by Alice Sebold
"Who are you working for in Santa Barbara?" I managed.
"Some computer guy," he said.
Jake came and stood close beside me, as if we were two line workers on a conveyor belt. He took the glass pot from my hands and turned on the faucets of the sink to rinse it out. I tossed the old grounds out and replaced the filter.
"He has homes in about a dozen places. Actually, Avery was the one who hooked me up. He's friends with this guy's acquisitions rep."
"Acquisitions rep?"
After handing me the pot, Jake turned and leaned against the counter. I spooned in the coffee, keeping my mind on the count.
"Are you sure you want to hear about this?"
I nodded my head.
"It's a whole new world. I do more and more private commissions. It beats the teaching. I like to say I burned out in Bern."
"So, you're a whore," I said.
"Now that's my Helen."
I smiled at him weakly. "Thank you."
"My flip-flop artist," he said. He took a cursory look around. It had been eight years since he'd stood in my kitchen. In a quick moment during a party, we had had a private toast to Sarah, who had graduated high school that day by the skin of her teeth.
I snapped in the filter and turned on the switch.
I did not look at him but at the counter, at the small golden flecks in the old linoleum. I had never been comfortable asking for help.
He walked over to the kitchen desk, where I paid bills and kept my own records, which was separate from the desk in the living room, where I kept my mother's, and hung his coat off the back of an old Mexican chair. The coffee gurgled into the pot behind me. I thought of how the roof light of our VW Bug had gone on the night we knew it was over. He was dropping the girls and me at home before going to hang out with a group of teachers. I saw his features briefly, sickly, sadly, and then he closed the door. I stood in front of our small house with Sarah in my arms and Emily holding my hand. "Good-bye, Daddy," she said. And then I said, "Good-bye," and so did Sarah. Our words like so many useless cans rattling at the back of the car.
We moved over to the glass-topped dining table, and he pulled out a chair.
"What do we do?" I asked.
"That's all I thought about on the way out," he said. I realized how tired he must be. In all the years of flying, he had never adjusted to it. Sarah had told me that when she'd asked him to describe his globe-trotting life, he'd responded with one word: "Lonely."
I did not sit but stayed standing, my arms crossed against my chest. I had four hours before I was due at Westmore at ten o'clock.
"Before I crawled in that window and saw her in the basement, I thought it would be simple. I somehow thought we'd just say that she had died, and you'd been so distraught you'd called me, and though I'd implored you to call an ambulance, you waited for me to come before you did. Now I'm not sure what to do. Having her down in the basement and nude, and you having left her there, makes it stranger."
On the tip of my tongue I found the name Manny, but I did not say it. Instead I turned and took down two mugs from the hooks underneath the cabinets. I poured the coffee into them as it continued brewing.
"Couldn't we say," I said, "that I found her that way? That she fell?"
As I placed his cup in front of him, he looked at me.
"What do you mean?"
I sat down and wrapped both hands around my mug. "I mean, we say what you said, that I was so upset I waited for you to arrive, but that instead of trying to explain how she ended up down there, we just say that that's how I found her."
"Nude with a broken nose in the basement?"
"Exactly."
I sipped my coffee. He reached his hand across the table and touched my forearm.
"You do realize what you've done, right?"
Weakly, I nodded my head.
"You really hated her, didn't you?"
"And loved."
"You could have taken off, done something else instead."
"What?"
"I don't know. Anything but this."
"She was my mother," I said.
Jake was silent.
"So what's wrong with my plan?"
"They'd treat it like a crime," Jake said. "They'd be much more likely to scrutinize things."
"So?"
"So," he said, "they'll figure it out, Helen. They'll put it together that you didn't just find her that way but that you put her there."
"And then what?"
"There'd be an investigation."
I drank my coffee and leaned back in my chair.
"Stonemill Farms," I murmured to myself, saying, as I often did, the name of my own development. It had always sounded like the name of a medieval jail to me.
