by Alice Sebold
"It's called 'star sixty-nine,' " he said. "Who is this?"
"Helen."
He paused and then echoed my name back to me.
"Good morning, Hamish," I said.
"When can I see you again?" he asked.
To think, even if for the wrong reasons, the feeling was mutual made me smile as if I were half, as opposed to closer to twice, his age. I tucked my chin down but saw my painted toes and quickly looked up. Reminders were crowding in on me.
"Maybe tonight," I said.
"I'll count on it," he said brightly.
"I can't promise. I have a lot to get done, but maybe."
"I'll be home," he said, and hung up.
When Jake started leaving the studio we'd fashioned behind a drape in the living room and going out into the cold, I didn't question it. At first he went alone for an afternoon and hurried home in the pale-blue Bug, the car shaking up to the outside of our temporary-faculty-housing Quonset hut and sputtering to a sudden stop. We were not too far from town, and I could walk if I needed to run chores. Besides, I had Emily and then Sarah to attend to. He would return half frozen and amped up, talking about ice on leaves and the way an underground stream meandered at the base of a tree.
"And berries. These dark-red berries. If you crush them, they make this sort of thick viscous dye!"
Now I put down the phone and turned to where my mother's braid throbbed on the bed. Even I knew it was too damning to keep. I took my orange-handled shearing scissors from the pencil cup on the dresser and walked over to the bed.
In the bathroom, I leaned over the toilet, squatting down so no hair would fly away. I began to slowly slice the braid into bits small enough to flush.
For her colon surgery, they had had to shave what hair was left from her pubic area. Tucking her in at night, I'd think how we had come full circle. "It's like handling a giant baby," I said to Natalie. "When she's too tired to fight, she just collapses onto me, as if we hadn't been battling each other for half a century."
Natalie listened to me and asked questions. Her parents were younger than mine by a decade and had moved into an assisted-living community on the edge of a perpetually flooded golf course. Her mother had stopped drinking and become the leader of the community's pep step class. What will I tell Natalie? I wondered.
At the thought of this, I nicked my finger with the scissors. Blood and hair floated on the surface of the water. When I was done with the braid, I stood and flushed the toilet, waiting for it to resettle and then flushing it again. I made a mental note to squirt in some Soft Scrub later to clean under the rim.
I remembered taking my mother to the doctor. The blankets, the towels, the constant cajoling, and how once she arrived and removed her wrappings, no one knew she was anything but just a little fearful and strange. She might moan and scratch, but when we hit the entrance door, she performed.
I was present at a rectal examination of my mother when, calling back to her long-held notions of hospitality, she tried to distract the young intern from what he was doing by telling him the story of the meticulous restoration of Jefferson's Monticello, which she had read about in Smithsonian magazine. I sat nearby in the visitor's chair, helpless. The intern, a West Indian, was too polite to continue the examination while my mother chattered on. The result was that our visit took a very long time.
When I stepped into the walk-in closet, I could hear Jake's voice coming up through the floorboards, but I couldn't make the words out. Denied the braid, I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser I kept in the closet and took out the rose-petal-pink slip.
I walked downstairs in my old black sweater and jeans. I had let the slip fall over my hips like a tunic. Since I made my living taking off my clothes, the ones I wore to and from Westmore were barely noticed. And it would be an outfit Sarah might like when she came.
Jake was standing in the kitchen, knocking back shots.
"Well, I've told Emily," he said.
"You what?"
"I didn't tell her the gruesome details," he said, "just that her grandmother's dead. I needed to talk to her. I was supposed to go up there at the beginning of next week."
"Oh," I said. I was aware of the shape of my mouth as I said it.
"She won't be coming out."
I thought of Leo slipping through my mother's fingers, tumbling down, and the sound of his soft skull against the edge of the chair. Emily had called me after she'd returned home. "I don't blame you, Mom, and it's not just Leo. I can't be around Grandma anymore."
"Good for her," I said, though I couldn't help but take it as rejection.
Jake began to tell me more. About Emily saying she was sorry for me and that she hoped this would mark a transitional period toward self-empowerment and other of the yin-and-yang-speak that I knew both she and Jake believed in. My eyes drifted over to the empty bird feeder hanging in the dogwood tree above the drained and barren birdbath. I watched it swing slightly in the breeze. It seemed to mock my lack of motherliness, a hollow plastic tube bereft of food.
Emily had been in love with being a mother since the moment her eldest, Jeanine, was conceived. I'd watched her pick her children up and bury her nose in the space between their heads and necks just to breathe in the scent of them.
"Why are you here?" I asked Jake. "Really."
Jake screwed the cap on the vodka bottle and walked it over to the antique liquor cabinet that my mother had passed on to me after my father's death.
"Because you are the mother of my children," he said. His back was to me. He placed the phone on top of the bottles and then grabbed the pillow from the sideboard and put it inside too. I didn't know if this made me feel less insane or more, Jake being so careful to replace things just the way they were.
"And," he said, turning, "I hated your mother for how she treated you."
"Thank you," I said.
"Where is her braid?"
"How much vodka did you have?" I asked.
