Undressing the Moon Read online

  I nodded, and he reached toward me again, pressing the soft inside of his wrist against my head.

  His smile faded into concern. “You’re burning up. I think you have a fever.”

  It was only then that I connected the vague pain over my eyes with the rivers of cold running down my shoulders. I’d thought it was only the music. When we stood, I was aware of how weak my legs felt. I feared that if I put my hands together to clap, they wouldn’t be strong enough to make sound.

  Mr. Hammer tugged gently on my sleeve and ushered me out past the noise into the warm lobby. And as we walked out into the cold night again, into freezing rain and ice, I felt something familiar. Illness. Flu.

  “We need to get you home,” Mr. Hammer said. He looked worried as he helped me down the slippery steps onto the sidewalk. “I’m worried about the roads, though.”

  When we crossed the road to the car, my feet spun underneath me, and he caught me just as I was about to fall. After I regained my balance, he looked out at the icy street illuminated by the streetlights and headlights, his eyebrows furrowed with worry.

  “We may need to wait until morning,” he said. “It’s glare ice.”

  My heart was pounding hard from the near fall, and I thought immediately of Quinn. “You mean stay here?” I asked. Quinn would be furious. He would make me quit my lessons. He might even make me quit the play. “I really need to go home,” I said.

  “My sister lives in Shelburne. It’s just a couple of miles from here. Piper, I’m really worried about driving all the way back. Could you call home?”

  Quinn would have to understand. He’d been stuck before. It happens in Vermont.

  I called from a pay phone at a gas station. I closed the door so that Mr. Hammer wouldn’t have to listen to me arguing with Quinn.

  “The roads are terrible,” I said.

  “It’s fine here,” he said. He was pacing. I could hear his boots on the linoleum.

  “You’re ninety miles away,” I said. “It’s freezing rain, and I’m sick.” I was starting to cry. Part of me wanted to be at the other end of the phone right now. Lying in my own bed.

  “Get his sister’s name and phone number,” Quinn said.

  I opened up the door and ran to Mr. Hammer’s car, leaving the phone hanging by its cord. I asked him for her name and number, and he scribbled them on the gas receipt.

  “Make him buy you some aspirin and some orange juice. I want you home by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. You tell him that. And I’m calling his sister in an hour to make sure you’re there.”

  I nodded, because the pain behind my eyes was growing too strong to argue.

  “I love you, Piper. Just be safe.” He paused. “Can I talk to him?”

  My heart sank. But I motioned for Mr. Hammer to come to the phone, and I went back to the car. From the passenger seat, I could see him nodding and talking. It didn’t look as if Quinn was yelling at him.

  Mr. Hammer’s sister lived in a little white house; a boat covered with a blue tarp was parked in the driveway. The rain and hail bounced off the tarp in strange rhythms. His sister didn’t look anything like him. She had soft blond curly hair, and she was little, like Becca.

  By the time she had ushered us into her kitchen, I could feel my fever like hot ice. While Mr. Hammer made some tea, she took me into her room and gave me an armload of warm clothes to change into. The lights in the bathroom hurt my eyes, so I changed in the dark, shaking so hard I could barely pull on the wool socks she had given me.

  She returned with aspirin and a cup of tea and steered me into a guest room, where she helped me into a tiny bed, covering me with blankets.

  “It’s okay, honey,” she said. “Everything’s going to be fine. Nick will be in the living room if you need him, and my room is right down the hall. We’ll get you home tomorrow.”

  I nodded.

  Mr. Hammer was standing in the doorway, his tie loosened. It looked like a red Christmas ribbon, unfurled.

  His sister left the room and Mr. Hammer came over to the side of the bed. He crouched down so he was at my level.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I felt suddenly overcome with guilt and embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to get sick.” My throat was thick.

  “Shhh,” he said, leaning forward and kissing my forehead. The kiss was warm and soft. Like a flower, I thought. Like summertime. But he moved away from me as if my fever had blistered his lips. “I’m sorry. Feel better,” he mumbled and he hurried out the door. I closed my eyes and thought about summertime, my fever transformed into the simple heat of sun on my face.

