Mending the Moon (14 page)

And Anna, throat thick with tears each time she imagines this—Anna who wants to howl, too, and sometimes does—gets up and goes to the dog and strokes him, her sobs mingling with his whimpers, until he calms. Sometimes she talks to him the way she'd talk to Percy if he were here, if he were still alive. “Why did you do it? I know you did, they tell me you did, and the way you acted makes me believe that, but I don't understand.
Why,
Percy? What happened?”

Whatever happened, it was some terrible aberration. It was not Percy. Her private theory is that someone drugged one of the beers he drank that night. The police have shown her the tab from the hotel bar. He only had four beers: not enough to get terribly drunk, much less psychotic, and so she thinks someone put something in his drink and he reacted terribly to it. She thinks the drug made him a monster. She thinks that when it wore off, Percy couldn't live with himself, couldn't even bear the idea of confessing to his parents.

She knows that she will never know if this is true. She has a hazy sense that the drugs that might have this effect don't last in the body long. She doesn't research the issue; she doesn't want to learn that she's wrong and have this fragile explanation shattered. She's glad that Percy's body was cremated, although she hasn't had the strength to go pick up his ashes. His remains are past any possible testing. She can maintain her theory in whatever now passes for peace.

William identified the body. She couldn't, although already she feels guilty for sparing herself that one last glimpse of the child she bore. She feared that the sight of Percy's bloated and discolored corpse would, like acid, erase all other memories.

She and William have not talked about a funeral. She and William have barely spoken. The house phone rings and both of them ignore it. The doorbell rings and both of them ignore it.

She knows that William has spoken to his parents, knows that they want to fly out from Boston. She's told William she can't handle that right now, can't deal with them. She knows they're family, but she's always found them suffocating. William knows that.

William's clients have sent tactfully minimalist condolence cards. Several times, this first week post-Percy, Anna has opened the door to find offerings on their doorstep. A roast chicken from their next-door neighbor. Flowers from Karen, with a scribbled note on pink paper dotted with tear stains.

I read about it in the paper. I can't believe I'm the one who brought your dog back. I'm so sorry.

Flowers, notes, food. Anna and William eat the food, when they remember to eat and can stand to eat, but the flowers die, and Anna opens the notes haphazardly, letting them pile up and then ripping through five or ten of them until she can't stand it anymore. There aren't that many, anyway.

Whatever small gestures the outside world has made, they are encased in silence. Right now, that's what Anna wants. Carl, she knows, has gone to some effort to minimize media coverage, although some shots of Percy from Stanford have wound up in the papers and on the Internet. She can't bear to read the reader comments on the news stories.

She wonders if the people who loved Melinda Soto feel encased in silence.

Anna has never had a great many friends—she has many acquaintances, but otherwise centered herself on William and Percy—and those she has, some old friends from college and a couple who used to live in the neighborhood but moved away, are scattered across the country. She probably has e-mail from them, or maybe some of the messages from the unanswered calls are from them, and she will appreciate their thoughts when she has the time and energy to deal with them. Right now, she doesn't and can't.

Her moat has been breached, terribly. She's trying to raise the drawbridges again.

She's glad she isn't working now. Before Percy was born, and sporadically thereafter, she did freelance writing and consulting work for nonprofits. But between the gallery and the money she inherited from her parents, she didn't really need to work. She stayed busy caring for her husband and son, keeping her house, knitting and reading and traveling. She has never felt bored or lonely. She has led a simple, quiet life, and has loved it, and if the quiet now seems more suffocating than soothing, well, she suspects she would feel that way whatever she'd spent her time doing. At least she knows how to enjoy her own company, how to treasure silence.

The morning after the note arrives from Reno, Anna walks the dog, as usual. When she gets back to the house, there's a strange car in the driveway.

Anna, still half a block away, stops, nerves taut. The car's a blue Prius. She doesn't know anyone who drives a blue Prius. If the car were a police car, she'd keep walking, hoping that maybe the police have brought Percy's ashes home. But she doesn't know who this is, can't imagine who it might be.

