by Alice Sebold
The bunny key was there, under a loose concrete egg. I looked to my left and right; the roof of my father's workshop was barely visible through the trees. It was odd to be in a neighboring yard from mine, where completely different lives had been lived, and to know almost no one now but those who had died.
Ultimately, even with a valid passport, I could never have escaped to Jake's converted mill house in Aurigeno, or even hitchhiked west. I had told Jeanine that Greenland was a big piece of land and was composed of nothing but greens. Green people eating green food on green chairs at green tables in green houses. And then we moved on to Iceland, where everything was ice. And China, where the people and the places all had a porcelain sheen. I had made her scream with laughter as I spun the globe. "In Oman," I said, "there are men shaped like Os! Australia is 'ausome' and India, in!" In Madagascar, I thought . . .
I opened the screen door, turned the key in the lock. No alarms went off. I stumbled in the dark of what I knew to be Mrs. Leverton's kitchen. I could see dark shapes around me, and with ease I saw the phone, its old-style cord twirling down to the floor and back. Tsvetaeva could have hung herself easily enough. I thought of Arlene wiping down the counters, the stove, the sink, each week entering and leaving another person's house, learning that person's habits and regimes. At least, I thought, she was smart enough to get paid.
I knew I could not turn on the lights for fear of being seen. I would take a moment and adjust. That's what I thought, but I heard a mewling outside, and I jumped.
I took my purse into the half bath to the side of the kitchen and closed the door. It felt safe to risk a light inside the windowless room, but I was unprepared for who I saw.
There I was in the mirror, the strap of my purse cutting into my shoulder, weighing me down. The gun heavier with each step I'd taken since leaving the car. I saw my face, puffy from lack of sleep, my hair jutting out in all directions. My lips were dry, the creases above them puckered and hard. I looked into the mirror, and I saw the thirteen-year-old Helen. I touched the plywood figures along the walls of a once-drowned house. I looked at my father on the rocking horse, saw the solitary mattress on the floor.
"There are secret rooms inside us," I had said to my therapist.
"A relatively benign construct," he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.
My eyes staring back at me were small and black, and behind them was a room I'd avoided all my life. My parents were waiting for me, I thought, and in the small wallpapered bathroom of Mrs. Leverton's house, I could, if I wanted to, blow my brains out. My father had killed himself, I had killed my mother, and I could join them both. If I hustled, perhaps I could be interred with my mother, head to toe--our own jumbled version of The Lovers of Pompeii.
Quickly, I shut the light off. I set the purse down, and in the dark I washed my hands and face, splashing the water cupped in my two palms against my skin, running the tap ice-cold. I saw her then, Emily racing up to me beside the pool at the Y. She was holding something out to me and smiling widely.
"My Flying Fish Badge," she said. "I got it!" In the weeks leading up to my father's death, she had mastered the butterfly.
I did not turn on the light again but stood over the sink, breathing heavily. I willed myself to open the door. I picked up my purse as if it were some stranger's bowling bag and made my way into the kitchen and over to the round dining table, where I sat down in a wicker-backed chair. I moved my hand over the smooth grain of the table. Mrs. Leverton had left no crumbs from her evening meal.
I thought of the girls.
Once, when the three of us were visiting my mother, and Emily and Sarah were still small, we had been walking down the street on the way back to the house from the park, where a new jungle gym had been installed. The girls were excited and wild. Sarah had run up Mrs. Leverton's walk and started stamping on the concrete with her foot.
"See, it's not like Grandmom's!" she yelled.
"Sarah, get back here. That's not your house."
She had stared at me, nonplussed. "I know that," she said. Emily looked up at me to see what came next.
Mrs. Leverton was what. She tapped on her front glass--single-paned back then--and as I hurried up the walk with Emily to retrieve my errant child, the front door opened fast.
"Why not come in?" she said. "Daughters must be lovely things."
