Mending the Moon (8 page)

“Sit down.” William pushes the extra desk chair toward her. She sits. “According to the news stories, one of the housekeepers found the body and called the front office, who called the police, but they kept the whole thing very quiet precisely because they didn't want the other guests to panic.”

Anna rubs her eyes. She's very tired. She feels like she should know what this means, but her mind veers away when she tries to consider it. “Yes, and? William, I'm sorry, but can you cut to the chase? I don't know where you're going with this.”

William gives her a long, level look. His voice is strained, on the verge of cracking. “The guests weren't told what had happened until a few hours before it made the news. None of them knew anything until then; the cops came in plainclothes. A guest interviewed at the resort said it just seemed like a normal day, with people hanging out by the pool and eating in the restaurant. They specifically asked that no one leave until the police had interviewed everyone.”

Now Anna's frowning. The angles of the room seem to be bending, and she has to blink to make them straight again. She doesn't want to understand this. She doesn't want to know what he's trying to tell her. “But Percy said—”

“Yes. Exactly.” William shakes his head. He looks older than he did two hours ago. “By the time the news went public, he was already on the plane. He had to be. The timing doesn't work otherwise.”

*   *   *

Melinda's life as a mother begins with a thirteen-hour flight home to Reno from Guatemala City. Jeremy, who's two and a half but looks younger, who's unused to motion and pressure changes, cramped space and strange adults holding him, howls almost the entire way, earning glares from other passengers. Melinda and Walter try to quiet him with food, with toys, with songs and games. He won't nap, and Melinda refuses to give him anything to help him sleep, although she's heard of other parents doing so on planes.

Long past both exhaustion and tears, she tries to cradle her new son, whispering into his hair, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” She's intensely grateful that Walter came with her. What would she have done without him to handle paperwork, bribes, luggage, and maps?

Everyone they've encountered on the trip—except the officials directly involved in the adoption, who know the true story—have mistaken Walter and Melinda for a couple. It's a logical mistake, and it's no one else's business that Melinda decided to adopt as a single parent, so she and Walter don't correct the well-meaning fellow passengers who congratulate them on the adoption.

Jeremy has brown skin and dark black hair. Melinda's hair is ash-blond, already graying, and Walter's a redhead. It's obvious that Jeremy's adopted. Melinda has thought about this, about the problems Jeremy will face because he looks different—Reno is still in many ways a small town—but has decided that life in an orphanage would be much worse.

They have to change planes in Dallas; that flight's delayed, and the wait turns into a new species of hell. Jeremy lies on his back, kicks his heels, and screams himself purple. But finally a flight attendant produces a finger puppet from somewhere and sings a lullaby in Spanish, and he quiets. Spanish isn't really his mother tongue; K'iché is. But Spanish is what he heard at the orphanage.

Melinda—shamefully, she now realizes—knows only one Spanish song, the hymn
“Santo, Santo, Santo, Mi Corazón,”
which the overwhelmingly white congregation at St. Phil's sings every few weeks. She and Walter take turns singing it to Jeremy, until at last he sleeps.

They sleep, too, on that second flight, and wake on landing. Rosemary and Tom, beaming, are waiting at the gate with a new stroller. Veronique's there, too, not beaming—Melinda wouldn't recognize her if she were—but bearing a shopping bag of toys and clothing. Everyone admires Jeremy, coos at him, touches his soft skin. Melinda's grateful that he continues to sleep soundly through all this, worn out from his previous tantrums.

The other four come into the house, help get Jeremy settled in his crib—soon enough he'll need a big-boy bed—and praise his loveliness. “You're home,” Rosemary says. “The hard part's over.”

“Oh, no,” Melinda says, looking at her sleeping child. So small. He's been stunted until now, like most of the orphanage kids. But she paid for an American-trained doctor down there to evaluate him, and he's basically healthy. He'll grow, and she'll help him grow, and she'll grow, too. “The hard part's just started.”

*   *   *

Jeremy awakens to the sound of birdsong. When he opens his eyes, he sees sunlight streaming through a window, and he thinks the sunlight should make him happy, because it was raining yesterday, but the window's in the wrong place. This isn't his dorm room, and it's not the house. Where is he?

