Alice Sebold Read online

  The rose trellis that climbed up the back of our house was lush with vines and flowers by the time I was six or seven. The trellis surrounded both of the small windows in my bedroom, and so at the height of spring, my mother had to keep the flowers and shoots artfully trimmed. It was an operation I loved watching and so, I grew to realize, had my father. The two of them came into my bedroom. She was holding a basket with the handle looped over her arm. Her clippers and work gloves were tucked inside.

  “Time for a little high-wire gardening,” my father said, and the two of them approached the first window, which was over an empty twin bed next to mine. I lay on the soft maw of my mattress and watched my father watching my mother as the window took the top half of her body. It cut off her head, her hands, her arms, and her shoulders until, at its most extreme, when she was leaning backward, resting her hips against the window ledge, my father held on to her in a way I knew even then to be sexual. Sometimes he slid his hand up along her thigh. Once or twice I thought I heard a smile in her voice along with her admonishment.

  Outside, there was a scuffle in the trees and then a cat’s low growling. Bad Boy was facing down another cat at the edge of our property.

  I stood again and walked to the kitchen sink to dump and replace the water. I thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.

  I listened to the cats’ intermittent noises in the trees near the work shed. When I was growing up, there had been a hoot owl that came around every year and sat in the oak out back. My father would stand in the yard, holding me piggyback style, and hoot back at it. If it grew late and we stayed in the yard, my mother would join us, with lemonade for me and a neat scotch for the two of them.

  I turned, resigned to finish quickly now, when the phone rang. I dropped the bowl, and the hot soapy water splashed out across the floor.

  “Hello?” I said softly, as if the house were sleeping.

  “You’re there!”

  “Jake,” I said, “how did you know?”

  “I couldn’t get you at your house, and I still have your mother’s number in my address book. How are you?”

  I looked at my mother’s body. It seemed almost to glow in the darkened kitchen. “Good?” I said.

  “Avery just called me. He said something might be wrong.”

  “And you called here?”

  “It seemed the place to start,” he said. “What’s wrong, Helen? Is it the girls?”

  “My mother’s dead,” I said.

  There was silence on his end. He had been my champion against her for the entire eight years of our relationship.

  “Oh, Helen, I’m so sorry. When?”

  I found I couldn’t speak. I made a gulping sound instead.

  “I know how much she meant to you. Where are you?”

  “We’re in the kitchen.”

  “Who is?”

  “Mother and me.”

  “Oh, Jesus! You need to call someone, Helen. What happened? You need to hang up the phone and dial nine one one. Are you sure she’s dead?”

  “Very,” I said.

  “Then call nine one one and tell them that.”

  I wanted to get off the phone and enter the nowhere state I’d just been in, where no one knew anything and my mother and I were alone together. There was no easy way to say what came next.

  “I killed her, Jake.”

  The silence was long enough that I had to repeat it.

  “I killed my mother.”

  “Describe to me what you mean,” he said. “Go slowly, and tell me everything.”

  I told Jake about Mrs. Castle’s calling, about the Pigeon Forge bowl, about my mother’s accident. When I said “she had an accident,” he stopped me, his voice hopeful, and asked, “What kind of accident, Helen?”

  “She lost control of her bowels.”

  “Oh, God. Before or afterward?” he said.

  “And then she called Mrs. Castle a bitch and raved about how people were stealing things from her.”

  “Are they, Helen?” he asked, his voice leading discreetly into an adjoining room where sanity might dwell.

  “No,” I said. “She’s lying here right in front of me on the floor. I broke her nose.”

  “You hit her?” I could tell I was shocking him. It made me feel good.

  “No, I pressed too hard.”

  “Helen, are you crazy? Do you hear what you’re saying to me?”

  “She was dying anyway. She’s been sitting up, dying, for the past year. Is it better that she should go to a hospice, babbling, and die in a pool of her own waste? At least I care. At least I’m bathing her.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m in the kitchen, bathing her.”

  “Just a minute, Helen. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I could hear the sound of Jake’s dogs. Emily had told me that every time she and the children visited, Jeanine spent the next week barking like a dog.

  “Helen, listen to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to cover your mother’s body and stay in the house until I can get there, okay? I’ll get someone to look after the dogs and call you from the airport.”

  “Mrs. Castle will come in the morning.”

  “Does she have a key?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “There was an incident a few months ago when someone broke in who’d been doing chores here. We got the locks changed, and I think Mrs. Castle never got a new key.”

  “Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to listen to me now.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You can’t tell anyone else about this, and you can’t go anywhere. You have to stay in the house with your mother until I get there.”

  “I’m not deaf, Jake.”

  “You just killed your mother, Helen.”

  His dogs were whimpering in the background.

  “What time is it where you are?” I asked.

  “Early enough to get a flight out tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “Santa Barbara. I’m doing a commission piece here.”

  “For who?”

  “It’s on private property. I haven’t met the people. Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the temperature there?”

  “I don’t know. I have all the windows closed.”

  “Is the corpse still . . . pliable?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I mean has your mother stiffened up yet? How long ago did you . . . Excuse me.” For a moment I thought Jake had hung up the phone, but the jangling noise of the dogs’ collars reassured me.

