Moonlight
Sunrises had no business being so damn beautiful. Not in worlds where Kestrin wanted to tear the sun out of the sky and grind it in the garbage disposal.
Apparently there wasn't enough testosterone in his blood for him to go kill things, he had to write bad mental poetry about tearing the sun out of the sky to deal with the pain. Kestrin rubbed his eyes and swore softly. He didn't want to look at his cell phone, he didn't want to think or remember. His head hurt from the bottle of wine that he'd finished after going to bed, and thoughts were hitting him too quickly to process this morning.
Carlina had over-fed him at dinner, kissed his forehead and directed him to a guestroom with vanilla-scented sheets. She never asked or even hinted that he needed to tell her why he'd come. Kahlil slept down the hall on a futon in the library.
The night's memories flooded back like water through a bursting dike. Kestrin had surrendered to insomnia and crept down the stairs, fumbling until he found the right door for the library. A glass Tiffany lamp glowed golden-orange from underneath a dragonfly mosaic on a small walnut desk.
“I'm awake,” Kahlil whispered.
Kestrin slid inside, clicking the door shut a bit too loudly. He winced. “She'll hear that. She hears everything.”
“We'll keep our clothes on.” Kahlil winked. He flicked the curtains apart and pointed. “Check out the moon. It's incredibly bright tonight.”
Kestrin knew before he looked that the moon would do the same thing it had done the night of the party. He tried to step away, but the white sphere was determined to bewitch him. It pulsed with a burning clarity, its round circle cutting into his skin like a leech's mouth, sucking away his will. He looked away, but its presence had slipped into the library like a ghost.
The library door opened. Kestrin jumped when he saw the white-clad figure, but it was only Carlina, wrapped in her sleeping robe and wearing fluffy house slippers.
“Guest bed mattress too stiff?” she teased.
His humor kicked in to cover for him. “I felt a pea. A tiny one.”
She laughed musically and produced two plastic buckets from behind her back. “I don't encourage idleness in my house. If you're not going to sleep, I have some late harvest grapes that could use picking. My regular help is away for a family reunion and I'm left in a lurch to finish up the late grapes.”
“You want me to go pick grapes in the middle of the night if I'm not going to sleep?” Kestrin asked it with only mild surprise. This was Carlina, after all. She often did much stranger things herself.
Carlina nodded, her eyes cheerful and serious. “That's what I said.”
Kahlil declined the offer and remained inside to sleep as Kestrin donned his jacket and shoes. Carlina handed him a wood-handled knife and shut the door behind him without further instructions. For a moment Kestrin wondered if she'd been devising some weird plan for getting him out into the moonlight to pick grapes, but he reminded himself that as magical as his aunt appeared to be at times, she couldn't curse him with insomnia, too. He plunged into the vineyard and down a row that appeared still laden with fruit. He worked in silence, clipping the stems and gently lowering grape bunches into the bucket.
A visit to this house and vineyard was the one trip his parents made together while they were still together. Kestrin didn't remember much of his father, but he recalled very faintly someone who held his hand and walked him through the vineyard, pointing to the grapes, splashing their toes in the long shallow pool. He remembered watching his mom and his aunt talk and laugh like best friends and the fight when on the very last night Amanda confessed to Carlina that she was planning to leave Henry. Carlina had begged her to reconsider and Amanda had grown defensive and angry. She threw one of Carlina's urns on the dining room floor and it gouged the wood. The scar in the floorboard was still there and Kestrin made a point to touch it on every subsequent visit.
The wind seemed to whisper Lorona's name, hissing and weeping through the grape leaves, grating around the wooden posts that held the leafy bowers in neat rows.
At the end of his row, several hundred feet beyond him, stood the shallow reflection pool that Carlina had built soon after she bought this house and property. The grounds had belonged to her for several years before she fell in love and married. The pool was far too whimsical for something that Carlina and Daniel would have planned together. A corner of the moon's disc reflected on the water, which Kestrin could just see if he looked down the end of his row. He watched it for a moment, then returned to his work, taking his time and letting the heavy thunk of the fat grapes in the bucket soothe him. He kept his head bent low and away from the moonlight as he plodded along. When he emerged on the end near the edge of the pool, he halted to gaze at the still water. He wasn't alone.
Carlina sat like a statue, cross-legged, at the far end of the pool in her white dressing gown. A leather book lay in her lap.
Kestrin set down his bucket and approached her, the sense of a conspiracy returning. She gestured to him and he sat beside her, also folding his legs and facing out across the glassy pool.
“Tell me about her,” Carlina murmured.
Kestrin shivered. She knew what he'd say before he said it, so he just spilled what he'd been thinking. “It's a short story. I thought I'd found the one and now, like the jack-ass I am, I'm not sure she's who I thought she was. I'm seriously wondering if I'm not made for this sort of thing: You know, monogamy or marriage.”