And though my mother hated her and she disapproved of me, we went into her house and sat in the living room, which Arlene cleaned every other Friday. We had store-bought cookies from a tin, and Sarah told her about how, at her grandmother's house, there was a hollow spot under the front path.
"The sound changes when you walk on it," Emily clarified.
"And Mom says there are tiny people who live in there," Sarah said.
"Does she?" Mrs. Leverton looked at me and made an effort to smile. Crumbs from a shortbread cookie sat at the corner of her mouth.
"A whole village," Sarah said excitedly. "Right, Mom?"
I did not say anything.
"Like Gulliver's Travels," Emily said. "Sarah likes to imagine them."
There she was, I thought, at nine, already a better mother than I was. She had taken the lead with Mrs. Leverton so that Sarah would not notice my disappearance. I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.
I put my hands together.
"God, forgive me," I said softly.
I had set my purse on the floor beside me, and I leaned over to pick it up and place it on the table. I pushed back my chair a foot or so and reached my hand in. There was the felt between my fingers. I searched for the braided gold twine and pulled out the Crown Royal bag. It made a loud clunk against the table. Next I took out the box of bullets. I put the box beside the bag. I stared at the purple felt. Even taking the gun out seemed unfathomable.
I stood up.
The clock over Mrs. Leverton's sink had a blue neon circle surrounding it--a faux diner clock. They had the real McCoy at Easy Joe's.
It was only 7:45 p.m. It felt like three o'clock in the morning. Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.
I saw the teapot on the stove and decided that I would make a cup of tea. A stalling tactic, no doubt, but what was and wasn't reasonable had left me. Everything was reasonable if killing your mother was. Everything was reasonable if giving up your life was second nature.
I did not want to think. I became methodical. I filled the teakettle and made sure not to replace the blue whistling bird on its spout. I pushed back images of my father in his terry-cloth robe and my mother wrapped in the Mexican wedding blanket, toppling to the basement floor.
I brought the water over to the stove and turned on the flame. I could not leave this way. Not, I thought, without a letter, not as my father had left me, had left my mother. I had chosen Mrs. Leverton's because it made sense. It was empty. But I also knew now that it was a house they would never have to enter, my head blown off a sight they would never have to see.
I opened one cabinet and then another, finding the cups in this second one. Mrs. Leverton did not have hooks with mugs or pots hanging on them. She had good china and everyday. Mugs, to my mother, had also been abhorrent things. How nice it would have been if they had known each other. Visited. Done something besides send cards at the appropriate moments--the birth of grandchildren, the death of men--but it was my mother who had pointed out their reality. "Just because we're old doesn't mean we change into friends."
I knew that, like my mother, Mrs. Leverton would no doubt have a drawer in the house that held stationery--perhaps a whole chest of drawers. It was one of the fallback gifts for an old lady. How many shawls or boxes of note cards had Mrs. Leverton been given in her ninety-six years? "Cash," Jake reported his father had said to him near the end. "If it isn't cash, I'm not interested." He joked with Jake that he wanted to die clutching
a thousand-dollar bill in each hand. "I didn't have the heart to tell him they didn't exist anymore," Jake said.
I left the water to boil. Who cared if I burned the house down?
I went to the door that led to the living room. In the center of the wall across the room, there stood a highboy desk. The bottom edge was illuminated slightly by a light-sensitive night-light. I looked to my left and saw another of these lights. Green circular disks jutted out of random outlets so that Mrs. Leverton or a happy burglar could pick his or her way through her downstairs rooms.
Once, my parents had fought about the light bill. My mother insisted that every light in the house remain on even when it was sunny out. Even when I was at school or my father away on a business trip.
"Why? Why all these lights?" he had asked, waving the bill in her face as she sat on the couch, unraveling a thread at the hem of her dress.
"I'm not a bank," he said, before grabbing his hat and coat to go out.
