Reece McCormack is a writer and carer, living in Gloucestershire, England. His fiction has appeared in the New England Review.
There was a problem with joyriding in our village at the time. Kids—though they were older than I was then—would take stolen cars from the nearby towns and drive them off the roads out here. It was because we were out in the sticks, as everyone liked to say. We were in one of those pockets of the Yorkshire Dales where it was quite unusual to come across a stranger, and you were just as acquainted with the cows as you were with the people. The village itself was nothing but a slap-dash formation of houses, a church, a convenience shop, and a pub, spread thinly over a large hill. It was as though someone had brushed a single coat of paint over the hill—drystone walling, telephone poles, buildings made of gritstone—and the original surface—grass, wet dirt, cow shit—still bore through from underneath. As a child, I did not understand the need to space everything so far apart, and I did not, for that matter, understand why we could not live closer to the town where I went to school. It made me think of how the continents used to be joined up together, but slowly, for whatever reason, they all drifted apart.
Every morning, my mother would cut the horoscopes from the newspaper and place them at each of our spots at the breakfast table; Pisces for herself, Aquarius for me, and Taurus for Howard. There were two topics of conversation in our village at this time. One was the joyriders. The other was Howard.
I would overhear conversations about the joyriders—locally dubbed ‘them boys’—as I sat in the pub on a Saturday lunchtime, at the table by the window, with my Judy Blume books and the plate of chips that Andy or his wife Deborah would give me on the house.
People would say things like:
“Them boys keeping me up at night, racing around like they do.”
“Sooner or later one of them boys going to go up in a ball of fire.”
“Police don’t bother out here. Not even when one of them boys drove his car into Bailey’s cow field.”
But now that I think about it, they were always more interested in Howard than they were the joyriders.
Howard was a stranger, who, as far as anyone could tell, had turned up in my mother’s life quite suddenly. That was news in our little village. And the fact that sometimes his yellow 1981 Ford Escort could be seen on the driveway and other times it couldn’t, well, that made it all the more exciting.
Such conversation—‘Howard Talk’—would stop dead the moment I entered the pub, only to strike up again in hushed tones once I was seated with my chips at a presumed safe distance. I would pretend not to hear them. When I saw the strange smiles they would offer my mother as she browsed groceries in the shop or the way they would slow down and stare at Howard’s car as they drove past our house, I would pretend not to notice. The illusion served both parties. They could say whatever damn thing they wanted and I could imagine that I wasn’t the strange woman’s daughter, with a name that sounded like a witch’s spell. I was just an ordinary girl, dipping chips into a giant puddle of ketchup.
Ignorant to this pretense was Cohen, the village paperboy.
One morning he came trudging over the hill and into my mother’s garden with his newspaper trolley as I was sat on the front step with our cat Lavender. Handing me the fat bundle of newspapers, he indicated Howard’s car and said, “My dad says he’s glad your mother bagged herself a new bloke. Says her tatties were probably growing sprouts since your old man died.”
. . .
There was a common misconception in the village that my father was dead.
The truth—as my mother put it—was that he had run away. He had blamed my mother for the death of my sister and he had jumped ship, when I was just the size of a pinecone inside my mother’s belly.
I later found out that that was not exactly true. “Your mother’s story is just that. A fiction,” my father told me the first time I met him. We were sitting across the table from each other at an Italian restaurant in Leeds city centre. I was twenty-three.
Well, my father explained, my sister had still fallen out of a second-story window onto a circular garden slab, her head had still bust open like a butternut squash, and he had still run out on my mother—
“No,” I stopped him. “You ran out on me.”
My father looked down at the food. The seafood risotto and pork loin that divided us. For a long moment neither of us spoke.
“Fact is, I never blamed your mother for Jane’s death. I didn’t leave because of that. It was after.”
His eyes were set to the table as though he was talking to his dinner plate. And as he put it, Jane’s passing did something to the dinner plate’s mother. She became strange. Impossible to live with. In fact, the dinner plate’s mother just about completely lost her fucking mind.
My father started talking about séances. Strange rituals. Angel visitations. Animals which could confer messages from the dead.
“When I was five Mum told me that Jane was living inside of me,” I interrupted. “Apparently, when Jane died her spirit left her body and cohabited with my own during the pregnancy. I think that’s my earliest memory, Mum saying that.”
He looked around the restaurant, as though he was worried that someone might hear us.
