Summary
Back on the road, after Gram is discharged from the hospital, Sal continues telling the story of Phoebe and the lunatic. Phoebe has been pressing Sal to inform her father about their suspicions surrounding Margaret Cadaver; meanwhile, John, Sal's father, has been trying to explain his relationship with Margaret to Sal ever since they arrived in Euclid. Sal keeps refusing to hear anything he has to say about Margaret. But one night, Sal tells John she has some things she'd like to say about Margaret. At first, John is excited that Sal is finally ready to talk about Margaret, but his excitement quickly dissipates when Sal explains that she's been watching Margaret from the window, and she's highly suspicious about how she hacks away at her garden and digs holes, and that she doesn't think they should be going to her house anymore, for their own safety. When John once again tries to convince Sal that she's "trying to catch fish in the air" (115) and attempts to explain the nature of his and Margaret's relationship, Sal, once again, refuses to hear him.
In Mr. Birkway's class, Sal and her classmates begin to discuss Greek mythology. Mr. Birkway assigns Sal a "mini-journal" in place of the full-length summer journal she missed because she transferred from Bybanks. He also assigns Ben a presentation on Prometheus and Phoebe a presentation on Pandora and Pandora's box. Mr. Birkway asks Sal to stay after class to explain the mini-journal assignment to her, and Phoebe stays behind with her to make sure he doesn't hack Sal up with an axe (117). Sal and Phoebe walk home together after school and cross paths with "the lunatic." When he sees them, he addresses Phoebe and says, "Phoebe Winterbottom, right?" and reaches into his pocket (118). Phoebe and Sal sprint back to her house and rattle at the doorknob; the door is locked. After a moment, Mrs. Winterbottom opens the door and Phoebe scolds her for keeping the door locked. She tells her mother that they encountered the so-called lunatic and urges her mother to tell the police, or at least inform Mr. Winterbottom. Mrs. Winterbottom seems very scared, but she doesn't follow Phoebe's advice. Phoebe tells Sal that next time, she'll phone the police herself.
In her mini-journal, Sal writes about one morning when she watched her mother walk up to a tree on their property in Bybanks, throw her arms around its trunk, and give it a kiss. Later that day, Sal approached the same tree and thought she could perceive a small, dark impression where her mother kissed it, like dark blackberry juice transferred from her mother's lips to the tree's bark. Sal kissed the tree on the spot her mother left behind, and in her journal, she writes about how the tree tasted. She writes that since that incident, she's kissed many trees, and different types of trees have distinct tastes. The next day, she turns the journal in, and Phoebe and Ben are immediately curious about whether or not she wrote about them.
That afternoon, when Phoebe returns home from school, Mrs. Winterbottom is not there. Instead, Phoebe finds three notes, each addressing a different member of the Winterbottom family. Phoebe's note tells her to keep the doors locked and call her father if she needs anything. Prudence's note details how to heat up the spaghetti for dinner. Mr. Winterbottom's simply says, "I had to go away. I can't explain. I'll call you in a few days" (126). The Winterbottoms are confused and dumbstruck by her absence. Prudence and Phoebe assail their father with questions, but he has no answers for them. When Phoebe suggests Mrs. Winterbottom was dragged away by a lunatic, Mr. Winterbottom doesn't take her suggestion seriously and seems to think she's joking. When Sal returns to her house that night, she finds her father poring over a photo album. She tells him that Phoebe's mother has disappeared, that "she left some notes" and "said she's coming back," but that Sal doesn't believe it. John tells Sal, "People usually come back" (128). Sal takes this remark as a glimmer of hope that perhaps her mother could come back, too.
At school the next day, Mr. Birkway asks everyone to draw their souls. He only gives them a few seconds to do so before they turn them in, and then he tapes them up on the wall for all to see. Sal notices that most people drew their souls as iterations of basic geometric shapes, but despite their similarities, each drawing was different from the others, except for two souls. They were both circles with a single maple leaf inscribed in the center. They belonged to Sal and Ben, and the class quickly took notice that two of the souls on the wall were perfect matches.
