Losing the Moon Read online

  The drone of the radio, the vibrating hum of the car finally lulled her into a sunbaked doze as she remembered the last time she’d seen Nick Lowry.

  Chapter Two

  The winter quarter Nick was scheduled to spend in Costa Rica approached like a lumbering train, a hulking gray rumble in the distance. Amy heard it in her sleep and waking, during their lovemaking. She began to see the bulked shape the week before he left, smell its acrid smoke and feel the trembles of the earth as it barreled down the tracks toward them. They made the decision together, as they did all things—Nick would spend the winter quarter in a Costa Rican tropical biology conservation program where his interest in reforestation and preservation could be explored in the rain forest. She would stay at Saxton University and wait for him.

  They were to reunite in three months and begin their life together after he fulfilled his internship. He would come back knowing exactly what he wanted to do, what they wanted to do and where. All they knew was that it would involve Amy preserving architectural gems while he saved the land and wildlife. Together, saving.

  Amy stood in the airport departure lounge to say goodbye to him, consumed by a feeling of finality so complete that she couldn’t catch her breath. In those days she felt everything so sharply, her skin felt peeled. Each emotion arrived strong and complete, and often Nick seemed to be her only protection against the onslaught.

  During their final farewell, Amy found herself begging him to stay. He was usually the sole witness to her symptoms of emotion, yet that day the out-of-focus and sharply delineated faces of other Costa Rica-bound travelers saw her fall apart; there was the Indian woman with the dot on her forehead in the green plastic chair, the flight attendant placing white letters on the flight board while glancing behind her shoulder at Amy’s tears.

  The gate attendant called for the final boarding. Amy grabbed Nick’s cotton shirt. She was desperate to pull him back from the bulk of the white plane outside the grease-streaked window. Her voice was raspy with fear and lack of sleep. He was so solid: his thick hair, his muscular shoulders, his dense copper eyes without variation in color. She was light, air, exposed and he held her to the earth. She clung to him.

  “Don’t go. Do. Not. Go.”

  “Amy . . .” His eyes were wet. He leaned close to her ear. “You’re making this harder.”

  “Don’t. You can’t. Something bad. You won’t come back. I can’t breathe. Don’t.”

  “I’ll be fine. I promise. This is not an ending. It’s just the beginning of our life.”

  “Nick, there’s something . . . wrong.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “Yes.” He would stay now. He knew she was scared. He would stay.

  “I’ve never left before. That’s all it is, Amy.”

  “That’s not it. Something . . . something else.” She grabbed at the silver cross that dangled from a thin chain around her neck. “Don’t.”

  The final boarding call came through the waiting room like an executioner calling her name.

  “Don’t.” People behind Nick stared at her: the Indian woman clutched a child, the flight attendant pursed her lips, an obese man wiped his face with a handkerchief.

  “I love you.” Nick kissed her lips, kissed her tears, kissed her cheeks. Then he held her face in both hands. “Close your eyes.” He kissed each eyelid. “Keep your eyes shut until I’m gone.”

  She did. She didn’t want to open them again until the gray metal door opened in three months and Nick walked out with stories of the rain forest, a three-month beard and his arms around her.

  But he never walked back through the door and the last Amy Malone ever felt of Nick Lowry was his lips on her eyelids as he kissed her one more time and promised to come back to her.

  Nick threw the cooler into the trunk of the Mercedes and slammed down the lid. For good measure, he kicked the tire. He glanced over his shoulder at his wife as she walked toward the car, chatting with an old friend she had run into at the football game. If she knew who Amy really was, she would probably hurl herself to the ground.

  When Eliza had told him, in calm tones, whom his daughter was dating, whom he would see today, he’d done a gut-check and realized it was okay. Eliza obviously hadn’t made the connection with Amy’s married name. Amy and Eliza had never met and, more than twenty years later, all Amy would be to Eliza was the old girlfriend. Although he’d never tried to track her down, he knew her married name: Amy Reynolds. He hadn’t been positive it was her, but the coincidences were too many to ignore, and he was right. He’d known it was her before she turned around—the way she stood, the way her hair fell across her shoulders, the way his heart flipped inside his chest.

