“She was right here,” she said. “I can’t imagine where she ran off to.”
Max looked into the shadows of the yard, the skin on the back of his neck prickling.
She.
“What did she look like?”
Kim bit her lip. “A bitty thing with bleached blond hair. She couldn’t have been over eleven or twelve.”
Max handed Kim her wine and walked down the stairs. The grass was cool against his bare feet.
He looked toward his neighbor’s house and then gazed at the dark tree line fringing the backyard. Nothing stirred.
“What did she say?” he asked.
Kim sipped her wine thoughtfully. “She said, ‘It’s a full moon tonight.’ I agreed with her and laughed because I got a chill. And then you came out…” Kim trailed off, looking at him, concern tinging her voice. “What is it, Max? Are you feeling ill?”
Max shook his head and returned to the porch. “She said it’s a full moon?”
On the cusp of his words he heard sirens in the distance.
Both he and Kim looked toward the sound, but it faded away and the quiet night took over once more.
“Eerie,” she murmured, shivering.
He nodded and wished eerie was where it ended.
“Shall we go inside?” he asked, gazing toward the trees crowding his backyard, hiding the wildness that hid within them.
He’d never feared the woods. Few kids who grew up in Northern Michigan did, but the woods in the day differed from the woods at night. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in daylight the woods were sun streaked and filled with the comforting sounds of birds and chipmunks. At night, darker things reigned. They crept out from holes and caves, their eyes glowing and their teeth gleaming. Few children walked into a dark forest without such thoughts.
“Yeah,” Kim agreed, rubbing her hands over her arms as if she’d gotten a chill. “Do you ever get the sense you’re being watched?” she asked, following his gaze to the trees.
He nodded, and broke his stare, pushing open the back door and releasing a flood of light onto the dim porch.
Kim followed him through the kitchen and into the living room. They sat on opposite ends of his gray suede couch. The conversation that had been so easy on their drive home from the Shindig seemed stilted. They sipped their wine in silence.
“I feel like a meteoroid.”
“A meteoroid?” Max asked.
She nodded.
“Nicholas loves outer space. We made a paper mâché’ solar system for his room. Denny probably destroyed it. I hate to think what else he’s done.” She took another drink and pressed the glass against her forehead. “I feel like I’m drifting in space. No path, no gravity, just adrift.”
“My mother would say, rest in the uncertainty of this moment,” he told her. “She used to tell my brother and me that all the time growing up. Whenever we were anticipating something or recovering from a break-up. I didn’t get it as a kid, but it’s come in handy as an adult. I had no idea how much uncertainty there was in life. I still don’t. Not at the level you do, anyway.”
Kim stood and walked to his bookshelf, examining his photos. The shelf held pictures of his graduation from Michigan State University. He stood wedged between his beaming parents, holding his diploma. He saw photos of himself posing next to his new motorcycle, photos of a family cruise they’d all taken several years before.
His face fell as he watched Kim studying his pictures. His life looked like happily ever after. One smiling, shiny day after another.
He hadn’t seen any family pictures in her apartment. The frames had probably all been smashed by her violent husband.
“Uncertainty,” she said after several minutes of silence. “Right now, in this untethered space, I think that’s why I stayed with Denny. I don’t think I had a word for it before this moment, but the uncertainty is what I feared most of all. At least with Denny, his fists were familiar. I don’t even know how to be in this life. Am I still a mother? When someone asks if I have children, what do I say?”
Max winced at her question, imagining his own mother if she ever lost her sons. Her heart and her legs, she had called them just days before. And more than once in his lifetime, she’d told Max he and Jake were her life’s purpose.
“You say yes,” he told Kim. “And then you tell them all about Nicholas. Why don’t you start with me?”
Kim’s head drooped, and she continued to face the bookshelf.
“I gave birth to Nicholas on Valentine’s Day. My Valentine’s baby, I called him. Denny brought me one of those big heart-shaped boxes filled with chocolates. He ate all of them except the cream-filled kind.” Kim laughed and touched a finger to a framed photo of Max and Jake as children dressed in matching powder blue suits. “I didn’t care. I’d never been so in love.”
She turned to Max with red-rimmed eyes.
“Not with Denny, but with Nicholas, my son. He lay on my chest and blinked up at me with those milky blue eyes. He weighed less than five pounds, but he gained weight fast. I remember his doctor told me not to introduce cereal into his bottle because he’d get fat.”
She laughed.
“Fat! Nicholas ran from the moment he woke up in the morning until he fell into bed at night. Fat was the last thing he would be.
“He loved outer space before he could walk. We lived in a little trailer in those days, and I’d sit with him on the porch and look at the stars. Tinkles, he called them. He started to talk about aliens in elementary school. All of his art projects showed googly-eyed aliens and giant silver discs flying through space.”
Max watched her shoulders relax as she spoke. She lifted her head and walked purposefully to the window, peeling back the curtain and peering into the night sky.
“He learned about the moon and how its cycles affected the tides. He used to mark the new moon and the full moon on our calendar at home. He liked to fish and play basketball. He requested lasagna for his birthday dinner every year and angel food cake with whipped cream and sprinkles. He hated carrots. He used to pick the carrots out of soup if I tried to sneak them in there.”
Her eyes shone in the moonlight slanting through the window. She walked to the lamp and flicked it off. Only the eerie white glow lit the room. Kim’s skin looked translucent, almost glowing in the darkness.
“He loved to read. Every other Friday we walked to the library, and he checked out books by Ray Bradbury.”
“Fahrenheit 451?” Max asked.
Kim nodded. “But The Martian Chronicles was his favorite.”
Max smiled, remembering reading the same books as a boy.
What had happened to the space loving child? If they were in a happily-ever-after novel, the boy would have been abducted by space aliens. The aliens would worship him, and later he’d convince them to return to Earth to rescue his mother from her abusive marriage. Nicholas and Kim would live happily ever after on a planet with six moons and pink waterfalls.
“He read for hours,” she went on. “In the summer he read ten books a month.”
Max didn’t know what had compelled him to stand and go to her, but he’d barely registered the thought when his hands slipped around her waist. She tilted her face, and he kissed her, sinking his hands deep into her wavy hair.
She tasted of wine and something deep and sweet, memories he thought, memories of her son.
When he drew away from her, his breath hitched.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have-”
But she cut him off by pressing her finger to his lips. She took his hand and pulled him toward the stairs.