The Radical Element by Jessica Spotswood (8)

Before the war, moonlight used to taste like sugar and butter and fresh cream. Mama would fold in the ingredients until it fluffed up like meringue. She’d even sprinkle it with cinnamon. But now she’s only got sprigs of mint, a few basil leaves, or a stem or two of rosemary from her kitchen garden, and sometimes the soil won’t even give her that. Still, she’s always made sure I’ve never tasted it raw. Pure. Straight from the sky. It’s too bitter and sharp.

The water around my ankles is still cold for late spring. Oak Bluffs hasn’t warmed yet. It always feels like Massachusetts — especially Martha’s Vineyard — is the last place on Earth to grab heat and let it press down into the water and into the land. We’ve been here five years, and it feels like it’s colder and colder every year.

Standing in the small lake behind our house, I grip the two canning jars and wait. It seems like I’m always waiting these days.

For Molly to come over.

For the moon.

For another spring cotillion.

For something, anything, to happen.

The feeling rises up like a tide ready to flood my insides, drown my heart, choke my voice, and swallow me whole.

I watch the sky. It looks different now. Maybe gunpowder gets trapped in clouds and these have drifted across the Atlantic from the battlefields. Maybe it’s just me — and my eyes have changed and I can’t see the same things anymore.

The clouds break to let out the moon. It’s fat and slightly blushing with a halo. Mama will be happy. This is one of her favorite types of full moons.

The rays hit the water’s surface. They climb over the cool ripples step-by-step as if called to my legs.

I let the beams kiss my skin, make the light brown glow like fireflies, before I dip the jar into the water. The liquid does not enter. Instead, the moonlight itself folds into the glass receptacle, attracted to the blood coating its inner walls. Mama’s blood tonight. Mine tomorrow. Daddy’s the next night. We take turns with the bleeding.

The light thickens like sweet pudding.

I fill both jars, then stand there as if the great glowing orb could tell me something. When will the war end? Will we have to move again? Will I ever get to see the world on my own? Is this how my life will always be?

I wait for the moon to leave words etched onto the water or spread letters through the clouds or send down messages in the beams.

But it gives me nothing but its light.

“Emma, get in here right now. Been out too long. It’ll spoil without a covering.” Mama’s voice carries from the back of the house to the lake. It can always find me, especially when I’m thinking of something she wouldn’t approve of.

“Coming!” I holler back.

“You want to wake the whole world?” she snaps when I walk in the house. She stares down at me like I’m a little girl again and too loud during a church service.

“You yelled first,” I mumble.

“What did you say?” she asks.

“Nothing, ma’am.” My cheeks burn with heat, and a wish bubbles up inside my chest: a desire to be free of her and on my own for a little while.

She stands in the doorway, her hair spilling over with pin curls that poke out from under her scarf. Her freckles cover her light-brown cheeks like chips in a cookie. Not that there is much chocolate with the rations these days.

I hand her the glass jars. She lifts them up and sucks her teeth. “You could’ve caught more than two jars’ worth. We’ve got to keep the stores full. Always.”

“I will tomorrow. It was sluggish tonight,” I lie.

“Seems more like you are.” She eyes me. “You’ve been walking around here dragging your tail these past couple of weeks, and I’ll have no more of it.”

“I don’t —” I start to speak, then swallow the words. I want to tell her that I’m tired of always doing things her way, that I haven’t been a child for a very long time and I’m tired of being treated like one.

“Go to your room. I’ll wake you when it’s ready.” She shoos me upstairs.

I slam my bedroom door and ignore Mama’s shout of displeasure.

Mama jostles me out of bed before dawn. The house smells like fresh biscuits and bacon and honey. The moon fades into a pale-blue sky as the sun starts to poke its head above the horizon.

Mama has the candles lit in the kitchen and at the table. She doesn’t like to waste electricity when the sun’s about to come up and do its duty. Daddy reads the paper, using a thick candle bearded with drippings as a paperweight. The headlines almost scream in thick black ink:

I slide into the seat beside him. “’Morning, Daddy.”

“’Morning, butterbean.”

I stare at the pictures of General MacArthur’s men and ships. I toy with a question. It rolls around on my tongue and teases my vocal chords. I’ve always been able to talk to him. Mama says he’s got a listening spirit, and it was one of the reasons she married him.

Daddy looks up from the paper. A crease mars his forehead like the wrinkles in a raisin, and his left eyebrow hitches up. “What is it? I can see something knocking around in there.”

“You think the Nazis will make it over here?” I ask.

“They could.”

