Mending the Moon (15 page)

He can move within the house itself, though, switch things up at least that much.

Mom herself naturally had the nicest bedroom in the house—she'd lived here for years before he showed up, after all—and Jeremy realizes that if he wants to, he can move in there. That room has windows on two sides, a big walk-in closet, even a little verandah. From the windows, you can see trees and mountains, and Mom hung a finch feeder from the eaves, so the birds congregate there, bright spots of yellow and orange and red. “Flying flowers even in winter,” she called them once.

It's a great room. It has space for everything Jeremy will want. He stands in his old bedroom, dreaming. He'll leave the finch feeders there. He'll get a cat—he and Mom had a cat once and both adored it, but it died when he was a junior in high school, and Mom decided not to get another one because she wanted to travel and he'd be going to college soon—and he and the cat can sit in Mom's rocking chair, the one her grandfather made for her grandmother, and watch the flying flowers, and sunlight will dapple the floor and the breeze coming in through the windows will smell like sagebrush and juniper.

This is a summer fantasy, he realizes. He's thinking about the future. He's thinking about a life without Mom. Grief and guilt swamp him again. Too soon, too soon.

*   *   *

Rosemary, aching, pulls into Melinda's driveway. No: not Melinda's driveway anymore. It's Jeremy's driveway now.

Veronique, next to her, unbuckles her seat belt. “Before I forget, what do you want me to bring to Thanksgiving?” The holiday's next week. None of them feel remotely festive, but gathering for the holiday is better than being alone. Veronique has been included for years, because Melinda wanted her to be; Rosemary has inherited her now.

I want you to take away the two empty chairs, Rosemary thinks grimly. She and Walter have always hosted, fed Melinda and Jeremy and Veronique and sometimes a few stragglers from church. Walter's empty place would have been hard enough, this year. Now she'll have to deal with Melinda's, too.

“Salad,” she says. “Salad or a side, whatever you prefer. Just let me know.”

“I'll do my usual, then, that salad with cranberries and walnuts.”

“That's great. Thanks.”

Veronique, hand on the car door, looks over at her. “You know, if you're going to get out, you'll have to take off your seat belt.”

“Right,” Rosemary says, pulling the buckle. “I knew that. I just—I'm not sure I'm ready for this.”

“Of course not. How could we be? But Jeremy thinks he is, and we promised to help him. Come on: you can't expect a nineteen-year-old kid to know what to do with his mother's shoes and clothing.”

“I guess not.”

“Dibs on that jacket she got in Montana. The boiled-wool one with the southwestern design and the concho buttons. If it fits me. Rosemary, get out of the car.”

She does, finally. Vera waits next to the car until Rosemary crosses in front of it to stand on the front walk, and then she comes up behind Rosemary, on her right, and nudges her slightly. “Good. You're out of the car. Now walk.”

Vera the sheepdog. Rosemary complies. Waiting won't make this any easier.

Jeremy calls, “Come in,” when they ring the bell. They find him waiting in the kitchen. He's made tea and laid out a plate of cookies, Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano, on one of Melinda's good plates. When he sees them, he offers up a passable imitation of a smile. “Thanks for coming. It's nice of you.”

He looks terrible: drawn, too thin, his warm brown skin an ashen gray, as if he hasn't slept in days. Rosemary moves in to hug him; he smells slightly sour.

How do you tell a murdered friend's bereaved son that he needs to take a shower?

You don't.

Rosemary steps back, away from him, and opens her mouth to ask him how he is, but Jeremy says, “Don't ask me how I am, okay? For one thing, I don't know. For another, well, what is there to say?”

“Good,” Veronique says briskly. “Thank you. I wasn't going to ask, because I assume you're about how we are, which is lousy, but I didn't want you to think I was being rude. Or uncaring.”

“It's good of you to come,” he says again. They're all standing around the table. He nods at it. “Please have some tea, because otherwise it will just get cold, and I won't drink it, and that would have driven Mom nuts. If you don't want the cookies, though, I'll eat them. I was going to bake, but I bailed instead. That would have driven Mom nuts, too.”

