The Pull of the Moon

by Julie Paul

  “Really? She said you didn’t want kids.”

  He leans closer. “I love that child more than anything. More than Erica wants to believe. I wanted her from the get-go—she was the one who wasn’t sure she even wanted to stay pregnant.”

  You frown, and lean away. Is he for real? “Erica? No.”

  “She’s a good storyteller. Don’t believe it all.”

  “Did you ask Erica about the nightmares?”

  “Not yet,” he says. “But I will when I drop Beany off tonight.”

  “They’re normal at this age,” you say. “I read about it in a book.”

  “Yeah, well, the experts don’t know everything.” He stands up and calls to the girls. “Okay, who wants to go down the big slide?”

  Both of them start shrieking, “Me! Me!” and you give David the nod when he asks if Angela can go with him.

  You wonder if you should trust this guy, someone you’ve only met once before, full of stories that you don’t want to believe. But Beany is with him. He’ll watch both girls carefully. There is a lifeguard at the top of the slide, too. People are doing their jobs. The kids will be perfectly safe. You hop into the steam room to warm up while they have their fun, grateful to David for giving you a few moments of quiet.

  IMAGINING YOURSELF AS ERICA

  Know that you might be making it up, but allow that thought to go out the window, because you are as much of an expert on the subject as the next person. You knew her. You knew how she and Beany lived, and that’s what you think of when you create the scene.

  Supply list: Blender, stuffies, girl, bathtub, medication, headache, a child’s complete trust in her mother.

  Feel a pounding headache. Rattle a couple of Tylenol 3s onto your palm, and when you set them on your tongue, taste their smooth, bitter surface before taking a mouthful of water. As you swallow, feel something else enter you like a surge of electricity, like a wave filling a hollowed stone. An idea; a way to deal with things.

  Whip your head back to help the pills slide better, and try to relax your throat to ease them down. Your throat is narrow, good at trying to protect you from swallowing something the body doesn’t want.

  Remember that your daughter has the same kind of throat. Remember her as a baby, how she had put all kinds of things in her mouth: marbles, a carpet staple, a screw, stickers. Some of these she had swallowed, but not without trouble. The unicorn sticker was the worst, the way it had seemed to cover the opening in her tiny esophagus like a lid. It had made her cries go flat, then wheezy and high. Remember this, how her cries came back to normal when you pried that sticker from her throat. How good you felt when she was finally quiet.

  Feel no headache now, but feel instead an idea. The idea is growing into a plan. The plan grows.

  Say, “Let’s make a smoothie,” when the girl putters out in her striped pyjamas. Feel Beany lean against your legs as you fill the blender with bananas and berries, yogurt and maple syrup, everything she loves and more.

  Watch as the machine mixes everything together, the same magical disappearing trick you love to watch every morning. It is good to have routines, the experts on split families tell you. Habits, special things to share. Pour the smoothie into Beany’s favourite Snow White tumbler.

  Notice, when she’s finished drinking it, how she is sleepy again. Watch as she lies down on the carpet, tries to get up, and can’t. Listen to her crying, saying, “Mama, Mama, I’m sick.” See her throw up on her princess carpet, lay her head back onto her stuffed pig, start convulsing again.

  Tell her, “It’s okay, baby. You’re going to be just fine,” as Beany’s eyes start rolling back in her head.

  Look around for something to help you; grab Beany’s dog stuffie. Place it over the girl’s face, and hold it there. “Doggy will help you.”

  Do not look away as Beany struggles a little, tries to move her face, to get air, to keep her eyes, wide with terror, on her mother.

  Say, “It’s okay, my love. Everything is okay now.”

  Keep the pressure on until Beany stops making any sound, then stops moving altogether.

  Sit there, for a few moments, with your daughter’s body in the quiet of the late summer morning. Then, quick as it had come, feel the idea leave you. Scream and pick Beany up, run into the bathroom, lay Beany in the tub and run cold water on her, to wake her. Keep screaming. Keep hoping none of this is real.