  If he’d anticipated feeling anything when he saw Amy, he’d thought it would be pure acidic anger for her betrayal. He was wrong. The anger had somehow been replaced. The vacant feeling he’d thought he put to rest when she betrayed him, when she never came for him, rose again.

  Eliza walked up to the car, threw her purse in the backseat, then hugged her friend goodbye. Nick pulled the keys out of his back pocket and climbed into the driver’s seat, slammed the door. This old ache would pass, it would most definitely pass.

  Eliza tucked her head into the car. “What’s your problem?”

  “I don’t have a problem I’m aware of.” Nick put the keys in the ignition, started the car. At least not one you want to hear about.

  Eliza climbed in and sat down. “You didn’t even say hello to Ansley Worthington. Don’t you remember her? Her father is the CEO of Southern Energy—it wouldn’t have hurt to say hello.”

  “Didn’t realize I missed an opportunity to further my career.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Nick. What’s going on?’

  “I just want to get home. The traffic only gets worse by the second. . . .”

  “Well, then, let’s go.”

  When Nick turned on the radio, Eliza leaned over, turned it down, and asked, “Did you have fun today?”

  “Yeah, great game. Saxton wins again.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Did you like Lizzie’s boyfriend?”

  “He seemed very nice, Eliza. Very nice.”

  “Yes, he did, didn’t he?”

  Nick reached over and turned up the radio. Amy and her family were not something he would discuss with his wife, or anyone else for that matter. He’d vowed, when Amy didn’t show up in Costa Rica after the accident, never to think about it all again. Seeing her at Saxton University—their place—with her son and husband was not going to change how he felt about dredging up the painful past.

  “Well, I’m glad you like him. I invited his family to the lake next weekend.”

  Nick turned. “What?”

  “If you’d turn down this radio, you could hear me.” She turned it down again. “I invited them to the lake house next weekend.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “I did. What’s the big deal? We always have guests there.”

  “The last thing I want to do next weekend is entertain Lizzie’s boyfriend’s family. This latest project’s been exhausting and I just want a weekend to relax. Why does everything have to be a social event?”

  “It’s not a social event, Nick. It’s Lizzie’s boyfriend. And all you have to do is tell Daddy you need more help.”

  Nick held up his hand. “Not now, Eliza. I don’t want to discuss this now. I don’t want to hit the PLAY button on this same old conversation.” He patted her leg, unsure if he was trying to ease her frustration or his own.

  For many years he’d done well enough with a large corporation in Maine that Harlan Sullivan had seen fit to offer him a job at his company. Nick’s job with Sullivan Timber did have its advantages—he utilized his expertise in resource management and wildlife preservation, and as an added bonus, he didn’t have to listen to Eliza lamenting the perils of living up n
orth when she longed for the South. Surely the fact that he worked for the family company and that she had moved back to her hometown would decrease the whining, but no, she always wanted more—wanted him to climb the social as well as the corporate ladder. He couldn’t care less if he made it to the first rung as long as he could have his hands in soil, be truly involved in some part of the work he loved.

  He sighed. The landscape danced past the car window in harmony with the tires’ thump against the pavement as they drove the two hours back to their house in Garvey. Nick glanced over at his wife as they pulled into the driveway. She was leaning back against the headrest; her mouth was slightly open in sleep. He looked back up to the house—white pillars, resembling the bars of some pristine prison, stood guard over a front porch with an all-white wicker couch, rocking chairs and swing.

  Fresh lawn-mower marks covered the front lawn; it looked like someone had vacuumed the grass in a crisscross pattern. The landscaping company must have come while he and Eliza were at the game. They liked to arrive when he wasn’t home—they didn’t appreciate him coming out, telling them where to prune, cut or leave his plants alone.

