Mending the Moon Read online

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  For Jim Winn

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgments

  Tor Books by Susan Palwick

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  1

  Melinda Soto, four years old, looks out her bedroom window and sees the full moon, orange and bulbous, rising over the Washoe Valley. Melinda has seen the moon before, has listened to her parents explaining why it waxes and wanes, but she has never noticed the pits and shadows on its surface. In her picture books, as in the pictures she draws herself—at school and at home, in bold marker or wavering pencil or the waxy smudge of crayon—the moon is always purely white, as spotless and serene as a newly peeled egg.

  Now she rests her arms on the windowsill, breathing the wildness of sagebrush and frowning up at the orange circle marred with dark blotches. “Mama!” she calls, and a little while later her mother, smelling of soap and sweat from mopping the kitchen floor, comes up behind her with a hug. Melinda could have gone to find her mother, indeed half expects to be scolded for not doing so, for interrupting kitchen tasks, but she’s afraid to lose sight of the moon, as if only her gaze keeps it safe.

  “What is it, baby?”

  “The moon’s dirty. Look. There are spots on it.”

  She can feel her mother’s smile, a warmth at her back. “That’s how it always looks. You just never noticed before.”

  “Can you wash it?” Melinda wonders if Mama could mop the moon, the way she mops the floors.

  “No.” Mama laughs. “I can’t wash it. No one can wash it. It’s too far away. And anyway, those aren’t stains. They’re holes. Craters where things crashed into the moon. Rocks. Big rocks that move through outer space.”

  “People throw rocks at the moon?” Melinda is both astonished and indignant. Why would anyone want to hurt the moon, and how could anyone throw a rock that far?

  “No. People don’t throw them. They’re rocks that fly through outer space. They’re called asteroids. A long time ago, some of them crashed into the moon, and now it has craters. Like when your ball bounces in the dirt, and it leaves a little scooped-out place.”

  “But you can fill the dirt back in.”

  “Here you can, yes. But not up there.”

  “The moon doesn’t look right,” Melinda says, her words definite and her fingers clenched on the windowsill. “I want to fix it.”

  “You can’t, honey. That’s the way it is. You can’t get there to fill the dirt back in. It’s too far away for mending.”

  Melinda resists the urge to suck her thumb, a habit she has only recently broken. Sucking her thumb would mean she was a baby again, and surely only a big girl can mend the moon. She likes the word “mend”—her mother’s word, a grown-up word—likes how the m sounds in mend and moon and Mama blend into mmmmmmm, into the sound for happiness, or for someone thinking, or for cleaning. Mop. But the more she stares at the pockmarked moon, the more the shadows look like bruises, like the painful places on her knees and elbows when she falls. “I want to anyway. I’m going to. Will you help me?”

  Mama kisses her head. “As soon as you tell me how, I’ll help you with all my heart. Let’s get into bed now, all right? Sleep tight, Melinda. Sweet dreams.”

  Melinda never finds a way to mend the moon, but decades later, all her friends will know the story of how she promised herself that she would when she was a child. It is, she often says, her origin story.

  * * *

  Sixty years later, in a dormitory at the University of Nevada, Reno, Jeremy Soto wakes up on the floor of his room. He has a headache, and his face is glued to the latest issue of Comrade Cosmos by a trail of drool.

  He groans, rolls over, and looks at the clock. He remembers groggily that he fell asleep after lunch, thanks to spending too long in the CC chat room last night. Now it’s five o’clock, and his English class starts in half an hour, and he hasn’t even finished reading the book, which has to be the most boring thing ever written. Cranford. A book about lonely old women: no wonder Very Bitchy assigned it.

  He gets up and makes his way to his backpack, a journey of three feet that requires him to sidestep two piles of textbooks, three dirty socks, and an empty pizza box that’s several days old. He isn’t even sure which of the books and socks are his and which are his roommate’s. On the way, he glances at the mirror over his bureau. His hair looks like stuffing coming out of a torn couch, and the trail of drool shines faintly white against his dark skin.

  Pathetic. “This round to the Emperor of Entropy,” he mutters.

  He rummages in his backpack and finds his copy of Cranford. He’s been using a crumpled copy of the class syllabus as a bookmark, which at least makes it easy to figure out how much more reading he has to do.

  He checks the syllabus, checks his place in the book—he’s forty pages behind last week’s assignment—and checks the clock. Twenty minutes to class. This is not going to work.

  The logical approach would be to skip class, but VB has a strict attendance policy. He’s already used up his three allowed absences. Any more will hurt his grade, which isn’t exactly great to begin with. He could always hide in the back of the room and hope VB won’t call on him, but since she’s one of his mother’s best friends, that’s dicey, too.

  He speed-flips through Cranford, wondering again why he signed up for this section. What was he thinking? That Very Bitchy would go easy on him because she’s known him since he was three? They’ve never liked each other. Mom still tells the story of how he bit VB the first time she babysat and tried to get him to eat spinach.

