Pack Up the Moon (20 page)

Kate said nothing. She was at bottom. This was the lowest she could go. And maybe that was why the question she’d never quite been able to ask him, the one that had filled her mouth so many times until she could have chewed the words, finally—finally—came out as if torn from her body. “How could you take him from me?”

Nolan gasped, and then said, “
My
son, Kate. Robin was my son, too.”

“That makes it better?” God, why hadn’t she asked him this then? Why hadn’t she railed at him, beating him with her fists back
then
? She’d wanted to. More than anything, she’d wanted to. Nolan had
lived
. She remembered wishing through her blinding fury that he hadn’t. That he’d finished the terrible job he’d started. He’d tried to leave her. He’d wanted to leave her all alone in her pain. Alone. Which he’d done anyway.

Nolan said, “He was dying.”

“But he wasn’t dead.”

Nolan was white around the eyes. “I told you a million times how sorry I was. I’ll tell you a million more times how sorry I am. But I’m not sorry he isn’t in pain anymore. That he got where he was going that much sooner.”

Kate felt the tears well, and she hated herself for it. She was weak. Exposed, in front of the person who knew her best.
You left me,
she almost said.
How could you want to kill yourself, too? You said you’d never leave me.
“Robin didn’t
get
anywhere. He was just gone.”

“He comes to me, you know.” Nolan’s voice lost the bewildered gray and was back to its normal dark blue.

“No.” It was impossible. Too unfair to contemplate. “He doesn’t.”

“I see him in my dreams.”

“I don’t believe you.” Kate’s only dreams about Robin had been awful corporeal ones right after he died, fleshy dreams in which she touched his clammy skin, knowing he was dead, moving his arms and legs, giving him CPR, kissing his cold blue mouth. Just a few months earlier, she’d dreamed that she was touching Robin and that, finally, he was warm. She woke in a panic to save him, to find she was wrapped around Esau so tightly he was pulling at the sheets to get away from her. It was the last time she’d slept with him.

“And it’s like he’s there. Like he’s just been in another room.” Nolan looked directly into her eyes. Now
he
was lying. She’d always been able to tell—his face became more controlled, almost perfectly still, and he tapped his fingers in that way he did when he was nervous—
tap tap tap—
on something, anything that was close. “He tells me he’s always around.”

For a moment there was nothing but the sound of their mingled breathing, as harsh as if they’d been running. Then her cell phone rang. The song she’d programmed it to play, “Blue” by Lucinda Williams, was too intimate, telling him a secret she didn’t intend to tell.

Kate stood. She didn’t recognize the number. “I have to get this.” No matter who it was, she was grateful to the caller. She walked into the kitchen before hitting the button to answer.

“Is this Kate Monroe?”

“Yes.” She didn’t recognize the voice.

“Carey Pike, with Channel 7. I interviewed your husband last night. How are you responding to the news about him?”

“Ex-husband. Pardon?”

“Did you hear he saved a man’s life yesterday?”

“I was with him when he did the CPR. I helped him.” She’d helped the man who’d let her son die. And she’d do it again. Of course she would.

“So you’re confirming that you’ve reconciled with the man responsible for the death of your child?”

Kate hung up, regretting that all it took was a click of a red button. She wanted to be able to throw it into its cradle, to hang up with fury, with a bang, rather than just a quiet beep. Lucinda’s song was stuck in her head now,
I don’t wanna talk
.
I just wanna go back to blue.

“I’m sorry,” said Nolan from behind her.

She hadn’t heard him enter the kitchen. “I’d forgotten what they were like.”
We don’t talk about heaven, and we don’t talk about hell.

“Kate. I’m sorry.”

“How could you talk to him?”

“He tricked me.”

She sighed and leaned against the edge of the stove, the handle squeaking the way it always had. “Remember the time the one woman found me in the locker room at the gym and pretended to need a ride home so she could get in my car and take those photos of the inside? I really thought her car had broken down.”

