Valley of the Moon (29 page)

I
interrogated Benno on the way home.

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“Greengage!”

“I think it's cool.”

“You think it's cool.”

“Yeah.”

“That's it—cool?”

“What do you want me to say?”

I wanted him to tell me he forgave me. Tell me he understood now why I'd been gone for a year. And to share in my love of the place.

“Can you please stop staring at me and look at the road while you're driving?”

“You seem different.”

He sighed.

“I'm not kidding. Going through the fog changed you. It does that.” I took a quick glance at him. “You look older.”

“Stop it, Mom,” he said, but I could tell he was pleased at the “older” part of my comment.

He was silent until we went over the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he hugged his knees to his chest and said, “I feel bigger. Like there's more room inside me.”

“Really? That's an interesting way to put it. What else?”

“I don't know. Peaceful, I guess.”

I felt peaceful, too, although I knew the high wouldn't last. I'd crash tonight and tomorrow morning I'd have to drag myself to work. I paid for my visits. Every time I went, it was a little harder to return to the modern world.

That weekend, all the occupants of 428 Elizabeth Street caravanned to Stinson Beach. It turned into an impromptu welcome-back party for Benno. He played host, setting up the volleyball net. He distributed ham sandwiches and made sure everybody got an even share of strawberries, the last good ones of the summer.

The peacefulness he'd described to me in the car
had
lasted. He was still riding a long, slow wave of contentment.

“Throw the Frisbee to me, Penny!” he yelled.

Penny ran to him with the Frisbee and slammed it into his stomach, then grabbed him around the thighs, toppling him into the sand. He took her down with him and she shrieked with delight.

“I said throw it to me, not bash it into me!”

She clung to him even tighter.

“That's it. He's officially ruined her. She's never going to get over him,” said Rhonda.

“Rhonda, Penny is four.”

“So? She's in love with him.”

“She's a baby. She's too young to be in love.”

“You have no idea what it's like with girls. She may as well be fifteen.”

Benno jumped up, grabbed Penny by the hands, and swung her in a circle.

“I should have listened to you and brought him to Greengage years ago. He wants to go back on the next full moon,” I said.

“What day is it on?”

“A Tuesday.”

“How are you going to manage that with his school?”

“I have no idea. How many days a month can you miss before you become truant?”

“I can't believe you're asking me that question.”

“Well, he's not going to let me go alone.”

And honestly, I didn't want to go alone anymore. Going without him was out of the question.

“Goddamn, what I wouldn't do for a beer.” Rhonda was pregnant with her second child.

I handed her my can of PBR. “A sip won't kill you.”

She took a furtive sip and sighed. “Even warm, it's the nectar of the gods.”

“I saw that!” yelled Ginger. He ran across the sand to our blanket. “How dare you ply my pregnant wife with alcohol?”

“She begged me.”

“It's true, I begged her,” said Rhonda.

“You are a very bad influence,” said Ginger. “Give me that beer.”

I handed it to him and he drained it. “Benno, my boy!” he shouted, his other hand raised. Benno leapt into the air and the yellow Frisbee arced across the sky.

School started and we fell back into our regular routines. I never realized this was a privilege, to know what the day would bring. To wake every morning, sit up in bed, look through my open door across the living room and see Benno, bleary-eyed and pajama-bottomed, searching for a clean shirt in his dresser drawer.

Before, this might have made me feel trapped. The tedium. The same thing every day. Now that I'd introduced Benno to Greengage, my life expanded. Here on the other side of the fog, time was pliable and elastic. It bulged and kicked, like Fancy's unborn child. Possibility and hope bled into my world,
our
worlds. Benno and I were in on it together. This changed everything.

On the full moon we'd leave right after I finished work. We'd stop at McDonald's before getting on the highway, and Benno would do his homework in the car. After that I'd usually lose him to the Walkman. Van Halen or the Stones. He'd stare out the window, his fingers tapping the beat out on his thighs, and I'd listen to public radio, collecting the news of the day for Joseph. Finally we'd pull into the lot of Jack London State Park, get our backpacks out of the car, and make the trek to our campsite. I'd set up the tent. He'd start the fire. At five in the morning we'd wake, pack everything up in the car, and drive back to San Francisco, just in time to get him to school.

We performed this ritual for four months before the fog returned.

I
didn't realize how I'd been waiting for their arrival and how slowly the weeks had passed, until I saw them standing in the meadow.

“How long has it been?” I called out to Lux when they drew near.

“Four months.”

Benno lifted his chin at me and held up a red package. “Brought you some Skittles.”

“Candy,” translated Lux.

Benno tore open the package, poured a few into his palm, and offered them to me. I chose the least offensively colored piece and popped it into my mouth. I spat it out immediately.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“It's appallingly sour.”

