Turtle Moon

by Alice Hoffman

  She’s waving the gun around, and she’s not kidding. Julian and Randy can both see that.

  “I didn’t start this,” Randy says. “I told her she’d never win if she was going to fight my parents on custody.”

  Lucy points the gun at Randy’s head. She has never held a gun before in her life; she has no idea of what a safety catch is, or whether or not it’s clicked into place. Julian knows now that she would actually do it; to protect someone, she wouldn’t think twice.

  “She never let that baby into the pool without water wings,” Lucy says. Her voice is uneven, a breakable thing. “She never once slept through the night, not since the baby was born.”

  “Do you think I wanted this?” Randy cries. “He keeps calling me, asking me for more money. He has to stay down there and he won’t leave, no matter what I say. There’s a witness he wants to get rid of and I can’t do a damn thing about it.”

  That witness is asleep in borrowed pajamas a thousand miles away, and although he cannot say a word, he’s seen more than a boy his age ever should.

  It takes only a few seconds to race through the house, to run down the driveway where the bluestone is carefully set in gravel, to get into the car that has been parked out of sight. They leave behind shards of glass and footprints in the flower beds. They don’t have to discuss their destination, because they know exactly where they’re going. If they started now and drove all night, it would still take them thirty-six hours to get home, and that is why Julian Cash finds himself breaking the speed limit all the way to La Guardia and why he finds himself thrown into the black night as, for the first time in his life, he leaves the ground.

  “A long time ago,” Miss Giles tells the boy while they sit on the porch after supper, “I received a sign that my life was about to change, right here on this porch, when I was peeling lemons.”

  Even though the crickets have begun to call, the sky is still blue. Miss Giles has a colander full of lemons on her lap, and every once in a while she hands some of the shavings to the baby, who sits near her feet. The baby sucks on the bits of lemon peel with a funny puckered look on her face, but she continues to reach for them greedily. The meanest boy in Verity does just what Miss Giles expects him to when she begins her story: he rolls his eyes, then turns his back to her and slumps against the porch steps.

  “Don’t think I’m crazy,” Miss Giles says. “Don’t be too quick to judge,” she warns him.

  The baby comes up behind the boy and hands him a piece of lemon peel, which he places between his teeth, though he’d much rather have a cigarette.

  “It was a hot day,” Miss Giles says. “And it was May. People around here are known to have sunstroke under conditions like that, but I was wearing a big straw hat, so that wasn’t the case. My life was somewhat messed up, not that I would tell you about it, since it’s none of your business, but that day when I was peeling lemons a circle of light appeared right over there.”

  In spite of himself, the boy raises his head and squints. He sees nothing but a porch railing badly in need of paint. He spits out the lemon peel, but he still feels the sharp taste in his mouth.

  “It wasn’t what you’re thinking,” Miss Giles says. She dumps the peeled lemons into her lap and gives the baby the colander so she can gather up all the rinds. “It wasn’t a religious situation at all. You hear these people on Oprah saying they’ve seen this and they’ve seen that—well, this wasn’t anything that would ever get you on TV.”

  When the baby brings Miss Giles the colander, Miss Giles lifts her onto her lap and gives her a hug, but it’s the back of the boy’s head she’s watching. She catches the boy as he looks at her, then quickly looks away. It’s been so hot today that the blue sky seems white in the center, not unlike a circle of light, if you were stupid enough to believe in such things.

  “I knew something was going to happen,” Miss Giles goes on. “And of course I was right. That same night I heard someone screaming in the woods.”

  The boy has turned, just a bit, so he can see Miss Giles from the corner of his eye. He has chopped so much wood for her in the past few days that there are calluses on the palms of his hands. Not far from here, everyone else in seventh grade is settling down to study for final exams. The boy will either have to go to summer school or be left back to repeat a grade he found boring enough the first time around.

  “The screaming was real bad,” Miss Giles says.

  The boy can feel the hair rise up on the back of his neck.

