Undressing the Moon Page 7

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Quite all right.” He smiled and pulled his hood down. It was Mr. Hammer.

  “Oh, hi!” I said. “Mr. Hammer, I didn’t know you lived here.”

  He looked confused, and I felt my cheeks growing warm; all of me, in fact, felt like steam.

  “It’s me, Piper,” I said, pulling off my own hat. I could hear the static electricity in the ends of my hair.

  “Oh, Piper. I couldn’t even see your face! What are you doing here?” He still looked startled.

  “I live up at the Pond,” I said by way of explanation. “My brother’s car wouldn’t start.”

  “So you’re walking?”

  “I was hoping to hitch a ride,” I said, sticking up my mittened thumb.

  “Well, hop on in,” he said, motioning to the rusty Volvo.

  “Are you sure?”

  “We’re headed in the same direction, aren’t we?” He laughed and opened the passenger door for me.

  I got into the front seat and snow fell all around me. The vents blew hot air, and the white crystals immediately melted, making everything wet. Mr. Hammer got in the driver’s side. “Well, then. Off we go.”

  It was warm inside the car, and he smelled like coffee and snow. It was the warmest I had felt in a long time. I unzipped my coat and unwrapped my scarf. He turned the radio on to the public radio station out of St. Johnsbury, and tapped his gloved fingers on the dashboard along with the violin concerto.

  “Do you plan to study music in college?” he asked, turning to me. His eyes were wide and interested.

  I had been thinking about Rolf, and whether I would have to kiss him.

  “Music?” I asked.

  “Music,” he said. “Voice?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about college, really. I’m only a freshman.” I took off my mittens and put them in my lap. I looked down at my knuckles, at my torn-up cuticles, and put the mittens back on again.

  “But your voice …” he said, still looking at me instead of the road.

  “What?” I said and then gasped despite myself as we caught a bit of ice and fishtailed.

  He grabbed the wheel tightly, correcting, and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We’re okay. There we go.” He looked back at me sheepishly. “It’s just rare, you know. To have such a mature voice at your age.”

  I blushed at mature. “Thanks,” I said, shrugging.

  “I would have chosen you to play Maria,” he said, looking away from the road again. “But Charlene Applebee’s husband, Mr. Applebee is—how do I say this?—funding the production. Please, that’s between us, but I wanted you to know that I really believe you have a gift.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, incredulously. “He bought them the parts?”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said, shaking his head. “I always do that. Me and my big mouth.”

  “I won’t say anything,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s just … girls like that. Melissa and Lucy …”

  “I know.” He nodded. “I know. Trust me.”

  When we pulled into the parking lot at school, I gathered my things and bundled myself back up again. “Hey, thanks,” I said and reached out my hand, awkwardly to shake his.

  “Any time.” He smiled and shook my hand. “What are neighbors for?”

  That afternoon as I sang, I thought mature and rare. I also thought about the smell of snow.

  I am conscious of the seasons now as I never used to be. Each season that passes feels like a small miracle. The seasons make me feel as if I am moving in circles instead of forward. I’ve made almost three circles since I found out I was sick. Three springs, three summers, three autumns, and two winters. It is nearing winter again, and I worry that that will make things complete. My body knows this.

  I moved into my apartment in Quimby because of the view from the living room. It’s on the top floor of one of the old mansions on the park; the windows in the living room face a careful maze of maples that, in autumn, turn fifty-two shades of red. You can’t even see the bandstand in the center of the park for all the crimson. From my sewing table in the window, I watch for the clues that signify a change in the seasons. The mud and puddles of spring, the thick haze and dew of summer, the collage of autumn colors. Now I am waiting for the leaves to fall and leave the cold branches exposed like bones. Every day, I pull back the curtains, turn on the sewing machine, and look to the leaves for evidence that time is passing and that I am moving forward with it.

  I can also see Melissa Ball’s old house and the house where Lucy Applebee’s family used to live. Most of these houses have been turned into apartments now. As single-family houses, they had five, sometimes six bedrooms. No one seems to need as much space anymore. It’s just not efficient. I am grateful for the divisions made in this house. I have all the space I need in my attic apartment: a room I painted the color of sun-bleached bricks to sleep in, a little kitchen with bright yellow linoleum and a painted tile countertop, a bathroom with a clawfoot tub deep enough to drown in, and a living room where I can watch the colors of the seasons in the tops of the trees. My rent is cheap, and Bog has a warm place to lie in front of the gas fireplace.

  Over the last five years, I have watched the little park, Quimby’s hub, from these windows. It’s like watching a clock. If you look too closely, you won’t see time pass, but if you glance away, when you look back again the hands will have moved.

  Not much changes, except the way the town girls dress. I watched them all summer during the Wednesday-night band concerts, huddled in groups of three or four by the stone fountain, their skin white in the glow of the soft street lamps that illuminate the park. I watched the boys too, pretending only to be passing through the park on their way somewhere else. Hands shoved into their front pockets, long hair hanging in their eyes. Only the way the town girls dress has changed. When last summer ended and the leaves turned from green to gold and red, filling my window with autumnal fire, through the flames I watched old ladies in pairs walk to and from the Quimby Atheneum, their shopping bags filled with books. I watched Casper pick up imaginary bottles from the cold ground and put them in the shopping cart he stole from the Shop-N-Save. I watched mothers with their babies, bundled against the chill of September and then October. I’ve lived in this little corner of the world my entire life, and the way the town girls dress is the only thing that has changed.

