The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

  It was as if I'd turned a key. He raised his head. His eyes looked dreamy and distant in a way I'd never seen the eyes of my best friend's son.

  "Sure, baby," he whispered, and I tried not to hear the tone in his voice. A tone I was aware he adopted with the women I'd seen riding on the back of his motorcycle. They wore ludicrous shorts while wrapped around Hamish's Kevlar-encased torso and legs. I tried to picture myself clinging on to him. He had more than once invited me to do so, but I had always declined. "He has the hots for you," Natalie had said once, and the two of us had laughed together as we drove off to some sort of pitiless exercise class while Hamish peeled off in the opposite direction on his Japanese death machine.

  His lips were pendulous, ridiculous, young. I reached my arm up and pulled his head down to kiss them. I was beginning to feel his weight, his bones against my bones. I would have wished it could be different than this, that I could have fucked my best friend's son without having to be made aware of it. I tunneled into it, firmly now, as I realized thinking was not going to get me anywhere. Morality was just a security blanket that didn't exist. All of it, what I had done and what I was doing, was not leading me perilously toward the edge of a cliff. I had already jumped.

  I tugged upward at Hamish's shirt, and taking his weight away from me for a moment, he peeled it off over his head. He was beautiful, his chest muscular and divoted, but his beauty was as much about youth and a life still ahead of him as anything else. I felt a stab of regret.

  I turned my eyes away from his face and unbuttoned my pants. As he rushed to help, he bumped his head on the inside of the passenger-side door. It made a horrible hollow sound. I thought of Mrs. Leverton hitting the ground outside her house six months ago. How she had called through the bushes to my mother to get help. How the enemies had fleetingly bonded. They were desperate to be able to continue living on their own in their own houses.

  Mrs. Leverton thought I was a degenerate, a failure as a wife who modeled nude for a living, but in one solid sense she was envious of my mother. Mrs. Leverton had a son who wanted to do everything for her, but "everything" was an assisted-living facility attached to a nursing home with a pricey hospice program. "Everything" was paving the road to her death with his money. He would line her way to the grave with gold when all she really wanted was to be allowed to die in her own home.

  "Jesus," Hamish said. He rubbed the back of his head and left my pants to fester around my ankles, the immediacy dangerously threatened once again.

  I bit my lip. I writhed. "Fuck me," I said, and hoped that no one's God was watching.

  This brought him back. He stared at me. "Wow," he said. With a final tug, he threw my pants onto the gravel drive. I winced when he ripped off my underpants. They were not high waisted or gauzy or old like handmade paper, but his stripping me cut too closely to what I'd just done to my mother. I propelled myself up and grabbed for Hamish's penis, which had poked above the waistband of his briefs.

  As soon as I had my hand on it, I tugged him forward and down. He moaned in pleasure as I spread my legs and wrapped myself around him. "Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!" he wailed. I lay there in disbelief. He had ejaculated on my stomach. My fingers, sticky and enraged, squeezed. "Ow," he said, and placed a hand on my wrist. "Let go."

  He moved around, flattening one of my knees painfully with his ass, until he was sitting on the seat behind my legs with his own legs bent up in a tent above them. I smelled the fetid smells of the backseat, where the crisp scent of my greenmarket groceries mingled with the danker smell of my ancient gym bag.

  "Shit, I'm sorry," he said. "This is intense."

  I lay there. Suddenly I was beside my mother in the basement. Mrs. Leverton was coming down the stairs with After Eight mints spread out in a decorative circle on an old enamel tray. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, and Manny was upstairs dropping condoms like so much rain.

  "Will you take me to Limerick?" I said, as if I were asking to be voluntarily committed to an asylum just over the hill. I would not look at him. Did not want to see his face. Instead I looked at the square-cornered tear in the back of the passenger seat and tried to recall how it had gotten there.

  Hamish was kind, even if motivated by an unnecessary shame. "Do you want to wash up?"

  "I'll stay here," I said.

  I could feel him wanting to say something but resisting. "I'll bring you a towel," he said, and I nodded my head at him, both to say yes to the towel and to make him, for the moment, go away.

