The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [39]
“He didn’t wonder anything,” Natalie tried to reassure me in the days to come.
By the time I got home, his body was gone, but I could still see the long stain that smeared the pavement like an exclamation mark. “His brains were smashed,” Natalie said. “He wasn’t thinking anything.”
But I had listened to my mother sobbing in my father’s arms. “He called me ‘ma’am,’ ” my mother said over and over again. “He looked across at me and called me ‘ma’am.’ ”
My father, who, if not exactly social, was roundly liked in the neighborhood for his hellos and his courtly manner when he ran into the neighbors at the local grocery, had tried to explain my mother’s inability to walk into the road.
“Why didn’t she call someone, then?” asked Mr. Tolliver, who lived around the corner and led his own wife on humiliating walks in which he forced her to pump her arms and raise her legs high like a one-woman marching band. “Mrs. Tolliver is a rounded woman,” my mother said. “He shouldn’t have married a rounded girl if he didn’t want a rounded wife.”
“Clair was frozen,” my father explained. “Literally frozen to the spot. She couldn’t help him.”
As the men and women of the neighborhood drove home from work, they were stopped by police and told to park their cars and walk or, if it made more sense, to circle around in the opposite direction. But most of them parked their cars and got out, joining the crowd that stood on the Beckfords’ lawn across the street.
They were angrier, it seemed, at my mother than at the faceless, nameless stranger who had mown Billy Murdoch down. It took every person who joined the group two or three times hearing the story before they understood how what my mother had done was possible. And it wasn’t exactly that they understood. It was more like, by rote, it began to sink in. Clair Knightly, whose husband they all knew, had stood in her yard and watched a boy they all knew die. She did not help. She did not go to him. None of them asked what his parents would wonder for years: Did Clair Knightly even speak to him? Did she say anything?
The answer was that my mother both wept and sang.
She stood at the edge of her property and rubbed her chest furiously, back and forth with the sharp knuckles of her right hand. Her left hand flitted from her head down to her side.
“Billy,” she said over and over again, as if naming him might pull him closer.
His head was on the road, and it was facing her. His eyes were open. She saw his mouth moving but couldn’t get herself to stop repeating his name in order to hear what he had to say. By saying “Billy,” she was keeping herself in the present, anchoring herself there by the mailbox. Instinctively she knew this was what she must do if she was going to try to help him.
When there was a break in her rhythm, she heard him.
“Ma’am?”
That was the moment she knew she wouldn’t be able to do it. She didn’t bother saying his name anymore. She stared at him. She stayed right where she was, kneading and rubbing her chest until, as she revealed to my father two days later, she had rubbed a bloody cavity from her throat to her breastbone.
The other thing the neighbors never found out was the song my mother sang him. It was a song that, whenever I heard it coming through the vent that led from her bedroom to the bathroom, put me on guard for the advent of a bad day. It was a rhyme she remembered from childhood, and she would sing it repeatedly, the words running together into a sort of chant.
Posies are bright, clear, and gay.
Daffodils sprout on the lawn in May.
Flowers and girls are often the same.
Rose, Violet, and Iris are names.
She would hum the next few lines, whose words, I assumed, she had forgotten long before. It soothed her, and I knew this, but when I went to her bedroom to ask if she needed anything, I would remain in the doorway until her lips stilled.
My mother sang and hummed this song to Billy Murdoch until a delivery truck drove up, heading for the Levertons