Shooting the Moon (11 page)

I slammed my fist on his desk. Hard.

“No, it can't wait! No, it cannot. You're going to tell me what happened to Private Hollister, and you're going to tell me right now. Did you sign those orders? Is he in Vietnam?”

The Colonel put his briefcase down. He put his hat on. “One dead boy in that family is enough,” he said in a steady voice. “More than enough.”

It felt like every muscle in my body went slack when I realized what the Colonel was telling me. “So you didn't sign the orders?”

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then, picking up his briefcase, he told me, “Your brother is missing. We need to go home.”

It took me a full five minutes to comprehend what the Colonel had said. I'd followed him out of his office, past Miss Murlene's desk, into the hallway, down two clattering flights of stairs, and outside into the late afternoon heat, the parking lot still pulsing with it, the tires just minutes away from melting. I'd slid gingerly into the car, the leather seats still hot enough to burn, and clicked on my seat belt before I fully understood what the Colonel meant when he said my brother was missing.

He did not mean that TJ was lost in the supermarket.

He did not mean that TJ had gone home to a friend's house after school and had forgotten to call.

He meant that my brother was somewhere in
Vietnam, but nobody knew exactly where, and nobody knew exactly what he was doing, or if he was doing anything at all. He might just be sitting there, on a half-rotten log in the jungle, a bamboo leaf tickling his ear, just sitting there and waiting for somebody to find him.

Every last picture was of the moon.

I'd torn out of the Colonel's car the second he'd put it in park in our driveway and bolted back to the rec center. But once I'd gotten into the darkroom, I took my time developing the film, working carefully as I could so the negatives would be perfect, no marks, no scratches, nothing to get in the way of what I wanted to see. I believed those negatives would reveal the truth about TJ, what he'd been doing right before he went missing in action, what he'd been thinking about, some clue that would tell me where he was about to go.

Then maybe somebody could go and get him back.

There's a moment in the darkroom, when you hang your negatives to dry, that you finally see what occurred the moment you opened your camera's shutter to let in the light and make a picture. I was learning that half the time me and my camera had been looking at different things. I'd focused on Alice's face, but the camera caught the girl behind her combing her hair in the mirror. I took a picture of a tree bending in the wind; my camera found a bird taking flight from a branch.

Alice said that the best photographers saw what their cameras saw. They saw the girl in the mirror and the flying bird. What TJ and his camera had seen was the moon, thirty-six frames of it.

When I loaded the negatives in the enlarger and printed the pictures, I discovered that in some of them wispy clouds were sliding by a full moon's eyes, and in others crescent moons stood suspended in the night sky like slivers of light, Venus twinkling beneath them. There were quarter moons and waning gibbous moons, every sort of moon there was, sometimes with stars peeking out from the corner of the frames, sometimes framed by circles
of light—which later, when I looked it up in the encyclopedia, I learned were called penumbras.

I printed every one of them, over and over. I blew them up until moons filled the frames. I blew them up until the only thing you could see were millions of tiny grains of light. Somewhere in there was a clue, I felt sure of it. For two days I printed the moons over and over again, my hands shaking, my heart racing. And with every picture I printed, I grew more and more afraid.

Because there were no clues. There was nothing but light and darkness, circles and crescents, a tiny star, a piece of a cloud.

When I was done, when I finally couldn't think of one more way to look at TJ's moons, I took them to Cindy's house. I wanted to show them to somebody who wouldn't feel afraid when she saw them.

“Is this my birthday present?” she asked me when I handed her the photographs. “Because it's my birthday tomorrow, only I'm not having a party. My mom says since TJ's lost we can only have a family party. Otherwise it would be bad manners to your family.”

“You could still have a party if you wanted to,” I told her, my voice flat. I felt as though my body had suffered a series of electrical shocks and now I was empty of feeling. “And then when TJ comes home you could tell him all about it.”

Cindy shook her head sadly. “It's too late. My mom already called everyone and told them not to come.”

“Do you want to hang up the pictures? It would be sort of like decorating for a party.”

Cindy grabbed a roll of tape from a kitchen drawer, and we went upstairs. Thirty-six eight-by-ten moons take up a lot of space, and by the time we were done putting them all up on Cindy's walls, her room was covered.

“Did you know that some planets have lots and lots of moons?” Cindy asked me. We were sitting on her bed like a couple of planets ourselves, orbited by every kind of moon imaginable. “I thought my teacher was crazy when she said that to me, but then I asked Daddy and he said it was true. Satan has at least twenty-eight moons.”

