The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

  Since they were first built, the Limerick nuclear towers, lit up in the distance, had become an ominous presence. So much encased power. The large white udders cut off and opening out like craters.

  I sat in the car with the sleeping Hamish and looked out over the rolling farmland and past the treetops backlit by the lights surrounding the towers. Natalie and I had talked of taking a field trip to the plant to see how close we could get, but the plan never came to anything. It seemed we had silently and mutually agreed that this distant image was best, that the reality of the thing could not help but be disappointing. We had always called this view the "future that was no future."

  When I'd found out I was pregnant with Emily, I had called my father at his office. I had been to the student health center in Madison and taken a blood test. The nurse who called with the results recommended that I sign up to receive counseling on birth control. I sat in a circle of other girls, some of whom were pregnant and others who had had a close call, and found myself the only one smiling. I wanted it--her, him, whoever was inside me who was one part Jake and one part me.

  "Not everyone wants a child so young," my father said. "I am happy, Helen. Is Jake?"

  Jake sat at our rickety dining table, silently offering me support.

  "Yes."

  "Girl or boy?" he had asked me. "Which would you prefer?"

  "It doesn't matter, Dad. I thought about it, but I don't care either way."

  "Then I'll selfishly say I'd love a granddaughter. It would be like having a little Helen to visit us."

  Next came the call to my mother. When I rang the house, I could hear KYW in the background. It was an all-news station she listened to throughout the day. Bulletins of murders and fires and peculiar deaths.

  "Well, are you proud of yourself?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "You're throwing your life away, you know that? Pissing it down your leg."

  I stared at Jake.

  "Mom?"

  "What?"

  "I'm going to have a child."

  "There are no awards given out," she said.

  Something about the expression on my face made Jake stand and take the phone from my hand.

  "Mrs. Knightly," he said, "isn't it wonderful news? I'm incredibly happy at the prospect of being a dad."

  I took his seat at the table and looked up at him, marveling. Though I had entered the confused state my mother often put me in, I sensed that if I watched his face and listened to his voice, I would come back to the new world that Jake and I had made. A world my mother didn't rule.

  Nearly eight years later, it had also been my father whom I sought out at the local Catholic church. I was in town, but I didn't tell my mother this when I called. I didn't want to see her until I'd spoken to him.

  A man he worked with had told my father about the rising cost of maintenance at St. Paul's Parish, and my father had suggested the vestry consider keeping sheep. With all the ancient headstones jutting up and out in uneven rows, the sheep could keep the grass down better than any mower, and their munching was exact, my father said. "No clippers needed." He had even volunteered, though he had no connection with the church, to come and tend them when he could.

  The girls and I approached him from the parish parking lot. I carried Sarah in my arms, though in Madison I had told her that, at four, she had grown much too old for Mommy to carry her around. Emily, however, smiled for the first time since I'd packed the two of them and three suitcases in the Bug.

  "Granddaddy!" she yelled. As we reached the churchyard wall, Sarah slid down my side to the ground. My father turned and dropped his rake at the sight of us. Emily scrambled over the wall by using the horse-mount steps while I lifted Sarah up and over to join her.

  After they had been introduced to the sheep, Sally and Edith and Phyllis, and my father had shown them how he cared for them--cleaned out their wooden shelter, filled bowls with food and water--and talked to Emily about a bully she was frightened of, the girls were content to play among the graves.

  My father and I walked.

  "I see it in your face," he said quietly as we crossed out of the churchyard and entered the newer section, where mowers, not sheep, were responsible for the maintenance of the flat markers.

  "We're getting a divorce," I said.

  Without speaking, the two of us sat down on a white marble bench donated by a family who had lost three of its members in a car crash.

  We were silent for a moment, and I began to cry.

  "I always think of how much life there is in the graveyard," my father said. "Flowers and grass grow better here than they do anywhere else."

  I leaned my head into his shoulder. I had discovered a level of affection with Jake and knew I would miss it. I sensed my father's discomfort almost immediately. He pivoted ever so slightly, and I sat straight up.

  "Have you seen your mother?" he asked.

