Remember the Moon - Prologue

Ruts in the road at Pompeii

Cat’s eyes in the road in Pompeii

I thought I'd try a little experiment and post the first little bit of my fictional book.

Cat's Eyes

I literally fell over Maya in Pompeii on a hot Italian September day, 1991. My eyes on my guidebook, I strode along blithely, sweat dripping down my forehead. Not seeing her crouched in the middle of the shimmering, hot road, I toppled over her hunched form. Lethargic tourists – their cameras slung around their necks like all-seeing windows into their souls – limped past trying not to make eye contact. I cursed and rubbed my knee. Mortified, she stammered her words of apology as she stood. Surprised she spoke English, I reached up to take hold of her outstretched hand, noticing its softness as she pulled me up with surprising strength. I stood shakily, looking into her eyes, which were a greenish yellow, like an olive, but flecked with light brown and blue and with a dark purple ring around the iris. I might have overlooked them under different circumstances, but she looked directly at me, eyes filled with concern. Familiar eyes.

“Maya?” I hadn’t seen her for ten years. The last time I’d seen Maya Willis was August 15, 1981, the day my father died. She’d been my fourteen-year-old crush, an infatuation both light with innocence and marred by tragedy. I’d spent many summers at Maya's cottage, swimming in the lake, bunking in the boat house, playing Crazy Eights on rainy days. Two years older was an eternity to a sixteen-year-old girl in love with Marcus Pellegrino, one of her cottage friends from down the road. At eighteen, he trumped me with his fully matured biceps, deep baritone, and Italian-Irish confidence. The last I’d heard of Maya, she lived with Marc in a tiny apartment in Toronto while she studied Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art and he worked as an account executive for some big Toronto ad agency.

Meeting here in an ancient, city-sized graveyard seemed impossibly ironic, as if death followed us here and arranged for this serendipitous meeting. Maya looked good. A little older without the baby fat, and her hips had filled out nicely. To me in that moment, she was as sexy as it got. She wore a tight tank top over low-slung utility shorts cinched with a wide leather belt, a brass star for a buckle.

“Jay? My god! What are you doing here?”

I still clutched her hand as she spoke my name.

“Hello, Maya. I could ask you the same thing. What the hell were you doing down there?”

She gave me a sideways glance, looking coyishly sexy. “I wanted to feel the ruts in the street.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“I know it’s weird. But I find them amazing.”

I glanced down. Two parallel grooves – the distance between them presumably a standard cart-wheel width – were deeply etched into the stone. The two lines wavered down the block until they seemed to meet far in the distance.

“Those ruts were formed by ancient carts driving along this street thousands of years ago, and yet here they still are, as though a cart had just driven along this road yesterday,” she said as she looked down at them, shaking her head in amazement. I could tell she wanted to touch them again.

I smiled. Maya's fascination with such a myopic detail was typical of her artistic obsession with details and textures. I remembered her at the cottage, always picking up stones and shells, rubbing them in her hand, passing them to me to feel. But here in Pompeii, there was something more to it. As if by touching those ruts, she could transport herself back to another time and relive what had happened there. One couldn’t deny one’s mortality in a place that remained frozen in death – the grisly aftermath of a volcano’s wrath, scant reminders of once-busy lives, instantly ended.

“Are you just traveling in Italy for the summer?” I asked. My open-ended post-college backpacking trip was my attempt to avoid being a grown-up and find a real job.

“I came to Italy a year ago. I got accepted to this artists’ commune at a monastery near Rome.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Yeah, it has been. More or less.” Maya's face clouded over.

“What? Has something happened?”

“Well, you remember Marcus?”

“Yes. I remember him.” I hoped my voice sounded neutral.

