Mending the Moon Page 7

  “Couldn’t agree more,” Very Bitchy says, giving him an odd look, and Hen nods.

  Rosemary’s frowning. She would be. Walter was military before he went to law school, and they’re Republicans. Somehow Mom still stayed friends with them. “Rosie and I just don’t discuss politics,” she told him once.

  Tough luck. He glares at Rosemary, says, “Oh, you think it doesn’t matter? You think this is a wonderful country of freedom and liberty, and I should be grateful, right?”

  Rosemary coughs. “Well, actually—”

  “Well, actually, it kind of sucks that the country that took me in is also the one that helped kill my real mother.” All three of them wince, but he goes on. He doesn’t care whose feelings he hurts, and he realizes in a giddy rush that he isn’t faking anymore. “Yeah, I know, Mom was my real mother because she took care of me, and if she hadn’t I’d be in an orphanage and I wouldn’t be able to talk or walk, boo-hoo, you probably wish right now that I couldn’t talk, right?”

  “No.” All of them speak in unison.

  Which means yes. He doesn’t care. “The day Mom told me about the war in Guatemala? The day she told me my real mother had been killed by the fucking Guatemalan army with weapons from the U.S.? They destroyed six hundred and twenty-six Mayan villages. They cut open the wombs of pregnant women and cut babies in half. ’Course she didn’t tell me those parts. I had to do research. Had to find out on my own.” He glares at Very Bitchy. “You think I’m stupid. You think I don’t know how to do research, but I do.” Even if it was just to get Mom off my back.

  VB gazes coolly back. “Yes, you certainly do, Jeremy. So do I. The genocide was in the early eighties. You were born in 1990, and your mother adopted you in 1993.”

  “Yeah, 1990.” Library facts he doesn’t even know he remembers march out of his mouth. “The year the army massacred thirteen people, including kids, in Santiago Atitlan. And 1993? That’s when the UN peace talks were suspended because they weren’t working. There’d been civil war that whole time, remember?”

  Very Bitchy’s sitting up straighter now. She gives him one of her thin smiles and starts to say something, but Henrietta interrupts her with a cough. “That must have been very hard,” Hen says quietly. “Learning about your birth mother.”

  “Hard? Hard for Mom, or me?”

  “Both of you.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He jabs the air with both fists, one-two. VB and Aunt Rosie shrink back. Hen simply watches him. “I don’t know if it was hard for her, because right afterwards she gave me this speech about how God is great and loving and we have to do good deeds to try to fix the world, like anything could fix my real mother being dead.”

  He looks at them, these white white women, with their white skin even whiter now because they’re all paler than usual. His fault. Aunt Rosie’s started to cry. His fault. He doesn’t care. He’s tired of being the only brown person. Not in Reno, certainly, but in Mom’s circles. He’s tired of being Mom’s token. “My real mother. The one who looked like me. The one who took care of me and loved me until she got her head blown off, or maybe she was raped by some army bastard and didn’t love me. Or maybe she was raped and loved me anyway. I figure those are the three most likely options. Or maybe somebody else took care of me, but I know somebody loved me, because I was still alive. And whatever happened, it ends with heads being blown off, and you’re going to talk to me about God and love?”

  They stare at him. “This is entirely healthy and very understandable,” Hen says. “Of course you’re angry. So are we.”

  “Great. That makes me feel so much better.” He sits down again, in a free chair this time, and starts clenching and unclenching his hands to try to get them to unknot.

  “Jeremy,” Aunt Rosie says. “Your mother loved—”

  “Me. I know. And all of you love me, and all your husbands or whatever love me, too. Walter was great, really, a great guy, when he still knew his own name. Tom’s a great guy.” He looks at Hen. “Ed’s a great guy. But none of them look like me, and they aren’t my dad. Even if my dad was a rapist.”

  “No,” Aunt Rosie says. She hasn’t reacted to the Walter barb. Not visibly, anyway. “They aren’t. Would you rather have stayed in the orphanage?” Her voice is very gentle.

  “No.” Exhaustion sweeps over him. “’Course not.”

