Life on Other Moons Read online

Together, the man and woman rubbed her back.

  "Are you okay?" the woman said.

  The girl seemed not to understand. The man and woman looked at each other and frowned.

  "This isn’t normal," the man said. "We’ve ignored it way too long. She’s not going to magically get better."

  "So what, you think we should call a doctor?"

  "What else? We can’t keep ignoring the fact that she doesn’t really talk. We definitely can’t ignore this."

  He motioned toward the feces on the wall and floor—and on the girl’s legs—and then he shook his head.

  The woman reached into her pocket and produced a small cellular phone, and then she dialed. She answered questions when prompted. When she had made an appointment, she hung up the phone and put it back in her pocket.

  "There’s an opening tomorrow at nine," she said. "Someone canceled."

  He nodded. She nodded. They looked at the girl, who was silent and was now falling asleep on the floor. Long moments of silence ensued—long, thoughtful moments in which some form of clarity might have come to the man or woman but didn’t.

  Eventually the woman went to get a bucket of water and some soap, and while she cleaned the floor and walls, the man took care of the girl. When they were finished, they lay there until morning, the three of them snoring quietly on the clean bedroom floor.

  The clock read 8:55 a.m. when the man, woman, child, and bunny entered the waiting room at the doctor’s office. They sat down in chairs along the wall, with the girl in the middle. She made the bunny hop up and down on her lap. She smiled and then held the bunny to her chest.

  To the girl’s left sat the woman, reading a magazine, flipping back and forth through the pages. To the girl’s right, the man sat and bounced his feet. The girl did not seem to notice anything but the bunny on her lap, with its sewn hole at the top where the ear had gone missing. She ran her finger along the stitches.

  It was some time before a female nurse came out and called the girl’s name. When she did, the man and woman stood up and helped the girl out of her chair. She held on tight to the bunny, and as they crossed the threshold into the office area, the clock read 9:07 a.m.

  "I’m sorry to keep you waiting," the doctor said when they were finally in his office. "Were you here long?"

  "Not very," the man said.

  "Good," the doctor said, and he smiled. "Now then, what’s your name, little girl?"

  The girl said nothing. In fact, she acted as if she had also heard nothing.

  "That’s why we’re here," the man said, "among other things. First thing, she’s six years old, and she doesn’t really speak. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever once—"

  "Our daughter’s never said an intelligible word," the woman said. She closed her lips tightly.

  "I’m sorry to hear that," the doctor said. "What else?"

  The woman cleared her throat. "She smeared shit on her bedroom wall last night. Isn’t that a sign of autism?" Tears welled in her eyes but did not spill.

  The man glanced at the woman and then looked at the doctor. "What do you think it is, doctor?" he said. "What can we do?"

  "I can refer you to a specialist," the doctor said. "This is a behavior issue, which could be linked to any number of developmental concerns. Autism is just one. A specialist can run tests to figure it out. Just to warn you, there’s a long road ahead. A lot of progress has been made in the field, though. I’m optimistic you and your child will reap the benefits."

  From her chair between the man and woman, the girl sat quietly, hopping the bunny up and down on her lap. She seemed unaware that anything was being said, let alone that she herself was the subject of conversation.

  One night, the yellow bunny sat on the dinner table next to the girl, who was now seven years old. It had no ears. It rested among the salt and pepper shakers and the dishes of carrots and potatoes and pot roast and carrot cake. Although the bunny had faded in color, and the carrots were bright orange and therefore noticeable, it was the most regal object on the table. It commanded attention.

  "Is that thing still there?" the woman said.

  She stared at the bunny across the table.

  "When might it’ve left?" the man said. "She loves the thing, it’s not going anywhere." He shoveled the last of his food onto his fork and then ate it.

  "Do you ever regret buying it?" the woman said. Her plate was already clean.

  "No."

  The girl silently finished her carrots and reached for the carrot cake. She took a piece in her bare hand and set it on her plate.

  "Well, I do," the woman said. "I wish you’d never bought it. Most children outgrow their stuffed animals eventually."

