SAVING THE MOON

Zoe was in the bathroom with the big mirror, doing her hair and makeup, when her mother came in to tell her she was not coming to the wedding that was supposed to take place in four hours.

“You’ve had three months to clear your schedule, Mom. What’s your excuse this time?” asked Zoe’s older sister Tabitha, who had been married three years ago and was now divorced and living back at home again.

“I have to save the moon,” said Mom. “It’s falling out of orbit and I’m the only one who knows how to get it back where it belongs.”

Tabitha rolled her eyes. “Mom, this is Zoe’s wedding. You only get one chance to attend this.”

“Really? What about you, then? Are you saying you’re never going to get married again?” asked Mom.

“No, I’m not saying that. And you liked Aaron a lot, by the way. I think you liked him more than I did, in fact.”

“Are you blaming your divorce on me, Tabitha? I liked Aaron, and I went to your wedding and it didn’t make any difference. It’s not me making the vows. Or breaking them, as the case may be. I know what weddings are like. I’ve been to them before. And the mother of the bride isn’t an important part. You might as well bring one of those cardboard cutouts of me and no one will know the difference.”

Tabitha mouthed, “I’m sorry,” at Zoe and then pulled Mom away.

They were still arguing. Zoe could hear them, though her brain was too busy with other things to parse what they were saying. Tabitha treated every relationship she had like a fixer upper. She seemed to think that if she argued long enough, their mother would change her mind.

Zoe knew better. When Mom made a crazy decision, it was best to nod and act like you understood. If she hadn’t worked hard not to do it, Zoe could have made a list of all the events in her life that her mother had missed. The school play in ninth grade.

She had to prevent a black hole from forming then.

Eighth grade graduation.

She had to make the sun a little hotter. It had been a cold year.

Her first swim meet. Dad had come, apologetic. Mom was busy keeping the earth’s core stable.

Zoe was like Dad had been. Apologetic. Sometimes embarrassed. But never confrontational. He had loved Mom just the way that she was, since there was no other way for her to be. He had stepped in when he could, and for the rest, had tried to make the best of it. There had been good times with Mom.

But Dad had died three years ago, just after Tabitha’s wedding. He hung on to be in the pictures, gray as he was, and died about a week after Tabitha and Aaron returned from their honeymoon.

Zoe thought about Jude’s parents. She liked them a lot, although she didn’t feel particularly close to Jude’s mother. It would be awkward in the line, everyone asking where the bride’s mother and father were. Zoe had thought her mother would handle those questions. Now it would be her.

Mom did seem to be missing things more often now. Especially things that were inconvenient or difficult for her.

Zoe had been nervous before. She figured that was normal for a wedding, even if it was supposed to be the happiest day of her life. But now her shaking fingers turned cold, almost numb. She kept looking at herself in the mirror, doing each curl, holding it for the right length of time because she counted in her head, but she didn’t feel the hair warming up like she usually did and she began to wonder if she had on too much makeup or if she should pull more of her hair back in an upsweep or if she should have chosen the gown with the white appliquéd flowers on it in the front instead of the one with the tulle that she knew Jude would like.

Tabitha came back after about ten minutes. There were bright red spots of anger on each cheek. “She won’t take her medication. She says that it makes her feel fuzzy-headed.” Tabitha made a sound of disgust. “She says if she takes the medication, then the moon will come crashing down out of the sky, and that would ruin your wedding. She claims she is doing all of this for you. As if she would let the moon come crashing down if it were any other day, because then it wouldn’t matter if the pictures came out right.”

“Let it go, Tabby,” said Zoe. “There’s no point in fighting with her.”

“You’re enabling her, you know. Just like Dad did. Can’t you see how ill she is? She needs to be in a full-time facility and I think this proves it. She isn’t acting in a sane way. Do you have any idea where she goes when she says she’s saving the universe? Have you ever followed her?”

“No. You have?” asked Zoe. It had never occurred to her to do such a thing.

“I followed her last year, when she walked out of the Christmas party. Do you remember what she said? That she had to slay some demons?”

Zoe vaguely remembered. Jude had been with her at the party, and they had just been engaged. The rest of the world had faded in her mind.

“Demons? She never said anything about demons before.” It was almost always some astronomical event that Mom had to deal with. She had a degree in astronomy, a PhD, but she had never taught except in graduate school. She’d had Tabitha her last year, and had wanted to stay home with her children until they were older. She had never gone back to academia, had said she was still looking for the right “opportunity” if someone asked her.

“She went to the park. The one with the two bridges where she used to take us to walk if we were in trouble from school. You remember?”

“She went there? At Christmas?” It would have been covered in snow and all the beautiful trees bare of leaves. The bridges over the waterways would have been treacherous with ice and the water itself frozen on the top.