Bart, next to her, looks up inquiringly. “I don't know,” she says. “Sit, Bart.”

Bart sits. It's impossible to own any dog as large as an Irish Wolfhound without investing in a great many obedience classes, and Bart is exquisitely trained.

Anna stands squinting at the blue Prius. Is anyone inside? If she moved a few feet closer to the house, she'd be able to tell if someone's at the door, but she feels paralyzed. And then she sees someone emerging from behind the car, someone waving and calling out to her. “Anna! There you are!”

An elderly woman wearing a garish orange and green plaid coat, her slight frame topped with a frizzy mass of snow-white hair. William's mother.

*   *   *

Two weeks after the funeral, Jeremy moves back into the house. He doesn't feel right staying at Hen's anymore, although she and Ed say he can stay as long as he likes. He doesn't want to go back to the dorm, either; he might not want that even if he had any interest in returning to school.

VB helped him get in touch with the proper people on campus, who expedited his withdrawal with a full refund. It usually wouldn't be a full refund; there usually wouldn't be any refund, this late in the semester. But the proper people mouth platitudes about Extraordinary Circumstances, and pull strings, and give him his money back. Or Mom's money. It was hers; now it's his. Like the house, and everything inside it.

Technically, it's not quite his yet. Technically, it's in trust until he's twenty-one. Tom's the trustee. Tom's also taking care of the bills until Jeremy can, as Tom puts it, “get your feet back under you.” Jeremy supposes moving back into the house is part of getting back on his feet, but he doesn't feel very steady.

Tom and Hen and Ed and Rosie and VB all offer to come with him, the first time he goes back to the house. He doesn't want anyone else there, though. So Tom picks him up at the dorm, packs all his stuff into a station wagon, and helps him unload it onto the front porch. “You sure you don't want me to stay?”

“I'm sure.”

“I can sit in the car, just stay to make sure—”

“Tom, I'm okay, okay? I just— I need to do this by myself. I'd be more comfortable if you left.” He knows it may take him a while to get through the front door. He doesn't want Tom watching. He doesn't want to feel eyes at his back. He's glad the front door is hidden from the sidewalk by a huge juniper bush, but he still doesn't want Tom in the driveway.

“You have my cell number?”

“Of course.”
Just go already.
“I'll call you if I need to, I promise.”

“All right.” Tom turns and gets back into the car. He sits in the front seat, watching Jeremy through the windshield, until Jeremy makes waving motions. Go. Shoo. Get out of here. Then, finally, he starts the car, and pulls out of the driveway, and drives away.

Jeremy feels his knees go weak. There's a garden bench on the front porch, mostly covered by boxes now, but he moves a few of them and sits down. He takes a deep breath, smelling juniper, watching the quail in the yard. Then he gets up again.

In the end, it takes him only the normal amount of time to get through the front door, because he suddenly has to pee. He tries not to look at anything as he hurries to the bathroom, tries not to smell anything—Mom's lavender sachets, the dusty smell of all the books in the house—tries not to hear the silence. Usually she'd call out as soon as she heard the front door open. “Hey, Jer! Welcome home!”

That used to drive him nuts. She'd welcome him home if he'd just walked down the hill for potato chips, if he'd just come in from raking or mowing the lawn, if he'd gone out to get the mail. Anytime he crossed that threshold, however briefly he'd been gone, she yelled her cheerful greeting. He used to wonder what drugs she was on.

Now he'd give anything to hear her voice.

He's determined to empty his bladder without crying. He manages that, blessedly—a small three-minute victory—but as he turns to wash his hands, he's ambushed by the soap dish, an ugly clay slab with a long-necked head and four round blobby legs: a dinosaur. He made it for Mom for Mother's Day when he was, like, five or something. When he was into dinosaurs and fossils. It's painted a muddy purple, with one streaking green eye, and he's begged her a thousand times to toss the fucking thing, for God's sake, but she won't. Wouldn't.

“It's your house now,” Hen told him when he was still at hers. “Make it your house, Jeremy. Don't turn it into a Melinda Museum. It's all right for you to change things. I know you probably won't want to do that right away, but remember that you can redo the place the way you want to when you're ready.”

