Mending the Moon Page 8

  Rosemary walks to the bed now, sits on the chair placed there should Walter feel like sitting up, or should anyone come to see him. “Walter? It’s Rosie. Do you remember me?”

  “Hello,” he says, and holds his hand out for her to shake. Throat aching, she does. “It’s nice to meet you.” His voice is soft, tentative, as if he hasn’t used it in a while. “Do you live here?”

  She swallows. “No. I live in the house where you used to live. I’m your wife. Do you remember living with me?” She speaks gently, as she’d speak to an ER patient, a stranger.

  His gaze clouds now, and his hand goes to his mouth in a gesture she knows, a signal of social embarrassment. It’s what he’s always done after a faux pas: mangling a client’s name, forgetting an appointment, neglecting to ask after a neighbor’s sick child.

  His body still remembers, even if his mind doesn’t.

  And she’s made him feel bad: stupid, stupid. Of course he doesn’t know her. It’s obvious that he doesn’t. Why did she even ask? “It’s all right,” she says. “Shall I tell you a story?” When Walter was a little boy, he loved hearing his mother tell him stories. Later, he loved the radio. He’s always enjoyed listening more than reading.

  He smiles uncertainly, but nods. “Why, sure. That would be fine.”

  “All right. I’m going to tell you a story you knew once, to see if you still know it. But if you don’t, it’s all right. It’s not a test.” He looks anxious again; he picks up a corner of his sheet and frets it between thumb and forefinger. She shouldn’t have said that.

  Squeezing his hand, to calm herself as much as him, she takes a breath. “Once upon a time, there was a little boy who loved listening to stories. When he grew into a young man, he went to the theater one night, and he met a young woman who loved stories, too. They fell in love, and they got married.”

  “What did he look like?” Walter asks.

  “He looked like you,” Rosemary says steadily, “and the young woman looked like me, a long time ago. Have you heard this story before?”

  “Noooo.” He draws the word out thoughtfully, frowning.

  “Well, that’s all right. I’ll tell you some more. The young man and the young woman got married, and they were very happy, except that they couldn’t have children. But they had each other. They loved each other very much, and they loved their friends. One of their friends was named Melinda. She’d never found anyone to marry, but she decided she wanted a child anyway. She learned that there was a little boy in a faraway country called Guatemala. His parents were dead, and she decided she’d be his new mommy. So she got on an airplane to go get him.”

  Walter’s gaze has wandered away; he’s looking out the window. Rosemary can’t tell if he’s heard her or not.

  “Melinda didn’t go to Guatemala by herself,” she says, taking a deep breath. “The young man—well, he wasn’t so young anymore—the husband of the couple, he went with her. To help her, and to keep her company. His wife stayed home. Walter? Do you remember this story?”

  At his name, he turns to look at her again, eyes cloudy. His hand goes to his mouth.

  Rosemary swallows. “You were the young man, Walter. You got on the airplane with our friend Melinda. You went to Guatemala to help her get her son. Do you remember any of this?”

  His hand travels up from his mouth to scratch his ear. “Jeremy?” he says.

  “Yes!” Rosemary feels a surge of hope. “Yes, Jeremy! Melinda’s son. Our godson. The two of you went to Guatemala to get him! Do you remember?”

  “He cried.” Walter shivers and hugs himself. “He kept crying, poor little boy. He didn’t know where he was. Too many strangers.” Walter’s weeping now himself, slow tears dripping down his furrowed cheeks, and Rosemary, stricken, knows that Walter is on a plane full of strangers, headed from a life he cannot recall to a destination he cannot imagine.

  She won’t tell him about Melinda. She can’t. It would be too cruel, after everything else he’s lost. If he ever remembers Melinda, let him remember her alive.

  6

  And what of Cosmos’s love life? He’s had various relationships over the run of the franchise. The most serious was with a nurse named Zeldine, whose work with pediatric AIDS patients he admired as much as she admired his own humanitarian efforts. They dated for a full year, but ultimately—as is so often true in real-life relationships—the very factors that pulled them together also pushed them apart. The more time they spent together, the more they felt they were neglecting their constituencies. Plans for romantic dinners, movie nights, or weekends away were invariably interrupted by crises. When they did manage to sneak off to get some alone time, they often discovered chaos waiting for them when they returned.

