Sister Moon Read online

  I am in the doorway and he looks up slowly. ‘Monkey,’ he says. He knows me, who I am. Of course he does. Hayley skids up behind me on the polished floor. By the weight of the hand on my shoulder I know that Auster is there also, strengthening my back. We move into the room together, a triad of support. The weather outside cocoons us and makes this cave of a room the only place in the world. Hayley is injected with an instant energy at the sight of him and she runs forward, jumps onto his bed. Children don’t always see what we do. She doesn’t see him as a has-been, someone sitting on the far edge of life. Children see the warmth and the kindness or the absence thereof. They respond most to the emotion, not the physicality or the history. But Samuel doesn’t see her. His eyes are aimed at Auster. ‘What’s he doing here?’ he spits the words; small specks of saliva leave his mouth as shiny, tiny torpedoes.

  ‘We’ve all come to see you today,’ I say. There’s something wrong. I can feel it, but if there’s a warning in the air, I don’t heed it and I blunder forth, despite the threat I already perceive. Samuel’s head lolls, his neck suddenly gone loose as a cloth doll’s and for a moment I wonder if he’s fallen asleep. Narcolepsy. The word appears in my head from nowhere. I know nothing about it, and suddenly I’m wondering if it’s part of my father’s degenerative condition.

  But he’s not asleep. Wherever he is simply grants a hiatus, a moment of respite from the ravages of his decaying brain. This is the moment we should leave and escape what’s to come, but we miss the chance to get away. I only realise that later, in retrospect.

  Auster closes the door of the room behind us. Hayley is there on the bed and close to Samuel. He’s not actually in it, but it’s unmade and his feet are up and he’s breaking the cardinal rule of beds because his shoes are still on. Hayley reaches forward to touch his hand and in the same moment, as though she’s a spirit invisible to his world, he swings around to put his feet on the floor, pivots on his rear end and kicks my daughter in the process. I let out a protective yelp and Hayley says, ‘Ow!’ Strongly. She cups her elbow with her other hand and tries to examine it for any mark or bruise.

  Samuel’s wearing his dressing gown despite his shoes, a thick tartan weave of blues and browns. Fear slides up my spine, but I can’t move. His eyes are fixed on Auster.

  ‘What’s he here for?’ Samuel says, and he gets to his feet beside the bed. There’s a darkness to his face like an invisible bruise. Still I do not move and still I believe that we are all a family and that surely love will preside over this creeping madness. I think of Devin, I think of how false such a presumption can be. We’re bound to each other by an accident of blood. Sometimes love has no part in it.

  Samuel’s forefinger is gnarled and bent like an old twig and it pokes into the air, points in Auster’s direction. Auster stands with his hands in his pockets; he’s not the kind to back down from difficult things and that’s why he’s here with me now and not in front of the television set at home on the soft marshmallow couch.

  Samuel’s eyes are half-mast and it crosses my mind that he might be drugged, that this schizoid behaviour might be a side effect of the medication he has to take here. There’s someone else in there; Samuel has vanished and left another person in his place. He stands, his feet spread like a cowboy’s and I wonder if the effect is for balance or to make himself appear bigger or if he even realises who he is and why he’s standing there. He doesn’t see me or Hayley. We are peripheral, insignificant. His eyes are on my husband, my dear, beloved husband.

  ‘How’re you doing, Sam?’ Auster says. He doesn’t get it yet. He doesn’t see the difference as easily as I do. There’s only one other person in the world who has called him Sam, and as soon it’s out of Auster’s mouth I know it, the building confusion in my father’s brain about who my husband is.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Samuel says. ‘Don’t you dare take my little girl—’

  Auster gives a half-laugh, inappropriate perhaps, but he’s trying to lift the situation and he plays along as though life is light, and I’m not too certain that he doesn’t really think it is.

  Samuel blinks, uncertain. Not bound to my family by history, how many layers of meaning can Auster possibly know? Here he only scratches the surface and my father has lost the ability to read nuance or intention in another.

  ‘Too late,’ Auster says to my dad, but again it’s the wrong thing. ‘Too late, I’ve already got her.’

