Luna (18 page)

“Yes, he knew,” Kent said. “He was supposed to tell you before we got here.”

“He never said nothing to me,” Ross said, looking at Queenie.

“Me neither,” she said. They could all see her blinking back tears. Brian was their youngest. The oldest three or four were long since married and gone, and there were only two girls older than Brian still at home.

Kent didn’t seem to know how to proceed. He cleared his throat. “Did he tell you he’d marry you?” Ross said to Phoebe’s bowed head. His voice was surprisingly gentle. She nodded without looking up.

“Sort of,” she said. Ross studied her bent head for a moment, then shook his with an attitude half-sad, half-angry, almost as if he had expected something like this.

“Yeah,” Kent said, and Selena silently willed him to tell Ross that Brian had forced Phoebe. Then, when she sensed that Kent wasn’t going to, she thought, I’ll tell Queenie, and lifted her head to look at Brian’s mother. She was wiping her eyes with a tissue she had taken from her pocket. She was a short, stout woman, with the too-large hands of someone who had put in a lifetime of hard work. Her hair was short, unruly and grizzled in an unbecoming way. She would not even be allowed to grow old gracefully, Selena thought, and she was overcome with a pity for Queenie that silenced any words she had been about to say. What good would it do to tell them what kind of a son they had? Queenie must know, she hadn’t even questioned Phoebe, and even Ross hadn’t doubted them. They must know things about him that we don’t, she thought. “We thought they’d
get married as soon as the women can get a wedding pulled together, Kent said, but the conviction that had been in his voice the night before was gone.

Ross seemed surprised, as if it was too soon to be talking about weddings.

“I guess,” he said dubiously, “that’s the thing to do.” He looked to Queenie again. “Brian should be here. How can we talk about this without him?”

“He knew we were coming,” Kent repeated. “He said last night it was his baby.”

“Did he say he’d marry her?” Ross asked quietly. Queenie blew her nose.

Selena said, “When I think about it now, he never did
say
he’d marry her.” She gave a quick, surprised laugh.

“We must have took it for granted,” Kent said.

Selena said hesitantly, “I’m not sure marriage is the right thing.”

“Why is that?” Ross asked quickly. Queenie had lowered her tissue and looked with bright, surprised eyes at Selena.

Kent said, forcing ease into his voice, “Oh, you know kids. They think they know best, got to do everything their own way.” Selena could feel some strong emotion coming from Phoebe, but she couldn’t quite read it.

“She’s … we’re thinking about an … abortion,” Selena said. All three of them turned to stare at her.

“Oh, no,” Queenie said. “Don’t even think of such a thing. Oh, no.”

“Why tell us then? Why not just do it?” Ross sounded angry, and Selena was suddenly filled with confusion. Why hadn’t they done that? Why had they come? She couldn’t sort this out now, so she remained silent, looking from one to the other.

“This is crazy,” Kent said, standing up. He was very angry. “We can’t talk about this without Brian.” Ross blinked several times behind his glasses, then stood.

“Was he wearing his roping club jacket?” he asked his wife.

“I never noticed,” she said. She pulled herself out of her chair with difficulty. “I could look in his room.”

“Do that, Mother,” Ross said. She hurried out of the room. They could hear her puffing up the stairs. Almost as soon as she reached the
top, she started back down again and they waited, listening. At the bottom of the stairs she stopped, and as they watched her through the doorway, she leaned against the newel post, one hand against her chest, and said, between breaths, “His things are gone.”

In bed that night Selena said, “Kent, what if Brian doesn’t come back?”

“Oh, he ain’t coming back,” Kent said sourly. He made a disgusted, angry sound and moved his long legs around under the blankets.

“What are we going to do then?” she asked, although her mind was made up.

“I could go after him,” he said tentatively. She could tell this was the last thing he wanted to do. If I pressed it, he’d try though, she told herself.

“It’s not worth it,” she said. “You don’t have any idea where to look, and what kind of a husband and father would he make if he got married with a gun to his head?”

