But in reality, at the mortuary director’s urging, I had excused myself. I had taken my mother into the dining room, where we stood by the large corner cabinet near the kitchen, huddled together-not exactly touching each other so much as hovering helplessly in proximity.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the director said when they’d come back up the stairs with the paperwork. They were trained to say that.
The younger one had just started at the funeral home. “Yeah, me too,” he’d said, and shook my hand.
Something was digging into my side. It was sharp. I felt it stabbing me. Became aware that it had been poking at me for some time.
I leaned back and put my hand in my jeans pocket. Sarah’s butterfly barrette. I took it out and held it in the palm of my hand, making the light from the hope chest pick up its blues and greens, the thin gold rhinestones on the blunted antennae and legs.
It was almost nine. I wondered if Sarah and Jake were looking for me or if they’d thought to speak to Hamish yet. I wondered when Hamish would open his bedside drawer.
I closed my hand over the rhinestone butterfly and pressed, thought of all the discarded items over all the years that had made me feel free. I had not thrown out the weeping Buddha Emily had given me. I would not throw out the butterfly.
I stood up on the landing and pinned the blunt clip of the barrette through the weave of my black sweater until I heard the closure snap.
Mr. Forrest will be asleep now, I thought, or listening to music on his treasured Bose. We had talked about it when we’d run into each other a year or so ago.
“It gets the best sound. I can lie in bed and listen. I have a special velvet sleep mask. It used to be if I wanted to listen to music, I had to sit in the front room.”
I bent down to retrieve the letter to Emily and the box of crayons. I tucked them under my arm like a clutch. I was in the house, finally, of the Other. The Levertons and their holiday cruises, their intricate “On Donner, on Dancer” display at Christmas, their elaborate barbecues out back-the laughter of the guests pushing through the trees and across our lawn. All of that was over forever.
I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and so I walked down the short hallway that in my mother’s house ended in the only upstairs bathroom. In Mrs. Leverton’s, it led to another hall, off of which was the bedroom where she had been standing the night before and seen my mother and me outside.
A humidifier had been left on in the corner of the room, and the overwhelming scent of Mentho-Lyptus filled the air. On the table beside the bed-the wood protected by a thick sheet of glass, cut to fit-there were rows and rows of prescription bottles and a notepad made from strips of paper held together with a clip. Beside this sat a chewed-up pencil. It seemed the prompts to off myself were endless.
I put the crayons and Emily’s letter down on the bed and sat by the table. There was something written on the notepad. I picked it up.
She had a shockingly spidery hand.
I realized that almost all the pages of the tablet were filled up, not with lists of chores or groceries needed but with the names of the presidents, the capitals of each of the fifty states, and the names of doctors who had treated her, coupled with their nurses’ names. I looked at page after page.
On her good days, her hand was stronger, and she remembered Frankfort, Kentucky; Augusta, Maine; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. On bad days, her hand shook more, and she forgot Johnson through Bush. My knowledge paled in comparison. I knew nothing of Rutherford Hayes.
I was about to lose it anyway, I could feel the tears waiting to fall, but then I saw a drawing she had made-a scribble really-of a woman’s figure. I knew it was a woman because it wore a skirt, and all around it, in a hand shaky with frustration and fear, were obsessive misspellings of her daughter-in-law’s name. Sherill, Sherelle, Cherelle, Shariwell, Charille. She never got to Cheryl no matter how many times she tried.
I wondered what Cheryl thought of her. I had seen her only once or twice. Was Cheryl someone Mrs. Leverton loved or an ogre she had to befriend in order to get to her son?
I looked again at the figure Mrs. Leverton had drawn next to the butchered spellings of her daughter-in-law’s name. Every day, I thought. Every day, Mrs. Leverton wrote again the things that kept her tethered to the outside world. No matter how frail, she had not relinquished her hold.
I knew what held me.
I found my note to Emily by the crayons. I ripped it lengthwise once. I ripped it this way again. I was determined now to explain what I could to my children and to carry the shame of my mistakes.
I let the confetti I had made fall to the floor and thought distractedly of the water I’d left boiling on the stove. I smiled at the memory of Jake calling Sarah his “Little Gadhafi” because of her penchant for green clothes. I could take the Crayolas and melt them into lumps in a pan. I could mark the capitals of the countries I had never been to and never would. Green for Nuuk, I thought, the capital of Greenland, where everything is green. I could teach art classes in prison. One day I’d be released, and I’d stand in the field at Westmore, coaching old people to paint the rotten oak tree.
I got up. In the kitchen there was a gun on the table and a fire on the stove, but I walked to the casement windows in the corner. One faced the rear of the Levertons’ property, and the other faced my mother’s house.
The trees had grown even thicker in the years since my father’s death, but fall had arrived early, and leaves were dropping fast. I could see my father’s workshop and, beyond this, the house lit by the moon. I saw the window of my bedroom and imagined the vines lacing up, my mother’s front half hanging out the window while my father held her and I sat quietly on my bed.
It must have been then or a moment later that I saw the lights. They were blue lights that seemed to be pulsing from somewhere out in front of the house. Blue lights and red.
I did not understand, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. What my mother’s fear was comprised of, why my father felt he had to leave us the way he did. Or the blessing of children and the love-once, then twice, because Hamish had to be counted-of a more-than-good man.
I stood at the window and edged off my shoes. My feet sank into the plush carpeting. I opened the window ever so slightly, and a breeze rushed in, bringing into the sealed-up room a blast of cool night air. I listened. I heard the branches creak against one another in the wind, and then, coming from my mother’s house, I heard voices and saw dark shadows armed with flashlights spread out across our lawn and enter my father’s workshop.
I would do what I did best, I thought. I would wait. It was only a matter of time, after all.
“She’s not here!” I heard a policeman yell. “There’s no sign of her.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE BLOOD:
BENDER, COOPER, DUNOW, GOLD
THE CIRCLE:
Barclay, Doyle, Elworthy, Fain, Goff, Muchnick, Nurnberg, Pietsch, Snyder
THE UNEXPECTED:
Charman
THE MASTER MECHANICS:
Bronstein, MacDonald, Schultz
THE CITADEL:
The MacDowell Colony
WILD CARD:
Wessel and the Italian Contingent
WILD DOG:
Lilly (woof!)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Sebold is the author of the #1 bestsellers The Lovely Bones, a novel, and Lucky, a memoir. She lives in California with her husband, the novelist Glen David Gold.
