The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [16]
“I don’t know a Helen Knightly,” he said.
“So this is Avery then?”
He was silent.
“You knew me as Helen Trevor, Jake Trevor’s wife.”
“Helen?”
“Yes.”
“Helen, it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”
“I need to eat,” I said. In the hours since I had come over to my mother’s and killed her, I hadn’t eaten anything.
“Are you all right, Helen?” he asked. I imagined him standing by his phone with a ski mask on. Avery had favored full-body coverage when he went out in the cold with Jake.
“Something’s gone wrong,” I said. I could feel my desire to collapse, to blurt out to someone what I had done, where I was, what lay behind me on the floor. “Hold on a minute, Avery.”
I turned sharply around, set the receiver on the taped-up high chair, and walked to my mother’s body. I was relieved to find that she didn’t move. Not even a twitch. I walked back to the phone and turned on the overhead light before picking the receiver back up. Mrs. Leverton would be sleeping now. I needed the chastening effect of the light switched on. As the fluorescent halo buzzed to life above my mother’s head, I breathed in deeply and took control. I did not want him to hear so much as a quaver in my voice.
“I need to get in touch with Jake,” I said.
“I haven’t talked to him in a while,” he said. “I do have a number for him, if you like.”
“I’ll take it.”
Avery told me the number, and methodically, I repeated it back. I did not recognize the area code.
“Thank you. I really appreciate it,” I said.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Helen,” he said, “but it wasn’t your fault Jake didn’t get tenure. I’ve always worried you might have blamed yourself.”
I thought of Avery standing in our living room in Madison. How he and Jake packed boxes and carried them silently out to Avery’s Ford. I saw Avery going toward the white pickup, carrying the hand-me-down bassinet.
“Sarah, our youngest, is singing jazz at a nightclub in New York,” I lied. “She’s quite accomplished at what she does.”
“That’s great.”
There was a silence on the line that neither of us filled.
“Thank you again, Avery.”
“Be well,” he said. I heard the beep of his phone as he hung up.
I closed my eyes and kept the phone to my ear until a recorded voice came on, informing me that the phone was off the hook. I saw myself in Wisconsin, walking out from behind the scrim of trees that surrounded Jake’s ice dragon. All the full professors from the college had gathered to see it before the thaw set in, even the dean. I had ruined it by inadvertently breaking the transparent spine along its back. Later that night, the fight that unraveled us began. Suddenly, I could not imagine calling him.
Using my fingers, I felt along the wall to switch off the buzzing halo. I knelt once more to my task, and with the dripping sponge in hand, I hovered at the edge of my mother’s underwear.
I peeled down her old-fashioned panties. They came away in my hands, the elastic shot through on both legs. I had grown used to the smell of her by now, a sort of fecal-mothball combo, with a sprinkle here and there of talc.
In order to remove her underpants, I ripped them open, and her body jiggled just a bit. I thought of the bronze statues that artists cast to resemble people doing everyday things. A bronze golfer to meet you on the green. A bronze couple to share a bench with you in a city park. Two bronze children playing leapfrog in a field. It had become a cottage industry. Middle-Aged Woman Ripping Underpants off Dead Mother. It seemed perfect to me. One could commission it for a schoolyard, where students ran from the building after working all morning with numbers and words. They could climb on the two of us at recess or drown flies in the dew that pooled in my mother’s eyes.
And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me. The cleft that had compelled the mystery of my father’s love for forty years.
This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia. In the last decade, I had become my mother’s official enema-giver. She would lie down, in a position not dissimilar