The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

  SEVEN

  I was eight when my father had an accident in his workshop and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. He did not come home for three months, and I was not allowed to see him. My mother said he would be gone for exactly ninety days and was visiting friends and family in Ohio. When I asked who, or why we couldn't join him, she hushed. Mr. Forrest's visits grew more frequent, and the Donnellsons and Levertons brought us meat loafs and casseroles, which I often found on the stoop after school.

  I would let myself in and sit at the dining room table, reading. I allowed myself just enough light via the dimmer switch on the chandelier so that when darkness fell, the house did not go black. My mother came down from her bedroom in the early evening, and we made dinner together. I had decided, after my father had been gone a week, to hoard the casseroles. Instead we made peanut butter on Ritz crackers, or Swanson suppers, or my favorite: endless rounds of cinnamon toast. My mother would be wearing the gown she had slept in--white and diaphanous--and I would remain in my school clothes.

  "Still eighty-two days," she would say. Or "Only seventy-three."

  It became a shorthand with which we would greet each other. "Sixty-four." "Fifty-seven." "Twenty-five."

  Over those ninety days, it did not matter what time I reached home. I would stop in front of Mr. Forrest's house on my way back from the bus stop and tap on the window to wake his sleeping dog. Tosh, a King Charles spaniel--"The only breed!" Mr. Forrest said--would come to where I stood and sadly paw the glass.

  If I spotted a casserole on our doorstep, I would hurry it to the kitchen and wrap it in tinfoil to hide in the basement freezer. I was worried my father might never come home, and feeding us would become my responsibility.

  When I had tried once to explain what was wrong with my mother, it felt hopeless.

  "She doesn't do much," I'd said.

  "It may seem like that to you, Helen," Miss Taft had said. She was my second-grade teacher, and my class was her first.

  "She doesn't drive," I tried.

  "Not everyone does."

  "My father does. Mr. Forrest does."

  "That's two," she said, and held up two fingers. She smiled at me, as if supplying me with whole numbers would solve everything.

  "She used to go for walks," I said, "but she doesn't do that anymore."

  "Raising a child takes all of one's energy," Miss Taft said.

  I stared past her to the map of the world that hung over the blackboard. I knew when to shut up. My mother's problem was my fault.

  Ninety days after my father left, he returned. My mother had put on a suit I'd never seen before and meticulously combed and coiffed her hair. It was the first time I realized that beneath her diaphanous gowns, she had been losing weight. I remembered then that I had never seen her eat more than one or two of the Ritz crackers she heaped with Skippy. She had also never said a thing about the hoarded casseroles.

  My father walked in the door and smiled sheepishly at me. His hat had a crisp new feather in it, though he too had grown thinner. I went to hug him--something we did not do--and he held out a large plastic bag, inadvertently blocking my way.

  "I brought these for you," he said.

  He turned to envelop my mother. I saw her face as she came toward him. Her tears had already made inky troughs of mascara under her eyes.

  "I'm so sorry, Clair," he said. "I'm home to take care of you now. I'm strong again."

  Without even speaking, he lifted her up, cradling her easily and drawing her to him. In my head that day, I equated "I'm strong again" with only that--his physical ability to carry more weight. Inside the bag I held were plastic dishes in aqua-green. One was a pitcher and one was a tray and one was a kidney-bean shape, which I later learned had been his sick bowl.

  In the weeks and months that followed, it became a riddle we played out.

  "Why did you go away?"

  "To get better."

  "Better from what?"

  "Better than I was."

  "What was wrong with you?"

  "I can't remember because it's gone!"

  Quickly, I forgot too. I needed him. It was my mother who had the problems. My mother who was afraid. So afraid that nothing could make her unafraid. She felt safer in my father's arms. She felt safer in the house on Mulberry Lane. Or under blankets. Or with her feet tucked up beneath her and a hot-water bottle nestled in her lap.

  My father would greet me in the morning when I came down for breakfast.