Rosemary feels herself relaxing. He still has his sense of humor. Good.

They sit, nibble cookies, sip tea. Veronique asks if he's thought about when he'll come back to school, and he shrugs. A year or two, he says, when he figures out what he wants to do. He bends his head, shoves his cookie around his plate with one finger. “Mom tried to get me to take some time off after high school. She said I was too unfocused. Pretty ironic I'm doing it now, huh?” His voice is thick.

“It's a good idea,” Rosemary says weakly.

Veronique chews her cookie, swallows, takes a long slurp of tea, and puts her mug back on the table with a decisive thunk. “I think we've reached the end of the small talk. The tea and cookies were good, Jeremy. Shall we tackle your mother's room now?”

Rosemary follows the other two up the stairs; Vera evidently doesn't feel the need to herd her this time. Melinda's room is painted in shades of green and lavender; Jeremy's piled a stack of broken-down storage boxes in the middle of the floor, with packing tape and scissors next to them. Such a pretty room. Rosemary looks around at the framed dried flowers, the cross-stitch sampler Melinda got at a yard sale—she always claimed she was hopeless at any needlework herself, although she admired it—the collection of baskets and ceramic boxes on top of the bureau.

Veronique's looking around, too. She wipes a tear from her cheek, as briskly as she always does everything, and says, “You're going to repaint when you move in here, I assume? More macho colors?”

“I dunno. I haven't gotten that far. Whatever I do, we need to deal with her clothing and stuff, right?”

Rosemary realizes she's shaking. She feels almost nauseous. She can't stand the idea of disassembling the room. She hasn't been able to pack up Walter's things, either, except for what he needs in the nursing home. If she keeps everything the way it is, she can pretend he's coming home.

If only they could leave this room alone. If only Melinda were coming home. But this is what Jeremy wants to do, and Veronique's right. They promised to help him.

It will get easier, Rosemary tells herself. Once we're doing the work, once everything's packed up and the room's dismantled, it won't be so hard. All right. Time to dive in.

She picks up a box. “Where do you want me to start, Jeremy? Closet, or drawers?”

Veronique nods approvingly. “You take one. I'll take the other.”

“You could flip a coin,” Jeremy says.

“No.” Veronique shakes her head. “I'll take the dresser. It's likely to be more straightforward. And Rosie's the one with the fashion sense, so she should take the closet. But mind you put that jacket aside for me, if you find it.”

They split up. Rosemary's calmer now that she has a clearly defined task. The closet will probably be more work than the bureau— it's a large walk-in with two tiers of hanging clothing, plus boxes, and it's stuffed—but Vera can help when she's done discarding underthings no one else will want.

Rosemary has always loved clothing, and while she and Melinda never had terribly similar tastes—Melinda's ran to Birkenstocks and hemp, and what skirts she wore were long, baggy, and embroidered—Rosie still expects to enjoy the process of packing up the garments for use by someone else. She'll drive them to Goodwill, or call the local women's shelter to see if they can be used there; she can even bring some to the hospital, since with winter coming, there will be more homeless patients in the ER who need warm garments. There are fewer female patients in this category than male, and anyway the ER staff doesn't like to keep too much around—their compassion is tempered by prudent caution against becoming known on the streets as a source of free loot—but Rosemary can stow some sweaters and jackets in a storage room and let a few of the staff know they're there.

She believes that such recycling, like Holy Communion, transforms loss and brokenness into food. But even as she tells herself this, she has a sudden, unwanted memory of an article she read about a Holocaust survivor. The woman's job was to sort the piles of shoes and clothing left behind by inmates heading into the infamous showers of Auschwitz. She stole items she thought her friends in the barracks could use, and she survived the work by concentrating entirely on how she was helping her friends. She didn't, couldn't, allow herself to think about where the items came from.

Rosemary wants to think only about all the people this clothing will help, but she doesn't know if she'll be able to keep herself from thinking about Melinda. Does she even want to?

She's always pitied the Holocaust survivor, scorning the woman's delusion. Now she finds herself admiring the discipline involved in maintaining it.

