The Almost Moon

FIFTEEN

It was still early in the evening. The clock on the dash read 7:08, and traffic along the road outside Natalie’s was such that I felt the need to concentrate. I saw minivans and SUVs pulling off into driveways and versions of these same cars disgorging men or women carrying grocery bags and dry cleaning. Lamps went on in downstairs windows, and blue lights flickered from large-screen televisions.

When I reached the end of this new prosperity and took the still more abandoned stretch of road toward my old neighborhood, I felt myself calm a bit. Here the land had begun to be sold and quartered like so much meat, but there were also dilapidated houses tucked up between trees or, more sadly, so near the road that they would never be able to escape the influx of population despite shut-up windows or white-noise machines. The occupants of these old houses wouldn’t even know what a white-noise machine was. Things such as noise-cancellation headphones or expanded cargo holds were foreign concepts to them. As members of my parents’ generation, they sat and suffered until death, and I had reached the age where I glimpsed why this seemed preferable to keeping up.

There was one man who had taken matters into his own hands and built a ten-foot cinder-block wall around his entire property. He regularly sprinkled the top with broken beer bottles, which spilled over the side. No matter how many fines or threats of demolition came from the county, he would not tear the wall down. The war between the city officials and this homeowner had been going on for a decade with seemingly no end, and though he had made the local papers repeatedly, there was never a picture of him. I had begun to think of him as a homunculus who contained within him all the fears of modern man. There were no pictures of him because he looked like all of us. His fear had made him into a phantom who changed shape behind his walls. He was my mother, hiding in the linen closet. He was my father, drawing shadows on sheets of plywood. He was Natalie, afraid of loneliness, or Sarah, stealing change. He was me as I passed his house at 7:23 on a Friday night, going to Mrs. Leverton’s. I hoped, as he roared and thundered and fought off every lawsuit or claim, that he would survive forever or, if not, would at least die thrashing and spent long after all our deaths.

I drove into Phoenixville proper, the old part of town, where revitalized businesses still shut down at five p.m. and the streets were empty except for small clusters of activity that revolved around insular community projects. I saw Antipode, the sculpture gallery, all lit up. It was a hub for the arty in the area, and I had gone there more than once. It had been the scene of my drunken date with Tanner. He and the owner, surrounded by people much younger than they were, had engaged in a one-upping concerning each other’s relevance.

“That was the saddest display I’ve seen in a long time,” I said as the two of us stumbled out onto the sidewalk.

“Oh, shut up!” he had cried. “What have you ever done?” And our companionable misery began.

Antipode was bright but quiet tonight. I saw movement toward the back. A show was being hung. Down the block, the wheeled carts of the Paperback Shack, which were brought in each night, had been knocked over onto the sidewalk and into the road. The owner, a lone old woman, stooped to pick them up, no doubt regretting her attempt to stay open longer for the sake of attracting after-work customers.

I pulled over into an empty spot and got out. I gathered up a group of tattered romances strewn in the road, their busty cover art faded from long days in the sun. But what caught my eye was a heap of moldy poetry books, seemingly adhered to one another, that had fallen as one. The names appeared Russian to me. Quickly I scanned the titles and knew immediately: these were the books Mr. Forrest had donated to the local library thirty years ago. “They are deficient in their Russians,” he had said to me.

I startled the woman when I said, “Excuse me,” and held out the two stacks of paperbacks.

She spit toward me, spraying my hand as well as the books.

“I’ll put them here,” I said, and laid them on the trunk of a stripped-down Lincoln Continental.

As I walked back to my car, I could hear her muttering. I had read about the poet Marina Tsvetaeva and how she had hung herself from a coat hook. How was that possible? I had thought at the time. Ceiling fixtures, trees-yes. But doorknobs or coat hooks?

Shooting yourself in the head was, I’d been told, a message suicide, but what kind of message had my father been leaving? I had scoured the house for a note afterward, looked in his drawers and under his pillow, and ended up washing down the stairwell with old rags, determined to erase the only marks he’d left.

