The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

  "That gives us two hours," Jake said. "I'm going to shower. What are you going to tell her, Helen?"

  "I don't know yet."

  "You better figure it out. Sarah's no idiot, and this isn't over the phone."

  "Emily," I said.

  "Call her back."

  "I can't."

  "Do it," Jake said, and left the room.

  Once, when I was in Seattle, Emily had shown me how she took vitamins out of their original jars and placed them in beautiful porcelain containers on a handmade cherrywood lazy Susan in the middle of one of the multiple islands of their kitchen. When I was foolish enough to ask how the children could tell where their chewables were, Emily told me that color entered a child's memory more fluidly than text, and so Jeanine knew that the jar with the eggshell-blue glaze held her chewables.

  Emily had been just out in front of me her entire life. She learned to dress herself and tie her shoes before I was ready to relinquish these tasks, and she became absolutely adamant about taking responsibility for herself as soon as she could. If I tried to read her a story or pour her cereal into a bowl, she would rip Harold and the Purple Crayon or the box of cornflakes from my hands and shout--quite bossily, I always felt--"I do!"

  I heard Jake above me in the girls' bathroom. I remembered how he would leave his pants on the bathroom floor where they fell. I listened for the sound of it, for the belt buckle and pockets, heavy with change, hitting the tile floor. When I heard it, I picked up the Bat Phone and dialed Emily's number.

  It rang three times.

  No one said hello, but I heard breathing on the other end.

  "Jeanine?"

  Nothing.

  "Jeanine, it's Grandma. Is Mommy there?"

  I heard the phone being dropped on a table or on the floor and the sound of small footsteps walking away.

  "Hello?" I said.

  I waited for what seemed a reasonable amount of time.

  "Hello?" I called again. Louder this time.

  I heard the water in the pipes above my head. Jake was taking his shower. I noticed that the vodka bottle had not been put back. I thought about how four years ago I had found my mother curled up on the floor of the linen closet after I had called for her throughout the house.

  "What are you doing?" I'd asked.

  "Hiding," she'd said.

  I had hauled her out like an animal that had gotten stuck under the house. She had a line of heavy dust from the closet floor along her left side. I had batted at her gown in order to clean it off.

  "Stop hitting me!" she'd shrieked. "Stop hitting me!"

  And I had had to remind Mrs. Castle to keep the linen closet locked.

  "I only wanted to change the tablecloth."

  Why hadn't I told her, "You don't understand--my mother hides in there"?

  I pressed the phone to my ear. I heard voices. They were the voices of TV. In Seattle, Jeanine was watching television--a DVD, I imagined. Emily and John kept the shelves that I thought should hold books stocked with them. When I'd asked John where they kept their books, he had shrugged his shoulders. "Who has time to read?"

  I listened for a while. I pictured the rooms. Judging by the nearness of the television, it had been the phone in the kitchen Jeanine had picked up. I wondered where Leo was. Emily. I knew that John would be at work, lecturing nonenvironmental types on the endless joys of plastic fabrication.

  "I suffocated her on the side porch," I whispered over the phone. There was no response. "I cut off her braid and took it home."

  Cartoon music filled the air in Seattle. A chase was on.

  I hung up the phone. I thought of the line that traveled through me and reached all the way to Leo and Jeanine. How Leo almost uncannily had my eyes. How Jeanine seemed to possess a trace of my father in her jawbone. Her laugh had me in there somewhere, and when she sang, as she often did, I remembered my mother singing in the quiet house when I was a child.

  I walked upstairs to my bedroom. I had told Emily when she was little that we were descended from the Melungeons of Tennessee. When she was much older, she realized I had been pulling her leg, but for a brief time I had her believing that she sprang from this strange, lost group of people cut off from the rest of the world in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. I had passed by the bathroom to find her looking for the telltale signs of bluish skin. In Sarah, she said, she saw the high forehead and cheekbones and the "almost Asian look," but in herself she saw nothing.

