The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [51]
As my father hustled me into the kitchen and kissed me lightly on the forehead, his thoughts preoccupied with my mother, who was humming loudly upstairs in a wavering voice, I saw the blankets he had stacked on the dining room table and knew what they were for.
The morning had started with my father waking early and coming down to fix my mother breakfast on a tray. He had a volume knob on his love for my mother, and her weakness seemed to turn it up so loudly that the reverb shut me out.
The blankets were meant to calm her. They were heavy gray movers’ blankets. Felt on one side and quilted cotton on the other. My mother had last left the border of our yard when I was eleven. All the way to the local drugstore and back, she had never taken the blanket off her head. Instead, my father and I guided her to the aisle where they sold feminine supplies. No matter how torturous it was for her, she had wanted to be with me when I bought my first menstrual pads.
From my place in the kitchen, I saw her through the diamond-shaped window in the swing door. She was deathly pale and wearing the apricot linen suit that had lain out all week. On her feet were the pumps in which I’d placed the carrot slices. My father embraced her and then held her in his arms as he softly spoke words I couldn’t understand but knew meant comfort. He rubbed her tensed back until she stepped out of his embrace and stood ramrod straight, her posture the stance of the model she’d once been. I saw that she had taken the time to apply what she thought of as outside makeup, not just the powder and gloss she usually wore but the whole nine yards, for no one to see but my father and the dark cloth—mascara, eyeliner, foundation, and red matte lipstick.
She’s ready, I thought. It’s now or never.
My father lifted the first gray blanket up and wrapped it around my mother’s waist, pinning it loosely with safety pins. It fell to just below her feet and skimmed the ground. The next blanket was draped around her shoulders and pinned down the front. Up to this point, she still looked like a big kid playing some kind of monk dress-up. But it was the final blanket that had been the hardest one in the past. The blanket that went over her head.
When I had assisted my father, I could not help feeling that as we put this blanket over her, we were sending her to the gallows. I had held the blanket up so I could still see her face—“Are you all right, Mom?” “Yes.” “Dad and I can get them.” “I’m going.”—and then I had lowered the blanket and stared at the wavy lines of the machine quilting, knowing my mother needed the reassurance of this slow suffocation when she went out into the world.
I saw my father lean in to kiss my mother before unfolding the final blanket. It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn’t serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other’s arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.
My father draped the fateful hood over her head, and my mother disappeared, replaced instead by a hollow vision of dark-gray wool. They took the steps toward the door in a rush. I left my spot in the kitchen and felt the cool morning air flood in from outside.
Just as suddenly as my father swooped my mother up in his arms, and as she moaned like an animal trapped in a snare, I rushed forward into the dining room and then to the stoop in time to see them disappear out the front door and down the stairs.
My father had planned ahead. The Oldsmobile was facing the opposite way of the other cars, with the passenger side nearest the house and the car door open. I saw Mrs. Castle and her husband drive by. My father ignored them, when on another day he would have waved. Mr. Donnellson was out mowing his grass and looked up with pity toward my parents.
My mother did not struggle. She was suffering too much to have