Girls in the Moon Read online

  Tessa and I first saw it on SPIN’s website in the cover gallery, in the middle of ones featuring Jane’s Addiction and Weezer and Kurt Cobain, both while he was alive (October 1993) and after he was dead (June 1994). There was my mother, looking small and beautiful and foreign on the screen. It felt like proof to me that my parents had been together once, that they had existed, and they had made something out of it besides Luna and me. There was barely an internet when Shelter was together, so the information you can find on the web is limited. Plus I wanted to hold something solid in my hands, something that had existed at the same time as my parents’ band. I was suddenly an anthropologist and I wanted an artifact of this civilization, long dead and gone. So we scoured the internet for an hour before we found a paper copy, then ordered it with the credit card Tessa’s dad had given her for emergencies. If this wasn’t an emergency, neither of us knew what was.

  Now, on the tray table, I try to smooth the crumpled cover with my fingers. It had come that way, already a little damaged, taped inside a cardboard envelope with my name and address scrawled in Sharpie across the front. The band has headlines printed over their shoulders and above their heads. Everyone else’s gaze is fixed on something just off in the distance, but my father is looking right at the camera. I haven’t seen him in a while, obviously, but I know this face. Twenty years later, I bet he still looks like this: satisfied, in control, as if he knows something I don’t. Like how to write a hit song. Or how to leave.

  My mother couldn’t see it because, well, sometimes she even goes so far as to pretend she isn’t and never was Meg Ferris, rock star. We’ll be at the farmers’ market, for example, and some guy will come up to her by the organic carrots (greens still attached!) and he’ll say, “Hey, aren’t you Meg Ferris?”

  That’s when she puts the whole plan into action.

  She’s perfected a series of facial expressions for dealing with this situation. First there’s Who, me? and then Oh, not this again and then, Sure, but she’s not me! Thanks for the compliment, friend! The whole sequence takes about ten seconds. She’ll say, “You know, everyone tells me I look like her. I wish!” She’ll smile dazzlingly and the poor guy will look confused, holding a bag of tomatoes or artisanal cheddar. He’ll say, “Oh, okay,” and wander off slowly, or he’ll say, “A case of mistaken identity!” with a peppy exclamation point you can actually hear and they’ll both laugh weird fake laughs that belong in bad theater. Sometimes a wife or girlfriend will appear and pull him off in the direction of the lettuce. (My mom may be forty-two, but she’s pretty hot.) And then Meg Ferris in Disguise will look at me, triumphant, as if she’s waiting for applause.

  Every time, I think about telling the random fan the truth, just to see what my mother would do. Which is why it’s funny that I don’t do it when I get the chance, right here on the plane, with my mom back on Earth.

  The woman sitting next to me is in her late thirties, I think, wearing a turquoise sheath dress and high-heeled sandals. She offered me a piece of gum as the plane taxied down the runway before takeoff (I accepted), but that’s been the extent of our interaction so far. But when she sees the copy of SPIN she lets out a little gasp, and I feel the lies start to bubble up from some secret Ferris spring.

  “Shelter!” the woman says. “I loved that band. Is this a throwback cover?”

  “It’s vintage,” I say. I consider the stories I might tell and choose one. “My dad has a lot of old magazines.”

  “Cool dad,” she says. She’s leaning forward a little, looking at me conspiratorially. I shrug and smile.

  “I was so bummed when they broke up,” she says, and I don’t know if she means the band or my parents. “Meg Ferris was such a badass, and Kieran was adorable.” She drops her voice to a theatrical whisper. “I was so jealous of her. Sort of hated her a little. Listen to me, I sound sixteen again.” She shakes her plastic cup of ice like a maraca, looking wistful. She sets the cup down.

  “I’m Jessica,” she says. “May I?” She holds her hand out. It’s perfectly manicured, each nail a narrow oval painted in coral pink. It makes me feel a little bad about my own chipped gold polish.

  I give her the magazine and she begins flipping through, looking for the article.

  “Page seventy-seven,” I tell her. She nods, not seeming to think it’s weird that I have it memorized.

