Remember The Moon

Copyright © 2014 by Abigail Carter

Publish Green

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Cover art: “Remember the Moon” by Sheri Bakes.

Cover design: Kelsye Nelson.

ISBN:
978-0-9911050-0-7

W
atching myself die, I felt no pain, no emotion, no fear. The grisly scene of my death faded and grew hazier, as if a dense fog had rolled in across the Sound, obscuring my view. The fog grew whiter and more opaque. I witnessed a unique clarity of light, like sunlight refracted through a diamond. For an instant, instead of being blinded by the light, my vision was clearer than it had ever been.

My eyelids were heavy, the white noise of pavement clacking under the tires, lulling me at the end of a long day. My spat with Maya still fresh in my mind, I knew I had been driving out of spite in order to join her and Calder on this family ski weekend, but I was determined to be the dutiful husband.

It was a clear night in February 2006, but construction for the upcoming 2010 Vancouver Olympics made the road treacherous. During a slowdown, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes for a few moments before a honk from behind jolted me into shifting gears and lurching on. I passed Horseshoe Bay and wound around steep hairpin turns in the dark, driving too fast, widening my eyes to keep them from drooping shut as the smooth hum of the car lulled me. I turned on the radio and fiddled with the tuner until I found a classic rock station playing Steely Dan’s Aja. I cranked it.

The traffic thinned until only the odd car sped by in the opposite direction. Transfixed by the white dividing line, my eyelids fluttered shut for the briefest second. A crucial second. I missed a sharp curve, veered left across the oncoming lane, and launched through a perfectly aligned gap in the guardrail, fate having its way with me. My eyes sprang open. The arc of my ineffective coffee, suspended in time, splattered like a Pollock painting against the windshield. The car tilted downward, Steely Dan’s Aja still blasting, ...there’s no return...

The view of Howe Sound was particularly breathtaking. Tiny boats glowed against the black water. In the sky, a pale light of the crescent moon, ...double helix in the sky tonight. A voice that didn’t sound like mine whispered “Oh fuck” just before the car made impact with the gnarled rocks of the coastline. The car rolled in deafening slow motion until it arrived at a precarious resting spot, teetering on the edge of the cliffside, fifty feet below the highway, a hundred feet above the water. The white edges of the waves crashed violently against the rock face. Still conscious, I couldn’t feel my legs but could see that they were crushed beneath the dash. Something warm dripped down my cheek. I tasted blood. Christ. This was bad. I thought about Maya and Calder. If I made it out of this alive, I would stop being such an asshole. God. One weekend in Whistler. Why did I make it into such a big deal?

“You’ve gotten yourself into quite a pickle here, J.J.” My father sat beside me in his Rolling Stones T-shirt.

“Dad? What are you doing here?”

“I told Calder to warn you. ”

“He did warn me. How did he know? Am I going to die?”

“You should’ve listened to your son, son.”

I yelled a dry, hoarse whisper. Shit. I was hosed. I wondered if anyone had seen me go off the road. Darkness prevailed.

I awoke to a man’s face leaning through the broken window, swinging slightly. I glanced toward where my father had been sitting, but he was gone.

“Hey buddy! Wake up! That’s it.” I forced my eyes open. Pain constricted the movement of my legs, forcing a moan from deep in my chest. He looked away for a second and shouted, “He’s conscious!” Turning back to me he said, “Quite a mess you’ve found yourself in here. What’s your name?”

“Jay,” I croaked.

“OK, Jay. We’re just going to try and get a line hooked up to the car and then we’ll get you outta here, K?” I managed another nod.

“Just don’t move. We’re going to get you—” The car lurched another few inches, tilting now at a dizzying angle. “Whoa!” The firefighter swung free, his arms waving as he tried to regain balance and I realized he was suspended from above. He grabbed onto the door handle, leaning down to peer into the window.

“Don’t move, Jay. K? Just don’t move!”

“Tell my wife I love her,” I whispered.

