Undressing the Moon

by T. Greenwood

  Inside Mr. Hammer’s house the phone was ringing, the clothes dryer was rumbling, and a small kitten was tearing across the hardwood floor with a crazed look in its eyes. I stepped in after he opened the door, the phone cradled between his chin and his shoulder, motioning for me to take off my coat.

  “Got it,” he said. “See you on Monday afternoon.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard him hang up the phone. I looked at the little calico kitten, who was looking back with a scary intensity, and took my coat off and hung it on a peg by the front door.

  “Hi, Piper,” Mr. Hammer said from the kitchen.

  “Hi.”

  “Make yourself comfortable. I’m just making some coffee.”

  I sat down on the couch and, noticing the puddle the snow was making around my feet, I quickly unlaced my boots and slipped them off. I looked toward the kitchen and leaned over, trying to get close enough to my feet to make sure they didn’t smell bad. Then I tried to sop up some of the melted snow with my scarf, but it just sort of pushed the water around. I got up and carried my boots to the mat by the door.

  I could hear and smell the coffee brewing in the kitchen, the sound of Mr. Hammer’s feet shuffling across the floor. I sat back down on the couch. The kitten had disappeared.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked. “Tea? Hot cocoa?”

  “I’m fine.”

  The sun was starting to come out. It had been a week without sun. I felt myself smiling despite myself. I moved to the other side of the couch, into a warm pool of sunlight. The blue upholstery was faded in this spot. I wondered if I sat there in that little puddle of sun if I might fade, too.

  I was about to tell Mr. Hammer that I would like some hot chocolate when I felt a terrible, sharp pain in my ankle. I cried out, looking down at the kitten attached to my wool socks and to my skin by its claws.

  “Are you okay?” Mr. Hammer said, rushing into the living room.

  I looked up at him, tears in my eyes, as the kitten released me. It didn’t retreat, though; it only stood there, hissing at me, the hair on its back raised.

  “Jack! What a horrible cat you are,” he said, scooping up the kitten, and then, to me, “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, but my ankle stung.

  “Take your sock off,” he said.

  Horrified, I shook my head. My feet had smelled okay, but who knows what would happen if I took off my soggy wool sock?

  “You really should let me look at it. Cats are pretty dirty little animals. We should at least put some antiseptic on it. Let me go grab some peroxide,” he said, disappearing through another doorway.

  I stared at my feet and then, reluctantly, peeled the heavy wool sock off my foot. The claws had made four perfect punctures around the back of my ankle. Already, there were puffy red welts. It stung. Everything stung.

  Mr. Hammer came back into the room with a bottle of peroxide, two white cotton balls, and some Band-Aids.

  “Put your foot up here,” he said, tapping on the other end of the couch.

  I lifted my leg up and set it there. He tipped the peroxide bottle against the cotton ball and then dabbed gently at the little wounds. The peroxide bubbled and made the room smell like medicine. Then he used his teeth to tear open two of those little Band-Aids you usually use for your pinky finger, knelt down, and pressed one of them against my skin. He repeated this with the other one, cradling my foot in the palm of his hand. He inspected his handiwork and looked up at me.

  “Better?” he asked.

  I nodded, but he kept holding my foot as if it were broken instead of only wounded. And all of a sudden I felt so grateful that tears welled up in my eyes like snow puddles.

  Becca still takes me to my doctor’s appointments, even though I stopped treatment almost four months ago (when the leaves were still green, when the girls still flirted by the fountain, in the moonlight, summer evenings). She has been there with me through three rounds of chemo. She’s seen that their elixirs are really poisons. But she was also there when the chemo and radiation worked, when everything slowed down for a while, when I could pretend that I might get better.

  When my doctor tells me what I already know: that it is in my bones as well as my lungs, and that now it is only a matter of time (weeks? months?) unless I’m willing to allow them to harvest my bone marrow and undergo a bone marrow transplant, Becca will not hear my noes.

  On Church Street, at the small dark restaurant where we always go for lunch after my appointments, she is buzzing with excitement. We are the only customers. We sit in the window facing the street, unwrap ourselves from our coats and scarves. She repeats all the things the doctors said about the procedure. I stare at the menu, and I can’t remember what any of the words mean: au jus, au gratin. The words coming out of her mouth could be menu items, they are so foreign: autologous, stem cells. Marrow, marrow, marrow.

  As she rattles on, excited, I press my hands against my ears to make all the words go away.

  She sees me, stops talking mid-sentence, and looks out the window.

  Then I ask her if she remembers the nights I spent curled up in the cold bathtub so that I could be closer to the toilet, if she remembers the sores on my knees. I close my eyes, remembering the first time I washed my hair, and the way it floated across the surface of the bathwater like decaying plants on the surface of a pond. I ask her if she remembers the dreams I had right after my surgery, the ones in which a wild dog was attacking me, biting my breasts, my feet, and my hands. But she only stares into her soup.

  “Don’t you get it?” I ask.

  “What?” she says, her face and voice raised to meet mine.

