Crying for the Moon Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Jesse and Don

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part II Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part III Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  DECEMBER 7, 1970

  MONDAY NIGHT, DRUNK, MAUREEN STARTED HYSTERICALLY accusing Bo of going with someone else, and if it wasn’t the one with the withered arm in the next apartment, it was someone. She knew he was out catting around. She called him all the big betrayers in the book, every heartbreaker, every whore-hopper, and once she started, she didn’t stop. Bo hauled her out of bed, pulled her hair out, blackened her eyes. He wouldn’t even let her sleep on the couch; he wouldn’t let her sleep. He just kept dragging her around by her hair and kicking her and spitting at her and yelling.

  She couldn’t remember much else because they’d both been really, really drunk. Tuesday morning, she got up, hungover, bruised, miserable, without a thought in her head. Then her eyes lit on the big industrial-sized brown glass bottle of chlordane, a chemical exterminator used 1:50 to kill cockroaches and all other manner of insect life, which the ditzy buddy from Orkin had forgotten after he’d sprayed their apartment for earwigs. Next to the bottle was the Flit gun that he’d also forgotten, filled with the 1:50 chlordane-water cockroach and earwig killing mix. Not really present to herself, dazed and stupefied, she picked up the Flit gun, went directly to the fridge and Flit-sprayed on everything that wasn’t covered—on the half tomato on the plate, on the deli turkey in the gaping plastic, on the cheese, on the sad piece of leftover pizza; she Flit-sprayed them all. Then she spotted the orange juice. She could see in her mind’s eye Bo hungover, padding out from the bedroom on his big, thick, hairy hobbit feet, pulling the fake crystal fancy stopper out of the bottle and drinking straight from the decanter, probably downing the entire contents. Maureen went over, picked up the huge bottle of straight chlordane and poured the poison right into the orange juice, put the fancy stopper back in the bottle, put it back in the fridge, put on her clothes and, quiet as a mouse, left the apartment.

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN MAUREEN GOT OFF THE PLANE AT TORBAY Airport on July 15, 1967, of course the Sarge was not there waiting to pick her up and welcome her home, but Carleen’s big sister, Joyce, and her mom were there. Carleen’s mom was crying and Joyce was trying to calm her down. They wanted Maureen to tell them all about Carleen and what was going on in Montreal. Mrs. Maynard seemed out of it somehow and was really mad at Maureen, which Maureen thought was so unfair on the one hand, but on the other, she felt so guilty about Carleen, she knew she deserved it. As she was standing there, she was uselessly wishing that the Sarge and them had come to pick her up, but of course Maureen’s family didn’t have a car, and the bus that was going to drop off all the girls who weren’t picked up by their parents was blowing its horn, waiting on Maureen, so somehow she got away from Joyce and Mrs. Maynard and got on that bus. She’d known they were going to blame her, because they thought they were better than her, better because Maureen didn’t have the kind of Father Knows Best family from TV, or the David and Anne in the Grade One reader good, decent, Catholic kind of family that most of the other girls in the glee club seemed to have. Maureen had a hard-drinking, hard-living, working-class, sell-your-mother-for-a-bottle-of-beer, downtown St. John’s family who lived on Princess Street. If they’d been any further downtown, they’d be in the harbour, and those were the facts, but oh, sometimes Maureen just wished and hoped and dreamed and made up and pretended that she didn’t have her kind of family at all. She desperately wanted that other kind of family, because as much as Maureen was always getting on like a rebel without a clue, a little tiny part of her knew that all she really wanted was to belong, to be “in,” to be one of those “in girls,” one of those girls with the dad and mom and little brothers and sisters and the car and the house in on the tree streets, Pine Bud Street or Maple Avenue or Chestnut Place, one of those girls Maureen could see from the window of the bus, being welcomed back home from Expo. Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em! I don’t care. I don’t give a sweet fuck, Maureen’s mind said, but Maureen’s heart knew different.

  MAUREEN HAD BEEN DYING TO BE PART OF THE CHOIR, mostly because it would be going to Expo, but also because there was a part of Maureen that longed to be able to sing. Every year at the Kiwanis Music Festival, Maureen was one of the girls who had to stand at the back of her class choir, clasp her hands in front of her chest and silently pantomime the words to the songs. In January of 1967, Sister Mary Catherine, tall, patrician, cold, was auditioning girls for the choir that would be travelling to Expo. Anyone in the school could try out, but that day she was dismissing most of the wannabe choristers because their voices were too small, too weak. She was looking for altos with strength and power.

  When Maureen got in front of Sister Catherine, she opened her mouth and gave her all to the note.

  “Oh . . .,” Sister Catherine said. “Again.” And, once again, Maureen put all the power she had into that one deep note.

  “Good, very good,” Sister Catherine said. “Go stand over there with the altos.”

  Maureen adored Sister Catherine and hated her just as much. She’d always known, though, that if she could just get in with Sister Catherine, become part of her inner circle of singers, she would drop her hatred like a hot rock. Sister Catherine was just like all the other nuns, of course, a sucker-upper and a kicker-downer, totally nice to the rich girls and so unbelievably mean to—or, at the very least, dismissive of—the poor girls.

