The Almost Moon (7 page)

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

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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 descended the stairs.

Being careful not to glance at my mother's face, I stood at her feet, briefly bent down to close her legs, and then played the

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game that first Emily, and then Sarah, had begged me for when I tucked them in at night. A game my father had made up for me.

We called it "waft." I would stand at the end of their beds, with their top sheet balled up in my hands, and then shoot it out over their bodies, allowing it to slowly waft down over them. It was a game that, if given the choice, Sarah in particular never wanted to call an end to. "I love the feel of air escaping all around me,"

she had told me once.

For my mother, it was a one-time waft, and I did it so the queen-size sheet covered her face. It stuck to her damp body in an almost ghostly way. Hurriedly I repackaged her in the Mexican wedding blanket and the Hudson Bay as if she were a gift I was returning to the store.

I stood and walked into the small back hallway and opened the basement door. Then, holding her under her armpits, I dragged her headfirst to the top of the stairs.

I walked a few steps down in almost pitch-black darkness and flailed my hand along the wall until I found the light switch. The bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs came on. I walked down the rest of the way. These stairs, when I was little, were a dare for neighborhood children and me. Past the first three stairs, both walls fell away, and never, no matter how much one was needed over the years, was a guardrail installed. Hamish had even volunteered to fabricate one out of old pipes after laying down the carpet upstairs. "These stairs are the real death trap," he'd whispered to me when I'd brought him to the basement so he could choose among my grandfather's old guns as payment.

But what had always made the dare of descending into the dark basement worth it was the supersize brown refrigerator at the bottom of the stairs. This was where my mother kept tins of brandy balls and stores of Hershey's bars. Mason jars of pecans and almonds, Christmas boxes of peanut brittle left uneaten, and hideous sherry-soaked fruitcakes given to us each holiday season.

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The Levertons gave everyone a box of After Eight mints. Mrs.

Donnellson, before she died, would bring my mother a ham.

The ham, like all meats, went in a separate place—the long, low meat freezer that hummed to the right of the stairs, on top of which my mother sorted laundry or stacked magazines she wanted to keep. During my father's life, there was always a shifting parade of objects on top of the meat freezer. He had hoped she'd take up arts and crafts, so there were baskets filled with green foam blocks and giant discarded jug-wine bottles that, if she found the time, might make beautiful terrariums. Acorns, horse chestnuts, boxes of goggle eyes, and distinctly shaped twigs. River rocks polished in my father's workshop. Odd bits of driftwood he'd collected. And a pristine economy-size Elmer's that ruled over it all.

The gun had been my mother's idea.

"What does he want with a gun?" I whispered to her while Hamish was washing up. "Why not cash?"

"He's a grown man," my mother said. "Emily just gave birth to a child."

But by the time I could trace my mother's thought process and figure out that this was my mother's way of pointing out that both Hamish and Emily were adults, the insanity train had left the station and I was in the basement, showing Hamish the rack of guns.

We stood in front of the meat freezer as he took up each rifle and held it in his hands, testing the weight of it.

"I know nothing about guns, except that they're cool," he said.

I was no help. I watched him lean each rifle out of the wooden rack and hold it inexpertly by its stock as if it were a particularly

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thick-stemmed weed he had pulled from the ground. Hamish, like Natalie, provided the perfect light contrast to my darkness.

Until she began to sprout enough gray hair that she chose to color hers what I thought of as an alien shade of red, Natalie had been the blonde to my brunette. When I stood by her son, I saw the same brown eyes his mother had, heard the same easy laugh.

"Why doesn't she sell these things?" Hamish asked. "She could make a mint."

I could barely hear him. He had taken the only pistol out of a felt Crown Royal bag and, holding it, had spread his legs wide as if it were something he'd seen cowboys do. As he aimed at a point on the opposite wall and put his finger to the trigger, I screamed and grabbed the barrel with my hand.

He held on, and we collided. Hamish took my right shoulder in his hand.

"What? You look so upset. What is it?"

I came very close to saying something. Words I had not spoken to anyone but Jake.

"My father taught me not to point a gun at anyone."

"I was pointing it at that lamp shade!"

He set the pistol down behind him on the meat freezer. He cupped my cheek as if I were the child and he the parent. "It's all right," he said. "No one's hurt."

I was shaking. He turned to slip the pistol back inside the purple bag, then cinched the gold braid closed at the top.

"I'll take this one," he said.

With Hamish's help, I put the rifles, which were much more valuable, back in their mounts. The pistol sat in its bag on a stack of starched linen napkins I had folded and left on top of the meat freezer. I remembered turning around and seeing it, imagining the dulled platinum barrel, the scarred brown grip, and thinking of my father lifting it, loading it, raising it to his head.

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* * *

I breathed in and tried to make my muscles strong, not rigid.

I pulled my mother's upper body out over the edge of the stairs and walked down one stair and then another. Her weight against me increased with each step. I smelled the lilac scent of her hair through the sheets. I felt my eyes watering but would not blink.

