The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [20]
It was dark; the cicadas were thrumming in the trees. I could hear the trucks shifting miles away on the ridge of the highway. I knew that, no matter what, I would not be able to stay in the house tonight. I could not wait the hours it would take for Jake to arrive. Besides, as the minutes ticked by, he did not, I noted, call me back.
As I breathed and counted with my eyes wide open, I stared into the house and saw the front hall, the stairs that led up to the three small bedrooms, and the thick padded carpeting that Natalie’s son had installed to break a fall.
“We have to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to you that happened to your husband,” Hamish had rather witlessly said. He knew the version of events that Natalie had told him—that my father had died when he fell down the hardwood stairs. I had stood by quietly that day, nodding my head, unable to look in my mother’s direction.
They would have brought my mother’s body out of this house on a gurney, I thought. They would have carried her almost vertically down the steep front stairs. She would have been another lonely old lady who died in her home. How sad. How helpless. How very very high she would rate on people’s sympathy curve.
But that was not going to happen. I would make sure of it.
I walked inside. I resisted pausing in the living room to march in place. My muscles were stiff from the time on the kitchen floor, but, posing at Westmore, I had known and recovered from worse. I went upstairs and retrieved a simple white sheet. Then, two at a time, I descended the stairs.
Being careful not to glance at my mother’s face, I stood at her feet, briefly bent down to close her legs, and then played the game that first Emily, and then Sarah, had begged me for when I tucked them in at night. A game my father had made up for me.
We called it “waft.” I would stand at the end of their beds, with their top sheet balled up in my hands, and then shoot it out over their bodies, allowing it to slowly waft down over them. It was a game that, if given the choice, Sarah in particular never wanted to call an end to. “I love the feel of air escaping all around me,” she had told me once.
For my mother, it was a one-time waft, and I did it so the queen-size sheet covered her face. It stuck to her damp body in an almost ghostly way. Hurriedly I repackaged her in the Mexican wedding blanket and the Hudson Bay as if she were a gift I was returning to the store.
I stood and walked into the small back hallway and opened the basement door. Then, holding her under her armpits, I dragged her headfirst to the top of the stairs.
I walked a few steps down in almost pitch-black darkness and flailed my hand along the wall until I found the light switch. The bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs came on. I walked down the rest of the way. These stairs, when I was little, were a dare for neighborhood children and me. Past the first three stairs, both walls fell away, and never, no matter how much one was needed over the years, was a guardrail installed. Hamish had even volunteered to fabricate one out of old pipes after laying down the carpet upstairs. “These stairs are the real death trap,” he’d whispered to me when I’d brought him to the basement so he could choose among my grandfather’s old guns as payment.
But what had always made the dare of descending into the dark basement worth it was the supersize brown refrigerator at the bottom of the stairs. This was where my mother kept tins of brandy balls and stores of Hershey’s bars. Mason jars of pecans and almonds, Christmas boxes of peanut brittle left uneaten, and hideous sherry-soaked fruitcakes given to us each holiday season. The Levertons gave everyone a box of After Eight mints. Mrs. Donnellson, before she died, would bring my mother a ham.
The ham, like all meats, went in a separate place—the long, low meat freezer that hummed to the right of the stairs, on top of which my mother sorted laundry or stacked magazines she wanted to keep. During my father’s life, there was always