Maybe the Moon

yeah.”
    “She didn’t know the details.” He scuffed the arm of the chair with the flat of his hand, filling dead air. “I wanted to tell you in person, to make sure you didn’t feel…you know, responsible.”
    I nodded slowly, letting that sink in.
    “Linda said she’d been depressed for weeks. Janet, I mean. So anything you might’ve said to her on the phone wouldn’t really have made that much…Well, you could tell how fucked up she was that day at the greenhouse.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.” I suppose I was rattled by then, but more than anything, I was touched by Neil’s instinct to protect me, to spare me the guilt. Was guilt warranted? I wondered. Had my little diatribe about Janet’s “incompetence” come at entirely the wrong time? What if she had told someone about the tantrum? Or left a note. Christ, a note. Goodbye, cruel world. The dwarf made me do it . “Does Linda know that Janet and I…had words?”
    Neil shook his head. “She didn’t mention it, anyway.”
    “Did she call you?”
    “Linda?”
    “No, Janet. After I cussed her out. I thought she might.”
    Neil said she hadn’t called.
    “I called her back, you know. I tried to be really nice about it.”
    “I know. I remember. I really don’t think it had anything to do with…”
    “What was she depressed about? Did Linda say?”
    “No. Just…general stuff.”
    “General stuff.” I echoed him flatly, beginning to be annoyed by his vagueness.
    “Janet had a few wheels in the sand, Cady. She always did.”
    I asked him if he’d known this when he’d fixed me up with her.
    “Well…” He picked his words carefully. “I knew she was neurotic. Lots of creative people are. It comes with the territory.”
    “Yeah,” I said numbly. “I suppose.”
    “I’m really sorry, Cady. If it hadn’t been for me…”
    “Oh, c’mon now.” I wanted to be magnanimous, to brush it off as nothing, but my mind kept lurching back to the scene of the carnage, sifting through the wreckage for clues, the black box of Janet’s personality. “She didn’t leave a note?”
    “Apparently not.”
    “What day did she do it?”
    Neil chewed on that for a moment. “Tuesday, I think.”
    The day after , I thought. “Where?”
    “At home. Her place in Brentwood.”
    I had already pictured her at the greenhouse, the setting of her final failure, that pale, angular body sprawled across the stage like a broken marionette, the lighting next to perfect. What if she hadn’t been in dwarf panic that day? What if she had just been in panic, pursued by some entirely personal demon?…And what if she had managed to keep that monster at bay until yours truly stepped in to destroy her defenses with a few lethal words?
    You’re a total incompetent, Janet. You don’t deserve to work with real professionals .
    Neil must have noticed the stricken look on my face, because he left the chair and sat on the floor next to the sofa, taking my hand in his. “Look, Cady. There are lots of people thinking the same thing right now. There’s no way you can take the blame for this. You hardly even knew her.”
    “I suppose.”
    A moment of weighty silence passed, broken only by the piglet squeals of the Stoate kids, running amuck in their backyard. Neil gazed up at me with a sleepy, ironic smile. “There’s more.”
    “Oh, shit. What ?”
    “It’s not bad. It’s sort of nice, actually. They’ve invited us to the funeral.”
    I couldn’t have been more stunned. “ Who ?”
    “Janet’s parents.”
    “They didn’t.”
    He nodded. “They specifically requested you.”
    “They don’t even know me.”
    “They knew about the video, I guess.”
    “Did they know I walked out on the video?”
    “Doesn’t sound like it. Linda just said they were trying to reach some of Janet’s film friends. They want the funeral to, you know, reflect her life.”
    Yeah, I thought, but what if Janet had told her mother about the Incident? And what if her mother had invited me to the service just to lure me into an ugly confrontation? I could already see her weeping hysterically, flinging her pale, gawky, Janet-like body across her daughter’s coffin as she thrust an accusing finger (long and white, like Janet’s) at the wicked actress in the front row.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “I think it would mean something if you were there,” Neil countered. “They think of you as Somebody.”
    “Who does?”
    “Janet’s