The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

  I paused at the edge of the trees. I saw Sarah, marking off days on a calendar and living in my house alone, waiting for me to come home from a prison term for manslaughter or accidental death. She would need work, and my job would be open. Perhaps Natalie would drive her that first day. The students would be pleased--new meat--and she could talk to Gerald on her breaks. "My mother died," he'd say. "My mother rolled a decade," she'd say. I knew Sarah well enough to know she'd love the lingo--a paltry consolation prize.

  But none of this was the picture in my mind that scared me most. What scared me was the one where I was home again, where Sarah and I lived together, where she ran errands and massaged my feet while they sat begging on a leather ottoman. She'd bring me broths in bed and draw a shawl over my shoulders, rub at the caked-on food at the corner of my mouth with a damp cloth. And I would begin to forget her, to scream at her, to say cruel things about her body and her love life and her brain.

  I bushwhacked through the trees along the property line and entered a patch of roadway forest. The ground was strewn with litter as I cut farther in, beer cans and condoms being the trash du jour, and I winced each time I accidentally stepped on them.

  I had forgotten the red hair ribbon on the porch, leaving it to Bad Boy to have his fun with, and my fingerprints were on every surface of the kitchen. How many children bathed their mothers on the floor, sliced their clothes off with scissors, or quite literally dragged them outside to get fresh air? There would be no evidence of Manny Zavros anywhere.

  On the arm of my desk lamp at home, I had hung a ribbon from my mother's hair. It too was red. But there were other ribbons, as well as a magnetic cat, a Mexican Day-of-the-Dead skull, a snail figurine, and the felt Christmas ornament my mother had sent. Why would any one thing in my home draw more attention than another?

  I had not squirted the bleach into the toilet that morning. The hair from her braid might still cling there--might have scattered, unbeknownst to me, across the tiles of the bathroom floor. Would it have a time-and-date stamp if examined in a lab?

  I reached Elm. Traffic was intermittent on the back roads, and I waited for my moment to rush out of the trees and across to the other side--ducking into another patch of abandoned forest.

  The police could easily discover enough evidence. And if faced with direct questions, I knew I would tell the truth. Either way, when I thought of returning home with Sarah, I could see only one destiny, and it was hers, not mine.

  I reached the place where I would have to scramble down a steep embankment in order to meet Hamish. I looked down the gravelly berm that they had built on all three sides of Vanguard. More than anything, the place itself looked like a high-voltage electrical plant. In the lot below, separated from the berm by a high metal fence, was a row of shiny black SUVs--top-of-the-line. I would pass within a whisper of them.

  I took precautions not to injure myself, descending the steep slope from a seated position, crawling like a crab all the way. I strapped my purse over my neck and left shoulder and rested it in the center of my stomach for the descent. It would not be the last time, I knew, that I wished I could trade my discipline for Sarah's youthful resilience. My youngest could still beat the shit out of her body and go to her job the next day--if she had a job.

  At the bottom I stopped for five whole luxurious minutes, daring the men inside Vanguard to sense me radiating human heat on the other side of the corrugated fencing that shot up ten feet high. It was utterly sterile. Not an ant or a blade of grass. Not a weed. Just gravel and more gravel. An endless gray sea lit up by spotlights posted along the fence.

  I did not want Hamish to come and look for me, so I pushed myself up and walked hurriedly along the wall toward the parking lot.

  About two hundred feet away, I could see Hamish's car near the entrance. He hovered next to the giant illuminated V that sat on the edge of the property.

  I stepped briskly across the pavement and slipped inside the car.

  "Let's get out of here," I said.

  "No argument," said Hamish.

  As we backed up into the road, I saw a guard come around the opposite side of the building and glance our way with a quizzical look. I could have met Hamish outside the VFW or the Mini Storage, but I hadn't thought of them quickly enough.

  "Where's your car?" Hamish asked.

  I could smell the heavier-than-usual application of Obsession and remembered that Mr. Forrest had once given my father cologne from Spain that smelled like pot. Oblivious, my father wore the cologne until it was gone, saving the bottle on his dresser, where I found it the day after he'd shot himself.

