Waking the Moon

until he saw her. “Mom!”

“Dylan,” she said, and opened her arms to embrace him. “Dylan—”

“What happened, Mom, what’s—”

“Shhh,” she said, raising her hand to stroke the long hair from his eyes. “Shhh, don’t worry, it’s okay—

“Just something bad, that’s all. Something bad that happened to Cloud.”

CHAPTER 13 Other Echoes

WHEN I CALLED THE Beacon I got Baby Joe’s voice mail, his soft sleepy voice followed by a few bars of the Bernard Herrmann score for Jason and the Argonauts. I left a message, then went to clear my head.

Outside on the Mall, the Aditi was in full swing. Raga music, wailing flutes, fire-eaters and magicians and puppet masters, all obscured by the duck smoke of frying samosas and the dust raised by thousands of passing feet. Already the grass had been trampled into a dirty greenish mat pleached with cigarette butts and trampled hot dogs and broken balloons. You could see the heat shimmering from the sidewalks and the flow of traffic on Constitution Avenue. In front of the National Gallery of Art, water arced from a line of sprinklers and children ran shrieking in and out of the rainbow spray. A woman in a stained sundress rummaged through a trash bin.

It was the second of July. Tens of thousands of tourists had descended on the city, and they all seemed to be right here, mingling with the dancers and fakirs and weavers imported from India at the expense of Winesap, Inc. I watched a family in full American tourist drag staring at a Bengali mother in tissue-silk sari and gold bracelets and her children, as they watched two young men angle a pair of fighter kites across the sky. In the background the Capitol glowed like a huge white cloud, its perimeter ringed with flags and the concrete bulwarks set up over the last few years to guard against terrorist attacks. The kites swooped and dipped, delta chips of green and yellow. Their strings had been coated with broken glass, so that when one suddenly dived at the other, the tail of the second kite was severed. It went into a stall and crashed. The victor reeled in his kite, smiling; then the two warriors gathered their reels and arm in arm walked to a Good Humor wagon.

It was all a little too weird for me. I went to a booth with a yellow-and-white awning and bought a lemonade. I crossed the Mall to the Freer, always an oasis of calm amidst the summer storm of tourists and children. I sat on a bench and sipped my lemonade and mused on what I had seen on TV.

Angelica a cult figure.

I shook my head and took another sip, getting a grainy mouthful of sour sugar. Although, really, it wasn’t totally unexpected. If I really thought about it, I would have been surprised if Angelica hadn’t turned out to be somehow extraordinary. If instead of an Italian count, she’d married a chemical engineer from Houston and settled there to raise their children. I wondered if she had children, dismissed the notion as ridiculous, maybe even a little grotesque. I could imagine Angelica hiring someone else to bear a daughter for her, and then engaging an army of nannies and tutors and linguists to raise her, a serenely beautiful child playing by herself in a Florentine garden.

But Angelica pregnant, Angelica in labor; Angelica changing diapers and making Play-Doh and watching The Brave Little Toaster? Not in a thousand years.

I finished my lemonade, dropped the empty cup atop a trash can already filled to overflowing. I walked slowly back across the Mall. A murky breeze carried the greasy smells of hot dogs and egg rolls from the lines of roach coaches parked in front of the museums. A bunch of marines in summer whites posed on the museum steps with a cardboard cutout of the president and his wife. Two museum guards watched, laughing, and saluted.

Too weird. I let the heavy revolving doors bear me inside, breathing gratefully the cool recycled air, the heady scents of tourism and scholarship, and returned to my office.

A little while later Baby Joe called. “What’s shaking, hija?”

“Baby Joe!” I was unexpectedly relieved to hear his voice. “You okay?” Silence. It had been only a week since Hasel’s death. “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

“Well—I just saw the weirdest thing on TV. On Opal Purlstein—”

“You watch Opal Purlstein?”

“Angelica was on! I saw her, she was promoting some new book—”

“Oh, yeah. Waking the Moon. It’s supposed to hit the best-seller list this Sunday.”

I was flabbergasted. “I have a friend at the Times Book Review,” said Baby Joe tentatively, “he says—”

“You knew?” I exploded. “You knew about Angelica and didn’t tell me?”

“Hey, Sweeney, it’s not like it’s some kind of state secret—”

“I know that! But all that stuff about Hasel, and you never even mentioned —”

“I didn’t even know until a few months ago. I mean about her,” he said, aggrieved. “And—well, with Hasel and everything, I kind of forgot—”

“How could you forget?”

“Cut me some slack, Sweeney! My best friend fucking died!”

“But Angelica—Hasel said he saw—”

I could hear a soft intake of breath as he dragged on his cigarette. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about Hasel right now,” he said finally.

“Fine,” I snapped. “Can we talk about Angelica?”

Another long silence, followed by a sigh. “Yeah. But listen, Sweeney—there’s something weird going on. I mean with Angelica—”

“So that’s news?”

“Back off, huh? Okay, this is what I know: someone here interviewed Angelica for the Leisure section a little while ago. She’s got some kind of cult following out on the West Coast, feminist grad students, something like that…”

“You could have told me, Baby Joe. Jeez, I almost had a heart attack when I saw her—”

“How’d she look?”

“Fantastic. I mean, she doesn’t look different at all, she looks just like—”

I thought of how she had looked the last time I’d seen her: crouched over Oliver, as though she were a wolf and he her prey. I felt a clutching in my chest, the same awful disjointed feeling I’d had when Baby Joe told me Hasel died.

“—she looked just like always,” I ended lamely.

“Yeah.” Baby Joe sighed again. “Okay, I guess I should have told you when I first found out. But I kept thinking of Oliver, and—well, you and Angie had all that weird history—”

“We did?”

“Hey, hija, you tell me. But Oliver, you know, I thought it would just make you feel bad…”

His voice drifted off. I imagined him sitting at his computer, hazed with blue smoke and a dusting of ash. My anger melted—because seeing Angelica did make me think of Oliver, and that did make me feel bad.

“It was a long time ago,” I said at last.

“A long time ago, in a university far, far away,” Baby Joe giggled softly. “Hey, you didn’t videotape her or anything, did you?”

“No. I guess I should have. But I was so—well, I was kind of shocked. It was like