You said you'd help. You promised. She steps into the closet, turns to reach for the nearest item, and finds herself grasping a fuzzy purple cardigan covered with beaded flowers. The thing's hideous, but Melinda loved it. She found it in a thrift store in Philadelphia when she was there for an ALA conference, and shipped her find home even though it was high summer at the time and she wouldn't be able to wear the sweater for months. Every year, she delighted in the first day cold enough for her to wear it. Over the years, she bought turtlenecks and earrings, and even a pair of purple suede boots, specifically to match it.

This can't go to strangers. It just can't. Rosemary wouldn't be caught dead in it, though. She takes it carefully off its hanger and carries it out of the closet, back into the bedroom proper, where she expects to find Jeremy and Vera busily at work.

Jeremy's sitting on the bed next to a half-packed box of tchotchkes, cradling a glass bottle. Hand-blown, from the looks of it: swirling brown ridges. “She got this in Guatemala when she went down there to meet me the first time,” he says. “There was some snag and she had to wait an extra day to meet me and she was really antsy, so she went shopping to distract herself, even though adopting me was costing a fortune and the last thing she needed was to spend more money. But she found this in a little shop and it was cheap, and she loved the shape and the color, so she bought it, and then she went back to her hotel room and sat on her bed holding it on her lap, just like this.” He shakes his head. “She kept rubbing the bottle, because she liked how the glass felt, and then the phone rang and it was the adoption people telling her that everything was going ahead, that she could come meet me. She called this her magic bottle. She said she rubbed it and I came out, like a genie.”

Rosemary's heard the story, but she's never seen the bottle. She didn't know Melinda still had it. Jeremy looks up at her and says, “If I keep rubbing it, do you suppose I'll get Mom back?”

He's trying to be funny again. It's not working. Rosemary retreats into chaplain mode. What would she tell the son of a dead patient at the hospital?

“No, but you'll get your memories of her back. You can keep that, you know. You don't have to pack everything.” She holds up the sweater and turns to Vera. “One of us has to keep this. I'll never wear it. Will you?”

“Oh, Lord. That old thing.” Vera sighs and puts a stack of bras into a trash bag. “I guess I'll wear it, if no one else will, but I can't wear it at home because the cats will either shred it or shed all over it, or both. I could keep it in my office, I guess. Maybe even wear it to teach. Would that wake everybody up, Jeremy?”

He shrugs, rocking the glass bottle, and Vera sighs again. “All right, kids. Here's my show-and-tell item.” She waves a flowing blue scarf, billowing silk, like a piece of parachute. “Remember this?”

“Of course,” Rosemary says. “Her strip-of-sky scarf.” If Melinda wore the sweater on cold days when she delighted in the change of seasons, she wore the blue scarf during gloomy weather—rare enough in Nevada, the sunniest and driest state in the country—when she needed to remind herself what good weather looked like.

“I'll wear the hairy grape sweater if you'll wear this,” Veronique says.

Rosemary prefers her scarves a bit more understated, but she can see herself wearing this. She can't see herself wearing the hairy grape. “Deal.”

“Did you find my boiled-wool jacket?”

“No. Not yet. This is as far as I got.”

Vera snorts. “We aren't being very efficient, are we? I think we should get Ed and Tom to do this. We could supervise them—watch from across the room and tell them what to keep and what to toss—but they wouldn't get bogged down in memories of why Melinda wore whatever, and where it came from, and what she said about it.”

Rosemary walks to the bed and sits down next to Jeremy, the old mattress sagging under the double weight. Melinda really should have been sleeping on a better bed. “I don't think efficiency's the point. You know, this feels like liturgy. It should be liturgy. We have house blessings, after all.”

“We do?” Veronique asks. “You do? I've never heard of that.”

“It's in the
Book of Occasional Services
. There's a gorgeous one in the New Zealand prayer book, too. Anyway, there are house blessings, and there's a service for the deconsecration of a church, and some clergy are doing divorce liturgies now, which makes sense.”

Veronique looks skeptical. “How would it work? What would you call it? The Goodwill Liturgy?”