  “It was the kind that makes you jump out of bed and not bother with a bathrobe or slippers or anything like that.”

  Miss Giles pauses to take a bite out of a lemon. She almost has him now, she can feel it.

  “I was half asleep, but I knew what was about to happen. And here’s the thing: It was pitchblack outside, but I could hear bees buzzing, and that’s never a good sign. It means they’re real disturbed about something, and when bees can’t sleep, nobody can. I suppose I could have stayed in bed, pulled the covers up, and put my hands over my ears, but by that time the screaming creature was at my front door.”

  The boy casually swings his legs up from the steps onto the porch, twisting slightly, so that he almost faces her.

  “I was fairly certain that it was the devil at my door,” Miss Giles informs him.

  The baby on Miss Giles’s lap is humming to herself; all she wears in this heat is a diaper and a white T-shirt dozens of babies have worn before her. Miss Giles takes one unpeeled lemon and slips it into her apron pocket. She’ll use it later as a rinse for the baby’s hair, since lemon juice has been known to keep ticks away.

  “I knew it from the way the doorknob was shaking, and the way those bees came out at night and then the wind came up suddenly, even though it was May and there shouldn’t have been any wind. Whether it was foolish or not, I opened the door. And there she was. She had dark hair all in knots, and her clothes were all torn up, and I could see, even in the dark, there was blood all over her skirt.”

  The boy’s breathing has quickened; he’s holding on to the old wooden banister.

  “I could have sent her away right then. But my father had told me that if the devil ever appeared at my door, I should invite it in and act polite, even if I wasn’t feeling much like it. So I invited her in, and when she came inside, a swarm of bees came in with her, and they knocked over all my tables and chairs. I turned on the light and those bees just flew out my window, all in a rush. I saw then that I knew the woman, she’d been a neighbor of mine for years and years, but never a friend. I hadn’t recognized her because she looked so wild, like something was after her or she was after something. And she couldn’t talk, she just kept screaming, and that’s when I saw she was covered with bee bites. Some of the stingers had been left in her, and there was more than that. There was blood on her skirt because she’d just delivered a baby, all by herself, in the woods, and worse than that, the baby she was holding had already turned blue.

  “I took that baby from her since she was dangling it so carelessly, almost like it was a pumpkin, and I wrapped it up in my bathrobe, and then in some towels, but it was even bluer than before. It was so cold you’d think she’d carved that baby out of ice. I asked her questions about what had happened and what had gone wrong, but she couldn’t hear me over her own screaming, so I stopped asking. I went into the kitchen and lit the woodstove, and I put that baby right inside the oven, because I knew, all of a sudden, that he was already dead and he might have been dead even when I first grabbed hold of him.”

  The boy has inched over, closer to Miss Giles.

  “I brought a wooden chair over to the stove—it may have been this one I’m sitting on—and I sat there and watched the baby, and while I was doing that I heard the front door slam, and I knew that she was gone, but I still didn’t get up from my chair. The bees came into my house again, but I didn’t pay any attention to them, they weren’t going to scare me. The air got thick and heavy. That kind of air can put you to
sleep in an instant, but I just ignored it. I kept on watching that baby, and after a while the bees flew out my window and the bad air slipped through the cracks in the wall that I’d meant to fix, and the baby’s color started to change. I grabbed him out of the oven as quickly as I could, and then I heard the sound of birds and I realized it was morning.

  “Every night after that I heard her out in my yard. She never came any closer than the willow trees I used to have right there, but I could hear her, even when she didn’t make a sound. I kept waiting for her to knock on my door again, but she didn’t. She kept circling out there and she didn’t stop. Sometimes I’d see her during the day, at the general store or walking down the road. She’d just ignore me, like she’d never seen me before in her life. But then at night she’d be there again, and she came closer and closer, and then she took to looking in the window. That was when I realized what it was she wanted.”

  Miss Giles puts the baby down on the porch, then stands up. “I’m talking myself silly,” she says.

