Undressing the Moon Read online

  “Wait,” I said, trying to find the words that would tether her, the ones that would hold her voice on the line. It felt like the times I had tried to hold water, the times I’d tried to hold sand. “I won’t tell. I won’t tell anyone,” I pleaded.

  But she was already gone.

  I was still lying in bed with the script to The Sound of Music dog-eared on my chest. I laid my head on my pillow and listened to the slow click and the dial tone on the other end of the line. Then I took the heavy receiver and hit my nightstand. The noise startled me, the loudness of resistance. I raised my arm again and pounded the phone against the wood until the varnish chipped. Until it stopped resisting, until the wood split. My voice didn’t belong to me. The sounds were primitive, coming from some subterranean place.

  When the phone rang again, I answered breathless, exhausted. “Mum?”

  “Piper?” Becca sounded confused. “Piper, did your mom call you?”

  “I … I was sleeping,” I said, stumbling, crying. “I was dreaming.”

  “It’s just me,” she said. “Are you okay? Do you need me to come over?”

  I went because of Becca, I went because watching her pick through the bin of winter coats that someone had just dropped off at Boo’s made me feel sad. When she found the long wool coat, the camel-colored one with furry cuffs, her face lit up, and she spun in circles in Boo’s driveway while Boo and I passed the cold basketball back and forth. I knew I couldn’t say no to her.

  So we went together after last period to the auditorium to wait for Mrs. Jasper and Mr. Hammer to let us inside. Lucy Applebee was leaning against the trophy case in the hallway, reading her script intently. She would look up and whisper her lines, and then look back down again. Serious. Important. She was going to be the nun who sings “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” to Maria.

  Melissa Ball showed up in her field hockey uniform. “I don’t know how I’m going to find the time for this,” she said loudly to anyone who would listen. “We’ve still got two more games and then playoffs.” She sighed and bent down to adjust her bleached white tube sock and knee pad. She was slated to be Louisa, the second-oldest girl.

  Mr. Hammer arrived then, a tattered leather bag flung over his shoulder, one shoe untied. His hair was mussed, like a boy’s. He smiled nervously at us. I felt shy suddenly, his embarrassment rubbing off on me. He fumbled with a ring of keys, trying three different ones before the door finally relented. He smiled weakly at us and held the door open, ushering us into the dark auditorium.

  He sat on the edge of the stage, and we all sat in the first row.

  “Today, I just want to read through the script. I just want to go through it once, to hear your voices. We won’t do the songs yet: we’ll get started on that next week.”

  Becca hadn’t taken her coat off, but she was perched at the edge of her seat, looking intently at Mr. Hammer. He was younger than a lot of our teachers. Most of them had been teaching at Quimby High for twenty years or more.

  “Mr. Hammer?” Melissa said, waving her hand frantically. “I have a game on Wednesday. I have to be there.”

  “Nick,” he said. “Please, after school you can all call me Nick.”

  Melissa looked confused. “But, Mr. Hammer, about the game?”

  “If you don’t feel that you have the time for rehearsals, we should talk later.”

  “But, Nick,” she said.

  “Later, please. Thank you.”

  It took only about an hour to read through the script, and then Mr. Hammer sent us home. When Becca and I left the auditorium, Melissa was talking to him quietly at the edge of the stage.

  We went outside to wait for Quinn, and Melissa came running up behind us.

  “Nice coat,” she said.

  Becca looked around first to see who Melissa was talking to and when she realized it was her, she smiled brightly, looking down at the coat. Her freckles were dark against her pink cheeks.

  “It’s exactly like one of mine that my mom just donated to charity,” Melissa said. “Funny. Just like it.”

  Becca’s smile faded.

  Melissa grinned wickedly and swung her duffle bag over her shoulder.

  “Fuck you,” I whispered.

  Becca hit me in the arm.

  “Excuse me?” Melissa said, her jaw dropping.

  “You heard me.” I felt my voice rising again, to the surface from the darkest places inside. “I said, fuck you.”

  “Girls?” Mr. Hammer said, emerging from the auditorium. “What’s going on here?”