  Very Bitchy is still peering at him. “Jeremy, what would Comrade Cosmos do?”

  “What?” Jeremy squints at her. VB, deigning to talk about Comrade Cosmos? Either she’s on drugs or Jeremy’s much more pathetic than he sounds even to himself. “How the hell do I know? He’s just a story. A comic book, remember?”

  Very Bitchy nods. Hen’s frowning, and Rosemary looks as startled as Jeremy feels. “Yes, I know. But he’s the story you live your life by, and you just outlined a series of stories about what might have happened to the people who raised you. Stories are important.” She sits forward on her chair. “Well?”

  “I have no idea. What could he do? What could anybody do? He restores order. He makes things right again. But entropy’s won, down there. It’s too broken to fix.”

  “Nothing’s too broken to fix,” Hen says.

  He stands up, shaky, breathing hard. “Mom is. And I don’t see your God doing anything about it, and a comic book can’t, either.” He swallows, throat raw, and says, “I have to get outside. Have to walk. You—all of you, make your plans. I’ll tell you if I want to change anything when I get back.”

  They murmur assent, and he escapes to the front door. Here’s his jacket, hanging with Hen and Ed’s stuff. Here are his hat and gloves in the pocket. Here’s the doorknob.

  And then he’s out, away, into a gloriously golden autumn day. Run. Run it out. Run forever.

  * * *

  “That was smart,” Hen says. “Asking him about Comrade Cosmos.”

  “Thank you.” Veronique despises comic books, the dumbing down of narrative, but they’re what speaks to Jeremy. And she thinks that she doesn’t despise them as much, right now, as she despises any Judeo-Christian god who could allow this to happen to Melinda.

  Rosemary and the priest are trying to be kind, including her in the funeral planning the same way Melinda always included her in social events, picnics and Scrabble nights and the Alaska cruise. She knows it’s good of them. She doesn’t care. Her knee still hurts, even though it’s not raining anymore. Her head throbs. Her chest aches. She envy’s Jeremy’s ability—his license—simply to leave. He’s Melinda’s son. He can do whatever he wants right now, short of damage to property or people.

  She plans to cancel her classes next week. She’ll call in sick. She has plenty of sick time, and she might as well use it. Given how rotten she feels right now, it’s not even a stretch.

  Only relatives get bereavement leave; it doesn’t matter that Melinda was her best friend. These days, Veronique and Sarabeth could register as domestic partners, if Sarabeth were still around, but there’s nothing similar for platonic friends so close they might as well be family.

  Part of her knows that her department would understand, even if there’s no formal paperwork for the situation. But she’d rather nurse her resentment.

  “We need to pick out hymns,” Hen says quietly. “Can you tell me which were Melinda’s favorites?”

  “The old ones,” Rosemary says. “‘Simple Gifts.’ Shape-note hymns. She liked Taizé, too.”

  “Good. That’s a good start. Thank you, Rosie.”

  Veronique shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t do this even if I knew Melinda’s taste in church music. I can’t think about pretty little songs right now. I should go home. I’m not a churchgoer. You two can plan the service.”

  The priest nods. “If you need to go home, we’ll understand. But what do you want to talk about?”

  Veronique glares at her. What does this woman think she wants to talk about? What other topic is there, right now? “I know Melinda didn’t believe in the death penalty. I know you probably
don’t, either. But right now, if I could get my hands on the guy who did this—”

  “I know,” Rosemary says. “Me, too.”

  “Me three,” says the priest, but she’s as unruffled as ever, and Veronique’s stomach feels like a cauldron. Honor complexity, she always tells her students, and they never do, but she has to. “Except that before I came over here, I browsed the Net a bit. Read the news stories, which didn’t say much. No one heard anything, even though the rooms on either side of hers were occupied.”

  Rosemary shivers. “Weird.”

  “That’s one word for it. No leads, but the police are collecting DNA samples from staff and guests, yada yada. So then I looked at the reader comments: equal parts ‘what a terrible tragedy’ and racist rants about how Mexicans just love to murder American tourists, and those made me furious, too. So if I want to kill the killer and I want to kill the idiots spewing bigoted filth, what does that make me?”