  "I couldn't bear to," I said. "I called from a pay phone, and she told me where you were."

  "Will you move back home?"

  "I'd like to be near you," I said, "but I think the girls need . . ."

  "Of course," he said. "Of course."

  I could see his mind working as I had hoped it might. I thought of the small glass-backed clock that sat on his dresser, how as a child I had watched it in fascination to see the brass gears moving inside the four beveled panes.

  "Mr. Forrest has a friend, a real estate agent," he said. "There's a new development in the area near where your mother and I once looked. Nice two-stories, not split-levels."

  "But . . ."

  "It will be my gift." He patted my hand.

  I stood and straightened my skirt. The ride from Wisconsin had been long and hot. Guiltily I watched his back as he moved closer to the churchyard and his grandchildren. I did not want to be like my mother. I did not want to depend on him.

  SIX

  I don't remember when Hamish finally roused. I had spent the intervening time staring into the dark, toward the Limerick nuclear towers, and thinking of my father.

  In the night, at a nonparticular hour, the lights at Limerick begin to flash green, then red--the one color answering the call of the other. It was always a message Natalie and I imagined as an SOS, as if inhabitants were trapped inside the molten core and, under cover of darkness, were communicating with an unknown other on the outside.

  When Hamish reached out for me, I had almost forgotten it all. How and why I had ended up where I was.

  "I used to believe I had a female twin in the world somewhere," he said.

  I stared blankly at him, but then the weight of his palm on my thigh jostled me back from where I'd been.

  "That wasn't bullshit," he said. "I don't use that as a line."

  I kissed Hamish slowly, as if they were true, those dreams of childhood--that we were adopted, that we had fallen whole from the sky, that our parents were not our parents but hologram projections that proved there was another world to be escaped into.

  As the light blinked on and off in the distance outside the car, Hamish leaned into me. I felt his weight and breath and resilience. He reached over to my side of the driver's seat and pulled up the lever until my seat shot back. Neither of us spoke. We grappled with the awkwardness of the stick shift and steering wheel, but our persistence was united and thorough. I knew there was no way I was leaving that spot on the hill until Hamish and I were satisfied in our separate vacuums. It was sex of determination and will, sex of mountain climbing and straining and checking a goal off on a list made only moments before. The passion came from a limited supply of air and time and an obvious illicitness.

  When we reached a place we both sought--two feverish patients chasing an itch--I was halfway into the backseat with my head at an almost right angle. Hamish had used his arms to keep his full weight off me, and looking forward, I could see only the warm, moist margin between our abdomens as his head moved upward toward the roof of the car. I closed my eyes and met the slamming of his hips.
I would not leave the car or the moment. I would chase the animal that had wanted to murder my mother since my earliest age. Until today, I realized, it had been an innocent urge I carried inside me like a spleen, optional but always present, in some way part of the whole.

  Between Hamish's collarbone and his left biceps, there was a tattoo I had never noticed. I thought tattoos were highly stupid--a way, like ordering an upside-down Frappuccino, that people lacking direction claimed identity in the world. I stared at it now as a wave of nausea and hilarity rose in my gut. It was a circular tattoo, very suburban-mall "oriental" in look and no doubt inked at Thad's Parlor next to the auto-body shop. You could pick out in the minimal blue the tail of a dragon, and if you followed it, you swiftly arrived at the head, biting that tail.

  "Jesus, Hell," Hamish breathed beside me. "Fuck."

  "Thank you, Hamish," I said.

  "You're most awesomely welcome."

  "I should get home," I said.

  Hamish moved to glance at his watch and sat up. I thought only then of Natalie. I pictured her out on her date with the contractor from Downingtown. I remembered her quoting, when we were girls, from an Emily Dickinson poem. "Because I could not stop for Death--/ He kindly stopped for me." She had been en pointe in her despised toe shoes, and at the end of each line, she spun in a circle until, dizzy and slightly drunk from the brandy we had stolen from her mother, she fell into my arms on her bed.

  "Death?" she queried, looking up at me.

  "Nice to meet you, sister," I said in a warbling baritone.