A deep shudder ripples through me. Every day the radio hosts warn listeners about the presence of German U-boats off the eastern coast, and how if the Nazis came here, they’d tear America up just like they were doing in Europe.

“Then, why are we staying this time?”

Daddy scratches his beard. “I’m getting tired of moving, butterbean, and this has been my favorite place of all the ones we’ve lived.” He pats my hand. “Also, I don’t really think this war will reach us.”

“But if it did, what would we do?”

“What we have always done.”

“Leave,” I say, and grit my teeth.

“Yes. Find a faraway corner to hide in.”

“But what if the Nazis spread to all the states? What if they find out about us? What would happen?” My heart knocks against my rib cage, each thundering beat anticipating his answer.

“We’d make sure we weren’t found. Cross the border into Canada again or go back down into Mexico. You know what’s at stake if anyone figured out what we can do.” He takes a deep breath. “They’d lock us up in their hospitals. They’d poke us with their needles and measure our skulls and take our blood. They’d study us like the animals they already think we are.”

“Would you join if you could? To help keep us safe from the Nazis?” I ask in a whisper.

“Join what?”

I point at the picture on the front page. His lips purse, and he doesn’t look up.

“You already know the answer to that question, and you know I don’t like to talk just to hear myself. It wastes the good Lord’s air.”

“But this time we stayed!”

“We don’t get involved. We’re not patriots,” he says. During the Civil War, we left New Orleans for a small village in Mexico, and when America entered the first Great War, we headed north out of New York City to Canada. When the wars ended, we came back.

He continues to read the paper. The silence thickens between us as I try to gather the courage to ask him another question. The word patriot reverberates like a ghost floating through the room, setting my nerves on edge.

The ration coupons sit on the kitchen counter like paper-thin reminders that the world is starving. The radio reports the body count each day and reminds us how perilous life is for our soldiers in Europe and the Pacific. The two white boys who used to bring the papers into Oak Bluffs enlisted and died. Now the newspapers warn that Japan could invade from the west and Germans from the east if we don’t fight back.

I’ve never seen any of this before. Mama and Daddy always took me far away, where all of these things were legend and myth. War never felt real before.

Now it’s everywhere. On the tips of people’s tongues. In every newspaper. On every radio program. Part of every passing conversation.

I’ve dreamed about it since the attack on Pearl Harbor, since President Roosevelt declared war. In my dreams, the war comes like a great storm, a blizzard of dust with angry spirals and sizzling lightning and thick gunpowder clouds that rage in the sky and cast a suffocating darkness over the world. It feels like the hand of the Devil sweeping over us with his fingers gathering into a fist, ready to squeeze us all. I wake up soaked from head to foot.

Daddy glances up. “What is it?”

“Don’t you want to help? Use your medical —?”

“Help?” He thumps the newspaper.

I stuff my mouth with a piece of biscuit. Its folds are fluffy like what I think a cloud might be like, if I could catch it like I catch moonlight.

“War is not a fairy tale, butterbean. Men die.” His wire-rimmed glasses slide down the bridge of his thick nose. “I’m much too old to entertain heroics, especially for a country that doesn’t care about people who look like you or me.”

“I know. But —”

“But what?”

“We never do anything. We just move.”

Mama overhears me and fumbles with a plate stacked high with biscuits. They tumble along the table, leaving tiny buttery fingerprints on the tablecloth. “Best be dropping the topic.” Mama resets the pyramid of warm biscuits and hands out milky glasses of moonlight.

“But you’re a nurse, Mama. And, Daddy, you’re a doctor. Don’t you feel like you should help this time?” After the first Great War ended, we moved to the capital, where Daddy and Mama studied at Howard University and worked in the colored hospital there. I thought it might be the place we finally stayed — Mama seemed happier and even let herself have friends — but people started asking questions after they both served ten years at the hospital without a single change in their outward appearance.

Mama’s hazel eyes narrow. “I was a nurse, and your father didn’t study medicine as some kind of duty to others. We did it so we could always take care of ourselves, so we’d never have to go and ask for medical attention. Now, let’s move on. You’re gonna make me fly off the handle, and the Lord doesn’t like ugly, especially this close to Sunday.”

“Let’s remember we’re blessed. We’re alive. We will be here forever. We have the moonlight.” Daddy lets his eyes linger on mine before turning to Mama.

The McGees mind their own business.

The McGees hold on to their own breaths, Mama says.

The McGees only worry about the moonlight.

I already know this. It’s settled deep in my bones and tissues and soul. We lived through slavery, and we survived. We moved north after Emancipation, and we survived. We kept our heads down and mouths shut, and made our way out of no way.