  I stare out at the cold street, where people rush in and out of doorways, bundled and cloaked. You can’t see anyone’s face when it is this cold. When I look back at Becca, she has set her spoon down and her hands are on the edge of the table, as if she might just stand up. As if she might simply walk away. The thought of that terrifies me more than anything. More than the pain in my hips and my legs. More than the idea of suffocating in my sleep.

  “I’m scared,” I say. “I’m tired and I’m scared and I just want everything to go away. I want to sit here and talk about what movie to see or some new book or … sex, for Christ’s sake.” I hold up my hands, empty, and feel my shoulders falling. Feel everything falling. “But I can’t.”

  Becca puts her hands back in her lap and looks at me. Her eyes are watercolor blue. She reaches across the table and puts both of my hands inside hers.

  “You said I act like I’m already dead.”

  She looks down at the table.

  “But Becca, I don’t remember how to live. I don’t remember the last time I even felt close to normal.” Then I am crying. Hard. Through the blur of tears I can see the waitress and the bartender, leaning into each other, trying not to look.

  Becca squeezes her hands over mine, makes a cocoon to keep them safe, and I keep crying, sobbing like a child, letting the sadness shake me. I don’t even try to stop, not when the waitress puts her hand on Becca’s shoulder and asks if everything is okay. Not when she brings more napkins and sets them on the table. And all the while, Becca waits.

  “Please don’t leave,” I say.

  And in that moment, with Becca still sitting across from me, after everything I’ve said and done and put her through, I realize she won’t leave. She won’t leave me, no matter what I say or don’t say, no matter what I do or don’t do. In my whole life, she is the only person who has ever stayed. And that’s why I start to nod and ask her questions, furiously, about the procedure, about the statistics, about what all the words mean. I hadn’t been listening; I hadn’t heard any of them. This is all I have to offer her.

  And when she says harvest, I think about the winter garden behind his house, when he showed me where, in the summer, things would grow, plentiful and good. I can smell the dank, wet sweetness of soil and taste the way rain would taste on fresh lettuce or green beans or peppers. And I
realize that it is possible that there is something left inside me that can be salvaged. That there is something left still to be saved.

  On Sunday afternoon, after my lesson with Mr. Hammer, I walked home feeling lighter. With each breath, with each released note, a little of the pain of what happened with Blue had disappeared. It wasn’t something you could see, though; it was more transparent than breath. But it had weight, and now that weight was lifted.

  The sun was shining brightly on Gormlaith; the lake was not frozen yet, only very, very cold. Most of the camps on the lake were closed up for the winter, and I felt briefly that I was the only person in the whole world. If the world ended, I thought, it would feel like this. Cold, bright, and desolate. Light.

  By the time I got back to our house, the sun was starting to melt behind the trees, liquid sunshine turning cold as the foliage swallowed it. My mother’s car was parked in the driveway: Quinn was home.

  Sleep met me at the door, winding his way clumsily through my legs as I tried to take off my coat and boots. Quinn was in the living room. There was a trail of ski clothes: from his boots and skis at the door to his goggles on the table to his ski pants strewn across a chair. He was fast asleep on the couch, wearing his long johns and his ski hat. His hands were clutched together between his knees, and his feet were bare. He and I have the same long, bony toes.

  I tiptoed into the living room and carefully pulled the afghan off the back of the couch to cover him up, but as I started to cover his feet he woke up.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  I sat down on the floor next to him. “How did the race go?”

  “I came in third for slalom. First for giant slalom,” he said.

  “That’s great!”

  He sat up, yanking the afghan around his shoulders. “I’m beat. The sun did a number on me.” He had owl eyes from his goggles, a bright red forehead and cheeks.

  “Did you bring your charm?” I asked.

  He gestured to where his parka was lying, empty, on the floor. “I haven’t taken it out of the pocket.”

  “You hungry?” I asked.

  “A little,” he said, nodding. “Hey, where have you been all day?”

  “At my lesson.”

  “Oh, I forgot. Is he teaching you anything useful yet?”

  I thought about the breathing exercises, the scales like little baby steps. I shrugged.

  “You want some tuna pea wiggle?” I asked.

  “You cookin’?”

  “Sure.”

  Quinn found the remote control between the couch cushions, flipped on the TV, and lay back down.

  “You look silly,” I said, pointing at his sunburnt face.

  “Thanks.”

  In the kitchen I got two plates out of the cupboard and crushed up a bunch of saltines, making a big pile of broken crackers on each plate. In a saucepan, I stirred milk and butter and tuna until it was hot, adding a little flour to help thicken it up. Then I dumped in the can of peas. When everything was hot, I poured the sauce on the crackers, grabbed two forks, and carefully carried the plates in to Quinn. I loved tuna pea wiggle. It made me think of times when I was sick and stayed home from school with Mum. She always made it for me, and it always made me feel better. Sometimes if I was feeling well enough by the afternoon, we’d do some sort of project. Once we made candles out of my old crayons and paraffin. One time, we made the thick pretzels you usually can only buy in malls. We even made potato chips once from scratch, using real potatoes.

  Quinn ate like he hadn’t eaten in a month, getting cracker crumbs all over the afghan and couch.

  I snorted like a pig.

  “Cut it out …” he said.