  “When did she die?”

  “Just before dark.”

  “And what time is it there?”

  I looked up at the clock. “Six forty-five.”

  “Helen, I have another call. I have to take this. I’ll call you back.”

  I heard the line go dead. I wanted to laugh.

  “The art hustle never stops,” I said, turning to my mother. For the briefest moment, I expected a response.

  I waited by the phone while I stared at her. My mother’s face must have been wet under the towel, and this disturbed me. I dropped to my knees and crawled over to her. Without looking, because I was not ready to see her face, I removed the towel in one swift flick of my wrist. I heard her yelling. I heard her calling my name.

  I jumped up and walked quickly from the room, through the tiny back hall, and into the living room, where my day had started for a second time, a million years ago.

  What had I been doing before Mrs. Castle called? I had gone shopping at the greenmarket in town. I had bought string beans from the elderly Armenian couple who sold only three things out of the back of a small pickup truck. I ha
d gone to my dance class.

  I saw the brass ash bin next to the fireplace and went to stand above it. If only I could vomit.

  I knew then that my idea of counting on anyone in this was bullshit. What could Jake do, sitting in a rich man’s house three thousand miles away? He had taken another call while I stood in the kitchen with my dead mother! “You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out of it.” When exactly had that become my philosophy?

  Jake had been asking me questions about temperature and hours and stiffness, and obviously this was all about rot. He’d done enough ice sculptures in the cold capitals of the world to know things I wouldn’t have thought of. Couldn’t have thought of. Briefly I tried to recall the plot of a movie I’d seen with Natalie last fall. It hinged on whether the death was murder or manslaughter. I could remember the actress’s face, her dewy beauty as she broke down on the stand—past that, I couldn’t recall a thing.

  My mother had been dead too long to cover it up easily, and I had, fatal tell, broken her nose. Now, out of the kitchen and away from her, I saw more clearly the trouble I was in.

  I had never been able to do Jake’s meditation exercises. I’d sit on the little round black pillow and try to om-out while my feet and hands went into prickly pins and needles. Inside my head, strange figures walked in and out as if my brain were a heavily frequented coffee shop.

  I stood on my mother’s porch and planted my feet. I could feel the straw from the mat through the soft, wet leather of my jazz flats. I thought of the old Victorian house imploding. I breathed in and out ten times, counting very slowly. I made the exhalation noises I usually ridiculed in yoga class. What I was going to do next could not be misinterpreted. What I was going to do next left me no way back.

  It was dark; the cicadas were thrumming in the trees. I could hear the trucks shifting miles away on the ridge of the highway. I knew that, no matter what, I would not be able to stay in the house tonight. I could not wait the hours it would take for Jake to arrive. Besides, as the minutes ticked by, he did not, I noted, call me back.

  As I breathed and counted with my eyes wide open, I stared into the house and saw the front hall, the stairs that led up to the three small bedrooms, and the thick padded carpeting that Natalie’s son had installed to break a fall.

  “We have to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to you that happened to your husband,” Hamish had rather witlessly said. He knew the version of events that Natalie had told him—that my father had died when he fell down the hardwood stairs. I had stood by quietly that day, nodding my head, unable to look in my mother’s direction.

  They would have brought my mother’s body out of this house on a gurney, I thought. They would have carried her almost vertically down the steep front stairs. She would have been another lonely old lady who died in her home. How sad. How helpless. How very very high she would rate on people’s sympathy curve.

  But that was not going to happen. I would make sure of it.

  I walked inside. I resisted pausing in the living room to march in place. My muscles were stiff from the time on the kitchen floor, but, posing at Westmore, I had known and recovered from worse. I went upstairs and retrieved a simple white sheet. Then, two at a time, I descended the stairs.

  Being careful not to glance at my mother’s face, I stood at her feet, briefly bent down to close her legs, and then played the game that first Emily, and then Sarah, had begged me for when I tucked them in at night. A game my father had made up for me.

  We called it “waft.” I would stand at the end of their beds, with their top sheet balled up in my hands, and then shoot it out over their bodies, allowing it to slowly waft down over them. It was a game that, if given the choice, Sarah in particular never wanted to call an end to. “I love the feel of air escaping all around me,” she had told me once.

  For my mother, it was a one-time waft, and I did it so the queen-size sheet covered her face. It stuck to her damp body in an almost ghostly way. Hurriedly I repackaged her in the Mexican wedding blanket and the Hudson Bay as if she were a gift I was returning to the store.

  I stood and walked into the small back hallway and opened the basement door. Then, holding her under her armpits, I dragged her headfirst to the top of the stairs.

  I walked a few steps down in almost pitch-black darkness and flailed my hand along the wall until I found the light switch. The bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs came on. I walked down the rest of the way. These stairs, when I was little, were a dare for neighborhood children and me. Past the first three stairs, both walls fell away, and never, no matter how much one was needed over the years, was a guardrail installed. Hamish had even volunteered to fabricate one out of old pipes after laying down the carpet upstairs. “These stairs are the real death trap,” he’d whispered to me when I’d brought him to the basement so he could choose among my grandfather’s old guns as payment.

