The Almost Moon (26 page)

"And my mother?"

"What time did you leave your mother's house last night?"

I sat up straighter and looked for signs that he was on the verge of accusing me. But he glanced at me mildly and pulled at the crease of his right trouser leg with the same hand that held his pen.

I remembered a phrase Sarah had taught me. Weak Handsome.

It was a show-business term that stood for men who were shadows of truly handsome men. They held all the proportions and qualities—hair color, height, etc.—but there was just enough flat or off about them that they were never cast as leads. A weak chin, eyes a bit too far apart, ears that stood out from the sides of their heads. I decided that Robert Broumas was Weak Handsome.

"I want to know how she died," I said.

"I'll answer that in a moment. What time did you leave your mother's house?"

"Shortly after six," I said. I stopped short of flinching. Mrs.

Castle had said she'd seen me at seven.

Detective Broumas flipped back a few pages in his notes. He adjusted himself in the chair, cleared his throat.

"Did you go straight home? "

"No."

"Where did you go?"

"Mrs. Castle may have told you how badly off my mother was,"

I said. "That she hadn't recognized her yesterday."

"She did."

"I knew I would have to call the hospice. That once they took her away, she would never see her house again."

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I found myself crying now. Tears rolled down my cheeks, and I wiped them with the sleeve of my sweater. She never had to leave her house, I wanted to say. Do you realize how important that was to her?

"I drove around a lot," I said. "I went to a spot I go to, to think."

"Where is that?"

"It's near farmland up near Yellow Springs Road. You can see the Limerick nuclear plant from there."

"And you stayed there for how long?"

I calculated in my head how long I had been with Hamish and added the extra hour or so I'd still been at my mother's.

"About three hours."

"You sat and thought for three hours?"

"I'm afraid to admit that I fell asleep. My mother can be very exhausting."

"And you went home after that?"

"Yes."

"Did you make any phone calls or talk to anyone?"

"No. Will you tell me how my mother died?" My lies were mounting, and I knew it.

"Her body was found in the basement."

"The basement? Did she fall?" I stopped. Even to my own ears, I sounded false.

"We aren't certain yet. We have an autopsy scheduled for this afternoon. What was your mother wearing yesterday?"

I mentioned the skirt I had cut open, the blouse I had ripped, and her putty-colored bra. They must have already collected them from the kitchen floor.

"Was she in the habit of dressing herself?"

"Yes," I said.

"Did your mother go outside the house much?"

"She was agoraphobic," I said. "It was very hard for her to leave the house."

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"I mean around the yard or, say, taking the trash down the steps outside the kitchen, that sort of thing."

"She was very willful. She wouldn't let Mrs. Castle and me do everything."

I thought we had barely begun, but after placing the thin red ribbon on the current page, Detective Broumas closed his notebook.

He visibly relaxed, waving a sort of postural off-duty flag.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" he said.

"Can I see her?"

Detective Broumas stood. I stayed in the model's chair.

"Tomorrow, after the autopsy," he said. "What's this like?" He gestured to indicate the room.

"What's what like?" I asked.

"Doing what you do for a living?" His smile came easily. I hated it. I hated it because I could not tell him to fuck off, because I knew the kind of interest he had. There was sincere and there was prurient.

"Like any other job, but that much more exposed," I said.

He chuckled to himself and stepped off the platform. I took this as my cue that I could stand.

"We have a few people we still haven't tracked down who we want to talk to. Neighbors at work, that sort of thing." He took his jacket off the easel and slipped it on. "There are fingerprints and a footprint to run. We found a small bit of blood on the side porch. It could be your mother's. Her body had been moved."

I stepped down from the platform. I felt myself floating.

I pictured myself nude and curled up in the bathtub of my father's workshop. The tools and hooks that had fallen from the walls were sticking halfway out of my bloodless flesh.

