The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

Not in the hallway or the front room but in the back rooms on the first floor and in the bedrooms of the floor above, I saw and understood what my father had been doing over the years in his workshop when he was not busy with his rocking horses. He had been making figures out of plywood.

  When I walked into the kitchen and saw wood nailed to the wall--a finely articulated shadow of two adults and a child sitting at a table--I stepped back.

  "Dad!" I said.

  "I'm right here," he said.

  And he was, standing right behind me just inside the doorway.

  "That's so cool," I said.

  I could sense his rare smile even though I wasn't looking at him.

  "I'm glad you like them."

  I went up and traced the head of the child lightly with my index finger, careful of splinters. They were rough and unpainted, and what held them fast was a variety of screws and nails.

  "Is this supposed to be you?" I asked, my palm spread flat against the chest of the child.

  "Yes," he said. "And that's my mother and father. This is the second one I made. You were very little then."

  It must have struck me at some point that this meant he had been building a family out of plywood over a stretch of about a dozen years. At the time I felt the adrenaline rush of the shared secret between us, something my mother wasn't privy to.

  "Is this where you went that time?"

  "No," he said, and gave the standard line. "I was in Ohio, visiting friends and family."

  By thirteen I sensed this was a lie my parents told, but I still didn't know why.

  It was cold in the rooms, as there was no heat, and the plaster around the plywood people was nearly down to the boards, but I could see why he liked it here. It was deathly quiet except for the tree branches scraping against the windows. Occasionally, a pane would break, my father said, "from the trees' desire to occupy the place."

  "Are you ready to go upstairs?" he asked.

  "This is so weird, Dad," I said.

  "I can count on you, can't I?" he asked. His eyes drew together in anxiety for just a moment.

  "I'll never tell if you don't want me to," I said.

  We climbed the stairs together, as if on the way to an important party just beyond the landing up above. Here there were more people. In a room to the left, there was a bed with a figure propped up. I could see the space between the angle of the elbow and the wall. A figure was standing at the end of the bed.

  "That's my mother, coming to wake me up," my father said.

  "And who's that?" I pointed to a gaunt plywood figure holding up something that, without paint or shading, looked like a cord or snake.

  "That's the doctor. He had come to sound my chest."

  I turned and looked at my father.

  "I was often sick," he said. "It was hard on my mother."

  In another room I thought I spotted myself, and without speaking, I pointed to a figure tacked to the wall.

  "Yes," he said.

  There were two other figures in the room--the smallest room on the second floor--and I did not ask who they represented. If I was the larger one--the size of myself at eight or nine--then the two bundles on either side of me were my unborn brothers or sisters.

  In the middle of the largest room, where two adults stood with their arms gesticulating in the air, was a rocking horse like the one he had once made me and those he made and painted each year for the Greek Orthodox Children's Fair. This one was plain, save for the pencil work that would mark out the separations between colors.

  "Why didn't you paint it?" I asked.

  "I thought about it," he said, "but I wanted it to feel at home here. Go ahead and ride it if you want."

  "I'm too big, Dad," I said.

  His eyes saddened behind his heavy glasses.

  "Not in this house," he said. "In this house, you're ageless."

  I looked at my father and felt a pain right in the center of my chest, as if all the air in the room would not be enough, could not fill me up.

  He smiled at me. I did not want to disappoint him, so I smiled back.

  "I'll show you," he said.

  He took off his glasses, folded the stems carefully, and handed them to me, his thumb and forefinger on either side of the nose bridge. I took them in both hands on the outside of the frames. His world without them, I knew, was merely fuzzy shapes and colors.

  Carefully, he got on the rocking horse.

  "I have to admit," he said, "I haven't tried this before. I don't know how much weight it will support."

  He sat on the flat back section of the horse and kept his feet on the floor instead of curling them up to the dowel that stuck out on either side. I was grateful that I held his glasses. If I winced, it might look like a smile.

  He rocked the horse back and forth gently, keeping his weight, I saw, mostly in his legs. "Hilda says I put so many screws in them that these horses would hold a horse!" He laughed at Mrs. Castle's joke.