  Along with my father's letters in the basement, there would be the paper Emily wrote in junior high, on which a teacher had scrawled a failing grade. I no longer remembered the woman's name, Barber or Bartlett, something beginning with a B. I had marched into the junior high in a mock-mommy outfit I'd composed for effect--corduroy bag jumper and deranged Mary-Jane flats--and lit into Emily's teacher with all my might. This had succeeded in gaining Emily a C and me a plea from my daughter never to do anything similar again. I still saw these moments spent in defense of my children as the finest of my life.

  I heard Jake gargling on the girls' side of the house. The faint scent of his musk-based aftershave reached me as I turned to lock the door.

  I walked into my long closet. Most of the luggage was kept on the other side of the house, in the closet that had slowly gone from keeping shoes and clothes that Emily could use when she visited to a place where I could stash items I might never use again but did not feel like throwing out. But the many lopsided, ill-measured sweaters and scarves my mother had made over the years, I kept in my closet in an old duffel bag of Jake's. It sat, an army-green lump, balanced perilously on top of two other boxes on the shelf above the clothing rack.

  I stood up on a small step stool that Sarah had made in wood shop. I batted at the bag with my right hand until it came tumbling down. I did not think about what I was doing. I knew we were going to pick Sarah up at the train. I knew the police knew more than they were saying. Jake was right, there was still a sliver of a chance I would get away with it, but I had realized sometime during the morning that it did not matter whether I did or not. It was my children who would ultimately sit in judgment of me, and the two of them would know. I could never fool them, and I didn't want to.

  I unzipped the heavy gold zipper of the canvas bag and took out my mother's sad pile of knitting.

  "Why is it that everything she knits resembles vomit?" Sarah asked one Christmas. The girls were just entering adulthood, and that year, my mother had outdone herself, knitting a full-length sweater coat for each of them. She had used a variety of yarns in a striated design, and sure enough, though it was meant to be autumnal in effect, the result seemed more intestinal.

  I found one of these coats easily enough and placed it back in the bag before shoving the remaining knitting on top of a file cabinet I kept in the corner. Then I looked at my jumble of shoes and chose the ratty sneakers I wore for gardening. I heard Jake walking down the hall toward my door. Three shirts. Over to my dresser, long underwear, underwear, one cashmere sweater. I had my good jeans on, and I put a second pair into the bag. In the bottom drawer were the slips and a nylon running suit with reflector stripes that I had thought was stylish in the store. I shoved the nylon suit in the duffel bag and zipped it up.

  Jake knocked very lightly on my door.

  "Helen? Are you awake?"

  I left the duffel on the floor and closed the closet.

  "Of course," I said.

  I saw the doorknob jiggle.

  "It's locked," he said.

  When I opened the door, Jake was bleary-eyed. He swayed slightly to the right.

  "Did you shower with the vodka?" I asked, and led him by the hand across the room, where he slumped into a sitting position on the bed.

  "You lie down and close your eyes for a while," I said. "I'll wake you when it's time to go get Sarah."

  He nodded his head up and down. "I am tired," he said.

  "Of course you are. Where's the poison?"

  "Don't have any, Helen," he
cautioned. "You need to stay sober."

  I smiled.

  "I know. I just want to put it away."

  "We should call Phin. Phin could help us."

  I put my hand against his chest and pushed. He fell backward on the bed.

  He brought his knees up and curled up on the unmade sheets.

  "You've been wonderful," I said.

  "Milo and Grace love to lick faces," he said. "Phin doesn't like that."

  I grabbed a pillow from the headboard for him to put under his head. "You sleep for a bit," I said.

  A moment or two later, I heard his breathing shift into light snoring. I reached out to touch him. I realized I had forgotten socks, but I didn't want to risk waking him. I tiptoed to the closet, grabbed the duffel bag, and crept down the stairs through the back hall--Who knows, Caracas?--and out into the garage. I tucked the duffel behind the lawn mower and a few empty plastic pails that were left over from the last time I'd had the house painted. It would go unnoticed there.

  I had prepacked a bag for the hospital before Sarah was born. I had made a day of it. New toothbrush, new nightgown, even a powder compact, because all the pictures of me holding Emily had featured my face flush with perspiration. I had been the rare mother, the doctor had said, who had had a more difficult delivery the second time around.

