Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

We moved over to the glass-topped dining table, and he pulled out a chair.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“That’s all I thought about on the way out,” he said. I realized how tired he must be. In all the years of flying, he had never adjusted to it. Sarah had told me that when she’d asked him to describe his globe-trotting life, he’d responded with one word: “Lonely.”

I did not sit but stayed standing, my arms crossed against my chest. I had four hours before I was due at Westmore at ten o’clock.

“Before I crawled in that window and saw her in the basement, I thought it would be simple. I somehow thought we’d just say that she had died, and you’d been so distraught you’d called me, and though I’d implored you to call an ambulance, you waited for me to come before you did. Now I’m not sure what to do. Having her down in the basement and nude, and you having left her there, makes it stranger.”

On the tip of my tongue I found the name Manny, but I did not say it. Instead I turned and took down two mugs from the hooks underneath the cabinets. I poured the coffee into them as it continued brewing.

“Couldn’t we say,” I said, “that I found her that way? That she fell?”

As I placed his cup in front of him, he looked at me.

“What do you mean?”

I sat down and wrapped both hands around my mug. “I mean, we say what you said, that I was so upset I waited for you to arrive, but that instead of trying to explain how she ended up down there, we just say that that’s how I found her.”

“Nude with a broken nose in the basement?”

“Exactly.”

I sipped my coffee. He reached his hand across the table and touched my forearm.

“You do realize what you’ve done, right?”

Weakly, I nodded my head.

“You really hated her, didn’t you?”

“And loved.”

“You could have taken off, done something else instead.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Anything but this.”

“She was my mother,” I said.

Jake was silent.

“So what’s wrong with my plan?”

“They’d treat it like a crime,” Jake said. “They’d be much more likely to scrutinize things.”

“So?”

“So,” he said, “they’ll figure it out, Helen. They’ll put it together that you didn’t just find her that way but that you put her there.”

“And then what?”

“There’d be an investigation.”

I drank my coffee and leaned back in my chair.

“Stonemill Farms,” I murmured to myself, saying, as I often did, the name of my own development. It had always sounded like the name of a medieval jail to me.

He was wearing a blue sweater, which he peeled off over his head. Underneath I saw the kind of T-shirt only Jake would wear. Against a beige backdrop and underneath a picture of a stick-figure man lying in a hammock strung between two green trees, there was a short slogan: “Life is good.” If there was a reason for our divorce, it was this in a nutshell. On this point, we had always disagreed. It was also, I guess, our reason for marrying.

“Do you ever draw nudes anymore?” I asked.

“My hands don’t work that way these days. I’m working with sheet metal now.”

“Should we make the phone call?” In my mind I had connected calling the police to finally taking a shower. I didn’t care if what I said on my end of the line made sense anymore.

“Why did you bathe her?” Jake asked.

“I wanted to be alone with her,” I said. The word “alone” rang in my head. Suddenly I looked at Jake and felt he was still thousands of miles away and that this would be true no matter how close he moved.

Through the closed windows leading out back, I could hear the neighbor’s baby scream. It was a child whom I had never seen but whose screams were the unhappiest I’d ever heard. And long. They arced and warbled and started up again. It was as if the mother had given birth to an eight-pound ball of rage.

I finished the dregs of my coffee. “Another?”

He handed me his empty cup, and I took both mugs over to the counter to refill. We had always done that well together-drunk coffee. I would be his model, and he would sit and sketch me, and between the two of us, we could drink three pots of coffee in an afternoon.

“I think you should tell me how it happened. Exactly how.”

I carried the cups back over to the table, setting his down but holding on to mine. “I think I should shower,” I said. “I have to be at the college for a ten a.m. class.”

Jake pushed back his chair and looked up at me.

“What’s wrong with you? You’re not going to Westmore. We have to figure this out and then call somebody.”

“You call,” I said.

“And say what, Helen? That you were tired and it seemed like a good day to murder someone?”

“Don’t use that word,” I said.

I walked out of the room. I thought of Hamish as I climbed the stairs. A day when he would want to kill his mother would never come.

Outside the upstairs front window, I could see the line of poplars that swayed in the breeze. Their remaining leaves were golden and peach, and fluttered on their stems. Years ago I had thought that getting away from my mother would be only a matter of time, that fleeing meant taking a car or an airplane, or filling out an application for the University of Wisconsin.

I could hear Jake stir in the kitchen. The creak of the floor under my faux-terra-cotta-tile linoleum. Would he stand at the sink and wash out the mugs? Would he watch the jays and the cardinals in their daily clamor for food underneath the crab apple tree? The views from my windows, whether leaf-turning poplars or birds at their feed, often felt like the farthest distances I’d ever traveled. I tried to imagine the Helen who had taken the wheel from her father that first Christmas vacation when he had driven all the way out in the Olds to get her. “I’ll drive this leg,” I’d said as we headed toward the interstate. “Our road trip,” my father had called it in the years that followed, as it became increasingly clear we would never have another.

I went into the bedroom and quietly closed the door. In the bathroom, I turned on the shower to let the water heat. While standing on the rug in front of the sink, I realized that I was undressing in the way one would if her clothes were caked with winter grime or the remains of heavy yard work. I rolled my pants down carefully to the ground and slipped them over my socks, stepping gingerly out onto the rug, as if, by disturbing the trouser cuffs, the silt of a dead body might escape into the air. I peeled off my socks. On my toenails, I wore my mother’s color-that muted coral I detested-which I had put on two weeks before on a long afternoon during which we watched television together. The sound of the PBS program about stock trading was like a dentist’s drill boring into me while my mother napped in her red-and-white-flocked wing chair.

I was still, I knew, the woman Hamish had wanted to make love to. Still the woman to whom girls at Westmore routinely said, “When I’m old, I want to look as good as you,” not realizing the insult. But whereas I felt my mother had possessed, throughout her life, true beauty, I had always believed that I lived on borrowed time. I knew that the same bones that made my mother a domestic Garbo underpinned my more average looks. My father, though delicate around the eyes, was also long-jawed and bulbous-nosed, and so I had inherited just enough of his qualities to blunt my mother’s. I believed it galled her that a painting of me existed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I had rushed to point out that it was only my body. “My face wasn’t interesting to Julia Fusk,” I said, trying to please her when I saw on her coffee table a monograph of the exhibit that Mr. Forrest had brought.