by Alice Sebold
When my father began to house-hunt in Frazer, Malvern, and Paoli, he went alone. He took Polaroids of the rooms and yards. He would bring them back to my mother, and in the dining room, they would spread out the photos, making a sort of montage of each house, separated from the others by the dark walnut of the dining table.
I would return from driving with Mr. Forrest, and the three of us would circle around the table, looking cautiously at what might become ours. It was through this experience that my father decided to equip me with a camera of my own.
"This way," he said, "you can take pictures of your schoolmates or a band recital and bring them home to your mother."
"I don't go to band recitals," I said.
"Right. Well, things you do do, then."
He smiled weakly, and I knew not to say anything. That somehow doing so would be disloyal in that all of it pointed to the fact that my mother might never again make it past our door.
But I did enjoy the house-shopping via photographs. At night, I could dream about bedrooms that floated in the sky next to a one-car garage in which sat a cherry-red Jaguar with real wood inlay on the dash.
I couldn't tell sometimes whether my mother was interrogating my father or the houses.
"Fancy wood paneling," she'd say, "but hideous green carpeting. What do you have to say to that?"
"It looks like grass," my father said.
"Filthy grass, at best."
And though it was my turn to speak, I held back.
When it was finally time for my mother to see the three houses that had passed muster, plans were put in place for nearly a week. My mother chose her outfit for the day and kept it laid out in the spare bedroom, where her father's rifles still had pride of place along one wall. I decided that I would find a silent way to show her my support even if I still refused to speak to her.
I was dieting stringently at the time, and a few mornings before the Saturday of the houses, I sliced up my carrots and celery for the day and stared at them. Using the orange circles of the carrots as notepads, I made my own dietetic version of the sugar hearts from Valentine's Day. "Good luck!" I wrote with a black felt-tip on one carrot disk. "Triumph!" I wrote on another. Then I got into it. "Fuck them!" I wrote. "Take good care." "Eat carrots!" "Tallyho!" "Avaunt!"
The next step was to hide them around the house in places she would find them. The toes of the shoes she'd put in the spare room with her outfit. Beneath the fluffy puff I had once coveted inside the powder on her dresser top. In her chipped and lipstick-stained teacup. As I crept about the house, going into and out of each room in search of places to hide these carrot notes, I forgot my hatred of my mother and opened to my love. It was, like a playground seesaw, so easy to pitch from one side to the other.
On the morning of the big day, my father asked me to leave the living area and remain in the kitchen with the swing door closed. By that time my mother had not left the house itself in nearly a year, and our yard in nearly five. The neighbors, knowing my father was spending his weekends house-hunting, had grown oddly quiet.
As my father hustled me into the kitchen and kissed me lightly on the forehead, his thoughts preoccupied with my mother, who was humming loudly upstairs in a wavering voice, I saw the blankets he had stacked on the dining room table and knew what they were for.
The morning had started with my father waking early and coming down to fix my mother breakfast on a tray. He had a volume knob on his love for my mother, and her weakness seemed to turn it up so loudly that the reverb shut me out.
The blankets were meant to calm her. They were heavy gray movers' blankets. Felt on one side and quilted cotton on the other. My mother had last left the border of our yard when I was eleven. All the way to the local drugstore and back, she had never taken the blanket off her head. Instead, my father and I guided her to the aisle where they sold feminine supplies. No matter how torturous it was for her, she had wanted to be with me when I bought my first menstrual pads.
From my place in the kitchen, I saw her through the diamond-shaped window in the swing door. She was deathly pale and wearing the apricot linen suit that had lain out all week. On her feet were the pumps in which I'd placed the carrot slices. My father embraced her and then held her in his arms as he softly spoke words I couldn't understand but knew meant comfort. He rubbed her tensed back until she stepped out of his embrace and stood ramrod straight, her posture the stance of the model she'd once been. I saw that she had taken the time to apply what she thought of as outside makeup, not just the powder and gloss she usually wore but the whole nine yards, for no one to see but my father and the dark cloth--mascara, eyeliner, foundation, and red matte lipstick.
She's ready, I thought. It's now or never.
My father lifted the first gray blanket up and wrapped it around my mother's waist, pinning it loosely with safety pins. It fell to just below her feet and skimmed the ground. The next blanket was draped around her shoulders and pinned down the front. Up to this point, she still looked like a big kid playing some kind of monk dress-up. But it was the final blanket that had been the hardest one in the past. The blanket that went over her head.
When I had assisted my father, I could not help feeling that as we put this blanket over her, we were sending her to the gallows. I had held the blanket up so I could still see her face--"Are you all right, Mom?" "Yes." "Dad and I can get them." "I'm going."--and then I had lowered the blanket and stared at the wavy lines of the machine quilting, knowing my mother needed the reassurance of this slow suffocation when she went out into the world.
I saw my father lean in to kiss my mother before unfolding the final blanket. It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.
My father draped the fateful hood over her head, and my mother disappeared, replaced instead by a hollow vision of dark-gray wool. They took the steps toward the door in a rush. I left my spot in the kitchen and felt the cool morning air flood in from outside.
