Northward to the Moon (18 page)

I
sit next to Ned on the plane. We are seated two and two across the aisle because both Maya and I want window seats, although Maya spends most of her time playing cards with Dorothy, who has a seemingly endless tolerance for Go Fish. Ned and I read. He has called my mom and warned her that Dorothy is coming with us. Ned says my mother sounds delighted.

“Well, she would be,” he says, shaking his head. “She never fails to astonish and fascinate me, your mother.”

When we get home there are more practical arrangements. My mother has bought an inflatable bed for her and Ned, which she sets up in the
living room, giving Dorothy their bedroom. Getting Dorothy in over the sand is a bit of a trick. She has to be carried everywhere, even out to the picnic table when we eat, so it’s a good thing she is so slight.

As we put bowls on the picnic table, my mother gasps.

“For a second I thought I saw Mrs. Spinnaker,” she explains. “It must be her sister, they look so alike. Why don’t I go over and ask her to have dessert with us and we’ll find out what she’s asking for Mrs. Spinnaker’s cottage?”

“It looks like a wet place to live,” says Dorothy uncertainly. “And all this sand.”

“But you’d be next door to us,” says Maya.

“Well, yes, that would make it all worthwhile, wouldn’t it, dear?” says Dorothy, putting her hand on top of Maya’s.

My mother and I go next door to see Mrs. Spinnaker’s sister. “Why do you think Dorothy and Maya like each other so much?” I ask my mother.

“I don’t know, but you see, there are always upsides in these situations,” she says. I didn’t know she
regarded Dorothy as a situation. She may have given herself away a little there but I don’t pursue it.

My mother knocks on the door and when it opens we are flabbergasted. There indeed is Mrs. Spinnaker’s sister, but also Mrs. Spinnaker. In the back we hear Horace barking.

“Forevermore!” says my mother.

“Yes, my reaction exactly,” says Mrs. Spinnaker’s sister.

“Mrs. Spinnaker, you’ve returned!”

“Obviously,” says Mrs. Spinnaker. “As have you.”

“Yes, yes, I hadn’t thought of it that way,” says my mother.

“So there you are,” says Mrs. Spinnaker.

My mother does not know what to say. She can hardly say what she came to say, which is, We want to buy your house. Finally she just asks them both over for dessert.

“And Horace too, of course,” she says.

I don’t think Mrs. Spinnaker would have come but her sister has already accepted enthusiastically so she has to follow suit. She gets Horace and we troop back over.

When Ned, who has been clearing the table,
sees her he says, “OH NO! Mrs. Spinnaker! You’ve come back!”

I know he is thinking that the plan to put his mother in Mrs. Spinnaker’s house is foiled now but it certainly doesn’t sound right. He quickly explains himself but Mrs. Spinnaker is still left with the impression that Ned is either (a) an idiot or (b) the type of person who says Oh no when he sees you coming. Either way it puts her in a tetchy frame of mind.

We have dessert, and afterward as we sit, gently leaning our full stomachs forward toward the table like you do after a too-abundant meal, my mother finally says, “So, Mrs. Spinnaker, where were you?”

“Hawaii,” says Mrs. Spinnaker.

“Vacation?” asks my mother.

“None of your business,” says Mrs. Spinnaker.

“She was having a love affair,” whispers her sister. I don’t know why she whispers it. It is designed for all to hear. But we can’t react. Obviously Mrs. Spinnaker doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Well, I’m glad to see Horace is all right,” says my mother.

“Why wouldn’t he be?” asks Mrs. Spinnaker grumpily.

“There are some folks who thought he drowned,” says my mother falteringly.

“There’s always some folks thinking some things,” says Mrs. Spinnaker, and this, I think, pretty much says it all.

