The Moon Sisters: A Novel Read online

  I took a seat in Jim’s office to wait for the official word. The stone-and-glass room was air-conditioned, which might’ve made it easier for me to cool off, figuratively as well as literally, and think through what to do next. My bus sat in the lot outside. Though Jim hadn’t had time for a full diagnosis, he thought the problem might be a bad axle shaft caused by the collision with the deer.

  But you never know, he’d said. Sometimes a thing—after it’s been around the block a couple hundred times—gets tired.

  I’d nodded and looked at the bus—long since the bane of my existence—but my mind was on my mother.

  My mother, bent over her story in the kitchen.

  My mother, fallen asleep while making dinner, while driving.

  My mother, in the casket at the funeral home.

  I remembered the day the ambulance arrived in Tramp, how I’d followed it a stone’s throw from Babka’s to find it stopped and silent in front of our house. Olivia sat near it on the withered grass, not wearing a coat despite the season. There was something about her fractured expression and the way her eyes twitched around that told me all I needed to know. That’s when the earth began to spin the other way on its axis.

  And not just for Olivia.

  Was that what was bothering me? Was Olivia’s need to deny our mother’s suicide another example of her highlighting her experience, as if her grief was deeper and more significant than anyone else’s? I pressed my palm hard against my forehead. It did feel sometimes—compared with her and my father—that my grief was nothing, that there wasn’t any time for it. Just because my feelings were complicated, though, didn’t mean they didn’t exist. I’d lost her, too. Sometimes I felt that I’d lost the most when she died. Another thing I might not understand.

  Not suicide?

  What would’ve made Olivia say that? Did she believe it? Denial was a part of grief, I knew. I’d read all about that in a pamphlet I picked up at the funeral home the day I accepted the job from Emilia Bryce. But still. I eyed the bag at my feet. There was something inside my canvas sack that would put an end to my sister’s delusions, if I cared to share it with her. If I cared to share it with anyone.

  No, I didn’t think that was the answer, even if I didn’t know what was. I couldn’t avoid her forever, though. And I knew I should probably apologize for calling her a bitch.

  Good daughter.

  As much as I didn’t like it, as unfair as it might be, as difficult as it would remain, I’d have to find a way to do better. Olivia was family, my legally blind sister. I would need to be there for her and try harder to identify with her. In many ways, we were all each other had left.

  The phone rang, and I leaped up, but Jim was inside by the second ring.

  “How’s the bus?” I asked, before he even reached the phone.

  “Hang on,” he said, then picked up the receiver. “Jim’s.”

  I walked over to the window as he made cursory remarks to the caller—“Yepper. Huh, that’s odd. Sure, gotta pay”—and stared out at the bus.

  Let it be all right, I thought to whoever might be listening. Send some good luck my way.

  “Well, sure, I’ll let her know,” Jim said, and I spun around. He hung up the phone, then scratched at his head with the same hand that nudged aside his cap. “Your sister left a note on a napkin at Ramps saying you were here and would pay for the pie and drinks.”

  “She’s gone?” I asked, but I knew already, felt the truth of it churn in my gut with all that coffee.

  In the distance, the train whistled.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On Fate. Or Luck.

  OLIVIA

  We didn’t have a computer at home, not even an old one like they used to have in the health office at school, so whenever Mama and I needed to look something up online we had to walk a few miles to the next town over, which was just as small as Tramp but had a free library. We always had a great time there and were able to answer a lot of the random questions that filled my head when I was younger—like how fish have babies, why salt melts ice, and if worms sleep.

  I wish I could drive, Mama would say sometimes. I’d give her a hug and tell her I was glad we couldn’t drive, because that meant more time for us to talk. She didn’t have a license because of a series of accidents she’d had while I was still in public school. I didn’t miss her not driving, but it was true that the weather wasn’t always ideal for walking, and I knew that lost license bothered her.

