The Girl Who Chased the Moon

Chapter 8

Good, you’re home,” Grandpa Vance said as he ducked out of his room as soon as Emily came in the front door. She was surprised he’d come out on his own. She’d been prepared to smoke him out. “I was thinking, you need a car so you can go out to the lake whenever you want to, instead of being cooped up here. I happen to have one, you know. A car, I mean.”

“Grandpa Vance-”

“I don’t actually drive it. I’ve never been able to drive. Not with these legs. But your grandmother had a car. Come, I’ll show you.”

What was this all about? Just last night they were eating barbecue in silence. He led her through the kitchen, where he had to turn sideways because his shoulders were broader than the width of the doorway to the porch. She followed him out and around the side of the house. There was an old garage there that looked like it hadn’t been used, or even opened, in ages. The driveway from the street no longer existed, so the garage stood in the grassy side yard like an island that had lost its mainland bridge.

When Vance pulled the garage door up, dust motes sparkled in the sunlight, but they couldn’t see very far inside. He reached around and felt for the light switch. The fluorescent light popped on reluctantly, buzzing and flickering and complaining until it finally decided to shine properly on the car.

“It’s a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass,” he said. “Under all that dust, it’s actually brown. If you wouldn’t mind driving something this old, I’ll have someone look it over.”

Emily stared at it. “Did my mom used to drive this?”

“No. When she turned sixteen, she wanted a convertible, so I bought her one.” He paused. “If you want something different, I can arrange that.”

“No,” she said immediately. “I think I like this one. It looks like a muscle car.”

“A muscle car, huh? Lily would have liked that.”

She turned to him. “Who is Lily?”

Vance looked shocked. “Lily was my wife, child,” he said. “Did your mother never talk about her?”

“She didn’t tell me anything.” Emily tucked her hair behind her ears. Talk to him. “Grandpa Vance, today at the lake, there was this party. It turned out to be a party thrown by the Coffeys, and I was asked to leave.”

If indignation were something you could see, it would look exactly like an eight-foot man pulling himself to his full height. “You were asked to leave?”

“Well, not in so many words,” she said, still embarrassed by it. “But it was clear enough that the Coffeys don’t like me. Well, except for Win. I think. Actually, I’m not really sure about him.”

“That was the one thing I asked you to do, Emily!” he said. “To stay away from them.”

Win was right. He said Grandpa Vance would soon tell her that. “You asked me to stay away from the Mullaby lights, not to stay away from the Coffeys. I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.”

Vance took a deep breath and shook his head. “You’re right. None of this is your fault.” He looked at the car for a long moment before turning off the light. “I had hoped, with all the time that had passed, these old wounds had healed.”

“Is this because of my mom?” she asked hesitantly. “Win told me some pretty unbelievable things today. He said she was cruel. But that can’t be true. Mom was a wonderful person. Wasn’t she a wonderful person? I know you don’t want to talk about her. But please, just tell me that.”

“Dulcie was a handful when she was a young girl,” he said as he pulled the garage door down. “She was so stubborn and high-spirited. She could actually sting people with her energy. But she was also bright and happy and curious. She got that from Lily. Dulcie was twelve when Lily died.” He looked away and rubbed his eyes with an embarrassed flick of his hand. “I didn’t know how to handle her on my own. The only thing I could think to do was give her everything she asked for. She tested me at first, asking me for outrageous things, just to see how far I would go. But I never said no. So she got the best of everything. As she got older, she began to take great pleasure in teasing people who didn’t have as much as she did. She could be very cruel sometimes. Julia was a frequent target.”

Emily felt like she’d been walking upstairs and had suddenly missed a step. “My mom was cruel to Julia?”

He nodded slowly. “And others,” he added reluctantly.

Emily could feel herself resisting this, wanting to push it away. This couldn’t be her mother he was talking about. Her mother had been a good person, a selfless person. She’d wanted to save the world.

“She was the queen bee of her social circle, and her word was law. She had an incredible power over them. Who she accepted, they accepted. Who she shunned, they shunned,” he said. “So when she took this shy, troubled boy named Logan Coffey under her wing and told everyone to accept him, they did.”

“Win said he committed suicide.”

“Yes.”