Nolan jammed his fingers through his hair and made it stick straight up. She’d always been a sucker for that look of his. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, and she remembered how he used to do that, to hide there, behind his eyelids, as he thought. “I still think we should have sued over that.”

“Like we needed more time in court. And I would have had to do it alone. Besides, the one thing we learned was that they get tired of the same subject fast. In a day or two they’ll be gone again.”

Nolan picked up the pink hula girl saltshaker he’d bought her at a barn sale when they’d taken a leaf-peeping trip back east the year before Robin was born. They’d always thought it was funny that a hula dancer reminded them of Vermont.

“I get e-mails,” he said.

“What?” Kate didn’t follow the jump in the conversation.

He set the saltshaker down, making the dancer sway gently. “From people. Like us. Who want advice.”

It took a moment to sink in. “They want your
help
?”

Nolan nodded.

“For fuck’s sake.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“What do you say?” What would Kate say?
Fuck off, fuck you, shit, damn, I’m so sorry, so sorry, sorry sorry sorry no one else understands, I’m sorry . . .

“Nothing. I just . . . put them in a file.”

“You save them?” Kate rolled the hem of her shirt with her fingers.

“I want to respond—I just . . . I just can’t.”

He’d never been able to send the important e-mails or make the essential phone calls. When Robin was sick, she’d had to write the updates to friends and family. Nolan couldn’t physically bring himself to do it. When he’d called his parents in Hawaii to tell them Robin’s diagnosis, he had thrust the phone at her so he could throw up in the wastebasket.

“But that, Nolan—it’s important.” It had been important that she tell Nolan she’d had another child. Fuck, it was important that she tell him he had a daughter. And she didn’t do it. Surely this guilt would stop her heart soon and she’d fall to the floor, breath gone forever, the last Monroe to die in this house. And she was on him about
e-mails.

Nolan didn’t say anything, just sighed heavily and sank into his old chair at the kitchen table. She hadn’t heard its particular thick-boned creak for years, had forgotten it had one. He scrubbed his face with his hands and then sighed a second time.

“I know,” he said. “Why the hell else am I still here? To do road work? To pick up dead raccoons and paint yellow stripes and watch my coworkers jump out of the way of cars like they’re playing dodgeball? I thought my friend Rafe’s wife was sick, and I wondered if that’s why I stayed. To help him. But she’s okay, thank god, and that’s selfish, isn’t it? To think I’m that fucking important? But there has to be a reason, Kate, and I just need to figure out what it is.”

He rocked back in his chair, just as he’d always done. Robin used to worry he’d fall backward, until one day Nolan had done just that, on purpose, to prove he would be okay and instead ended up breaking his wrist. Robin had refused to sign the cast, saying Nolan didn’t deserve the attention. Then he’d relented and had drawn a small picture of Hedwig the Owl with crossed eyes on the plaster.

Nolan bowed his head. Then he said, “I’m so sorry, Kate.” She knew he wasn’t talking about the e-mail anymore. He didn’t articulate the full thought, didn’t speak all the words. It was all right. She didn’t want to hear them again anyway.

Thursday, May 15, 2014
10 p.m.

I
t was Flynn’s idea. After he’d held Pree for the ten minutes it took her heart to still, for her to be able to speak to him, he’d listened in that accepting Flynn way as she told him where she’d been for two days. He hadn’t been mad. He
should
have been angry, and Pree told him so, but he just shook his head, his soft blond hair falling around his face like a piece of sheer, shiny fabric. “Why would I be mad? You’re working some stuff out.”

The paint box, a true artist’s toolbox, made of steel and oak, was gorgeous. It was a labor of love, everything she’d ever wanted, and nothing she ever would have asked for. It made her love Flynn more desperately, which made her want to run. Pree cursed her own fickleness as she ran her fingers over it again and again.