I neared my mother’s neighborhood, and a hot wave of dread began to prickle across my spine and back, tiptoeing along my shoulder blades and turning into gooseflesh. I could not explain why, exactly, but I sensed I should not even pass through the place, much less stay the night. I was also tired. It was easier for me to attribute the strange shifts in my body to a forlorn exhaustion-the futility and ruin of the last twenty-four hours taking over my heart, my limbs, my mental firings-than to know I was merely a robot that had gone off the rails and that, after serving its master faithfully for years, had turned back predictably to the place where it was made.

A few of the houses were still dark, waiting for their owners, but most had one or two lights on. There were young couples with children in my mother’s neighborhood, but these were not the same sort of couples who bought the faux manses near Natalie’s house. These were couples who cleaned their own houses and fixed their own leaks. They set aside weekends to replace the rotting shingles or paint their chimneys, trim their trees, or wash their cars. The children helped and were rewarded with ice cream or special TV shows.

I drove by Mrs. Tolliver’s house as I rounded the bend toward my mother’s and Mrs. Leverton’s. There was no light on, and I wondered where Mrs. Tolliver had gone. It had been a summer night, I remembered, when Mr. Tolliver, screaming at her from his position on the lawn, suddenly clutched his chest.

“He fell over like a pillar of salt,” my mother said. “Blam! The sprinkler shifted before anyone had thought to shut it off. They drove him to the hospital sopping wet.”

I had seen Mrs. Tolliver six months later, when I was home visiting my parents with Emily and Jake. We were shopping in the Acme. She lit up at the sight of Emily.

“How wonderful!” she said. She was animated in a way I hadn’t remembered. Overwhelmed to see me in the deli aisle, she had gestured with a package of boneless chicken in her hand.

I asked after her, her house, how she was feeling.

“It’s too late for me,” she said at some point. “Not you. It’s not too late for you.” She looked at Jake and smiled, but the smile contained a wince, as if she were afraid of being hit.

I was lost in thoughts of Mrs. Tolliver when I saw him through his giant, still-uncurtained window. Mr. Forrest sat in his front room, as he always had, for all the world to see. I pulled the car over to the side of the road opposite him. I was not even aware of what was to my right-a house, a horizon, or the pope out for a stroll.

I lowered the window and let the night air of my old neighborhood flood in. I breathed. I smelled the scent of the lawns and the asphalt. And I heard faint music. It was coming from Mr. Forrest’s; he was listening to Bartók.

He and my mother had argued in the months following my father’s death. There had been no funeral, and Mr. Forrest found the omission unforgivable; he didn’t care whether she could leave the house or not. “And why, Helen,” he had asked me, “were those guns allowed to remain?”

Without reflection, I got out of my car and hurried across the road and up the sloped concrete walk. He had never favored vegetation, and decades on there was barely a bush or branch on his lawn. Two chubby untamed boxwoods were the exceptions. They stood on either side of his stoop.

But I did not make it there. Halfway up the path, I stopped to watch. There was something in Mr. Forrest’s lap-an animal-and he was petting it. I thought for a moment about all of his dogs, but then I realized that it was Bad Boy, the marmalade tom. He was upside down in Mr. Forrest’s lap, allowing himself to be scratched.

How smart Mr. Forrest had been, I thought, how incredibly smart to remain alone as he had.

My knees felt as if they were made from hollow glass, and I knew I might collapse, but I did not move.

I had no doubt why my father had liked him; Mr. Forrest had shared the burden of my mother. He had a way of revealing her beauty to her that she trusted. His conversation was like a sparkling cocktail held aloft. In his eyes, my mother had been the neglected Garbo still in her slip, forever young, unspent.

I wondered if he would look up and see me standing on the path. Over the fireplace, I saw the painting he had bought from Julia Fusk. Finished the same year she’d painted me, the portrait Mr. Forrest had chosen was of a clothed woman whose face you could see. With her eyes shut, she was leaning to the left and pointing down toward the mantel, where my glance now fell. Spaced along it were three almost-perfect wooden globes made by my father. He had become obsessed with how these anonymous globes represented the finest woodwork he had ever done. Sitting in his workshop in the last few years of his life, while I gave birth to children and went to wine-and-cheese parties as Jake’s wife, my father would sand these spheres for hours. He came in at night only after he saw the lights in the house go off. He would step quietly across the backyard and into the kitchen, climbing the steep wooden steps to his room, where the guns were kept.

