The Half Moon: a Novel, page 19
Listening to the bedtime routine, she had the same thought she’d had her first night at Cobie’s, that a house where kids lived felt full even when the kids were out of sight, even when their toys were tidied away for the night. There were always whispered footsteps, bedsprings squeaking, doors opening and closing, faucets turned on and off. When these kids got older and had more freedom, they’d show up from school with their friends in tow, their bodies suddenly too big, their bikes abandoned to the front lawn, and like a descending army they’d look through the cabinets, clear out the snacks. Then they’d sit around saying all the obnoxious, self-important things teenagers have been saying since the beginning of time. Later still, they’d pull up in cars, run inside with breezy shouts of where they were going, where they’d been. How lucky for the person listening, to have that energy sweep through. What company to walk in to find all those scuffed bags and worn-out sneakers piled up in the front hall. Even the performance of being annoyed—“Clean up your shit!” Siobhán often yelled at her kids—had joy at the heart of it, exhausted and fed-up though that joy may be.
“Mom, you said ‘shit,’ ” one always replied, and Siobhán would pull that one to her thickening midsection and hold him tight. On college breaks, all these kids would bring friends home. Someday they’d bring their husbands or wives. Their children. Neil, Siobhán, Cobie—they’d have full tables at Thanksgiving for the rest of their lives. Jess could see it, see all of it, including herself, in sort of a split screen, living in an ordered quiet, always turning on the radio for company.
I shouldn’t be here, she thought. These people were blanks to her. They moved to different music, were formed by different clay. They were appealing for those differences, she reminded herself—but now that it was time to color them in, color herself in beside them, she couldn’t see how the picture would ever look right. And she wouldn’t be able to do this again. It’s a thought that hit her at some point while she was staying with Cobie, and which she immediately tried to silence. Because if this was real between her and Neil, why would she care about that? Most people got one chance in life, and she was stealing a second. But to use that second chance and end up in a house only three miles from where she started? Why hadn’t she thought bigger, gotten farther? She didn’t have the excuse of being young anymore.
Because it was him I met, she remembered. Him I liked. She recalled the strange feeling she got, locking eyes with him from across a room when they barely knew each other’s names, recognizing him, feeling recognized, long before anything happened. A line pulled taut. A tug. A whole life that was hers to step into, if she wanted to.
She could hear Neil’s low murmur coming from upstairs, though not what he was saying. She could sneak out now, head back home, beg Malcolm for forgiveness. But whether that made her brave or cowardly depended on what was actually the right thing to do, and that’s the part she couldn’t decide. She could take the flashlight she’d spotted in Neil’s mudroom and make her way back along the ruts and inclines of the roads she knew so well until she arrived at her own door and apologized for trying something new. A new backdrop, new rooms to move through. A new way of being touched, looked at—that was part of it, too.
As she listened to him soothing one of the kids, she pictured the long walk home, how she’d rehearse her apology. But then even in her mind she stopped walking. The bouncing light stilled. She was at the exact point in the road where kids used to crawl through a broken section of the chain-link fence to find a sheltered spot to drink beers, to make out in the mossy patches between the trees. She was also not sorry for trying. For feeling a way and doing something about it. She had a problem and she was trying to solve it.
And anyway, she couldn’t leave. Neil had already carried her bag upstairs, and she’d already taken out her hairbrush, left her toiletries case on the sink. She’d already emptied her pockets of change, put it in the kids’ change jar. Next thing Neil was back downstairs, searching a drawer for menus, and from across the room he looked like a stranger to her, as if she’d met him not ten minutes before. “Let’s order dinner,” he was saying. “Your first night. Let’s open a bottle of wine. Hey,” he said, coming over to her. “I’m really happy you’re here.”
But she couldn’t keep her thoughts on track.
“Hey,” he repeated, so that she’d look at him. “Everything is going to be okay.”
“They say once a cheater always a cheater,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“Do you count this as cheating?” he asked. “Jess, this is not wrong, and I’ll never be convinced otherwise.”
She liked him best when he said things like that, when he was insistent about it and seemed absolutely sure.
The next morning the kids said hello when they padded into the kitchen, but wore puzzled expressions, like they were just remembering, Oh yes, that’s the stranger who arrived yesterday and is still here, pouring our milk into her coffee.
eight
His whole life, he’d had good luck. Hadn’t he?
“Well aren’t you the luckiest boy!” his mother said to him in August 1987, shaking him for joy when he found a twenty-dollar bill not once but twice in a single month. He remembered the moment because what she said felt so true. Of all boys, he’d been chosen. Ordained. Picked by fortune. Two twenties, just three weeks apart. What were the chances? There were dozens of kids his age who biked around town all day, but he was the only one who’d spotted that folded bill on the grass beside the bandstand, and then, on a different Friday, another, folded almost exactly the same way, on the sidewalk outside Buster Brown. His father asked him if he mugged two different people or the same guy twice.