Just as suddenly as my father swooped my mother up in his arms, and as she moaned like an animal trapped in a snare, I rushed forward into the dining room and then to the stoop in time to see them disappear out the front door and down the stairs.
My father had planned ahead. The Oldsmobile was facing the opposite way of the other cars, with the passenger side nearest the house and the car door open. I saw Mrs. Castle and her husband drive by. My father ignored them, when on another day he would have waved. Mr. Donnellson was out mowing his grass and looked up with pity toward my parents.
My mother did not struggle. She was suffering too much to have the energy for that. The moans grew louder even though they were farther away. If I had not once helped encase my mother in blankets, I would not have believed it was she. It seemed instead like a movie one might see in which a woman was being kidnapped. My father, the criminal, would call home for a ransom that I had no choice but to deliver: here is my heart, here is everything I cherish, here is my mother for my mother.
My father got my mother inside the car and tucked the blankets in so he could close the door. The car door slammed, and he jogged around the front to the driver's side.
It will be better when we move, I thought, but just as quickly knew this for a lie.
My father glanced up. I waved from the stoop. Down the street I saw Mr. Warner standing in his yard with his middle son. Quickly, I turned to hide.
My parents didn't even make it inside the first house. The Realtor stood on the lawn and peered into the car as my father explained that he was sorry but that things just weren't going to work out. He was no longer interested in buying a house.
"She was very uppity," my mother said later. "Very curious about who I was. My shroud would have served her well!"
Mr. F
orrest had come by to ask after the house-hunt. He sat on the sofa, his arm resting on the memory quilt. My father brought in a tray of cocktails, and I stayed on the Victorian love seat at the far end of the room.
Watching her construct her criticism of the Realtor from the borrowed observations of my father was incredible. She joked about the woman's hair and nails, and called her accent a "concoction of cornpone." And there I was, unable not to speak.
"What's cornpone, Mom?"
There was only the slightest pause.
My father handed her a scotch, and she sat back in her wing chair as if nothing unusual had happened in the last twenty years.
"Should you tell her or should I?" she asked Mr. Forrest.
"Ladies first," he said.
After serving Mr. Forrest, my father took his scotch and sat on the ottoman near my mother's wing chair. We all watched her. She still had on her apricot linen suit, and her thin legs were encased in skin-tinted panty hose and crossed at the knee.
"Cornpone is two things. It's a bread you can eat and it's folksy bullshit. She was the latter. All compliments and sweet until she saw your father wouldn't budge. Then her voice changed completely. Suddenly she was from Connecticut!"
Mr. Forrest laughed appreciatively and so did my father while she continued skewering the Realtor. I sat and watched the three of them from my perch on the hard red-velvet love seat, wondering if she'd read the carrot notes. I saw that inside the four walls of our house, my mother would remain the strongest woman in the world. She was impossible to beat.
After Mr. Forrest left, my father tucked my mother into bed, and I went into the backyard, where eventually he joined me.
"What a day, sweet pea," he said. I could smell the scotch on his breath.
"Mom's different, right?" I asked.
I couldn't see my father's face clearly in the dark, so I watched the tops of the fir trees, which were outlined by the blue night.
"I like to think that your mother is almost whole," he said. "So much in life is about almosts, not quites."
"Like the moon," I said.
There it hung, a thin slice still low in the sky.
"Right," he said. "The moon is whole all the time, but we can't always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there's only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides."
"Right."
I knew I was supposed to understand something from my father's explanation, but what I came away with was that, just as we were stuck with the moon, so too we were stuck with my mother. Wherever I'd travel, there she'd be.
TEN
The night I killed my mother, I slept only a short time, but I dreamed. I dreamed of snakes slithering into the orifices of my daughters and of not being able to help or even to scream. But I woke because of pebbles against the windowpane.
The sky outside the windows was a deep blue, and I knew who I would see down in the yard before I stood. It had been something he'd done when the girls were young and he'd forgotten his keys. He stole the small glazed decorative pebbles from our Wisconsin neighbor's flowerpots and pitched them against our bedroom window in the dark.
I walked to the window. I felt like it had been more years than I could count.
"Jake?"
"Let me in," he said. His voice was soft but strong and made me think of what my mother had said after I'd put him on the phone from Wisconsin. "It sounds like you're marrying an anchorman."
I had slept in my clothes. I didn't want to turn on a light or look in the mirror. Hanging above me were the clear-glass globes that now took on the cast of separate worlds. I imagined a mother and daughter in each of them. In one, the mother and daughter would be sharing an old-fashioned sled as they slid down a deep, downy bank of snow. In another, they drank hot cider and told each other stories in front of a fire. In the final globe, the daughter held her mother's head beneath the surface of the icy water, strangling her as she drowned.
I forced myself to stand in front of the mirror that hung over a beaux arts dresser Sarah and I had pulled from the wrecked Victorian in my mother's neighborhood. The mirror was even older, and its glass held small circular wear marks the color of ash.