  I am on the verge of winter. I can smell it through the cracks in the woodwork around my windows.

  Daddy came home one night near the end of November with a black eye and thirteen purple stitches in his cheek. He stood in the doorway like an apparition, holding onto the frame with the transparent hands of a ghost.

  “Jesus,” Quinn said, looking up from his skis, which he was waxing in the middle of the living room floor. “What happened to you?”

  “Got into it with someone down at the Lodge,” he said, taking off his cap and tossing it on the kitchen table.

  I stared down at my math homework. But the numbers swam across the page. I looked up at Daddy and saw him wince as he leaned into the fridge.

  “A customer?” I asked.

  “Mmm,” Daddy said behind the refrigerator door.

  Neither Quinn nor I seemed to know what to do with Daddy in the house. We’d gotten used to his absence by then. Having him home felt wrong, like company you don’t really want. But neither one of us asked him what he’d come home for. Not then and not later, not when Daddy made himself a sandwich and not after Quinn had ruined our only iron pressing hot wax onto the bottom of his skis. We just pretended it was perfectly normal for Daddy to disappear into the bathroom and run the water so hot that steam poured out from under the door.

  But I didn’t sleep that night, not with that stranger in our house. Instead I stayed awake and listened to him whispering into the phone in the kitchen. I sat with my back against my closed door and listened for clues. Maybe I fell asleep sitting there, and maybe
it was a dream, but I swear I heard him crying.

  Daddy stayed only one more night, and then he started staying in town again with Roxanne.

  In English class, I kept staring at the back of Jake’s neck. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I tapped on his thick shoulder. He turned around and looked at me, confused. We’d never spoken.

  “Hey,” I said, flushing red.

  “Hey.”

  “I was just wondering … you know, my dad and your mom …”

  “What about ’em?” he asked. His breath smelled like chewing tobacco.

  “I was just wondering if you might know what’s going on.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and suddenly I didn’t. “Forget it.”

  “Sure,” he said, and turned back around. His best friend, Gopher, leaned over to whisper something into Jake’s ear. They both looked back at me and laughed.

  Later, Becca and I were sitting on the bleachers after school, waiting for rehearsals to start, and I overheard Gopher telling one of the other football players, “Jake’s mom beat the crap out of that guy. Sent him to the hospital. No shit. Now his daughter’s got the hots for Jake.”

  When I was eleven years old, a boy named Monty moved into a house down the road from us. Because we were neighbors and because he was two years older than I, Mum thought it would be a good idea if we walked home from the bus stop together. Monty had a glass eye. I thought that was the most fascinating thing in the world. He told me that his brother shot the real one out with a BB gun. On purpose. I’d met his brother, and I believed it.

  Monty and I got to be friends on those long walks back to the Pond from Gormlaith. The school bus didn’t go as far as the Pond. The roads were bad; they caused too much wear and tear on the town’s only bus. He took out his glass eye and let me hold it in the palm of my hand. I remember thinking that it felt exactly like a cold marble. I showed him the pale scar I had on my stomach from the time my appendix almost burst. We shared stories of gore and horror the way we shared our lunches. He always had Devil Dogs he was willing to give up for my mother’s homemade oatmeal cookies.

  When it started to get cold and the roads turned black with ice, Monty took to shoving me down. He’d wait until I wasn’t expecting it, and then he would run from behind me and push as hard as he could. I split my lip twice and scuffed my chin. Pretty soon he couldn’t sneak up on me anymore because I was always waiting for the next attack.

  The stories he told me became more and more gruesome. He told me about the time he blew up fifteen toads with his brother’s fireworks. About how he threw up in the snow once and then his dog ate the frozen vomit. I made up stories to match his. But mine were always about blood.

  One afternoon, instead of walking me home first, he said, “Let’s go to my house,” and pulled me by the hand until my arm felt as if it might come out of its socket. He dragged me behind the small house to the barn in the back and threw open the door. Hanging from the rafters was a newly killed buck. There was ice around its eyes.

  “My brother got him this morning before school.”

  I swallowed hard and tried not to see the deer’s eyes. They looked like glass.

  “You ever seen one before?”

  “’Course,” I said. But I’d really only seen them thrown in the backs of passing pickups. Daddy didn’t hunt.

  “Then you probably seen one split down the middle, too, huh?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He smiled in his crooked way and reached into his pocket, pulling out a Swiss Army knife. I knew he didn’t know what he was doing, and that his brother would probably kill him when he saw the damage he’d done, but I didn’t stop him as he poked the knife tentatively at the deer’s exposed belly. I forced my eyes to stay wide open when he sawed away at the animal’s tough skin and didn’t hold my nose when the smell of the steaming insides hit me.

  Monty beamed at me.

  “Big deal.” I shrugged.