I had blamed my mother. I had blamed her for everything. It was easy. She was crazy-“mentally ill,” Mr. Forrest had said.

For years I had done my penance for blaming someone who was essentially helpless. I had warmed baby food and fed it to her with long pink spoons pilfered from Baskin-Robbins. I had carted her to doctors’ appointments, first with blankets and then towels to hide the world from her. I had even stood and watched her drop my grandchild.

I would not disturb Mr. Forrest; I would not ask him for money or confess my sins to him. I would leave him with his portrait, with his spherical pieces of wood, and with Bad Boy, who had scratched my mother’s cheek.

I turned and regained the sidewalk, walked to the car in order to fetch my purse. I could not bring myself to get back in the car. I could not imagine the sound of the engine. It would destroy the music I heard and the hush of the dark, abandoned lawns. I took the keys out of the ignition and walked around to the other side. I would leave them in the glove box.

I reached my hand inside the open window on the passenger side and quickly opened and closed the glove box, tucking Hamish’s keys away. I grabbed my purse. From braid to bullets, I thought. How this would have satisfied my ill-fated therapist. He would delight in the alliteration until I would want to smack him silly. Perhaps I would give him a call sometime. A little ring-a-ling from hell.

I heard the Bartók go silent. I placed the purse firmly on my shoulder. I would walk to Mrs. Leverton’s, let myself in, and-was it possible?-calmly shoot myself.

As I stood, I noticed that Mr. Forrest had shut off his lights. I saw Bad Boy bounding across the lawn and heard the front door close. I turned and walked at what I considered a normal pace, down to the end of the block.

I did not look at my mother’s house-never my father’s, though it had been his earnings that had paid for it. His earnings that had set me up, allowed me to raise two daughters on live modeling and occasional secretarial work. I had moved, married, had children, my own home, a job, but just like my father, I had seen the yawning tide that was my mother’s need and fallen in. Jake would say I had dived in, that it had been my choice to return.

Mental illness had the unique ability to metastasize across the generations. Would it be Sarah? Would it be tiny Leo? Sarah seemed like the most obvious candidate, but that didn’t mean much. And always, always, it had been left undiscussed, as if the geographical cure that Emily had taken would be enough. But I had tried that myself. I thought Madison, Wisconsin, would mean escape, but it did not. Nor did marriage or motherhood. Or murder.

I crossed the street again. I saw police tape stretched across my mother’s front stairs. It zigged and zagged all the way to the top, through the iron rails. I kept walking. The holly my father had planted when they’d first moved in obscured the house from the side, but even so, I knew where the three slate stepping-stones were. During my father’s life, he had kept these shrubs trimmed back so he could carry large sheets of plywood back to his workshop. Now the stones were hidden. They had been the three slate steps Mr. Forrest had backed over that day in the yard in the months following Billy Murdoch’s death. I bent down where I remembered them and pushed my way into the prickly hedge. Small, rigid branches caught at my hands and face.

I had grown to believe there had been countless signals left by my father. I thought of my mother and me counting down the days until he returned from what Natalie eventually helped me realize must have been a mental facility.

“What do you remember?” she had pressed me.

“Only that he hurt himself in his workshop, and he went to the hospital for a long time.”

And Natalie had looked at me long enough for me to realize what that had meant-not an accident with a screwdriver or skill saw as I’d initially thought, but that he had been the agent of what had happened to him.

“And the guns,” I’d murmured.

Natalie had merely nodded her head.

I heard my father say the universal words again: “It’s a hard day, sweetheart.”

It was the afternoon. My mother was still in her nightgown. My father had retired from the Pickering Water Treatment Plant and spent his days at home, conscientiously leaving at least once a day on either real or created errands. He found it helpful as a way of staying connected to the outside world.

He bought stamps. He stopped by Seacrest’s on Bridge and High to buy a paper or have a briny coffee at the lunch counter. He kept the house well-stocked with cleaning supplies and bouillon, instant Jell-O, and eggs from a farm stand run by an Amish family. He waited patiently on the old wooden benches that ran along the walls of Joe’s Barbershop, chatting to Joe about items from the paper. Eventually, he would have to get in his car to come home.