“They're supposed to be sour. That's the point,” he said.

He bobbed up and down, twitchy. He seemed pent up, as if he'd been counting the days until he and his mother would be let back into Greengage. This pleased me, to know they'd been waiting anxiously on the other side of the fog as well.

“What should we do now?” he asked me.

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Thirsty?”

“No.”

“Well, then, would you like to go on a ramble?”

“What's a ramble?”

“It's a stroll. A walk.”

“Where?”

“Wherever our feet take us. That's the point of a ramble. You don't have a destination.”

“All right. Yeah. Cool, man.”

“Fancy?” Lux inquired.

I nodded. “A girl. Gennie. She arrived last week.”

Lux clapped her hands and squealed. “Everybody healthy? How's Fancy holding up?”

“Both mother and child are fine.”

“Magnusson?”

“He's fine, too.”

She smiled proudly. “My God. You're an uncle! How does it feel?”

It felt unnatural, to be honest. I had virtually no experience with infants. Benno, impatient, shook his bag of Skittles in an effort to regain my attention.

“I assume you won't be joining us? You'll want to go straight to Fancy?” I said to Lux.

“Yes! I'm dying to get my hands on that baby!”

Lux ran toward the house, her full pack bouncing on her back. She never came empty-handed.

“She loves babies,” said Benno. “She can't get enough of Penny.”

Penny was Rhonda's daughter: Lux had told me all about her. Lux was a surrogate aunt to Penny just as Rhonda was a surrogate aunt to Benno, part of the makeshift family she'd built for herself over the years.

“Let's go,” I said to Benno.

His head swiveled from left to right as we walked. The boy took in everything with a starved expression on his face.

“Was it strange when you went back home last month?” I asked.

“What do you mean—strange?”

“Was it difficult to comprehend what had happened? Where you'd been?”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Sort of. But not really. I didn't think about it. I mean, I didn't question it too much. You're here. You're a reality. I didn't dream you all up.”

We walked past the vegetable garden. The gardeners were on their knees, jabbing tiny onion bulbs deep into the ground.

“They have hundreds to plant,” I said. “They'll need to last us for an entire year.”

“What's the date here?” he asked.

“April 19th.”

“The day after the earthquake.”

Yes, yesterday had been the two-year anniversary. I'd thought of that briefly at breakfast. Should I stand up and say something? Acknowledge it? In the end I'd decided against it. The dining room had been filled with happy chatter. People didn't need to be reminded.

I led Benno past the garden toward the chicken coop. I thought we might gather some eggs.

“My mom worries about you,” said Benno.

“Does she?”

“Yeah. You're always on her mind. She gets this faraway look in her eyes and when that happens I know she's thinking about you.”

“About Greengage.”

“No, you. Jesus, that chicken house stinks. You're not going to make me go in there, are you?”

I steered him in the opposite direction. “Is your mother doing well?”

“She got a really good job. She's a loan officer at a credit union.”

Lux had shared this news with me last time she was here. “Is she enjoying it?”

“I think so.” He looked at me, then looked away. “I don't understand. Why don't you want anybody to know about Greengage? There could be people who could help you get through the fog, help you get back.”

“There's nobody that can help us, and besides, it's too late for that. We've been gone for seventy-three years. There's no
back
to get back to.”

A wagon rumbled past. The field crew. They held up their hands in greeting.

“So you've just given up,” he said.

“No, we've accepted our fate.”

He gave me a perplexed look. “I know that sounds good and all, like what you should say as a grown-up, but I think it's bullshit. You could come back. You could adapt. You just don't want to.”

“That's ridiculous. Why wouldn't we want to?”

“Because you're scared.”

Was I? Thanks to Lux, I'd grown lazy, used to having the future spoon-fed to me. Delivered verbally, or through a magazine or newspaper, or the Walkman. Safe in my parlor, I sat and slowly absorbed the news. But actually being there, on the frontlines of the modern world—that was something I felt quite ambivalent about. Perhaps the boy was right.

“This way,” I said.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Back to the house.”

“Back to the house. Why, did I do something wrong?”

“No. I just have the sudden urge to see my niece.”

That was not a lie. But mostly I realized I wanted to see Lux's reaction to my niece. How she looked when she met Gennie—the proper way one should look when meeting the baby of somebody you loved for the first time.

Benno made a face. “Does the baby do anything besides sleep and drool and spit up?”

“Not that I've seen.”

He groaned.

“I'll drop you off at the schoolhouse.”

He brightened.

“But you must promise to sit in the back quietly. You mustn't disturb the lesson.”

