I reached my hand inside the open window on the passenger side and quickly opened and closed the glove box, tucking Hamish's keys away. I grabbed my purse. From braid to bullets, I thought. How this would have satisfied my ill-fated therapist.
He would delight in the alliteration until I would want to smack him silly. Perhaps I would give him a call sometime. A little ringa-ling from hell.
I heard the Bartok go silent. I placed the purse firmly on my shoulder. I would walk to Mrs. Leverton's, let myself in, and—
was it possible?—calmly shoot myself.
As I stood, I noticed that Mr. Forrest had shut off his lights. I saw Bad Boy bounding across the lawn and heard the front door close. I turned and walked at what I considered a normal pace, down to the end of the block.
I did not look at my mother's house—never my father's, though it had been his earnings that had paid for it. His earnings that had set me up, allowed me to raise two daughters on live modeling and occasional secretarial work. I had moved, married, had children, my own home, a job, but just like my father, I had seen the yawning tide that was my mother's need and fallen in. Jake would say I had dived in, that it had been my choice to return.
Mental illness had the unique ability to metastasize across the generations. Would it be Sarah? Would it be tiny Leo? Sarah
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seemed like the most obvious candidate, but that didn't mean much. And always, always, it had been left undiscussed, as if the geographical cure that Emily had taken would be enough. But I had tried that myself. I thought Madison, Wisconsin, would mean escape, but it did not. Nor did marriage or motherhood.
Or murder.
I crossed the street again. I saw police tape stretched across my mother's front stairs. It zigged and zagged all the way to the top, through the iron rails. I kept walking. The holly my father had planted when they'd first moved in obscured the house from the side, but even so, I knew where the three slate stepping-stones were. During my father's life, he had kept these shrubs trimmed back so he could carry large sheets of plywood back to his workshop.
Now the stones were hidden. They had been the three slate steps Mr. Forrest had backed over that day in the yard in the months following Billy Murdoch's death. I bent down where I remembered them and pushed my way into the prickly hedge.
Small, rigid branches caught at my hands and face.
I had grown to believe there had been countless signals left by my father. I thought of my mother and me counting down the days until he returned from what Natalie eventually helped me realize must have been a mental facility.
"What do you remember?" she had pressed me.
"Only that he hurt himself in his workshop, and he went to the hospital for a long time."
And Natalie had looked at me long enough for me to realize what that had meant—not an accident with a screwdriver or skill saw as I'd initially thought, but that he had been the agent of what had happened to him.
"And the guns," I'd murmured.
Natalie had merely nodded her head.
* * *
Alice Sebold
I heard my father say the universal words again: "It's a hard day, sweetheart."
It was the afternoon. My mother was still in her nightgown.
My father had retired from the Pickering Water Treatment Plant and spent his days at home, conscientiously leaving at least once a day on either real or created errands. He found it helpful as a way of staying connected to the outside world.
He bought stamps. He stopped by Seacrest's on Bridge and High to buy a paper or have a briny coffee at the lunch counter.
He kept the house well-stocked with cleaning supplies and bouillon, instant Jell-O, and eggs from a farm stand run by an Amish family. He waited patiently on the old wooden benches that ran along the walls of Joe's Barbershop, chatting to Joe about items from the paper. Eventually, he would have to get in his car to come home.
By the time he shot himself, he must have known that leaving the house each day was not enough. Standing in the sun—if he could find it—for his required fifteen minutes of vitamin D was not going to do the trick, whatever that trick was.
My mother came out of the kitchen. She'd taken to eating Marshmallow Fluff on carrot and celery sticks in the afternoons, craving sugar and licensing it with vegetables. My father had left the house that morning but had returned quickly and gone upstairs to lock himself inside the spare room.
"I slept in," my mother had told the police. "He was in his room when I got up. I read. We mostly talked in the evenings."
I watched the policeman silently nodding his head. At some point during the questioning, Mr. Forrest arrived, then Mrs.