Later I told him that it must have something to do with the operation--her mastectomy. That she thought the light was helping her heal, and that if he was patient, I was sure she would return to using lamps only in the rooms where she sat. Four months later, she did. I never knew what had caused it. I had made up the lie to keep things as they had always been.
In a drawer under the foldout desk, I found the stationery. I would write the first letter to Emily. She deserved what she had never gotten from me, what she so much wanted: an explanation. Why I was the way I was despite what she thought of as free will and the endless possibilities that she had never seen me grasping.
I could not make out the designs of the paper or the colors, and I did not want to write my suicide note on card stock lined with Holly Hobbie dolls. I grabbed the three boxes of stationery in the narrow drawer and stacked them in my free arm before shoving the drawer closed with my hip and opening the one below it. I smiled. On one side was a soft lump, and when I touched it, I could feel the looped wool of what must have been a shawl or blanket. To the left of this were more boxes. I lifted one out--cribbage--then replaced it. Another--a deck of cards, still in cellophane. I threw it back. The next box was obviously a vestige of her grandsons: a Crayola one-hundred pack with built-in pencil eraser. I took this.
I could not go back to the kitchen.
I carried my spoils carefully through the hallway, picking out the dark shapes of a grandfather clock and a half-circle table, on which objects of different sizes sat. I heard my mother's voice: "Tchotchkes is the woman's middle name."
I saw a small light on at the top of the stairs--enough to write by, I thought, and climbed. Her stairs were padded with plush carpeting. I wanted to take off my shoes and walk about, but I had what countries called an exit strategy to pursue.
I spilled the boxes of cards and the crayons at the top of the stairs near a hope chest, on which the brass reading lamp illuminated the hall. I knelt down in front of it. Fanned across the surface of the hope chest were back issues of AARP, with an occasional Woman's Day or Ladies' Home Journal as bright spot. I felt I was kneeling at a foreign altar and then imagined myself flailing around, stuck to a giant glue trap.
I needed a pen. I could not write to Emily with a crayon. For Sarah, yes, the rainbow effect seemed appropriate, but for Emily, no. I needed ballpoint. On the windowsill behind the hope chest, there was a light-blue cup--the blue of my mother's Pigeon Forge bowl--and in it there was an emery board, a tire gauge, and three Bic pens.
I extracted a pen and grabbed an AARP. I crawled back to the boxes and crayons, three feet away, and sat with my feet two stairs down, using the magazine as my desk. Quickly I chose a piece of ecru-colored paper with gilt edges--elegant for Em--and bent to my task.
Dear Emily,
How can I begin to explain to you what you already know? That though I am prouder of you and your sister than anything else in the world, I have found myself at the end, with no other choice.
I stopped. I knew how she scrutinized. She spent hours in front of a mirror, finding flaws. Her house was spick-and-span, and she had once pointed out to me that the best thing about having a cleaning woman was that they did what she called the "first wave" and left her free to focus on the details.
I cleared my throat. It echoed in the hall.
By the time you get this, I will be dead. I hope you are spared having to see me. I had to see my father, and it never left me. Sarah will have told you by now that my father killed himself. That he did not fall down the stairs, or rather he did, but only after shooting himself.
I don't know why he left me.
Did you know my mother kept her hair long for your grandfather? He loved it. He would brush it every night one hundred times. In hindsight I came to think of it as their nightly Prozac. Yes, I know, I know--meditation, not medication. In theory I agree, but sometimes . . . don't you think?
What I want you to know is that I did not kill my mother out of vengeance or even, really, pity. It was the right thing to do, though I didn't plan it. If I had, I obviously would have thought of where I am now. All day today, I've been thinking of you and your sister.
It was unforgivable--how I forced you to grow up, to take the place beside me that your father's absence left.
I applaud you in your life. That's what I really wish to say. You have your own house and family, and you live very far away. Keep it like that. Never come back. With me gone, there will be nothing to come back to. That's the gift I want to give your sister. Don't let her live in the house, Emily, or fritter her life away. Sell both houses. Your father will help.