The day Phoebe's mother disappears, Sal spends the night at Winterbottoms'. Phoebe sleeps fitfully and interprets every random noise from outside—the rustling of leaves, the tapping of branches—as sinister. The next day, their classmates ask Phoebe all about the whereabouts of her mother after Phoebe begrudgingly lets it slip that her mother is away when Beth Ann draws attention to Phoebe's wrinkled blouse. Phoebe tells them all that her mother is away on a business trip in London; the only person who knows this isn't true is Sal. That night, the Winterbottoms find weeks' worth of casseroles in the freezer with instructions for reheating them left by Mrs. Winterbottom. Mr. Winterbottom points to these prepared meals as proof for Phoebe that nothing nefarious led to Mrs. Winterbottom's leaving, but Phoebe still doesn't buy it. She wants to go to the police, but Mr. Winterbottom doesn't feel that it's a matter for the authorities.
The way Phoebe's family acts when Mrs. Winterbottom leaves reminds Sal a lot of how she and her father were when her mom first left. They were totally unprepared to live without her, as if she was an essential mechanism in the machinery of their daily lives. Without her, nothing seemed to work. When Sal returns to her house, she tells her father they should never have let Chanhassen leave. John tells her that she left because she wanted to leave. "A person isn't a bird," John says to Sal. "You can't cage a person" (141).
Meanwhile, on their roadtrip, Sal and her grandparents continue to make progress toward Idaho. They stop in the Badlands, where Sal's mother sent her two postcards on her journey to Lewiston. Sal remembers being shocked when her mother told them she was taking a cross-country bus trip, because Chanhassen strongly disliked traveling by car. She felt it was too fast. In the Badlands, Gram's breathing turns noticeably more labored. She can't even muster enough breath to utter her signature "Huzza, Huzzas." While stopped, Gramps notices a pregnant woman who looks "world-weary" (144) and offers her their blanket to lie down. Sal pointedly decides to explore the pit-stop rather than interact with the pregnant woman because pregnant women frighten her.
The sight of the woman reminds Sal of a fateful day when her mother was pregnant; Sal was climbing a tree, as she often did in Bybanks, when one of the branches snapped and she fell to the ground. The fall knocks her out cold. Eventually, Chanhassen finds her and carries her back to the house to call for medical attention. At this point, Chanhassen is far along in her pregnancy. The strain of carrying Sal may have caused her to go into an early and painful labor. The doctor who delivers the baby informs John and Chanhassen that the baby was stillborn, was strangulated by the umbilical cord, and may have been dead for a few hours. The birth also causes physical trauma, and Chanhassen, still unable to process the emotional trauma of the event, is rushed into surgery where she is given an emergency hysterectomy, making it impossible for her to have more children. Sal still blames herself for this trauma.
With Phoebe's mother still missing, messages continue to appear on the Winterbottoms' porch. The latest message reads, "You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair" (154). Meanwhile, kids at school continue to bring up Phoebe's mother's "business trip in London," much to Phoebe's dismay. Ben gives a presentation on Prometheus in Mr. Birkway's class, after which Mary Lou Finney, Ben's cousin, invites Sal and Phoebe over to their house for dinner. At dinner, Phoebe makes a spectacle of herself by commenting on the Finneys' high-cholesterol diet. She goes on about how her mother prepares her and her family healthy, vegetable-based meals. On the walk back to their street, Sal asks Phoebe if she'd like to sleep over at her house for the weekend. Though Sal thinks Phoebe is a handful, she can sense that she's acting out because she misses her mother, and Sal can relate to that. Phoebe accepts the invitation after making her father promise to call her if there are any updates on her mother's whereabouts.