  It was still months before the choir would be going to Expo, so Maureen had to play a very clever game. Many times during those months, Sister Catherine would say, “There is something off. Something is wrong in the altos.” Maureen knew, of course, that it was her who was wrong, who was off, and whenever Sister Catherine said it, Carleen, Maureen’s friend, would look at Maureen, raise an eyebrow and start to tut-tut until they were both reduced to helpless laughter. That would irk Sister Catherine even more than the off-key singing in the altos, and she’d banish them from the auditorium until they’d gotten themselves “under control.” A couple of times, being sent out of the room saved Maureen, because some days, when Sister Catherine heard the off-key alto, she would get up from the piano, push back her starched white guimpe to free her right ear and listen to each girl in turn in order to catch the culprit. On the days Maureen wasn’t out of the room, she would wait until the moment Sister Catherine was st
anding right in front of her and, using the force of her will, sing strong and loud and, most importantly, on-key. Most days, as long as Carleen sang right into Maureen’s ear (without, of course, ever letting on that she was doing it), Maureen could just manage to stay on-key. It was the stupid music that made her sing off-key.

  AT LAST, IN JULY, MAUREEN FOUND HERSELF IN MONTREAL at Expo 67, mortified. Everyone in Montreal had a bouffant, while Maureen had plaits. It was the Summer of Love, and everyone who was truly groovy was in bell-bottoms or had gone all mini mod, while Maureen was trapped in the awkward, obsolete, itchy wool serge Our-Lady-of-Mercy-Convent-for-Girls school uniform with the horrible white buttons down the front and the hideous plastic collars and cuffs, which set her apart for all to see as someone who was truly not “with it.”

  The choir was staying at a convent in Old Montreal. Right away, Maureen hated Old Montreal; it was a real downer, all that stone . . . all that grey, weighty and oppressive stone. Maureen was all for gutting the old. She was all for not trusting anyone over thirty.

  The first night, after they’d all knelt in the corridor and said the rosary, after Sister Mary Imobilis had checked each room to make sure the girls were all in bed, Maureen and Carleen snuck out of the dorm and went to The Rainbow Steps bar on Crescent Street. Carleen’s sister Joyce, who’d lived up in Montreal and gone to McGill, had told Carleen that The Rainbow Steps was full of poets and singers and that even Leonard Cohen sometimes went there.

  Crescent Street that night was alive with people and music and life—real life, life like Maureen had only read about in magazines—and as soon as she set foot on that street, she felt herself come alive with all that endless longing, all that real hunger to be part of “It,” all those feelings she usually kept underneath a blanket of “I Don’t Give a Fuck.” But now, all that achy yearning rose up and almost swallowed her, and she knew she couldn’t wait one minute longer to start her real, grown-up, sophisticated Montreal life.

  The bouncer at the door of the club wanted to see their ID, and Maureen’s real Montreal life was almost stopped dead before it even began. Carleen and Maureen put on their best country hick act and said they were from Newfoundland and just visiting and had left their ID at the hotel. They were ready to get down on their knees and beg the guy to let them in. But then a nattily dressed man in shiny white shoes and a dazzling white suit stood in the doorway. As soon as he heard they were from Newfoundland, he whisked them past the bouncer and right into The Rainbow Steps; they would be his guests. He introduced himself as Perry Johns, the owner and operator of the bar. Right away, Maureen didn’t like the look of him, didn’t like all that white. Sure it was okay on that guy Trudeau: he was so cool he could get away with it. But buddy? She didn’t think so.

  Inside the bar, he introduced them to another Newfoundlander, a young fella he was starting a business with, he said. There were a bunch of them, “Newfie up-and-comers” Mr. Johns called them, giving the young fella, Fox, a hard smack on the back as he said it. It turned out that Wade “Fox” Albert knew Carleen’s sister Joyce—his face lit up when he realized who Carleen was, and he asked anxiously how Joyce was and where she was. Maureen got bored; she wasn’t up in Montreal to waste all her precious real-life time answering questions about Carleen’s big sister. Mr. Johns, “Oh call me Perry,” was telling them how he had opened a couple of bars in St. John’s, the El Toro and The Stone Mill, and was going on about how much he loved Newfie girls. He was definitely putting the makes on Carleen, and after a few drinks, she looked like she was warming up to him, but Maureen couldn’t believe that Carleen could be so easily sucked in. “Oh my God, Leonard Cohen! Leonard Cohen! Look! He’s here,” Maureen said.

  “He’s always here,” Perry said flatly, unimpressed.

