The Moon Sisters: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY THERESE WALSH

  The Last Will of Moira Leahy

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Therese Walsh

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walsh, Therese.

  The moon sisters : a novel / Therese Walsh.—First Edition.

  pages cm

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters. 3. Forgiveness—Fiction. 4. Families—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.A36617M66 2013

  813.′.6—dc23 2013018032

  ISBN 978-0-307-46160-5

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-46162-9

  Jacket design by Kimberly Glyder Design

  Jacket photograph by Stephen Carroll/arcangel-images.com

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to Riley, for one hundred read-throughs and one-hundred-and-one sage comments; and to Liam, for one thousand rounds of laughter.

  And to my sisters, who are as different as the moon and the sun.

  What one commonly takes as “the reality” … by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous.… There are many realities.

  —Albert Hofmann

  Action is the antidote to despair.

  —Joan Baez

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Ground Zero: The End of the Beginning

  First Stage: Denial

  Chapter One: The Foolish Fire of Olivia Moon

  Chapter Two: Blue and Chocolate

  Chapter Three: Square Pegs

  Chapter Four: Hope and Mirrors

  Second Stage: Anger

  Chapter Five: Boiled Poet

  Chapter Six: On Fate. Or Luck.

  Chapter Seven: Good Daughter

  Chapter Eight: A Fortunate Thing

  Third Stage: Bargaining

  Chapter Nine: A Fascination with Death

  Chapter Ten: Another Way to Look at Things

  Chapter Eleven: A History of Oran

  Chapter Twelve: Crossroads

  Chapter Thirteen: Outlanders

  Chapter Fourteen: The Edge of the Periphery

  Chapter Fifteen: The Long Memory of Old Dreams

  Chapter Sixteen: A Hollow Heart

  Chapter Seventeen: Scars

  Fourth Stage: Depression

  Chapter Eighteen: Wishes

  Chapter Nineteen: The Plague

  Chapter Twenty: Cranberry Glades

  Chapter Twenty-one: Regrets

  Chapter Twenty-two: Right Tree, Wrong Dream

  Chapter Twenty-three: Mushroom Soup

  Fifth Stage: Acceptance

  Chapter Twenty-four: Hope Chest

  Chapter Twenty-five: The Undying

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FEBRUARY

  GROUND ZERO

  The End of the Beginning

  OLIVIA

  The night before the worst day of my life, I dreamed the sun went dark and ice cracked every mirror in the house, but I didn’t take it for a warning.

  The day itself seemed like any other Tuesday at the start. Papa made pancakes, then went to the bakery to prepare for deliveries with Babka. My sister, Jazz, followed behind him shortly after that. Even though it was one of the coldest stretches we’d had that February, I chose a button-down shirt from the pile of clothes on the floor of my room instead of my wool pullover, because I planned to see Stan.

  When I went to say goodbye to Mama, I found the door to the kitchen closed from the living room. She’d have the oven on to battle back the chill in our house. The kitchen, at least, could be warmed quickly this way, a small room shaped like a stubby number 7 that doubled as Mama’s office in the wintertime.

  “What’s out there?” I asked when I stepped inside to find her staring out the room’s lone window. She wore her frayed blue robe, thick socks, and a ponytail that was just to the right of center. It was still cold in there; the oven had yet to warm the room.

  “Nothing,” she said. “A gray sky.”

  I was hardly aware. Even though it was the middle of winter, my nose filled with the scent of clothes right off the line on a summer day, like sunshine itself. That’s what seeing Mama always did to me; it was my favorite part of having synesthesia.

  “If you live your whole life hoping and dreaming the wrong things,” she said, “what does that mean about your whole life?”

  Her voice sank low, looked like roots descending in a slow and seeking way into the earth, which told me she was in what she called one of her “up-and-downs.”

  I sat at the table, littered with manuscript pages, a plateful of cold pancakes, and a typewriter older than my mother. She’d been working on a fairy tale called A Foolish Fire nearly my entire life but had yet to finish it. I knew this was what she was talking about.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your dreams, Mama,” I told her. “Believe, believe.”

  “Not everyone has your courage, Olivia.”

  I might’ve suggested she take the trip she dreamed of taking, go to the setting of her story—a bog in our state of West Virginia called Cranberry Glades. But I knew a mention of the ghost lights she hoped to see there could send my mother’s mood up or further down, and that maybe this wasn’t the time to risk it.

  “Maybe you’ll feel better after you take a nap,” I said, because Mama called sleep her personal tonic.

  She said, “I take too many naps as it is,” which is when I pulled off a boot.

  “I’ll stay home with you today. If you’re up for it, we can dream together for a while. We haven’t done that in a long time.”

  When I was younger, we called it “the dream game.” Sometimes I’d describe life through my eyes—like the way thunder filled the air with a mustard-gold fog—because she enjoyed hearing about it. Sometimes we’d both poke our heads through the clouds, especially after math, when we were worn out from too much thinking. She’d lie on the couch with her eyes locked shut, and I’d fling myself over a chair with my eyes wide open, and we’d unloose our wildest imaginings. Trees rained soft white buds the size of platters onto our shoulders and into our hair, covered us until we looked like exotic birds. We’d fly to Iceland or France or Russia or Brazil. Visit creamy blue pools and limestone cliffs and waterfalls that went on for miles.

