Waking the Moon (65 page)

“You said you were a friend of his?”

“Yes.” My heart was pounding as I stammered, “Why?”

The woman sighed. “I’m not really supposed to do this, but—” She hesitated. “José passed away a few weeks ago.”

I slumped back into my chair as she went on, “He had a heart attack—”

“A heart attack! But he couldn’t—he’s so young!”

“I know. I’m sorry.” The woman’s voice broke slightly. “I really am. It was a terrible thing, very unexpected. We’re all really going to miss him around here …”

“Yes,” I whispered. I wanted to ask more but suddenly I felt sick. “Th-thank you, thank you very much. I’ll call somebody—I mean I’ll call one of our friends …”

I hung up. For a moment I clung to the edge of my desk. Then it was too much, on top of cognac and a nearly sleepless night and everything else that had happened. I stumbled out of my office and down the hall, and fled into the ladies’ room. I thought I’d throw up—I
wanted
to throw up—but I didn’t. Instead I started choking with sobs, so violently that Laurie came running in from her cubicle around the corner.

“Katherine! What is it—”

She put her arm around me and I shook my head. “Here,” she said in a softer voice, and turned on the tap. “Get some cold water on you—you’re so hot! Is it heatstroke?”

“I’m okay—I’m okay,” I gasped. “I just had some bad news—a friend of mine—a friend of mine died.”

“Oh, Katherine—”

“I’ll be all right. It’s just—just so sudden,” I said, and gulped back a sob.

Laurie nodded, her eyes wide with pity. “I’m
so
sorry. Do you want me to get Dylan?”

I shook my head. “N-no. It’s—it’s not anyone he knows, and tomorrow’s his birthday and I don’t want to upset him. I’ll be okay, really. But thanks.”

I stood over the sink with the cold water running, until finally I stopped crying. Then I went back to my office, hoping to hide until lunchtime.

But Dylan was already there. “Sweeney, I’m so sorry,” he murmured, hugging me. “Who was it?”

“Just a—well, an old friend of mine. From school—from the Divine, I mean. I hadn’t even seen him in a year or so, but we talked all the time, and he left me all these messages early in the month but I kept putting off calling him back. And then I—”

I bit my lip, trying to keep the tears back. “I called him this morning. To tell him about us. And someone at the
Beacon
told me he had a heart attack.”

“Your friend Baby Joe?” Dismay flickered across Dylan’s face as he made the connection.

I nodded. “Yeah. Oh god. I don’t even know who to call—I mean, his family was from here, but I never met them or anything …”

“It’s okay, Sweeney. It’ll all be okay.” Dylan soothed me, stroking my head. “Don’t worry …”

I tried not to laugh bitterly.
Yeah, death sucks, man; but what the fuck does a kid like
you
know about it?

But that was just mean. I looked up and could see how confused he looked, and also a little worried: was he doing this right, was this how you behaved when one of your girlfriend’s friends died?

“I’ll be okay,” I said, and tried to sound like I meant it. “It’s just so—unexpected. And I feel so fucking guilty. He left me all these messages, and I just blew him off. Because of—”

Because of you.
I fought back the nasty thought, and ended, “Because I—I just didn’t feel like talking. And now—he’s
dead.”

“How could he have a heart attack? I mean, if he’s your age?”

I moved away from him. “I don’t know. I—well, I don’t know, that’s all.”

For the first time, I thought of Hasel: how had
he
died, really? That insane letter he’d sent to Baby Joe, about seeing Angelica bathing in a creek in Virginia; and the next thing I knew, he’d drowned.

What had Baby Joe been up to when
he
died?

I leaned against my desk. “You know,” I said slowly, “I think I’m going to leave early today I feel pretty awful—” I smiled ruefully. “No offense—it’s just, you know, I’m kind of hung over and now this.”

“It’s okay.” Dylan ran a hand through his hair. He hadn’t showered that morning, and had dressed hastily, in wrinkled khakis and a blue cotton shirt that had seen better weeks. In the close hot room he still smelled like the smoke and beer from Kelly’s. “I’d go too, but I told Laurie I’d help her with stuff downstairs.”

“Okay.” I felt relieved. I needed to be alone for a few hours, if nothing else just to sleep and take a cold shower. “Hey—”

I linked my hands behind his neck and kissed his chin. “You haven’t changed your mind, have you? I mean about last night?”