“She just walked around with her hands in her pockets. She wasn’t doing a thing. It was just an excuse,” said Tabitha.

“Is that the only time you’ve followed her?” asked Zoe.

“Are you saying you think she was actually doing what she said she was doing any of the other times? Zoe, get serious.”

“I just wondered if you had seen where she went other times. That’s all.” Zoe wasn’t sure what she would do when she was saying her vows. Would she think of her mother at the bridge park or would she not think of her at all? Or would she think of her with her hands on the moon, pushing it back into place in the sky? It made a nice image, even if it wasn’t real.

“She should be evaluated.”

“Today?” asked Zoe.

“No, not today.” Tabitha pulled one of Zoe’s curls to the side.

“Ouch!”

“Let me do that. You can’t see in the back.” Tabitha took the curling iron from Zoe. She was glad to be free of the weight, but her fingers felt colder than ever.

“Zoe, we can’t ignore this any longer. She’s getting worse since Dad died.”

“You think so? It seems about the same to me. It’s not like she does this every day.”

“How do you know? You’ve stopped asking her to do anything that might matter to you. You did that years ago. And even when you asked her to come, you didn’t expect it, so you wouldn’t get hurt. It’s your coping strategy.”

“So do you think she’s dangerous? Is she going to hurt herself or someone else?” asked Zoe.

“I don’t know. How can I guess what she will do? She isn’t thinking straight, Zoe. She might be capable of anything. How do we know what she thinks about when we aren’t there with her.”

“Tabitha, she’s just not violent. You know that. She never has been.” They’d been raised with a no tolerance for violence policy since they were babies. They couldn’t pull each other’s hair or punch each other, even in play.

“Fine. She’s not violent. But there are a lot of other things she can do to hurt herself.”

The curling iron burned the back of Zoe’s neck. She jumped forward.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. What was I thinking? I’ve got to finish this before I talk more about Mom. It makes me too upset.”

So Tabitha finished the curls in the back.

“You look so beautiful,” she said, her head behind Zoe’s in the mirror. “I think I’m going to tear up.”

“Maybe you could pretend to be Mom at the reception? We could say she had a makeover and that’s why she looks so young.”

“I am not going to take her place, Zoe. I’m not going to help her get away with this without penalty. She should hurt over this. She should have to talk about it every day for the rest of her life and make excuses about it.”

“I thought you said you didn’t want her to make excuses anymore.”

Tabitha shook her head. “I have to get dressed, too.” She disappeared for ten minutes and when she returned, she was wearing the flowy, mint-colored dress that the other two bridesmaids (Jude’s sisters) would be wearing.

“You look great.”

Tabitha looked at herself in the mirror, made a couple of adjustments around the bust. “Thanks,” she said.

“And if you think we’re done talking about Mom, we’re not.”

Zoe made a face. “Fine. Let’s get it over with now.”

“Do you think that Dad believed her?”

“You mean, do I think he believed that she was saving the universe? No.”

“Then why did he stay married to her? Why didn’t he divorce her and take us away from her craziness.”

“You think our lives would have been better if we saw even less of Mom than we did? At least she was home, most of the time, when we came back from school. She made dinner. She kept the house clean, the laundry done. She was a good mom, in lots of ways.”

“Now you’re making excused for her.”

“I’m just accepting what is, weighing the good and the bad. You can only see the bad,” said Zoe.

Tabitha grit her teeth. “I think that it would have been better if Dad had shown her how much she needed to change. Then maybe we wouldn’t still be waiting for her to take her medication on a regular basis. She would have seen how much it could cost her if she didn’t.”

“So it’s Dad you’re mad at, more than Mom?” asked Zoe.

“Well, he was the sane one.”

Zoe put her wreath on. She’d chosen that instead of a veil. It looked good.

Tabitha handed her the sapphire ring that she’d gotten for her graduation from college.

“Here. Something borrowed, something blue.”

Zoe teared up.

“Now, don’t start that. You’ll ruin your makeup and I don’t want to start all over again.” She shook her finger imperiously.

“Did you ever think Mom means it—metaphorically rather than literally?” asked Zoe. “I mean, that she really is doing something, in her mind at least, that saves the universe?”

“Or slays demons?” Tabitha shrugged. “What difference does it make? It’s still an illness that should be treated.”

They got everything ready to go. It took another hour of checking, double checking, unloading and reloading, and finally they were only fifteen minutes late.

“Just one second,” said Zoe, and she ran back inside, into Mom’s room.

But Mom was gone. Wherever she’d gone to save the moon, at least she wouldn’t be sitting at home while her daughter got married. She was somewhere, doing something important, at least to her.