The moonlight always provided.

Mama raises her glass. We all follow, just like we always do. I tip the rim to my lips and let the liquid tease my mouth. I wonder how quickly I’d age if I didn’t drink it. Would my body shrivel within a month? Would my bones start counting the days and weeks and months and years like everyone else’s? Would I feel even more empty than I already do?

It goes down like flames every time. A hot surge that travels through my throat like a snake and curls into my belly like a fire in the hearth. Daddy says it’s worse than Scottish whiskey, but I’ve never had more than a sip of champagne. Mama says it burns because it’s pushing into our bones, keeping us alive no matter what. She says it’s a gift from the Lord. I’ve had it once a month since I turned sixteen on December 12, 1768, on Honey Alley Plantation outside of Jackson, Mississippi.

I’m 191 years old. But I have always been sixteen.

“This one is too puffy, I think.” Molly prances through her bedroom, twirling in her cotillion dress. Her willowy arms are the color of the honey caramels Mama used to make and give as gifts when we lived in Philadelphia. The dress is too puffy; Molly looks like she belongs on top of a wedding cake.

I mostly look out of her little window. All the houses line up like gingerbread ones in a fairy tale with primrose-pink and lemon-yellow and robin’s-egg-blue piping, and flower boxes spilling over with spring blooms. Rocking chairs creak on tiny porches that reach like poked-out lips onto Clinton Street. Mrs. Brooke tends to her victory garden. Mr. Jordan hobbles along with the help of his granddaughter, Sadie. The church ladies pass by in their pillbox hats and white-gloved hands with big smiles swallowing their brown faces. The click-clack of their heeled shoes creates a melody. You can hear everything so clearly now. The gasoline ration means most people are walking these days.

Molly jostles my shoulder. “I said, what does your dress look like?”

I want to tell her I have a closet full of dresses. This is my twenty-seventh cotillion, though it’s my first in Oak Bluffs. The cotillion dresses I’ve worn in the past zip through my head like the turning of a film reel. I loved the champagne empire-waist gown I wore after Daddy bought our freedom from Master McGee at Honey Alley in 1809 and we joined the free colored society of New Orleans. Also, the blush-pink bustle one I wore in 1880 while in Atlanta. And the cream chiffon one with the trumpet-shaped bottom in 1902, when we lived in Chicago. Or the flapper-style one I swapped for the one Mama picked when we were in Harlem in 1922.

But I can’t tell Molly any of that. We’ve known each other for three years now, and I know everything about her, and she barely knows anything about me. I should feel lucky Mama let me have a friend this time around. I haven’t had one since 1938 — right before we moved here — when it didn’t go so well in Boston. Mama let her guard down a little with the Brooks family, and little Lilly May found the moonlight. We had to spin so many lies to explain that Mama made us leave immediately.

“Do you ever wonder about what’s going on over there?” I ask.

Molly frowns. “Over where?”

“In Europe. You’ve seen the papers, right? Heard the radio?”

“I’d much rather talk about your cotillion dress. Did you get it yet? July’s coming quick.” She rubs her hands over the bodice. Tiny pearls catch the light.

“It’s only the end of May,” I remind her, then take out the newspaper I borrowed from Daddy’s desk and spread it over her floor. The headlines talk of war, increased rations, an East Coast blackout, men dying, U-boats spotted in the Atlantic, and the Nazis.

Molly smooths a loose curl from my bun. “You think George will be a good dancer? Caroline says his feet don’t work and his hands get all wet when he’s nervous, and I should’ve picked Brandon. We haven’t even practiced. I don’t want to look like a fool.” She prattles on and on. “Will you go with Raymond Finley?”

I scoff. “He hasn’t asked.”

“Well, George says it’s ’cause he can’t figure out if you actually like him.”

I’m not supposed to like anyone. I’m not supposed to let anyone close.

I shrug. “Maybe I won’t go.”

“Won’t go?” Her nose crinkles with disgust.

“It’s not like it’s my own wedding.”

“It’s the first big thing that ever happens to a girl. Your wedding will be second,” she says.

I won’t ever get married. I’ll always be with Mama and Daddy. The thought hits me in the chest. I’d always just accepted that. But now, the desire to do something, anything else burns inside me like a hot coal.

“I heard Miss Claudine say we might not have any dessert to serve at the ball this year. Can you believe it? There’s not enough butter or chocolate to make a big enough cake to feed fifty people.”

“Is that so?” My mind drifts off.

“Also, my mother thinks I should wear my hair out. I don’t think we’ll have enough bobby pins for a full updo. She’s not willing to buy me some under the counter. She thinks they’re cracking down and that colored folks who get caught will be treated harsher.”