“And I believed her, you know, I really believed her. For a long time. I thought that Jane was in there, that I was this strange mixed-up composite of two different people. When I did something wrong or something that I didn’t understand, I would attribute it to Jane’s influence. I would spend nights hunched over the toilet, making myself sick, trying to get Jane out. So please, don’t talk to me about what she was like.”
Eventually, meeting my eyes, my father said, “She told me that Jane was always meant to die. It was her fate. Now, that might bring your mother some comfort, but I couldn’t take it anymore, Emily. I had to get out.”
My father refused to call me Luna. Instead, he called me Emily. The name they had both agreed upon before he left. Luna, the name my mother gave me, was just too symptomatic of all that other shit.
“I hope you can forgive me,” he said.
I slowly pushed the prongs of my fork into a squid ring. “Doesn’t matter now,” I told him. “None of it does. Mum’s dead.”
. . .
Some mornings my mother would read the horoscope sitting in front of my cereal bowl and say something like, “Well, Luna, this one hardly applies to you,” and if I managed to look before she snatched it away, it would read something like: As Venus ventures into orbit and love comes knocking, it is time to tap into your inner sensuality. That horoscope, my mother would say, is for an Aquarius who was a little older.
My mother had the horoscopes down to a science. It wasn’t just about which astrologers were charlatans and which were genuine. Through trial and error she had learnt that all astrologers were different, and some were more accurate than others. What this boiled down to was simple psychic ability. It was the same as in any field. When she used to teach classes of young children, my mother explained, there were always students who struggled with some of the harder mathematical concepts, such as fractions or algebra, but sure enough, they could handle basic math. Some astrologers were simply better at reading the cosmos than others. And some were better at reading Pisces than they were Aquarius, and some were better at reading Aquarius than they were Taurus.
Cohen had once asked me why we bought so many newspapers, even the ones his father told him you would have to be totally scatter-brained to read together. I didn’t tell him that my mother never actually read them. Instead, I told him, “My mum is completely loopy.”
There were other factors my mother considered, too. Franklin Booth was her favorite astrologer during the winter months, but his psychic mind seemed to melt away once all the snow and bad weather had gone. Judith Russell’s ability, however, came to life in the summer; it seemed to grow and blossom alongside the marigolds that my mother grew in our front garden.
It was summer when my mother met Howard and I don’t know what Judith Russell had told her that morning, but it must have been something good, because she was practically dancing around our kitchen as she put the kettle on the oven hob, bread on the grill, water in the painted pots that lined the windowsill. The night before she had been racked with nerves, drinking four chamomile teas before finally going to bed. She was going to some spiritual conference in the city where people bought crystals and talked about the afterlife and listened to panels held by people who claimed to be able to speak to the dead.
They were both standing at the same stall, looking to buy some incense. I know this because my mother has told me this story many times. And if she is to be believed, once they saw each other, my mother and Howard immediately burst into tears. They were strangers, but what they saw in one another was a deep recognition like nothing either of them had experienced in their lives. Their souls, my mother claimed, had recognized each other. And they had remembered.
Remembered what?
My mother and Howard spent some time and an awful lot of money to see some of the best psychic mediums in the country, and slowly, a picture had begun to emerge. In a previous life my mother and Howard had been married. When and where, they were not entirely sure. There were signs, the psychics said, that Howard had been a stockbroker at the Paris Bourse during the early nineteenth century, and my mother, the daughter of a wealthy surgeon. There were also signs that they had lived together in a small Chinese fishing village during the Liao dynasty. And there were signs that they had owned a plantation in the American South in the years before the Civil War. Howard didn’t like that. He did not want to believe that their past selves, who had been so much in love, were also slave owners.
My mother said that it was possible—maybe even likely—that every possibility was true. Maybe they were fated to meet each other again and again.
There was a lot of talk like that once Howard started staying over.
Contrary to what everyone in the village thought, my mother and Howard never had sex. For one thing, Howard was married, with an estranged adult son who lived abroad. Whenever he stayed the night he slept on the futon in the living room. I used to love the times that Howard stayed over. We would all stay up late—even on a school night—talking and playing games like Monopoly or Mouse Trap. Howard would sit with me at the kitchen table, teaching me card games and tricks that he used to play with his son. Sometimes my mother and Howard would get into long discussions about the spirit world or fate or their former lives or whatever, and whenever this would happen I would zone them out and watch the television, happy just to be allowed to stay up so late.
Howard spoke differently to me than my mother did. He would ask me questions like what I was reading or what I wanted to do when I was older.
“I want to move out of this place,” I’d say.