  "Sarah borrowed it," I said.

  This seemed to satisfy him. He stopped at a four-way stop and leaned over to kiss me. I shrank back, but he remained undaunted.

  "Where shall we go?" he asked.

  Paris and the Ritz, I felt like saying, and thought of the maudlin song about some sad woman realizing at the age of thirty-seven that she would never drive in an open car in a European capital. If that was the limit of her deprivation, she was one lucky bitch.

  "The thing is," I said, keeping my hands on my lap and avoiding his gaze, "I need to borrow a car."

  He pressed the accelerator. "Is that it?"

  "I'm in a weird place," I said.

  "Your mom?"

  "Yes."

  "Do they have any idea who did it?" he asked.

  "I think so," I said, and I decided it couldn't hurt. "A boy who used to come over and do things for my mother," I said. "His name is Manny."

  "The one who fucked someone in your old bedroom?"

  "Yes."

  "My mom told me about that."

  We passed the quarry, where mountains of gravel and shale sat waiting to be borne away on trucks. They glimmered under the low argon lights spaced throughout the property.

  Twenty years ago, there had been a boy Sarah's age who was playing captain-and-pirate on top of a giant pile of gravel dumped at the end of our block. He climbed up, brandishing a balsa-wood sword made the night before with the help of his father, and quickly sank inside.

  "Do you remember Ricky Dryer?" I leaned my head into the window. I saw the reflection of my tired eyes come toward me and then disappear.

  "The kid who died. Man, I haven't thought of him in years."

  "Let's go to your house, Hamish," I said. "We can have a drink and talk."

  "That's more like it," he said. I could tell he was looking over at me, but I did not look back. "You don't need to borrow a car," he said. "I'll take you anywhere you want to go."

  I felt he deserved it: my body for a car.

  We arrived at the house. I had made sure that Natalie would not be walking in at any moment. Hamish confirmed she was off with her contractor.

  "It's like she has a whole other life now," he said. "I'm not part of it."

  I steeled myself. I had had sex I didn't want before, and Hamish was a loving, wonderful--I couldn't get the word "boy" out of my head--man.

  My entire body crawled with the desire to get on with it. Get on with the preamble, get on with the act, the sweet-nothing words, the faux regret at completion, the anticipated cleanup, and finally, finally, the car I would drive away in.

  He held my hand and led me up the heavily carpeted stairs. Thump, my father's body falling. My mother cradling his skull as I walked in. The blood everywhere.

  I had passed by Hamish's room countless times on the way to the upstairs bathroom when I was visiting. Once, when the children were in high school, Natalie had brought me inside and implored me to inhale deeply.

  "This is the funkiest room in the house," she said. "I can't get rid of it, and he never opens a window."

  "Hormones," I'd said.

  She smiled. "It's like living with a bomb about to go off."

  But the scent of teenage lust had been replaced with a whirring air filter in the corner of the room, and the bed was no longer a twin.

  "You bring girls here?" I asked.

 
; "Some girls," he said, and put his hand at the base of my skull. We kissed.

  "I just want to make you feel better, Helen," he said. "I'm not expecting anything."

  I remembered what Jake had said once, after Emily was born and I could not relax. Let yourself fall in.

  We leaned back on the bed, and I shut my eyes. I had made my living striking poses at the instruction of others. Whenever it was hard, I would think of the smudged charcoal drawings in the basements and storage spaces of former Westmore students across the nation and of the few artists who had done something more than this.

  In the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there was a painting by Julia Fusk. She had hired me to do a series of sittings for her when I was thirty-three. The painting that resulted was of a dynamic torso that bled off the page. It was only because I'd modeled for it that I saw where Fusk had taken certain liberties--made me more muscular, less lean.

  As Hamish made love to me, I thought of Fusk's painting. Eventually the girls would find it again. Jake would lead them to it or Sarah would remember me taking the two of them to see it. She had stared at the blues and greens and oranges that waved across my thighs and lower stomach. Emily had excused herself and gone to the gift shop.

