The Almost Moon

We drove on and made our way to Phoenixville Pike. We passed by Natalie’s house. Hamish’s car was in the drive. By the time we passed the girls’ old high school, I was pissed.

“So you want us to get away with it, but you don’t want to think of real ways for that to happen,” I said.

“You killed her, Helen, not me. There isn’t an us involved in this.”

“She was my mother!”

“There’s your us-the two of you, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

We crossed 401 and drove by Haym Salomon Cemetery, which stretched along the road for a quarter of a mile. It had turned into a perfect fall day. The air was crisp but cool, and the sun glinted in and out behind a light veil of clouds.

“When you started working outside with ice and leaves, I thought it was because of me.”

“It wasn’t.”

“You stopped drawing me. It killed me. It was like you’d slammed a door in my face and didn’t think twice about it.”

“My work took me different places, Helen, that’s all. Drawing was always just a way into other things.”

“I don’t understand how you go from drawing nudes to building ice huts and shit dragons.”

“For the millionth time, it was dirt, not shit, and Emily loved it.”

“Perfect little Emily,” I said. The moment I said it, I wished I could take it back.

To our right a partial barn was collapsing in the middle of a graded field. I wanted to run toward it and disappear as all of us eventually would, as my father and now mother had, sinking into the region’s unsung history.

“I’m sorry, Jake,” I said, desperate. “I didn’t mean it. I take it back. I love you.”

“Do you know what you put her through? How you clung to her? She told me you used to crawl into bed with her at night and cry.”

I saw myself. I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Emily was only seven when we separated. Emily was all I had. She was a warm body I needed to hold.

“You left us,” I said, trying futilely to defend myself.

“We left each other, Helen. Remember, we left each other.”

“And you left the girls,” I said. “I may not have been perfect, but I didn’t take off to become some sort of art-circuit fuck god. Meanwhile Emily seems to have granted you a lifetime-achievement award.”

“I never wanted it,” he said.

“What?”

The car slowed, but Jake did not look at me.

“The divorce. I never wanted the divorce,” Jake said. “I gave it to you, but I never wanted it. Your father knew that.”

He looked down at the steering wheel between his hands. Something had collapsed inside him. I could see it in his shoulder blades. I reached over and placed my hand in the middle of his back. I thought about touching him, about how he had liked to rest his head on my chest and talk to me about what he wanted to shape and build and make. I took my hand away. We had been going in circles. I needed to focus.

“Okay,” I said. “What did we do this morning? Why wasn’t I at the house for the last hour or so? We need to agree on all of this now.”

“That’s my Helen, come out swinging.”

“They’ll want to know.”

He turned his face toward me. “We went out to breakfast?”

“Someone would have seen us. No, we drove somewhere and made love. It was unexpected,” I said.

“Are you nuts?”

“I think I’ve answered that resoundingly,” I said.

I cautioned Jake to wait for a car coming in the opposite direction over a one-lane bridge and then directed him to the turn for Westmore.

“We drove to my favorite spot overlooking the nuclear plant and made love,” I said.

“And how did my prints get on her window?”

“You came by yesterday. She asked you to fix a few things for her, and you did, for old times’ sake.”

“It’s pretty baggy. They’ll check it out, I’m sure.”

“Can you think of anything better?”

By the time we reached the college, it was 9:15. I had forty- five minutes to kill until Ta

“I’ll be back to pick you up, just as if you weren’t going to hear any news that would change our plans.”

“And if the cops come?”

“Act as if this is all new to you. You don’t know who killed your mother.”

“And hope that Mrs. Castle told them about Ma

Jake bowed his head. “Don’t tell me those things.”

“Right, I’m alone in this.”

“Yes,” Jake said. “I mean, I don’t know.”

We were double-parked outside the student union. Behind us, a car blasting hip-hop pulled up.

I put my hand on the latch.

“Good luck,” Jake said.

I did not go into the student union, where there was a chance I might run into Natalie having a liberal breakfast before modeling for the Lucian Freud wa

Perched on the edge of the field, as I thought they might be, was the Senior Center ’s watercolor class. In the fall and then again in late spring, you could see a group of older people in different scenic spots around the campus, with their huge painting boards out and all of them wearing sun hats and matching red Windbreakers. Their teacher was a woman my age. A volunteer who loved to work with the elderly.

I sat down in the grass far enough away from them that I would not be noticed. All of them except the teacher had their backs to me, and she was intent on her task of going from senior to senior and offering brief encouraging commentary.

I put my hands up underneath my sweater for warmth and felt the silk of the rose-petal-pink slip. I could have been watching a herd of zebra on the African plain-that’s how different these older people felt from my mother. I saw these people as wondrous, as the fantasy types that I wished had raised me. What had they been in their first lives? Lawyers, bricklayers, nurses, fathers, mothers? It seemed surreal to me that they would choose to come to the Senior Center, see classes offered in watercolors, and then sign up. I knew that I would never fall among their number. I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.

I had to eat something, and Natalie or no Natalie, the student union was the only place within walking distance to get food at this hour. I stood, regretfully, and bid good-bye to the Sunday painters I had been taught to condemn.