“I don’t know why he ran,” Kent said. Far off in the purple felds a couple of coyotes were barking, and Blackie began to howl an answer. “They probably would have gotten married if this hadn’t happened.” They were silent, listening to the faint howling of the coyotes and to Blackie’s voice growing softer as he ran out toward the fields to meet them. “Maybe he just got scared. Women don’t realize how hard it is for a man. One day he’s a boy with no responsibilities and then everything seems to happen at once. He’s got to find a way to make a living, and then he gets married and he’s got a wife, and first thing he knows he’s got a family to feed, too. It’s a wonder more men don’t run away.” He laughed, a faintly surprised sound in the dark.

“Well,” Selena said, “She said she wouldn’t marry him, so maybe this is for the best.” She hesitated. “I think we should talk about an abortion.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Don’t call me silly.” She had never contradicted him so directly before, although he often said to her, don’t be silly, and it always rankled. But now she was sick with anger. She had hissed the words, too angry even to shout.

“All right,” he said, “you’re not silly. But there’ll be no abortion. You know I don’t think they’re right.” She wanted to say, who cares what you
think? You’re not the one who has to carry it, or look after it, but she was still shocked by her own anger and by his mild response to it. She had expected a row like they’d never had before, and she had been so angry she was ready for it. Maybe I should talk back to him more often, she thought. “That’s my grandchild she’s carrying there, and there’s no way I’m going to let her kill it,” he said, as if he were the reasonable one, and she was not. He sighed. “I’ll raise it, Selena,” he said. “I gotta admit, I don’t see what else we can do.” She was afraid to move for fear he would take back what he had just said.

“You mean …”

“I’ll keep her here,” he said, a touch of irritation in his voice. “I’ll feed ‘em, keep a roof over their heads. And I won’t ever say nothing.” Instead of gratitude, she found herself thinking of all the things he would not say.

“But there was no rape,” he said, his voice solid with conviction.

She was silent, knowing it was no use to speak, even her anger was washed away by the futility of trying to reach him. She closed her eyes, replacing the darkness in the bedroom with the larger, private darkness behind her eyelids. She stopped thinking about what he had just said, it was only a symptom, after all, of the way the men and women she knew lived their lives together—a way that over the last week or so, since Phoebe had told her story, that she was beginning to see differently.

So, this is how it is, she was thinking. All my life I’ve wondered how it really is between men and women. I thought for a long time that sex was what lay between us, then, when I had babies, I thought this must be it, each time he came into my hospital room, his eyes full of love, and he kissed me. After the kids were in school, I thought maybe it was sitting together in the audience at a Christmas concert with our kids on the stage, or I thought, even chasing cows together, or doctoring a sick steer. But now I see I was wrong. What lies between men and women is fear—fear and mistrust.

So bleak was this thought that Selena had to bite her lips to keep from crying out. All the things she had believed in, the rock bottom of security she had found in their marriage in the face of a bewildering, changing world, was dissolving, she could almost see it turning to liquid, and she held onto the bedclothes as if to keep from swirling away with it.

My life is broken now, Phoebe says, looking up at Rhea, who towers in front of her. The hem of her nightgown lifts gently, falls again with a sigh to cling to her calves. The grass prickles against her ankles, is stuff and dry under her bare feet.

It only seems broken, Rhea answers, because your mother raised you to believe that life is a long unbroken dream of safety and protection, when, in fact, it is a delving, a suffering, a rise and falling again, a long series of almost touching.

Phoebe lifts her face to the full white moon hanging suspended in the deep sky.

There is rape, Rhea says, looming black and shapeless before her, her face hidden in shadow. Her voice seems to be coming from somewhere else. Tell me what happened.

It was rape! Phoebe cries. I never thought that you would doubt me.

I don’t doubt you. But we have to understand what it is that happens to us. We have to fold it into ourselves, make it a part of what we are. We cannot, ever, afford to reject our experiences.

He forced me. He held my legs apart with his hands and then his body. I was fighting to stop him, but he was too strong for me. And when he thought I might scream, he put his arm over my throat. He almost choked me. I couldn’t breathe.

Had you been kissing? Had he been touching your body? Kissing it?

Yes.

And you allowed this. Welcomed it, even?

He tore my dress. He made me bleed.

