The Exact Same Moon Read online

  “Looks like you’re stuck here,” he tells me.

  “Thanks,” I tell him.

  “Well, I try to be nice to a pretty girl once a day,” he says, smiling. “Anyway, what else do I have to do?” He reaches over the plastic flowers separating our booths and extends his hand. He says his name is Mack. He confesses that he likes it when the fog rolls in. He gets to know people. He asks me what I’m doing here in Bradford.

  “A conference,” I say. “At the university.” Which is all I feel like saying about it. See, I should have bagged the conference. It was the conference that kept me from just driving home to be with my mom as soon as I got the news. I should have canceled! I was going to cancel! But my sister Claire said, No. She said, Don’t cancel. Don’t panic. Just do what you have to do, come home when you can. She said my mom was stable. She’d given the same advice to Kristin, who had to clear things up at work before she could bolt.

  So I figured, all right. You said you’d do the speech to kick off the conference, you agreed to it months ago, they have you in all the publicity material, your mom is stable, you have to do this conference. Even though the conference is four hours north of Pittsburgh. I mean, way the heck in the middle of nowhere. The other side of the universe from Philadelphia, where my mom is.

  “What kind of conference?” Mack says.

  “Just a … conference,” I say. “It was yesterday. Today is, you know, today.” Oh, brother. There’s a statement. I’m not doing well. It’s hard to be your normal self when you’re walking around with big, awful news in your head. But what is there to say, anyway? Nothing except: Hey, never mind the stupid conference, my mom is sick! Completely healthy one day, my mother is now lying in an intensive care unit paralyzed up to her eyeballs—the good news is she can blink—struggling for every breath. And no one is exactly sure why.

  And what about happily-ever-after? Whew. It sure can get yanked out from underneath you. There is no holding on to happiness.

  But then again, that’s not exactly right. Happy moments don’t vanish altogether. They just get … added to. Of course they do. Moments never exist in isolation. Moments are like music. The strings come in, then the brass, then some percussion. Moments never drown each other out unless you let them. Hey, it’s your orchestra.

  “Hey,” says Mack, sitting across from me. “You want to come see my plane out back?”

  “Thanks,” I say, forcing a smile. “But I’m good.”

  “Aw, come on,” he says. “I’m a harmless old man.”

  “You know what,” I say, “I’m waiting for a phone call.” I hold up my red phone as proof. He shrugs, looks away.

  Aw. And now why do I feel guilty? I am waiting for a phone call. I’ve been waiting for phone calls for two straight days. My dad, who is sounding eerily calm about my mother’s condition, is due any second with an update. I think all this reporting is helping him, like he’s a foreign correspondent on the front line. He certainly has the deep resonant announcer voice for it.

  At the moment there are three theories floating. Number one, my mom could have a collapsed disk in her neck. She’s had neck pain for years, nothing serious, just discomfort. But perhaps the disk is now pinching her spinal cord? If so, she would likely need surgery—on her spinal cord. This option seems to be a very unpopular one.

  The second theory is: brain tumor. This option is a lot less popular than even the first. There just isn’t a whole lot to say past the words brain tumor.

  The final guess is a rare disease called Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which at the moment is the diagnosis everyone is rooting for because, while we know almost nothing about it, the one thing we do know is that most people suffering from it eventually recover.

  My dad is supposed to call any minute now. Why isn’t he calling? Is that good news? Or is that bad news?

  I’m trying to picture my mother paralyzed. It is an impossible image to invoke. I’m trying to picture my mother with arms that aren’t able to move. They say she can’t even move her fingertips. She can’t smile.

  But she can blink.

  See, I can’t picture any of this. Actually, at the moment I can’t even picture my mother at all. Oh, I hate this. This used to happen to me, as a kid, when my parents took off on vacation together, leaving us kids in the gentle command of our Aunt Ag. I loved my Aunt Ag as much as anyone on earth, but somehow I’d end up missing my parents so much, I’d forget what they looked like. I’d absolutely lose the picture of them in my mind. I wonder now why I didn’t just go get a photograph of them or something. Maybe I did. But I don’t remember that. I remember only the blankness of forgetting.

  Eventually, I could feel them. And this was usually the way back. I could feel my dad’s hand on my cheek. He’d always put his hand on my cheek when I needed comfort. He had hands like clouds. Only warmer. And closer. Big and strong enough to ward off anything scary. He had hands that held you and made you feel like a flower.

  I can feel his hands now. Oh, it’s a cinch to conjure them. What I can’t feel is my mother’s arms. Well, that’s weird. Because after feeling my dad’s hands, I could usually feel my mother’s arms. I could feel myself being held by her.

  And now I can’t. My mother is paralyzed, and I’m the one having trouble feeling.

  There’s my phone. Dee dump, dee dump, dee dump. Now why do I have the Mexican Hat Dance song programmed in? A lot of the decisions you make when you’re happy seem painfully stupid when you’re sad.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” I say to Mack, who’s sitting here staring at me. He nods, climbs out of the booth, and saunters away.

  “Hello?”

