Mending the Moon Read online

  But the minute the cop made his announcement, all Jeremy wanted to do was race into the parish hall, or outside, and check the news on his iPhone. Percy Clark, the cop said. Another guest at the resort. Positive DNA match, and now he’s drowned himself.

  Percy Clark? Is this the Percy Mom talked to at the pool, the CC fan? Postcard Percy? It can’t be the same guy, can it? But how many people named Percy could have been at the resort?

  He wants to check his phone; he sees plenty of other people checking theirs. He wants to call the cops and get the full story. He wants to hit something. But instead he’s trapped next to Hen in the back of the sanctuary, receiving condolences.

  He’s tired and hungry and hot, and he really needs to drink something and sit down, and he doesn’t know most of these people. Nobody knows what to say. He doesn’t know which are worse: the ones who look mournful, wring his hand, and whimper, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” or the ones who didn’t get up to the mike and want to tell him long stories about his mother, or the ones—all men—who punch his arm and say, “Hey! The bastard’s dead! Fantastic!” as if their favorite football team has just taken home a trophy.

  Percy’s dead. We win. But oh, wait: Mom’s still dead, too, isn’t she?

  Tie.

  And then there are the people who presume to tell him what Mom would have wanted. “Your mother would want you to be strong.” “Your mother would want you to put all this behind you and have a good life.” “Your mother would want you to continue her legacy.”

  Whatever the people in front of him say or do, Jeremy says only, “Thank you for coming,” which is universally useful and easy to remember. What he really wants to say, especially to the last group, is, “You don’t have a clue what my mother would want. My mother would want me to have a drink of water right now. My mother would want me to have some privacy. My mother would want anybody who hasn’t known her for at least twenty years to shut up.”

  He’s lost count of how many people have said, “If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.” His jacket pockets are stuffed with business cards and slips of paper with scribbled telephone numbers. He plans to throw all of them away, and maybe to burn the suit, as soon as he’s safely out of here.

  “Yes, there is something you can do for me. Leave me alone.” But he can’t say that, much less scream it at the top of his lungs.

  Finally it’s over. Hen touches his arm. “You okay?”

  Jeremy glares at her. “What do you think?” Then he’s out, into the blessedly cool narthex, at the tail of a line of people filing into the parish hall. They’re walking past the Mom Memorial tables Aunt Rosie and VB arranged: photos, some of her favorite rocks and houseplants, the library newsletters she edited.

  Jeremy can’t deal with this anymore. He’s been doing his duty for hours now. He needs a break. He ducks out the narthex door and heads toward the thick shrubs along one side of the parking lot. There’s a gap leading to an empty field. When he still came to church, the Sunday school kids played out there a lot, and the field was a great place to hide Easter eggs.

  He’s bigger than he was the last time he did this, and his suit snags on a branch as he pushes his way through. But then he’s in the field, hidden from anyone looking out the parish hall windows. He’s safe.

  It’s chilly out here, despite the sunshine. Shivering, Jeremy sits down on the grass and pulls his knees to his chest. His need to Google Percy has suddenly dissolved. Percy’s not going anywhere. Percy will keep.

  He doesn’t want to know anything about Percy. He wants Percy never to have existed. If Percy had never been born, there would be two fewer dead bodies in the world right now.

  It’s quiet and peaceful out here. Jeremy sits and watches the clouds, watches the birds, plays idly with bits of dirt. He’s just starting to get truly cold when Tom’s head pokes through the gap in the hedge. “Hey, you.”

  “Hey.”

  “How you holding up?” Jeremy shrugs, and Tom eases the rest of himself through the makeshift gate. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  Tom plunks himself down next to Jeremy. They sit there without speaking for maybe ten minutes, until Tom’s phone rings. He sighs and answers it. “Hi, Hen. Yes, I found him. We’re in the field. Has the crowd thinned out?” A grunt. “Really. Okay, I’ll tell him.”