And then he remembers where he is, and why.

He wishes he could go back to sleep, but he knows he won't be able to. He's alert now, awake. Too awake: tense. He slept well. This is a better bed than any he usually sleeps in: expensive sheets, just the right kind of pillow, a fine firm mattress. And everything smells like fabric softener.

The smell of clean laundry has always been the scent of safety for him. But now it brings a vertiginous rush of memory, and he understands quite clearly that everything he sees and hears and smells and tastes from now on, for longer than he wants to imagine, and maybe for the rest of his life, will plunge him into Mom-movies.

His mother, sorting the laundry, letting him fold the easy stuff, the towels and dishcloths. How old was he then? Six? Eight?
If you're really good, I'll teach you to iron.

Mom, waving a red fabric napkin like a bullfighter's cape. Using a pair of socks as hand puppets and challenging him to match the other pairs in under a minute, while her two hands delivered an NBC sports–style commentary. Right hand wagging, fingers and thumb opening and closing like a talking mouth: “Will he find the other argyle? He only has ten seconds left, Joe! Can he do it?”

And now the left hand: “Yes! Yes, Cindy-Lou, he used his eagle eyes to find the other argyle inside the arm of that shirt! Here he goes! He's putting them together! He's matching heel to heel!”

Back to the right: “And yes, he's done it! Look at that, Joe! He matched all the socks in
under a minute
! Jeremy Soto is once again the champion sock-matcher!”

Mom doing the laundry, every week, several times a week. Putting clean, soft jeans, neatly folded, on his closet shelf, even when he was fighting with her, being shitty to her, neglecting his own chores. Yard work. Taking out the garbage.

They had such stupid fights about taking out the garbage.

They had fights about how much time he spent reading
CC
instead of doing homework. They had fights about going to church camp. They had fights about the fact that he was adopted.

He'll always remember Mom, and he will never remember his birth mother, never know anything about her. All he knows, from the Internet and the library, is the chaos of the country he came from.

Why couldn't Mom vacation in the States? She could have gone to San Francisco, Sedona, Palm Springs. If she'd stayed here, she'd have been safe. Safer.

Is he being a racist now? He doesn't know. He doesn't care.

He forces himself to sit up, to swing his feet out of bed and onto the floor. He has to get up. He can't lie in Hen's guest room and cry all day.

Get a move on, kiddo. Time's a wasting.
Mom's voice, in his head.

He grabs the small duffel bag on the dresser—Hen stopped by the dorm last night so he could pick up some clothing—and pulls on jeans and a shirt. Then he shuffles into shoes and follows the smell of food downstairs.

Lasagna. He smells lasagna. Mom always made lasagna, because it was his favorite food.

He hears voices before he rounds the corner into the dining room. Very Bitchy. She's the last person he wants to see. He knows he should thank her for taking the phone last night, for canceling class and driving him to Aunt Rosie's, but all he feels right now is despair and rage. None of it should have happened. He shouldn't have to be in a position to have to thank VB. He shouldn't have had to wake up in a strange room, shouldn't have to be wondering if someone else's lasagna will be as good as his mother's.

Hen, VB, and Rosemary are sitting around the table. They look up as he enters. VB and Aunt Rosie say, “Good morning,” nearly in unison, too obviously trying to sound cheerful.

“Jeremy.” Hen isn't trying to sound cheerful. “How are you? Did you get any sleep?”

“I slept fine,” he says, and sits down. The table's huge, meant to seat eight or ten, too large for the room. Behind Jeremy is a cabinet with glass doors showing piles of teacups and little statues and stuff. Fragile stuff, all pink and blue. If he moves, he'll break something. If he breathes, he'll break something.

“Are you hungry?” Hen says. “Everybody from church has been bringing food, because I told them you're staying with me and they don't know what else to do. We have enough lasagna to feed the five thousand.”

“I guess I could eat.” Much as he loves lasagna, he prefers cereal right after waking up. But he's a guest, and has to take what he's given.

