The Pull of the Moon Read online

  Lawrence tried to smile as he thanked her again. Gentle? He could be gentle with Jenny. He was always gentle with Jenny.

  His mind leapt to Vicki. He was having trouble being gentle with her. He was confused. Relieved. Angry.

  She should have warned him that this could happen, this, this sudden onset of menstruation. She should have given him a heads-up. How the hell was he supposed to know? He scrolled through his numbers to find her cell and hit the call button.

  The words coming out of his mouth when Vicki answered his call would not be gentle. They would not be coming from a place of equanimity. And if she asked him in her newly modulated voice if he knew that anger was just a mask for fear? He would say that he did. Of course he did. And he would still be angry.

  Jenny came out of the bathroom. She looked paler than normal, and she was no longer wearing her long johns or her scarf.

  “Hi, honey,” he said and flipped his phone shut. It had gone to Vicki’s voice mail, the greeting a meditation gong. His legs felt like mush. “How are you feeling?”

  Jenny didn’t reply; she looked at him as though she didn’t know him. She walked toward the gelato vendor.

  “You still want ice cream? I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  “Okay.” They walked in single file until they reached the lineup. Everyone looked suspicious to Lawrence, as if Jenny was still missing and one of them had taken her.

  He stood behind her, hoping she’d lean back into him like she usually did. But she didn’t lean back.

  “I can wait by myself,” she said.

  “No, no. I’ll stay with you. I should have earlier, too.”

  Jenny turned around and looked at him, seriously. “Daddy, it’s okay.” She lowered her voice. “I’m a woman now.”

  Lawrence blushed. “Okay.” He remembered the flowers. “These are for you.” He held out the bouquet. “Um, congratulations?”

  Jenny’s face opened up, a sunrise entering a grey morning sky. “Oh, my God! Thank you, Daddy!” She clutched him in a fierce hug.

  The leather lady had been right on the money. “Are you sure you’ll be okay here?” Lawrence asked when she let him go. “I’ll keep checking back—I mean—if you . . .” He shrugged. “You gave me quite a scare there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “I just felt—I just had to go, right then.”

  Lawrence nodded. “We’ll get you home soon. And get you whatever you need.”

  Jenny’s sunny face turned dark, and within five seconds she was crying.

  “What is it? A cramp? Do you want to sit down?”

  She shook her head and tried to calm her sobbing. “I just, I just think I need her. I need Mom. She’s supposed to be here for this kind of thing.”

  Lawrence pulled her back in for another hug. “I know. I know. You’re totally right.” He pressed his cellphone into her hand. “Call her and tell her that. And tell her brunch is now dinner, tonight. No excuses.” Vicki had wanted a couple of days to readjust before coming to visit. Well, she wasn’t going to get them.

  “Okay,” Jenny said, wiping her face on her sweatshirt sleeve. “Go get the rest of the stuff.”

  He did as instructed, rushing through as fast as possible, taking all the plastic bags the vendors offered to speed things up. When he stepped on a woman’s toe, and heard her gasp, he pretended not to notice. He had another woman to look after.

  Lawrence made it back to Jenny in less than ten minutes. She was standing beside a garbage can, holding, and licking, methodically, back and forth, two cones of gelato.

  “I got you lemon, too,” she said. “Since I had to keep up with the drips.”

  “Thank you.” He lifted up his bags. “All done.” He waited for her plastic bag lecture, but it didn’t come. “Let’s sit and enjoy it before we head back home.”

  At one of the picnic tables, covered in syrup spills and empty sugar packets, Lawrence parked the groceries and patted the seat beside him. “We’ll face out,” he said, “so we don’t have to look at this mess.”

  Jenny checked the back of her skirt before she sat down beside him. She smiled. “Okay.”

  “So,” he said.

  “She’s coming. Tonight.”

  “Ah,” Lawrence said. “Good news. Did you, um, tell her?”

  Jenny nodded. “She’s bringing me everything I need.”