She thought of Jimmy and how close she’d come to fucking him. She thought of the fetus. Flynn’s baby. “Yeah.” She pulled the box close to her on the bed again and flicked the clasps. Then she took out a pen she’d already stored inside and reached for her pad. She didn’t think—she just moved the pen around the page. Her eyes were open the whole time, but her brain was somewhere else, and suddenly she realized she had a full drawing in front of her. She could barely remember doing it. Her suspender girl was sitting on top of a brick wall staring down at the ground, where a shattered egg with legs lay. The egg’s legs were wearing combat boots, just as her girl was.

Pree’s hand stopped moving. Had her girl just pushed Humpty? Or was that another part of herself lying on the ground?

“Did she tell you where he was buried?”

Pree started. “What? Robin? Yeah. In a cemetery near her house. Mountain View.”

“We should go there.”

She reached out and touched his face. That was so Flynn. “That’s a great idea. We should. We will.”

Flynn slapped his thighs and unfolded himself into his full height. “Let’s go.”

“Now? It’s dark. I’m sure they’re closed.”

“That makes it even better. Let’s go have an adventure.” He challenged her with the words that had never failed before—that particular sentence was how they’d ended up hopping a freight train one spring morning in Tulare, how they’d gotten matching penguin tattoos on their ankles, how they’d spelunked for the first time. Those words had been why Pree had applied to a job so out of her reach, and why she’d accepted it when it was offered to her. Since she’d met him, Flynn had been both her challenge and her reason for trying.

Pree directed him, and they got lost only once. Oakland was huge, and the roads around Kate’s were confusing as they twisted up and around small treelined hills, but she liked the feel of it, the motion. Flynn, using impressive street smarts, parked in front of a florist shop a block away from the big iron gates at Mountain View Cemetery. “We don’t want the license plate to be on camera,” he said, his voice electric with excitement.

The gates were high, ornate, and very closed. Pree looked for a security camera, and found it, on the east side. “Let’s pretend we’re just looking for a make-out spot,” she whispered in his ear, and then she realized it wasn’t pretend at all, which made it even more fun. It was hard to tell exactly where the camera was aimed and where it wasn’t, and she was distracted by Flynn’s mouth, his hands . . .
Robin,
she thought. She was here for a bigger reason, not just to kiss this man. And she suddenly wanted to tell Flynn the truth.

“One thing,” she started, and then stopped, scared.

He looked at her, and his eyes were all melty and soft and sweet and she almost didn’t go through with it.

“I’m pregnant,” Pree said.

He grinned, as if she’d made a joke. Then he looked at her face again and the grin melted away. “Oh, shit.”

“I know.”

Flynn folded like a grasshopper and sat on the curb, then looked up at her, his blond hair gleaming white under the sodium glow of the streetlamp. “What are we going to do?”

Pree loved him fiercely in that moment. He went—always—directly to
we.
“I don’t know.”

“Do you want . . . ?” he started.

“I don’t want a baby.”

“Oh.” Flynn swallowed, his sharp Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “An abortion. That’s gonna be hard, right?” He reached up and took her hand, holding it tightly. “I’m with you. I’ll help in whatever way I can.”

Pree sucked in a breath. She hadn’t imagined him saying this, hadn’t imagined him going along with her so easily. What if Kate had gone to her birth father back then? What if he’d been this helpful? Would Kate have held his hand as the fetus that became Pree was vacuumed out? Who would have fought for her then? “I don’t want an abortion, either.”

He frowned. “Adoption?”

A pulse beat frantically at Pree’s temple. “It worked out in my case, yeah, but it’s not what I want for a baby. To be separated from her blood family forever.”
Her
. When had the baby become a girl?

“Then . . . what’s left?”

She couldn’t be angry at him. He was just so earnest. He would believe anything she said, wouldn’t he? Why was that so frustrating? Pree shook her head and pulled him up off the sidewalk, going up on tiptoe for a swift kiss. “Let’s find Robin.”

He stepped closer, taking her hands, pulling her close. She had to crane her neck to look up at his face.

