Envious Moon(46)

“You scared me.”

I wiped at my face. “You didn’t have to hit me.”

She rubbed her eyes and she looked away from me. She didn’t say anything. I said, “Jesus, you could say you’re sorry.”

Hannah rolled over on her side. She said, “I want to go home.”

And perhaps it was because while she slept I had been thinking my own thoughts of home, and of the sacrifices I had made for the two of us, that this angered me. I grabbed her roughly and tried to turn her back over, to face me. She resisted and I said, “Come here, look at me.”

“I’m tired of looking at you,” she said.

I got on top of her then, flipped her onto her back. She squirmed underneath me, and I used my knees to pin her arms down. “Look at me,” I said, but she wouldn’t. Her eyes roamed to the left and right but never up, never up at my face.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

I gazed into her eyes then, those green eyes, and I saw the pain in them, the fear, and I had never wanted to frighten her and now I was and I hated myself for it. I lifted my knees off her arms. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Get off me,” she said.

I moved off her and onto my back. We were side by side looking up at the wooden ceiling. “I didn’t mean anything,” I said.

“I just want to sleep,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have hit me,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have woken me like that. What was I supposed to do?”

“I don’t want to fight,” I said.

“Then let me sleep,” she said. “Please? I just want to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said softly.

Hannah rolled back away from me. Outside I heard the wind moving across the mountains. There was a lot more I wanted to say. We had never had a fight before, not a real one, not like this. I didn’t want anything to change between us. There was so much out in the world, beyond that bedroom, that was conspiring around the clock to keep us apart.





The thing that frustrates me the most, Anthony,” Dr. Mitchell said to me last week, “is that we have never been close to a breakthrough. Do you know what I mean by a breakthrough?”

We were sitting in his office. Outside the big windows a cool autumn rain fell. I had been watching it fall, wondering if anyone’s brain was fast enough that they could actually count each thread of rain. I hadn’t been listening to Dr. Mitchell, though I heard this last part.

I nodded. “You mean that we’ve never come through something to stand on the other side.”

He smiled. His teeth aren’t very good for someone who smiles all the time. “Metaphorically, yes, Anthony, that’s what I mean. More specifically, related to you, we’ve never reached a point where I can say, ‘now he gets it.’ Sometimes I think we should bring in someone else for you to see.”

“But I like you, Dr. Mitchell.”

“I like you, too, Anthony, but that’s hardly the point. Look, you’re very bright, we both know this. You are capable of sophisticated thought. You read all the time and now you are writing. Which I think you should share with me, by the way. But let me ask you something.”

I looked past him again to the window. There is a giant oak right outside and its limbs spread out in all directions. For a moment it looked to me like an umbrella, with the rain spilling off it. “Go ahead,” I said.

“Do you ever think of getting out of here, Anthony? Do you think about living on the outside again? With other people? Getting a job, being around friends and family?”

I crossed my legs. I stared at Dr. Mitchell, his wild hair. “I don’t know,” I said.

He leaned forward. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“No?” I said.

“I don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Here’s what I think. I think you think about it constantly. I think that every time your mother comes here it breaks your heart. You want to be able to take care of her, Anthony. You see her getting older and wonder what will happen if she gets sick. Because somewhere inside you is someone who cares, who really cares. And you can’t help her from in here.”

I couldn’t look at Dr. Mitchell anymore because I thought I was going to cry. This time I studied the books that line his walls. “You can read my story,” I said.

“It’s a story?”

“Yes. A true story,” I said.

“I would appreciate that, Anthony,” he said.

“I’m not finished yet, though.”

He nodded. “I can wait. Here’s the thing, Anthony. What I truly want you to understand. I want nothing more than to stand in front of that board and recommend to the state that you be released. I want that so badly for you. But I can’t get there if we continue this long stalemate. Does that make sense?”

I gave him what he asked for. I was anxious to get back to my room, to my notebook and my seat with the view of the grounds and the hint of blue ocean in the distance. I wanted to get back to my thoughts.

I nodded. “It makes sense.”

Dr. Mitchell smiled again. “Good,” he said. “Good.”





We lay in bed in that A-frame and I tried to count Hannah’s freckles. We had been up for hours, waking to make love and then rolling around together, pretending to sleep, letting our hands move languidly over each other. She didn’t know what I was doing at first, but then she saw me using my finger to count and she got mad.