“You’re going to be fine, Jay. We’ll get you secured. Don’t worry.”

“Tell her to remember the moon.”

“Remember what?” The car slipped another inch and I could only see his torso now. “I can’t hold it!” he yelled up to the crew.

“The moon!” I yelled as loudly as I could. The car slipped away with a slight grinding of metal against rock.

“Shiiiit!” I heard the man yell. I closed my eyes and braced for the impact. A wall of water slammed into me through what was left of the windshield. The car bobbed for a minute, hood down, my entire body submerged. I gasped from the cold and sucked air into my lungs. When the trunk filled with water, my beloved Beamer and I plunged through the depths of black until my giant lead boot touched the sea bottom silently in a velvet nap of sand. My final breath escaped in tiny bubbles, jewels of iridescent light that rose, dancing languidly to the surface.

Gaping mouth, empty eyes, floating hair, legs crushed into my giant steel clamshell – I became a grisly sea anemone. I floated underwater, looking down on my lifeless body, limp hands and hair flowing with the current, my skin glowing an alien greenish-yellow hue.

A shape began to form in a fog – a body pushed against a thin layer of latex. A figure emerged through it, someone familiar.

“Hey J.J. Welcome home.”

I was supposed to have taken Calder to a matinée after a short day at work, but there was a crisis at the office, as usual. Maya was pissed that I was so late. “I knew you’d do this, Jay,” she said when I called on the drive home. The car ahead inched forward. I tilted my head back to lean on the headrest, eyes closed, willing patience. I rocked the clutch and accelerator, still in first, the car easing forward making a soft purr that sounded like a pent-up exhale. The choppy waves on the left side of the 520 bridge across Lake Washington were violent. Angry black water contrasted with sharp, white dragon’s teeth crests, exploding into themselves in impressive plumes of spray that crashed over the low walls of the bridge. Two lines of cars were at a standstill. The water on the right side of the bridge was calm, mirror-like, pristine, as if unaware of the brisk February wind causing such havoc on the other side of the narrow four-lane strip of highway that floated on the water’s surface toward Seattle. The cement sky grew darker, but sunshine poured through a hole in the clouds lighting up the Seattle skyline.

She had no right to be pissed. I couldn’t help it. A client called in crisis mode, panicked. I had to calm her down. This client was important and if we were to lose her it could mean the demise of the small financial software start-up of which I was President. The company struggled financially as I desperately tried to get more funding or land a new big client contract. Fast.

I pretended not to notice the tone of disappointment in Calder's voice when Maya made me tell him the news. I’d promised to take him to the arcade downtown, then a movie and dinner at our favorite Mexican place. A guy’s afternoon out during Calder's week-long school break. “We can still go to the arcade,” I said, hoping to bypass a new mood he had fallen into lately, one I called “shut down.” It seemed weird that a kid should be so morose.

“We may have to skip the movie, K. Beano?”

Calder replied with his newly learned refrain – “Whatever.” Seven years old and already sounding like a cocky teenager.

Fucking traffic. Christ. Why were Seattlites such crappy drivers? The car ahead had at least five car lengths between himself and the car in front of him. I honked. The guy flipped me the bird in his rearview mirror. “Moron!” I revved the Beamer, and he slowed, increasing the gap to seven car lengths, allowing a car from the right-hand lane to move in ahead. “Screw that!” I pounded my hand against the steering wheel. Inexplicably, the traffic started to move again. A wave crashed ahead of me, sending spray across my windshield, blurring the view. I threw on the wipers, cleared the water, shoved the stick into second, then third. More flashes of brake lights ahead, back to second, to neutral. Christ. Another half hour passed before I pulled angrily into the driveway. In the kitchen, I flung my messenger bag on the floor and threw my jacket on a kitchen chair. Maya perched on a stool at the island, the paper spread out in front of her, a glass of white wine pushed to the side.

“Hey,” she said, the word laced with sarcasm.