  The plywood curve mashing against the wooden floors didn't sound right to me. It went against everything my mother had taught me about putting furniture on rugs and coasters under cups.

  "I'm going to go farther up," I said.

  My father stopped rocking the horse.

  "No, sweetie," he said. "This is it."

  "But there're more stairs," I said.

  "That's just a cramped attic space. No people there."

  He stood but still straddled the rocking horse, and I knew he had another secret.

  "I'm going up!" I said gleefully, and turned and ran, his glasses still in my hand.

  I could hear my father stumbling as I put my hand on the newel post and gained the bottom stair.

  "Honey, don't!" he called out.

  At the top of the stairs, there was a closed four-panel door. I put my hand on the cold porcelain knob.

  "You won't like what you find in there."

  "Oh, well," I said over my shoulder. "Such is life." It was an expression Mr. Forrest often used when talking to my mother in the living room. She would complain, and he would say, "Such is life," and steer her back to a discussion of Trollope, whom they read in tandem, or of Edith Wharton's The Glimpses of the Moon, a first edition of which Mr. Forrest had given my mother as a gift.

  I turned the doorknob and stepped into the room.

  It was much smaller than the floor below, and there were windows only at the back, which looked out over the sunken yards of Lambeth. Unlike that of the first and second floor, the view from the third floor still cleared the trees. In the distance I could see the menacing inward curve of the Delaware.

  My father stood in the doorway now. He had taken the stairs slowly, giving me time to see what there was to see. His eyes without his glasses looked lost.

  "Here," I said. He fumbled for them and put them on.

  "The front is a storage space. You get there by crawling into that small doorway."

  But I was looking at the mattress, covered in blue ticking with balled-up blankets and a pillow, that sat in the middle of the floor. I thought of all the days he spent away from us.

  "Sometimes I sleep here," he said.

  I shifted my feet so that all my father would see from where he stood was my back. There were paperbacks on the floor beside the head of the bed. I recognized a photographic history of trains. It had once been on the nightstand in my parents' bedroom. And a huge anthology of love poems was there too. It had been a gift at Christmas from my father to my mother. And I could see, peeking out beneath a scattering of detective novels, one fleshy thigh of what I knew was a nude photograph of a woman in a magazine. Her skin looked orangey to me.

  "I like being able to look out over the yards at night. I feel like I'm hidden away up here in a nest."

  "Did you really go to Ohio that time?" I asked.

  "I went to a hospital, Helen."

  I took this in.

  "And the business trips?"

  The question hung in the air. He walked up behind me and put his hands
on my shoulders. He leaned over and kissed the top of my head, the way he did with my mother.

  "I go on business trips," he said, "but sometimes, on my way home, I spend a night here."

  I tore myself away from him and turned around. My face felt hot.

  "You leave me alone with her," I said.

  "She's your mother, Helen."

  I stumbled over the edge of the mattress and fell down. He came toward me, but I quickly leaped to my feet and walked to the head of the bed so that we would have the blue ticking and the smelly wad of sheets between us.

  "Just for a night or two at a time," he said.

  I kicked the anthology of love poems and the detective novels aside and uncovered the rest of the orangey woman. Her breasts were larger than I'd thought it possible for breasts to be. Even then they struck me as preposterous.

  We both stared at her.

  "She's gross, Dad," I said, forgetting, for the moment, my anger.

  "Admittedly," he said, "she's a bit top-heavy."

  "She looks like a freak," I said. Inside my head I heard the word "hospital" over and over again. What did it mean?

  "She's a beautiful woman, Helen," he said. "Breasts are a natural part of a woman's body."

  Without thinking about it, I crossed both arms over my chest. "Gross!" I said. "You come here and stare at gross freak women and leave me with Mom."

  "I do," he said.

  What I didn't ask, because it was never a question in my mind, was Why?

  "Can I come here with you?"

  "You're here now, sweet pea."

  "I mean, can I sleep here?"

