Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (25 page)

It's possible that our fathers were geniuses, that they conducted an elaborate, organized, and flawlessly executed disappearance scheme that persisted for more than a decade. Or it's possible that their abandonment was more spontaneous, a simple case of one following another following another, and that they still roam, individually and aimlessly, around the earth. Or it is possible—as all things are possible—that they discovered a way to get to the moon, and that indeed they live a new and secret life there that we will never understand.

When I was a younger man, such thoughts obsessed me. I can admit that, because I believe that such a story would obsess any young man for years and years. But now as I get older, now that I am a father, to be honest, I no longer think about my father and all of the other disappeared men every day. There simply isn't the energy in my guts to worry about it anymore. There isn't the desire and pain that is necessary to fuel endless speculation and wonder. They were men who failed at something in my eyes, and failure is not something we dwell on in the Midwest, in Maple Rock.

In either case, I don't see much difference between the things that never happened and the things that are believed to have happened and the things that are inevitably going to happen. I don't see a whole world of difference between our deepest wishes and our deepest fears.

They all merge together eventually.

We do what we can.

FOR A LONG TIME
that night, nobody knew what to do. We stood there in the parking lot, talking in low voices, looking around at the streets and the sky, waiting for an explanation or a sign. There were about two dozen of us by the time the stream of nighttime pedestrians and roaming headlights stopped coming into the parking lot. We talked in quiet groups, catching up with one another or talking about the day at work we just had. We told each other how we had arrived at this place, how our lives had gone or had been going or how they were striving to go. Our conversations were serious, perhaps even a bit melancholy, but really, there was nobody voicing any sort of disbelief or nervousness or shock at the spontaneous and mystical nature of our gathering. We had a common thread of memories. We had spent years believing in a story that nobody else really believed. We had been through things, and maybe we were like soldiers at the end of a long war, who watch with calm resignation as the air raids come into their cities. It was no surprise to us that our worlds would eventually lead us to this point.

Maybe we were waiting for something. Maybe we were waiting to be reunited with our fathers, maybe we believed they were about to be returned to the earth, or maybe we believed that we were about to be taken to the moon. Either way, nothing else happened. Around six in the morning, the sky quickly filled with light.

Like we were sixteen again, we all looked at Nick, and Nick said, "I'm going home."

So we did too.

I went home and slipped into bed next to Ella. I wasn't quite asleep when her alarm clock began to chime.

THAT MORNING
, like any morning, I got out of bed and came downstairs for coffee. It was after ten o'clock, but because of my work schedule I often slept late. Nobody seemed to be suspicious of me. Rusty was in the living room watching
Sesame Street
and Nina was down for the first nap of the day. Ella was at the kitchen table, with a textbook open in front of her. She was in her white bathrobe, with wet hair, and she crossed her legs, which were tan and lean. I remember thinking that she looked like a good omen for the day—tangible and clean and real. She wrote tiny, barely legible notes in green ink on a yellow legal pad. The lines of her book were highlighted in blue and orange and yellow and pink, and next to the book were the four highlighters. It was a scene of order and ambition. In hopes of someday getting us into the realm of financial prosperity, Ella had started law school at Wayne State, at the urging of Sunny, who had become her best friend. Sunny hadn't finished her dissertation yet, not with two kids, but she was pushing Ella to finish school. Once, at a party, I overheard Sunny saying, "Look, it's not like every one of us has to give up on our dreams. You weren't born here. You have no reason to behave like the rest of us."

Ella looked up from her book for a second and muttered, "Fresh coffee."

Ella is not a morning person, but since I was working nights, she had to be the parent who got up early with the kids, made breakfast, and started the day. Understandably, she was not always in a good mood when I got up, but this morning she seemed particularly terse.

"A lot of work to do?" I said, sitting down across from her with my coffee. It did not taste fresh; it tasted bitter and burned, and so I got up and added milk and sugar to it.

"Yes," she said. She waited until I had my coffee and had taken a sip and then she asked, "Did you come home last night and then leave again? Did you leave after I called you to come upstairs and help with the baby?"