  One chill fall day, we had to walk to the library. I had a test to study for, and neither of us knew how to divide algebraic expressions. Midway between Tramp and the library sat a lone house, where an old woman lived with her seven dogs. She was always in her rocking chair on the front porch, and never shushed her pack when they barked at us, either. As we passed on this particular day, the dogs barked as usual, but the woman wasn’t on the porch. It was sort of weird, but everyone has to go to the bathroom now and then, so we didn’t think much of it until the dogs started going crazy the farther we got down the road.

  Something was wrong.

  We turned back, and though Mama was nervous about the dogs, I told her there was no reason to be. The barks of angry dogs were black karate chops in the air, but these dogs weren’t mad; the high notes of their barks were blue with anxiety. Once she knew that, Mama went with confidence onto the woman’s property and up the porch stairs. I followed, even though she said to stay put near the road.

  Turns out the woman who lived there had been trying to reach a photo album at the top of a bookshelf and had stepped onto a low shelf to do it, toppling the whole thing—books and all—onto her legs, both of which had broken. She’d been trapped there for two and a half days before we found her. Two and a half days without food or water, and not having a bathroom except for the floor. Mary Lee Wilson was her name, and we found something out about Mary later on, after she got back from the hospital and felt better. Mary was a retired teacher, and she was nice, too, once you got to know her. She died a year later, but not before teaching me everything she knew about algebra and in a way that I finally understood.

  Things happened for a reason, Mama always said, even when you couldn’t see the why of it right away. Mama lost her license. I couldn’t stay in public school. Tramp didn’t have a library. We had to walk miles from home to get to a computer. They all seemed like inconvenient things. But Mary Lee Wilson may have gained an extra year of life because of all those things, and that was saying a lot.

  The distance from the ground to the floor of the boxcar was more than I’d thought it would be. The bed of the car I’d found—a blue one with an open side door—was even with my armpits. I rested my hands there along with my bag, feeling flecks of rust against my skin and the hard slap of reality.

  I couldn’t do it.

  Alone and handicapped and without direction.

  The absolute certainty of this, knowing that getting into the train would be a giant mistake, was the opposite of how I’d felt five minutes before, when I’d scrawled a message that may or may not have been legible on a napkin and left it on the table. When I’d stood with my bag in hand, and opened the door and walked through it. Just beyond the shade of the restaurant’s rooftop, I’d lifted my face. Even though the sun slipped into the dark space of my vision, I felt it on my skin and sensed Mama long enough to be sure.

  I was going on alone, leaving Jazz, because doing anything else would mean failure. And despite what she thought—what she argued—this did mean something to me. Everything. I needed this trip, maybe more than I’d needed anything in my life.

  The tang of something musty stirred in the air, as I followed along the brick building, trying to better my view of the tree line I’d seen inside, but still unable to make out the train. When I would’ve begun inching my way down the hill, a low hiss came from the direction of the tracks, announced to the world just where the train lay. And that it was leaving.

  Now. Last chance.

  I ran toward the sou
nd, toward the tree line and the train’s cars, clearer now, through long grass and weeds that brushed against my bare legs like a thousand fairy fingers, scratched like a thousand fairy nails. One car caught my attention with its open door, but before I reached it I fell on the stones lining the track and landed hard on my forearms. They stung now, as I laid my hands inside the car’s vibrating body and realized …

  I couldn’t do this. It was stupid.

  Why didn’t I stay with Mama that day? We could’ve been together; I could’ve made her feel better. Dreamed her through her up-and-down and back to a better place. Taken her on a trip with wings as soft as flour, into a canyon on a summer day, or to a gurgling stream or bog full of will-o’-the-wisps. If I’d made that choice, the sun would’ve risen the next morning smelling like my mother, and with my mother in her bed instead of a morgue, instead of dark and death and grief and everyone broken.

  I hadn’t made that choice.

  Instead, I’d pulled my boot back on and left to meet Stan, because I wanted him to get into my knickers while I got into his. Mama died while I was getting busy with a boy who’d never meant more to me than a diversion, who’d disappeared like a puddle of rain in a hot sun after Mama died anyway, because this sort of thing was too hard. Too real.

