Chapter 8
JENNA
We finished the moth on Tuesday night.
The week could have taken that night off us, and it didn't. It was the best one of the whole build. Lucy put on the playlist she made in September, ninety percent songs out of a video game, and I did the popcorn on the stove in the pot, because she says the microwave kind tastes like a candle.
Last steps: hindwings onto the spine, mount the harness, antennae.
I'd written the order on the back of an envelope in September, because if you do the harness before the wings you can't reach the rivets.
Seven items, six of them crossed off by eight o'clock, which is the only time in my life a project list has ever gone that way.
"Read me what's left."
"You wrote it in pen and then wrote over the pen."
"Read the one on top."
"Antennae. Then quality control."
"What's quality control?"
"It's a thing I added," Lucy said.
The antennae were fiddly — two lengths of wire wrapped in floral tape, feathering cut out of the leftover organza and glued in overlapping rows so they'd look plumed.
Lucy did the cutting, because she's good at cutting, and because she has more patience than I do for the part where you do the same small thing eighty times.
"They look like ferns."
"They look like antennae."
"Fern antennae."
"Wear the fern antennae, please."
By then we had a system neither of us had decided on. She cut, I glued. She held, I trimmed. When something went wrong she said "uh oh" in a specific flat way that meant it was recoverable, and in a different, higher way that meant get over here.
Halfway through the second antenna she said, "Do you think Mrs. Vargas is going to let me."
"I think Mrs. Vargas is going to say no to the tails and yes to everything else."
"That's so stupid."
"It's a rule about a hallway. It isn't about you. Last year it was the boy with the trident."
"I could pin the tails up."
"You could pin the tails up," I agreed. "That's actually a very good solve. Safety pins at the ankle, they hang in a loop, nobody trips."
"Then I'd do that." She held the antenna up to the light and squinted at it. "For the parade. Not for the party."
I kept my eyes on the glue. "Right."
She put the headband on and looked at herself in the black window over the sink, turning her head to make them bounce.
"Do they have to be symmetrical?"
"No."
"Good, because they're not."
"Nothing on a real one is symmetrical. Look at the book — that one's got a chunk out of the left wing."
She got the book off the counter, found the page, and studied it with the antennae still on her head, and for a solid minute she was gone. It's a particular stillness she gets when she's actually looking at something instead of performing looking at it.
"It got bitten," she reported.
"Probably."
"Should we bite ours?"
"We are not biting ours."
She got the antennae seated on the headband, then stood up and checked them against the doorway, which she does now, because she's learned that everything we make has to get through a door.
Then we did the wings, and the left hindwing went wrong. I'd zip-tied it at the wrong angle on the spine, and I didn't catch it until she had the harness on and turned sideways. The whole left side sat four inches lower than the right. It looked like she'd been hit by a car.
"Oh no," Lucy said.
"Hang on."
"Mom, it's broken."
"It's not broken, it's crooked. Crooked is a Tuesday problem."
"It's Tuesday now."
"Then we're right on schedule."
I got the snips and cut both ties on the left side, which meant the wing came off in her hands and she made a horrified noise. Hold it, I told her, don't let it flex, and she held it out flat like a tray while I got down on my knees behind her with the flashlight in my teeth.
"Don't flex it," I said, around the flashlight.
"I'm not flexing it."
"You're flexing it."
"My arms are getting tired, Mom."
"Set it on the table. Flat. Both hands under the spine."
It was the mounting panel. I'd riveted it in September with the harness laid out flat on the floor, which is not how a harness sits on a person, and the top rivet had ended up three quarters of an inch too high.
On the right side it didn't matter because I'd fudged the tie.
On the left it put the whole wing at an angle.
Forty minutes. We had to punch a new hole through the webbing, and my punch is garbage, so I ended up heating a nail on the stove and burning through. It stank up the kitchen. Lucy considered it the single greatest thing she had ever witnessed.
"You're melting it."
"I'm making a hole."
"With fire."
"With a hot nail."
"Can I do the next one?"
"There is no next one. There had better be no next one."
We got it seated. New ties, cinched, tails cut flush. She turned around.
Level, both sides.
"Walk."
She walked to the doorway of the front room, and the thing I'd been picturing since September actually happened. The wings lagged half a step behind her, caught up, settled — that heavy soft float big wings have — and the long tails swept a few inches off the floor behind her heels.
