Summary
Moth stays alone in the Jeep, not keeping track of the time since Sani left. Eventually she walks to the nearby Walmart she finds by looking on her phone. She is halfway there, weeping, when she hears Sani yelling from the Wrangler. She keeps walking. He pulls over in front of her and jumps out with a cigarette between his lips. There are dark circles under his eyes. He collapses in front of her with the note and the application clutched in his hands. He apologizes repeatedly. She holds his cheeks firmly and tells him he has to take care of himself. She tells him to leave her alone.
Moth leaves, but then second-guesses herself, eventually walking back to Sani’s front door. He holds her like he will never let go. They go on a night hike under the stars and comment on how they each look different in a good way, with Moth happy and blurry around the edges and Sani buzzing like a guitar string. Sani says he is going to try to stay in this Glittering World. He promises to audition for Juilliard. They come across a group gathered around a fire. They keep their distance, listening to conversation from a hill. When they hear music, Moth encourages Sani to play. He picks up a guitar and sings in a language Moth doesn’t know while she dances in the shadows.
Moth comments that she still doesn’t know what Sani’s pills are for; he only says that they are for his mind. She wonders why he threw them away again. Sani’s dad finds the pills and shouts at Sani that he needs to tell Moth that if she cares about him, she will make him take the pills. They argue over whether Moth is making Sani sicker, as Sani’s father claims. Sani says he started singing again because of her. Sani’s father says she makes him avoid the world. Sani’s father storms outside and then immediately returns. He looks as though he has seen a ghost. He demands that Sani sketch Moth. Sani obliges, drawing a sketch of Moth immediately. Moth doesn’t understand why sketching makes Sani cry.
From a drawer Sani’s father gently takes out a photo of Moth. He places it next to the sketch. Sani’s father whispers that Moth’s grandfather gave him the photo a long time ago. He says Moth feels significant to Sani because “this was planned. This is Hoodoo work.” Moth looks at the photo of herself and her grandfather in front of an oak tree. On the back of the photo is a message: “My friend, I know I ask too much, but if your son can help her home, she’ll teach him how to live.” Moth doesn’t know how her grandfather knew they would run away together.
Grandfather left a letter for her. In it, he says she will have trouble crossing, but she can’t stay here in her cocoon; she must grow sturdy wings that will fly her to a different sky. He says she has magic in her bones and her ancestors are with her. He tells her to go to the crossroads and walk north home. She says she doesn’t understand: home is east. Sani tears at his hair and yells, “How dare he.” Sani’s dad grabs him and cries, “He knew you had a gift. He knew what would happen. If I did not agree, she would have roamed forever and you would have folded inward into nothing. I never thought it would work.”
Sani keeps crying in his father’s arms. She wants to move toward him, but she can’t, as though she is trapped in a jar. Sani’s father says that the five-finger grass (Sani’s tattoo) appeared on his skin like an omen. Sani reaches for Moth’s hand but can’t seem to grasp it. He says moths are both omens and miracles. Moth feels her scar splitting open. She remembers the crash and the car that split in two. Lines appear on Sani’s face, like there’s an earthquake inside him. He tells Moth that he is being selfish and she has to leave. He repeats it. He tells her she is his heart, and he loves her, but she has to leave. Sani says she isn’t real. Her ashes are in a vase. He says she is a ghost. He says there is a whole lot of heaven waiting for her.
Moth comments that this morning she woke up dead. She can’t understand why her heart keeps beating if she is already gone. She realizes she kept up daily rituals but no one saw her. She accidentally haunted Aunt Jack. She got involved with Sani, a boy who her Hoodoo grandfather knew had a gift for seeing the dead. Sani sees past the veil. Moth realizes no one ignored her; rather, they simply didn't see her. She has been entombed in dirt, covered in dust, and is growing wings only to leave. The truth is that she didn’t make it out of the hospital with her parents and brother. Moth says her wild heart didn’t think it could die, so she stayed to punish herself for living.
Sani finds the ghost version of Moth and they speak about how she has to leave. He sees ghosts—that is why his mind is always so heavy and busy and why he takes pills. Moth goes to the crossroads. Her gray-bearded grandfather appears through a haze. He says he told her, the dead don’t leave. She wishes she could stay with Sani. A mystical red string has stitched their spines together. She doesn’t know how to unravel the magic. She tells him that she will dance when he sings; she will hear him somehow.
She needs to go to the Fifth World that only ghosts know. She will be with her family and her ancestors, in a place where death is just one dimension in a universe of thousands of dimensions. She reaches to touch her grandfather’s hand as Sani lets go of hers. Moth flutters her new dusty wings and Grandfather tugs her across the boundary between worlds. Grandfather holds her close and says she will always have her dusty wings. She grew them, and she can use them to hover forever. Sani is on his knees, singing a request for Moth to haunt all his dreams.
