The Girl Who Chased the Moon (18 page)

Julia, of course, would make the cake.

He gave a short laugh at how far ahead of himself he was getting.

He might be tall enough to see into tomorrow, but he hadn’t looked there in a long, long time.

He’d forgotten how bright it was.

So bright he could hardly stand it.

SEVEN DAYS later, Emily felt like she was living in a bubble, waiting for Win’s punishment to end. She began to wonder if his father had grounded him for life.

Not that there wasn’t plenty to distract her. Vance was suddenly on a home improvement kick, which was a good thing, except every morning Emily woke up to hammering on the roof, or the roar of a lawn mower in the backyard, or the sharp, pungent scent of house paint. When Emily asked Vance what was the hurry, he told her rain was coming and he wanted all the work done before then.

A heat wave had hit Mullaby that week, so Emily couldn’t believe rain was coming any time soon. But every time she would come downstairs, irritable from the heat, Grandpa Vance would tell her not to worry, rain was coming to cool things off. When she finally asked him how he knew, he told her his elbow joints told him so. She didn’t argue, because she really didn’t want to get into why he was talking to his elbow joints.

Every day, when Vance took his afternoon nap, she would go next door just as an excuse to spend some time in an air-conditioned house. It didn’t exactly work to her favor, though. Despite the heat, every day Julia made a cake with her kitchen window wide open. When Emily asked her why, she said she was calling to someone. Emily didn’t question this. That Julia believed it was good enough for Emily. While Julia baked, Emily told her about Win, and Julia seemed glad that Emily now knew. Emily knew that Julia had forgiven her mother for what she’d done. Julia seemed to be doing a lot of forgiving lately. She’d lost a lot of her restlessness.

At five o’clock every day, Julia would leave with the cake she’d made, just as Stella came home from work. On the seventh day of this happening, Emily finally asked Stella where Julia was taking the cakes. At first she’d assumed she was taking the cakes to her restaurant, but she became curious when she realized Julia never returned in the evenings.

“She takes them to Sawyer,” Stella said.

“Does he eat all that cake?” Emily asked.

“Don’t worry. He burns it all off.” Stella looked shocked at herself. “Erase that. You didn’t hear that. Crap. I need a glass of wine. Remember, do as I say, not as I do.”

Emily liked sitting on the back porch with Stella after Julia left, the slow pace of the day as it turned into evening, waiting to go eat dinner with her grandfather. Stella would sometimes talk about Emily’s mother. She was a champion storyteller and had a wild past, which was a great combination. Emily never sensed that Stella was anything but happy with her life as it was now. She got the feeling the stories were worth more than Stella’s desire to go back and do anything differently.

As she headed back home that evening, she realized that, if possible, the heat made things in Mullaby move even slower. There were still plenty of tourists, but the neighborhoods were quiet, with only the occasional hum of a window fan or air conditioner gliding from houses as she passed them. It was as if everyone was in stasis, waiting for something to happen.

Finally, that night, it did.

A terrific thunderstorm erupted just as darkness fell. It came on so strong that Emily and Vance had to race around the house closing the windows. They laughed as they did so, making a game of it, then they stood on the front porch and watched the sheets of rain. The ending of that day felt like she was coming to the end of a story, and suddenly Emily felt sad. She made excuses to stay up with Grandpa Vance. They played cards and looked through photo albums Vance magically produced, full of photos of her mother.

Finally, Grandpa Vance said he was tired and she reluctantly said good night to him. She went upstairs and walked into her room, and realized that she’d forgotten to close her balcony doors. Rain was flying in and the floor was soaked. She spent nearly an hour wiping down the floor, the doors, the walls, and all the nearby furniture. She dropped all the wet towels in the bathtub, then stripped out of her wet clothes.

She put on a cotton nightgown and fell into bed. The temperature had dropped sharply, and it felt almost decadent to cover herself with a sheet. The clatter of drops against the windows on the balcony doors sounded like raining coins.

A few hours later, she woke up as she was unconsciously kicking the sheet off. Everything was quiet, a strange sort of quiet that felt like an unfinished sentence. The storm had passed and it was uncomfortably hot in her room now.

