Moon Over Edisto

by Beth Webb Hart

  “If you decide to take care of the children . . . and I’m not saying you should . . . I’m just saying if Marney passes and you feel . . .” He leaned in closer.

  She shook her head and the lump in her throat continued to grow.

  He reached over and squeezed her hand. “I will help,” he said. “If it comes to that, I will do whatever I can to help you.”

  She exhaled, taking in the sincerity in his eyes. How could he commit to something like that? To helping raise three children? He could up and move or fall in love and start his own family tomorrow, for all he knew. Anything could happen.

  And yet, somewhere inside of her, in the little eight-year-old-girl part of her who still believed in simple kindness and straightforward love, she thought, He means it. He really means it.

  “I appreciate you saying so,” she said. “I really do. But I don’t know how you or I or anyone could agree to something like that. There are too many turns the future could take.”

  “Maybe,” he said as he rubbed his thumb across her hand again. “But sometimes the future is straight and clear, like the South Edisto River on a still summer day. And all you have to do is steer in as straight a line as you know how.”

  She looked at him, at his warm, dark eyes. “You’re either an idealist or a fool.”

  He nodded and raised his eyebrows. “I’ve been called both.” He cleared his throat and took the last sip of his tea. “I’ve also been called a romantic.”

  She chuckled as she wiped her eyes. What a day. What a crazy, crazy day. She squeezed his hand back. “Do you think you could take me by to say good-bye to the children and then on to the airport?”

  “I’d love to,” he said.

  SHE MADE A QUICK WHIRLWIND OF FAREWELLS TO THE kids, Aunt Dot, and even her mother as she dropped by the antique shop where she worked and embraced her.

  “What happened with Marney?” Her mother looked up from her bifocals as she stood over a gilded statue in the back of the shop, her new little puppy curled up on a pillow at her feet.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you, okay?”

  Julia’s mother nodded and hugged her again. Then Jed dropped her off at the Charleston Airport. She raced through the ticket counter and then to the checkpoint and caught the last flight of the day back to New York.

  CHAPTER 33

  Etta

  Some things you just can’t stop. Like the leaves from turning red in November. Like their loosening from the tree limbs. Like their flutter down to the ground where they turn brown and dry. Or their crunch under your bare feet when you walk through the old garden.

  It’s Mama’s forty-first birthday. Aunt Dot is making her favorite dish, beef stew, and her favorite dessert, coconut cake. The cake had to set for two days in the refrigerator, and it’s been all I can do to keep Charlie away from it.

  Charlie is restless and so am I. We’ve been at Aunt Dot’s for six weeks now, and we miss roaming the woods at Edisto and dipping our lines in the creek. Aunt Dot doesn’t move as fast as she used to because of her hips and the walker she has to lean on, and we don’t get to go to the park or for walks or bike rides as often as we’d like.

  We do, however, go out in the old garden behind her house where there is one good climbing-size magnolia tree whose trunk stretches beyond her rooftop and several azalea and camellia bushes that are good for hiding behind or napping beneath.

  Heath is allowed to take us for short walks as long as Charlie holds her hand and we watch for cars pulling out of driveways and we don’t talk to strangers, which I have no intention of doing. We are also allowed to go to Colonial Lake and to Moultrie Playground before dusk, and we can go to Mr. Burbage’s to buy a piece of candy or a Gatorade.

  We can even walk to the coast guard station in the afternoon and watch the junior sailing class, dozens of little one-man boats near the seawall tacking this way and that, their bright sails flapping in the wind like a rabble of butterflies. The kids in the boats don’t look much older than me or Heath, but they do seem to have a lot more freedom than us, driving their vessels wherever the wind blows.

  “I’m going to sail a boat one day.” Charlie points to a redheaded boy who is grasping the tiller with one hand and some sort of rope connected to the sail with the other.

  Heath tousles his hair, and I reach for his chunky hand. If we didn’t have Charlie to look after, we would be bored and lonely and, worst of all, purposeless.

