Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“Emily,” I said.

“Call her back.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it,” Jake said, and left the room.

Once, when I was in Seattle, Emily had shown me how she took vitamins out of their original jars and placed them in beautiful porcelain containers on a handmade cherrywood lazy Susan in the middle of one of the multiple islands of their kitchen. When I was foolish enough to ask how the children could tell where their chewables were, Emily told me that color entered a child’s memory more fluidly than text, and so Jeanine knew that the jar with the eggshell-blue glaze held her chewables.

Emily had been just out in front of me her entire life. She learned to dress herself and tie her shoes before I was ready to relinquish these tasks, and she became absolutely adamant about taking responsibility for herself as soon as she could. If I tried to read her a story or pour her cereal into a bowl, she would rip Harold and the Purple Crayon or the box of cornflakes from my hands and shout-quite bossily, I always felt-“I do!”

I heard Jake above me in the girls’ bathroom. I remembered how he would leave his pants on the bathroom floor where they fell. I listened for the sound of it, for the belt buckle and pockets, heavy with change, hitting the tile floor. When I heard it, I picked up the Bat Phone and dialed Emily’s number.

It rang three times.

No one said hello, but I heard breathing on the other end.

“Jeanine?”

Nothing.

“Jeanine, it’s Grandma. Is Mommy there?”

I heard the phone being dropped on a table or on the floor and the sound of small footsteps walking away.

“Hello?” I said.

I waited for what seemed a reasonable amount of time.

“Hello?” I called again. Louder this time.

I heard the water in the pipes above my head. Jake was taking his shower. I noticed that the vodka bottle had not been put back. I thought about how four years ago I had found my mother curled up on the floor of the linen closet after I had called for her throughout the house.

“What are you doing?” I’d asked.

“Hiding,” she’d said.

I had hauled her out like an animal that had gotten stuck under the house. She had a line of heavy dust from the closet floor along her left side. I had batted at her gown in order to clean it off.

“Stop hitting me!” she’d shrieked. “Stop hitting me!”

And I had had to remind Mrs. Castle to keep the linen closet locked.

“I only wanted to change the tablecloth.”

Why hadn’t I told her, “You don’t understand-my mother hides in there”?

I pressed the phone to my ear. I heard voices. They were the voices of TV. In Seattle, Jeanine was watching television-a DVD, I imagined. Emily and John kept the shelves that I thought should hold books stocked with them. When I’d asked John where they kept their books, he had shrugged his shoulders. “Who has time to read?”

I listened for a while. I pictured the rooms. Judging by the nearness of the television, it had been the phone in the kitchen Jeanine had picked up. I wondered where Leo was. Emily. I knew that John would be at work, lecturing nonenvironmental types on the endless joys of plastic fabrication.

“I suffocated her on the side porch,” I whispered over the phone. There was no response. “I cut off her braid and took it home.”

Cartoon music filled the air in Seattle. A chase was on.

I hung up the phone. I thought of the line that traveled through me and reached all the way to Leo and Jeanine. How Leo almost uncannily had my eyes. How Jeanine seemed to possess a trace of my father in her jawbone. Her laugh had me in there somewhere, and when she sang, as she often did, I remembered my mother singing in the quiet house when I was a child.

I walked upstairs to my bedroom. I had told Emily when she was little that we were descended from the Melungeons of Tennessee. When she was much older, she realized I had been pulling her leg, but for a brief time I had her believing that she sprang from this strange, lost group of people cut off from the rest of the world in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. I had passed by the bathroom to find her looking for the telltale signs of bluish skin. In Sarah, she said, she saw the high forehead and cheekbones and the “almost Asian look,” but in herself she saw nothing.

Along with my father’s letters in the basement, there would be the paper Emily wrote in junior high, on which a teacher had scrawled a failing grade. I no longer remembered the woman’s name, Barber or Bartlett, something beginning with a B. I had marched into the junior high in a mock-mommy outfit I’d composed for effect-corduroy bag jumper and deranged Mary-Jane flats-and lit into Emily’s teacher with all my might. This had succeeded in gaining Emily a C and me a plea from my daughter never to do anything similar again. I still saw these moments spent in defense of my children as the finest of my life.

I heard Jake gargling on the girls’ side of the house. The faint scent of his musk-based aftershave reached me as I turned to lock the door.

I walked into my long closet. Most of the luggage was kept on the other side of the house, in the closet that had slowly gone from keeping shoes and clothes that Emily could use when she visited to a place where I could stash items I might never use again but did not feel like throwing out. But the many lopsided, ill-measured sweaters and scarves my mother had made over the years, I kept in my closet in an old duffel bag of Jake’s. It sat, an army-green lump, balanced perilously on top of two other boxes on the shelf above the clothing rack.

I stood up on a small step stool that Sarah had made in wood shop. I batted at the bag with my right hand until it came tumbling down. I did not think about what I was doing. I knew we were going to pick Sarah up at the train. I knew the police knew more than they were saying. Jake was right, there was still a sliver of a chance I would get away with it, but I had realized sometime during the morning that it did not matter whether I did or not. It was my children who would ultimately sit in judgment of me, and the two of them would know. I could never fool them, and I didn’t want to.

I unzipped the heavy gold zipper of the canvas bag and took out my mother’s sad pile of knitting.

“Why is it that everything she knits resembles vomit?” Sarah asked one Christmas. The girls were just entering adulthood, and that year, my mother had outdone herself, knitting a full-length sweater coat for each of them. She had used a variety of yarns in a striated design, and sure enough, though it was meant to be autumnal in effect, the result seemed more intestinal.

I found one of these coats easily enough and placed it back in the bag before shoving the remaining knitting on top of a file cabinet I kept in the corner. Then I looked at my jumble of shoes and chose the ratty sneakers I wore for gardening. I heard Jake walking down the hall toward my door. Three shirts. Over to my dresser, long underwear, underwear, one cashmere sweater. I had my good jeans on, and I put a second pair into the bag. In the bottom drawer were the slips and a nylon running suit with reflector stripes that I had thought was stylish in the store. I shoved the nylon suit in the duffel bag and zipped it up.

Jake knocked very lightly on my door.

“Helen? Are you awake?”

I left the duffel on the floor and closed the closet.

“Of course,” I said.

I saw the doorknob jiggle.

“It’s locked,” he said.

When I opened the door, Jake was bleary-eyed. He swayed slightly to the right.

“Did you shower with the vodka?” I asked, and led him by the hand across the room, where he slumped into a sitting position on the bed.