Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“I mean, can I sleep here?”

“You know you can’t. What would we tell your mother?”

“I’ll tell her about this place,” I threatened. “I’ll tell her about the magazines. I’ll tell her about the plywood babies in that little room!”

Each sentence hit nearer the mark. He didn’t actually care much if I told on him about the mattress or the Playboy bunnies or visiting the house. It was the plywood people he cared about.

“I didn’t raise you to be cruel.”

“What hospital?” I asked.

My father looked at me, considering.

“Why don’t we go on our picnic and I’ll tell you about it.”

For the remainder of that afternoon, my father showed me the still-visible parts of the town where he’d grown up. We had a picnic of egg-salad sandwiches with cucumber, and chocolate chip cookies that he’d made himself. There was a thermos of milk for me, and he drank two Coca-Colas end to end and burped as loud as I’d ever heard anyone. He couldn’t get me to stop laughing after that. I laughed so hard I ended up coughing, like a bark, over and over again.

“Why don’t we wait for the darkness here,” he said.

It was a gift, and I did not have the heart to ask again about the hospital. Part of me was happy with the fib. It made him seem normal, even if it was just pretend. Where is your father? In Ohio, visiting friends and family. I decided that day that I would never blame my father for anything-his absence, his weakness, or his lies.

Jake and I had been married for little more than a year when I began having nightmares. They involved boxes, the empty gift boxes that occupied space on tables or were circled under the Christmas tree. But these boxes were sodden and the cardboard darkened. What was in these boxes were pieces of my mother.

Jake learned to wake me slowly. He would put his hand on my shoulder as I mumbled words that in the beginning were too garbled for him to figure out. “You’re here with me, Helen, and Emily is safe in her crib. Let’s look at Emily, Helen. You’re here with us.” He had read somewhere that repeating the name of the sleeper helped usher her into the present. He would speak to me like this as he saw me surfacing. My eyes would open but remain unfocused until I heard him saying his name, Emily’s name, mine. My pupils were like camera lenses, adjusting, readjusting, zooming in. “Cut-up dream?” he would ask then. Slowly I rose out of the land where I was the person who had cut my mother up and labeled the boxes. My father was in our house at large in the dream. Whistling.

As the remaining students left and Tanner futilely shouted out a homework assignment to their departing backs, I stepped behind the partition to get dressed.

“We’ll wait for you outside the room,” Detective Broumas said.

I heard them go and the door shut, but I was not dressing. I was sitting on the wooden chair, shivering and holding the hospital gown tighter and tighter against myself. I had finally done it, and now the world would know.

“Helen?”

It was Tanner.

“Are you okay?”

“Come around,” I said.

Tanner came behind the partition and knelt in front of me. We had tried to have sex once but instead ended up getting drunk and depressed about how our lives had turned out. As he knelt before me, I saw that he had begun balding on top.

“You have to get dressed,” he said.

“I know.” I stared down at my knees, which suddenly seemed as marbleized as my mother’s skin. I saw my joints, fat sheared off at a rendering plant. Scarsdale patties made of my thighs and arms and stored in a meat freezer, waiting to be broiled or pan seared.

“It will be okay,” he said. “Cops are always freaky, but they’ll just ask you things about your mother’s routines and such. It happened when my landlady died.”

I thought about nodding my head, for a moment I even thought I was nodding my head, but my brain seemed to have broken itself in two. I looked at Tanner.

“I’m not crying,” I said.

“No, Helen, you’re not.”

“It’s over,” I said.

Tanner did not know the details of my life. But drunkenly, I had mentioned how I felt my mother was sucking the life out of me day by day, year by year. I wondered if he could possibly know what “it’s over” meant, or if he, despite his anarchist habits, was still moved by the sentimentalist portraits of mothers that were created all over the world.

“Let me help you,” he said. “Is this your sweater?”

He reached over to the hutch and pulled out my sweater, along with my bra, which I had tucked inside. Hurriedly he snatched the bra off the dirty floor.

“Sorry,” he said.

Though Tanner had seen me nude week after week for years now, as I peeled back the top of the hospital gown and let it fall around me on the chair, I felt as if I had never really undressed in front of him. He held out my bra as if it were a dress for me to slip into. Seeing his attempt to dress me, I realized that no matter how hard it was, I would have to wrest control of myself and perform.

I took the bra from him and held it in my lap. I managed a small smile. “Thank you, Tanner,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”

He held out his left hand, and I put my free hand in his. When I was standing, he very gently leaned over and kissed me on the head.

“I’ll see you Monday morning at ten a.m.?”

This time, I nodded my head.

I was zipping up my jeans when Natalie came in.

“Are you back there?”

“Yes.”

She came around the partition in her Diane von Furstenberg and a cloud of newly applied perfume. Her face was splotchy. Tears had recently moistened her cheeks.

“They came in Room Two Thirty looking for you. I dressed as fast as I could. Can I hug you?” she asked. Always, even now, I radiated that permission had to be granted.

Her warmth made me melt into her, want her in the way I had always wanted a mother. But inside my animal brain, I thought how dangerous this was. The very things that would comfort me could make the necessary coil unwind.

I wanted to claw at her. At her ample breasts and what we recently had read was called a “menopot.” I wanted to take her ridiculous dyed hair and pull it out at the roots. I wanted these things because I could not have what I wanted most-to crawl inside her and disappear.

I let her move her hand through the short bristle of my hair and down the back of my neck. I let her rub me across my bony shoulder blades. And I cried, just a little bit, unable to know whether it was because I should, given the circumstances, or because Natalie’s comfort was painful to me.

“Where’s Jake?” she asked. She pulled herself away from me and held my shoulders in her hands. I looked at her. I was happy to have tears at the corners of my eyes. Would this make me more sympathetic? Could I manage it again when necessary?

I remembered our backstory. “I don’t know. He’s supposed to pick me up. He was going to hook up with a former student who works at Tyler now.”

“So he’ll be here soon? He can go with us.”

“With us?”

“To the police station,” Natalie said.

“What?”

“Your mother was killed, Helen.”

I sat down with force.

“Didn’t the police tell you? I thought you knew.”

I tried not to wince. “By who?”

“I thought they told you, sweetie. I’m sorry. Listen, get your shoes on. They’ll tell you everything they know.”

“Do they have a suspect?”

“I don’t know. I was talking to one of them, and then another guy, in a sport jacket, cut him off.”

“Detective Broumas,” I said. My voice enunciated each syllable in a monotone. I thought of Jake and of our wedding vows: Do you promise to take this man in marriage, as long as you both shall live, in sickness and in health, in murderous extravagance?