The Exact Same Moon Read online

  Claire typically relieves my dad midmorning. A physical therapist before she became a physician, she spends much of her time ranting and raving and demanding that my mom receive proper care. Her point is: Every patient needs an advocate, and she’s it. Claire is the Worry Sister, so this role comes naturally. She got the hospital to give my mom a special blow-up mattress, special boots, special pillows. She visits with the doctors as they make their rounds. She consults on every decision. Staying on top of all of this, she gives the rest of us tremendous peace of mind. It’s funny how the Worry Sister can absorb so much of the family’s worry.

  Kristin, who like me has set up a little office with a laptop in my mom’s room, usually relieves Claire around lunchtime. She brings in homemade soups and breads and tries to get my mother to eat. Kristin brushes my mother’s hair. She holds her hand, tells her stories. Kristin is the Compassion Sister. Compassion takes courage—at least acting on it does. I wish I had Kristin’s courage. I wish I could just sit at my mother’s bedside the way Kristin does and say the reassuring things a critically ill person needs to hear. I wish I had the courage to hold my mom’s hand and pray. Knowing that Kristin is there to take on this role, it takes the pressure off.

  So then I show up at four o’clock, the Utterly Useless Sister. At least that’s how I feel. I’m the baby. What else is there to say? I’m … the fool. At least that’s how I feel. And out of my anxiety comes: entertainment. Oh, I’m good at entertainment. I work the TV. I’ve brought in a VCR for my mom, a CD player, and a tape player. I’ve coordinated a lot of buttons on a lot of remotes, and by now I’ve created a fairly sophisticated surround-sound system with the speakers I’ve placed around her room. I wish I had a better role, a more important one or a more dignified one.

  My brother comes in during my shift, and several times throughout the day. He always brightens my mother’s mood. He’s the Crown Prince of the family who also happens to be the Maniac Brother with his prodigious enthusiasm for everything from growing flowers to eating a sandwich to watching a spider spin a web. He’s a life force. He’s my mother’s firstborn child and the apple of her eye; I never appreciated the extent of the admiration until now.

  “So,” I say to Alex on the phone. “Anything else new at the farm? Tell me everything. It really cheers me up.”

  “Well, let’s see,” he says. “Yesterday George and Pat invited us to a pancake breakfast at their church.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet. Isn’t that sweet? Did you tell them I’m away? Did you tell them what’s going on?”

  “I did. Pat sent over some stuffed peppers.”

  “Oh, that is so sweet! Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “But I’m lonely.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I miss you,” he says.

  These are oddly soothing words. I can’t imagine going through this ordeal without Alex out there somewhere, a guardian angel you can just dial up on the phone. He’s coming here on Thursday, just a few days from now, to help with the move. He’s going to bring a U-Haul. My sisters and brother have also ordered U-Hauls. We’re going to park all those orange trucks out in the driveway and just … haul. Then on Saturday the movers will come and take the good stuff, the furniture and other items we’ve selected to appoint my parents’ new apartment.

  “I had a dream last night I had a baby,” I tell Alex.

  “Oh?”

  “It was a green peanut M&M.”

  “Oh?”

  “Which was not strange, in the context of the dream.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I dropped it,” I say. “You dropped it?”

  “But then I found it!” Now he is silent. “It was under the radiator.”

  “Uh-huh …”

  “But the nose had fallen off.”

  A long silence. I’m waiting. Surely he will have some dream interpretation to offer up. He’s a shrink. Surely he knows what the dream means.

  “So what do you think it means?” I ask finally.

  “Are you asking for my professional assessment of your dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, that’s an easy one,” he says. “I can sum up what that dream says about you in two words.”

  “Okay.”

  He makes a big deal of clearing his throat, like some orator about to say something important. “The first word is coo,” he says. “And the second word is coo.”

  “Cute.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But seriously. At first I thought it was a dream about some deep-seated need to have a baby,” I tell Alex. “But I think that’s too obvious.”