“This place?” he’d ask.
“The village.”
“And why is that?”
“Because it’s boring here. It’s so far away from everything. Nothing happens.”
“That’s why people like it.”
Nights without Howard were quiet. My mother would often sit alone in her room and if I tried to talk to her, her replies would be short and vacant sounding. I had not noticed this until Howard came into our lives, but I am almost sure it was the same before him. Howard seemed to open up a part of my mother that I had never seen.
One night I sat out in the front garden, in the empty space where Howard usually parked his car. It was a warm night and I was happy wearing just my skirt and short-sleeved t-shirt, even though the sun had disappeared hours ago. The stars that replaced it were spread broadly across the sky, as though the thread holding them together had severed and now they were all rolling apart. Lonely sequins pitted in darkness.
I was listening to the roar of engines in the distance. It had been weeks since I last heard the joyriders and I was worried that they had stopped coming. Unlike everyone else in the village, who saw them either as a nuisance or very serious trouble, the joyriders excited me. They were like foreign invaders, infiltrating our placid home. I wanted them to take me away.
The door opened behind me and my mother came outside. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Shh. Listen,” I told her. “They’re back.”
“You should come inside.”
“Wait,” I said. “In a minute.”
In the end, my mother sat next to me in the empty parking space. We both listened, saying nothing. The cars sounded like a rip in the silence.
“It’s a lovely night, really,” my mother said nervously. She smiled at me and leant forward to hold my hand.
The cars were getting louder, closer. We could hear them race over the cattle grid at the bottom of our road. Then, it must have been seconds later, two cars, one red and the other blue, which was all that I could make out, blew past our front garden. Then they were gone. The roar got quieter and quieter until it disappeared.
My mother had grabbed me tight and shielded me with her body, even though we were meters away from the road.
. . .
Shortly after that, Howard’s wife showed up at my mother’s home. We had all been sitting around the kitchen table, playing a card game that Howard had shown me, when there were three loud thuds on the front door. I remember thinking that whoever it was, it sounded like they were punching the door, like how someone on the school playground might punch someone in a fight. My mother went into the living room and peered out of the curtains. Howard’s wife was standing by the door, staring at his yellow 1981 Ford Escort.
My mother invited her inside.
She ignored her and stamped into the living room.
“So this is it, Howard? The witch bitch’s castle? To be perfectly honest, it’s a little nicer than the mud-cave at the side of the hill I was expecting.”
We were all standing in the living room now. My mother at one side, then Howard’s wife, then Howard, then me in the doorway to the kitchen.
Howard’s wife glared around the room: at the crystals that were perched on the cabinet shelves, at the singing bowl on the tablecloth, at the dreamcatchers and the candles and the books on ghost sightings.
“What are you doing here, Eloise?” Howard asked.
“Swear to me that you are not sleeping with this woman.”
The cat came in from the kitchen. “Lavender,” I said, and scooped her up in my arms.
“No. Marianne and I are not sleeping with each other,” Howard said. He walked over to the futon and placed his hand firmly on its back. “This is where I sleep when I stay here. Isn’t that right, Luna?”
I nodded, uneasy about being made complicit even though it was the truth.
“You see that bag over there. Inside that bag are the pillows and the duvet that I use. Look, I’ll show you.” Howard walked over to the bag in the corner of the room. He undid the large zip and started to pull out the contents one at a time. The tie-dye pillow, then the one with the owl on it, then the duvet which used to be mine that was pink and covered in butterflies.
Throughout all of this, my mother never spoke. She was a mouse caught in a cat’s mouth, playing dead. I wanted to remind her to breathe.
“And this is what you choose, is it? Instead of a nice warm bed with your wife?” Eloise sounded angry, but she also sounded sad, like she might cry, so she was trying desperately to stay angry. I remember thinking that she was just like the people in the village. She had no idea what was really going on between my mother and Howard. I don’t think I did.
I also remember thinking that Howard and Eloise were horribly mismatched. She was a short ordinary-looking woman. Her hair was dyed what was probably its natural colour and styled into a bob that came to just below her chin. She could have been one of my teachers. Even as a child, I could not put her and Howard, with his long grey hair pulled back into a ponytail, his circular glasses, and his moustache, together. They were alien to each other. Watching them as they stared at each other from across the room, I felt more sorry for Howard than I did his wife.
“Just remember that you have a family—a real family—back home. Not whatever this is,” she said.