  Tom flips the phone closed and sticks it back in his pocket. “Hen says most of the strangers are gone. It’s just us Philistines.” This is an old parish joke. “So some folks are cleaning up, and Hen’s getting ready to leave, too, but she says there’s something she thinks you should see in her office.”

  “’Kay,” Jeremy says, hunching his shoulders. His knees are stiff from sitting for so long; Tom has to help him up, even though Tom’s older than he is. They work their way through the hedge again, Jeremy’s suit snagging in two different places this time—the suit’s definitely ruined now, but that may be the best thing that’s happened all day—and plod back across the parking lot to the church.

  When they get back inside, Jeremy realizes how cold he was out there. The warmth inside enfolds him like a blanket, and he feels himself relaxing.

  The building’s mostly empty again. The sexton’s collecting discarded bulletins in the sanctuary, and waves. Jeremy nods and turns to walk down the hall to Hen’s office. He hears a few voices from the parish hall, the familiar chunk-clunk of chairs being stacked for storage, the whir of a vacuum cleaner.

  Hen’s office is cozy and cluttered, the desk a continent of ever-shifting piles of paper, the walls decorated with icons and framed greeting cards and a large quilt of a Celtic cross, a gift from Hen’s last parish when she came to St. Phil’s. She gestures to a chair, and Jeremy sits. “Sorry I left,” he says. “I guess I should have stayed to be nice to everybody.”

  She shakes her head. “Nope. No shoulds, not for you, not today. You held up in that receiving line better than a lot of people would have. Your priority right now is taking care of yourself, Jeremy.”

  He looks down at his knees. He feels obscurely ashamed. “Well, okay. Thanks.”

  “But should you feel like writing some thank-you notes”—she pauses, and he looks up to find her grinning, so he’ll know the “should” is a joke—“here are the cards from people who sent flowers.”

  He feels a stab of annoyance, infuriating as a mosquito bite. “I don’t want flowers. I asked for donations to Doctors Without Borders. Mom gave them money every month.”

  “I know. But some people always send flowers anyway.” She holds up a small pile of cards. “If you don’t want to deal with these, Rosie and I can. But, you know, I grew up on Emily Post, and she insists that the principal mourner hand-write thank-you notes. She says it’s a way to do something useful and connect yourself to the world again. And I think there’s something to that.”

  Jeremy scowls. “I thought you said there were no shoulds.”

  “There aren’t. It’s just a suggestion. When my mother died, I actually found writing the notes helpful.”

  Jeremy blinks. It’s never occurred to him that Hen had parents, although of course she must have. “Can you keep them for me? For, like, a week or something? And I’ll think about it?”

  “Sure,” Hen says, and tucks the cards into a small manila envelope and sticks it to her overflowing bulletin board. “But there’s one you need to see, Jer. You absolutely don’t need to respond to it if you don’t want to. It came with this.” She nods at a tiny pine tree in a fancy ceramic pot next to her desk. Jeremy just assumed it was part of her office decor, a new addition he hadn’t seen yet. A miniature Christmas tree for the rector’s office.

  He squints at it. “Someone sent me a Christmas tree?”

  “Evergreen,” Hen says. “Always green, always alive. It’s a symbol of eternal life and of hope, which is why they got used for Christmas trees in the first place.” She pushes another card, larger than the others, across the desk. “You should read this.”

  Jeremy picks it
up, reads the delicate script.

  Dear Jeremy, and all of Melinda’s friends:

  You don’t know me, but my son Percy was staying at Castillo del Sol when Melinda was killed. I am so terribly sorry. I read that she loved to garden. Please plant this tree somewhere in her honor.

  With deepest sympathy, Anna Clark, Mercer Island, Washington

  Jeremy blinks and rereads the note. He shakes his head to try to keep his brain from scrambling. It doesn’t work. “I don’t—I—”

  “The card came yesterday,” Hen says, “inside a larger envelope with a note on the outside, explaining that the card went with a plant that would be delivered today. I guess she really wanted to write the card herself, instead of having the florist do it.”

