Moon Over Edisto

by Beth Webb Hart

  He was murmuring to someone who seemed to be his assistant because the other fellow was young and taking notes on his iPad.

  “Nothing new from her in years.” He shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure she ever had much to begin with.”

  The young fellow nodded and typed something.

  Julia swallowed hard. The art scene in New York was brutal and flippant, and she was well aware of that, but something about what Weims said got her right in the gut and sank its teeth in hard. Was it the truth? In this moment she believed that it was, and now she was certain that she was a complete fraud. Suddenly she felt a little dizzy. A cracker caught in her throat and she realized it was tightening.

  She prayed, Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

  She swallowed hard and saw a few stars and hoped the attack would pass over like a few quick-moving dark clouds. She stood there for twenty minutes until Bess popped her head into the kitchenette.

  “We’re heading out,” she said.

  Julia beckoned Bess over and pointed to her chest where her heart was beating wildly. Her friend looked her up and down. “It’s happening, isn’t it?” Julia nodded. Bess ran to tell Graham what was going on, then she came back, found a door in the back, and they stepped out into the alleyway. A cab happened to be pulling over to a lounge on the other side of the dark street and Bess waved her arms. She tucked Julia into the cab, then held her hand all the way home. Julia could hardly breathe. “Should I call Dr. Johansen?”

  Julia shook her head. “I just need an Adderall. I’ll be okay.” She closed her eyes as her heart pounded and her throat tightened. She bit the heel of her palm hard and blinked back the stars as the cab flew up Fifth Avenue toward Carnegie Hill.

  BACK IN THE APARTMENT, THE ADDERALL PRODUCING A calming effect, she closed her eyes and saw a face she’d tried to block out for a long time. Her father. He had called her just a few weeks before his heart attack to see if he could come up for a visit, but she’d said no. “It’s not a good time, Dad. Maybe after Christmas.”

  “I miss you, Julia,” he had said. Me too, she had wanted to say, but she hadn’t.

  When she woke up the next morning, Bess and her daughter, Chloe, were knocking on the studio door. They had the Times and a pot of coffee and her favorite spinach and feta cheese omelet from the little diner around the corner on a tray.

  “A nice review,” Bess said. Weims had a way of trashing you without trashing you, so she was curious about how he had put it. Of her work it read, “While Bennett’s paintings bear a strong resemblance to the work of her last several exhibits, she remains an institutional presence in the New York art community with a voice and vision that are both well practiced and comprehensive.”

  Her cell rang. “Hi, Mama.”

  “Congratulations, love. Tell me all about it.”

  Her face reddened. She felt like a little girl again. A little girl who wanted to please her parents. But that was silly. Her father hadn’t really loved her, their family had been a sham—probably—all along. But her mama needed to feel like a mama sometimes. This much she understood and was willing to give. “It was a fantastic evening.” She winked at Bess, who took Chloe by the hand and tiptoed out. “It started with an enormous calla lily delivery and then . . .”

  CHAPTER 4

  Etta

  I’m a secret keeper. A pretty good one. And there’s a lot of stuff I know that I’m not going to tell. But I will say this. Our mama loves us. Not like the mothers in books and on television and on vacation at the island where we live, but it’s not bad, and I know we are the reason she gets up and out of bed every morning. Our daddy loved us too, but he was gone before Charlie was born.

  Here’s a secret: There are enemies out there. Enemies who mean to do us harm. My older sister, Heath, knows who they are. And so does Mama. Charlie doesn’t know, and there’s no need to tell him right now. It’ll become clear enough to him if they strike again, but maybe they won’t. Maybe they will forget about us and leave us alone. We are fine, but I bet there are other kids out there in the world who aren’t.

  There’s also sickness, which is a different kind of enemy. Not the kind that drives down the long dirt road and knocks on your door when you’re in the middle of drawing a bouquet of yellow snapdragons. There is sickness in Mama’s lungs. The doctor showed it to her on the X-ray when we spent the day at Aunt Dot’s. Heath was watching cable TV and Charlie was playing with Aunt Dot’s old fire truck, the one her son used to play with, when Mama came home from the doctor. She and Aunt Dot ducked into the kitchen, and I crept up quietly to the doorway and listened.