Castle.
He had stood at the top of the stairs, my mother said, and called her name three times.
"I was rereading The Eustace Diamonds. I was two paragraphs from the end. I called out for him to give me a minute."
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He waited. Then she laid down her book on the round table next to the wing chair and went to the bottom of the stairs.
"Are you done?" he'd asked her. The gun was already at his temple.
"I reached my arm up," my mother told us—and there on the carpet was a celery stick with its Marshmallow Fluff now pink instead of white—"but he..."
I held her as she shook, and I shook too. I would not allow myself to wonder what exactly, if she had baited him, she might have said in the end. Her head was against my chest, and mine was tucked over her shoulder. I had vowed to hold her more from that day forward and to come and care for her, because we were what remained.
The police asked her if she had a mortuary she preferred, and Mr. Forrest mentioned Greenbrier's on Route 29.I nodded my head. In that moment, I could not have realized what had just happened to me. My father had exited stage right, and in I had walked, seeing it not only as my duty but as perhaps the greatest gift I might give him posthumously, to take forever the burden of my mother.
Now as I left the border of my parents' property, I knew that it had been his house as well as hers. It had been his illness as well as hers. She just garnered more attention. She was always—
day in, day out—there. My father had been pity to her blame, warmth to her cold, but had he not, in the end, been colder than she? She had fought and blubbered and screamed, but hadn't the two of us sat together for years?
Last night I had left her rotting in her own basement, and now she was in a metal locker somewhere, having been autopsied.
Sarah knew. Emily would know soon, if they had not already told her. And Jake—Jake had even seen her body and stayed.
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There was no Mercedes in the driveway. Only the timer lights along the front walk and at the four corners of the house shone out from Mrs. Leverton's lawn. Why not call her by her first name now that she was gone? Beverly Leverton and her late husband, Philip, neighbors to my mother for fifty years.
Unlike my mother's house, where single-pane glass still prevailed, which I could easily have smashed with a tap of a good-size rock to each corner, Mrs. Leverton's house had windows fitted by her son with thick thermal glass and a trigger-point alarm.
But Mrs. Leverton had disconnected the alarm, and Arlene, her Jamaican cleaning woman of long duration, had kept a key in the basket of a concrete bunny statue under a pine tree just off the back porch. I often stood in my mother's backyard and saw Arlene carefully bending to retrieve the key. I had even noted recently that doing this was getting harder and harder for her. As old ladies grew older, so did their maids.
The bunny key was there, under a loose concrete egg. I looked to my left and right; the roof of my father's workshop was barely visible through the trees. It was odd to be in a neighboring yard from mine, where completely different lives had been lived, and to know almost no one now but those who had died.
Ultimately, even with a valid passport, I could never have escaped to Jake's converted mill house in Aurigeno, or even hitchhiked west. I had told Jeanine that Greenland was a big piece of land and was composed of nothing but greens. Green people eating green food on green chairs at green tables in green houses.
And then we moved on to Iceland, where everything was ice.
And China, where the people and the places all had a porcelain sheen. I had made her scream with laughter as I spun the globe.
"In Oman," I said, "there are men shaped like Os! Australia is
'ausome' and India, in!" In Madagascar, I thought...
I opened the screen door, turned the key in the lock. No alarms went off. I stumbled in the dark of what I knew to be
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Mrs. Leverton's kitchen. I could see dark shapes around me, and with ease I saw the phone, its old-style cord twirling down to the floor and back. Tsvetaeva could have hung herself easily enough.
I thought of Arlene wiping down the counters, the stove, the sink, each week entering and leaving another person's house, learning that person's habits and regimes. At least, I thought, she was smart enough to get paid.
I knew I could not turn on the lights for fear of being seen.
I would take a moment and adjust. That's what I thought, but I heard a mewling outside, and I jumped.
