The Almost Moon

EIGHT

The day the neighbors showed up in the yard, my father had told us he was in Erie, Pennsylvania, shaking up vials of poisonous silt and calculating the rate of sedimentary accretion in the local drinking water.

My mother was in the kitchen, and I had just come in through the side door. After Billy died, she stopped asking me where I’d been. I could have been sleeping with the boy she called the “horror,” who lived down the road and had a tattoo in a time when such a thing was equal to the mark of Cain. She needed all her energy to stay upright.

At some point, after the buzzer on the stove had rung and I’d come out of the downstairs bathroom, having washed up, my mother and I both heard the same low sound together.

It was a gathering of men.

I can’t say how I knew to be scared, but I was. I can say that I was immediately relieved my father was away. Far enough away that he would be gone for days still. And I’ve never known if this was exactly why the men chose that day to come.

In sixth grade I had studied a photo of a lynching in the South. It was a small black-and-white photo that had been mimeographed and distributed by our history teacher, who believed history made the most impact when it was illustrated. Parents throughout the district had complained when their children came home with photos of lynchings, or Auschwitz, or the head of an African warlord raised and dripping on a stick. But the teacher had been right, and the fascination I had had looking at those images now gripped me in the pit of my stomach as I stood with my mother while she held a vegetarian casserole in her hands.

The space between the stove and counter was a short one, but that day the noise outside was a lengthening agent she could not have predicted. We heard it, and the heat of the casserole burning through the dishcloth my mother held it with made her drop the Pyrex dish on the floor.

“You go,” she said.

Panic filled her eyes.

“They want you,” I said.

“But I can’t. You know I can’t.”

And I did know.

I knew my mother’s limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones. I realized then, as I had sensed for years but never named, that I was born in order to be her proxy in the world and to bring that world back home-whether that meant bright construction-paper creations from my first years in school or meeting the angry men out in the yard. I would do it all for her. That was our particular unspoken contract, how this child served this parent.

It had been warm out that day, and I’d changed into a pair of cutoffs upon my arrival home from school. My mother despised cutoffs, thought them cheap and unkempt for the same reasons I loved them, the mangy endless fringe that I could pick at with my nails. I had known I could wear them just as I had indulged in polishing my fingernails that spring. My mother was too weak, for the first time in my life, to make her judgment voluble.

As I tiptoed from the kitchen through the back hall and into the living room, I grabbed the quilt that hung over the side of the couch. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it, but instinct told me to cover myself as best I could. I remember I wrapped it around my shoulders as if it were a giant beach towel.

One of the men saw me through a window, and the noise in the side yard flared louder. I was barefoot, and my hair, so thin my ears poked through, hung down on either side of my face. I wanted Natalie to be there. As if together we would be an army that could flank and conquer a crowd of men.

I walked through the small living room, and as I put my hand on the doorknob that led to the screened-in porch, I heard my mother risk two words from the kitchen, where she hid. “Stay safe,” she said very quietly. I knew the effort this took was heroic for her. But something had happened in the time I had crossed the room and put on, as I later thought of it, my superhero cape. My mother, in that moment, had ceased to exist for me.

The first person I saw, when I came through the screened-in porch and out the door, calmed me. It was Mr. Forrest. He was with Tosh. He was standing off to the side of the cluster of fathers and husbands, and he made a point, when I glanced at him over the waist-high fence, of trying to smile. But it was a sick and worried attempt. Tosh, usually frenetic under the best of circumstances, was hidden behind Mr. Forrest’s legs.

“Where’s your mother?” one of the men asked. There were six of them, seven if I counted Mr. Forrest.

“She’s inside,” another one answered him, though he was staring at me. “She’s always inside, right?”

This truth, stated so boldly out in the open air, was like a poison arrow coming out of nowhere. I felt a tightness in my chest and paused just long enough to take a breath.

“Can’t you speak?” Mr. Tolliver asked. I hated him, and this hatred was unaided by my mother’s judgments of how he marched his wife around our block. He kept a small piece of wood painted white and in the shape of a gravestone that said, HERE HE LIES, COLD AND HARD, THE LAST DOG WHO SHIT IN MY YARD! The rhyme was supposed to make it funny. I’ve always traced my disdain of what generous people call “lawn art” to the first time I read the words of that mock grave.

