"Don't do that," I said.
"How?"
"He shot himself."
"And you blamed her for that?"
"At first."
"And later?"
"She was my mother, Sarah. She was ill. You know that."
"I don't know anything," she said. "You said something about police."
"The thing is," I said, "Mrs. Castle found her, and she was, well..."
"Yes."
"I washed her."
Sarah's face distorted, her lip curling as if she might soon be sick.
"Before or after?"
"After."
"Oh, Jesus," she said. She walked away from me but this time across the potted road and into the edge of the woods on the other side.
"Ticks," I said.
She walked quickly back. "You killed Grandma, and you're worried about Lyme disease?"
"She had soiled herself. I knew she wouldn't want anyone to see her like that."
She stared at me. It took me a moment, and then I realized.
"Not afterward," I clarified. "She soiled herself that afternoon.
I was trying to figure out how to clean her before I called hospice. That's why I had the towels."
"I want to see Dad."
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"I wanted to tell you myself. I thought it was important."
"You've told me." She threw the beer can down, smashed it flat with her foot, and then tucked it inside her coat pocket. "Now let's get out of here."
She turned too sharply and a second later was down on the ground. I saw her lying there. I thought of my mother. I thought of tiny Leo bouncing off the back of the chair.
"Honey," I said, stooping over her.
"It's my fucking ankle."
"Is it broken?"
"No," she said. "That is, unless you're in the mood for more."
"Sarah?"
"It's a joke," she said flatly. "Get it? Ha-ha."
"You can lean on me until we get to the car," I said.
"I sort of don't want you touching me right now."
I helped her to stand regardless, but within three or four hops, I knew we should sit.
"Can you make it to that log? We'll rest awhile first."
It would be dark soon, and the animals, who had slept all day in the woods behind us, would come alive. I had always preferred the fall. In providing shorter days, it was more merciful than spring or summer.
The two of us sat on a long fallen tree that looked as if it had once blocked access to the road but had been shunted to the side.
Part of me wanted to keep walking, to see who or what lived at the end of Forche Lane.
We were quiet. Sarah took out her stowed beer and popped the tab. While she sipped, I looked at the ground between my feet.
"Emily doesn't know yet," I said. "Your father told her that Grandma was dead but not how. I went to Natalie's house afterward, but she wasn't there. She's dating someone pretty seriously.
Hamish thinks they'll get married. He was home. I needed
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someone, Sarah, and so I made love to him. I'm not proud of any of these things."
I could hear her breathing beside me. Imagined what my life would be like if she chose never to speak to me again. Thought of the pain I had once put my own mother through.
"But I'm not ashamed either. I don't know how to explain it.
I knew that she was at the end, and when I realized that, it just seemed a very natural thing to do. Her eyes opened, but it wasn't her; it was her amphibian brain—pure survival instinct. I know it was wrong, but I'm not sorry."
"Do the cops know?"
"I think so."
"I'll stay here if you want me to," Sarah said.
"What?" I looked over at her. She too was keeping her eyes trained on the ground.
"Things aren't working out for me in New York."
"But your singing," I said.
"I'm broke. I could help out and be here for you. The cops and stuff."
In a day or two, I would slip out of the house, put the duffel bag in my car, and back out of the driveway, claiming I would soon return.
I had a flash of myself walking down the streets of some foreign city. Children frayed by poverty were begging me for money by holding out old plastic bags. Slapping against my emaciated body underneath voluminous clothes would be bags too, bags of all kinds, holding my fluids, giving and receiving, an in/out system of effluvia, shit and urine, saline and blood, and illegal remedies—the ground bones of animals, the pits of stone fruits mixed with liquids in someone's mortar and pestle, and broths that I would drink that would never slake my thirst.
"I think we shouldn't make any decisions just yet," I said.
"We'll see how the next few days play out."
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I stood and offered her my hand. She took it and wobbled up.
"Better?" I asked.
"Good enough."
As we walked slowly up the incline and back to the car, I felt as if we were being watched from behind. As if Mrs. Leverton and a thousand ghosts were standing in the woods, advancing as we left, wanting to get a look at the woman who had killed her mother in the same way you would turn the light off in an empty room.
"I never really knew Grandpa," Sarah said as we came within sight of the car.
"I hate the phrase 'You never get over it,' but that's a hard one.
It stays."
"And Grandma?"
"She lost her connection to the world," I said. "And I replaced it."
"No, I mean, did you love her?"
We stopped for a moment before crossing the road.
"That's a hard one too," I said.
"If you had to answer it," Sarah said. "If you were asked in a court of law."
I don't know, I thought. "I will say yes," I said aloud.
I led her to the car and opened the passenger-side door. I heard a musical gurgling sound.
"That's me," she said, retrieving her phone from the pocket of her coat.
"Your grandmother thought the cell phone I gave her was a grenade."
"I know."
I went around to my side of the car and got in.
"It's from Dad," she said, after getting into the passenger side.
"A text message."
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She held up the phone so I could see the screen. I ignored her face and focused instead on Jake's words.
"Helen—search warrant," it said.
I imagined Jake standing in the downstairs bathroom, unable to speak for fear he might be heard.
Sarah slipped the phone back in her pocket. "We should go home."
"Do you think you could drive?"
"Not with my ankle."
"Right."
I started the car and did a U-turn, taking us back in the direction of the Ironsmith. I can drop Sarah there was my first thought.
I would tell her what? That I wanted to face the police alone?
She would never buy that. I knew her well enough to know she would not let me out of her sight, not for one moment. For reasons that I feared could only spell her doom—because I was her mother and because I needed her—she would stick to me like glue.
Natalie was in York. This meant Hamish would be alone.