“Sorry. ”

Maya pursed her lips.

“C’mon, you know as well as I do how important this client is.”

“I get it, Jay. You’re stressed out about work. But he’s really disappointed. He was so excited to be spending the afternoon with you.”

“I’m still going to take him.”

“I know. It’s just... oh, never mind.”

“What?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Priorities I guess. I just wonder if yours aren’t a little–”

“Please, Maya. I can’t deal with it now, not after today.”

“Well, I hope we can talk about it soon. This lifestyle just isn’t working for me. For any of us. I feel like a single mother half the time.”

“Please, Maya.”

“OK. OK. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll talk to him.” Erratic pounding and clanging noises could be heard coming from upstairs. “Not getting any better, is he? We need to get him some lessons.”

“Hey, this drum thing was your idea. You find him lessons. Maybe that will help with the god-awful racket he’s making now. What were you thinking, buying him that drum set?”

“Yeah, in retrospect not my brightest move, but it gives him an outlet. I know it helped me when I was a kid. To be able to bang stuff out. I guess I never realized the headache my mom had to put up with.”

“I feel her pain.”

I knocked on Calder's closed door.

“Hey dude,” I said to the door. He couldn’t hear me over the drumming. I opened the door and walked in. The room was dimly lit by the dinosaur lamp on the top of his tall dresser. He sat on the drum stool sandwiched into the corner of the room, pounding on the snare, part of the starter set I’d found on Craigslist. He did not look up. His hair hung limply to his shoulders, shrouding his face. His hi-topped foot hit the pedal of the bass drum, completely out of rhythm, no beat whatsoever, just noise. He looked up and saw me but continued playing.

“Hey!” I shouted. He looked up again but didn’t stop.

“Can you stop drumming for a minute?” I yelled. He dropped his hands, holding the drumsticks at his sides, shoulders slumped. The quiet was a relief.

“I’m really sorry, Cald. It couldn’t be helped. I had a really important call that could mean a lot of money for the company. You get that, right?”

Calder shrugged.

“But I’m here now. You want to get going?”

“Whatever.”

“If you don’t want to go...” I turned to walk out of the room, copying Maya's reverse psychology tactic.

“No! I WANT to go!”

“OK then. Let’s do this,” I said, resting my hand on his shoulder as we left the room, pleased with myself and amazed it actually worked.

Calder sat in the backseat looking sullen. An old Grateful Dead song came on the radio, and I cranked it. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him clamp his hands over his ears.

“OK, OK,” I said, turning down the radio. “Not a Dead fan. I get it.” Neither of us spoke for the rest of the ride. At the arcade, I handed Calder his tokens and he ran around from one game to the next amidst a dizzying array of flashing lights and loud electronic chiming noises, ignoring me completely.

“Hey, Calder, you want to do this shooting one with me?” Calder shrugged his shoulders.

“What about the motorcycles?”

Another silent shoulder shrug. This wasn’t how I’d imagined our afternoon together. I envisioned a laughing Calder grabbing me by the hand, pulling me around in excitement – shooting at muted pixilated enemies, careening across winding highways at nauseating speeds, punching at ominous street gang members. Things his mother would never let him experience.

“You hungry?”

A shrug.

“Come on, Calder. Throw me a bone here. You gonna be mad at me the entire time?”

Shrug.

“Well, maybe a movie then? We probably have time, though you might be a little late for bed. What movie would you like to see?”

“Borat?” He looked up at me, hopeful.

“Borat?! That movie is restricted! Where did you even hear of that movie?”

“I saw the commercial.”

“Jeez. I thought maybe Curious George.”

“I don’t want to see Curious George. That movie’s for babies.”

“Fine. Let’s get a burrito then.” Calder said nothing but followed me upstairs to the arcade’s dining room. “Wings?

Burgers? What’s your poison?”

Shrug.

“We could just go home then.”

Shrug.

“OK, what do you want?”