By the time he shot himself, he must have known that leaving the house each day was not enough. Standing in the sun-if he could find it-for his required fifteen minutes of vitamin D was not going to do the trick, whatever that trick was.

My mother came out of the kitchen. She’d taken to eating Marshmallow Fluff on carrot and celery sticks in the afternoons, craving sugar and licensing it with vegetables. My father had left the house that morning but had returned quickly and gone upstairs to lock himself inside the spare room.

“I slept in,” my mother had told the police. “He was in his room when I got up. I read. We mostly talked in the evenings.”

I watched the policeman silently nodding his head. At some point during the questioning, Mr. Forrest arrived, then Mrs. Castle.

He had stood at the top of the stairs, my mother said, and called her name three times.

“I was rereading The Eustace Diamonds. I was two paragraphs from the end. I called out for him to give me a minute.”

He waited. Then she laid down her book on the round table next to the wing chair and went to the bottom of the stairs.

“Are you done?” he’d asked her. The gun was already at his temple.

“I reached my arm up,” my mother told us-and there on the carpet was a celery stick with its Marshmallow Fluff now pink instead of white-“but he…”

I held her as she shook, and I shook too. I would not allow myself to wonder what exactly, if she had baited him, she might have said in the end. Her head was against my chest, and mine was tucked over her shoulder. I had vowed to hold her more from that day forward and to come and care for her, because we were what remained.

The police asked her if she had a mortuary she preferred, and Mr. Forrest mentioned Greenbrier’s on Route 29. I nodded my head. In that moment, I could not have realized what had just happened to me. My father had exited stage right, and in I had walked, seeing it not only as my duty but as perhaps the greatest gift I might give him posthumously, to take forever the burden of my mother.

Now as I left the border of my parents’ property, I knew that it had been his house as well as hers. It had been his illness as well as hers. She just garnered more attention. She was always-day in, day out-there. My father had been pity to her blame, warmth to her cold, but had he not, in the end, been colder than she? She had fought and blubbered and screamed, but hadn’t the two of us sat together for years?

Last night I had left her rotting in her own basement, and now she was in a metal locker somewhere, having been autopsied. Sarah knew. Emily would know soon, if they had not already told her. And Jake-Jake had even seen her body and stayed.

There was no Mercedes in the driveway. Only the timer lights along the front walk and at the four corners of the house shone out from Mrs. Leverton’s lawn. Why not call her by her first name now that she was gone? Beverly Leverton and her late husband, Philip, neighbors to my mother for fifty years.

Unlike my mother’s house, where single-pane glass still prevailed, which I could easily have smashed with a tap of a good-size rock to each corner, Mrs. Leverton’s house had windows fitted by her son with thick thermal glass and a trigger-point alarm. But Mrs. Leverton had disconnected the alarm, and Arlene, her Jamaican cleaning woman of long duration, had kept a key in the basket of a concrete bunny statue under a pine tree just off the back porch. I often stood in my mother’s backyard and saw Arlene carefully bending to retrieve the key. I had even noted recently that doing this was getting harder and harder for her. As old ladies grew older, so did their maids.

The bunny key was there, under a loose concrete egg. I looked to my left and right; the roof of my father’s workshop was barely visible through the trees. It was odd to be in a neighboring yard from mine, where completely different lives had been lived, and to know almost no one now but those who had died.

Ultimately, even with a valid passport, I could never have escaped to Jake’s converted mill house in Aurigeno, or even hitchhiked west. I had told Jeanine that Greenland was a big piece of land and was composed of nothing but greens. Green people eating green food on green chairs at green tables in green houses. And then we moved on to Iceland, where everything was ice. And China, where the people and the places all had a porcelain sheen. I had made her scream with laughter as I spun the globe. “In Oman,” I said, “there are men shaped like Os! Australia is ‘ausome’ and India, in!” In Madagascar, I thought…

I opened the screen door, turned the key in the lock. No alarms went off. I stumbled in the dark of what I knew to be Mrs. Leverton’s kitchen. I could see dark shapes around me, and with ease I saw the phone, its old-style cord twirling down to the floor and back. Tsvetaeva could have hung herself easily enough. I thought of Arlene wiping down the counters, the stove, the sink, each week entering and leaving another person’s house, learning that person’s habits and regimes. At least, I thought, she was smart enough to get paid.