Shortly after she said that, it occurred to him that he would now, at last, be able to get rid of the hideous dinosaur soap dish. He'd imagined hurling it against a wall and watching it explode into dust and shards; he'd even pictured what a pain in the butt it would be to sweep up all the pieces.

But now he can't touch it. He can't even use the soap it holds, a girly handcrafted artisanal lavender-and-oatmeal bar from someplace in California. Mom was probably the last person who touched this bar of soap. Some of her molecules may still be clinging to it. He can't wash them away.

So he goes into the kitchen, where he knows there's ordinary hand soap in a dispenser at the sink, and washes his hands there. The kitchen's a Mom-mine: the café curtains she made hanging in the window, rocks she collected lined up on the windowsill, an avocado pit, suspended by toothpicks and sprouting roots, in a glass of water. The glass is almost empty. Jeremy refills it. At some point someone will have to plant the pit—that's clearly what Mom wanted to do—but he doesn't know how or where. He'll give it to Aunt Rosie. She'll know.

He should send it to Seattle.

The baby Christmas tree is still in Hen's office. Hen says she wrote a thank-you note, but that it would be fine if he wrote one, too. He has no intention of doing this anytime soon, if ever.

Jeremy opens the fridge, as empty as it always is when Mom's on a trip—at least he won't have to worry about whether to discard or memorialize her leftovers—and checks the shopping list held to the door with a magnet. “Quinoa, sprouts, tofu, yogurt, blueberries, granola, bananas, soy milk, coffee, artichokes.” He snorts. Rabbit-Mom, with her grains and greens. The only tastes he shares with her here are the fruit and coffee. He tears the list from the pad, ready to crumple it, and then stops.

She wrote this list.

Stupid, Jeremy. What are you going to do, bronze the thing?

But he can no more throw it away than he could shatter the hideous soap dish. With a sigh, he folds the note and shoves it into a junk drawer overflowing with miscellaneous debris. Speaking of which, time to bring the boxes in from the porch.

That keeps him busy for twenty minutes, good physical work, undemanding and satisfying. He stacks the boxes neatly in the front hall and then, feeling a little more cheerful, dons a backpack full of clothing and picks up a similarly stuffed suitcase. He knows his clothing will go in his room. This is an easy task.

Going up the stairs, he hears the familiar creak on the sixth and tenth steps, remembers countless weekend mornings when, as he lay in bed, that squeaking warned him that Mom was coming upstairs to rouse him for breakfast.
Time's a wasting.

His eyes are wet again. His bedroom, at least, should be safe. His bedroom's full of him, not Mom. But when he shoulders his way through the door, he sees, neatly folded on his narrow single bed, a small pile of laundry.

Of course. He came over two weeks before Mom's trip to do laundry, but he got pulled into a discussion on the CC boards and never got around to it, so he left it here. He figured he'd do it when Mom got back from Mexico, and he had enough other clothing in the dorm, so it wasn't crucial.

Mom did it for him.

Aching, he looks around the room and suddenly hates it. It's too small, too cramped with bookshelves and boxes of
CC
issues, too childish. There are still plastic dinosaurs sitting on a shelf, and there isn't even room for a real desk in here. That's one reason he wanted to live in the dorm, because he felt like he'd outgrown this room. Mom offered him the guest room or the attic, but moving everything was too complicated when he was getting ready to start college at the same time. He told her he'd move over the summer, but privately he believed that he'd never live in this house again, that he'd move into an apartment at the end of the academic year, maybe a frat house or something, and after college he'd get the hell out of Reno and go someplace where he wouldn't feel so self-conscious, someplace more diverse. San Francisco. Seattle. He knew he'd have to share living space for a long time, but at least he wouldn't be sharing it with her.

Now he'd give anything to be sharing it with her.

He wishes he could leave Reno now, but how would he pay for it? The thing's impossible, and anyway he has a hazy sense that it's important to stick around for a while, to let his insides settle as much as they ever will.