  Miss Giles takes her colander of lemons to the back door, then calls to the baby, who follows her inside. When the screen door slams shut behind her, the meanest boy in Verity sits alone on the porch, feeling very cold in spite of today’s record temperature. When darkness falls it will still be over a hundred; the leaves will drop from the trees and turn dusty and dry. From where the boy sits he can see the rabbits in their cages, stretched out on their beds of cedar chips, limp from the heat. The boy gets up, walks to the house, then slowly pushes the screen door open. Miss Giles has taken her dough out of the refrigerator; she’s given the baby a little ball of dough all her own to roll out on the wooden tabletop. When she hears the squeak of the screen door as it closes, Miss Giles turns, as if she were surprised to see the boy in her kitchen.

  “Would you like a cold glass of milk?” she asks him.

  The boy shakes his head. He’s got chills all down his arms and legs; what would he want with milk?

  “I suppose I can tell you just about anything,” Miss Giles says, considering. “Since you’re not about to go and repeat it. I’m right about that, aren’t I?”

  The boy shrugs, and then, when he sees that’s not good enough, he nods.

  “She wanted to make certain he was alive,” Miss Giles says. “That’s why she kept coming back. I had no idea what happened in those woods, or what happened before that, but I saw then that people leave their children for all sorts of reasons they’re never going to tell you or me. So one night I took the baby out of his crib, at around the time she used to come, and I held him right up to the window.”

  Miss Giles has come to sit down at the table. It’s no longer possible for the boy to pretend he isn’t listening. He’s getting more and more uncomfortable; he’s not sure he wants to hear this story anymore, especially not the end.

  “She looked inside when she came that night, and she saw him. She saw that he wasn’t blue, and that he was a real live baby who was crying for his bottle of milk, and I could tell she was satisfied. She must have been, because she never came back, except for one time, and then I didn’t see her. One morning, a few weeks later, I found a piece of notepaper on my front porch, with a rock set on top of it, so it wouldn’t blow away.”

  The boy stays where he is at the table, in spite of the heat and the scent of lemons and the terrible feeling in his stomach.

  “She wrote for me to name him Julian,” Miss Giles says. “And that’s exactly what I did.”

  Miss Giles’s voice sounds funny, as if the edges were broken. “I’ve told Julian every bit of that story. Except for one thing. I didn’t remember this for the longest time, and when I did it seemed too late to tell him. As I wrapped him up to warm him, I noticed he didn’t have a single bee sting on him, which was unusual, considering his mother’s condition. I don’t know how she did it, but she didn’t let those bees get anywhere close to him, not one.”

  The boy doesn’t know what’s happening, but whatever it is, it’s what he’s desperately tried to avoid. When he looks down at the tabletop there’s a pool of water in front of him. Miss Giles hands him the dishtowel she’s kept over her piecrust dough, and he uses it to wipe his eyes. It’s been so long since he cried he believed he was no longer capable of it. And although he’s not sure why, by the time he’s finished he’s extremely hungry. He doesn’t leave Miss Giles’s kitchen until the pie is out of the oven, and has been cooled in the freezer, then cut into wedges, to be served on the good blue-and-white plates Miss Giles likes to use for pie, the ones with the willow pattern, which her father left to her, since he knew she would always be certain to take good care of whatever came into her possession.

  NINE

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, the plane circles Hartford Beach three times before beginning its descent. For the past half hour they have been flying through heavy turbulence, and in his aisle seat, Julian Cash curses to himself, repeatedly and silently. This trip has been pure misery; they had to change planes twice—in Raleigh and again in Atlanta. Each time Julian had to argue with the security guards in order to bring Loretta on board; in Raleigh, two police officers were called to the boarding gate before Julian was allowed on with his gun. Now Julian wonders if he was ever meant to fly at all. None of the other passengers seems to be bothered by all the bumps, by the club soda spilling onto the floor, or the flight attendants buckling themselves in tight. Julian tells himself that if they don’t crash in the next ten minutes, everything will be all right. Verity is, after all, only a few miles away.