Coldness kills. I saw it as an entry in Jake's journal, scribbled in his hurried hand. I thought of my mother leaning out my bedroom window when I was a teenager, to braid and rebraid the vine outside. Protecting me from Mr. Leverton had seemed so

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crucial to her that she had regularly risked falling from the second story of her home. Why hadn't she been frightened? Had she loved me that much or had it had nothing to do with me?

Had my birth merely created an extension of her fear?

The uniformed police officer opened the door.

"I'll let you get back to your friend and your husband. Oh,"

Detective Broumas said, "I'm sorry. Your ex-husband, correct?"

I nodded my head. I had gotten down off the platform only to find myself desperately in need of a chair. I leaned, as nonchalantly as I could, into the carpeted edge of the platform.

"Yes."

"And how long have you two been divorced?"

"More than twenty years," I said.

"That's a long time."

"We have two daughters."

"You're close enough that he would come and repair your mother's window."

"Yes."

"All the way from Santa Barbara?"

"Actually," I said, "he's in town to meet his—"

Detective Broumas cut me off. "Yes, yes, he gave me a name.

Let's go, Charlie."

I stood then and walked toward the door. I thought of the game of shadow the girls had played when they were small, in which one of them walked right behind the other, turning left when the other turned, leaning right when the other leaned, so that the one in front could never see the shadow girl.

I could see Natalie and Jake talking in the room opposite.

Both of them had taken seats in the front row of what was a more traditional classroom used for art history and Western thought classes. The desk part of the molded chairs was a light lemon yellow and curved around their bodies.

I saw the policemen walking down the hallway, Detective 12 17 1

Alice Sebold

Broumas slightly behind the two uniformed officers. He was talking on his cell phone. I heard him say "hair ribbon" to someone in a directive tone and then the word "braid."

Jake, who was facing toward the door, spied me first.

Natalie turned awkwardly around in the school chair and looked at me. "I don't even know who you are sometimes," she said.

I felt my stomach drop. I started to speak but then saw Jake vigorously shaking his head side to side and mouthing, No.

There was only one other thing Natalie could be referring to.

Why would he have told her?

"I'm sorry," I said.

"You've known him since he was a baby."

This didn't matter to me. Plenty of fifty-year-old men slept with thirty-year-old women, and I was certain that among their number were those who had known their conquests as infants.

Unfortunately the only person I could think of just then was John Ruskin and a ten-year-old named Rose la Touche.

"It was mutual," I said.

"Jesus," Natalie spat out. She looked away from me and toward the blackboard. I followed her glance. One of the students had taken advantage of an emptying classroom to draw a giant penis on the board. The caricature fellating it looked an awful lot like Tanner.

"You slept with Hamish?" Jake asked, incredulous.

"Last night, in her car," Natalie said. "I called home to tell him about your mother, and he comes out with that! He says he's in love with you."

"Did you tell the police I was with him?" I asked, knowing that it conflicted with what I'd just said.

"That's what you care about? That's all you have to say?"

Jake was staring at me now. "You took him to the Limerick spot." It was not a question.

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I nodded my head.

Natalie's dress, as often happened, had loosened, and the deep overlapping V of the neckline now hung low and open, revealing her bra and her ample cleavage.

In comparison I felt like a twig that could be snapped underfoot—

brittle, insubstantial, combustible. Fodder for fire or lust.

"There's an autopsy scheduled for this afternoon," I said. "She was killed somewhere other than where her body was found."

Natalie stood. She walked over to me.

I bowed my head, avoiding her gaze.

"I guess I should congratulate him," she said. "Hamish has wanted a run at you for a long time."

"And me?" I asked.

"Truth?"

"Yes."

"I'm tired. I'm tired of living in that stupid house and of this job, and I'm seeing someone."

"A Downingtown contractor," I said.

"Of course you don't approve."

"I'm not in a position to judge anyone right now," I said.

Natalie brought her hand up to my cheek. A gesture, I was aware, that Hamish also used. "But you do."

