The Almost Moon (28 page)

Jake stood in the doorway of the dining room, drinking straight vodka out of a juice glass.

"That's your second round today," I said.

"No rules apply."

I thought of the box in my basement, the one that held my father's letters, which he had written to me when Jake and I had spent two months overseas right after Emily was born. Jake had been awarded a travel grant by the university, and we'd chosen the most obvious place to visit: Paris.

While he went off to museums or met with other painters, I walked around the streets with Emily in a sort of Central-American infant sling across my chest. I remembered how hot it was and how alone I felt. I learned to order a plate of cheeses and a beer in one cafe and go to the French-American bookstore.

I walked the same fifteen blocks every day and spoke to no one, bleary with cheese and hops, the sling wearing a sore on my shoulder. The highlight, for me, was not the chance to visit the Louvre or to plumb the depths of Le Bon Marche, but the letters my father sent me describing his days, telling me about the progress of his herb garden or whether there was only one owl or two, the first having been joined by a mate in the trees between Mrs.

Leverton's house and theirs.

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"I don't know yet."

"You better figure it out. Sarah's no idiot, and this isn't over the phone."

"Emily," I said.

"Call her back."

"I can't."

"Do it," Jake said, and left the room.

Once, when I was in Seattle, Emily had shown me how she took vitamins out of their original jars and placed them in beautiful porcelain containers on a handmade cherrywood lazy Susan in the middle of one of the multiple islands of their kitchen. When I was foolish enough to ask how the children could tell where their chewables were, Emily told me that color entered a child's memory more fluidly than text, and so Jeanine knew that the jar with the eggshell-blue glaze held her chewables.

Emily had been just out in front of me her entire life. She learned to dress herself and tie her shoes before I was ready to relinquish these tasks, and she became absolutely adamant about taking responsibility for herself as soon as she could. If I tried to read her a story or pour her cereal into a bowl, she would rip Harold and the Purple Crayon or the box of cornflakes from my hands and shout—quite bossily, I always felt—"I do!"

I heard Jake above me in the girls' bathroom. I remembered how he would leave his pants on the bathroom floor where they fell. I listened for the sound of it, for the belt buckle and pockets, heavy with change, hitting the tile floor. When I heard it, I picked up the Bat Phone and dialed Emily's number.

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It rang three times.

No one said hello, but I heard breathing on the other end.

"Jeanine?"

Nothing.

"Jeanine, it's Grandma. Is Mommy there?"

I heard the phone being dropped on a table or on the floor and the sound of small footsteps walking away.

"Hello?" I said.

I waited for what seemed a reasonable amount of time.

"Hello?" I called again. Louder this time.

I heard the water in the pipes above my head. Jake was taking his shower. I noticed that the vodka bottle had not been put back. I thought about how four years ago I had found my mother curled up on the floor of the linen closet after I had called for her throughout the house.

"What are you doing?" I'd asked.

"Hiding," she'd said.

I had hauled her out like an animal that had gotten stuck under the house. She had a line of heavy dust from the closet floor along her left side. I had batted at her gown in order to clean it off.

"Stop hitting me!" she'd shrieked. "Stop hitting me!"

And I had had to remind Mrs. Castle to keep the linen closet locked.

"I only wanted to change the tablecloth."

Why hadn't I told her, "You don't understand—my mother hides in there"?

I pressed the phone to my ear. I heard voices. They were the voices of TV In Seattle, Jeanine was watching television—a DVD, I imagined. Emily and John kept the shelves that I thought should hold books stocked with them. When I'd asked John where they kept their books, he had shrugged his shoulders.

"Who has time to read?"

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I listened for a while. I pictured the rooms. Judging by the nearness of the television, it had been the phone in the kitchen Jeanine had picked up. I wondered where Leo was. Emily. I knew that John would be at work, lecturing nonenvironmental types on the endless joys of plastic fabrication.

"I suffocated her on the side porch," I whispered over the phone. There was no response. "I cut off her braid and took it home."

