Northward to the Moon (14 page)

“Candace!” says Nelda in a loud whispery voice.

“Oh honestly,” says Maureen. “Mom, this is coming out all wrong. The doctor wanted us to tell you. He seems like a nice man and he thought we could do it better….” She stops as it occurs to everyone how wrong he was. “But yeah, you damaged some vertebrae and at your age …”

“So this is it, this is as good as it’s going to get?” asks Dorothy.

“Which is why you’re going to need help. You know, they have very nice places with a staff who can help you.”

“Great balls of fire!” says Dorothy.

“Now, there’s no need to react like that. You have no idea what we’ve been through trying to find you a nice place before we went home,” says Candace, bending her napkin into neat little folds. “And luckily today we finally found one by Ely that will take you, and when we sell the ranch you’ll have enough money to pay for it for some time.”

Dorothy looks too stunned to speak.

Maya hasn’t been following the conversation among the sisters and Dorothy. She has had her ears glued to my mother and Ned and now she leans over and whispers to Dorothy but in tones loud enough for us all to hear, particularly as her whisper echoes in the great stunned silence. “You were right. About
you know who …
” She points at Ned behind her napkin but of course we all see this too.

“What have you been telling her?” Ned barks at Dorothy in outraged tones.

“Just the truth. I thought she should know. Now, you’re a very nice boy, Neddie, but you’re not reliable. I didn’t want her getting too attached.”

“Too
ATTACHED
!” says Ned.

“Dorothy, honestly,” says my mother. “Ned is very reliable.”

“He’s going to
Alaska
!” says Dorothy.

“Well, yes, … there
is
that,” says my mother musingly.

“Too
ATTACHED?”
Ned is almost standing in indignation. He throws his napkin on the floor.

“Jane thinks he’s the devil’s spawn,” whispers Maya confidingly to Dorothy, but unfortunately we all hear this too.

My mother looks over at me wild-eyed. I know she counts on me to support her but, honestly, she
knows
what he did to me. I roll my eyes and start looking for my own scalloped-potato Virgin Mary.

“Anyhow, Mother, you can’t stay on here alone and we can’t stay and take care of you,” says Maureen. “So obviously some kind of living situation had to be found.”

“Well, I never!” Dorothy sputters. “What were you planning to do … just up and move me one day without warning?”

“That’s just what
you
did,” says Nelda quietly without looking up. “That’s just what you did with
us. You moved us all to Fort McMurray, where nobody wanted to go. You just moved us without warning.”

“Oh,
that’s
what this is all about. For heaven’s sakes,” says Dorothy. “That was all years ago. So this is just revenge.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Maureen, but it suddenly occurs to me that maybe this is what this
is
all about. And from the look on Maureen’s face, this is occurring to her too.

“That’s
not
what this is about,” says Candace. “This is purely practical. We’re just looking for a place for you, is all. We’re trying to help you here.”

“Well, thanks for telling me because I never would have guessed that throwing me out of my own home was particularly helpful. Ned, take me upstairs. I want to go back to bed.”

But Ned is turning to me instead. “Jane, I’m sorry. I don’t know how many ways to say it. It just slipped out. I didn’t know you’d take it so hard. I mean, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, having a crush on a boy.”

Thank you very much, Ned. Now there are eight people who know. That was
so
helpful.

“Ned,” says my mother. “Let’s not talk about that here.”

“Who does Jane have a crush on?” asks Maya.

“Is Jane going to crush someone?” asks Max.

“Who is Jane going to crush?” asks Hershel.

“NOBODY!” I yell.

The aunts are studiously looking elsewhere. Oh great! Everyone
already
knew!

“Nobody tells
me
anything,” says Maya in aggrieved tones.

“Can we have dessert?” asks Max.

“Yes, come, boys, let’s go into the kitchen and I’ll get you dessert,” says my mother.

“Take me to bed,” says Dorothy. “I’ll admit I may have to move somewhere where someone will assist me
now that I know I’ll never be able to walk properly again
but I don’t have to put up with you all planning it behind my back like I’m senile. Honest to God. Sometimes I wish I’d had gerbils instead when the mothering instinct came over me.”