  Most everyone did that. Retreated. Jazz. Even Papa.

  I didn’t want to go back to that, and if I didn’t go forward how would anything ever change? I gripped the car’s metal edge and leaned my forehead against the back of my hand as the train groaned and the hiss grew louder.

  “Shit. That one!”

  I froze. The male voice came from behind me. Was it the bull? Would I end up in jail now?

  A dog barked.

  “Run up, jump in, hurry.” A different voice.

  “Hey, there’s a ladder right there. You gonna use it or—”

  Hisssss. Pop.

  Grung-grung-grung-clank.

  “Well, help her, you asshat!” someone shouted, and I was pushed over the rusty lip and into the car—despite cries that I’d changed my mind, despite trying to propel my body back outside again.

  All effort was lost as a rush of bodies piled in after me, as my head went light and a dog’s growl crystallized to my left. The world clouded over with darkness as the train bucked under my feet and we started to move. Someone corralled me into a corner and yelled, though I only caught pieces of it.

  “What do you think, you—get us caught? Bull … yard … stay there … you blind?”

  “I am blind,” I shouted back. And then I repeated it in a whisper—“I am blind”—as noises poured over us and creaks turned into squeals, squeals into screams, screams into a banging, trembling, thudding tumble of asymmetry, explosions of shapes and colors—the darkest of browns and greens, reds and blacks, purples and blues—assaulting me like hail in a wild storm.

  I covered my ears with my palms, clamped my jaw to keep my teeth from rattling, and planted my head against the rocking steel car as wind snatched at my hair and threw it back into my face. I began a chant to my family, told them one hundred times that I was sorry.

  Urine with a hint of French fries and hamster bedding. That’s what the car smelled like. Every part of me felt as trapped as my toes against my shoes, as I cried along with the train. With my eyes closed, I could envision my sister: the grim line of her mouth, the sharp jab of her gaze. She’d be back at the restaurant by now. What would she feel, finding me gone? Probably relief at being rid of me.

  Someone tapped on my wrist. I opened and adjusted my eyes to find a redheaded girl there. Her voice rose above the noise. “It’s all right. We’re away from the yard now, and my brother’s got the dog. Kramer’s bark is way worse than his bite, anyway, trust me. If anything, he’d lick you to death.”

  I hugged my left arm, felt a slick of blood and the stick of slivers under my fingers from the fall I’d taken earlier.

  She whistled. “Fuckadoodledoo. You’re bleeding. Hobbs?” A true shout. “She’s bleeding. Do you have a bottle?”

  I tried to make out the others on the train—three more strangers, and the dog. Someone stood. I turned my head, still not sure that I was safe, but there were no options there; beside me lay stacks of things, a big wooden structure of some sort.

  “Pallets should stay put, if you’re worried about ’em,” said a male. He leaned over the girl’s shoulder, a hood pulled up around his face. “Only one died on this rail because of pallets, and the way the story’s told he wasn’t too bright. Glad to see you looking at them, though. Jop wanted to toss you off if you really were blind.”

  I dropped my forehead to my knees and sobbed again.

  “Niiiiice,” said the girl.

  “Well, she can see, right?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” she said, and rubbed my shoulder. “No one’s going to throw anyone over the side. Jop is king of the dipshits. I know that because he’s been my brother for the last eighteen years.” She sat beside me. “Listen, we can either leave you alone or help you clean your cuts. Whatever, though, right? It’s your call.”

  A line of warm blood trickled down my left elbow. I had no idea how bad my cuts were, if they were deep and dirty and could become infected. I’d have to decide: trust or not trust, risk or not risk. Or maybe there was nothing to decide at all.

  I held out my arm.

  “You do it, Hobbs,” she said.