After that, we go to bed. The surf is wild and we hear the waves splashing soothingly. It is, I realize, like my own deepest breathing. That’s why the surf is so soothing. It is as if it breathes for me so I can take a break. Sometimes I think I am almost frantic, trying to keep myself safe, to keep everyone I love safe. Wanting things to be all right and people to be happy. I think everyone is like this but the sound of the ocean makes me think I can relax my vigilance. Something will breathe for me while I sleep. Something will breathe for Maya. Maybe our heroic measures aren’t really needed. But what if they are? I don’t have to know tonight, I think, and fall asleep to the crash and scraping of tiny pebbles being pulled out to sea along the ancient shore.

In the morning Ned and my mother and Dorothy are talking around the kitchen table. There are
a coffeepot and a plate of muffins on the table and they look like they are digging in for a long complicated discussion. Then I see why.

“Now what?” says Dorothy. “I thought the point of moving here was to live next door to you.”

“It was going to be a great setup,” says Ned, shaking his head. “This just bungs up everything. I suppose you could move in here. I know Felicity doesn’t mind.”

“It’s still pretty wet,” says Dorothy. “And there isn’t a lot of space.”

“We could build an addition,” says my mother uncertainly.

“I suppose it would cost less than buying Mrs. Spinnaker’s place,” says Dorothy with equal uncertainty.

The table gets pretty quiet after that.

It was one thing when Dorothy was temporary but now that she’s someone who will be here permanently, it is different. Our house seems vastly more crowded and someone is always in the living area.
I don’t think the boys mind but even Maya seems to find it cramped. And Dorothy isn’t just a stage prop. The willing victim of our kindness. She is used to her own house. She has opinions about everything and especially about Ned.

Ned has his own opinions and one is that she should stop calling him Neddie. “It drives me crazy,” he mutters to no one in particular. “It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard.”

Then one day Ned comes home from pounding the pavement and brings cupcakes and steaks and potato chips.

“You got a job!” says my mother.

“YES!” He grabs her and twirls her in a circle.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Ned,” says Dorothy from her perch on the porch. “You could throw your back out.”

“What kind of a job?” I ask.

“Teaching Japanese!” he says exultantly. “Night school! And there’s some translation work for me too!”

“You don’t speak Japanese,” says Dorothy.

“Yes he does, it’s
French
he doesn’t speak,” corrects Maya.

We are all happy and Ned is making a fire on the beach to grill the steaks but Dorothy is uncomfortable. It is too damp and chilly, she says. It makes her hip hurt. The sand gets into her food and why can’t we eat inside, why are we always eating outside like animals?

By the end of the week Ned has found a nice convalescent hospital in Lincoln that can take Dorothy until her hip is totally healed and he finds a room for her in Mrs. Bedlington’s boardinghouse in town. He assures her both places are very dry. Also it is just two doors down from Nellie’s church, where we used to go every Sunday. Even Maya can walk there alone.

Ned moves Dorothy into the convalescent hospital and suddenly our house feels enormous to me. We have a steak dinner that night although no one says that it is to celebrate.

“I don’t care,” Ned has taken to saying enigmatically and out of context. “I’m no saint.”

Ginny comes home from camp finally and we take many sunrise walks on the beach to catch up. We go at sunrise because I love the fresh clean morning beach before anyone else gets to it and
Ginny says she can’t sleep late after a summer at camp. “They made us get up at the crack of dawn!” she complains. “It’s horrible what some people put you through in the name of fun.”

I tell her everything that has happened this year, some of which she has heard before in letters, but the Nevada part is all new. Mostly she seems interested in Ben. She agrees that what Ned did was terrible.

“Oh my God, I would have simply died. I would have died!” she says.

“Exactly!” I say with satisfaction. “Although it did turn out he was of a criminally bent nature.”

“Never mind that,” says Ginny. “Tell me again what he looked like.”

I have already told Ginny this a dozen times, and also how he would vault right over the fence into the ring. She finds it fascinating. “I would have thought you would go for a more cerebral type. But I applaud your taste,” she says. “Tell me again about his shoulders.”

“Sometimes you really are shallow,” I say affectionately.

