The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [105]
As I walked back to my car, I could hear her muttering. I had read about the poet Marina Tsvetaeva and how she had hung herself from a coat hook. How was that possible? I had thought at the time. Ceiling fixtures, trees—yes. But doorknobs or coat hooks?
Shooting yourself in the head was, I’d been told, a message suicide, but what kind of message had my father been leaving? I had scoured the house for a note afterward, looked in his drawers and under his pillow, and ended up washing down the stairwell with old rags, determined to erase the only marks he’d left.
I neared my mother’s neighborhood, and a hot wave of dread began to prickle across my spine and back, tiptoeing along my shoulder blades and turning into gooseflesh. I could not explain why, exactly, but I sensed I should not even pass through the place, much less stay the night. I was also tired. It was easier for me to attribute the strange shifts in my body to a forlorn exhaustion—the futility and ruin of the last twenty-four hours taking over my heart, my limbs, my mental firings—than to know I was merely a robot that had gone off the rails and that, after serving its master faithfully for years, had turned back predictably to the place where it was made.
A few of the houses were still dark, waiting for their owners, but most had one or two lights on. There were young couples with children in my mother’s neighborhood, but these were not the same sort of couples who bought the faux manses near Natalie’s house. These were couples who cleaned their own houses and fixed their own leaks. They set aside weekends to replace the rotting shingles or paint their chimneys, trim their trees, or wash their cars. The children helped and were rewarded with ice cream or special TV shows.
I drove by Mrs. Tolliver’s house as I rounded the bend toward my mother’s and Mrs. Leverton’s. There was no light on, and I wondered where Mrs. Tolliver had gone. It had been a summer night, I remembered, when Mr. Tolliver, screaming at her from his position on the lawn, suddenly clutched his chest.
“He fell over like a pillar of salt,” my mother said. “Blam! The sprinkler shifted before anyone had thought to shut it off. They drove him to the hospital sopping wet.”
I had seen Mrs. Tolliver six months later, when I was home visiting my parents with Emily and Jake. We were shopping in the Acme. She lit up at the sight of Emily.
“How wonderful!” she said. She was animated in a way I hadn’t remembered. Overwhelmed to see me in the deli aisle, she had gestured with a package of boneless chicken in her hand.
I asked after her, her house, how she was feeling.
“It’s too late for me,” she said at some point. “Not you. It’s not too late for you.” She looked at Jake and smiled, but the smile contained a wince, as if she were afraid of being hit.
I was lost in thoughts of Mrs. Tolliver when I saw him through his giant, still-uncurtained window. Mr. Forrest sat in his front room, as he always had, for all the world to see. I pulled the car over to the side of the road opposite him. I was not even aware of what was to my right—a house, a horizon, or the pope out for a stroll.
I lowered the window and let the night air of my old neighborhood flood in. I breathed. I smelled the scent of the lawns and the asphalt. And I heard faint music. It was coming from Mr. Forrest’s; he was listening to Bartók.
He and my mother had argued in the months following my father’s death. There had been no funeral, and Mr. Forrest found the omission unforgivable; he didn’t care whether she could leave the house or not. “And why, Helen,” he had asked me, “were those guns allowed to remain?”
Without reflection, I got out of my car and hurried across the road and up the sloped concrete walk. He had never favored vegetation, and decades on there was barely a bush or branch on his lawn. Two chubby untamed boxwoods were the exceptions. They stood on either side of his stoop.
But I did not make it there. Halfway up the path, I stopped