I sipped my coffee and leaned against the counter. With my white cotton pajamas, my messy hair, and my steaming Detroit Lions mug, I must have looked like the very symbol of domesticity—the sleepy and happy husband, the hapless sitcom dad in a minor bit of marital trouble—not someone who wanders off at night while his wife deals with an insomniac child and a squalling infant.

"What's that?" I said, though it must have been obvious that I'd heard her and was only stalling for more time. She did not repeat herself, and I was left to take a second to ponder the wisdom of lying about the night before.

"Yes," I said. "I did."

"Well, that's great, Michael. Why did you do that?"

"It was a rough night at work," I said. "Three kids were shot and I covered it."

"I saw it on the news this morning," she said. "I figured you were there."

"It was awful," I said, though, I have to be honest, I had not given it much thought since I'd been home. It sounded like a good excuse, but I'd become used to such tragedies while working the night shift in Detroit. They rarely kept me up at night anymore.

"You need a new line of work," she said.

"I know."

"Where did you go?" she said.

I shrugged.

"Wandering," I said. "I just kind of wandered."

WHEN ELLA LEFT
for class, Nina woke up and I got a bottle of breast milk Ella had pumped and brought Nina into the family room where Rusty was still watching cartoons.

Nina looked just like Ella, in my opinion, already with a head of dark hair and big, watery eyes. But my mother said she looked like me.

A few nights after Nina was born, I woke from bad dreams and went into the front yard and sat down on the curb. We had the heat on fairly high for the baby, and I had woken up in a sweat, my face burning and my throat dry. I was happy, not even officially married for a year, yet already father of a newborn. My life had shifted so much in the last three years that some mornings I woke up and could hardly remember its details: I had a wife. I had a newborn daughter. My mother had remarried. My brother was in the army, overseas. I had a full-time job that paid better than minimum wage. I was in the process of officially adopting Rusty.

Thinking on these details out in the night air, my chest tightened. It was late March and still cold. I went back in the house, dressed quietly, took the car keys, and went back outside.

I went driving that night. I got into my car and headed down Mansfield Street, then north on Warren Avenue, which seemed to me to be the direction of the moon. Fat flakes of snow made their way down from the sky, crumbling onto my windshield and melting. I liked to leave the wipers off for ten seconds or so, just to cloud my vision a little. My heart pumped away, skipping beats, on the verge of implosion. I drove out of the city, out of Detroit and up toward Flint, then farther still, toward Alpena. By sunrise, I was very far away from the life I was living.

I don't know what made me turn around and head back home. I'd like to tell you that it was something altruistic, or some epiphany that appeared suddenly in front of me, but there was none of that. I just felt bad for leaving. I made up an excuse about being called in to work, and that was that. The next night, I stayed in bed where I was supposed to be.

I thought of that night while I sat in my home, the morning after we men gathered in the parking lot of the old Black Lantern. I was holding my baby, watching Rusty play with his toys in the family room. I was overwhelmed with love for them, for their tiny and innocent hearts.

I called Rusty up to the couch and let him hold the bottle and feed Nina with me.

But I worried—worried about the man who went driving north in the night, worried about the man who stared at the moon, worried about the man who felt his feet leave the ground when he went walking on a sleepless night. I worried because I knew that the man who did those things would do them again.

THAT AFTERNOON
, on my way to work, I dropped the kids off at my mother's house in Northville. She was cleaning the screens of the house, and was dressed in shorts and a Maple Rock High T-shirt, and wore a blue kerchief around her head. She was tan and had lost weight. She had recently begun to take a yoga class at the Y.

She wiped her hands and came down the front yard to meet us.

She took Nina from me and Rusty skipped up to her side, singing, "Grandma!" He had never had grandparents he knew until my mother and Mack entered his six-year-old life like some great and sudden dream. I was happy for him, happy for my mother and Mack, who seemed just as delighted by his existence as he seemed by theirs.

"Well, Ma," I said, "I have to get to work."

"So soon?" she said. "I didn't think you started until seven."