“We’ll have to deal with worse if the war comes here.”

“To Oak Bluffs?” She laughs. “Never. Nothing ever comes here except people on vacation.” She turns back to the mirror. “Why are you so worried?”

I can’t find an answer. It all feels wispy and out of touch and half formed. I close my eyes and see the storm from my dream — a roaring black mass of death. The headlines, the radio news reports, the rations, the looks on people’s faces swirl inside the chaos. Maybe this is why Mama and Daddy usually leave. So we won’t have to see it, anticipate it, worry about it. So that we could always just come back after things were okay again.

“I just am” is all I can muster.

“Well, my mama says there’s no use in worrying yourself sick about things you can’t change. I’m going to busy myself with the cotillion and George. Mama thinks he might ask me to marry him after we graduate.” Molly tries on another dress while prattling on about getting married. “This one’s my sister’s old cotillion gown from five years ago. You think it’s out of fashion?” She sighs with disappointment. “I hope no one remembers it. The rations have made it impossible for me to get another one made. You know I like more than one option. I’m not keen on either of these.” A deep flush blooms beneath her pale cheeks. Even in selfish anger, she’s one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. Mama calls her “Red Molly” and says her bones must be red on the inside ’cause her skin’s so light and pale and yellowy instead of deep brown.

“Emma.” She squints. “What do you think?”

The tulle blooms around her waist like a lovely upside-down church bell, and the sweetheart neckline shows off her perfect collarbone. The lace is like intricate frosting.

“That one is delicate. Very pretty.”

She beams, flashing a perfect set of white teeth. “Maybe I should go with this one, then. Even though my sister wore it.” She dances around the room, lifting her legs and swishing around while pretending to do the jitterbug. “Dance with me.”

“No,” I grumble.

“Yes.” She reaches out her hands.

I groan but let her drag me up off the floor. She turns me in circles, then pulls me in for a slow dance. Her skin smells of lavender. She hums a popular song from the radio. We bob left and right, then left again.

“What do you think will happen?” I whisper into her shoulder.

“We’ll dance and sneak champa —”

“No, in the war.”

“I don’t know.” She pivots me around, then catches me again.

“Don’t you think about it? Pearl Harbor?”

“No.”

“Why not?” I pull back and stare into her hazel eyes. We could be sisters in the winter, when the sun doesn’t color my skin so deeply and Mama pulls the frizz out of my hair with her pomades.

“I have other things on my mind, as should you.” Molly places a hand to my forehead. “Are you ill? What’s wrong with you?”

I break out of her grip and walk to the door. She calls after me, but I don’t stop.

I let Raymond Finley put his tongue in my mouth even though I shouldn’t. I let him unpin my hair so it falls down my back in frizzy waves. I let him whisper in my ear about his plans to give me his grandmother’s ring when I turn eighteen like him. He was the first boy I met when we moved to Oak Bluffs. He tried to kiss me on the old fishing pier, but I didn’t let him until a month ago.

I sink into this fantasy and pretend until my lips are swollen and I’m out of breath from kissing him. I’ve only kissed five boys in over a hundred years, and it always feels like the very first time every time.

We’re in the large oak behind his house. Our legs dangle from its sturdy boughs, and its thick green leaves hide us from any prying eyes.

“I’m going away,” he says, leaning back to stare into my eyes. He’s the color of a smudge of peanut butter and has the smallest gap between his front teeth that makes him look clever.

I’d always thought I’d be the one leaving him.

“I mean, I’m planning to,” he says. “So I will miss being your cotillion date.”

“You haven’t asked me,” I say. “Where are you going?”

His eyes dart all around. “You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.” He takes my hand, and I nod. “I’m enlisting.”

His words are a firework exploding between us.

“I filled out the paperwork and I’ll ship out soon.”

“They’re going to let you fight?” My hands go all fluttery, and he grabs them to hold them still. My stomach pinches and I think about what it might be like to go to Europe or the Pacific or wherever they’re planning to ship him out to. I wonder what he’ll see.

“In one of the colored units.” He kisses me again with a smile. “Will you write to me?”

A searing hot wave of jealousy shoots through me.

“Will you?” he presses.

“Of course.”

“I want to fly a plane.” His smile grows so big it almost swallows his face. It makes me think of what he must’ve looked like as a little boy.

“What if I told you I wanted to go, too?”

A small chuckle escapes his mouth. I clench my teeth and slide away from him. “War is no place for girls or women.” He reaches for me to bring me closer again.

“Why is that?” I snap.