  At last Zeldine told Cosmos that they could no longer be together. “Each of us is already in a relationship. Our truest bond, even though it’s a negative one, is with the Emperor himself. That relationship began when we were born. It will end only when we die.”

  “Everyone’s in that relationship,” Cosmos said, weeping. He’d been thinking of proposing. He’d been looking at rings.

  He moved in to try to embrace Zeldine, but she held him at arms’ length, although her own eyes were brimming over. “Yes, my love. Everyone is. But you and I have the misfortune to recognize it. We have, in effect, already forsaken all others.”

  Cosmos’s breakup with Zeldine forced him to realize that his wistful fantasies of marriage and family were probably impossible. Charlie and Vanessa are a full-time job in themselves; so’s the work of being Comrade Number One. Just as some clergy take a vow of celibacy so they’ll have more platonic love to bestow on the entire world, so Cosmos must husband his energies to care for a family much larger and more various than any nuclear grouping of parents and children.

  Because he is human, sometimes he becomes bitter about this.

  Because his fans are human, they don’t accept it. Cosmos fanfic—as robust and varied as any devoted to Buffy, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter—features as a prominent subcategory the “how to date Cosmos” story, known as Cosmos Cosmo.

  Even within the series proper, Cosmos is an object of erotic fascination, and occasional obsession, for both women and men. He has received countless propositions and proposals, and has had to invoke several restraining orders. He and Roger sometimes pretend to be a gay couple to discourage would-be suitors, both Cosmos’s and Roger’s, since it turns out that a middle-aged librarian can pack an inappropriately erotic punch for a certain kind of geeky adolescent, especially one who has a Giles fixation from over-immersion in the Buffyverse.

  There is also, as any scholar of fanfic would expect, a thriving community of slash writers. Cosmos is most often paired with Roger, for obvious reasons; while readers are given no evidence that the Cosmos/Roger relationship is anything but platonic, fan writers seize on these charades and turn them into the real thing. But fanfic Cosmos has also had dalliances with the Emperor himself—as physically impossible as that would actually be—and, since many slash writers cross fandoms, with Harry, Dumbledore, Giles, Xander, Frodo, Legolas, and Gollum.

  Zeldine, meanwhile, has hooked up with Anelda (although this required a time-travel subplot), Hermione, and Galadriel, among others. More than one fanfic scholar has observed wryly that all this madcap dalliance is in itself a species of chaos, and that the Emperor blesses it. Fan writers don’t care. They make their own order.

  Repeatedly asked whether Cosmos will ever get to settle down and be happy, the CC Four have said only that they don’t believe this is possible while he’s still caring for Charlie and Vanessa. Afterward, who knows?

  The more thoughtful observers of the CCverse, both fannish and academic, tend to agree that he will probably never marry or settle into a fulfilling relationship. Cosmos has had the misfortune, or the grace, to face the void too steadily and too young. Like certain combat veterans, like many survivors of the disasters he has helped mend, he can never return fully to the sunlight, althoug
h he delights in it and is its champion.

  And there is surely more pain to come. The loss of Vanessa and Charlie, while inevitable, will undo Cosmos. In that darkness, only the Emperor will be visible, waiting at the end of all things, final partner and eternal companion.

  7

  A week and a day after the lunch at Hen’s house, Veronique sits in the family pew, at the front of the church, at Melinda’s funeral. Because the building gives her hives and she wants to be able to make a quick escape, she sits on the aisle. Jeremy’s next to her, with Rosemary sandwiched between him and Tom.

  Veronique wears a black suit she bought for this wretched occasion. She already owned black pumps. Walking in them, even the short distance from the car into church, made her remember why she never wears heels anymore. Her knee throbs.

