by Alice Sebold
Moments later I was lying curled up in the backseat of Jake's car just as I had the night before in my own. Natalie had turned from me with no good-bye.
"Take care," she said to Jake.
"It was nice to see you again, Natalie."
"I guess it was," she said. Jake started the car, and I closed my eyes. I would ride in the back the way I had as a child, with my father driving and no one in the front passenger side. I hadn't told Natalie about my mother, and now I never would.
After the remaining parts of Lambeth were destroyed to make way for a new bypass and an outlet mall, I had written down a line for my father: "All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone." I couldn't remember who had said it or in what context.
When Jake stopped drawing me, I thought his fascination with the way ice coated a leaf or the way crushed berries mixed with snow could make a dye was a temporary fancy. I thought he would come back to me. But then he began building things out of earth and ice, sticks and bones, and left all human flesh behind.
Emily found one of his first crude sculptures and marveled. It was made out of grass and dirt woven together, the grass of winter acting as a thatch to keep the mud from disassembling. If it were not for Emily's delight, I would quickly have grabbed it with a covered hand and flushed it away. It looked like a particularly nuanced piece of shit to me, sitting as it did on the floor behind the toilet. But because Emily made me get down on my hands and knees first, and called it "him," I had a chance to see.
Jake had made a small sculpture. As I stared at it, openmouthed, Emily launched, as only a small child's body could, in one swift motion from bent knees to sitting with legs stretched out in front of her and began to bang the flat of her palms on her fleshy thighs with joy.
"Daddy!" she screamed.
"She's afraid of the toilet, Helen," Jake said later, after I had brought out the offending object and placed it on the small ceramic dish where he put his keys and change at the end of the day.
"And this is how you propose to cure her? By making donkeys out of shit?"
"It's mud, and it's supposed to be a dragon."
If I wanted to talk to him in those days, I had to stop him between the front door of the small house we rented and the shower. He would begin to disrobe in the hallway, peeling off the layers of scarves and hats, parka and vest, and heavy wool plaid shirts so that by the time he hit the bedroom, he was dressed like a normal man about to sit down to dinner.
That day I had chased him from the front door to the bedroom with the sculpture held aloft on its ceramic dish.
"Did she like it?" he asked as we reached the bedroom.
He wore his rag-wool sweater over a turtleneck and, I knew because I watched the routine in the dark each morning, hidden layers of T-shirts and long underwear. First to come off before entering the house were always his boots, but still on his lower half were the old army pants from the surplus store and huge wool socks that looked as prickly as cacti and that necessitated liners between them and his humid, winter-tenderized feet. On his hands he wore nothing, swearing that as they acclimatized to the cold, he would ultimately become more dexterous, able to stand more hours outside and capable of finer detail work.
"Of course she liked it," I said, not wanting to concede what was so obvious, that any child, even a fearful one, would love an animal made out of mud and found at the base of a semipristine toilet.
He turned to me. His cheeks were permanently ruddy where the wind got to them between his wool cap, which sat low over his eyebrows, and his scarf, which he knotted up above the tip of his nose. His eyes, watering a bit from the shock of the baseboard heat inside the house, seemed liquid blue to me.
"That's all I wanted for her," he said. "To make her laugh when she was face-to-face with that thing."
I could not say that I was jealous, not of my child but of the objects that he'd begun making, nor could I bring myself to beg him to keep drawing me.
He peeled all the underlayers of T-shirts and thermal underwear off together and threw them on the bed, then walked into the bathroom to turn on the shower. I followed him inside the shower stall, fully clothed.
"What are you doing, Helen?" he asked, but he was laughing.
"Fuck me," I said.
I did not think about what was happening to me. I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be.
I felt Jake take the speed bump just before exiting Westmore's front gate.
"Sit up and talk to me," he said. "I know you're awake."
I pushed myself up with my arm as if I were in yoga class, about to come out of the all-too-fitting corpse pose.
He caught my eye in the rearview mirror.
"So after suffocating your mother, you decide to seduce Natalie's son? Is that the timeline?"
"Yes."
Jake shook his head. "Now you're diddling with children."
"He's thirty."
"Well, mine is thirty-three," he said.
"Yours?"
"Her name is Phin."
"Fin? What kind of name is that?"
"The best she can do, having been named Phineas by her father and called Phinny. She works at the art museum in Santa Barbara."
"What's she like?" I asked.
"Shouldn't we be talking about other things?"
"Like prison?" I said.
"Or what we're going to tell Sarah?"
He pulled the car into a lot across from the Burger King. There was a store there I'd never been inside of called Four Corners.
"Do you want anything?" he asked.
I shook my head.
As I watched Jake hold the door for a young mother pushing a stroller with another child in her arms, I thought of my mother giving my phone number to the man who'd dug new sewer lines that spring.
"I've told you not to give out my number without asking first," I had said. The sewer man had already called me three times by that point.
"Your sordid life is your sordid life," she had said. "You shouldn't live it if you don't like it."
It had been as easy as that. She had stood in her kitchen and issued her riddle-me-this invitation to end my life. When was she, and when was she not, aware of what she said?
