The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [59]
“Yes, it was Sarah’s idea. The phone downstairs is inside the liquor cabinet, under a pillow. Sarah calls it the Bat Phone.” I had never had to stand in my own house, half nude, and explain myself before. Certainly not since I’d begun to do things like hide my phone. “And there’s a slogan on it about opportunity, which you can feel free to ignore.”
“You know I’m here to help you, right?”
“I do.”
The moment he was out the door, I felt relief. I liked hiding in my own darkness. I liked it to the point that I’d neglected to realize it was what I’d been doing more and more. Crouching with my mother in her house and ignoring the raucous, wild, demanding world. Even Natalie and I now saw each other mostly at Westmore. We would drive to the nearby Burger King in the afternoons and drink the brown-colored water they called coffee, groaning as we got out of the car.
I walked to the phone and dialed her house, not thinking what I’d do if she picked up. But it was Hamish.
“Hello?”
I found myself unable to speak.
“Hello?”
I hung up. I wanted to drive out to Limerick in my car and fuck him again.
A moment later, the phone rang.
“It’s called ‘star sixty-nine,’ ” he said. “Who is this?”
“Helen.”
He paused and then echoed my name back to me.
“Good morning, Hamish,” I said.
“When can I see you again?” he asked.
To think, even if for the wrong reasons, the feeling was mutual made me smile as if I were half, as opposed to closer to twice, his age. I tucked my chin down but saw my painted toes and quickly looked up. Reminders were crowding in on me.
“Maybe tonight,” I said.
“I’ll count on it,” he said brightly.
“I can’t promise. I have a lot to get done, but maybe.”
“I’ll be home,” he said, and hung up.
When Jake started leaving the studio we’d fashioned behind a drape in the living room and going out into the cold, I didn’t question it. At first he went alone for an afternoon and hurried home in the pale-blue Bug, the car shaking up to the outside of our temporary-faculty-housing Quonset hut and sputtering to a sudden stop. We were not too far from town, and I could walk if I needed to run chores. Besides, I had Emily and then Sarah to attend to. He would return half frozen and amped up, talking about ice on leaves and the way an underground stream meandered at the base of a tree.
“And berries. These dark-red berries. If you crush them, they make this sort of thick viscous dye!”
Now I put down the phone and turned to where my mother’s braid throbbed on the bed. Even I knew it was too damning to keep. I took my orange-handled shearing scissors from the pencil cup on the dresser and walked over to the bed.
In the bathroom, I leaned over the toilet, squatting down so no hair would fly away. I began to slowly slice the braid into bits small enough to flush.
For her colon surgery, they had had to shave what hair was left from her pubic area. Tucking her in at night, I’d think how we had come full circle. “It’s like handling a giant baby,” I said to Natalie. “When she’s too tired to fight, she just collapses onto me, as if we hadn’t been battling each other for half a century.”
Natalie listened to me and asked questions. Her parents were younger than mine by a decade and had moved into an assisted-living community on the edge of a perpetually flooded golf course. Her mother had stopped drinking and become the leader of the community’s pep step class. What will I tell Natalie? I wondered.
At the thought of this, I nicked my finger with the scissors. Blood and hair floated on the surface of the water. When I was done with the braid, I stood and flushed the toilet, waiting for it to resettle and then flushing it again. I made a mental note to squirt in some Soft Scrub later to clean under the rim.
I remembered taking my mother to the doctor. The blankets, the towels, the constant cajoling, and how once she arrived and removed her wrappings, no one knew she was anything but just a little fearful and strange. She might moan and scratch, but when we hit the entrance door, she performed.
I