The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [91]
“Stop hitting me!” she’d shrieked. “Stop hitting me!”
And I had had to remind Mrs. Castle to keep the linen closet locked.
“I only wanted to change the tablecloth.”
Why hadn’t I told her, “You don’t understand—my mother hides in there”?
I pressed the phone to my ear. I heard voices. They were the voices of TV. In Seattle, Jeanine was watching television—a DVD, I imagined. Emily and John kept the shelves that I thought should hold books stocked with them. When I’d asked John where they kept their books, he had shrugged his shoulders. “Who has time to read?”
I listened for a while. I pictured the rooms. Judging by the nearness of the television, it had been the phone in the kitchen Jeanine had picked up. I wondered where Leo was. Emily. I knew that John would be at work, lecturing nonenvironmental types on the endless joys of plastic fabrication.
“I suffocated her on the side porch,” I whispered over the phone. There was no response. “I cut off her braid and took it home.”
Cartoon music filled the air in Seattle. A chase was on.
I hung up the phone. I thought of the line that traveled through me and reached all the way to Leo and Jeanine. How Leo almost uncannily had my eyes. How Jeanine seemed to possess a trace of my father in her jawbone. Her laugh had me in there somewhere, and when she sang, as she often did, I remembered my mother singing in the quiet house when I was a child.
I walked upstairs to my bedroom. I had told Emily when she was little that we were descended from the Melungeons of Tennessee. When she was much older, she realized I had been pulling her leg, but for a brief time I had her believing that she sprang from this strange, lost group of people cut off from the rest of the world in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. I had passed by the bathroom to find her looking for the telltale signs of bluish skin. In Sarah, she said, she saw the high forehead and cheekbones and the “almost Asian look,” but in herself she saw nothing.
Along with my father’s letters in the basement, there would be the paper Emily wrote in junior high, on which a teacher had scrawled a failing grade. I no longer remembered the woman’s name, Barber or Bartlett, something beginning with a B. I had marched into the junior high in a mock-mommy outfit I’d composed for effect—corduroy bag jumper and deranged Mary-Jane flats—and lit into Emily’s teacher with all my might. This had succeeded in gaining Emily a C and me a plea from my daughter never to do anything similar again. I still saw these moments spent in defense of my children as the finest of my life.
I heard Jake gargling on the girls’ side of the house. The faint scent of his musk-based aftershave reached me as I turned to lock the door.
I walked into my long closet. Most of the luggage was kept on the other side of the house, in the closet that had slowly gone from keeping shoes and clothes that Emily could use when she visited to a place where I could stash items I might never use again but did not feel like throwing out. But the many lopsided, ill-measured sweaters and scarves my mother had made over the years, I kept in my closet in an old duffel bag of Jake’s. It sat, an army-green lump, balanced perilously on top of two other boxes on the shelf above the clothing rack.
I stood up on a small step stool that Sarah had made in wood shop. I batted at the bag with my right hand until it came tumbling down. I did not think about what I was doing. I knew we were going to pick Sarah up at the train. I knew the police knew more than they were saying. Jake was right, there was still a sliver of a chance I would get away with it, but I had realized sometime during the morning that it did not matter whether I did or not. It was my children who would ultimately sit in judgment of me, and the two of them would know. I could never fool them, and I didn’t want to.
I unzipped the heavy gold zipper of the canvas bag and took out my mother’s sad pile of knitting.
“Why is it that everything she