Mending the Moon (36 page)

He feels something on the back of his thigh. A sharp voice says, “Bart!” and Jeremy turns to find an improbably huge dog gazing at him with somber, sorrowful eyes, while Mr. Clark frowns and tugs at the leash. “I'm sorry, Jeremy. Anna insisted that he be here. He usually behaves around strangers.”

So you can talk, Jeremy thinks, and then, I'm not exactly a stranger. He holds out a hand, tentatively. The great beast nuzzles it. The tail beats, once. Then the dog returns to Mr. Clark and sits obediently on command.

“He's the puppy in the photo,” Anna says, and Jeremy turns to find her standing next to the urn. She gives a wan smile. “Older now, of course. He—well, he was the last of us to see Percy alive. I thought he deserved to be here. I guess that sounds crazy, but Percy really loved this animal. He—I keep thinking he must still be alive somewhere. My Percy. The person who died wasn't my Percy. The person who did that to. To your mother. Wasn't my Percy.”

“The woman who died,” Jeremy hears himself saying, “was my mother.”

Anna Clark sags, lets out a breath, reaches out to lean on the pedestal for support. “Thank you, Jeremy. That's the first honest thing anyone's said to me.”

*   *   *

It's inexpressibly horrible, a charade. Anna sits in her pew, William an unbending poker next to her, Marjorie and David letting out sighs and sniffles on her other side. Several times, Marjorie reaches for her hand. Anna shakes it away. This was a mistake. She shouldn't have done this. What was she thinking?

There's some music, a pleasant piano piece, an arrangement of “Here Comes the Sun.” Anna chose it because Percy liked that song and often hummed or whistled it in the house, but now it sounds entirely wrong. Awash in humiliation, she listens to the Unitarian minister's bland, sincere homily. The minister's a short-haired, owlish young woman who goes on a few minutes too long about the Tragedy of Suicide and What We Don't Understand and the Agony of Percy's Inexplicable Behavior, and then—as Anna instructed her—invites people up to the podium to share good memories of Percy, Because We Are Here to Support the Family in Their Grief, and We Also Wish to Acknowledge and Honor the Family and Friends of Melinda Soto, Who Have Graciously Joined Us Today. Heads throughout the sanctuary whip around. Where, where? Jeremy nods, half raises a hand, gives a small bow in his seat. Anna bites back a laugh, which she knows would sound too shrill and hysterical.

No one else moves. Then Marjorie clears her throat, stands, and marches the short distance to the microphone. “I'm Marjorie Clark, Percy's grandmother. I couldn't believe it when I heard what had happened—none of us could—and I suppose I never will”—oh, get on with it, thinks Anna, the minister already said all this—“and I'm sure I'll never understand it, but I can tell you that the Percy I knew was a sweet boy.” She goes on to tell a story about taking Percy grocery shopping when he was three, how he stopped stock-still in front of a display of lettuce and said, “That's the biggest salad in the
world
!” A few people laugh, politely. Anna doesn't. It's completely irrelevant.

Marjorie's saying something about the Reno people now, thanking them. Turning to gesture at the urn, she wishes Percy a sentimental good-bye, and then sits down.

Someone else has gotten up. Toby Tobin. At least his mother isn't here. Anna would have banned him, too, if she'd been able to, but that's Poor Form.

Wait, didn't the bitch say Toby wouldn't be able to come? Because they'd be away? Something about Europe? Whatever happened to keep Toby home? Maybe he doesn't like his mother any better than Anna does? No: more likely it's something else. And he's talking; Anna should listen.

“Percy and I played lacrosse together,” he says, gripping the sides of the podium so hard Anna can see his pale knuckles. “I've known him since kindergarten, because we both went to Blake, and—well, we weren't always friends. We competed a lot. But I couldn't have told you anything bad about him, and like everybody else, I'll never understand this. It would be a lot easier if I could point to something and say, ‘Oh, yeah, he was clearly off,' but I can't find anything like that. And I think we're all going to spend the rest of our own lives looking, and it's really scary because I'll never be able to take anyone at face value again, but maybe that's a gift, too.” He stops, swallows. “I'm talking too long. Anyway, I just—I feel awful for everybody. I wish I could do something to change it, any of it.”