  I fell asleep to the hushed sounds of their voices rising and falling outside my door. I woke up once in the middle of the night, the music in my head so loud it had crashed through my dreams and into the quiet room. But when I opened my mouth to call out for someone to come, my own voice was gone.

  Becca and I went to the Quimby Atheneum to do some Internet research about bone marrow transplant facilities. My oncologist had suggested traveling all the way to Seattle for the procedure, and Becca wanted to see if there might be someplace closer. I wasn’t even sure if my insurance company would pay for any of this, but I told her we could look anyway.

  It’s so hard to imagine going through all of this again. The idea behind the transplant is that if the healthy cells are harvested prior to treatment, even higher doses of chemotherapy can be administered to—the doctors hope—eradicate the cancer, and then the healthy marrow can be put back inside the body. The thought of drugs more potent than the ones that had almost crippled me with nausea three times before is terrifying. I’d taken the antinausea drugs, changed my diet, even bought a half ounce of weed from a shaggy kid outside Quimby High. Nothing had helped.

  But I have been having more and more difficulty breathing lately, and the pain in my legs and hips has become so intense, it snubs its nose at my painkillers. And the procedure makes sense logically. It really does. I think at night about a body without cancer. I think about living without pain for a little longer.

  It was a brisk day. Becca parked in the library parking lot and held onto my arm so I wouldn’t slip on the ice. I felt like an old lady, so terrified of breaking a hip.

  “You know, back when I was a kid, we didn’t have books,” I said in my best old-lady voice.

  “You’re crooked,” Becca said, reaching to straighten the blond wig. It has become my favorite lately.

  Inside the library, Becca dragged one of the comfortable overstuffed chairs over to the computer table and sat me down in it. “You know how to go online?” she asked.

  “Back when I was a kid,” I started, “a mouse was a little furry thing.”

  “Oh, hush,” she said.

  I’d made a list of things I wanted to check. An online wholesale fabric supplier; eBay for antique buttons and lace. I’d told the widow-bride I’d look for something blue to sew into the dress, and I thought a sapphire button might be perfect. While Becca researched transplant facilities in Seattle and Baltimore and Boston, I looked at silks from India and Paris. Asian mail-order brides. Antique toys from my childhood, and gay porn.

  “What are you doing?” Becca asked, looking at my screen. Two men in leather thongs embraced glamorously. Amorously. “Jesus, Piper,” she said. “Come see.”

  She was on the home page for the facility in Seattle that my doctor had recommended. Her notepad was covered with scribbled notes.

  “I’ve never been to Seattle,” she said. “We could go to the top of the Space Needle! There’s a restaurant up there. We could go to the place where they throw those big fish at you.”

  I’d been afraid of this. I’d known she would try to do too much. “Becca, you’ve got school.”

  She looked at me blankly. “I’ll take a leave of absence. It would only be for a month or so.”

  She sat back down at the computer, her eyes glistening in the light from the screen.

  “We could
become rock stars,” I said softly.

  “Drink lattes all day.” She smiled.

  Becca returned to her research, printing out information about lodging for patients’ families, street maps, and airfare bargains. While she clicked and scrolled and printed, I found a site that lets you locate anyone. And while she was busy with the Seattle chamber of commerce, I typed, “Nick Hammer.”

  Christmas morning, I woke up to the smell of French toast, a remote but familiar smell. I went into the kitchen and Quinn was standing over a frying pan with a dripping piece of bread. “French toad!” he said. That was what he called it when he was a little boy. Every time Mum made breakfast, he asked for French toad. Sometimes she’d even put green food coloring in the eggs and milk.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said, hugging him from behind. I stayed like that, my face pressed to his back as he flipped the sweet-smelling toast. Vanilla and cinnamon. He made me scrambled eggs with cream cheese, and let me have some coffee.

  My flu was finally completely gone. The cough had lingered for two weeks but I was finally able to sleep through the night. Quinn still made sure I drank a whole glass of orange juice and swallowed two chalky vitamins every morning.

