The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [108]
The police asked her if she had a mortuary she preferred, and Mr. Forrest mentioned Greenbrier’s on Route 29. I nodded my head. In that moment, I could not have realized what had just happened to me. My father had exited stage right, and in I had walked, seeing it not only as my duty but as perhaps the greatest gift I might give him posthumously, to take forever the burden of my mother.
Now as I left the border of my parents’ property, I knew that it had been his house as well as hers. It had been his illness as well as hers. She just garnered more attention. She was always—day in, day out—there. My father had been pity to her blame, warmth to her cold, but had he not, in the end, been colder than she? She had fought and blubbered and screamed, but hadn’t the two of us sat together for years?
Last night I had left her rotting in her own basement, and now she was in a metal locker somewhere, having been autopsied. Sarah knew. Emily would know soon, if they had not already told her. And Jake—Jake had even seen her body and stayed.
There was no Mercedes in the driveway. Only the timer lights along the front walk and at the four corners of the house shone out from Mrs. Leverton’s lawn. Why not call her by her first name now that she was gone? Beverly Leverton and her late husband, Philip, neighbors to my mother for fifty years.
Unlike my mother’s house, where single-pane glass still prevailed, which I could easily have smashed with a tap of a good-size rock to each corner, Mrs. Leverton’s house had windows fitted by her son with thick thermal glass and a trigger-point alarm. But Mrs. Leverton had disconnected the alarm, and Arlene, her Jamaican cleaning woman of long duration, had kept a key in the basket of a concrete bunny statue under a pine tree just off the back porch. I often stood in my mother’s backyard and saw Arlene carefully bending to retrieve the key. I had even noted recently that doing this was getting harder and harder for her. As old ladies grew older, so did their maids.
The bunny key was there, under a loose concrete egg. I looked to my left and right; the roof of my father’s workshop was barely visible through the trees. It was odd to be in a neighboring yard from mine, where completely different lives had been lived, and to know almost no one now but those who had died.
Ultimately, even with a valid passport, I could never have escaped to Jake’s converted mill house in Aurigeno, or even hitchhiked west. I had told Jeanine that Greenland was a big piece of land and was composed of nothing but greens. Green people eating green food on green chairs at green tables in green houses. And then we moved on to Iceland, where everything was ice. And China, where the people and the places all had a porcelain sheen. I had made her scream with laughter as I spun the globe. “In Oman,” I said, “there are men shaped like Os! Australia is ‘ausome’ and India, in!” In Madagascar, I thought . . .
I opened the screen door, turned the key in the lock. No alarms went off. I stumbled in the dark of what I knew to be Mrs. Leverton’s kitchen. I could see dark shapes around me, and with ease I saw the phone, its old-style cord twirling down to the floor and back. Tsvetaeva could have hung herself easily enough. I thought of Arlene wiping down the counters, the stove, the sink, each week entering and leaving another person’s house, learning that person’s habits and regimes. At least, I thought, she was smart enough to get paid.
I knew I could not turn on the lights for fear of being seen. I would take a moment and adjust. That’s what I thought, but I heard a mewling outside, and I jumped.
I took my purse into the half bath to the side of the kitchen and closed the door. It felt safe to risk a light inside the windowless room, but I was unprepared for who I saw.
There I was in the mirror, the strap of my purse cutting into my shoulder, weighing me down. The gun heavier with each step I’d taken since