He twirls my hair around his fingers. “It’s a place where men fight and win, or fight and die.” He sounds like Daddy.

“And you want to go there?”

“I want to do something to help us, to help our people.”

His words pluck the same feeling straight out of me.

“But why?” I ask, and sound like Mama. I wonder why Raymond and I both want to go and fight but neither Mama nor Daddy wants to.

He takes a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolds it to show me a torn-out article from the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper Daddy often reads. He points at the headline:

“We can change things here if we fight overseas. We can also fight for our rights.”

“I want to be part of something, too,” I say, not sure exactly what that might be. Maybe helping other colored people or maybe the war effort. Maybe both. The confusion tangles into a knot in my stomach.

He traces his finger along my nose and mouth. “I’m making a memory of you.”

“You’ll come back,” I say, knowing that I most likely won’t be here when he does because Mama and Daddy might pack us up again.

“Will you wait for me?”

I kiss him long and hard, knowing this is our last kiss. I try to take in every scent of him, every flavor of his mouth, every part of his touch.

I want to be him. I want to be able to enlist. I want to see the world. I want to do something that matters instead of always hiding.

Martha’s Vineyard is shaped like a very old turtle and her babies. That’s how Mama described it to me when we first moved. With Oak Bluffs at the peak of the shell, and Aquinnah and Chilmark at the tail, and Edgartown at the head. The turtle’s babies float above her — the Elizabeth Islands across the sound.

Mama and Daddy love it here. The colored community is quiet and small, mostly tending to their own affairs. No one has noticed that the McGee family hasn’t aged. The white folks aren’t the mean kind who spit or call you names or give you dirty looks. They’re the “all right” kind, Mama says. The kind we can live beside without any trouble.

Out of all the places we’ve lived, the Vineyard is the most beautiful — and the most boring.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been anyplace I wanted to stay until we got here, butterbean,” Daddy says as we drive to the post office in Vineyard Haven. The one in Oaks Bluff closed last year. He parks the car across from the filling station, where a little white boy throws a rubber ball into a wire-fenced crate for the metal-scrap drive.

“Come, let’s be quick, Emma. Before Mama finds out we took the car.” Daddy leads me forward. “She’ll give me an earful about wasting the gas.”

The bell chimes when we walk into the post office. Some white people let their eyes linger on us for a few seconds too long before setting brown paper – wrapped parcels on counters or joining us in the line to buy twenty-five-cent war stamps. We’re the only black people in here.

Daddy’s tall frame curves like a question mark over the postal counter. A man behind us reads the newspaper. I crane to see the headlines:

Worries seep out of everybody but Daddy. It’s in the way they purse their lips and knit their hands or fuss with their briefcases or purses. We’re all holding our breath and waiting for the world to fall out from under us.

Cheers draw everyone to the post-office windows. Youngish white boys dressed in army uniforms jump into cars. The small crowd claps. The boys’ cheeks flush pink as they flash us their perfect teeth. I think of Raymond. How the olive green of his uniform will make his skin glow. How he’ll earn medals of honor to decorate the lapel with because he’s smart.

A little girl sets her elbows on the window ledge. “I wanna be like them, Mommy. I wanna wear a hat like that.”

The mother draws the little girl’s attention to a wall poster. “This lady has a hat on, too, Wendy.”

It’s a pretty white lady in a green army hat. Buttons shine on her lapels like fallen stars. The caption reads:

I take a step closer. My heart thuds in my chest as if it’s grown fingers of blood and tissue, ready to latch on, grip something other than all it’s ever known.

“I heard them saying in Edgartown that there’re still men trapped in the ships at Pearl,” our neighbor Montgomery says to Daddy. They’re playing bid whist and sipping amber liquid from two glittering tumblers. Mama’s packing up a meal for Montgomery. She feeds him on occasion since his wife died last year. Daddy says Montgomery’s not a man who pays attention to details, so he’s easy enough to have around without our secret slipping out.

I linger near the parlor door. The radio crackles in the background, reporting the latest news.

“Let us not worry ourselves with such sad talk,” Mama says.

“Them Nazis might show up here. I went and got me some blackout curtains, and I’m going to set up my own bunker.” Montgomery rubs the salt-and-pepper whiskers across his cheeks and chin before setting down a card on the table. “Then what we gonna do?”

“No use in —” Mama calls from the kitchen.

“There’s black soldiers headed there, too,” Montgomery adds.

Mama joins them in the parlor with a skillet of golden corn bread and a jar of fresh honey.