  I lay in the backseat and listened to the night noises surrounding me, thought of fucking Jake in Madison in the VW Bug. Avery would come and sit for the girls, and we would go to a dark spot at the edge of the U-Mad campus and leave the AM radio playing low while we made love.

  I wanted to be looking up at the sky, but instead I was looking up at the waffled roof of my Saab. The cool night air rushed in the open door at my feet, and I shivered, drawing myself up and turning over to lie in a fetal position and stare at the back of the front passenger seat, where my mother's braid lay tucked inside my purse.

  I had once read one of Sarah's true-crime books that she'd left at the house. It was a book about a serial killer named Arthur Shawcross, and the most vivid thing in it, for me, was the portrait of a woman whom he had obviously meant to kill but who was too smart for him. She was old for a prostitute and still doing speedballs and getting high. She'd gotten high for three days straight after Shawcross tried to strangle her while raping her in his car. He was a man who picked up a prostitute, drove to a deserted spot, and killed her after he was unable to perform. She had known how to talk to him, known how to brace herself so that his hands, enclosed around her neck, could not produce the leverage needed to crush her windpipe. And she had known that her survival was connected intimately with his ability to ejaculate. It had taken hours, or so she said, and it was arduous, but he was grateful enough that he didn't kill her and instead drove her back to the spot where he'd picked her up.

  "How can you read such things?" I asked Sarah over the phone, brandishing, as if she could see me, the consumed-in-one-night book.

  "It's real," Sarah had said. "There's no bullshit."

  Hamish returned, smelling of Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men, which it embarrassed me to know. He ducked in the backseat and held out a small blue hand towel. I looked at it in horror, but I did not reach for it.

  "That's okay," I said. "I'm good."

  Again a quizzical look came across his face, but instead of asking me a question, he broke into a smile.

  "You like having it on you," he said.

  "Hamish," I said, sitting up and scrambling out of the car to find my pants and underwear, "your job is not to make me throw up."

  "Harsh," he said.

  "What I mean is that I'm still your mother's friend, and your seduction lines are calibrated for women half my age."

  "If that," he said.

  "Touche," I said, and zipped up my pants while slipping on my flats.

  "You've got to admit this isn't our usual way of relating."

  "We'll take my car," I said. "I'll drive. You go around the side."

  "Sweet. Mom always makes me drive."

  I sat down behind the wheel and whisked my purse off the passenger seat, tucking it by my side. I pictured an eight-year-old Hamish running to my car with a wild smile on his face. He had been smitten with Emily from the first time they'd met when they were two. I looked out the window at the full-grown man whom I had almost just fucked and who was now walking around to the passenger door. I didn't know who I was anymore or what I was capable of.

  He swooped in and kissed me on the cheek.

  "Buckle up," I said, my spine stiff against the soft and mealy seat.

  I backed out of the driveway, the gravel crunching under my tires. It was Leo's baby carrier that had torn the hole in the back of the passenger seat. I had struggled to get it inside the car on the day my mother dropped him, trying to show Emily I could take care of
it while she stood on the sidewalk, clasping Leo to her chest and shouting, "It doesn't matter, Mother! Leave it! Leave it!" until I shoved the carrier in and slammed the door. Inside the car, I turned and saw a spot of blood seep through Leo's blue baby bonnet. When I'd called to tell my parents I was pregnant for the second time, my mother had yawned extravagantly and said, "Aren't you bored yet?"

  "Who is Natalie out with?" I asked as I swung the car onto the road and started off.

  "Shit," Hamish said. "Don't make me tell you."

  But I didn't want to talk about what had happened between us. "Okay, can we talk about your father instead? Are you ever happy that he died?"

  "Man, what's with you? I'm sorry about back there, but chill out, okay? I want to make you happy."

  "Sorry, I just came from my mother's house."

  "Oh."

  It was roundly known that my mother and I had problems with each other, that I attended her by duty, but now I had done something stupid, I knew. I had given Hamish knowledge of my previous whereabouts. I was a lousy criminal, and he was a lousy lay. We were perfect together.

