Me and the Moon

Summary: They had become strangers, but she confessed it to him. She didn't know why, and he certainly didn't want to hear it. But he understood.

"Why?" he demanded simply as he cursed the luck that brought him into her presence again. He probably loved her; it didn't matter. She was exponentially more fucked up than he was. But that was the thing that kept bringing him back, wasn't it?

"What the hell do you mean 'why'? 'Why' what? Why did I do it? Why am I telling anyone? Why are you the anyone that I'm telling? Clarify for me. Please." She was being more extroverted and demanding than she was comfortable with, so she sat back and sipped on her stale coffee as she waited for his clarification. She only one to treat one person like that ever, and that woman was dead.

"Why… why would you ruin your life like that?"

"She was a monster. You know this better than anyone."

The truth is that she was right; he did know her inherent evil. She tried to seduce him once the summer after graduation, and he wisely avoided the Nash residence ever since then. "I thought you changed. I thought you found religion."

"This wasn't about Jesus, Craig. This was about her." She looked older and dirtier and she knew it. She could barely look at herself because she saw too much of her mother in her appearance. She saw the age lines around her temples and the streaks of gray that she couldn't bring herself to dye. She wouldn't become her mother, not in any sense.

"We haven't even had our ten year reunion, and you have more gray hairs than Caitlin."

"Thanks," she said sarcastically. The last thing she needed to hear after a confession like that, not to mention a night like she had the evening prior, was another insult towards her aging appearance.

"I mean, that's not healthy."

"Don't you think I know that? Why do you think I did it? Why do you think I killed her? She was killing me, and she wouldn't stop. She wouldn't stop until she was dead."

He tried to rationalize the situation, but he hated rationalizing things. They were right or they were wrong. And this was very, very wrong. "You could've left. You could've gone somewhere."

"Where would I go, Craig?" She resisted the urge to punch the table by gripping her sturdy mug and sipping again the scorching liquid. It was like cutting, except sans the social stigma.

"I had an extra bedroom."

"I'm sure your girlfriend would've loved that."

"Leave Ashley out of this."

"Why the hell should I?"

He stared at her until she couldn't look him in the eyes. She hated backing down from an argument, especially with him, but she couldn't win as long as he stared at her. "She didn't do anything wrong, except to not answer a few of your phone calls."

"I needed her, Craig. When she was off at Oxford, when you were off at Julliard, I was here. I was picking up my mother's mess. I was domesticated at age 19, except I had no husband or baby to show for it. All I had was a drunken slob of a mother and burns on my hands and thighs from spilling various boiling food substances."

"I'm sorry you had to go through that, but it's not our fault."

She laughed a little; she had to. Of course Craig was playing the smug yet innocent little bastard. Of course he was. What more could she expect from Ashley's little lap dog? "I made it look like a suicide. It's not that far off. She always talked about offing herself when she was trashed. I could find at least five witnesses who would attest to that."

"I think I should go, Ellie."

She looked up at him and saw the severity written across his face as if a skywriter had done it. It hit her then, moreso than it had all day: Ellie Nash had murdered her mother. And there was nothing to do now but pray.

"It's a good year for a murder.
She's praying to Jesus;
She's pulling the trigger."

Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with the phone cord wrapped around her wrists as Ellie dropped the bags of groceries on the counter. "A little help please, Mom?" she asked. She still had at least 15 more bags left in the car, and she wanted to put the lasagna in the oven soon or they'd be eating dinner at midnight.

"Eleanor, I am on the phone." She looked at the girl, well- woman, as if she were crazy and continued to schedule lunch with her friend Bette for the next day.

Ellie glanced at her small purse sitting on the table. The revolver was hidden in there, and, even invisible, it comforted her. She walked over to the pantry and removed a pan, making sure to allow it to bang off of other dishes and shelves as she pulled it from the back.

She heard her mother end the phone conversation and stand behind where Ellie had begun the preparation process on the kitchen's beat-up counter. Ellie looked into the window and saw the reflection of her obviously agitated mother. "Are you going to get those bags, mother?"

"I do not quite appreciate this new attitude that you have."

"That's lovely, mom. The bags?"

"Ellie! Quit it! Quit ordering me around! I am your mother, and you will respect me. I am telling you, as long as you live under my roof, you will have a respectable attitude – "

"Do you think I live under your roof voluntarily? Yea, mom, I chose for dad to die and I chose for you to get your stomach pumped like a trashy 15 year old and I chose that the only way to keep you alive was to move back. I loved every minute of that. I loved not moving out and going to college like all of my other friends. You know what I loved the most? I love that I still live here, at age 26, when every other decent human being of my age has the foundations of their life planted. I'm still living with you, I have no post-secondary schooling, and I haven't had a boyfriend since the last time I was in a classroom. How's that for fair, momma?"