“Well, of course I am, darling, I’m in fashion,”
says Ginny. This business of calling me darling is a new affectation that needs immediate squelching. She has sorely missed my influence in the year we’ve been apart.

“OH!” I say. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this—guess who is Maya’s father?”

“Who? Who? Mr. Fordyce!” says Ginny.

“NO! Worse! H.K.,” I say.

“How do you know? Did your mother tell you?”

“Not in so many words but she said that she was worried about insanity in Maya’s family history! That made it obvious. Crazy Caroline!”

“You know Crazy Caroline is out again?”

“Never mind that. Think! That also means he probably isn’t
my
father.”

“True, true,” says Ginny, but I can tell her mind is elsewhere. We walk a bit in silence and then she says, “Is that all your mother said, that there was mental illness in Maya’s family history?”

I think back. “Yes.”

“And from this you deduce that it must be H.K.?”

“You’re saying it’s not?”

“Well … think about it, Jane. The clothes hanger
man wasn’t exactly the poster boy for normalcy. I mean, what do you call someone roaming all over the country with only the clothes on his back?”

“Oh,” I say. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“And Mr. Fordyce lives in a trailer and reads books all day. Okay, that’s not so strange, but who knows what lurks in his family? You don’t know him well enough to say. We should go and ask a few questions, you know, in a roundabout way that won’t raise his suspicions. And then there’s Ned.”

“Ned?”

“Well, from the way you describe them, his whole family sounds crazy to me. I mean, the mother moves them all up to some remote outpost for no reason and his sister sees the Virgin Mary in her food.”

“Oh,” I say. “And I suppose spending the year pretending you can teach French is pretty loopy.”

“I kind of like that about him. There’s something so, sort of, free about Ned …,” says Ginny. “I mean, my mom and dad had normal upbringings and they never got schlepped up to Fort McMurray one night and they would never think of pretending to teach French.”

“Yeah,” I say, but now I am deflated. “I thought I had it all figured out.”

“People are nuts,” Ginny concludes, then she does a little twirl. “What do you think of this dress? I made it myself this spring.”

Ginny wants to be a dress designer. It is not her dress twirling in the wind that I see, though, it is the sun beginning its arduous luminous climb through the sky. A pair of gulls flies by, tilted sideways in the wind, cackling messages we cannot understand. But they can’t understand us either. It doesn’t mean, I think, that none of us are making sense.

“Come on, “ I say. “Let’s go to my house for breakfast. I’m starving.”

Maya and her new friend, Rachel, are sitting on the beach playing paper dolls when we get there.

“My mom and Maya ran into Rachel and her mother in the convalescent hospital visiting Dorothy,” I explain to Ginny. “Rachel’s grandmother is in there too. Rachel and Maya used to play in the block corner together in kindergarten and when they saw each other Maya asked her for a sleepover.”

“Good for Maya,” says Ginny.

I nod. Maya looks happy and absolutely fine, just like my mother predicted.

We head toward the porch. Ned is sitting on the steps.

“Hi, Ned,” says Ginny. “So my mom says Mrs. Bedlington says your mom is moving in there in a month.”

“I’m no saint,” says Ned, wearing the haunted hangdog expression he has had since his mother moved to town.

“Jeez, what’s with him?” whispers Ginny.

“Oh, he’s just not forgiving himself or anyone else since another highfalutin’ idea he had about how things ought to be never panned out,” I say.

“I thought his mother didn’t want to live here,” says Ginny.

“She didn’t! He didn’t want it either. I don’t think anyone did. But don’t worry, my mom is jollying him out of it,” I say as my mother comes out on the porch and hands Ned a plate.

“Oh, but, Ned, you must be a saint. Because, look! The Virgin Mary is appearing on your toast!” says my mother, and laughs uproariously.

“She’s spent the last twenty-four hours putting the Virgin Mary on all his food,” I say to Ginny.

“Your mother is jollying him along by putting sacred apparitions in his food?” says Ginny.

“Yes,” I say.

“Let’s go make toast,” says Ginny. “Without religious miracles. Just toast.”