  In the scattered moments after dropping Hamish off, I didn't know whether to congratulate myself or break out the ice packs. It had been two decades plus since I'd had sex in a car with a man who hadn't yet reached an age when he coughed or spit or groaned when he woke up. We had agreed, vaguely, to see each other again, and his eyes had focused on me with what I can only call a Vaseline-on-the-lens acuity. He saw sex and experience. Through my own clouded perceptions, I saw, when I looked his way, the last vestiges of grace.

  It was deep night. Clouds covered the moon, and in my neighborhood, unlike Natalie's, outdoor lighting had not become a competitive sport of motion sensors and solar-powered path spotlights. There was the occasional faux carriage lamp, and the Mulovitches at the end of the block kept a bare bulb on over their front door that was bright enough to interrogate their pothead son by, but my lawn and the lawns surrounding it were pitch-black.

  My father and Mr. Forrest had found a home for me in the very neighborhood where my father had once looked when I was a teenager. On move-in day, he had driven the three of us over in his car and snapped photos as the Realtor handed me the key. When I walked inside, I was able to ignore the walls that needed to be painted and the floors that needed to be cleaned because my father had come the day before and had had delivered two beds for the girls and a mattress and dresser for me.

  Barefoot, I left my car and walked onto the lawn. The grass was cool but dry against my feet, the heavy dew still hours away. All in all, it was early. Somewhere, Westmore students vomited in the shrubs at the edges of half-acre lots in which kegs sat on back porches. Teenage girls passed out in places they shouldn't, and Sarah would be, if I knew her, just starting her night out in the East Village. It took me a moment to remember her current boyfriend's name, but as I reached up to touch the branch of the dogwood tree, I remembered its fill-in-the-blank quality. Joe or Bob or Tim. A one-syllable, easily replaceable name. Like Jake.

  I walked to the center of my front lawn and lay down, spread-eagled. I looked up at the stars. How did I end up in a place where doing such a thing marked you for crazy, while my neighbors dressed concrete ducks in bonnets at Easter and in striped stocking caps at Christmas but were considered sane?

  I let my shoes and purse fall from my hands. Only a few stars were out. The earth was cold beneath me. "There are children starving in China," my mother had frequently said to me when I gorged on food.

  "That doesn't mean I'm not hungry," I whispered now. I thought of her face when I had brought Jake from Wisconsin to meet them. He had been the first, and last, direct challenge to her power. She had welcomed him with a floor show so extreme that it was almost painful to watch. She forced herself to smile and bow and scrape as if he were the lord of the manor and she merely a lowly thing. Why hadn't I seen the truth? She had a steely resolve that surpassed anything Jake and I might build. Our swizzle-stick empire was so fragile in the end. "The only thing you've ever loved is your mother!" he had yelled at me. I had refused this truth, brought my hands up as if to stop a blow.

  I knew where my mother was. She was not in the heavenly skies but in her basement, stone-cold dead. I had her braid in my purse to prove it. I forced myself to stare at the sky--unblinking. If she was there, I couldn't make her out. She could be a dark star behind a cloudy mass, like the tiny tumor that finally comes to kill, but I did not see her, no matter how hard I looked.

  I turned onto my side. The final leavings of Hamish drained out of me. I felt spent and oddly whole and ready to sleep. I thought of the platform I was scheduled to mount later that day and the pose I was meant to strike. I was in the fourth week of sitting for Tanner Haku's Life Drawing class. I had, until the day before, been working out in front of the mirror with small weights and doing yoga even more diligently in order to keep my muscles teeming just below my skin. I knew that was what Haku wanted, and I knew adapting to the teacher's wishes was the linchpin of life modeling. Not just striking the pose but understanding what amount of physicality he or she wanted you most to bring. Natalie was having her usual cream-cheese-and-bagels semester, as the instructor she was perpetually assigned to was a faux Lucian Freud. He wanted rolls of fat and body hair and a good patch of scarred or rash-strewn skin.

  "Slump!" he would command.

  Modeling had been something I'd talked her into. She had been reluctant at first, self-conscious of her body, but it had led to a part-time job in the bursar's office, and now she balanced the two.