“Okay,” he said, his voice soft. “Okay, then.” Guilt tasted like Flynn’s tongue and the sweet coconut scent that drifted up the street from the tiki bar. Pree tried to lean into the kiss, but incongruously—horribly—she needed to find her brother.

A burst of laughter drifted up from the end of the street and jarred them apart. Flynn touched her chin and repeated, “Okay.” Then, smacking his hands together, he said, “Let’s
do
this.”

He pointed out a place where the two fences joined, hopefully just out of sight of the camera. Without discussing how they’d do it, Flynn hoisted her up and tossed her over as though she weighed nothing. He came over next, landing with a thud. “Oh, yeah. That’s what I’m talking about,” he said.

“You’re pretty good at breaking and entering, huh?”

He had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Eh. I’m no angel.” But there, under the halo of light, next to the wide shooting fountain, which was still lit as if the grounds were open, Flynn, with his blond, floppy hair and beautiful, beautiful face, looked like one.

Was it wrong to wish that he’d gotten upset with her? That he’d chastised her—and himself—for being so careless?

Flynn’s gaze slid past her and up the darkened treelined pathways. “This is huge. How do you think . . . ?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

They walked under thick boughs of wisteria just in bloom, the fragrance heady and sweet. To the left and right, headstones stretched as far as she could see, flanked by burial vaults of all sizes. As the road wound up the hill, the crypts got bigger, guarded by stone angels and creepy as hell, the old glass broken, open to the elements. Flynn had a small flashlight on his keychain, and they peeked inside one that was labeled
Barton-Sykes
. Pree fully expected to see bones—a whole skeleton laid out inside, leaves trapped in the chest cavity—but instead there were just two stone boxes, one on either side, faded fake flowers in a plastic vase resting on top of the left one. A Snickers wrapper caught by an eddy of air whirled in the far right corner. It was gorgeous. All of it.

Pree was ready to run, but so far they’d seen no sign of security. She wondered if trespassing was a misdemeanor or a felony. Flynn wound his fingers with hers. “There has to be some kind of organization to this,” he muttered, casting his flashlight over to a crypt that looked like a mini-mansion with Ionic columns and a stained-glass door. Then he turned, sending the beam toward a low-slung white building that ran almost a block in length.

“There,” said Pree. “Shine it there.”

She led them to a small pedestal that kind of resembled an old phone booth if it had been miniaturized and painted white. Inside a small glass door, attached with a length of silver chain, was a laminated book. The pages had rows of tiny numbers matched to names. “Bingo.”

Her fingers flipped the pages, Castorini, Foster, Giovans, Lemos . . . Monroe, Monroe, there were two and half pages’ worth. Who knew there were so many dead Monroes? Then, there it was.
Robin Monroe. Plot 17.68.

They cross-referenced it to the attached map, then took off uphill. Something snapped behind them in the building, and even though no lights came on, they ran faster.

Plot 17 was wide and sloped downward on the back of a hill. Five deco crypts stood at the top, but the rest of the plot was filled with plain marble slabs, simple and clean, old deaths lying next to new ones.
Robert Wooster, b. Missouri, 1897.
And next to that,
Agnes Wu, Oakland, 1972.

Pree scanned the newer ones while she used the moonlight as best she could, but it wasn’t enough. Without asking, she slipped Flynn’s flashlight from his hands. Carmela Justice died in 1979. Pablo Flint in 1987. Ace “Buster” Neville in 1997. Closer, closer . . .

And then, just like that, the narrow beam played across the name that had been spooling across her mind on repeat.
Robin Isaiah Monroe. 2002–2011. Our Perfect Love.
The slab was tall and thin, almost up to midthigh, and a flower detail trailed downward. No plastic roses here, but Pree spotted something nestled in the grass at the base.

