The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [63]
We sat stunned and silent for a moment, watching the men clip a slip of paper to the top of each bag and place it in a cardboard box.
“It isn’t just about you anymore,” he said. “I climbed up on the grill this morning. I went in through the window.”
“I’ll tell them the truth,” I said. “That I dragged you into this.”
“And why didn’t I call them myself?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said what I had always thought. “Because you’re too good for me.”
Jake looked right at me. “That isn’t going to help. Do you understand? My fingerprints are on the window, in the basement, and on the stairwell. I didn’t call them when I should have after I first talked to you.”
I nodded my head. “I’m sorry.”
We both sat back in our seats.
“Try to breathe,” he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn’t Fuck you. I breathed.
On instinct, when we heard a siren coming down the road, we sank lower in our seats. It was an ambulance.
“Why another one?”
“Another what?” Jake said.
“Ambulance?”
“The one at your mother’s is the coroner,” he said.
We both peered over the edge of the door.
“It’s pulling into Mrs. Leverton’s driveway,” I said. I was gleeful. Elated. As if this would cancel out the sight of police cars outside my mother’s house. As if Mrs. Castle could be standing in our yard, describing how she preferred to toast the bread for sandwiches first before she cut off the crusts. How cream cheese and chives, though admittedly an acquired taste, had always been her favorite lunch.
“Is Emily’s number there?” Jake asked.
“What?”
“You said Sarah’s number was over the phone. Is Emily’s?”
“Not after Leo. Emily asked me to take it down.”
“She had a way with kids, your mother.”
“I killed her, Jake.”
“I know,” he said.
“They’ll find out, won’t they?”
“Probably. Yes.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“I wish I had died along with her.” I had not expected to say this or even feel it, but there it was. He did not respond, and I wondered suddenly if I was speaking out loud or only inside my head. I would not get to see my mother again. I would not get to brush her hair or paint her nails.
“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions,” I said. “I read that in a pamphlet while I was waiting for my mother at the doctor’s.”
I did not tell him that I thought it applied to love. I wanted to touch him, but I worried he might pull back.
“Eventually she got better at leaving the house. I could get her to her doctors’ appointments by using a bath towel. It took her forty years, but she graduated from blankets to bath towels,” I said.
Jake was thinking, and I was staring straight ahead at the low cement retaining wall that bordered the parking lot.
It always took me a moment to recognize him without his dog. He had lost the last of five King Charles spaniels two years before and decided he was too old to risk another one. “Dogs don’t understand us leaving them,” he’d once said when we’d met on the sidewalk outside my mother’s house.
“There’s Mr. Forrest,” I said. I indicated the dapper old man standing on the hill over the retaining wall.
“Yes, her only friend,” Jake said.
In the distance, I could see Mrs. Leverton being loaded into the ambulance. A paramedic was holding up a drip of some sort, and I could see Mrs. Leverton’s head above the sheet. Almost simultaneously, a smoky gray Mercedes pulled up, and her rich son got out. Mr. Forrest watched it all from the hill in front of me. He was wearing stiff corduroy pants with a crease and a gray flannel suit jacket, under which appeared to be a conglomeration of sweaters and turtlenecks to keep him warm in the unpredictable fall air. A cashmere muffler, because he believed deeply in cashmere, was tied tightly around his neck. He was at least seventy-five, I knew. He had stopped coming by to see my mother shortly after my father’s suicide.
“I think we should leave,” Jake said.
I was staring at Mr. Forrest. As if he knew, he turned his head in our direction. His glasses