  “You have some deep-seated need to have a baby?”

  “Um.”

  “Do you?”

  My goodness! I have no idea. Shouldn’t I have an answer? I don’t have an actual yes or no answer. Do I? And why does this seem like an awfully personal question? My goodness. How rude.

  “The dream,” I say. “I really think it’s about my mom. Because M&M’s are her favorite candy, you know. At least in the milk chocolate family. As you know she’s a dark chocolate person—”

  “I really think you’re stretching here—”

  “No, the dream is about her,” I insist. “She’s reduced to a helpless little peanut M&M, and I’m … losing her. So I’m trying to rescue her.”

  “I don’t know,” Alex says.

  More silence.

  “Maybe you’re just … lost right now,” he says.

  “Like a piece of runaway candy?”

  “Well—”

  “Well, I am.”

  “Anyone would be,” he says.

  “I guess. But the main thing I am is useless.”

  “Oh honey, all of this is normal. This is how people feel in a crisis.”

  “Like a peanut M&M underneath a radiator?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Lost,” I say.

  “Lost,” he says.

  We don’t say anything for a while.

  “Tell me what else is going on at the farm,” I say finally. “Tell me everything. It cheers me up to hear.”

  “Baby lambs,” he says. “You should see all the lambs. All up and down Daniel’s Run Road. All the hillsides are covered with lambs and their mamas. Quite a show, really. George must have over two hundred.”

  “Lambs,” I say. “I can’t believe I’m missing the magnolia and lamb season, too. How long does the lambing go on?”

  “Awhile, I think. I’m not really sure.”

  “See, now we’re out of our league.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Actually, I thought it was pretty impressive the way I said ‘lambing.’ ”

  “It was,” he agrees.

  “So what about George? He didn’t bring any sheep over yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “What do you think he’s waiting for?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know how to ask. What’s the protocol?”

  There’s a knock on my door. It’s Kristin. “We’re running out of green and yellow,” she says, peeking in. “Can you go up to Thrift and get stickers?”

  “Sure,” I say, and I tell Alex I’ll think about the lambing protocol, think about it and get back to him on that. We say good-bye. Kristin trudges in, throws herself on the twin bed next to me. She’s got red hair like my sister Claire’s, and round features like my dad’s. She has a slight Asian flare to her green eyes, an exotic look that has always driven the boys wild. I’m glad she’s able to be here. In addition to being the Compassion Sister, she’s also the Write the Script Sister. Oh, she’s a wonderful producer. She’s gotten us organized. She’s the one who came up with the sticker solution. I’m blue. Claire’s yellow. Kristin is green. My brother is red. You take your stickers, and you walk around the house and you put a sticker on everything you want, even if there’s already a sticker on it. (We’ve already put white stickers on the stuff that’s going with my parents to the n
ew apartment.) So if, say, a lamp ends up with two stickers on it, you talk about it and decide. So far this plan is working out beautifully. It’s strange to think how worried my mom used to be about this deal of splitting stuff up. “Oh, I just don’t want you kids fighting over things,” she’d say. I don’t think any of us could have predicted how much of a nonproblem it would turn into.

  “Claire wants the piano,” Kristin says. “Do you care?”

  “Nope,” I say. “So far the only things I care about are flowers and paintings.”

  All week I’ve been digging up daylilies and daffodils. I don’t know if these really qualify as things you’re supposed to move when you move out of a house, but these are what I’m moving.

  My mother’s garden. It was her passion. It was her therapy. It was her lime-green explosion of hope every spring and her wilted brown exercise in faith each fall. So of course I’m moving it. I’m taking as much of her garden with me as I can physically manage. I’ll replant it at the farm. I am bound and determined to make sure those flowers get out alive.

