To See the Moon Again (12 page)

“Carmen, stop it. Stop talking.”

The girl stopped and looked at Julia. She was still chewing.

“I can't let you leave,” Julia said. “Not yet.”

Carmen frowned. “Why?”

But Julia had no answer, hadn't even known she was going to say those words. The question hung in the air for a moment. “Well, what I mean,” she said, “is you're not ready to go anywhere yet. I still need to get some things together for you—like a suitcase for starters.” She was making this up as she went. “You can't travel anywhere carrying your things in a plastic bag.”

“I don't need things,” Carmen said. “Naked came I, and naked shall I return. In a manner of speaking.” She flashed a smile at Julia. “I've seen Walden Pond, did you know that? In fact, I lived near there for a few weeks last spring. A few very chilly weeks. In spartan simplicity. Henry Thoreau would've approved, I think. Wasn't he the one who said we're a ruined nation because of too much stuff? Simplify, simplify, simplify, keep your accounts on your thumbnail, strip away everything superficial and . . . superfluous. Reduce life to the essentials. Instead of three meals a day, why not . . .”

“Carmen, stop it. What happened?” It came out much louder than Julia intended.

Carmen stared at her, evidently as surprised by the question as by the intensity.

“What happened . . .
when
?” she finally said.

But Julia couldn't begin to explain what she meant. Her mind was in a tumult. She wasn't referring to a specific incident, of course. It was instead a sudden hunger to know the answers to all the questions she hadn't asked, and all the ones she hadn't yet thought of asking, about all the years of Carmen's life. She was appalled to feel her eyes brimming with tears. She couldn't remember the last time she had cried. She clamped her hand over her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut.

After a long silence Carmen pushed her chair back and stood. She moved to Julia and stooped down beside her, laying a hand on her arm. “I'm sorry. It's been too much having me here. I can go tonight. You don't need to get me anything else. You've done so much for me already.”

How can this be? Julia wondered. How can I be sitting here while this
child
comforts me? She opened her eyes and saw her empty plate on the table, her bowl of half-eaten salad, her half-empty glass of soda. She looked across the kitchen and saw the microwave on the counter, the colored tiles of the backsplash, the sink, all the same things she saw every day and knew so well. But she couldn't bring herself to look at the girl kneeling at her side.

“Here, here's your napkin.” Carmen held it out.

Julia took it and wiped her eyes. “I'm okay now,” she said. “I don't know what came over me. I think I'm just tired. I didn't sleep much last night.”

Carmen stood up. “Well, it's my fault. I need to go.”

Julia pointed to the chair. “No, you need to sit down. Please, Carmen. I have some questions . . . they might take a little while. If you don't mind.”

S
HARPER
F
OCUS

Carmen's answers were thorough and, to the best of Julia's judgment, honest. The things that had happened to her were indeed lamentable, and many. She refused to answer no question. If there was a certain sense afterward of secrets undisclosed, Julia took responsibility, for not asking the questions that would have revealed them.

It would be difficult to rank the sadnesses in Carmen's life if drawing up a “Top Ten” list, though Jeremiah's death when she was nine would surely be first. That event had sliced her life in two, like a piece of fruit, separating the good half from the bruised. Her mother's emotional unraveling had begun almost immediately, as well as a sudden influx of loosely connected relatives claiming concern for Lulu. The trailer was soon bursting with people Carmen barely knew, among them Ida and Effie.

As Jeremiah had always been considered an interloper among Lulu's kin, his child was by association viewed in the same light, a nuisance at best, but more often made to feel as if she were somehow directly responsible for this upheaval in her mother's life. Apparently no one recognized it as an upheaval in her life also.

With the loss of her father and, for all purposes, her mother, she was in many ways an orphan. Some of Carmen's elementary teachers took an interest in her—she was bright and diligent—but it was a limited kind of interest, for at the end of every school day and every school year, she always had to go home, such as it was. At first some of the people from the church she had attended with Jeremiah called and came by, but were soon made to understand from Ida and Effie that their help was neither welcome nor needed. With no one to take her to church, Carmen quit going.

“Were you ever . . . abused by a man?” Julia asked her at one point. From Carmen's answer to this question, her besetting flaw was clear: She had wanted love so desperately that she had trusted too easily. Either that, or she had carried a sign around that read
Take Advantage of Me
.

But they were only
attempted
abuses, Carmen pointed out, not fully realized—a fact she cited as a “blessing.” The first time was when she was only eleven, at the hands of one of the assorted relatives passing through the trailer—a lowlife cousin of Lulu's they called Jayhawk, who tried to force himself on Carmen when no one else was at home. Though Lulu's mind was disengaged by this point, her motherly instincts were jarred loose by what she saw that day when she walked in, and as she scrambled to get Jeremiah's shotgun down from the wall, Jayhawk had time to run. He disappeared, no charges were pressed, and this incident, like others, melted into the background of Carmen's childhood.