His mother told him to put the money in his sock drawer for a rainy day, but he was afraid if he kept it she’d get ideas about spending it on something practical. So instead of waiting around for her to tell him he was in charge of buying his own notebooks and pencils that school year, he marched every kid in the neighborhood up to Two Scoops and bought a round of ice creams. Siblings tagged along, which he hadn’t expected or calculated. He didn’t want to leave anyone out, so he ended up pedaling full speed back to his house to beg his mother for $1.75 or else he didn’t know what would happen. She said no at first, let it be a lesson to him, what a fool, treating the entire neighborhood when his father was busting his hump and the propane tank needed filling. But the kids had already started licking their cones! He couldn’t exactly return them! “You’re joking,” his mother said, furious, peeling two dollars from the fold that lived in the blue cookie tin over the fridge.
“You mean to tell me you got one, too?” she said to him not fifteen minutes later, when he came cruising down the dead center of the block on his BMX, the soggy end of a cone in his hand.
“Well, I wasn’t going to leave myself out!” he said. “It was my money.”
“And sprinkles?” she said, eyeing his T-shirt.
He shrugged.
Another time, when he was even younger, the Gephardts went to the Jersey Shore for a few days. They usually rented a house in the Catskills for a long weekend every summer—Malcolm and Mary played with the kids of their parents’ friends from the Bronx, while the adults played cards and told loud stories that ended up with drinks rocking off tables and glasses shattering on the floor. But his dad had struck up a friendship with a guy who owned a motel in Margate, on the Jersey Shore, and Malcolm overheard him tell his mother that he liked that it was close to Atlantic City in case he got bored sitting on the beach. On their third day there, Malcolm woke up very early, odd to have his entire family sleeping in the same room, so he decided to go for a swim despite the warning sign outside the manager’s office, despite his mother’s cautioning that the ocean was not the town pool. The motel’s floating dock looked so close, hardly a risk, and he’d watched people swim back and forth the previous afternoon. If it really was rough he could always turn around. He wasn’t scared at the time, but since then the feeling he had that day sometimes returned to him without warning: having to fight for a full breath, feeling his body pulled by some mysterious force, glancing at where he’d come from and then ahead at where he was going, unable to decide whether to push forward or go back, and all the while knowing that the longer he took to choose the more precious energy he wasted.
* * *
The landline in the bar rang, cutting through the silence and jolting him back to the present. Malcolm staggered up from his arrangement of chairs and pressed his palm to his chest to stop his heart from pounding.
* * *
“And what did you decide?” Jess asked, when he first told her the ocean story. That vacation was the only time he could remember his father wearing a bathing suit. His sister was embarrassed because the bathing suit was almost the exact same color as their father’s skin, and from far away he looked naked. Jess laughed, said her father must have had the same one, said she remembered wanting to die the one and only time he came to the town pool. They were in bed, somewhat new to each other still, the windows wide open, a humid summer afternoon. They’d been lying there for hours, telling stories about growing up. Jess’s family had had less than the Gephardts. There were ways to tell. Which sports a kid played. Whether a kid had birthday parties at McDonald’s or whether all the photos were of their siblings crammed around their own kitchen table, a defrosted Sara Lee in the tinfoil pan. Her family wasn’t poor, Jess was always quick to say. There were a lot of kids who had less.
Something about the smell of a storm in the air made him remember that swim he took at ten or eleven years old.
“What happened? Did you end up swimming to the dock or did you turn back?”
“Neither,” Malcolm said. An old man zoomed up to him in a motorboat, reached out a hand, and heaved Malcolm on board. He scolded him over the buzz of the motor until they reached shore.
Back at the beach, the man bought him a fountain soda from the crab shack, told him to use his head.
“So I lived, plus I got a soda,” he bragged to Jess.
“But you didn’t have to make a choice,” Jess said, and seemed troubled.
He never understood why that was such a thing for her. He was rescued because he was always going to be rescued, was his point, and by that logic had never really been in danger. She seemed to consider it a sign of something else, and only now, in the silence of the bar, the ringing phone calling attention to the silence, did her point move into slightly clearer focus. He was surprised he slept that deeply. He was surprised he slept at all.
The sound of the boat was almost identical to the noise of the generator running in the alley beside the bar all night, and Malcolm’s brain made the link out of the most delicate filament, where it became briefly incandescent and then broke. It must have run out of gas at some point just before dawn. The heater was cold to the touch.
By the phone’s third ring he’d shaken off every dark thought and was in work mode, all business. He slipped through the swinging door quickly, to keep the warm air trapped in the kitchen, and the cold of the main room felt like stepping outside. He’d taken off his boots to sleep, and the feel of the hex mat under his socks was like a massage. Who could be calling the landline? Jess. Patrick. His mother. He should have checked on his mother on Saturday. Now it was Monday. He hoped she had enough wood stacked beside the slider on her deck. He hoped she hadn’t had to wade through the snow to the pile in the backyard. What if she slipped and fell out there? He had to get over there as soon as he could.
“Half Moon,” he said when he picked up, in the same harried tone as always, as if there were a dozen hands reaching for him.
“Malcolm Gephardt?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yeah?”
It was an officer from the local police department, but he didn’t catch her name. She and her partner had been by his house already, trying to track him down. They wanted to ask him a few questions about a patron. Would he still be there in ten minutes if they came by?
