Northward to the Moon (16 page)

We all forget dinner. Now
I
am worried. My mother and I are looking together again through the barn when Ben comes in. She explains what we are doing and he says he will saddle up and start riding the property in case she has wandered off.

Just then we hear the wolves.

“Darn it, I’m going to
shoot
those things,” says Ben, throwing an unsold saddle onto Satan. He can tack up a horse with lightning speed and is galloping off within minutes.

“Do you think a wolf ate her?” asks Max, his eyes like saucers.

“NO, MAX,” I say.

“No, Max,” says my mother, picking him up, something she hasn’t done in a long time, but I think she just wants to hold someone. “Now, let’s just calm down and think. Let’s think where she might have gotten to.”

We are standing there and Ned comes in to say he’s checked the truck and the car and she’s not there either. Ned is looking frantic now. “It’s just that you can usually predict where she will be. This isn’t like her to be nowhere.”

“Exactly,” says my mother. “Did something special upset her?”

“No one would play with her,” I say.

My mother frowns.

“She’s had enough,” says Ned. “She wanted to go home a long time ago. This is all my fault. We never should have come here. We should have taken her home.”

My mother is opening her mouth to speak when we hear Ben galloping back at a furious rate and we all run into the yard to meet him.

“There’s a break in the fence,” he says breathlessly. “And wolf tracks.”

“Did you see the wolves?” asks Ned.

“No, it looks, actually, from the tracks like they headed out again the way they came in.”

“I’m saddling up too,” says Ned. “I think we’d better scour the grounds anyhow. Don’t worry, Felicity. I’m sure she’s hiding somewhere in the house where we just haven’t found her. Maybe she fell asleep there.”

We go inside and my mother paces and then she starts checking the house and grounds again and calling for Maya. She can’t seem to stop moving.

When Ned gets back he is pale. They’ve found nothing. But now he has seen the wolf tracks too.

We have gone out to the ring, where Ben has tied up the saddled horses in case they are needed again, and Ned keeps saying, “Darn it, I don’t like seeing those wolf tracks.”

“Shhh, shhh,” says my mother, who is still holding Max, who starts to cry.

For a second I think of Maya’s mangled wolf-eaten body lying somewhere and I unexpectedly tear up and then tilt my head back to hide it. That’s when I see the hayloft.

“Did anyone look up in the hayloft?” I ask.

My mother is already halfway up the ladder by the time the rest of us get into the barn. We follow her up and when we reach the top we see her sitting on the floor in the hay, holding Maya in her lap. Maya’s face is pale and listless and she has her fist halfway in her mouth. She looks miserable. Who knows how long she has been up here like this? Who knows why she didn’t come down when she heard us? We stare at her, our eyes huge, all except for my mother’s, which are closed.

Ned says, “Enough of this. We’re going home.”

After that we all go back to the house. Not even Dorothy comments on us going home or the new arrangements that will have to be made. Or that Ned has changed his mind about Alaska.

We all go to bed. Maya falls right asleep. But I stay awake, thinking about Ned’s new plan. My mother hasn’t reacted to it any more than she did his plan to go to Alaska. They are on the porch swing and I can hear them through my window. But they don’t seem to have much to say. All I hear are things like “Jeez.” “Yeah.” “Christ.” “Yeah.” “Never want to do that again.” “Nope.” And the sound of the porch swing creaking well into the night.

The next night at dinner we sit around the dinner table talking about what has to be done now that we are leaving as well.

“Well,” Candace begins. “You’re still going to have to do something about that money. You can’t just deposit it. Not that amount. Maybe the best thing is to turn it over to the police.”

“Aw, Candace, we’ll be here forever explaining things if we do that,” says Ned.

“Maybe we should split it between us. Not to keep, I mean,” says Nelda in her whispery voice. “Just to hang on to temporarily. In smaller amounts it won’t be so suspicious.”

“I don’t want anything to do with that money, thank you,” says Candace. “That money is trouble. Maybe you
should
bring it to Alaska, Ned.”

“I’ve already told you that I’m not going to Alaska,” said Ned.

“Never mind the money, any of you,” says Dorothy suddenly, and she is usually so quiet at these meals that it startles all of us.
“I’m
keeping it. I’m going to stay on at the ranch and use it to pay Ben to care for me. I don’t need nursing, I just need help with things like shopping and driving and cooking and such.”

“Mom …,” says Maureen. “How can you stay on here? We’ve already sold so much of your stuff.”

“Don’t need much,” says Dorothy.

“Since when?” says Candace. “And I thought you didn’t want this money any more than I did. Than any of us did.”

“I didn’t but then was then and now is now. You don’t know how it’s been preying on my mind, having to turn Ben out. He’s been a good ranch hand and he’s been good to me and this is all he knows. It wouldn’t be so easy for him finding another job in these parts. Now I don’t need to sell Satan either. Ben can care for him, do my chores and my shopping, and I can stay here until the money runs out. I figure that money will buy me two more years on the ranch.”

