

  Jeremy’s never been an academic superstar. He’s certainly bright enough, but he’s a classic underachiever, and she worries about him in college. He barely even got into UNR, which is a decent state school but no Harvard, and as desperate as he’s been to get out of the house, he had no interest in applying anywhere else. The way Veronique slides around any discussion of how he’s doing in her class is sufficient indication that Melinda’s worry is well-founded. He enjoys cooking, though—he’s always been happy to make breakfast or whip up batches of cookies for church coffee hour, even after he stopped going to church—and she hopes the cookbook may nudge him to think about being a chef, or at least pursuing the hobby more seriously.

  She hopes it isn’t too much of a nudge. She knows she has to be careful. He’s so prickly these days, so resentful of any suggestion that she has an agenda for him. She doesn’t know how much of this is normal growing pains and how much is his continuing issues with the adoption.

  She reminds herself that he’s an adolescent. If he didn’t have issues with the adoption, he’d have issues with something else, and thank God his physical health has always been good. If there are any lingering developmental delays from the orphanage, Melinda can’t detect them. He’s an indifferent student, but so are lots of kids who didn’t spend their first few years institutionalized in war-torn countries.

  Sighing, she smooths the Christmas paper around the book and tapes it. Then she clambers to her feet and walks into her study. There’s too much stuff on the floor right now for her to sit and wrap in here. She really needs to straighten up.

  She always needs to straighten up.

  Laughing at herself, she opens the cabinet under the shelves of geology books—this unit was one of her better yard-sale finds—and pulls out the shopping bag of Jeremy’s gifts. She’s wrapped them already, but she recognizes them by shape and size. More chocolate, a gourmet assortment of fair-trade dark ranging from 65% to 90% cacao. A red woolen pullover, since red has always been Jeremy’s favorite color. The soundtrack of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. That one’s a bit of a risk, since any day now she expects him to disdain their old tradition as childish, but the CD was on huge sale at Borders last January.

  She puts the wrapped book in the bag and replaces it in the cabinet. Since he’s not living at home, she probably doesn’t have to be so careful about hiding stuff in here, but this way he can’t stumble across anything on his rare visits, and she doesn’t have to worry about reminding herself to hide the bag before he comes home on Christmas break.

  She closes the cabinet, stands, and rocks back on her heels, stretching her lower back. There are still a few things she wants to get him, small stuff. Stocking stuffers, really: things she knows he’ll use. Some of his favorite razors, socks, a pencil case since he’s been keeping pens and pencils in a Ziploc bag in his backpack. And of course she’ll bring something back from Mexico for him, probably a souvenir for right away and something a bit nicer for Christmas.

  The holidays always go so fast. She’s glad she’s planned this Mexico trip, though. Part of her current sadness, she knows, is the annual advent of shorter days, whatever the moon’s doing. By October, sun and warm water will be just what she needs, a final taste of summer before winter kicks in.

  * * *

  Still in her bathrobe, hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, Veronique sits at her tiny kitchen table and stares balefully at her calendar. January 1. That means that the holidays are over. Tomorrow, she’ll have to start prepping her spring classes. It’s not like this will be a tremendous amount of work—she’s teaching a Women & Lit class she’s done a million times and a nineteenth-century British survey, one of her bread-and-butter courses—but just thinking about it makes her chest ache. In a little over two weeks, she’ll be back in the classroom, dealing wit
h a new crop of blunted brains.

  Melinda always took her out to dinner on the first day of class. It happened by accident the first time; they’d been trying to find a time to have dinner, and that night just happened to work. Halfway through the meal, Veronique made some offhand comment about how nice this was, a little reward for making it through the first day of classes, and Melinda promptly said, “Well then, we’ll have to make it a tradition.”

  And so they had, for what, seven or eight years now? The first day of classes, both spring and fall semester—and the one year Veronique was foolish enough to teach summer school, which left her feeling like she’d been flattened by an army tank—they invariably went out for Thai food. The tradition had become more important each year, as Veronique’s boredom with teaching morphed into active hatred of it.

  Classes start in two weeks. What’s she going to do?

  She’s weeping now, furious at herself but still flummoxed by the question, which feels like a real and pressing problem. She could take herself out to dinner, but that would feel like an exercise in misery. The real problem is that she dreads returning to the classroom. Her courses this semester are essentially prepped, but that’s because she’s taught them so often that they bore her into somnolence.

  She could get in her car tomorrow, drive to Canada, and vanish. Go AWOL. Who cares how cold it is this time of year? Maybe the weather would deter people from looking for her. She pictures herself leaping across ice floes to reach freedom, like Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.