Mending the Moon

by Susan Palwick

  Fuck. This is much further than Archipelago meant to go. Panicking, she tries to decide what to do. They could trace the landline in her apartment, and maybe her cell phone, too, couldn’t they? How long does a trace take? Can she risk it?

  E-mail. She can go to the library, create a fictitious Google account, and send an anonymous e-mail. They’ll trace it to the library, but lots of people use the library. Although fewer people use the library now than used to, before the fire, and are there security cameras? Archipelago can’t remember.

  Just as she’s resolved to attempt the library anyway, the radio announcer interrupts himself with “devastating news.” The Mayor has died.

  Also, a bar dart has been found behind the rally grandstand. With fingerprints on it.

  Shit. Shit shit shit. Why didn’t she think of that?

  It’s the lack of sleep. It’s the migraine. It’s the fact that for all her sneering bravado, Archipelago has never been an actual criminal, and has no idea how to go about it properly.

  She’s an actual criminal now, isn’t she? Wanted for murder.

  Of course the police know that the perpetrator will be trying to get out of town. There will be blockades. She can’t run on her Harley; it would be too conspicuous.

  Think, Archipelago. Think. It’s the beginning of the month. The rent’s just been paid. Barring some compulsory roll call, which Archipelago wouldn’t put past the current power structure for a second, she has about four weeks before anyone will notice she’s gone.

  She opens her closet door, extracts a small backpack, puts Erasmus into a large jar with holes in the lid, puts another jar with all her crickets and cockroaches next to it, piles all her cash and coins into a pocket, and sets out on foot, whistling down the stairs as if she hasn’t a care in the world, as if she’s merely out for a Sunday stroll on this lovely day. She cuts across lawns and through alleys, angling away from any lights or noise that might be police, and in due course finds herself, miraculously, in open country.

  Archipelago Osprey is now a fugitive.

  12

  “Don’t throw that out, please.” Anna, wrapped in wool and Gore-Tex against the damp March cold, has just come in from walking the dog. William’s standing at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, going through the mail, quickly sorting it into Real and Junk. He’s put the latest CC issue on the Junk pile.

  “What?” He picks up an envelope, waves it: some zero-interest credit card offer. “You need another card?”

  “No, William.” She unclips Bart’s leash; he shakes himself, shedding water, and ambles up to William for a pat. “Comrade Cosmos.”

  “Oh, okay.” She’s on the living room side of the breakfast bar. He slides the shrink-wrapped issue across to her. “Somewhere in there it should explain how to cancel the subscription. We should have done it ages ago.”

  “I don’t want to cancel it.” She tries to keep her voice mild. She usually gets the mail, so he doesn’t realize she hasn’t been tossing the issues. “I’m reading those.”

  William looks at her, eyebrows raised. “Really.”

  “Yes, really.”

  He frowns now. “Huh. You okay?”

  That, she thinks, has to be the stupidest question anyone has ever asked her. “Of course I’m not okay. Neither are you. But that’s beside the point.”

  He shakes his head. “Speak for yourself. I’m fine.”

  She just looks at him. She doesn’t even know how to respond to this, but his head’s cocked in the attitude that means he’s waiting for an answer. She chooses her words carefully. “You’re functioning. We’re both functioning. You’re back at work. We’re paying the bills. We get up every morning and eat breakfast and do what’s necessary. But we’re not fine. Not individually, not together. Our only son killed himself four months ago after raping and murdering a stranger. If we were fine, something would be very wrong.”

  William’s staring at her as if she’s speaking Martian, perhaps because this is the longest set of sentences she’s directed at him since Percy died. Then he frowns, almost imperceptibly. “Percy wasn’t fine. We are, Anna.” Individually, or together? She doesn’t dare ask. “We can’t blame ourselves.”

  She feels like she’s juggling ten-ton weights. Her eyes ache. “With or without blame, there’s still grief.” And now she feels like a fortune cookie. Great. “Don’t you miss him?”