  She hates being here. She hates being at Melinda’s funeral. She hates being stuffed into the suit. She hates being in a church. Melinda used to invite her to come, citing research claiming that people who are part of faith communities live longer, happier lives than those who aren’t.

  “It’s science!” Melinda said, laughing.

  “It’s social science,” said Veronique, “which means it’s pseudoscience.”

  She understands perfectly well that churches can be good support systems. But even were she a parishioner here, the keystone of that support would now be gone.

  Behind her, she hears a vast rustling punctuated by sobs. The small sanctuary is standing-room only, packed with parishioners, people from other local churches, library staff and patrons, Melinda’s neighbors, members of the adoptive-parent group she attended for several years, and curiosity seekers who’ve been following the story.

  Hen requested no recording equipment, but Veronique suspects that some of the strangers are reporters, or regular people sneaking in cameras to sell pictures to the news. Cell phones all have cameras, anyway. Veronique loathes all of this. She’s suffocating, and not just because the sanctuary’s unbearably hot. She’s sick of platitudes, of good behavior, of pious lies.

  None are the priest’s fault. Even Veronique recognizes her short sermon as a model of rhetorical tact, gracefully balancing mourning and hope, rage and redemption: honoring anger and grief while stressing the need for compassion. Before offering the mike to anyone who wishes to speak, she asks everyone to take a moment of silence to pray for Melinda’s murderer. “This is what Melinda would have done, and difficult as it may be, it is what our faith requires of us.”

  Maybe it’s what Melinda would have done, but Veronique couldn’t do it even if she were the praying type. She wonders how many people here can. She’s glad she can’t see anyone else’s face. She keeps remembering Tom’s account of identifying the body. He came to Rosemary’s house straight from the airport; Veronique was there organizing the photographs to be displayed at the service. Tom walked in without ringing the bell and asked for scotch, straight up, which he drank straight down. The fury on his face didn’t abate much after he emptied his glass.

  “Horrible. I’ll never forget it, and I won’t go into details, because neither of you needs those pictures in your head. Thank God Jeremy wasn’t there. Thank God he was okay with cremating her. No one should have had to look at that body. I shouldn’t have: they’d already identified her from dental records.” He raised the empty glass, looked at it, and put it down again with a sharp sigh, waving off Rosemary’s offer. “No. No more. I probably shouldn’t have had that much. All I can say is that the animal who killed her—”

  He stopped, pale. “No. I’ll stop now. That’s enough.”

  Melinda was cremated after he identified her, and he brought home the ashes. Veronique can’t imagine that trip. She doesn’t want to, and yet she finds herself compulsively trying. How can Tom tolerate his memories of the journey? How could he stand to carry that burden? Veronique knows from her parents’ deaths what a shockingly small space a cremated body occupies, and how unexpectedly heavy it is.

  Melinda’s urn sits on a pedestal in front of the altar. “So the service will have a focal point,” Rosemary said. It’s gray marble, understated and tasteful. Jeremy chose it. He asked that some of his mother’s ashes be put in the columbarium, with the rest to be divided between her garden and the Nevada desert, the vast expanses she’d loved. To Veronique, this seems the decision of someone older and wiser than the Jeremy she’s known. She’s heard that some events can make you grow up overnight. If that’s true, surely this is one of them.

  And now the priest’s asking them to pray for the animal who killed Melinda. Veronique wonders how many prayers run along the lines of, “Lord, please deliver this bastard to the police so they can fry him in boiling oil. Let him die in agony and burn in hell.”

  After that little exercise, the open mike is a relief. All kinds of people get up to talk. Some tell funny or moving stories about Melinda, but few are good storytellers, and Veronique finds her attention wandering. She tries to count clichés, but loses count after ten variations on: “It seems impossible that this little urn in front of us could hold anyone as beloved and huge-spirited as Melinda.”

  The woman currently at the mike is meandering on about how Melinda taught her how to garden. She’s in the middle of a complicated and heartfelt story about zucchini, but her voice is soft, and she isn’t speaking into the mike properly. Veronique wonders how many people can actually hear her.