  “Good,” he said. “Great.” What did the everything include? What did she need? How complicated was menstruation, anyway? And why did he not really know? He remembered brown paper bags in the bathroom cupboards when he was a boy, and asking his sister what pads were for. She’d told him they were for lining women’s shoes, to keep them smelling fresh. He’d believed her for far too long.

  “She’s coming over soon, too,” Jenny said. “Like in an hour or so. She might even beat us home.”

  Dammit! They had two metro lines to catch, followed by a ten-minute walk. Small wings of panic opened in his gut. The house was a mess. He hadn’t washed the baking dishes from last night, and there was chocolate chip cookie dough flattened into the kitchen floor because he was the one who had stepped on it and left it there.

  “She cried,” Jenny said. “I think that’s a good sign, don’t you?”

  Lawrence nodded. But would serenity, or joy, or forgiveness—whatever Vicki was feeling—would it be enough to make her blind or deaf? He hadn’t admitted it, but he had enjoyed his months away from her hyper-vigilance. Not having to line the silverware up with the pattern on the tablecloth. Not keeping his voice down to a whisper when she was reading in the next room. Not needing to rinse the rice five times, or measure it to the exact top of the cup.

  Vicki wasn’t there when they got home. But a bouquet of flowers was on the doorstep—cosmos and daisies and a lush pink rose in the middle—snug in a tall Nutella jar.

  “Ooh!” Jenny said. “More flowers!”

  “Strange,” Lawrence said.

  “Mom probably dropped these off and then forgot something and had to go back to her . . . to . . . to wherever she’s staying.”

  He let her think that. He unlocked the door quickly and hustled Jenny inside. He didn’t want her to see him scanning Mia’s yard or windows, even if it was just to check on her flower varieties. No use in checking, anyway; he already knew.

  “Two bouquets in one day!” Jenny exclaimed. “This whole menses thing is all right.” She started rummaging for vases under the sink.

  “Why don’t I do that while you go get ready for dinner? Maybe a bath?”

  Jenny looked at him, a shocked face. “I can’t,” she whispered. She pointed at her abdomen.

  “Oh. Well.” Lawrence reddened. “Really? You can’t? Not supposed to?”

  She shook her head. “No heat allowed.”

  He racked his brain trying to remember if Vicki had followed this rule. He didn’t know. “Okay,” he said. “How about cleaning your room?”

  She had spilled sequins and beads on her floor about a week ago, searching for a glass bead in the shape of a fish.

  She sighed. “I guess.” But it was a happier response than he’d become used to, and she robot-walked down the hallway.

  Lawrence found the vases, arranged both bouquets of flowers, and looked around the kitchen for an empty surface they could sit on. Flower-perching spots should be the least of his concerns—the macaroni Jenny made two days ago was still in the pot, a congealed yellow brain. On the kitchen table, his newspapers from the past week were layered, newest on top, and in between he’d left toast plates and an unfinished game of Crazy Eights. He had to get to work.

  By the time the doorbell rang, he had managed to scrape the dough off the floor, wash the dishes, and clear the table.

  “I’ll get it!” Jenny yelled and came running down the hall. Lawrence stayed behind as she flung the door open and called, “Mama! Bienvenue!” Then she started to cry again.

  His wife was standing there, holding a cake box, a plastic
shopping bag, and some kind of statue: a white woman with her arms raised over her head in a perfect circle. “Take this, Lawrence,” she pleaded, handing him the cake. “It’s so heavy I nearly dropped it.”

  He lifted the lid to peek inside. Black forest cake, white fluff on top, a circle of goopy cherries around the perimeter.

  Vicki put the bag and the statue down beside her and locked Jenny in an embrace, rocking slightly from side to side. Jenny would be her height within two years.

  His wife was home.

  Lawrence felt winded. He left them in the hall and took the cake into the kitchen, sat down at the table and considered what it held. Flowers and cake: signs of celebration. He wasn’t feeling it. He’d have thought that Jenny, of all people, would be mortified at this strange holiday in honour of blood. Ordinarily she pretended to faint when she cut herself. Or were they celebrating something else, too? A homecoming? Then he looked at the cake again, its shining red garnish.