When the police cruiser pulled up, he expected Rob Waggoner to be one of the two officers, but instead it was Jackie Becker with an officer he didn’t recognize. Jackie was the youngest sister of a friend of his from high school. She used to come to their baseball games and run after the foul balls. Whenever he spoke to her back then, she would blush a deep violet. He hadn’t seen her in years. She and her partner were both in uniform and both looked exhausted.
“Hey, Jackie,” Malcolm said. “Was that you on the phone? You should have said.”
“Hi, Malcolm.” She smiled. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”
“I thought you worked in the city. How’s Tom? Still down in DC?”
“I transferred up here last year. Yeah, he’s good. Three kids. I’ll tell him you were asking.”
Malcolm stuck his hand out to the other officer. “Officer Navarro,” the man said.
“So,” Jackie said as she reached up and straightened the Hennessy sign by the door. “What can you tell us about Charles Waggoner? We heard Rob filled you in a little.”
“He hasn’t turned up yet?” Malcolm was surprised. He figured Tripp would have shown up one way or another by then, that he’d either found his way home or been discovered somewhere between there and the Half Moon. If he’d attempted the walk home on Friday night, he might have stopped for a rest, fallen asleep like drunk people tended to do. And then the snow, the extreme cold that followed. It wasn’t a bad way to go, really. There was also the creek that ran along Jefferson, the water moving fast under the surface ice. A body had been fished out when Malcolm was in ninth grade, and he was certain that every person his age who grew up in Gillam could name the place they were when that news went out. They’d played in that creek all summer.
“No, and we really need to track him down before this next storm gets here,” she said.
“One more biggie and then spring,” Officer Navarro said. “Next thing the tulips will be pushing through.”
“That’s March for you,” Jackie said.
“I hadn’t heard that,” Malcolm said. “About another storm. My phone’s dead.”
“Tomorrow, supposedly,” Jackie said. “They might be wrong. It doesn’t have that smell, if you ask me. You know how you can smell snow coming?”
A Tuesday storm would be better than another Friday storm. He needed to be up and running by Thursday, latest. He had a birthday party coming in. Plus the rolling St. Patrick’s Day parades that took up most of March—Hoboken, Jersey City, Woodlawn—would mean people returning to Gillam and going for a drink in town. The rowdy groups opened tabs, stayed for hours. He had a band scheduled for Saturday night. They were probably awful but they’d agreed to play for drinks and tips. March was usually his best month.
Malcolm told the officers more or less the same things he told Rob the day before, that Tripp had gotten drunk, cooled out in the kitchen, walked off. They took Emma’s and Roddy’s names. He went to the kitchen to get his phone so he could give them their numbers, forgetting it was dead. They asked if he knew the names of any of the people Tripp had been arguing with, but Malcolm didn’t.
“What’s upstairs?” Jackie asked. She looked at the ceiling.
“You ever hang out here, Jackie? I’ve never seen you.”
“I don’t think I’ve been here in years. I like going to Riverside or into the city. That new place on Oak is nice. Have you been?”
“Nope,” Malcolm said, and pulled on his tight shoulder. “Well anyway, there’s nothing up there. Odds and ends. I thought I’d use it as an office, but I really don’t need one. There’s a door from the sidewalk, or a staircase in the back, if you walk past the men’s.” Malcolm pointed.
“You never had a renter or anything?”
“No. Thought about it, but I’d need to renovate, put in a full bath and a kitchenette.” And who in the world would want to live above a bar? They’d have to soundproof it, bring it to residential code. “I’ve been thinking of opening a wall, having outdoor space, a rooftop bar. You can see the lake from up there.”
He watched for their reaction.
Jackie turned her face north and tilted her head. “Wouldn’t it overlook the commuter lot?”
“There are things you can do about that. Decorative things.”
But she’d already lost interest. “You mind if we look around up there?”
“Sure,” Malcolm said, and then apologized for having to lead them back outside to the door that led upstairs. A policy leftover from Hugh’s time; they kept the interior door to the second floor locked so that people didn’t sneak up when the bar was full.
Upstairs, the light was brighter. The walls were scuffed and the floor was pitched badly, needed to be leveled. But there was something cheerful about it, something promising.
“What’s all this?” Officer Navarro asked. Malcolm was across the room, imagining the wall gone, some sort of wood trellis to prevent a person from looking left. “Is someone staying here?”
Malcolm turned to see what he was talking about. There in the corner of the room closest to the door they’d entered through was a duffel bag, and next to it, a short stack of clothes, neatly folded. A phone charger. Two battered paperbacks. A clip-on book light. A camp mattress, rolled up into a cylinder. A sleeping bag. As a group they moved toward the tiny bathroom and looked in. There was a cup on the windowsill that held a single toothbrush and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste. Deodorant. A striped towel hung from the doorknob.
“Whose stuff is this?” Navarro asked, looking at him carefully.
Malcolm shrugged, astonished. For some reason his first thought was of Jess. But if it was her stuff, there’d be the face wash she liked. There’d be her floral makeup case. She didn’t wear men’s deodorant, mountain fresh scent.