  Julia visited for a few hours last week, and she left the same day. She came to talk to Mama, who is sick and quiet and resting in Aunt Dot’s guest room with several quilts across her long, bony legs. I saw Julia run down the stairs and out the back door, wiping her nose and her green eyes with the backs of her hands. Whatever Mama said or did must have upset her. Maybe that is why she never wanted to see her when she visited us last summer. Whatever Mama said or did is a secret that even I don’t know.

  NOW AS I SIT IN THE TOP OF THE MAGNOLIA TREE IN Aunt Dot’s garden, sketching the rooftops and St. Michael’s steeple, I ignore Charlie’s begging me to get down and play hide and go seek.

  “Ask Heath,” I finally whisper. He scoffs and walks back to the house where I hear the old screen door to the kitchen screech, then slap behind him.

  I look over to one of the upstairs windows where I can see Mama resting in an old lounge chair. Her eyes are closed and she looks still. So still you would never know there is an invasion going on in her brain. A tumor growing larger by the moment, destroying the gray matter that helps her think and remember and be herself.

  I hear the screech of the back door again. “Etta?” Heath has her hands on her hips and is staring up the tree. I joggle the limb a little so she knows I’m here.

  “You need to set the table. I’m going to help get Mama down the stairs.”

  I turn and grab hold of the knobby trunk of the great tree and climb down it limb by inner limb like a leafy ladder.

  MAMA CAN’T MAKE IT DOWN THE STAIRS SO HEATH carries up a card table, and I set it up in the upstairs hallway. Charlie pulls a few chairs and stools from the bedrooms until everyone has a place.

  Aunt Dot slowly carries up steaming bowls of beef stew as Mama leans on Heath and makes her way out of the bedroom door before settling herself in the ladder-back chair from Aunt Dot’s vanity.

  Charlie burns his mouth on the stew right away and then he drops his spoon on the hardwood floor. I take it to the bathroom sink, wash it out, and give it back to him, and Aunt Dot tells him to drink his milk and blow on the stew before he takes another bite.

  Mama tries hard to keep her head up, but it looks like it weighs one hundred pounds, and she drops it to the side from time to time. Aunt Dot brings the stew to Mama’s lips and she slurps a little and smiles. “Mmm,” she says. Then she looks to me and winks, and I know she is still in there somewhere, ducking up out of the trenches as if to say, It’s not over yet.

  After supper Heath carries up the cake and we sing “Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday, dear Mama.” Then we are all quiet as Aunt Dot cuts into the cake and serves it up. She gives Charlie an extra-large piece and she cuts Mama’s up into little bites and lifts it on a fork to her mouth. Mama chokes a little on the coconut bits and Aunt Dot lifts the water with the straw up to her mouth and she slurps and nods.

  The cake is good. Sweet and fluffy and whip-creamy. I remember, back when I was five, when Daddy and I tried to make the same cake for Mama on her birthday. It turned out lopsided and gooey because we didn’t know it needed to set a few days in the refrigerator. But Mama acted like it was the greatest thing she had ever tasted. She ate two large slimey slices just to convince us as the top layer slid slowly off of the bottom layer onto the table on the screened porch at the creek house.

  “We did good, Etta baby.” Daddy squeezed my shoulder and I rested back into his thick, soft chest.

  “Yes, you did.” Mama smiled, then she reached over and put the top layer back on the bottom as we all chuckled.

&nb
sp; AFTER A FEW MORE BITES OF CAKE, MAMA SAYS SHE needs to lie down and Heath helps her back to the bed while Aunt Dot and I clear the table and Charlie eats a second slice before putting on his pajamas. Once the Crock-Pot is soaking in sudsy water and the dishwasher is turned on, churn-churn-churning all of the food off of the china plates, I sneak back out to the darkened garden and climb the tree so I can see the steeple at night, its soft light glowing from the upper balcony above the bells and the clock tower.

  Aunt Dot says she’s been to the top of the tall, tall steeple a few times, and the view of the city and the harbor is like no other. And once, when the enormous brass bells rang out while she was up there, she could feel the steeple swaying ever so slightly from side to side.

