The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [81]
I let her move her hand through the short bristle of my hair and down the back of my neck. I let her rub me across my bony shoulder blades. And I cried, just a little bit, unable to know whether it was because I should, given the circumstances, or because Natalie’s comfort was painful to me.
“Where’s Jake?” she asked. She pulled herself away from me and held my shoulders in her hands. I looked at her. I was happy to have tears at the corners of my eyes. Would this make me more sympathetic? Could I manage it again when necessary?
I remembered our backstory. “I don’t know. He’s supposed to pick me up. He was going to hook up with a former student who works at Tyler now.”
“So he’ll be here soon? He can go with us.”
“With us?”
“To the police station,” Natalie said.
“What?”
“Your mother was killed, Helen.”
I sat down with force.
“Didn’t the police tell you? I thought you knew.”
I tried not to wince. “By who?”
“I thought they told you, sweetie. I’m sorry. Listen, get your shoes on. They’ll tell you everything they know.”
“Do they have a suspect?”
“I don’t know. I was talking to one of them, and then another guy, in a sport jacket, cut him off.”
“Detective Broumas,” I said. My voice enunciated each syllable in a monotone. I thought of Jake and of our wedding vows: Do you promise to take this man in marriage, as long as you both shall live, in sickness and in health, in murderous extravagance?
“Shoes,” Natalie said, and pushed them toward my chair with her foot.
The door opened, and I heard Jake’s voice in the hallway.
“Is she almost ready in there?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
“We’re coming,” Natalie trilled. “Just one more minute.”
“Her husband’s here.”
“He can come in.”
“The detective is asking him a few questions.”
Natalie and I looked at each other. My shoes were on, and for all intents and purposes I was as ready as I’d ever be.
I grabbed my bag, for a moment confusedly thinking my mother’s braid was still inside. Jake had known. Without him it would still be on the bed, curled like a snake.
“Lipstick?” Natalie said.
“Kiss me,” I said. Without hesitation, she did. I rubbed my lips together, spreading out the gloss.
“Ready?”
“Let’s go.”
“It’s horrible, what’s happened,” Natalie said as we approached the door. “But Jake is here. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
I could not tell my friend it had nothing to do with the Lord but everything to do with a chain of events that my own hands had set in motion less than twenty-four hours ago. Pushing down on the towels, the blankets wrapped around her broken body, her rose-petal-pink slip wedged between the hutch and the wall, traces of the silver braid clinging to my toilet bowl. All of them, like the phone call to Avery that had alerted Jake, had come from the hands that now held my purse, now reached for the door as it swung open, now shook the meaty palm of Detective Broumas.
I saw Jake sitting on the teacher’s desk in the classroom opposite. He made a move to stand up, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.
“Your husband is answering a few simple questions for us,” Detective Broumas said. “I’d like you to do the same.”
I focused on his shoulders. Flecks of dandruff were scattered over the midnight-blue wool. His eyes, a deep hazel surrounded by long lashes, reminded me of a therapist I’d gone to five years after my father’s death. “Probe, probe, probe,” I had said to this doctor. “Is that all you ever do?”
A student, late for class, headphones blaring, walked by, turning her head like an automated camera, then passed on.
“We’re ready to leave,” Natalie said.
“Leave?”
“Yes, Detective,” she said. “I would like to accompany her to the station.”
The detective smiled. “Nothing so fancy,” he said. “We’ll just find an empty classroom and make the best of it.”
I was watching Jake. His feet dangled over the