  He had brought home a little tree from the place in the parking lot outside the Shop-N-Save. Together we had strung popcorn and cranberries. Neither one of us wanted to go through Mum’s boxes in the shed. Besides, the tree looked pretty without too much junk on it: just some green lights and a silver star I made from straws and tinfoil. I had asked Quinn to bring home some empty boxes, and I wrapped them up like presents, trying to make it look more like Christmas. But this morning there were some new boxes, ones I hadn’t wrapped, underneath the tree.

  Two were from Daddy, though the labels said, “From: Daddy, Roxanne, and Jake.” Boo had also dropped off presents. She put one in the branches of the tree; that one said, “To: Piper / From: Mum.” I thought about leaving it there, stuck in the branches, perched like a strange and colorful bird. Maybe after Christmas, when we brought the tree to the dump, the box would take flight, rise out of the branches in a flutter of red and green and gold.

  I ran into the bedroom to get the present I’d gotten for Quinn and said, “You first.”

  He sat down on the couch and tore the paper off. I had been saving a little bit of the money Daddy gave us every week so I could get it for him. It was one of the expensive ski sweaters that everyone else on the team had. He was always embarrassed by his one lumpy gray pullover. I knew that. This one was navy blue, with a red stripe across the chest. He pulled it on over his head and looked down at it.

  “I love it. It’s perfect.” He motioned for me to hug him.

  “Can I have your old one?”

  “What for?” he asked.

  “I like the way it smells.”

  I unwrapped Quinn’s present, and it was really two presents. An Etta James album and the Billie Holiday record of Mum’s that I’d broken. “Thank you,” I said, feeling grateful and sad at the same time.

  Boo gave us each a pair of slippers and some bubble bath for me. It was the same kind Mum used, the kind that looked like a champagne bottle. Daddy sent some long johns and socks for Quinn. He gave me a Whitman’s Sampler and a Storybook box of Life Savers. I cracked the cellophane, took out the roll of Butter Rum, and offered Quinn one.

  Mum had sent Quinn a ski hat. It even matched his new sweater, as if she had spied on me staring at the rows and rows of choices at the ski shop in Quimby. He paraded across the living room floor in both and then reached into the branches of the tree for Mum’s gift to me.

  “Here,” he said.

  I held the box in my hand as if it really were an exotic bird, afraid and fascinated by it at the same time. I unwrapped the paper, thinking of feathers. Inside the little box, underneath a square of cotton, was a necklace, a silver chain so thin it could have been a silver thread. And hanging from the chain, edged in a silver braid, was a perfectly square piece of blue glass.

  The first time we went hunting, I was eleven years old. It was spring, and my mother and I were trespassing.

  I used to believe that the world was made of mud. That’s what Daddy always said in springtime. The road to our house turned into a thick river of it when the last of the snow finally melted. The banks of the Pond were stinky with it. There was no way to stay clean if you were a kid. I had two sets of clothes: school clothes and mud clothes. Even Sleep was perpetually filthy; his coat turned from golden to a dark, sticky brown in the spring.

  But there was something else about spring. Something clean. It descended on us like a slow kiss. Winter always threatened permanence. The sun would tease us with brief appearances in March and April, but then the gray skies would inevitably return, and the mercury would drop again. Spring sunshine was honest.

  Quinn hated spring. He’d keep hiking up the mountain well into May, looking for patches of snow that had escaped the sun. When everything had melted, he still kept looking. He’d come home tired and frustrated, his boots filthy. All that mud was like a personal insult from God.

  Daddy was working at the gas station that year. His job at the dump didn’t start until June. He had to work the early shift, and he worked doubles a lot. Sometimes he’d be gone from the time I woke up until the time I fell asleep. Our whole house smelled like gasoline when he came home and peeled off his gray spaceman suit. That smell wound its way into my dreams.

  This is the way I remember spring: gasoline and sunshine and mud, mud, mud.