  What are the odds of a child losing two parents before they turn ten? What is the probability? What is the explanation? Even in the novels I read, a child doesn’t lose two parents, except in The Secret Garden and The Boxcar Children, of course. But Mary Lennox’s parents were never good to her when they were alive so the loss doesn’t seem so bad, and it doesn’t take long for the boxcar children to find their grandfather, who is loving and kind and willing to take care of them forever and ever.

  Now I can see Aunt Dot take her place by Charlie’s bed in the twin bedroom next to Mama’s. Aunt Dot’s got the little devotional book out with the yellow, smudged pages. It’s called More Little Visits with God and she used to read it to her son many years ago. There are stories about trusting God and looking forward to heaven, and when she reads them my heart slows down and I imagine the basin of light filling a dark, cold room with warmth.

  I’m scared. I’ll admit it. I don’t know what will happen to us. It’s a secret I am not allowed to know.

  Now I zip my fleece up and lean back against the trunk of the tree and stare at the steeple against the indigo sky. I rub my arms across the large knobby limbs as a cold breeze rustles the waxy green leaves. What other choice do I have but to wait?

  CHAPTER 34

  Julia

  Julia gave her last exam, put the final touches on the five-year plan and budget for the visual arts department, and turned it into the dean. It had been snowing lightly for almost twenty-four hours, and with a few hours to kill before she met Bess and Chloe for an afternoon fitting of the wedding gown at the boutique on Madison and 57th, she decided to take a cab down to the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and walk her way up Fifth so she could peer into the Christmas windows of the department stores—Bergdorf, Macy’s, Henri Bendel, Saks. She used to do this every Christmas when she first moved to New York as a postgraduate with barely two pennies to rub together, and she felt like both the luckiest woman and the loneliest as she passed the faces of strangers, their arms laden with bags that they carried home to families and tucked beneath beautiful Christmas trees.

  All those years ago she used to always stop into St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Despite the tourists and the business of the city at Christmas, there was always a precious, hushed silence once you stepped inside the cathedral. There, she’d stop and exhale and find an empty pew in the back and get down on bended knee. She could be still for a moment, and that was precious to her.

  She had spent many lonely years in her early twenties on bended knee around the holidays asking God why: Why did my father betray me? Why did my best friend betray me? Will my mother ever get over it? Will Meg? Will I? She never received an audible answer, but she did always feel a kind of heat, even though the stone floors of the cathedral couldn’t have been colder. A kind of heat that started in her solar plexus and worked its way up to her heart and her mind.

  She hadn’t asked those questions in several years, and when she walked into St. Patrick’s this day, she lit four candles: one for Heath, one for Etta, one for Charlie, and one for Marney. Then she found a pew in the back, walked to its very end by one of the inner stone columns, and kneeled down.

  “I pray for Marney to be well,” she uttered. “To make a miraculous recovery. And if not, I pray for someone, the right person, to raise the children. I pray for their hearts not to give in to despair. I pray for them to have hope and hang on and survive and find faith.”

  “Please, please, please,” she said, though she wasn’t exactly sure, in her heart of hearts, what her please was most for. There was so much she yearned for and so much she was afraid of. And it was all so interwoven into a tangled heap of love and loss.

  As she prayed she pictured that smooth surface that Jed had talked about, and she imagined herself on the bow of her father’s old johnboat, moving out over the slack tide toward the honey hole on a bright summer morning as the ibises gathered on a marsh mound, as two porpoises broke the water with their silver fins. The future as a straight line? It hardly felt like that. When she looked back on the bow of the boat, she saw her father driving. He was looking over at the ibises, taking the scene in with a great inhale.

  Watch, she could hear him say as he leaned over her shoulder and examined her canvas. The scene passes quickly, and if you’re not careful, you’ll miss it.

  AND THEN ON THE HARD PEW ON THE STONE-COLD floor, she dozed off and woke when the pew in front of her creaked as a row of tourists—schoolchildren from China it looked like—filed in.

  Julia checked her phone. She was five minutes late for her fitting. She raced out of the cathedral and hailed a cab, and when she walked into the boutique, Chloe and Bess were sipping tea and smiling at her.

