Cover Issue Two

 

Grandmother Moon

Elijah David

Grandmother dozed beneath the watchful eye of the no-longer-quite-full moon. Her right hand held Perry’s left, stretching his arm across the narrow aisle between the SUV’s middle seats like a lifeline in the sea of memory.

Or forgetting, Perry thought. Perry had no illusions about Grandmother’s ability to remember him or their relationship. She was past remembering, her mind swallowed up in a darkness as certain as that which surrounded the moon.

If I could draw the moon down in my hand, Perry thought, I’d drop it in your head and it would shine into all the deep corners of your mind where our faces lie cobwebbed and moth-eaten. And you’d remember us again. But even as Perry stretched a hand to the sky, the futility of the act froze him. Moons did not leave the sky without fingers of gods hurling them down.

Perry’s gaze shifted to the empty road before them, lit by the harsh yellow headlights of his father’s SUV. His father had refused all offers to switch places, to let Perry drive awhile, despite the sleep that threatened to club them both over the head. The beams from the headlights stretched into the night like insubstantial fingers grasping for purchase in the dark.

Fingers . . .

Perry lowered the window, drawing nothing more than a curious glance from his father, and stretched his arm into the October night. He did not look away from the road, did not let his sleep-numb left hand know what his right might be doing. The night seemed deeper as he pulled his arm back inside. But the car’s interior grew moon-bright. Perry finally allowed himself to view the prize in his hand.

“Don’t stare at that screen too much,” his father stagewhispered from the front seat. Perry only nodded in response. Speaking any louder might startle Grandmother into one of her confused states. Perry had had enough of those; he didn’t care to instigate another.

In his right palm lay a small pill the color and shape of the moon. It was not perfectly smooth nor uniformly grey, but cratered and splotched. His eyes turned back to the night sky, searching for confirmation that he hadn’t lost it, wasn’t dreaming. Where an almost-full moon had been guiding their way home, no moon hung in the sky. The stars shone more clearly. No clouds were in evidence.

Perry had stolen the moon.

At their next stop, Perry had to sort through Grandmother’s medications and make certain she’d taken all the right pills at the right times. There were a surprising number of them, even if Grandmother was pressing ninety years old.

The moon-pill still glowed in Perry’s hand, but the fluorescent bulbs in the McDonald’s parking lot diluted the moonlight. To most people, it was just another grayish-white pill, even if it did seem to shine a bit brighter.

For Perry, the difficult part wasn’t slipping the new pill into the mix; it was keeping himself calm through the process, not giving away the fact that he’d just given Grandmother the moon to swallow like an aspirin.

Perry told himself his attentiveness to Grandmother as she swallowed each tiny cupful of medicine was only his due diligence. Old people sometimes faked taking their medication, didn’t they? He was only ensuring she didn’t miss any. Especially not the moon-pill.

The rest of the drive—all four hours of it—passed much the same as the previous four. Grandmother dozed.

Perry’s arm fell asleep. His father drove without diverting his attention from the road. Occasionally, Grandmother woke with a start from her nap and had to be reassured of the rightness of the world. The same questions had to be answered and reanswered and answered once again.

No, he wasn’t her son. He was her grandson, Perry.

They were going to Tennessee. Yes, they’d cleared it with the front office. And the Post Office. And the bank. No, that wasn’t Perry’s wife driving them. Yes, they’d checked beneath the mattress. (There was nothing there.)

As the night came round its axis and turned toward the morning—though not so far that the sun had actually rolled over in its bed—Grandmother woke again, but this time instead of asking where they were and where they were going, she gripped Perry’s hand tighter than ever. She looked around the cabin of the SUV, and Perry swore that rather than reflecting the glow of the dashboard’s LEDs, her eyes emitted their own ghostly light. Then she locked eyes with Perry and said, “Perry. You’re Perry, right?”

The lucidity of the question shut down Perry’s ability to speak. He nodded.

“Perry,” Grandmother repeated. “I haven’t seen you since . . . it was a wedding, I think. Is that right?”

Perry nodded again.