  The girl took a large bite of carrot cake, almost too large to fit in her mouth. She looked at the bunny and smiled as she chewed.

  "Our daughter isn’t most children," the man said.

  The woman looked at the girl and then at the bunny. She reached across the table, struggling to grab the bunny, but instead, she knocked it to the floor.

  The girl swallowed her cake and looked down.

  "Bunny," she said, and she whimpered.

  The man and woman looked at her. They paused.

  On the floor, the bunny lay facedown. The man went to pick it up, and the woman followed. They each held part of it, gently rubbing the stitches on the top of its head, petting it, a hint of a smile on their lips as if they did not mind that it was there now—and never did.

  Fresh

  Louise was thirty-two years old and jobless in February 1969, when she found herself moving back into the twelve-room brownstone on Chester Street where she had grown up. She didn’t move because she was lonely or because she had been fired from her job or because she had already spent most of her trust fund on rare first editions of French novels, the ones she had been introduced to while in boarding school after her mother’s death. Louise moved home mostly because if she didn’t, there would be no one left to care for her sick father. She pitied him.

  Several times a week, while he lay on the hospital bed that had been installed in his bedroom, staring at the ceiling, she put needles into his bruised, pinpricked arms and flipped a switch. For a moment, she watched as an intricate network of long plastic tubes pumped his blood into an in-home dialysis machine, where the blood was cleaned and then returned to him.

  The procedure took about four hours. For several months, they went through it each time in silence. Louise sat in a leather easy chair next to her father and read her books. He stared at the wall opposite him. It was not until July that he spoke during the procedure for the first time.

  "What are you reading?" he said.

  His voice was soft and weary, but it startled her. Louise pulled her head out of her book to find him looking at the cover. It was a French edition of The Bride of the Sun by Gaston Leroux. She wondered how long he had been staring, squinting, trying to read the title without his glasses, which did nothing for his eyesight these days. Even if they did help, she knew he couldn’t read French.

  "Just an old book from school. You comfortable?"

  She had never asked him this before, and now the words felt strange on her lips. Was he comfortable? What a stupid question. She couldn’t imagine how he would be, lying there with needles in both arms.

  "Mostly," he said. "No less so than yesterday."

  "That’s good."

  She waited for him to say something else.

  "Well, I guess it’s about that time," she said at last.

  She sat the book in the chair and went to turn off the machine. She removed the needles, making sure blood didn’t spill everywhere. Her father drifted off while she was finishing her cleanup, so she left him to sleep.

  In her room that night, she read more from The Bride of the Sun. Though she had read the book in school, she had forgotten most of the plot. She was struck by the notion of sacrificing a female virgin to a sun god. To her, the moon was more feminine and, frankly, more allurin
g. Which was why, in two days, when astronauts landed on the moon for the first time, she would be watching the whole thing on TV. As Louise began to fall asleep with the book in her arms, she considered what it might look like for a woman to die for the cause of the moon. The last image she saw before she fell asleep was a naked woman anointed with mud, surrounded by men.

  The next day was not a dialysis day. Louise spent most of it in her room, finishing The Bride of the Sun. But she went out three times to make something for her father to eat—and once more, before bed, to check that he was still alive.

  That night in bed, Louise tried to prepare herself mentally for dialysis the following day. Life with her father now was not particularly tiring, but the sight of him on the bed, immobile, with tubes coming out of him, had been off-putting since the day she arrived back home. On the other hand, she was concerned and outraged that the sight of her father like this made her feel anything. When he sent her to school in another country, she learned to live without him. Now she was bothered that any part of her felt like it needed him to be well again. She went to sleep and dreamed he had died.

  The next day, Louise went about her daily routine: making breakfast for herself and her father, reading her French novels, and waiting for the time when she would have to hook her father up to a machine to clean his blood. Once the machine was running, she sat down in her easy chair and read for a while, leaving her father to stare at the ceiling. But today, she had a hard time concentrating on the book, and after a while, she set it aside.