“They’re not going to let us fight. Really fight,” Daddy says, flicking a card from his hand. “Even if more of us wanted to. They’ll make us stay in the kitchen or mop up the blood of white folks.”

“You’d think they’d want to send us over there to die, and be rid of us.” Montgomery reaches for a slice of the warm corn bread. “The colored newspapers been telling our boys to sign up. That we can fight for our rights abroad and at home.”

My heart squeezes. My hands flutter, and I clutch them tight.

“The Finley boy enlisted,” Montgomery reports.

Mama starts a worried hum and rocks back and forth on her heels. I hold my breath.

Daddy drops his head. “Now, why would they let him go on and do that?”

“He didn’t give them a choice,” Montgomery says.

“He up and left?” Mama asks, horrified.

“Sure did.”

My heart beats so loud, I’m certain they can hear it.

“His mama cried and cried. He said he wanted to fight for his country.”

“His country? This country?” Daddy slams his cards down on the table. “Who sold him that lie? That this has ever been or ever will be his country is the greatest lie ever told. When has this country cared about colored folks? Maybe when they were selling them on the auction block and needed them to pick cotton? But we’re nothing but flies in the milk here. That’s the way it’s always been and how it’s always going to be. Finley’s a damn fool. His father is probably grumbling around in his grave.”

“We shouldn’t get mixed up in this. White folks’ wars always get the rest of us in trouble,” Mama says with fear crackling in her voice. She told me that before she met Daddy, she’d been taken by a British soldier, and that she had to resort to means she wouldn’t tell me to get away. Daddy told me the sight of soldiers kick up bad memories for her.

I want to feel like Mama and Daddy. I want to not want to do something. I want to be like an untethered balloon, floating. I want to fight the urge swirling in the pit of my belly. I want to do things like we always have.

But I understand Raymond Finley.

His kiss still warms my mouth.

I remember the people clapping and the pride of the soldiers Daddy and I saw at the post office. I remember the way the little girl looked at them. I remember the poster.

I understand wanting to belong somewhere, wanting to be part of something, wanting to do something — anything — to make things a little better for all of us.

I lean farther into the parlor as Montgomery starts to whisper.

Mama’s eyes find me in the doorway. She strides over.

I should step back.

I should scamper up to my room.

I should apologize.

Her teeth are clenched. “This is grown folks’ business.” Mama closes the door right in my face.

I put a hand on the door. My palm burns with the desire to shove it back open. I’ve been alive longer than Montgomery. I’ve earned the right to have an opinion.

But I can’t muster the courage to push.

The next afternoon I tell Mama I’m heading to Molly’s but ride my bike to Vineyard Haven and find the Junior Red Cross in the Brickman Building. I pace up and down the street. A few white onlookers stare, and a blush settles into my cheeks. There aren’t as many people who look like me outside of Oak Bluffs. My stomach flutters.

I should go back home.

I should go to Molly’s.

I should remember the years and years when I was content with just doing what Mama and Daddy asked me to do.

I take a deep breath, walk up the long staircase, and ease open the door. The bright-red cross blazes on it, almost alive with warning.

All the white women freeze over their worktables. Bundles of white gauze sit like small pillows in front of them.

“Can I help you with something, miss? Are you lost?” one of them says. She hitches a blond eyebrow up at me.

“I — I wanted . . . Are you taking more volunteers?” I squeak out.

An older woman wearing a nun’s habit approaches. “Yes, of course. Many hands make the Lord’s work lighter.”

The room’s so quiet, you could hear a mouse tiptoe. She leads me to a corner table, and we settle across from one another.

“I’m Mother Powell.”

“Emma,” I whisper. “Emma McGee.”

“And where are you from?”

“Oak Bluffs.”

“Of course. How did you hear we were in need of help?”

“I saw a poster about the Red Cross.”

She nods. “Very well, then. Wash your hands in that bowl.” She points to a water basin. “Must keep them clean. Then use this here.” She places a square template in front of me. “Fold in on all four sides.”

“What are these?” I whisper.

“Medical bandages for the soldiers.”

The conversation in the room picks up as I fade into the background like a vase on a stand. The other girls discuss boys they fancy and the music on the radio and what might happen to the world if Hitler succeeds.

Hours pass. Girls and young women drift in and out. I fall into a rhythm. The simple folding action fills a hole I didn’t know existed. The ache of needing to do something, anything of meaning besides collecting moonlight. The bundle of bandages becomes a mountain.

“We’re closing for the day, dearie,” the nun says.

I gaze up and realize I’m the only one left.

“Thank you for volunteering.” She transfers the bundles to boxes. “You are most industrious. You have a good touch.”

