What was happening here? I wasn’t even sure it was just in my head anymore.
“Chin up,” he said, and I locked my eyes onto his, even as I imagined him leaning closer, tucking the hair behind my ear, again. I’d smile, then. No question. “Chin up.”
“It’s coming,” Mira said to me one morning a few weeks later as we sat eating cereal: me, Grape-Nuts, her, Count Chocula.
My days had narrowed to just work and the portrait, and breakfasts were the one time we still had together.
“What is?”
She picked up a folded newspaper and slid it across the table.
LOCAL MAN GROWS BIGGEST TOMATO ON RECORD, the headline said.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Tomatoes?”
“No, no, not that,” she said, reaching over and pointing. “This!”
It was a small blurb at the bottom of the page, right beside the weather for the next day. There was a picture of the moon, and the words “Full lunar eclipse scheduled to occur August fifteenth reaching totality at 12:32 A.M. If the night is clear it should be a perfect time for viewing. ”
“The eclipse,” I said. “I forgot all about it.”
“How could you?” she said, taking another spoonful of cereal. “Haven’t you felt how weird things have been lately? I mean, the cosmos is getting ready to freak out. Big changes coming. I can’t wait.”
Big changes. I thought of Norman, then shook him out of my head. Ridiculous. “It’s still a ways away,” I said.
She turned to her calendar, flipping up the page. I could see the moon drawn in on the fifteenth, the day circled in purple pen. “Seventeen days and counting….”
“Seventeen days,” I repeated. She went back to her paper, searching for the horoscope, happily eating her cereal. To her, change could only be a good thing.
I was thinking of this a few nights later at Norman’s. We had the radio on, just enough to hear the music but not the words,
and the door open. Out above the water, a half moon was hanging there, big and bright.
“Fourteen days,” I said out loud.
“What?” Norman said, poking his head around the canvas.
“The eclipse. It’s in fourteen days.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”
I sat back in the chair, lifting my chin before he asked me to. I was used to it now, the same way I was used to my days revolving around this one thing. I still went to work, and ran on the beach, and made my way through the maze of Mira’s notes. But everything seemed like a means to get to this end, the portrait. We’d spent almost a month on it, Norman slowly constructing me on canvas as I memorized each part of him: the arch of his eyebrow, the way his shoulder blade jutted out when he stretched, the smell of turpentine on his skin whenever he crossed the room to adjust my position. I had started to dread the moments when he stopped painting, pausing with the brush in midair, as if at any second he would pronounce it finished and everything would be over.
“I remember the first time I saw a lunar eclipse,” he said suddenly, jerking me back to attention. “I was, like, six, and me and my brothers camped out in the backyard to stay up for it. It was the biggest deal.”
“Really.”
“Yeah.” A breeze blew through, spinning the mobiles over my head. “They fell asleep before it even happened, just like my dad predicted, but I remember lying there in my sleeping bag, looking up as the moon just disappeared. And even though I knew what it was, and I was so excited all day waiting for it to happen, I got really scared. Because it doesn’t just come right back, you know? There’s like this long, long time when it’s just gone.”
I didn’t know. I’d never seen one.
“So I ran inside and up to my parents’ room and woke up my dad,” he went on, dipping the brush into the can of paint thinner and swishing it around. “I was freaking. Crying and everything. And my mom kept saying how she’d known I was too young to camp out and how he should have listened to her-- this was before the divorce--and my dad kept telling her to be quiet so he could hear what I was saying, because he couldn’t understand me.”
He stopped then, and I thought of the voice on the answering machine, clearing his throat. Waiting.
“What were you saying?” I asked him.
“I was saying,” Norman said, looking outside, “that they took the moon. They were keeping the moon.”
“What did your dad do?”
“He walked me back downstairs and out to the yard, and told me to stop being ridiculous and go to sleep. It wasn’t really a big bonding moment.” He looked back at the painting in front of him, then at me. “But I will never forget how it felt to He there and wait for it to come back. Because I wasn’t really sure it would. I wanted to believe it as much as I’d always believed the moon could never go away. But I didn’t.”
“But it did come back,” I said. “Eventually.”
“It did,” he agreed, nodding, looking right at me.
And I never wanted this to end, could have stayed forever in this tiny universe with the radio playing, Norman watching me, and the breeze just blowing through, warm and sweet.
“But it’s strange,” he went on, “when you’ve always been told something is true, like the moon will come back. You need proof. And while you wait, you feel the entire balance of your world just tipping. It’s crazy. But when it’s over, and it does come back, that’s the best, because it’s all you want, everything narrows to just that. It’s this great rush, like for that one second everything’s okay with the world again. It’s amazing.” He looked up at me and smiled and I thought again how I could be happy spending a lot of time, maybe even forever, earning those.
“You’ll see what I mean,” he said, moving behind the canvas again, out of sight. “You’ll see.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was the second week of August, two days before Mira’s eclipse, when Morgan came to work with a plan.
“I’m going to Durham to surprise Mark,” she announced. She had her hair curled and makeup on, as well as a cute skirt and blouse I didn’t recognize. “Will you work for me?”