The three of us left the Art Hut. In my joints I felt the ache of tension—the accruing of the previous night's deeds with posing and the police questioning. I wanted desperately to go and sit where I had that morning, overlooking the rotten oak tree behind the building.

"Remember my father's plywood people?" I said to Natalie.

We stood in the parking lot. Jake's red car glistened in the sun.

"Yes." She had seen them only once, shortly before they'd finally been demolished. Jake had only heard about them.

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"They were more real to him than my mother and me."

"I feel sick looking at you," she said.

She dug in her shoulder bag for her keys. They were easy to spot. After she had lost them dozens of times, Hamish had presented her with a key chain topped off by a giant red cat.

Jake tried to fill the space. "Sarah is coming on one of her visits today. We won't have the happiest news to greet her with, I'm afraid."

He had put his hands in his pockets, which he had always done to keep himself from fidgeting. Out of nowhere I thought of the shirt he was wearing beneath his sweater: "Life is good."

"I'm headed up to York with my contractor. I'm meeting his mother for the first time," Natalie said to Jake. She would not look at me. I had suddenly become the unstable one to their upright citizens. Had I killed the only person who, in comparison, made me appear sane?

Moments later I was lying curled up in the backseat of Jake's car just as I had the night before in my own. Natalie had turned from me with no good-bye.

"Take care," she said to Jake.

"It was nice to see you again, Natalie."

"I guess it was," she said. Jake started the car, and I closed my eyes. I would ride in the back the way I had as a child, with my father driving and no one in the front passenger side. I hadn't told Natalie about my mother, and now I never would.

After the remaining parts of Lambeth were destroyed to make way for a new bypass and an outlet mall, I had written down a line for my father: "All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone." I couldn't remember who had said it or in what context.

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The Almost Moon

When Jake stopped drawing me, I thought his fascination with the way ice coated a leaf or the way crushed berries mixed with snow could make a dye was a temporary fancy. I thought he would come back to me. But then he began building things out of earth and ice, sticks and bones, and left all human flesh behind.

Emily found one of his first crude sculptures and marveled.

It was made out of grass and dirt woven together, the grass of winter acting as a thatch to keep the mud from disassembling.

If it were not for Emily's delight, I would quickly have grabbed it with a covered hand and flushed it away. It looked like a particularly nuanced piece of shit to me, sitting as it did on the floor behind the toilet. But because Emily made me get down on my hands and knees first, and called it "him," I had a chance to see.

Jake had made a small sculpture. As I stared at it, openmouthed, Emily launched, as only a small child's body could, in one swift motion from bent knees to sitting with legs stretched out in front of her and began to bang the flat of her palms on her fleshy thighs with joy.

"Daddy!" she screamed.

"She's afraid of the toilet, Helen," Jake said later, after I had brought out the offending object and placed it on the small ceramic dish where he put his keys and change at the end of the day.

"And this is how you propose to cure her? By making donkeys out of shit?"

"It's mud, and it's supposed to be a dragon."

If I wanted to talk to him in those days, I had to stop him between the front door of the small house we rented and the shower. He would begin to disrobe in the hallway, peeling off the layers of scarves and hats, parka and vest, and heavy wool plaid shirts so that by the time he hit the bedroom, he was dressed like a normal man about to sit down to dinner.

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That day I had chased him from the front door to the bedroom with the sculpture held aloft on its ceramic dish.

"Did she like it?" he asked as we reached the bedroom.

He wore his rag-wool sweater over a turtleneck and, I knew because I watched the routine in the dark each morning, hidden layers of T-shirts and long underwear. First to come off before entering the house were always his boots, but still on his lower half were the old army pants from the surplus store and huge wool socks that looked as prickly as cacti and that necessitated liners between them and his humid, winter-tenderized feet. On his hands he wore nothing, swearing that as they acclimatized to the cold, he would ultimately become more dexterous, able to stand more hours outside and capable of finer detail work.