The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [107]
I crossed the street again. I saw police tape stretched across my mother’s front stairs. It zigged and zagged all the way to the top, through the iron rails. I kept walking. The holly my father had planted when they’d first moved in obscured the house from the side, but even so, I knew where the three slate stepping-stones were. During my father’s life, he had kept these shrubs trimmed back so he could carry large sheets of plywood back to his workshop. Now the stones were hidden. They had been the three slate steps Mr. Forrest had backed over that day in the yard in the months following Billy Murdoch’s death. I bent down where I remembered them and pushed my way into the prickly hedge. Small, rigid branches caught at my hands and face.
I had grown to believe there had been countless signals left by my father. I thought of my mother and me counting down the days until he returned from what Natalie eventually helped me realize must have been a mental facility.
“What do you remember?” she had pressed me.
“Only that he hurt himself in his workshop, and he went to the hospital for a long time.”
And Natalie had looked at me long enough for me to realize what that had meant—not an accident with a screwdriver or skill saw as I’d initially thought, but that he had been the agent of what had happened to him.
“And the guns,” I’d murmured.
Natalie had merely nodded her head.
I heard my father say the universal words again: “It’s a hard day, sweetheart.”
It was the afternoon. My mother was still in her nightgown. My father had retired from the Pickering Water Treatment Plant and spent his days at home, conscientiously leaving at least once a day on either real or created errands. He found it helpful as a way of staying connected to the outside world.
He bought stamps. He stopped by Seacrest’s on Bridge and High to buy a paper or have a briny coffee at the lunch counter. He kept the house well-stocked with cleaning supplies and bouillon, instant Jell-O, and eggs from a farm stand run by an Amish family. He waited patiently on the old wooden benches that ran along the walls of Joe’s Barbershop, chatting to Joe about items from the paper. Eventually, he would have to get in his car to come home.
By the time he shot himself, he must have known that leaving the house each day was not enough. Standing in the sun—if he could find it—for his required fifteen minutes of vitamin D was not going to do the trick, whatever that trick was.
My mother came out of the kitchen. She’d taken to eating Marshmallow Fluff on carrot and celery sticks in the afternoons, craving sugar and licensing it with vegetables. My father had left the house that morning but had returned quickly and gone upstairs to lock himself inside the spare room.
“I slept in,” my mother had told the police. “He was in his room when I got up. I read. We mostly talked in the evenings.”
I watched the policeman silently nodding his head. At some point during the questioning, Mr. Forrest arrived, then Mrs. Castle.
He had stood at the top of the stairs, my mother said, and called her name three times.
“I was rereading The Eustace Diamonds. I was two paragraphs from the end. I called out for him to give me a minute.”
He waited. Then she laid down her book on the round table next to the wing chair and went to the bottom of the stairs.
“Are you done?” he’d asked her. The gun was already at his temple.
“I reached my arm up,” my mother told us—and there on the carpet was a celery stick with its Marshmallow Fluff now pink instead of white—“but he . . .”
I held her as she shook, and I shook too. I would not allow myself to wonder what exactly, if she had baited him, she might have said in the end. Her head was against my chest, and mine was tucked over