“I’ve been living with him for the last three years in Toronto. When I got this fellowship, he thought it would be an adventure to come with me. Of course I was thrilled. I didn’t want to leave him. I wasn’t even going to come to Italy because of him. We were going to get married. Well, we talked about it… Anyway, he gave up his job in Toronto. He thought he might be able to get a job in Rome, but he didn’t speak Italian. He took language classes, but then he found a motley group of Italian musicians to play with in a band. And he found some cute Texan singer…” Maya shook her head as if trying to shake away the memory. “It hasn’t ended well. He left two weeks ago. With her.”

“I’m sorry, that must be tough.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been doing some amazing painting. All that angst,” Maya smiled.

“I’m really sorry, Maya.”

“No you’re not.”

“I’m sorry to see you in pain, but I’m not sorry about Marc, that’s true. I always thought he was an arrogant prick.”

“I know. You have a weird history with him. With your dad and everything.”

“You could say that, yeah.”

“But he’s a good guy. Really. He’s passionate and smart and…” Maya began to cry.

“I’m sorry Maya. I really am.” I patted her shoulder. Maya wiped away a tear and gave me a shy smile.

“Enough about me, what are you doing here, Jay?”

“The consummate bumming around Europe.”

“I heard you went to Dalhousie. How was that?”

“I liked it alright. Got a degree in Poly Sci. Typical. Have no idea what I’m going to do with it. I’m thinking about going to business school. What about you? I heard you went to Ontario College of Art.”

“Yeah, I graduated from OCA a couple of years ago. I’m a painter. And an installation artist. I’ve even had a show at a tiny gallery in Toronto. You’ll have to come to a show.”

We both looked down and watched a drip of blood snake down my shin from a cut on my knee, threatening to seep into my one pair of clean sport socks.

“Do you need a Band-Aid or something?”

I smiled at her concern. “Nah, I’m fine,” I said, brushing ancient volcanic dust from my shorts. Maya squirted my wound with water from her water bottle, causing a dusty, bloody mess to run onto my sock and shoe.

“It’s OK. I’m fine. Really.”

“I’m just trying to help.” I’d forgotten her alluring pout, a tiny puckered rosebud. “I feel terrible I made you fall!”

“So ruts in the road, eh?” I put my hand out for her water bottle, which she handed me and I took a swig.

“I know, it’s dumb.” She squatted down to run her fingers over them once more. “They are proof of what was, Jay, a reminder of another world. And look at these.” She reached over to point out a small, sparkly, inch-square tile embedded in the stone. “They’re called ‘cats eyes.’ They reflect the moon’s light, guiding travelers at night. Funny how it took the rest of the world so much time to rediscover that technology!” She stood up, grinning. “Oh, how I love Pompeii!” Her eyes flashed an excitement I remembered from when we were kids, becoming a deeper shade of green with contagious passion, drawing me in. “I could hang out here every day for a year.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said, my mouth strangely dry. I tore myself away from her eyes and crouched to pick my guidebook off the ground and shove it into my backpack. She blew a thick curl of reddish hair that had escaped her ponytail off her face. I noticed a few faint freckles across her nose. I had never noticed before that she possessed the same intriguing coloring of many of the people I admired in the region around Amalfi and Positano – that same deep shade of auburn hair, a complexion that turned coppery in the sun, and those green eyes. I remembered her dad Peter had the same coloring and now faintly recalled him talking of his Italian ancestry. It hadn’t meant anything then.

“Have you seen any of the castings of some of the people who died that day?” she asked.

I nodded, grim-faced. They had spooked me. Bodies contorted, captured in their moment of death, trying to ward off the tons of ash about to bury them.

“They have some amazing mosaics and frescoes in one of the villas just down the road,” she said, perhaps sensing my discomfort. “I was just heading there now. Would you like to join me?”

We spent the rest of the afternoon together, Pompeii a distraction from our intersected past. Only through some kind of divine intervention was it possible that I now sat with Maya Willis, ten years since I had last seen her, sipping freshly squeezed lemonade under the canopy of a giant fig tree, just outside the gates of Pompeii. The breeze, flecked with the sugary citrus scent of orange blossom, danced with her hair. This girl – now woman, knew my inner scar and shared my deepest sadness. She sat across from me, her elbows on the table, mouth pressed into an O around her straw, and looked into my eyes. I felt naked.

