Waking the Moon

Prologue

THEY NEVER FOUND HER. Nothing at all: no clothes, no jewelry, no bones or teeth or locks of auburn hair. No lunula. Maybe that’s why I never truly mourned Angelica. Oh, I grieved, of course, with that hopeless misery one reserves for lost youth or broken chances or a phantom limb. That was how I wept for Angelica; not the way I’d raged when I lost Oliver. Not even the muted anguish I’d felt during all those lost years in Dr. Dvorkin’s carriage house.

This was a small grief, really: because how can I believe that Angelica is really gone, any more than a storm or hurricane is gone? The clouds pass over, the skies clear; but there are still the shattered homes and decapitated trees, the dunes given to the sea. And always there will be that clutch in the chest when you see a darkness on the horizon, a greening in the evening sky.

Like Oliver, she was beautiful; she was so beautiful. And she was kind and smart and funny, the sort of friend you dream of having. The kind of friend I dreamed of having, and somehow she found me, just as Oliver had. If she was a force of nature, she was still human; at least until the end. How can I believe she is gone?

But she is gone, and I have so little to remember her by. If only I had written more about my friends, or done something with my nearly empty college notebooks. If only I had taken pictures, or saved Oliver’s funny crabbed drawings, and the delicately calligraphic notes Angelica pinned to the door of my room in Rossetti Hall with their faint musky scents of sandalwood and oranges!

But I kept nothing of Oliver and Angelica, not a single real photograph or letter or drawing. Only a black-and-white Polaroid that Oliver gave me shortly after we met, showing his shoe—a rather worn black wing tip—and part of his bare ankle; that and the sea urchin lamp Angelica sent me our first Christmas.

That’s all. Though I have more of them within me now than they could ever know. Perhaps, that is almost enough.