"Eleanor, you seem to enjoy blaming me for every little thing about your life that has gone wrong. Sweetie, the truth is you're not attractive to boys. They don't like to date the screwed-up little girls who were gothic in high school and did drugs instead of going to college."

"I never did drugs, mommy. That was you."

"You're a liar. You always were."

Ellie had been inching closer to the kitchen table the entire time her mom was degrading her. By the time her mom called her a liar, the fingers on her right hand were gripped around a chunk of cold metal that Ellie had spent too much money on. "Mother, don't call me a liar. I've worked my ass off to save your life. But I'm not going to work anymore."

Her mother scoffed. "That's a terrible thing to say to the woman who gave birth to you. That's like saying that you wouldn't care whether I lived or died."

"That's not true. I do care whether you live or die." She pulled the pistol out of her handbag. "In fact, I care enough to kill you."

Ellie's hand was steady. She didn't know why. She was about to commit an act so heinous that she couldn't even wrap her mind around it. Shouldn't she be nervous, be shaking? Her finger sat unmoving on the trigger, and the barrel was pointed directly at her mother's chest. After the initial shock of seeing a gun in her daughter's hand wore off, Mrs. Nash smiled sardonically. "Ellie, you think you're scaring me. But I know you. I know you could never do it. It's just not what you do."

The drunken woman didn't have time for her life to flash before her eyes before the bullet lodged itself in her heart.

"There's no tears,
Cause he's not here.
She washes her hands,
And she fixes the dinner."

The prosecuting attorney stepped into the office of his unwanted colleague, Detective John A. Winters. "I never knew a place could actually smell like a hangover until I started coming here," he remarked to the man behind the desk who had already cracked open his flask for the day.

The detective sneered. If his job description didn't mean working with this contemptuous ass everyday, he would've gladly thrown the lawyer out. Instead, he picked a folder up off the mound of papers on his desk and threw it at him. "Something's not right with that suicide a couple days ago."

Nicholas Gessler began to flip through the folder. "What's not right?"

The detective lit up a cigar which made the lawyer take a step back and turn his head away from the smoke. "For starters," he said after the first puff, "it can't be a suicide." The detective paused for another inhalation and to allow the lawyer to find the lab report in the folder. "The way the bullet is lodged, it couldn't have come from point blank range or anywhere near point blank range. The way that puppy's in there, the gun was ten to twelve feet away, at least."

"The gun is registered to the daughter, so that's the logical suspect."

"The only one for right now. I'd like you to get me a warrant."

The lawyer closed the folder and held it firmly between his hands. "You're not giving me a lot to go on, detective."

In the three years Winters had been working with the kid, he hadn't called him anything but "detective" once. Never "Mr. Winters," not "John," not even "Detective Winters." It was always simply "detective." "Shaky alibi, possession of the weapon, an assortment of motives ranging from bathroom time to possible abuse during childhood and the obvious alcoholism, I could go on. Come on, I did my job, now it's time for you to do yours."

Gessler took any chance he could get to make a hurried escape from the smoke-filled office. As he was walking through the tiny doorway, he managed to tell the detective, "If I can get it, I'll send it over in a few hours."

"But soon they'll be coming to rush her away.
No one's so sure if her crime had a reason,
But reasons like seasons they constantly change. . ."

She didn't get much sleep that night, but it wasn't like she tried too hard anyway. John A. Winters, the "A" standing for "Asshole", had kept her up until 4 with questioning. He didn't want her to sleep in her own house for the night, but she refused. Her mother had already spent twenty-six miserable years ruining her life; she most certainly was not giving her the benefit of another night. She watched him drive off before it got light again and realized that she hadn't seen the last of him.

She wrapped herself in a blanket and sat in the sturdiest seat they had on the back porch as a faint blue light began to emerge. She wondered why she did it, or, at least, why she did it when she did it, but she didn't come to many definite conclusions. She thought about her temp job, about how her mother, once again, caused her to lose another source of income. She took another sip of the now-lukewarm coffee. It was too late and she was too sleep deprived for thinking. She just wanted some company.

She shuffled back into her house and barely noticed the spot on the kitchen floor where her mom had lain dead for hours and hours as they photographed her and gathered evidence. In just a few hours, she figured as she refilled her coffee mug, they'd be cutting her open for the autopsy. Ellie smiled at the thought, knowing that her mother's dead body would finally feel the unfathomable torture that Ellie herself had felt emotionally for so many years.

