The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [112]
I wrote again.
When I close my eyes for a moment, as I’ve done just now, I see my father, but then I see you. Remember that day at the Y? I’m so proud of you, my Flying Fish!
I’m in Mrs. Leverton’s, and it’s dark outside. I have to write a note now to your sister. Take care of Jeanine and Leo, and God bless any positive memory of me you are able to entrust to John. Do you remember how much Sarah has always loved the color green? I do.
I love you, Emily, no matter what.
Remember that over everything.
I sat back. I let the pen fall from my hand and silently tumble to a stop. For years after his death, I had gone around jealous of the moments with him I’d missed, staring at Emily and Sarah, thinking of the grade-school chaperoning or the jungle-gym monitoring I’d been engaged in instead. Once or twice he came to sit at the edge of the playground and join me. I had that. That, I clung to, but when I tried to remember what we had talked about, I couldn’t. I had wanted something to keep with me; even my mother had hurriedly clipped a lock of his hair when we’d first heard the men from the mortuary coming up the front walk.
I stared at her, horrified, while she tucked it inside her shirt.
“He was my husband,” she whispered.
When the doorbell rang, I felt it would be my job to assist the men with their task. Lift my father onto the gurney. Strap him fast.
But in reality, at the mortuary director’s urging, I had excused myself. I had taken my mother into the dining room, where we stood by the large corner cabinet near the kitchen, huddled together—not exactly touching each other so much as hovering helplessly in proximity.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the director said when they’d come back up the stairs with the paperwork. They were trained to say that.
The younger one had just started at the funeral home. “Yeah, me too,” he’d said, and shook my hand.
Something was digging into my side. It was sharp. I felt it stabbing me. Became aware that it had been poking at me for some time.
I leaned back and put my hand in my jeans pocket. Sarah’s butterfly barrette. I took it out and held it in the palm of my hand, making the light from the hope chest pick up its blues and greens, the thin gold rhinestones on the blunted antennae and legs.
It was almost nine. I wondered if Sarah and Jake were looking for me or if they’d thought to speak to Hamish yet. I wondered when Hamish would open his bedside drawer.
I closed my hand over the rhinestone butterfly and pressed, thought of all the discarded items over all the years that had made me feel free. I had not thrown out the weeping Buddha Emily had given me. I would not throw out the butterfly.
I stood up on the landing and pinned the blunt clip of the barrette through the weave of my black sweater until I heard the closure snap.
Mr. Forrest will be asleep now, I thought, or listening to music on his treasured Bose. We had talked about it when we’d run into each other a year or so ago.
“It gets the best sound. I can lie in bed and listen. I have a special velvet sleep mask. It used to be if I wanted to listen to music, I had to sit in the front room.”
I bent down to retrieve the letter to Emily and the box of crayons. I tucked them under my arm like a clutch. I was in the house, finally, of the Other. The Levertons and their holiday cruises, their intricate “On Donner, on Dancer” display at Christmas, their elaborate barbecues out back—the laughter of the guests pushing through the trees and across our lawn. All of that was over forever.
I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and so I walked down the short hallway that in my mother’s house ended in the only upstairs bathroom. In Mrs. Leverton’s, it led to another hall, off of which was the bedroom where she had been