  Run back into the kitchen and find the knife you used on the bananas. Slice into your wrists, but not enough to make you die. Wait for the neighbours to break in, for them to find you, hysterical and bleeding. To find Beany, still in the bathroom, water running over her small, pale face, into her ears and open mouth, into her half-open eyes.

  YOU GET A PHONE CALL

  Even though you don’t like to answer the phone, you always do. It could be Michael. It could be the school. Recently it was a woman telling you to subscribe to Maclean’s magazine, since it was for people like you. You wondered if she knew you, and how much did she know, and what kind of person are you anyway?

  Today, Erica’s old boss calls, telling you to write a letter, drop her a line, be a supportive friend.

  “She’s in the Women’s Provincial Detention Centre,” she tells you. “I have the address for you.”

  “What?” you say. “What did you say?”

  “She could use our support,” she says. “I can’t imagine how lonely it must be in there.”

  You have talked to this woman a few times, and have always thought of her as sane. “I’m sorry,” you tell her, holding on to the counter so you won’t fall. “I think I better go now.”

  “Erica tried to kill herself,” she says. “She lost her daughter!”

  “Lost? Lost? No. She didn’t lose her. She wanted to keep her from her father, because he got custody.”

  The woman doesn’t seem to hear you. “She needs us more than ever. It was all a horrible mistake. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

  You could believe in fate, or chicken soup, or the stages of grief if you wanted to. Feeling the sadness. Mourning the one who has died. Acceptance. But these tools are for getting over the death.

  You befriended a woman who killed her child, a person who put your own family in psychic danger. What tools exist for that?

  “I gave her what I could,” you tell her. “I’m done.”

  But after you hang up, you write a letter. You write ten letters. None of them say what you want them to say. None of them get mailed.

  JUST A SMALL PART OF THE AFTERMATH

  David is sick now. Pain all over, he tells you, like bugs are burrowing tunnels inside his skin. His life is one big list of should-haves. He visits the gravesite daily and brings her lemonade and Popsicles and cinnamon toothpicks and sticky buns. You saw him once in the grocery store, filling his basket. This is his life now. Beany is gone, but he’s still her daddy, still giving her what she loved.

  She loved.

  You drive past David’s house regularly, hoping he’ll be outside so you can see his face when he recognizes you. To see how much blame he might give you. How much he keeps for himself.

  What you keep thinking: the ripples keep moving out when a stone is thrown, but the stone sinks quickly. Erica is put away, but you and everyone else are still here, out here, without Beany, without the Erica you knew. The one you loved. You still have other friends, but they are wary, a bit cooler now that they know how close you were with a killer.

  You haven’t made any new connections. You don’t know what to look for; you don’t know how to judge.

  You think of her in her cell, sometimes, when you’re lying in bed. You make lists of signs you should have picked up on. Your lists are short. Your nights are long. Instead of sleep, you turn to the mantra of I’m sorry, Beany, repeat it under your breath until you must drift off. That’s the thing about sleep. It takes you down without you knowing. In your kinder moments, you imagine Erica’s madness hitting her like this, something beyond her a
bility to notice or control.

  WHAT YOU HEAR ON THE RADIO

  One morning, you catch the middle of a broadcast from a women’s penitentiary on the East Coast, after they’ve completed a survey about conditions. “The beds are hard,” the voice says. “The sheets give me a rash. But what can you do? Two years in, I’m getting used to it.”

  You feel a chill rush over your whole body. It’s Erica’s voice.

  “And how is the staff treating you?” the interviewer asks her.

  “One of the guards likes to flirt with me,” Erica says, giggling a little. “But I’m not complaining.”

  The interview moves on, to another woman, who starts in on a tirade about the foul-tasting water. No crimes are mentioned. These women are innocent consumers, complaining about their lot in life. You turn the radio off and sit down on one of the stools surrounding your kitchen island. You want to throw things, you want to weep. You want to call your friend, that one on the radio, because you miss her. Your insides are churning. She still sounds like the woman who sat with you here, on these stools, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  Instead you sit like a stone until your daughter comes into the kitchen and wraps you up in her sleepy smell and asks for breakfast.