Sani buries a goodbye note to Moth in the ground in Central Park, New York City. He puts it in the ground so the trees and seeds know Moth was alive. He says spirits don’t die, they shift. He hopes the roots and magic and ancestors get the message to her that he hopes they will find each other again a Sixth World of their own creation where they live in a cocoon together. He imagines their backs being laced together so that when they are born again they will never have to part. Ten years later, Sani is playing a sold-out concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Sani dedicates “Summer Song” to Moth, saying she is the reason he remembered his voice and tries to live. The song contains all of the improvised lyrics the two worked out on their road trip. The refrain goes: “Honey, all the clocks are against us, we’ve only got one summer, I’ll do your bidding just tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want.”
Analysis
McBride continues building on the theme of abandonment with Sani’s desertion of Moth at their campsite. Moth doesn’t understand his motive for severing their connection so abruptly, but Sani hints at the inevitability of them having to separate; this suggests Sani may understand that Moth is a ghost. However, McBride leaves Sani’s level of awareness open to interpretation. It is also likely that Sani tries to end things early because he has been conditioned to believe that everything good in his life will eventually leave him.
The theme of mental illness arises when Moth sees Sani again. Sani is smoking again and disheveled, with dark eye circles that suggest Sani has entered a manic-depressive high and has not been sleeping. In this way, McBride shows that Sani has likely stopped taking his medication, leaving him open to perceiving Moth again. This explains the sudden contrition he shows her as he apologizes profusely and begs her to stay. Despite perceiving that Sani is unwell and will continue to act inconsistently, Moth softens her resolve against him and the two regain their former intimacy.
The themes of transformation and healing from trauma come up with Sani and Moth’s nighttime hike. Both comment on the serenity the other is emanating, with Sani seeming to vibrate like a guitar string and Moth becoming blurry around the edges. While Sani interprets this blurring as Moth being happy, he doesn’t realize that he is witnessing the outlines of her form dissolving, as though her “cocoon” is breaking. Having found joy in dancing again, Moth is unwittingly drawing closer to her full passage to the afterlife. Similarly, Sani is finding his voice; with this renewed ambition to sing, he is coming closer to leaving his isolation.
As a contrast to these apparently positive developments in the plot, McBride brings back the theme of mental illness with Sani’s father’s angry insistence that Sani take his pills consistently. Sani’s father even implicates Moth, suggesting that she should be encouraging Sani to take his pills rather than making him sicker—a claim Sani rejects. The story reaches its climax when Sani’s father has a revelation that prompts him to ask Sani to sketch a picture of Moth. While Moth doesn’t understand the purpose of what Sani’s father is demanding, she weeps as he draws, knowing intuitively that something profoundly destabilizing is happening.
McBride returns to the theme of ritual with the revelation that Sani and Moth found each other because of a Hoodoo spell Grandfather cast a decade earlier. With this revelation, McBride gives context to the objects Grandfather buried in the Nashville cemetery. Having predicted Moth’s death and her delayed journey to the afterlife, Grandfather exploited Sani’s gift for communicating with spirits. Upon hearing this news, both Sani and Moth realize that, as much as they love each other, their connection was orchestrated by powerful Hoodoo magic.
The denouement of the novel details how Sani and Moth have both transformed. Despite the pain of knowing they must separate, Moth and Sani recognize the positive elements of Grandfather’s manipulation. For Moth, the time she spent believing she was still alive proves to be her own cocoon time in which she was so traumatized from the car crash that she entered an intermediary zone in which she was isolated from both the living and the dead. With Sani’s companionship, Moth overcomes the trauma of her death and summons the courage to break free from her cocoon. McBride makes this symbolic change literal by showing Moth sprout actual wings that allow her to flutter into the afterlife, where her grandfather is waiting.
Sani has a transformation of his own. In exchange for being a companion to Moth and helping guide her to the afterlife, Sani has received encouragement and support from Moth as she helped him re-access his singing voice, his creativity, and his confidence. Sani leaves the cocoon of his depressive isolation by pursuing his musical career at the Juilliard Conservatory, fulfilling Moth’s dream of attending herself. His success is confirmed by the sold-out show he plays at New York’s Madison Square Garden—a world-renowned arena. In a gesture that conveys his ongoing love for and appreciation of Moth, he dedicates the “Summer Song” to her. With this ending, McBride depicts the ill-fated lovers as maintaining their spiritual connection.