  But what had always made the dare of descending into the dark basement worth it was the supersize brown refrigerator at the bottom of the stairs. This was where my mother kept tins of brandy balls and stores of Hershey’s bars. Mason jars of pecans and almonds, Christmas boxes of peanut brittle left uneaten, and hideous sherry-soaked fruitcakes given to us each holiday season. The Levertons gave everyone a box of After Eight mints. Mrs. Donnellson, before she died, would bring my mother a ham.

  The ham, like all meats, went in a separate place—the long, low meat freezer that hummed to the right of the stairs, on top of which my mother sorted laundry or stacked magazines she wanted to keep. During my father’s life, there was always a shifting parade of objects on top of the meat freezer. He had hoped she’d take up arts and crafts, so there were baskets filled with green foam blocks and giant discarded jug-wine bottles that, if she found the time, might make beautiful terrariums. Acorns, horse chestnuts, boxes of goggle eyes, and distinctly shaped twigs. River rocks polished in my father’s workshop. Odd bits of driftwood he’d collected. And a pristine economy-size Elmer’s that ruled over it all.

  The gun had been my mother’s idea.

  “What does he want with a gun?” I whispered to her while Hamish was washing up. “Why not cash?”

  “He’s a grown man,” my mother said. “Emily just gave birth to a child.”

  But by the time I could trace my mother’s thought process and figure out that this was my mother’s way of pointing out that both Hamish and Emily were adults, the insanity train had left the station and I was in the basement, showing Hamish the rack of guns.

  We stood in front of the meat freezer as he took up each rifle and held it in his hands, testing the weight of it.

  “I know nothing about guns, except that they’re cool,” he said.

  I was no help. I watched him lean each rifle out of the wooden rack and hold it inexpertly by its stock as if it were a particularly thick-stemmed weed he had pulled from the ground. Hamish, like Natalie, provided the perfect light contrast to my darkness. Until she began to sprout enough gray hair that she chose to color hers what I thought of as an alien shade of red, Natalie had been the blonde to my brunette. When I stood by her son, I saw the same brown eyes his mother had, heard the same easy laugh.

  “Why doesn’t she sell these things?” Hamish asked. “She could make a mint.”

  I could barely hear him. He had taken the only pistol out of a felt Crown Royal bag and, holding it, had spread his legs wide as if it were something he’d seen cowboys do. As he aimed at a point on the opposite wall and put his finger to the trigger, I screamed and grabbed the barrel with my hand.

  He held on, and we collided. Hamish took my right shoulder in his hand.

  “What? You look so upset. What is it?”

  I came very close to saying something. Words I had not spoken to anyone but Jake.

  “My father taught me not to point a gun at anyone.”

  “I was pointing it at that lamp shade!”

  He set the pistol down behind him on the meat freezer. He cupped my cheek
as if I were the child and he the parent. “It’s all right,” he said. “No one’s hurt.”

  I was shaking. He turned to slip the pistol back inside the purple bag, then cinched the gold braid closed at the top.

  “I’ll take this one,” he said.

  With Hamish’s help, I put the rifles, which were much more valuable, back in their mounts. The pistol sat in its bag on a stack of starched linen napkins I had folded and left on top of the meat freezer. I remembered turning around and seeing it, imagining the dulled platinum barrel, the scarred brown grip, and thinking of my father lifting it, loading it, raising it to his head.

  I positioned my mother’s body so that, standing three steps down into the basement, I could grab her around the shoulders and, walking blind and feeling for each stair with my foot, could use my body to keep her from tumbling into the no-man’s-land below.

  I breathed in and tried to make my muscles strong, not rigid. I pulled my mother’s upper body out over the edge of the stairs and walked down one stair and then another. Her weight against me increased with each step. I smelled the lilac scent of her hair through the sheets. I felt my eyes watering but would not blink. Down two, three, four, five. Her bundled feet thumping their arrival.

  My mother’s cocoon was unraveling. No hospital corners here. Her feet, first cleaned, were poking out of the sheets at the halfway point on the stairs. Her toes seemed blue to me in a way they hadn’t before, and I wondered if that was the light of the basement playing tricks on me. I took another step. Another. I knew, because I had counted them dozens of times as a child, that there were exactly sixteen steps. I saw the meat freezer humming to my left. On top of it was a stack of Sunset magazines, hoarded hand-me-downs from Mrs. Castle, who had relatives on the West Coast. Also left, from the previous Christmas, were the prop gift boxes lined up in rows in their sun-faded finery of ribbons and bows. I imagined Mrs. Castle taking them down the stairs for her, or perhaps it had even been me. My mother may have indeed instructed me to bring them down and put them in the giant plastic bags that she kept them in eleven months of the year. I would have failed to do that for some reason. I would have taken the time the task was supposed to occupy and sat in the old wicker-and-iron lounge chair near the washer and dryer, calculating exactly how many minutes I could let go by before I should reasonably appear upstairs to keep my mother company.