  Cranford. Literary spinach, with a hefty dose of beets. His friends in other 101 sections are reading, like, two-page essays and newspaper columns. Very Bitchy has them reading fucking endless British novels about old ladies.

  And Mom’s coming home from Mexico tomorrow. He’s already gotten her postcard; she sends one every trip. One to him, one to VB, one to Aunt Rosemary. Rosie’s not really his aunt, but she’s Mom’s other best friend, even if she and VB don’t get along much better than he and VB do.

  Mom prides herself on finding the perfect postcard for each person. Jeremy’s shows sea turtles swimming past coral, probably because he had a series of pet turtles when he was a kid, although they kept dying. Lame, Mom.

  Her neat, tiny script covers the other side.

  Sitting at sunny poolside. Great food here: you’d love it. Just met guy your age, Percy, who likes CC too
. He was impressed that I’d read some issues. His mom won’t go near it. I told him I couldn’t talk about the discussion boards; that’s your territory. Snorkeled with turtles like ones in pic. Miss you. Be good. Love, Mom

  When she’s back home, she’ll call him to have lunch, and maybe he’ll be able to get out of it for a few days, but eventually, he’ll have to face her. She’ll ask him about English, and he’ll tell her it’s going fine, because he can’t tell her that one of her best friends is the worst professor on the planet. And she’ll ask him what he wants to major in and he’ll have to say that he doesn’t know yet, except that he knows he doesn’t want to major in English.

  And she’ll ask him how Spanish is going—or worse, try to speak it with him—and he’ll have to tell her it’s going even worse than English. He didn’t have to take Spanish at all; he had four years in high school and managed to pass, barely. But when he was signing up for classes, Mom insisted that he take a Spanish conversation and culture class, so he wouldn’t lose his roots.

  His roots are Guatemalan, not Spanish or Mexican. He told her that. He even tried telling her that if she wants him to study his roots, he should be learning K’iché, not Spanish. That promptly sent her to the Internet to find somebody at UNR who taught K’iché, which promptly sent him into a speech about how he doesn’t care about his roots; she’s the one who cares about his roots, and if she cares so much, why doesn’t she learn K’iché? Why can’t she let him be an American? Isn’t that why she brought him here?

  And she said that it was important for him to learn about where he came from, and he said fine, and did just enough research to figure out that if your birth parents were Mayans who spoke K’iché and were probably slaughtered by Spanish-speaking troops funded by the CIA, English and Spanish are the last languages you’d want to study.

  And she said, yes, she could see his point, but English was required in college, and Spanish was really useful.

  How can she complain that they never talk?

  And why’d he cave in to the pressure, anyway? He’s the one taking the classes, and he doesn’t need Spanish to graduate. Next semester he’ll only take things he either has to take or wants to take. It’s his life. He has to stop letting Mom control him.

  He looks at the clock again. Fifteen minutes until class, and it takes ten to get there. Crap. Think, Jeremy. Panic is not your friend. Panic is the ally of entropy. That’s what Comrade Cosmos always says, and he’s right. There’s more than enough entropy in the room right now anyway, with the socks and pizza box. Jeremy really has to clean up. He’s good about picking up after himself at home, where he has Mom to nag him—although she’s a fine one to talk, with her rocks and books and lists scattered all over the house—but here, everything winds up in heaps on the floor. Entropy.

  In his psych class, which is required but much more interesting than Spanish, the prof talks about internal and external loci of control, how people with external loci are less mature than the others. Mom, Jeremy’s pretty sure, would completely agree.

  Maybe he should have lived at home this semester after all, like she wanted him to. But that would be caving again, and the dorm really is more fun, and if he didn’t live on campus, he’d have even more trouble getting to class on time.

  Ten minutes to Cranford. Time to go. He hears Mom’s voice in his head: Get a move on, kiddo. Time’s a wasting.

  He crams the novel back into his backpack, shoves on his shoes, and does a quick visual scan for his cell phone. He can’t find it. All right, never mind: VB takes a very dim view of phones in class anyway. But just as he’s shrugging into his jacket and getting ready to sprint across campus, he hears the theme music from the latest CC movie, the triumphant “March of Order Restored.”

  That’s his phone.

  The music’s coming from under one of the pizza boxes. Cursing, Jeremy shoves the box aside with his foot and scoops up the ringing phone. If it’s somebody important, he’ll answer it on his way to class.

  Unknown Caller. Probably a telemarketer. Jeremy sighs as he turns off the light and leaves the room. He’ll have to remember to put the phone on silent before he walks into class.

  “Hello? Yes, this is Jeremy. Who’s this?”

  * * *

  Five minutes to class. Earlier in her career, Veronique would have gotten there at 5:15, as soon as the previous class left. These days, she gives herself thirty seconds to walk down the hall to the classroom. The less time she has to spend teaching, the better. All she wants to do is retire.

