The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

  Jake was thinking, and I was staring straight ahead at the low cement retaining wall that bordered the parking lot.

  It always took me a moment to recognize him without his dog. He had lost the last of five King Charles spaniels two years before and decided he was too old to risk another one. "Dogs don't understand us leaving them," he'd once said when we'd met on the sidewalk outside my mother's house.

  "There's Mr. Forrest," I said. I indicated the dapper old man standing on the hill over the retaining wall.

  "Yes, her only friend," Jake said.

  In the distance, I could see Mrs. Leverton being loaded into the ambulance. A paramedic was holding up a drip of some sort, and I could see Mrs. Leverton's head above the sheet. Almost simultaneously, a smoky gray Mercedes pulled up, and her rich son got out. Mr. Forrest watched it all from the hill in front of me. He was wearing stiff corduroy pants with a crease and a gray flannel suit jacket, under which appeared to be a conglomeration of sweaters and turtlenecks to keep him warm in the unpredictable fall air. A cashmere muffler, because he believed deeply in cashmere, was tied tightly around his neck. He was at least seventy-five, I knew. He had stopped coming by to see my mother shortly after my father's suicide.

  "I think we should leave," Jake said.

  I was staring at Mr. Forrest. As if he knew, he turned his head in our direction. His glasses were the same as they'd always been--thick tortoiseshell squares--and he would have had to see me through the slightly tinted glass of the front windshield of a car I did not own. I looked directly back at him and swallowed hard.

  "Did you hear me?" said Jake. "I want you to back out and leave the way we came. The shortcut."

  It was among the subtlest things I'd ever seen, Mr. Forrest's nod of his head in my direction.

  "Okay," I said. I turned the key in the ignition. After carefully backing out, I drove away.

  I did not tell Jake about Mr. Forrest. I was beginning to feel a certain inevitability building, but at the same time I didn't want to peer too far into the distance.

  "You'll go to Westmore," Jake said, "and I'll call Sarah."

  "And tell her what?"

  "Nothing, Helen. I don't know!" he said.

  I drove along the railroad tracks on the access road all the way out of town. It was as if we were fugitives. I hated it. Absolutely hated that even my mother's corpse could still exact such control. Seeing a bank of gravel just ahead, I drove into it. The wheels spun beneath us and then stopped.

  "What the fuck are you doing?"

  I put my head against the steering wheel. Numb.

  "I should go back."

  "The hell you will."

  "What?" I said. I had never seen Jake so angry. "I'll go back. I'll tell them what I did. You'll be free and clear."

  Tears rolled down my face, and I turned to get out. He leaned over me and held the door shut.

  "It isn't always just about you and your mother."

  "I know," I blubbered.

  "And it would be nice for our daughters not to find out that their mother killed their grandmother, and then their father popped through the window like some demented jack-in-the-box!"

  A train rounded the bend. The engineer honked loudly, seeing our car so close to the tracks, and then the car shook and shuddered as the train barreled past. I screamed. I screamed the whole time it took to pass us.

  When it was quiet again, I stared miserably at the empty tracks. My eyes felt the size of pinpricks.

  "I'll drive," Jake said.

  I was wobbly when I stood, and Jake made it around to the driver's side before I could take a step.

  He placed his hands on my shoulders. "I'm sorry if that was too much," he said. "I'm thinking about the girls, understand?"

  I nodded my head. But it didn't sound entirely right to me. It was not so much the girls as it was his entire life. His dogs. His career. Someone he had called "babe" on the phone.

  "Your mother ruined so much," he said. "I don't know what we're going to do, but we need to be functional. You're not in your mother's house anymore. You're out in the world."

  I nodded again.

  He hugged me to him, and I let myself hang limp in his arms. I thought of the warble of Sarah's voice on the CD she'd made me. Of the dreams she somehow kept alive in a way I couldn't imagine doing. She would come with me over to my mother's house and describe Manhattan as if it were so much glittering cake. Meanwhile her phone had been disconnected and she routinely took back as much food from my house as she could fit among the vintage clothes in her duffel bag.

