The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [21]
The gun had been my mother’s idea.
“What does he want with a gun?” I whispered to her while Hamish was washing up. “Why not cash?”
“He’s a grown man,” my mother said. “Emily just gave birth to a child.”
But by the time I could trace my mother’s thought process and figure out that this was my mother’s way of pointing out that both Hamish and Emily were adults, the insanity train had left the station and I was in the basement, showing Hamish the rack of guns.
We stood in front of the meat freezer as he took up each rifle and held it in his hands, testing the weight of it.
“I know nothing about guns, except that they’re cool,” he said.
I was no help. I watched him lean each rifle out of the wooden rack and hold it inexpertly by its stock as if it were a particularly thick-stemmed weed he had pulled from the ground. Hamish, like Natalie, provided the perfect light contrast to my darkness. Until she began to sprout enough gray hair that she chose to color hers what I thought of as an alien shade of red, Natalie had been the blonde to my brunette. When I stood by her son, I saw the same brown eyes his mother had, heard the same easy laugh.
“Why doesn’t she sell these things?” Hamish asked. “She could make a mint.”
I could barely hear him. He had taken the only pistol out of a felt Crown Royal bag and, holding it, had spread his legs wide as if it were something he’d seen cowboys do. As he aimed at a point on the opposite wall and put his finger to the trigger, I screamed and grabbed the barrel with my hand.
He held on, and we collided. Hamish took my right shoulder in his hand.
“What? You look so upset. What is it?”
I came very close to saying something. Words I had not spoken to anyone but Jake.
“My father taught me not to point a gun at anyone.”
“I was pointing it at that lamp shade!”
He set the pistol down behind him on the meat freezer. He cupped my cheek as if I were the child and he the parent. “It’s all right,” he said. “No one’s hurt.”
I was shaking. He turned to slip the pistol back inside the purple bag, then cinched the gold braid closed at the top.
“I’ll take this one,” he said.
With Hamish’s help, I put the rifles, which were much more valuable, back in their mounts. The pistol sat in its bag on a stack of starched linen napkins I had folded and left on top of the meat freezer. I remembered turning around and seeing it, imagining the dulled platinum barrel, the scarred brown grip, and thinking of my father lifting it, loading it, raising it to his head.
I positioned my mother’s body so that, standing three steps down into the basement, I could grab her around the shoulders and, walking blind and feeling for each stair with my foot, could use my body to keep her from tumbling into the no-man’s-land below.
I breathed in and tried to make my muscles strong, not rigid. I pulled my mother’s upper body out over the edge of the stairs and walked down one stair and then another. Her weight against me increased with each step. I smelled the lilac scent of her hair through the sheets. I felt my eyes watering but would not blink. Down two, three, four, five. Her bundled feet thumping their arrival.
My mother’s cocoon was unraveling. No hospital corners here. Her feet, first cleaned, were poking out of the sheets at the halfway point on the stairs. Her toes seemed blue to me in a way they hadn’t before, and I wondered if that was the light of the basement playing tricks on me. I took another step. Another. I knew, because I had counted them dozens of times as a child, that there were exactly sixteen steps. I saw the meat freezer humming to my