  The phone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I said and set my plate on the coffee table. I ran to the kitchen, almost slipping when I rounded the corner in my stocking feet.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Piper? It’s Blue.”

  All the heaviness returned, throbbing in my hands and in my chest. I could barely breathe.

  “Listen, I was thinking you might like to go to the movies or something? My mom said she could take us tomorrow night.”

  I could hear his voice, but it felt as if I were only listening to the TV or the radio. He was that far away.

  “Piper?” he asked again.

  “I … I can’t,” I said.

  “Oh …” the voice said. “Well, maybe we could get some sandwiches or pie or something after school tomorrow?”

  “I have rehearsals. I can’t.”

  I wanted him to go away. I wanted him to give up, hang up the phone, to stop. But he kept on talking, trying out plans as if nothing were out of the ordinary. As if he hadn’t taken me and shattered me into little pieces the night before, in some stranger’s bedroom, on some stranger’s bed.

  “I don’t want you to come by anymore,” I said. My words felt as distant as his.

  “Piper, is this about last night?” he asked.

  And then I was moving the phone away from my ear, gently setting it back on the cradle. My ears were buzzing. I went back into the living room, where the tuna pea wiggle was already cold and soggy on my plate.

  “Who was it?” Quinn asked, flipping the channels so fast it looked the way it does when you watch out the side window of a moving car.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  “Nobody who?” he asked.

  “Nobody Henderson,” I said, trying to smile.

  “Oh,” he said, looking away from the TV to me. I was pushing the peas around my plate with my finger. “You okay, Pipe?”

  I nodded, trying not to feel the weight of Blue in my shoulders and in my legs. Trying not to remember the weight of Blue on my chest.

  There are a lot of people who don’t know I’m sick. Sometimes, I think about all the people I’ve ever met or been acquainted with or loved, and it is incredible to me that most of them have no idea about what is happening inside my body. And then I think about all the people I have met or been acquainted with or loved and wonder if they have similar secrets that they are carrying around with them. It makes you realize how many people, out of all the people you know, are actually important to you.

  I started a list book once in which I tried to name every person I had ever known. I started with family, and then worked chronologically through my life. Elementary school classmates, family friends, the librarians at the Quimby Atheneum, girls from swimming lessons and the clerks at the Shop-N-Save. When I got to fifth grade, I stopped. I had twenty college-ruled pages of names, and there were only a handful of people with whom I was still in touch. All those pages, all those people; it made me feel terribly alone.

  Sometimes I’ll bump into someone at the post office or at the bank, someone I haven’t seen in a couple of years, and I’ll strike up a conversation with them, realizing halfway through that they don’t know me anymore. And that, worse yet, I don’t know them either.

  A couple of days after my doctor’s appointment, I was leaving the fabric store in Quimby when I saw Richard, a friend of a friend who swept into my life one weekend four or five years before. It was one of those things, those flings, you know will amount to nothing, but you do it anyway because you’re lonely or bored, and then you forget about it after it’s all done.

  I was wearing the blond wig that Becca had given me. My hair has still not come back. It might take a while, my doctor says. Normally, I just pull on a baseball cap or a bandanna, but it’s getting cold now, and I miss the way my hair used to feel around my neck. My real hair, when I had it, was brown. And curly. I always hated my hair, its willful disorder, but now I miss it terribly.

  He was walking down the street, blowing warm air into his bare hands. I recognized him from almost a block away. And I considered, for a moment, waving, calling out, “Hey, Richard! It’s me, Piper Kincaid. Remember?” But as he got closer, I simply clutched my paper bag of thread and bias tape and buttons, and waited for him to pass. The funny thing was that he slowed down as he r
eached me, and a slow smile crept across his face. Startled, I opened my mouth to say something, but he had already passed. And I realized that what he saw was simply a blond girl with cheeks flushed pink from a cold early-winter afternoon. I was nobody he remembered in this disguise. I wasn’t who I used to be.

  I have told some of my old friends, but mostly people have just figured it out. Quimby is a very small town, and if you walk outside to get your mail, forgetting your hat, someone is bound to notice and spread the word for you. Once, after a trip to the Laundromat when my dryer was on the fritz, and my bandanna slipped, my second-grade teacher showed up at my apartment door with two pans of lasagna. After that day, I barely had to cook for the next three months.

  But I’ve been sick for so long now, it’s not hot news anymore. Especially not since one of the cooks at the Miss Quimby Diner blew his own head off and the undertaker from the Holmes and Holmes Mortuary was arrested for stealing jewelry off his customers’ dead bodies. My neighbors still bring me casseroles every now and then, but there’s only so much sympathy you can send in one direction. Even I have settled into my illness like an old rumor.

  Maybe this is why I decide one afternoon to find him. Maybe it’s just some sort of attempt to find someone new to startle with my misfortune. But I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about him lately. He’s been invading my dreams. After Becca convinced me to go through with the bone marrow transplant, to allow myself to hope, he started visiting me in my sleep. Not every night. Not every time I fell asleep. But sometimes I wake up breathless, feeling shame. Guilt heavier than the quilts on my shoulders. More violent than pain.