The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [100]
At the bottom I stopped for five whole luxurious minutes, daring the men inside Vanguard to sense me radiating human heat on the other side of the corrugated fencing that shot up ten feet high. It was utterly sterile. Not an ant or a blade of grass. Not a weed. Just gravel and more gravel. An endless gray sea lit up by spotlights posted along the fence.
I did not want Hamish to come and look for me, so I pushed myself up and walked hurriedly along the wall toward the parking lot.
About two hundred feet away, I could see Hamish’s car near the entrance. He hovered next to the giant illuminated V that sat on the edge of the property.
I stepped briskly across the pavement and slipped inside the car.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“No argument,” said Hamish.
As we backed up into the road, I saw a guard come around the opposite side of the building and glance our way with a quizzical look. I could have met Hamish outside the VFW or the Mini Storage, but I hadn’t thought of them quickly enough.
“Where’s your car?” Hamish asked.
I could smell the heavier-than-usual application of Obsession and remembered that Mr. Forrest had once given my father cologne from Spain that smelled like pot. Oblivious, my father wore the cologne until it was gone, saving the bottle on his dresser, where I found it the day after he’d shot himself.
“Sarah borrowed it,” I said.
This seemed to satisfy him. He stopped at a four-way stop and leaned over to kiss me. I shrank back, but he remained undaunted.
“Where shall we go?” he asked.
Paris and the Ritz, I felt like saying, and thought of the maudlin song about some sad woman realizing at the age of thirty-seven that she would never drive in an open car in a European capital. If that was the limit of her deprivation, she was one lucky bitch.
“The thing is,” I said, keeping my hands on my lap and avoiding his gaze, “I need to borrow a car.”
He pressed the accelerator. “Is that it?”
“I’m in a weird place,” I said.
“Your mom?”
“Yes.”
“Do they have any idea who did it?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said, and I decided it couldn’t hurt. “A boy who used to come over and do things for my mother,” I said. “His name is Manny.”
“The one who fucked someone in your old bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“My mom told me about that.”
We passed the quarry, where mountains of gravel and shale sat waiting to be borne away on trucks. They glimmered under the low argon lights spaced throughout the property.
Twenty years ago, there had been a boy Sarah’s age who was playing captain-and-pirate on top of a giant pile of gravel dumped at the end of our block. He climbed up, brandishing a balsa-wood sword made the night before with the help of his father, and quickly sank inside.
“Do you remember Ricky Dryer?” I leaned my head into the window. I saw the reflection of my tired eyes come toward me and then disappear.
“The kid who died. Man, I haven’t thought of him in years.”
“Let’s go to your house, Hamish,” I said. “We can have a drink and talk.”
“That’s more like it,” he said. I could tell he was looking over at me, but I did not look back. “You don’t need to borrow a car,” he said. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
I felt he deserved it: my body for a car.
We arrived at the house. I had made sure that Natalie would not be walking in at any moment. Hamish confirmed she was off with her contractor.
“It’s like she has a whole other life now,” he said. “I’m not part of it.”
I steeled myself. I had had sex I didn’t want before, and Hamish was a loving, wonderful—I couldn’t get the word “boy” out of my head—man.
My entire body crawled with the desire to get on with it. Get on with the preamble, get on with the act, the sweet-nothing words, the faux regret at completion, the