  Fusk's work was my immortality. The fact that it was headless had never bothered me.

  Hamish stopped suddenly.

  "You've got to give me something, Helen."

  I reached for his penis, hoping this time for the ejaculation that I could wipe off of my stomach and pretend was disappointing.

  After his initial pleasure, he stilled my hand.

  "I'm more than my dick," he said. "Touch me."

  I could feel how small and desperate my eyes had grown. "Don't ask too much of me, Hamish. I can't give too much right now."

  "You're doing this for the car."

  I did not contradict him.

  Something changed then. He parted my legs farther than was truly comfortable. He worked at me roughly, as if I were one of the action figures that had littered his floor as a child.

  I tried to help him along. I pulled my own string and spoke to him in phrases I'd heard myself say in the midst of actual passion dozens of times. I stared at the small tattooed dragon below his collarbone and mimicked my former self for him.

  Finally, just as the muscles on the insides of my thighs felt strained beyond recovery, the joints in my hips the dry ball bearings of a woman my mother's age, he came.

  He shuddered and fell on top of me with all his weight. My breath went out of me, and for a brief second I thought of the prostitute in Arthur Shawcross's car, how she had spent the next three days doing speedballs.

  I pushed at Hamish's chest.

  "Car," I said.

  "You're a good fuck too," he said bitterly.

  As he zipped up his pants--chinos, I noted, instead of his usual jeans--I thought how I could ruin anything.

  "Give me a few minutes to check everything out," he said.

  I lay undressed on his bed and listened to him take the stairs down to the first floor, walk through the family room, and go out the garage door.

  I did not move until the air filter cycled on, making a light breeze cross my body. I turned on my side and propelled myself up with my left arm. I sat on the corner of Hamish's bed and began to clothe myself. I was staring at the louvered doors of his closet when I thought of it. Because it was not his house but his mother's, he must store everything that mattered to him inside his room. Hurriedly I stood and pulled open the doors. I reasoned that it would not be down low or even immediately accessible. He was not the type to show off that way. I pulled out a milk crate stuffed with CDs and turned it on its side--so much for stealth. On the shelf above his clothes, he had an extra blanket, a sleeping bag, and a shoe box, inside of which were shiny wing tips he had worn the day of his father's funeral. I did not find what I was looking for.

  I was crazed now. During sex I had barely broken a sweat, but now I felt perspiration spring up along my brow. How long Hamish would take and when he would come looking for me, I could not predict. I scanned his room. I assessed. Where would he have put it?

  And then, of course, I knew. He would see himself as the man of the house. He was not a freeloader; he was his mother's protector. It lay in the drawer of his bedside table, still in the Crown Royal bag my mother's father had kept it in, and beside it was an unopened box of bullets. I picked up the bag by its braided rope and grabbed the bullets before closing the door.

  I saw the jumble of the bed, how our sex had made the fitted sheet pop off its corners and collapse into a jellyfish in the center. At another time I would have corrected this, but that was when I was not trying to leave behind everything I knew.

  I took the stairs slowly, my thighs aching, knowing they would ache more the next day and wondering where I would be by then. Sarah and Jake would be together, perhaps still watching the police go through my house. I hoped Sarah had enjoyed her drink at the bar and only then gone looking for me in the ladies' room. I had to get the Crown Royal bag back to my purse before Hamish saw it. I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. My purse was in the kitchen. I knew I had to move but couldn't.

  No one would be at Mrs. Leverton's, I realized. Her son had always avoided coming to the house, and if he was there, his Mercedes would be prominently displayed in the driveway. I could rest there, and given the food stores I was sure she must have, I might hide there for days.

  I heaved myself up and walked through the hall and into the kitchen. I found my purse on the dining table and plunged the gun into my bag. I breathed.

  Natalie had had the back wall redone that year. Now a long window ran across the kitchen, above all the counters. "He's convinced me," she'd said, "to have only under-counter cabinets to create an indoor-outdoor feel." She called him a charmer. What was his name?