  "You know you can't. What would we tell your mother?"

  "I'll tell her about this place," I threatened. "I'll tell her about the magazines. I'll tell her about the plywood babies in that little room!"

  Each sentence hit nearer the mark. He didn't actually care much if I told on him about the mattress or the Playboy bunnies or visiting the house. It was the plywood people he cared about.

  "I didn't raise you to be cruel."

  "What hospital?" I asked.

  My father looked at me, considering.

  "Why don't we go on our picnic and I'll tell you about it."

  For the remainder of that afternoon, my father showed me the still-visible parts of the town where he'd grown up. We had a picnic of egg-salad sandwiches with cucumber, and chocolate chip cookies that he'd made himself. There was a thermos of milk for me, and he drank two Coca-Colas end to end and burped as loud as I'd ever heard anyone. He couldn't get me to stop laughing after that. I laughed so hard I ended up coughing, like a bark, over and over again.

  "Why don't we wait for the darkness here," he said.

  It was a gift, and I did not have the heart to ask again about the hospital. Part of me was happy with the fib. It made him seem normal, even if it was just pretend. Where is your father? In Ohio, visiting friends and family. I decided that day that I would never blame my father for anything--his absence, his weakness, or his lies.

  THIRTEEN

  Jake and I had been married for little more than a year when I began having nightmares. They involved boxes, the empty gift boxes that occupied space on tables or were circled under the Christmas tree. But these boxes were sodden and the cardboard darkened. What was in these boxes were pieces of my mother.

  Jake learned to wake me slowly. He would put his hand on my shoulder as I mumbled words that in the beginning were too garbled for him to figure out. "You're here with me, Helen, and Emily is safe in her crib. Let's look at Emily, Helen. You're here with us." He had read somewhere that repeating the name of the sleeper helped usher her into the present. He would speak to me like this as he saw me surfacing. My eyes would open but remain unfocused until I heard him saying his name, Emily's name, mine. My pupils were like camera lenses, adjusting, readjusting, zooming in. "Cut-up dream?" he would ask then. Slowly I rose out of the land where I was the person who had cut my mother up and labeled the boxes. My father was in our house at large in the dream. Whistling.

  As the remaining students left and Tanner futilely shouted out a homework assignment to their departing backs, I stepped behind the partition to get dressed.

  "We'll wait for you outside the room," Detective Broumas said.

  I heard them go and the door shut, but I was not dressing. I was sitting on the wooden chair, shivering and holding the hospital gown tighter and tighter against myself. I had finally done it, and now the world would know.

  "Helen?"

  It was Tanner.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Come around," I said.

  Tanner came behind the partition and knelt in front of me. We had tried to have sex once but instead ended up getting drunk and depressed about how our lives had turned out. As he knelt before me, I saw that he had begun balding on top.

  "You have to get dressed," he said.

  "I know." I stared down at my knees, which suddenly seemed as marbleized as my mother's skin. I saw my joints, fat sheared off at a rendering plant. Scarsdale patties made of my thighs and arms and stored in a meat freezer, waiting to be broiled or pan seared.

  "It will be okay," he said. "Cops are always freaky, but they'll just ask you things about your mother's routines and such. It happened when my landlady died."

  I thought about nodding my head, for a moment I even thought I was nodding my head, but my brain seemed to have broken itself in two. I looked at Tanner.

  "I'm not crying," I said.

  "No, Helen, you're not."

  "It's over," I said.

  Tanner did not know the details of my life. But drunkenly, I had mentioned how I felt my mother was sucking the life out of me day by day, year by year. I wondered if he could possibly know what "it's over" meant, or if he, despite his anarchist habits, was still moved by the sentimentalist portraits of mothers that were created all over the world.

  "Let me help you," he said. "Is this your sweater?"

  He reached over to the hutch and pulled out my sweater, along with my bra, which I had tucked inside. Hurriedly he snatched the bra off the dirty floor.

  "Sorry," he said.

