Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“What’s next?” I asked.

“What’s next?!”

“You seem to be in control,” I said. “Let’s do this your way.”

“We call the police.”

“I thought you didn’t like that choice,” I said.

“I didn’t, but I think you’re right. We say that you found your mother like that last night but waited until I arrived to call them. We should do it now. I’ve already been here half the morning.”

“If we’re doing this,” I said, “I’d like to go back to the house and clean up.”

“You’re worried about housekeeping?”

“I want to see her again,” I said. I winced at his expression of disbelief. It wasn’t as if he were suggesting anything.

“Get your coat. I have a rental car, but you should probably drive.”

Just as we were dressed and ready, Jake caught my hand and squeezed.

Outside on the concrete path leading to the driveway, I pictured driving Jake’s car just beyond Hamish’s house and having him meet me. It was a red Chrysler convertible and very low-tech, but without youth on my side and after perhaps being accused of murder, I could use it to distract him. A bauble.

I drove out the entrance of the subdivision. For a while Jake and I were silent. But when I hit Pickering Pike and started heading toward Phoenixville, I saw Jake begin to take notice of the area.

“God,” he said, “it’s like nothing has changed here. It feels frozen in time.”

I was reviewing my mother’s kitchen in my mind. The scattered plastic containers and the scissors on the floor might, I thought, be seen as elements in a failed robbery.

We drove by the VFW next to the lumberyard. “Wait until you see Natalie’s house,” I said. “She has three en suite bathrooms!”

“What will you tell her?”

“I’d like to be able to tell Natalie the truth,” I said.

“You know you can’t, Helen.”

I didn’t respond. I thought suddenly of the Edgar Allan Poe story in which someone was buried inside a wall, alive.

“I’m the only one, Helen. Me. No one else.”

“Natalie knows how I felt about my mother.”

“Maybe so, but this is different. You’ve gone beyond where most people go. This isn’t something you share.”

“Most people are idiots,” I said.

We passed the old tire factory. When Sarah was four, she’d been certain Jake lived there.

“When you talk like that, it’s hard to be in the car with you.”

“Why?”

“Because it reminds me of how you could be all the time. Even when things were good, you turned bleak. You hated everything.”

“Obviously it’s my time to drive around in cars with men who feel the need to tell me the truth about myself,” I said.

But he didn’t ask whom I was referring to. Miles ticked by on the Playskool speedometer that had been made to look like a race car’s controls. We passed Natalie’s house. I chose not to point it out.

“The old bridge is still here,” Jake said, his tone offering an olive branch. “I remember that when your father took us out for drives, it was always this spot that marked a change in him. He used to get all cheery, sort of. Remember? Like he was rousing the troops so that we would all hit the house united to have a good time. I didn’t understand it at first.”

“And then you did?”

“Last night, when I climbed in through that window, it all came back to me. That place was a prison.”

“And you married an inmate,” I said.

I clenched the steering wheel. I did not particularly like being in the car with Jake. Too much history, like too much truth, could prove a painful thing.

“How is Emily?” I asked.

“She’s good,” Jake said, smiling. “She’s having no trouble adjusting to being thirty.”

“She was thirty…” I said, and then Jake joined me, “… from the day she was born!”

We laughed in the tinny rent-a-car together.

“And John?”

“Well, I haven’t exactly ever warmed to him, but he’s good. He’s responsible.”

“I think he hates me,” I said.

Jake cleared his throat.

“That would be a yes?”

“In general he disapproves of all of us. Sarah too.”

“Poor Sarah.”

“They divided us, Helen,” he said. “Sarah chose you. You know that, don’t you?”

I looked away from him.

“Shit!” Jake said. We had just hit the outskirts of Phoenixville.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“I had forgotten. I had completely forgotten.”

“Not all of us grew up in the great Northwest, with a rock edifice for a dad and an undulating waterfall for a mother,” I said. “Some of us pushed up through asphalt.”

“Just think of what it must have been like for her,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your mother. I mean, why would she even want to leave the house when outside there was… this?”

“I know this is going to make you laugh,” I said, “but I’ve sort of grown fond of it over the years.”

“Of this?”

An old bridge that bisected two parts of the town loomed up. Underneath was strewn a circle of trash. The barrel that had formerly held it was blackened from fire.

“Admittedly,” I said, “it has seen better days, but it still has a downtown. They’ve even tried to revitalize it.”

“Come meet Helen, your hostess from the Bureau of Touristry and Death.”

“That’s the Phoenixville spirit,” I said.

We pulled up behind a car at a stoplight, but when the light went from red to green, the car didn’t move.

“There’s no one in it,” Jake said.

I looked, and sure enough, without even having drifted over to the side of the road, the car had been left there, abandoned.

“That creeps me out,” I said. “What should I do?”

“Pull around it,” Jake said. “That’s somebody else’s mess to deal with.”

We did.

“ East Germany felt cheerier than this.”

“Watch it,” I said. It was as it had been back in childhood. I could call my mother names, but no other child could. I still worried for the declining businesses of the town, and I often frequented Old Joe’s son for my haircuts.

“Sorry. I know it gets prettier where your mother’s house is.”

This was a concession for Jake, and I knew it. As newlyweds, making the long drive out from Madison with Emily, Jake had expected to see the sort of stately homes that came from his greatest exposure to the East, which was actually the South. He had seen Gone With the Wind on television and fallen in love with Vivien Leigh.

Besides the cluster of mansions that were built by the owners of the ironworks on the north side of town, Phoenixville was full of old brick tenements and leaning clapboard houses. Most of the supposed revitalization consisted of looming big-box stores on the former site of the steelworks or the old silk-and-button factories.

I took the neighborhood shortcut behind the railroad tracks, which led through the parking lot of the Orthodox church and onto Mulberry Lane.

“Wait,” Jake said, leaning forward in his seat. “What’s that?”

Then I saw them. The block was swamped with police cars and an ambulance.

“Hang back.”

Accidentally, I pressed the gas with my foot still on the brake.

“Helen,” he said, “do what I say.”

It took all my energy to nod my head.

“Slowly, I want you to pull into one of the parking spaces.”

The church parking lot was all but deserted on a Friday morning. I did as Jake told me to. When I was in the spot, Jake reached over and turned the ignition off.

“Fuck,” I said. “Oh, fuck.”

“Let’s just sit here a minute.”

“Sarah’s number is under mine. What if they call her?”