The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [109]
“There are secret rooms inside us,” I had said to my therapist.
“A relatively benign construct,” he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.
My eyes staring back at me were small and black, and behind them was a room I’d avoided all my life. My parents were waiting for me, I thought, and in the small wallpapered bathroom of Mrs. Leverton’s house, I could, if I wanted to, blow my brains out. My father had killed himself, I had killed my mother, and I could join them both. If I hustled, perhaps I could be interred with my mother, head to toe—our own jumbled version of The Lovers of Pompeii.
Quickly, I shut the light off. I set the purse down, and in the dark I washed my hands and face, splashing the water cupped in my two palms against my skin, running the tap ice-cold. I saw her then, Emily racing up to me beside the pool at the Y. She was holding something out to me and smiling widely.
“My Flying Fish Badge,” she said. “I got it!” In the weeks leading up to my father’s death, she had mastered the butterfly.
I did not turn on the light again but stood over the sink, breathing heavily. I willed myself to open the door. I picked up my purse as if it were some stranger’s bowling bag and made my way into the kitchen and over to the round dining table, where I sat down in a wicker-backed chair. I moved my hand over the smooth grain of the table. Mrs. Leverton had left no crumbs from her evening meal.
I thought of the girls.
Once, when the three of us were visiting my mother, and Emily and Sarah were still small, we had been walking down the street on the way back to the house from the park, where a new jungle gym had been installed. The girls were excited and wild. Sarah had run up Mrs. Leverton’s walk and started stamping on the concrete with her foot.
“See, it’s not like Grandmom’s!” she yelled.
“Sarah, get back here. That’s not your house.”
She had stared at me, nonplussed. “I know that,” she said. Emily looked up at me to see what came next.
Mrs. Leverton was what. She tapped on her front glass—single-paned back then—and as I hurried up the walk with Emily to retrieve my errant child, the front door opened fast.
“Why not come in?” she said. “Daughters must be lovely things.”
And though my mother hated her and she disapproved of me, we went into her house and sat in the living room, which Arlene cleaned every other Friday. We had store-bought cookies from a tin, and Sarah told her about how, at her grandmother’s house, there was a hollow spot under the front path.
“The sound changes when you walk on it,” Emily clarified.
“And Mom says there are tiny people who live in there,” Sarah said.
“Does she?” Mrs. Leverton looked at me and made an effort to smile. Crumbs from a shortbread cookie sat at the corner of her mouth.
“A whole village,” Sarah said excitedly. “Right, Mom?”
I did not say anything.
“Like Gulliver’s Travels,” Emily said. “Sarah likes to imagine them.”
There she was, I thought, at nine, already a better mother than I was. She had taken the lead with Mrs. Leverton so that Sarah would not notice my disappearance. I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.
I put my hands together.
“God, forgive me,” I said softly.
I had set my purse on the floor beside me, and I leaned over to pick it up and place it on the table. I pushed back my chair a foot or so and reached my hand in. There was the felt between my fingers. I searched for the braided gold twine and pulled out the Crown Royal bag. It made a loud clunk against the table. Next I took out the box of bullets.