The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [65]
When Jake walked back toward me, his face was ashen.
“We will get in the car,” he said. “We will not speak. I am taking you to Westmore. When you are contacted, you’ll act surprised. Don’t act devastated. By the time the police get to you, they’ll know you wouldn’t be. Go numb or something.”
“But I would be devastated,” I said. “I am devastated.”
“Get in the car.”
I walked around and got in on the passenger’s side. Jake turned on the ignition and carefully backed up in the gravel until we met the road again.
“I’ll handle the girls. I don’t know what I’m going to say to them. After I drop you off, I’m going to call Avery and arrange a lunch later in the week. That way I’ll be able to bolster the idea that I also came out for professional reasons.”
“Jake—” I started.
“Helen, I don’t want to hear anything right now. I don’t blame you for what you did. What I want is to be able to limit the damage. I have my own life. Manny is your story. I won’t bring him up, and I don’t know about him. What happens, happens as far as any of that, but I’m not willing to cast blame.”
We drove on and made our way to Phoenixville Pike. We passed by Natalie’s house. Hamish’s car was in the drive. By the time we passed the girls’ old high school, I was pissed.
“So you want us to get away with it, but you don’t want to think of real ways for that to happen,” I said.
“You killed her, Helen, not me. There isn’t an us involved in this.”
“She was my mother!”
“There’s your us—the two of you, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”
We crossed 401 and drove by Haym Salomon Cemetery, which stretched along the road for a quarter of a mile. It had turned into a perfect fall day. The air was crisp but cool, and the sun glinted in and out behind a light veil of clouds.
“When you started working outside with ice and leaves, I thought it was because of me.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You stopped drawing me. It killed me. It was like you’d slammed a door in my face and didn’t think twice about it.”
“My work took me different places, Helen, that’s all. Drawing was always just a way into other things.”
“I don’t understand how you go from drawing nudes to building ice huts and shit dragons.”
“For the millionth time, it was dirt, not shit, and Emily loved it.”
“Perfect little Emily,” I said. The moment I said it, I wished I could take it back.
To our right a partial barn was collapsing in the middle of a graded field. I wanted to run toward it and disappear as all of us eventually would, as my father and now mother had, sinking into the region’s unsung history.
“I’m sorry, Jake,” I said, desperate. “I didn’t mean it. I take it back. I love you.”
“Do you know what you put her through? How you clung to her? She told me you used to crawl into bed with her at night and cry.”
I saw myself. I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Emily was only seven when we separated. Emily was all I had. She was a warm body I needed to hold.
“You left us,” I said, trying futilely to defend myself.
“We left each other, Helen. Remember, we left each other.”
“And you left the girls,” I said. “I may not have been perfect, but I didn’t take off to become some sort of art-circuit fuck god. Meanwhile Emily seems to have granted you a lifetime-achievement award.”
“I never wanted it,” he said.
“What?”
The car slowed, but Jake did not look at me.
“The divorce. I never wanted the divorce,” Jake said. “I gave it to you, but I never wanted it. Your father knew that.”
He looked down at the steering wheel between his hands. Something had collapsed inside him. I could see it in his shoulder blades. I reached over and placed my hand in the middle of his back. I thought about touching him, about how he had liked to rest his head on my chest and talk to me about what he wanted to shape and build and make. I took my hand away. We had been going in circles. I needed to focus.
“Okay,” I said. “What did we do this morning? Why wasn’t I at the house for the last hour or so? We need to agree on all of this now.”
“That’s