  As he stared at the landscape of his home, his life, an honest question rose out of long-held patterns of denial—how in the hell had he come to live in this spotless house that, eight years later, still smelled of new carpet and wet paint, on a manicured, construction paper-cutout lawn, when he wanted to live in the middle of forest, tree and plant?

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids.

  Eliza stirred and Nick reached over and touched her cheek. She opened her eyes and turned to him, smiled.

  “Hmm,” she murmured.

  “We’re home.”

  “I didn’t even realize how tired I was.”

  “Me neither,” he said. And he meant it, as fatigue settled into his bones at the thought that there was no use trying to figure out might-have-beens; yet there they were, roaring at him with a fierceness he had thought squelched.

  Chapter Three

  The week before Amy and Phil were to go to the Lowrys’ lake house, Amy felt her whole tucked-in life start to wrinkle as if left in the dryer too long. Memories and questions about Nick Lowry leaked out and she couldn’t stop them. Was it menopause? Almost-empty nest? Seeing her son with a serious girlfriend? All of these were possible reasons for the disintegration of her well-being. She began to look, really look, at things that had never before bothered her.

  She usually moved with ease in their home. She once loved the laundry—the small piles of neatly folded clothes representing each member of the family. She adored the evidence of family life under her feet, the sound of children running through the home, moments spent planning the next birthday, the next Easter-egg hunt. She had listened to the complaints of mothers in her children’s schools and neighborhood—about their unfulfilled lives, their hatred of the minutiae, their quandaries with housekeeping, and she would wonder that she felt so grateful for all the things they found so grating.

  She sought perspective now, grounding, and remembered how when her parents had been killed in a car wreck when Molly and Jack were infants, Phil had provided the only solid foundation in a world adrift. The sudden loss of her parents was filled only by the love she had with Phil, Molly and Jack. The loss of Nick’s love had seemed, then, insignificant compared to the dank emptiness of soul her parents’ deaths had produced. She needed to remember that—remember what was important.

  She stood in the laundry room with its blue-and-white-striped walls that she and Molly had painted during an excruciating 102-degree day four summers ago, and she pulled the clothes from her daughter’s tennis bag in slow motion. Her actions seemed apart from her—distinct but separate. There was a time when she was dating Phil, when her heart had begun to heal after Nick’s breaking it, that Phil had asked her why she liked country music. She’d told him that she didn’t know why she liked it, or why she adored the color Tiffany blue, or the smell of her grandfather’s sweater or the way rain ran down bubbled antique glass. Why would she want to know why? Wouldn’t analyzing it ruin the knowing of it? Just knowing what she liked was enough.

  She tossed the laundry and realized this was how she felt now—she didn’t want to analyze why she was anticipating this reunion. She was afraid it would ruin the expectation that she hadn’t felt in . . . she couldn’t remember how long. For now, the feeling was a remembrance of the days when possibility was endless and she didn’t know what would happen next, when things weren’t so set and understood. She compared it to the anticipation of preadolescence, knowing a change was coming, but not what it would entail.

  This week her dreams had become vivid and she could finally answer the stupid question she’d once been asked, “Do you dream in color?” Yes, she could now say—many, many colors.

  On Thursday morning she awoke at two a.m. Phil was staring at her. “What?” She snuggled closer.

  “You’ve been kicking me. Tossing, turning all night.”

  “Really?” A metallic guilt flooded her mouth.

  “Yes, really.”

  “I don’t know why.” She was astounded at her newfound capacity for white lies.

  “Are you getting sick?”

  “I feel fine. Really.”

  “I’ll get up with Molly in the morning and send her off to school. Why don’t you try and sleep in? Obviously something has been keeping you up.” Phil rolled over and went as softly into sleep as he entered each day. Nothing was done harshly, abruptly with Phil.