I took my purse into the half bath to the side of the kitchen and closed the door. It felt safe to risk a light inside the windowless room, but I was unprepared for who I saw.
There I was in the mirror, the strap of my purse cutting into my shoulder, weighing me down. The gun heavier with each step I'd taken since leaving the car. I saw my face, puffy from lack of sleep, my hair jutting out in all directions. My lips were dry, the creases above them puckered and hard. I looked into the mirror, and I saw the thirteen-year-old Helen. I touched the plywood figures along the walls of a once-drowned house. I looked at my father on the rocking horse, saw the solitary mattress on the floor.
"There are secret rooms inside us," I had said to my therapist.
"A relatively benign construct," he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.
My eyes staring back at me were small and black, and behind them was a room I'd avoided all my life. My parents were waiting for me, I thought, and in the small wallpapered bathroom of Mrs. Leverton's house, I could, if I wanted to, blow my brains out. My father had killed himself, I had killed my mother, and I could join them both. If I hustled, perhaps I could be interred 12 7 9 1
Alice Sebold
with my mother, head to toe—our own jumbled version of The Lovers of Pompeii.
Quickly, I shut the light off. I set the purse down, and in the dark I washed my hands and face, splashing the water cupped in my two palms against my skin, running the tap ice-cold. I saw her then, Emily racing up to me beside the pool at the Y. She was holding something out to me and smiling widely.
"My Flying Fish Badge," she said. "I got it!" In the weeks leading up to my father's death, she had mastered the butterfly.
I did not turn on the light again but stood over the sink, breathing heavily. I willed myself to open the door. I picked up my purse as if it were some stranger's bowling bag and made my way into the kitchen and over to the round dining table, where I sat down in a wicker-backed chair. I moved my hand over the smooth grain of the table. Mrs. Leverton had left no crumbs from her evening meal.
I thought of the girls.
Once, when the three of us were visiting my mother, and Emily and Sarah were still small, we had been walking down the street on the way back to the house from the park, where a new jungle gym had been installed. The girls were excited and wild. Sarah had run up Mrs. Leverton's walk and started stamping on the concrete with her foot.
"See, it's not like Grandmom's!" she yelled.
"Sarah, get back here. That's not your house."
She had stared at me, nonplussed. "I know that," she said.
Emily looked up at me to see what came next.
Mrs. Leverton was what. She tapped on her front glass—
single-paned back then—and as I hurried up the walk with Emily to retrieve my errant child, the front door opened fast.
"Why not come in?" she said. "Daughters must be lovely things."
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And though my mother hated her and she disapproved of me, we went into her house and sat in the living room, which Arlene cleaned every other Friday. We had store-bought cookies from a tin, and Sarah told her about how, at her grandmother's house, there was a hollow spot under the front path.
"The sound changes when you walk on it," Emily clarified.
"And Mom says there are tiny people who live in there," Sarah said.
"Does she?" Mrs. Leverton looked at me and made an effort to smile. Crumbs from a shortbread cookie sat at the corner of her mouth.
"A whole village," Sarah said excitedly. "Right, Mom?"
I did not say anything.
"Like Gulliver's Travels" Emily said. "Sarah likes to imagine them."
There she was, I thought, at nine, already a better mother than I was. She had taken the lead with Mrs. Leverton so that Sarah would not notice my disappearance. I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.
I put my hands together.
"God, forgive me," I said softly.
I had set my purse on the floor beside me, and I leaned over to pick it up and place it on the table. I pushed back my chair a foot or so and reached my hand in. There was the felt between my fingers. I searched for the braided gold twine and pulled out the Crown Royal bag. It made a loud clunk against the table.
Next I took out the box of bullets. I put the box beside the bag.
I stared at the purple felt. Even taking the gun out seemed unfathomable.
I stood up.
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The clock over Mrs. Leverton's sink had a blue neon circle surrounding it—a faux diner clock. They had the real McCoy at Easy Joe's.