Waking the Moon

Coda

THERE IS A WOMAN in the moon. Dylan and I see her, night after night, her face growing closer to ours until it fills the window, huge and round and white, and we can hear her singing to us in Angelica’s voice. She has Angelica’s face as well, but bleached of all color. Angelica’s emerald eyes washed to grey, Angelica’s hair streaming from her face like clouds, Angelica’s hands the limbs of the willow tree tapping at the window. She is calling to us, she is waking us; she is willing us to follow her. Her hands reach through the window; the glass shatters as the moon engulfs our room and she is everywhere around us, the color of night, the color of milk, the color of bone.

We awaken in each other’s arms. We are in bed, Dylan and I, in the carriage house—the place that Robert Dvorkin, and the Benandanti, have given us. Outside the late-night traffic on Capitol Hill murmurs past. A lone taxi trawls for passengers, two college girls call drunkenly to each other on the distant avenue.

With a groan Dylan turns to look out the window. The moon is full. It no longer has his mother’s face, because he is awake now, and he remembers that his mother is gone. But something in the wind tapping at the glass reminds him of Angelica, I can tell, something in its low moaning makes him turn to hug me close to him, his arms tight around my stomach, his fingers moving restlessly, feeling what is there even though I have told him it is much too soon, it will be weeks, maybe months, before we will be able to feel the baby move.

But Dylan knows that she is there—his daughter, Oliver and Angelica’s child as much as his and mine—just as he knows that Othiym is there too, somewhere beyond the rim of the sky and the racing ledge of clouds, someplace where the sky runs black and stars stream down the bowl of heaven like blood in a cauldron.

She is there now. She will be there for the rest of our lives, and our daughter’s life, and perhaps beyond. That vast and dreaming form—sister, mother, daughter, wife—the eternal mystery, lover and destroyer. Othiym Lunarsa.

The woman in the moon.