The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [64]
“Did you hear me?” said Jake. “I want you to back out and leave the way we came. The shortcut.”
It was among the subtlest things I’d ever seen, Mr. Forrest’s nod of his head in my direction.
“Okay,” I said. I turned the key in the ignition. After carefully backing out, I drove away.
I did not tell Jake about Mr. Forrest. I was beginning to feel a certain inevitability building, but at the same time I didn’t want to peer too far into the distance.
“You’ll go to Westmore,” Jake said, “and I’ll call Sarah.”
“And tell her what?”
“Nothing, Helen. I don’t know!” he said.
I drove along the railroad tracks on the access road all the way out of town. It was as if we were fugitives. I hated it. Absolutely hated that even my mother’s corpse could still exact such control. Seeing a bank of gravel just ahead, I drove into it. The wheels spun beneath us and then stopped.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I put my head against the steering wheel. Numb.
“I should go back.”
“The hell you will.”
“What?” I said. I had never seen Jake so angry. “I’ll go back. I’ll tell them what I did. You’ll be free and clear.”
Tears rolled down my face, and I turned to get out. He leaned over me and held the door shut.
“It isn’t always just about you and your mother.”
“I know,” I blubbered.
“And it would be nice for our daughters not to find out that their mother killed their grandmother, and then their father popped through the window like some demented jack-in-the-box!”
A train rounded the bend. The engineer honked loudly, seeing our car so close to the tracks, and then the car shook and shuddered as the train barreled past. I screamed. I screamed the whole time it took to pass us.
When it was quiet again, I stared miserably at the empty tracks. My eyes felt the size of pinpricks.
“I’ll drive,” Jake said.
I was wobbly when I stood, and Jake made it around to the driver’s side before I could take a step.
He placed his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry if that was too much,” he said. “I’m thinking about the girls, understand?”
I nodded my head. But it didn’t sound entirely right to me. It was not so much the girls as it was his entire life. His dogs. His career. Someone he had called “babe” on the phone.
“Your mother ruined so much,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we need to be functional. You’re not in your mother’s house anymore. You’re out in the world.”
I nodded again.
He hugged me to him, and I let myself hang limp in his arms. I thought of the warble of Sarah’s voice on the CD she’d made me. Of the dreams she somehow kept alive in a way I couldn’t imagine doing. She would come with me over to my mother’s house and describe Manhattan as if it were so much glittering cake. Meanwhile her phone had been disconnected and she routinely took back as much food from my house as she could fit among the vintage clothes in her duffel bag.
“Manny,” I mumbled into Jake’s shoulder.
He loosened our embrace. “What?”
“Manny.”
“Who is Manny?”
I went cold somewhere inside myself. My heart slipped in my chest like a chip of ice.
“He used to run errands for my mother or fix little things around the house. Things Mrs. Castle and I weren’t up to.”
“So?”
“About six months ago, I found a used condom in my old room.”
“I don’t understand,” Jake said.
“And my mother’s jewelry box had been broken into.”
“He had sex in your old room? With who?”
“I don’t know. We got the locks changed. Mrs. Castle knows about it and so does the congregation of the church. I never reported the jewelry missing.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Jake asked.
I looked at him but didn’t know what to say—what would be good enough.
“Oh, God.” He turned and walked away from me.
I stood by the car. I had not thought of Manny in any real way since the night before. I remembered placing my hand over the weeping Buddha but could not