  He’s frowning again. “Of course I miss him. Dwelling on it won’t do any good. You need to get out of the house more. It really helps.”

  I was just out of the house, she thinks. I’m the only one who walks the damn dog anymore. “Maybe I do, William. But joining clubs and committees wouldn’t fix this, even if they’d have me.” He knows Blake kicked her off the board. She hasn’t had the courage to attend her knitting group, since the woman who hosts it is another Blake parent. “I’ll plan Kip’s opening, and I’ll probably enjoy it, but that’s it. When is the opening, anyway? Has he scheduled it yet?”

  “He went to another gallery.”

  “He what?” Anna’s genuinely shocked. “How could he do that? You gave him his first show when no one else would, and now he pulls out when the stuff’s selling? Oh, Will, I’m so sorry!”

  It occurs to her in a dizzy rush that she and William have shared ground again: they’ve both been rejected by their peers, and maybe that will bring them closer together. But William’s staring at her with the baffled expression he wears so often these days. “It’s all right. People move on. I always knew he wouldn’t stay forever.”

  Anna blinks away the eerie sense that William’s really talking about Percy. She hopes Kip had the decency to fire William in person, at least, and not to write a letter. “When did you find out? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It wasn’t important. I didn’t want to bother you with it.”

  Anna closes her eyes. She remembers when William told her everything that happened at the gallery, when he sought her advice and used her as a sounding board. How have they arrived here?

  She reaches across the breakfast bar to touch William’s hand. It’s a calculated gesture. “Will, I wish you’d told me. If you want me to get more involved with life again, you have to talk to me.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about Percy. You don’t want to talk about anything else, and you won’t talk to anyone else, and I can’t take that weight, Anna.”

  She tightens her grip on his hand. “You can’t pretend everything’s normal. You can’t pretend you aren’t sick over this, don’t miss him, don’t wonder why—”

  “Stop.” He pulls his hand away. “I told you, I don’t want to hear it. I wish I did. I wish I was able to. But I can’t. Find a therapist, Anna.”

  She swallows hysteria, takes a gamble. “If I do, will you come with me? Couples counseling—”

  “No.” He turns away from her. He is, she can tell, poised to leave the room. “That won’t change anything.”

  “It won’t change what happened to Percy,” she says. It might change the vacuum in the house, the hollow roar where there used to be a marriage, but if she’s going to say that, she wants it to be when they’re both sitting down, facing each other. Not to his back. “It might change what happens to us.” She doesn’t know if this is oblique enough or not; in any case, William’s walked away from her, down the hall to his study. She doesn’t even know if he’s heard her. Bart, following him, turns around to look at her inquiringly. “Go on,” she tells the dog, and he trots happily after William.

  Trembling, she picks up the CC issue and turns to walk the other way, to Percy’s room, where she’s been spending more and more time. The boxes the police brought back are all unpacked, the computer on the desk and the clothing laundered and folded and put in drawers and closet. She knows she should donate the clothing, and she will, but not yet.

  As she promised herself in January, she’s been going steadily through the CC archives, reading from the beginning. She’s started to allow herself t
o read the new weekly issues as they arrive, though, even if sometimes she doesn’t quite understand what’s happening. That way, she doesn’t have the suffocating sense of continuously falling farther behind.

  That suffocation, she knows, is the Emperor’s work.

  She began the series expecting to scoff at it, to be bored and annoyed. Instead, she found herself being pulled deeper into the story, found resonance of it everywhere she turned. Since November, she has been engaged in a struggle with the Emperor of Entropy, with despair and meaninglessness and mortality, with decay. It amazes her that such a huge pop-culture phenomenon can speak so directly to a middle-aged woman.

  She wonders how it spoke to Percy. When he first started following the series, he tried to tell her about it a few times, but she could never keep herself from changing the subject out of sheer boredom. Now she aches to go back and redo those conversations.

  She wonders, though, what the series has to say to anyone Percy’s age, to all those youngsters obsessed with dating and mating and money and jobs and clothing. At that age, she’d simply have found it odd and unfathomable. When she was twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five, her most serious experiences with entropy were traffic jams and dirty laundry.

