Black Moon (11 page)

The woman seemed surprised by the empty state of the fridge. She stood back and studied it, scratching at her heavy thigh. Her legs were webbed with purplish veins. She walked past Lila and opened a door, which Lila could see led into a dimly lit garage. Was there a car in there? Could she drive it home? Could she drive a car? It didn’t look that hard, you just turn the wheel when the road curves.

The woman stepped into the garage and shut the door behind her.

Lila sat alone in the kitchen, painfully chewing fistfuls of the soft flakes and watching the door. Her hope was that a larger meal was coming her way, and the possibility of eating overrode all other concerns for the moment. Five, then ten, minutes passed and the woman did not return. Lila got up and tried the faucet. Water miraculously spilled from it with a steady hiss. She leaned into it and drank, though this made her head wound throb. She could feel water passing through her throat and sloshing heavily in her stomach. The water was cool and airy, almost fizzy, as it flowed from the tap. She finally broke away from the stream,
gasping for air, and wiped her mouth with her hand. She looked out the window. The street was empty. She liked that—the absence of people. People without sleep were trouble, broken and dangerous even if they’ve loved you their whole life.

Before she sat down, she held the jar under the faucet and filled it so that the bottom of the avocado seed sat in water. Then she placed the jar back on the windowsill and returned to the counter, where she started in on another bowl of stale cereal.

Eventually, she heard movement from the hallway. The woman must have come back in through another door. The shuffling footsteps came closer. The woman who emerged was not the same woman who had led her into the house. This woman was tall with short blond hair—nearly as pale as her white top, which was streaked with orange and yellow stains. When this new woman saw Lila, she stopped, her deep-set eyes narrowing on Lila’s forehead. “Baby, what is it that has happened there onto your head?” she said.

Lila’s hand went up to her wound, then to a gash on her left thigh. “What is what what?” the woman said, now very concerned.

She went to the sink and wet her hand, then rubbed at Lila’s head wound. The rubbing hurt. Lila pulled away. “No it’s not,” the woman said to herself.

She pulled off her top and wet it under the sink. The woman wasn’t wearing a bra and her small, freckled breasts were even whiter than the rest of her skin. She held Lila’s head against her chest as she scrubbed at the wound. It felt like her face was on fire.

When Lila squirmed, the woman said, “Hold so that.”

Then more firmly:
“Hold so that I can.”

After she had cleaned the wounds on Lila’s head and thigh,
she put the shirt back on, though backward. Lila could see her bloodstains on the shirt.

“Go you with them and find wood that burns,” the woman ordered cryptically.

She shooed Lila off the barstool and into the hallway. It was a white-walled corridor with four doors and a low ceiling. Family photos hung on the wall and Lila studied them for a moment. The pale woman was there, and children with her deep-set eyes and light skin. One girl was maybe the same age as Lila. There were pictures of her dressed as a cheerleader. A man, bald and lean, also appeared in the pictures—the father. There were older black-and-white pictures too, the family before the family. The people like you who came before you, Lila found herself thinking, hinting at who you’ll be. Clues to the answer that’s you.

They had pictures just like this, she and her parents—her own family. Though they hadn’t been taking pictures much the last couple of years, she realized. Probably, she considered, because her dad had moved out to the desert base to start his new job while she and her mother had stayed in San Jose. For a while, Lila wondered if her parents had separated. She was astonished when her mother casually told her that families weren’t necessarily permanent. It was only after Lila tearfully demanded that she be allowed to live with her dad that they made the move. The desert turned out to be all her mother said it would be, only crappier. But at least we’re together, they’d all say, to the point that it became a punch line in their wry attempt to transform any mishap or unsavory condition of the environment into a shared joke. When the air conditioner broke, when their neighbors shot automatic rifles into the air on the Fourth of July. Or once, while they were driving, when they spotted a dead fox on the shoulder of the road being torn at by coyotes.

“At least we’re all together,” her mother had said with fake cheer.