Jake had told me he had friends in Switzerland in a town called Aurigeno. He had gone to the trouble of spelling it out. But I no longer had a passport. It had expired years ago.
"You're taking the long way," Sarah commented.
"I always do," I said.
"Are you frightened?" she asked.
When I didn't respond, she volunteered, "I am."
We passed a new corporate complex whose landscaped lawns still had the checkerboard pattern of freshly laid sod. They did them better now than when the girls were growing up. No more metal boxes surrounded by wide loops of easy-access road. Now there were mature trees brought in by the truckload.
People came out of the buildings and approached their cars.
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I would wait until very late at night, when no one but the security guards were about. I could park my car and walk around unnoticed. Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse. Helen Knightly, into the Chester Corporate Center's false pond.
I did not want to leave my children. I had loved them both immediately. They were my splendor and my protection, both something to safeguard and something to safeguard me.
I saw a familiar neon sign up ahead.
"I have to go to the bathroom," I said. "I'm going to pull in here."
Easy Joe's was full of the silver-haired happy-hour crowd that filled up on cheap booze to mask the flavor of their meals. The arrival of someone my age, unaccompanied by a parent, was an event. When Sarah followed, it caused a hush. It was the opposite of a biker bar, but it could make you feel just as unwanted. What I knew about Easy Joe's was that they had a pay phone by the bathrooms and an exit opening onto the back.
I set Sarah up on one of the plush leather stools, facing a mirror lined with booze.
"I may be a while. I need to collect myself."
"Should I order something?"
I opened my purse. I would need all the money I had, but I had never been stingy with my younger child.
"Will a twenty do?" I asked.
"Do you want anything? "
"Just to wash my face. I'll come back for you," I said. I placed the keys to Jake's car on the bar.
"Mom?"
"I love you, Sarah," I said. I reached out and touched her hair and cheek.
"It will be okay, Mom. Dad's here to help."
"Hey, do you have that butterfly barrette?" I asked, brightening.
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She dug into her pocket and brought it out. I took it from her outstretched hand.
"For luck," I said, holding it up. I knew I would cry then, so I turned and quickly rounded the corner of the bar.
At the phone, I put in my change and dialed.
"Hamish, it's Helen," I said. "Could you come pick me up?"
"Where?"
I thought quickly. It was a walk I could easily make.
"Vanguard Industries. Twenty minutes."
"You know," he said, "Mom told me about your mom."
I leaned my head into the reflective surface of the phone.
Pressed it hard into the return-change knob.
"Yes. Vanguard, okay?"
"I'll be there."
I hung up. The voices in the restaurant area behind me grew louder.
I did not turn but proceeded down the back hall toward the
"Heifers" and "Bulls" rooms, as if it weren't clear by a bit of translation that this meant women were cows. The back door was propped open with an ancient gray milk crate turned on its side.
Carefully, I stepped over it, opening the door only a little further to squeeze past. There were a few beat-up cars parked at odd angles in back—The kitchen staff, I thought—and a Dumpster on the edge of the lot before it turned to grass and trees. As I climbed up the hill out back, I saw a large paper sack on top of the Dumpster. The top was open. Inside were rolls of bread, perhaps a day old. I thought for the first time, How will I live? and saw myself in a month, two months from now, grabbing a bag like this and ferreting it away.
I paused at the edge of the trees. I saw Sarah, marking off days on a calendar and living in my house alone, waiting for me to come home from a prison term for manslaughter or accidental death. She would need work, and my job would be open.
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Perhaps Natalie would drive her that first day. The students would be pleased—new meat—and she could talk to Gerald on her breaks. "My mother died," he'd say. "My mother rolled a decade," she'd say. I knew Sarah well enough to know she'd love the lingo—a paltry consolation prize.
But none of this was the picture in my mind that scared me most. What scared me was the one where I was home again, where Sarah and I lived together, where she ran errands and massaged my feet while they sat begging on a leather ottoman.
She'd bring me broths in bed and draw a shawl over my shoulders, rub at the caked-on food at the corner of my mouth with a damp cloth. And I would begin to forget her, to scream at her, to say cruel things about her body and her love life and her brain.
I bushwhacked through the trees along the property line and entered a patch of roadway forest. The ground was strewn with litter as I cut farther in, beer cans and condoms being the trash du jour, and I winced each time I accidentally stepped on them.
I had forgotten the red hair ribbon on the porch, leaving it to Bad Boy to have his fun with, and my fingerprints were on every surface of the kitchen. How many children bathed their mothers on the floor, sliced their clothes off with scissors, or quite literally dragged them outside to get fresh air? There would be no evidence of Manny Zavros anywhere.
On the arm of my desk lamp at home, I had hung a ribbon from my mother's hair. It too was red. But there were other ribbons, as well as a magnetic cat, a Mexican Day-of-the-Dead skull, a snail figurine, and the felt Christmas ornament my mother had sent. Why would any one thing in my home draw more attention than another?
I had not squirted the bleach into the toilet that morning. The hair from her braid might still cling there—might have scattered, unbeknownst to me, across the tiles of the bathroom floor.
Would it have a time-and-date stamp if examined in a lab?
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I reached Elm. Traffic was intermittent on the back roads, and I waited for my moment to rush out of the trees and across to the other side—ducking into another patch of abandoned forest.
The police could easily discover enough evidence. And if faced with direct questions, I knew I would tell the truth. Either way, when I thought of returning home with Sarah, I could see only one destiny, and it was hers, not mine.
I reached the place where I would have to scramble down a steep embankment in order to meet Hamish. I looked down the gravelly berm that they had built on all three sides of Vanguard.
More than anything, the place itself looked like a high-voltage electrical plant. In the lot below, separated from the berm by a high metal fence, was a row of shiny black SUVs—top-of-theline.
I would pass within a whisper of them.