She stopped in the doorway with her back to me.
"They move."
"Told you."
"Mom, they move."
"Do it again."
She went the length of the front room and back twice, faster the second time, then took a turn too fast and clipped the lampshade. I said easy. She said sorry. The lamp survived.
"Walk slow," I said. "Slow's the one. That's when it does the thing."
So she walked slow — heel to toe, down the hall, chin up, arms loose at her sides the way I'd told her back in September when this was still an armature and a photograph in a library book.
"Okay," she said, quietly, to herself.
She came back up the hall at the same speed without looking at me, checking the wall for clearance on both sides.
Then I got the bag down off the shelf.
"Sit down. Turn around."
"What is it?"
"Turn around."
Ten minutes to wire in. Four LEDs, cool white, a coin-cell pack the size of a matchbook velcroed inside the harness panel where it would sit flat against her spine, the leads run under the wing membrane on the inside where you couldn't see them unless you knew.
"Okay. Go stand in the hall. Somebody hit the light."
Eric hit the light. He'd come in halfway through and been standing there with his arms crossed the whole time, not saying anything.
I found the switch through the fabric.
The eyespots came on — four of them, cool white behind two layers of green organza, so they glowed instead of glared. Soft round moons in the dark, one on each wing, exactly where they'd sit on the real thing.
Lucy screamed. Not the scared kind. The other one.
"MOM."
"Yeah."
"MOM, THEY LIGHT UP?—"
"They light up."
She ran to the hall mirror, came back, ran to the mirror again, then stood in the dark hallway turning slowly with her arms out while the two little moons swung around with her.
"Jesus, Jen," Eric said, very quietly.
"Hush."
"That's — no. That's really something."
"How long do they last?" she said, out of the dark.
"The batteries? Six, seven hours. There are two spares in the drawer."
"Six is enough."
"Six is plenty."
"Does cold kill them?"
"Cold slows them down. You'll be inside."
"Mostly inside," Lucy said. "They only really work outside."
"Then you'll be outside."
"It's going to be freezing."
"You'll be outside anyway, because you're going to want the little kids to see it."
"Obviously," she said.
She came back into the kitchen glowing. We put the overhead light on and she sat down at the table still wearing the harness, because she wasn't ready to take it off. She ate popcorn with three feet of wing on either side of the chair.
"Grandma's crown has real crystals," she said, out of nowhere, with her mouth full. "Like actual glass ones, not plastic. You can tell because they're cold."
"That's a good way to tell."
"I really like it."
She said it carefully, watching my face the whole time she said it.
I put the popcorn bowl down.
"You should like it. It's a gorgeous crown, and your grandmother has excellent taste. She's had excellent taste since before I met her."
"You're not mad?"
"Lucy. I am not mad at you, I am not mad at the crown, and I am not mad at Grandma."
"But you're mad."
"I'm working something out with your father. It's a grown-up thing, it's boring, and it's about seven years older than you think it is."
She thought about that and took another handful of popcorn.
"Which one am I supposed to wear?"
Third time in three days, and she asked it flat this time, tired of it, the way she asks what's for dinner.
I looked at her sitting at my kitchen table in a costume that had taken us six weeks, with the popcorn bowl and the snips and the burnt-plastic smell still hanging in the room.
"Your dad and I are handling it. You'll know by tomorrow, and you don't have to think about it again tonight."
"Okay."
"I mean it. Off your plate."
"Okay," she said, and I watched her put it down. Her whole face changed. She reached over and took the last of the popcorn out of the bowl with both hands.
She went up at nine. The water ran, then her door.
I stayed down and started putting away things I wouldn't need again for a year.
Snips in the box. Silver back in the paint bin with the cap on tight, because acrylic dries out.
I swept up about a pound of trimmed organza, all of it clinging to the broom, none of it going into the dustpan, because static hates me.
Under the popcorn bowl I found the graph paper sketch from September — Lucy's first drawing, the one she did off the library book, wings out of proportion, antennae like two exclamation points. In the corner, in her handwriting: ACTIAS LUNA (real).
I stuck it to the fridge with a magnet.
We hung the wings from two cup hooks I'd put in the ceiling of the front room, so nothing would rest on the tails overnight, and they hung there in the dark over the reading chair like something asleep.
Eric stood looking up at them a long time after she went to bed.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow what?"
"I'll go over in the morning. Before she starts setting up the garage."