Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

“I think we shouldn’t make any decisions just yet,” I said. “We’ll see how the next few days play out.”

I stood and offered her my hand. She took it and wobbled up.

“Better?” I asked.

“Good enough.”

As we walked slowly up the incline and back to the car, I felt as if we were being watched from behind. As if Mrs. Leverton and a thousand ghosts were standing in the woods, advancing as we left, wanting to get a look at the woman who had killed her mother in the same way you would turn the light off in an empty room.

“I never really knew Grandpa,” Sarah said as we came within sight of the car.

“I hate the phrase ‘You never get over it,’ but that’s a hard one. It stays.”

“And Grandma?”

“She lost her connection to the world,” I said. “And I replaced it.”

“No, I mean, did you love her?”

We stopped for a moment before crossing the road.

“That’s a hard one too,” I said.

“If you had to answer it,” Sarah said. “If you were asked in a court of law.”

I don’t know, I thought. “I will say yes,” I said aloud.

I led her to the car and opened the passenger-side door. I heard a musical gurgling sound.

“That’s me,” she said, retrieving her phone from the pocket of her coat.

“Your grandmother thought the cell phone I gave her was a grenade.”

“I know.”

I went around to my side of the car and got in.

“It’s from Dad,” she said, after getting into the passenger side. “A text message.”

She held up the phone so I could see the screen. I ignored her face and focused instead on Jake’s words.

“Helen-search warrant,” it said.

I imagined Jake standing in the downstairs bathroom, unable to speak for fear he might be heard.

Sarah slipped the phone back in her pocket. “We should go home.”

“Do you think you could drive?”

“Not with my ankle.”

“Right.”

I started the car and did a U-turn, taking us back in the direction of the Ironsmith. I can drop Sarah there was my first thought. I would tell her what? That I wanted to face the police alone? She would never buy that. I knew her well enough to know she would not let me out of her sight, not for one moment. For reasons that I feared could only spell her doom-because I was her mother and because I needed her-she would stick to me like glue.

Natalie was in York. This meant Hamish would be alone. Jake had told me he had friends in Switzerland in a town called Aurigeno. He had gone to the trouble of spelling it out. But I no longer had a passport. It had expired years ago.

“You’re taking the long way,” Sarah commented.

“I always do,” I said.

“Are you frightened?” she asked.

When I didn’t respond, she volunteered, “I am.”

We passed a new corporate complex whose landscaped lawns still had the checkerboard pattern of freshly laid sod. They did them better now than when the girls were growing up. No more metal boxes surrounded by wide loops of easy-access road. Now there were mature trees brought in by the truckload.

People came out of the buildings and approached their cars. I would wait until very late at night, when no one but the security guards were about. I could park my car and walk around unnoticed. Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse. Helen Knightly, into the Chester Corporate Center’s false pond.

I did not want to leave my children. I had loved them both immediately. They were my splendor and my protection, both something to safeguard and something to safeguard me.

I saw a familiar neon sign up ahead.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “I’m going to pull in here.”

Easy Joe’s was full of the silver-haired happy-hour crowd that filled up on cheap booze to mask the flavor of their meals. The arrival of someone my age, unaccompanied by a parent, was an event. When Sarah followed, it caused a hush. It was the opposite of a biker bar, but it could make you feel just as unwanted. What I knew about Easy Joe’s was that they had a pay phone by the bathrooms and an exit opening onto the back.

I set Sarah up on one of the plush leather stools, facing a mirror lined with booze.

“I may be a while. I need to collect myself.”

“Should I order something?”

I opened my purse. I would need all the money I had, but I had never been stingy with my younger child.

“Will a twenty do?” I asked.

“Do you want anything?”

“Just to wash my face. I’ll come back for you,” I said. I placed the keys to Jake’s car on the bar.

“Mom?”

“I love you, Sarah,” I said. I reached out and touched her hair and cheek.

“It will be okay, Mom. Dad’s here to help.”

“Hey, do you have that butterfly barrette?” I asked, brightening.

She dug into her pocket and brought it out. I took it from her outstretched hand.

“For luck,” I said, holding it up. I knew I would cry then, so I turned and quickly rounded the corner of the bar.

At the phone, I put in my change and dialed.

“Hamish, it’s Helen,” I said. “Could you come pick me up?”

“Where?”

I thought quickly. It was a walk I could easily make.

“Vanguard Industries. Twenty minutes.”

“You know,” he said, “Mom told me about your mom.”

I leaned my head into the reflective surface of the phone. Pressed it hard into the return-change knob.

“Yes. Vanguard, okay?”

“I’ll be there.”

I hung up. The voices in the restaurant area behind me grew louder.

I did not turn but proceeded down the back hall toward the “Heifers” and “Bulls” rooms, as if it weren’t clear by a bit of translation that this meant women were cows. The back door was propped open with an ancient gray milk crate turned on its side. Carefully, I stepped over it, opening the door only a little further to squeeze past. There were a few beat-up cars parked at odd angles in back- The kitchen staff, I thought-and a Dumpster on the edge of the lot before it turned to grass and trees. As I climbed up the hill out back, I saw a large paper sack on top of the Dumpster. The top was open. Inside were rolls of bread, perhaps a day old. I thought for the first time, How will I live? and saw myself in a month, two months from now, grabbing a bag like this and ferreting it away.

I paused at the edge of the trees. I saw Sarah, marking off days on a calendar and living in my house alone, waiting for me to come home from a prison term for manslaughter or accidental death. She would need work, and my job would be open. Perhaps Natalie would drive her that first day. The students would be pleased-new meat-and she could talk to Gerald on her breaks. “My mother died,” he’d say. “My mother rolled a decade,” she’d say. I knew Sarah well enough to know she’d love the lingo-a paltry consolation prize.

But none of this was the picture in my mind that scared me most. What scared me was the one where I was home again, where Sarah and I lived together, where she ran errands and massaged my feet while they sat begging on a leather ottoman. She’d bring me broths in bed and draw a shawl over my shoulders, rub at the caked-on food at the corner of my mouth with a damp cloth. And I would begin to forget her, to scream at her, to say cruel things about her body and her love life and her brain.

I bushwhacked through the trees along the property line and entered a patch of roadway forest. The ground was strewn with litter as I cut farther in, beer cans and condoms being the trash du jour, and I winced each time I accidentally stepped on them.

I had forgotten the red hair ribbon on the porch, leaving it to Bad Boy to have his fun with, and my fingerprints were on every surface of the kitchen. How many children bathed their mothers on the floor, sliced their clothes off with scissors, or quite literally dragged them outside to get fresh air? There would be no evidence of Manny Zavros anywhere.