Breathings of the Moon

Chapter 1

My brother arrives. This time, he takes two years to find me.

I rise from my desk to greet him and the woman standing at his side. Still living in the memory of Ashley Maxwell, I do not recognize them. They have nothing to do with Ashley’s life as a beloved elementary school teacher, so my mind doesn’t acknowledge them.

“Are you David’s parents?” It is the parent-teacher conference night, and I have met with everyone but this child’s parents who rarely show, so I am surprised to see this couple.

“Zoe, I have some bad news.”

The name doesn’t register. I have been Ashley Maxwell for some time, living off the memories that I devoured from her mother and friends at her graveside services, where they mourned a life cut short by a drunk driver. I bring my papers over to the round table where I have been discussing the grades and performance reports of children for the last two hours. Tapping the edge of my stack of papers on the table to straighten them, I gesture with a nod for them to take a seat. They don’t.

“David really is a bright child and with the proper encouragement—”

“They’ve found her.”

With these words, he rattles my self-composure and cracks in my mind start to form. I desperately try to re-seal them. Ashley Maxwell, who always wanted to work with kids. Who hoped to have her own children one day when she met the right guy. She likes the color yellow and loves to eat cherries that stain her fingers. She sings off-tune in the shower.

My mouth is dry. I lick my lips, feeling their parchment texture.

He says again, a little louder, as if I am deaf, “They’ve found her.”

My oldest stolen memory surfaces: Quack-quack-quack goes the duck. I raise it high and make it dive into the water. My baby girl laughs. Once again, I can feel the slippery smoothness of the water in the bubble bath, the thick rubber of the duck, and the smell of baby shampoo on my fingers as I relive both mine and my mother’s memory at the same time.

I’m glad to be sitting down, for I’m light-headed. The two of them seem to be at once far, far away, and suffocatingly close. Before I can stop it from happening, my primary self surfaces, taking back control from Ashley.

“Where?” I ask.

“Down an old well. Out in the National, in some falling down shack.”

As he tells me this, the woman beside him touches his arm, but the man is not interested in being soothed. He shakes her off and comes closer, bending down so his eyes meet mine, a hand-span away. They are magnetic; I cannot look away.

“Time to wake up, Zoe. We’ve got to go home.”

Hairline cracks become yawning crevices.

“Is everything all right, Ms. Maxwell?” This is from the doorway where the principal of Ashley’s school is now standing. She picks up on Ryan’s threatening posture and it disturbs her. One hand holds her cell phone, ready to summon help if need be.

“It’s fine. This is my brother, Ryan Bancroft.” Some of her tension releases, and she enters the classroom cautiously. We have plenty of experience in dealing with irate adults during parent-teacher conferences, so it is natural that she is concerned.

But it only takes a moment before Ryan has her Charmed. Like all the men in my family he is handsome, with a movie star jawline, square brow, thick dark brown tousled hair, and a fit masculine figure that women want to caress. The fake smile and the sugary sweet warmth that suddenly suffuses his voice melts my superior, and she smiles back. Her hand comes up to smooth her hair, and she stands taller. At least she doesn’t proposition him immediately, something I’ve seen happen before.

“I didn’t realize Ashley had family.”

“We flew in from out-of-town. I’m afraid the situation is urgent. A family matter, you understand. I’m afraid my sister will need to take some compassionate leave.”

Her brow furrows with concern, and she spares a glance at me to see my expression. I wonder what it tells her. That I’m stunned? I am shocked, but probably not for the reason, she thinks.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Ryan’s hand comes down on my shoulder. Perhaps it is unfair of me, but it feels like the closing of a jail cell door. “Our mother is very ill. Cancer.”

Oh, how glibly he lies!

Ryan gently guides the principal back to the door as they continue talking. He needs her gone so he can talk to Zoe, not the Ashley personality I’ve stolen.

My sister-in-law suggests, “Why don’t we pack up your things?”

Because, of course, I no longer have a choice. I have been found, collected, and they expect me to go, and I will. I always do.

No goodbye to the class of impressionable nine-year-olds who will wonder why Miss Maxwell left. Yesterday will be their last memory of me. I wish I had made it more special for them, bringing cupcakes or gifting each with a pad of colorful sticky notes. They love writing on sticky notes at that age.

With the principal gone, Ryan shuts the door and locks it. I am sitting at my desk, sorting through drawers. I will leave most of it for whoever replaces me. Besides, I travel light; anything important, I keep in my head.

“About three months ago, the police told us they discovered a body in the backwoods at an old house that kids were using to meet up. Rotten boards were covering up the top of a well and they almost fell in. Scared the shit out of them, but at least they had sense enough to call in their parents, who notified the police. They weren’t sure it was mom until they matched the DNA.”

