A PLACE TO KEEP MOONLIGHT by Rebecca Bernard
On the smooth, granite surface of the kitchen counter, moonlight pools like butter. Like a rich something Beth might spread with her fingers as she breaks the circle of moonlight, standing alone in the empty kitchen in the middle of the night, her hand reaching out for the counter’s flat plain.
She wants the moonlight to feel like something, she’s decided, like Rapunzel’s golden hair or Rumpelstiltskin’s hay, cool and hard to the touch, but with a certain flexibility, a sense that if she were to place the moonlight gently between her teeth, like a gold bar, there would be the smallest give in the metal’s bite. She would take this moonlight, but she wouldn’t sell it, she would hide it in her top dresser drawer, beneath her old maternity bras, and holey socks, and by the safety fifty she keeps there, just in case, because you never know.
Upstairs, her family sleeps, her gently snoring husband whose quiet breathing has woken her again from a fitful rest, and the two girls, passed out, their innocent faces pressed deep into their clean pillowcases, hungrily dreaming of things Beth cannot imagine, nor does she want to imagine them. Let them have their own mysteries, their own secrets, some kind of inner life worth living, worth keeping from their parents.
Downstairs, in the empty kitchen, the room is dark but for the moonlight pouring in from the row of windows above the kitchen sink. It’s only March, and the house feels cool this time of night without any sunlight seeping in to warm the tile floor. Beth is barefoot, wearing just a thin nightgown, and she can feel the newly shaved hairs on her calves prickling with the chill. She takes turns rubbing one foot against the opposite shin, leaning into the counter for support, and peering out to the dark lawn with its dark grass and dark trees. Their neighborhood, not quite sinister at night, but not nearly so bland as in the daytime.
As a girl, Beth hated to be the only one awake when everyone else, first her family, then the other girls in the dormitory, were sleeping. It felt like being left behind, like the lurching sensation of a car driving too fast over a steep hill, and she could remember how many nights at the state-run boarding school when she would close her eyes so tight against the pillow that they would tear up and leave little stains of wetness, evidence of how far away she longed to be from where she was, not just the place but the wakefulness. The sense that being awake when others slept made you vulnerable. Made you primed for the taking.
And back then, it would have been easy for her to be a casualty, it had been easy after all. Neglect bred opportunity. Her parents deemed unfit by the state, the boarding school more like a foster home, if those had existed then, young Beth, less a child than a potential statistic, a victim readymade.
Now though, as a grown woman, a mother and a wife, it feels erotic to be the only one up. A certain dangerousness to be awake when everyone you love, everyone to whom you are responsible, is somewhere else, drifting or flying or having conversations with their friends, their ex‑lovers, their stuffed animals come to life. Like a den of sleeping animals, and Beth is the mother cat, sure, protecting them, but also, for once, with the freedom to think about herself.
She’s not hungry, but she decides that eating something might make her sleepy. She opens the refrigerator door, shivering before its cold and light. Jake is always after the girls to quit staring into the fridge, stop looking at the food like it’s some kind of masterpiece, know ahead of time what they want, and so now she does the opposite. She basks in the light, her gooseflesh rising, already knowing what she’ll eat, the leftover cold chicken she baked earlier for dinner. The drumstick between her teeth, that feeling of gold, its richness. What she can sink her teeth into.
If Jake were awake, he’d tell her to have some warm milk, what his mother always gave him to fall asleep, then he’d tell her to lie down, try to sleep and eventually sleep would come. It’s psychological, he’d say, and she’d nod, biting her lip despite herself. Biting into the chicken now, thinking about it.
There’s wine in the fridge, a half-open bottle of chardonnay on the door, but Beth doesn’t feel like drinking. What she likes about this feeling is the clarity, the sobriety of wakefulness, how one moment she dreamed just below sleep’s surface, and then the next she lay awake, her heart beating so she could feel it and the room like a dim charcoal drawing, slowly adjusting itself before her eyes.
She feels her heart again now in the empty kitchen, like something come to life, usually dormant, but here, in the early hours of the day, alive. A strong wind blows outside and the branches of the oak scrape gently against the roof. Somewhere, a furnace clicks off and on, the house creaks as if under the weight of the moon’s glow. A sighing, almost human.
When she and Jake bought the house almost twelve years ago, Marie only a baby and Lola nothing at all, she’d had trouble sleeping then as well. Every other night she’d wake up, heart seizing, and not for any normal fear, nothing to do with Marie or the newness of motherhood, this was an older, more innocent, more primal fear. The house would creak and groan, and she’d push her body against Jake, rub his beard, wait for him to tell her this was just the place settling, that older houses were like older people, they groaned sometimes, they belched, they shifted closer and closer to the earth beneath them, their eventual home.