She found the number under stacks of old papers in her never-used dining room. It was too early, or too late depending on how you looked at it, to be calling him, but her fingers dialed anyway. It rang a few times, and she grew uncomfortable. What would she do if he didn't answer? Leave a message? What would she say? No, she wouldn't leave a message. Too awkward and too much of a chance of his girlfriend hearing it. No, she absolutely would not - "Hello?" It was him, she noted thankfully, not her and her faux British accent that she miraculously formed after only four years in England.

"Craig? Hi. Come over."

"Huh? Who is this?"

She coiled the phone cord around her wrist and pulled her knees up to her chest at her kitchen table. "Craig. . ." she trailed off because she wasn't sure how, after all this time, she should introduce herself. "It's Ellie."

He squinted at the clock and rolled out of bed, holding up the cordless phone with his shoulder. "Ellie Nash?"

"It's me. Come over. Please. You know I wouldn't ask unless it was important." Her voice grew soft as she realized that it had been years since they'd talked. He seemed unaffected.

He sat on the floor of his bathroom and closed the door. His head throbbed with the beginnings of a hangover. Did he drink last night? He couldn't remember. "Ellie, I can't. I have things."

"Craig, I have no one else. Please? I have coffee."

He regretted the words as soon as they escaped from his mouth. "Fine. I'll be over in twenty minutes."

She opened her front door to her old classmate twenty-six minutes later. He followed her wordlessly into the kitchen where she poured a mug to the brim with the best of the cheap coffee she had in the cupboard. He put in four packs of sugar and it was still bitter. She sat across from him and skipped all the pleasantries that he had been expecting. "I shot my mom last night."

He swallowed the bitter coffee and wished she had put something stronger in it. He knew anything to do with Ellie Nash was a huge, huge mistake. But he never expected it would be that bad.

". . .And the seasons of last year like reasons have floated, away,
Away with this spilled milk,
Away with this dirty dishwater,
Away. . .
Seventeen years, and all that he gave was a daughter."

She leaned her head against the cold wall and tried to bury herself in the cement. The phone buzzed in her ear but the other end's ringing was slightly louder. She was entirely still. She didn't know how these things worked. If she moved, would some dyke make her into her bitch? It was too scary.

He looked at the caller ID and shook his head. "Prison, El?"

She smiled at the sound of a familiar voice but kept her head buried into the wall so no one else could see. "It's not as bad as you think."

He sighed and hopped up onto the kitchen counter, noticing for the first time that his girlfriend's signature smell had finally left the apartment, four weeks after she did. "What do you need?"

"Bail." He took a sharp breath. "Please, Craig. I know you don't want to, but I don't have anyone else to call."

The million reasons why he should do anything in the world other than posting Ellie Nash's bail ran through his head. It was a slippery slope, she was a slippery slope, and getting involved in any part of her life once was enough for a lifetime. However, it came to mind how many times she was there for him when he needed it and how we swore to never allow people to fall into the kind of madness he had to fight through in high school. He hated her for this. "Alright, I'll be over as soon as I can. Don't let some dyke make you her bitch."

Ellie smiled and even allowed herself a small chuckle despite her surroundings. "I won't. Thank you."

She hung up before he got a chance to respond.

"It's me and the moon, she says,
and I got no trouble with that.
And I am a butterfly, but you wouldn't let me die.
It's me and the moon, she says."

It wasn't as if she said, at any point, "this is where she was standing when I shot her." But he knew. It was obvious. She had taken a rag to the linoleum floor of the kitchen and removed most of the evidence of the crime in that room, but there were still drops of blood soaked into the carpet where the dining room met the living room.

She sat on the floor, oblivious to thoughts of her mother and death, and even though he hated her, he told her the thing that he hadn't even been able to admit to himself for the last month. "I, uh, well, Ashley left me."

She looked sympathetic, but he was probably wrong in thinking that. She probably only pitied him. "I'm sorry. I never-" she stopped herself. "I'm sorry."

He lowered himself to his knees next to her. "I knew, from the first sound of your voice on the phone a few weeks ago, I knew you hadn't changed and that you were going to-"

She stopped listening to him. She hadn't changed? That was a novel concept. She used to stick up to her mom. She used to tell her that if she didn't change, if she didn't stop drinking, that she would leave. And Ellie did leave. She left until it was okay to come home again. She left until she could sleep in her own room without reaching for the blade under her bed. She wasn't the same girl who left. She stayed. She stayed until... until she broke.

She kissed the boy then. She leaned up and kissed him on his still talking mouth because he thought she was the girl whom she hadn't even dreamed of becoming in years. She kissed the boy, and to his own amazement, he kissed her back. He wasn't sure how far she would take the kiss, but she knew. She would take him to the place that she hadn't wanted to go to since she was seventeen and desperately in love with him. She wondered if Ashley had touched him like that or if he had moaned for Ashley in the same way he moaned for her. She wondered if he would cry out that he loved her in a moment of ecstacy.