  An operation can fix the sickness. The doctors can cut it out from inside Mama like cutting off a rotten spot from a peach. She said it’s no problem. It’s a done deal. But by the look on Aunt Dot’s face when she walked us to the car and by the way Mama stops to stare at us sometimes when we’re on the porch passing the milk for the cereal or doing our schoolwork, I’m not so sure. I think there are some unknowns. Some secrets our own bodies keep from us. Secrets that grow in dark places when no one is looking. And sometimes we don’t know what the secret is until it’s too big and too late.

  Take my father, for instance. His body kept a secret from him. There was something called plaque in his body, and it built up year after year in an important place near his heart. One day the plaque burst without warning, and it formed a wall that blocked all of the good blood from getting to his heart. A heart without good blood begins to die. It’s true. I saw it with my own eyes just a week before my fifth birthday. Heard him cry out in the chair before he fell forward onto the dock, his legs bucking then twitching like a fish out of water. That’s another one of my secrets. But I’ve got more.

  Aunt Dot has a bad hip, but she will take care of us when Mama has to have the operation. Heath and I will help Aunt Dot. We can pick up Charlie and give him a bath. We can feed him. We can chase down Phydeaux, our crazy old dog that Daddy found on the side of the road the year before the plaque burst and built its wall. We can feed him and give him his worm medicine. All we have to do is bury it in peanut butter and plop it down in his bowl.

  Mama will be in the hospital for three weeks. Then she’ll be back, she’ll get stronger, and we’ll have the end of our summer to do the things we like to do: make Velveeta sandwiches for a picnic and swim to the little island that forms in our creek at low tide, get ice cream at the movie store on the beach, ride around in our old Suburban with our flashlights at night hoping to stop some deer in their tracks, watch the sunset at the sound, and pick fresh tomatoes in Skeeter and Glenda’s garden.

  Then homeschool will start again, even though Heath wants to go to a real school and meet boys and girls her age. Heath is real smart. She’s only twelve, but she’s skipped three grades in homeschool. Mama tried to get her a scholarship to a private school in town, but it didn’t work out. I think the enemies had something to do with it, but I’m not sure.

  I just like to draw. Still lifes are my favorites, but I do portraits too, as well as landscapes. Daddy worked with me when I was little, and I still remember what he taught me—how to divide the face into three parts, how to shade the nose, how to create a shadow beside the basket of oranges or a shadow of the rising moon on the water. I don’t show Mama or Heath my drawings. I only show Charlie, who doesn’t know how lucky he is not to have known my father. Not because Daddy was mean or bad, but because he doesn’t have to miss him the way we do.

  I know a lot of other stuff that people don’t think I do. I know that Daddy had a whole family before our family. His wife and daughters were beautiful. I found the picture in his handkerchief drawer, a picture of them all in front of a pretty Charleston house in their Sunday best, but I didn’t tell anyone. This means we have two half sisters. Heath seems to know that much of the story too, but I don’t think she’s seen the picture. One of the sisters could be an enemy. She came here once after Daddy died, and screamed at Mama. The other one is a famo
us artist who lives in New York City. Daddy used to show me articles about her in the newspaper. She’s pretty and stylish and serious looking. Her eyes, even in the grainy black and white of the newspaper, look like they can see right through you, into your secrets. Her name is Julia, which is a name that reminds me of dew on a flower petal. It’s sweet and melodic. She went to college with my mama. But that’s another secret too. One only she, Mama, and I know. And her mother and her sister, of course. But not mine. Heath doesn’t like knowing that kind of stuff. She’s like Mama in that way.

  I don’t know what happened. How my daddy came to be with my mama instead of Julia’s mama. And anyway, I’ve probably said too much already.

  “Eddda!” Charlie’s feet slap the hardwood floor. “Where’s my remo contro helcopter?”

  Much of my life is spent finding Charlie’s things.

  He stands in the doorway, his eyebrows furrowed. He’s pretty cute even though he’s demanding. He looks like a miniature version of my daddy, deep brown eyes and lots of golden curls.