  Anna closes the door to Percy’s room. She’d leave it open if she were alone in the house, so Bart wouldn’t feel abandoned. She can’t stand his whining when he’s in the house and lonely, which has been happening more often lately. She’s once again begun to entertain fantasies of selling Bart or giving him away or leaving him somewhere or having him put down, but the image of him pulling against his leash as Percy wades into the water always stops her. And, she reminds herself, he’s an old dog now. Eight is ancient, for a Wolfhound. She’ll lose Bart, too, soon enough. In the meantime, since William’s home right now, she can keep the door closed. Bart still prefers William to Anna, which is fine with her.

  She really needs to talk to William about the dog-walking issue, even if he won’t discuss anything else. If he doesn’t want to walk the dog, maybe they can hire someone. Maybe that someone will fall in love with Bart and run off with him.

  No. Anna glances at Percy’s desk, at the framed photo of him with the puppy. Percy loved this creature. In a way, he’s all of Percy they have left, the best of Percy. Maybe that’s why William now has so little to do with the dog. In any case, it’s why Anna is irrevocably tied to the animal, for better or worse, bad breath and shedding and all, which is more at the moment than she can say for William.

  A Stanford 2009–2010 academic calendar hangs over the desk. Percy never wrote on it, but Anna has. She blinks at today’s square. Wednesday, March 10: Melinda Soto’s birthday.

  Her throat constricts. That poor woman. Those poor people. Riding a wave of rage at Percy, she forces herself to stare at the photograph, to remember him as the sweet child who played with his dog.

  Melinda Soto had a son. She’d have understood, surely.

  When the rest of the world hates your child, with reason or without, you cling to your love for him. You’re his mother. Loving him is your job.

  Trembling only a little, Anna sits on the bed and opens the plastic wrapping around the issue, taking pains not to tear the cover. Percy was very careful with CC as a physical object, and so she is, too. She has a sudden, vivid memory of Percy telling his father—who was marginally more interested in the topic than Anna, or at least willing to pretend he was—about the Comrade Cosmos Club at Stanford. Anna should write them, find out if any of them knew Percy, see if someone might be willing to speak at the memorial service.

  This is the first bit of planning she’s done for the event. Marjorie, ever efficient, booked the local Unitarian church for that day before she and David flew back home. “July 24 is a Saturday, Anna. We need to grab the building before someone books it for a wedding.” No one in the family’s religious, but holding memorial services in a church is What’s Done. Marjorie has an acute sense of such things, which she’s passed down in modified form to William. Anna could care less.

  She’s avoided even thinking about the service since Marjorie and David left; it’s some kind of irony that Comrade Cosmos brought her back to it. She starts to ponder a possible guest list, but this quickly becomes painful, another reminder of how isolated they’ve been. She’ll put a notice in the paper, and anyone who wants to be decent can come; surely everyone knows that a funeral isn’t the time for privacy.

  Anna and William and Marjorie and David will definitely be there. Anna’s pretty sure that Karen-who-brought-back-Bart would come, too, if she were invited. Bart should be there, too. Anna wonders if the Unitarians will allow a dog in the sanctuary.

  Percy’s ashes are currently in a brown cardboard box in Anna’s closet. It would be so much easier just to scatter them in the backyard, but that’s not What’s Done.

  Or is it? The memorial service isn’t about the disposition of the ashes. If they want to bury Percy in the backyard, they can. If they want to scatter him somewhere, they can do that, too. Where would he want to be scattered?

  This suddenly seems like an urgent question. Anna can’t believe she hasn’t thought of it before. Since William’s in the house, for once, maybe she should consult him. She stands up to go find him, but then remembers how he pulled his hand away from hers, how he walked away from her down the hall. He doesn’t want to talk about Percy.

  She sits down again and picks up the new issue.