Lila thought she heard a cough coming from the end of the hallway. One of the doors was cracked open. She went to it and listened, hearing the quiet sounds of someone in the room—the occasional sniffle, the squeak of mattress. When she slowly pushed the door open, she saw the man from the pictures sitting naked on the corner of the bed. He was staring at the TV, which wasn’t on. Lila could see that he was wearing tennis shoes, no socks. He was remarkably thin, with his ribs exposed, his sinewy frame, the dark patch of hair and his penis like a bird in a nest. She had seen a lot of naked adults over the last few weeks, especially in the desert, and was surprised at how quickly she had gotten used to it.

The man caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye. He made no move to conceal himself. Without turning in her direction, he said, “Go away, Dad. You can see that there is a nasty business here. Fuck, your beard is such a ruiner.”

Lila backed out of the room. Off to the left, another door was partly open. She pushed through and found herself standing in a dimly lit bathroom. To her relief, there was water in the toilet. The whole neighborhood must still have water. They had lost their water in the desert a few weeks ago. One well on an abandoned property became the source for the whole community, requiring her father to walk out to it every morning with a five-gallon gas can and fill it up, sometimes fighting with others who tried to hoard the source. When that became too dangerous, they started taking water right out of the aqueduct and boiling it.

Lila used the toilet, savoring the whoosh of the flush but watching with skepticism. Maybe that was the last flush ever. Yet the bowl slowly refilled.

Just like hope, Lila thought. That was what her mother would have said.

Then she held her breath and turned, daring a look into the mirror. She could hardly recognize herself. One side of her face was swollen. A cut ran from her scalp to just below her cheekbone. It was red and raised, but probably from that woman scrubbing at it, she thought. Both eyes were purple with bruises, though one was worse—puffy, the skin stretched tight, shiny. Her lower lip was swollen and split. There was the painful gash on her thigh too. She knew she was supposed to feel lucky to be alive, but she didn’t feel much of anything. This must be what shock feels like, she thought.

She should never have allowed herself to fall asleep. The Marine driver wasn’t a sleeper. She thought she had sensed it when he first arrived at the house, but he did a good job of hiding it. He probably saw faking it as the only way off the base, arranging with her father to serve as courier in exchange for medical authorization and the car. Who knows where he was really going, and when he planned to ditch her. It was the car and the clearance he wanted. Probably just made up the safe haven.

The Marine didn’t say a word as her father threw her into the backseat. Her mother seemed to have forgotten their agreement, or her instincts took over. She started slapping and clawing at her father, screaming, “You let her go!” But he already had Lila in the car, door slammed. He slapped the trunk and the Marine floored it, throwing her back as the car lurched forward and ignoring her screamed demands to stop and let her out. Instead, they rushed headlong and she watched her mother draw back into the distance, swallowed by the desert darkness.

She tried to reason with the back of her driver’s head—a square block of meat, prickly with high-and-tight hair, rising
from bulky shoulders. A faceless face with no connection to emotion. He sat stony and fixed, eyes squinting at the unlit road ahead. The engine whined as they shot up the on-ramp and onto the deserted freeway, the scarecrow forms of Joshua trees blurring by. She sobbed and screamed behind him, face glazed. His response was to stomp the pedal, throwing her back against the seat, her head banging against the door as he swerved to dodge something in the road. She sat upright and again he swerved hard, this time tossing her into the door to her left. Her head hit the window, rattling her brain.

“Better strap,” he said. These were the only words he spoke to her. It was his erratic driving that encouraged her to pull the seatbelt around herself.

The swerving continued, though she saw nothing in the road ahead of them. She should have known then that he was an insomniac, dodging imaginary obstacles. But instead she thought he was just trying to keep her off balance and out of sorts, or in such a state of worry about his driving that she would give up trying to get him to turn around. Still, she had no intention of falling asleep in the presence of this stranger.