He frowned. “Last night? Last night?—oh, you mean
that.”
He grinned. “Hell no. Have you?”

“Hell no.” I pulled his face closer to mine and kissed him, his skin rough and hot where he hadn’t shaved. “Never …”

Dylan half turned and reached for the door, closed and locked it. He turned back and gently pushed me until I was sitting on my desk. We made love with most of our clothes on, until the whole room smelled like sex and afterhours. When he came he bit my shoulder to keep from crying out, so hard he left a small bruise there beneath the silk. For a long time we sat on my desk curled in each other’s arms, our hearts pounding, and when I drew away from him I knew that somehow things had changed. I knew that this was it: that there was no turning back now, for myself or Dylan. His skin and blood and memory were branded into me as surely as that little bruise on my shoulder, but I knew that none of those things would ever fade. He was mine now, he had always been mine, and nothing on earth would ever take him away from me.

“Sweeney,” he whispered. “I love you so much. I always have.”

“I know,” I said, and gently pushed the long damp hair from his face. “I love you too, Dylan.”

I left, not caring that my blouse was soaked with sweat as I walked unsteadily down the long curving marble stairs; not caring that I looked dazed and maybe even a little nuts, like someone who’s survived a terrible accident; someone who had just watched everything she owned in the whole world go up in flames except what she loved most; someone who had seen all that, and just walked away with bruises.

I went home and took a cold shower and slept naked on our bed with the fan turned on me. When I woke it was after six o’clock—I could hear Dylan downstairs in the kitchen, watching the local news—and I felt much better. I had decided I’d call the
Beacon
again next week, after Dylan’s birthday, to get the whole story I could try to contact Annie Harmon, but that might be difficult. She was an up-and-coming star of sorts, and it seemed tacky to get in touch now, after such a long hiatus. Still, I figured if I got my nerve up, I could get her number from whoever had taken over Baby Joe’s column.

And then there was Angelica, of course. The next day was Dylan’s birthday, and while we’d made our own plans, he seemed to take it for granted that his mother was going to show up sometime. Maybe a few days late.

“But she’ll call over at Dvorkin’s,” he’d assured me. “She gets caught up in her work, but she’ll call.”

“I hope so,” I said. He still refused to let me buy him anything, and his wardrobe was looking pretty shabby. “You need some new clothes.”

He rolled his eyes. “Clothes. Like you ever see me in
clothes.”

“Good point.” I left it at that.

Now I was hungry. I yawned and threw on a T-shirt and a pair of Dylan’s cutoffs, then padded downstairs.

“Sweeney! Come here!”

“What?” I walked into the kitchen, to find him perched in a chair staring at the tiny Sony on the counter. “Is that
news?”
I asked darkly. “You know I hate news—”

“Just listen!”

He turned up the volume, so I could hear a correspondent in L.A. talking about how a previously unknown fungus had apparently been released from somewhere within the ground during the previous spring’s earthquake. People all over southern California were getting sick, their symptoms alarmingly similar to those caused by biological warfare in Southeast Asia in the sixties.

“Isn’t this great? First rats, now fungus!” Dylan shook his head and reached for an opened bag of tortilla chips. “My mother is right—we are going to hell in a clutch purse! Here—” He pushed the bag at me. “I got some salsa.”

I grimaced. A list of symptoms was scrolling across the postcard-sized screen, along with information numbers for the Center for Disease Control and NIH. “Thanks, Dylan. Maybe later.”

“Wait—don’t go, there’s supposed to be something about that man who boiled his kids in Trenton—”

“Dylan!”

I had started for the living room, when the screen switched from the L.A. correspondent to a woman standing in front of a huge sand-colored building.

“Hey,” I said. “I know that—”

“This morning, officials at the University of the Archangels and Saint John the Divine in Washington, D.C., confirmed that they had reached an agreement to transfer a collection of over three hundred ancient artifacts to the radical feminist group Potnia.”

“That’s the Divine!” I grabbed Dylan’s shoulder. “That’s where—”

“Shh—I can’t hear!”

“—
as ongoing investigations continue at several museums in this country and abroad, amid rumors of a secret society from which women are barred, and even stranger allegations made by Potnia. We spoke to Professor Balthazar Warnick, Professor Emeritus at the University’s Thaddeus College.”