And really, there were ways in which it was fun to have Tabitha at her side instead of Mom. It wasn’t so bad, explaining to people that Mom hadn’t been able to make it. Only the first few people asked, and then the news seemed to spread by word of mouth. At least half of the people knew Mom first hand, and had seen this behavior before. The other half had heard whispers about it, via Jude’s mom, who was not at all tolerant of a mother who was unreliable.

“I would have to be in prison before I would miss my own daughter’s wedding,” she hissed when she first heard. “I would have to be tied to a hospital bed with terminal cancer. Or in my grave at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Mother, this is Zoe’s mom you’re talking about,” said Jude. “It’s Zoe’s right to be angry or not. She’s the one missing her, not you.”

So after that, Jude’s mother refrained from making any comments, but would just look upset whenever she looked at the space at Zoe’s side, empty or filled by her sister.

The last ten minutes of the reception, after the cake had been cut and the photographer had gone, and it was only a few old high school friends still chatting with them, Zoe’s mom walked in, after all. She was dressed in a wetsuit that was dripping all over, and her hair looked like it had been in a blender. Her face was clear of make up and she was smiling.

“I did it,” she announced to Zoe, as she pulled her forward by both hands and kissed her on each cheek. “I saved the moon. Do you want to come out and see it?”

Zoe looked at Jude. “Whatever you say, Zoe.”

“It will only take a minute.” He still hadn’t told Zoe where the honeymoon was going to be. She only knew that they were staying at a local hotel tonight and that they would go the airport tomorrow.

Zoe’s mom stepped out of the reception center and pointed up at the sky. There was a full moon bursting out behind cloud cover dramatically just at that moment.

“You see?” she said. “It’s there. Just like it’s supposed to be. Now isn’t that a wedding present to remember. I only hope it stays there.” She chewed a moment on her lower lip.

Zoe thought about what Tabitha had said. It was true. Mom needed medication. Maybe she needed more than that. She wasn’t acting normally, healthily. It sometimes took for her to step out of what she had been used to all her life to see that. Being with Jude’s parents, for example, gave her a better picture of what she ought to expect from her mom.

“I wish so much I could have been there,” Zoe’s mom whispered in her ear before she let her go on her way.

Zoe wiped at the wet spot on her gown and was glad the pictures were finished. Her mother in a wetsuit would not have been an improvement over no mother at all. And the sisters pictures with her and Tabitha were going to turn out great.

It happened gradually that next year, as Zoe and Jude and Tabitha all worked together to persuade Mom that the medications were important, that she would feel better if she took them, and that the universe would survive without her constant intervention.

Zoe had just found out she was pregnant when she had her first vision of Io careening into Jupiter and the resultant chaos.

She talked to Jude about it, and he said it was probably subconscious guilt about her mom’s change. She talked to Tabitha about it, and she said that Zoe shouldn’t worry about dreams during pregnancy. She’d read they were all weird and they didn’t mean anything at all.

But the dreams kept coming back. Sometimes twice in a week, sometimes twice a month. And when the baby was born—a little girl she named Luna—the dreams intensified. She would wake sweating in the middle of the night, her heart pounding, a black feeling pressing on her body.

Until she went to talk to her mom.

“It’s your turn now. Your turn to save the universe.”

“Mom, is this what happened to you?”

Mom looked her in the eye, which she had trouble doing for long on the medication. “When I was fourteen. That was when my mother saved the sun for what she said was the last time. She told me she’d rather it explode and kill us all than have to get into it with her hands again. She told me how hot it was, and how it burned her, even if she had protection on. It wasn’t worth it, she said. But when the dreams came to me, I decided it was worth it for me. You’ll have to decide for yourself, I suppose, Zoe.”

Zoe looked at her daughter, the little arms and legs kicking. She would give anything to ensure that the universe was safe for her daughter to grow up in. Even if she couldn’t be there to see her herself.

“How do I do it?” she asked.

“Oh, you’ll know. That’s not the part that’s hard.”

“Tabitha will think I’m crazy,” Zoe muttered.

Her mother put a hand on each side of Zoe’s face and pressed hard enough that Zoe made a sound of pain. “Do you remember the moon on your wedding night?” she asked. “Do you remember that?”

“Yes. I remember,” Zoe gasped.

“It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And that’s what you will be giving to her, every day. She will not know it is her gift, not when she is young. Maybe you will choose never to tell her. But that is what a mother is. A mother is the one who does what must be done, no matter the cost. There are things you will miss and times she will hate you for it. And you will bear her hatred as you bear everything else.”

I took a picture of the moon that night and put it into my wedding album.

Then I went and saved another moon. Maybe one day I will learn to save ours.