“Maybe it’s because you’ve never lived in a house before?” He’d said it so casually, the first time she’d woken him, pushing at him and asking what was that noise, was it an animal or a person, some spirit presence? And his nonchalance, the condescension, however accidental, in his tone, it had made her bite the inside of her cheek, blush with shame. Was he right? It had been a series of apartments, her life, some of them nicer than others, until the nicest one with Jake before this new home, and though the apartments came with sounds of their own, other people’s showers, conversations, overheard miseries and joys, maybe it was comforting being near other people, connected to them save for some thin walls and flooring, while in this new home, a small three-bedroom, two stories, with its own little yard, she was alone. Alone and together for the first time. Jake had called it their starter home, and she’d hated him for it.
If their home was a starter, when would it become real? How could you expect to be happy when you undercut the present? But he’d made her see it his way, at least for a time. He understood this world, and she didn’t. I can be your guide, Beth. You’re safe. You’re safe with me. And at the time it was all she wanted to hear, even as she might resist it.
Then, last year, he’d remodeled the kitchen, put in the new granite counters and she knew it was because he was ready, long ready, to be somewhere better, and when she’d fought him, said the girls didn’t need some damn mansion, they were fine, all of us fine in this house, he’d sighed, rubbed her back, and she hated that he knew to acquiesce, that he could still, even now, find a way to make her feel small for wanting only what they had, for feeling uncomfortable even with this normal-sized taste of comfort. And how he’d known how much she would come to love this kitchen. The smooth, cool granite. The temptations of something grander, less plastic and more plastic, both at the same time. How much of a marriage was things? Was being surrounded by things?
From upstairs, she thinks she hears a moan, a child’s voice, the thin, shrill ballad. Beth freezes, her belly pressed against the counter, leaning in so she can hear better, stock still, like a deer in the forest privy to the crunch of dead leaves, the hunter’s tread. But there’s nothing. Just the one sound, then sleep overtaking.
Earlier that day, she’d taken Lola, her nine-year- old, to the park after school to play. It was a half day, and she’d wanted to kill time before the inevitability of home. She’d sat watching her play on the jungle gym, climbing to the top of the hexagonal dome, dangling from its middle. Lola was almost too old to be playing here, but Beth understood the child needed to realize this on her own. It wasn’t the mother’s place to tell her daughter she couldn’t be a child forever.
She’d sat watching the kids, listening to their faint laughter, her daughter’s low, nasal voice, until all the sound blended away into birdsong. She felt nothing proprietary in these moments, though she often wondered if other mothers did. If they had a sense of pride in their child’s antics, their young limbs stretched skyward, small faces bathed in the innocent sun, reddening, darkening, burning.
She’d felt peaceful watching the kids, letting the day blur into a pointillist abstraction before her. A deconstructed Norman Rockwell, like an image turned into music. She and Jake had gone to the symphony the weekend before, Lorin Maazel conducting the Pittsburgh orchestra, Mozart’s Symphony 41. She could still hear the strings if she half closed her eyes, let the colors fade and wax, let her fingers rest on the green metal bench in a meditation pose, her fingertips like small conductors of the moment, the wind and the sun’s heat. She’d felt a lightness in her heart, a lilting, lifting breeze through her innards, and she remembered weeping in her orchestra seat, its plush comfort forgotten or maybe just internalized. The wind blew through the trees and the children played and the animals and insects moved somnolently through the world, tiny hearts alive in perfect peace. She felt radiant and lucky, and it was a time she recognized that these kinds of luxuries—the symphony, the opera, the trips to the ocean— these were worth a granite kitchen, were worth the trappings of a life that sometimes confused her with its shallowness and privilege, its inherent sense that what one had one deserved, be it cactus-shaped margarita glasses, a 401K, the ability to give your kid braces.
And then, and maybe this is why she’s awake now, her guilt and desire tripping her out of peaceful sleep, because there in the park, she’d seen him again, the young father, his almost handsome face appearing before her now in the cool, dark kitchen like an apparition, a forking life. She sees the graying stubble, the warmth of his smile, the bottom lip a little too thick for the top one, but in his gaze, communion. As if he’d seen her joy and it made him smile, too. He was a father also, she knew. Daddy to a little boy, a kindergartener. A man, this stranger on the next bench over. A bit younger than herself, she imagined, maybe in his early forties, and this was what? The third or fourth time she’d run into him. Always from a distance, but friendly, veiled.
He’d stared at her until she caught his eye, and still he hadn’t looked away. He smiled after what felt like a long, lost pause, and nodded his head in recognition, dropping his gaze to her hands resting on the bench. Shyly she moved them to her lap. Her hair was too long, like the hair of a younger woman, and there were grays, so many what was the point, but somehow he made her feel desirable, like a woman first, a mother second.