“Be kind,” Mr. Forrest said, his voice coming forth in a higher register than usual. His collar was unbuttoned, but he still wore his necktie from work. I realized later that he must have run into the men while taking Tosh for a walk around the block.

The men grumbled. Most still wore what passed for work clothes-worn slacks and jackets, an occasional Windbreaker with the steel company’s logo.

“Helen,” Mr. Warner said, “we are here to talk to your mother.”

Mr. Warner, whom my mother had nicknamed the “Blusterer,” considered himself a spokesman for every occasion. He could hold court on any subject. He had once stood in our front yard, lecturing my father-who knew more about water treatment than anyone within miles-on the benefits of sewage silica plants in Liberia. “He’s read an article,” my father said when he finally peeled himself away as darkness came. “It’s nice that the man’s excited, but even I don’t want to talk about sewage that much.”

I stood on our side of the chain-link fence.

“Come talk to us, Helen,” said a father I didn’t recognize.

Why didn’t I see the warning in Mr. Forrest’s eyes before I lifted the friendship latch and walked out into the side yard? I must have been looking at the men near the hedge and not at him. Only after I turned and shut the gate behind me did I see his face. I could read fear like tarot cards.

“Where’s your mother, Helen?” Mr. Warner asked.

“Helen,” Mr. Forrest said, “you should go back inside.”

I knew enough, or at least I thought I did, to advance from against the gate and move closer to Mr. Forrest. But as I did, he backed away.

“My mother is unavailable. What can I do for you?” I asked, using the most grown-up voice I had. I was anxious now. I stepped toward Mr. Forrest once more.

“I wish I could help, Helen,” he said, his voice hollow. He knew what to fear, and I didn’t. I was beginning to hover there, in the vicinity of the truth, but with my bare feet in the grass and my quilt for a cape, I could not yet imagine men like my father, who lived all around us, wanting to hurt me. The Murdochs had moved. It had been eight months since Billy’s death. The end of my junior year was only a month away. But what I hid behind the most, the thing that made me blindest up until the minute it happened, was that I was a girl. In the world where I was raised, unlike the one in which I made sure to raise my daughters, girls did not get hit.

Mr. Warner advanced toward me and stopped.

“We have business with your mother, Helen, not you.”

This, I now saw, had been simmering ever since the inquest. My mother was never officially held accountable in Billy’s death because, according to the report of the medical examiner, his injuries that day had been traumatic enough that he would have died regardless of whether she had stepped into the road. It was the missing hit-and-run driver’s fault, not hers. Perhaps she might have held him, as other women would, or rushed to call his family, or an ambulance, but none of these actions, the authorities concluded, would have saved Billy Murdoch’s life. Officially, she was merely an innocent bystander.

When I looked behind me, Mr. Forrest was holding Tosh in his arms.

“Mr. Forrest?” I was balancing on the edge of something thin and perilous, and he was the only thing I had to trust.

“You can come with me, Helen. Why not do that?”

One or two of the men laughed when they heard this, and then we all watched Mr. Forrest walk quickly to the three flagstones set into the side of the yard that led to the sidewalk.

“Tony tends toward the hysterical,” Mr. Warner said. “No one is going to hurt you.”

But I was not relieved by this. If Mr. Warner was my only protector against the cluster of fathers and strangers, then I was in what kids at school called “deep shit.” Mr. Warner knew the cuts and quarter cuts on every major meat. He could name them and tell you their qualities. Tender, stringy, chewy, or moist. Perhaps Mr. Warner would not be the one to do the actual quartering, but I could easily picture him pontificating over my corpse.

“Where’s the bitch?” Mr. Tolliver said. His face was bright red-swollen with pride.

“Where’s the crazy bitch?” said the father I didn’t know. Their particular macho one-upmanship involved adjectives.

Phoenixville Steel, I knew, had fired Mr. Tolliver that winter. Men all over the area were losing their jobs. My father, whose own job was secure, took the news hard each time he heard it.

“ ‘Let go,’ ” he would say, and shake his head. “I hate that phrase, as if the man’s an animal and he’s being released into the wild.”

Mr. Warner shot the men a sharp look.

