The Girl Who Chased the Moon

Chapter 6

That afternoon, with nothing better to do and no one to talk to-Grandpa Vance was holed up in his room again and Julia wasn’t home-Emily started cleaning. She dusted until she looked like she was covered in hoary frost. She tackled her room first, cleaning everything but the chandelier because she couldn’t find a ladder to get up to it, then she went to the other rooms, opening blinds and shedding light into corners that looked like they hadn’t seen the sun in years. It was an adventure at first-apparently chasing the light last night had given her a taste for it-exploring the unknown, learning the story of the house. But she soon realized the story was a sad one. There was a room that had obviously once been a little boy’s room. There were blue sailboats on the wallpaper and safety rails still on the bed. Maybe it had been Grandpa Vance’s as a boy. Or did he have a brother? If so, what happened to him? Then there was a room with a bed that was twice as long as a normal one. There was a vanity table in the room, too, a feminine touch. Grandpa Vance had obviously shared this room with his wife. Where was his wife? Where were all the people who had once lived here?

She started to feel claustrophobic, overwhelmed by the history of this place. She wanted to feel a part of it, but her mother had told her nothing. Nothing. Why?

She went to the balcony outside her room for some fresh air. She kicked at the leaves, and decided to sweep them away. She swept until she had a large pile of leaves pushed against the balustrade. She set the broom aside and gathered some leaves in her arms, then tossed them over the side. They smelled mulchy and looked like someone had cut them out of craft paper. She scooped up some more and tossed them, stopping this time to watch the leaves fall. It wasn’t until they hit the head of the person standing on the front porch steps that she had any idea someone was there.

“Julia!” she called. “Hi!”

Julia smiled up at her, leaves in her hair, and said, “Bored, are we?”

“I’m so glad you’re here! I have something to tell you.”

She ran downstairs and out the front door, thrilled that she had someone to discuss last night with. Julia was standing on the porch with two large brown paper bags in her arms and leaves still in her hair.

“I saw the light again last night!” Emily said excitedly. “It’s not a ghost, Julia. I chased it, and it had footsteps.”

This revelation didn’t garner the reaction she’d wanted. Julia looked dismayed. “You chased it?”

“Yes.”

“Emily, please don’t do that,” Julia said gently. “The Mullaby lights are harmless.”

Before Emily could ask why Julia didn’t think this was a huge discovery, the screen door squeaked behind her and Emily turned around to see Grandpa Vance duck under the doorway.

He’d changed clothes since she’d last seen him that morning, when she’d followed him to breakfast, like he had designated morning clothes and evening clothes. She’d hardly slept at all last night after chasing the light through the woods, and she’d been awake when she’d heard him leave. She’d intended to wait for him outside the restaurant and walk home with him again. But then Win had distracted her. She’d followed Win to a diner, where she’d watched him go in and vanish in the crowd. She’d gone home after that and waited for Grandpa Vance there, but when he’d gotten home, he’d disappeared into his room after leaving an egg sandwhich for her on the kitchen counter.

“Julia,” he said. “I thought I heard your voice.”

“I brought you a gift.” Julia handed the bags she was holding up to Vance, who looked like he’d been given the Holy Grail of foodstuffs. “With this heat, I thought cooking dinner would be the last thing either of you wanted to do today. Maybe the two of you could eat together,” she said with a significance that wasn’t lost on Emily. She was trying to get them to spend some time together. Emily appreciated the effort, but didn’t think it would do much good.

But Grandpa Vance nosed around in the bags and surprised her with his zeal. “You’re in for a treat, Emily! Julia’s barbecue is the best in town. It’s all because of her smokehouse. Electric smokers just aren’t the same. My mouth is watering already. Will you join us, Julia?”

“No, thanks. I have to be going.”

“You’re right neighborly. Thank you.” Vance disappeared inside, leaving Emily on the porch with Julia.

“That’s the first time he’s been out of his room since this morning,” Emily said, amazed.