  Same with my mom’s paintings. Long ago she said she wanted to throw away all of her practice canvases that have been stored in the basement. Practice canvases to her, maybe, but treasures to the rest of us one day. And I figure, hey, I have a barn. I’ll take the paintings—perhaps a hundred canvases—and give them at least a temporary home in my barn. This way, if anyone else in the family ever wants them, they’ll still be around.

  “You’re going to lose your light if you want to dig up any more flowers today,” Kristin says.

  “Yeah.” I swing my weary legs off the bed. “What about the stickers? Can you wait a couple of hours?”

  “Right now I’m aiming toward a nap,” she says, pulling the green comforter up over her.

  “Get it while you can.”

  I head downstairs, through this house so eerily adorned with white, green, yellow, blue, and red stickers. How ominous it all is. How I long to just get this move over with. I don’t want some extended good-bye. I don’t want to stand here and imagine Claire on these steps, Claire in her wedding dress, and me in a magenta bridesmaid gown next to her, and Kristin next to me, pinching me so I’ll crack up when the photographer takes the picture, and my mom standing down there watching, saying, “I have beautiful girls! Don’t I have beautiful girls? But you know what, they’re so much more than their beauty. I mean, I have an interesting family! What an interesting family!” I don’t want to stand here and imagine my mother pulling the photographer aside into her garden to brag about her children.

  And I don’t want to stand here and imagine my mother downstairs in her studio painting, and me upstairs writing, and the two of us meeting down here for tuna fish sandwiches, and iced tea, and the opportunity to commiserate over how the creative process, no matter what you’re in the act of creating, dictates the degree to which you are able to stay your own personal sanity course.

  No. Memories just take time. I have no time. And memories take feeling. Just say no to feeling! Let’s just get this move over with.

  I open the kitchen door and hear the raaaack, raaaack squeaking sound the hinges make. Now that is noteworthy. If you hold on to no other sound from a house you once lived in, you should hold on to the sound of the kitchen door.

  It’s funny. I have no idea what the sound of the kitchen clock is. I never knew that sound. I wonder if my mother came to know it when we all moved out.

  But, raaack, raaaack. There. There’s the door sound.

  Raaack, raaaack. I think I’ve got it.

  There’s another sound following it. An echo in this house. Clip CLOP clip CLOP clip. The sound of my mother’s determined heels over these wood floors. There’s a sound that has surely become absorbed good and tight within these walls.

  My sisters and I used to love to imitate my mother and her uniquely purposeful walk. Clip CLOP clip CLOP clip CLOP. The walk of a woman going places, stand back, move aside, she may just bowl you over. If my mother ever walks again, I wonder what new rhythm will make itself known. Then again, what sounds do footsteps make on wall-to-wall carpeting? The carpeting in the apartment at the retirement village is white. I don’t see my mother being at home walking on a white carpet. I just don’t. And that’s the nicest image I can conjure. The more accurate one is probably her in a wheelchair on a white carpet.

  Some of the doctors seem reluctant to promise that she’ll ever walk again normally.

  The whole situation, in the end, leaves me angry. I’m angry that my mother never got to say good-bye to her clip CLOP clip CLOP over these wood floors. I’m angry that the last time my mother got to see her dream, she was looking at it from the rear window of an ambulance.

  Outside the side yard is all bright orange dirt. Clay in huge piles, courtesy of the backhoe. The sun is heading down, and so the water in the cove is still, smooth, asleep. The trees overhead are just getting a green glow around their edges, the faint foretelling fuzz of spring.

  There should be some deer coming out for a drink any minute. I wonder how those deer are doing. I had such a complicated relationship with those deer. I used to chase them. Oh, I would run after them screaming like a crazy lady in curlers who just got her car stolen. Not because I wanted the deer to leave. Not really, anyway. I chased them so they would be afraid. It was the highest act of generosity, at least in my little adolescent mind. Don’t befriend the deer! That’s the worst thing you could do for them. The real act of love was to teach them to run. To fear. To never trust a human. Because the truth about humans was that humans were not trustworthy. Humans kill innocent creatures like deer. It was my singular duty—and sacrifice—to destroy their innocence so that they might survive.