  “In case we die, there’s something you should know,” Lucy says.

  She is hunched over, clutching a plastic glass of ginger ale. At their feet, Loretta stretches out as best she can, yawning each time there’s a loss in altitude.

  “What are you saying?” Julian asks. “Are you saying this isn’t a normal flight?”

  Sitting next to each other, surrounded only by air, they don’t need to talk above a whisper, but Lucy leans closer. All through this flight she’s been panicked. She can’t close her eyes, because when she does all she sees is Keith, at some killer’s mercy. Now that the plane has begun to drop from the sky, she finally turns to Julian. He looks calm, but he’s holding on to the armrests so tightly his fingers are white.

  “It’s not important, but I want you to know I would have never spent the night with Randy, no matter what,” Lucy says.

  In spite of himself, Julian laughs. “I know that.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Julian figures they are careening to earth right this second; what he says or doesn’t say can’t matter a whole lot.

  “Because you spent the night with me,” he says.

  “Kitty Bass told me to stay away from you,” Lucy tells him.

  “You should have listened to her,” Julian says.

  They can see the lights of Hartford Beach below them, as if the dusty earth were littered with stars.

  “Well, I didn’t,” Lucy says.

  Julian Cash believes that’s what she says, although he’s not positive. The engines are straining and they seem much too loud.

  “Nothing will happen to Keith,” Lucy says.

  “That’s right,” Julian agrees.

  “I mean it,” Lucy says. She closes her eyes now; she wills it to be true. “Nothing can happen to him.”

  The plane touches down, hard, on the runway, then skids to a stop. Although they are the first ones off the plane and Julian has called ahead so that there’s a rental car waiting at the terminal, it’s close to dinnertime when they finally get on the road. What Julian’s not prepared for is the scent of lemons in the air, and a fog so thick he has to switch the windshield wipers on. Since the night of the accident he’s been a fairly cautious driver, but now he speeds with his hand on the horn and his foot so heavy on the gas that Loretta slides off the backseat. Julian doesn’t speak as they travel along the Interstate; he’s not going to allow himself to think he might have a chance at something, he’s jus
t not going to think that way. He concentrates on the road, for when they pull off at the Verity exit it is even foggier, and the asphalt is slick with the pulp of strangler figs. Every now and then they drive right through a cluster of white moths that beat their wings against the windshield and then are held on the glass until the wipers clean them away.

  A long time ago, Julian used to sit by his window, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. But that wasn’t the only reason he stayed up late. He was waiting to see if his mother would come back for him, even after it became clear that she never would. With every night he spent at the window, his heart closed up a little more, and it would have stayed that way if Bobby hadn’t come looking for him. He remembers exactly the way he felt, sitting on the porch with his bucket of toads, blinking in the sunlight, not quite believing that someone had actually found him. He knew, even at the age of seven, how dangerous it was for someone like him to have hope. He knows how to have no expectations. He can completely control not just what he wants but what he needs.

  As they turn into Miss Giles’s driveway, Lucy unhooks her seat belt. Julian throws the car into neutral before it comes to a full stop, then opens his door and jumps out. Lucy gets out just as quickly, but she stumbles over what’s left of the willow roots, and for that one moment she panics completely. It is so foggy out here at Miss Giles’s, anything can happen. As Lucy runs across the yard she can see that Julian has already reached the front door and is banging on it with his fist. She can see the old woman who swings the door open, and just by watching them Lucy knows something is not right. The old woman is tiny, but she stands on her tiptoes so she can reach up. She touches Julian’s forehead, as if for fever, in the place where he has his scar. Lucy has done the same thing a thousand times herself, with her own child, since it is so much easier to cure a fever than all the other horrible things that can go wrong. And something has certainly gone wrong now; her son isn’t here, she can feel that without being told.