fell. I looked up at her for a moment. She stood near my high chair, laughing. I noticed the flour on her forehead and chin, and how it coated the invisible hairs on her forearms. I wanted her to come to me to pick me up, and so I wailed at the top of my lungs.
[64]
The Almost Moon
* * *
My purse sat upright on the dining room table. I tucked the Ziploc bag, with its silver prize, inside the center compartment and, as if I might forget something, looked all around me, doing a 360-degree turn. I jumped when I saw Mr. Fletcher in a litup window, staring back at me, until I realized I had not turned on a light in the dining room and that he was staring not at me but at a computer terminal, which, as he searched the Internet or played the same Byzantine games that Emily's husband liked, lit his face in flashes of blue and green.
When I reached my car and looked back up the brick path to the front door, the light dusting of white powder on my chest and legs—the sugar from the pecan meringues, the flour from the Mexican wedding wafers—was the only thing that marked me as having been in my mother's basement.
I wanted to weep, but instead I thought of where I could go.
I had to relax. No one knew except Jake. What felt like other people's knowing—the call to Avery, the questioning from Mrs.
Leverton, the whispering of my name by Mrs. Castle—wasn't.
And no one would go into the house without me there.
I sat in my ancient Saab with the windows rolled up and placed my purse on the passenger seat, resisting the impulse to strap it in like a child. I put the key in the ignition and started the car.
Slowly I pulled away, hunching over the steering wheel as if the streets were dense with fog.
Mrs. Leverton's house was dark except for the timer lights her son had installed. The clock on the dashboard read 8:17. Time for old women to be tucked in. But apparently not old men. As I drove by Mr. Forrest's house, I could see him reading in his front room. All his lights were on. He had never believed in blinds.
16 5]
Alice Sebold
At least in the old days, he had always had dogs. There he is, I thought to myself, an old man vulnerable to bullies and thieves.
I was sixteen that day in Mr. Forrest's house, when I'd first seen color plates of women in various states of undress.
"They call them muses, Helen," he had said as he watched me turn the pages of an outsize book called simply The Female Nude.
"They are women who inspire great things." I had thought of the pictures that stood throughout our house. Pictures of my mother in outmoded support garments or diaphanous peekaboo gowns, smiling winsomely into the camera.
The thirty-minute drive between my mother's house and my own had always been an excuse for talk. Some people talk to themselves in front of their mirrors at home, psyching themselves up to ask for a raise or undertake a self-improvement project. I had always talked to myself most inside the car on the back roads that led from Phoenixville to my suburban faux colonial in Frazer.
The halfway point, mentally, if not physically, was Pickering Creek and the small one-lane bridge that crossed it.
The night I killed my mother, I sang to myself in a low hum in an effort to create a sort of white noise in between me and what I had done. Every so often I would say, "You're okay, you're okay, you're okay," as I pressed more tightly on the wheel to feel the squeeze of blood that pulsed at the ends of my fingertips.
At Pickering, I waited on the Phoenixville side for a beaten-up Toyota to pass by, and as I crept over the bridge, my car lurched up briefly on the patched road. My headlights seemed to catch something moving in the limestone ruins on the other side. It looked like a man, lit up and dancing over the dark rock, and I shivered in my clothes.
On the other side of Pickering, the trees were thinner and denser, and struggled during the day to get any sun through the
[6 6]
The Almost Moon
crowded canopy above.
[64]
The Almost Moon
* * *
My purse sat upright on the dining room table. I tucked the Ziploc bag, with its silver prize, inside the center compartment and, as if I might forget something, looked all around me, doing a 360-degree turn. I jumped when I saw Mr. Fletcher in a litup window, staring back at me, until I realized I had not turned on a light in the dining room and that he was staring not at me but at a computer terminal, which, as he searched the Internet or played the same Byzantine games that Emily's husband liked, lit his face in flashes of blue and green.
When I reached my car and looked back up the brick path to the front door, the light dusting of white powder on my chest and legs—the sugar from the pecan meringues, the flour from the Mexican wedding wafers—was the only thing that marked me as having been in my mother's basement.
I wanted to weep, but instead I thought of where I could go.
I had to relax. No one knew except Jake. What felt like other people's knowing—the call to Avery, the questioning from Mrs.
Leverton, the whispering of my name by Mrs. Castle—wasn't.
And no one would go into the house without me there.
I sat in my ancient Saab with the windows rolled up and placed my purse on the passenger seat, resisting the impulse to strap it in like a child. I put the key in the ignition and started the car.
Slowly I pulled away, hunching over the steering wheel as if the streets were dense with fog.
Mrs. Leverton's house was dark except for the timer lights her son had installed. The clock on the dashboard read 8:17. Time for old women to be tucked in. But apparently not old men. As I drove by Mr. Forrest's house, I could see him reading in his front room. All his lights were on. He had never believed in blinds.
16 5]
Alice Sebold
At least in the old days, he had always had dogs. There he is, I thought to myself, an old man vulnerable to bullies and thieves.
I was sixteen that day in Mr. Forrest's house, when I'd first seen color plates of women in various states of undress.
"They call them muses, Helen," he had said as he watched me turn the pages of an outsize book called simply The Female Nude.
"They are women who inspire great things." I had thought of the pictures that stood throughout our house. Pictures of my mother in outmoded support garments or diaphanous peekaboo gowns, smiling winsomely into the camera.
The thirty-minute drive between my mother's house and my own had always been an excuse for talk. Some people talk to themselves in front of their mirrors at home, psyching themselves up to ask for a raise or undertake a self-improvement project. I had always talked to myself most inside the car on the back roads that led from Phoenixville to my suburban faux colonial in Frazer.
The halfway point, mentally, if not physically, was Pickering Creek and the small one-lane bridge that crossed it.
The night I killed my mother, I sang to myself in a low hum in an effort to create a sort of white noise in between me and what I had done. Every so often I would say, "You're okay, you're okay, you're okay," as I pressed more tightly on the wheel to feel the squeeze of blood that pulsed at the ends of my fingertips.
At Pickering, I waited on the Phoenixville side for a beaten-up Toyota to pass by, and as I crept over the bridge, my car lurched up briefly on the patched road. My headlights seemed to catch something moving in the limestone ruins on the other side. It looked like a man, lit up and dancing over the dark rock, and I shivered in my clothes.
On the other side of Pickering, the trees were thinner and denser, and struggled during the day to get any sun through the
[6 6]
The Almost Moon
crowded canopy above.
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