“I think you mean Saturn.”

“And Jupiter has moons too,” Cindy continued, ignoring me. “A bunch. But we only have one. But at least people can go to our moon. The other moons are too far away.”

I wondered if TJ was looking at the moon right at that very minute, wherever he was. I wondered if he was imagining what it would feel like to rocket through space and land on the moon. To leave your footprints there. To cast a shadow across a crater.

It made me feel better to think he was.

Not much. But a little.

Private Hollister was sitting on the living-room couch when I got home. When he saw me, he stood up and said, “I heard about TJ being MIA. Byrd told me. Thought I ought to come see how you were doing.”

I shrugged. I didn't even know how to answer that. “Okay, I guess.”

We stared at each other for a few minutes, the silence as awkward as a turtle on its back. Fortunately, my mother, an expert hostess, came in
and offered Private Hollister some iced tea, which he accepted. Then he turned to me and said, “You want to play some cards?”

“Sure,” I answered, nodding, glad to have something to do besides stand there feeling stupid.

He looked to my mother. “Ma'am, would you like to play? It'll take your mind off of things.”

To my surprise, my mother said yes. So when the Colonel walked in the front door about an hour later, there we were—me, my mother, and Private Hollister—eating peanuts and playing gin rummy.

“Colonel, this is Private Hollister from the rec center,” I said. “Only now he's back at 1st Signal.”

Private Hollister jumped up and stood at attention. “Private Bucky Hollister, sir. Pleased to meet you, sir.” He saluted sharply.

The Colonel returned Private Hollister's salute and said, “At ease, soldier.”

“What time is it?” my mother asked. “I haven't done a thing about dinner.” She stood up and handed her cards to the Colonel. “Take my hand, sweetie. I've got a casserole that I've got to get in the oven if we're going to eat by seven.”

The Colonel sat down in my mother's chair, examined his hand, and shook his head. “God knows I love that woman, but she collects dead-wood worse than a tidal pool.”

Private Hollister laughed, then stopped abruptly, like maybe he thought laughing was disrespectful to my mother.

“It's all right to laugh, son,” the Colonel said. “Mrs. Dexter's tough. She'd have to be, to be married to me all these years.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, not ‘yes, sir, it'd be tough to be married to you,'” Private Hollister stammered. “I meant ‘yes, sir, I'll go ahead and laugh then.' Except I don't want to be rude, sir.”

“You're fine, son. Don't worry about it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Whose turn is it, anyway?” the Colonel asked. “Because I need to get rid of some of this wood.”

Private Hollister leaned forward. “No, I mean, thank you, sir. For what you did. I know it was because of you that I didn't get sent to Vietnam.”

The Colonel raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”

“My CO told me you didn't sign my orders. You signed everybody's but mine. He figured it was because of my brother getting killed over there and everything.”

“If you want to know the truth, I didn't sign your orders because my daughter asked me not to.”

“Well, thank you, sir.”

Then Private Hollister looked at me and grinned. “I sure am glad I let you win at cards.”

I kicked him under the table, but he acted like he didn't notice. And then I looked at the Colonel, who nodded at me. And winked.

And that's when I knew that I'd finally made a good impression on him.

Or maybe I'd been making a good impression on him all along.

I like to think that's true.

We played cards all night, me, Private Hollister, my mother, and the Colonel, the moon rising behind us through the window, round and full. We played without keeping score, played just to hear the slap of the cards on the table, the riffle of the deck being shuffled. And though we didn't know
it yet, somewhere in Vietnam my brother, TJ, was waiting in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he would wait for two more years, without a camera, without a pen to write us a letter to let us know where he was or if he was safe.

And when he came home, when the war was over, he would look at all the pictures I took of the moon while he was gone, one for every day, even on new-moon days, when the moon hung invisible in the sky, and he would stare at them for almost an hour until he finally said,
You got all the ones I missed.

But we didn't know that yet.

Frances O'Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of
Dovey Coe, Where I'd Like to Be, The Secret Language of Girls, Chicken Boy, Phineas L. MacGuire … Erupts!, and Phineas L. MacGuire … Gets Slimed!
A veteran Army brat, she spent her formative years moving hither and yonder and is a former resident of Fort Hood, Texas, just like Elvis Presley. She lives with her husband and two sons in Durham, North Carolina.