  "It's a hard day, sweetheart," he would say.

  This was our shorthand, and it never changed. On hard days, my mother stayed in bed with the blinds drawn until my father and I left the house. She knew why we had to leave, but still she thought our abandonment of her cruel. My father and I kept our voices low in the kitchen and wolfed down our food. When there were no crisp bills from his wallet for me to take to buy my lunch, I totted up money from the change jar in the kitchen, being careful not to let the sorting of coins make any noise.

  At age eleven I confided in Natalie about the way my mother behaved, and held my breath when she said her mother was the same way. I had never been so happy. But my excitement drained away when I queried her further. Natalie's mother drank booze. That was enviable to me. The ease of being able to locate it in a bottle was like a dream.

  It was on a hard day--

  "Are you okay, Mom?"

  "It's a hard day, Helen."

  --that Billy Murdoch was hit by a car in front of the house.

  I was in high school. My father had spent the night before away from home. "An overnight business trip to Scranton," he'd said. Everyone else on our short block seemed to be gone that afternoon. But, most important, it was a hard day.

  On the afternoon Billy Murdoch got hit, my mother paced herself as she always did on a hard day, filling the hours with house chores to try and keep busy, to try and keep from sitting on the couch or at the kitchen table and giving in to it. It was as if, if she cleaned and washed and organized, she could keep her terror just enough at bay for her to breathe.

  She told me later, in one of her bottomless whispers, when she was speaking from a place she lived in for months afterward, that she remembered hearing the sound--the sound of Billy's body being struck by the car. "Like a pumpkin being hit by a baseball bat," she said.

  It was around two o'clock in the afternoon, and my mother had just come up out of the basement with a load of my father's socks and underwear. Something about the astringent smell of bleach always heartened her, and the basket felt warm against her chest.

  Her usual routine was to place the basket on one end of the couch and snap, then fold, my father's boxer shorts, placing them in two stacks: plain white and thin blue stripes. His socks came next, matched and mated, with folded-over tops.

  When my mother heard the sound, she did not rush to the window to check it out, as everyone else later agreed they would have. She stood at attention for a single second and then went about what she was doing. Everything she did after the sound was even more focused, even more robotic, until the next sound came.

  It was the sound of a car peeling away, squealing down the block at high speed. Some entry was made then in her nervous system that something wasn't right outside. Despite all the empty chattering noise that filled her brain on a hard day, she dropped the two socks in her hand and walked, not ran, to the front door. Then she blacked out until she got to the edge of the curb. Her fear for the boy made her act, but like a dog trained not to go beyond the boundary of his own yard no matter what, she was brought up short by the mailbox.

  He had been riding his bike, which had now landed on the edge of our lawn, its front wheel spinning slowly before it stopped.

  My mother raised her hand to her chest and started to rub hard with the knuckles of her right hand into the soothing worry stone of her sternum.

  His lower limbs jerked once, then twice.

  She put her left hand on top of our mailbox to steady herself. She was six feet aw
ay from him.

  "Billy?" she whispered.

  The doctor said later that if mercy had been attending him, he would have been walking. That way, the car would have hit him head-on and lower to the ground. Whoosh, he would be plowed down--dead immediately.

  I've always wondered what he must have thought during those final minutes as my mother stood so close to him. How could the world change so fast? Could he know, at eight, what death was? Cars came out of nowhere and hit you two houses down from where you had grown up, and a woman who had always seemed just a typical adult, in those rare moments you saw her in her yard, stood at the edge of the road but did not comfort you. Was this punishment for having stayed home sick from school? For having broken the rule of remaining in the house while your mother was gone?

  I was sixteen. Natalie and I would put on Danskin unitards and make up dance routines in her parents' refurbished basement. We used her father's circular bar to propel us across the room, where we perfected a tumbling routine involving the long, low couch and the bearskin rug on the floor. Our dances were narrative and sweaty, and contained sit-ups and leg lifts that cropped up out of nowhere.