We did not see Howard for a while after that. My mother became withdrawn and spent more and more time in her room. In the mornings, she still placed our horoscopes at our spots at the table, and while she no longer cut out Howard’s, I know she was still reading it, as though that would offer her some insight into his day. I continued to eat chips at the pub on a Saturday lunchtime and listen out for the joyriders in the evening, whether they came or not. The talk in the village evolved to whatever new thing was worth talking about, and while nobody asked me directly, I know they were all wondering what happened to the car that would sometimes and sometimes not be found parked on my mother’s drive. I moved up a year in school. I switched from ketchup to barbecue sauce. One morning, I asked Cohen if he wanted to kiss me and he said no, but that was okay. It wasn’t that I forgot Howard, I just lost hope of ever seeing him again.
It was during this period that the accident happened. It was a Wednesday evening, a school night, and my mother had gone to the shop for one thing or another, when she was hit by a stolen Volkswagen Polo going upwards of fifty miles-per-hour on the open country lane. Later, we would be told that my mother was lucky. Had the driver not slowed down for the bend she would certainly have died. I remember thinking, if not for the bend maybe the driver would have seen my mother and the accident would not have happened at all. It was one of those things that my mother put down to fate.
I did not realize anything was up until almost two hours had passed. I had seen the flashing lights of ambulances come by the house, and had probably put them down to one of the old people in the village dying or having a stroke, which was the only time ambulances ever came out here. When Andy and Deborah came to pick me up from the house, my mother had already been taken to the hospital.
“Is my mum dead?” I asked them in the car.
They had not known what to say, because they did not know themselves. Deborah held my hand. I watched a tear pass down her cheek in the brief glare of a disappearing streetlight.
My mother had suffered a spinal injury which meant she had to stay in the hospital for a long time, during which I lived with Andy and Deborah in their home above the pub. It also meant that my mother would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
As for the joyriders, they all stopped after that. In fact, a few arrests were made and depending on their age—and in some cases, previous convictions—they were all going to youth detention centers or prison.
For my mother, however, this was just like Jane’s death years before. It was fate. She was quite happy to describe it as such. At the hospital they had called my mother’s next of kin, which she had listed as Howard the previous summer. He had driven to the hospital the same night and had never left her since. He divorced his wife and moved into the house with my mother and me. I am quite sure that the divorce had been an ugly messy affair—as divorces always are—but I never saw or heard any of that.
The years after my mother’s accident were probably the happiest of her life. If she believed that my sister’s death and her accident had had to have happened for that, I was not going to tell her otherwise. And what did I know. Maybe she was right?
I took the responsibility of cutting the horoscopes out of the newspaper each morning. Pisces for my mother, Aquarius for myself, and Taurus for Howard.
I continued to read them throughout the years. Sometimes I felt that they were comically off-base.
When I broke my leg playing junior competitive dodgeball for the school team, my horoscope read: Jupiter, the great benefactor, is the purveyor of great fortune.
When I got into a fight with my childhood best friend, which resulted in me ripping out a hooped earring and being temporarily excluded from school, my horoscope read: Pluto emits a deep calm. Today is a day of tranquillity.
And then there were other times, when the horoscopes would be spookily accurate.
When I lost my virginity at the age of fifteen, my horoscope read: The celestial atmosphere carries all the force of Cupid's arrow. Permit yourself and you may find new doors opening in the world of love.
When I smoked my first cigarette, which I did walking through Bailey’s cow field, my horoscope read: You feel that there is a burning restlessness inside of you. You may feel adrift in the cosmic climate and should be warned of the dangers of entering toxic relationships.
When I decided I wanted to study photography and maybe one day become a photographer, my horoscope read: You may have a sudden insight which instills you with newfound purpose.
On the morning that my mother eventually died—of a blood clot caused by the inactivity in her legs—she did not get a chance to read the horoscopes. But I did.
My mother’s read: The planetary alignment ensures monumental change. Today, you are in transit.
My horoscope read: As you ride the crest of the astral waves, you may find you wash up on exciting new shores. You may find your world has bust right open.
. . .
It was shortly after my mother’s death that I learnt about the letters. We had been going through my mother’s things, throwing away what would not be missed and boxing up what we could not bear to let go. As it were, boxes were piling up around the house. Boxes full of books and gemstones and incense burners. Boxes full of framed illustrations of angels and half-burnt candles, bones of melted wax crystalized down their stems. Each day, Lavender would find a new home nestled inside another box of dresses.
One morning, when I went into the kitchen, Howard was already sat at the table waiting for me. “Do you want some tea? It should still be warm.”