  She can’t retire. The house isn’t paid for, and she can’t pay the mortgage on her retirement income, and she can’t sell, not in this market. When she and Sarabeth bought the house, she was a newly tenured associate professor. She believed that one day she’d make full professor, a promotion that carried with it a ten percent raise and a corresponding bump in retirement income. She and Sarabeth had two salaries. They’d be able to retire, maybe even a little early, and enjoy some well-earned leisure.

  But Sarabeth found another lover and walked out, and seven years into Veronique’s tenure, the chair of the department told her gently that she wasn’t promotable. Once, she would have been. Once, associate professors had been promoted to full simply for doing more of the things they’d done to get tenure. This was no longer true. Veronique, the chair said, choosing his words very carefully, was a valued member of the department, but didn’t have enough of a national profile to be promoted.

  In short, she wasn’t famous enough.

  To be fair, Veronique had expected something like this when she walked into his office, since even then she was bored with what she’d done to earn tenure. She’d written her doctoral dissertation on narratives of female flight in nineteenth-century protest literature, women running away from home to seek better lives. As an assistant professor, she’d published a string of scholarly articles on writers like Stowe, Gaskell, and Eliot. But around the time when Sarabeth ran away, literary criticism had started to seem like a useless exercise, intellectual masturbation. Veronique found herself much more interested in how people who didn’t have the luxury of running away created homes where they were. She didn’t think they used footnotes.

  Even then, she knew her boredom with the profession was her problem, not the department’s. Her feeling trapped in a job she’d come to hate was her problem, not the department’s. The fact that she lacked the courage to run, or even walk, away from tenure was her problem, not the department’s.

  The conversation stung anyway, and it hurts more now than it did then. These days, Veronique doubts that anyone considers her a valued member of the department. They’re waiting for her to retire. A young, hungry lecturer could teach her courses for a fraction of her salary, and would undoubtedly be more popular with students.

  Four minutes to class: time to go. Her tote bag holds Cranford, the folder of graded reading responses she’ll hand back today, a bottle of water, her keys—there’ve been thefts on campus, so she keeps her office locked—and a list of discussion points, although she knows she’ll wind up doing most of the talking.

  She reminds herself, as she always does before class, that there are good students in this section. Amy Castillon: smart young woman, hardworking and perceptive. And then there’s that boy, the shy one in the corner—Charles?—whose in-class writing exercises are more polished than most of the finished essays she gets from the others.

  And then, God help her, there’s Jeremy, who seems unable to fasten the Velcro tabs on his sneakers without his mother’s help. Why did he sign up for her section? He’s not a good student. The only text he cares about is that blasted comic book, and he isn’t especially articulate even on that subject. Dealing with him tactfully is a nightmare; avoiding Melinda’s unspoken questions is even worse.

  Three minutes to showtime. Veronique scans her office and sees nothing else she needs to bring. All right. She puts her tote bag over her arm, so she’ll have a hand free to open her office door, and grabs th
e cane she uses when her arthritis acts up. It’s been raining all day, last week’s glorious Indian-summer weather replaced by biting autumn gloom. Saturday’s Halloween. She hopes her students don’t expect candy, which some colleagues hand out this time of year. Her knee hurts.

  Limping into class, only ten seconds late, she takes a quick survey of the seats. A scattering of students, huddled into jackets and sweaters, sit slumped in their usual places. One child wears flip-flops; her toes look faintly blue around their sparkly pink nail polish. A Vegas native, and not the sharpest mind in the room. By the time she figures out how to dress for the weather up here, she’ll be ready to graduate.

  Only Amy’s sitting up straight, and even she seems more subdued than usual. “Hi, Professor Bellamy.”

  Veronique nods a greeting, too oppressed by the apathy in the room to speak. Eleven out of twenty students, and no Jeremy. He’s always late, even without the excuse of bad weather. Veronique doesn’t understand why rain or snow slows kids down, even the ones who don’t have to drive to campus, but it’s a consistent pattern.

  She looks unhappily at the clock. Time to start. More students will drag themselves in, probably, but it’s not fair to the ones who got here on time for her to stall. She clears her throat. “Please open your books to—”

  She senses movement at the door and turns to see who it is. Jeremy, face haggard, phone clamped to his ear, rushes to her desk and thrusts the phone at her. He’s shaking. “This has to be a joke. This can’t—this can’t be happening. You talk to him.”

  “What? Talk to whom? Jeremy, this is—”

  “Please,” he says, and she realizes in horror that he’s crying. The other students, more awake now, stir and stare—this is the most interesting thing that’s happened all semester—as Jeremy presses the phone into her hand. “Please, talk to him.”

  * * *

  “You’re on until nine?” the charge nurse asks. “We just called the family. They’ll be here soon. I’ll let them know a chaplain’s here in case they want to talk to you.”