I knew I could not turn on the lights for fear of being seen. I would take a moment and adjust. That’s what I thought, but I heard a mewling outside, and I jumped.

I took my purse into the half bath to the side of the kitchen and closed the door. It felt safe to risk a light inside the windowless room, but I was unprepared for who I saw.

There I was in the mirror, the strap of my purse cutting into my shoulder, weighing me down. The gun heavier with each step I’d taken since leaving the car. I saw my face, puffy from lack of sleep, my hair jutting out in all directions. My lips were dry, the creases above them puckered and hard. I looked into the mirror, and I saw the thirteen-year-old Helen. I touched the plywood figures along the walls of a once-drowned house. I looked at my father on the rocking horse, saw the solitary mattress on the floor.

“There are secret rooms inside us,” I had said to my therapist.

“A relatively benign construct,” he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.

My eyes staring back at me were small and black, and behind them was a room I’d avoided all my life. My parents were waiting for me, I thought, and in the small wallpapered bathroom of Mrs. Leverton’s house, I could, if I wanted to, blow my brains out. My father had killed himself, I had killed my mother, and I could join them both. If I hustled, perhaps I could be interred with my mother, head to toe-our own jumbled version of The Lovers of Pompeii.

Quickly, I shut the light off. I set the purse down, and in the dark I washed my hands and face, splashing the water cupped in my two palms against my skin, running the tap ice-cold. I saw her then, Emily racing up to me beside the pool at the Y. She was holding something out to me and smiling widely.

“My Flying Fish Badge,” she said. “I got it!” In the weeks leading up to my father’s death, she had mastered the butterfly.

I did not turn on the light again but stood over the sink, breathing heavily. I willed myself to open the door. I picked up my purse as if it were some stranger’s bowling bag and made my way into the kitchen and over to the round dining table, where I sat down in a wicker-backed chair. I moved my hand over the smooth grain of the table. Mrs. Leverton had left no crumbs from her evening meal.

I thought of the girls.

Once, when the three of us were visiting my mother, and Emily and Sarah were still small, we had been walking down the street on the way back to the house from the park, where a new jungle gym had been installed. The girls were excited and wild. Sarah had run up Mrs. Leverton’s walk and started stamping on the concrete with her foot.

“See, it’s not like Grandmom’s!” she yelled.

“Sarah, get back here. That’s not your house.”

She had stared at me, nonplussed. “I know that,” she said. Emily looked up at me to see what came next.

Mrs. Leverton was what. She tapped on her front glass-single-paned back then-and as I hurried up the walk with Emily to retrieve my errant child, the front door opened fast.

“Why not come in?” she said. “Daughters must be lovely things.”

And though my mother hated her and she disapproved of me, we went into her house and sat in the living room, which Arlene cleaned every other Friday. We had store-bought cookies from a tin, and Sarah told her about how, at her grandmother’s house, there was a hollow spot under the front path.

“The sound changes when you walk on it,” Emily clarified.

“And Mom says there are tiny people who live in there,” Sarah said.

“Does she?” Mrs. Leverton looked at me and made an effort to smile. Crumbs from a shortbread cookie sat at the corner of her mouth.

“A whole village,” Sarah said excitedly. “Right, Mom?”

I did not say anything.

“Like Gulliver’s Travels,” Emily said. “Sarah likes to imagine them.”

There she was, I thought, at nine, already a better mother than I was. She had taken the lead with Mrs. Leverton so that Sarah would not notice my disappearance. I had wondered if all mothers shared a fear of how vibrant and alive their children were.

I put my hands together.

“God, forgive me,” I said softly.

I had set my purse on the floor beside me, and I leaned over to pick it up and place it on the table. I pushed back my chair a foot or so and reached my hand in. There was the felt between my fingers. I searched for the braided gold twine and pulled out the Crown Royal bag. It made a loud clunk against the table. Next I took out the box of bullets. I put the box beside the bag. I stared at the purple felt. Even taking the gun out seemed unfathomable.