  Sometimes we’d visit the bog and see the ghost lights, which Mama said were like a vision of hope itself, and she’d have a revelation about the end of her story.

  But it was all just dreaming.

  She told me she wasn’t in the mood for that and urged me to go on with my plans. I took it as a positive sign that she sounded calmer when she said it, that the downward trek of her voice had stilled. I half expected her to say something about Stan—Don’t let that boy into your knickers—even though I was nearly eighteen and we lived in the middle of nowhere.

  “Will you write today?” I asked, when she stayed quiet.

  She nodded but never turned around. I pulled my boot back on. I told her to stay warm. I told her I loved her. And then I left.

 
I was the one who found her later—not moving, not breathing, dead with her head on the kitchen table. The gas on and the pilot light out, the windows and doors closed, sealing the room as tight as the envelope sitting beside her.

  I have a hard time recalling what I did in those next minutes. Screamed. Felt for a pulse that wasn’t there. Called 911. Pulled her to the floor. Held my mother, and rocked us both, the way she’d rocked me over endless hours when I was a child.

  “You’re not dead, you’re not dead,” I chanted, rocked harder, hoped harder, as cold air from a window I must’ve opened poured over us both. “Mama! Mama, please, wake up!”

  She did not wake up. The ambulance came and took her away, and I saw no colors or shapes from the siren—the beginning of a landslide of change.

  I hid the letter in the torn lining of my coat, where it dug at my heart like a spade, and I told no one. It was not a letter meant for us—me and my father and sister. It was not Goodbye, life wasn’t what I thought it would be. I’ve lived and dreamed the wrong things, and I no longer believe, so I am gone. Mama had turned on the oven, and the pilot light flickered out because it was an old stove in an old house, and she’d fallen asleep with the door closed, because that’s what she did all the time.

  An accident.

  Ghosts sometimes visited from the other side, Babka always said; they breathed on glass as a sign of their discontentment. It was only later that I noticed frost on the bathroom mirror.

  JULY

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Foolish Fire of Olivia Moon

  JAZZ

  My sister began staring at the sun after our mother died, because she swore it smelled like her. For me, it would always be the scent of oven gas, since that’s how Mom went—fumes pouring out, her breathing them in. Like Sylvia Plath, my father said, because my mother was a tortured writer, too.

  Olivia’s actions were just as purposeful. Burned her retinas out over a period of months, made it so she couldn’t drive or even read. Well, she could’ve, if she’d used the glasses the doctor gave her—those big things that look like telescopes on her face—but she wouldn’t. So no reading. No driving. Instead, she lived with her head always tilted to the side, with an oil smudge in the center of everything she might want to see.

  My sister’s reality had always been bizarre, though, with her ability to taste words and see sounds and smell a person on the sun. So when she decided to toss our dead mother’s ashes into a suitcase and go off to the setting of our dead mother’s story to find a ghost light, I wasn’t all that surprised. She’d never been the poster child for sense.

  There were dozens of tales about ghost lights, or will-o’-the-wisps, as they’re sometimes called—those slow-blinking lights that folks claim appear over bogs and swamplands. Some say they’re the spirits of dead Indians or disgruntled miners, even unborn children. They’re lost souls trying to find their missing parts. They’re mercurial sprites who’ll lead you to hidden treasure or danger if you follow, which is why they’re also called Foolish Fires; trusting in them is not a sensible thing. Scientists say they’re just swamp gases blinking to a strange pseudo-life now and then. A reasonable explanation, if you ask me.

  Olivia did not ask me.

  She woke up one day determined to find them. As if she might see with her blind eyes just when she needed to see—notice those lights hiding in a mushroom ring, or hanging alongside a thousand leaves in a hickory tree, or drowning with a bunch of cranberries in a bog. As if finding them might matter somehow, when our lives had been upended and nothing could ever be the same again.

  I knew better.

  “I’m not a cripple, Jazz, and I can see well enough to walk around without falling into a ditch. I’ll be just fine.”

  Olivia stood at the end of the lane, a small tattered suitcase in one hand and a bag lunch in the other. Dirt swirled around her ankles when Old Man Williams rattled by in his pickup.

  I pulled as close to the curb as I could and glared out at her from the small window of the biscuit bus. The shame I’d felt having to drive the ancient red-and-rust beast, which my grandmother and father didn’t even use anymore but which seemed unwilling to quit, had been worth it in the end. I’d won the job in Kennaton. I’d won it, and I couldn’t even enjoy it. Not when my eighteen-year-old, legally blind sister was about to do another stupid thing.

  “And what happens when you get thirsty?” I asked.

  “I’ll buy water.” She rattled her pocket. Coins jangled from within.