  "Manny," I mumbled into Jake's shoulder.

  He loosened our embrace. "What?"

  "Manny."

  "Who is Manny?"

  I went cold somewhere inside myself. My heart slipped in my chest like a chip of ice.

  "He used to run errands for my mother or fix little things around the house. Things Mrs. Castle and I weren't up to."

  "So?"

  "About six months ago, I found a used condom in my old room."

  "I don't understand," Jake said.

  "And my mother's jewelry box had been broken into."

  "He had sex in your old room? With who?"

  "I don't know. We got the locks changed. Mrs. Castle knows about it and so does the congregation of the church. I never reported the jewelry missing."

  "Why are you telling me this?" Jake asked.

  I looked at him but didn't know what to say--what would be good enough.

  "Oh, God." He turned and walked away from me.

  I stood by the car. I had not thought of Manny in any real way since the night before. I remembered placing my hand over the weeping Buddha but could not remember whether I had thrown it away or whether it still sat discreetly on my shelf.

  When Jake walked back toward me, his face was ashen.

  "We will get in the car," he said. "We will not speak. I am taking you to Westmore. When you are contacted, you'll act surprised. Don't act devastated. By the time the police get to you, they'll know you wouldn't be. Go numb or something."

  "But I would be devastated," I said. "I am devastated."

  "Get in the car."

  I walked around and got in on the passenger's side. Jake turned on the ignition and carefully backed up in the gravel until we met the road again.

  "I'll handle the girls. I don't know what I'm going to say to them. After I drop you off, I'm going to call Avery and arrange a lunch later in the week. That way I'll be able to bolster the idea that I also came out for professional reasons."

  "Jake--" I started.

  "Helen, I don't want to hear anything right now. I don't blame you for what you did. What I want is to be able to limit the damage. I have my own life. Manny is your story. I won't bring him up, and I don't know about him. What happens, happens as far as any of that, but I'm not willing to cast blame."

  We drove on and made our way to Phoenixville Pike. We passed by Natalie's house. Hamish's car was in the drive. By the time we passed the girls' old high school, I was pissed.

  "So you want us to get away with it, but you don't want to think of real ways for that to happen," I said.

  "You killed her, Helen, not me. There isn't an us involved in this."

  "She was my mother!"

  "There's your us--the two of you, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!"

  We crossed 401 and drove by Haym Salomon Cemetery, which stretched along the road for a quarter of a mile. It had turned into a perfect fall day. The air was crisp but cool, and the sun glinted in and out behind a light veil of clouds.

  "When you started working outside with ice and leaves, I thought it was because of me."

  "It wasn't."

  "You stopped drawing me. It killed me. It was like you'd slammed a door in my face and didn't think twice about it."

  "My work took me different places, Helen, that's all. Drawing was always just a way into other things."

  "I don't understand how you go from drawing nudes to building ice huts and shit dragons."<
br />
  "For the millionth time, it was dirt, not shit, and Emily loved it."

  "Perfect little Emily," I said. The moment I said it, I wished I could take it back.

  To our right a partial barn was collapsing in the middle of a graded field. I wanted to run toward it and disappear as all of us eventually would, as my father and now mother had, sinking into the region's unsung history.

  "I'm sorry, Jake," I said, desperate. "I didn't mean it. I take it back. I love you."

  "Do you know what you put her through? How you clung to her? She told me you used to crawl into bed with her at night and cry."

  I saw myself. I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Emily was only seven when we separated. Emily was all I had. She was a warm body I needed to hold.

  "You left us," I said, trying futilely to defend myself.

  "We left each other, Helen. Remember, we left each other."

  "And you left the girls," I said. "I may not have been perfect, but I didn't take off to become some sort of art-circuit fuck god. Meanwhile Emily seems to have granted you a lifetime-achievement award."