He was wearing a blue sweater, which he peeled off over his head. Underneath I saw the kind of T-shirt only Jake would wear. Against a beige backdrop and underneath a picture of a stick-figure man lying in a hammock strung between two green trees, there was a short slogan: "Life is good." If there was a reason for our divorce, it was this in a nutshell. On this point, we had always disagreed. It was also, I guess, our reason for marrying.
"Do you ever draw nudes anymore?" I asked.
"My hands don't work that way these days. I'm working with sheet metal now."
"Should we make the phone call?" In my mind I had connected calling the police to finally taking a shower. I didn't care if what I said on my end of the line made sense anymore.
"Why did you bathe her?" Jake asked.
"I wanted to be alone with her," I said. The word "alone" rang in my head. Suddenly I looked at Jake and felt he was still thousands of miles away and that this would be true no matter how close he moved.
Through the closed windows leading out back, I could hear the neighbor's baby scream. It was a child whom I had never seen but whose screams were the unhappiest I'd ever heard. And long. They arced and warbled and started up again. It was as if the mother had given birth to an eight-pound ball of rage.
I finished the dregs of my coffee. "Another?"
He handed me his empty cup, and I took both mugs over to the counter to refill. We had always done that well together--drunk coffee. I would be his model, and he would sit and sketch me, and between the two of us, we could drink three pots of coffee in an afternoon.
"I think you should tell me how it happened. Exactly how."
I carried the cups back over to the table, setting his down but holding on to mine. "I think I should shower," I said. "I have to be at the college for a ten a.m. class."
Jake pushed back his chair and looked up at me.
"What's wrong with you? You're not going to Westmore. We have to figure this out and then call somebody."
"You call," I said.
"And say what, Helen? That you were tired and it seemed like a good day to murder someone?"
"Don't use that word," I said.
I walked out of the room. I thought of Hamish as I climbed the stairs. A day when he would want to kill his mother would never come.
Outside the upstairs front window, I could see the line of poplars that swayed in the breeze. Their remaining leaves were golden and peach, and fluttered on their stems. Years ago I had thought that getting away from my mother would be only a matter of time, that fleeing meant taking a car or an airplane, or filling out an application for the University of Wisconsin.
I could hear Jake stir in the kitchen. The creak of the floor under my faux-terra-cotta-tile linoleum. Would he stand at the sink and wash out the mugs? Would he watch the jays and the cardinals in their daily clamor for food underneath the crab apple tree? The views from my windows, whether leaf-turning poplars or birds at their feed, often felt like the farthest distances I'd ever traveled. I tried to imagine the Helen who had taken the wheel from her father that first Christmas vacation when he had driven all the way out in the Olds to get her. "I'll drive this leg," I'd said as we headed toward the interstate. "Our road trip," my father had called it in the
years that followed, as it became increasingly clear we would never have another.
I went into the bedroom and quietly closed the door. In the bathroom, I turned on the shower to let the water heat. While standing on the rug in front of the sink, I realized that I was undressing in the way one would if her clothes were caked with winter grime or the remains of heavy yard work. I rolled my pants down carefully to the ground and slipped them over my socks, stepping gingerly out onto the rug, as if, by disturbing the trouser cuffs, the silt of a dead body might escape into the air. I peeled off my socks. On my toenails, I wore my mother's color--that muted coral I detested--which I had put on two weeks before on a long afternoon during which we watched television together. The sound of the PBS program about stock trading was like a dentist's drill boring into me while my mother napped in her red-and-white-flocked wing chair.
