The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [50]
Mr. Forrest would pull up in his Jaguar and honk the horn, and I would grab my jacket and fly down the stairs. Sometimes I would be aware of a shadowy presence in the living room, but it took exactly three giant steps from the bottom of the stairs until I was out the front door, and so I chose to believe that her presence was diminishing with my every escape from it. Outside was sunlight and the willow-green car with the jaguar leaping boundlessly in the air.
Once I was outside my house, Mr. Forrest and his car were only twenty concrete stairs away, but I was always too afraid to slide down the metal banister to get there faster. I had a vision of my head split open on the sidewalk, followed by a vision of my mother, unable to come down to where I’d fallen, unable to call an ambulance, or worse: pushing herself to the point where she stomped around in the brains and muck of me while gasping for air and gesticulating wildly.
When my father began to house-hunt in Frazer, Malvern, and Paoli, he went alone. He took Polaroids of the rooms and yards. He would bring them back to my mother, and in the dining room, they would spread out the photos, making a sort of montage of each house, separated from the others by the dark walnut of the dining table.
I would return from driving with Mr. Forrest, and the three of us would circle around the table, looking cautiously at what might become ours. It was through this experience that my father decided to equip me with a camera of my own.
“This way,” he said, “you can take pictures of your schoolmates or a band recital and bring them home to your mother.”
“I don’t go to band recitals,” I said.
“Right. Well, things you do do, then.”
He smiled weakly, and I knew not to say anything. That somehow doing so would be disloyal in that all of it pointed to the fact that my mother might never again make it past our door.
But I did enjoy the house-shopping via photographs. At night, I could dream about bedrooms that floated in the sky next to a one-car garage in which sat a cherry-red Jaguar with real wood inlay on the dash.
I couldn’t tell sometimes whether my mother was interrogating my father or the houses.
“Fancy wood paneling,” she’d say, “but hideous green carpeting. What do you have to say to that?”
“It looks like grass,” my father said.
“Filthy grass, at best.”
And though it was my turn to speak, I held back.
When it was finally time for my mother to see the three houses that had passed muster, plans were put in place for nearly a week. My mother chose her outfit for the day and kept it laid out in the spare bedroom, where her father’s rifles still had pride of place along one wall. I decided that I would find a silent way to show her my support even if I still refused to speak to her.
I was dieting stringently at the time, and a few mornings before the Saturday of the houses, I sliced up my carrots and celery for the day and stared at them. Using the orange circles of the carrots as notepads, I made my own dietetic version of the sugar hearts from Valentine’s Day. “Good luck!” I wrote with a black felt-tip on one carrot disk. “Triumph!” I wrote on another. Then I got into it. “Fuck them!” I wrote. “Take good care.” “Eat carrots!” “Tallyho!” “Avaunt!”
The next step was to hide them around the house in places she would find them. The toes of the shoes she’d put in the spare room with her outfit. Beneath the fluffy puff I had once coveted inside the powder on her dresser top. In her chipped and lipstick-stained teacup. As I crept about the house, going into and out of each room in search of places to hide these carrot notes, I forgot my hatred of my mother and opened to my love. It was, like a playground seesaw, so easy to pitch from one side to the other.
On the morning of the big day, my father asked me to leave the living area and remain in the kitchen with the swing door closed. By that time my mother had not left the house itself in nearly a year, and our yard in nearly five. The neighbors, knowing