The Moon Sisters: A Novel Read online

  Everything was a stone’s throw from everything else in Tramp, so I drove a stone’s throw and left the keys in the ignition. My grandmother was inside, cleaning a countertop. She stopped when she saw me, her face full of animation and an unspoken question.

  “I got the job,” I said.

  She pressed her thick lips together and narrowed her wrinkled eyelids. “When will you start? Tell me everything.”

  “In a minute, Babka. Is Dad here?”

  When she looked over her shoulder, I ducked under the counter and walked past her, into the kitchen, where the scent of bread had long ago been baked right into the walls. Now early afternoon, appliances sat cool and settled from the morning’s work. My father was also settled—bottom in a chair, top slumped over a desk in the corner. There was an open bottle of something beside him—an increasingly common sight this summer.

  “Was he drunk for deliveries? When did he start?”

  “After lunch. He is just sad,” she said. “Give him time. It has only been five months.”

  It felt more like five years.

  I took the bottle. Vodka. Walked it over to the wide porcelain sink.

  “Don’t,” she said. “He’ll just buy more.”

  More of what we couldn’t afford to begin with. Still, I knew she was right. I screwed the cap on the bottle and put it back beside him, then gripped his shoulder and shook.

  “Dad. Dad, wake up.” He didn’t stir. “Dad, come on. It’s about Olivia. Olivia’s in trouble.”

  One eye squinted up at me. “Liv?” he said. “What?”

  “She’s halfway down the street, heading out of town with Mom’s ashes in a suitcase. She’s keen on walking them all the way to the bogs, but with her miswired senses she’ll probably end up in Canada.”

  Or dead. Flattened under someone’s tires. Dead. Picked up by some hitchhiker killer. Dead from dehydration, from being lost or—

  “You have to tell her to come home,” I said. “She won’t listen to me.”

  Vodka poured off him in sheets as he righted himself. Three sheets to the wind. Maybe that’s where the saying had come from.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  He pulled himself upright, his hands on the desk, his left cheek coated in flour, his mass of dark, wavy hair—something Olivia and I had both inherited—in desperate need of a trim. His eyes looked a little screwed up. If my mother were suddenly brought back from the grave, she’d die all over again seeing him like this; she’d always thought him the handsomest guy on the planet. At least he never threw up on himself.

  “I can’t drive,” he said.

  As if. “I’ll drive. Come on, she can’t be too far.” I pulled at his sleeve, but he didn’t budge.

  “I should’ve taken Beth to the bogs,” he said, almost moaning the words. “Why didn’t I take her?”

  Another replayed topic. But you couldn’t turn back time, or halt it, no matter how many clock batteries you chucked out the window. I felt the presence of the three ovens behind me as if they’d come to life and nodded their heads, mouths snapped shut.

  “Because she didn’t want you to take her,” I said, hoping my pointed words cut through his fog. “Remember how she always had an excuse whenever you brought it up? Remember how you tried that one time and she couldn’t bring herself to get in the car?”

  What an ordeal that had been, what a disappointment for us all, but especially my father, who’d taken great pains to try to make it happen.

  “She didn’t want to go,” I continued. “Not really.”

  “You’ll have to take her down there, Jazz,” he said. “In the bus.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Drive her down to Monon—Monongahela. Go on and find those berry bogs for your mother.” His eyes came into focus when he said it, too, which made my pulse race in a fight-or-flight kind of way.

  “Can we take a moment to ground ourselves in the reality of the situation here?” I said. “Olivia doesn’t just want to visit the bog, have a moment, then turn around again right after. She wants to play hide-and-seek with a will-o’-the-wisp. She wants to find one. That could take an eternity, if they even appear down there, and for what purpose? It’s not like seeing a light is going to bring Mom back. It’s not like her ashes are going to care, either.”

  My blood pumped harder when my father’s expression didn’t change.

  “All right,” I said. “What if we find a ghost light but it’s not the good sort of spirit Mom imagined? What if it’s a trickster goblin who’ll charm us right off a cliff edge?”

  His eyes lost their clarity, and I knew I should’ve taken more care with my words. But was it my fault that I had to sink to the level of superstitious bullshittery in order to make a point?

  “It’s such a small thing to do for your father, to bring peace,” Babka said. “Such a small thing for your sister, to keep her safe.”

  My grandmother had such a wise way about her; that’s what made her guilt trips especially potent. But driving around the state in an ancient bus searching for ether was not how I wanted to spend my time. Not when my life was about to change so dramatically.

  In one week and one day, I would start my job at Rutherford & Son Funeral Home in Kennaton, working directly with Emilia Bryce. I would be there four days a week as a rule, though my official start date—August 1st—was a Thursday. Emilia liked the neatness of the idea: new month, new staff member. I couldn’t use my job as an excuse, though, because I hadn’t told my father about my interview yet; I didn’t know how he’d feel about me taking work in the same funeral home Mom’s body had been laid out in.