  "He didn't wonder anything," Natalie tried to reassure me in the days to come.

  By the time I got home, his body was gone, but I could still see the long stain that smeared the pavement like an exclamation mark. "His brains were smashed," Natalie said. "He wasn't thinking anything."

  But I had listened to my mother sobbing in my father's arms. "He called me 'ma'am,' " my mother said over and over again. "He looked across at me and called me 'ma'am.' "

  My father, who, if not exactly social, was roundly liked in the neighborhood for his hellos and his courtly manner when he ran into the neighbors at the local grocery, had tried to explain my mother's inability to walk into the road.

  "Why didn't she call someone, then?" asked Mr. Tolliver, who lived around the corner and led his own wife on humiliating walks in which he forced her to pump her arms and raise her legs high like a one-woman marching band. "Mrs. Tolliver is a rounded woman," my mother said. "He shouldn't have married a rounded girl if he didn't want a rounded wife."

  "Clair was frozen," my father explained. "Literally frozen to the spot. She couldn't help him."

  As the men and women of the neighborhood drove home from work, they were stopped by police and told to park their cars and walk or, if it made more sense, to circle around in the opposite direction. But most of them parked their cars and got out, joining the crowd that stood on the Beckfords' lawn across the street.

  They were angrier, it seemed, at my mother than at the faceless, nameless stranger who had mown Billy Murdoch down. It took every person who joined the group two or three times hearing the story before they understood how what my mother had done was possible. And it wasn't exactly that they understood. It was more like, by rote, it began to sink in. Clair Knightly, whose husband they all knew, had stood in her yard and watched a boy they all knew die. She did not help. She did not go to him. None of them asked what his parents would wonder for years: Did Clair Knightly even speak to him? Did she say anything?

  The answer was that my mother both wept and sang.

  She stood at the edge of her property and rubbed her chest furiously, back and forth with the sharp knuckles of her right hand. Her left hand flitted from her head down to her side.

  "Billy," she said over and over again, as if naming him might pull him closer.

  His head was on the road, and it was facing her. His eyes were open. She saw his mouth moving but couldn't get herself to stop repeating his name in order to hear what he had to say. By saying "Billy," she was keeping herself in the present, anchoring herself there by the mailbox. Instinctively she knew this was what she must do if she was going to try to help him.

  When there was a break in her rhythm, she heard him.

  "Ma'am?"

  That was the moment she knew she wouldn't be able to do it. She didn't bother saying his name anymore. She stared at him. She stayed right where she was, kneading and rubbing her chest until, as she revealed to my father two days later, she had rubbed a bloody cavity from her throat to her breastbone.

  The other thing the neighbors never found out was the song my mother sang him. It was a song that, whenever I heard it coming through the vent that led from her bedroom to the bathroom, put me on guard for the advent of a bad day. It was a rhyme she remembered from childhood, and she would sing it repeatedly, the words running together into a sort of chant.

  Posies are bright, clear, and gay.

  Daffodils sprout on the lawn in May.

  Flowers and girls are often the same.

  Rose, Violet, and Iris are names.

  She would hum the next few lines, whose words, I assumed, she had forgotten long before. It soothed her, and I knew this, but when I went to her bedroom to ask if she needed anything, I would remain in the doorway until her lips stilled.

  My mother sang and hummed this song to Billy Murdoch until a delivery truck drove up, heading for the Levertons', who, in celebration of their wedding anniversary, had already left the day before on a trip. The young man, in white coveralls and a ponytail, leaped out and in a flurry ran past my mother. He bolted up the stairs through our open door, found the phone on the side table in the family room just next to the couch piled with half-sorted boxers and socks, and called the hospital.

  By the time the ambulance and the police arrived, Billy was almost gone, and everyone had questions for the incoherent woman singing an incoherent song.

