The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [89]
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We pick Sarah up. We put one foot in front of the other. I think that’s all we can do until they contact us.”
“Or show up.”
Behind us, we heard a car pull in. Both of us turned around. It was a panel truck with sheets of mirrored glass strapped to either side. The man inside shut off the engine but kept the radio on. It was a talk station. Rancor poured forth from his open windows.
“Lunchtime,” Jake said.
I watched Jake smoke until he had finished the cigarette. He had always, I thought, looked silly with a cigarette, somehow too feminine, as if he were declaiming from a divan.
“So will you marry Phin?”
Jake took a moment to consider.
“Probably not,” he said.
“Why?”
“She’s efficient.”
“Meaning?”
“She’s very good at organizing dinner parties and trips.”
“And feeding dogs?”
“I transferred my affections to them a long time ago.”
“Milo and Grace?”
“Animals in general.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It’s where I ended up.” He smiled. “Besides, I’m too attracted to struggle. You know that.”
“Poor fucker,” I said.
He looked toward me. His eyes were as I had never seen them, as if they’d been crushed somehow, flattened by my existence in the world. “I loved you, Helen.”
What I had done, not just to my mother but to everyone, seemed suddenly bottomless.
It was out before I could stop it. A loud, broken caw close to the sound of retching, and then out of nowhere I was flooded with tears. My sinuses let go, and saliva and phlegm flooded my mouth and nose. There was nowhere to hide, and so I put my head into my hands and leaned to the side to bury my face in the ground.
“It’s okay, Helen,” Jake said. “It’s okay.”
I could feel him kneeling over me, his hand lightly touching my back and then my shoulder. I did everything I could not to respond to his grip. I felt like I could barely breathe, but I took huge drafts of air. I was crying and coughing and grinding my fist into the dirt.
“Helen, please.”
He took hold of my wrist, and I stared at him.
“I ruined everything!” I said. “Everything!”
The man in the panel truck had turned up his radio. Calls for the ban of illegal immigrants issued forth.
“You have to control yourself,” Jake said. “For the girls’ sake, for mine. Who knows, nothing might happen.”
Nothing seemed worse to me somehow. That there would be so little evidence of the loss of my own life to my mother that I could even get away with killing her. I was, at the end of the day, that insignificant. Was it this that chastened me? Or that when I sat up and Jake daubed at my face with his shirt, I saw that the man in the truck had pulled his vehicle to the side and across three parking spaces, in order, I imagined, not to have to look at us while he ate his lunch. I noticed this, and then I saw the woman in the mirrored glass held fast to his truck. It was me. I was sitting on the ground in a desolate park in Pennsylvania. A man I had once been married to, had had children with, was trying to pull me toward him. I saw the sapling and the broken grills and the edge of the highway behind me.
FOURTEEN
Jake went immediately for the vodka, and when he lifted the pillow from the bar, I saw that the Bat Phone was blinking madly with messages.
“Should I play this?”
“Yes.”
Following the messages from Natalie that she had left the day before was one from Emily, who said she had also left a message on my other phone.
“But this one seems more appropriate somehow,” she continued. “Remember, you are entering a new and exciting period of your life. I’ll try later tonight after I’ve put the kids to bed.”
“I always hear half of what she says as ‘blah, blah, blah,’” I said.
Jake walked into the kitchen in order to retrieve his glass.
Sarah came next. Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor.
“Mom? Fuck, leave me alone, asshole. Sorry, Mom, some jerk likes fat asses, apparently. Listen, your other phone is