  And what does she want? A smoothie.

  YOUR FONDEST MEMORY

  One day during her last summer, just days before she died, Beany and Erica had come over for tea. You were outside in the backyard, under the apple tree, seeking its shade. Then Erica went inside to the bathroom. “Wrap us up, Mommy,” your daughter said. “Let’s play Hot Dog!” You made this game up when she was just a toddler, where you wrapped her in a blanket and then pretended to squirt her with giant bottles of ketchup and mustard, which were really tickles down her sides.

  The girls had been playing on an old sleeping bag, so you lay Beany out on the plaid inner layer and rolled her into a wiener. Beany loved it, she was laughing like mad, and Angela helped you to squirt her with the imaginary condiments.

  Then you and Angela lay down beside Beany, one on each side, like you were two halves of a bun, and then you reached an arm across and squeezed both girls as tight as you could, without hurting them. You all looked into the tree branches above you, and noticed how many small apples there were, and you made a list of what you’d make in the fall.

  Squirrel People

  “Who is it?” Sheri was using her honeyed voice.

  Dylan should have said the Big Bad Wolf. Instead he admitted his real name and his affiliation—the upstairs neighbour—and after she’d opened the door, wearing a see-through purple negligee with bows and garters beneath, his purpose for knocking.

  “Uh, your lights,” he said. “Your car lights are on.” He pointed at the driveway, in case she couldn’t remember where the car was.

  “Oh, silly me! I was just getting ready for beddy-bye.” She pointed at her ensemble.

  “Okay. Well. Have a good night, then.”

  “Oh,” Sheri said, “I will.”

  Had she just winked at him?

  Dylan walked upstairs to the apartment he shared with his wife and daughter and poured himself a vodka and ginger ale. The long day was nearly over. His wife, Jess, and three-year-old daughter, Lulu, were visiting Grandma. Back by ten. He wadded the note and tossed it. He had just enough time for a Law & Order rerun.

  Dylan had the volume down low because that’s what neighbours do, but he could hear them below. Sheri and Mario. He wondered if Sheri took the garters off or not. The thought messed up his ability to follow the crime on the TV show, because that’s what brains do—they bring up naughty images. According to Jess, the people below were every kind of wrong. Mario smoked inside, Sheri smoked more—pot, too—and it rose through the spaces in the old house-turned-apartments, into everyone else’s suites. If they weren’t screwing, they were fighting. Often they fought outside in the backyard, just below the bedroom window. Sheri swore expertly and spent her days off talking non-stop on her cellphone while tanning and drinking cider from a two-litre bottle. He, Mario, was quiet: he took it all like a scarecrow, a perpetual cigarette at the corner of his mouth.

  Dylan could smell smoke now; yes, the after-love puff. He’d never smoked much himself, but he could understand the ritual. He wasn’t allowed to forgive them, though. Jess was drafting an email to the landlord, despite Mario’s being the landlord’s nephew. It’s the law, Jess said, and he’s breaking it. “And their negative energy is pervasive, messing up your cells,” she’d said. “It spreads like an infection.”

  He didn’t feel it; or if he did, he could block it out pretty well.

  Jess and Lulu woke him from a nice couch nap, and once he got the whiny child to bed, he and Jess made love, quiet as thieves aside from the springs, then took their creaky walk to the bathroom and ran a bubble bath. Dylan imagined Mario and Sheri lying in bed listening below, mapping out the lives of their upstairs neighbours, talking about them and feeling lucky they didn’t have a kid of their own dropping things, yelling, crying out in nightmares.

  But the next morning, Dylan and Jess were not startled from their lavender sleep by Lulu’s bad dreams. No, they awoke to the neighbours out in the yard, calling the squirrels.

  “Hey, Blackie,” Sheri said. “Hey, Grey!”

  “Watch this.” They heard Mario clicking his tongue, as though he was calling a hunting dog.

  “Far out, babe.” Sheri’s voice. “Blackie, Daddy’s got some nuts for you. Come get Daddy’s nuts.”