“Barbecue gets him every time.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Listen,” Julia said, “how would you like to go to Piney Woods Lake with me on Saturday? It’s the place for kids your age to go in the summer. Maybe you can meet some people you’ll be going to school with.”

It felt nice to be included. Those elderly ladies this morning had to be wrong. She could fit in here. “Okay. Sure.”

“Great. See you tomorrow. Now go talk with your grandfather.” Without another word about the lights, Julia gave her a backward wave and jogged down the front porch steps.

Emily turned and went back into the house. She thought about just going to her room and letting Grandpa Vance eat in peace, but then she decided to give it one more try. When she reached the kitchen, she heard the dryer door close and Vance came out of the attached laundry room. He’d been looking in the clothes dryer again. He was inordinately preoccupied with it, which was strange because just that afternoon, someone from the dry cleaner’s had come by to take a bag of laundry he’d left on the porch.

Vance stopped when he saw her. “Emily.” He cleared his throat. “So, um, has the wallpaper in your bedroom changed yet?”

“Changed?” she asked.

“It does that sometimes. Changes on its own.”

It sounded like something you would say to a child. The moon is made of cheese. Wish on a star. There’s magic wallpaper in your room. He probably thought of her as a little girl, she realized, and he was trying to make her smile. “No, it’s still lilacs. But I’ll be on the lookout,” she said to humor him.

He nodded seriously. “All right, then.”

In the silence that followed, Emily looked around and found where he had set the bags on the table in the breakfast nook. “Are you going to eat now?” she finally asked.

“I thought I might,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all. Have a seat.” He took plates and utensils out of the cabinets and put them on the table. They sat opposite each other, and together they unloaded the contents of the bags, mostly Styrofoam containers of various sizes, plus a few hamburger buns and two slices of cake.

Vance took the lids off all the containers. His incredibly long fingers were clumsy and his hands shook a little.

“What is this?” Emily asked, looking in the largest Styrofoam container. There was a bunch of dry-looking chopped meat inside.

“Barbecue.”

“This isn’t barbecue,” Emily said. “Barbecue is hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill.”

Vance laughed, which automatically made Emily smile. “Ha! Blasphemy! In North Carolina, barbecue means pork, child. Hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill-that’s called ‘cooking out’ around here,” he explained with sudden enthusiasm. “And there are two types of North Carolina barbecue sauce-Lexington and Eastern North Carolina. Here, look.” He excitedly found a container of sauce and showed her, accidentally spilling some on the table. “Lexington-style is the sweet sugar-and-tomato-based sauce, some people call it the red sauce, that you put on chopped or pulled pork shoulder. Julia’s restaurant is Lexington-style. But there are plenty of Eastern North Carolina-style restaurants here. They use a thin, tart, vinegar-and-pepper-based sauce. And, generally, they use the whole hog. But no matter the style, there’s always hush puppies and coleslaw. And, if I’m not mistaken, those are slices of Milky Way cake. Julia makes the best Milky Way cakes.”

“Like the candy bar?”

“Yep. The candy bars are melted and poured into the batter. It means ‘Welcome.’”

Emily looked over to the cake Julia had brought yesterday morning, still on the counter. “I thought an apple stack cake meant ‘Welcome.’”

“Any kind of cake means ‘Welcome,’” he said. “Well, except for coconut cake. You give coconut cake and fried chicken when there’s a death.”

Emily looked at him strangely.

“And occasionally a broccoli casserole,” he added.

Emily watched as Vance picked up the container of barbecue and forked some chopped pork onto the bottom hamburger bun. He poured some sauce on it, then topped it with coleslaw. He capped it all with the top bun and handed it on a plate to Emily. “A barbecue sandwich, North Carolina-style.”

“Thank you,” Emily said, smiling as she took the strange sandwich. He really was a nice man. She liked being around him. And he made her feel so small, like there was so much more to the world than just her problems, her grief. “This was nice of Julia to do.”

“Julia is a wonderful person. Her father would have been very proud of her.”

