The Almost Moon (17 page)

Jake was standing outside the back door, holding a brown leather backpack. I could see him through the half pane as I approached, tapping his fingers against the leather strap, a habit of his—finger tapping, foot wiggling, knuckle cracking—that had driven me mad by the end of our marriage. But it seemed reassuring somehow. He still had the same nervous energy he'd had so many years ago.

I unlatched the bolt and drew the door open toward me.

We stared at each other.

He had aged in a good way. The way wiry men who seem unconcerned with their appearance but who have deep habitual hygiene and exercise habits age. Stealthfully. At fifty-eight, he had salt-and-pepper hair but still appeared to be in fighting trim.

"I've been to the house," he said. "Why did you move her?"

I gasped. He stepped over the threshold and took the door away from my hands, shutting it firmly and bolting it.

"How?"

"You left the living room window in back unlocked. I didn't know if you were inside or not, so I climbed onto the grill and popped the screen. Helen," he said. He looked right at me, there in the tiny hallway. "What have you done?"

"I don't know. You were talking about rot, and I thought, Freezer."

"You killed someone," he said, enunciating each word as if I couldn't understand. He looked angry enough to strike me.

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I backed into the laundry room. He had never hit me. He was not the hitting type or even one to raise his voice. He reasoned.

He analyzed. At worst, he stewed.

He had conditioned himself to going gloveless in the cold of Wisconsin years ago. I saw his ruined thumb and finger, where the nails had become permanently discolored.

"What did you think putting her in the freezer would achieve?"

"I don't know," I said. I could feel the shelf I kept the laundry supplies on gouging into my back. "I don't know."

He came forward, and I flinched. "Don't be afraid." He took one of my arms in his hand and pulled me away from the wall. A box of softener sheets fell to the floor. "Come here," he said.

And then he encased me. Encased me in a way the thirty-yearold Hamish never could. There was history and knowledge and even, as amazing as it was, compassion in this embrace. I thought of how he would talk about his work as ephemeral, and that all things were ephemeral when it came down to it, even relationships.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," I said. I let myself lean, for a moment, against his rough gray coat. "I should have called someone, but I didn't."

Ever so gently he removed the backpack from his shoulder and placed it on the dryer.

"You called me," he said.

I kept my head burrowed into his chest even though I could feel him wanting to pull back and look at me. I did not want to be looked at by anyone. I could not believe what I had done, but at the same time, inside me, like a kernel just beginning to grow, I felt justified. No one—not even Jake, who could conceive of it better than anyone—knew what my life with my mother had become.

"I couldn't do it anymore," I said. He put his hands on my I 1 3 S ]

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shoulders and forced me to look at him. I was crying in a hideous leaking sort of way. I had forgotten, as the years passed and our conversations were had only over the phone, me always in Pennsylvania and him in one city after another, how kind his face could be. I saw the gentleness that Emily had grown so close to.

I saw the man Jeanine and Leo called "Big Dad," and whom, for obvious reasons, they preferred to me.

"Oh, Helen," he said. He put his hand to my cheek. "My poor Helen."

He kissed me on the top of my head and then held me against him, rocking me. We stayed that way for a long while. Long enough for the light outside to go from deep to light blue. Long enough for the first bird of dawn to be joined by a chorus. Only Jake could get away with saying such things to me.

When we pulled apart, he suggested coffee, and we moved down the long back hallway, on the wall of which I kept a map of the world that had once been my father's. Over the years, the countries at shoulder height had been rubbed raw by the accidental brushing of my winter coat whenever I left through the garage. I spied the just-spared Caracas out of my left eye.

My father had brought the map over two weeks before he shot himself. "Why now?" I'd asked him. He smiled as Emily came to greet him. Every man, even her grandfather, a secret disappointment to her in those first years away from Jake. "So that Emily and Sarah can learn their geography!" he'd said.

I turned on the lights in my kitchen. They were recessed and supposed to be better than old-fashioned overheads, but the slight broken-filament sound they always made as they heated up had never failed to disturb me. I went to the long counter and pulled the coffeemaker away from the wall. I wanted to talk about something besides my mother.

"Who are you working for in Santa Barbara?" I managed.

"Some computer guy," he said.

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Jake came and stood close beside me, as if we were two line workers on a conveyor belt. He took the glass pot from my hands and turned on the faucets of the sink to rinse it out. I tossed the old grounds out and replaced the filter.

"He has homes in about a dozen places. Actually, Avery was the one who hooked me up. He's friends with this guy's acquisitions rep."

"Acquisitions rep?"

After handing me the pot, Jake turned and leaned against the counter, I spooned in the coffee, keeping my mind on the count.

"Are you sure you want to hear about this?"

I nodded my head.

"It's a whole new world. I do more and more private commissions.

It beats the teaching. I like to say I burned out in Bern."

"So, you're a whore," I said.

"Now that's my Helen."

I smiled at him weakly. "Thank you."

"My flip-flop artist," he said. He took a cursory look around.

It had been eight years since he'd stood in my kitchen. In a quick moment during a party, we had had a private toast to Sarah, who had graduated high school that day by the skin of her teeth.

I snapped in the filter and turned on the switch.

I did not look at him but at the counter, at the small golden flecks in the old linoleum. I had never been comfortable asking for help.

He walked over to the kitchen desk, where I paid bills and kept my own records, which was separate from the desk in the living room, where I kept my mother's, and hung his coat off the back of an old Mexican chair. The coffee gurgled into the pot behind me. I thought of how the roof light of our VW Bug had gone on the night we knew it was over. He was dropping the girls and me at home before going to hang out with a group of teach-

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ers. I saw his features briefly, sickly, sadly, and then he closed the door. I stood in front of our small house with Sarah in my arms and Emily holding my hand. "Good-bye, Daddy," she said. And then I said, "Good-bye," and so did Sarah. Our words like so many useless cans rattling at the back of the car.