“What
mothering instinct?” Maureen whispers to Nelda, but we all overhear that too. When are people going to learn that you can hear almost any whisper at the dinner table? Even though Dorothy
is halfway out the door, being carried by Candace and Ned, I think she hears too because her body becomes rigid.

My mother comes into the dining room. “Pie, anyone?”

We all shake our heads. We are either angry or in the depths of inconsolable despair.

“It’s pecan …,” says my mother.

“Well, maybe just a slice,” says Maureen.

“Yes, a sliver,” whispers Nelda.

“A crumb,” says Candace.

“Oh well, if it’s pecan …,” I say, and sullenly let her bring it to me.

T
he next day Ned announces that he and his sisters are going to take Dorothy to see the home in Ely that has space for her.

“We’ll make a day of it,” says Maureen to Dorothy, who has been gotten dressed and is sitting stonily at the breakfast table clutching her patent leather pocketbook as if she might swipe anyone who came near.

“We can stop in Ely for lunch,” says Candace.

“If you think that’s supposed to be an inducement then you’ve obviously never eaten out in Ely,” says Dorothy.

Ned comes downstairs and he and Dorothy and the sisters take off.

I wash the breakfast dishes. It is soothing work.

Maya is curled up in Dorothy’s bed watching television. She has gone back to putting her knuckles by her mouth. I think the amount of discord in the house is upsetting her. I am loafing about the study dipping into Dorothy’s dusty old books when my mother comes in.

“So, want to go riding, just you and me?” she asks.

“I don’t know how,” I say.

“I do,” she says. “And with a nice gentle trail horse, you don’t need to know. Your horse can just follow mine.”

“I didn’t know you could ride,” I say.

“Yes. A little,” says my mother. “And Dorothy told me she has a very gentle old mare that used to do trail rides and that if you’re on her, you should have no trouble. I’ve asked Ben to keep an eye on the boys and I’ve told Maya that Ben is just in the barn with them if she needs anything. I’ve already got the horses saddled up and tied by the gate so we can just take off.”

Without having to pass by Ben, I suppose she means. This all begins to sound very suspicious to
me. She is probably trying to get me alone so she can tell me that I have to forgive Ned and then she will try to plead his case. It annoys me. It’s not like my mother to be such a buttinski. She ought to be as mad at him as I am. We should form an anti-Ned club. I think I may point this out to her. Maybe she is just waiting for someone to give her license to be mad at him.

I get on the horse and at first the novelty of this wipes out all thought.

We ride slowly out over the grasslands. The sky is light washed blue with clouds painted in patches. The grass pokes from the earth so that there is almost an equal amount of both and you can see mountains in the background. The air is thin and dry and coated with a fine haze of dirt so that you have it not just under your feet but filtering into your lungs in a way that is pleasant. The way the earthy smell of the manure pile is pleasant.

This country is twice as beautiful on horseback. For the first time I feel like I am part of the landscape. It is what I always feel on our beach in Massachusetts. That I am an integral part of it. I wonder if everyone finds home like that or if some people,
like Ned, never do. And so they’re not even looking for it, they just keep moving.

Out of habit, the thought that I am finally on horseback like an outlaw crosses my mind but I quickly correct it. No more being outlaws with Ned. Well, we never were, I think he just wanted to get away from things. I wanted adventures to get
to
things. This is the difference I could never put my finger on.

We ride side by side and don’t talk at all. The gentle rocking of the horse is soothing and my mother looks awake and alive and happy in a way I realize I haven’t seen her for a long time.

I would love it if Ned went to Alaska. But I am doubly angry at him, now on my mother’s behalf, for wanting to do so. Suppose he goes and she never looks peaceful like this again? Suppose she becomes like Dorothy when Ned’s father left?

“I’m sorry to say it but I think Ned is doing a really terrible thing wanting to go to Alaska like that. I think he’s really”—I am hesitant to be so harsh about my mother’s husband but she should at least have the idea suggested to her—“not a very
good person after all. At the very least, he is doing a
bad
thing.”