  She wiped the haze from her eyes. “Sorry I’m late. I somehow fell asleep in St. Patrick’s.”

  The designer’s assistant, a woman named Siri, gave her an odd look. “Well, you’re the last fitting of the day, so go ahead into the dressing room and then come out and step on the pedestal for a final look.”

  “All right.” She looked at Bess and gave her an I’m sorry look.

  Bess shrugged her shoulders and whispered, “She’s just being a snob. That’s part of her job.”

  Julia stepped into the large dressing room with its crystal sconces and thick, creamy wallpaper with large gold bees. She peeled off her work clothes—brown corduroy suit, knee-high well-scuffed boots, burgundy scarf. Her eye makeup had smeared at the edges of her eyes, highlighting her crow’s feet, and she noticed a blemish she was getting on the side of her forehead.

  Lovely bride, she thought. Aging and yet somehow still pimply.

  The assistant knocked on the door and came in to fasten the silk-covered buttons on her candlelight-colored gown. It was strapless and pure silk with a straight skirt and a small train bustled on the back with silk-covered buttons.

  The assistant helped put the long silk gloves on and gave her her arm as they walked out into the center of the fitting room where both Chloe and Bess gasped in wonder.

  “You look beautiful.” Chloe smiled, exposing the little upside-down peak in her top gum where her two front baby teeth had once protruded like little pearls in the center of a perfect strand. She leapt up and walked around and around Julia, taking it all in. Bess put down her tea and walked behind Julia so as to catch her eye in the mirror.

  “It’s stunning,” she said, and she patted her waist gently. “You look like a twenty-year-old bride.”

  “Yeah, right,” Julia uttered as she wiped her eye with the tip of her silk glove, leaving a smudge of mascara on one of the fingertips. “Though I suppose the big pimple on my forehead does add a certain child-bride effect.”

  The assistant clucked at the smudge on the silk glove, removed it, and put on another. Then she set to work pulling at the waist and hips to make sure there didn’t need to be another tuck between now and two Saturdays from now when Julia would tie the knot.

  “It’s perfect.” Bess spoke to Julia, but her message was directed to the assistant. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Siri. “Just let me make sure.”

  Chloe grabbed Julia’s gloved hand and stood on the pedestal beside her. “Are you the happiest lady in the world?”

 
Julia squeezed the precious child’s hand and met her eyes in the mirror. Happy? Astonished, perhaps. Astonished that she was finally getting married, finally pinning Simon down, finally about to start that family she’d been longing for the last several years.

  But happy? When was the last time she could say she was really happy? Filled with joy? She knew the answer instantly, but she didn’t dare speak it or even think it too hard. If she let her mind go there, she might fall apart at the seams. Get a grip. Press on. Don’t look back. These were her life mottos and had been for decades. She couldn’t abandon them now.

  “I am,” she said to Chloe, who cocked her head and stared into her eyes as if she wanted to believe her more than anything as Bess fussed with Siri about leaving the dress be.

  “Good.” The child squeezed Julia’s hand hard and gave her a serious look in the mirror. “I want you to be,” she said.

  CHAPTER 35

  Julia

  Four days before the wedding, Aunt Dot called. Simon’s sons had just flown into town and they were all having lunch at Nobu when Julia stepped into the ladies’ room to hear her aunt better.

  “We’re moving Marney to hospice this afternoon,” she said. “They think it will be a matter of days, not weeks.”

  Julia felt as if she’d gotten a kick in the stomach. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Dot.” Then they both wept into the phone before Julia worked up the nerve to ask, “How are the children?”

  Aunt Dot spoke through her warbly voice as she tried to hold back her weeping. “I’ve tried to tell them, Julia. Tried to prepare them. But you never really know if they understand what’s happening.” She paused and talked in a more hushed tone. “I know Heath knows what death means, and I suppose Etta does too, but of course she won’t say a word to let me know how she’s doing. Charlie really doesn’t understand any of it, naturally. He won’t understand what’s happened for a long time.”