  Amy tried to sleep, but couldn’t. Something about the way Phil told her what he was going to do—how he would take care of it all—irritated her. He had always prided himself on how he took care of things, of her, of the kids. She was proud of him and often told him so.

  Phil came from a strong line of chiseled German ancestors from whom he inherited his sense of responsibility—yet his emotions were often stashed behind a shiny armor of high ethical standards. Amy didn’t focus on what he lacked because, as she often said, we’re all missing something. Her emotion, she understood, was too much on the surface, yet it balanced the family. Whatever ability she lacked in taking care of things or providing, her husband filled. What he lacked in emotion, she filled. So for the kids, both existed.

  But only for the kids, she thought before she could censor the betraying idea.

  As the alarm went off, Phil rose quietly from the bed, and Amy kept her eyes closed while he took care of everything. She listened to the familiar sounds of her own home: the thump of the cabinet (Molly was removing a cereal bowl), the creak of the door (Phil was getting the newspaper off the front porch), the dishwasher opening and closing, the grind of the garage door, the slam of car doors, and finally the puff of the Toyota leaving the driveway. She snuggled deeper into her pillow.

  Questions plagued her; she couldn’t find the answers, but they existed—out there, dancing to some taunting tune of the past. Why hadn’t Nick returned on the plane he was scheduled for? Why hadn’t he ever contacted her? Why had he stayed in Costa Rica? When had he come back? Why hadn’t she been able to find him, no matter how hard she tried? And, most of all, when had he met and married Eliza?

  In those days before cell phones and e-mail, she hadn’t been able to access him or ask if he’d received her letters. He was as far off as Jupiter, with its unreachable surface and toxic gas. She’d been blocked at every turn; his mother and the school had told her Nick had decided to stay in Costa Rica, and yes, they would tell him to contact her. He never did.

  When she married Phil, she entombed those questions behind a solid wall. Seeing and touching Nick Lowry now was like a sledgehammer pounding on the crumbling mortar of that very wall, and the questions tumbled out.

  She finally rose from bed after giving Molly and Phil time to leave the neighborhood, to let Molly notice she’d forgotten something at home and come back to retrieve it: a
book report, her tennis racquet. She sat on the side of the bed and hung over her knees, groaned at her fatigue. She wanted to return to a week ago when none of this was anywhere near the surface of her life, of her thoughts. She rose to go to the kitchen. Coffee, she needed coffee.

  A luminous day poured through the window over the kitchen sink. Amy moved to close the blinds, but her hand hung in the air as she watched a red-breasted robin grab a sunflower seed from the wooden bird feeder that Molly had made in fourth grade at a Home Depot workshop with her dad. Molly had proudly brought it home, and she and Amy had painted it bright apple green and blue to match the kitchen. They’d gone outside together and hung it in front of the sink’s window. For eight years now, Amy had started the morning by watching which bird came to visit.

  At this memory of Molly, Amy felt tenderness akin to what she had felt when leaning over her babies’ cribs, knowing there was nothing she could do to force them to continue to breathe in and out. She could not start or stop what life brought to her, including Nick Lowry.

  Exhaustion lay behind her eyes as a burned patch of sleeplessness. She turned to the counter and knocked her favorite brown pottery mug on its side next to a full, hot coffeepot.

  “Oh, Phil. You’re so sweet.” She spoke out loud and lifted the front page of the Darby Chronicle that he’d left for her.

  She filled her mug just as the phone rang, startling her. She fumbled with the pot and coffee spattered on the counter, on her white cotton nightshirt.

  “Damn.” She was shaky, unsure, and she hated it. She grabbed a kitchen towel and the phone at the same time.

  “Hello.” She wiped at the spilled coffee, preoccupied.

  “Amy? It’s me, Eliza.”

  Amy was wordless.

  “Amy, are you there?” Eliza spoke with soft, drawn-out syllables that reminded Amy of the way one would talk to a stranger’s child.