Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

Jake laughed. The two of us moved toward the sapling and sat down in the scrubby grass surrounding it. He lit another cigarette.

“Plus, he loved wordplay. I told him about my father’s town, the drowning of it, and he just looked at me, bugged out his eyes like he was a cat with a mouse, and said, ‘Swoosh!’ ”

“Swoosh?” Jake said.

“Exactly. What was I supposed to do with that? He cost me thousands of dollars and did nothing but put me off Philip Roth.”

“There are other therapists.”

I started to pull up the grass beneath me, as I’d once told Sarah she should never do.

“I saw someone for a while,” Jake said. “Here’s a hint: she wore Pippi Longstocking tights.”

“Frances Ryan? You went to Frances Ryan?” I stared at him in disbelief.

“She helped me after you left.”

Frances Ryan had been a graduate student at U-Mad when we were there. Everyone knew her by her trademark hose.

“Does she still wear them?”

“It’s been ten years, at least, since I saw her. I don’t think those hose work over forty.”

“I don’t think they ever worked.”

“Better than martyred torsos,” Jake said, passing his cigarette to me.

Other than murder and seduction, I’d limited my vices to such an extent recently that from just one inhale, I felt an immediate rush. I had worked in therapy on my issues of control, until one weekend I was in the grocery, thumping melons. I held a cantaloupe in my hands and felt as if I were holding my head. The therapist had been poking about inside of me, turning my brain into so much mush.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We pick Sarah up. We put one foot in front of the other. I think that’s all we can do until they contact us.”

“Or show up.”

Behind us, we heard a car pull in. Both of us turned around. It was a panel truck with sheets of mirrored glass strapped to either side. The man inside shut off the engine but kept the radio on. It was a talk station. Rancor poured forth from his open windows.

“Lunchtime,” Jake said.

I watched Jake smoke until he had finished the cigarette. He had always, I thought, looked silly with a cigarette, somehow too feminine, as if he were declaiming from a divan.

“So will you marry Phin?”

Jake took a moment to consider.

“Probably not,” he said.

“Why?”

“She’s efficient.”

“Meaning?”

“She’s very good at organizing dinner parties and trips.”

“And feeding dogs?”

“I transferred my affections to them a long time ago.”

“Milo and Grace?”

“Animals in general.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s where I ended up.” He smiled. “Besides, I’m too attracted to struggle. You know that.”

“Poor fucker,” I said.

He looked toward me. His eyes were as I had never seen them, as if they’d been crushed somehow, flattened by my existence in the world. “I loved you, Helen.”

What I had done, not just to my mother but to everyone, seemed suddenly bottomless.

It was out before I could stop it. A loud, broken caw close to the sound of retching, and then out of nowhere I was flooded with tears. My sinuses let go, and saliva and phlegm flooded my mouth and nose. There was nowhere to hide, and so I put my head into my hands and leaned to the side to bury my face in the ground.

“It’s okay, Helen,” Jake said. “It’s okay.”

I could feel him kneeling over me, his hand lightly touching my back and then my shoulder. I did everything I could not to respond to his grip. I felt like I could barely breathe, but I took huge drafts of air. I was crying and coughing and grinding my fist into the dirt.

“Helen, please.”

He took hold of my wrist, and I stared at him.

“I ruined everything!” I said. “Everything!”

The man in the panel truck had turned up his radio. Calls for the ban of illegal immigrants issued forth.

“You have to control yourself,” Jake said. “For the girls’ sake, for mine. Who knows, nothing might happen.”

Nothing seemed worse to me somehow. That there would be so little evidence of the loss of my own life to my mother that I could even get away with killing her. I was, at the end of the day, that insignificant. Was it this that chastened me? Or that when I sat up and Jake daubed at my face with his shirt, I saw that the man in the truck had pulled his vehicle to the side and across three parking spaces, in order, I imagined, not to have to look at us while he ate his lunch. I noticed this, and then I saw the woman in the mirrored glass held fast to his truck. It was me. I was sitting on the ground in a desolate park in Pennsylvania. A man I had once been married to, had had children with, was trying to pull me toward him. I saw the sapling and the broken grills and the edge of the highway behind me.

Jake went immediately for the vodka, and when he lifted the pillow from the bar, I saw that the Bat Phone was blinking madly with messages.

“Should I play this?”

“Yes.”

Following the messages from Natalie that she had left the day before was one from Emily, who said she had also left a message on my other phone.

“But this one seems more appropriate somehow,” she continued. “Remember, you are entering a new and exciting period of your life. I’ll try later tonight after I’ve put the kids to bed.”

“I always hear half of what she says as ‘blah, blah, blah,’” I said.

Jake walked into the kitchen in order to retrieve his glass.

Sarah came next. Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor.

“Mom? Fuck, leave me alone, asshole. Sorry, Mom, some jerk likes fat asses, apparently. Listen, your other phone is busy. I’m on my way to Penn Station, and I’m taking the earlier train. I’ll get in around two thirty, okay? If you can’t meet me, I’ll cross over and sit in that hideous T.G.I. Friday’s, if that’s what it is anymore. Maybe get some cheese fries. Die, asshole! I mean it. Sorry, Mom. Two thirty, okay? Bye.”

I paused over the liquor cabinet and waited for the machine to tell me what day and what time the message had been left. This marked the before time, I thought, before my children knew I’d killed their grandmother.

Jake stood in the doorway of the dining room, drinking straight vodka out of a juice glass.

“That’s your second round today,” I said.

“No rules apply.”

I thought of the box in my basement, the one that held my father’s letters, which he had written to me when Jake and I had spent two months overseas right after Emily was born. Jake had been awarded a travel grant by the university, and we’d chosen the most obvious place to visit: Paris.

While he went off to museums or met with other painters, I walked around the streets with Emily in a sort of Central-American infant sling across my chest. I remembered how hot it was and how alone I felt. I learned to order a plate of cheeses and a beer in one café and go to the French-American bookstore. I walked the same fifteen blocks every day and spoke to no one, bleary with cheese and hops, the sling wearing a sore on my shoulder. The highlight, for me, was not the chance to visit the Louvre or to plumb the depths of Le Bon Marché, but the letters my father sent me describing his days, telling me about the progress of his herb garden or whether there was only one owl or two, the first having been joined by a mate in the trees between Mrs. Leverton’s house and theirs.

“That gives us two hours,” Jake said. “I’m going to shower. What are you going to tell her, Helen?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You better figure it out. Sarah’s no idiot, and this isn’t over the phone.”