Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

I had once read one of Sarah’s true-crime books that she’d left at the house. It was a book about a serial killer named Arthur Shawcross, and the most vivid thing in it, for me, was the portrait of a woman whom he had obviously meant to kill but who was too smart for him. She was old for a prostitute and still doing speedballs and getting high. She’d gotten high for three days straight after Shawcross tried to strangle her while raping her in his car. He was a man who picked up a prostitute, drove to a deserted spot, and killed her after he was unable to perform. She had known how to talk to him, known how to brace herself so that his hands, enclosed around her neck, could not produce the leverage needed to crush her windpipe. And she had known that her survival was connected intimately with his ability to ejaculate. It had taken hours, or so she said, and it was arduous, but he was grateful enough that he didn’t kill her and instead drove her back to the spot where he’d picked her up.

“How can you read such things?” I asked Sarah over the phone, brandishing, as if she could see me, the consumed-in-one-night book.

“It’s real,” Sarah had said. “There’s no bullshit.”

Hamish returned, smelling of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, which it embarrassed me to know. He ducked in the backseat and held out a small blue hand towel. I looked at it in horror, but I did not reach for it.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m good.”

Again a quizzical look came across his face, but instead of asking me a question, he broke into a smile.

“You like having it on you,” he said.

“Hamish,” I said, sitting up and scrambling out of the car to find my pants and underwear, “your job is not to make me throw up.”

“Harsh,” he said.

“What I mean is that I’m still your mother’s friend, and your seduction lines are calibrated for women half my age.”

“If that,” he said.

“Touché,” I said, and zipped up my pants while slipping on my flats.

“You’ve got to admit this isn’t our usual way of relating.”

“We’ll take my car,” I said. “I’ll drive. You go around the side.”

“Sweet. Mom always makes me drive.”

I sat down behind the wheel and whisked my purse off the passenger seat, tucking it by my side. I pictured an eight-year-old Hamish running to my car with a wild smile on his face. He had been smitten with Emily from the first time they’d met when they were two. I looked out the window at the full-grown man whom I had almost just fucked and who was now walking around to the passenger door. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I was capable of.

He swooped in and kissed me on the cheek.

“Buckle up,” I said, my spine stiff against the soft and mealy seat.

I backed out of the driveway, the gravel crunching under my tires. It was Leo’s baby carrier that had torn the hole in the back of the passenger seat. I had struggled to get it inside the car on the day my mother dropped him, trying to show Emily I could take care of it while she stood on the sidewalk, clasping Leo to her chest and shouting, “It doesn’t matter, Mother! Leave it! Leave it!” until I shoved the carrier in and slammed the door. Inside the car, I turned and saw a spot of blood seep through Leo’s blue baby bonnet. When I’d called to tell my parents I was pregnant for the second time, my mother had yawned extravagantly and said, “Aren’t you bored yet?”

“Who is Natalie out with?” I asked as I swung the car onto the road and started off.

“Shit,” Hamish said. “Don’t make me tell you.”

But I didn’t want to talk about what had happened between us. “Okay, can we talk about your father instead? Are you ever happy that he died?”

“Man, what’s with you? I’m sorry about back there, but chill out, okay? I want to make you happy.”

“Sorry, I just came from my mother’s house.”

“Oh.”

It was roundly known that my mother and I had problems with each other, that I attended her by duty, but now I had done something stupid, I knew. I had given Hamish knowledge of my previous whereabouts. I was a lousy criminal, and he was a lousy lay. We were perfect together.

“It’s good with my mom,” Hamish said. “We get along, and living together works for us. It was harder with Dad.”

“You don’t have to,” I said, feeling guilty now.

“I’ll tell you if you want.”

I remembered Hamish as a toddler then, how he would allow Emily to boss him around and how, over time, she took advantage of this in a way I didn’t like. He was that same boy now. He would tell me what I wanted to know in the same way he would endlessly give his toys to my small daughter or bring her, on demand, bucket after bucket of sand for building Barbie castles. Natalie and I had pretended only briefly that the two of them would grow up to be married. At a certain point we both realized that neither of us knew the first thing about what made a good marriage.

“You know your father and I didn’t get along,” I said.

We had driven out of the McMansions-set-in-birches section and were passing through the long no-man’s-land of one-story warehouses and shabby ’50s-era community halls.

“That’s not unusual for you,” Hamish said, looking straight ahead.

“What?”

“If you call ‘mostly ignoring me’ getting along,” he said.

“I’ve never ignored you,” I said.

“I know what you think of me.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m lazy. That I’m a drain on my mom. Stuff like that.”

I was silent. Everything he said was true. I pulled off Phoenixville Pike and onto Moorehall Road. I was taking the long way round.

“I’m a real bitch, huh?” I said.

Hamish laughed. “You know what? You kind of can be.”

I slowed the car down and scanned the lot of Mabry’s Grill for Natalie’s car.

“He picked her up in a Toyota four-by-four,” Hamish said.

I cleared my throat and put my turn indicator on for Yellow Springs.

“My dad was horrible in a lot of ways,” Hamish said. “I don’t miss the screaming between them and between me and him. He hated me.”

It was the moment to say “No, he didn’t” or “I’m sure that’s not true,” but I wouldn’t. Hamish may have needed a tantric-sex tutorial, but his sense of the truth was exact.

“My mom’s glad,” Hamish said. “Though she wouldn’t say it to me. His great dream was to move back to Scotland someday.”

“How can she stand to live so near the bridge?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Hamish said. “I think it’s because she wants to be there in case his spirit rises out of Pickering Creek so she can bash it over the head.”

“That’s how I feel about my mother,” I said.

“I know,” Hamish said, and reached out to touch my hair.

How long would it take Jake to get to Pennsylvania? The flight was at least five hours, maybe more. He was coming from Santa Barbara, not Los Angeles or San Francisco. There was too much I didn’t know. I wanted to tell Hamish this: that the very same afternoon Jake had met my mother, he’d turned to me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me she was nuts?” And how it had been like a curtain parting for the first time onto a larger world, the beginning of the great divide between Jake’s and my mother’s love. The force that, if I had let it, would have ripped me apart.

“She met him on the Internet-Mom’s date,” Hamish said. “He’s a contractor from Downingtown.”

“What?”

“She was afraid you’d judge her. I think she wants to get married again.”

We passed the gravel yards and one or two low-lying buildings that, for as long as I’d lived in the valley, I’d never seen anyone enter or leave. These buildings sported two large V s on their corrugated windowless outsides and were protected by electrified fencing.