“I have trouble remembering things sometimes,”

Grandmother continued. It was like they’d gone back a few years, back to when her mind had still mostly been there. Before the darkness had truly begun to take hold. “But I remember dancing with you.”

They’d been the first couple on the dance floor after

Perry’s older brother, Todd, and his wife. They’d tried to be the last, but Grandmother’s knees couldn’t take that much movement all at once. Grandmother’s face screwed up with her effort to remember. The moonshine of her eyes blinked out, then reemerged as she asked the question Perry had been avoiding for the last day.

“Pop’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked.

For several seconds, Perry didn’t have the words. His throat closed up and wouldn’t let him speak the reality of why they were moving Grandmother. Then they came clawing out of his throat. “Yes. He is.”

Grandmother sighed and turned away, though her hand still clutched his in a bronze grip. “I’d forgotten,” she whispered before falling back into sleep.

The rest of that night blurred in Perry’s memory, not unlike the night he’d viewed 2001: A Space Odyssey under the influence of Benadryl. Only this time, his drug was sleeplessness.

Over the next few days, Grandmother’s confusion—or rather, her lack of confusion—startled Perry’s father and the staff of the new care facility they had chosen for her.

“She’s handling the change remarkably well for someone in her condition,” one of the intake nurses said. “Usually a move like this agitates dementia patients.” They all said to take it as an unexpected blessing, and so Perry’s father did. But Perry remembered the pitiful way Grandmother had said she’d forgotten about her husband’s death, and he wondered if he’d really given her a blessing.

When they finally had Grandmother settled into her apartment, she sat reminiscing with Perry’s father about events she hadn’t recalled in years: Perry’s birth, his father’s promotion, deaths and marriages and birthdays and vacations from the last two decades that had all been thought lost to her forever. She didn’t always have the details right, insisting on a blue dress when she wore green in the pictures, but wasn’t that true even of people who didn’t have dementia? Every so often, Grandmother would look at Perry with that old glint in her eye. They had a secret, she and he, one that would do Perry’s father no harm in the keeping.

At last, Perry excused himself from the room and sat in the hallway breathing deeply and slowly, refusing to let himself panic. Did Grandmother know about the moon-pill? Had its medicine—or its magic, Perry didn’t care which at this point—worked so well that she actually remembered what—and more importantly, who—was responsible for her miraculous recovery? But recovery was a strong word for a few days of clearmindedness. Better to wait and see.

That night Perry stared up at the sky, searching in vain for a moon he knew was not there. No one else seemed to notice its absence. No news reports of failing tides or animals acting unusually. No astronomers demanding to know how a rock that big could just vanish from the sky without a moment’s warning.

As more nights passed with no sign of the moon, Perry began to consult moon charts, keeping careful track of the phases as they should be. Even he wasn’t sure why at first. But then, on a visit to Grandmother, he understood why. The surge in her memory had been only that; she was fast returning to her demented state. She no longer remembered Perry’s birth, or Perry’s father for that matter. The lead nurse said Grandmother might be worse than before they had moved her.

Even through her forgetfulness, Grandmother still looked at Perry knowingly. Almost accusingly. None of the adults recognized it, but Perry did. He had worn that same look when his mother had died. Perry had glared at the doctors with every ounce of guilt-inducing shame he could muster. And now Grandmother held Perry responsible for . . . what? Losing her memory? Regaining it? Regaining her mind only to lose it again?

Perry consulted his moon charts, seeking solace or perhaps understanding in their esoterically real pictograms. There it was. Tonight would have been a new moon. The sky would be black even if he hadn’t pulled the moon down and given it to Grandmother.

And Grandmother’s mind, so full of memories only two short weeks ago, was now a new mind, wiped clean by the very medicinal magic that had healed her in the first place.

Perry lay awake all night pondering how he could fix Grandmother’s problem. But he had only two options: leave her alone to swing in pendulum cycles from full to empty mind and back, or somehow draw the moon from her and replace it in the sky.