  Babka had asked me at least a dozen times if the job was what I wanted, if something more than money motivated my decision. I knew she asked for a bigger reason than being sorry to lose my dough-rolling hands at Susie’s, too. It was hard for her to accept that I was a twenty-two-year-old doer who was not a dreamer—that such a thing could exist with the involvement of her DNA—or that my choices didn’t have to satisfy a deep need of any sort. And, if they did, I didn’t know about it; self-analysis was anything but my talent. The bottom line was that I wanted the job and wouldn’t risk it on my sister’s whim.

  Babka seemed to read my mind. “It will not take long to drive there, little macka.” Much-ka. Cat. An endearment as well as a reminder to use my claws for good, to scrabble on behalf of my family, toward and not away from them. “You know your mother would want you to go after her, to protect.”

  Oh, yes, I knew. I could almost hear her voice.

  Find your sister and bring her home, Jazz. She’s off wandering again.

  When wasn’t she? Following her impulses, regardless of sense. As predictable as smoke in the wind. But I could not live my life as my sister’s keeper. I wouldn’t.

  Please, Jazz. Be good.

  I was sick of being good.

  “Thank you, Jazz,” my father said.

  I stomped my foot—“Wait a second!”—but he’d slumped down again, his head already returned to the desk.

  Babka led me out of the back room by the hand. “I have a map for you,” she said, also assuming.

  I kept up my end of the argument, but I knew I was finished when she started to pack a bag full of biscuits for me, when I realized that’s what Olivia had held, too—not a bag lunch but a sack from Susie’s—that Babka had been aware of Olivia’s plans all along. She handed it to me along with a jar of peanut butter and a dull knife, and said, “You never know. Maybe you’ll find the end of the story.” An inside joke I’d never found funny.

  Any doubt that I’d been bamboozled evaporated when she told me she’d put the sleeping bags in the storage room and reminded me how to unstick the tricky latch on the back of the bus—the cheapest motel one could find, as the bus was all but gutted. Once home to racks of biscuits, the wide floor now housed only dust.

  She tucked money into my hand, if I needed to call or buy more food.

  “I thought you said this would
take just a few hours.”

  “A few to drive. A few to look. A few to sleep. A few to look again. A few to drive back. Just a few.” She landed a wet kiss on my cheek, and her features turned serious when she said it: “Keep your sister safe. Keep you safe. And do not worry about Miss Emilia Bryce. Some dead can wait with patience. Some dead cannot.”

  The air that rushed out at me when I opened the door to the house nearly melted my skin, and that’s saying something, seeing as I was coming from the hottest bus ever manufactured. But, along with covering all our mirrors, Babka had insisted we keep the windows closed. Those spirits—you never did know how they might slip in. And, of course, there was no air-conditioning in our house—or in any house in Tramp. There were no cordless teakettles, either, or iPads or flat-screen TVs. We knew they existed, out there in another sphere, but they were not a part of our world any more than was the water found recently, supposedly, on Mars. A lack of money had a way of repressing a life, turning it back a few years—sometimes a few centuries. I suspected that it had a way of taking the dream out of you, too, that you cashed it in at some point in exchange for a few dollars.

  It was while I rushed around, grabbing what I thought we’d need for an overnighter, that I noted the latest change: My mother’s desk had been moved out of my parents’ room and into Olivia’s. There it sat—two tall crates bridged with a plywood worktop—butted up against the end of my sister’s bed. In the warmer months, my mother would spend hours there, writing longhand and typing and staring off into space.

  On top of the desk’s usual tablecloth covering were Olivia’s rejected glasses—exhumed from a small drawer filled with other things I was probably never meant to find, including an unopened pack of condoms. Sitting beside the glasses was the framed photograph that had always been on the desk—a picture of a man with steel eyes and a thin smile, his hand held in the air in the manner of a wave, or the waving off of a photographer. My grandfather. My mother’s father.

  Sometimes my mother called this desk her altar, though I never understood why. She didn’t exactly believe in God, though she wouldn’t admit that and risk an eternity in hell; she’d always preferred purgatory to making a real choice. And now there it was—desk or altar—taken by my sister the way she took everything else.

  Everything except what had lain hidden under the loose floorboard in our mother’s room. Twenty-two letters, and they all began the same way.

  Dear Dad.

  Dear Dad.

  Dear Dad.

  “Must be nice to always do whatever the hell you want,” I muttered, taking one last look at the desk before zipping up my mother’s old Kennaton State backpack, where those letters lay snug under food and water bottles.

  The pack was tucked away under the bus’s dash when I reunited with my sister on the road, about half a mile from where I’d last seen her. This time, when I swung open the door, she stepped up and in.

  “You can be dangerously passive-aggressive,” I told her.

  In an unusual display of good sense, she said nothing. Just settled into the seat behind me as we headed out of town.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Blue and Chocolate

  OLIVIA

  I was seven years and seven months when my father said he could hear music in the box fan that sat on the floor of our living room. It was fiddler’s music, he said, well bowed and true. Mama, Jazz, and I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of blades cutting into the hot summer air, but he hummed the tune for us and it was nice. I was so excited that maybe he was like me, but it only happened the one time.