  A sound comes from Samuel’s mouth that I’ve never heard before. Something like a whimper and a soft roar caught in the way of each other. He lunges at Auster and I step to the side and, as though time has slowed, I see Auster’s face change to horror. Hayley screams and in a fluid motion Auster ducks his head, but a brutish physicality comes out in my father as he rushes to defend what he loves. Only problem is, he’s defending the wrong person, and way too late. Auster catches it above his eye; the fist that still carries my father’s wedding band sinks into the skin on his face. Hayley starts to cry and Auster stupidly lifts his head, not believing what has just happened, trusting too much that it could be something else, and Samuel’s hand boxes into his face again. A small spray of blood spurts from Auster’s nose, not as dramatic as you’d imagine, or what you’d see in films, but in films despite the excess blood and bruise and fluid there is a choreography to fights that makes them seem more like a dance or a different kind of conversation, and so more comfortable to watch. In reality it is different. Slower. Duller. More angular and uncoordinated and random. There is a sick thud as bone meets flesh. More frightening and unpredictable and the damage is felt inside as well as on the skin. There is no make-up person to cover the bruises afterwards.

  Hayley runs to me and almost slips on the shiny floor. I reach out and grab her arm and she buries her face in my stomach. Auster’s hands rise to protect his face. Samuel sees the defensive move as an initiation of attack and he hits out harder, longer, and with both fists. Hayley is screaming now and Auster is against the wall, trying to cover his head with his arms. There is no way that he will raise a hand in return to my father. He will protect me and my heart and my father before he’ll defend himself, his beautiful face. I move to the door, Hayley clinging like a limpet behind me. I fling it open and call for help down the white and shiny corridor and my frantic voice and Hayley’s wails bring the people running.

  They come in uniforms, calling between themselves in urgent, serious voices that flow around and above us. They take the situation in hand and I want to shout when they take my father from behind, restrain him with two of their young and lean male bodies, and lead him out of the room. I want to shout at them to leave him alone, but my husband is hurting and I say nothing. It’s too much to choose between them. Hayley quietens, but she keeps her grip on me, and her nails pierce the skin beneath my clothing.

  Auster raises himself upright and looks at me with a bemused expression on his face. He dabs at his mouth with his fingers, and then examines them for blood.

  ‘Maybe I should’ve stayed at home,’ he says. His mouth is smiling but his eyes are not. Hayley lets go of me, but she won’t go to him. She stands in the middle of the room and all there is behind her is the unmade bed.

  In the car we are silent. The rain has softened and the mist prevents me from seeing too far ahead as I drive. Other cars have their lights on and I turn the dial to ignite my own. Hayley stares out of the window. Little drops run down the glass and create shiny clear pathways behind them as they go. I look at Auster. I know I should reach out, put a hand on his leg for comfort, but I cannot touch him. He’s alone in this, as am I. His face is going to bruise but I cannot speak. I don’t know if it’s a conversation that we will ever have – I’m not willing to let go of Samuel, even for him.

  I am about to turn left into the road that will take us along the seaboard to the city when Hayley says, ‘I want to go to the beach.’ Her breath mists up the window, that’s how close she wants to be to the outside.

  ‘It’s raining too hard,�
� I say. ‘Don’t be silly. We’ll go home now, your dad’s not feeling that great.’

  Auster looks at me. ‘What’s wrong with the beach?’ he says.

  ‘But it’s raining.’

  ‘So?’

  Hayley’s small voice echoes from behind: ‘So?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and indicate right instead. ‘So we go to the beach. Ten minutes. But I’m not getting out of this frigging car. It’s way too cold.’

  When I pull the car into the vacant lot the rain ceases for us, though the sky still hangs with the promise of more to come. The tide is out and the sea has retreated to merge in greyness with the sky and the rain has darkened the sand. Sometimes nothing about the elements of nature seems fully separate. They combine as a single force, to conspire against us.

  The door behind me swings wide and the cold swoops in, large and jovial and full of force. Hayley gets out and together Auster and I speak in unison: ‘Close the door!’