Emily paused, wondering if she really wanted to ask what she was about to ask. “Did my mom have something to do with it?”

She waited, holding her breath, until he finally answered. “Yes.”

“What did she do?” she whispered.

Vance seemed to struggle with what to say. He looked up at the sky for a moment, then said, “What did Win tell you?”

“He said Logan loved my mom, but his family didn’t approve of her. He said Logan broke tradition to be with her, but all my mom wanted was to trick him into revealing a Coffey family secret.”

Vance sighed. “The Coffeys are much more social these days, but you have to understand, back then they were very exclusive. Status was important to Dulcie. It started with me, giving her everything she wanted. It all got wrapped up in her grief over losing her mother. If only she had more, then she’d be happy. When the Coffeys wouldn’t let her into their social circle, when they frowned on her relationship with Logan, it made her angry. Not just angry. Livid. She had a hard time with her temper after Lily died. She lashed out a lot. The Coffeys had, and still have, one particular quirk: They never come out at night. Never. But Logan came out at night for Dulcie. She assembled most of the town in front of the bandstand in the park one night, saying she was going to perform for them. She had a lovely singing voice. Instead, she led Logan onstage.”

She waited for more. There had to be more. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “He committed suicide because she made him come out at night? That’s the big secret? That’s ridiculous. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Tradition has always been important to the Coffeys,” Vance said. “And Logan was a very sensitive, very troubled young man. His suicide almost drove the Coffeys away. If they’d left and taken their money with them, Mullaby would have been ruined. That was the last straw. No one wanted anything to do with Dulcie after that, after what she had cost the Coffey family, after what she had almost cost the town. She finally did something no one would forgive her for, something I couldn’t buy her way out of.”

Emily was several feet away before she realized she was backing away from him.

“I haven’t spoken of it in twenty years,” Vance said. “And I was going to keep it from you, because you were better off not knowing. The Coffeys obviously thought differently. I’m sorry.”

Emily continued to back away. Vance simply watched her go, as if leaving him was what he expected, what he was used to. Without another word, Emily turned and walked back into the house.

When she reached her room, she just stood there, not knowing what to do. Coming here had been a mistake. A huge mistake. She should have known her mother had a good reason for keeping this place from Emily. This place wasn’t right. There was something distinctly off about it. She’d felt it all along. People here committed suicide just for breaking tradition. For coming out at night. And this person everyone remembered as Dulcie Shelby wasn’t her mother at all.

As she stood there, she began to hear a slight fluttering sound, like something was in the room with her.

She quickly looked up and around, and couldn’t believe what she saw. She turned in a full circle, staggering slightly.

The wallpaper didn’t have lilacs on it anymore.

It had changed to tiny butterflies of every imaginable color.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could have sworn she saw a few of them fluttering. There wasn’t a pattern, they were simply everywhere. There was a static frenzy to them, like they desperately wanted out. Out of this room. Out of this town.

She walked over to the wall by the bed and put her hand to the paper.

Setting aside her incredulity for a moment, she knew exactly what they felt like.

She lowered her hand and slowly backed out of the room, then she ran back down the stairs. Vance was just now making his way into the kitchen from the yard.

“The wallpaper in my room,” she said breathlessly. “When did you change it?”

He smiled. “The first time is always the hardest. You’ll get used to it.”

“The wallpaper looks old. How did you get it to look like that? How did you get it up so fast? How do you get it to… move?”

“I didn’t do it. It just happens.” He waved his arms like a magician. “It started with my sister. No one knows why. It’s the only room in the house that does that, so you can move to any other bedroom, if you want.”

She shook her head. This was too much craziness for one day. “I’m not a child, Grandpa Vance. Wallpaper doesn’t change on its own.”

Instead of arguing, he asked, “What did it change to?”

As if he didn’t know. “Butterflies. Crazy butterflies!”

“Just think of that room as a universal truth,” Grandpa Vance said. “How we see the world changes all the time. It all depends on our mood.”

She took a deep breath and tried to be tactful. “I appreciate that you want it to be something magical, and I’m sure it took a lot of effort, but I don’t care for that pattern. Can I paint over it?”

“Won’t work,” he told her, shrugging. “Your mother tried. Paint doesn’t stick to that wallpaper. Won’t tear off, either.”