  At least those denim shorts were hers. The bleach-streaked blue V-neck she wore—like so many of the things she wore now—had been our mother’s. Taking her things was Olivia’s latest obsession, as was trying to braid her hair the way our mother did for her when she was young, when her hair was an artful mix of curls and waves. The opposite of the nest of neglect on her head now, with braids wound so tight they jutted from her skull like worms with rigor mortis.

  “What if you’re not near a store?”

  “There are streams all over the state,” she said. “I’ll find water.”

  “You’ll get giardia.”

  She didn’t blink.

  My fingers dug into the cracked plastic steering wheel as the bus coughed. “And what happens when you’re tired?”

  “I’ll sleep.”

  “Where?”

  She shrugged. “Wherever I am.”

  “And where are you going to find these ghost lights, Olivia? Do you even know?”

  She looked sidelong at me with big, blue, broken eyes set in a pale face, and said, “Cranberry Glades,” as if I’d asked her the time of day.

  I was sicker than I could say of hearing about the bogs and ghost lights of the Monongahela Forest. Our mother had talked about them a lot over the years, always in relation to her book. One of these days I’ll visit that bog, see those wisps, and figure out the ending—you’ll see, she’d say.

  I might’ve asked her how that could matter, tried to impress upon her the impossibility of finding the end to a fictional story out in the real world and that she didn’t need a trip so much as dogged determination and hard work to finish. But logic wasn’t my family’s strong suit, and my mother had never been one to actualize a dream—even one as straightforward as Visit Cranberry Glades.

  “That trip isn’t for you to worry about, Olivia. It isn’t anyone’s to worry about anymore,” I said, giving logic a try despite what I knew about my blood. “We need to let it go.”

  “It’s unfinished business,” she said, and sounded for a moment like my grandmother—a woman I respected for being both a dreamer and a doer, even if she was far too superstitious for my taste.

  The dead remain when there’s unfinished business, Babka had said after the funeral, reciting one of her Old World beliefs and covering the mirrors in our house lest my mother’s spirit reenter our world through a looking glass. They were still covered, too, even though it had been five months since my mother died. The business is still unfinished, Babka insisted whenever I pressed her on it.

  Maybe my mother’s ashes were scattered in my sister’s suitcase, but I had no doubt that my mother’s spirit had long since moved on. I’d seen the way she looked through magazines, planning trips we’d never be able to afford. I’d heard her gasp with longing over any number of things in People magazine: the latest red-carpet dress, elaborate mansions with manicured lawns, even a lobster drowned in a pool of butter—things you’d never find in our hometown.

  Dreaming. Always wanting what wasn’t.

  No, my mother’s spirit wasn’t hanging around Tramp. She was gone. Free, finally, of the cement shoes that had always been of her own construction. She might’ve worn those shoes right out to the deepest part of the stream running through our town, let nature take its course, but that wasn’t the path she chose when at last she chose.

  I knew something was wrong with me.

  I should’ve felt something about her death, more than I did—something that I could label a
nd understand, instead of the knot that I couldn’t. All I knew for sure was what that knot wasn’t. It wasn’t what I’d believed grief would be. And it wasn’t the desire to memorialize my mother in marble or the stars, or make good on any of the dreams she’d abandoned along with her family.

  At the other end of the spectrum lay my father, whose grief was so evident that it hurt to look at him. Sometimes he stood in the bathroom with a portion of the mirror uncovered—staring into his own vacant eyes, his face half-shaved—hoping, praying maybe, that my mother would sneak back through the glass. He blamed himself for her death, I knew, though I didn’t understand the why of that; it’s not like he’d turned on the gas.

  A few weeks ago, I came home to find her favorite chair gone. I couldn’t begin to guess the number of naps my mother had taken in that seat, or the number of library books she’d read there, either. Maybe my father thought he’d miss her less if he didn’t see that empty dented cushion every day. But if that was the reason he would’ve done well to get rid of all her things instead of leaving the most significant reminders of her right where they’d been.

  The typewriter in our tiny kitchen.

  Her manuscript tucked under that.

  The makeshift desk in their bedroom.

  Maybe it’s time the rest went away, too, I told him just yesterday, hoping we could be rid of it all, quick and done. But spontaneous, dramatic gestures weren’t his nature.

  A dog’s bark brought me back to the present.

  “Olivia!” I shouted, when I noticed her start to walk away again—noticed Mrs. Lynch, too, on her porch across the road, staring at the two of us. I pulled the door handle, a snakelike metal bar angled up and out of the dashboard, until the squeezebox doors creaked open. “Get in, Olivia. Right now.”

  “Goodbye, Jazz. Try not to worry,” she said, and continued down the lane.

  Our hometown of Tramp, West Virginia, had about a hundred homes, all of them old firetrap constructions, and only six businesses: a post office, a liquor store, St. Cyril’s Church, a gas station, a corner store, and my grandmother’s bakery. Everyone in town called the business Susie’s—even though its real name was Sušienka, a Slovakian word for biscuit—and they called my grandmother Susie—even though her real name was Drahomíra. She didn’t mind. Not so long as they came in every morning and bought a bag of her warm small cakes. I tried to steer clear of them myself, since most of my neighbors could probably attribute their potbellies to Susie’s biscuits.