“You came all the way here just to say that to me?”
“Not exactly.”
“And your parents? I assume you've consulted others about this?”
Kestrin squirmed. “Dad's got enough on his hands with teaching classes overseas. He's got his own life. And Mom isn't exactly the most practical in her advice about women. Plus, I don't have any married friends.”
Carlina smiled but didn't reply.
Kestrin continued. “The advice Mom gives is stuff like, ‘Your lover’—she hates the word wife—‘should be a woman who can climb well, smell a fire before it's close, and knows her own body.’ She never says anything like, ‘Find a woman who can take care of herself, knows how to cook, and can dance a little.’ I think she just wants me to never marry and have a steady chain of girlfriends to keep life interesting. That wouldn't surprise me at all. And then there are the dreams.” Kestrin elaborated on his recurring dream as Carlina listened, and even then he couldn't give her all the details without referring to his journal, which was back in his room. He finished with, “I've thought I'd found the girl and been wrong before.”
“What happened?”
“I loved her because she cried.” It sounded lame when he said it out loud. “She made me feel like I could take care of her. Then I realized that her tears were manufactured to manipulate. I don't want to go into details, but it ended badly and I'd rather never see her again. She was the only girl to ever play me. Ever. Instead of vice versa.”
“So after this first really bad experience with trying to figure out your dream, you decided to listen as close as you could to them, in hopes of escaping any similar heartache?” Carlina said.
He just looked at her and the moon-glow illuminating her face. Then, “I guess I did. Even though part of me wants to just try out my mom's way of life.”
“And this other girl? The one you're seeing now. Does she cry, too?”
He paused. “I've never seen her cry. Not even when I left her.”
“You left her?”
“I married the second one.”
Carlina looked at him hard, making eye contact for the first time. “Kestrin Feather, you know that marriage is no trivial thing.”
“I was an idiot.” Kestrin dipped his hand into the water and flung it upward as if he could empty the pool with the motion. A pathetically small wave rippled toward the far end. “I'm not sure the girl in the dream even exists.”
“Did this girl, your wife, do something to hurt you?”
“This is so embarrassing.”
“You can say anything or nothing.”
“She didn't do anything; she just couldn't complete the dream. I married her a few days after I met her, without showing her the dream, because I'd lost my journal and I was so convinced by this other dream that I had to confirm my actions. Essentially, I gambled way too much on my nighttime hallucinations.” He laughed and stopped when he saw Carlina's stoic face.
She was holding a single grape up to the light of the moon, suspended between two fingers.
He said, “You and Uncle Daniel have a great relationship. I'll always be jealous, you know.”
Her eyes sparkled at the mention of her husband's name, then saddened. Daniel was often away on long business trips these days, and she always missed him like a newlywed bride. But whenever they were together, it was paradise on earth.
Kestrin would have enjoyed watching her face if it didn't make him feel so guilty about his own wife. He looked up, found the moon, thought again of Lorona, and glowered at his knees which had prickled into goose bumps. Carlina was waiting for him to go on. He finally did. “The journal shows up, Lorona reads it and gives me a look as blank as anyone else's. Shock of my life. So here I am, wondering why one dream says one thing and I obey it, and then the other ditches me at the bottom of the ninth. They've always been true.”
His aunt nodded. “Doubt is a powerful beast. It eats at you from inside.”
Kestrin snatched a fallen grape leaf and shredded it.
He thought of Lorona in her wedding dress, smiling with fresh innocence. Warmth flowed into his body at the memory of her roving through the apartment, exploring each nook and cranny of their home. A Pavlovian response. Kestrin only had to think of her and he felt calm, even if he didn't want to, even if he was in the process of explaining why she wasn't the one for him.
“So tell me,” Carlina said quietly, her voice almost chanting. “Why take one dream more seriously than any other? Have you ever known one of your true dreams to be later proven untrue?”
Kestrin thought for minute. “No. I could always tell the difference between regular dreams and real ones.”
“All right. Follow this logically.”
Kestrin imagined a college blackboard behind his aunt and for a moment the grape in her fingers looked like piece of chalk.
“You had another dream telling you to marry Lorona, and it was one of your dreams that you knew was true, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you don't believe in polygamy, right?”
“Of course not. What a nightmare.”
She paused for a moment, then went on. “So if you have one dream telling you about the girl for you, the one, the life-mate, the wife who was destined for you…”
“Yes?”
“And another telling you to marry Lorona, what do you think that means?”
Kestrin shook his head. The shredded leaf fell through his fingers and sank in the water. “But she isn't that girl. I must have crossed some wires along the way. She can't complete the first dream. I must have been wrong about the one that I thought told me to propose to her. There's a first time for everything and maybe this was a mistake. There was alcohol involved the night I met her.” Kestrin didn't add that the alcohol had only been a few sips.