  “Human,” says the priest. “Are they using her name yet?”

  “No.”

  The priest nods. “I think that has to wait until Tom’s identified the body. Even though there’s really no doubt.”

  Veronique can’t imagine having to identify the body. Someone should go with Tom, just for moral support, but she certainly won’t do it. She should go home. She should leave. Why does she keep talking?

  But she keeps talking. “I keep thinking about Melinda’s book group at the library. I was there once when some woman asked why Melinda wouldn’t let us read murder mysteries. She could have been one of my students: ‘Why do we have to read all these serious books?’ Idiot. And Melinda said, ‘I don’t want to read about people dying horribly, especially in books that aren’t supposed to be serious.’ She said, ‘Those books turn senseless, violent death into a puzzle with a neat solution: once you’ve caught the murderer, the puzzle’s solved, and the world’s safe again.’ She said that was fundamentally dishonest.”

  Rosemary laughs; the priest raises an eyebrow. “She said all that? To a library patron?”

  “She did.” If you can’t imagine her doing that, lady priest, you didn’t know her very well. “The woman walked out, of course. But here we are, in a murder mystery. I hate murder mysteries. I hate this. Melinda would have hated it.”

  “We all hate it,” the priest says gently. She looks at her watch. “But planning Melinda’s service is the best thing we can do right now. It’s necessary, and it’s constructive. And I’m sorry, but I have to leave in fifteen minutes. I promised to keep the church doors open this afternoon. A lot of people will want to talk. I’m glad Sunday’s All Souls. That’s one small blessing.”

  And I, Veronique thinks, am sick of talking, and think the word “blessing” is obscene in this setting. She stands. “I have to leave now. I’m sorry. You have my number if there’s anything specific I can do.”

  As she walks down the priest’s driveway to her car, she wonders if she’s just running away. Women in flight. But she can’t flee this. No matter where she goes, she can’t unknow what has happened. If she could, she would.

  * * *

  Rosemary drives home in a haze of pain and grief. This is even worse than Walter’s diagnosis and decline: for all its horrors, Alzheimer’s is an illness, a natural process. What happened to Melinda—

  She can’t even think what to call it, how to describe it. Her brain freezes at the mere attempt.

  She remembers the last time she saw Melinda, at church the Sunday before she left for Mexico. She’d been happy, glad that Jeremy was surviving his first semester of college, glad that she was taking a long overdue solo vacation.

  It was an utterly normal Sunday morning: no omens, no premonitions, no gathering thunderclouds. Walter’s condition had at least produced clues, growing evidence that something was wrong, that worse was coming. There had been time to adjust, to prepare.

  Walter. Should she tell him about Melinda? Can he understand? Will he remember Melinda?

  Will he remember Rosemary?

  Can she even bear to visit him?

  She weighs options as she drives. Melinda’s name hasn’t been made public yet, but it will be soon, within the next few days. There are televisions all over the nursing home, and while Rosemary doubts that the staff often puts on the news—especially in the Alzheimer’s wing—this is a local story, one that might even interrupt other programming. And people will be talking about it. Can she trust that Walter won’t see or hear anything, or that if he does, he won’t have one of his sudden, increasingly rare flashes of recognition and understand his loss?

  She can’t take the gamble, can’t risk his finding out when she isn’t with him. She has to try to tell him.

  Melinda’s one of their oldest friends. Walter and Rosemary knew her before Veronique did, before anyone at church did; they were the ones who invited her to St. Phil’s.

  Walter has more memories of Melinda than anyone else Rosemary knows. Even if Rosemary decides not to tell him that Melinda’s dead, maybe she can somehow spark those memories. Maybe, if even only for a few minutes, she can take both of them back to a happier time.

  And so, instead of going home, she goes to the nursing home for the first time in weeks. It’s early afternoon, and Golden Meadows has a rehab wing, which means that many of its denizens still get visitors. Right now, the bright halls bustle: aides, doctors, relatives with flowers, children bringing crayoned artwork to their grandparents. Residents sit in the corridors in their wheelchairs, aimless but smiling, able to respond to a passing stranger’s “Hello” or “Good morning.”

