Moon Shadow: The Totally True Love Adventure Series (Volume 1) (27 page)

... the monstrous fiend, snorting and gasping incessantly, spewing forth deep harsh wheezing noises, focuses its eyes on my goddess. It holds an object in its enormous outstretched hand, and I can see that it’s a red book. Then the fiend stands over my goddess and raises the book high in the air, waving it ominously.

My goddess begins to sob. “No, don’t let him hurt me again. Stop him! Stop him!”

Her pleadings resound unmercifully in my head until I think I will go insane, driven there by the searing image of my suffering goddess, and I quickly raise myself up and seize the book from the fiend.

The monstrosity roars so loudly my room rocks as if with the tremors of an earthquake. But before the fiend can reach me, I jump back and grab my Louisville slugger. I bring the metal club around in a long-armed swing that joins the bat’s sweet spot with the head of the monstrous fiend. The fiend crashes to the floor in a pool of blood. I stand over the monstrosity, club resting on my shoulder, just as Beowulf stood over Grendel.

My white goddess, gracefully, without a hint of shame, discards her camisole. Her naked beauty, essential and true, daunts me. She smiles, beckoning me, and I—

I awaken with the sense of a changed world. Liz lies next to me, asleep. I know I’ve been dreaming but the memory of it remains vague, the dream having to do, it seems, with something forbidden. I’ve been sleeping soundly within the coffin of moonlight, but I haven’t slept long. My eyes feel dry and grainy.

I gaze upwards and I’m dizzied by the great well of the heavens, the stars sprayed across the dark boundless sky as from some colossal explosion, caught motionless on their migration outwards by the brevity of my vision. On the soft sandy beach I’m in a safe, warm place. But I know I cannot stay long. The hour nears when I have to move on. I’m at a beginning and at an end, a wanderer without a map who has chosen to journey into the unknown.

I
awake abruptly, with a little cry. My God! Daniel is going to hurt himself! My nightmare about Frank’s death had transformed itself into a genuine concern for Daniel.

I fling away the covers, hop out of bed (don’t bother to put on my slippers) and hurry downstairs in the darkness, to my mother’s bedroom.

“Mom! Mom!” I shout frantically, as I rush into my mother’s bedroom. “C’mon, we have to go, now, Mom! Daniel needs our help! Now, Mom!”

My mother, sleepy-eyed, leans out of bed and switches on the reading lamp. “Darling, you have to forget about Dan, he’ll be all right.”

I can’t stop shouting. The words are gushing out. “No, Mom! I saw it in a dream ... I saw him at his mother’s gravesite ... like I was there, too, Mom ... it was real, just as Grandma Hartford said it would be ... we have to go now—”

“Sarah Jane Hartford that’ll be just about enough,” my mother says stiffly. “You get hold of yourself this minute. I’m not going to drive around at five-thirty in the morning on a whim, looking for Dan. I haven’t slept more than an hour or two after a grueling night. Now you go back to bed, and we’ll discuss—”

“Mom, I promise, I swear, if you don’t drive me to see Daniel right now, I’ll leave and take the bus, or I’ll hitchhike until I reach him, and then I’ll keep on leaving, I’ll keep running away until I’m eighteen and can do whatever I want, hating you for the rest of my life!” I give my mother a determined stare, contracting my eyes into narrow slits.

As she stares back at me, I notice a sliver of doubt in her eyes. Adults aren’t wise at all, I am thinking. They just carry a superficial store of so-called knowledge as a kind of armor against the world, against the burgeoning canopy of adult fears.

My mother folds back the covers and gets out of bed. “Sarah, I know you’ve been through a lot, dear. I only want to do what is best for you. We’ll go to the cemetery—I went once with Frank a very long time ago—but if Dan isn’t there, we’ll come straight back. And when things settle down you and I will have a serious talk.”

“I’ll meet you in the car, Mom.” I run upstairs to get dressed as fast as possibly can. I want to cry, but I don’t have time for tears. If I were to lose Daniel, I’d have to swim far out to sea and drown, like Edna Pontellier in
The Awakening
.

I
drive David’s Mustang along Washington Avenue, headed towards El Cajon Cemetery, which abuts on the foothills in the southeast corner of the Valley. I’m too tired, too removed from the present to drive, but it seems I have no choice.

At the apartment, a half-hour ago, I had mimed going to sleep with the others (Liz and I on the floor, David and Devon on the sofa) and then, while the others slept I had faded from their existence like a wan ghost. There’s a bleak satisfaction in inflicting solitude on myself. Alone again, I’m determined to forget that loneliness can only serve me when it proves impossible to endure and I hope to end it. One has to do unpleasant things to gain the upper hand of his soul, I tell myself.

I’d left the key to the apartment for Liz, the key to my car, and the pot and the cash. She’ll have a place to stay until the end of September, the loan of a car to get her to and from a new job, and some money to live on until she secures that job.

The day is just beginning to shape itself with a hint of sunlight, sepulchral, like in a deserted synagogue where only a few half-burnt candles provide flickering light. I’m set to introduce myself to the new day by returning my mother’s diary, or, rather, having it returned by the caretaker, to its rightful place alongside her. Then ... well, I’ll have to see ...

It was when I found the diary that I had decided, at least subconsciously I now realize, not to invade my mother’s privacy, her God-given right to hold personal secrets.