I wondered what specific rhythm had been playing inside my father's head as he lifted the pistol. He had plunged down the staircase face-first, blood arcing up and splattering in a diminishing wavy line along the stairwell. He had done it in front of her. Had she begged him to stop or had she begged him to go, directing the thoughts in his head like a traffic cop?
I got out of the car and closed the door. I watched Jake exit the store.
"Cigarettes," Jake said. "This is what you do to me. Get in."
This time I sat beside him in the passenger seat.
He closed the car door. "I saw a park off the highway between here and the house this morning. We need someplace to talk."
I nodded my head as he started the car.
"Mrs. Leverton would have been a witness," I said after we merged onto the highway. "She saw the two of us last night out on the side porch. I sat there with Mom before I used the towel."
Jake was quiet. I felt the breeze from the night before. I saw the tops of the trees bending in the wind, the light outside Carl Fletcher's back door, the muted sounds of his radio. Had his daughter, Madeline, been there last night? Had she seen anything?
"There, that's the park I saw," Jake said.
We pulled off the highway and took the access road until we came to a sad little park of picnic tables and trash. The wrought-iron barbecue grills set in cement looked like they hadn't been used in years. We parked in the slanted spaces and got out.
"Pennsylvania depresses me," said Jake.
"I may spend the rest of my life in Pennsylvania," I said.
Jake stood in a scrubby patch of weeds and grass, and tore the cellophane off his pack of Camels.
"Do you want one?"
"No, thanks," I said. "I'll have plenty of time to pick up the habit in Graterford or the women's equivalent."
"Christ." He took a long drag off the cigarette, almost as if it were a joint, and let it stream through his nostrils instead of his mouth. "I think they know, Helen. We need to figure out what to say."
"Will you marry Phin?" I asked.
"Helen, we're talking about our future incarceration."
"Mine."
"The window, my apparent collusion. Hello?"
"You'll tell them why if you have to," I said. "You'll be fine."
"No."
"It makes sense," I said. "I'm the one who killed her. You just broke in to make sure I was okay."
"They asked me about your mental state," he said, absentmindedly looking at the cigarette as if someone else had put it in his hand.
"And you said?"
"That you were fearlessly sane."
He moved closer to me and put his arm around me. He drew me over to him so I stood snugly against the side of his body, my shoulder fitting into his armpit as it always had.
"You are," he said.
"What?"
"Incredible. Always have been."
In front of us, between two disused grills, stood one small sapling that the township had recently planted. I remembered reading about a fight, pro and con--beautifying through trees versus more money for the schools. A wire support surrounded the sapling's trunk, and I wondered if anyone would remember to cut it off before the tree slowly strangled.
"Poor fucker," Jake said.
"Me or the tree?"
"Your father, actually. Did you think you were marrying him when you married me?"
"I wanted your attention."
"You had it," he said.
"For a little while."
"That was my work. It had nothing to do with you."
He leaned his head down, and our lips met. We kissed in a way that lifted me, however briefly, out of the world where discipline and temper, grit and resolve, carried me through my weeks and years. Afterward he looked at me for a long time.
"I'll have to tell them what I know."
"I think you should," I said.
"What about the girls?"
"I'll tell Sarah," I said. "And Emily."
"Emily won't understand, you know."
"Do you think it matters that she was so old?"
"To Emily?"
"To the police."
"There's no special dispensation I'm aware of. I'm sure it depends on how a lawyer frames it."
"I don't even know any lawyers."
"Let's try not to think about it, okay?"
"I should have stayed in therapy," I said.
"Why didn't you?"
"His shelves were full of I. B. Singer, and the statues on his tables were that lost-wax Holocaust style. Lots of dismembered trunks of tortured people wrapped in barbed wire and mounted on poles. I would be talking about my mother, only to look up and see a legless, armless torso reaching out for me."
Jake laughed. The two of us moved toward the sapling and sat down in the scrubby grass surrounding it. He lit another cigarette.
"Plus, he loved wordplay. I told him about my father's town, the drowning of it, and he just looked at me, bugged out his eyes like he was a cat with a mouse, and said, 'Swoosh!' "
"Swoosh?" Jake said.
"Exactly. What was I supposed to do with that? He cost me thousands of dollars and did nothing but put me off Philip Roth."
"There are other therapists."
I started to pull up the grass beneath me, as I'd once told Sarah she should never do.
"I saw someone for a while," Jake said. "Here's a hint: she wore Pippi Longstocking tights."
"Frances Ryan? You went to Frances Ryan?" I stared at him in disbelief.
"She helped me after you left."
Frances Ryan had been a graduate student at U-Mad when we were there. Everyone knew her by her trademark hose.
"Does she still wear them?"
"It's been ten years, at least, since I saw her. I don't think those hose work over forty."
"I don't think they ever worked."
"Better than martyred torsos," Jake said, passing his cigarette to me.
Other than murder and seduction, I'd limited my vices to such an extent recently that from just one inhale, I felt an immediate rush. I had worked in therapy on my issues of control, until one weekend I was in the grocery, thumping melons. I held a cantaloupe in my hands and felt as if I were holding my head. The therapist had been poking about inside of me, turning my brain into so much mush.