  "I never wanted it," he said.

  "What?"

  The car slowed, but Jake did not look at me.

  "The divorce. I never wanted the divorce," Jake said. "I gave it to you, but I never wanted it. Your father knew that."

  He looked down at the steering wheel between his hands. Something had collapsed inside him. I could see it in his shoulder blades. I reached over and placed my hand in the middle of his back. I thought about touching him, about how he had liked to rest his head on my chest and talk to me about what he wanted to shape and build and make. I took my hand away. We had been going in circles. I needed to focus.

  "Okay," I said. "What did we do this morning? Why wasn't I at the house for the last hour or so? We need to agree on all of this now."

  "That's my Helen, come out swinging."

  "They'll want to know."

  He turned his face toward me. "We went out to breakfast?"

  "Someone would have seen us. No, we drove somewhere and made love. It was unexpected," I said.

  "Are you nuts?"

  "I think I've answered that resoundingly," I said.

  I cautioned Jake to wait for a car coming in the opposite direction over a one-lane bridge and then directed him to the turn for Westmore.

  "We drove to my favorite spot overlooking the nuclear plant and made love," I said.

  "And how did my prints get on her window?"

  "You came by yesterday. She asked you to fix a few things for her, and you did, for old times' sake."

  "It's pretty baggy. They'll check it out, I'm sure."

  "Can you think of anything better?"

  By the time we reached the college, it was 9:15. I had forty-five minutes to kill until Tanner Haku's Life Drawing class. I was to do a series of three-minute standing poses, most of which I found ludicrous, from holding a towel to my side to pretending I had just stepped from the bath and was combing my hair.

  "I'll be back to pick you up, just as if you weren't going to hear any news that would change our plans."

  "And if the cops come?"

  "Act as if this is all new to you. You don't know who killed your mother."

  "And hope that Mrs. Castle told them about Manny."

  Jake bowed his head. "Don't tell me those things."

  "Right, I'm alone in this."

  "Yes," Jake said. "I mean, I don't know."

  We were double-parked outside the student union. Behind us, a car blasting hip-hop pulled up.

  I put my hand on the latch.

  "Good luck," Jake said.

  I did not go into the student union, where there was a chance I might run into Natalie having a liberal breakfast before modeling for the Lucian Freud wannabe. Instead, I walked around the low, flat building and down a well-traveled dirt path to the sole remaining patch of earth Westmore owned that had yet to be developed. The problem was that every time it rained, the field of weeds would flood. It sometimes remained swamped for half the year. There was one large oak tree in the middle of it. It must have been more than two hundred years old before its roots had rotted through.

  Perched on the edge of the field, as I thought they might be, was the Senior Center's watercolor class. In the fall and then again in late spring, you could see a group of older people in different scenic spots around the campus, with their huge painting boards out and all of them wearing sun hats and matching red Windbreakers. Their teacher was a woman my age. A volunteer who loved to work with the elderly.

  I sat down in the grass far enough away from them that I would not be noticed. All of them except the teacher had their backs to me, and she was intent on her task of going from senior to senior and offering brief encouraging commentary.

  I put my hands up underneath my sweater for warmth and felt the silk of the rose-petal-pink slip. I could have been watching a herd of zebra on the African plain--that's how different these older people felt from my mother. I saw these people as wondrous, as the fantasy types that I wished had raised me. What had they been in their first lives? Lawyers, bricklayers, nurses, fathers, mothers? It seemed surreal to me that they would choose to come to the Senior Center, see classes offered in watercolors, and then sign up. I knew that I would never fall among their number. I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.

  I had to eat something, and Natalie or no Natalie, the student union was the only place within walking distance to get food at this hour. I stood, regretfully, and bid good-bye to the Sunday painters I had been taught to condemn.