“Dead,” I whisper, hanging my head. Sure, it’s been twenty years since I last saw her, but you always hope, don’t you? That she got amnesia, had a mental break causing her to wander off, and that she was still living somewhere. Like me. I assumed she lost herself in a memory and was unexpectedly swept away.

You look at faces you see in the grocery store and wonder if one of them is hers. You had a fantasy of how you’d recognize her, and she would suddenly remember everything as you two hugged and cried over the lost years. She’d come home with you and things would be better. I’d always clung to that scenario, thinking, “this will be us.”

My brother’s voice becomes hard from a simmering anger he has nursed for a long time. “I knew she would never leave us for some mystery lover. I told you that, didn’t I? Someone took her, and our family did nothing to discover the truth.”

“Alibaba tried.” I regret saying that.

“Tried? Grandfather did nothing! He just let her disappear without a fight. You were too young, but I remember.”

He grabs my wrist like a vise. “You remember?”

His face is inches from mine as he forces the recall, shoving it into my mind.

“When’s mommy coming home?”

Child Ryan sees grandfather as a giant and hopes the monster won’t eat him. Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum. In a booming voice, the giant says, “When she learns her lesson, she’ll be back.”

Perhaps it is the look on my face, but when Ryan pulls away from me, he is breathing hard. It is not often that we can share memories anymore like we did as children. Perhaps he forgets how disturbing it can be to remember everything in such rich detail as you relive the moment?

We stare at each other: his eyes are that pale caramel color inherited from Grandfather, and for the first time I notice the faint trace of crow’s feet. He has aged, and we are no longer children. Our mother is dead.

Home has reached out with its tentacles and it will drag me under once more. In my heart I weep for the loss of Ashley Maxwell. She is dead now twice-over.

Ryan whispers, “You can do something about it. You can force the truth from them.”

I shake my head. “No. No. It doesn’t work like that.”

He seems not to hear me. “You can crack open their minds like a walnut, sort out the meat, and throw the rest away. You owe it to Mother.”

His wife, Jennifer, stands at the opposite side of the room, examining a wall decorated with bumblebees and spring tulips that describe cloud shapes.

I ask, “What did Grandfather say?”

“Don’t know. I hung up on him after I got the facts.” That was one way of ending a Charm, for Grandfather had the same Talent as Ryan, and he was far more ruthless and liberal with applying it to get what he wanted.

“I haven’t been back since—”

“Your twenty-first birthday party. How could anyone forget?”

Exposing my second cousin’s husband as a pedophile hadn’t gone down well with the rest of the enablers in the family. Ranks closed. Too bad about that anonymous letter to the police with details about a hidden flash drive which held all his filthy secrets. It had given me great satisfaction to send that package.

“You’re the Memory Keeper. We need to find out what happened to her.” Ryan sees the effect that mentioning her has upon me. There are other ways than Charm to get what you want.

I try to shake him off. “Look, I don’t know what you think I can do—”

“You looked into Roger’s nasty mind and you found the details needed to get him sent away.”

“And almost went crazy trying to forget it!” It had taken years of shifting personalities from hospice care-giver, pet shop dog trainer, and research librarian, to fill my mind with, so there was no room for Roger’s foul memories.

“I’m not asking you to look into the mind of pedophiles or serial killers. All I want you to do is nose around. Find out what Grandfather and the others were doing when Mother went missing. Get us the facts.”

“That’s what you never have understood, Ryan. Memories aren’t facts. They have emotions attached to them. The older the memory, the harder it is for people to even think about what happened. Anything I learn will be colored by time, by nostalgia. It’s been twenty years, for goodness’ sake! Grandfather and Aunt Belle are ancient!”

“If I could do it, I would. Aunt Belle is insisting on a memorial service, and I’m not letting her or Grandfather decide on what happens to our mother. We aren’t kids to be ordered around anymore. We make the decisions.”

“Cremation?”

“I can’t agree with that. What if they want to examine her body later because of additional evidence or new techniques?”

Ryan’s hand falls on my shoulder again as I wipe my eyes. “I’m counting on you, sis. Mom is counting on you.”

There is no way I can refuse. Ashley Maxwell is blown away, and all that remains is Zoe Underhill. I say wearily, “How will this work?”

“I’ve got a plan.”

“Of course you do,” I murmur.

“The memorial will give us a reason to invite plenty of people who knew her back in the day. People you could read for clues.”

Reluctantly, I admit it isn’t a bad idea. When our mother vanished, we had been kids; Ryan, nine, me, six. Our memories are practically useless in solving what happened. We need knowledge from adults around at the time of her disappearance. “And what about your job?”

“Compassionate leave. They all feel sorry for me, while greedy to hear all the salacious details.” Ryan never discusses his private life with strangers, and for him, anyone outside of the family was strangers.

Sometimes, I wondered how much his wife, Jennifer, even knows about him. Across the room she still seems entranced reading poems the kids had written about clouds and rain.

“Okay. I’ll help.”

END OF CHAPTER ONE