  Back then, everyone but my family thought I was either crazy or had the wildest imagination they’d ever heard expressed. They didn’t know that there were others who could smell sights (Papa was fresh-mown grass, the sun was Mama) or taste words (not every word, and not the way regular people taste, either; freckle, like the dots all over Mama’s face, tasted like togetherness). They didn’t know that others could see sounds (Babka’s voice looked like a tumble of soft flour). They didn’t know that I wasn’t the only one who could see a calendar in her own head, with days and numbers that lingered in the background, like a hungry dog when you’re eating a sandwich.

  They didn’t know there was a word for what I had.

  synesthesia (n.): the stimulation of a sense other than the one receiving input; sensory areas with faulty wiring

  That’s what the dictionary might say, my doctor explained when he figured it out. After that, my mother told the school they needed to stop using colored chalk and ink in my classes, because if a letter was written in the wrong color (like A written in sky blue instead of cranberry red, which was the color it always was to me) it made my brain stall. But they didn’t change, so she took me out of there in the sixth grade and taught me at home after that. Taught me everything I needed to know and everything she’d learned in three years of college besides. She always used black ink on white paper, which left my letters free to be themselves. D was a superior sort of hot orange, standing beside C, so modest in her buttery tones. O was my favorite, like water shooting out of a hose in summertime.

  My mother liked hearing about my letters about as much as Jazz didn’t like hearing about them. Maybe that’s because my sister had to stay in school even after I was taken out of it, and I was able to finish my twelfth-grade requirements early. The trouble between us began before that, though.

  The year I turned six, Jazz got a lava lamp for Christmas. It transfixed us both from the second she plugged it in, with globs of oily crimson that rose and fell like sleepy dancers in a pool of green.

  That’s how “Silent Night” looks! I’d said, excited to share what I saw every time I heard the song. I grabbed the lamp, but it slid out of my hands and broke, spilling all those little dancers onto the kitchen floor.

  When my parents walked into the room seconds later to find Jazz boring holes into my skull with her eyes like some medieval torturer, Papa covered one of his own eyes to remind us that there were two ways to look at everything.

  It’s not the end of the world, Mama said. Maybe Santa will bring you an even better lava lamp next Christmas.

  Jazz’s eyes flicked away from me and to my parents, where they stayed for a long second before she stormed away. I hate your synesthesia. And there’s no such thing as Santa Claus, she said, already halfway up the stairs.

  I might’ve cried for a week over the death of Santa, but my mother pulled me onto her lap and reminded me of one of her life truths: It was okay to believe in things that others didn’t believe in. It was okay not to believe, too.

  I leaned my forehead against the rattling window as Jazz merged onto the highway on the way to the glades, my nose raised to catch the slim breeze sneaking in through the permanently stuck window. The world was still an interesting place to see, even now that I was blind in the legal sense of things, unable to clearly make out expressions on faces or my colored letters. Being left with only the periphery made you look at life in a unique way, consider its exhalations and auras—like the deep, deep green of the forested hills on either side of us and the secrets it might hide. And in many ways I could still see more than most: The red-streak sounds left by passing trucks and cars looked like rubber eraser bits on paper, and a clear blue sky always smelled of warm chocolate and adrenaline.

  If I’d been in the bus with anyone else, I might’ve shared that the day was like a cup of chocolate coffee, but I knew better than to bother with Jazz, especially when everything down to her clothing choice of gray shorts and a black T-shirt revealed her storm-cloud mood. She was driving us to the glades against her will and better judgment, she’d said, which meant I would get the mostly silent treatment from her for the duration, with a few snippety snap comments thrown in for good measure. How was I supposed to know she’d come home today with a job in her back pocket? It’s not like my sister told me anything. And now I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  A funeral home. The funeral home.

&nbs
p; I recalled my mother in her casket with her eyes closed, how I’d stood beside her with my hand on her hair. They’d covered her cinnamon-sugar freckles with wrong-colored makeup, and I wanted to rub it off her face.

  I want to see Mama’s eyes one last time, I told Missy Finnegan, one of Babka’s oldest customers from Tramp, who’d stepped up to pay her respects.

  She’d lifted her glasses off her nose, looked at me with her tiny black eyes, and wiggled her teeth. They take the eyeballs out of ’em before now, child. Hang on to your memories.

  “Will you have to do the eyes?” I asked the back of my sister’s head.

  “What?” she said, the word like a bite.

  “They take the eyes out of corpses, don’t they? You won’t have anything to do with that, will you?”

  “We don’t remove the eyes, only the tongues.”

  “Really?” I asked, before my brain kicked in.

  Maybe it was because Jazz always treated me like a five-year-old that I sometimes felt like one with her. She was the only person who’d ever made my mouth run off out of nerves. Sometimes I wished I were still five when I was around her. My five-year-old self never cared what my sister thought of me, or knew that what she thought of me didn’t amount to much.

  I twined my fingers through a section of hair, started another braid, as Jazz ended our not-quite conversation by turning on the radio. A familiar lime static appeared as she searched in vain for a station. I was glad to see that static—glad to have it back.