The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [53]
I walked to the window. I felt like it had been more years than I could count.
“Jake?”
“Let me in,” he said. His voice was soft but strong and made me think of what my mother had said after I’d put him on the phone from Wisconsin. “It sounds like you’re marrying an anchorman.”
I had slept in my clothes. I didn’t want to turn on a light or look in the mirror. Hanging above me were the clear-glass globes that now took on the cast of separate worlds. I imagined a mother and daughter in each of them. In one, the mother and daughter would be sharing an old-fashioned sled as they slid down a deep, downy bank of snow. In another, they drank hot cider and told each other stories in front of a fire. In the final globe, the daughter held her mother’s head beneath the surface of the icy water, strangling her as she drowned.
I forced myself to stand in front of the mirror that hung over a beaux arts dresser Sarah and I had pulled from the wrecked Victorian in my mother’s neighborhood. The mirror was even older, and its glass held small circular wear marks the color of ash.
I looked exactly as I had the day before, but there was something behind my eyes I couldn’t name. It was not fear or even guilt. I shifted my body slightly so one of the mirror’s wear marks—a black dot with a wavy black circle surrounding it—was positioned exactly in the center of my forehead. Bang-bang.
I had not seen Jake in almost three years, since shortly before Leo was born. He had touched my nose with his index finger and said, “A true button. I’ve never known anyone else with a button nose! Jeanine has it too.”
“Yes,” I said. “And your hazel eyes.”
“I’m hoping this one gets your blue.”
We had stood, looking at each other, until John came out of the bedroom where Emily was under strict orders to stay in bed.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.
“We were just fighting over who has more gray hairs,” Jake said.
“That’s easy,” John said, with the humor of a pear. “Helen does.”
My hair had begun to silver years ago, in my late thirties. I’d thought long and hard before coloring it. There was something sad to me about saying good-bye to my original color by dyeing it and keeping it dyed. In opting to wear it very short, I sometimes felt I resembled a stick woman in a black skullcap.
Jake was standing outside the back door, holding a brown leather backpack. I could see him through the half pane as I approached, tapping his fingers against the leather strap, a habit of his—finger tapping, foot wiggling, knuckle cracking—that had driven me mad by the end of our marriage. But it seemed reassuring somehow. He still had the same nervous energy he’d had so many years ago.
I unlatched the bolt and drew the door open toward me.
We stared at each other.
He had aged in a good way. The way wiry men who seem unconcerned with their appearance but who have deep habitual hygiene and exercise habits age. Stealthfully. At fifty-eight, he had salt-and-pepper hair but still appeared to be in fighting trim.
“I’ve been to the house,” he said. “Why did you move her?”
I gasped. He stepped over the threshold and took the door away from my hands, shutting it firmly and bolting it.
“How?”
“You left the living room window in back unlocked. I didn’t know if you were inside or not, so I climbed onto the grill and popped the screen. Helen,” he said. He looked right at me, there in the tiny hallway. “What have you done?”
“I don’t know. You were talking about rot, and I thought, Freezer.”
“You killed someone,” he said, enunciating each word as if I couldn’t understand. He looked angry enough to strike me.
I backed into the laundry room. He had never hit me. He was not the hitting type or even one to raise his voice. He reasoned. He analyzed. At worst,