The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [78]
In the middle of the largest room, where two adults stood with their arms gesticulating in the air, was a rocking horse like the one he had once made me and those he made and painted each year for the Greek Orthodox Children’s Fair. This one was plain, save for the pencil work that would mark out the separations between colors.
“Why didn’t you paint it?” I asked.
“I thought about it,” he said, “but I wanted it to feel at home here. Go ahead and ride it if you want.”
“I’m too big, Dad,” I said.
His eyes saddened behind his heavy glasses.
“Not in this house,” he said. “In this house, you’re ageless.”
I looked at my father and felt a pain right in the center of my chest, as if all the air in the room would not be enough, could not fill me up.
He smiled at me. I did not want to disappoint him, so I smiled back.
“I’ll show you,” he said.
He took off his glasses, folded the stems carefully, and handed them to me, his thumb and forefinger on either side of the nose bridge. I took them in both hands on the outside of the frames. His world without them, I knew, was merely fuzzy shapes and colors.
Carefully, he got on the rocking horse.
“I have to admit,” he said, “I haven’t tried this before. I don’t know how much weight it will support.”
He sat on the flat back section of the horse and kept his feet on the floor instead of curling them up to the dowel that stuck out on either side. I was grateful that I held his glasses. If I winced, it might look like a smile.
He rocked the horse back and forth gently, keeping his weight, I saw, mostly in his legs. “Hilda says I put so many screws in them that these horses would hold a horse!” He laughed at Mrs. Castle’s joke.
The plywood curve mashing against the wooden floors didn’t sound right to me. It went against everything my mother had taught me about putting furniture on rugs and coasters under cups.
“I’m going to go farther up,” I said.
My father stopped rocking the horse.
“No, sweetie,” he said. “This is it.”
“But there’re more stairs,” I said.
“That’s just a cramped attic space. No people there.”
He stood but still straddled the rocking horse, and I knew he had another secret.
“I’m going up!” I said gleefully, and turned and ran, his glasses still in my hand.
I could hear my father stumbling as I put my hand on the newel post and gained the bottom stair.
“Honey, don’t!” he called out.
At the top of the stairs, there was a closed four-panel door. I put my hand on the cold porcelain knob.
“You won’t like what you find in there.”
“Oh, well,” I said over my shoulder. “Such is life.” It was an expression Mr. Forrest often used when talking to my mother in the living room. She would complain, and he would say, “Such is life,” and steer her back to a discussion of Trollope, whom they read in tandem, or of Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon, a first edition of which Mr. Forrest had given my mother as a gift.
I turned the doorknob and stepped into the room.
It was much smaller than the floor below, and there were windows only at the back, which looked out over the sunken yards of Lambeth. Unlike that of the first and second floor, the view from the third floor still cleared the trees. In the distance I could see the menacing inward curve of the Delaware.
My father stood in the doorway now. He had taken the stairs slowly, giving me time to see what there was to see. His eyes without his glasses looked lost.
“Here,” I said. He fumbled for them and put them on.
“The front is a storage space. You get there by crawling into that small doorway.”
But I was looking at the mattress, covered in blue ticking with balled-up blankets and a pillow, that sat in the middle of the floor. I thought of all the days he spent away from us.
“Sometimes I sleep here,” he said.
I shifted my feet so that all my father would see from where