  "My big head," Sarah would concede.

  "Your big, beautiful head," I would correct.

  I noticed that the sticky trap I'd set out early in the week was no longer in its place near the trash cans. I stood very still and listened. Wherever the mouse had dragged itself, it would have to be dead or close to dead by now.

  Back upstairs in Sarah's bedroom, I saw the vodka bottle on the windowsill. There was still at least a third left. Jake had always been an easy drunk. On our first real date, he had slipped under the table within an hour after a salty full professor had challenged him to a drinking contest.

  I did my best to straighten the room in preparation for Sarah. I had kept her room the lavender she had wanted years ago. All the other rooms had been repainted a stark white, even Emily's.

  I moved my hand briskly against the deep-purple coverlet, smoothing out the wrinkles from where Jake must have sat to put on his shoes. I adjusted the alarm clock by one hour, having failed to do so at daylight saving time, and I used the bottom of my sweater to dust around the items on her bureau.

  In this room, three years ago, I had unleashed a violence I had never thought myself capable of. Sarah had come home with a boy named Bryce, whom I had been suspicious of as soon as I met them at the train. He was an ultra-WASP who, he claimed, came from an old family in Connecticut. None of this meant much to me, and after a dinner during which he talked mostly of himself, I'd gone to my bedroom so the two of them could have the run of the house.

  The first slap was like a distant gunshot. On the second, I sat straight up. I heard Sarah in that way that you do when a person is trying not to make a sound but can't stop themselves. By that time I was halfway across the house in my nightgown, with the baseball bat my father had given me for protection.

  It was something Sarah had sworn me to secrecy about. Emily and Jake were never to know that she had allowed a man to hit her. Bryce had fled the house on foot after I had brandished the bat and then slammed it as hard as I could into the doorjamb.

  I sat down on the floor of Sarah's bedroom and then lay back on the rug. Without thinking, I went through the series of stretches I had done every morning for fifteen years.

  At half past one, I went back to my bedroom to find Jake asleep in the same position he had been. I whispered his name, but I had already decided to go without him. I left a note on the kitchen counter saying I would return with Sarah. I tucked the vodka bottle in the liquor cabinet, and just as I was about to put the Bat Phone back in with its companion pillow, I stopped myself. I yanked the cord from the wall and carried it out to the garbage cans.

  I debated taking the duffel bag with me but decided against it. I was not ready yet. If I could, I wanted to cook dinner for Sarah and wake her the next morning by bringing up a pot of hot coffee for the two of us to share.

  I had never gotten used to the official rush hour of the suburbs, which revolved around school's letting out and parents in their cars lined up outside. In the years since I'd had children coming and going, the curbside pickup, fueled by stories of abduction, had increased in popularity. Still, as I edged my way down the street where Lemondale Elementary School sat, I was happy to see at least three or four yellow buses pulled up to the curb.

  At Crescent Road, I was stopped by a matronly crossing guard with a white sash and a whistle--the full effect. I watched a mass of children--the "primaries," they were called at Lemondale--walk in front of my car in a swirling pattern that reminded me of shifting clouds on a TV weather map. Only a few kids walked by themselves, heads bent, knapsacks towing their shoulders down. The others ran or pulled at one another's coats and shirts, dropped their knapsacks, and yelled names and taunts across to those on the other side.

  I drove on.

  I passed the old music store, which was now a shop called The Ultimate Cupcake, where I had once purchased Emily's much-despised clarinet. I thought of how when the girls were growing up, their friends would thunder through my house and think nothing of having me make sandwiches to order. This one liked mayo, but this one would have only mustard. One of Emily's friends, disappointed in her sandwich, had stood in the kitchen and pointedly explained the difference between jelly, which she had requested, and jam, which I had given her.

  The most convenient train for Sarah to take from Manhattan stopped in Paoli. This way she could avoid switching in Philadelphia and arrive via Amtrak. Instead of crossing the bridge to the side where the passengers were let out, I checked my watch. I counted out the minutes and double-parked outside Starbucks.

