Last week, Brooks had told her how the female moth’s one purpose was to reproduce. She waited for a male to catch her scent, make his awkward zigzag journey to where she sat on a branch. Waiting. Crippled. What kind of monster is nature, Leslie thought, to give a creature wings never to be used?
She had followed Brooks into the ballroom when they’d returned home and he’d shouted at her to go away. Jules hadn’t even tried. He walked like a zombie toward his precious garden. So she’d decided to sit outside on the patio and wait. Just like the white moths. She waited for her boy, her love, her life, her firstborn after so many dead, to come to her. She’d hold him. Kiss his sweaty forehead. Beg him to tell her his sadness. Hand over his pain. She’d swallow it whole to free him.
But hours passed and still he did not leave the ballroom. At first, there had been a dozen dying moths falling from branches overhead, skittering across the stone patio, and now there were thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. So many dead mothers who would never see their babies.
The music throbbed louder, harsh and raw, until he was playing only hate-filled heavy metal. What she’d always thought of as angry-white-boy music. A few East Avalon boys had come to the front door of the Castle but she had told them politely to go away. Come back tomorrow night. Their eyes were hidden under baseball caps tucked low, the brims shaped into tight arches, and she felt them glance toward the music blaring from the ballroom before they climbed back in the BMW one of their parents, surely, had bought them.
Her helpers had also shown up. Vinny and Enzo and Paulie and the quiet one whose name she could never remember. She sent them away too, but only after paying them one hundred dollars each. She spotted the black paint staining their fingernails when they reached for the crisp new bills and told them, in her mother’s tone, to scrub with some turpentine. She didn’t want them to get in trouble, of course not, but she had her own son to protect. Jules knew, or was on the edge of knowing, she could feel it, and there was no way out of telling him now.
She realized too late, just as their souped-up Cougar with the tinted windows peeled out of the driveway, gravel spraying, that she should’ve given them smaller bills. They’d have trouble breaking the hundreds at any of the stores on the west side. She imagined the owners of West Side Liquor holding the bill up to the fluorescent lights to spot the anticounterfeit strip. To make sure it was real. Another person doubting the boys’ worth, telling them they were no good without having to say anything at all.
They were the kind of boys people didn’t trust. That was why she’d had to pick them. When she’d seen them that night at the fair, putting on a show, flexing their muscles so the panthers inked on their arms seemed to stretch and strut, bare fangs, she knew they’d be perfect for the part. Envoys who would spread the message Brooks had already sprayed across that phallic monument in the center of town. She had counted on their anger, their frustration, their pent-up lust for power, which, she’d known, since she was a girl, burned brighter in boys than even their need for sex and money.
But Brooks, her bighearted boy who wanted to see the good in people, became too attached. Wanted to call off the plan just when they were so close. The factory near ruin. He’d been worried his new pals would get in trouble. What she hadn’t foreseen was the girl. It was just like Brooks to fall in love with a broken doll. She’d witnessed Tony LaRosa’s temper flare years ago when they were at school—his fists smash jaws. One look at the girl and she’d seen past the cardigans worn to hide bruises. Brooks was like Jules. A fixer. A healer. Too good for this world. And she had brought them to an island lousy with the bad.
The music slowed and a mournful voice replaced the techno beat. She was cold in her thin sundress. But she wouldn’t leave him. Not until he came to her. Like he always had.
She fingered the diamond choker she’d made a big show of buying in town—parading Jules and the kids in and out of Friedman’s, the same store her father had escorted her to each Valentine’s Day to pick out a new charm for her bracelet. A tiny wishing well with a bucket that swung back and forth. A miniature sterling replica of a Wildcat jet. A heart that read I LOVE DADDY. She’d been wearing the choker two links too tight so she could feel it there throughout the day. It reminded her why she had returned, why she had sacrificed so much by coming back. She was there to cause them pain. The men at Grudder, and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who had dumped toxic chemicals in such numbers that a three-mile plume of trichloroethylene hovered under the island, poisoning the well water.
Thirty-six moth mothers. Thirty-seven. When they fell from the trees they made a soft pip-pip as they landed on the slate floor. She heard something. He was coming to her at last. Her boy. But it was only the whisper of the dying moths’ wings fluttering against stone. A sob rose from her belly and she swallowed hard.
She had explained the plume to Vinny and Enzo. After all the time they’d spent together, the hours plotting where to spray the graffiti (the truth), they’d begun to feel like surrogate sons. Brooks had helped. He was a natural-born activist. There had been an enraged hopefulness in his voice (anger and hope could coexist, she’d always believed this, ever since her first antiwar rallies in Cambridge) as she’d listened to him educate the West boys—lift them up, empower them with knowledge. He explained how the toxic cocktail had started out small. A pond-sized mass that had hidden like a cancerous cell under the plant for years before beginning its southward journey, spreading out under all of West Avalon, contaminating the water supply, stretching past the Avalon Turnpike in 1982, then creeping past the border of east and west in ’86, so that now the island hovered over a plume curled like a giant octopus. Its tentacles reaching up out of the ocean, gripping every corner of the island, pumping poison into the sinks and showers of every home.
The charming one, Vinny, had wept when Brooks told them how Grudder had known for decades. Held countless meetings on the upper floors of Old Ironsides. Hired teams of lawyers to hide the truth. Brooks had put an arm around Vinny, told him it was Grudder who’d made Vinny’s father sick. Grudder who had killed not just the old and weak, but also the young and strong. Withered the babies in the wombs of Avalon women from east to west.