But if he did that, never mind the how just yet, would she retain what little memory she’d had before the moon-pill? Or would she be left in the same phase as the moon she ejected? Worse, would she become a new moon permanently, no mind left to remember even who she was?

When sunrise finally came, Perry had decided. All he had to do was wait. True to phase, Grandmother’s mind waxed in the following days. She slowly returned to the small memories she’d had before that long moonlit drive.

The nurses warned Perry’s father not to put too much stock in this resurgence, but Perry knew by his father’s smile when they visited Grandmother that their words fell on hard ground and took no root.

Perry bided his time. Grandmother’s memories had to be just so when he retrieved the moon.

Then, on the night before the full moon, he visited

Grandmother alone. His father was working late down at the church, preparing scenery for the Christmas play, and Perry knew he could visit without fear of interference. When Grandmother saw that Perry was alone, she said, “It has to stop.”

It wasn’t a question, nor a plea. Only an observation of reality. Perry nodded, that same tightness returning to his throat to throttle the words before they could escape.

“What was it you gave me?” Grandmother asked. “It sits so heavy inside me.”

The words stampeded out. “The moon, Grandmother. I pulled it down from the sky to light up the corners of your mind so you could remember us, and it worked, it really worked and then—” Guilt and sorrow choked his words out again.

Grandmother nodded. “And then it didn’t.” She took his hand, more gently than on the car ride, though she still held him like a lifeline. “So how do we fix it?”

“I don’t know,” Perry began.

“I don’t think anyone knows anything in this situation, do you?” And she grinned at him, disarming his doubt. “But what are you thinking?”

Perry told her his plan. He hadn’t done more than fiddle with the finer details since he first hatched it two weeks before. He couldn’t allow himself to second guess what came next.

Grandmother considered Perry’s ideas, her eyes shining with silver light. He wondered if she was thinking the moon’s thoughts as well as her own.

When Grandmother decided, she did not speak. She stood and linked her arm with Perry’s, still clutching his hand to keep from drifting away.

They stepped out into the well-lit garden, following paths of pale stones that should have been glowing in moonlight. A handful of other residents sat on benches scattered through the garden or walked slowly along in the company of attendants or relatives.

“I remember once you and Pop took me fishing by

moonlight,” Perry said, the words once again scraping out of his chest, his throat, his mouth, dying animals clawing for a last breath before the final plunge. “Everything—the sand, the wind, the waves—was cold. I never realized before that how different the beach was at night. The gulls were quiet, and the crabs scuttled across the dunes like ghosts. We didn’t catch much, not like when Dad went mullet fishing with the cast net, but it was worth staying up late and getting salty again just to see the beach when everything was quiet and cold.”

As he spoke, Perry’s hands acted of their own accord.

One reached up to Grandmother’s temple, pushing back silver hair and pulling back something firm and much larger than a pill. The other held tightly to Grandmother’s hand, not so much to prevent her from drifting away or keep her standing upright, but to keep him from losing his nerve. Perry didn’t look at his first hand, the one holding something larger than a baseball. But the garden path glowed with silver light as well as the unnightly yellow of the streetlights.

Grandmother gasped and said, “How pretty. Did you bring it for me, Perry?”

And Perry muttered that of course he had, but he had to put it back now and he reared back and threw the basketball-sized moon as far as he could manage. It wobbled in its course, and Perry’s stomach dropped as he wondered if he’d failed altogether, but then the magic of gravity or the medicine of homecoming pulled the tableglobe-sized moon up and into the midnight black sky.

“That moon sure is pretty,” Grandmother said.

“Sure is,” Perry replied.

There was a pause in which Perry sensed more than saw Grandmother look down at their hands anchoring one another in the night. “Who are you? Are you my beau?”

“No, Grandmother. Just a friend. Let’s get you back to your room.”

Perry prided himself on keeping the tears back until he’d seen her safely to her apartment and walked out to his car. He drove home in a mist of his own making, and all the while the moon watched over him, and every so often, he swore it gave him a knowing look. See here, we have a secret from the world, you and I, and it’s no harm to them in the keeping.