  “Come on. I’ll show you.” I walk past him, brushing my arm against his shoulder.

  Aunt Dot says it’s not good to act exasperated. She knows a lot of stuff that seems right because it makes my heart feel better. Mama says she doesn’t believe in the stuff Aunt Dot does, but she also says it’s okay if I want to. She says maybe it will help me and my condition.

  I do want to believe in what Aunt Dot believes in, but I’m not going to tell Mama or anyone else. It will be another secret, though I might tell Aunt Dot or someone else when I grow up and leave our little house on Edisto Island.

  Heath says there is a whole world outside of this one, but it is hard to imagine. Maybe I will go live with my half sister in New York and we will be artists together. Maybe she believes the thing I want to believe. The thing Aunt Dot believes. Maybe she has secrets too, and we can share and trade them like Silly Bandz or baseball cards or Lifesavers. You don’t have to look at her picture in the paper too long to know she has some. Sometimes you can keep a secret so long that you forget it’s even there. And it’s not until everyone around you starts talking that you realize what you’ve hidden. But it’s not all bad. There is a kind of strength in silence. A kind of power. It can be dangerous, I know, but it can also protect us from the enemies.

  CHAPTER 5

  Julia

  She was sitting at her office desk in the art department entering the final semester grades into the computer system when her phone rang.

  “Juuuuul-yah?”

  “Aunt Dot!” She instinctively grinned when she heard the soft, warbly Southern accent of her father’s older sister. She hadn’t talked to the woman since a phone call over Christmas. “It’s been too long—since, what, Christmas? How are you?”

  “Well, I’m all right,” she said. “If you count half-blind with a bad hip and a general tilting toward the grave as all right.”

  Julia chuckled. “Oh, it’s not that bad, is it?”

  “Of course it is, dahlin’,” the woman said. “But no one wants to talk about that, nor do they want to talk about your half siblings and their ill mother.”

  Julia squeezed her eyes shut. She had a feeling where this conversation was going, and she needed a way to stop it without upsetting her aunt. When she opened her eyes, Simon was standing in the doorway, leaning against it with his thin red lips forming a grin. He was back a day early. What a nice surprise.

  She cupped her hand over the receiver. “Hey,” she whispered. “Welcome home. I’ll be off in a minute.”

  He nodded before striding into her office, where he slid a book on Cubism off of her shelf and sat down on the bright yellow love seat against the wall.

  Julia cleared her throat as Aunt Dot continued. “Julia, I’m not going to beat around the bush. Marney needs you right now.”

  “Aunt Dot—”

  “Now, I know you’ve been avoiding the woman and the situation for nearly two decades, and that’s pretty impressive, I have to hand it to you, but something has changed, sweetheart. The woman is not well, not at all. She needs help with those kids for a little while until she can get on her feet again, and I’m in no condition to lend a hand right now.”

  Julia exhaled. “What about friends? Neighbors? She’s been in that community for a long time.”

  Aunt Dot clucked. “C’mon, Julia. Do you think Marney has close friends?”

  “Well, even dreadful people connect with other dreadful people, don’t they?”

  “You’re the last real friend she’s had.” Aunt Dot cleared her throat. “And that’s the truth. And now she’s alone with those three children, and in for a battle we all need her to win.”

  Julia went to open her mouth. Simon was watching her carefully. He had a kind of morbid fascination with the story of her family’s demise, and he was watching like someone on a street corner who can’t turn away from a car accident.

  “Of course it’s unfair to call on you,” Aunt Dot continued. “And I know you’ve got that big career in the Big Apple your daddy was so proud of you for building.” She lowered her voice as she had during Julia’s childhood when she was about to reveal a family secret. “But those children are fragile and they’ve had some struggles, and whether you like to acknowledge it or not, someday you’re going to come to realize that they are your family, and no amount of states you put between you and them can change that.”

  Julia raked her hands through her hair as Simon furrowed his brow and cocked his head. Southern gothic dysfunction was right. It was a freak show, and she was not going to be sucked into it.

  “What about Meg?”

  “I’ve tried.” Aunt Dot cleared her throat and lowered her voice again. “Meg is in a worse place than you on all of this. She’s not going to be any help.”