  I could see a reflection of myself in the glass. I turned my back on my spotlighted ghost and walked to the fridge. I was as hungry as I'd been the night before and realized that except for what I'd managed to eat of Natalie's breakfast in the student union, I had not eaten all day.

  I grabbed what seemed easiest and most full of protein--hot dogs and cheese sticks--and methodically stuffed myself with them, one after another. I ate mindlessly, looking blurrily at the items tacked to Natalie's fridge. There was an invitation to a wedding for someone I did not know. She had yet to RSVP. The little card and envelope were under the magnet with the invite. It was a Christmas wedding, and I wondered if Natalie and her contractor would go. If the ceremony might put thoughts in his head or if, like Hamish said she hoped, they were already there.

  Beside this was a picture of Natalie and me at a party at Westmore eighteen months ago. I remembered the day. Emily and John and Leo and Jeanine had left the day before, three days earlier than originally planned. I had kissed Leo good-bye on the one bare spot of his forehead that was not covered by gauze. I had tried to hug Emily, but her shoulders were stiff and resistant, and reminded me of me.

  In the photo there was no sign of any of this, or the argument I'd had with my mother before I'd doubled back to pick up Natalie. Natalie looked radiant, and I, I felt, looked as I always had, the dutiful sidekick.

  Hamish walked in just as I was pushing the last of the hot dogs into my mouth. He came over to me and turned me around to face him. My cheeks full of food.

  "I'm sorry for up there."

  I chewed and made a waving motion with my hand to indicate that it was fine, that it hadn't meant anything.

  "It's just that you can be so cold, and I know you're not at heart. I've always known."

  I looked at him. My eyes bulged as I swallowed.

  "It wasn't Manny, was it?"

  I saw the phone hanging on the wall near the kitchen table. Wondered who I could call to help me if Hamish refused. And I saw my purse sitting upright in the middle of a gingham place mat. Why had I taken the gun? What did I think I was going to do?

  "It just makes sense. I was out
working on the car and I thought, What is she doing here? Why is she borrowing a car? Mom told me Jake was here, and you said Sarah was too. The only reason why you're not with them is because they don't know where you are."

  "You're very smart today," I said.

  "Chalk it up to postcoital genius," he said. He turned and opened the fridge. "Besides, it fits. You came looking for my mom last night."

  He grabbed a quart of chocolate milk and brought it over to the counter, where he stooped to get a glass.

  "Are you going to tell?" I asked.

  He poured his milk and faced me again, leaning back into the counter.

  "You asked me yesterday if I ever thought of killing my father. Well, I did. I think a lot of people do," he said. "They just aren't honest about it. You actually went ahead and did it."

  He took something from his pocket, a set of silver keys, and threw them at me. They landed at my feet.

  I squatted down to get them.

  "My mom won't forgive you," he said. "She's turning very moralistic in her old age."

  I could feel already that I would be outside soon, that I would put the key I held in my hand into the ignition and back the car out of the driveway.

  "Maybe it's Sarah I'm meant to end up with," he said. He took a swig of his milk. "After all, I love her mother."

  It was like a sock in the stomach, and he saw it.

  "Too much," he said. "I know."

  "I have to go now, Hamish," I said, wishing I could leave him with some perfect phrase.

  "Where?"

  "I haven't figured that out yet," I lied. "I'll leave the car somewhere. I'll call you and let you know where it is."

  He turned. I grabbed my purse from the table and followed him through the kitchen and then the living room. I saw a vase I'd given Natalie countless years ago. It was filled with store-bought flowers.

  Behind the garage where Hamish kept the extra cars he worked on, he got inside a nondescript late-'80s Ford and signaled for me to wait. He turned the engine on and backed up until the nose of the car was facing toward the street, then got out with the engine still running.

  All I could see was the open car, waiting. All I could think was with each leave-taking, those who remained behind were safe from me.

  "I wish I was enough to make you stay," Hamish said. He hugged me, and for a moment he was my father and I was his child.