Jorja's care for her daughter Marcie

Jorja's care for her daughter Marcie is shown through the small acts by which she watches for danger: keeping Marcie close after a hospital stay, listening to her sleep, and trying to distinguish ordinary childhood enthusiasm from a sign that her anxiety has returned. As Marcie's fear of doctors gives way to an intense interest in the moon, Jorja's protectiveness becomes a negotiation between alarm and reassurance. Her attention is loving, but it cannot make the source of Marcie's distress clear or guarantee that it has passed.

Vigilance After the Hospital

After Marcie's release from the hospital, Jorja's concern takes a practical form. For three nights, Marcie sleeps in her mother's bed in case an anxiety attack occurs. None does. The nightmares become less frequent and less powerful, and Marcie's sleep-talking wakes Jorja only twice. When Marcie calls out, "The moon, moon, the moon!", the words are no longer a shout: they come softly, almost forlornly. Jorja is listening not only for whether the child wakes in distress, but for a change in the intensity of the distress itself.

The morning after one of those nights, Jorja asks Marcie about her dream. Marcie cannot remember dreaming of the moon; she says she dreamed of horses and asks whether she might have one someday. Jorja answers that perhaps she could, when they no longer lived in an apartment. The exchange brings their relationship back into the ordinary scale of a child's wishes and a parent's limits. Yet Jorja's bedside vigilance remains part of the scene: the question about the dream is also a check on whether the troubling pattern continues.

A Collection That Reawakens Concern

On January 5, Jorja finds Marcie at the dining-room table in her pajamas, removing photographs from the family album and arranging them in neat stacks. Marcie explains that she needs the album for a moon collection and holds up a magazine picture of the moon. She says it is pretty. To Jorja, however, the fixed attention with which Marcie studies the image recalls the single-mindedness she had previously shown while playing with the Little Ms. Doctor kit.

That resemblance turns an apparently harmless project into a source of apprehension. Jorja remembers that Marcie's fear of doctors began quietly and innocently, and wonders whether the child has exchanged one phobia for another. She considers calling Dr. Ted Coverly, Marcie's psychologist, even though it is Sunday. Then she reins in her own alarm: Marcie does not seem afraid of the moon, and a bright seven-year-old may develop a brief, fierce fascination without it being a new phobia. Jorja's response holds two readings of the same behavior in tension—maternal vigilance recognizes a possible warning, while maternal judgment resists turning every intense interest into illness.

Anxiety and the Limits of Reassurance

The collection grows beyond the first magazine clipping. During the week after she begins it, Marcie fills the album, adding hundreds of drawings made with coins, jar lids, vases, drinking glasses, cans, and thimbles as templates. She traces moons onto tablet paper, construction paper, paper bags, envelopes, and wrapping paper. She does not spend all her time on the album, but each day she devotes somewhat more time to it than the day before. At bedtime, Jorja watches her coloring one of the lunar faces, registering this as a new development whose meaning she cannot yet know.

Dr. Coverly offers a possible connection to Marcie's earlier fear. He believes the anxiety underlying her irrational fear of doctors has not been relieved; instead, it may now be expressed through preoccupation with the moon. He explains that anxiety need not take the form of another phobia and can appear as an obsession. Jorja cannot understand where her daughter's extraordinary anxiety comes from. Therapy, Coverly says, is intended to seek that understanding. His explanation gives Jorja a framework for her concern, not a settled cause or an assurance that the moon interest will end.

Care in the Presence of Loss

Jorja's worry intensifies when she learns that Marcie's father, Alan Rykoff, has killed himself. She has not yet told Marcie. After leaving Pepper Carrafield's apartment, she calls Coverly for advice; he is astonished to learn that Alan had also dreamed of the moon and independently developed an intense fascination with it. He wants time to consider that coincidence, and recommends postponing the news until Monday so that he and Jorja can tell Marcie together. Jorja fears that, despite Alan's inattention, his death will devastate their daughter.

As she watches Marcie coloring at a desk whose chair is still too large for her, Jorja is struck by the child's physical smallness and vulnerability. Marcie's toes barely reach the floor. The sight makes Jorja feel how precarious her daughter's life is and how easily she might lose her. When she calls Marcie to put on pajamas and brush her teeth, her voice trembles. Marcie briefly looks bewildered, as if unsure where she is or who her mother is, then her eyes clear and she smiles. The scene does not resolve Jorja's fears about the moon, the anxiety, or the coming conversation about Alan. Instead, it makes her care tangible in her attention to Marcie's fragility and in the love that surges through her even while uncertainty remains.