  I pushed myself up off the ground and stood, gathering my shoes and purse and finding my keys with the trusty flashlight attached. This, like the cell phone, had been another mother-inspired gift. I had often approached the mall like a sergeant arming a battalion. Mother and I would have cell phones. Mother and I would have flashlight key chains. Mother and I would have new stainless-steel teakettles, down-filled pillows, Scotchgarded all-canvas slipcovers. If. Then. If we shared X, then all would be ready and steady and right. When I inserted the key in the lock of my door, I saw my own epitaph: SHE LIVED SOMEBODY ELSE'S LIFE.

  Years ago, when I began to feel overwhelmed by having to care for my mother, I started to dispose of small items throughout my house. Perhaps that's why I wouldn't have blamed Mrs. Castle if she had stolen the Pigeon Forge bowl. In some sense, after all she'd done, I'd more than once felt like opening my mother's jewelry box and saying, "Help yourself." Unfortunately, young Manny of the condom had already done that, a fact I had successfully kept hidden from everyone.

  I took my coat off and let it drop to the flagstone floor instead of hanging it up. In contrast to my mother's house, I always kept at least one window open, even as it grew cooler. I liked the feeling of air constantly coming in to refresh the rooms. I walked to the shelf in the living room, and between the Virginia Woolf and the Vivian Gornick (I file my authors on a first-name basis), I spied tonight's item: a weeping Buddha made of wood. A gift from Emily.

  As if I am committing a crime, I will take an item--a paperweight, a dried-flower arrangement, a small cameo brooch of my great-great-grandmother's--and "accidentally" dispose of it on trash day. I've done this on a whim, never planned. I'll see something resting on a shelf and feel the need to grab a piece of newspaper or an old rag and cloak it, like a magic trick. Then I'll walk rapidly to the curb and dump it into the sole pristine can of labeled waste waiting to be forked up by the garbage truck. A lightness overtakes me. One less stone weighing me down.

 
I looked at the weeping Buddha, the size of a fist and carved of gnarled wood. It would be the first item of my own that I disposed of--a gift from my child. But as I reached out to grab it, I thought of Manny.

  I touched the Buddha with my fingers but let it remain on its stand.

  I walked upstairs to my bedroom, trying not to think of Manny having sex in one of the rooms of my mother's house while, most likely, she was downstairs, sitting in her chair in the living room. What did I owe him besides the tips I had given him above and beyond what my mother had paid him?

  I turned on the bedside lamp. What had I been reading before this day began? Emily had sent me a new translation of the Tao Te Ching. The slim volume itself was comforting to hold, but when I opened the pages and tried to read, it was as if all language had turned to Xs. I was not a fish or a door or a reed and never would be. I was a fetid human creature a la Lucian Freud.

  Over my dresser I had hung an early drawing Jake had done of me. He'd based it on a photograph Edward Weston took of Charis Wilson before she became his wife. I sat the wrong way on one of our metal-and-vinyl kitchen chairs from the house we shared in Wisconsin. I wore my childhood Brownie beanie, which Jake drew to resemble Wilson's sporty beret, and a bra and short slip. When I spread my legs, I made the slip come up to the tops of my thighs. Though you could see nothing through the slip, which drifted down to act as a veil, the invitation was there. With that drawing, I went from being a bright student in the classrooms of my professors to being a pinup in the faculty gallery attached to the university library.

  I crawled into my bed and pulled the blankets over me. I remained fully dressed in my soiled clothes. I thought of the nightly rituals of beauty that I had learned growing up. How adult I felt the first time my mother applied moisturizer to my feet. After this came socks and then old-fashioned lace-up ankle weights. "Otherwise," my mother said, "you'd rip the socks off in the middle of the night and ruin the effect." As I drifted off to sleep, I remembered one of so many countless phone calls from Mrs. Castle over the last few years. She had arrived to find my mother wearing dainty Danish-green cotton gloves, over which she'd fastened a pair of aluminum handcuffs. She had informed Mrs. Castle that she had misplaced the key. Did I happen to remember where it was?