He leaves the podium, giving Anna an abashed half nod as he passes. She nods back. He said the same thing Marjorie said, but he said it much better. His words were honest, heartfelt, and non-cloying, which is worth a lot right now. It's worth even more that he even came. Anna concedes, only a little grudgingly, that Toby seems to have grown into a fine human being.
And Percy didn't.
Of course, if she weren't terminally irritated with William's mother, alert for self-congratulation in every syllable of her speech, maybe she'd have liked Marjorie's comments, too.

Anna glances around the sanctuary. No one else has stood up. The minister clears her throat and moves forward, but Anna stands abruptly, feeling as brittle as a burned-out lightbulb, and makes her way to the mike. The few feet seem like miles, but this fiasco was her idea. If you want something done right, do it yourself.

She looks out over the tiny, scattered audience. “I've thanked all of you for coming,” she says, “but I'm thanking you again. The fact that so few people are here shows just how brave and caring all of you had to be to show up. That means the world to me, and to Percy's father.” She's pretty sure it means precisely nothing to William, but that part's formula. She takes a deep breath. “Twenty-three years ago today, my only child was born, and I held him in my arms and I imagined a bright, happy future for him. I never imagined that I'd outlive him, and certainly not under these circumstances. I'm sure many people, and maybe even people here, are happy he's dead, consider it right and fitting. Other people are probably angry he's dead, because it means they can't kill him, or because it means he won't suffer for decades in prison. I understand both of those positions. I do.”

She pauses. They wait, watching her. “I don't have any answers. His father and I knew something was wrong as soon as he came home from Mexico, but he wouldn't talk to us about it. He didn't leave a note. I believe he felt so horrible about what he'd done that he couldn't live with it. Maybe that's not true. Maybe he didn't feel horrible about what he did to Melinda. Maybe he was only terrified of the consequences. I don't know. Whatever answers he might have been able to offer, he carried them into the water. So of the stories that might be true, I tell the one that comforts me the most: that he felt remorse. I'm his mother. Please grant me that.”

Her voice wavers, just a little, and is answered by rustling from the pews. William has looked away, and Marjorie's frowning. Anna doesn't care. She takes another breath. “But this I do know. When Percy killed Melinda, he also destroyed himself. He did that the second he began to hurt her.” Her voice breaks on the word “hurt”; she can't bring herself to say “rape.” “He did that even before he walked into the water. The Percy I knew was a nice kid, a fun and decent kid, not a genius but smart enough. He loved his dog. I believe he loved us, his parents. He was loyal to his friends.” Damn few of whom have shown up today, but she's already said that. “All of that's banal, I know, and it makes Percy sound utterly ordinary, and the Percy I knew was, except that he was mine. That Percy died in Mexico. That's the Percy I'm mourning, the one no one else even seems to want to hear about or to remember, because the other Percy—the one who did such horrible things to Melinda—has taken center stage.”

Everyone's staring at her now, even Marjorie and William. Well, at least she has their attention. She supposes she's being unkind—Marjorie and Toby have both remembered that Percy, or tried to—but she doesn't care. The minister comes up behind her, clears her throat again, says gently, “Anna,” but Anna shoos her away.

She's not done talking. It's her party. She paid for the damn salmon canapés. She'll talk as long as she needs to.

She feels dizzy. Breathe, Anna. “Twenty-three years ago today, my only child surfaced from the waters of my womb.” That sounds pretentious as hell, but so what. This is her only son's funeral. “Eight months, two weeks and four days ago, he walked into the waters of Lake Washington.” Pause. Breathe. “Many of you know that Percy was a
Comrade Cosmos
fan. Some of you are, too.” She sees Jeremy Soto wince, watches his shoulders hunch. She keeps going even though he's glaring at her. She deserves that glare, maybe—Percy deserved it—but she needs to say her piece. “After Percy died, I started reading
CC
from the first issue. Not because I thought it would give me answers, but because Percy loved it, and I'd never bothered to try and share that with him when he was still alive. I didn't expect to get pulled into it, but I did.”