I was still, I knew, the woman Hamish had wanted to make love to. Still the woman to whom girls at Westmore routinely said, "When I'm old, I want to look as good as you," not realizing the insult. But whereas I felt my mother had possessed, throughout her life, true beauty, I had always believed that I lived on borrowed time. I knew that the same bones that made my mother a domestic Garbo underpinned my more average looks. My father, though delicate around the eyes, was also long-jawed and bulbous-nosed, and so I had inherited just enough of his qualities to blunt my mother's. I believed it galled her that a painting of me existed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I had rushed to point out that it was only my body. "My face wasn't interesting to Julia Fusk," I said, trying to please her when I saw on her coffee table a monograph of the exhibit that Mr. Forrest had brought.
The steam from the shower filled the bathroom. I thought of the box of my mother's slips that I'd stolen from the basement some years before. I had put them in tissue paper in the bottom of a spare bureau in the walk-in closet. Sometimes, I would open the drawer and stare down at the rose-petal pink. It was such a simple thing, the satin piping on the bodice that became the spaghetti straps that looped over her shoulders. The slight swish and sway of the silk around the middle of her body. The tug of it when it met her hips.
I could see the general outline of my body in the fogged-up mirror. Having lost all shyness by having spent my career taking off my clothes in public, I enjoyed how demure the steam made me seem. Quickly, just before stepping in the shower, I leaned into the mirror and drew a smiley face. In the clear spots, I saw my reflection. "Ugly is as ugly does," my mother would say.
I heard Jake coming into the bedroom as I closed the frosted shower door. The idea of him being so close by after all these years both scared and delighted me.
At some point my father began sleeping in the spare room. Every morning he would wake up and make the bed perfectly as if no one had lain down there the night before, as if the empty bed waited for a never-invited guest. Even I believed this for a very long time until, like my mother, I began to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the house. When my grandfather's rifles were pulled off the rack, I could hear from my room the popping of the clasp that held the stocks. At least once every few months, I noted this distinctive sound, and in September of my senior year in high school, I decided to investigate.
It was unusually hot for September, and the humidity seemed only to increase after dark. The night noises coming through the open windows made my progress across the hall and past the top of the stairs go undetected. When I reached the spare room, I opened the door as quietly as I could.
"Go back to bed, Clair," my father said in irritation. He was looking down at the rifle, which lay across his lap in the deep blue of his terry-cloth robe.
"Dad?"
He looked up and came to standing immediately.
"It's you," he said.
The rifle dangled from his arm, its barrel pointing toward the ground. Behind him I saw the rumpled sheets of the bed. The pillow, I knew, he had brought in from the master bedroom. The case matched the sheets on my parents' bed. On the table was a tumbler of orange juice.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm cleaning them," he said.
"Cleaning them?"
"Guns are like everything else, honey. They need to be cleaned to keep them in working order."
"Since when do you care about guns?"
"Right."
"Dad?"
His eyes seemed far away. He would focus on me for a moment and then drift.
"Why don't you just bring your stuff in here? You're not fooling anyone."
"No, honey, that's silly. I come in here sometimes when I can't sleep. So I won't disturb your mother."
"Are you done with that?" I said, indicating the rifle with the thrust of my chin.
"I can rely on you not to tell your mother about this, can't I? Her father's guns are very precious to her, and I wouldn't want her knowing that I was fooling around with them."
"But you're cleaning them, you said."
"Right." He nodded his head in agreement with himself, but I was unconvinced.
I could not bring myself to move away from the door and go over to him. Seeing him in the soft clothes of pajamas and terry-cloth robe had always been strange for me. He was up and dressed before I was, and he changed into his pajamas only after I went to bed. On the rare occasions when I saw him like this, I didn't know how to classify him. He wasn't the father I knew but more of the caved-in man who had appeared on and off since I was eight years old.
He took the rifle and returned it to its rack, then shut the clasp that held the barrel.
"Someday I'm going to convince your mother to get rid of them."
He walked over toward the head of the bed, picked up the orange juice, and drank it down all at once.
"Let's put you to bed, okay?"
We walked out into the hallway and across to my side of the house.
I lay down on my twin bed. "How about a round of waft?" he asked.