“Well, gee, Mom,” says Maureen.

“I still say it’s risky. You don’t know who is after that money,” says Candace.

“Well, life’s a risky business,” says Dorothy. “Besides, for all we know no one is after that money. All we really know about it is that John left it for Ned to take care of. I’ve made up my mind. I made it up the second you told me Ned wasn’t going to Alaska.”

Ned and his sisters look at each other around the table and then Ned shrugs. “Okay, then, suit yourself,” he says. “Go tell Ben.”

“Already have,” says Dorothy complacently. “Pass the peas.”

The rest of the week is spent preparing to leave. Ben is going to move into the house when we go. Ned gives him his new cell phone number. He gives it to Dorothy too.

“May come in handy after all, Bibles,” he says to me, but I am still ignoring him.

Ben has been going back and forth doing airport runs with the sisters, who leave one by one until it is just us.

Finally we say our goodbyes. Everyone is dry-eyed and overly cheery but Maya, who lingers behind when the rest of us go down to the car. She looks sad but I know that she is as anxious to get home as the rest of us. Finally she comes down too.

Ben is outside piling leftover tack and tools into the truck. He will probably try to sell it in town.

“He seems very reliable,” says my mother reassuringly as we drive away.

“I think he is,” says Ned. “I sure hope so.”

“I still feel kind of bad about leaving Dorothy after we said we’d stay,” says my mother.

“Aw, she’s okay,” says Ned. He is going into his meditative driving state. You can always tell. His answers get shorter and he begins to sound far away.

“It seems so odd. I was mentally prepared to be here for the summer and suddenly we are leaving. I haven’t quite digested it. I feel like we didn’t give Dorothy time to digest it properly either.”

“She won’t mind, I’m telling you, she’s not attached that way,” says Ned, and we drive quietly after that.

It is a subdued ride across the country.

One night as we drive and Maya and the boys sleep, my mother says to Ned that she keeps thinking about when Dorothy said to him not to worry about her, to “get that little girl home.”

“It’s so funny,” says Ned, “how different she is with Maya than she ever was with us as kids. How she puts her first.”

“Well, they say people are different with their grandchildren,” says my mother.

“Stepgrandchild at that,” says Ned, shaking his head.

I make a mental note of this, more evidence that he isn’t Maya’s biological father.

When we get back to the beach it is a wonderful salty homecoming. The moist air makes me come alive. I can feel it seeping into all my pores, which were shriveled in the desert dryness. It is as if I can finally breathe all over my body again, in my skin, my blood vessels, my brain. The first few days we do nothing but hang out on the beach. It is like a miracle to hear the waves crash and recede, crash and recede as they have been doing all this time while we were gone. It felt oddly that we stopped their movement by going away but we never did.

I love everything here with renewed vigor. The salt marshes. The loons serenely paddling through the long grasses. The crickets at night. The stars over the ocean. The village with its whitewashed buildings. Our tiny two-room church with its pointy steeple. The air-washed salt-faded colors of the clothes of people who live by the shore. Our laundry line. The creak in the floorboards on the
left side of the porch. Waking up to luminous dawn.

Ginny is still at camp but I am patient, knowing I will see her before long and be able to tell her everything.

The house is immaculate and it is soon apparent why. Mrs. Merriweather, a woman from our church, comes over when she hears we are returned.

“My dear!” she says to my mother, sitting happily across the table from her and shoveling in my mother’s freshly baked cookies. “How happy we all are to find you safely back. The place was not the same without you. Not the same at all!”

“What happened to the Gourds?” asks my mother. “You wrote that they had vacated our house but you didn’t say why.”

“Did no one tell you? Well! Therein lies a tale. While Mr. Gourd was in prison, Mrs. Gourd took up with a young muscleman—really, I know no other term for him—from Lincoln. Lifted weights all the livelong day. Worked somewhere, I don’t know where, but he’d come around here in his souped-up Trans Am with the engine running, revving it in the parking lot while she and those
children hurried across the beach to him. The fumes, my dear, the fumes! And the noise! Well, anyhow, they were dating for only a month or so and the week before Mr. Gourd got out of prison, they left.”

“What? They left town?”

“Yes. She pulled those children right out of school and loaded them into that Trans Am and off they took. And to where, do you think?”

“I have no idea!” says my mother.

“None other than Venice, California. And why? Because Mr. Muscleman wanted to lift weights on Muscle Beach. Have you ever? Have you ever heard of a sillier reason for moving an entire family cross-country than that?”

My mother shakes her head no.

“Of course, people say it was also to avoid Mr. Gourd, who was bound to come back for her. But she had complete custody of those children, so she could do as she liked. I’m afraid she found in the new boyfriend all the qualities she thought she’d left behind with Mr. Gourd. Really, it makes you wonder if people ever learn anything.”

“Yes, it does,” says my mother, round-eyed, eating another cookie herself.