I see you here sometimes, he’d said, raising his voice to be heard, and she’d nodded, felt his eyes drift to her breasts, then back to her face, a warmth that bordered on heat. Odd how danger could find you anywhere.
But perhaps this is what has her awake, because in the midst of this flirtation that wasn’t even a flirtation, so Nothing on the radar of Anything, she’d caught Lola’s eye. Lola sitting cross-legged atop the jungle gym stared at her with a fierceness, some combination of curiosity, wonder, and want, her small mouth downturned, brown bangs unevenly streaking across her forehead. It was moments like this that Beth wanted to tell the girl, I made you, you have no idea, but I made you, I put you on this earth, and why must you challenge everything I do? Why let your little heart be always an open sore when you have only been loved? Look away, girl, look away, and as if she were telepathically linked to the child, Lola looked away, and Beth’s shame blossomed.
A bang comes from outside and Beth turns quickly to see its source. It sounded like the thump of a bird against a windowpane, a stunning. But there’s nothing there. Just the wind and the darkness. No man’s face leering in. Nothing but dead, empty streets and the occasional wind striking the homes, the shutters, the neighbor’s chime, tinkling an artificial melody she has never wanted to hear.
The chicken sits cold on the counter. Beth takes the finished drumstick and drops it into the trashcan. She licks the grease off her fingers and then licks them again. The granite so shiny, so rich and milky and pale, she puts her palm against it once more.
She loves her husband and her kids, loves the small Japanese maple, the refrigerator filled with good things to eat, the silver chain against her neck with the small locket with its wisp of sea grass held inside, loves Marie’s slender ankles when she raises one strong leg to the barre, loves Lola when she’s willing to be loved, half-asleep, her head tucked against Beth’s breast, drifting off to The Wind in the Willows, loves Jake’s hands when they’re earth-rich from a Saturday afternoon spreading mulch and teasingly he traces the shape of her jaw, a little fleshier than it once was, but something she knows he sees as lovely, and she loves her time, the freedom to finish her bachelor’s four years back, and now on the long, slow journey of her masters in counseling. Loves the leisure to read and weave and write letters, the chance to volunteer with the girls and women at the shelter. And she loves this granite with its Rorschach patterns of milk and tea, and when Jake first bought it, surprising her, making her cry with frustration at the unnecessariness of it, the expense, he’d asked her what she saw in it, the pattern, and nothing was what she’d said, nothing nothing nothing and only later was it something. Something kind and something good. A place to keep moonlight or some other girlhood dream.
“Mom?”
Beth turns to see Marie standing at the foot of the stairs, one hand picking sleep from her eye. The girl is tall for her age, slender, a woman already, and sometimes, her beauty makes Beth want to step back, lower her eyes, how a girl like this could have come from someone like her. “Baby, what’re you doing up?”
“I don’t know. I thought I heard something.” Marie enters the kitchen. She wears a long t‑shirt that comes to her mid-thigh, but even under the bulky fabric, Beth can see the musicality of her movement, the litheness of her step. The girl, a teenager now, goes to the fridge and opens the door, then closes it. Then opens it again, staring into the light.
“You probably just heard me. I came down to get some water is all.”
Marie nods, not looking at her mother. Then turns, her lips pursed to the side like she’s thinking. “You haven’t been sleeping well lately.”
“What do you mean? Close the door if you’re not going to eat something.”
Marie closes the refrigerator door and moves beside her mother, leans against the counter, facing away from the windows, the night. Beth reaches out to stroke the girl’s hair. She tucks a strand behind her delicate ear, a small pearl stud in the recently pierced lobe.
“I saw you down here last night,” says Marie.
“I wasn’t down here last night.”
Marie shrugs. “Well I saw you. You were leaning against the counter and you were staring out the window. I sat on the stairs and watched you for like five minutes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t think you wanted to be found.”
Beth sighs and takes a step away from her daughter. How strange when they start to be people, when they start to sense that you’re a person, too. “Everything’s fine, honey.”
“What do you think about?”
“What do you mean?”
Marie crosses her arms. “I mean, when you’re looking out the window, what are you thinking about? What’s wrong?”
“It’s late, baby. You’ve got practice after school tomorrow and you need to get some sleep. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’m not worried. I just want to know.”
Beth sighs again and pulls Marie toward her, wraps her arms around the girl’s shoulders, her thin frame bird-like.
What does she think about? She smells Marie’s shampoo, the same one Lola uses, apples and other chemically conjured fruits, robust and delicious despite their artificiality.