It was a tiny figurine, so small that at first glance it looked like one of those little GI Joe figures. But as Pree knelt to pick it up, she saw it was a teensy Harry Potter, an inch and a half tall, as if Hermione had used the Reducio spell on him. His arms were raised, robes flying behind him, his wand above his head, his features contorted as if he were about to throw down with a Dementor. Goose bumps rose along her arms and legs. A cross was generic. Flowers were silly if they were fresh, and just plain stupid if they were plastic. But this? A tiny, very special boy, casting a spell? Tears ached in the back of her throat, and she put the plastic toy back exactly where she’d found it.

“You okay?”

She nodded. She was. Really, she was. It was just . . . more than she thought it would be, being here. And Flynn was a distraction. She should be using that time to really
be
with Robin. Pree looked sideways up at his face and said simply, “Hey . . .”

Flynn got it, with that one word. “I’m going to go see if I can find the Ghirardelli crypt. A guy at the steelworks told me about it. Maybe there’s chocolate inside or something. I’d do that if I were a Ghirardelli. I’d always leave candy on the steps. In a skull-shaped bowl—
yeah.
” He grinned and stuck his hands in his pockets as he ambled away, long-limbed as a giraffe. She heard him whistle low under his breath, a tune she didn’t recognize, and rather than being alarmed that a security guard might hear it, she felt better. Not so alone.

She spent a minute looking at the marble as if something would reveal itself to her. More words, perhaps, scrolling across the bottom if she just waited long enough. But nothing. Just his name, the dates, and
Our Perfect Love
. It must have been nice for him to be that to someone, even while he was sick.

She turned, sitting so that her back was against the marble. Was she aligned the same way he was? Were his feet pointing downhill the way hers were? She hoped so. Five years earlier Pree and the moms had gone camping in Yosemite. Pree’s tent had been on a slope so gradual she hadn’t noticed it until she’d slid downhill all night toward her head. She woke up again and again, her neck twisted, the top of her head pressed against the cold tent wall.

Better to be like this, feet down, face up, looking up at the night, at the fat quarter moon that shone somehow brighter than she’d ever seen it. As an experiment, more to test herself than anything else, she scooted down, easing her butt along the grass until she could lie on her back on top of the grave. She fought a heebie-jeebie horror movie moment as she imagined Robin’s skeletal arms exploding out of the ground to wrap around her, pulling her under. Then she dug her fingers into the grass. Just so long as the ground didn’t give way beneath her, she was good. She didn’t think she could handle falling into a grave, something she’d read once could happen in older graveyards as coffins degraded and the air pockets below collapsed.

She stilled her heart by taking a deep breath, and then one more. As she gazed upward, the fog parted for just a moment, reminding her of someone pulling a cotton ball apart—thinner, thinner, until the fibers slipped against each other and then the two pieces came free. And even with the Oakland lights, the moon gleamed bright at her. It looked down at her, and even though she knew she was perhaps being the most ridiculous girl in the Bay Area at that moment, she let herself imagine that her brother was there, a small little man in the moon, glowing toward her.

A gift.

It was almost like meeting him.

“I don’t have anything for you, though,” Pree said quietly. “Unless you want a piece of Juicy Fruit, which maybe you liked. I don’t know. Or a pen. But what would you do with a pen?”

She lay there another moment, thinking. Then she said, still so softly she could barely hear her own voice, “Hey. I’m pregnant.” She paused. “I guess you’d be too young to understand that when you died, but you’d be, what now, twelve? You’d be getting the gist of it by now. And if you were around, and if I knew you, I wouldn’t tell you. Obviously. Not unless I was showing, I guess. No one else knows. No one except the guy. I just told him.” She paused. It felt silly to talk out loud like this. It also felt right.

“I can’t help thinking that if I had a twelve-year-old brother I’d take him to the batting cage or to the arcade or something. Just to forget about it for a minute. Because I
never
forget about it. Not even for a minute.” She brushed an ant from the back of her hand. “I wish I’d gotten to meet you, brother.” The word felt bittersweet in her mouth, round and heavy with something that could have been.