  "Why did you send me away to France?" she said.

  Her father removed his gaze from the ceiling and looked at her. "What makes you ask that?"

  "Mom died, and you immediately sent me away. What was I supposed to think?"

  "I’d spent all my time working in insurance while your mother raised you," he said. "When she died, I didn’t know how to give you a real home on my own. So I sent you to someone who could."

  "I didn’t see you for four years."

  "And I still regret that. I should have visited, at least."

  "You didn’t speak French. You didn’t even learn it afterward."

  "I’m sorry, you’re right. There’s no excuse except that I really thought I was doing the right thing at the time; I know now that it wasn’t right. When you left, I cried for a week."

  "You never told me that."

  "There’s a lot I never told you. Do you know how I met your mother?"

  Louise shook her head.

  "It was raining one night. At the time, your mother drove a 1932 Nash convertible, and those things were a lot longer in the front than they were in the back. They were sort of top-heavy. But anyway, she was driving down close to the river and got stuck in the mud, and I was driving across the bridge and just saw the front of this car sticking up out of the ground. Looked like the earth was swallowing it whole. Then I saw that there was someone, your mother, still inside, and with the rain still coming down and the mud swallowing up the car, she was just filthy. She was covered from head to toe."

  He coughed violently, and Louise grabbed a tissue and handed it to him. He coughed again.

  "Do you want some water?" she asked.

  "No, I’m fine." He cleared his throat. "Where was I?"

  "Covered head to toe in mud."

  "Right. Well, she was covered, like I said, so I pulled over and ran down there to help her get out. By then, it was too late for the car. I reached for her hand and pulled. She jumped toward the embankment and rammed right into me. Fell right on top of me, and so I was covered now, too. We just sat there on the ground and laughed as her Nash went down in the mud. Eventually it went into the river and got swept away. We never saw it again."

  He smacked his lips.

  "Maybe I will take some water."

  Louise went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water at the sink. Through the window, she could just barely see the moon sitting underneath tree branches. In a matter of hours, if everything went smoothly, U.S. astronauts would be walking on it for the first time. But she was no longer interested in the moon. She went back to her father’s room and handed him the glass of water. He drank it. She took the glass and set it on the table next to him.

  "Your mother always liked to say I was her hero and I swept her off her feet," he said. "I think it was the other way around. She was stunning, even covered in mud, and—well, you remember: she was a petite little thing, and yet she just bowled me over. Well, look at that, I guess I do know a little French. Petite. Just don’t ask me how to spell it."

  Louise laughed. She could see tears in his eyes.

  "Thank you," she said. "Thank you for telling me all of this."

  "Can we start over? I’d like to get to know my daughter before I die."

  "I’d like that."

  Louise smiled. She realized she was standing right next to him, holding his hand, and she wondered how long she had been doing so. She checked the clock above her father’s bed and found it had been well over four hours since she had turned on the machine; the process was complete. Louise let go of his hand to turn off the machine. She grabbed his hand again.

  "Voilà," she said with a wink. "Fresh blood."

  This time, Louise did not leave her father alone after the session. Instead, she pulled the easy chair closer to him and sat down, and they talked late into the night about the one thing they had in common: the woman who had held them together, who, for fourteen years, had made their house as much of a home as it could be.

  King Henry on a Porch Swing

  You and the old lady have been bumbling around the home for weeks now in silence, unable to face each other. But one night, she corners you on the porch swing of your subconscious, your comfort place, and bitches at you about sex and Jersey and the day King Henry died, and how dare you ignore her? You want to get up and walk away, but you can’t. It’s your mind; she’s working in your space now.

  She speaks—not so much in logical, audible words as in an uncanny barrage of subconscious thoughts and complex concepts and questions, and her patented derision—about the child you didn’t want initially. About the way he had sat in his punkin seat, already holding up his own head, confidently, like a great king on his throne, and about the tiny shoes he had been wearing and the ease with which he could nap on the nape of your neck. And most of all, about how careless you had been. Oh, yes, she blames you. She speaks until you can’t stand it anymore, until, at last, words fly from your own mouth like balloons finally escaping the wrists of children.