  ELEVEN

  I walked through the gathering crowd of students outside the student union. Westmore was not known for its intellects or even its sportsmen. It was known for being an affordable commuter school, good for a four-year degree in subjects such as marketing or health-care consulting. The Art Department, like the English Department, was a condescended-to anomaly staked out by a variety of types whom Natalie and I alternately thought of as losers or geniuses. The school's founder, Nathaniel Westmore, had been an artist and writer before his Thoreau-like disappearance into the woods of Maine. As a result, both departments had remained comparatively independent from the rest of the campus.

  Westmore students wore the off-price version of the clothes that were worn in New York a decade ago. On the few occasions I'd brought Sarah with me to the campus, her presence had caused a stir. I had always been proud that my daughters lived in other states and chose to make their lives away from home even if, very often, I wished I could drive down the street and sit in their houses. But I would never do that to either one of them. One saving grace in my own life was that my mother was never capable of a pop-in.

  I walked up the wheelchair-accessible ramp and passed through the heated momentary hush of the double doors, and there was Natalie, among the sea of students thirty years' our junior. She was sitting at a round booth by herself, over near a wall of windows that looked out on the swampy undeveloped land. From the student union, the old oak tree wasn't visible, only the reedy grass that soon, after the next frost, would turn color and, as winter came on, make an ushering sound as the dried-out stalks beat against one another in the wind.

  She was looking out into the distance, perhaps out over the highway, where the large traffic signs were nothing but small green flecks and the cars were impossible to see.

  I would not tell her, I realized. How would I phrase it? I had said the words so far only once. "I killed my mother." I wondered at this new lexicon I had entered. I killed my mother. I fucked your son.

  I walked over to her, barely aware of the students bearing food on trays as I passed.

  "Natalie."

  And there were her eyes, Natalie's light-brown eyes, which I had looked into since childhood.

  She was dressed in one of her faux Diane von Furstenberg dresses that Diane von Furstenberg would never have put her name
on. The material consisted of an inscrutable pattern that seemed to adorn many women's bodies at middle age--a sort of dazzle camouflage designed to keep the eye from being able to focus on the actual shape inside. The wraparound dress was in a style we'd agreed was perfect for disrobing but that I had abandoned. At some point, seeing those dresses hanging in my closet had begun to depress me--their light cloth and indistinguishable patterns made me think of endless suits of wasted flesh.

  "Hi," she said. "You can finish this. I'm stuffed."

  I sat down opposite her, and she pushed the pale orange-flecked cafeteria tray over to me. On it was half a cheese danish and a yogurt left untouched. We had always been like this. She ordered too much, and I ate what was left.

  "Where were you yesterday?" she asked. "I called your number half a dozen times. I even called the Bat Phone twice."

  "At my mother's," I said.

  "I had a feeling. How is she?"

  "Can we not talk about it?"

  "Coffee?"

  I smiled at her.

  Natalie stood with her cup. The cafeteria cops never stopped us when we walked backward through the line and got a refill. We were tacitly granted the same privileges as the teachers.

  I wolfed down the half-eaten danish and peeled back the foil on the top of the yogurt. By the time Natalie returned, I was halfway done with my secondhand meal. The coffee--hot, watery, weak--obliterated what was left of my appetite.

  "What's with you?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You seem sort of nerved-out somehow. Is it Clair?"

  I thought of deflecting mechanisms. I could have commented that not everyone ends the night with half a bottle of wine and a sleeping pill or that not everyone was secretly fucking a construction worker from Downingtown . . . but I didn't. I would tell as much of the truth as I could.

  "Jake showed up," I said.

  It was as if she'd heard a gun go off. She slapped both her hands down on the table and leaned in toward me.

  "What?"

  "You know how I told you he used to wake me when the girls were sleeping? With pebbles from the neighbor's geranium pots?"

  "Yes, yes."

  "He woke me up this morning at about five a.m. He was standing inside the fence of my backyard, tossing rocks. We spent the morning together."

  "Helen," she said, "it is now my opinion that you are not acting nerved-out enough! What's going on?"

  "I don't know," I said. "How's Hamish?"