I would find out soon enough that my mother, too afraid to watch, had locked herself in the downstairs bathroom and turned on the transistor radio.

“I don’t know what to do, Mr. Warner,” I said. He had sons. They were one, two, and three years older than I was and barely spoke to me except to grunt hello in the presence of adults.

“It really would be best if you went and asked your mother to come out. I don’t want you to get hurt. You haven’t done anything.”

He said this with the compassionate care that a physician delivering a temporary reprieve might. But the news I heard was still bad. My mother, if not me, would be hurt.

“I can’t do that, Mr. Warner,” I said. “Why are you here?”

I knew why, of course, but I wanted to hear them say it.

“Bitch,” Mr. Tolliver said.

I saw the line of distress cross Mr. Warner’s face. This was not, at least, what he had intended. It was also not what two or three others had wanted. I could see them splitting up behind Mr. Warner. There was Mr. Tolliver and the man I didn’t know, both of them wearing Phoenixville Steel softball jackets. And there were the others, like Mr. Forrest before them, who were beginning to edge closer to the corner of the yard, tripping into the front vegetable garden in which, since my earliest childhood, my father had planted and tended and snipped herbs for my mother.

It was this that finally pushed me to make a move. When Mr. Serrano, who was an accountant and had a young daughter, crushed my father’s Italian parsley, I dropped the quilt from my shoulders and stepped forward.

“You’ll kill it.”

It was that word.

Mr. Tolliver’s friend was suddenly to my right, but I was watching Mr. Serrano step carefully back from the border of the herb garden. Just as I exhaled, I felt the sting of a slap across my face.

I fell onto the grass, my own hand going up to my cheek. Mr. Warner was jumping past me to restrain the unknown father, whom Mr. Tolliver was patting on the back. I saw Mr. Serrano look down at me as he fled the yard. It was not my first awareness of the pity people had for me, pity like a vast sea that was impossible for me to cross.

The good men left with sincere apologies thrown over their shoulders, but not to me. They apologized to Mr. Warner. I was on the ground. I was a teenager. I didn’t matter. Mr. Warner said, “No problem.” He said, “Talk later.” He said, “Take care.”

He had stopped the man who’d slapped me from doing more, and so I supposed I should have been thanking Mr. Warner, but I wasn’t. I was edging toward the quilt, which I’d dropped a few feet behind me. It seemed the only thing in the yard to offer protection.

Mr. Tolliver and his friend had appeared ready to storm the house and find my mother, but they were no match for the law Mr. Warner laid down, and, I imagine, a female teenager in cutoffs and T-shirt lying on the ground was probably scary to them. The sight of me begged a question neither had intended to pose. Mr. Warner told them to go sober up and get some food. “Go home to your wives,” he said.

The spring evenings stayed light for a long time, but the day had just crested that point where darkness was inevitable and the sun had begun to descend into the line of fir trees that separated our yard from the Levertons’.

I had reached the quilt, and sitting up, I grasped it to my chest. I would not cry. I remember promising myself that, despite the sting in my cheek. What was oddest was that my father’s crushed parsley seemed worse to me than the slap. It was one of the joys he brought into the house for my mother. When he did, clipping rosemary or marjoram or thyme, the scent would linger on his fingers, and he would run them through my mother’s hair to make her smile.

“You can tell your father,” Mr. Warner said, standing above me, “that it is the consensus of the neighborhood that your family should move.”

“We have the right to stay,” I said. I had chosen my side.

He stared at me a moment and then shook his head.

He left the yard, and I wrapped myself tighter in the quilt. It was a memory quilt that we’d bought at the Kutztown Fair. “See that?” the woman who sold it to my father said. “That’s all handwork. No machines at all.”

My father had bought it, sure that my mother would be impressed. She had been. She put it over the arm of the couch, and during aimless afternoons when Natalie was busy and I had to keep myself entertained, I would spread the quilt out over the sofa and make memories up for my family.

“This bright red patch symbolizes a slap on the cheek to Helen when she was sixteen,” I whispered to myself that night in the yard. Already it worked. The slap fell into the hole that was my accumulating past, and I stood, walked inside to clean up the casserole from the floor, and heard the scratchy sound of a big-band radio station as I passed the bathroom door.