  She walks in front of the car, climbs over the low wall and moves further out along the sand. Her face is hidden from me, pointing at the sea.

  ‘I hope she’ll be okay,’ I say. ‘No child should see what she did today. I hope she understands one day, about dementia, about how it can turn someone into another being entirely. Samuel was never violent. Not like that.’

  Auster stretches out his legs and winces. ‘You hope she’s okay? Shouldn’t you be hoping I’m okay?’

  I watch Hayley’s small figure as it recedes across the sand. I will her to stay in sight of the car; I cannot have my daughter disappear from my vision. ‘You’re big,’ I say. ‘You have to be okay.’

  He nods, slowly. ‘I didn’t know it was so bad. This far gone,’ he says. This is the conversation I cannot have. I stare at the sea and the image of my daughter fading in the mist and I fail yet again to answer him.

  He sits upright, peers through the windscreen, his eyes screwed up for better vision. ‘Look!’ he says. ‘Is that a dog?’

  There’s no other person on the beach, but the bitch with hanging teats lopes towards my small daughter. Hayley has seen it and she stands, motionless. Auster puts his hand to the lock and he’s about to open the door when I put a hand on his leg. I can do it now; I can touch him at last, for my daughter, without feeling as if I am betraying Samuel.

  ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘We know this dog. We’ve seen it before.’

  ‘It might attack her. What if it hurts her? I’ll never live with myself.’

  ‘Just look.’

  And he does. He stays in the car and he watches along with me. Hayley drops to her knees and the creature bends its head in deference to her. Hayley reaches into her pockets and pulls out chunks of bread, the toast from breakfast time that she must have stashed this morning in the hope of seeing the dog again. She holds the bread out to the hungry animal, and gently it feeds from her hands.

  Thirty-One

  Before she died, I discovered why my mother is seldom part of my mental picture of our childhood on the beach. She was home by then, a fast-diminishing pound of flesh for whom the doctors could do no more. She wanted to slip away quietly in her own bed with her eyes on the mountain and my father’s hand in hers. I spent the last weeks with her, but I slept the nights at my own house because my father made his bed on the floor beside her at night.

  When she returned from the hospital for the final time, she moved to the spare bedroom to lie in the single bed. I never asked why she didn’t want to die in the big double bed in the room they’d shared, or why my father accepted it. After she was gone, I came to believe that he never returned to that bed. Sometimes, when I arrived in the morning to bring him fresh washing or a bulk-cooked meal, there were blankets on the couch or on the floor of the lounge. The bed in their own room remained made up, the space undisturbed as though nobody lived there any more.

  I like to think that she was ready to go, but I suspect that her will to relinquish life came more from a desire to escape the pain and futility than from any sense of completion.

  One morning, right near the end, I bent to kiss her soft forehead and her eyes fluttered like two frightened moths before they opened. ‘You’ve been to the beach,’ she said when she saw me in my sarong and she breathed in the scent of the sun lotion on my skin.

  ‘I went to the beach near the old house,’ I said. ‘The water’s calm there, and it’s not too crowded.’

  ‘You always loved the sea.’ Her voice was a thin reed, a rasping whisper.

  ‘You hardly ever came with us when we were young,’ I said.

  She moved to sit up, but the attempt took more effort than she had and instead she shifted her head. ‘I’m afraid of the sea,’ she said.

  ‘But why? You knew how to swim. I’ve seen pictures of you and Dad in the water when you were young.’

  ‘Do you remember when Devin nearly drowned? That freak wave that came up and took her, washed her clean into the sea?’

  I put a hand on her shoulder. I wanted her to rest, but she wouldn’t stop talking. She wanted me to listen.

  ‘I screamed from the beach. Maybe the wind was up. Maybe I was too far away. I’ve never moved so fast. Your father dived in and pulled her out. I’d had enough of the sea after that. I never wanted to go near it again.’

  ‘Devin must have been scared.’

  ‘She cried a bit afterwards. Maybe only because I was crying. I don’t think she even properly knew what happened. I was never too fond of the sea after that.’