  Jeremy’s still shaking his head. “I don’t—Clark. Clark? This is from Percy’s mother?”

  “Sure looks like it,” Hen says gently. “She must have sent it before Percy died.”

  Jeremy’s skull is buzzing, as if someone’s hit it with a tuning fork. “So she sends me a tree because her son killed Mom? What the hell?” He doesn’t even care that he’s cursing in a church. “Of all the nerve—”

  “Jeremy,” Hen says, and her voice is firmer now, “she may not have known yet. She must have sent it before the DNA results came in. When she sent the tree, she may have had no idea that her son was the murderer.”

  “I have no clue what to do with this,” Jeremy says.

  “I don’t expect you to. Neither do I. But the others are pro forma expressions of sympathy. This one isn’t. It requires more thought, that’s all.”

  “Fuck,” Jeremy says. Hen doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. “What am I supposed to do? Send them a cactus to plant for Percy?”

  “No. Not unless you want to.” She stands up. “Come on. I’m tired, and you must be exhausted. Let’s go back to the house. The tree will be fine here in the office, for the time being.”

  “Good,” Jeremy says. “Keep it. Use it for firewood.” He hands her the card. “Keep that, too.”

  PART TWO

  8

  A week after Percy’s death, a thank-you note arrives from Reno. It’s on church stationery, handwritten like Anna’s own note.

  Dear Anna,

  I am writing on behalf of Jeremy and all of us who loved Melinda to thank you for the lovely sapling. Sending it was an extraordinarily thoughtful gesture. We have not planted it yet, but certainly will when we feel led to the right location. Please know that it will be loved and cared for.

  I can’t imagine what you must be feeling now. Whatever our children have done, we love them, and this is the worst loss any parent can face. My heart breaks for you, and I hope your friends and family are supporting you. May the God of mercy and compassion enfold you and help you find healing.

  In sorrow, The Rev. Dr. Henrietta Alphonse-Smith, Rector, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church.

  Anna, who has slogged out through the ever-present rain to get the mail on the day the note arrives, never shows it to William. William doesn’t know about the tree. She paid for it with her own credit card, not one of the ones they use jointly. She doesn’t know where the impulse to keep it secret comes from. She can’t think clearly about anything right now. She wonders if she’ll ever think clearly again.

  She can’t even remember when she decided to send the tree, or why. That was before Percy died, before Karen showed up at their door with Bart, and everything before that moment has faded, become impossibly distant. The world has fractured.

  Anna has become a dumb animal. She sleeps, eats, and relieves herself. She weeps. She finds herself walking in circles, finds herself in rooms she doesn’t remember entering and doesn’t know why she entered.

  She has not gone into Percy’s room. The police searched it, seized his journal and computer, impounded the luggage he took to Mexico to examine it for forensic evidence. She can’t imagine why they have to do this. They know he killed Melinda Soto. What else do they need? And yet another part of her hopes they find some answer, some reason, so she’ll have one, too.

  In any case, she has not yet been able to bring herself to go back into his room. William, meanwhile, seems barely able even to remain in the house. He vanishes for hours. Not to work, Anna knows—he’s closed the gallery for a month “due to family emergency”—and he comes home every night, at least, but he won’t tell her where he’s gone. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t remember. He gets in the car every morning and drives away, and when Anna checks the odometer she sees that he’s clocked hundreds of miles. She thinks he simply drives, the way she simply wanders the house.

  William isn’t home when the note comes. Anna tucks it into the zippered pocket of her Gore-Tex jacket. By the time William does get home, she’s in bed: not asleep, exactly, because sleep is difficult if not impossible now, but in that gray twilight where it is easier to pretend to be asleep than to open her eyes, to speak, to ask him where he’s been.

  The next morning, William—eerily like Percy—is already gone when Anna gets up. She makes herself coffee and tries to eat some toast, which might as well be cardboard. Then she puts on sweats and her Gore-Tex slicker and walks the dog.

