Envious Moon(42)

“Then why?”

“I’m scared, that’s all,” she said, and the look on her face was so vulnerable, I wanted to take her lovely face in my hands and hold it, feel her pulse beneath my fingers.

I said, “I would never hurt you.”

“I know.”

“Come here,” I said, and she did, she fell down next to me and I rolled toward her. I slung my arm across her belly and afternoon light slanted through the break in the heavy curtains. Narrow bars of gold on the thick carpet.

“I love you,” I said.

She turned her face to me. “Do you?”

Her green eyes were wet. “Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Do you love me?”

Hannah’s eyes flickered from the top of my head down to my waist. She was so shy sometimes it killed me. “I do love you,” she said.

I undressed her slowly, as if each part of her was a mystery to be revealed. When she was naked on the bed, I spent the longest time just running my hands over all of her, from her toes to her feet, up her shapely legs and across the flat table of her belly, the rise of her breasts, to the soft whiteness of her bare throat.

There was a fury to our lovemaking that afternoon. We crashed together like we could not get enough of each other. Like we were trying to make up for the hours and the days we were apart.

When we finally collapsed, we lay side by side in the sweet quiet and we did not say anything. There was the rise and fall of our collected breath on the bed, the smell of the musty room, the smell of our sex. The alarm clock on the table next to us flipped a new number over, a flapping sound. Time was beating on. Not that it mattered. Inside that space, there was only Hannah and there was only me. No light, no moon, no night. The world didn’t make it past those heavy drapes.





We were not perfect parents. What I would give to do things differently! You have no idea. Jacob was busy with his work, the company, and it’s no secret that I started to drink. I know now that I am sober—I have this to thank for that, sometimes even flowers grow out of ashes—that I was depressed. At the time, I just thought I was bored. In that big house all day with nothing to do, Jacob at work and Hannah at school. I would close those heavy blinds and drink vodka on ice and watch bad television. I thought it was a temporary thing. Something to help me through a difficult time in my marriage. But it lasted ten years. It got so bad I had bottles of Smirnoff hidden all around the house. Under the couch. In the bathroom. Even in the tire well of the station wagon. The greatest guilt I have is how much my drinking cost me time with my girl. Jacob and I had been done for a while. We made a good show of it during Hannah’s school year, though he worked as much as he did because he did not want to be home with me. And then in the summers he disappeared to the island and took Hannah with him. She got that from him, her love of the ocean. Unless it was a beautiful day, the island made me sad. It seemed so lonely out there on the point, nothing but fog and water. I was happy to have them gone, to be completely honest. I didn’t have to hide my drinking in the summer. They were gone, and I could be myself in that big house. Even after Jacob died, I couldn’t get myself to go there. Who knows how different things would have been? Would you have come for her if I was there? Would you two have even met?

Oh, but Hannah loved it there. She loved the rocky coast and she loved the beaches. She loved to lie in the sun and brown. I was always telling her she had to be careful, that the sun will age you if you’re not careful. But she didn’t care. She liked being alone in that old house. And I never worried about her. When you grow up with parents like us, you grow up quickly. You learn how to travel. How to be in society. What is expected of you. And you also learn how to be on your own at a young age.





We made love until we could not make love anymore. Until our very bones ached from coming together. I found a small town nearby and fetched us sandwiches and we ate on the bed, lying on our stomachs. I stood on that tiny porch and looked at the huge pines and out to the rural highway and I smoked. It was the only time I allowed myself away from her. But then I was back inside and in the dark of that room I watched Hannah sleep. I lay on my back and traced the spider-web cracks on the ceiling. And when the sadness rolled over me, it took me by surprise. Didn’t I have everything I wanted? Wasn’t she all I wanted?

Of course, there was all that we knew that went unsaid. In Rhode Island and in the western corner of Connecticut, we both knew they were looking for us. Men and women we did not know, and some that we did, whose entire existence right now was built around finding the two of us and tearing us apart. Taking Hannah away from me. Sometimes lying there, I pictured them. Cops and detectives, in some windowless room, map on the wall, going over different scenarios. Did they go to New York to try to vanish into the big city? Or had they driven out west? Were they still in Connecticut, maybe at another campground?

And I’ll admit that part of me liked their attention, how it elevated the thing between me and Hannah, even though I was afraid of what they wanted to do to us.

There was something else important that went unsaid. For the first time in my life, I was away from the ocean. I know that sounds silly, but the more we moved inland, into these forested hills, the more I felt its absence. The ocean that was a different color every single day. The ocean that had given me work, had given my father work. The ocean that when I rode on its surface I was aware of its awesome strength and its power, at the same time knowing that I was one of the few who knew how to respect and love it. Not tame it because no man could do that. I had been born to the sea. It was in my blood. It was all I had ever known. And it saddened me to think that it might be gone forever.