"What do we do now?" I asked.
"We pick Sarah up. We put one foot in front of the other. I think that's all we can do until they contact us."
"Or show up."
Behind us, we heard a car pull in. Both of us turned around. It was a panel truck with sheets of mirrored glass strapped to either side. The man inside shut off the engine but kept the radio on. It was a talk station. Rancor poured forth from his open windows.
"Lunchtime," Jake said.
I watched Jake smoke until he had finished the cigarette. He had always, I thought, looked silly with a cigarette, somehow too feminine, as if he were declaiming from a divan.
"So will you marry Phin?"
Jake took a moment to consider.
"Probably not," he said.
"Why?"
"She's efficient."
"Meaning?"
"She's very good at organizing dinner parties and trips."
"And feeding dogs?"
"I transferred my affections to them a long time ago."
"Milo and Grace?"
"Animals in general."
"That doesn't sound like you."
"It's where I ended up." He smiled. "Besides, I'm too attracted to struggle. You know that."
"Poor fucker," I said.
He looked toward me. His eyes were as I had never seen them, as if they'd been crushed somehow, flattened by my existence in the world. "I loved you, Helen."
What I had done, not just to my mother but to everyone, seemed suddenly bottomless.
It was out before I could stop it. A loud, broken caw close to the sound of retching, and then out of nowhere I was flooded with tears. My sinuses let go, and saliva and phlegm flooded my mouth and nose. There was nowhere to hide, and so I put my head into my hands and leaned to the side to bury my face in the ground.
"It's okay, Helen," Jake said. "It's okay."
I could feel him kneeling over me, his hand lightly touching my back and then my shoulder. I did everything I could not to respond to his grip. I felt like I could barely breathe, but I took huge drafts of air. I was crying and coughing and grinding my fist into the dirt.
"Helen, please."
He took hold of my wrist, and I stared at him.
"I ruined everything!" I said. "Everything!"
The man in the panel truck had turned up his radio. Calls for the ban of illegal immigrants issued forth.
"You have to control yourself," Jake said. "For the girls' sake, for mine. Who knows, nothing might happen."
Nothing seemed worse to me somehow. That there would be so little evidence of the loss of my own life to my mother that I could even get away with killing her. I was, at the end of the day, that insignificant. Was it this that chastened me? Or that when I sat up and Jake daubed at my face with his shirt, I saw that the man in the truck had pulled his vehicle to the side and across three parking spaces, in order, I imagined, not to have to look at us while he ate his lunch. I noticed this, and then I saw the woman in the mirrored glass held fast to his truck. It was me. I was sitting on the ground in a desolate park in Pennsylvania. A man I had once been married to, had had children with, was trying to pull me toward him. I saw the sapling and the broken grills and the edge of the highway behind me.
FOURTEEN
Jake went immediately for the vodka, and when he lifted the pillow from the bar, I saw
that the Bat Phone was blinking madly with messages.
"Should I play this?"
"Yes."
Following the messages from Natalie that she had left the day before was one from Emily, who said she had also left a message on my other phone.
"But this one seems more appropriate somehow," she continued. "Remember, you are entering a new and exciting period of your life. I'll try later tonight after I've put the kids to bed."
"I always hear half of what she says as 'blah, blah, blah,'" I said.
Jake walked into the kitchen in order to retrieve his glass.
Sarah came next. Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor.
"Mom? Fuck, leave me alone, asshole. Sorry, Mom, some jerk likes fat asses, apparently. Listen, your other phone is busy. I'm on my way to Penn Station, and I'm taking the earlier train. I'll get in around two thirty, okay? If you can't meet me, I'll cross over and sit in that hideous T.G.I. Friday's, if that's what it is anymore. Maybe get some cheese fries. Die, asshole! I mean it. Sorry, Mom. Two thirty, okay? Bye."
I paused over the liquor cabinet and waited for the machine to tell me what day and what time the message had been left. This marked the before time, I thought, before my children knew I'd killed their grandmother.
Jake stood in the doorway of the dining room, drinking straight vodka out of a juice glass.
"That's your second round today," I said.
"No rules apply."
I thought of the box in my basement, the one that held my father's letters, which he had written to me when Jake and I had spent two months overseas right after Emily was born. Jake had been awarded a travel grant by the university, and we'd chosen the most obvious place to visit: Paris.
While he went off to museums or met with other painters, I walked around the streets with Emily in a sort of Central-American infant sling across my chest. I remembered how hot it was and how alone I felt. I learned to order a plate of cheeses and a beer in one cafe and go to the French-American bookstore. I walked the same fifteen blocks every day and spoke to no one, bleary with cheese and hops, the sling wearing a sore on my shoulder. The highlight, for me, was not the chance to visit the Louvre or to plumb the depths of Le Bon Marche, but the letters my father sent me describing his days, telling me about the progress of his herb garden or whether there was only one owl or two, the first having been joined by a mate in the trees between Mrs. Leverton's house and theirs.