"Enough. The braid?"
"I cut it up and flushed it down the toilet."
"Good."
"Did Emily know you were drinking?" I asked.
The first time I'd walked into Emily's house in Washington, it was a one-two punch. First, I noted that the entire house had wall-to-wall white carpeting and that I was not allowed to wear my shoes past the foyer, and second, when I asked for a drink, I was told that they kept no alcohol.
"She chose to believe me when I told her it was grief," said Jake.
"Lying?"
"You are having your usual effect on me."
"Which is?"
"Not good."
I smiled. Jake had pulled me in the direction of faith in the world, and I had pulled him toward a place where daggers awaited behind every smiling face. At some point we'd snapped apart like a doll made from nothing but opposable parts.
"What's next?" I asked.
"What's next?!"
"You seem to be in control," I said. "Let's do this your way."
"We call the police."
"I thought you didn't like that choice," I said.
"I didn't, but I think you're right. We say that you found your mother like that last night but waited until I arrived to call them. We should do it now. I've already been here half the morning."
"If we're doing this," I said, "I'd like to go back to the house and clean up."
"You're worried about housekeeping?"
"I want to see her again," I said. I winced at his expression of disbelief. It wasn't as if he were suggesting anything.
"Get your coat. I have a rental car, but you should probably drive."
Just as we were dressed and ready, Jake caught my hand and squeezed.
Outside on the concrete path leading to the driveway, I pictured driving Jake's car just beyond Hamish's house and having him meet me. It was a red Chrysler convertible and very low-tech, but without youth on my side and after perhaps being accused of murder, I could use it to distract him. A bauble.
I
drove out the entrance of the subdivision. For a while Jake and I were silent. But when I hit Pickering Pike and started heading toward Phoenixville, I saw Jake begin to take notice of the area.
"God," he said, "it's like nothing has changed here. It feels frozen in time."
I was reviewing my mother's kitchen in my mind. The scattered plastic containers and the scissors on the floor might, I thought, be seen as elements in a failed robbery.
We drove by the VFW next to the lumberyard. "Wait until you see Natalie's house," I said. "She has three en suite bathrooms!"
"What will you tell her?"
"I'd like to be able to tell Natalie the truth," I said.
"You know you can't, Helen."
I didn't respond. I thought suddenly of the Edgar Allan Poe story in which someone was buried inside a wall, alive.
"I'm the only one, Helen. Me. No one else."
"Natalie knows how I felt about my mother."
"Maybe so, but this is different. You've gone beyond where most people go. This isn't something you share."
"Most people are idiots," I said.
We passed the old tire factory. When Sarah was four, she'd been certain Jake lived there.
"When you talk like that, it's hard to be in the car with you."
"Why?"
"Because it reminds me of how you could be all the time. Even when things were good, you turned bleak. You hated everything."
"Obviously it's my time to drive around in cars with men who feel the need to tell me the truth about myself," I said.
But he didn't ask whom I was referring to. Miles ticked by on the Playskool speedometer that had been made to look like a race car's controls. We passed Natalie's house. I chose not to point it out.
"The old bridge is still here," Jake said, his tone offering an olive branch. "I remember that when your father took us out for drives, it was always this spot that marked a change in him. He used to get all cheery, sort of. Remember? Like he was rousing the troops so that we would all hit the house united to have a good time. I didn't understand it at first."
"And then you did?"
"Last night, when I climbed in through that window, it all came back to me. That place was a prison."
"And you married an inmate," I said.
I clenched the steering wheel. I did not particularly like being in the car with Jake. Too much history, like too much truth, could prove a painful thing.
"How is Emily?" I asked.
"She's good," Jake said, smiling. "She's having no trouble adjusting to being thirty."
"She was thirty . . ." I said, and then Jake joined me, ". . . from the day she was born!"
We laughed in the tinny rent-a-car together.
"And John?"
"Well, I haven't exactly ever warmed to him, but he's good. He's responsible."
"I think he hates me," I said.
Jake cleared his throat.
"That would be a yes?"
"In general he disapproves of all of us. Sarah too."
"Poor Sarah."
"They divided us, Helen," he said. "Sarah chose you. You know that, don't you?"
I looked away from him.
"Shit!" Jake said. We had just hit the outskirts of Phoenixville.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
"I had forgotten. I had completely forgotten."
"Not all of us grew up in the great Northwest, with a rock edifice for a dad and an undulating waterfall for a mother," I said. "Some of us pushed up through asphalt."
"Just think of what it must have been like for her," he said.
"Who?"
"Your mother. I mean, why would she even want to leave the house when outside there was . . . this?"
"I know this is going to make you laugh," I said, "but I've sort of grown fond of it over the years."
"Of this?"
An old bridge that bisected two parts of the town loomed up. Underneath was strewn a circle of trash. The barrel that had formerly held it was blackened from fire.
"Admittedly," I said, "it has seen better days, but it still has a downtown. They've even tried to revitalize it."
"Come meet Helen, your hostess from the Bureau of Touristry and Death."
"That's the Phoenixville spirit," I said.
We pulled up behind a car at a stoplight, but when the light went from red to green, the car didn't move.
