Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“You know I’m here to help you, right?”

“I do.”

The moment he was out the door, I felt relief. I liked hiding in my own darkness. I liked it to the point that I’d neglected to realize it was what I’d been doing more and more. Crouching with my mother in her house and ignoring the raucous, wild, demanding world. Even Natalie and I now saw each other mostly at Westmore. We would drive to the nearby Burger King in the afternoons and drink the brown-colored water they called coffee, groaning as we got out of the car.

I walked to the phone and dialed her house, not thinking what I’d do if she picked up. But it was Hamish.

“Hello?”

I found myself unable to speak.

“Hello?”

I hung up. I wanted to drive out to Limerick in my car and fuck him again.

A moment later, the phone rang.

“It’s called ‘star sixty-nine,’ ” he said. “Who is this?”

“Helen.”

He paused and then echoed my name back to me.

“Good morning, Hamish,” I said.

“When can I see you again?” he asked.

To think, even if for the wrong reasons, the feeling was mutual made me smile as if I were half, as opposed to closer to twice, his age. I tucked my chin down but saw my painted toes and quickly looked up. Reminders were crowding in on me.

“Maybe tonight,” I said.

“I’ll count on it,” he said brightly.

“I can’t promise. I have a lot to get done, but maybe.”

“I’ll be home,” he said, and hung up.

When Jake started leaving the studio we’d fashioned behind a drape in the living room and going out into the cold, I didn’t question it. At first he went alone for an afternoon and hurried home in the pale-blue Bug, the car shaking up to the outside of our temporary-faculty-housing Quonset hut and sputtering to a sudden stop. We were not too far from town, and I could walk if I needed to run chores. Besides, I had Emily and then Sarah to attend to. He would return half frozen and amped up, talking about ice on leaves and the way an underground stream meandered at the base of a tree.

“And berries. These dark-red berries. If you crush them, they make this sort of thick viscous dye!”

Now I put down the phone and turned to where my mother’s braid throbbed on the bed. Even I knew it was too damning to keep. I took my orange-handled shearing scissors from the pencil cup on the dresser and walked over to the bed.

In the bathroom, I leaned over the toilet, squatting down so no hair would fly away. I began to slowly slice the braid into bits small enough to flush.

For her colon surgery, they had had to shave what hair was left from her pubic area. Tucking her in at night, I’d think how we had come full circle. “It’s like handling a giant baby,” I said to Natalie. “When she’s too tired to fight, she just collapses onto me, as if we hadn’t been battling each other for half a century.”

Natalie listened to me and asked questions. Her parents were younger than mine by a decade and had moved into an assisted-living community on the edge of a perpetually flooded golf course. Her mother had stopped drinking and become the leader of the community’s pep step class. What will I tell Natalie? I wondered.

At the thought of this, I nicked my finger with the scissors. Blood and hair floated on the surface of the water. When I was done with the braid, I stood and flushed the toilet, waiting for it to resettle and then flushing it again. I made a mental note to squirt in some Soft Scrub later to clean under the rim.

I remembered taking my mother to the doctor. The blankets, the towels, the constant cajoling, and how once she arrived and removed her wrappings, no one knew she was anything but just a little fearful and strange. She might moan and scratch, but when we hit the entrance door, she performed.

I was present at a rectal examination of my mother when, calling back to her long-held notions of hospitality, she tried to distract the young intern from what he was doing by telling him the story of the meticulous restoration of Jefferson’s Monticello, which she had read about in Smithsonian magazine. I sat nearby in the visitor’s chair, helpless. The intern, a West Indian, was too polite to continue the examination while my mother chattered on. The result was that our visit took a very long time.

When I stepped into the walk-in closet, I could hear Jake’s voice coming up through the floorboards, but I couldn’t make the words out. Denied the braid, I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser I kept in the closet and took out the rose-petal-pink slip.

I walked downstairs in my old black sweater and jeans. I had let the slip fall over my hips like a tunic. Since I made my living taking off my clothes, the ones I wore to and from Westmore were barely noticed. And it would be an outfit Sarah might like when she came.

Jake was standing in the kitchen, knocking back shots.

“Well, I’ve told Emily,” he said.

“You what?”

“I didn’t tell her the gruesome details,” he said, “just that her grandmother’s dead. I needed to talk to her. I was supposed to go up there at the beginning of next week.”

“Oh,” I said. I was aware of the shape of my mouth as I said it.

“She won’t be coming out.”

I thought of Leo slipping through my mother’s fingers, tumbling down, and the sound of his soft skull against the edge of the chair. Emily had called me after she’d returned home. “I don’t blame you, Mom, and it’s not just Leo. I can’t be around Grandma anymore.”

“Good for her,” I said, though I couldn’t help but take it as rejection.

Jake began to tell me more. About Emily saying she was sorry for me and that she hoped this would mark a transitional period toward self-empowerment and other of the yin-and-yang-speak that I knew both she and Jake believed in. My eyes drifted over to the empty bird feeder hanging in the dogwood tree above the drained and barren birdbath. I watched it swing slightly in the breeze. It seemed to mock my lack of motherliness, a hollow plastic tube bereft of food.

Emily had been in love with being a mother since the moment her eldest, Jeanine, was conceived. I’d watched her pick her children up and bury her nose in the space between their heads and necks just to breathe in the scent of them.

“Why are you here?” I asked Jake. “Really.”

Jake screwed the cap on the vodka bottle and walked it over to the antique liquor cabinet that my mother had passed on to me after my father’s death.

“Because you are the mother of my children,” he said. His back was to me. He placed the phone on top of the bottles and then grabbed the pillow from the sideboard and put it inside too. I didn’t know if this made me feel less insane or more, Jake being so careful to replace things just the way they were.

“And,” he said, turning, “I hated your mother for how she treated you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Where is her braid?”

“How much vodka did you have?” I asked.

“Enough. The braid?”

“I cut it up and flushed it down the toilet.”

“Good.”

“Did Emily know you were drinking?” I asked.

The first time I’d walked into Emily’s house in Washington, it was a one-two punch. First, I noted that the entire house had wall-to-wall white carpeting and that I was not allowed to wear my shoes past the foyer, and second, when I asked for a drink, I was told that they kept no alcohol.

“She chose to believe me when I told her it was grief,” said Jake.

“Lying?”

“You are having your usual effect on me.”

“Which is?”

“Not good.”

I smiled. Jake had pulled me in the direction of faith in the world, and I had pulled him toward a place where daggers awaited behind every smiling face. At some point we’d snapped apart like a doll made from nothing but opposable parts.