The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Author:Alice Sebold
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction.Contemporary, fiction
ISBN: 9780316022842
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

“What?”

“You said Sarah’s number was over the phone. Is Emily’s?”

“Not after Leo. Emily asked me to take it down.”

“She had a way with kids, your mother.”

“I killed her, Jake.”

“I know,” he said.

“They’ll find out, won’t they?”

“Probably. Yes.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“I wish I had died along with her.” I had not expected to say this or even feel it, but there it was. He did not respond, and I wondered suddenly if I was speaking out loud or only inside my head. I would not get to see my mother again. I would not get to brush her hair or paint her nails.

“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions,” I said. “I read that in a pamphlet while I was waiting for my mother at the doctor’s.”

I did not tell him that I thought it applied to love. I wanted to touch him, but I worried he might pull back.

“Eventually she got better at leaving the house. I could get her to her doctors’ appointments by using a bath towel. It took her forty years, but she graduated from blankets to bath towels,” I said.

Jake was thinking, and I was staring straight ahead at the low cement retaining wall that bordered the parking lot.

It always took me a moment to recognize him without his dog. He had lost the last of five King Charles spaniels two years before and decided he was too old to risk another one. “Dogs don’t understand us leaving them,” he’d once said when we’d met on the sidewalk outside my mother’s house.

“There’s Mr. Forrest,” I said. I indicated the dapper old man standing on the hill over the retaining wall.

“Yes, her only friend,” Jake said.

In the distance, I could see Mrs. Leverton being loaded into the ambulance. A paramedic was holding up a drip of some sort, and I could see Mrs. Leverton’s head above the sheet. Almost simultaneously, a smoky gray Mercedes pulled up, and her rich son got out. Mr. Forrest watched it all from the hill in front of me. He was wearing stiff corduroy pants with a crease and a gray flannel suit jacket, under which appeared to be a conglomeration of sweaters and turtlenecks to keep him warm in the unpredictable fall air. A cashmere muffler, because he believed deeply in cashmere, was tied tightly around his neck. He was at least seventy-five, I knew. He had stopped coming by to see my mother shortly after my father’s suicide.

“I think we should leave,” Jake said.

I was staring at Mr. Forrest. As if he knew, he turned his head in our direction. His glasses were the same as they’d always been—thick tortoiseshell squares—and he would have had to see me through the slightly tinted glass of the front windshield of a car I did not own. I looked directly back at him and swallowed hard.

“Did you hear me?” said Jake. “I want you to back out and leave the way we came. The shortcut.”

It was among the subtlest things I’d ever seen, Mr.

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