  I felt my skin grow hot.

  “Nothing.” Melissa smiled. “I was just complimenting Becca on her coat.”

  Back at my house that night, while Becca and I read through the script again, Becca took off the coat and folded it neatly. She set it next to her on my bed, and as we read, she rubbed the furry cuffs between her fingers.

  Becca and I still play dress-up. After the surgery, and later after my hair began to thin and then fall out in my hands like feathers, she brought home bags and bags full of costumes. Loud and garish, but somehow the mountain of clothes and wigs on my bed made everything better.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m Diana Ross!” In a red dress, her red hair hidden inside a sleek black wig, Becca laughed until she had to run to the bathroom.

  I stuffed a bra with rolled-up stockings and became Marilyn Monroe, Dolly Parton, Madonna. The costumes were versatile. I could be anyone I wanted to be. I could be whole.

  She still dresses me. When I haven’t changed out of my flannel pajamas in a week, she’ll force me to get up and put on a pair of jeans, a clean T-shirt, and a necklace or a new barrette. She brushes the hair I have left, muttering under her breath when it fails to yield to her fingers. She helps me to wear the costume of someone who isn’t dying.

  Last night she brought home a straight blond wig, parted in the middle, and a black beret. “We’re going out,” she said.

  Within minutes, she had me dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and jeans, the blond wig perched on my head, secured with the black beret.

  “You look gorgeous!” she said. “Like a beatnik. No, no, like Twiggy!”

  And then we were in her car, headed to St. Johnsbury for the Chinese restaurant.

  Remarkably, the cancer has not affected my appetite. Especially now that I’ve stopped the chemo, the familiar waves of crippling nausea are gone. I ordered sweet-and-sour chicken and four egg rolls. The waitress didn’t bat an eye at my ensemble. Neither did the two guys who were eating in the booth by the window.

  When we left the restaurant Becca said, “Thank you for playing with me,” gesturing to the wig and my new beret.

  “Let’s not go home yet,” I said. “Let’s get a drink somewhere. Let’s go dancing.”

  “Really?” she asked, her eyes hopeful and sparkling.

  “Why not?”

  At the Lodge, the doorman took my ID and raised his eyebrows suspiciously. In the photo I was twenty-six years old, with long brown curly hair. I weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds. “This you?” he asked.

  I thought for a second about going into an explanation of how it came to this, about how my hair fell out so quickly I didn’t even have time to adjust to the idea of being bald. But before I could open my mouth, Becca said, “She’s in disguise.” And then softer, “Ex-boyfriend’s a stalker.”

  The doorman ushered us in, looking past us to the parking lot to see if we’d been followed.

  The music was loud, and the smoke was thick. Becca motioned toward the bar and I took one of the stools. Becca sat next to me and spun around to get a better view of the rest of the bar. I stared straight ahead, past the glasses and bottles, at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. It didn’t look anything like me. This girl was pretty. This girl was well.

  “I’ll have a beer, whatever you’ve got on special,” I said to the bartender.

  “Do you really think you should drink?” Becca whispered.

  “I’m fine. Let m
e live a little.”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging. “Hey, look at those guys over there. They’re the ones from the restaurant. They must have followed us here.”

  I turned around and saw the two men showing their IDs to the bouncer.

  The bartender set down my beer. But when I pressed the glass to my lips, I felt suddenly sadder than I had in a long time. The cold condensation on my glass, two cute guys looking at us from the doorway, and the simplicity of the twirling seat beneath me were suddenly overwhelming.

  “Do you feel like dancing? ’Cause we could ask them,” Becca said.

  And I realized she’d forgotten that we were only playing, that this wasn’t real. And for a minute I’d almost let myself forget, too. I looked at the blond girl in the mirror and my chest heaved.

  “I need to go home,” I said.

  Becca’s face fell, but she nodded. “Okay.”

  Outside it was snowing. Small white flakes descended in triangles of light beneath the street lamps. Becca twirled around with her tongue stuck out. The snow melted as soon as it touched her skin. It wasn’t even October yet; the snow wouldn’t last. I knew this, but it made me feel betrayed. It was too early. Winter wasn’t supposed to come yet. I wasn’t ready.