Cartoon music filled the air in Seattle. A chase was on.

I hung up the phone. I thought of the line that traveled through me and reached all the way to Leo and Jeanine. How Leo almost uncannily had my eyes. How Jeanine seemed to possess a trace of my father in her jawbone. Her laugh had me in there somewhere, and when she sang, as she often did, I remembered my mother singing in the quiet house when I was a child.

I walked upstairs to my bedroom. I had told Emily when she was little that we were descended from the Melungeons of Tennessee. When she was much older, she realized I had been pulling her leg, but for a brief time I had her believing that she sprang from this strange, lost group of people cut off from the rest of the world in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. I had passed by the bathroom to find her looking for the telltale signs of bluish skin. In Sarah, she said, she saw the high forehead and cheekbones and the "almost Asian look," but in herself she saw nothing.

Along with my father's letters in the basement, there would be the paper Emily wrote in junior high, on which a teacher had scrawled a failing grade. I no longer remembered the woman's name, Barber or Bartlett, something beginning with a B. I had marched into the junior high in a mock-mommy outfit I'd composed for effect—corduroy bag jumper and deranged Mary-Jane flats—and lit into Emily's teacher with all my might. This had

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succeeded in gaining Emily a C and me a plea from my daughter never to do anything similar again. I still saw these moments spent in defense of my children as the finest of my life.

I heard Jake gargling on the girls' side of the house. The faint scent of his musk-based aftershave reached me as I turned to lock the door.

I walked into my long closet. Most of the luggage was kept on the other side of the house, in the closet that had slowly gone from keeping shoes and clothes that Emily could use when she visited to a place where I could stash items I might never use again but did not feel like throwing out. But the many lopsided, ill-measured sweaters and scarves my mother had made over the years, I kept in my closet in an old duffel bag of Jake's. It sat, an army-green lump, balanced perilously on top of two other boxes on the shelf above the clothing rack.

I stood up on a small step stool that Sarah had made in wood shop. I batted at the bag with my right hand until it came tumbling down. I did not think about what I was doing. I knew we were going to pick Sarah up at the train. I knew the police knew more than they were saying. Jake was right, there was still a sliver of a chance I would get away with it, but I had realized sometime during the morning that it did not matter whether I did or not.

It was my children who would ultimately sit in judgment of me, and the two of them would know. I could never fool them, and I didn't want to.

I unzipped the heavy gold zipper of the canvas bag and took out my mother's sad pile of knitting.

"Why is it that everything she knits resembles vomit?" Sarah asked one Christmas. The girls were just entering adulthood, and that year, my mother had outdone herself, knitting a full-length sweater coat for each of them. She had used a variety of yarns in

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a striated design, and sure enough, though it was meant to be autumnal in effect, the result seemed more intestinal.

I found one of these coats easily enough and placed it back in the bag before shoving the remaining knitting on top of a file cabinet I kept in the corner. Then I looked at my jumble of shoes and chose the ratty sneakers I wore for gardening. I heard Jake walking down the hall toward my door. Three shirts. Over to my dresser, long underwear, underwear, one cashmere sweater.

I had my good jeans on, and I put a second pair into the bag.

In the bottom drawer were the slips and a nylon running suit with reflector stripes that I had thought was stylish in the store. I shoved the nylon suit in the duffel bag and zipped it up.

Jake knocked very lightly on my door.

"Helen? Are you awake?"

I left the duffel on the floor and closed the closet.

"Of course," I said.

I saw the doorknob jiggle.

"It's locked," he said.

When I opened the door, Jake was bleary-eyed. He swayed slightly to the right.

"Did you shower with the vodka?" I asked, and led him by the hand across the room, where he slumped into a sitting position on the bed.

"You lie down and close your eyes for a while," I said. "I'll wake you when it's time to go get Sarah."

He nodded his head up and down. "I am tired," he said.

"Of course you are. Where's the poison?"

"Don't have any, Helen," he cautioned. "You need to stay sober."

