The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [19]
“Mrs. Castle will come in the morning.”
“Does she have a key?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “There was an incident a few months ago when someone broke in who’d been doing chores here. We got the locks changed, and I think Mrs. Castle never got a new key.”
“Helen?”
“Yes.”
“You have to listen to me now.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You can’t tell anyone else about this, and you can’t go anywhere. You have to stay in the house with your mother until I get there.”
“I’m not deaf, Jake.”
“You just killed your mother, Helen.”
His dogs were whimpering in the background.
“What time is it where you are?” I asked.
“Early enough to get a flight out tonight.”
“Where?”
“Santa Barbara. I’m doing a commission piece here.”
“For who?”
“It’s on private property. I haven’t met the people. Helen?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the temperature there?”
“I don’t know. I have all the windows closed.”
“Is the corpse still . . . pliable?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I mean has your mother stiffened up yet? How long ago did you . . . Excuse me.” For a moment I thought Jake had hung up the phone, but the jangling noise of the dogs’ collars reassured me.
“When did she die?”
“Just before dark.”
“And what time is it there?”
I looked up at the clock. “Six forty-five.”
“Helen, I have another call. I have to take this. I’ll call you back.”
I heard the line go dead. I wanted to laugh.
“The art hustle never stops,” I said, turning to my mother. For the briefest moment, I expected a response.
I waited by the phone while I stared at her. My mother’s face must have been wet under the towel, and this disturbed me. I dropped to my knees and crawled over to her. Without looking, because I was not ready to see her face, I removed the towel in one swift flick of my wrist. I heard her yelling. I heard her calling my name.
I jumped up and walked quickly from the room, through the tiny back hall, and into the living room, where my day had started for a second time, a million years ago.
What had I been doing before Mrs. Castle called? I had gone shopping at the greenmarket in town. I had bought string beans from the elderly Armenian couple who sold only three things out of the back of a small pickup truck. I had gone to my dance class.
I saw the brass ash bin next to the fireplace and went to stand above it. If only I could vomit.
I knew then that my idea of counting on anyone in this was bullshit. What could Jake do, sitting in a rich man’s house three thousand miles away? He had taken another call while I stood in the kitchen with my dead mother! “You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it.” When exactly had that become my philosophy?
Jake had been asking me questions about temperature and hours and stiffness, and obviously this was all about rot. He’d done enough ice sculptures in the cold capitals of the world to know things I wouldn’t have thought of. Couldn’t have thought of. Briefly I tried to recall the plot of a movie I’d seen with Natalie last fall. It hinged on whether the death was murder or manslaughter. I could remember the actress’s face, her dewy beauty as she broke down on the stand—past that, I couldn’t recall a thing.
My mother had been dead too long to cover it up easily, and I had, fatal tell, broken her nose. Now, out of the kitchen and away from her, I saw more clearly the trouble I was in.
I had never been able to do Jake’s meditation exercises. I’d sit on the little round black pillow and try to om-out while my feet and hands went into prickly pins and needles. Inside my head, strange figures walked in and out as if my brain were a heavily frequented coffee shop.
I stood on my mother’s porch and planted my feet. I could feel the straw from the mat through the soft, wet leather of my jazz flats. I thought of the old Victorian house imploding. I breathed in and out ten times, counting very slowly. I made the exhalation noises I usually ridiculed in yoga class. What I was going to do next could not be misinterpreted.