The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [37]
“Still eighty-two days,” she would say. Or “Only seventy-three.”
It became a shorthand with which we would greet each other. “Sixty-four.” “Fifty-seven.” “Twenty-five.”
Over those ninety days, it did not matter what time I reached home. I would stop in front of Mr. Forrest’s house on my way back from the bus stop and tap on the window to wake his sleeping dog. Tosh, a King Charles spaniel—“The only breed!” Mr. Forrest said—would come to where I stood and sadly paw the glass.
If I spotted a casserole on our doorstep, I would hurry it to the kitchen and wrap it in tinfoil to hide in the basement freezer. I was worried my father might never come home, and feeding us would become my responsibility.
When I had tried once to explain what was wrong with my mother, it felt hopeless.
“She doesn’t do much,” I’d said.
“It may seem like that to you, Helen,” Miss Taft had said. She was my second-grade teacher, and my class was her first.
“She doesn’t drive,” I tried.
“Not everyone does.”
“My father does. Mr. Forrest does.”
“That’s two,” she said, and held up two fingers. She smiled at me, as if supplying me with whole numbers would solve everything.
“She used to go for walks,” I said, “but she doesn’t do that anymore.”
“Raising a child takes all of one’s energy,” Miss Taft said.
I stared past her to the map of the world that hung over the blackboard. I knew when to shut up. My mother’s problem was my fault.
Ninety days after my father left, he returned. My mother had put on a suit I’d never seen before and meticulously combed and coiffed her hair. It was the first time I realized that beneath her diaphanous gowns, she had been losing weight. I remembered then that I had never seen her eat more than one or two of the Ritz crackers she heaped with Skippy. She had also never said a thing about the hoarded casseroles.
My father walked in the door and smiled sheepishly at me. His hat had a crisp new feather in it, though he too had grown thinner. I went to hug him—something we did not do—and he held out a large plastic bag, inadvertently blocking my way.
“I brought these for you,” he said.
He turned to envelop my mother. I saw her face as she came toward him. Her tears had already made inky troughs of mascara under her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Clair,” he said. “I’m home to take care of you now. I’m strong again.”
Without even speaking, he lifted her up, cradling her easily and drawing her to him. In my head that day, I equated “I’m strong again” with only that—his physical ability to carry more weight. Inside the bag I held were plastic dishes in aqua-green. One was a pitcher and one was a tray and one was a kidney-bean shape, which I later learned had been his sick bowl.
In the weeks and months that followed, it became a riddle we played out.
“Why did you go away?”
“To get better.”
“Better from what?”
“Better than I was.”
“What was wrong with you?”
“I can’t remember because it’s gone!”
Quickly, I forgot too. I needed him. It was my mother who had the problems. My mother who was afraid. So afraid that nothing could make her unafraid. She felt safer in my father’s arms. She felt safer in the house on Mulberry Lane. Or under blankets. Or with her feet tucked up beneath her and a hot-water bottle nestled in her lap.
My father would greet me in the morning when I came down for breakfast.
“It’s a hard day, sweetheart,” he would say.
This was our shorthand, and it never changed. On hard days, my mother stayed in bed with the blinds drawn until my father and I left the house. She knew why we had to leave, but still she thought our abandonment of her cruel. My father and I kept our voices low in the kitchen and wolfed down our food. When there were no crisp bills from his wallet for me to take to buy my lunch, I totted up money from the change jar in the kitchen, being careful not to let the sorting of coins make any noise.
At age eleven I confided in Natalie about the way my mother behaved, and held my breath when she