The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [79]
“I like being able to look out over the yards at night. I feel like I’m hidden away up here in a nest.”
“Did you really go to Ohio that time?” I asked.
“I went to a hospital, Helen.”
I took this in.
“And the business trips?”
The question hung in the air. He walked up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. He leaned over and kissed the top of my head, the way he did with my mother.
“I go on business trips,” he said, “but sometimes, on my way home, I spend a night here.”
I tore myself away from him and turned around. My face felt hot.
“You leave me alone with her,” I said.
“She’s your mother, Helen.”
I stumbled over the edge of the mattress and fell down. He came toward me, but I quickly leaped to my feet and walked to the head of the bed so that we would have the blue ticking and the smelly wad of sheets between us.
“Just for a night or two at a time,” he said.
I kicked the anthology of love poems and the detective novels aside and uncovered the rest of the orangey woman. Her breasts were larger than I’d thought it possible for breasts to be. Even then they struck me as preposterous.
We both stared at her.
“She’s gross, Dad,” I said, forgetting, for the moment, my anger.
“Admittedly,” he said, “she’s a bit top-heavy.”
“She looks like a freak,” I said. Inside my head I heard the word “hospital” over and over again. What did it mean?
“She’s a beautiful woman, Helen,” he said. “Breasts are a natural part of a woman’s body.”
Without thinking about it, I crossed both arms over my chest. “Gross!” I said. “You come here and stare at gross freak women and leave me with Mom.”
“I do,” he said.
What I didn’t ask, because it was never a question in my mind, was Why?
“Can I come here with you?”
“You’re here now, sweet pea.”
“I mean, can I sleep here?”
“You know you can’t. What would we tell your mother?”
“I’ll tell her about this place,” I threatened. “I’ll tell her about the magazines. I’ll tell her about the plywood babies in that little room!”
Each sentence hit nearer the mark. He didn’t actually care much if I told on him about the mattress or the Playboy bunnies or visiting the house. It was the plywood people he cared about.
“I didn’t raise you to be cruel.”
“What hospital?” I asked.
My father looked at me, considering.
“Why don’t we go on our picnic and I’ll tell you about it.”
For the remainder of that afternoon, my father showed me the still-visible parts of the town where he’d grown up. We had a picnic of egg-salad sandwiches with cucumber, and chocolate chip cookies that he’d made himself. There was a thermos of milk for me, and he drank two Coca-Colas end to end and burped as loud as I’d ever heard anyone. He couldn’t get me to stop laughing after that. I laughed so hard I ended up coughing, like a bark, over and over again.
“Why don’t we wait for the darkness here,” he said.
It was a gift, and I did not have the heart to ask again about the hospital. Part of me was happy with the fib. It made him seem normal, even if it was just pretend. Where is your father? In Ohio, visiting friends and family. I decided that day that I would never blame my father for anything—his absence, his weakness, or his lies.
THIRTEEN
Jake and I had been married for little more than a year when I began having nightmares. They involved boxes, the empty gift boxes that occupied space on tables or were circled under the Christmas tree. But these boxes were sodden and the cardboard darkened. What was in these boxes were pieces of my mother.
Jake learned to wake me slowly. He would put his hand on my shoulder as I mumbled words that