I remember, as if it were the familiar backdrop of a recurring dream, that on the day of my mother’s funeral, in January, the sky was ashen, gloomy. In the afternoon drizzle, raindrops gathered on the fallen leaves. Today, as the sun rises, mountain peaks will line themselves against a clear blue sky, forming a contrast of surfaces so stark and pure it will be breathtaking.

Without warning the car’s engine stalls with a jolt that grabs at my heart. I guide the car, as it rolls to a stop, onto the shoulder of the road. I’ve reached the west end of Dehesa Road, a half-mile from the cemetery. I turn the key in the ignition to restart the engine. No luck. I’ve only to look at the gas gauge to understand. I’ll have to complete the final leg of my journey on foot.

I open the glove box, take out Mike’s gun and my mother’s diary. Clutching the red book, and with the gun shoved down the front of my jeans, I walk east, along a narrow shoulder of mostly dirt and weeds. There is no traffic, not a car in sight. The early morning sun warms me. A tiny silver airplane inches its way silently across the cloudless sky.

I find myself immersed in the quietude of this country setting. I listen to the soft thrumming of bees lured by flowers banked at the edge of the road, and to the birdsong that brings forth the new day like it was the morning after God created the world.

Before long a wave of exhaustion passes through me, though I have vast distances still to be traveled. I reach a bend in the road that harkens a steep quarter-mile incline leading up to the cemetery. With each step, trudging uphill, holding the diary to my breast, I feel an unbearable lightness in my head.

I’d not been able to grieve properly last night because I was cauterized of all abstract things. My reality had consisted only of the world I could touch, see, smell and hear. Now, as I whirl into oblivion, it’s as if I’ve flung myself away from those realities, towards the stark windy reaches of madness. I sense I’m being followed, but when I turn around there’s no one. It seems some paranoiac transference of guilt is making me feel as if I’m being watched.

I begin to feel cold, nauseous. It’s fear that gives me goose bumps, I think. The less alive I feel, the more I am afraid to die. I press my brow with the back of my hand and stop. As I lean over a clump of weeds I vomit. There’s a strange pleasure in my weakness, like the dreaminess of fever. I’m given to a sensation of total helplessness, an inability to stave off the terrible weight of my guilt. My favorite Doors tune, “The End,” plays in my head.

A mixture of emotions courses through me as I move on: anger, fear, sadness, the anguish associated with guilt, one after another in lightning review. Tremors of disquieting impulses I thought I had conquered in puberty come back to me, such as shame and fear of God. I seem transported somewhere far away, to a place of great importance, and I am overcome by a hallucinatory sense of unreality.

My reverie has taken a path that descends through levels of time, culminating in darkness, and then back again to steal into my consciousness and fill my inward eye with a ghostly light, the bright vision of a young boy, eleven or twelve, named Danny. Danny lies on his bed, murmuring to himself with words I can hear clearly. Danny’s is the voice towards which I have been half-consciously wending my way for some time.

“Why didn’t you do something? How could you listen to her cry like that night after night and just lie there, trembling like a little boy, playing with yourself?”

“I didn’t know what to do,” I answer, wide-eyed. “I was afraid of him then.”

“Do you know why she didn’t leave him? Why she stayed and put herself through all that pain? She did it for you, she stayed with him only for you, and you were nothing.”

“No,” I retort, “she really did love him, because for each moment of suffering there had been a moment of joy, there was the memory of pleasures he had given her in their years of happiness.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone he was hurting her? You might have told Mr. Christie, your school counselor, anyone.”

“I don’t know. I was afraid, ashamed. I didn’t want others to stare at me. I thought they might see the secret in my eyes and find out what I knew. I wanted to be like them. I didn’t want to be different, despised and ridiculed. But I’ve told Sarah.”

“It’s too late, clown. You did nothing and your mother is dead. He killed her and it’s your fault. You were all she had and you sold your soul to the devil, thought about nothing but sex. You cared about little else, and she knew. She found your letters.”

“It wasn’t like that. I was younger then and I thought I was in love with Liz. We didn’t intend to hurt anyone, we were expressing ourselves, naturally, that’s all. We never followed through. I wanted to wait until we were married.”

“How can you live with yourself? You should take that gun and do yourself a favor ...”

My picture of Danny blurs and then fades to black, the voice trails off, replaced by the familiar thock of my mother’s green sandals on the hardwood floor of the parlor at The Gables. I shudder and draw up short, close my eyes, and I see my mother’s face, a ghostly countenance with a nimbus of light surrounding her head. She draws nearer and, yes, she’s here with me, tucking me into bed and whispering, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Then she’s closing my bedroom door, but not all the way because I’m afraid of the dark. I’m hearing the indistinct noise from the television in the living room and then the sharp crack of my father’s open hand striking my mother’s face. She’s beginning to cry, and I can wipe the memory from my mind, but instead I endear myself to it, hold fast to the luminous vision like I would cling to my stuffed monkey, Junior.

I open my eyes and walk on, and as I near the cemetery I come to understand that my unfocused dread, my fear, the result of trauma in early adolescence, is wrapped up in one memory, one instance of fear and trembling in my under-sized bed, one night of listening to my mother suffer at the hands of my father. And I see that my self-pity only sanctions the oppressive hold my mother’s death has on my heart.

I am suddenly able to go down deep, where the grief is, and discover that I have pleasant memories of my mother, too, many happy memories I can hardly wait to share with Sarah.

I stop in the road again, recoiling with horror at the thing I had intended: to extinguish myself with Mike’s gun, beside my mother’s grave, and lie with her in the womb of the earth.