  “Oh my god.” She flips back to check the date on the cover. “I can’t believe it’s been twenty years.” She puts her hand to her lips, then touches her cheek as if she thinks she might find a different face there. “You’ve heard their music, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I like Sea of Tranquility.”

  “That’s the best! I loved that record. And the song.” Jessica finds the article and spreads the magazine flat on her own tray table. There’s a photo of the record cover, a navy blue background with a shadow-covered moon in the center. “Oh my god.” She turns toward me. “My favorite song was ‘Still.’ Do you know that one?” She starts to hum.

  I nod and glance at the old lady dozing across the aisle, half-worried Jessica is going to start full-on singing it. But she stops after a few bars.

  “I bought Kieran’s new record,” she says. “He’s still pretty amazing. And still cute.” She touches the picture of my father’s face. “But Meg, she’s been gone for years.”

  I think for a moment about that statement. It depends what you mean by gone, I guess. It’s true that I rarely even hear her sing, and when I do, it’s always from another room. Like the call of some bird everyone thought was extinct, its song ricocheting around in the forest, getting caught in all the leaves. By the time you get close enough, she’s already stopped.

  “She’s an artist now,” I tell Jessica. “She works in metal. Sculptures and jewelry.” I don’t tell her that I’m wearing some right now: the thin silver bangle on my wrist, the sharply geometric studs in my ears. Nothing big enough to set off the airport’s metal detector, but still here. A couple of years ago Rolling Stone wanted to do a tiny article about my mother’s sculptures, a “Where Are They Now?” sort of thing, but she refused to be interviewed. They put in a blurb about it anyway, a photo from the installation outside the Albright-Knox under the headline Shelter Singer Sculpts in Metal. They ran a picture of her from the university website, standing in front of a stark white gallery wall. She looks official, somehow. Responsible, and still beautiful.

  Now, Jessica looks at me. “You know a lot about them. And you’re so young! Is your dad a fan?”

  Good question, I think. Is he? I’m not sure. So I shrug my shoulders and give a safe answer.

  “He used to be.”

  She nods knowingly. “But you are.”

  “Totally,” I say. This is the truth, even though I’ve had to be a fan in secret. It’s as if my mother can’t stand to hear the sound of her own voice coming out of a speaker. But I’ve listened to Shelter for as long as I’ve had an iPod—earbuds only. I can catch the woman I know in those songs, but only sometimes. Only fleetingly.

  Jessica leans back on the seat, holding the magazine in front of her, and for a moment, I consider telling her the truth. She might believe me, if she looked closely at my mother’s photo: we have the same green-blue cat eyes, the same cheekbones, though Luna is the one who really resembles her. If I told her, it would give her a story to tell when she gets wherever she’s going, and let me pretend to be famous for a few moments, if only by association. But then the flight attendant comes by and tells me I need to stow my purse away, and Jessica hands me back the magazine.

  “Thanks,” she says. “Nothing like reminiscing to make you feel young and old at the same time.” She takes out a lipstick from a tiny pouch in her lap and starts to apply it without a mirror, tracing it over her lips quickly, as if she’s done it a thousand times before. I feel the plane’s nose ease downward toward the earth and I turn back to the window. Outside, the clouds whip away and I can see the water, the wide blue Atlantic, and the curving shore of
Long Island.

  As the plane falls slowly from the sky, I look at the front-cover picture of my mother’s face. If I wanted to tell the story, where would I even start? “My mother named us both for the moon,” I’d say. She tried to make a space for us in the life she already had, but then something made her change it all. Our father kept making music, stayed in New York, stayed famous. And eventually, close to three years ago, he just stopped calling.

  The airport comes closer and so does Luna, somewhere down there in its big-windowed space. She’s applying her lip gloss, she’s reading a book, she’s humming a song on her iPod.

  She’s waiting . . . for me.

  eight

  MEG

  APRIL 1997

  WHEN WE PULLED UP IN the town car, Luna woke in her car seat and stretched, slipping her tiny fist out of the blankets. Our doorman Thomas opened my door for me and a spring breeze blew straight through the backseat.

  “Mrs. Ferris,” he said. He called me that no matter how many times I’d asked him to call me Meg. “Welcome home.” He peeked in toward Luna. “And hello, little one.”

