Without looking, because I was not ready to see her face, I removed the towel in one swift flick of my wrist. I heard her yelling. I heard her calling my name.
I jumped up and walked quickly from the room, through the tiny back hall, and into the living room, where my day had started for a second time, a million years ago.
What had I been doing before Mrs. Castle called? I had gone shopping at the greenmarket in town. I had bought string beans 15 01
The Almost Moon
from the elderly Armenian couple who sold only three things out of the back of a small pickup truck. I had gone to my dance class.
I saw the brass ash bin next to the fireplace and went to stand above it. If only I could vomit.
I knew then that my idea of counting on anyone in this was bullshit. What could Jake do, sitting in a rich man's house three thousand miles away? He had taken another call while I stood in the kitchen with my dead mother! "You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it." When exactly had that become my philosophy?
Jake had been asking me questions about temperature and hours and stiffness, and obviously this was all about rot. He'd done enough ice sculptures in the cold capitals of the world to know things I wouldn't have thought of. Couldn't have thought of. Briefly I tried to recall the plot of a movie I'd seen with Natalie last fall. It hinged on whether the death was murder or manslaughter.
I could remember the actress's face, her dewy beauty as she broke down on the stand—past that, I couldn't recall a thing.
My mother had been dead too long to cover it up easily, and I had, fatal tell, broken her nose. Now, out of the kitchen and away from her, I saw more clearly the trouble I was in.
I had never been able to do Jake's meditation exercises. I'd sit on the little round black pillow and try to om-out while my feet and hands went into prickly pins and needles. Inside my head, strange figures walked in and out as if my brain were a heavily frequented coffee shop.
I stood on my mother's porch and planted my feet. I could feel the straw from the mat through the soft, wet leather of my jazz flats. I thought of the old Victorian house imploding. I breathed in and out ten times, counting very slowly. I made the exhalation noises I usually ridiculed in yoga class. What I was going to do
[51]
Alice Sebold
next could not be misinterpreted. What I was going to do next left me no way back.
It was dark; the cicadas were thrumming in the trees. I could hear the trucks shifting miles away on the ridge of the highway.
I knew that, no matter what, I would not be able to stay in the house tonight. I could not wait the hours it would take for Jake to arrive. Besides, as the minutes ticked by, he did not, I noted, call me back.
As I breathed and counted with my eyes wide open, I stared into the house and saw the front hall, the stairs that led up to the three small bedrooms, and the thick padded carpeting that Natalie's son had installed to break a fall.
"We have to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to you that happened to your husband," Hamish had rather witlessly said. He knew the version of events that Natalie had told him—
that my father had died when he fell down the hardwood stairs.
I had stood by quietly that day, nodding my head, unable to look in my mother's direction.
They would have brought my mother's body out of this house on a gurney, I thought. They would have carried her almost vertically down the steep front stairs. She would have been another lonely old lady who died in her home. How sad. How helpless.
How very very high she would rate on people's sympathy curve.
But that was not going to happen. I would make sure of it.
I walked inside. I resisted pausing in the living room to march in place. My muscles were stiff from the time on the kitchen floor, but, posing at Westmore, I had known and recovered from worse. I went upstairs and retrieved a simple white sheet. Then, two at a time, I
I jumped up and walked quickly from the room, through the tiny back hall, and into the living room, where my day had started for a second time, a million years ago.
What had I been doing before Mrs. Castle called? I had gone shopping at the greenmarket in town. I had bought string beans 15 01
The Almost Moon
from the elderly Armenian couple who sold only three things out of the back of a small pickup truck. I had gone to my dance class.
I saw the brass ash bin next to the fireplace and went to stand above it. If only I could vomit.
I knew then that my idea of counting on anyone in this was bullshit. What could Jake do, sitting in a rich man's house three thousand miles away? He had taken another call while I stood in the kitchen with my dead mother! "You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it." When exactly had that become my philosophy?
Jake had been asking me questions about temperature and hours and stiffness, and obviously this was all about rot. He'd done enough ice sculptures in the cold capitals of the world to know things I wouldn't have thought of. Couldn't have thought of. Briefly I tried to recall the plot of a movie I'd seen with Natalie last fall. It hinged on whether the death was murder or manslaughter.
I could remember the actress's face, her dewy beauty as she broke down on the stand—past that, I couldn't recall a thing.
My mother had been dead too long to cover it up easily, and I had, fatal tell, broken her nose. Now, out of the kitchen and away from her, I saw more clearly the trouble I was in.
I had never been able to do Jake's meditation exercises. I'd sit on the little round black pillow and try to om-out while my feet and hands went into prickly pins and needles. Inside my head, strange figures walked in and out as if my brain were a heavily frequented coffee shop.
I stood on my mother's porch and planted my feet. I could feel the straw from the mat through the soft, wet leather of my jazz flats. I thought of the old Victorian house imploding. I breathed in and out ten times, counting very slowly. I made the exhalation noises I usually ridiculed in yoga class. What I was going to do
[51]
Alice Sebold
next could not be misinterpreted. What I was going to do next left me no way back.
It was dark; the cicadas were thrumming in the trees. I could hear the trucks shifting miles away on the ridge of the highway.
I knew that, no matter what, I would not be able to stay in the house tonight. I could not wait the hours it would take for Jake to arrive. Besides, as the minutes ticked by, he did not, I noted, call me back.
As I breathed and counted with my eyes wide open, I stared into the house and saw the front hall, the stairs that led up to the three small bedrooms, and the thick padded carpeting that Natalie's son had installed to break a fall.
"We have to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to you that happened to your husband," Hamish had rather witlessly said. He knew the version of events that Natalie had told him—
that my father had died when he fell down the hardwood stairs.
I had stood by quietly that day, nodding my head, unable to look in my mother's direction.
They would have brought my mother's body out of this house on a gurney, I thought. They would have carried her almost vertically down the steep front stairs. She would have been another lonely old lady who died in her home. How sad. How helpless.
How very very high she would rate on people's sympathy curve.
But that was not going to happen. I would make sure of it.
I walked inside. I resisted pausing in the living room to march in place. My muscles were stiff from the time on the kitchen floor, but, posing at Westmore, I had known and recovered from worse. I went upstairs and retrieved a simple white sheet. Then, two at a time, I
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