  Then he slipped his hand into the pocket-sized hole he’d made, and it took everything I had not to gag. A few seconds later, stifling his own retches, he pulled something brown and wet out of the deer and held it in front of my nose.

  “The heart,” he said, though it was probably the liver. And I knew then and there that love was a violent thing.

  The next time Daddy came home blue with bruises and anxious with shame, I closed myself in the bathroom and would not come out.

  “Piper,” he pleaded through the door.

  I sat on the toilet and stared out the window at the red plastic hummingbird feeder my mother had hung from one of the birch trees. The sugar water was gone and the red had faded to pink in the sun.

  “Come on, honey, please let me in,” he said. He sounded pathetic; my throat was thick. I felt sorry for him. I hated him.

  Outside, the ground was brown; sun had melted most of that pristine snow from the first storm, leaving only dirty piles of it in the places protected by shade. Sleep was outside, hitched on his run. He paced back and forth, stopping at each end when the chain caught short and choked him. Daddy had made him go outside after he found a pair of his shoes chewed up, even though Sleep had done it over a month earlier.

  I tapped my fingers against the window, trying to get Sleep’s attention. As soon as Daddy left, I would let him in again.

  “Piper, let me in right now.”

  “Why?” I asked. My voice startled me. I hadn’t planned on speaking to him.

  “Because,” he said, “I’m your father, and I told you to. Now open it.” He sounded angry now.

  “Fine,” I said, standing up and unlocking the door.

  He stood in the doorway, his right cheek puffy. Scratches like thin red rivers ran across his neck. He looked at me for consolation, and I felt something like thunder welling up inside me.

  “Honey, help Daddy find the Bactine,” he said softly.

  I thought of skinned knees and bumped elbows, my mother’s hands working to open the wrappers of a Band-Aid. I’d sat on the toilet in the bathroom, crying through gravel-riddled palms and bumps on my head. Mum would know what to do about Daddy’s scratches and bruises. She’d be able to make Roxanne’s handprints disappear from his cheeks. But then again, if she were here, none of this would be happening.

  Daddy came into the bathroom and moved toward the medicine cabinet and I lunged into him with every ounce of strength I had. He stumbled back, surprised, and braced himself in the doorway. I pounded my fists against his chest, alarmed by how thin he was. I could feel his ribs, sharp and hard. Tears ran hot down my cheeks.

  “Piper, stop it. Stop.” He sounded like a boy. It made me want to hit him harder.

  I kept hitting him until my shoulders ached and he was holding me up.

  He looked at me, confused and sad, and I pulled away from him with one last burst of energy.

  “How could you?” I screamed.

  He turned to face me, standing in the middle of the kitchen. The floor was cold under my bare feet. “How could you be with her?” I asked.

  But instead of defending himself, instead of explaining away the fine scratches that looked like a map from his chin to his chest, he just stood there, his shoulders falling forward. He lowered his head, and I stomped my feet on the kitchen floor the way I used to when I was little and mad and thought that making noise would force people to listen.

  But he offered me nothing, not one word.

  “Your mother is gone,” he said after a long silence. “She left me.”

  “You made her go. You made her leave!” I yelled; my throat was hoarse. I didn’t sound like myself. The voice that came out of me was like flames, burning everything it touched. “All of this is your fault. And I’m glad.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes wide and terrified.

  “I’m glad you let her beat the shit out of you. You deserve it.”

  Daddy slowly took his jacket off the back of the chair at the kitchen table and p
ulled it on. He reached into the pocket and took out his wallet and opened it up. He pulled out two twenty-dollar bills, all the money he had, and held it out to me.

  “You’ll be needing to get some new boots.”

  I crossed my arms and left him standing there with his arm extended. He set the money down on the table between us and then turned to the door.

  After he was gone, after my heart had slowed back down to its normal pace, leaving only an echo of the pounding in my chest, I pulled on my old boots, too small and with bald soles, and went out to the backyard, where Sleep was still pacing. Trying not to slip on the icy ground, I unhooked him from the run and grabbed onto his collar when he tried to bolt. “Come on,” I said. “Inside.” He wagged his tail, and it slapped against my leg. I scooted him in the house, closing the door and locking it behind us.

  I hate my father’s cowardice. It haunts me more than my own fears.

  After the pathologists confirmed that my body was being attacked, I waited nearly two months to call him. He didn’t live in Quimby anymore, so he was easy to avoid. He had moved to Burlington almost three years before, with a woman he met at the bar. I knew he lived in an apartment on Pearl Street near Pearl Street Beverage. It was just down the hill from the hospital where I went for my chemo treatments. There were times when, dizzy and sick from the drugs, my veins sore from the needles, I thought about stopping by. Knocking on the door. Making him look me and my illness in the face. But every time I dream-walked the trip up the broken stairs of the old house to his door, I saw only the traces of Roxanne’s anger running red across his face. I imagined the scars as fresh as the needle tracks in my arm.

  When I finally told him I was sick, he was so quiet on the other end of the line that he could have been sleeping. He had nothing to offer me when I was fourteen, and he had nothing to offer me now.

  “Do you need me to come stay with you?” he started, but he knew I wouldn’t accept, or else he would never have offered in the first place.