He nodded, though we both knew his arrival would indeed disturb the lesson. His role was to deliver the future to the younger generation, via his clothing (a black and pink harlequin print shirt), his expressions (
Cool, man
) and sweets (Skittles). They'd enjoy the candy, of that I was certain.

Lux had brought Gennie a stuffed elephant and something called a lightsaber.

“The Force is strong with this one,” she said. She gazed down at Gennie in her crib. “God, she's so long.”

“Twenty-three inches,” said Magnusson.

The day after she'd been born, he'd taken his daughter to the woodshop and measured her himself. Of course Gennie would be tall; Magnusson was a giant.

“And you're all living here in the house?” Lux asked. “That's so cozy.”

Yes, Magnusson and Fancy had temporarily moved into the wing after Martha had died. I'd tried to convince Magnusson they should live in one of the cottages (surely they wanted more privacy), but Fancy wouldn't hear of it.

“She wants her uncle,” said Fancy, handing a bundled-up Gennie to me.

I held her for a moment, an awkward smile on my face. The thumbprint of her fontanel, her green eyes, her snow-blond hair, made me distinctly uncomfortable. She was as alien to me as one of Nardo's piglets.

“Here.” I slid the baby into Lux's arms.

Lux was a complete natural. She expertly held Gennie in the crook of her arm, shifted her hip to the side, and began swaying back and forth. I unwittingly began moving in time to her rhythm.

“I'd forgotten about their little starfish hands,” Lux said.

“Joseph—are you
dancing
?” asked Fancy, smirking.

For God's sakes. Could I get away with nothing? “I'm going to the dining hall.”

“Bring me back something sweet, I'm starving,” said Fancy. “This little one is eating me out of house and home.”

This was entirely too much information. The other day I'd stumbled upon Fancy breastfeeding in the kitchen. Yes, she was covered, a blanket shielding her, but I could still hear what was going on. And then my sister tried to carry on a normal conversation with me. But the suckling! The gurgling! She'd seen my stricken look and admonished me.

“This is not Victorian England. Nor do I have the luxury of a wet nurse, Joseph.”

“But—”

“But what?”

“You look like you're enjoying it.”

She'd laughed then. “Why shouldn't I enjoy it? I'm feeding my daughter, Joseph.”

“Hold on, I'll go with you,” said Lux. She carefully handed the baby back to Fancy.

Lux shivered. It was a cool day. I took off my jumper and handed it to her and she pressed it to her nose.

“It smells like you.” She put it on; it came nearly to her knees. We walked across the yard and I watched as she took stock of Martha's gardens.

“The flower clock—I can't believe you made it work. It's beautiful.”

“I'm not sure it's really working,” I said. The clock required constant attention. Some plant was always on the verge of dying. And whether the blooms opened or closed exactly on the hour was anybody's guess. I couldn't bring myself to watch it, or time it. I'd only finished it as a tribute to Martha.

“I brought you a greengage seedling,” Lux said nervously. “Please don't be mad at me. Now, I know you said they're notoriously hard to grow and there's probably a perfectly good reason why you named this place Greengage Farm and there are no greengage trees on the property, but I just thought maybe—”

I held up my hand, stopping her. “You brought me a greengage plum seedling.”

Two pink spots appeared on her cheeks. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Really?”

She bit her lip.

“That does me no good.”

“Fine, I'll take it back with me. I knew I shouldn't have—”

“Because greengages can't pollinate themselves. In order for the tree to bear fruit, I'll need at least two other seedlings, different varieties, maybe the Monsieur, and the Royale de Montauban.”

“You want to keep it?”

She looked flustered and happy and I felt a piercing stab of gratitude for her. For knowing what I needed well before I knew and just getting it for me.

“It's time we grew into our name,” I said.

We walked past the schoolhouse. I heard the children singing “Meet Me in St. Louis.” We caught a glimpse of Benno sitting in the back of the classroom, leaning forward, trying to learn the words to the song.

“Do they ever sing anything else?” asked Lux.

She was right. Miss Russell had a tiny repertoire of songs: “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “By the Old Oak Tree,” and “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”

“Benno should teach them some modern stuff.” She popped up on her toes and then did a little spin. “Michael Jackson. Probably not your style.”

We made our way across the meadow toward the dining hall.

“So what's it like for you, having a new baby in the house?” she asked.

“She wakes every morning at two and at five.”

Lux laughed. “God, I don't miss that, I have to say. Infant time. The hours warp when there's a baby around.”

“How are you doing?” she asked a moment later, meaning
How are you doing about Martha?

I'd gotten to the point where Martha was dead in my dreams. I didn't have to wake up anymore and remember she was gone. I knew this was a good thing, a sign of my moving on, but I missed the dark hours of the night when my unconscious gave me a brief holiday, when all was as it had been before.

“It's a little easier every day.”