1 Bad Moon on the Rise
Bad Moon on the Rise
The drive from my family’s apartment in New Jersey to the Emersons’ summer place in Maine took seven and a half hours, but I wouldn’t have cared if it lasted a month. I got to sit in the front seat next to Forrest. What else mattered?
It was a little after one o’clock when Forrest pulled up in front of our building, meaning he must have left Lake Catherine before sunrise.
I could hear the music blasting from the Porsche a block away—Creedence Clearwater, music I knew from listening to my father’s old vinyl.
Never mind that it was drizzling. Forrest always had the top down.
He and my father had been friends since they were eleven years old.
That summer, when everything changed, I was fourteen going on fifteen—stuck in a box called Hubbard, New Jersey, the only child of two parents so occupied with waging war against each other they seemed to have forgotten I existed.
Then Forrest Emerson showed up to take me to Maine, and it felt like my life was finally going to get interesting.
I wasn’t wrong about that.
Back when Forrest and my father were growing up in the neighborhood, he went by his original name—Howie. My father, Henry, went by Hank.
My dad had filled me in on the basics. His family lived in the apartment one floor above where Forrest grew up—three kids to a room, rice and beans the staple for dinner, a belt on the behind when they got out of line and when they didn’t.
Nobody had any money, and they had even less in the way of prospects for the future.
“When you grow up in the projects like I did,” my father said, “it’s hard to picture getting out of there. That’s all you know.”
The two of them, Hank and Howie, had been like brothers, my father said.
They got into lots of trouble together but had fun doing it.
Then there was the other part. Howie could barely read or write.
He struggled so badly in school, he never would have graduated if not for my father, who sat next to him when they took tests so Howie could copy off his paper.
“He isn’t stupid,” my father said. “There’s just something about Howie’s brain. Words on paper don’t make sense to him. When he tries to write, it looks like what you’d expect from a very young kid.”
Still, Howie was the one who got out of Hubbard. He changed his name to Forrest when he married Regina. Except for visits with my father, he did not look back.
My dad was still Hank. Still living within five blocks of where he started out.
Also still drinking. These days he and Forrest only saw each other once a year, when my parents and I made our annual visit to Forrest and Regina’s house in Maine, Wonderland.
As differently as their lives had played out, though, Forrest still called my father his best friend.
Now here he was, back in the old neighborhood.
He got out of the car like Erik Estrada, my first crush, on the show that used to be my favorite when I was younger, CHiPs—hopping over the driver’s-side door of the convertible instead of opening it like a normal person. He looked like a movie star.
We were only three days into June but already Forrest had a tan.
He was wearing shorts and a Ramones T-shirt that said “Too Tough to Die.” He kissed me on the cheek, then opened the trunk and tossed in my suitcase—an old red Samsonite bag that my mother had bought for her honeymoon, to Florida, with my dad.
“This all you got?”
I nodded. I was ready to become a whole new person. Hard to accomplish that in your same old clothes.
The offer to spend the summer in Maine had come out of the blue on the last day of ninth grade, just four days earlier.
(They’d had to cancel the last two weeks of classes on account of a broken water line that flooded the whole first floor of our school, causing a giant mold problem. That was my neighborhood for you.)
Sometime that year my parents had stopped speaking to each other.
The two of them moved through the small, dark rooms of our apartment as if there were some kind of radioactive field around the other person’s body—careful not to brush up against each other.
I huddled in the corner, trying to keep out of range of the hate waves.
When one of them needed to get a piece of information across to the other, they used me as the message bearer.
Tell your mother.
Ask your father.
“I’m not your secretary,” I told my father one time. Not that this had any effect.
My parents and I had been sitting at the kitchen table in our apartment, finishing dinner—television on, no conversation, picking at a reheated casserole that wasn’t any good back on Day One—when the call came, with Forrest’s job offer.
The au pair they’d hired had just canceled on them.
Did I want to join his family at Wonderland as their mother’s helper?
Was the sky gray? (In Hubbard, the answer was always yes.)
“Can you imagine?” my mother said—a rare moment in which she seemed actually to address my father. “With Regina in the shape she’s in? Some spoiled French girl decides she has better things to do and leaves the family without a babysitter the week before the children’s school gets out?”
The shape Regina was in.
Regina was Forrest’s wife, of course. It was never clear what her problem was, only that she had one. I used to think she was just drunk a lot—a condition I knew well—from the slurring of her speech as the day went on, but though she definitely took prescription drugs, Regina never touched alcohol.
She was very skinny. And she was always knitting something. She explained it to my mother one time. “If you’re holding knitting needles, you’re not so likely to reach for a snack.” She held those knitting needles a lot. If she did eat, it was probably celery.
“The thing about dealing with Regina is recognizing she’s just not a normal person,” my father said. He was the one who held out a little sympathy for her. My mother? None.
How Forrest put up with her was a mystery.
There was her money, of course—the brownstone in Back Bay, Boston, where they lived the rest of the year, their Florida vacation home, right on the ocean.
(We’d never visited there, but every Christmas we got a card with the four of them—Forrest, Regina, Hayward, and Jilly—pictured in front of a giant white tree with matching ornaments. Blue one year, purple the next.)
But the place that occupied my imagination was their lake house, Wonderland. If you asked me to dream up what heaven might look like, that would be it.
“I’d probably marry a psycho too,” my mother said, “if they came with a maid and a cook and a handyman to take care of everything.”
According to my father, none of that mattered much to Forrest.
“The guy loves his wife,” he said. “They’ve got this thing going on between them. It must make him feel good, taking care of her.”
That summer I thought he’d take care of me too.
Now the two of us leaned against the side of the convertible. Forrest stood there taking it all in: The street where he grew up, with its boarded-up storefronts and graffiti, stray dogs and winos, the smell of rotting trash. The windows of my family’s shabby apartment two floors up.
“I’ll just run up and say hello to your old man,” Forrest said.
A look passed between us. As early in the day as it was, my father would have started in on the vodka. One look at my face and Forrest put away the idea of a visit.
Then I was buckling into my seat beside him, and we were heading toward the highway—the wind in my hair, like an actress in a commercial.
“You want the top up?” he asked me. I shook my head. Everything was perfect. It wouldn’t matter if I never laid eyes on Hubbard, New Jersey, again. Forrest Emerson was delivering me to my future. I might have thought—though I wouldn’t have said this part out loud—that Forrest Emerson was my future.
“What do you say we hit a casino in Hartford on our way north?” he asked me. Before I had time to respond, he slapped his thigh. “Damn. I keep forgetting you’re just fourteen years old. I was all set to teach you how to play blackjack. Give you a hundred dollars and see how far you get with it.”
“I’ll be fifteen in September,” I reminded him.
“Oh, well then. That makes all the difference,” he said.