He poured the drink into the mug before I could answer.
“Milk? Sugar?”
He placed the little pot of sugar and the milk jug at my seat.
“Well, you going to sit down or are you just going to stand there?”
I sat down.
Howard watched as I heaped a teaspoon of sugar into the tea and stirred in the milk.
“You’re being weird,” I said. “What’s going on?”
Howard sighed like his spirit was evacuating his body. He took his glasses from his face and folded them in his hands. For a moment I had the horrible premonition that he was leaving. That he was moving back in with his wife.
“I was going through the bedroom last night and I found these.” He retrieved the bundle of letters from the top of my mother’s seat, which was tucked underneath the table. “I thought you ought to read them.”
He placed them in front of me, then exited into the garden.
As I started to read my father’s letters at first I didn’t understand. Who was this man and who was this woman he was writing to? Then—halfway through the first letter—it felt like I had been submerged in ice.
I stopped reading and looked at the name at the top of the page.
Emily.
That was me.
I had another name.
I looked at the heap of papers next to me and all at once felt the need to be sick. Turning back to the letter in my hand I found that I could no longer focus on the words. I laid the page face-down on the table, went to the sink, and poured myself a glass of water.
The letter did not feel like mine. It belonged to a different version of me that was living in some alternate dimension. It belonged to a girl who lived in a city with her mother and father, and her sister, Jane, who had never fallen out of a window and died.
Beyond the window, the sky was unusually blue that morning. Yet, as I leant over the sink, I thought I could almost see the scattered pinball arrangement of stars that existed behind that blue veil. I had always felt an odd kinship for the stars, but now it burnt through my very being. Emily had been a part of a constellation once. Luna was an outlier, living on the edges of space.
The feeling that Jane was there, living inside me, just underneath the skin, was stronger than ever. My life felt as though it had been hijacked.
I bounded into the garden after Howard. “What the fuck is this?” I was yelling at him, furious, the letter shaking in my hand.
Howard was sat on the bench, watching the birds drinking in my mother’s birdbath. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s fate.”
. . .
“Do you still see much of Howard?”
This is what my father asked me once I had finished telling him my story. After dinner he had insisted that we have a drink, and now we were sitting in the back of a faux-country pub, with an interior not too dissimilar to the one in the village. Except none of the patrons were locals, and none of them paid me or my father any mind. There was irony here that was lost on my father and I hadn’t the interest to point it out.
“Howard’s gone, too,” I told him.
“Oh.”
“Heart attack, start of this year.”
A silence. My father seemed to be thinking about this. Watching him, dressed in the suit he wore to work, as he massaged the leather strap of his watch with his thumb, I tried to imagine him and my mother together.
“Well, who knows, maybe they’re together again already. Maybe they’re living their next lives, years from now,” my father said. “He’s a mechanic on a spaceship and she’s a passenger on its maiden voyage.”
“You’re mocking them.”
“No, I’m not. Not really.”
“Don’t.”
“What are you saying? Don’t tell me you really think that they were together in other lives? That they recognized each other?”
These days, I often think about my mother and Howard’s time together. Sometimes I like to believe that they were right. Their souls really had recognized one another that day at the spiritual conference. They really had been married in previous lives. It was fate. It was all fate. Other times, I admit that is unlikely. Either way, I have decided that I do not believe the answer matters much. I realize now that no matter the answer, my mother had succeeded, even if just for herself, to stitch the stars back together.
I didn’t want to share this with the man who sat across from me at the table. To explain how she had managed to reassemble all her broken pieces, as if exhuming herself from the grave, just to allow him to smash her apart for a second time.
Instead, I told my father, “You’ll be happy to know that I’m officially changing my name. To Emily. Luna, you know, is just too symptomatic of all that other shit.”
. . .
When I left for university, Lavender came with me. She’s an old cat now, her right eye has gone a milky white, the outline of her spine is visible underneath her thinning fur, and she often struggles with the stairs in the house share I am currently living in. Most of the time she just curls up on the desk chair in my bedroom. Every morning I wake up and find her sleeping there, the last relic of a childhood that already seems a lifetime away. Behind her are the daily horoscopes that I cut out each day and stick to the pinboard. And even though I am uncertain of the capability of transcribing one’s fate in a line or two inside a newspaper horoscope, as though it were being extracted from the stars with a syringe, I cannot imagine a time in which I will not do this.
Aquarius for me, Taurus for Howard, and Pisces for my mother.
•