  “God!” Jess sat up, reached across Dylan, and struggled to pull the old window closed.

  “Come get Daddy’s nuts,” Dylan said, reaching for Jess’s ass.

  She pushed him away and shouted curses into her pillow. She lifted her head. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  He sighed. She was right. It was nearly time for their annual move. He could put it down to bad luck those first two years—faulty roof, no insulation—but this was the fourth year and it was beginning to feel like a sign: this city didn’t want them. Jess dreamt of a little cabin in the woods, dipping candles, gathering mushrooms, homeschooling Lulu. But hospitals were not located near the kind of forest she wanted to live in. His work as an X-ray technician was not the portable kind.

  “I’ll get the paper today,” he said. “There should be plenty of listings now that the students are gone.”

  “Yeah, basement suites with five-foot ceilings and mould.”

  Mario and Sheri were clapping and cheering outside.

  “Blackie ate his nuts,” Dylan said, hoping for a little smile. He didn’t get one.

  The next evening, the neighbours were at it again: anger as pastime. She was yelling, he was silent, heavy objects victimized as they hit the walls. Then, the following morning, all was calm again in the yard as Mario clicked his tongue and the little vermin came boldly to him. Fortunately, Jess had closed the window at some point in the night, so the feeding rituals didn’t waken them. What woke them was Lulu falling off the chair she’d climbed on to reach the cereal bowls. She was fine—just a scare—but while Jess took a shower, the scene in the yard seemed to turn not fine at all.

  “You hurt him!” Sheri shrieked. “You fucking hurt Blackie, you idiot!”

  Dylan looked out the kitchen window and saw a squirrel, run-crawling away from the fence, as if it had been thrown there, leaving a vague brownish-red spot on the grey wood.

  “What’s out there, Daddy?” Lulu asked.

  “They are,” Dylan muttered. “Just eat your corn flakes, sweetie.”

  “I might be blind,” Mario yelled. “That thing gouged my face, in case you can’t see me.”

  “That thing,” she said, “is a living creature, smaller than you. And you hurt it! You hurt Blackie bad!”

  “Sheri,” he said. “Don’t get near it. You don’t know what it’ll do now.”

  “It’s in pain, dickwad!” Sheri screamed. “I can’t fucking believe you!”

  “What are they talking about, D
addy?” Lulu asked.

  “Let’s get you some juice,” Dylan said. “They’re just being silly.”

  That was their agreed-upon way of diverting Lulu from any harsh reality. It was silly—it was completely ridiculous—but he had a vague notion to call an ambulance, just in case Mario really was hurt. But then Jess came out of the bathroom, and he decided to leave it alone.

  The paper had turned up few housing options, so they made the coffee-shop rounds. A kid—even one as delightful as Lulu—was not everyone’s optimal tenant, so after breakfast they went to family-friendly places that might have posters tacked up on their bulletin boards.

  They managed to see three apartments. All were dismal. That night, over frozen pizza, while Lulu watched Sesame Street at louder than normal volume, which felt sadly good to Dylan—a stab at conventionality—they discussed their options.

  “We shouldn’t have to suffer.”

  “No.”

  “We’re not the bad guys.”

  “No.”

  “We’ve got a child!”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s totally not fair.”

  “I know, honey, I know.”

  “I’m sending that email.” Jess paused. “Or wait. A better idea. I’m going to get a petition going. I’ll canvass the other suites and get signatures. Won’t the landlord have to do something then?”

  “Don’t forget he’s the nephew.”

  “Dylan, you’re not helping.”

  “You’re right,” he said, even though he had helped, having carried his daughter the twelve blocks home. “I’ll start the dishes.”

  “Yeah, there are so many.” She pointed to the pizza boxes, their three plates. Then she was off to create a declaration. We the people . . .

  After he filled the sink with hot soapy water and the plates, he zoned out on the couch with Lulu, tripping down memory lane as Mr. Hooper and Bob and Marie talked about not being able to see Snuffleupagus. It made him feel good, that he could still see that giant furry mammoth, despite being all grown up.