I walk toward the door. Her desk has a pile of Army Nurse Corps forms. My fingers float over the pages, feeling buzzy and light.

“Will you come back? We could use more hands. Always,” Mother Powell says.

I reach for the doorknob and fight the smile tickling my lips.

“Yes,” I reply.

I swipe an application before slipping out. I press it to my heart.

“Maybe we should leave again.” Mama’s voice carries up the stairwell, where I’m hiding and listening.

I should still be asleep. I should be waiting for her to wake me for our early-morning breakfast and moonlight. She caught the rays tonight as I watched her from my bedroom window.

“I like this place,” Daddy replies.

“This war could be worse than the others. What happened at Pearl Harbor was bad. And even though it feels far away, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s coming and will show up on our doorstep before we’ve even gotten the chance to plan. I won’t live with soldiers around ever again.”

The scent of bacon finds me. My stomach gurgles. I hold it so it won’t give my hiding spot away.

“Where would we go, Matilda? We’ve found a good place here. It’s a sleepy community. One that avoids suspicion. We know how to get through the worst of it.”

“Maybe Toronto? Or Montreal?” Mama frets. “Or back to Mexico, even.”

“I’m tired of running. Packing and moving. Then unpacking and trying to settle back in somewhere new.” Daddy’s paper crackles. The candle burns out. “Light me another, please.”

“Malcolm, maybe —” Mama says.

The hiss of the match echoes.

“I’ll think about it. If the Nazis or the Japanese make it to our shores, then we must go. I won’t allow what happened to you before to happen again. I promised you that many years ago.” He reaches for Mama’s hand. “I do what I say I’m going to do.”

“I know,” she replies.

“We’re safe when we’re together. We’re better when we’ve thought things through together.” He kisses her hand. “Go on and finish breakfast. The bacon’s burning.”

Mama’s cast-iron skillet makes a bang. “Emma’s walking around fussin’ about the war. You seen her?”

“She’ll be all right.”

“You always say that,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like it this time. She’s changing.”

I hold my breath.

“She’s been our little girl for almost two hundred years. Surely she’ll remain that way for two hundred more,” Daddy says.

“I don’t want to be your little girl anymore,” I whisper under my breath, then clasp my hand over my mouth.

“She’s got an itch that I’m not sure I can scratch out of her.”

“Well, we’re going to have to,” he says. “We have to just focus on the moonlight.”

It takes me an entire month to gather all the documents needed to join the Army Nurse Corps and sign up for training. I steal Mama’s nursing license and graduation certificate from her nursing school out of a tin she keeps in the bottom of her desk. We have the same name — Matilda Emma McGee — even though everyone calls me Emma. I change the dates to last year — no one will believe I was old enough to graduate nursing school almost twenty years ago. Then I forge Daddy’s handwriting to write a note about my good health, and write a letter from Molly testifying to my moral and professional excellence.

I try to quiet all the troublesome worries in my head: Emma, you don’t know anything about medicine. Emma, you aren’t a nurse. Emma, you could hurt someone. Emma, Mama would be so upset and say this is unethical.

“I will pay attention to every bit of training. I will not take any risks with anyone’s life. I will ask to be assigned simple tasks,” I tell myself.

I use my best pen to fill out one of the numerous birth certificate forms Daddy has stockpiled in his office. I will my hands to stop shaking. I write in a new birthday — December 12, 1921. I’ll be twenty-two years old. That seems like a good age. One that implies trust and responsibility. One that fits within the requirements: twenty-one to forty years old. One that I can pass for.

I pack a small satchel with just the necessities — clean underwear, a few dresses, toiletries, the only two stockings I have left after a year of rations. I leave room for the moonlight jars.

Mama peeks her head into my room. “Come help me pluck the string beans for supper.”

I pull one of my pillows over all the forms. “I promised Molly I’d help her pick out a dress for the cotillion.”

“And when might you be picking your own?”

“I don’t think I want to do it this year.”

“You don’t think?” Her mouth purses.

“Yes, ma’am. I thought maybe I could not have a debut.”

“Everyone has one. You know this.”

“I’ve had so many. Maybe we can do something diff —”

“Different?” she says.

I nod.

“What’s all this different talk?” She steps farther into the room.

I shrug. I want to tell her I’m tired of being sixteen. I’m tired of going through the same rituals and milestones every year. I want something new. But she lifts her eyebrows and purses her lips. “It’s nothing. I’ll pick my cotillion dress tomorrow, Mama. I promise.”

She eyes me, then smiles. “Whichever one you choose will be beautiful. You always look lovely in them.” A sadness creeps into me, and I wish I could tell her the truth and make her understand.