I smiled.

"I know. I just want to put it away."

"We should call Phin. Phin could help us."

I put my hand against his chest and pushed. He fell backward on the bed.

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He brought his knees up and curled up on the unmade sheets.

"You've been wonderful," I said.

"Milo and Grace love to lick faces," he said. "Phin doesn't like that."

I grabbed a pillow from the headboard for him to put under his head. "You sleep for a bit," I said.

A moment or two later, I heard his breathing shift into light snoring. I reached out to touch him. I realized I had forgotten socks, but I didn't want to risk waking him. I tiptoed to the closet, grabbed the duffel bag, and crept down the stairs through the back hall—Who knows, Caracas?—and out into the garage.

I tucked the duffel behind the lawn mower and a few empty plastic pails that were left over from the last time I'd had the house painted. It would go unnoticed there.

I had prepacked a bag for the hospital before Sarah was born.

I had made a day of it. New toothbrush, new nightgown, even a powder compact, because all the pictures of me holding Emily had featured my face flush with perspiration. I had been the rare mother, the doctor had said, who had had a more difficult delivery the second time around.

"My big head," Sarah would concede.

"Your big, beautiful head," I would correct.

I noticed that the sticky trap I'd set out early in the week was no longer in its place near the trash cans. I stood very still and listened. Wherever the mouse had dragged itself, it would have to be dead or close to dead by now.

Back upstairs in Sarah's bedroom, I saw the vodka bottle on the windowsill. There was still at least a third left. Jake had always been an easy drunk. On our first real date, he had slipped under the table within an hour after a salty full professor had challenged him to a drinking contest.

I did my best to straighten the room in preparation for Sarah. I 12 3 8]

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had kept her room the lavender she had wanted years ago. All the other rooms had been repainted a stark white, even Emily's.

I moved my hand briskly against the deep-purple coverlet, smoothing out the wrinkles from where Jake must have sat to put on his shoes. I adjusted the alarm clock by one hour, having failed to do so at daylight saving time, and I used the bottom of my sweater to dust around the items on her bureau.

In this room, three years ago, I had unleashed a violence I had never thought myself capable of. Sarah had come home with a boy named Bryce, whom I had been suspicious of as soon as I met them at the train. He was an ultra-WASP who, he claimed, came from an old family in Connecticut. None of this meant much to me, and after a dinner during which he talked mostly of himself, I'd gone to my bedroom so the two of them could have the run of the house.

The first slap was like a distant gunshot. On the second, I sat straight up. I heard Sarah in that way that you do when a person is trying not to make a sound but can't stop themselves. By that time I was halfway across the house in my nightgown, with the baseball bat my father had given me for protection.

It was something Sarah had sworn me to secrecy about. Emily and Jake were never to know that she had allowed a man to hit her. Bryce had fled the house on foot after I had brandished the bat and then slammed it as hard as I could into the doorjamb.

I sat down on the floor of Sarah's bedroom and then lay back on the rug. Without thinking, I went through the series of stretches I had done every morning for fifteen years.

At half past one, I went back to my bedroom to find Jake asleep in the same position he had been. I whispered his name, but I had already decided to go without him. I left a note on the kitchen counter saying I would return with Sarah. I tucked the vodka

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bottle in the liquor cabinet, and just as I was about to put the Bat Phone back in with its companion pillow, I stopped myself.

I yanked the cord from the wall and carried it out to the garbage cans.

I debated taking the duffel bag with me but decided against it.

I was not ready yet. If I could, I wanted to cook dinner for Sarah and wake her the next morning by bringing up a pot of hot coffee for the two of us to share.

I had never gotten used to the official rush hour of the suburbs, which revolved around school's letting out and parents in their cars lined up outside. In the years since I'd had children coming and going, the curbside pickup, fueled by stories of abduction, had increased in popularity. Still, as I edged my way down the street where Lemondale Elementary School sat, I was happy to see at least three or four yellow buses pulled up to the curb.