“Holy cow,” I breathed. “I don’t
believe
this—”

The screen showed a slight man in a three-piece suit, standing in a cavernous space. He was so thin as to appear almost wasted, but his hair was still dark, and his eyes were the same piercing eyes I had last seen years before at the Orphic Lodge.

“There has been absolutely no wrongdoing on the part of the University or any individuals associated with the institution,” he said. At the sound of his voice—silken as ever it had been, with that same ironic undertone of menace and laughter—I hugged myself; as though someone had opened a window onto winter. “We have held these items—and numerous others of greater value, I should add—for many,
many
years. Centuries, some of them.” He swept his hand upward to indicate the vaulted recesses of a ceiling high overhead, and I realized he was being taped somewhere in the recesses of the Shrine.

“No one,
absolutely
no one,
at the University has ever gained any sort of financial benefit from these objects,” he went on. For an instant I saw a glint of fire in his eyes. “I should also say that, considering the political climate in many of the countries where these artifacts have their origin, the University has done an
excellent
job of safekeeping—”

Abruptly the camera cut to an elegantly dressed young woman sitting behind an important-looking desk. She was even more diminutive than Professor Warnick, with straight jet black hair and white skin and black eyes. Her almost childlike beauty was belied by her suit, which probably cost what I made in a month, and the delicately drawn tattoo on her cheek.

The newscaster intoned,
“Rosanne Minerva, attorney and spokeswoman for Potnia, disagrees.”

“Some of these figurines, including the so-called ‘Tahor Venus,’ are literally
tens
of
thousands
of years
old
,” Rosanne Minerva said. Her tone was utterly self-assured. “For centuries this relatively small group of men—primarily American and European businessmen and scholars—has been hiding these treasures—these priceless religious artifacts that belong to women, and men,
everywhere
!”

When she said the word
men
it was with the sort of pity usually reserved for speaking of the terminally ill. The camera drew in for a close-up of her poised, aquiline face, and I got a better look at her tattoo. Without meaning to I gasped.

“What?” demanded Dylan.

The little cusp drawn so carefully upon her cheek was a perfect half-moon, incised with tiny swirled lines and meanders. The same lunar crescent that Angelica had worn: a lunula.

“What these men have done is nothing short of profanation,” Rosanne Minerva said. Her hand rested lightly upon a stack of papers, but I could see how her fingers tensed. “It is a sin, and a crime, and it will be—it has been—stopped.”

I continued to stare in disbelief even after the screen cut back to the newsroom.

“She’s just a lawyer,” Dylan said, reaching for another handful of chips. “I know who she is.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Potnia—they’re with my mother.” He turned to look at me, a curtain of dark hair flopping over his eyes. “Haven’t you ever heard of them?”

“Well, sort of. I read something about them. What—”

At that moment the door buzzer rang. Dylan stopped eating in mid-bite. I froze with one hand on the wall.
Nobody
rang that buzzer, except for UPS men and Seventh-Day Adventists.

“My mother!”
whispered Dylan. He glanced nervously down at his shirt, then at me. “Uh-oh.”

“You stay here,” I commanded.

“Why?”

“I don’t know!” I said, flustered. “It’s my place, that’s why,
I’ll
open the door—”

“I live here too!” Dylan called after me plaintively, but he stayed in the kitchen.

I walked to the door in my bare feet, running a hand through my hair and cursing myself for not putting on makeup. Give it to Angelica to pull off something like this. After all these years, here she was coasting in with a little fanfare of related media coverage and not even a phone call to warn me. I could just make out a figure through the window, someone nearly hidden by wisteria. I stopped in front of the door, took a deep breath, and opened it. “Surprise,” someone rasped. It was Annie Harmon.

I was so stunned I could only gape. She had the same dun-colored hair, trimmed to a messy crew cut; the same recalcitrant cowlick, dusted now with grey; the same brown violet-tinged eyes and wanton voice. She was thinner than she had been, and it showed mostly in her face—puckish Annie had cheekbones now, and a small cleft in her chin, that obviously hadn’t just been put there for her music video. She had lines too, around her eyes and mouth; her arms were thin and muscled, her hands worn and raw-looking. Her tiny feet were shoved into red tennis shoes—
expensive
red tennis shoes. She wore torn fatigues, a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped out, a gold wedding band on her right hand. She looked absolutely beautiful.