Jeremy's wiping his face now, a series of fierce swipes. The girl sitting next to him grips his shoulder. “If you follow
CC,
you know that this month's issue opens with a flood. Cosmos and Archipelago are caught in that flood, and Archipelago's pet scorpion has been swept away, and she's grieving terribly, even though most people wouldn't mourn a scorpion. She's grieving because Erasmus the scorpion was hers, and she loved him.”

She takes another breath, feeling stronger now. “I don't want to push this too far. Percy wasn't a scorpion. Not literally, anyway.” William scowls, but there's a ripple of laughter from the others. Good. “But when I saw that flood, I thought about my own womb, and I thought about Lake Washington, and I thought, We all come from the water, and we're all swept away in floods sometimes, and sometimes the people we have to work with to find safety are the last ones we expected. Sometimes the only way to survive is to work with people we thought we hated. Sometimes those are the people who wind up saving us, just like Cosmos, I'm pretty sure, will save Archipelago.”

The minister's hovering again. Anna turns to her and snaps, “I'm almost done,” and the woman retreats. “I'm not asking any of you to save me. I'm not claiming I can save you. But we're in a flood, and when the waters recede, everything will look different. Our task now is to save what we can.” She swallows. “I ask that you try to save at least one memory of the Percy who died in Mexico, the one I loved. Thank you.”

She steps away from the podium. Her legs are rubbery. William stands and helps her back to her seat; Marjorie takes her hand—she permits that, now—and David reaches around Marjorie to squeeze her shoulder, hard. For a moment, this moment, they're almost a family. It won't last.

The minister's talking again. Anna doesn't even try to listen. She closes her eyes and breathes.

*   *   *

The day before Melinda leaves for Mexico, she listens to Science Friday on NPR. They're talking about the moon. There's water on the moon, it turns out, quite a bit of water. Several dozen buckets of water, trapped in the moon's icy poles.

She reads more about the story when she gets home. Scientists are excited: this could open the door for a lunar space station, since there's now a water source, although it doesn't seem to Melinda that several dozen bucketfuls would go very far. Other commenters are more interested in how the water got there. One of the leading theories is that it was carried on asteroids that smashed into the moon. Some people believe that studying the moon's ice will provide invaluable information about the history of the entire solar system.

As she packs her suitcase—the aqua swimsuit, or the red one that's less slimming but more comfortable? okay, both—Melinda muses over the story. She thinks the moon is a little like Nevada: even a trickle of water transforms a wasteland into a potential windfall that sets speculators panting. She likes the asteroid theory, though. The moon is still scarred, but the objects that wounded it also brought potential life. What hurt the moon also has the capacity to mend it.

She laughs to herself. The church reading group just finished Henri Nouwen's
The Wounded Healer,
and this would fit right in. She'll have to tell her own Hen about it when she gets home.

*   *   *

The rain's started again. Yes, of course it has: this is Seattle, after all, even if they're here in July, during the dry season. Standing at a window in the church fellowship hall, clutching a glass of punch and a plate dotted with salmon canapés, Rosemary stares out at the falling water and wonders what Walter's doing.

Everything aches. She's stiff from the long car ride, from the strange bed, from the tension of sitting through this dreadful funeral. Yesterday she went to Pike Place Market and did a little shopping, but that seems like a century ago.

The funeral was hideous: soothing platitudes from the minister—who clearly hadn't known Percy—the tone-deaf offering from the grandmother, that jagged and heartbreaking speech from Anna Clark. Percy's school friend was the most credible speaker, and certainly the briefest.

As awful as Melinda's funeral was, it was better than this.

Under these circumstances, what would a good funeral look like? Rosemary has no idea. But once again, she's grateful to be Episcopalian. The Episcopal Church gives good funeral. There's a well-defined liturgy. There's a shape to the thing, a shape created both to express and to contain grief, a shape that points to hope.

The Unitarians have no Eucharist. She expected that, but there wasn't even any Scripture. The minister quoted Plato's maxim about always being kind, because everyone you see is fighting a terrible battle. True enough, but completely inadequate.