  Though Tanner had seen me nude week after week for years now, as I peeled back the top of the hospital gown and let it fall around me on the chair, I felt as if I had never really undressed in front of him. He held out my bra as if it were a dress for me to slip into. Seeing his attempt to dress me, I realized that no matter how hard it was, I would have to wrest control of myself and perform.

  I took the bra from him and held it in my lap. I managed a small smile. "Thank you, Tanner," I said. "I'll take it from here."

  He held out his left hand, and I put my free hand in his. When I was standing, he very gently leaned over and kissed me on the head.

  "I'll see you Monday morning at ten a.m.?"

  This time, I nodded my head.

  I was zipping up my jeans when Natalie came in.

  "Are you back there?"

  "Yes."

  She came around the partition in her Diane von Furstenberg and a cloud of newly applied perfume. Her face was splotchy. Tears had recently moistened her cheeks.

  "They came in Room Two Thirty looking for you. I dressed as fast as I could. Can I hug you?" she asked. Always, even now, I radiated that permission had to be granted.

  Her warmth made me melt into her, want her in the way I had always wanted a mother. But inside my animal brain, I thought how dangerous this was. The very things that would comfort me could make the necessary coil unwind.

  I wanted to claw at her. At her ample breasts and what we recently had read was called a "menopot." I wanted to take her ridiculous dyed hair and pull it out at the roots. I wanted these things because I could not have what I wanted most--to crawl inside her and disappear.

  I let her move her hand through the short bristle of my hair and down the back of my neck. I let her rub me across my bony shoulder blades. And I cried, just a little bit, unable to know whether it was because
I should, given the circumstances, or because Natalie's comfort was painful to me.

  "Where's Jake?" she asked. She pulled herself away from me and held my shoulders in her hands. I looked at her. I was happy to have tears at the corners of my eyes. Would this make me more sympathetic? Could I manage it again when necessary?

  I remembered our backstory. "I don't know. He's supposed to pick me up. He was going to hook up with a former student who works at Tyler now."

  "So he'll be here soon? He can go with us."

  "With us?"

  "To the police station," Natalie said.

  "What?"

  "Your mother was killed, Helen."

  I sat down with force.

  "Didn't the police tell you? I thought you knew."

  I tried not to wince. "By who?"

  "I thought they told you, sweetie. I'm sorry. Listen, get your shoes on. They'll tell you everything they know."

  "Do they have a suspect?"

  "I don't know. I was talking to one of them, and then another guy, in a sport jacket, cut him off."

  "Detective Broumas," I said. My voice enunciated each syllable in a monotone. I thought of Jake and of our wedding vows: Do you promise to take this man in marriage, as long as you both shall live, in sickness and in health, in murderous extravagance?

  "Shoes," Natalie said, and pushed them toward my chair with her foot.

  The door opened, and I heard Jake's voice in the hallway.

  "Is she almost ready in there?" an unfamiliar voice asked.

  "We're coming," Natalie trilled. "Just one more minute."

  "Her husband's here."

  "He can come in."

  "The detective is asking him a few questions."

  Natalie and I looked at each other. My shoes were on, and for all intents and purposes I was as ready as I'd ever be.

  I grabbed my bag, for a moment confusedly thinking my mother's braid was still inside. Jake had known. Without him it would still be on the bed, curled like a snake.

  "Lipstick?" Natalie said.

  "Kiss me," I said. Without hesitation, she did. I rubbed my lips together, spreading out the gloss.

  "Ready?"

  "Let's go."

  "It's horrible, what's happened," Natalie said as we approached the door. "But Jake is here. The Lord works in mysterious ways."

  I could not tell my friend it had nothing to do with the Lord but everything to do with a chain of events that my own hands had set in motion less than twenty-four hours ago. Pushing down on the towels, the blankets wrapped around her broken body, her rose-petal-pink slip wedged between the hutch and the wall, traces of the silver braid clinging to my toilet bowl. All of them, like the phone call to Avery that had alerted Jake, had come from the hands that now held my purse, now reached for the door as it swung open, now shook the meaty palm of Detective Broumas.