Alice Sebold by The Almost Moon

Author:The Almost Moon [Moon, The Almost]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780316022835
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-10-16T05:00:00+00:00

At some point my father began sleeping in the spare room. Every morning he would wake up and make the bed perfectly as if no one had lain down there the night before, as if the empty bed waited for a never-invited guest. Even I believed this for a very long time until, like my mother, I began to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the house. When my grandfather’s rifles were pulled off the rack, I could hear from my room the popping of the clasp that held the stocks. At least once every few months, I noted this distinctive sound, and in September of my senior year in high school, I decided to investigate.

It was unusually hot for September, and the humidity seemed only to increase after dark. The night noises coming through the open windows made my progress across the hall and past the top of the stairs go undetected. When I reached the spare room, I opened the door as quietly as I could.

“Go back to bed, Clair,” my father said in irritation. He was looking down at the rifle, which lay across his lap in the deep blue of his terry-cloth robe.

“Dad?”

He looked up and came to standing immediately.

“It’s you,” he said.

The rifle dangled from his arm, its barrel pointing toward the ground. Behind him I saw the rumpled sheets of the bed. The pillow, I knew, he had brought in from the master bedroom. The case matched the sheets on my parents’ bed. On the table was a tumbler of orange juice.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m cleaning them,” he said.

“Cleaning them?”

“Guns are like everything else, honey. They need to be cleaned to keep them in working order.”

“Since when do you care about guns?”

“Right.”

“Dad?”

His eyes seemed far away. He would focus on me for a moment and then drift.

“Why don’t you just bring your stuff in here? You’re not fooling anyone.”

“No, honey, that’s silly. I come in here sometimes when I can’t sleep. So I won’t disturb your mother.”

“Are you done with that?” I said, indicating the rifle with the thrust of my chin.

“I can rely on you not to tell your mother about this, can’t I? Her father’s guns are very precious to her, and I wouldn’t want her knowing that I was fooling around with them.”

“But you’re cleaning them, you said.”

“Right.” He nodded his head in agreement with himself, but I was unconvinced.

I could not bring myself to move away from the door and go over to him. Seeing him in the soft clothes of pajamas and terry-cloth robe had always been strange for me. He was up and dressed before I was, and he changed into his pajamas only after I went to bed. On the rare occasions when I saw him like this, I didn’t know how to classify him. He wasn’t the father I knew but more of the caved-in man who had appeared on and off since I was eight years old.

He took the rifle and returned it to its rack, then shut the clasp that held the barrel.

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