The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [61]
“If we’re doing this,” I said, “I’d like to go back to the house and clean up.”
“You’re worried about housekeeping?”
“I want to see her again,” I said. I winced at his expression of disbelief. It wasn’t as if he were suggesting anything.
“Get your coat. I have a rental car, but you should probably drive.”
Just as we were dressed and ready, Jake caught my hand and squeezed.
Outside on the concrete path leading to the driveway, I pictured driving Jake’s car just beyond Hamish’s house and having him meet me. It was a red Chrysler convertible and very low-tech, but without youth on my side and after perhaps being accused of murder, I could use it to distract him. A bauble.
I drove out the entrance of the subdivision. For a while Jake and I were silent. But when I hit Pickering Pike and started heading toward Phoenixville, I saw Jake begin to take notice of the area.
“God,” he said, “it’s like nothing has changed here. It feels frozen in time.”
I was reviewing my mother’s kitchen in my mind. The scattered plastic containers and the scissors on the floor might, I thought, be seen as elements in a failed robbery.
We drove by the VFW next to the lumberyard. “Wait until you see Natalie’s house,” I said. “She has three en suite bathrooms!”
“What will you tell her?”
“I’d like to be able to tell Natalie the truth,” I said.
“You know you can’t, Helen.”
I didn’t respond. I thought suddenly of the Edgar Allan Poe story in which someone was buried inside a wall, alive.
“I’m the only one, Helen. Me. No one else.”
“Natalie knows how I felt about my mother.”
“Maybe so, but this is different. You’ve gone beyond where most people go. This isn’t something you share.”
“Most people are idiots,” I said.
We passed the old tire factory. When Sarah was four, she’d been certain Jake lived there.
“When you talk like that, it’s hard to be in the car with you.”
“Why?”
“Because it reminds me of how you could be all the time. Even when things were good, you turned bleak. You hated everything.”
“Obviously it’s my time to drive around in cars with men who feel the need to tell me the truth about myself,” I said.
But he didn’t ask whom I was referring to. Miles ticked by on the Playskool speedometer that had been made to look like a race car’s controls. We passed Natalie’s house. I chose not to point it out.
“The old bridge is still here,” Jake said, his tone offering an olive branch. “I remember that when your father took us out for drives, it was always this spot that marked a change in him. He used to get all cheery, sort of. Remember? Like he was rousing the troops so that we would all hit the house united to have a good time. I didn’t understand it at first.”
“And then you did?”
“Last night, when I climbed in through that window, it all came back to me. That place was a prison.”
“And you married an inmate,” I said.
I clenched the steering wheel. I did not particularly like being in the car with Jake. Too much history, like too much truth, could prove a painful thing.
“How is Emily?” I asked.
“She’s good,” Jake said, smiling. “She’s having no trouble adjusting to being thirty.”
“She was thirty . . .” I said, and then Jake joined me, “. . . from the day she was born!”
We laughed in the tinny rent-a-car together.
“And John?”
“Well, I haven’t exactly ever warmed to him, but he’s good. He’s responsible.”
“I think he hates me,” I said.
Jake cleared his throat.
“That would be a yes?”
“In general he disapproves of all of us. Sarah too.”
“Poor Sarah.”
“They divided us, Helen,” he said. “Sarah chose you. You know that, don’t you?”
I looked away from him.
“Shit!” Jake said. We had just hit the outskirts of Phoenixville.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“I had forgotten. I had completely forgotten.”
“Not all of us grew up in the great Northwest, with a rock edifice for a dad and an undulating waterfall for a mother,” I said. “Some of us pushed up through