  The priest stands to the left of the altar, ready to comfort anyone who breaks down or tactfully cut off anyone who rambles. People have been coming up to talk for half an hour now. There’s still a line, but Veronique hopes the priest won’t let many more speak. According to the bulletin, they still have to do the bread and wine bit, and depending on how many in the crowd participate, rather than staying in their seats to watch the quaint tribal rituals of practicing Christians, that could take a while. Veronique and Sarabeth once attended a wedding where the communion part of the service dragged on for forty-five minutes.

  Veronique opens her purse, extracts a notepad and pen, and scribbles a note to Rosemary, which she passes across Jeremy.

  How long will communion take? Are we here all day?

  Not all day. Relax. 4 communion teams, 2 f 2 b. I’m serving chalice.

  Things should go quickly, then. Good. Somewhat relieved, Veronique leans back and tries to pay attention to zucchini lady, but she’s stepping down from the mike. The priest steps forward. “Thank you all for these wonderful remembrances. I can see that many other people wish to speak, but I’d ask—”

  “Lemme talk!” A figure pushes its way from the back of the church, through the crowd standing behind the pews. A man, sloppily dressed and clearly drunk. “I gotta talk.”

  “Sir,” the priest says, “I’m sure Melinda’s family and friends would like to hear your thoughts—”

  “Oh, really?” mutters Veronique. Next to her, Jeremy groans.

  “—but we need to move on, so if you can wait until—”

  “Can’t wait,” the man says, and grabs the mike.

  Here we go, Veronique thinks. The nutcases are coming out of the woodwork. Tom stands up and signals to the priest. Nine fingers, one, one: Call the police? The priest shakes her head: wait.

  The man at the mike is oblivious to all this. “This is so sad,” he slurs. “Sad and horrible. I knew her: nice lady. She helped me look stuff up. Sure can’t pray for the shithead who killed her, though.” Veronique hears coughing, a few muffled gasps, some strangled laughter. Well, at least he isn’t being pious or polite. Good for him.

  But then he says, “Now, I’m no racist,” and Veronique’s heart sinks, and sure enough he’s off on a meandering rant against Mexicans, “all those illegals and dope dealers who just love to kill Americans. We should just close the borders. And Melinda’s family, you should sue Mexico. The whole damn government. Start a class-action suit. All the other people who’ve had family killed down there can join in.”

  The priest steps up to interrupt him,
but he waves her away with a glare and clutches the microphone. Tom’s on his cell phone. Veronique wonders why she didn’t see police cars in front of the church, but surely it won’t take them long to arrive.

  The drunk’s voice has risen. “Close the borders! All those illegals making too many babies, living off our welfare—”

  Not if they’re undocumented, they aren’t. Veronique sighs. Another failure of critical thinking.

  “—raping our women. No more killing Americans! We gotta—”

  Rosemary stands up, turns to face the congregation, and, in a surprisingly strong voice, starts singing. “In Christ there is no East or West.”

  Now the priest chimes in, cuing the organist. “In him no South or North.”

  Self-righteous idiots. The churchgoers are no better informed than the heckler, even if they’re more politically correct. Haven’t these people heard of the Crusades? But now others who know the hymn join the swell. “But one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth.”

  Right. One great fellowship of love. Melinda died of love? Do believers even think about what they sing?

  Throughout the sanctuary, though, there’s a great scrambling for hymnals and flipping of pages; by the end of the next verse, almost everyone in the church is singing. “Join hands disciples of the faith, whate’er your race may be! Who serves my Father as his child is surely kin to me.”

  As if no other faiths even exist. Typical arrogant Christian colonialist crap.

  Veronique, seething, wants to spit, to scream. How could Melinda stand this place? Melinda had a brain.

  At least the voices have drowned out Drunk Guy. If they hadn’t, the organ would have. The organist—Veronique remembers Melinda telling her that he’s a gay botanist—pulls out all the stops, playing the hymn with crashing bass notes and long vibratos, like an especially dramatic version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.