I take out the cotillion dress I wore in 1934. We’d returned to New Orleans, and I loved being back in the city, especially to ride their new trolleys. I’d been escorted by Christophe Laurent, and he’d left tiny grease stains all over the waist of the dress from all the food he ate that night. Mama liked him. If I were a girl who could get married, she’d have picked him for me.

I leave the dress on the bed with a note for Mama that I think I want to alter this one since the war rations will make it near impossible to buy another of equal value and beauty. I bet she can do something about the grease stains and alter it so it doesn’t look nearly a decade out of fashion. But I don’t plan to be around for the cotillion.

I ride my bike into Vineyard Haven with all the documents tucked into the front wicker basket. A new summer breeze pulls some of my hair from its bun. The stickiness of late June has now settled over the island. The sound of bleating frogs and chirping crickets mixes with the few cars still moving across the Vineyard roads and risking their gasoline ration.

The Junior Red Cross has fewer volunteers today. Fewer people to stare at me and wonder what a colored girl is doing outside of Oak Bluffs.

Mother Powell nods at me and motions to a table with a bowl of water. I wash my hands and start to work on bundling the bandages. She smiles at me. The monotony of the work usually makes me forget how many hours have passed, but today I can’t help stealing glances at the parcel of paperwork I’ve brought. It almost has its own heartbeat.

If I turn it in, the process starts. I will have to leave Mama and Daddy and take a ferry to mainland Massachusetts and then a bus to Fort Devens. I’ll be trained to be a war nurse and then shipped off to Great Britain.

In 191 years, I’ve never been away from them. I don’t know what it would be like not to see them every day, not to have Mama mix up the moonlight, not to hear Daddy’s voice.

I close my eyes and imagine my future: me in a nurse’s uniform, sitting on a ship headed across the sea, tending to men like Raymond. Then Daddy’s warm smile and Mama’s hurt eyes erase the picture.

My stomach knots.

A hand touches my shoulder and I jump. My eyes snap open.

“You all right, child?” Mother Powell gazes down at me.

“Yes.” I hand her the parcel before I lose my courage. “I want to help in the war effort.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.” I rest my hands on all the paperwork. “I want to join the Nurse Corps.”

“You’re a nurse?”

“I am,” I lie, and tell her a few old nursing stories Mama used to tell me after coming home from the hospital when we lived in Washington, D.C.

“The Vineyard ferry’s leaving tomorrow around sunrise. Some girls headed up to Fort Devens will be on it. If you want to go, show up there.”

The moon is high by the time I get back home. I park my bike in the garage beside Daddy’s car and try to slip through the door into the mess room.

The light flickers on. Mama stands in the doorway, arm jammed to her hip and a scowl across her face. “And just where have you been?” she barks.

“At Molly’s.”

“How about you try again with the truth?”

“I . . .” My stomach bubbles up like it might come out.

“Clare called me about whether you would want to have a lady do your makeup before the cotillion. She was going to set it up for you and Molly. She told me you hadn’t been by today.”

I nibble my bottom lip. A dozen more lies flicker through my mind. None settle. None feel good enough to withstand Mama’s interrogation.

“We don’t lie to each other.” Tears brim in her eyes, and she’s shaking mad with upset.

I sigh. “I went to volunteer.”

“Where? And for what?”

“The war effort. Women are folding bandages and putting together care packages at the Junior Red Cross in Vineyard Haven.”

Her fists ball. “You’re to stay out of it, you hear me?”

The light bulb goes out, and we’re bathed in darkness. Only the moonlight illuminates the cobblestone driveway.

“Did you hear me, Matilda Emma McGee?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Guilt and anger tangle inside me. I’ve never defied her before.

I climb down into the cellar with an oil lamp. I hold my breath as my feet seem to hit every creak in the wooden ladder. It’s as if my own feet want to give me away and wake up Mama or Daddy. A menagerie of moonlight illuminates the room like hundreds of fireflies sprinkled across a dark cornfield. The glow awakens inside the glass cages as it senses my presence. Shelves upon shelves of mason jars cover each wall, full of surging moonlight. At least three years’ worth.

When I was little, Mama would only stockpile a month at a time to keep it fresh. There’d always be one or two jars in the pantry or the icebox if she wanted it cool. The moon would provide forever. Now she doesn’t seem so sure.

I swipe four jars. Enough for one person for four months.

Outside, I gaze up at the house and the moon.

“I’m sorry, Mama and Daddy,” I say below their bedroom window, hoping and wishing that the message will somehow find them in their dreams.