She paused. No one in this town would give an inch. Not with her mother. Not with this… wallpaper situation. “So what you’re saying is, I’m stuck with the mood room.”

“Unless you want to move.”

Emily leaned back against the red refrigerator, because standing on her own suddenly seemed too much of a task. Grandpa Vance watched her silently. She didn’t realize until that moment that he listed to one side, as if his left hip hurt him. “I’m still waiting for someone to tell me this is all just a trick being played on me,” she finally said.

“I know that feeling well,” he said quietly.

She met his eyes. “Does it get better?”

“Eventually.”

Not the answer she wanted. But she was going to have to live with it.

What choice did she have? She had nowhere else to go.

OVER SEVENTY years ago, during the full moon in February-people called it the Snow Moon-when Piney Woods Lake froze solid and the aquatic plants trapped in the ice looked like fossils as kids skated over them, the house beside the Coffey mansion on Main Street caught fire.

Flames were jetting out of the windows of the house by the time the fire engine arrived. The vehicle had to be pushed there by the six strongest men in town because it wouldn’t start in the cold. The town gathered in the park across the street to watch, huddled together under blankets, clouds of ice from their breath hovering above them. Vance was only four years old at the time, and his height was not yet a concern to anyone in his family. In fact, at the time, his father had actually been proud of what a strapping boy he had. Vance was wearing a red hat that night. It had a ball on top that his older sister, who was standing close behind him as they shared a single blanket, kept batting playfully back and forth.

Everyone watching the fire was riveted by the undulating yellow-golds and blue-oranges. It was like watching a memory of summer that the dark, relentless winter had almost made them forget. Some were so mesmerized, so ready for warmer weather and an end to aching joints, frozen commodes, and skin so dry it cracked and fell away like paper, that they walked dangerously close to the burning house and had to be hauled back by firemen, covered in soot.

First one person saw it, and then another, and soon the entire crowd was watching, not the fire, but the house next door-the Coffey mansion. All the servants were leaning out the windows on the side of the house facing the fire, and they were throwing whatever liquid substance they had on hand at the flames next door, trying to keep the fire away from the Coffey mansion. They threw water from flower vases, jars of peaches swimming in juice, a snow globe from one of the children’s rooms, a leftover cup of tea from breakfast.

The town watched in awe, and slowly began to realize that the Coffeys weren’t coming out and their loyal house staff was bravely trying to save them.

The fire was eventually extinguished and the Coffey mansion wasn’t affected, except for some burnt azalea bushes that the cold had killed anyway. The next morning, the story began to circulate that the Coffeys had huddled in their basement while the fire had raged next door, claiming they would rather die than come out at night.

People had always known about the Coffeys’ aversion to the dark hours, but no one had ever realized just how serious they were about it. It was the first time the citizens of Mullaby began to wonder, What if it wasn’t that they didn’t come out at night…

What if it was because they couldn’t.

Dulcie had loved that story when she was a little girl. Sometimes Vance had to tell her twice before she would go to bed. Dulcie had always been close to her mother, but she’d never wanted much to do with him. Maybe because he’d been so cautious around her when she was a baby. She’d been so unbelievably small compared to him. He’d been scared of accidentally stepping on her, or losing her in his broad hands when he picked her up. So when he’d found something, like stories of the Coffeys, that brought Dulcie closer to him, he’d been thrilled. He hadn’t known at the time that he’d been building the framework for disaster. By the time she was a teenager, she’d been obsessed with the Coffeys.

He didn’t want that for Emily.

After Emily had gone to bed that night, Vance moved a chair to the back porch and waited, a flashlight in one hand, a piece of clover for courage in his other. The full July Buck Moon was out-a time for the young and randy.

The Mullaby lights had been around a long time, and there were dozens of stories about them. But after the fire, the rumor started that the Mullaby lights were really the ghosts of Coffey family members who had passed on, running free at night in death as they were never able to in life. That rumor stuck, and to this day, it was still what the people of Mullaby told all outsiders who asked.

When the light appeared in the woods that night, he stood and turned on his flashlight.

“Go back to where you came from,” he called softly, knowing it could hear him. “I know what my daughter did to you. But you can’t have Emily.”