  "Shut up, woman! Talking about King Henry on a porch swing won’t bring him back."

  You wake up, and her side of the bed is empty. The closet door is open, the light is on, and there is nothing inside.

  Life on Other Moons

  After the war, there was moon dust in their hair and on their faces, and there was moon dust in their lungs. The moonlings carried it with them in pockets—to the Sea of Tranquility and other places on their half of the moon, where there was nothing left after the bombing ended the war and broke the moon in two. The other half of the Sandystone Kingdom dangled there in space, waiting to be reclaimed.

  "Father," Alana said, "we have to send a rescue over there. It’s been days. There could be survivors."

  "With what resources?" the king said. "We have no way to get there, and even if we did, who would go? Me, I suppose?"

  "For starters."

  The king laughed from somewhere deep inside. It was the laugh not only of a king but also of an old man, a moonling of distinction.

  "But if I left, who would lead the people?" he said. "You, I suppose?"

  "Why not?"

  "You’re too young. It’s not protocol."

  "But you make the protocol. You’re the most powerful moonling alive. Especially now."

  Indeed, most of the moon’s population had perished in the blast and the fighting that had led up to it, and even Alana’s mother, the queen, had disappeared, though no one had managed to find
a body in the aftermath.

  "You still haven’t found her yet, have you?" she said.

  He shook his head. "There are other moonlings for me to worry about right now, the ones who are here and starving, barely surviving off the underground supply stores. But I know that our faithful Derek is looking for your mother night and day. If she’s out there, he’ll find her."

  "What if she’s stranded and dying on the other side?"

  "We both know she can make it on her own until we get to her. Try not to think about it so much."

  Alana nodded. With one hand, she gathered her long hair together as if to form a ponytail, and then she let it drape over her shoulder.

  "You look so much like her when you do that," the king said. "That hair. It was her defining characteristic, wasn’t it?"

  "You mean isn’t it."

  "Yes, let’s hope."

  He tried to smile, and Alana wiped some dust from his shoulder.

  "I feel useless," she said. "I’m going to see if I can help anyone."

  With that, she left the king to his thoughts. On her way past the Sea of Tranquility, which was now just a dried-up hole, she came upon Derek, and she smiled.

  "What news?" she said.

  "It’s not good, I’m afraid. Still nothing. Either she’s dead or she doesn’t want to be found."

  "I was afraid you’d say that. Guess there’s always tomorrow. Walk with me awhile?"

  "I could do that."

  He offered her his arm, and she took it. They walked in sweeping circles and zigzags through the rubble and the moon dust, toward nowhere, which was all there was. Along the way, they talked at length about recovery and civilization. Then, Derek brought up the topic of the population and how and when to begin rebuilding.

  "I think all the men need to be ready," he said. "A day’s going to come when we need to be well rested and ready to perform. If I’m telling the truth, I’ve already been practicing."

  He nudged her with his elbow.

  "How so?" she said.

  "Do you know the Silver sisters?"

  "You slept with them?"

  "Twice since the bomb went off. Twice each, in fact—and once at the same time."

  He laughed, and she pulled her arm away from his.

  "I didn’t know you’d been giving this so much thought," she said.

  "Just sex. Not much to think about."

  "I see."

  She took a step backward.

  "Good day, Derek. I believe Father requires my attention."

  She left him there by the sea. When she was far away, she sat down in her loneliness and cried. Her tears spilled into the moon dust and formed a small amount of thick paste in front of her. On each side of her face was a long streak of brown where the salty liquid had merged with dust. She breathed in spurts. The moon dust entered her lungs and made her cough, wildly and at length, until she forgot to cry.

  When her emotions settled, she stood up and wiped the tear streaks from her face. She went to find her father, as she had said she would. She found him at the edge, where the other half of the moon should have been. He was not alone. Several women, all with very long hair, had formed a queue nearby, and more were on the way, lining up behind one another.

  "What’s all this?" she said.