  Something was passed between them, and even I could make out the bold black-and-white label, the blur of “Vladimir” on the bottle of vodka. I’d seen plenty of that around my house over the last few months. This was going to sting.

  “You want a swig first?” asked Hobbs.

  “No, thanks,” I said, my voice a sandpaper rasp.

  My doctor told me years ago to avoid liquor or drugs stronger than aspirin, that my mind was altered enough by nature and there was no telling how heightening that would affect me. Maybe he saw a spark of curiosity in my eyes, because he spent the next ten minutes going on about drug-related disasters, like kids on LSD who’d leaped out of windows thinking they were pools of water, which scared me enough that I listened for the most part; I’d had a few sips of beer here and there with no dramatic results. But, even though I’d already left my better judgment behind me, I didn’t think drinking myself into oblivion with a group of strangers would help any.

  Hobbs said, “You’re not a snob like this one, are you? A girl who needs her liquor strained through a Brita before she’ll drink it?”

  “What’s a Brita?”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “Trust me, girl, it doesn’t help,” she said. “I’m Ruby, by the way.”

  “Surf,” said Hobbs. “You know the rules.”

  “It’s not like she’s going to—”

  “You know the rules,” he said.

  “Fine. You can call me Surf,” Ruby said, a second before Hobbs poured the vodka.

  I felt the moan in my chest, but not even I could hear it over the relentless clang-clatter of the train.

  Ruby guided me down the car, until we sat closer to the others but not too close, with our backs against the wall across from the open door. The world beyond blurred in greens and browns, familiar to me but causing an unfamiliar pinch of anxiety along my spine. Colored shapes tumbled around in my vision like earlier from the noise, but they were more polite now—not covered in awkward points or raining into my face like a child’s tower of tumbledown blocks.

  “It’s primo seating, unless you really can’t see, and then who cares, right?” Ruby said, and the strength of her high-wire voice put me at ease.

  “My central vision’s gone,” I said. “I can tell you’re a redhead but could only guess the color of your eyes.” Blue, maybe. Green. “I could tell if you stuck your tongue out, but not the exact expression on your face.” I smiled when Ruby stuck out her tongue. “I saw that.”

  “So what’s a partially blind girl like you doing on a train like this?”

  “T
rying to reach Cranberry Glades of the Monongahela Forest. My mother was writing a story set there when she died. I brought her ashes.”

  “To scatter?”

  “To see a ghost light.”

  I expected questions, criticism, but Ruby just said, “That’s a new one.”

  We spent the next hour talking about everything and nothing. I told Ruby about home—Babka’s shop and Papa’s talent with the fiddle. I told her about my synesthesia, which she said sounded like taking peyote, a Texas whacky plant that, in Ruby’s words, “makes you see some seriously weird shit.”

  I didn’t mention Jazz.

  Ruby, who insisted that I not call her Surf, told me she’d once lived on the West Coast in a house with a five-car garage that no one used because the door opener had broken. How her parents decided to abandon the family on the same day, leaving notes for each other in different parts of the house, and leaving Ruby alone with her younger brother. It wasn’t a shock. She’d prepared herself for them to leave at various points throughout her childhood; her folks were second-generation hippies with happy feet who shouldn’t have tried to settle down in the first place.

  When they took off, Ruby and Jop decided to follow suit, hop trains like their parents and grandparents before them. Living on the rails was, Ruby said, a “totally unique and harmlessly rebellious way to get out from under the oppressive thumb of the real world, and say a big F you to the parents if they ever decide to phone home.” She had no regrets, she said, and had learned more during a few months on the road and rail than she had through four years of college.

  “So, I have a question for you,” she said, and her tightrope voice swayed. “Traveling alone on the rails isn’t always safe, especially for women. Does your family know you’re out here? Are you meeting anyone on the other side?”

  I dug my hand into my hair, drew a clump over my shoulder, and separated it into three pieces. “I’m not meeting anyone. But my sister knows I’m here. I have a sister. She thinks our mother committed suicide,” I said without meaning to.