I paused. I thought of my father, sitting beside me the day we cosigned the papers for my house. He had made sure to set me up as firmly as he could, had mentioned that day that his will and other important documents were in the Malvern branch of the bank, and had told me where he hid the key. Only later did I realize why he had been so explicit in this, making me repeat back to him each fact.
I wrote again.
When I close my eyes for a moment, as I've done just now, I see my father, but then I see you. Remember that day at the Y? I'm so proud of you, my Flying Fish!
I'm in Mrs. Leverton's, and it's dark outside. I have to write a note now to your sister. Take care of Jeanine and Leo, and God bless any positive memory of me you are able to entrust to John. Do you remember how much Sarah has always loved the color green? I do.
I love you, Emily, no matter what.
Remember that over everything.
I sat back. I let the pen fall from my hand and silently tumble to a stop. For years after his death, I had gone around jealous of the moments with him I'd missed, staring at Emily and Sarah, thinking of the grade-school chaperoning or the jungle-gym monitoring I'd been engaged in instead. Once or twice he came to sit at the edge of the playground and join me. I had that. That, I clung to, but when I tried to remember what we had talked about, I couldn't. I had wanted something to keep with me; even my mother had hurriedly clipped a lock of his hair when we'd first heard the men from the mortuary coming up the front walk.
I stared at her, horrified, while she tucked it inside her shirt.
"He was my husband," she whispered.
When the doorbell rang, I felt it would be my job to assist the men with their task. Lift my father onto the gurney. Strap him fast.
But in reality, at the mortuary director's urging, I had excused myself. I had taken my mother into the dining room, where we stood by the large corner cabinet near the kitchen, huddled together--not exactly touching each other so much as hovering helplessly in proximity.
"I'm sorry for your loss," the director said when they'd come back up the stairs with the paperwork. They were trained to say that.
The younger one had just started at the funeral home. "Yeah, me too," he'd said, and shook my hand.
Something was digging into my side. It was sharp. I felt it stabbing me. Became aware that it had been poking at me for some time.
I leaned back and put my ha
nd in my jeans pocket. Sarah's butterfly barrette. I took it out and held it in the palm of my hand, making the light from the hope chest pick up its blues and greens, the thin gold rhinestones on the blunted antennae and legs.
It was almost nine. I wondered if Sarah and Jake were looking for me or if they'd thought to speak to Hamish yet. I wondered when Hamish would open his bedside drawer.
I closed my hand over the rhinestone butterfly and pressed, thought of all the discarded items over all the years that had made me feel free. I had not thrown out the weeping Buddha Emily had given me. I would not throw out the butterfly.
I stood up on the landing and pinned the blunt clip of the barrette through the weave of my black sweater until I heard the closure snap.
Mr. Forrest will be asleep now, I thought, or listening to music on his treasured Bose. We had talked about it when we'd run into each other a year or so ago.
"It gets the best sound. I can lie in bed and listen. I have a special velvet sleep mask. It used to be if I wanted to listen to music, I had to sit in the front room."
I bent down to retrieve the letter to Emily and the box of crayons. I tucked them under my arm like a clutch. I was in the house, finally, of the Other. The Levertons and their holiday cruises, their intricate "On Donner, on Dancer" display at Christmas, their elaborate barbecues out back--the laughter of the guests pushing through the trees and across our lawn. All of that was over forever.
I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and so I walked down the short hallway that in my mother's house ended in the only upstairs bathroom. In Mrs. Leverton's, it led to another hall, off of which was the bedroom where she had been standing the night before and seen my mother and me outside.
A humidifier had been left on in the corner of the room, and the overwhelming scent of Mentho-Lyptus filled the air. On the table beside the bed--the wood protected by a thick sheet of glass, cut to fit--there were rows and rows of prescription bottles and a notepad made from strips of paper held together with a clip. Beside this sat a chewed-up pencil. It seemed the prompts to off myself were endless.
