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Show Moon - 42 Gloria and their child Tommy had restored Michael to Anne. He could be a proper brother now. She could look into his olive dark eyes and almost forget what he'd done to her. She could visit their home, safe with a daughter by her side and Gloria, who carried the past as if it were a tribal fire-stick, and she, the keeper of the one thing that keeps us going: the story of our lives. "She's a wise woman," Anne said to Michael. "Listen." "I didn't come here for advice," her brother said. He stood up and reached his arms toward her as if they were in a dark room and he wasn't sure where she was. "I came here for you." Anne's legs felt trembly as if her feet were sliding away from her on a pond of ice. And terribly, without will or reason, she felt coming out of her body a sudden sticky dampness. "Joy!" she called. "Joy! Come here!" Which is where I came in and did whatever little girls do to create a diversion, though I didn't realize that was what she'd called me for. Perhaps I kissed Michael, even sat on his lap. I took love whenever it came, stored it in my body the way a plant takes water out of the air. I might have wondered why my uncle frowned when I came to my mother's call. I might have worried that her back was turned to us, unmoving. I couldn't have known what they'd just been saying. So let me offer a factual version of this story: My Uncle Michael visited us once just before Daddy came home from the war. He was all alone, which seemed odd, and he didn't stay very long. After he left, my mother had sudden brief crying spells like bursts of hail and then she'd talk about the rats in the walls. |