She opened her eyes and saw that moonlight was now filtering in through the gaps in the curtains on the closed balcony doors. She slowly got out of bed and went to the doors to open them. The limbs of the trees were so heavy with rainwater that some of them almost touched the balcony floor. The heat of a typical Southern summer night was back, the humidity oppressive, but the moonlight reflecting on the wet surfaces made the neighborhood look like it was coated in ice.

All this had been so foreign at first. She hadn’t known, when she’d first arrived, that she would grow to love this place like she did.

There were a lot of things she hadn’t known when she’d first arrived.

Strange and wondrous things.

The light from the moon shone along the door casing and spread across the walls a few inches inside, far enough for her to suddenly notice that the phases-of-the-moon wallpaper she’d been living with all week was gone. It was a now curious dark color she couldn’t quite make out, punctuated by long strips of yellow. It looked almost like dark doors and windows opening, letting in light. The wallpaper was usually some reflection of her mood or situation, but what did this mean? Some new door was opening? Something was being set free?

When she finally realized what it meant, she spun around, her eyes darting around the room until she found him.

Win was sitting on the couch opposite her bed. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped.

“My punishment ended as of midnight,” he said.

Her heart began to race. It was so good to see him. And yet, she felt unexpectedly awkward. “So … so you were just going to sit there until I woke up?”

“Yes.” He stood. It made a swishing sound in the silence. He walked to the balcony doors. She was standing in a square of moonlight, and he stopped just short of it, like it was a line he couldn’t cross.

“I’d almost forgotten what you looked like,” she said, joking. A bad joke. Why was she so nervous?

Because he had almost kissed her
.

“I spent all my time remembering what you looked like,” he said seriously.

“I had people hammering and sawing and mowing all around me. It was hard to concentrate.”

He gave her a funny look. “That’s your excuse?”

“And there’s no air-conditioning in this house. Do you know how hard it is to concentrate when you don’t have air-conditioning?” She needed to stop, but couldn’t seem to.

“Your grandfather had the largest limb of the oak that stretched to your balcony cut down. I had a hell of a time getting up here this time.”

That finally drew her up short. She stared at him in the shadow. “How many times have you come up here?”

“A few.”

She suddenly thought back to the day she’d arrived in Mullaby. “The day I arrived, my bracelet on the table …”

“I knew you were coming in that day,” he said. “I was curious about you. I found the bracelet on the front walk.”

“You don’t have to sneak in here anymore,” she said. “Everything’s out in the open now, right?”

His answer was to step into the light in front of her, so close they almost touched.

Nothing happened at first. But then, like it was growing so hot it became white, the glow around him started to blaze. She looked up at him and he was watching her closely.

“I lied,” she whispered.

He looked concerned and started to step back. “About what?”

She reached out and stopped him. “About forgetting what you looked like. I could never forget this. I
will
never forget this,” she said. “Not in all my life.”

He smiled and took her face in his hands.

Then he finally kissed her.

Chapter 16

M
addie Davis adjusted the backpack on her shoulder as she walked down the sidewalk. She’d arrived in Mullaby yesterday and was staying at the Inn on Main Street. Her parents had arranged it. She’d wanted to do this alone, but she understood that her parents were worried, and if paying for her stay at a swanky inn made them feel better, then she would suffer through it and diligently eat the chocolate put on her pillow every night.

She hadn’t slept well the night before. The full moon had poured through the window in her room, and she’d spent most of the night curled up in a chair, staring at the park across the street from the inn. At breakfast, the innkeeper had told her that the full moon in August was called the Sturgeon Moon. It made people restless, she’d said, like there was too much to do, too many fish to catch.

After breakfast, Maddie had talked to her mom and had tried to keep it light. But her mother had still sounded nervous. “Maybe my sarcasm will finally be explained,” Maddie had joked. “Maybe it’s simply hardwired. That means it’s not your fault.” Her mother hadn’t laughed. Maddie should have known. Her parents were the kindest people she knew, but they didn’t share Maddie’s sense of humor. She’d learned early on to temper her smart mouth around them.

It was a perfect, sunny Monday morning. As Maddie walked, she took a deep breath of the tangy-sweet air and her shoulders relaxed a little. She liked this town. It reminded her of something she couldn’t quite place.