  “Well, some good news this time,” my dad says. “No evidence of tumor.” I can hear the relief in his voice, or maybe that’s a sound coming from inside my head. He says he should know any minute about the results of the MRI, which will give us the red or green light on the disk-collapse theory. I tell him about how I’m stuck at the Bradford airport, but I’m careful not to whine.

  “Okay, sweetie,” he says. “I’ll give you a call after the meeting.”

  “Meeting?”

  “She has a team. A neurologist, internist, a whole team. They’re going to go over everything. I’ll call you when I have some news.”

  “Good.”

  “Say some prayers,” he says. “I’m on it.”

  We hang up.

  And here comes Mack again.

  “You gonna come see my plane now?” he says.

  “I’m waiting for another call,” I say.

  “You can’t bring that phone with you?” he says. “Come on, you look like you could use something to take your mind off your troubles.”

  Well, that part’s true.

  “This’ll work,” he says. “Guaranteed.”

  There’s something charming about the way his eyes meet mine, then dart away. His skin is thick as a fisherman’s, and the deep creases hold stories, you can count on that. I imagine myself out there looking at his plane. I imagine there’s all of a sudden a miraculous break in the fog cover and Mack is able to start up his plane and whisk me on out of here. Hmm. This definitely could be what labor feels like, from the baby’s point of view. It’s like: How can I escape? You’re open to anything.

  “All right then,” I say.

  “You wait here, I’ll pull my truck around.”

  Soon I am climbing into a blue Ford pickup with lots of airplane stickers on the dash, which I dutifully admire.

  “You married?” Mack asks. “Not that it matters.”

  The way he says this—something in his tone. The pieces fall into place with a thud. “You’re trying to pick me up?” I say. “Aw, jeez. Listen, I’m having a bad enough day as it is.”

  He shrugs, looks down.

  “I didn’t mean it that way—”

  “It was worth a shot,” he says. He tells me he’s married. “Well, she died. Nine months ago.” He opens his glove compartment and pulls out a small green photo album labeled �
��Claire.”

  “That’s my mother’s name,” I say. And isn’t that strange? I’m starting to wonder what bizarre forces are at work this day. “And my sister’s, too.”

  He says she was fourteen when they met. They were married for fifty-one years. “Oh, I worshiped the ground she walked on. Everybody knew that.”

  I don’t know what to say. How do you console a person you’ve just met? A lonely, if unreconstructed, old man who probably just needs a friend?

  He pulls out another photo album. This one is red and has no label. “Okay, now these here are a couple of girlfriends I’ve had in my life. This is my lady in New Jersey, and this here’s my girl in Arizona. And then Betsy, she lives right here in town.”

  I look at him, confused.

  “Oh, I stepped out on Claire all my life,” he tells me. “She knew. But she never said a word about it.” He keeps flipping through the girlfriends. He says Betsy rolls her own cigarettes and skins deer and fixes cars. “But see how feminine she is?”

  I lean back, rest my elbow on the truck’s window ledge and my fingers on my eyes. You know, all I really wanted to do today was go home and be with my mother. How did I get into all of this? Forget the whole birth-canal metaphor. Either that, or I definitely took a wrong turn.

  Mack pulls his truck into the hangar and hops out to show me his yellow Cessna 150. He shows me how the flaps work and where the gas goes in. He opens the door, helps me settle into the cockpit. He says he loves machines. And adventure. “I like changes,” he says. “It’s why I drove a truck all my life. I can’t stay in one place.” His sons also drove trucks. “But both are dead,” he says. The first one cancer, the second one suicide. “One day his wife told him his kids were not his own,” he says, “and the next day he was dead.”

  I don’t know quite what to say. Families are messy, that’s what I want to say. Or, gee—and to think I’ve been craving family noise. Yeesh. Never mind. There’s a lot to be said for living your life with just a bird pecking you on the head.

  “Well, why did you cheat on Claire?” is what comes out.

  He shrugs. “It was just a thing I did with my life.”

  My cell phone rings. Dee dump, dee dump, dee dump, de diddly dump dee dump. “There’s my call. How do you open this door?” I find the lever. It reminds me of the way my old ’73 Volkswagen Beetle door opened. Cute latch. Cute door. I step out of the plane. “Hello?” I clunk my head on the wing, clunk it good. “Aw! Ow! Awwwww!”

  “Hello?” my dad says. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  I have no idea in this world how to explain what just happened. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I say. “What’s the word?”

  “Her neck is fine,” my dad says. “They just came in with the MRI results. No change at all from her last MRI a year ago. So I’m sure this is what they’re thinking. They’re thinking Gee-ann-bar-ray.” He’s careful in his pronunciation, as if he’s been practicing.

  “Oh Dad, that is so great,” I say. “I mean, I think it’s good news. Is it good news?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say, you know, good,” he says.

  But of all our choices, wasn’t this strange little disease the one we were rooting for? Shouldn’t we be relieved to hear this diagnosis?

  “We’re learning more about it,” he says. “We’ll know a lot by the time you get home.”

  “Yeah, well, she could be all better by the time I get home,” I say.

  He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t say anything at all for a moment.

  “It’s going to be a long haul, honey,” he says, finally. “We still have a lot to get through.”