His rage grows, flaring in his gut. His whole life, he's been a guest.

Rosemary heaps his pink-and-blue plate, and Hen brings him a glass of milk. He looks down at the food. Mom made him lasagna every birthday. One year when he was little and into fossils, she cooked metal dinosaur charms into the lasagna, as if the meat and noodles were geologic layers. “Chew carefully, kids!”

His eyes are wet. He doesn't want them to be. He stabs his fork into the food and winces as the metal skids off the bottom of the plate. No dinosaurs here: it's just Hen's china. He has to be careful. He can't scratch the priest's precious plates, even though he longs to break everything on the table, everything in the cabinet, everything in the house.

He can't eat this. He puts his fork down.

“Tom's going down to Mexico to get your mom,” Hen says. “Do you want to go? I need to ask now, because he's leaving in a few hours.”

The smell of the food's making him sick. “Why would I want to do that? He's not ‘getting my mom.' She's not alive anymore. He's getting what's left of her.”

“Right,” Hen says. She sounds very calm. “Jeremy, do you want to see her body, or is it okay with you if she's cremated there? You can take your time with that one. Tom won't have to make that call for a day or two.”

“I don't have to take my time.” He picks up his fork again. He has to try to eat. How can he eat? “I don't want to see her dead. I don't want to see what happened to her. Let them burn her.”

“Think about it,” Hen says. “Tom will let us know when we need to decide.”

“I've decided.” He can't eat, not right now. He suddenly yearns to go jogging, to run forever, to burn all the fury out of his system. With each step, he'll picture stomping on the face and balls of the bastard who did this. He'll punch the air and imagine connecting with flesh, blood, and bone.

He pushes away from the table, stands up. “Not hungry. Sorry.”

“That's fine,” Hen says. “We're going to sit in the living room and start working on your mom's service. Will you join us?”

“Yeah. Sure.” His fury flames and flares. “While we're at it, are we having a service for my other mother? The one murdered in Guatemala?”

He's only saying it to let out his rage, to make them feel guilty. He researched Guatemala because Mom expected him to. If he's anything, he's American. But Hen, for once, looks at a loss. VB and Rosie rustle, suck in air, cough. “Do you want us to?” Rosemary says at last. “We'll certainly pray for her.”

“Great. Terrific.” Jeremy brushes past the treacherous cabinet into the living room and plunks himself down on the couch, hard. The others stand now, too, and follow him. “You gonna pray for everybody else murdered or disappeared down there? In the genocide? All two hundred thousand of them?” He realizes he's punching the couch with each word.

Good. That feels good, even though he's being a complete hypocrite. He doesn't care about politics. He never has. Mom wanted him to be some kind of radical, but all he wanted to do was read
CC,
and he's a hypocrite about that, too, because he's not even a good Comrade. He's just a fan.

But he's on a roll, so he keeps punching. “You gonna pray for all the victims of all those other genocides, Germany and Cambodia and fucking Armenia, and Darfur and Sierra Leone and probably a dozen other places I don't even know about?”

“Yes,” Hen says. “We are.”

“Yeah, good. That'll really help.” He switches arms. Keep hitting, even though it hurts. “That'll keep all those people from being dead, won't it? It'll stop people from killing each other, because that always works. Right.”

“Prayer,” says Hen, “reminds us to do other things. I believe that prayer helps by itself, but the other things certainly do. Helping with money and food, with medical supplies, with aid to relief organizations—”

“Not to mention military aid,” Jeremy said. Relief organizations: please. Fucking Comrade Hen. Even if Jeremy ever had been a good Comrade, he couldn't be one now. Not anymore, not after this. Time to write a WISS essay. Jeremy will be a Minion for the rest of his life, eating donuts and lasagna.

He can't sit anymore. The punching isn't enough. He gets up and moves restlessly around the room, hating himself for his charade but unable to stop. “The U.S. underwrote the Guatemalan civil war. They supported the government because they were afraid of communism, even though the government was butchering Mayans. The U.S. knew what was going on, but they kept providing training and weapons and money. Just like we funded fucking Al Qaeda.”