The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [110]
I stood up.
The clock over Mrs. Leverton’s sink had a blue neon circle surrounding it—a faux diner clock. They had the real McCoy at Easy Joe’s.
It was only 7:45 p.m. It felt like three o’clock in the morning. Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.
I saw the teapot on the stove and decided that I would make a cup of tea. A stalling tactic, no doubt, but what was and wasn’t reasonable had left me. Everything was reasonable if killing your mother was. Everything was reasonable if giving up your life was second nature.
I did not want to think. I became methodical. I filled the teakettle and made sure not to replace the blue whistling bird on its spout. I pushed back images of my father in his terry-cloth robe and my mother wrapped in the Mexican wedding blanket, toppling to the basement floor.
I brought the water over to the stove and turned on the flame. I could not leave this way. Not, I thought, without a letter, not as my father had left me, had left my mother. I had chosen Mrs. Leverton’s because it made sense. It was empty. But I also knew now that it was a house they would never have to enter, my head blown off a sight they would never have to see.
I opened one cabinet and then another, finding the cups in this second one. Mrs. Leverton did not have hooks with mugs or pots hanging on them. She had good china and everyday. Mugs, to my mother, had also been abhorrent things. How nice it would have been if they had known each other. Visited. Done something besides send cards at the appropriate moments—the birth of grandchildren, the death of men—but it was my mother who had pointed out their reality. “Just because we’re old doesn’t mean we change into friends.”
I knew that, like my mother, Mrs. Leverton would no doubt have a drawer in the house that held stationery—perhaps a whole chest of drawers. It was one of the fallback gifts for an old lady. How many shawls or boxes of note cards had Mrs. Leverton been given in her ninety-six years? “Cash,” Jake reported his father had said to him near the end. “If it isn’t cash, I’m not interested.” He joked with Jake that he wanted to die clutching a thousand-dollar bill in each hand. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him they didn’t exist anymore,” Jake said.
I left the water to boil. Who cared if I burned the house down?
I went to the door that led to the living room. In the center of the wall across the room, there stood a highboy desk. The bottom edge was illuminated slightly by a light-sensitive night-light. I looked to my left and saw another of these lights. Green circular disks jutted out of random outlets so that Mrs. Leverton or a happy burglar could pick his or her way through her downstairs rooms.
Once, my parents had fought about the light bill. My mother insisted that every light in the house remain on even when it was sunny out. Even when I was at school or my father away on a business trip.
“Why? Why all these lights?” he had asked, waving the bill in her face as she sat on the couch, unraveling a thread at the hem of her dress.
“I’m not a bank,” he said, before grabbing his hat and coat to go out.
Later I told him that it must have something to do with the operation—her mastectomy. That she thought the light was helping her heal, and that if he was patient, I was sure she would return to using lamps only in the rooms where she sat. Four months later, she did. I never knew what had caused it. I had made up the lie to keep things as they had always been.
In a drawer under the foldout desk, I found the stationery. I would write the first letter to Emily. She deserved what she had never gotten from me, what she so much wanted: an explanation. Why I was the way I was despite what she thought of as free will and the endless possibilities that she had never seen me grasping.
I could not make out the designs of the paper or the colors, and I did not want to write my suicide note on card stock lined with Holly Hobbie dolls. I grabbed