  Meg, Julia’s younger sister, seemed to have not had anything to do with Marney or their father from the moment she found out about the affair. And there had been a distance between Julia and Meg ever since the divorce that seemed almost too large to bridge. They’d see each other from time to time over the holidays, but they never did more than talk on the surface. The landscape of their lives was entirely different. While they shared the same wound, a wound that neither one of them wanted to reopen, it seemed to Julia that for Meg there was a deeper seething beneath it all that she didn’t fully understand. She’d have to summon the nerve to talk Meg into looking after the kids. She had kids of her own. Motherhood was her passion. It would be natural. But how?

  Then it occurred to her. Meg had become more active in the church of their childhood. All of her Christmas cards featured her children in their pageant costumes, and her Facebook posts often featured some sort of parenting tip with a Bible verse to undergird it. Maybe Julia could take the orphans-and-widows angle, or the love-your-enemies one with Meg.

  “I’m asking you to reflect upon it, Juuul-yah. Search your heart. Pray.”

  Julia rolled her eyes, but she felt guilty as she did it. She did have at least a shred of faith left, and she owed that to Aunt Dot.

  “You have a sweetness in your heart, dahlin’. Even though you talk like a Yankee now, and even though your artwork is as strange as all get-out. You still have Prince of Peace love in your heart. Don’t ya, dahlin’.”

  Julia could feel her neck tightening and her heart pounding. She did not have a sweetness in her heart when it came to this topic. No, she did not.

  Now Simon was tapping the top of the book with his long, manicured fingers, and instead of being reminded by Aunt Dot of the basic tenets of Christian theology, Julia wanted to hang up and run into her man’s arms. She was still close with her mother—as close as one could be with a weekly phone call and the occasional e-mail—but Aunt Dot was about the only thing tethering her to her father and to her old faith. Julia hated to think it, but the thought surfaced like a swimmer intent on coming up for air: she would be relieved when her father’s sister was gone.

  “I have to go, Aunt Dot,
” Julia said. “I hear what you are saying. And I’ll talk to Meg.”

  “But, Juuuuulyah—” The voice started to crack. It was changing from warbly to stained glass with a blend of disappointment and protest.

  “I have to go now, Aunt Dot. I’ll be back in touch.”

  Then she hung up the phone and strode over to the other side of the desk where Simon stood and embraced her hard. “I missed you, love.”

  His thick British accent made her weak in the knees. It was an unfair advantage, but she adored it. Then she rested her head on his chest and took in the smell of cigarettes, airports, peanuts, and coffee. “Me too.”

  He pulled back and took her by the shoulders. “You can tell me all about your call to Aunt Dot tonight. I’ve got an eight o’clock reservation for us at Union Square. We’re due for a nice night out, don’t you suppose?”

  She smiled. It was her favorite restaurant, and they hadn’t been there in months. “I do.”

  He rested his stubbled chin on her golden head. “I’ve got to drop by my office and then by the apartment for a shower and shave. Pick you up at seven forty-five?”

  She nodded. “Perfect.”

  He walked out, grabbed his suitcase, and started wheeling toward the elevator, then he called back over his shoulder, “It’s going to be a good night, Jules.”

  She smiled through her watery eyes. Why was she weepy? And then she looked back at the phone where she had hung up on her seventy-five-year-old aunt, her father’s sister who had asked her about the Prince of Peace in her heart.

  “I could use one,” she called back, unable to keep her voice from cracking.

  JULIA SPENT THE REMAINDER OF THE AFTERNOON practicing her phone call to Meg as she entered her grades. She would try her the next day. It was six forty-five when she finally finished her work and hailed a cab back to her apartment, where she jumped in the shower and then into her silky midnight-blue dress with a subtle roll neck. It was late March and the city was starting to thaw a little. It had almost hit sixty-five degrees today, and even though there would be a little chill tonight, she decided against a coat, put on some metallic pumps, and grabbed the crinkled silver handbag Bess had lent her. Bess and Chloe insisted on seeing her in her outfit and riding the elevator down with her to the foyer.