  * * *

  On March 10, 2009, Melinda takes the day off work, an annual birthday treat. When Jeremy’s in college, she’ll be able to sleep in on her birthday, but since he’s still in high school, she has to get up early to get him up, fed, and out the door.

  She puts on a robe and pads downstairs, rapping on Jeremy’s bedroom door on the way. “Jer! Up ’n’ at ’em! Time’s a wasting!” She thinks she hears a groan in response. If he’s not in the kitchen in fifteen minutes, she’ll come back up and roust him more forcefully.

  Yawning, she starts the coffee, a peppermint chocolate roast she bought as a treat for today. It smells delicious, and she smiles when the odor starts to fill the kitchen.

  “God, Mom. How can you stand that stuff?”

  Jeremy, improbably, is awake and downstairs, standing scowling in his own bathrobe, a ratty blue terrycloth thing he refuses to let her replace.

  “Good morning. You don’t have to drink it.”

  “I have to smell it.”

  She decides to change the subject. “You’re up early.”

  “Spanish quiz. Michael and I are supposed to study before school.”

  “Ah,” Melinda says, swallowing past her disappointment. She’d briefly entertained a fantasy that he’d come down to surprise her with a gift, or even just an offer to cook breakfast. He hasn’t even said “happy birthday” yet. Has he forgotten? How could he?

  There’s still a chance that this is an elaborate ruse to surprise her, but the possibility’s fading, and the longer she waits to remind him, the more embarrassed he’ll be. She thinks. She hopes.

  “Jer? You know what today is, right?”

  He gives her such a blank look that she knows he’s forgotten. Jeremy has no acting ability whatsoever. “Tuesday. It is Tuesday, isn’t it? Yeah, it has to be, because yesterday was Monday, and—”

  “March 10,” she says gently, and he blinks at her for a moment before panic blooms across his face.

  “Oh, shit. Shit shit shit. Mom, I’m sorry. Happy birthday! I’m sorry.” He’s blushing. “I didn’t—I don’t know how I—”

  “It’s okay, honey.” If nothing else, this means he’ll be nice to her for the rest of the day. “It’s okay. Just sit down and have a nice breakfast so you’ll be ready for your Spanish quiz.”

  “I’ll cook!” he says, and he does, and it’s good. Jeremy knows his way around an omelette. He throws together cheese, veggies, spices, all of it ordinary enough but in just the right quantities. He even pours Melinda’s coffee, although he makes a great show
of wrinkling his nose as he carries the mug to the table. He even tries to make conversation about the library. She appreciates the effort.

  After he’s left for school, she goes back upstairs for another part of her birthday ritual. A framed photograph of her parents sits on her dresser. They’re very young in this picture, tan and lean, sitting in a rowboat smiling up at the camera. She doesn’t know who took the shot, but her mother told her once that it was taken just after Melinda was conceived.

  She carries the photograph downstairs, puts it on the kitchen table—which Jeremy cleared, mirabile dictu—and digs around in the cabinets until she finds a candle, which she lights. She sits in front of this makeshift altar and takes a deep breath.

  “I miss you guys.” This is almost always how she begins these birthday speeches to her dead. Her father died of a heart attack when she was thirty-five, her mother of cancer five years later. Neither of them knew Jeremy, whom Melinda adopted when she was forty-five. “I wish you were here to see your grandson. He’s eighteen now, and of course he thinks he’s all grown up, but I know better, just like you knew better when I was that age. I wish you were here to give me advice.” She swallows. Some years she has a sense of their presence; some years she imagines full conversations with them. This year, they’re mute.

  She keeps talking for a while, anyway. When it seems clear that nothing’s going to happen, she stops. Maybe next year.

  When Jeremy was in his Charlotte’s Web phase, terrified of death, she told him about this ritual, told him that you never really lose the people you love. You just can’t see them anymore, and that’s hard, but they’re still with you. “It’s like when we water the plants,” she told him. “The water sinks into the soil, and you can’t see it, but it’s still keeping the plants alive. Whenever we love people or they love us, the love sinks into us and helps us keep going, even when the people aren’t here anymore.”