But crying was like a sleep drug for her. About an hour into the drive, as they ascended the overpass, she nodded out. It was only for a few seconds, but it was enough for the Marine, who caught the dropping of her head in the rearview. He turned in his seat, reaching for her with both hands, completely abandoning the wheel and shouting incomprehensibly, and she jolted awake. She screamed, seeing the crashed car rushing toward them over his shoulder. The impact sucked him halfway out the windshield and spat him back into the driver’s seat with a smashed face. The car crumpled toward her as she folded over, bashing her mouth on her own knees, then blasted back with the seat into the trunk, which held her like a coffin. She had had
to kick it open to escape, then wandered a few wobbly steps before collapsing on the shoulder, out cold. Another crash—a car plowing into the trunk she had just fled—jolted her back onto her feet. She darted for the concrete barrier that lined the road and almost threw herself over before realizing she was several stories above the ground.

NOW
she was in the home of some strangers, staring into the mirror looking like a stranger herself. Maybe she was no stranger to them, she pondered. Maybe I just think I’m a stranger because I was in a crash. I’m just confused or something. Happens in movies all the time. Maybe I really do live here and have always lived here and that other life is just a dream I had. That’s why they don’t ask who I am. But she also knew that the sleepless are like that. They lose the ability to recognize people.

Plus, they get really stupid, Lila reminded herself as she stepped back into the hallway. You can talk them out of anything, except shipping you off to some imaginary safe zone, even though it’s just a rumor passed around by a bunch of sleepless lunatics.

Oh, man, my face kills.

She found the next door closed, but not locked, so she ducked inside. The bed was unmade. There were posters of shirtless actors on the wall. Eww. That whole vampire scene that Lila hated. This must be the cheerleader’s room. She went over to the desk where a laptop sat. She tried to turn it on. Nothing, of course. There were trophies on a shelf—cheerleading victories.

Catching her reflection again in the dresser mirror, it occurred to her that she should change her clothes. She searched the drawers and selected a pair of jeans. Sitting on the bed, she stripped off her bloodstained shorts and slid into the pants. They
were a little loose, but she cinched them tight around her narrow waist with a belt.

She decided she wanted a shirt with buttons so she wouldn’t have to pull anything over her battered and bruised head. When she pulled open the closet door, she was confronted by two large eyes in the darkness—unblinking eyes the size of saucers. She gasped and drew back before her brain could process what she was seeing.

It was a mask.

The mask of a team mascot. An owl’s head with enormous eyes. Oh, yeah, she thought, recalling the local high school’s team name from the trophies. The Night Owls.

OUT
on the street there was a commotion at the center of the cul-de-sac, where the ashes were piled. Several parents and kids had emerged from the houses and were gathering in the hot, shadeless street. Lila could see them from the cheerleader’s window. She wondered if one of the kids was the cheerleader. Maybe they had food out there. The soggy cornflakes hadn’t quite filled the void of hunger. She had been carrying it for weeks now—always hungry, always sleepy.

She made her way to the gathering, stepping over the clutter of objects the houses seemed to have coughed up on the yellow lawns—toaster ovens, printers, shattered televisions and torn-up books, soiled clothes, soccer cleats, documents blowing around. Broken shards of circuit boards and plates, barbecue grills. How had all this gotten outside? A couple of young boys came up behind Lila, running past her toward the ash pile, where two men were standing with rifles slung on their backs. Lila studied them. Could they drive her home? They wore only shorts and boots. One had a long, wild beard that hung down, dark and wet
over his sunburned chest. “The fire we want is higher than the houses,” the bearded man said.

The other began speaking before the first man had finished. “The ones who don’t are the ones who won’t, better understand.”

Lila saw the woman who had first led her into the house. She came out the front door of yet another house, walking with an elderly woman in a bathrobe. Trying to lead her by the arm, but the two of them staggered drunkenly off the path into the lawn. The older woman slumped toward the ground, but the other woman held her up. Another woman was watching from her upstairs balcony as she threw papers into the air. There were about a dozen kids now. Most of them were younger than Lila—eight, ten, maybe. Boys and girls, thin and scraped up. Red-eyed and twitching with nervous energy, practically panting like dogs chained to a tree.

There were four teenage boys and three girls. A fat boy was shirtless, exposing his floppy breasts and loose folds of skin. Another boy with a scruffy goatee held a homemade spear. It looked to Lila like a curtain rod with a knife duct-taped to the end. He looked old enough to drive, not that messed up. Sleepless, she could see, but not that sleepless. Not too sleepless, yet.