The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [62]
“Just think of what it must have been like for her,” he said.
“Who?”
“Your mother. I mean, why would she even want to leave the house when outside there was . . . this?”
“I know this is going to make you laugh,” I said, “but I’ve sort of grown fond of it over the years.”
“Of this?”
An old bridge that bisected two parts of the town loomed up. Underneath was strewn a circle of trash. The barrel that had formerly held it was blackened from fire.
“Admittedly,” I said, “it has seen better days, but it still has a downtown. They’ve even tried to revitalize it.”
“Come meet Helen, your hostess from the Bureau of Touristry and Death.”
“That’s the Phoenixville spirit,” I said.
We pulled up behind a car at a stoplight, but when the light went from red to green, the car didn’t move.
“There’s no one in it,” Jake said.
I looked, and sure enough, without even having drifted over to the side of the road, the car had been left there, abandoned.
“That creeps me out,” I said. “What should I do?”
“Pull around it,” Jake said. “That’s somebody else’s mess to deal with.”
We did.
“East Germany felt cheerier than this.”
“Watch it,” I said. It was as it had been back in childhood. I could call my mother names, but no other child could. I still worried for the declining businesses of the town, and I often frequented Old Joe’s son for my haircuts.
“Sorry. I know it gets prettier where your mother’s house is.”
This was a concession for Jake, and I knew it. As newlyweds, making the long drive out from Madison with Emily, Jake had expected to see the sort of stately homes that came from his greatest exposure to the East, which was actually the South. He had seen Gone With the Wind on television and fallen in love with Vivien Leigh.
Besides the cluster of mansions that were built by the owners of the ironworks on the north side of town, Phoenixville was full of old brick tenements and leaning clapboard houses. Most of the supposed revitalization consisted of looming big-box stores on the former site of the steelworks or the old silk-and-button factories.
I took the neighborhood shortcut behind the railroad tracks, which led through the parking lot of the Orthodox church and onto Mulberry Lane.
“Wait,” Jake said, leaning forward in his seat. “What’s that?”
Then I saw them. The block was swamped with police cars and an ambulance.
“Hang back.”
Accidentally, I pressed the gas with my foot still on the brake.
“Helen,” he said, “do what I say.”
It took all my energy to nod my head.
“Slowly, I want you to pull into one of the parking spaces.”
The church parking lot was all but deserted on a Friday morning. I did as Jake told me to. When I was in the spot, Jake reached over and turned the ignition off.
“Fuck,” I said. “Oh, fuck.”
“Let’s just sit here a minute.”
“Sarah’s number is under mine. What if they call her?”
“They disconnected her phone last week,” Jake said. “She only has her cell.”
Sarah had not told me this. I risked a look past Jake and through the passenger-side window. I could see Mrs. Castle standing on the front walkway, talking to a policeman. For a moment, I thought she looked over at the parking lot.
“We have to get out of here,” I said.
“No, we don’t,” Jake said. “We need to figure out what we’ll do next.”
I thought of waking up as a child in the middle of the night. Sometimes my father would be sitting in the chair at the end of my bed, watching me in the dark. “Go back to sleep, honey,” he’d say. And I would. I thought of Sarah. I knew that after a few bright spots early on, her life in New York had flatlined. I’d sworn that the last few times she’d visited, coins had gone missing from my change dish.
“I can’t, Jake,” I said. “I just have to tell them.”
I saw two policemen come out the front door. They had white plastic bags tied over their shoes.
“What are they holding?” I asked.
“Paper bags.”
“Paper bags?”
The two of us watched as they brought the bags over to where Mrs. Castle stood, clutching them in their hands.
“Did she make them lunch?”
“Helen,” Jake said, his voice suddenly drained,