“I was just talking to her about the Mullaby lights,” Emily said, hoping he’d be more interested in what she’d discovered than Julia had been. “I’ve been seeing them at night.”

Vance paused in the middle of handing her the container of hush puppies. “You have? Where?”

“In the woods behind the house,” she said as she reached over and took the container from him.

“I’ll only ask you to do one thing while you’re here, Emily,” he said seriously. “Just one. Stay away from them.”

“But I don’t think it’s a ghost,” she said. “I think someone is doing it on purpose.”

“No one is doing it on purpose. Trust me.”

She wasn’t usually an argumentative person, despite her mother’s love of passionate debates. But Emily had to bite her tongue to keep from pointing out that leaving her a box of Band-Aids last night seemed pretty intentional.

“Your mother would get that same look on her face when she was a little girl,” he said. “She was stubborn, my Dulcie.” He hastily looked away, as if he’d said too much. Suddenly that old awkward tension was back, joining them at the table with apologies for being so late.

Emily toyed with the hush puppies on her plate. “Why don’t you want to talk about her?”

Still not looking at her, he said, “I get all confused about it. I don’t know what to say.”

Emily nodded, though she didn’t really understand. Maybe, like everything else about him, his grief was larger than anyone’s, so big that no one could see around it. Vance’s relationship with his daughter must have been a complicated one. But then, her mother’s relationship with everyone had been complicated. She’d been a hard woman to know. High-spirited and mercurial, she’d been like the mist from perfume. You had to be content to let a little of it sprinkle over you. And then, eventually, it went away.

She wouldn’t push him. And she would try not to be hurt by his avoidance. He’d taken her in when she had no other place to go, after all, and she was grateful. So she would talk to other people in town about her mother, find out more from them. Maybe she could find other members of Sassafras. Maybe she’d even see Win Coffey again and ask him about the relationship his uncle had had with her mother. He’d said next time he saw her he’d tell her about their history.

She liked that thought. Seeing Win again.

They ate in silence. Afterward, Grandpa Vance again checked the clothes dryer, as if something might have appeared during dinner. But again he found nothing, so he went to his room. Emily went upstairs and finished sweeping, then she sat on the balcony and waited for the lights.

And so ended her second full day in Mullaby.

LATER THAT evening, when Vance ducked out of his room to check the dryer one last time before bed, he paused to look up the staircase. He didn’t hear any more shuffling. No more scraping of a broom. Emily had settled in for the night.

It was a peculiar thing, he thought, having someone in the house again. He’d almost forgotten what it was like. Emily made the air different, vibrating, as if there were music close by but he couldn’t quite hear it. He was surprised by how much fuller he felt with her near, and he didn’t know how to handle it. Being needed was a lot like being tall-it was never really an issue until other people were around.

Vance had towered over all the other kids in kindergarten. That was his first memory of truly understanding how tall he was. Up until then, while he was certainly big for his age, he was still the shortest member of his own normal-sized family. Some kids in school teased him at first, but there a came a point when they realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pick a fight with someone who could knock them over with only the wind he caused by walking past them.

His family was gone now. Vance was the only one left of the Shelbys, and he had inherited the existing fortune. He knew he wasn’t supposed to have it all. It wasn’t supposed to all come down to him-the Shelby legacy, the Shelby name. There were supposed to be brothers and sisters who would do great things. There were supposed to be normal kids in his family. For a while there were. But his older sister, for whom the wallpaper in her room was always pink candy swirls, drowned in Piney Woods Lake when she was eleven. And then there was his younger brother, who died from a fall out of the tree house in the front yard when he was six. His parents tried for more children after that, but to no avail. They were stuck with Vance. Vance, who was so tall his feet reached the bottom of the lake, so he could never drown, and his arms reached all the way to the limbs in the trees, so he never had to climb and fall.

His parents died when he was in his twenties. He thought he saw disappointment in their faces when they passed away. Their legacy, it was all going to the giant. What was Vance going to do with it? they probably thought. He’d never get married. Who would want him?