“I bet you never talk about it.”

I pretended not to know what she meant. “About what?”

“Your dad, his death.” She settled back into her chair, prepared to listen, eyes still locked on mine.

“What’s there to say? He’s dead.” I began ripping the round cardboard coaster advertising Orangina into bits.

“Yeah, I know, Jay. I was there, remember?”

“Hey, that was ten years ago. I grieved. It sucked. And now I barely remember him.”

She gave me the tiniest smirk, apparently expecting my reluctance.

“You sound like Marc. He wouldn’t talk about it either.” She turned to look at the tourists who streamed out of the entry gate trying to escape the late afternoon heat bearing down on the ancient, leafless streets.

I heard a honk. On the road below, a man drove by in a tiny red Fiat, waving at someone in the street. My father had once owned a pale yellow, ‘67 Karmann Ghia with its smiling, friendly headlight eyes. At seven, I sat helpless in the passenger seat in a motel parking lot beside a busy Toronto thoroughfare, my father hidden slightly under the tiny hood. We’d been to a baseball game with my dad’s friend Paul. We were speeding along happily, singing “Rocket Man,” words flying away in the wind when a loud clinking noise interrupted us and the car slowed. My dad managed to steer us to the side of the road. When we stopped, he looked at me with his lips and cheeks puffed out, eyebrows cocked in a look of resignation.

“We seem to have a bit of a problem, J.J. How ‘bout you get out and push and I’ll steer?” Cars whizzed by, their gusts rocking the car as he turned to face forward, his back ramrod, gripping the steering wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, waiting for me to hop out and push the car.

“I’m only seven, dad.” I was used to my dad’s jokes, “I can’t push a car!” My dad let out a howl of laughter.

“I’m kidding, Monkey! You steer, I’ll push.”

“Really?”

“You can handle it.” He stood up on the driver seat, climbed over me and hopped over the side onto the shoulder. I climbed into his seat tentatively, holding the steering wheel tight until I felt the car lurch forward with my dad’s push from the back of the car. Panicking, I twisted the wheel back and forth fast, veering the car toward traffic.

“Other way! Other way! Just hold it there! That’s it!” Panic turned to thrill as the car slowly inched its way into the parking lot of the motel, its entire weight in my hands.

“OK, now put your foot on the brake!”

I had no idea which pedal was the brake, plus I had to lower myself off the seat to reach the pedals.

“I don’t know which one!”

“The left one!”

I dangled my foot down, searching for a pedal, bending my head to look under the steering wheel. Finally I saw it and stomped on it. The car stopped suddenly and I heard the weight of my dad’s body slam against the back of the car and he let out a groan.

“OK. Yup. You found the brake. Good job J.J.”

He came around the front of the car, popped the tiny hood, pulled out the long dipstick, and checked the belt, entirely exhausting his ability to diagnose the problem.

“Looks like we’re gonna be late for dinner,” he smiled. “Might have to find a place to have a burger. Good thing we’re near a phone booth. I’ll just go call your mother and a tow truck.” When he came back, my dad told me to keep steering as he pushed me around the motel parking lot, laughing as I commanded, “Faster, faster!” I learned to brake smoothly that day.

The car honked again and I was back in Italy with Maya gazing at me expectantly.

“You OK?”

“Yeah. Fine. Just thinking of my dad. I haven’t thought about him in a long time.”

She turned her head and looked at me from the corner of her eye, suspiciously. “He was a great guy.” She patted the top of my hand.

“Yeah.”

We were silent for a while.

“Hey, I’m staying at this little pensione on the road between Positano and Amalfi,” I said, hoping to distract her. “You can walk down to the water from there and swim in a tiny grotto. They also have amazing four-course dinners for next to nothing. Feel like a swim?”

“Are you trying to change the subject?” Maya smiled another sly smile.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” I laughed.