  “Cherries?” he said when she and Jenny came into the kitchen. “Cherries, Vicki?”

  “What do you mean?” she said, but the look on her face told him she got the obvious reference to what he was most afraid of in the world: his daughter, a sexual being. Not his little girl any more, but a girl in the world. About to begin a part of her life that would involve things he wouldn’t know about. And fertile. “Oops,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with cherries, Daddy?” Jenny, red-eyed and sniffly, swiped a fingerful of whipped cream and a couple of glazed cherries and stuck them in her mouth. “It’s delicious.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, sweetie,” Vicki said. “Now let’s go into your room and see what I brought for you.”

  Lawrence followed them into the hallway.

  Jenny’s eyes widened when Vicki handed her the bag, bulky with packages, looking like a bag of gifts. Then her eyes closed. “Great,” she said in a monotone. “How exciting.”

  “Come on. It’s not so bad. And, this.” Vicki turned back to the statue she’d left by the door. She looped her arm into Jenny’s. “A moon goddess,” Vicki said to Lawrence. “For our little woman.”

  Since when was Vicki like a buddy to Jenny? Since when did she smile like that?

  Oh, that’s right. Ever since she walked out and became a free agent, in search of nirvana. How she got to be the good guy was beyond him, and it made him angry, again. Surrender was all well and good, if you had the time, but it wasn’t what you wanted in a parent. You wanted tenacity. You wanted strength. Who, out of the two of them, would pick up a car pinning Jenny to the ground?

  He remembered the sound the Wii console had made as it hit the concrete at the bottom of the stairs and smashed. A Christmas gift to Jenny from them both that Vicki grew to hate. The synthetic music irritated her.

  When he went back into the kitchen to start dinner, he could smell sweetness above the high notes of the cake’s sugar and cream and red glaze. It didn’t take him long to find it: the pink rose in the centre of Mia’s bouquet. Ah, Mia. In this neighbourhood of three-storey walk-ups that boasted the highest per-kilometre density in Canada, he’d had his share of wackos, winos, and the unwashed. She was the best neighbour he’d had in years. Lucky man. He tucked his nose in for a closer sniff.

  A few minutes later, Jenny came out dressed like a regular person. A blue dress he hadn’t seen before, little white flowers all over it, her hair brushed and pinned back with clips.

  He waited to see her expression before commenting. “Looking good,” he said.

  She did a spin to make her skirt swirl. “Mom wants to know if you could go into my room for a second. Plus, if you haven’t started cooking, she wants to take us out for dinner.”

  What the hell? The sabotage had begun. “Really?” He stood up and had to concentrate on keeping his fingers from becoming fists. “We just bought all this stuff.”

  “We could make it tomorrow, Daddy, like we’d planned. Or we could give her some to take with her. I mean, if she isn’t—staying . . .” He could see that Jenny was going to cry again.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Lawrence said, squeezing her shoulders. “Everything is going to work out.” That was what regular people said to each other. Did they believe it? Even though Vicki was here, being a mother in a moment when Jenny needed her mother, asking him to talk in private—smiling—he was having trouble believing it. He kissed the top of Jenny’s head. But kisses on the head, over hair, never feel like kisses should.

  Jenny had cleaned up most of her beads, but a few of them pressed dents into Lawrence’s bare feet as he walked across her room to the bed, by the window. She had the best view in the flat: a huge maple, leaves wide and open as faces, looking back in. He could see Jenny’s long johns and scarf drying on the clothesline. Who had done that? Time seemed to have slipped sideways on him.

  Vicki patted the bedspread. “Sit,” she said.

  Lawrence pulled Jenny’s swivel chair out from the desk instead.

  She was still smiling. A tattoo of a smile.

  “Why a restaurant?” he asked.

  “I thought it would save us all the trouble of cooking. And you know, to celebrate.”

  “We have a cherry-covered cake to help with that,” he said.