  At night, the visitors leave, and the halls darken. The wheelchairs and their occupants gather around the nursing station, carried by time and gravity, like leaves collecting in a drain. The residents moan; sometimes they scream or sob, reaching out clawlike, beseeching hands to anyone walking by.

  During the day, the facility seems clean, almost antiseptic. At night, it smells faintly of urine and feces, interlaced with the astringent scent of bleach and the mostly unappetizing aromas from dinner trays.

  Rosemary hates the nursing home at night.

  Even at 1 P.M. on a brilliantly sunny day, she’s shaking as she walks into the facility. She realizes, with shame, that she worries what the staff will say about her, the wife who no longer visits, who’s abandoned her husband.

  Maybe they won’t judge her. Maybe they’ll understand. The day Walter was admitted, an aide told Rosemary, “It’s so hard, with Alzheimer’s. They stop knowing you, and it gets too painful to visit.” Even at the time, she recognized this as a kindness: a stranger giving her permission to let go, to leave Walter’s husk behind.

  Guilt grips her anyway. She remembers a presentation on grief during her chaplaincy training. Guilt’s a universal response to loss, the teacher said. Everyone feels it. What you need to tell mourners is that if they didn’t feel guilty about whatever’s tearing them apart right now, they’d feel guilty about something else.

  Rosemary walks to Walter’s room without looking right or left, without meeting the eyes of staff or other visitors or the helpless creatures in their wheelchairs. Later, she’ll go to the nursing station and alert someone there about the Melinda situation, but right now she needs to see Walter, before she loses her nerve. She wonders if he’ll look different: thinner, grayer. But there’s been no dramatic change in his condition. They’d have called her if there had been.

  When she enters his room, an attendant’s helping him out of his wheelchair and back into bed. She can see only his scrawny neck and large ears, the random tufts of gray hair he’s kept despite swathes of baldness, his stooped shoulders under the blue-and-white cotton pajamas she bought on sale at Macy’s last summer. Walter has always insisted on 100% cotton pajamas. From the bunching of the bottoms around his waist, she can tell he’s wearing Depends under them.

  No one has seen her yet. She stands and watches his tottering rise from the wheelchair, his slow-motion crash-landing in bed, the fussing of t
he aide who tucks him in. “There you go, Walter. Do you want me to raise or lower the bed? Do you need another pillow? What’s that, sweetheart?” Rosemary didn’t hear him say anything. “Do you want the TV on?”

  Oh, God. Not the TV. Please, not the TV. Not unless it’s cartoons or old movies, with the news locked out.

  Aching, Rosemary tries to look at Walter as if he’s a stranger. If he were a patient in the ER, someone she’d never met, what would she see? An old man, frail, being helped by someone kind. An old man who’s safe despite disability and disintegration. She isn’t watching a tragedy. She’s watching an act of compassion.

  But she can’t get that distance. He’s Walter. They’ve spent over half their lives together.

  Perhaps she’s made a noise, because now one bony finger points at the door. The aide turns to follow it. “Why, look, Walter! You have a visitor!”

  Rosemary has never met this aide before. How long has the woman been working here? What will she think of the wife who’s only appeared now for the first time?

  “I’m Rosemary. Walter’s wife.”

  “Walter! Your wife’s here!” The aide beams, introduces herself with some Filipina name that speeds by in a blur and that Rosemary’s too embarrassed to ask for again, and then says, “Walter just had a nice lunch. Didn’t you, Walter? You had ham and mashed potatoes. You had a good appetite today.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Rosemary says weakly. Ham. He’s always loved ham. She used to love making it for him. She blinks back tears and says, “Thank you for taking care of him.”

  She expects the aide to retort, Someone has to. But instead the woman only says cheerfully, “It’s my pleasure. I’ll leave you two alone now, so you can have your visit. Let me know if you need anything.” Short and bustling, she looks Rosemary in the eyes as she passes, and smiles, and squeezes Rosemary’s arm. It’s okay, the touch seems to say. It’s okay that you haven’t been here. He didn’t miss you, and the rest of us understand. And you’re here now.