  Mum and I loved spring. We’d sit on the back porch with our dirty feet up on the railing, roll up the sleeves of our T-shirts, and let the cold sunshine settle on our shoulders. She’d fill a Tupperware bowl with grapes, the red ones with seeds, and we’d sit out there for hours, sucking the skins off and spitting the seeds into the muddy driveway.

  Mum liked to walk to Gormlaith in the spring, even though the roads were muddy. We’d put on our winter boots and set out like explorers. Mum always acted like a tour guide, like the lady who worked at the Planetarium in Quimby, pointing out things along the way. Raspberry bushes and beaver dams could have been Orion and Cassiopeia, for all her wonder. When we got to the lake, she liked to make up stories about the people who lived at the camps. She said that the tree house at the McInnes camp was built especially for one of Gussy and Frank McInnes’s granddaughters, the smallest one who looked like a little elf. Her name was Effie, which sounded just like a fairytale name to me. Mum said that everything inside the tree house was made her size. A little bed and little desk. Little books to read and a little teapot. I would have crawled up the rope ladder that was hanging there, but in the spring, the path was thick with mud.

  She told me about old Magoo in the next camp down, how he couldn’t see anything except at night. That he was blind during the day, bumping into things if he left his familiar house, but that at night his vision was restored. I pictured him wandering around the lake at night, the sky illuminated only by fireflies. I wondered how someone could live backward like that.

  As we walked the long way around the lake, she fabricated lives for all the camp’s inhabitants. Her favorite cabin, though, was the one with stained-glass windows, the one that looked like the house in “Hansel and Gretel.” She didn’t even need to make up stories about that one. The first time we went there, I felt I’d stepped into one of my books. I felt illustrated. Unreal. I remember her looking at those windows, at the way the spring sunlight caught in all the impossible colors.

  At the boat access area, we sat down on two of the boulders that sat in the shallows. The edges of the water were filmy; parts of the lake were still frozen.

  “I would love to see the ocean,” she said, staring toward the center of the still lake. “I never have.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve heard that in California, you can look out at the ocean and on a still day you can see all the way to Japan. What do you think it looks like?” she asked.

  “California?” />
  “No. Japan.”

  California was as foreign to me as Japan was. I shrugged. It scared me when she started wondering about other places. Once on a hot summer day, she showed me a picture of Alaska. She said that there’s a time of year in Alaska when the sun never sets, a time when it’s always day.

  She slipped off one of her boots and unrolled her sock.

  “Mum, the water’s still frozen,” I said.

  But she let her toes touch anyway, slowly the way she’d tested my bathwater for me when I was little. She let them dangle there until I said, “Mum, you’ll get frostbite. Hypothermia.” I felt panicked.

  She pulled her foot out and looked at it. Then she rolled her sock back on and laced up her boot.

  “Let’s go,” she said, hopping off the rock. She pulled my hand and I jumped off my rock, too.

  I followed her down the muddy road toward the far side of the lake. When we got to the wooden gate with the “No Trespassing” sign, I reluctantly followed her as she ducked and went through the opening in the split-rail fence.

  It was an old logging road, even muddier and ruttier than the road to the Pond. My boots were completely covered with mud.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” I said, nervous. I’d heard stories abour people getting shot for trespassing.

  “Come on,” she said, and I followed.

  The woods were deep and green. We went so far in that it started to seem we were going backward in time, backward through the seasons. It was still winter this deep in the woods. Some of the tree branches were still burdened with snow.

  Finally, we came to a clearing, where the sun was touching the cold brown grass. I stepped into the sunlight and let it warm my shoulders, which were stiff with the cold. There was a little wooden shed in the clearing; it looked like an abandoned sugar shack.

  Mum smiled and pointed to the building. The wood looked rotten. The door had fallen off the hinges. “Boo and I used to play here when we were little girls,” she said. “Come inside.”

  Inside, the shack was remarkably dry and warm. I swore to her I could smell maple syrup. And instead of telling me that all the trees on this patch of land had been tapped out years before, she said, “I smell it, too.”