  "It's good with my mom," Hamish said. "We get along, and living together works for us. It was harder with Dad."

  "You don't have to," I said, feeling guilty now.

  "I'll tell you if you want."

  I remembered Hamish as a toddler then, how he would allow Emily to boss him around and how, over time, she took advantage of this in a way I didn't like. He was that same boy now. He would tell me what I wanted to know in the same way he would endlessly give his toys to my small daughter or bring her, on demand, bucket after bucket of sand for building Barbie castles. Natalie and I had pretended only briefly that the two of them would grow up to be married. At a certain point we both realized that neither of us knew the first thing about what made a good marriage.

  "You know your father and I didn't get along," I said.

  We had driven out of the McMansions-set-in-birches section and were passing through the long no-man's-land of one-story warehouses and shabby '50s-era community halls.

  "That's not unusual for you," Hamish said, looking straight ahead.

  "What?"

  "If you call 'mostly ignoring me' getting along," he said.

  "I've never ignored you," I said.

  "I know what you think of me."

  "Which is?"

  "That I'm lazy. That I'm a drain on my mom. Stuff like that."

  I was silent. Everything he said was true. I pulled off Phoenixville Pike and onto Moorehall Road. I was taking the long way round.

  "I'm a real bitch, huh?" I said.

  Hamish laughed. "You know what? You kind of can be."

  I slowed the car down and scanned the lot of Mabry's Grill for Natalie's car.

  "He picked her up in a Toyota four-by-four," Hamish said.

  I cleared my throat and put my turn indicator on for Yellow Springs.

  "My dad was horrible in a lot of ways," Hamish said. "I don't miss the screaming between them and between me and him. He hated me."

  It was the moment to say "No, he didn't" or "I'm sure that's not true," but I wouldn't. Hamish may have needed a tantric-sex tutorial, but his sense of the truth was exact.

  "My mom's glad," Hamish said. "Though she wouldn't say it to me. His great dream was to move back to Scotland someday."

  "How can she stand to live so near the bridge?" I asked.

  "I'll tell you what I think," Hamish said. "I think it's because she wants to be there in case his spirit rises out of Pickering Creek so she can bash it over the head."

  "That's how I feel about my mother," I said.

  "I know," Hamish said, and reached out to touch my hair.

  How long would it take Jake to get to Pennsylvania? The flight was at least five hours, maybe more. He was coming from Santa Barbara, not Los Angeles or San Francisco. There was too much I didn't know. I wanted to tell Hamish this: that the very same afternoon Jake had met my mother, he'd turned to me and said, "Why didn't you tell me she was nuts?" And how it had been like a curtain parting for the first time onto a larger world, the beginning of the great divide between Jake's and my mother's love. The force that, if I had let it, would have ripped me apart.

  "She met him on the Internet--Mom's date," Hamish said. "He's a contractor from Downingtown."

  "What?"

  "She was afraid you'd judge her. I think she wants to get married again."

  We passed the gravel yards and one or two lowlying buildings that, for as long as I'd lived in the valley, I'd never seen anyone enter or leave. These buildings sported two large Vs on their corrugated windowless outsides and were protected by electrified fencing.

  "Remember?" I said, nodding toward the steel buildings.

  "I just wanted to get in because they were keeping us out," Hamish said. "I wasn't going to steal anything."

  "A Toyota four-by-four, huh?"

  "Helen, judge? Helen never judges. She loves everything!"

  "Bitch?" I asked.

  "Grade A."

  "Who would want less?" I said, laughing.

  "That's why Dad sent me to Valley Forge," he said after a moment had passed. And my heart saw Hamish in his most difficult years. How he had tried to make his father happy and repeatedly failed, how when the three of them came to dinner at my house, he had made a point of sitting at the very edge of his chair, "like real soldiers do," and how he'd beamed as he passed the lamb chops to Emily. "You're not a real soldier," his father had said, heaping mint jelly on his plate as an awkward silence descended on the table.