  I walked briskly into the station and over to the Amtrak counter. I asked for a current schedule for the Northeast Corridor. On the way past the local SEPTA booth, I took two or three of their schedules as an afterthought. I did this by rote, as I had done my stretches, as I had packed my duffel bag and stowed it in the garage. My brain had divided in half, half focused on the tasks of normalcy--picking up my daughter from the train--and half focused on escape.

  I got back into the car and turned it around. Driving the red rental car made me feel even more conspicuous, but it had sat in the driveway, blocking any other choice. I thought of the promise I had made to Hamish--that I would see him tonight--and wondered if I was insane. I pictured Natalie in a crossing-guard outfit, holding a stop sign and blocking my way.

  Sarah was standing at the top of the platform stairs, scanning the parking lot. She had on a ratty sheepskin coat, beneath which I saw an old pair of my Frye boots that she had confiscated on her last trip home. "These are so urban hippie retro," she'd said. "I can't believe you wore these." When I told her that apparently she was now going to be wearing them, she said, "Yeah, but not seriously."

  Her hair was braided into two pigtails that reached to her waist, and clustered about the crown of her head were what seemed an infinite number of rhinestone barrettes. She would not recognize the car, and so I cruised up beside her, ducked my head across the passenger seat, and called her name.

  "Mom, oh my God, this is a horn-dog car!" she said as she threw her bag in the backseat and got in beside me.

  She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. It carried a shock, as if she had been rubbing her feet on carpeting.

  "Sorry," she said.

  We left the parking lot.

  "How was the train?" I asked.

  "Is this, like, a midlife crisis thing?" she said. "Go out and get a sports car? I thought men did that."

  "Women get Botox," I said.

  "Right, so what gives?"

  "Actually," I said, "this isn't my car. It's a rental."

  "The smell. I should have guessed that! Where's yours?"

  We were stopped at a li
ght across from Roscoe Automotive and the Mail Boxes Etc. store. Cars and mail, I thought. Trains.

  "Your head looks like a disco ball," I said.

  "Don't avoid the question."

  "My car is in the garage, and your father is asleep in my bed."

  I could not help baiting her. It was a game we had played since her childhood, who could get the other's goat, who could create the best exaggeration. Sarah, I knew, had hoped to make this early skill into an art. She was a child of embellishment and stylish turns. What Emily had in stolid substance, Sarah possessed in her ability to distract everyone from the main topic of conversation. That way, no one ever thought to get a real answer to the question of how she was doing. It was what she'd carried into voice classes like a blank check. She could sing well enough, but--and the "but" held everything, both a buoyant magnetism and what I feared might be her incipient version of the family's insanity.

  "Tell the story," she said.

  We passed the hospital, and I picked up speed. I could tell she was feeling good. Her cheeks were flushed as if she had just come from a run. But Sarah didn't run. She didn't exercise. Not for her what she called my "gym crucifixion." She starved sometimes, and sometimes binged. She drank and smoked, and I was sure did other things.

  "There is a lot to tell," I said. "I'd rather not go home just yet. Your father needs to rest anyway. It might be easier if it's just the two of us."

  "I sense intensity," she said.

  "We'll go somewhere," I said, "then I'll tell you all you want to know."

  "Yow!" she said, but she did not follow up with anything else. As we passed Easy Joe's Restaurant, I saw her check each rhinestone barrette with her hands. She took its shape between her thumb and forefinger and then tested it to make sure it held.

  "Why the braids?" I asked.

  "Oh, I don't know. My hair was wet. Like or not like?"

  "They remind me of your grandmother."

  "Not like, got it."

  I knew where I was headed. Hamish had been the first person I'd gone there with in years. In the daytime the farmland invited the eye, and then the towers between the treetops stopped it cold.

  As we passed by the Ironsmith Inn and turned left to crest the hill, Sarah sighed loudly.

  "No Schlitz?" she asked regretfully.

  Without looking in my rearview mirror, I threw the car into reverse and swung backward into the general store's lot.