Phoebe stays the night at the Hiddles, making a fuss over how Sal should treat her with more hospitality. For instance, Phoebe suggests that Sal should sleep on the couch downstairs and give her, the guest, her bedroom. Sal assures her that there's plenty of room in the bedroom for both of them. Sal ends up sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor of her own room. As she pretends to be asleep to avoid talking to Phoebe, Phoebe starts crying. Sal doesn't intervene because she remembers how she felt when her own mother left, and how sometimes, when people tried to console her, it only made her feel worse. Sal and Phoebe visit the Finneys again that weekend. While there, Sal confides in Ben that Phoebe is tremendously difficult to be around. Ben suggests that she is probably quite lonely. While there, Sal has a strangely overwhelming desire to touch Ben's face.
Analysis
At this important juncture in the plot of Walk Two Moons, Sal addresses a major traumatic event that occurred during her mother's second pregnancy. Sal recalls John and Chanhassen, on several occasions, proclaiming that they would fill their house in Bybanks with children; it was always their intention to have a sprawling family. But when Chanhassen has a miscarriage, and dangerous complications from her miscarriage cause the doctors to perform an emergency hysterectomy, suddenly John and Chanhassen's dream of raising a brood of children is complicated by Chanhassen's inability to become pregnant again. This unexpected turn of events injects every member of Sal's nuclear family with feelings of confusion and guilt, and it magnifies Chanhassen's existing feelings of unworthiness. According to Sal's retelling, Chanhassen was constantly referring to her husband John's "goodness," and contrasting his goodness with her own purported "rottenness" (109). Even before her miscarriage, Chanhassen is absolutely convinced that she will never fit into the Hiddle family because she lacks their effortless consideration and good will. After her ability to bear Hiddle children is taken from her, this feeling of unworthiness amplifies, because the role by which she'd begun to define herself no longer exists. They could not fill the house with children, and this new deficiency prompts her to take a long journey of self-discovery.
Sal's remembrance of the events leading up to Chanhassen's miscarriage contains heavily symbolic elements. For one, on that fateful day when Sal falls out of a tree, she remembers singing an old sailor song, the same song she remembers her mother singing while walking through the Bybanks farm, picking blackberries. The song is a repetition of the line, Don't fall in love with a sailor boy and ultimately resolves with the line, he'll take your heart to sea. The song is prescient in the sense that it points to a love-induced paralysis, or deficit—loving the sailor boy means losing a part of oneself, and as a result, losing a vital function of oneself. Chanhassen is convinced that her marriage to John underscores deficits in her character; she feels unable to measure up, unable to perceive herself outside of the boundaries of their relationship, and thus loses sight of her individual identity. This loss of a sense of self is a major reason she leaves for Lewiston in the first place.
By having Sal sing the same sailor song, Creech underscores Sal's inextricable connection to her mother's identity and sense of self. When Chanhassen identifies herself as a mother, Sal is the sole reason for that identification. When Chanhassen loses the biological ability to "fill the house with children," Sal suddenly represents the extent of Chanhassen's capacity for motherhood; Sal becomes the limit of Chanhassen's ability to identify as a mother.
Throughout the novel, Sal associates trees with her mother. She believes that her mother's spirit resides in trees. She remembers her mother hugging, kissing, and generally loving trees. When Sal draws a picture of her "soul" in Birkway's class, it is an image of a maple leave inscribed in a circle. Chanhassen's name is Iroquois for "maple sugar." It can be no coincidence then that the tree Sal falls out of is a maple tree, and when the maple branch snaps and sends Sal tumbling to the ground, it symbolizes a figurative "snap" that has been building inside of Chanhassen, as the tension of feeling hemmed in by her domestic role as mother, wife, and homemaker—while concurrently feeling inadequate in all of those roles—eventually ruptures after her miscarriage, sending her on a cross-country bus ride to Lewiston. Of course, this bus ride was always intended to be a temporary allowance of space and alone time. Chanhassen never intended to abandon her family. A major mystery of the book and ongoing denial of the narrator is the question of why Chanhassen hasn't returned to her family and what is preventing her from doing so, which remains unanswered up through the concluding chapters.