Then there was the science teacher later, in eighth grade, who also tried to take liberties with her, the kind that eventually got him fired. Ida and Effie had little sympathy, were of the opinion that Carmen had probably brought it on herself, and Carmen was so confounded she was afraid they might be right. After all, hadn't she eagerly gone to his office almost every day after school? Hadn't she smiled whenever she felt his eyes on her in class? Lulu's distress after the incident was such that she stayed in bed for a week, during which time Carmen wasn't allowed to see or speak to her.

Afterward, some of her classmates, especially the boys, called her names that implied she was fast and easy. The science teacher had been a popular one, so Carmen was held accountable for the replacement teacher, a grim moon-faced woman with the unfortunate name of Mrs. Plugg, whom no one liked.

And in tenth grade some of these same boys gathered around her after school one day. They had her shirt off when the janitor came down to the stairwell to see what was going on. They were all suspended for several days and thereafter invented quieter methods of tormenting her.

Julia asked about friends. Carmen shook her head. “Kids don't seem to like other kids who try too hard,” she said. “I guess I was too different. I didn't fit in.” It angered Julia to think of it—a beautiful, smart, friendly child, rejected. Children could be as cruel as fate, collectively turning on the appointed outcast, feeding off each other's meanness. Julia had seen it happen sometimes even among college students.

As time went on, Carmen took refuge in the warm, bright, populated land of books. That, and stories she made up. Sometimes she wrote them down, but more often she simply played them out in her mind. That way Effie didn't make fun of them and Ida didn't scold her for wasting paper.

•   •   •

O
NE
thing she said landed heavily on Julia's conscience. “I used to spend hours imagining what you were like,” Carmen told her. “I made up things about you. Told people I had an aunt in South Carolina who wanted me to come live with her. Said you were rich. I sort of justified the lie because of your last name. I told them your husband was a bank president, and he was always buying you things like new cars and diamonds. One time for no reason at all he got you a chocolate Monopoly set.” She shrugged. “I was just trying to impress people. I didn't really care if you were rich or not.”

It shamed Julia to realize that while her niece was constructing dreams about her, never once had she herself paused to consider what the girl's life would be like after losing her father or whether she might step forward and help in any way.

“Did he do that?” Carmen asked. “Buy you presents for no reason?”

Julia nodded. It was true, especially during the first several years of their marriage. There were many gifts, though not as extravagant as Carmen's stories claimed. But Julia didn't like to think about any of that, especially her ingratitude. “But no more questions from you now,” she said. “I'm not done with mine yet.”

Carmen's recall of details was extraordinary. She had a keen mind for names, numbers, chronology. She knew about the first letter Lulu sent Julia. She also remembered well the day Julia's check came in the return mail. She remembered the wrangling at home that day, too, with both Effie and Ida arguing for cashing the check and throwing the box of papers in the garbage can where they belonged.

But she also remembered riding to the post office with Lulu the next day to mail the box to Julia. “Ida and Effie were furious,” she said. “Lulu didn't buck them very often. Mostly she did whatever they said. Ida and Effie, they made a formidable duo, let me tell you. Relentless and . . . indefatigable. I just tried to stay out of their way.”

With both Effie and Ida taking up permanent residence in the trailer, Carmen was evicted from her bedroom and relegated to the living room sofa, where she slept for six years, until she lost even that with another downward turn in her bleak life: a short, ill-fated relationship with a boy named Tig Henderson, who showed up in Painted Horse the summer after she finished tenth grade. She was sixteen, and he was twenty. She believed everything he said, starting with his promise to love her forever. “I wanted so much to be the most important person in somebody's life,” she said. Tig was very convincing, told her he had a good job offer from an uncle in Alberta if they could only find a car to drive up there. In Canada, he said, teenagers could get married without a parent's consent, so that was the first thing they would do when they got there.

“I told him kissing and anything else was off-limits till we got married. Daddy had told me never to let another man kiss me unless he was my husband—that's what a good girl I was. Dumb, too. Tig played me like a toy drum. Acted like he agreed with everything I was saying. I don't think he was even interested in girls, really. He just needed an . . . accomplice.”

He laid out a plan to Carmen, and before sunrise one morning, while everyone in the trailer was asleep, she scraped together all the money she could find, including the cash Lulu kept in a mason jar for groceries and emergencies, some five hundred dollars in all. She also took Jeremiah's old guitar and Effie's car keys, along with her car, and met Tig down behind the old coal mine. They headed north toward the Canadian border.

