The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [26]
At Pickering, I waited on the Phoenixville side for a beaten-up Toyota to pass by, and as I crept over the bridge, my car lurched up briefly on the patched road. My headlights seemed to catch something moving in the limestone ruins on the other side. It looked like a man, lit up and dancing over the dark rock, and I shivered in my clothes.
On the other side of Pickering, the trees were thinner and denser, and struggled during the day to get any sun through the crowded canopy above. A decade ago, excavation crews became a common sight here, and I would drive by to see one hundred birch saplings having been mown to the ground. I hated to say that Natalie’s house, which was halfway between my mother’s and my own, was one of the McMansions that had been carved out of these woods. It shouted up out of the forest, with mock storybook turrets and a front door fifteen feet tall.
Natalie and the now thirty-year-old Hamish had lived inside this gingerbread palace for eight years, ever since Natalie successfully sued the manufacturer that supplied the tires to her husband’s truck. He had been idling on Pickering Bridge in a stare-down with another car and had revved his engine. His front tire exploded, breaking the axle and ejecting him through the windshield, and he hit his head on the old fieldstone bridge that had lain in ruins for more than a century. He died instantly.
Through the scrim of young white-barked trees that had grown back since the developers came and went, I saw Hamish lying in the driveway, one of his many cars ratcheted up, with a bright cage light hanging from the front fender. I slowed down and brought my car to a halt. Without a thought for what I would say when I saw her, I swung my car off the empty road and drove up the length of Natalie’s driveway. I seemed to be doing almost explicitly what Jake had told me not to, but I couldn’t stop myself.
As my headlights mingled with the glow from the broken car, Hamish rolled himself out on his mechanic’s dolly and motioned for me to switch them off.
I turned off the ignition and got out. My first steps were wobbly on the gravel drive.
Hamish ducked toward me, flipping his hair to the side of his face.
“Mom’s out,” he said.
I had never stopped thinking of Hamish as the boy who played with Emily in the sandbox in the community park at the end of my street. “Hamish is going nowhere—fast,” Natalie said in the years after Hamish Sr.’s death. She seemed happy about it. As if she’d lost one Hamish, but this Hamish was sure to stick around.
“Out where?”
“She’s on a date,” Hamish said, and smiled. His teeth were as white as stadium lights. Natalie had told me that he bleached them every six months.
I didn’t know which was stranger, that I found myself in the driveway of my oldest friend after killing my mother or that Natalie had gone on a date without telling me.
“I just remembered I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” he said. “Don’t tell her, Helen. I don’t want to get her mad at me.”
“No worries,” I said—two ridiculous words that I had picked up from an Australian-born administrator at Westmore. It applied to everything. “The kiln has exploded.” “No worries.” “I’m canceling Thursday’s Life Drawing class.” “No worries.” “I’ve murdered my mother, and she’s rotting as we speak.”
“Seriously, Hell,” Hamish said. He had picked up the nickname habit at Valley Forge Military Academy, where Hamish Sr. had forced him to go to develop moral fiber.
“I’m not feeling too well, Hamish,” I said. “I’m going to sit down.”
I opened up my car door again and positioned myself sideways with my feet on the gravel. I bent from the waist and propped my body up with my elbows on my knees.
Hamish squatted down beside me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Should I call Mom?”
The light from the hanging lantern came beneath my open car door to illuminate what met the ground. I saw Hamish’s shoes in the dust and my own thoroughly filthy jazz flats. I edged them off with my toes while