Down two, three, four, five. Her bundled feet thumping their arrival.

My mother's cocoon was unraveling. No hospital corners here.

Her feet, first cleaned, were poking out of the sheets at the halfway point on the stairs. Her toes seemed blue to me in a way they hadn't before, and I wondered if that was the light of the basement playing tricks on me. I took another step. Another. I knew, because I had counted them dozens of times as a child, that there were exactly sixteen steps. I saw the meat freezer humming to my left. On top of it was a stack of Sunset magazines, hoarded hand-me-downs from Mrs. Castle, who had relatives on the West Coast. Also left, from the previous Christmas, were the prop gift boxes lined up in rows in their sun-faded finery of ribbons and bows. I imagined Mrs. Castle taking them down the stairs for her, or perhaps it had even been me. My mother may have indeed instructed me to bring them down and put them in the giant plastic bags that she kept them in eleven months of the year. I would have failed to do that for some reason. I would have taken the time the task was supposed to occupy and sat in the old wicker-and-iron lounge chair near the washer and dryer, calculating exactly how many minutes I could let go by

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before I should reasonably appear upstairs to keep my mother company.

Until she was eighty-six, my mother persisted in using the basement.

It was the idea of her becoming disoriented or lacking the energy to climb back out that inspired me to buy her a cell phone.

Until then, my mother would descend the first three stairs one at a time, bracing her hands against the wall and preparing herself to go unassisted. Then, setting her jaw, she would pivot and continue down sideways, stair by stair. It could take her thirty minutes to get to the bottom, and by the time she reached the basement floor, she might have forgotten what she'd come for.

But just as Natalie's father thought the ATM would eat his arm, when I'd placed the no-frills phone in my mother's hand on her eighty-sixth birthday, she'd looked from it to me and said,

"You're giving me a grenade?"

"It's a phone, Mother," I said. "You can carry it with you everywhere you go."

"Why would I want to do that?"

"So you can always get in touch with me."

She was sitting in her wing chair. I had made her favorite drink, a manhattan, and ruined, she said, her recipe for cheese straws. "I don't know how you do it, Helen." Delicately, she spit a half-chewed cheese straw into her cocktail napkin. "You have a gift."

On top of the old mahogany dresser, beside the brown refrigerator, I saw the cell phone, where it had been for the last two years.

She'd left it there the morning after her eighty-sixth birthday, which was also the last time she'd been in the basement. I'd seen it at least once a week for the last two years. In the irrational way

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I'd always experienced her rejection, I'd ended up thinking that in order to avoid talking to me, she'd renounced an entire floor of her home.

Despite my going slowly, my mother's body swung out in an arc as the stairwell fell away halfway down. I watched the sheets unravel as her suddenly exposed lower half twisted backward onto the gritty cement floor. I held on despite the sounds—like Bubble Wrap being popped all at once—and rushed backward to the bottom, pulling her with me.

It was then that I heard the phone ringing in the kitchen.

I dragged her body free of the stairs and over to the meat freezer. I laid her lengthwise by the freezer's side, then hurriedly did my best to cover her again. The sheets were twisted beneath her. No matter what I did, after folding and draping, her marbling knees were exposed. She lay there, silent and broken, and I thought of the horror that had finally come with control.

When I was a teenager, I thought every kid spent sweaty summer afternoons in their bedrooms, daydreaming of cutting their mother up into little pieces and mailing them to parts unknown.

I did this both prone upstairs and gymnastically about the house.

As I agreed to take out the trash, I cut off her head. As I weeded the yard, I plucked out her eyes, her tongue. While dusting the shelves, I multiplied and divided her body parts. I was willing to allow that other kids might stop short of this, that they might not, as I did, work out all the details, but I could not imagine that they did not explore this territory.

"If you want to hate me, I encourage it!" I would say to Emily.

"Yes, Mom," she'd say. At six, she was already in possession of a nickname based on her greater reasonableness, her steely patience.

"The Little Senator," Natalie had dubbed her for her practical negotiations in the world of the sandbox, where Hamish,

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though her peer in age, was prone to tantrums and would often sit and cry.

I grabbed at the prop boxes on the meat freezer and threw them in groups and singly into various corners of the basement, to keep temptation at bay. Even growing up, I'd known that the boxes inside the faded wrapping paper and frequently refreshed bows would not hold what I wanted most. They would leak from their seams or be smashed if the postman happened to fall on a slippery patch when delivering my mother's shin to a printing plant in Mackinaw, Michigan, or her foot to a trout farm outside Portland. Always, in my daydreams, I kept for myself her thick red hair.

I carefully placed the Sunset magazines on the edge of a nearby stair. Inside the meat freezer were the lean meat patties that my mother ate on her resumption of the Scarsdale diet five years ago, and two ancient hams from Mrs. Donnellson. I knew this without looking.