  “And lots of lovely flowers, I noticed,” Vicki said.

  Lawrence looked at the tree outside. “We were at the market.”

  “Lawrence,” she said. “This is a big day for her. For us.”

  He looked right at her. “Why didn’t I know? To expect it?”

  She laughed. “Welcome to the life of a woman. You never know what you’ll get thrown.”

  He ran his hands over his face, trying to rub in some calm, some patience. “But there had to have been signs?”

  “Yes, Lawrence. She’s been developing for years, in case you didn’t notice. Sure, she’s gotten it earlier than some, but it’s within common range.”

  “Well, what do we do?”

  “We don’t do anything. I brought her enough supplies to last a few months, and showed her how to use them.”

  “But . . . I mean . . . what does all this mean? Miss Cherry Cake?” He stared at the goddess statue now on Jenny’s nightstand: a small-breasted, wide-hipped woman, a spiral in the centre of, well, her centre.

  “She knows all about sex, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Vicki said mildly. “And she’s still years away.”

  He thought about bringing up Jenny’s penis question but decided against it. “And then what? Where will you be when things get really interesting?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know.”

  Lawrence looked at her. “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not ready yet. To make a decision. About us.”

  “Three months wasn’t long enough?”

  She closed her eyes. “I’m in a better state now. Happier. But I don’t know how long that would last, if . . .”

  “If you had to live with us.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I’m sorry, Lawrence. I just don’t know right now.”

  He nodded and looked away. He felt cavernous, an empty warehouse. This was it; he was on his way to becoming an unmarried man. A single father. What he’d been practising at for the past three months. “Well then, we need to make some plans. Visitation, all of that.”

  “Okay,” she said. She paused and took a big breath in through her nose, then let it out slowly through her glossy lips. Her hands were palms up, the tips of her middle fingers and thumbs touching. “I thought she could come and live with me now, in Mile End. You’ve had her for three months, and believe me, I wish that could have been different. But there were no kids allowed at the centre.”

  Her face was calm and serene as she said this, as if she were saying she might go take a shower. No kids allowed. No kidding. He’d never felt as off-centre as he did right then. He said, “No. She can’t.”

  She breathed again, eyes closed. “I’ve already asked her,” she said. “She’s thinking about it. Es
pecially when I told her how close we’ll live to Figaro. You know how she loves that café. And it’s not far from here—only a fifteen-minute walk.”

  He felt he would fly into a thousand pieces. All he’d been asking for, in his head, was a little break from Jenny, just a day or two a month. He couldn’t lose her. Vicki couldn’t have her. It wasn’t going to be a battle about the kid. What about the marriage? Where had that suddenly gone?

  “We could do some sort of rotation. It would give you more time alone, for your music.”

  “What are you talking about? Since when has Jenny been a problem for my music?”

  “I know it’s not easy, always having a child around.” She paused. “You look tired.”

  “I’m fine.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He looked for Vicki’s wedding ring. Not there. “What about you? Won’t she get in the way of becoming transcendent, or whatever you call it?”

  “Oh, Lawrence,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure out my path, honey. My greater purpose.”

  “Well, is co-parenting on the list? Honey? ”

  Vicki took an even noisier breath in, then out. “Of course it is.”

  He used to be worried about other guys, with Vicki’s sparkly eyes and appetite for change, but he’d been focusing on the wrong danger. It was the desire for enlightenment that had smitten her. If he had to fight that sort of suitor, he was weaponless.

  Lawrence picked up the goddess, made from some sort of resin with a faux finish. What was this thing doing in his house? He ran his index finger around the spiral in the statue’s centre, then realized what he was doing and set it back on Jenny’s nightstand. His fingertip tingled. Was that supposed to happen?

  “Isn’t it powerful?” Vicki was giving him another tender smile. She wasn’t tender; he was tender. A little more pressure on him and he would weep.

  And yet, he would be pressured. There was no way out of this moment. “It’s cheap,” he said. “I can’t believe you think it has any power at all.”