And all he wondered was if she knew that she was laying in the exact place that her mother had been a few weeks ago. And then he wondered if she cared. And then he didn't think much more about it.

"And it's over, it just started.
The blood stained the carpet;
Her heart like a crystal.
She's lucid and departed.
A life left behind she can find in her mind, gone away."

Ellie knelt in the small booth and allowed the prayers to wash over her. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last confession."

The man smiled softly, although through the barrier, she couldn't see it. "Go on, tell me your sins."

"Father, I have done something terrible."

"Remember that nothing you do is so terrible that God cannot forgive you. He forgives adulterers, prostitutes, and murderers. He forgives all people." He had heard what was going on in the press; he wasn't blind to it. He had been expecting her, and he had devised a speech he would give her when she finally admitted her sin of murder.

"I engaged in pre-marital sex with a boy I'm not even in a committed relationship with. And I don't plan to be, either. I feel awful about it. I never meant to treat my body like that."

The priest was slightly taken aback. He hadn't expected that, no, not from her. Maybe she didn't do what the lawyers were accusing her of. He gave her some non-descript advice about cleansing her body and her soul through prayer and abstinence, and she seemed satisfied.

She left the small confessional booth to pray in the silence and almost overwhelming emptiness of the ornate church. She knelt in a pew at the middle of the church and began to do the first of many rosaries that she received as a penance. She pushed her hair behind her ears and silently recited the lines she had memorized only a few years prior. "Hail Mary, full of grace..."

As she began to say the same prayers over and over again, a tightness formed in her chest and she could feel her lungs getting heavier. She forced out her breaths with a great deal of effort but never stopped praying. Her mind was focused completely on the words, but she was forgetting... she was forgetting that she had to admit her sins to be forgiven, she had to accept the guilt to be free from it. She held on to the back of the pew in front of her before the weight of all her guilt pushed her back into a sitting position. She stayed there for a few minutes, her body not her own in the same way that it wasn't hers when she was with Craig, and she finally felt it. She felt her heart begin to swell as she remembered all the years she had spent with her mother. She remembered, for the first time, her smiles instead of her tears; the laughter instead of the screaming. Tears streamed down her face as she finally came to realize that her actions had consequences. She had done it, and there was no more pride, only guilt.

She was sobbing, the tears falling down her cheeks didn't seem to matter. The priest had come out of the confessional and walked towards her, unsure if she even saw him, unsure if she was even conscious. As he approached her, she stood and walked towards him, as well. She fell castrate onto the ground, and he wondered if she was having a seizure or if he should call an ambulance. She looked up at him and he could see how hard she had been crying. Her cheeks were raw red, and her eyes had more red than white. Her hands were clasped tightly together. She had been praying.

"I did it. Father, I did it. Forgive me. I killed her. I'm sorry. I did it. I'm so, so sorry."

He knew then that what the Lord had promised him on the day of his ordination had been true: the truth, no matter how heinous, always comes to the surface.

"Away with these nightmares,
Away with suburbia shakedown,
Away. . .
You marry a role,
and you give up your soul till you break down."

He didn't know what to do. Was he supposed to cuddle her? He couldn't even look at her. She was naked and shaking in the spot where her mother had died, and his eyes couldn't seem to focus on any part of her body. "What did we just do?" he managed to ask while still avoiding eye contact.

"Something we've been supposed to do since grade 11." He didn't believe her words. She didn't believe her words.

He let his hand rest on a patch of darkened, dried blood. "Why don't you feel any guilt?"

She looked at him out of the side of her eye. Who the hell was he to tell her about guilt? She was a goddamned Catholic. "I feel enough guilt."

"What? What do you feel guilty about?" He knew he shouldn't press it, especially not after what just happened between them. But he couldn't help it. He just couldn't stop.

She stood up. She couldn't bear to look at him anymore than he could at her. It was mutual dislike, yet they had just performed the purest act of love that two people can. He tried to reach for her hand; he wasn't about to give up on her. Not yet. "I feel guilty about leading you on. I feel guilty because I should've never touched you nor let you touch me. Is that the answer you wanted?" He didn't talk, but he left his hand out for her to grab. She didn't. "Maybe you should leave," she suggested.

He did as she asked.

"It's me and the moon she says,
and I've got no trouble with that.
I am a butterfly, but you wouldn't let me die.
I am a butterfly, but you wouldn't let me die.
I am a butterfly,
I am a butterfly,
I am a butterfly..."