The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [90]
I paused over the liquor cabinet and waited for the machine to tell me what day and what time the message had been left. This marked the before time, I thought, before my children knew I’d killed their grandmother.
Jake stood in the doorway of the dining room, drinking straight vodka out of a juice glass.
“That’s your second round today,” I said.
“No rules apply.”
I thought of the box in my basement, the one that held my father’s letters, which he had written to me when Jake and I had spent two months overseas right after Emily was born. Jake had been awarded a travel grant by the university, and we’d chosen the most obvious place to visit: Paris.
While he went off to museums or met with other painters, I walked around the streets with Emily in a sort of Central-American infant sling across my chest. I remembered how hot it was and how alone I felt. I learned to order a plate of cheeses and a beer in one café and go to the French-American bookstore. I walked the same fifteen blocks every day and spoke to no one, bleary with cheese and hops, the sling wearing a sore on my shoulder. The highlight, for me, was not the chance to visit the Louvre or to plumb the depths of Le Bon Marché, but the letters my father sent me describing his days, telling me about the progress of his herb garden or whether there was only one owl or two, the first having been joined by a mate in the trees between Mrs. Leverton’s house and theirs.
“That gives us two hours,” Jake said. “I’m going to shower. What are you going to tell her, Helen?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You better figure it out. Sarah’s no idiot, and this isn’t over the phone.”
“Emily,” I said.
“Call her back.”
“I can’t.”
“Do it,” Jake said, and left the room.
Once, when I was in Seattle, Emily had shown me how she took vitamins out of their original jars and placed them in beautiful porcelain containers on a handmade cherrywood lazy Susan in the middle of one of the multiple islands of their kitchen. When I was foolish enough to ask how the children could tell where their chewables were, Emily told me that color entered a child’s memory more fluidly than text, and so Jeanine knew that the jar with the eggshell-blue glaze held her chewables.
Emily had been just out in front of me her entire life. She learned to dress herself and tie her shoes before I was ready to relinquish these tasks, and she became absolutely adamant about taking responsibility for herself as soon as she could. If I tried to read her a story or pour her cereal into a bowl, she would rip Harold and the Purple Crayon or the box of cornflakes from my hands and shout—quite bossily, I always felt—“I do!”
I heard Jake above me in the girls’ bathroom. I remembered how he would leave his pants on the bathroom floor where they fell. I listened for the sound of it, for the belt buckle and pockets, heavy with change, hitting the tile floor. When I heard it, I picked up the Bat Phone and dialed Emily’s number.
It rang three times.
No one said hello, but I heard breathing on the other end.
“Jeanine?”
Nothing.
“Jeanine, it’s Grandma. Is Mommy there?”
I heard the phone being dropped on a table or on the floor and the sound of small footsteps walking away.
“Hello?” I said.
I waited for what seemed a reasonable amount of time.
“Hello?” I called again. Louder this time.
I heard the water in the pipes above my head. Jake was taking his shower. I noticed that the vodka bottle had not been put back. I thought about how four years ago I had found my mother curled up on the floor of the linen closet after I had called for her throughout the house.
“What are you doing?” I’d asked.
“Hiding,” she’d said.
I had hauled her out like an animal that had gotten stuck under the house. She had a line of heavy dust from the