  It began with snow.

  The night before we were scheduled to start learning the songs for The Sound of Music, it began snowing. Quinn was beside himself. He hurried home from work that night with all the ingredients for lasagna. Neither one of us knew how to cook, but we busied ourselves in the kitchen with our mother’s cookbooks, mozzarella, mushrooms, and the unruly noodles. Sleep seemed suspicious. As I browned the ground beef in a skillet, he stared at me, cockeyed, in the kitchen doorway. Even after I tossed a handful of hamburger into his bowl, he looked at me as if I were up to something.

  “What, Sleepyhead?” I laughed and stirred the tomato sauce into the pan.

  After it came out of the oven, Quinn served up two big plates and we sat at the kitchen table watching the snow come down through the open curtains. He opened two bottles of beer and handed me one. I looked at him suspiciously, feeling the way Sleep must have felt when we offered him something other than his usual Purina, and Quinn shrugged.

  I’d never had anything to drink before, except for a glass of wine with Mum one rainy afternoon when nobody was home but us. It had made me feel warm and woozy. The beer did the same.

  “I’m going to make States this year,” Quinn said, staring out the window at the falling snow illuminated by the bare bulb on the porch. “If I get to States and place, I’ll get a scholarship to UVM.”

  Quinn had taught himself to ski. He bought a pair of used skis at a yard sale when he was twelve years old. Franklin didn’t have a chairlift yet, just a rope tow that went about a thousand yards up the face of the mountain, so as soon as snow fell, he would hike up with his skis and poles on his back and then ski down. Every weekend he hitchhiked to Jay Peak and spent all his extra money on lift tickets. While half of Vermont hibernated in winter, Quinn came to life.

  After dinner and after two beers had made me dizzy and silly, Quinn made a fire.

  “You want to hear something on the radio?” he asked, after getting nothing but snow on the TV.

  “Oh, oh,” I said, standing up too fast from the couch. I steadied myself with the armrest and laughed. “Oopsy.”

  “Piper,” Quinn reprimanded softly.

  “I’m fine. Let’s find Mum’s records,” I said. “She has the best ones.”

  Quinn looked worried when I started to pull on my jacket and boots and mittens.

  “They’re out in the shed. I’ll be right back.”

  The porch light made the fresh snow glow golden in the driveway. It was almost a shame to step on it. I looked at my footprints and thought they looked a little like an animal’s instead of a girl’s. When I got to the shed door I shivered. My hair was covered with snow, and the realization that I hadn’t been inside the shed since she left hit me like a falling icicle.

  I stamped my boots hard on the ground. When I pushed the heavy door open, I almost expected to see her there, sitting on the high stool where she worked, all the colors of today’s broken things in front of her. But when I pulled the shoestring cord attached to the light, the room was empty. The card catalogue of glass was covered in a film of sawdust, like everything else in these parts of the woods, and the area where she worked was tidy. I took my mittens off and ran my fingers across the makeshift countertop, hoping for a sliver to pierce my skin. But she had been careful to get rid of the pieces before she left.

  There was a pile of boxes in the corner. The milk crate where she kept her records was teetering on the top of the pile. Usually she kept it inside the house, but I remembered that she’d brought the record player into the shed that summer and had wanted the records near. When she left us, she left them there.

  I lifted the entire box off the stack, careful not to let any of the carelessly piled records slip out. I hurried out of the shed and back into the falling snow, turning off the light and closing the door behind me.

  In the house, I felt sober again. Either the cold or the trip into the shed had made the fuzzy edges sharp. Quinn was sitting in Daddy’s La-Z-Boy, his feet propped up and his arm behind his head. He sat up when I came in. I set the milk crate in the middle of the floor. There were a couple of records I wanted to find. I lifted each one carefully out of the box and shuffled through the stack, looking. Remembering. When I found the one I’d been looking for, the one with “Stormy Weather,” I held it up and said. “Quinn! Here it is! This is the one!” And I pulled the cold record out of the sleeve. But as I was looking to see which side the song was on the record snapped in my hands. It broke into two, perfect halves, and my palms stung from the impact.