I looked exactly as I had the day before, but there was something behind my eyes I couldn't name. It was not fear or even guilt. I shifted my body slightly so one of the mirror's wear marks--a black dot with a wavy black circle surrounding it--was positioned exactly in the center of my forehead. Bang-bang.
I had not seen Jake in almost three years, since shortly before Leo was born. He had touched my nose with his index finger and said, "A true button. I've never known anyone else with a button nose! Jeanine has it too."
"Yes," I said. "And your hazel eyes."
"I'm hoping this one gets your blue."
We had stood, looking at each other, until John came out of the bedroom where Emily was under strict orders to stay in bed.
"Am I interrupting something?" he asked.
"We were just fighting over who has more gray hairs," Jake said.
"That's easy," John said, with the humor of a pear. "Helen does."
My hair had begun to silver years ago, in my late thirties. I'd thought long and hard before coloring it. There was something sad to me about saying good-bye to my original color by dyeing it and keeping it dyed. In opting to wear it very short, I sometimes felt I resembled a stick woman in a black skullcap.
Jake was standing outside the back door, holding a brown leather backpack. I could see him through the half pane as I approached, tapping his fingers against the leather strap, a habit of his--finger tapping, foot wiggling, knuckle cracking--that had driven me mad by the end of our marriage. But it seemed reassuring somehow. He still had the same nervous energy he'd had so many years ago.
I unlatched the bolt and drew the door open toward me.
We stared at each other.
He had aged in a good way. The way wiry men who seem unconcerned with their appearance but who have deep habitual hygiene and exercise habits age. Stealthfully. At fifty-eight, he had salt-and-pepper hair but still appeared to be in fighting trim.
"I've been to the house," he said. "Why did you move her?"
I gasped. He stepped over the threshold and took the door away from my hands, shutting it firmly and bolting it.
"How?"
"You left the living room window in back unlocked. I didn't know if you were inside or not, so I climbed onto the grill and popped the screen. Helen," he said. He looked right at me, there in the tiny hallway. "What have you done?"
"I don't know. You were talking about rot, and I thought, Freezer."
"You killed someone," he said, enunciating each word as if I couldn't understand. He looked angry enough to strike me.
I backed into the laundry room. He had never hit me. He was not the hitting type or even one to raise his voice. He reasoned. He analyzed. At worst, he stewed.
He had conditioned himself to going gloveless in the cold of Wisconsin years ago. I saw his ruined thumb and finger, where the nails had become permanently discolored.
"What did you think putting her in the freezer would achieve?"
"I don't know," I said. I could feel the shelf I kept the laundry supplies on gouging into my back. "I don't know."
He came forward, and I flinched. "Don't be afraid." He took one of my arms in his hand and pulled me away from the wall. A box of softener sheets fell to the floor. "Come here," he said.
And then he encased me. Encased me in a way the thirty-year-old Hamish never could. There was history and knowledge and even, as amazing as it was, compassion in this embrace. I thought of how he would talk about his work as ephemeral, and that all things were ephemeral when it came down to it, even relationships.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," I said. I let myself lean, for a moment, against his rough gray coat. "I should have called someone, but I didn't."
Ever s
o gently he removed the backpack from his shoulder and placed it on the dryer.
"You called me," he said.
I kept my head burrowed into his chest even though I could feel him wanting to pull back and look at me. I did not want to be looked at by anyone. I could not believe what I had done, but at the same time, inside me, like a kernel just beginning to grow, I felt justified. No one--not even Jake, who could conceive of it better than anyone--knew what my life with my mother had become.
"I couldn't do it anymore," I said. He put his hands on my shoulders and forced me to look at him. I was crying in a hideous leaking sort of way. I had forgotten, as the years passed and our conversations were had only over the phone, me always in Pennsylvania and him in one city after another, how kind his face could be. I saw the gentleness that Emily had grown so close to. I saw the man Jeanine and Leo called "Big Dad," and whom, for obvious reasons, they preferred to me.
"Oh, Helen," he said. He put his hand to my cheek. "My poor Helen."
He kissed me on the top of my head and then held me against him, rocking me. We stayed that way for a long while. Long enough for the light outside to go from deep to light blue. Long enough for the first bird of dawn to be joined by a chorus. Only Jake could get away with saying such things to me.
When we pulled apart, he suggested coffee, and we moved down the long back hallway, on the wall of which I kept a map of the world that had once been my father's. Over the years, the countries at shoulder height had been rubbed raw by the accidental brushing of my winter coat whenever I left through the garage. I spied the just-spared Caracas out of my left eye.
My father had brought the map over two weeks before he shot himself. "Why now?" I'd asked him. He smiled as Emily came to greet him. Every man, even her grandfather, a secret disappointment to her in those first years away from Jake. "So that Emily and Sarah can learn their geography!" he'd said.
I turned on the lights in my kitchen. They were recessed and supposed to be better than old-fashioned overheads, but the slight broken-filament sound they always made as they heated up had never failed to disturb me. I went to the long counter and pulled the coffeemaker away from the wall. I wanted to talk about something besides my mother.
