The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [86]
“I’m headed up to York with my contractor. I’m meeting his mother for the first time,” Natalie said to Jake. She would not look at me. I had suddenly become the unstable one to their upright citizens. Had I killed the only person who, in comparison, made me appear sane?
Moments later I was lying curled up in the backseat of Jake’s car just as I had the night before in my own. Natalie had turned from me with no good-bye.
“Take care,” she said to Jake.
“It was nice to see you again, Natalie.”
“I guess it was,” she said. Jake started the car, and I closed my eyes. I would ride in the back the way I had as a child, with my father driving and no one in the front passenger side. I hadn’t told Natalie about my mother, and now I never would.
After the remaining parts of Lambeth were destroyed to make way for a new bypass and an outlet mall, I had written down a line for my father: “All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.” I couldn’t remember who had said it or in what context.
When Jake stopped drawing me, I thought his fascination with the way ice coated a leaf or the way crushed berries mixed with snow could make a dye was a temporary fancy. I thought he would come back to me. But then he began building things out of earth and ice, sticks and bones, and left all human flesh behind.
Emily found one of his first crude sculptures and marveled. It was made out of grass and dirt woven together, the grass of winter acting as a thatch to keep the mud from disassembling. If it were not for Emily’s delight, I would quickly have grabbed it with a covered hand and flushed it away. It looked like a particularly nuanced piece of shit to me, sitting as it did on the floor behind the toilet. But because Emily made me get down on my hands and knees first, and called it “him,” I had a chance to see.
Jake had made a small sculpture. As I stared at it, openmouthed, Emily launched, as only a small child’s body could, in one swift motion from bent knees to sitting with legs stretched out in front of her and began to bang the flat of her palms on her fleshy thighs with joy.
“Daddy!” she screamed.
“She’s afraid of the toilet, Helen,” Jake said later, after I had brought out the offending object and placed it on the small ceramic dish where he put his keys and change at the end of the day.
“And this is how you propose to cure her? By making donkeys out of shit?”
“It’s mud, and it’s supposed to be a dragon.”
If I wanted to talk to him in those days, I had to stop him between the front door of the small house we rented and the shower. He would begin to disrobe in the hallway, peeling off the layers of scarves and hats, parka and vest, and heavy wool plaid shirts so that by the time he hit the bedroom, he was dressed like a normal man about to sit down to dinner.
That day I had chased him from the front door to the bedroom with the sculpture held aloft on its ceramic dish.
“Did she like it?” he asked as we reached the bedroom.
He wore his rag-wool sweater over a turtleneck and, I knew because I watched the routine in the dark each morning, hidden layers of T-shirts and long underwear. First to come off before entering the house were always his boots, but still on his lower half were the old army pants from the surplus store and huge wool socks that looked as prickly as cacti and that necessitated liners between them and his humid, winter-tenderized feet. On his hands he wore nothing, swearing that as they acclimatized to the cold, he would ultimately become more dexterous, able to stand more hours outside and capable of finer detail work.
“Of course she liked it,” I said, not wanting to concede what was so obvious, that any child, even a fearful one, would love an animal made out of mud and found at the base of a semipristine toilet.
He turned to me. His cheeks were permanently ruddy where the wind got to them between his wool cap, which sat low over his eyebrows, and his scarf, which he knotted up above the tip of his nose. His eyes, watering a bit from the shock