My mother looks at me and she doesn’t lose her placidity. She looks neither angry at Ned nor at what I have said. “Most things we think other people do that are bad are merely inconvenient for us, Jane. Most people we think are bad have just not acted in a way that was convenient
for us
. We assume they must have evil reasons if they do things that don’t turn out well for us, but most of the time we just don’t get it.” She shrugs.

I am flustered by this. I still want to think of Ned as bad. I don’t want to think of all these complications so I change the subject. “Have you noticed that Maya has been a little weird lately?”

“I’ve noticed you watch her with a worried expression,” says my mother. “She’ll be much better when we get home and she makes a friend.”

“Do you really think that’s it?” I say hintingly. I don’t want to worry her but maybe she ought to at least think about these things. “You know I was watching
The Price Is Right
with her and Dorothy for a few minutes and there was a commercial. With the six signs of depression.”

“And you thought Maya had some?”

“She had
all
of them,” I say.

My mother reins in her horse, turns to me and smiles. “Maya’s going to be okay, Jane. Even with her family history of mental illness, it never occurred to me she’d be anything else. She’s sensitive and she’s going through changes. As we all are. Sometimes when people are going through changes you just have to give them space to make them. But she’s solid. Just wait and see.”

All this business about changes goes right over my head because of the arresting first thing my mother said.
What
family history of mental illness? There is no mental illness on my mother’s side of the family. She must mean Maya’s
father’s
family history. This is the first time my mother has ever made any reference to any of our fathers and I think it just slipped out.

Back in Massachusetts I managed to figure out four men who were probable fathers of my brothers and sister and me, assuming each one of us had a different one. But I was never sure which man had fathered each of us. Which one of them had mental illness in the family?

Which potential father had a family
history
of mental illness? Immediately Crazy Caroline springs to mind, sister of a poet who I thought might have fathered one of us. That is the obvious answer. And she really was crazy. Certifiably, sadly, frighteningly crazy. That would make the poet, H.K., Maya’s father.

The rest of the ride is ruined for me. I look in the direction of my mother’s hands, pointing out hawks and vultures and snakes and dust devils, but I can’t care. How I long for my best friend, Ginny, back in Massachusetts. For someone who will behave normally when I tell her that Maya’s father is H.K. and Ned wants to desert us all and go to Alaska and there’s a bag of money sitting in the house and one of Ned’s sisters believes the Virgin Mary appears to people in waffles and how Ned betrayed me with Ben, and about Ben, and who, when I tell her these things, doesn’t just sit there smiling serenely but runs around in circles like a chicken with her head cut off, screaming, “OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!” Now,
that
is what is called for.
That
would be satisfying. But there is no such person here.

Later, as we turn the horses for home, it occurs to me that just as momentous as knowing that H.K. is most likely Maya’s father, is that by discovering this, I narrow down the possibilities of my own. The man who fathered me must now be one of the three remaining: Mr. Fordyce, who lives in a trailer outside of our town in Massachusetts and looks like Santa Claus; the clothes hanger man, whom I alone saw drown; or, and here I shiver with revulsion, Ned.

“Where were you?” demands Maya after we have untacked the horses and come onto the porch. She stands in the doorway with her hands on her stubby little hips.

“We went for a ride,” I say.

“You didn’t tell me you were going
horseback riding,”
says Maya.

“Maya, you don’t even like horses,” I remind her tiredly.

“Nobody ever tells me anything,” pouts Maya.

Sweetie pie, I want to say to her, you don’t know the half of it.

W
hen Ned and his sisters return they are chipper. They have found an assisted-living facility with a vacancy. Dorothy can move in anytime.

“It’s a dump,” says Dorothy at dinner. “But I guess my presence will improve it.”

“That’s the spirit, Mom,” says Candace.

Dorothy smiles. She seems pathetically anxious to spend what time she has left with her returned children before they leave again. She is amiable at the cost of doing this thing she really doesn’t want to do, moving to assisted living. It is better than being on the outs with them. I know this because Dorothy confides in Maya, who confides in me.