Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

Going to the doctor was one thing I could not do by proxy for my mother. It was her body they needed to poke and prod, not mine. Twice the man my mother still called “the new doctor,” though he had taken over the office of my parents’ original physician in the 1980s, had encouraged her to try a sedative. It was an attempt to make leaving the house not so excruciating for her. She had nodded her head as if she found this sage advice. I watched her as she creased the dutifully written prescription once down the middle and then continued folding it over and over again. By the time we reached the car to head home again, the prescription would be the size of her thumbnail, even smaller than the notes I remembered finding in Sarah’s room when she was a teenager. “Mindy screwed Owen under the bleachers,” Sarah’s notes said. “Xanax 10 mgs. As needed,” my mother’s said.

As her daughter, I could fill her prescriptions, and though she would not medicate herself, I often popped a pill before I had to wrestle her into the car. I was sanguine about it-if, by taking a sedative, I crashed the car and killed one or both of us, life would be easier as a result.

“Emily must fuck because she’s married,” my mother said, but by the end of the sentence I’d put the towel over her head and muffled the sound. It was actually better if she got onto a topic like this. Her aggression was strength and therefore preferable to the alternative, which was her moaning in fear as I guided her down the front steps and toward the car.

I had done this too many times to worry about what the neighbors thought. I learned from Manny that many of the newer neighbors assumed my mother was a burn victim and that the blankets and towels were meant to hide her scars.

“But she’s a really nice old lady,” he’d said. “I was surprised.”

“Right,” I’d said, and then Manny went down to the basement for some unidentified chore for which I’d have to figure out what to pay him.

“Alistair Castle just stared at me,” my mother said as she sat next to me, under her towels. “He stopped coming around.”

“And Hilda started,” I said.

“He rejected her after the operation. We had that in common.”

“A hysterectomy?”

“No, sexual rejection,” my mother said. She had lifted the towel up just enough to make sure she was heard.

“Got it,” I said.

“Change!” Tanner barked.

I heard the students growing restless. Three poses was usually the max of their attention spans. The adjustment for Woman Washing in Her Bath was minimal. I had to lean farther over and replace the hospital-gown towel with the sea sponge, which I would hold at the back of my neck. My shoulders ached now but in ways I was long familiar with. Quickly, I glanced up to find Dorothy at her easel. She stared intently back at me.

Jake had come from a family that prayed. Emily had taken up the call by covering all bases: New Age spiritualism, Christian revivalism, and an ecumenical inclusiveness that bordered on the sublime.

I thought of my father tending the sheep in a graveyard for a church he had never been in. Churches spooked him, he said. “I prefer it out here, with the dead.”

In the weeks following his suicide, I had freighted that sentence with more meaning than it had most likely deserved. I did this with everything. I remembered the particularly sweet kisses he had laid on the heads of Emily and Sarah in the days before. I was struck by how all his suits were hung perfectly in the closet, with one Jake had complimented freshly dry-cleaned and ready to wear. And I went searching in his workshop for a photo I had found there as a girl.

It was still in his tool drawer. I stared at the boy who would become my father and who would kill himself in the end. How far back did it go?

I had held on to the picture as I dialed Jake’s number in Wisconsin. His work was just beginning to garner attention. He was in the midst of applying for a Guggenheim to travel abroad. He had only recently left the temporary faculty housing we’d shared and was renting a house outside Madison-the carriage house of a mansion on a lake.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

“I can’t.”

I had managed to blurt out the words, not yet able to use the more exact word of “suicide.” So Jake described the water on the lake. How the back door of his house opened onto a short flight of concrete stairs that led directly to the water; how, depending on the season, the water came to within inches of his door.

“Where are the girls?” he asked.

“With Natalie,” I said. “I’m in the kitchen. Mom’s upstairs.”

I clutched the cord of the phone so tightly that my nails turned white.

“Say anything,” Jake said. “Just talk.”

I moved over to stand in front of the window. I could see my father’s workshop and the Levertons’ backyard.

“Mrs. Leverton’s grandson was outside, weeding the flagstones,” I said. “It was Mrs. Leverton who called the police.”

I felt the clutch in my throat but strangled the sob. I was blindingly angry and confused. I hated everyone.

“I thought of him this morning, once, just a half thought really. I was driving the girls to the Y. Emily got her Flying Fish Badge yesterday, and I heard music coming from the car behind me when I stopped at the light. It was Vivaldi, the sort of overdramatic stuff that could make my father smile. Mr. Forrest would know the exact piece.”

I dragged the red step stool away from the wall and put it in the middle of the kitchen. I could sit there and look out through the dining room and across the street.

“He used my grandfather’s old pistol,” I said.

I could hear, if I let myself, a momentary crackle on the line or the hum of Jake’s breath-the baffled noise of the distance between us. I told him everything I knew, how my father had looked when I’d come in the door; how my mother had seemed almost erased, I had such difficulty focusing on her; how the police and the neighbors had been so decorous, so kind, and all I’d wanted to do was rip off each face and throw it, fleshy and wet, onto the floor where my father lay.

Finally, when I had talked for a very long time, Jake spoke. “I know he loved you.”

My mouth hung open. I thought of the vodka in my freezer at home. I wondered what medications-sedatives and pain-killers-might lurk upstairs in the bathroom cabinets and the dresser drawers.

“How is this proof of love?” I asked.

Jake had no answer for me.

I thought of the Catholic minister. My father told me that the minister had never gotten his name right. “He called my father David instead of Daniel when he saw him tending the sheep.”

“Helen?” It was Tanner. He was close to me.

I heard commotion at the back of the classroom. Painfully, I sat up from my bending position on the chair.

“Here,” he said, “put this on.”

He draped the papery hospital gown over me. “There are men here to see you,” he said.

“Men?”

“Police, Helen.”

Over Tanner’s shoulder, I saw into the back of the room. Standing just inside the door, and trying not to look in any one direction for all the drawings of my nude body they might see, were two men in uniform. Beside them, just as ramrod straight but in a sport coat and slacks, was another man. He had thick white hair and a mustache. He looked once around the room, his eyes coming to rest on me.

“Class,” Tanner announced, “we’ll end early and pick up next time.”

The easels jostled while sketch pads were collected and charcoal was put down. Knapsacks were opened and cell phones were turned on, emitting songs and beeps and whistles to let the students know that yes, just as they’d thought, something more exciting had been going on while they’d been locked inside the classroom.