  “We named her Luna,” I said, unsnapping the buckle of her seat.

  “Beautiful,” Thomas said.

  He put out his hand and I took it. I slid out of the car, holding Luna in the crook of my other arm. She felt so light, and I realized I’d never held a baby like this, out in the real world. I’d never really held a baby at all, at least not since I was three and my sister was born, and even then, it was supervised, sitting on the sofa with my arm propped by pillows. I didn’t remember, but there were pictures to prove it.

  Kieran had already gotten out of the other side of the car and was standing on the curb. He put his arms out and I transferred Luna to him awkwardly, holding on with both hands until I was sure he had her. He held Luna in her blankets up to face the building.

  “This is where we live,” Kieran said. We were in the shadow of the building, but still she blinked into the light. He looked at me, put his lips close to Luna’s ear. “Your mama is going to write so many songs about you.”

  I saw someone out of the corner of my eye and I stiffened, thinking it was a fan or, worse, a photographer. But it was an elderly woman with a stick-straight spine and a Chanel suit, one of those New York ladies you were more likely to see on the Upper East Side than in the West Village, where we were. I was sure she had no idea who we were, but still, she stopped on the sidewalk in front of us.

  “That’s a beautiful baby,” she said. She was wearing wraparound sunglasses, and she pulled them down for a moment. Her eyes were blue and watery.

  “Thank you,” I said. I felt as if I’d just passed a test.

  “She is,” Kieran said. “Isn’t she?”

  We all nodded, me, the woman, Thomas. We were all smiling.

  The woman stood for a moment on the sidewalk, looking at us. It was like we were posing for a photograph, but no one was there to take our picture, because no one knew where we lived. Yet.

  “You should love her just as much as she needs,” she said. “And not too much.” She raised her pointer finger. “That’s the secret.”

  “I’ll try my best,” I said.

  She nodded. “You’re swaying and you’re not even holding her,” she said, and I realized she was right. Three days with this baby and I’d already changed the way I stood. I couldn’t be still. It was like some kind of new music had found its way into my bones, and it was trying to get back out.

  The woman smiled and said, “I think you’re going to be just fine.” She kept walking. Luna started to cry then, a thin, sharp peal. I thought of sirens cutting through the quiet night. Kieran held Luna out so I could take her.

  I settled Luna into my arms and she stopped screaming for just a second. Then she closed her eyes tightly and opened her mouth to let out another ear-shattering shriek.

  “She’s got your lungs,” Kieran said.

  A bubble of panic floated up from somewhere below me, but Kieran grabbed my hand and I brushed the bubble away. I looked up at him, and then toward the building, the roof, the sky.

  Scream to the rafters, baby, I thought. Let the world know you’re here.

  “Damn straight,” I said, holding Luna a little tighter.

  nine

  LUNA’S STANDING OUTSIDE THE BAGGAGE claim with her hip resting against the metal rim of the carousel, and for a moment, I see her before she sees me. Her hair has grown since May and hangs dark and shiny past her shoulders. She’s wearing a black sleeveless dress and flat gold gladiator sandals, buckled around her ankles and across her toes. Her left wrist is strung with thin ribbons woven into bracelets and a few half-inch Lucite bangles. Nothing metal. Nothing “Mom.” I study her face, looking for the ways it might have changed in the months since I’ve seen her last, but she looks mostly the same. If there’s something different, I can’t spot it.

  It’s always hard to figure Luna out when she’s quiet. So much of my sister is her voice. She’s loud, for one, and her voice is like homemade caramel in a saucepan: warm, golden, and sweet in a deep, bubbly kind of way. We overlapped for two years at St. Clare’s, and I’d always hear her before I saw her, which is part of the reason I felt at home there immediately.

  The first day of my freshman orientation, she was a junior-year leader and stood at the front of the banner-draped gym in skinny jeans and a St. Clare’s T-shirt, calling out the names of the freshmen who had been assigned to her. She saved my name for last, and the whole time I worried that I wasn’t going to be paired with her, but when she got to me, she said as loud as she could without actually yelling, “Phoebe Ferris—that’s my sister!”

