Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“You lie down and close your eyes for a while,” I said. “I’ll wake you when it’s time to go get Sarah.”

He nodded his head up and down. “I am tired,” he said.

“Of course you are. Where’s the poison?”

“Don’t have any, Helen,” he cautioned. “You need to stay sober.”

I smiled.

“I know. I just want to put it away.”

“We should call Phin. Phin could help us.”

I put my hand against his chest and pushed. He fell backward on the bed.

He brought his knees up and curled up on the unmade sheets.

“You’ve been wonderful,” I said.

“Milo and Grace love to lick faces,” he said. “Phin doesn’t like that.”

I grabbed a pillow from the headboard for him to put under his head. “You sleep for a bit,” I said.

A moment or two later, I heard his breathing shift into light snoring. I reached out to touch him. I realized I had forgotten socks, but I didn’t want to risk waking him. I tiptoed to the closet, grabbed the duffel bag, and crept down the stairs through the back hall- Who knows, Caracas? -and out into the garage. I tucked the duffel behind the lawn mower and a few empty plastic pails that were left over from the last time I’d had the house painted. It would go unnoticed there.

I had prepacked a bag for the hospital before Sarah was born. I had made a day of it. New toothbrush, new nightgown, even a powder compact, because all the pictures of me holding Emily had featured my face flush with perspiration. I had been the rare mother, the doctor had said, who had had a more difficult delivery the second time around.

“My big head,” Sarah would concede.

“Your big, beautiful head,” I would correct.

I noticed that the sticky trap I’d set out early in the week was no longer in its place near the trash cans. I stood very still and listened. Wherever the mouse had dragged itself, it would have to be dead or close to dead by now.

Back upstairs in Sarah’s bedroom, I saw the vodka bottle on the windowsill. There was still at least a third left. Jake had always been an easy drunk. On our first real date, he had slipped under the table within an hour after a salty full professor had challenged him to a drinking contest.

I did my best to straighten the room in preparation for Sarah. I had kept her room the lavender she had wanted years ago. All the other rooms had been repainted a stark white, even Emily’s.

I moved my hand briskly against the deep-purple coverlet, smoothing out the wrinkles from where Jake must have sat to put on his shoes. I adjusted the alarm clock by one hour, having failed to do so at daylight saving time, and I used the bottom of my sweater to dust around the items on her bureau.

In this room, three years ago, I had unleashed a violence I had never thought myself capable of. Sarah had come home with a boy named Bryce, whom I had been suspicious of as soon as I met them at the train. He was an ultra-WASP who, he claimed, came from an old family in Connecticut. None of this meant much to me, and after a dinner during which he talked mostly of himself, I’d gone to my bedroom so the two of them could have the run of the house.

The first slap was like a distant gunshot. On the second, I sat straight up. I heard Sarah in that way that you do when a person is trying not to make a sound but can’t stop themselves. By that time I was halfway across the house in my nightgown, with the baseball bat my father had given me for protection.

It was something Sarah had sworn me to secrecy about. Emily and Jake were never to know that she had allowed a man to hit her. Bryce had fled the house on foot after I had brandished the bat and then slammed it as hard as I could into the doorjamb.

I sat down on the floor of Sarah’s bedroom and then lay back on the rug. Without thinking, I went through the series of stretches I had done every morning for fifteen years.

At half past one, I went back to my bedroom to find Jake asleep in the same position he had been. I whispered his name, but I had already decided to go without him. I left a note on the kitchen counter saying I would return with Sarah. I tucked the vodka bottle in the liquor cabinet, and just as I was about to put the Bat Phone back in with its companion pillow, I stopped myself. I yanked the cord from the wall and carried it out to the garbage cans.

I debated taking the duffel bag with me but decided against it. I was not ready yet. If I could, I wanted to cook dinner for Sarah and wake her the next morning by bringing up a pot of hot coffee for the two of us to share.

I had never gotten used to the official rush hour of the suburbs, which revolved around school’s letting out and parents in their cars lined up outside. In the years since I’d had children coming and going, the curbside pickup, fueled by stories of abduction, had increased in popularity. Still, as I edged my way down the street where Lemondale Elementary School sat, I was happy to see at least three or four yellow buses pulled up to the curb.

At Crescent Road, I was stopped by a matronly crossing guard with a white sash and a whistle-the full effect. I watched a mass of children-the “primaries,” they were called at Lemondale-walk in front of my car in a swirling pattern that reminded me of shifting clouds on a TV weather map. Only a few kids walked by themselves, heads bent, knapsacks towing their shoulders down. The others ran or pulled at one another’s coats and shirts, dropped their knapsacks, and yelled names and taunts across to those on the other side.

I drove on.

I passed the old music store, which was now a shop called The Ultimate Cupcake, where I had once purchased Emily’s much-despised clarinet. I thought of how when the girls were growing up, their friends would thunder through my house and think nothing of having me make sandwiches to order. This one liked mayo, but this one would have only mustard. One of Emily’s friends, disappointed in her sandwich, had stood in the kitchen and pointedly explained the difference between jelly, which she had requested, and jam, which I had given her.

The most convenient train for Sarah to take from Manhattan stopped in Paoli. This way she could avoid switching in Philadelphia and arrive via Amtrak. Instead of crossing the bridge to the side where the passengers were let out, I checked my watch. I counted out the minutes and double-parked outside Starbucks.

I walked briskly into the station and over to the Amtrak counter. I asked for a current schedule for the Northeast Corridor. On the way past the local SEPTA booth, I took two or three of their schedules as an afterthought. I did this by rote, as I had done my stretches, as I had packed my duffel bag and stowed it in the garage. My brain had divided in half, half focused on the tasks of normalcy-picking up my daughter from the train-and half focused on escape.

I got back into the car and turned it around. Driving the red rental car made me feel even more conspicuous, but it had sat in the driveway, blocking any other choice. I thought of the promise I had made to Hamish-that I would see him tonight-and wondered if I was insane. I pictured Natalie in a crossing-guard outfit, holding a stop sign and blocking my way.

Sarah was standing at the top of the platform stairs, scanning the parking lot. She had on a ratty sheepskin coat, beneath which I saw an old pair of my Frye boots that she had confiscated on her last trip home. “These are so urban hippie retro,” she’d said. “I can’t believe you wore these.” When I told her that apparently she was now going to be wearing them, she said, “Yeah, but not seriously. ”

Her hair was braided into two pigtails that reached to her waist, and clustered about the crown of her head were what seemed an infinite number of rhinestone barrettes. She would not recognize the car, and so I cruised up beside her, ducked my head across the passenger seat, and called her name.