Marie relaxes into her arms, complying with this mothering, and it makes Beth want to hold the girl tighter for letting her mother, for knowing how to be gracious and kind. For wanting to understand her thoughts, even if Beth would never tell her. Would never want to lose this secret self, this inner person she must covet or lose touch with altogether.
Into the dark windows she stares from the dark kitchen. And one is inside, and one is outside and there’s safety in glass, and maybe this is what she thinks about most. She’s safe in this kitchen, for now. She remains safe as long as the world keeps itself at bay, and as long as she doesn’t invite the world inside. She has not always had this choice, these walls. Poverty, once an invitation to hurt.
“Mom?”
Beth lets go of her daughter, stumbles back a step. “I’m sorry, honey.”
Marie looks at her mother, her eyebrows raised in what Beth knows is a look of concern. A concern she does not want this child to feel. Does not want any child to be made to feel. What she once felt, her mother’s long, uncombed hair, her faltering mind.
“Let’s go back to sleep. Come on, I’ll tuck you in if you’ll let me.” Beth puts her hand on Marie’s back and guides her upstairs, feels the delicate feather bones move under her touch beneath the t‑shirt’s thin cotton.
In the bedroom, Marie climbs into her twin bed, and Beth pulls the covers up around her daughter, her first-born. The room is messy, littered with leotards, piles of clothes and make‑up containers caking on the top of the dresser. It smells to Beth like the ripening of youth. She bends forward to kiss Marie on the forehead and Marie turns on her side, snuggling into the pale sheets, eyes closed, lashes long and dark.
Beth hesitates before leaving, then she closes the door almost all the way and steps into the hall. She isn’t tired yet, though she wishes she was, but she knows she cannot go back downstairs. She is up here now in the realm of the dreamers, trapped in the world of the people she loves.
She glances into Lola’s room and sees the girl asleep on her back, mouth partially open like her father, eyes closed, sheets kicked loose, a stuffed sea lion clutched to her belly. A girl far removed from the girl in the park with her small, curious mind, her anxious accusatory eyes.
As she stares, Lola moans in her sleep, a small, lonely, primal noise and it makes Beth shiver and step back into the hall.
The girl has always been a sound sleeper. She could remember when Lola was a baby, milk fat and drifting off without hesitation, an easy baby, Jake said, but Beth had thought of it differently, jealous somehow of the infant’s lack of trouble moving between wakefulness and sleep. So rich and safe in her soft, clean onesies, her footed pajamas. Once, in a moment that now brings her shame, she’d pinched Lola’s thigh, just enough to wake her up, make her cry, and then she’d comforted her, soothed the infant, led her back to wherever it was she went with eyes closed. As the girl cooed, calming herself, Beth had pretended she was the baby in her own arms, that someone had loved her enough to show her what she had. That she was safe. That no one could get her. Though pretending something hadn’t happened didn’t make it undone. The pure skins of her daughters could not be an erasure of the mother’s pain even if this is what she wanted. Sometimes needed. They were themselves and could offer her, the mother, nothing.
She leaves Lola’s door open, knowing her fear of the dark, the small frog nightlight glowing beside her bed.
Beth brushes her teeth, pees, then slips back into bed beside Jake who has turned onto his side, one arm cradling his face.
Maybe there’s power in being the only one awake. To be able to see the people in your life silent, harmless, and docile under the cloud of dreams, and so you can learn to love them, this side of them that doesn’t argue, doesn’t have opinions or feelings or desires. To be like a family of bears where one whole season is spent recuperating from the pressures of living, tucked warmly into a cave hibernating, eating away at the existing flesh of the body to make oneself pure and new, and meanwhile the world goes on, whiles away, and when you wake, you’re once again ready to live, ready to love the family you’re given, the family you’ve helped to create.
Jake murmurs in his sleep. The floorboards shift with the weight of the lives lived atop them, the dust from bodies drifting ever down, a timeless bulk.
If the window downstairs breaks under the force of a rock, she doesn’t hear it. If the desperate hand reaches to unlock the knob, she remains oblivious. Like that night so long ago, the broken glass, the hand against the throat, asleep on the couch in a strange place, and like a fairy tale, if she’d only known the right word to say, maybe it would all have been otherwise. Maybe the shatter would have come as a song, a lullaby in reverse to make that girl sit up, brace her legs, escape somewhere into the gold and light. Or there would have been no need to run, nobody there, just the breeze, a fairy’s hum.
Beth closes her eyes and forces a yawn. Sleep might not come soon, but it will come. This she knows. It always comes.
Rebecca Bernard is the author of the collection of stories Our Sister Who Will Not Die (Mad Creek Books, 2022). Her work has also appeared in Shenandoah, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, and Wigleaf.