  “Oh no!” I cried.

  Quinn got out of the chair and joined me on the floor. “It’s okay.”

  “God, Quinn, this is her favorite. She’ll be so mad.” My hand flew to my mouth then, with the understanding of what I’d said.

  “It’s okay, Piper,” Quinn said as I started to shiver. He put an awkward hand on my shoulder, and rubbed it gently. “It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. Alone in this house where a family used to live, I felt abandoned. Discarded. A secondhand sweater dropped off at Boo’s. Outgrown, old, soiled.

  I picked up one half of the shattered record and thought about the ragged edge, about whether it was sharp enough to cut. If it could cut, then there was proof that broken things can harm you. I squeezed my hand tightly, the sharp edge pressing into my palm. But when the skin broke and a small trickle of blood ran down my arm, Quinn grabbed my wrist, prying the record loose. He looked at me, afraid.

  “She’s not coming back, is she?” I asked him, my eyes blurry with tears.

  He shook his head no, let go of my hand, and turned to the window. “No, she’s not.” It was quiet here. Without music there was only the sound of snow.

  I swallowed hard and wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. “It’s okay. I’m fine,” I said, shrugging his hand off my shoulder when he reached for me again. “Really.”

  That night it kept snowing. I watched it through my window until I couldn’t tell if it was falling up or down. It looked like bits of white glass, and I thought Mum should have had a drawer for this, a drawer called Snow.

  In the morning I heard Quinn outside trying to start Mum’s car. It wouldn’t start, and it wouldn’t have mattered. The snowplows wouldn’t make it up to the Pond until noon. When Quinn crawled back into bed in his long johns and wool socks, cussing and muttering under his breath, I dressed for a long walk. I figured I could probably walk far enough or hitch a ride into town in time to get to second or third period, and I’d be certain not to miss rehearsals. I felt determined to get to school, as if my life depended on it.

  “Where you going?” Quinn’s voice came from his room.

  “School,” I said. “I’ll hitch. Wann
a come?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Taking the day off.”

  “Sure?” I asked again, pulling on my hat with the earflaps.

  “Sure.”

  I heaved my backpack onto my shoulders and headed into the cold morning. It was still snowing; the sky was completely white. When I stepped out onto the road, I could have been stepping into a cloud. It was two miles to Gormlaith and then another six miles to Hudson’s, the closest store and gas station. I figured I was bound to find somebody between here and there willing to give me a ride.

  I trudged through the new snow, going over my lines in my head. I had already memorized all of my own songs as well as the lyrics to all the others. In my room, when Quinn was still at work, I sang them softly, trying on my voice like someone else’s clothes.

  By the time I got to Gormlaith, I was covered in snow and numb. Not one car had passed me on the road. My cheeks were hot, and I couldn’t feel my toes. I thought about turning around, returning home and crawling into bed like Quinn, but I’d made it this far. I figured if I could walk for another mile there would have to be some traffic. Even if they weren’t headed into Quimby, they might be willing to give me a lift to where I was going.

  I walked past the McInnes camp with the tree house, past old Magoo Tucker’s, the Beans’ and the Hadleys’, and around the lake to the far end, where I found a cottage with a swing. The seat was heavy with snow. The stained-glass windows were edged in white. And remarkably, there was a car in the driveway, exhaust rising in white clouds from the tailpipe. I stopped walking and stared at the car in disbelief. I was cold and tired, and I figured I might as well go knock on the door and ask for a ride.

  But just as I was about to start up the slippery flagstone path, the screen door swung open and a man emerged, bundled up almost as much I was. He was staring at the ground, watching his feet, careful not to slip, as he walked to the car.

  “Excuse me,” I said. My voice startled me. I expected it to be as quiet as snow.

  His feet spun like wheels beneath him and I reached out to help steady him, but his arms quickly compensated for his loss of balance. Like a tightrope walker, he found his equilibrium again. He looked at me. “That was a close one. You startled me!”