The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [88]
“Do you want one?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll have plenty of time to pick up the habit in Graterford or the women’s equivalent.”
“Christ.” He took a long drag off the cigarette, almost as if it were a joint, and let it stream through his nostrils instead of his mouth. “I think they know, Helen. We need to figure out what to say.”
“Will you marry Phin?” I asked.
“Helen, we’re talking about our future incarceration.”
“Mine.”
“The window, my apparent collusion. Hello?”
“You’ll tell them why if you have to,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”
“No.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “I’m the one who killed her. You just broke in to make sure I was okay.”
“They asked me about your mental state,” he said, absentmindedly looking at the cigarette as if someone else had put it in his hand.
“And you said?”
“That you were fearlessly sane.”
He moved closer to me and put his arm around me. He drew me over to him so I stood snugly against the side of his body, my shoulder fitting into his armpit as it always had.
“You are,” he said.
“What?”
“Incredible. Always have been.”
In front of us, between two disused grills, stood one small sapling that the township had recently planted. I remembered reading about a fight, pro and con—beautifying through trees versus more money for the schools. A wire support surrounded the sapling’s trunk, and I wondered if anyone would remember to cut it off before the tree slowly strangled.
“Poor fucker,” Jake said.
“Me or the tree?”
“Your father, actually. Did you think you were marrying him when you married me?”
“I wanted your attention.”
“You had it,” he said.
“For a little while.”
“That was my work. It had nothing to do with you.”
He leaned his head down, and our lips met. We kissed in a way that lifted me, however briefly, out of the world where discipline and temper, grit and resolve, carried me through my weeks and years. Afterward he looked at me for a long time.
“I’ll have to tell them what I know.”
“I think you should,” I said.
“What about the girls?”
“I’ll tell Sarah,” I said. “And Emily.”
“Emily won’t understand, you know.”
“Do you think it matters that she was so old?”
“To Emily?”
“To the police.”
“There’s no special dispensation I’m aware of. I’m sure it depends on how a lawyer frames it.”
“I don’t even know any lawyers.”
“Let’s try not to think about it, okay?”
“I should have stayed in therapy,” I said.
“Why didn’t you?”
“His shelves were full of I. B. Singer, and the statues on his tables were that lost-wax Holocaust style. Lots of dismembered trunks of tortured people wrapped in barbed wire and mounted on poles. I would be talking about my mother, only to look up and see a legless, armless torso reaching out for me.”
Jake laughed. The two of us moved toward the sapling and sat down in the scrubby grass surrounding it. He lit another cigarette.
“Plus, he loved wordplay. I told him about my father’s town, the drowning of it, and he just looked at me, bugged out his eyes like he was a cat with a mouse, and said, ‘Swoosh!’ ”
“Swoosh?” Jake said.
“Exactly. What was I supposed to do with that? He cost me thousands of dollars and did nothing but put me off Philip Roth.”
“There are other therapists.”
I started to pull up the grass beneath me, as I’d once told Sarah she should never do.
“I saw someone for a while,” Jake said. “Here’s a hint: she wore Pippi Longstocking tights.”
“Frances Ryan? You went to Frances Ryan?” I stared at him in disbelief.
“She helped me after you left.”
Frances Ryan had been a graduate student at U–Mad when we were there. Everyone knew her by her trademark hose.
“Does she still wear them?”
“It’s been ten years, at least, since I saw her. I don’t think those hose work over forty.”
“I don’t think they ever worked.”
“Better than martyred torsos,” Jake said, passing his cigarette to me.
Other than murder and seduction, I’d limited my vices to such an extent recently that from just one inhale, I felt an immediate rush. I had worked in therapy on my issues of control, until one weekend I was in the grocery, thumping melons. I held