Got to throw the guy a bone every now and then, right?
Besides, if the beer stops working, I’ve always got my handy-dandy flask.
Now the three of us are sitting on Luc’s front porch, watching the moon peek over the tops of the trees. It spotlights the bats as they swoop and wheel on the hunt for flying insects, and glimmers across the top of the swamp.
Silent, wounded watersis how Luc described the bayou in one of his poems.
I’ve never thought of this place as particularly silentorwounded. But it does have the disjointed air of a dream. Everything here seems softer. Fuzzier. Like reality has only a tenuous hold.
“There’s magic in the moonlight, isn’t there?” Maggie says, as if she’s reading my mind. Her feet are propped on the wooden railing. “I mean, think back to all the fun we’ve had after dark. Like how we used to meet in Audubon Park at night to listen to music until I had to run home to make curfew. Or that time y’all helped me catch lightning bugs for my freshman science project. Or all those winter nights when we roasted marshmallows over Aunt Bea’s fire pit. When I think back on it, some of my fondest memories happened under the moonlight.”
My head aches at the recollections. At their innocence and sweetness.
If I knew then what I know now, would I have done things differently? Acted more honorably?
I wish I could say yes. But those times she’s talking about? They’re the best of my life. So, no. I wouldn’t change a damn thing.
Luc is sitting on the other side of me, softly strumming his guitar. He doesn’t miss a note when he says, “I recollect the time we were riding bikes down Washington Avenue after dark and a raccoon ran out in front of you. You ended up in someone’s hydrangeas. How magical was that?”
She frowns around me at him, but there’s no real heat in her expression. “What about the night we sat down by the river watching the moon rise while you taught us chords on the guitar?” she counters.
His chin bobs. “Okay. You got me. There’s magic in the moonlight.”
“Thank you.” She dusts off her hands and sits back, looking pleased with herself. “What about you, Cash? Any fond moonlight memories?”
She’s trying to take my mind off Rick.
Should I tell her she needn’t bother? It’s weird, but I don’t feel much of anything now that he’s gone, except for maybe a smidge of disappointment that, in the end, he took the easy way out, never facing trial or serving time for his crimes.
Could be I don’t feel anything because I’d already written him off. Or perhaps forgiving him for being a true-blue bastard actually did give me closure. Or shit, who knows, maybe this thing with my head is fucking with my ability to fully process emotions.
Instead of saying any of this, however, I reply, “I remember the time we sat on the seawall at Lake Pontchartrain and tried to count the stars.”
I also remember dragging Maggie under a nearby willow tree to make out with her in the cool, leafy dark. I can still taste the sweetness of her breathy sighs. Hear the sound of her giggle when I accidentally tickled her ribs while trying to cop a feel.
She laughs now. “I made it to around three hundred before I gave up. I think you only got to fifty or so.”
“Patience has never been one of my virtues.” I take a sip of beer, being careful to grip it in my right hand since, most days, my left is completely numb.
Told Luc I think I have something wrong with my neck, a nerve or disc injury from the suicide bomber that’s just now making its presence known. I’ve assured him I’ll bring it up with Beckett the next time I’m at the VA, but I’m not sure he believes me. He’s been giving me the side-eye a lot recently, like he’s starting to clue in that something is up.
“How many did you count, Luc?” Maggie asks.
“I stopped at six hundred,” he says.
“Nowhehas patience coming out of his ears.” I point the neck of my beer in his direction.
“More like I was aiming to distract myself from the kissy noises coming from under the willow tree.”
“Yes.” Maggie clears her throat. “Well.” The moonlight can’t hide her rosy cheeks.
I chuckle. She may be twenty-six, but she still blushes like a schoolgirl.
Taking pity on her, I say, “I think myfavoritemoonlight memory is the one when we sat out on your aunts’ veranda while Luc recited Walt Whitman’s ‘I Sing the Body Electric.’”
I know this has got to be one of her favorite moonlight memories, too, because she managed to find an old copy ofLeaves of Grassto give Luc for Christmas. It wasn’t a first edition, but it was close, with an aged leather cover and embossed gold leaf lettering. Luc has the book proudly displayed on a shelf above his bed.
“And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” he eloquently quotes, still strumming.
