The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [42]
This truth, stated so boldly out in the open air, was like a poison arrow coming out of nowhere. I felt a tightness in my chest and paused just long enough to take a breath.
“Can’t you speak?” Mr. Tolliver asked. I hated him, and this hatred was unaided by my mother’s judgments of how he marched his wife around our block. He kept a small piece of wood painted white and in the shape of a gravestone that said, HERE HE LIES, COLD AND HARD, THE LAST DOG WHO SHIT IN MY YARD! The rhyme was supposed to make it funny. I’ve always traced my disdain of what generous people call “lawn art” to the first time I read the words of that mock grave.
“Be kind,” Mr. Forrest said, his voice coming forth in a higher register than usual. His collar was unbuttoned, but he still wore his necktie from work. I realized later that he must have run into the men while taking Tosh for a walk around the block.
The men grumbled. Most still wore what passed for work clothes—worn slacks and jackets, an occasional Windbreaker with the steel company’s logo.
“Helen,” Mr. Warner said, “we are here to talk to your mother.”
Mr. Warner, whom my mother had nicknamed the “Blusterer,” considered himself a spokesman for every occasion. He could hold court on any subject. He had once stood in our front yard, lecturing my father—who knew more about water treatment than anyone within miles—on the benefits of sewage silica plants in Liberia. “He’s read an article,” my father said when he finally peeled himself away as darkness came. “It’s nice that the man’s excited, but even I don’t want to talk about sewage that much.”
I stood on our side of the chain-link fence.
“Come talk to us, Helen,” said a father I didn’t recognize.
Why didn’t I see the warning in Mr. Forrest’s eyes before I lifted the friendship latch and walked out into the side yard? I must have been looking at the men near the hedge and not at him. Only after I turned and shut the gate behind me did I see his face. I could read fear like tarot cards.
“Where’s your mother, Helen?” Mr. Warner asked.
“Helen,” Mr. Forrest said, “you should go back inside.”
I knew enough, or at least I thought I did, to advance from against the gate and move closer to Mr. Forrest. But as I did, he backed away.
“My mother is unavailable. What can I do for you?” I asked, using the most grown-up voice I had. I was anxious now. I stepped toward Mr. Forrest once more.
“I wish I could help, Helen,” he said, his voice hollow. He knew what to fear, and I didn’t. I was beginning to hover there, in the vicinity of the truth, but with my bare feet in the grass and my quilt for a cape, I could not yet imagine men like my father, who lived all around us, wanting to hurt me. The Murdochs had moved. It had been eight months since Billy’s death. The end of my junior year was only a month away. But what I hid behind the most, the thing that made me blindest up until the minute it happened, was that I was a girl. In the world where I was raised, unlike the one in which I made sure to raise my daughters, girls did not get hit.
Mr. Warner advanced toward me and stopped.
“We have business with your mother, Helen, not you.”
This, I now saw, had been simmering ever since the inquest. My mother was never officially held accountable in Billy’s death because, according to the report of the medical examiner, his injuries that day had been traumatic enough that he would have died regardless of whether she had stepped into the road. It was the missing hit-and-run driver’s fault, not hers. Perhaps she might have held him, as other women would, or rushed to call his family, or an ambulance, but none of these actions, the authorities concluded, would have saved Billy Murdoch’s life. Officially, she was merely an innocent bystander.
When I looked behind me, Mr. Forrest was holding Tosh in his arms.
“Mr. Forrest?” I was balancing on the edge of something thin and perilous, and he was the only thing I had to trust.
“You can come with me, Helen. Why not do that?”
One or two of the men laughed when they