And though this was a routine that we had abandoned years ago, I nodded my head. Anything to make my father stay longer in the room. Anything to make him focus back on me.
When I shut off the shower, I heard Jake talking in the bedroom. I grew very still, and in trying to eavesdrop, I thought of Mrs. Castle coming by the night before, how the water had seeped from the sponge and run down my arm until it hit my elbow, the drops falling from me back into the pan of soapy water.
"I don't know how long yet."
I reached for a downy white towel from the towel rack. I had bought half a dozen three years ago in a splurge at the mall. Three for me and three for my mother. I had thought that if we used all white towels, we would suddenly be sunnier individuals, bright and happy, desperately clean.
"Just use the Science Diet and wet food on the weekend. Grace likes the beef, and Milo the lamb and rice."
He was talking to his dog-sitter. Giving him the facts.
"Yes, you know I'll make it up to you, babe. This is old business, and I need to be here right now."
I saw myself wrapped in the deceitful towel. Old business.
I heard him say his good-byes and the beep of the phone being hung up. I had managed to keep myself in good shape, but nonetheless I could see that through the eyes of the world, not just Jake's, I was indeed old business. I had come to treat my body like a machine both for the sake of my job and for the sake of my sanity. This had paralleled the increased physical maintenance my mother required. Everything between us was best as regiment. Habits were comforting in a way that love wasn't. Mrs. Castle, I thought, was somewhat daunted to find that I kept my mother's cuticles in tip-top shape, or that I buffed her calluses while her warped feet lay on a tufted footstool, or that I still indulged her belief in cellulite creams at the age of eighty-eight.
"Fuck! Helen!" I heard Jake scream.
I opened the door. He held the braid. I had removed it from its Ziploc bag the night before, as if it might suffocate.
"What the . . . Why would you do such a thing?"
&nbs
p; I looked at him. He seemed more horrified about this than he was that I had killed her.
"I wanted a memento," I said. "A keepsake."
"I can't . . . I mean. My God," he said. Realizing what was in his hand, he threw it back onto my unmade bed. "You slept with this?"
"I brushed and braided it every week. I loved it."
I felt humiliated, standing there in my towel, my hair wet and spiky. I thought of my mother pleading with me to make a concession in my no-makeup existence. "Just a spot of lipstick, please," she'd said, and in my bathroom cabinet I had the tubes of vivid color she'd encouraged me to buy: Honeydew Frost, Maximum Red, Mauve Mayberry.
"I have to get dressed," I said.
"What do we do with that? You can't keep it," Jake said. The braid lay in the jumble of my bedclothes.
"I know."
I stood in a towel on the small rug in front of my dresser. I felt, in front of him, as I never had--ugly. I wanted to call Hamish.
"I'll wait downstairs for you. Is there a phone down there? I looked for it but couldn't find one."
"That's the number my mother had."
"And this one's different?" he asked, indicating the small black phone on my desk.
"Yes, it was Sarah's idea. The phone downstairs is inside the liquor cabinet, under a pillow. Sarah calls it the Bat Phone." I had never had to stand in my own house, half nude, and explain myself before. Certainly not since I'd begun to do things like hide my phone. "And there's a slogan on it about opportunity, which you can feel free to ignore."
"You know I'm here to help you, right?"
"I do."
The moment he was out the door, I felt relief. I liked hiding in my own darkness. I liked it to the point that I'd neglected to realize it was what I'd been doing more and more. Crouching with my mother in her house and ignoring the raucous, wild, demanding world. Even Natalie and I now saw each other mostly at Westmore. We would drive to the nearby Burger King in the afternoons and drink the brown-colored water they called coffee, groaning as we got out of the car.
I walked to the phone and dialed her house, not thinking what I'd do if she picked up. But it was Hamish.
"Hello?"
I found myself unable to speak.
"Hello?"
I hung up. I wanted to drive out to Limerick in my car and fuck him again.
A moment later, the phone rang.