I stood up.

The clock over Mrs. Leverton’s sink had a blue neon circle surrounding it-a faux diner clock. They had the real McCoy at Easy Joe’s.

It was only 7:45 p.m. It felt like three o’clock in the morning. Finally, I thought, I had reached the future that was no future.

I saw the teapot on the stove and decided that I would make a cup of tea. A stalling tactic, no doubt, but what was and wasn’t reasonable had left me. Everything was reasonable if killing your mother was. Everything was reasonable if giving up your life was second nature.

I did not want to think. I became methodical. I filled the teakettle and made sure not to replace the blue whistling bird on its spout. I pushed back images of my father in his terry-cloth robe and my mother wrapped in the Mexican wedding blanket, toppling to the basement floor.

I brought the water over to the stove and turned on the flame. I could not leave this way. Not, I thought, without a letter, not as my father had left me, had left my mother. I had chosen Mrs. Leverton’s because it made sense. It was empty. But I also knew now that it was a house they would never have to enter, my head blown off a sight they would never have to see.

I opened one cabinet and then another, finding the cups in this second one. Mrs. Leverton did not have hooks with mugs or pots hanging on them. She had good china and everyday. Mugs, to my mother, had also been abhorrent things. How nice it would have been if they had known each other. Visited. Done something besides send cards at the appropriate moments-the birth of grandchildren, the death of men-but it was my mother who had pointed out their reality. “Just because we’re old doesn’t mean we change into friends.”

I knew that, like my mother, Mrs. Leverton would no doubt have a drawer in the house that held stationery-perhaps a whole chest of drawers. It was one of the fallback gifts for an old lady. How many shawls or boxes of note cards had Mrs. Leverton been given in her ninety-six years? “Cash,” Jake reported his father had said to him near the end. “If it isn’t cash, I’m not interested.” He joked with Jake that he wanted to die clutching a thousand-dollar bill in each hand. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him they didn’t exist anymore,” Jake said.

I left the water to boil. Who cared if I burned the house down?

I went to the door that led to the living room. In the center of the wall across the room, there stood a highboy desk. The bottom edge was illuminated slightly by a light-sensitive night-light. I looked to my left and saw another of these lights. Green circular disks jutted out of random outlets so that Mrs. Leverton or a happy burglar could pick his or her way through her downstairs rooms.

Once, my parents had fought about the light bill. My mother insisted that every light in the house remain on even when it was sunny out. Even when I was at school or my father away on a business trip.

“Why? Why all these lights?” he had asked, waving the bill in her face as she sat on the couch, unraveling a thread at the hem of her dress.

“I’m not a bank,” he said, before grabbing his hat and coat to go out.

Later I told him that it must have something to do with the operation-her mastectomy. That she thought the light was helping her heal, and that if he was patient, I was sure she would return to using lamps only in the rooms where she sat. Four months later, she did. I never knew what had caused it. I had made up the lie to keep things as they had always been.

In a drawer under the foldout desk, I found the stationery. I would write the first letter to Emily. She deserved what she had never gotten from me, what she so much wanted: an explanation. Why I was the way I was despite what she thought of as free will and the endless possibilities that she had never seen me grasping.

I could not make out the designs of the paper or the colors, and I did not want to write my suicide note on card stock lined with Holly Hobbie dolls. I grabbed the three boxes of stationery in the narrow drawer and stacked them in my free arm before shoving the drawer closed with my hip and opening the one below it. I smiled. On one side was a soft lump, and when I touched it, I could feel the looped wool of what must have been a shawl or blanket. To the left of this were more boxes. I lifted one out-cribbage-then replaced it. Another-a deck of cards, still in cellophane. I threw it back. The next box was obviously a vestige of her grandsons: a Crayola one-hundred pack with built-in pencil eraser. I took this.

I could not go back to the kitchen.

I carried my spoils carefully through the hallway, picking out the dark shapes of a grandfather clock and a half-circle table, on which objects of different sizes sat. I heard my mother’s voice: “Tchotchkes is the woman’s middle name.”