  “Not to mention the move,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says. By the way he says that, I can tell he hasn’t thought once about the move.

  Whoops. Now, why did I have to bring this up? The last thing my dad needs to think about is the move.

  For a long time, the move was front-page news. The move. The move. The move! This was all the family talked about. Oh, I must have a thousand hours of phone time logged in with my mom about the move.

  “I can’t think about the move,” my dad says.

  “No. I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I brought that up.”

  “I can’t think about it.”

  “No.”

  My parents have lived on the edge of Springton Lake, set back in a wooded cove, for nearly twenty-five years. This, you understand, was the land of my mother’s dream. Her big happily-ever-after dream. She picked the spot and designed the house when she was in her early fifties, having nearly finished raising her kids and feeling quite ready to begin pursuing the things she had put off. I was in high school when we moved, and I remember seeing my mom become the picture of joy in that house. She decided to go back to art school, she got accepted at the exclusive Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she took herself seriously as an artist for the first time in that house.

  As a matter of fact, looking back, I can see she really was a model for me when I set about pursuing my dream of living on a farm. Looking back, I can see that Springton Lake was my mother’s Sweetwater Farm.

  The weird thing, though, was that just as my Sweetwater Farm dream was coming true, my mother’s Springton Lake dream was coming to an end.

  “Your father’s talking about moving to the funny farm again,” my mother said to me one day about a year ago on the phone.

  “I really don’t think you should call it the funny farm,” I said.

  “I just don’t see myself living around a bunch of old people,” she said.

  I didn’t either. I was not at all in favor of the funny farm, also known as Riddle Village, a brand-new retirement center just a few miles from the house on Springton Lake. My parents were by now well into their seventies, and my dad was more than ready to give up the daily cares of home ownership. My mother was not. She was in no way prepared to leave her dream house, her painting studio, her wildflower gardens, and all those millions of daylilies she had tucked so lovingly into the earth over the years.

  Moving was a subject that was coming up a lot when I talked to my mom on the phone, a habit I’d long ago fallen into. For so many people my age, a mother is a touchstone. Something good happens in your life, you call your mother. Something bad happens, you call your mother. Your mother, the very person who sent you off to kindergarten with dry underwear in your lunchbox, she is a camera recording your life. It’s nice to know she’s there. It’s comforting to know someone is interested in all of this. Actually, when you really think about it, it’s fairly essential to your sanity that you have her there.

  I hated when my mother got to talking about the funny farm. A retirement village? It screamed: OLD. It was a building that said: Your parents are on their way out. I’d never really thought of my parents as old until my dad got that stupid funny farm idea in his head. If you start imagining your parents as old, the next thing you know you’re imagining them dead. I didn’t even know how to imagine a world without parents.

  One day last fall my mother called to tell me it was a done deal. They’d signed on the dotted line. “Funny farm here we come!” She tried so hard to appear happy about this. She said the apartment was huge. “And the food is great!” she said. “And the dining room is so elegant.”

  “Great, Mom,” I said, even though what I wanted to say was: “I’m so sorry.”

  It was just a few weeks later that the For Sale sign went up on the house on Springton Lake. My mother couldn’t even look at that sign. She got in the car and spent the day at the library. She went the next day, too, and the next. She grew increasingly withdrawn.

  My parents’ house sold within a month. Done deal. And then the minutes started ticking by. The move. The move. The move! It really has been like a time bomb we’ve been waiting to go off.

  Who could have imagined that we’d have an entirely different explosion?

  Now my mother is paralyzed. The movers are scheduled to arrive in just two weeks. No, my dad shouldn’t
be thinking about the move.

  “It’s just that, well, your mother is not exactly out of the woods here,” my dad says to me on my little red phone. “And I don’t want to scare you, but—”

  “I understand,” I say, even though I don’t. Mack is craning his neck, trying to listen, trying to figure out what is going on. I give him a sneer. The kind of sneer you give to your best friend since seventh grade: “Quit it!”

  “I’ll talk to you later, Dad,” I say. “I’ll be there soon.”

  I hang up, turn to Mack, who is still sitting in his plane. I’m talking to him through my little window, which is closed but apparently doesn’t block out sound. “Let’s go in and check on my flight, okay?”

  He looks at me, disappointed.

  Oh, brother.

  “I really like your airplane,” I say.

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

  “A real beauty,” I say.

  He drives me back to the terminal without incident. He stands with me in line. He seems to think I need company. I don’t quite know how to tell him that I really, really don’t.

  “Canceled,” the lady at the US Airways counter says. “All flights out of this airport are canceled due to fog.”

  “All flights?” I say to the woman. I mean, I didn’t actually know they did that.

  “All flights,” she repeats.

  I can’t believe this!

  The woman tells me that vans have been dispatched to drive passengers to either Buffalo or Pittsburgh, where there will be flights to take us all to our final destinations.

  I didn’t know they did that, either.

  “Hey, how about I drive you myself?” Mack says. “I’ll get you there faster.”

  I decline the offer. I’m sure he’s quite harmless, but spending four hours alone in a truck with him, I don’t know. Sometimes you have to set boundaries. There are people in this world who will move into your house if you don’t set boundaries.