  Maureen struggled to get up the nerve to go over and talk to him. She’d fallen in love with Leonard Cohen while watching Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen. It came on the CBC in the afternoon, after Take 30. It came on so often, Maureen’s mother, Edna, or “the Sarge,” as everyone in the family called her, was moved to remark, “Jesus Christ, that crowd at the CBC, they got that on a loop or something? What, they got nothing else to put on? Turn it off, I’m sick to death of listening to him jawing on. Oh, he thinks a lot of himself he does, and then look at the size of the conk on him, my God.” Maureen borrowed The Spice-Box of Earth and Let Us Compare Mythologies from the Gosling Memorial Library and even read Beautiful Losers, which she loved, wishing she was Catherine Tekakwitha, the first Canadian saint, and now there he was . . . Oh Jesus! Maureen stood up from the table. Carleen called out to her, but Maureen was on a mission and could not be turned aside. She ignored Carleen and walked straight across the room to where Leonard Cohen was standing at the bar. She stood there without a word in her mouth for what seemed like hours. At one point, Cohen turned toward her and gave her a quizzical look. Still Maureen couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  “How’d your hair get so long since Beautiful Losers?” Maureen blurted out finally.

  Cohen looked at her and then simply replied, “It just grew.”

  At that, he turned back to the bar and his glass of wine. Maureen stood there, feeling so stunned to have asked such a half-assed question when she could have said anything. For one brief moment there, the world had been her oyster: she’d had Leonard Cohen’s attention, for God’s sake, and then . . . God, why was she so stupid?

  Having fucked up her chance with her hero, Maureen was more determined than ever that she was going to live the high life here in Montreal and so kept drinking. After a few more drinks, every time Maureen looked at Carleen, Carleen would say, “Da feet, da feet,” the punchline of an old joke that just killed them in Grade 9—dead Jesus, up on the cross, and little Jimmy down below, Jesus saying, “Jimmy, take the nails out of my hands and feet and you will join me in heaven for eternity.” Jimmy scrambled up the cross and took the nails out of Jesus’ hands . . . Our Lord falling forward, screaming, “Da feet! Da feet!” And that night, again, Maureen and Carleen started in laughing until they laughed so hard that big tears rolled down their cheeks. And then in a blink, before Maureen even realized it was happening, Carleen was sobbing and laughing and sobbing and laughing and switching it up so fast that Maureen was terrified “it” would happen again.

  She tried to get Carleen to go back to the convent, but Perry kept insisting that he would take her upstairs and that she’d be fine.

  “I’ll just bring her upstairs. No need to worry,” Perry said. “You get back to the nuns, Maureen.” And with that, Perry led a laughing, sobbing, shaking Carleen away. Maureen didn’t know what to do. It was already eleven o’clock and soon they would have to leave and get back to the convent because Sister Catherine had warned them that the nuns were going to conduct a bed inspection at 12:10. If they were caught, well, she couldn’t even imagine what price Sister Catherine would exact. At the very least, they’d be thrown out of the choir and sent home in disgrace. And the other one, Sister Imobilis, or “the Mob,” was always in a red rage anyway, and she’d probably just beat them to death—or at least until they begged to die.

  Maureen started to stumble after Perry and Carleen. Just as she was heading up over the stairs marked Private, that guy, Fox—Carleen’s sister’s friend—stopped her.

  “Are you all right, little one?”

  “What?” Maureen was totally flustered.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh no, no, I’m good,” Maureen said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to find Carleen.”

  She tried to push him aside.

  “Perry said upstairs is off-limits to everyone. That’s his apartment.” Fox put his hand under her chin and put his face close to hers and in a not unkind way said, “No exceptions.”

  “But I’m her friend and I need to see if she’s all right.”

  “She’s fine, she’s with Perry. Sit down. Have a drink.”

  And Mau
reen thought, Yes, a drink. Maybe it’ll help me think and give me a bit of courage to get up over those stairs and get Carleen out of there.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Sure,” said Maureen, trying to be as nonchalant as possible. “I guess, I got nowhere else to go, might as well.”

  “Well, gee. Don’t put yourself out on my account.”

  “Oh! No, no, no . . . sorry.” Now she was going to have to worry about him, how she might’ve hurt his feelings or something. “Sorry, sorry. Sure, sure—I’d love to have a drink.”

  “Okay . . .,” Fox said. “What’ll you have?”

  “Well, what are you having?”

  “A Quebec beer.”

  “All right, that’s what I’ll have too then.”

  “Yea,” said Fox, “they’re called ‘mighty beers.’”

  It was the first time she’d ever had one of those Big Tallies, Quebec quart beers. She didn’t really like it. Bill, Maureen’s father, always called beer “old bellywash” and that’s what it tasted like to Maureen, too. So to get rid of it fast, she decided to chug it. Buddy, Fox, seemed impressed with her chugging ability, and Maureen, who always longed to impress, longed to be the best at something, anything really, kept at it, steadily gulping back the beer that Fox kept buying for her. Soon, she found herself in the centre of a group that was encouraging her and chanting, “Chug! Chug! Descendez un!” Before she knew it, she was loaded. It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen Carleen in a while, and then, just as she had the thought, there was Carleen, sidling up to her, looking sheepish or embarrassed or something.

  “Perry wants you to come upstairs.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “He . . .”

  “What?”

  “Perry, he wants”—Carleen could barely look at Maureen—“it.”

  “It? What it?”

  “It, it.”

  “Jumpins, Carleen! What do you mean he wants it?” Maureen said, starting to stand up.