Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

She’s ready, I thought. It’s now or never.

My father lifted the first gray blanket up and wrapped it around my mother’s waist, pinning it loosely with safety pins. It fell to just below her feet and skimmed the ground. The next blanket was draped around her shoulders and pinned down the front. Up to this point, she still looked like a big kid playing some kind of monk dress-up. But it was the final blanket that had been the hardest one in the past. The blanket that went over her head.

When I had assisted my father, I could not help feeling that as we put this blanket over her, we were sending her to the gallows. I had held the blanket up so I could still see her face-“Are you all right, Mom?” “Yes.” “Dad and I can get them.” “I’m going.”-and then I had lowered the blanket and stared at the wavy lines of the machine quilting, knowing my mother needed the reassurance of this slow suffocation when she went out into the world.

I saw my father lean in to kiss my mother before unfolding the final blanket. It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn’t serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other’s arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.

My father draped the fateful hood over her head, and my mother disappeared, replaced instead by a hollow vision of dark-gray wool. They took the steps toward the door in a rush. I left my spot in the kitchen and felt the cool morning air flood in from outside.

Just as suddenly as my father swooped my mother up in his arms, and as she moaned like an animal trapped in a snare, I rushed forward into the dining room and then to the stoop in time to see them disappear out the front door and down the stairs.

My father had planned ahead. The Oldsmobile was facing the opposite way of the other cars, with the passenger side nearest the house and the car door open. I saw Mrs. Castle and her husband drive by. My father ignored them, when on another day he would have waved. Mr. Donnellson was out mowing his grass and looked up with pity toward my parents.

My mother did not struggle. She was suffering too much to have the energy for that. The moans grew louder even though they were farther away. If I had not once helped encase my mother in blankets, I would not have believed it was she. It seemed instead like a movie one might see in which a woman was being kidnapped. My father, the criminal, would call home for a ransom that I had no choice but to deliver: here is my heart, here is everything I cherish, here is my mother for my mother.

My father got my mother inside the car and tucked the blankets in so he could close the door. The car door slammed, and he jogged around the front to the driver’s side.

It will be better when we move, I thought, but just as quickly knew this for a lie.

My father glanced up. I waved from the stoop. Down the street I saw Mr. Warner standing in his yard with his middle son. Quickly, I turned to hide.

My parents didn’t even make it inside the first house. The Realtor stood on the lawn and peered into the car as my father explained that he was sorry but that things just weren’t going to work out. He was no longer interested in buying a house.

“She was very uppity,” my mother said later. “Very curious about who I was. My shroud would have served her well!”

Mr. Forrest had come by to ask after the house-hunt. He sat on the sofa, his arm resting on the memory quilt. My father brought in a tray of cocktails, and I stayed on the Victorian love seat at the far end of the room.

Watching her construct her criticism of the Realtor from the borrowed observations of my father was incredible. She joked about the woman’s hair and nails, and called her accent a “concoction of cornpone.” And there I was, unable not to speak.

“What’s cornpone, Mom?”

There was only the slightest pause.

My father handed her a scotch, and she sat back in her wing chair as if nothing unusual had happened in the last twenty years.

“Should you tell her or should I?” she asked Mr. Forrest.

“Ladies first,” he said.

After serving Mr. Forrest, my father took his scotch and sat on the ottoman near my mother’s wing chair. We all watched her. She still had on her apricot linen suit, and her thin legs were encased in skin-tinted panty hose and crossed at the knee.

“Cornpone is two things. It’s a bread you can eat and it’s folksy bullshit. She was the latter. All compliments and sweet until she saw your father wouldn’t budge. Then her voice changed completely. Suddenly she was from Connecticut!”

Mr. Forrest laughed appreciatively and so did my father while she continued skewering the Realtor. I sat and watched the three of them from my perch on the hard red-velvet love seat, wondering if she’d read the carrot notes. I saw that inside the four walls of our house, my mother would remain the strongest woman in the world. She was impossible to beat.

After Mr. Forrest left, my father tucked my mother into bed, and I went into the backyard, where eventually he joined me.

“What a day, sweet pea,” he said. I could smell the scotch on his breath.

“Mom’s different, right?” I asked.

I couldn’t see my father’s face clearly in the dark, so I watched the tops of the fir trees, which were outlined by the blue night.

“I like to think that your mother is almost whole,” he said. “So much in life is about almosts, not quites.”

“Like the moon,” I said.

There it hung, a thin slice still low in the sky.

“Right,” he said. “The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.”

“Right.”

I knew I was supposed to understand something from my father’s explanation, but what I came away with was that, just as we were stuck with the moon, so too we were stuck with my mother. Wherever I’d travel, there she’d be.

The night I killed my mother, I slept only a short time, but I dreamed. I dreamed of snakes slithering into the orifices of my daughters and of not being able to help or even to scream. But I woke because of pebbles against the windowpane.

The sky outside the windows was a deep blue, and I knew who I would see down in the yard before I stood. It had been something he’d done when the girls were young and he’d forgotten his keys. He stole the small glazed decorative pebbles from our Wisconsin neighbor’s flowerpots and pitched them against our bedroom window in the dark.

I walked to the window. I felt like it had been more years than I could count.

“Jake?”

“Let me in,” he said. His voice was soft but strong and made me think of what my mother had said after I’d put him on the phone from Wisconsin. “It sounds like you’re marrying an anchorman.”

I had slept in my clothes. I didn’t want to turn on a light or look in the mirror. Hanging above me were the clear-glass globes that now took on the cast of separate worlds. I imagined a mother and daughter in each of them. In one, the mother and daughter would be sharing an old-fashioned sled as they slid down a deep, downy bank of snow. In another, they drank hot cider and told each other stories in front of a fire. In the final globe, the daughter held her mother’s head beneath the surface of the icy water, strangling her as she drowned.

I forced myself to stand in front of the mirror that hung over a beaux arts dresser Sarah and I had pulled from the wrecked Victorian in my mother’s neighborhood. The mirror was even older, and its glass held small circular wear marks the color of ash.