He'd expected Carlina to give him kind words about how to extricate himself from the marriage and then maybe some tips for boosting his fading self-worth. These would have been welcome, but no, Carlina had decided to keep with her conservative perspective. She understood nothing.
She probably doesn't believe at all in fate, just in following rules.
Kestrin touched his necklace and tried to glare at her.
She didn't take the hint. “Why would your dreams conflict with each other?” she asked, blithe as ever.
A fuse burst, violating the peaceful night air. “Because God hates me!”
He hadn't expected to say that. The grapes seemed to shrink back behind their leaves for protection. He might as well go on, now that he'd started. “Because I gave up my chance for happiness a long line of girls ago.” The last sentence reeked with bitterness. He'd given up on a lot of things after Heidi. He saw that now. “Maybe these dreams stopped making sense as my punishment.”
As bitterness slowly poisoned each of his brain cells, something else inside Kestrin was wishing and praying to all the powers that be that he hadn't lost his chance.
What if Lorona would have been the one if I just hadn't gone so wide off the mark? Kestrin paused. Is that what this is all about? I just don't deserve her, fate or no fate?
Kestrin felt like his chest was crumpling inward, bones scraping against his heart, snapping into sharp points and trying to puncture it. Before I made a mess of everything with the other girls, Lorona would have been the one.
That was why his dreams didn't line up with reality. They were what should have been, not what was going to be.
Sensing the bells of doom echoing inside his skull, Carlina said, “I see that I'm not bringing you into a better place. I'll stop.”
“Thank goodness.”
But then she spoke again, “Think about this for me.” She was still playing with the grape between her fingers. She held it with such care, it was like she held a whole planet and stood deciding whether to crush it or allow it continued life. Kestrin banished the notion. He didn't like to think of his aunt in terms near divinity.
“What if Lorona just doesn't have the answer you're looking for,” Carlina paused and whispered, “Yet.”
Kestrin couldn't bear to look at Carlina's face, joyful and triumphant, like she'd just spoken immovable truth. He muttered a curse under his breath, rose, and walked away, leaving her alone by the pool. She waited a moment, then followed him at a distance back to the house.
At the door, she took the bucket of grapes from him and kissed him goodnight. He found a bottle of her special merlot and a corkscrew in the kitchen and brought them with him to the library. Kahlil had apparently left with the lamp still on. Kestrin was drinking out of the bottle when he noticed the moon gloating at him through the window. He pulled the curtains closed. His cell phone buzzed in his coat pocket.
What if it was Lorona calling? He'd already seen her text and added her new number to his phone. What would he say? “I'm sorry I'm so tied up in the meaning of stupid dreams. I don't deserve you.” That was the best he could come up with. Groaning, he looked down at the caller ID display.
Not even close. It was Heidi Russell calling. Hadn't he deleted that number? No, now he remembered. He'd kept it so that he could ignore it. The call ended, and another began. She was calling a second time.
Each successive jingle was like an egg breaking across Kestrin's skull. Each egg held an old memory, revolting, degrading, but satisfying a base hunger. He understood Heidi and he knew exactly what she would give him. No surprises. No ambitions that were out of his reach. No high ideals.
Kestrin took a long drink from the bottle and stood as the phone began its third call. Why didn't he just silence the ring? The memories continued to pelt him, crack open, and dribble down his head. Each one left him feeling weaker and lonelier and more despicable, like the victim of a mob being bombarded with rotten tomatoes.
He raised his head to find something to look at, anything to distract him from the phone. On the library wall beside the door hung a framed list written in ornate gold calligraphy. It looked religious. Carlina was pretty serious about that sort of thing. She had her own little chapel room in her bedroom corner with a circular window and an intricately carved Coptic cross. She'd painted the walls light peach so it always looked like sunrise. Sometimes she'd say things and Kestrin knew by the way her eyes twinkled that it was inspired by what she'd read in her Bible.
Each sentence in the frame before him was written in a different ink color, edged in gold. One phrase popped out in red letters, and he squinted at it. ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’
Kestrin took several more swallows from the bottle. He looked down at the phone. It continued to buzz and he felt ready to slump over, as if the sound of the ring and memories had physically pummeled him. This was now the fourth call. He repeated the red inked phrase to himself and looked at the phone. This time his vision blurred as he stared at Heidi's name, flashing in black letters on a blue glowing screen.
He remembered the smell of Heidi's raspberry lemon drop perfume and it triggered a memory of the nights she wore her sundress and tied her hair up and danced with all the energy in the world. And everything was always about her and how she felt and what she wanted.
A wretched part of him whispered: Face it, Kestrin. She's the woman you deserve. Kestrin felt his remaining hesitation drain into the floor and, cursing himself under his breath, he answered.
Before he could say a word, Heidi whispered, “I've missed you.”
