The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [40]
By the time the ambulance and the police arrived, Billy was almost gone, and everyone had questions for the incoherent woman singing an incoherent song.
After that, we kept the blinds drawn and pretended the trash on our lawn had fallen there by accident. I stayed away from school for six weeks. I would meet Natalie on a wooden bench in the park five blocks from our house.
“Not yet,” she’d tell me, and hand me the assignments I’d missed. Even her parents preferred not to have me come over to her house anymore.
“I hate this,” I said.
“Remember Anne Frank?” Natalie said once. “Pretend you’re like her, and you can’t go anywhere until you get the all clear.”
“Anne Frank was exterminated!”
“Well, not that part,” Natalie said.
I began to spend my time calculating. I was a junior. I had eighteen months to go until, somehow, I would get out.
I did not tell my mother this. At home, all roads revolved around her more than they had before. My father and I whispered our hellos in those first six months after Billy died, and when the doorbell rang, we scurried like mice into dark corners, hoping whoever it was would go away. A rock came through the front window once, and we hid this fact from my mother, claiming instead that it had been my father reaching back to turn the page of a newspaper and poking his elbow through the glass. “Can you believe that?” he said with his best variety-show voice. “I didn’t know I was that strong!”
“Or that oblivious,” my mother said, weakly playing her part of condemning him, though we all felt the lack of her sharp tongue. Judgment, her savior and guardian, had left her. Her perch at the window of the living room, from which she could watch Mrs. Tolliver marching by or call the next-door neighbor’s child a slut, was cloaked in a heavy wool curtain that we ceased to open.
Shortly after Christmas of that year and three months after the accident, the Murdochs moved. A truck pulled up in the middle of the afternoon, and four men loaded all their possessions in a little less than three hours. Natalie and I were bike riding when we came over the hill and saw Mrs. Murdoch standing in the front yard with the dog, Billy’s dog. She wore a short checked coat and a circle skirt in heavy gray flannel, a pattern from Simplicity that everyone seemed to have made that year. I remember braking a little as I took in the moving van and the boxes, Mr. Murdoch’s back disappearing into the house, and then my eyes met Mrs. Murdoch’s, and it was everything I could do to keep my balance. As it was, my front tire wobbled dangerously as I all but ceased to pedal.
Natalie came up beside me on her green Schwinn ten-speed. “Let’s go,” she said softly.
And we did. I put my feet on the pedals and moved past Mrs. Murdoch. Billy’s dog, a Jack Russell named Max, strained against his leash, and I had to remind myself it was the wheels of the bike he hated, not me.
How can you apologize for the mother you love? The mother you, too, hate. The only thing I could hope was that Mrs. Murdoch would have plenty of people to love her in the future, plenty of people to console her and to listen to the story of how she lost her son. My mother would have only my father. Then she would have me.
EIGHT
The day the neighbors showed up in the yard, my father had told us he was in Erie, Pennsylvania, shaking up vials of poisonous silt and calculating the rate of sedimentary accretion in the local drinking water.
My mother was in the kitchen, and I had just come in through the side door. After Billy died, she stopped asking me where I’d been. I could have been sleeping with the boy she called the “horror,” who lived down the road and had a tattoo in a time when