You loved him, went everywhere with him? Thought perhaps you would marry him?

Yes. But what he did to me was still rape.

I agree. I would call it rape, too. But I want you to understand yourself. What Brian did is another matter.

It isn’t right! Phoebe could hear herself shout, could hear the cry rise around her, lifted by the wind, up, up and around, into the glowing sky. Perhaps the moon heard it, with her white face bent so kindly toward them. Men and women, I know it, should come together only in mutual willingness, only, only, no other way.

Why did you change from wanting his caresses to fighting them?

Phoebe feels her passion, her certainty begin to crumble. The wind sweeps it up and whirls it away, leaving a hollow where it had been. Before her, Rhea’s gown billows out with the wind, then drops silently to fold in around her.

We weren’t married, she replies, hearing herself mumble like a child. All the things I had ever been taught rose up before me, stronger than what I was feeling. You have to be the strong one, my mother said. So I tried to be.

Keep going, Rhea says, her voice gentle, yet larger than the darkness, or even than the voice of the owl flying somewhere nearby, its voice sounding more human than Rhea’s.

I was afraid.

Of what?

I don’t know … of my life. Phoebe cannot say: of being a woman.

It is indeed frightening.

You’re telling me I should have let him.

Welcomed him.

What about everything I was taught? What about the rules?

You have to take responsibility for your own life. That is the great lesson.

I can’t bear this, Rhea. I can’t bear this. I’ll die if this is true. That is what men and women are. Animals. Only animals. Sweating and grunting. That is what love is.

You’ll die anyway. The sooner you look that fact in the eye, the sooner you’ll be able to live. I am trying to tell you to look beyond your girlish dreams. Illusion, sweet Phoebe, rid yourself of illusion.

He shouldn’t have forced me.

No. He shouldn’t have. But everything that happens to you is only a part of your life. Nothing is a mistake, or an accident. Everything that happens is your life. You must wipe away the feelings of shame, guilt, fear. Each time you do, you grow stronger and stronger.

Watch your Aunt Diana.

Long after Kent was asleep Selena lay awake beside him, thinking. How could we be married all these years without my understanding anything about our life together. Me, standing in the kichen day after day, peeling
potatoes, washing dishes, cooking meals. For years standing at the kitchen counter working, lifting my head now and then to watch him working out in the corral with the cattle or horses, riding past my window on a greenbroke horse, or running a tractor by.

And as she thought of herself working in the kitchen, that pane of glass that stood between them, that had always seemed so ephemeral to her it was laughable really, took on a new hardness and impenetrability. She was struck by the soundlessness of the scene: his lips moving, but she, unable to hear his words even when he shouted; she standing on the other side of it, watching him rising and falling silently on a silent horse, his rope mutely whirling and falling.

This can’t be, she thought, unable to lie still and bear such a view of their life together, and she got out of bed quietly, so as not to wake him, went downstairs and wandered into the living room. It was dark there, but she welcomed this and didn’t turn on the light. Phoebe was sitting, wrapped in a thick white wool blanket, in her father’s armchair.

“Can’t you sleep?” Selena asked softly.

“No,” Phoebe said. “You either?”

“No.” Selena walked to the big front window and stood looking out of it, her back to Phoebe. In the ditch on this side of the road, two mule deer were grazing in the stubble, their backs shining white in the moonlight. Could you grow up in two, three days? Go from being a child to a woman in that short a time? Yes, she thought.

“Tell me again why you didn’t scream,” she asked. Phoebe moved, sighed, the blanket re-folded itself softly around her.

“Because everyone would have heard.”

“It was in the parking lot at the dance?”

“Yes.” And I was inside dancing, Selena thought. She remembered the strains of the waltz she had danced to with Kent, the violin lifting over the steady, muted beat of the drum and the guitar. She could see Phoebe struggling in the dark, Brian on top of her. The deer were beautiful in the moonlight, their silhouettes fluid and graceful. They began to move, first lifting their heads so their oversize ears stood high and alert, then moving slowly up the ditch, onto the road, crossing it and melting into the
shadows on the other side. She was struggling to understand, to assimilate what had happened to Phoebe.