I saw a small light on at the top of the stairs-enough to write by, I thought, and climbed. Her stairs were padded with plush carpeting. I wanted to take off my shoes and walk about, but I had what countries called an exit strategy to pursue.

I spilled the boxes of cards and the crayons at the top of the stairs near a hope chest, on which the brass reading lamp illuminated the hall. I knelt down in front of it. Fanned across the surface of the hope chest were back issues of AARP, with an occasional Woman’s Day or Ladies’ Home Journal as bright spot. I felt I was kneeling at a foreign altar and then imagined myself flailing around, stuck to a giant glue trap.

I needed a pen. I could not write to Emily with a crayon. For Sarah, yes, the rainbow effect seemed appropriate, but for Emily, no. I needed ballpoint. On the windowsill behind the hope chest, there was a light-blue cup-the blue of my mother’s Pigeon Forge bowl-and in it there was an emery board, a tire gauge, and three Bic pens.

I extracted a pen and grabbed an AARP. I crawled back to the boxes and crayons, three feet away, and sat with my feet two stairs down, using the magazine as my desk. Quickly I chose a piece of ecru-colored paper with gilt edges-elegant for Em-and bent to my task.

Dear Emily,

How can I begin to explain to you what you already know? That though I am prouder of you and your sister than anything else in the world, I have found myself at the end, with no other choice.

I stopped. I knew how she scrutinized. She spent hours in front of a mirror, finding flaws. Her house was spick-and-span, and she had once pointed out to me that the best thing about having a cleaning woman was that they did what she called the “first wave” and left her free to focus on the details.

I cleared my throat. It echoed in the hall.

By the time you get this, I will be dead. I hope you are spared having to see me. I had to see my father, and it never left me. Sarah will have told you by now that my father killed himself. That he did not fall down the stairs, or rather he did, but only after shooting himself.

I don’t know why he left me.

Did you know my mother kept her hair long for your grandfather? He loved it. He would brush it every night one hundred times. In hindsight I came to think of it as their nightly Prozac. Yes, I know, I know-meditation, not medication. In theory I agree, but sometimes… don’t you think?

What I want you to know is that I did not kill my mother out of vengeance or even, really, pity. It was the right thing to do, though I didn’t plan it. If I had, I obviously would have thought of where I am now. All day today, I’ve been thinking of you and your sister.

It was unforgivable-how I forced you to grow up, to take the place beside me that your father’s absence left.

I applaud you in your life. That’s what I really wish to say. You have your own house and family, and you live very far away. Keep it like that. Never come back. With me gone, there will be nothing to come back to. That’s the gift I want to give your sister. Don’t let her live in the house, Emily, or fritter her life away. Sell both houses. Your father will help.

I paused. I thought of my father, sitting beside me the day we cosigned the papers for my house. He had made sure to set me up as firmly as he could, had mentioned that day that his will and other important documents were in the Malvern branch of the bank, and had told me where he hid the key. Only later did I realize why he had been so explicit in this, making me repeat back to him each fact.

I wrote again.

When I close my eyes for a moment, as I’ve done just now, I see my father, but then I see you. Remember that day at the Y? I’m so proud of you, my Flying Fish!

I’m in Mrs. Leverton’s, and it’s dark outside. I have to write a note now to your sister. Take care of Jeanine and Leo, and God bless any positive memory of me you are able to entrust to John. Do you remember how much Sarah has always loved the color green? I do.

I love you, Emily, no matter what.

Remember that over everything.

I sat back. I let the pen fall from my hand and silently tumble to a stop. For years after his death, I had gone around jealous of the moments with him I’d missed, staring at Emily and Sarah, thinking of the grade-school chaperoning or the jungle-gym monitoring I’d been engaged in instead. Once or twice he came to sit at the edge of the playground and join me. I had that. That, I clung to, but when I tried to remember what we had talked about, I couldn’t. I had wanted something to keep with me; even my mother had hurriedly clipped a lock of his hair when we’d first heard the men from the mortuary coming up the front walk.

I stared at her, horrified, while she tucked it inside her shirt.

“He was my husband,” she whispered.

When the doorbell rang, I felt it would be my job to assist the men with their task. Lift my father onto the gurney. Strap him fast.

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.”