The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [102]
I was crazed now. During sex I had barely broken a sweat, but now I felt perspiration spring up along my brow. How long Hamish would take and when he would come looking for me, I could not predict. I scanned his room. I assessed. Where would he have put it?
And then, of course, I knew. He would see himself as the man of the house. He was not a freeloader; he was his mother’s protector. It lay in the drawer of his bedside table, still in the Crown Royal bag my mother’s father had kept it in, and beside it was an unopened box of bullets. I picked up the bag by its braided rope and grabbed the bullets before closing the door.
I saw the jumble of the bed, how our sex had made the fitted sheet pop off its corners and collapse into a jellyfish in the center. At another time I would have corrected this, but that was when I was not trying to leave behind everything I knew.
I took the stairs slowly, my thighs aching, knowing they would ache more the next day and wondering where I would be by then. Sarah and Jake would be together, perhaps still watching the police go through my house. I hoped Sarah had enjoyed her drink at the bar and only then gone looking for me in the ladies’ room. I had to get the Crown Royal bag back to my purse before Hamish saw it. I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. My purse was in the kitchen. I knew I had to move but couldn’t.
No one would be at Mrs. Leverton’s, I realized. Her son had always avoided coming to the house, and if he was there, his Mercedes would be prominently displayed in the driveway. I could rest there, and given the food stores I was sure she must have, I might hide there for days.
I heaved myself up and walked through the hall and into the kitchen. I found my purse on the dining table and plunged the gun into my bag. I breathed.
Natalie had had the back wall redone that year. Now a long window ran across the kitchen, above all the counters. “He’s convinced me,” she’d said, “to have only under-counter cabinets to create an indoor-outdoor feel.” She called him a charmer. What was his name?
I could see a reflection of myself in the glass. I turned my back on my spotlighted ghost and walked to the fridge. I was as hungry as I’d been the night before and realized that except for what I’d managed to eat of Natalie’s breakfast in the student union, I had not eaten all day.
I grabbed what seemed easiest and most full of protein—hot dogs and cheese sticks—and methodically stuffed myself with them, one after another. I ate mindlessly, looking blurrily at the items tacked to Natalie’s fridge. There was an invitation to a wedding for someone I did not know. She had yet to RSVP. The little card and envelope were under the magnet with the invite. It was a Christmas wedding, and I wondered if Natalie and her contractor would go. If the ceremony might put thoughts in his head or if, like Hamish said she hoped, they were already there.
Beside this was a picture of Natalie and me at a party at Westmore eighteen months ago. I remembered the day. Emily and John and Leo and Jeanine had left the day before, three days earlier than originally planned. I had kissed Leo good-bye on the one bare spot of his forehead that was not covered by gauze. I had tried to hug Emily, but her shoulders were stiff and resistant, and reminded me of me.
In the photo there was no sign of any of this, or the argument I’d had with my mother before I’d doubled back to pick up Natalie. Natalie looked