She made a face. “So, you see, I wouldn't kiss, but I would steal—how stupid is that? He didn't have any uncle in Canada or any job offer. He only wanted to hide out up there. He'd done something he could go to jail for—I found all that out later. That's why he always freaked out over cops.” She laughed. “He sure had me pegged. Gullible with a capital G. He must've had a hard time keeping a straight face.”

Several days later, after ditching the car, crossing the border on foot, and walking for endless miles in the middle of nowhere, Carmen woke up one morning to find Tig gone, along with all her money and Jeremiah's guitar. “No note or anything,” she said. “But at least he left my backpack.”

Julia had already identified these “at least” statements as an annoying habit, this latching on to a minor point as a ray of cheer in an otherwise miserable situation. As if leaving her backpack could in any way make up for the boy's treachery.

•   •   •

T
HOUGH
part of Julia wanted to cover her ears, another part wanted to hear it all in one sitting. And so after each answer, another question followed. Carmen spoke candidly of the years since Tig, but in a rush of words now, as if she needed to relieve herself of the truth as soon as possible. She began telling the facts more simply, stripped of detail. A CliffsNotes version of a lonely, wretched adolescence.

The exact sequence of events became a jumble in Julia's mind, mostly because her questions ranged far and wide in no particular order. There was no limit to the ways the girl had been lied to, lied about, rejected, cheated, disappointed—all of them strewn along the road of her short life like miles of wreckage after a collision—yet also interspersed along the way, according to Carmen, were countless mercies: at least
this
, at least
that
. A messy plot, with two driving forces—the girl's literal fight to survive and her quest to find a good man to take her father's place. But this was Julia's assessment, not Carmen's.

She had traveled light, moving about a good deal, by bus, train, hitchhiking, taking whatever work she could get from anybody who didn't ask a lot of questions. From Canada, she had returned to Montana, then headed to the Dakotas and down to Nebraska and west into Colorado. She slept on cots, couches, concrete floors, bare ground, occasionally in a real bed, but rarely in one place for very long.

One day outside Denver she thought about the trailer in Painted Horse, Wyoming, which seemed like a haven of tranquillity in comparison to her life as a vagrant, so she made her way back there. “But it didn't turn out exactly like the Prodigal Son story in the Bible,” she said. They wouldn't let her in. Effie said she was calling the sheriff to lock her up. Lulu came to the window crying and told her she'd made her bed, now go lie in it.

From there she headed east, passed through Kansas City, then St. Louis, traveled north through Minnesota and Wisconsin, lived in the Chicago area for a while, worked at a meatpacking plant in Ohio, and eventually ended up in New England, where she had lived for the last three and a half years. She had done every kind of work imaginable—each job “an answer to prayer,” as she called it. Everything from cleaning bathrooms to babysitting for a family with nine foster children.

She studied her hands as if remembering how much work nine children required. “That was a hard job,” she said, “but I loved it. It lasted only a couple of weeks, though. The parents thought the kids were getting too attached to me.”

“So answers to prayer can fizzle fast,” Julia said.

“But something else opened up after that,” Carmen said quickly. “It always did.” She looked at Julia for a long moment, her blue eyes unblinking. “I guess prayer must sound pretty silly to you.”

Julia said nothing. What need was there to reply? Surely after such a rehearsal of her life, the girl could see for herself how futile her prayers had been.

More questions, more answers. At some point Carmen had started going to church again, wherever she happened to be. She liked small churches best, had met “saints like you wouldn't believe.” She had even joined a church in Connecticut. “They let me clean on Saturdays and help in the nursery on Sundays,” she said.

Julia almost laughed. How kind of them to let her do their dirty work. She didn't say it, though.

The questions continued, and Carmen grew visibly weary. Sometimes she answered with a single word. Had she ever finished high school?
No.
So just to clarify, she had never been a victim of sexual abuse that resulted in pregnancy? A slight pause, then a firm
No.
Did she have any personal identification? A social security card? No card, but she knew her number. And, of course, no birth certificate?
No.

How had her shirt gotten torn? This question seemed to confuse Carmen at first until she understood that Julia had leapt forward in time to her arrival here at the stone house only a week ago. Perhaps sensing that the questions were almost over, she sat up straighter and summarized this most recent misfortune, the one that had left her without even her backpack. “But it was really ratty by now anyway,” she said. Once again it had involved a man, a seemingly nice man who wore gray ostrich cowboy boots with silver toe plates. She had been fooled by the boots since all the cowboys she had ever known in Wyoming were gentlemen, and since Jeremiah had worn boots with silver toe plates. Evidently gullibility was still an issue.