Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“They disconnected her phone last week,” Jake said. “She only has her cell.”

Sarah had not told me this. I risked a look past Jake and through the passenger-side window. I could see Mrs. Castle standing on the front walkway, talking to a policeman. For a moment, I thought she looked over at the parking lot.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

“No, we don’t,” Jake said. “We need to figure out what we’ll do next.”

I thought of waking up as a child in the middle of the night. Sometimes my father would be sitting in the chair at the end of my bed, watching me in the dark. “Go back to sleep, honey,” he’d say. And I would. I thought of Sarah. I knew that after a few bright spots early on, her life in New York had flatlined. I’d sworn that the last few times she’d visited, coins had gone missing from my change dish.

“I can’t, Jake,” I said. “I just have to tell them.”

I saw two policemen come out the front door. They had white plastic bags tied over their shoes.

“What are they holding?” I asked.

“Paper bags.”

“ Paper bags?”

The two of us watched as they brought the bags over to where Mrs. Castle stood, clutching them in their hands.

“Did she make them lunch?”

“Helen,” Jake said, his voice suddenly drained, “they’re collecting evidence.”

We sat stunned and silent for a moment, watching the men clip a slip of paper to the top of each bag and place it in a cardboard box.

“It isn’t just about you anymore,” he said. “I climbed up on the grill this morning. I went in through the window.”

“I’ll tell them the truth,” I said. “That I dragged you into this.”

“And why didn’t I call them myself?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said what I had always thought. “Because you’re too good for me.”

Jake looked right at me. “That isn’t going to help. Do you understand? My fingerprints are on the window, in the basement, and on the stairwell. I didn’t call them when I should have after I first talked to you.”

I nodded my head. “I’m sorry.”

We both sat back in our seats.

“Try to breathe,” he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn’t Fuck you. I breathed.

On instinct, when we heard a siren coming down the road, we sank lower in our seats. It was an ambulance.

“Why another one?”

“Another what?” Jake said.

“Ambulance?”

“The one at your mother’s is the coroner,” he said.

We both peered over the edge of the door.

“It’s pulling into Mrs. Leverton’s driveway,” I said. I was gleeful. Elated. As if this would cancel out the sight of police cars outside my mother’s house. As if Mrs. Castle could be standing in our yard, describing how she preferred to toast the bread for sandwiches first before she cut off the crusts. How cream cheese and chives, though admittedly an acquired taste, had always been her favorite lunch.

“Is Emily’s number there?” Jake asked.

“What?”

“You said Sarah’s number was over the phone. Is Emily’s?”

“Not after Leo. Emily asked me to take it down.”

“She had a way with kids, your mother.”

“I killed her, Jake.”

“I know,” he said.

“They’ll find out, won’t they?”

“Probably. Yes.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“I wish I had died along with her.” I had not expected to say this or even feel it, but there it was. He did not respond, and I wondered suddenly if I was speaking out loud or only inside my head. I would not get to see my mother again. I would not get to brush her hair or paint her nails.

“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions,” I said. “I read that in a pamphlet while I was waiting for my mother at the doctor’s.”

I did not tell him that I thought it applied to love. I wanted to touch him, but I worried he might pull back.

“Eventually she got better at leaving the house. I could get her to her doctors’ appointments by using a bath towel. It took her forty years, but she graduated from blankets to bath towels,” I said.

Jake was thinking, and I was staring straight ahead at the low cement retaining wall that bordered the parking lot.

It always took me a moment to recognize him without his dog. He had lost the last of five King Charles spaniels two years before and decided he was too old to risk another one. “Dogs don’t understand us leaving them,” he’d once said when we’d met on the sidewalk outside my mother’s house.

“There’s Mr. Forrest,” I said. I indicated the dapper old man standing on the hill over the retaining wall.

“Yes, her only friend,” Jake said.

In the distance, I could see Mrs. Leverton being loaded into the ambulance. A paramedic was holding up a drip of some sort, and I could see Mrs. Leverton’s head above the sheet. Almost simultaneously, a smoky gray Mercedes pulled up, and her rich son got out. Mr. Forrest watched it all from the hill in front of me. He was wearing stiff corduroy pants with a crease and a gray flannel suit jacket, under which appeared to be a conglomeration of sweaters and turtlenecks to keep him warm in the unpredictable fall air. A cashmere muffler, because he believed deeply in cashmere, was tied tightly around his neck. He was at least seventy-five, I knew. He had stopped coming by to see my mother shortly after my father’s suicide.

“I think we should leave,” Jake said.

I was staring at Mr. Forrest. As if he knew, he turned his head in our direction. His glasses were the same as they’d always been-thick tortoiseshell squares-and he would have had to see me through the slightly tinted glass of the front windshield of a car I did not own. I looked directly back at him and swallowed hard.

“Did you hear me?” said Jake. “I want you to back out and leave the way we came. The shortcut.”

It was among the subtlest things I’d ever seen, Mr. Forrest’s nod of his head in my direction.

“Okay,” I said. I turned the key in the ignition. After carefully backing out, I drove away.

I did not tell Jake about Mr. Forrest. I was beginning to feel a certain inevitability building, but at the same time I didn’t want to peer too far into the distance.

“You’ll go to Westmore,” Jake said, “and I’ll call Sarah.”

“And tell her what?”

“Nothing, Helen. I don’t know!” he said.

I drove along the railroad tracks on the access road all the way out of town. It was as if we were fugitives. I hated it. Absolutely hated that even my mother’s corpse could still exact such control. Seeing a bank of gravel just ahead, I drove into it. The wheels spun beneath us and then stopped.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

I put my head against the steering wheel. Numb.

“I should go back.”

“The hell you will.”

“What?” I said. I had never seen Jake so angry. “I’ll go back. I’ll tell them what I did. You’ll be free and clear.”

Tears rolled down my face, and I turned to get out. He leaned over me and held the door shut.

“It isn’t always just about you and your mother.”

“I know,” I blubbered.

“And it would be nice for our daughters not to find out that their mother killed their grandmother, and then their father popped through the window like some demented jack-in-the-box!”

A train rounded the bend. The engineer honked loudly, seeing our car so close to the tracks, and then the car shook and shuddered as the train barreled past. I screamed. I screamed the whole time it took to pass us.

When it was quiet again, I stared miserably at the empty tracks. My eyes felt the size of pinpricks.