The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [13]
“It will be okay, sweetheart,” my father would say.
On the day my father died, I had arrived at the house to the sight of my mother cradling his head in her lap at the bottom of the stairs. In the weeks that followed, she talked over and over again about his varicose veins and how much pain they had caused him. How he was stiff in the mornings and often stumbled or tripped over the smallest wrinkle in the carpet. She repeated stories of his clumsiness over the phone to the grocer, who still delivered food to her, and to Joe, my father’s barber, whom she had called in a deluded moment after she’d called me. Joe had shown up shortly after I had, worried that my mother might be all alone. He had stood in the front doorway, his mouth open, unable to speak. When our eyes met, he lifted his hand up and accurately made the sign of the cross before turning to leave. Was it from respect or fear that Joe had never commented on the open cleft at the back of my father’s head or the arc of blood against the wall?
Slowly I worked my way up to my mother’s knees. “They smile at me,” Mr. Donnellson whispered to me once, delighted to catch a rare glimpse of my mother in shorts.
A few moments later, I was wiping the shit from my mother’s rubbery thighs when I thought of the night my father nailed, straight into a wall upstairs, a list of hastily written rules:
Keep the Upstairs Linen Closet Locked
Do Not Leave Matches in the House
Monitor Booze
It took me a moment, as I thought of the tussles my father and mother frequently had—her in her nightgown and my father still dressed in his workday clothes—to realize that someone was pounding on the front door. I froze. I listened to the brass knocker sound against its base.
I made no noise. I could feel the soapy water seep from the sponge and roll down my arm from wrist to elbow. The small splash of a drop back into the old sick bowl was like a bomb exploding in an open field.
The knocker sounded again. This time there was a rhythm to it, like a friendly, half-familiar song.
In the silence that followed, I was aware of my muscles as I sometimes was when modeling. To hold a pose for a long time, the body had to work its way into stillness—it couldn’t be frozen suddenly and kept that way. I tried, as I sensed the person standing on the other side of the door, to imagine myself at Westmore, on top of the art studio’s carpeted platforms. My toes burrowed into the mottled brown shag while my elbows, long since inured to carpet burns, supported me.
Again the knocker sounded. Again the happy tune. It was “shave and a haircut, two bits,” but this time it was followed by an insistent bang, bang, bang.
I realized whoever it was had been giving my mother time to get to the door between knocks one and two, and even between knocks two and three. It was late, after all. She was an old woman. I stared down at her. She could be sleeping with her gown pushed up around her hips.
“Mrs. Knightly?”
It was Mrs. Castle.
“Mrs. Knightly, it’s Hilda Castle. Are you in there?”
Where else would she be? I thought with annoyance. She’s lying on her kitchen floor. Go away!
Then I heard a rattling on the front window in the living room. The noise of her heavy platinum wedding band against the glass. I had asked her once why she continued wearing it after her divorce. “It reminds me not to remarry,” she said.
Only when I heard her voice—a loud whisper—did I realize she had pushed the window open from the outside.
“Helen,” she whispered loudly. “Helen, can you hear me?”
Bitch! I immediately thought in solidarity with my mother. What right had she to lift the window sash?
“I know you’re here,” she whispered. “I see your car.”
How very Lord Peter Wimsey of you, I thought.
But my muscles relaxed as I heard the window closing. A few seconds later, I heard Mrs. Castle regain the concrete pathway. I looked at my mother’s feet and legs.
“What did you have to give away to her?” I asked. I wasn’t thinking of possessions but of the privacy that had always been so precious