The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [38]
It was on a hard day—
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“It’s a hard day, Helen.”
—that Billy Murdoch was hit by a car in front of the house.
I was in high school. My father had spent the night before away from home. “An overnight business trip to Scranton,” he’d said. Everyone else on our short block seemed to be gone that afternoon. But, most important, it was a hard day.
On the afternoon Billy Murdoch got hit, my mother paced herself as she always did on a hard day, filling the hours with house chores to try and keep busy, to try and keep from sitting on the couch or at the kitchen table and giving in to it. It was as if, if she cleaned and washed and organized, she could keep her terror just enough at bay for her to breathe.
She told me later, in one of her bottomless whispers, when she was speaking from a place she lived in for months afterward, that she remembered hearing the sound—the sound of Billy’s body being struck by the car. “Like a pumpkin being hit by a baseball bat,” she said.
It was around two o’clock in the afternoon, and my mother had just come up out of the basement with a load of my father’s socks and underwear. Something about the astringent smell of bleach always heartened her, and the basket felt warm against her chest.
Her usual routine was to place the basket on one end of the couch and snap, then fold, my father’s boxer shorts, placing them in two stacks: plain white and thin blue stripes. His socks came next, matched and mated, with folded-over tops.
When my mother heard the sound, she did not rush to the window to check it out, as everyone else later agreed they would have. She stood at attention for a single second and then went about what she was doing. Everything she did after the sound was even more focused, even more robotic, until the next sound came.
It was the sound of a car peeling away, squealing down the block at high speed. Some entry was made then in her nervous system that something wasn’t right outside. Despite all the empty chattering noise that filled her brain on a hard day, she dropped the two socks in her hand and walked, not ran, to the front door. Then she blacked out until she got to the edge of the curb. Her fear for the boy made her act, but like a dog trained not to go beyond the boundary of his own yard no matter what, she was brought up short by the mailbox.
He had been riding his bike, which had now landed on the edge of our lawn, its front wheel spinning slowly before it stopped.
My mother raised her hand to her chest and started to rub hard with the knuckles of her right hand into the soothing worry stone of her sternum.
His lower limbs jerked once, then twice.
She put her left hand on top of our mailbox to steady herself. She was six feet away from him.
“Billy?” she whispered.
The doctor said later that if mercy had been attending him, he would have been walking. That way, the car would have hit him head-on and lower to the ground. Whoosh, he would be plowed down—dead immediately.
I’ve always wondered what he must have thought during those final minutes as my mother stood so close to him. How could the world change so fast? Could he know, at eight, what death was? Cars came out of nowhere and hit you two houses down from where you had grown up, and a woman who had always seemed just a typical adult, in those rare moments you saw her in her yard, stood at the edge of the road but did not comfort you. Was this punishment for having stayed home sick from school? For having broken the rule of remaining in the house while your mother was gone?
I was sixteen. Natalie and I would put on Danskin unitards and make up dance routines in her parents’ refurbished basement. We used her father’s circular bar to propel us across the room, where we perfected a tumbling routine involving the long, low couch and the bearskin rug on the floor.