  After that, we kept the blinds drawn and pretended the trash on our lawn had fallen there by accident. I stayed away from school for six weeks. I would meet Natalie on a wooden bench in the park five blocks from our house.

  "Not yet," she'd tell me, and hand me the assignments I'd missed. Even her parents preferred not to have me come over to her house anymore.

  "I hate this," I said.

  "Remember Anne Frank?" Natalie said once. "Pretend you're like her, and you can't go anywhere until you get the all clear."

  "Anne Frank was exterminated!"

  "Well, not that part," Natalie said.

  I began to spend my time calculating. I was a junior. I had eighteen months to go until, somehow, I would get out.

  I did not tell my mother this. At home, all roads revolved around her more than they had before. My father and I whispered our hellos in those first six months after Billy died, and when the doorbell rang, we scurried like mice into dark corners, hoping whoever it was would go away. A rock came through the front window once, and we hid this fact from my mother, claiming instead that it had been my father reaching back to turn the page of a newspaper and poking his elbow through the glass. "Can you believe that?" he said with his best variety-show voice. "I didn't know I was that strong!"

  "Or that oblivious," my mother said, weakly playing her part of condemning him, though we all felt the lack of her sharp tongue. Judgment, her savior and guardian, had left her. Her perch at the window of the living room, from which she could watch Mrs. Tolliver marching by or call the next-door neighbor's child a slut, was cloaked in a heavy wool curtain that we ceased to open.

  Shortly after Christmas of that year and three months after the accident, the Murdochs moved. A truck pulled up in the middle of the afternoon, and four men loaded all their possessions in a little less than three hours. Natalie and I were bike riding when we came over the hill and saw Mrs. Murdoch standing in the front yard with the dog, Billy's dog. She wore a short checked coat and a circle skirt in heavy gray flannel, a pattern from Simplicity that everyone seemed to have made that year. I remember braking a little as I took in the moving van and the boxes, Mr. Murdoch's back disappearing into the house, and then my eyes met Mrs. Murdoch's, and it was everything I could do to keep my balance. As it was, my front tire wobbled dangerously as I all but ceased to pedal.

  Natalie came up beside me on her green Schwinn ten-speed. "Let's go," she said softly.

  And we
did. I put my feet on the pedals and moved past Mrs. Murdoch. Billy's dog, a Jack Russell named Max, strained against his leash, and I had to remind myself it was the wheels of the bike he hated, not me.

  How can you apologize for the mother you love? The mother you, too, hate. The only thing I could hope was that Mrs. Murdoch would have plenty of people to love her in the future, plenty of people to console her and to listen to the story of how she lost her son. My mother would have only my father. Then she would have me.

  EIGHT

  The day the neighbors showed up in the yard, my father had told us he was in Erie, Pennsylvania, shaking up vials of poisonous silt and calculating the rate of sedimentary accretion in the local drinking water.

  My mother was in the kitchen, and I had just come in through the side door. After Billy died, she stopped asking me where I'd been. I could have been sleeping with the boy she called the "horror," who lived down the road and had a tattoo in a time when such a thing was equal to the mark of Cain. She needed all her energy to stay upright.

  At some point, after the buzzer on the stove had rung and I'd come out of the downstairs bathroom, having washed up, my mother and I both heard the same low sound together.

  It was a gathering of men.

  I can't say how I knew to be scared, but I was. I can say that I was immediately relieved my father was away. Far enough away that he would be gone for days still. And I've never known if this was exactly why the men chose that day to come.

  In sixth grade I had studied a photo of a lynching in the South. It was a small black-and-white photo that had been mimeographed and distributed by our history teacher, who believed history made the most impact when it was illustrated. Parents throughout the district had complained when their children came home with photos of lynchings, or Auschwitz, or the head of an African warlord raised and dripping on a stick. But the teacher had been right, and the fascination I had had looking at those images now gripped me in the pit of my stomach as I stood with my mother while she held a vegetarian casserole in her hands.