The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [67]
Westmore students wore the off-price version of the clothes that were worn in New York a decade ago. On the few occasions I’d brought Sarah with me to the campus, her presence had caused a stir. I had always been proud that my daughters lived in other states and chose to make their lives away from home even if, very often, I wished I could drive down the street and sit in their houses. But I would never do that to either one of them. One saving grace in my own life was that my mother was never capable of a pop-in.
I walked up the wheelchair-accessible ramp and passed through the heated momentary hush of the double doors, and there was Natalie, among the sea of students thirty years’ our junior. She was sitting at a round booth by herself, over near a wall of windows that looked out on the swampy undeveloped land. From the student union, the old oak tree wasn’t visible, only the reedy grass that soon, after the next frost, would turn color and, as winter came on, make an ushering sound as the dried-out stalks beat against one another in the wind.
She was looking out into the distance, perhaps out over the highway, where the large traffic signs were nothing but small green flecks and the cars were impossible to see.
I would not tell her, I realized. How would I phrase it? I had said the words so far only once. “I killed my mother.” I wondered at this new lexicon I had entered. I killed my mother. I fucked your son.
I walked over to her, barely aware of the students bearing food on trays as I passed.
“Natalie.”
And there were her eyes, Natalie’s light-brown eyes, which I had looked into since childhood.
She was dressed in one of her faux Diane von Furstenberg dresses that Diane von Furstenberg would never have put her name on. The material consisted of an inscrutable pattern that seemed to adorn many women’s bodies at middle age—a sort of dazzle camouflage designed to keep the eye from being able to focus on the actual shape inside. The wraparound dress was in a style we’d agreed was perfect for disrobing but that I had abandoned. At some point, seeing those dresses hanging in my closet had begun to depress me—their light cloth and indistinguishable patterns made me think of endless suits of wasted flesh.
“Hi,” she said. “You can finish this. I’m stuffed.”
I sat down opposite her, and she pushed the pale orange-flecked cafeteria tray over to me. On it was half a cheese danish and a yogurt left untouched. We had always been like this. She ordered too much, and I ate what was left.
“Where were you yesterday?” she asked. “I called your number half a dozen times. I even called the Bat Phone twice.”
“At my mother’s,” I said.
“I had a feeling. How is she?”
“Can we not talk about it?”
“Coffee?”
I smiled at her.
Natalie stood with her cup. The cafeteria cops never stopped us when we walked backward through the line and got a refill. We were tacitly granted the same privileges as the teachers.
I wolfed down the half-eaten danish and peeled back the foil on the top of the yogurt. By the time Natalie returned, I was halfway done with my secondhand meal. The coffee—hot, watery, weak—obliterated what was left of my appetite.
“What’s with you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You seem sort of nerved-out somehow. Is it Clair?”
I thought of deflecting mechanisms. I could have commented that not everyone ends the night with half a bottle of wine and a sleeping pill or that not everyone was secretly fucking a construction worker from Downingtown . . . but I didn’t. I would tell as much of the truth as I could.
“Jake showed up,” I said.
It was as if she’d heard a gun go off. She slapped both her hands down on the table and leaned in toward me.
“What?”
“You know how I told