  I was immediately famous by association, because all those new, anxious fourteen-year-olds could tell that Luna was someone they wanted to know. During the school year Luna’s voice would echo in the hallways and I’d hear her from inside my classroom or from one flight down the marble stairs. She was always around.

  She sang in the chorus and when I passed the music room on my way to lunch I could pick her voice out of the rest. I saw it in my head as one golden thread running through a perfectly ordinary carpet. It was the thing that made her different, the thing that would let her do anything she wanted to do. Later I joined the chorus too, because it was an easy arts credit, but my own voice is ordinary, softly scratchy, not gold or silver or even a dull bronze. I didn’t get whatever it is that the rest of my family has.

  Now, in the bright open space of the airport, Luna’s eyes catch mine and she starts to walk toward me. She weaves around an Orthodox Jewish family with four children, all holding hands in a row. The last and smallest kid—maybe two years old—reaches out to touch Luna’s jersey skirt as she passes. My sister smiles down at her, resting her fingers on the girl’s brown curls for a second. Then she walks on.

  “Fifi,” she says, opening her arms for a hug. This is her childhood nickname for me, the name she called me when she was two and I was just born. She had it embroidered a couple of years ago as a joke, sewn in fancy script above my heart on a V-neck, navy blue preppy sweater from J.Crew. I still wear it sometimes.

  She squeezes me tightly, and for few seconds I find it hard to breathe.

  “There’s a B in there,” I say into her shoulder. She smells like citrus and sweet almond. “You’re missing it.”

  “Bibi?” She steps back, smiling. “You’ve changed it?”

  I roll my eyes. “Yeah. I’m starting over.”

  When I see my suitcase, I bend to hoist it off the carousel. It’s heavier than I expect and makes a clattering sound when the wheels hit the floor. A few people turn to look at me.

  “Let’s take the AirTrain,” Luna says. “I’d rather save the cab fare and go out for Indian tonight.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “But I should warn you that it’s not as glamorous as it sounds.” She’s already walking away. “AirTrain,” she says, making air quotes around the word. “We’ll be traveling through the s
wamps of Queens, basically.”

  “Sounds lovely.” I follow her as she follows the signs, and we end up on the platform in the AirTrain station listening to a calm electronic voice announce the imminent arrival of a train.

  “Do you want a snack?” Luna asks. She pulls a bottle of hand sanitizer out of her purse and shakes some into her palm.

  “Sure,” I say, taking the bottle. “But you asking that makes me feel like I’m five years old.”

  “Adorable little Fifi,” Luna says, patting me twice on the top of my head. She hands me a bag printed with Korean characters.

  “What are these?” I ask.

  “Freeze-dried green beans,” she says. “I can’t stop eating them. There’s this great Asian market near our practice space. I go there practically every time.”

  I take a few of the beans and crunch them between my teeth. They’re good—sweet and grassy—and I realize that I’m hungry underneath that frothy feeling of traveling, of being in a new place.

  I lean back and take out my phone then, and send a text: I’m here. The answer buzzes back almost immediately. In real life? I smile.

  Waiting for the AirTrain, I type back. Feels pretty real to me.

  Luna is looking at her own phone, so I pull a pack of M&M’s from my purse and toss them into her lap. Her face lights up.

  “Yes,” she says. “Perfect.”

  This is my first offering to Queen Luna, and I wish it were this easy to please her all the time.

  The truth is, if she had an altar we’d all be out there burning bags of M&M’s, scooping them up like sweet colorful beads and dropping them with decadent abandon into the flames.

  ten

  WHEN WE COME UP FROM the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn Heights, it’s as if we’ve entered a different country. The city smells like hot asphalt and stale pretzels, and my stomach growls in spite of Luna’s green bean snacks and the M&M’s. The sun is dazzling, reflecting off the cars sliding through the streets and the flat white concrete of the plaza. Luna knows where she’s going and I follow her, dragging my dead-weight-on-wheels suitcase behind. While we’re waiting to cross Court Street, a bus stops at the light next to us and breathes on us like a giant animal. It’s a relief when it pulls away, even though the air is hot and still. My skin already feels gritty with city dust, but I don’t mind.