Northward to the Moon (17 page)

“Well, as soon as I heard they’d flown the coop I came right over here and, my dear, the mess. It would have broken your heart.”

“Mess?” says my mother. “The place is immaculate.”

“Yes, after we got done with it. Some of us from church showed up with our mops and buckets and soon put things to rights, no thanks to those messy Gourds. Jam everywhere!”

“And peanut butter, I bet,” I say, pulling up a chair.

“Oh, you may be sure,” says Mrs. Merriweather, nodding at me. “Peanut butter everywhere! Oh, and you’ve not heard about Mrs. Spinnaker either, I suppose?”

“I notice she doesn’t seem to be here this summer.”

“No. Nor anywhere. Her sister has been frantic. She’s gone and Horace is gone. They’ve been missing six months now. Her sister is putting the cottage up for sale. She fears”—and here Mrs. Merriweather whispers even though it is clear she
would like everyone in the world to hear—“that Mrs. Spinnaker has come to a
bad end
!”

“No!” says my mother. “What
kind
of a bad end?”

“Well, my dear, the last anyone saw of her was during the winter storms. We had some doozies around New Year’s. Waves fifteen feet high. Mrs. Spinnaker showed up for the holidays—something she has never done before, and that alone created talk, of course. What was she doing here? And she was seen
running
down the beach with Horace. Running! Well, folks thought she’d gone mad. Neither one of them should have been on the beach with the surf like that. Anyhow, as I say, that’s the last anyone saw of her and it’s our opinion that she drowned going after that little dog. You know I always think small dogs are a mistake. So easily mislaid and I have it on good authority that Horace couldn’t swim.”

“No, I know,” says my mother, looking appalled and shocked.

“My mother saved him from drowning once,” I say.

“You don’t say, dear? Well, it appears Mrs. Spinnaker was not so lucky herself. And terrible for the
sister because you know she’ll never know for sure. Of course, none of us but you knew her well. She kept to herself, that one.”

“Yes, I can’t say we knew her well. We knew Horace rather better,” says my mother. “He used to come for dinner now and again.”

“Yes, well, she would have done better to have kept him fenced in. It appears such freedom was what did him in, did both of them in. Of course, there’s always people who will say it was suicide.”

“It would have to be a suicide pact,” I say.

“How do you mean, dear?” says Mrs. Merriweather, leaning forward, always happy to speculate on the misfortunes of others.

“Because of Horace, of course,” I say.

“I see! I see!” she says with increasing interest.

“Oh nonsense, she’d never allow Horace to kill himself,” says my mother, and Mrs. Merriweather and I turn to her, happy to argue this point, when Maya comes up with a catalog and wants me to help her design a whole paper-doll village, so we go onto the porch and cut them out and occasionally the wind lifts one up and flies it out to sea.

“We should rescue them!” says Maya as we watch a woman in a long dress fly into the waves.

“Never mind,” I say to her. “They’re only having adventures.” And then I think of Mrs. Spinnaker blown out to sea and the possible adventures she may be having but it gives me goose bumps. Mrs. Spinnaker just doesn’t seem to me like the type of person to disappear at sea. She was so pragmatic. You can’t see her coming to such a romantic and untidy end. I think things sometimes don’t turn out the way you think. We construct these little ideas of how things are but they’re like stage sets, they don’t really mean anything at all. There are plans in motion that have nothing to do with your tidy little ideas. I’m sure Dorothy never expected to end up in a home in Ely all by herself and yet she will in two years when the money runs out. I think she thought she would die in the saddle.

I hear Ned being greeted by Mrs. Merriweather and his cries of astonishment as my mother tells him about Mrs. Spinnaker, and then Mrs. Merriweather, with great delight, relating all the gossip about everyone all over again.

We are happily settled into our lives, although not entirely, since there is still this awkwardness between me and Ned. Fortunately he is gone a lot, looking for work. Then one morning his phone rings. It is odd. We have given the number to no one in town.

Ned answers it and keeps saying “WHAT? HE
WHAT!
!!” When he hangs up he says, “Well, I’ll be blamed! I’ll be doggoned. I don’t believe it.”

“What?” says my mother.
“What?”

“Ben has flown the coop. That was Candace. Mother called her to say that Ben went into town to deliver the three horses he sold and never came back. And apparently before he left, he turned Satan loose. Mom saw Satan from the bedroom window running across the grasslands by the pond. Candace says she kept asking Mom how she knew Ben wasn’t coming back and Mom wouldn’t tell her, just said that she knew and now she would have to move into the home in Ely. She was having a terrible time. She fell twice on the way to
the bathroom and it took hours to get to her feet.”

“Oh no,” says my mother.

“And Satan’s running loose on the ranch. Candace can’t leave what she’s doing. Everyone is back at work but me. I’ll have to go. I’ll have to go, Felicity. What a mess.”

“What could have possessed Ben? He seemed such a nice boy.”

“Nice boy, schmice boy, a nice boy would have taught Jane to ride,” says Ned.

“Can we please not bring that up again?” I shout from the porch, where I have been listening in.

“I’m just saying!” Ned shouts back.

“Well, when are you going?” asks my mother.

“Tomorrow, I guess. We can’t leave her like that. The airfare is going to be horrendous but we’ll just have to take it out of John’s bag of money.”

Maya goes dashing into the kitchen from the porch. “I want to go too,” she says. “I want to see Dorothy. I want to take an airplane ride.”

“No, Maya, Ned’s going to have his hands full,” says my mother.