He was thirty-two and living alone, rarely venturing outside, when he met Lily. She was related to the Sullivans down the street and, while attending State, came to visit them one weekend. If she’d been a color, she would have been bright green. If she’d been a scent, she would have been new paper. She was happy and intelligent and afraid of nothing. The Sullivan boys, who had taken to throwing balls into Vance’s yard and daring each other to fetch them and risk getting eaten by the Giant of Mullaby, had shared this story with their cousin. Lily was appalled. She took them by their ears and forced them into the yard and up the front porch steps, determined to get them to apologize. When Vance came to the door, Lily was so stunned that she let go of the boys. They instantly ran away. A few hours later, when Lily hadn’t returned home, they cried to their mother that the Giant of Mullaby had eaten her. When their mother went to investigate, she found Lily and Vance sitting on the front porch steps, drinking iced tea and laughing. She’d paused, then backed away. Something wonderful was happening and she could see it right away. No one had ever made Vance laugh like that.

Vance and Lily married after Lily graduated, and Lily taught second grade at Mullaby Elementary until she became pregnant with Dulcie. Those were halcyon days. Lily didn’t let him stay in the house. She insisted they go grocery shopping together, go to the movie theater, attend Little League games. People had always been curious about him, but that was only because he used to hide. Once he left the house, he came to realize that Mullaby easily accepted him. He was, in a town full of strange things, just another oddity. Vance was so grateful for this revelation that he helped fund playgrounds and war memorials and scholarships.

He almost died himself when Lily passed away. Dulcie was twelve when it happened. It was like snow had settled over their world, turning everything cold and silent. It was only Vance’s memory of Lily’s bright greenness, of her joy and intelligence, of her strong faith in everything, but especially in him, that made him survive. How Dulcie got through it, he had no idea. And that was one of his biggest shames.

Vance thought a person could only bear going through that once in a lifetime.

Then he learned that his daughter had died.

When Dulcie’s friend Merry called and told him that Dulcie had been in a car accident, Vance couldn’t even speak. He hung up the phone and crawled upstairs to Dulcie’s old room, but then he couldn’t get back down, so he stayed up there a week, the wallpaper in her bedroom turning gray and wet, like storm clouds. He wanted to die. What reason was there to go on? Everything that had tethered him to this world was now gone.

When Julia next door finally got to him, he hadn’t eaten in so long he couldn’t walk. He spent a week in the hospital, where his legs dangled off the end of the bed and it took three sheets to cover him.

After he got home from the hospital, there were several phone messages left by Merry. Dulcie had a daughter, she said. And she needed a place to live. Merry couldn’t keep her because she was moving back to her home in Canada. She’d hired a private detective to try to find any close relatives on both Emily’s mother’s and father’s sides. And Vance was it.

He’d always taken a passive stance in life. He knew that. His height made him shy. His parents had left him a fortune. His wife had found him. Lily had always taken care of everything. And Dulcie had basically been on her own since she was twelve. Now it was his turn. He finally had to step up and take care of something.

He hadn’t done a very good job of taking care of Emily so far. Dulcie hadn’t told Emily anything about Mullaby, about what had happened, so Vance was terrified of saying something Dulcie wouldn’t want her daughter to know. When Dulcie left, she’d sworn him to secrecy. Don’t speak of it, she’d said. And maybe it will go away. Maybe one day everyone will forget. He’d let his daughter down in countless ways, so he’d been determined to keep his word about this. And he had, for twenty years. Now he didn’t know what to do. Emily had attracted the attention of the Mullaby lights already. She was going to want answers.

He walked to the kitchen in the darkness. But instead of going into the laundry room to check the dryer, he went directly to the back door and opened it. Sure enough, like Emily said, there was a light in the woods in the backyard, not moving, as if watching the house.

Vance stepped onto the porch, making himself seen. The light immediately disappeared. He heard a gasp, then footsteps on the balcony above. He stepped off the low kitchen porch and looked up.

Emily was standing there, staring out into the woods.

She didn’t see him, so he quietly moved away.

He’d made this mistake once.

He wasn’t going to again.