Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

I could not go back to the kitchen.

I carried my spoils carefully through the hallway, picking out the dark shapes of a grandfather clock and a half-circle table, on which objects of different sizes sat. I heard my mother’s voice: “Tchotchkes is the woman’s middle name.”

I saw a small light on at the top of the stairs-enough to write by, I thought, and climbed. Her stairs were padded with plush carpeting. I wanted to take off my shoes and walk about, but I had what countries called an exit strategy to pursue.

I spilled the boxes of cards and the crayons at the top of the stairs near a hope chest, on which the brass reading lamp illuminated the hall. I knelt down in front of it. Fanned across the surface of the hope chest were back issues of AARP, with an occasional Woman’s Day or Ladies’ Home Journal as bright spot. I felt I was kneeling at a foreign altar and then imagined myself flailing around, stuck to a giant glue trap.

I needed a pen. I could not write to Emily with a crayon. For Sarah, yes, the rainbow effect seemed appropriate, but for Emily, no. I needed ballpoint. On the windowsill behind the hope chest, there was a light-blue cup-the blue of my mother’s Pigeon Forge bowl-and in it there was an emery board, a tire gauge, and three Bic pens.

I extracted a pen and grabbed an AARP. I crawled back to the boxes and crayons, three feet away, and sat with my feet two stairs down, using the magazine as my desk. Quickly I chose a piece of ecru-colored paper with gilt edges-elegant for Em-and bent to my task.

Dear Emily,

How can I begin to explain to you what you already know? That though I am prouder of you and your sister than anything else in the world, I have found myself at the end, with no other choice.

I stopped. I knew how she scrutinized. She spent hours in front of a mirror, finding flaws. Her house was spick-and-span, and she had once pointed out to me that the best thing about having a cleaning woman was that they did what she called the “first wave” and left her free to focus on the details.

I cleared my throat. It echoed in the hall.

By the time you get this, I will be dead. I hope you are spared having to see me. I had to see my father, and it never left me. Sarah will have told you by now that my father killed himself. That he did not fall down the stairs, or rather he did, but only after shooting himself.

I don’t know why he left me.

Did you know my mother kept her hair long for your grandfather? He loved it. He would brush it every night one hundred times. In hindsight I came to think of it as their nightly Prozac. Yes, I know, I know-meditation, not medication. In theory I agree, but sometimes… don’t you think?

What I want you to know is that I did not kill my mother out of vengeance or even, really, pity. It was the right thing to do, though I didn’t plan it. If I had, I obviously would have thought of where I am now. All day today, I’ve been thinking of you and your sister.

It was unforgivable-how I forced you to grow up, to take the place beside me that your father’s absence left.

I applaud you in your life. That’s what I really wish to say. You have your own house and family, and you live very far away. Keep it like that. Never come back. With me gone, there will be nothing to come back to. That’s the gift I want to give your sister. Don’t let her live in the house, Emily, or fritter her life away. Sell both houses. Your father will help.

I paused. I thought of my father, sitting beside me the day we cosigned the papers for my house. He had made sure to set me up as firmly as he could, had mentioned that day that his will and other important documents were in the Malvern branch of the bank, and had told me where he hid the key. Only later did I realize why he had been so explicit in this, making me repeat back to him each fact.

I wrote again.

When I close my eyes for a moment, as I’ve done just now, I see my father, but then I see you. Remember that day at the Y? I’m so proud of you, my Flying Fish!

I’m in Mrs. Leverton’s, and it’s dark outside. I have to write a note now to your sister. Take care of Jeanine and Leo, and God bless any positive memory of me you are able to entrust to John. Do you remember how much Sarah has always loved the color green? I do.

I love you, Emily, no matter what.

Remember that over everything.

I sat back. I let the pen fall from my hand and silently tumble to a stop. For years after his death, I had gone around jealous of the moments with him I’d missed, staring at Emily and Sarah, thinking of the grade-school chaperoning or the jungle-gym monitoring I’d been engaged in instead. Once or twice he came to sit at the edge of the playground and join me. I had that. That, I clung to, but when I tried to remember what we had talked about, I couldn’t. I had wanted something to keep with me; even my mother had hurriedly clipped a lock of his hair when we’d first heard the men from the mortuary coming up the front walk.

I stared at her, horrified, while she tucked it inside her shirt.

“He was my husband,” she whispered.

When the doorbell rang, I felt it would be my job to assist the men with their task. Lift my father onto the gurney. Strap him fast.

But in reality, at the mortuary director’s urging, I had excused myself. I had taken my mother into the dining room, where we stood by the large corner cabinet near the kitchen, huddled together-not exactly touching each other so much as hovering helplessly in proximity.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the director said when they’d come back up the stairs with the paperwork. They were trained to say that.

The younger one had just started at the funeral home. “Yeah, me too,” he’d said, and shook my hand.

Something was digging into my side. It was sharp. I felt it stabbing me. Became aware that it had been poking at me for some time.

I leaned back and put my hand in my jeans pocket. Sarah’s butterfly barrette. I took it out and held it in the palm of my hand, making the light from the hope chest pick up its blues and greens, the thin gold rhinestones on the blunted antennae and legs.

It was almost nine. I wondered if Sarah and Jake were looking for me or if they’d thought to speak to Hamish yet. I wondered when Hamish would open his bedside drawer.

I closed my hand over the rhinestone butterfly and pressed, thought of all the discarded items over all the years that had made me feel free. I had not thrown out the weeping Buddha Emily had given me. I would not throw out the butterfly.

I stood up on the landing and pinned the blunt clip of the barrette through the weave of my black sweater until I heard the closure snap.

Mr. Forrest will be asleep now, I thought, or listening to music on his treasured Bose. We had talked about it when we’d run into each other a year or so ago.

“It gets the best sound. I can lie in bed and listen. I have a special velvet sleep mask. It used to be if I wanted to listen to music, I had to sit in the front room.”

I bent down to retrieve the letter to Emily and the box of crayons. I tucked them under my arm like a clutch. I was in the house, finally, of the Other. The Levertons and their holiday cruises, their intricate “On Donner, on Dancer” display at Christmas, their elaborate barbecues out back-the laughter of the guests pushing through the trees and across our lawn. All of that was over forever.

I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and so I walked down the short hallway that in my mother’s house ended in the only upstairs bathroom. In Mrs. Leverton’s, it led to another hall, off of which was the bedroom where she had been standing the night before and seen my mother and me outside.