“Oh, let her go, Felicity,” says Ned. “It will cheer
Dorothy up no end. Much more than seeing me again.”

“But, Maya, you wanted to come home so badly,” says my mother.

“We’re going to rescue Dorothy!” says Maya.

“Maya, she’s not a paper doll,” I say, coming into the kitchen.

“All right, Maya,” says my mother.

I cannot believe it; my mother is letting Ned take Maya. Ned is not exactly reliable. Suppose she has nightmares or sees wolf shadows on walls? Or she has hysterics because they aren’t really rescuing Dorothy, they’re just moving her? Or she ends up terrified on the plane? Or she finds someplace even better to hide than the hayloft?

“Let me go too,” I say to my mother.

“You?” says my mother in surprise, but then it makes her happy. She is surprised I am willing to be around Ned. She sees this as a way to heal the breach, I can tell. She might have had second thoughts about letting Maya go—she knows what Maya is like too—but if I go with them, she wholeheartedly approves the plan. This will bring peace
to her little family. I realize offering to go was a big mistake.

“All right, that’s a very good idea, Jane. You and Maya can help Ned and cheer up Dorothy. I’m sure she’ll be sad that Ben has left her in this way.”

“Great. Then it’s me and my girls,” says Ned happily.

T
he plane ride, the first for me and Maya, is so wonderful that it almost makes me cease regretting saying I would come. I insist on the window seat so that I won’t have to spend the whole flight next to Ned. Also because I think putting Maya next to the window, where she can watch the ground disappear, is a mistake, but it turns out I am wrong, as she spends the whole time leaning over me trying to peer down at the ground anyway. You can just never tell with Maya.

When we get to Dorothy’s house it is too late to try to do anything about Satan. Dorothy doesn’t seem too badly off, just a little subdued. The
kitchen is a mess. She has found handling her walker and cooking difficult and has just been opening cans and leaving dishes about. But she is clearly very pleased with herself.

“You see, Neddie,” she says, “I think when the hip fully heals I can move into some kind of small apartment back in Elko. Of course, one of you will have to come and help me do the move but after that I should be fine. I just need to get the hang of things, working around the walker. But heck, once I’m healed I may not need a walker. At my age healing takes some time but I think I’m going to get around again eventually.”

Ned doesn’t turn from the stove, where he is making us eggs. “We’ll talk about it then,” he says.

Later, when he comes up to say good night—Maya and I are sleeping in Dorothy’s big bed and Dorothy is sleeping downstairs—Maya says, “Can I come back when it’s time to move Dorothy into an apartment?”

“Listen, Maya,” says Ned. “Even if she can do a little cooking for herself, there’s just too much she can’t take care of alone. It would be one thing if one of us lived in Elko and could help her out.”

“Why doesn’t she come back with us, then?” asks Maya.

“She likes Nevada,” says Ned.

“She could buy Mrs. Spinnaker’s cottage. Then she’d be right next door to us,” insists Maya.

“Maya, go to sleep,” says Ned.

“Well, why can’t she?” asks Maya as Ned turns off the light. This is rather high-handed of him as I am in here too but I think he hopes it will shut her up.

“Did you come along just to nag at me the whole time?” asks Ned.

“Turn the light back on,” says Maya.

Ned turns it on and then closes the door and escapes before he has to listen to more. But when I go to brush my teeth I hear him having another angry conversation with Dorothy.

“Ben
took
the money? Why didn’t you say this before? Why didn’t you call the sheriff?”

“And say what? Tell the sheriff he stole money that we don’t know the origin of and kept in a bag in the house? I’m more worried about my gun. He took the shotgun from where I keep it hidden in the china cupboard and all the shells. When I
found the bag of money gone, that was the first thing I checked for.”

“I
told
you we should’ve sold that thing. It should have been the
first
thing we sold.”

“Whatever,” says Dorothy, sounding exhausted. “He’s not going to do anything so bad with it. He just wants a ranch. He’ll probably light out for New Mexico or something and put a down payment on one.”

“Jeez Louise, Mom. Someone’s gotta know something. He’s got family in town. He can’t just disappear without a trace. We can get the money back, I’m pretty sure. I was counting on that money for the plane fares.”

“You know what, Ned? I start to make plans and then I just get too tired. I don’t have the energy to sustain that kind of thinking. It may be that I don’t even care anymore. I don’t seem to care about anything. I just wish he hadn’t let Satan run wild like that. Now,
that
was irresponsible. And I’ll pony up the plane fare. I’ve got a chunk in the bank from the sale of things and the ranch will bring in a pretty penny. Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow’s gonna be no fun and I’m tired.”

The next day the first item of business is to catch Satan. The second is to go into town and see if Hank or Leeron can move back to the ranch. Ned doesn’t want to leave the ranch empty when we go. The last item is to move Dorothy and her things over to Ely. This is the one we all dread.

Fortunately we can see Satan down by the pond, so Ned hands me the halter, Maya the lead rope, and he carries a bucket of grain. We make our way there. Grasses grow high around the pond, which is one reason the horses love it, and as we go through the long grasses, our eye on Satan, I suddenly hear Maya gasp. I turn to where she is looking. The ground up ahead is strewn with large lumps. Walking closer, we see what it is. There are seven dead wolves, including two dead cubs. All of them sprawled in various stages of decay.

None of us know what to say. The bodies of the dead cubs lie soft beside their mother, her body curling toward them as if even now trying to reach
them. Ned moves in for a closer look but it is apparent to all of us what happened.