"There's no one in it," Jake said.
I looked, and sure enough, without even having drifted over to the side of the road, the car had been left there, abandoned.
"That creeps me out," I said. "What should I do?"
"Pull around it," Jake said. "That's somebody else's mess to deal with."
We did.
"East Germany felt cheerier than this."
"Watch it," I said. It was as it had been back in childhood. I could call my mother names, but no other child could. I still worried for the declining businesses of the town, and I often frequented Old Joe's son for my haircuts.
"Sorry. I know it gets prettier where your mother's house is."
This was a concession for Jake, and I knew it. As newlyweds, making the long drive out from Madison with Emily, Jake had expected to see the sort of stately homes that came from his greatest exposure to the East, which was actually the South. He had seen Gone With the Wind on television and fallen in love with Vivien Leigh.
Besides the cluster of mansions that were built by the owners of the ironworks on the north side of town, Phoenixville was full of old brick tenements and leaning clapboard houses. Most of the supposed revitalization consisted of looming big-box stores on the former site of the steelworks or the old silk-and-button factories.
I took the neighborhood shortcut behind the railroad tracks, which led through the parking lot of the Orthodox church and onto Mulberry Lane.
"Wait," Jake said, leaning forward in his seat. "What's that?"
Then I saw them. The block was swamped with police cars and an ambulance.
"Hang back."
Accidentally, I pressed the gas with my foot still on the brake.
"Helen," he said, "do what I say."
It took all my energy to nod my head.
"Slowly, I want you to pull into one of the parking spaces."
The church parking lot was all but deserted on a Friday morning. I did as Jake told me to. When I was in the spot, Jake reached over and turned the ignition off.
"Fuck," I said. "Oh, fuck."
"Let's just sit here a minute."
"Sarah's number is under mine. What if they call her?"
"They disconnected her phone last week," Jake said. "She only has her cell."
Sarah had not told me this. I risked a look past Jake and through the passenger-side window. I could see Mrs. Castle standing on the front walkway, talking to a policeman. For a moment, I thought she looked over at the parking lot.
"We have to get out of here," I said.
"No, we don't," Jake said. "We need to figure out what we'll do next."
I thought of waking up as a child in the middle of the night. Sometimes my father would be sitting in the chair at the end of my bed, watching me in the dark. "Go back to sleep, honey," he'd say. And I would. I thought of Sarah. I knew that after a few bright spots early on, her life in New York had flatlined. I'd sworn that the last few times she'd visited, coins had gone missing from my change dish.
"I can't, Jake," I said. "I just have to tell them."
I saw two policemen come out the front door. They had white plastic bags tied over their shoes.
"What are they holding?" I asked.
"Paper bags."
"Paper bags?"
The two of us watched as they brought the bags over to where Mrs. Castle stood, clutching them in their hands.
"Did she make them lunch?"
"Helen," Jake said, his voice suddenly drained, "they're collecting evidence."
We sat stunned and silent for a moment, watching the men clip a slip of paper to the top of each bag an
d place it in a cardboard box.
"It isn't just about you anymore," he said. "I climbed up on the grill this morning. I went in through the window."
"I'll tell them the truth," I said. "That I dragged you into this."
"And why didn't I call them myself?"
I didn't know what to say, so I said what I had always thought. "Because you're too good for me."
Jake looked right at me. "That isn't going to help. Do you understand? My fingerprints are on the window, in the basement, and on the stairwell. I didn't call them when I should have after I first talked to you."
I nodded my head. "I'm sorry."
We both sat back in our seats.
"Try to breathe," he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you. I breathed.
On instinct, when we heard a siren coming down the road, we sank lower in our seats. It was an ambulance.
"Why another one?"
"Another what?" Jake said.
"Ambulance?"
"The one at your mother's is the coroner," he said.
We both peered over the edge of the door.
"It's pulling into Mrs. Leverton's driveway," I said. I was gleeful. Elated. As if this would cancel out the sight of police cars outside my mother's house. As if Mrs. Castle could be standing in our yard, describing how she preferred to toast the bread for sandwiches first before she cut off the crusts. How cream cheese and chives, though admittedly an acquired taste, had always been her favorite lunch.
"Is Emily's number there?" Jake asked.
"What?"
"You said Sarah's number was over the phone. Is Emily's?"
"Not after Leo. Emily asked me to take it down."
"She had a way with kids, your mother."
"I killed her, Jake."
"I know," he said.
"They'll find out, won't they?"
"Probably. Yes."
"How long?"
"I don't know. Soon."
"I wish I had died along with her." I had not expected to say this or even feel it, but there it was. He did not respond, and I wondered suddenly if I was speaking out loud or only inside my head. I would not get to see my mother again. I would not get to brush her hair or paint her nails.
"Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions," I said. "I read that in a pamphlet while I was waiting for my mother at the doctor's."
I did not tell him that I thought it applied to love. I wanted to touch him, but I worried he might pull back.
"Eventually she got better at leaving the house. I could get her to her doctors' appointments by using a bath towel. It took her forty years, but she graduated from blankets to bath towels," I said.