  I reached out and clung to my mother’s withered hand, each the comforter and the comforted, as we recalled a time when the sea’s potential turning was the only monster we could yet perceive.

  Two days later I sat beside my mother and willed her to open her eyes. Samuel made tea in the kitchen and brought it through on a tray. There were three cups and I waited as hers went cold.

  ‘She’s gone off her tea. She asks me to make it, but she never drinks it,’ Samuel said as he sat down in a chair next to the window. ‘I think it’s the hot weather. As you age, you become more sensitive to temperature.’ My father’s denial kept what he surely knew in a corner.

  She moaned and turned onto her side. I looked at the tube that went straight into her veins, the button that would allow her to administer the morphine at will. As though no one cared, any more, if she overdosed. It had to end.

  ‘Samuel,’ I said.

  He gazed out of the window. The light was bright, the day was beautiful and oblivious to the fact that my mother was dying.

  ‘It’s okay, Monkey,’ he said. He kept his eyes away from me, his chin up as though the position of his head would dictate what would happen. ‘She’s having a bad day, that’s all. She’ll be right tomorrow. She’ll be sitting up, you’ll see. Go home if you want to.’

  ‘We need to call Devin,’ I said. ‘She needs to be here too.’

  At her name my father retracted. His hand went up to his head and scratched at his scalp, then it sunk down and briefly covered his eyes. ‘Why should she sit around here? Tomorrow’s a better day, Monkey. We don’t even know how to contact her.’

  ‘We do. We know where she is.’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine these days.’

  I went to the hallway to the low table that held the telephone and a small slim book that contained every telephone number my mother had ever needed. I looked under M but could find nothing there. I moved my thumb to the letter L and flipped the pages open. I dialled the number listed beneath my uncle’s name.

  He answered on the second ring; short, interrupted. ‘Landsberg.’ He was in the room at the bottom of the stairs. I knew it. Bizarrely, I could smell it in his tone of voice.

  ‘Uncle Marshall. It’s Catherine.’

  There was a silence, a shuffle, as though he was shifting the receiver to his other ear. ‘How are you?’ His voice sounded older, no less controlled. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘It’s my mother. She’s really ill.’

  ‘I heard. How is
Sam?’

  ‘I need to talk to Devin.’

  ‘I … she’s not here.’

  I lowered my voice, cupped my hand around the mouthpiece of the phone. Why, when I was already grown and they had been adults for all of my life, did I still not want to upset my parents? My softened tone did nothing to diminish the fury that pierced the jagged urgency of my voice. ‘Marshall,’ I said. My voice was controlled. ‘I know she’s there. I know she’s staying there, with you.’

  His voice relented, softened. ‘I said I’d help her out while she gets back on her feet. I offered to pay for her tuition, Catherine, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not interested, Marshall. Whatever’s going on there, I’m not

  interested. All I want is to speak to my sister. Is she there? Can you get her on the phone?’

  ‘Hold on.’

  I waited a long time. I heard nothing but silence from that house of secrets. I didn’t want time to wait, to think about Devin in that house and wonder which room she slept in now. I needed her on the phone, I needed to break the news about my mother so the questions about whether I’d done right by my sister would cease. But then again, I reminded myself, Devin had never been easy, and I couldn’t look after her forever. I am not my sister’s keeper. The words cemented themselves in my head as I waited. Accountability. Responsibility. I’d done my bit for my family. I’d stood at my mother’s bedside and watched her body recede from her life. I couldn’t live Devin’s life for her. She had to do that alone, wherever she was.

  Her voice came on eventually, soft and sleepy down the wires. ‘Hello Cat.’

  ‘You need to get here fast,’ I said.

  ‘Is it Mom?’

  ‘You might not see her again.’

  A pause like thick soup as Devin mulled over the possibilities in her mind. Her distorted view of how things were, how at the core of it all she saw us all blaming her for everything; even her own mother’s death. She was on the defensive and she couldn’t pull her thoughts away from herself. They clung to her and to her defeated voice. ‘I don’t know how to get there,’ she whispered.