She saw the sign hanging over the door ahead.

J’
S BARBECUE
.

For some reason, she stopped. Her feet simply wouldn’t move. The people behind her had to break around her as they walked past.

She’d thought about doing this for years, and it was time. But she’d tried to downplay the seriousness of the event by blocking out only a few days to do it. She’d sandwiched it between the end of her summer internship at her father’s law firm and her first day back at school at Georgetown for her sophomore year. But now that it was really going to happen, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go through with it. What was it really going to accomplish? She had a great relationship with her adoptive parents. And she already knew enough about her birth mother to piece together why she’d given Maddie up for adoption. Julia Winterson had been sixteen and a student at Collier Reformatory, a now-defunct institution that had been groundbreaking at the time, a boarding school for troubled girls. It had closed down a few years ago because of budget cuts. Julia now lived in a small barbecue town in North Carolina and owned a restaurant She’d never married. Never had more kids. The private investigator her parents had hired on Maddie’s behalf had even supplied a photo of Julia. She was pretty and fresh, but with a faraway look in her dark eyes. Maddie, with her blond hair and blue eyes, didn’t look much like her, except maybe a little around the mouth. She figured she must take after her birth father, whoever he was. His name wasn’t on her birth certificate. That was one thing only Julia could tell her.

She started walking again, but her heart was racing. She could hear it in her ears. She was almost to the large front window of the restaurant when she stopped again, this time collapsing back against the brick façade of the building. She set her backpack by her feet and covered her eyes with the palms of her hands.

Don’t be a wuss, she told herself.

She let her hands fall to her sides.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw that she was standing opposite two teenagers sitting on a bench outside the restaurant. The girl had quirky flyaway hair and was dressed in shorts and a tank top. The young man was in a white linen suit and red bow tie. They were leaning in toward each other, their foreheads almost touching, and the guy had the girl’s hand in his, slowly rubbing his thumb over her wrist. They were in their own world. The prince and princess of their own kingdom. It made Maddie smile.

They both looked up when the door to the restaurant opened. Maddie turned her head, her eyes widening. The elderly man walking out had to duck under the doorway to get out. She’d never seen someone so tall.

The teenagers stood when they saw him. The giant walked over to them with an awkward, stiff-legged gait. The young man held out his hand and the giant shook it. They said a few words, laughed at something, then the guy in the white suit turned and walked down the sidewalk.

When he passed Maddie, he smiled slightly and gave her a polite nod. She watched him walk away, then turned back to the giant and the girl. The giant handed the girl a paper bag. She took it and together they walked down the sidewalk. Maddie craned her head to look up at him as he passed.

She felt like she was in some strange fairy tale, like she’d just dropped into the ending of a story.

The door to the restaurant opened again and two men walked out. Silver sparkles from inside caught in the air and rolled in the wind past her. She took a deep breath, and it made her stand up straighter. Sugar and vanilla and butter. That relentless scent had been following her around all her life. Sometimes she could see it, like this, but most of the time she ju
st felt
it. When she was a kid, she could be sitting in class at school, or walking her dog Chester, or in the middle of a dreary violin lesson with her older brother, and the smell would suddenly appear out of nowhere and make her inexplicably restless. Even now, sometimes she would wake up at night and swear someone was baking a cake in the house. Her roommates thought she was crazy.

It was the familiarity of the smell that gave her the courage to pick up her backpack and walk to the window and look inside the restaurant. It was a plain, nondescript place, but packed.

Maddie’s eyes went to a woman behind the counter right away. There she was.

Julia Winterson.

The woman who’d given birth to her.

She was smiling, talking to a handsome man with blond hair sitting on the other side of the counter. Maddie had spent countless hours staring at the photograph from the private investigator. In real life Julia looked happier, more settled.

Maddie kept her eyes on her through the window as she slowly walked to the door. When she reached the door, she saw that there was a flyer taped to it that read:

Blue-Eyed Girl Cakes:
Specialty cakes for any occasion. Inquire within
.

Someone else walked out and, seeing her, held the door for her.

“Are you ready?” the man asked.

The ending of one story. The beginning of another.

“Yes. I’m ready,” she said, then stepped inside.