We moved over to the glass-topped dining table, and he pulled out a chair.

"What do we do?" I asked.

"That's all I thought about on the way out," he said. I realized how tired he must be. In all the years of flying, he had never adjusted to it. Sarah had told me that when she'd asked him to describe his globe-trotting life, he'd responded with one word:

"Lonely."

I did not sit but stayed standing, my arms crossed against my chest. I had four hours before I was due at Westmore at ten o'clock.

"Before I crawled in that window and saw her in the basement, I thought it would be simple. I somehow thought we'd just say that she had died, and you'd been so distraught you'd called me, and though I'd implored you to call an ambulance, you waited for me to come before you did. Now I'm not sure what to do.

Having her down in the basement and nude, and you having left her there, makes it stranger."

On the tip of my tongue I found the name Manny, but I did not say it. Instead I turned and took down two mugs from the hooks underneath the cabinets. I poured the coffee into them as it continued brewing.

"Couldn't we say," I said, "that I found her that way? That she fell?"

As I placed his cup in front of him, he looked at me.

"What do you mean?"

I sat down and wrapped both hands around my mug. "I mean, we say what you said, that I was so upset I waited for you to

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arrive, but that instead of trying to explain how she ended up down there, we just say that that's how I found her."

"Nude with a broken nose in the basement?"

"Exactly."

I sipped my coffee. He reached his hand across the table and touched my forearm.

"You do realize what you've done, right?"

Weakly, I nodded my head.

"You really hated her, didn't you?"

"And loved."

"You could have taken off, done something else instead."

"What?"

"I don't know. Anything but this."

"She was my mother," I said.

Jake was silent:

"So what's wrong with my plan?"

"They'd treat it like a crime," Jake said. "They'd be much more likely to scrutinize things."

"So?"

"So," he said, "they'll figure it out, Helen. They'll put it together that you didn't just find her that way but that you put her there."

"And then what?"

"There'd be an investigation."

I drank my coffee and leaned back in my chair.

"Stonemill Farms," I murmured to myself, saying, as I often did, the name of my own development. It had always sounded like the name of a medieval jail to me.

He was wearing a blue sweater, which he peeled off over his head. Underneath I saw the kind of T-shirt only Jake would wear.

Against a beige backdrop and underneath a picture of a stick-

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figure man lying in a hammock strung between two green trees, there was a short slogan: "Life is good." If there was a reason for our divorce, it was this in a nutshell. On this point, we had always disagreed. It was also, I guess, our reason for marrying.

"Do you ever draw nudes anymore?" I asked.

"My hands don't work that way these days. I'm working with sheet metal now."

"Should we make the phone call?" In my mind I had connected calling the police to finally taking a shower. I didn't care if what I said on my end of the line made sense anymore.

"Why did you bathe her? " Jake asked.

"I wanted to be alone with her," I said. The word "alone" rang in my head. Suddenly I looked at Jake and felt he was still thousands of miles away and that this would be true no matter how close he moved.

Through the closed windows leading out back, I could hear the neighbor's baby scream. It was a child whom I had never seen but whose screams were the unhappiest I'd ever heard. And long. They arced and warbled and started up again. It was as if the mother had given birth to an eight-pound ball of rage.

I finished the dregs of my coffee. "Another?"

He handed me his empty cup, and I took both mugs over to the counter to refill. We had always done that well together—

drunk coffee. I would be his model, and he would sit and sketch me, and between the two of us, we could drink three pots of coffee in an afternoon.

"I think you should tell me how it happened. Exactly how."

I carried the cups back over to the table, setting his down but holding on to mine. "I think I should shower," I said. "I have to be at the college for a ten a.m. class."

Jake pushed back his chair and looked up at me.

"What's wrong with you? You're not going to Westmore. We have to figure this out and then call somebody."

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"You call," I said.

"And say what, Helen? That you were tired and it seemed like a good day to murder someone? "

"Don't use that word," I said.

I walked out of the room. I thought of Hamish as I climbed the stairs. A day when he would want to kill his mother would never come.

Outside the upstairs front window, I could see the line of poplars that swayed in the breeze. Their remaining leaves were golden and peach, and fluttered on their stems. Years ago I had thought that getting away from my mother would be only a matter of time, that fleeing meant taking a car or an airplane, or filling out an application for the University of Wisconsin.

I could hear Jake stir in the kitchen. The creak of the floor under my faux-terra-cotta-tile linoleum. Would he stand at the sink and wash out the mugs? Would he watch the jays and the cardinals in their daily clamor for food underneath the crab apple tree? The views from my windows, whether leaf-turning poplars or birds at their feed, often felt like the farthest distances I'd ever traveled. I tried to imagine the Helen who had taken the wheel from her father that first Christmas vacation when he had driven all the way out in the Olds to get her. "I'll drive this leg,"

I'd said as we headed toward the interstate. "Our road trip," my father had called it in the years that followed, as it became increasingly clear we would never have another.

I went into the bedroom and quietly closed the door. In the bathroom, I turned on the shower to let the water heat. While standing on the rug in front of the sink, I realized that I was undressing in the way one would if her clothes were caked with winter grime or the remains of heavy yard work. I rolled my pants down carefully to the ground and slipped them over my socks, stepping gingerly out onto the rug, as if, by disturbing the trouser cuffs, the silt of a dead body might escape into the air. I

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peeled off my socks. On my toenails, I wore my mother's color—

that muted coral I detested—which I had put on two weeks before on a long afternoon during which we watched television together. The sound of the PBS program about stock trading was like a dentist's drill boring into me while my mother napped in her red-and-white-flocked wing chair.