She was right, I didn't, but I lied and said someone had called in sick and I was covering a shift so they could leave. The explanation was clumsy and I mumbled most of it, and my mother said, "What's wrong with you, Michael?"

"What?" I said.

"Something's not right with you today," she said.

Her face had shifted from annoyance to concern to fear.

"Michael, what aren't you telling me?"

"Nothing, Ma," I said.

She looked like she might cry. It had been a rough summer for her. Kolya had been stationed in the Persian Gulf for most of it, and she watched the news too much and spent her days angry and nervous. But I wondered, what did she sense in me that afternoon? The last thing I could tell her about was the night before, my old friends and me staring at the moon. What could I tell her about the way the world felt? How could I explain that I thought, maybe, that it was getting too small for me? What could I say about the way my feet felt ready to drift off the earth, carry me away?

"Love you, Ma," I said, and got in my car and drove away.

NICK WAS IN THE
front yard with Natalie, his oldest daughter. She was running around the grass patting a beach ball, and she started laughing when I pulled into the driveway. She recognized my car. "Moo," she said, when I got out of the car. "Moo."

This was what she called me.

"Why does she call me that?" I asked Nick.

"She thinks you're full of bullshit," Nick said.

Sunny came out to the front porch. "Hi, Mikey," she said. "Come on inside and get washed up for dinner, Natalie."

Once they got Natalie to agree to go inside, Sunny said, "Maybe you can get Nick to tell you where he goes at night, Mikey."

I looked at Nick, and he motioned for me to follow him to the garage. He got two beers out of the fridge he kept there.

"I guess you know why I'm here," I said.

"Free beer?"

"What happened last night?" I said. "What was that?"

"You know what it was," he said.

"But you don't believe that," I said. "Do you?"

"What else do you believe?" he said.

I shrugged. I had to get to work.

"It didn't get us yet," Nick said.

Natalie had come back outside to where we were sitting and she wriggled her way onto Nick's lap.

"Eventually, it might," Nick said. "Eventually, it might win."

THAT FALL, I WAS
switched to the day shift. Driving the news truck in the glare and shadow of the bright autumn afternoons hurt my eyes, and I could never take off my sunglasses, a cheap pair of aviator shades I'd picked up at the Rite Aid. I'd not gotten into the habit of shaving in the mornings, and I wore a few days' worth of stubble most of the time. With the heavy equipment on my shoulder, the glasses, and the beard, I looked like an extra from a bad war film.

I felt disoriented in the truck, with all the sounds and lights of daytime traffic around me, and I missed those long, quiet nights, when at two in the morning I could be the only car in my lane for miles. Merging in and out of traffic on Telegraph Road and the Lodge Freeway exhausted me, and I'd come home in the evenings with a quiet, racing heart and shaky hands. It was good for me to be home with the family at dinnertime, and my mother and Mack loved being with Rusty and Nina when I was working and Ella was at class. Mack would pick up Rusty from third grade every afternoon and bring him to our house where my mother was looking after Nina. More often than not, my mother would cook a big dinner and when Ella came home from class and I came home from work, we'd sit down together as a family and eat.

We were blessed, and I knew that. It wasn't this tranquil, if dull, domesticity that rattled me that fall. I didn't feel smothered by any of it. Instead, I felt a profound and relentless doubt; I didn't believe I belonged there. I believed, sooner or later, that I would destroy all of it.

Most nights, I couldn't sleep: I couldn't stop thinking of the night we'd all wandered into the parking lot of the old Black Lantern, staring at the sky. The end of each day brought voices, starlight, the fading sound of machines, the constant grinding of wheels on pavement, the smell of smoke, a thick layer of burning ash, and then when I did finally drift into dreams, they were dreams that left me still half awake, not dreaming really, just drifting, floating off to somewhere else. I'd stay in bed and wait for the dreams to pass, for the feeling of floating to pass; I tried to ignore the recollections that came at me in fragments and jagged shards. I would just tough it out some nights, stay stone-faced and sober until morning, and then I would get up, not rested but restless, and the world was awake and bursting with dawn all around me.