  On the other side of Vanguard Industries was the remnant of a town established in the years before the Revolutionary War, with additions being made sporadically after that until the end of the 1800s. Only seven buildings remained, and these were all on one side of the road. Those on the opposite side had been washed away in the same storm that revealed the great mother lode of gravel that comprised Lapling Quarry.

  Everything in the small town was closed as Hamish and I cruised past. The still-functioning general store, with an attached tavern that served only Schlitz, had shut down at eight p.m. Through the windows, I saw the low lights on over the bar, and Nick Stolfuz--my age and the only son of the owner--mopping up.

  At the corner of the boarded-up Ironsmith Inn, I hung a sharp right with the skill that came from years of retracing the same near invisible shortcuts.

  It was on a drive with Natalie that I discovered the view of the Limerick nuclear plant. It was during a long, humid afternoon in the early '80s, when I was visiting my parents with Emily in tow. Sarah had stayed in Madison with Jake.

  Every time I came home to Pennsylvania from Wisconsin, I would call Natalie, and we would go for long drives during which neither one of us would talk. It was our way of being alone without being alone, and it provided a justifiable excuse, to my mother, to Jake, to Natalie's husband, to get away for a little while from the emotional hotbeds that were so benignly labeled "domesticity."

  We would purposely set off to get lost together. We would dead-end on old farm roads that hadn't been used for years or find ourselves in isolated churchless graveyards, our feet sinking into the gaps of air left by the only frequent visitors--the moles. Once lost and outside the car, wandering, we would easily separate, trusting that we would find each other again. If I looked for her, I might come up behind a long-dead chestnut tree and hear her crying. In those moments, I would feel the cords of my upbringing pulling me back. I had not been raised to hug or to comfort or to become part of someone else's family. I had been raised to keep a distance.

  As I drove by the chicken coops and dark backyards and then hit the old keystone tunnel that separated the partial town from the rangy farmland and incipient suburban development on the other side, I noticed that Hamish had fallen asleep. His head nodded on the stem of his neck, and I saw no reason to disturb him. Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love.
I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes or bone density?

  Over the past ten years, Hamish had been brought in for various jobs around my mother's house. After anything Hamish did, from installing a sprinkler system that kept the hedges and ivy watered along the curb to once wedging himself into the smallest crawl space to rescue a feral cat, my mother had rewarded him with food. I would arrive in the afternoon to see how things had gone and find him sitting at the dining table, surrounded by the tins of cookies that were my mother's contraband.

  Once, when my mother had gone back into the kitchen to, grudgingly, I felt, bring me a cup for tea, Hamish had seen the expression on my face.

  "She told me you used to have problems with your weight."

  He held out the tin of fudge, which, as my mother aged and I assisted at the helm, had become grainy with sugar.

  "No, thank you, Hamish," I said.

  "More for me!" He placed an entire square of fudge in his mouth, then winked at me.

  I remembered taking the girls to various toddler parties held on the other side of the keystone tunnel. I would stand in the kitchen with the mothers, wondering what demonic communal mind created games like bouncing up and down on balloons until each child broke theirs, fell on the floor, and then ran to an appointed place to be showered with candy. Once, I had been beckoned in the middle of the night by the clipped voice of another mother. Emily had wet the bed at a slumber party. When I arrived to pick her up, she was sitting alone in the hallway on a rubber dog mat with jam in her hair. And while Emily pissed, Sarah hit. She kicked. She called the other children Fat Assholes, Big Babies, and her favorite, Jerk Bastards. The two of them reminded me of polarized Scottie magnets.

  I looked over at Hamish and found myself wondering about a man who chose never to leave home. This choice seemed an unwise one to me, and yet, ultimately, it had been the one I too had made.

  The car took the familiar loft of the final hill, and we rose up above the houses where Sarah had acquired a scar on her forehead from the deep digging nails of Peter Harper, and Emily had her first kiss on the brown plaid couch of a high-school saxophone player. I turned off the headlights and cruised, in the dark, over to the side of the road, then shut the engine off. Hamish's head jerked back against the seat. His eyes flickered open, then closed again.