  I’d sort of forgotten about all of that. I wonder what happened to all of that. I wonder how the deer are doing. I don’t suppose they’ve erected a monument to me, but you never know.

  I head across the driveway, over toward the edge of the woods where the main population of daylilies are sticking their necks out of the earth, just peeping through as if to check the time.

  Where did I leave off when I finished digging yesterday? I’m trying to remember.

  There should be bookmarks for gardeners. I don’t mean so you can find your plants. I mean so you can find your thoughts.

  I was thinking about something yesterday. Something about the anger.

  I take my shovel and place it about eight inches from the base of a plant. Ready. Aim. I hop and then, stomp! The earth opens with a crunch, like a big man cracking his knuckles. Well, that felt good. A little air in those joints. I’m able to free the roots of the plant with a gentle rocking motion. I lift the plant. A daylily. It could be the Hyperion variety, or maybe Happy Returns, or even Uncommon Love, I suppose. See, my mom would be able to tell you what kind of daylily it is. She would be able to tell you the botanical name, and what height to expect it to reach, and when. Not that my mom is a daylily expert or anything. Just a fan.

  I think she’s going to like it that I’m taking some daylilies. She’ll be able to visit them at the farm. She can dig some up and give them to her friends.

  Some of the doctors said that in a year, if all goes well, she could be ninety percent back to her normal self. Some say eighty. It would be a higher percentage, they said, if the attack on her nerves hadn’t been so particularly brutal, if her nerves weren’t so badly damaged.

  If, if, if.

  Why did this have to happen? Why is my mother paralyzed? Raw chicken? A stupid little cold? Oh, come on. Can’t modern medicine do any better than that? I’ve read about an outbreak of GBS back in the late 1970s, when the U.S. government sponsored a campaign to get everyone vaccinated for the swine flu, which turned out not to be nearly the epidemic they’d imagined, no, it was the vaccine that wreaked havoc. They were able to link the swine flu vaccine to a huge rise in the number of cases of GBS.

  So I guess that’s a clue. But still. They should know more. Nobody should have to get this dise
ase, but if they do, at least they should know why. There’s a woman who visits my mom. Her name is Bobbie. She got GBS when she was thirty-two. Bobbie collapsed in her kitchen, the day before her daughter’s first birthday. Normal one day, the next day she was on a ventilator, with a feeding tube in her, and her eyelids taped closed because her eyelid muscles had become paralyzed and she couldn’t blink. She had a very severe case, was in the ICU for months. And she couldn’t tell anyone about the pain. She had no way to communicate, could not even make a signal. The nerves that had shorted out were playing the most bizarre tricks: She had the sensation that she had two extra arms and two extra legs. She felt them as real as anything is real. And these extra arms and legs were twisted up underneath her. The pain. She had no way to communicate. The pain, the imprisonment, it drove her into full-blown psychotic episodes. She was losing her mind.

  Two years later she’s fully recovered; her daughter is three, and she’s had another baby. She visits people like my mom, tells them it really is going to be over someday. Our whole family has come to think of Bobbie in saintly terms.

  Okay, this is a whopper, this plant. A whopper! Ready. Aim. I place the shovel right in the center. Hop, stomp! And then again. Ready, aim, hop, stomp! And one more time. Whew. That felt good. I put one section back in the hole, the rest in the wheelbarrow to take home. The new owners will never notice the difference. No, of course they won’t. And I won’t even charge them for this service that I’m providing. This is a favor! These plants really do need to be divided if they’re going to keep blooming.

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!

  Boy, is this therapeutic.

  I’m thinking maybe the reason my mom got paralyzed was because she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready to leave her dream. Maybe this is the sort of thing that can happen when you get yanked out of your dream too soon. You end up frozen in time.

  Ready, aim, hop, stomp!