  William, who adored Bart when Percy was still alive, will have nothing to do with him now, won’t even touch him. Of course, he also won’t touch Anna. Anna walks the dog because Bart has to be walked, and out of some obscure feeling that it isn’t fair to punish the animal for the complete collapse that has befallen the family. Bart can’t possibly understand any of this—neither can Anna, and she has what she’s always been told is a first-rate primate brain—and he’s dependent on his human keepers. William and Percy promised to take care of him when they brought him home as a puppy. Percy can’t keep that promise anymore. William, for whatever reason, won’t.

  Anna’s the only one left. And the dog’s demands are simple: food, water, exercise, affection. The first three, Anna can provide. The fourth is harder. Bart’s size and smell, the sheer dogginess of him, have always oppressed her, although she knows that as dogs go, he’s unusually calm and well behaved. Bereft of the men, he fastens himself to her, follows her everywhere, rests his enormous head in her lap and looks up at her with liquid brown eyes.

  There are times when she finds this unbearable, when she wants to shove him away, give him away, sell him, kill him, tie him up outside in the rain, take him into the city and abandon him. Several times, she’s been on the verge of calling their vet, or the Humane Society.

  But she doesn’t. Percy loved this dog. Her last memory of Percy is of watching him nap with Bart. And Bart is the last of them who saw Percy alive.

  Sometimes at night, Bart begins to howl, and William mutters and pulls his pillow over his head, and Anna gets up, fuming and cursing, determined to be rid of the dog by morning. But then she remembers what Karen said, and she pictures Percy wading into the water. She can all too clearly see Bart howling after him, straining against his leash, watching Percy disappear. He kept howling, Karen said.

  And Anna, throat thick with tears each time she imagines this—Anna who wants to howl, too, and sometimes does—gets up and goes to the dog and strokes him, her sobs mingling with his whimpers, until he calms. Sometimes she talks to him the way she’d talk to Percy if he were here, if he were still alive. “Why did you do it? I know you did, they tell me you did, and the way you acted makes me believe that, but I don’t understand. Why, Percy? What happened?”

  Whatever happened, it was some terrible aberration. It was not Percy. Her private theory is that someone drugged one of the beers he drank that night. The police have shown her the tab from the hotel bar. He only had four beers: not enough to get terribly drunk, much less psychotic, and so she thinks someone put something in his drink and he reacted terribly to it. She thinks the drug made him a monster. She thinks that when it wore off, Percy couldn’t live with himself, couldn’t even bear the idea of confessing to his parents.

  She knows that she will never know if
this is true. She has a hazy sense that the drugs that might have this effect don’t last in the body long. She doesn’t research the issue; she doesn’t want to learn that she’s wrong and have this fragile explanation shattered. She’s glad that Percy’s body was cremated, although she hasn’t had the strength to go pick up his ashes. His remains are past any possible testing. She can maintain her theory in whatever now passes for peace.

  William identified the body. She couldn’t, although already she feels guilty for sparing herself that one last glimpse of the child she bore. She feared that the sight of Percy’s bloated and discolored corpse would, like acid, erase all other memories.

  She and William have not talked about a funeral. She and William have barely spoken. The house phone rings and both of them ignore it. The doorbell rings and both of them ignore it.

  She knows that William has spoken to his parents, knows that they want to fly out from Boston. She’s told William she can’t handle that right now, can’t deal with them. She knows they’re family, but she’s always found them suffocating. William knows that.

  William’s clients have sent tactfully minimalist condolence cards. Several times, this first week post-Percy, Anna has opened the door to find offerings on their doorstep. A roast chicken from their next-door neighbor. Flowers from Karen, with a scribbled note on pink paper dotted with tear stains.

  I read about it in the paper. I can’t believe I’m the one who brought your dog back. I’m so sorry.

  Flowers, notes, food. Anna and William eat the food, when they remember to eat and can stand to eat, but the flowers die, and Anna opens the notes haphazardly, letting them pile up and then ripping through five or ten of them until she can’t stand it anymore. There aren’t that many, anyway.