FOURTEEN

Jake went immediately for the vodka, and when he lifted the pillow from the bar, I saw that the Bat Phone was blinking madly with messages.

“Should I play this?”

“Yes.”

Following the messages from Natalie that she had left the day before was one from Emily, who said she had also left a message on my other phone.

“But this one seems more appropriate somehow,” she continued. “Remember, you are entering a new and exciting period of your life. I’ll try later tonight after I’ve put the kids to bed.”

“I always hear half of what she says as ‘blah, blah, blah,’” I said.

Jake walked into the kitchen in order to retrieve his glass.

Sarah came next. Her voice hit the still house with its usual force factor.

“Mom? Fuck, leave me alone, asshole. Sorry, Mom, some jerk likes fat asses, apparently. Listen, your other phone is busy. I’m on my way to Penn Station, and I’m taking the earlier train. I’ll get in around two thirty, okay? If you can’t meet me, I’ll cross over and sit in that hideous T.G.I. Friday’s, if that’s what it is anymore. Maybe get some cheese fries. Die, asshole! I mean it. Sorry, Mom. Two thirty, okay? Bye.”

I paused over the liquor cabinet and waited for the machine to tell me what day and what time the message had been left. This marked the before time, I thought, before my children knew I’d killed their grandmother.

Jake stood in the doorway of the dining room, drinking straight vodka out of a juice glass.

“That’s your second round today,” I said.

“No rules apply.”

I thought of the box in my basement, the one that held my father’s letters, which he had written to me when Jake and I had spent two months overseas right after Emily was born. Jake had been awarded a travel grant by the university, and we’d chosen the most obvious place to visit: Paris.

While he went off to museums or met with other painters, I walked around the streets with Emily in a sort of Central-American infant sling across my chest. I remembered how hot it was and how alone I felt. I learned to order a plate of cheeses and a beer in one café and go to the French-American bookstore. I walked the same fifteen blocks every day and spoke to no one, bleary with cheese and hops, the sling wearing a sore on my shoulder. The highlight, for me, was not the chance to visit the Louvre or to plumb the depths of Le Bon Marché, but the letters my father sent me describing his days, telling me about the progress of his herb garden or whether there was only one owl or two, the first having been joined by a mate in the trees between Mrs. Leverton’s house and theirs.

“That gives us two hours,” Jake said. “I’m going to shower. What are you going to tell her, Helen?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You better figure it out. Sarah’s no idiot, and this isn’t over the phone.”

“Emily,” I said.

“Call her back.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it,” Jake said, and left the room.

Once, when I was in Seattle, Emily had shown me how she took vitamins out of their original jars and placed them in beautiful porcelain containers on a handmade cherrywood lazy Susan in the middle of one of the multiple islands of their kitchen. When I was foolish enough to ask how the children could tell where their chewables were, Emily told me that color entered a child’s memory more fluidly than text, and so Jeanine knew that the jar with the eggshell-blue glaze held her chewables.

Emily had been just out in front of me her entire life. She learned to dress herself and tie her shoes before I was ready to relinquish these tasks, and she became absolutely adamant about taking responsibility for herself as soon as she could. If I tried to read her a story or pour her cereal into a bowl, she would rip Harold and the Purple Crayon or the box of cornflakes from my hands and shout—quite bossily, I always felt—“I do!”

I heard Jake above me in the girls’ bathroom. I remembered how he would leave his pants on the bathroom floor where they fell. I listened for the sound of it, for the belt buckle and pockets, heavy with change, hitting the tile floor. When I heard it, I picked up the Bat Phone and dialed Emily’s number.

It rang three times.

No one said hello, but I heard breathing on the other end.

“Jeanine?”

Nothing.

“Jeanine, it’s Grandma. Is Mommy there?”

I heard the phone being dropped on a table or on the floor and the sound of small footsteps walking away.

“Hello?” I said.

I waited for what seemed a reasonable amount of time.

“Hello?” I called again. Louder this time.

I heard the water in the pipes above my head. Jake was taking his shower. I noticed that the vodka bottle had not been put back. I thought about how four years ago I had found my mother curled up on the floor of the linen closet after I had called for her throughout the house.

“What are you doing?” I’d asked.

“Hiding,” she’d said.

I had hauled her out like an animal that had gotten stuck under the house. She had a line of heavy dust from the closet floor along her left side. I had batted at her gown in order to clean it off.

“Stop hitting me!” she’d shrieked. “Stop hitting me!”

And I had had to remind Mrs. Castle to keep the linen closet locked.

“I only wanted to change the tablecloth.”

Why hadn’t I told her, “You don’t understand—my mother hides in there”?

I pressed the phone to my ear. I heard voices. They were the voices of TV. In Seattle, Jeanine was watching television—a DVD, I imagined. Emily and John kept the shelves that I thought should hold books stocked with them. When I’d asked John where they kept their books, he had shrugged his shoulders. “Who has time to read?”

I listened for a while. I pictured the rooms. Judging by the nearness of the television, it had been the phone in the kitchen Jeanine had picked up. I wondered where Leo was. Emily. I knew that John would be at work, lecturing nonenvironmental types on the endless joys of plastic fabrication.

“I suffocated her on the side porch,” I whispered over the phone. There was no response. “I cut off her braid and took it home.”

Cartoon music filled the air in Seattle. A chase was on.

I hung up the phone. I thought of the line that traveled through me and reached all the way to Leo and Jeanine. How Leo almost uncannily had my eyes. How Jeanine seemed to possess a trace of my father in her jawbone. Her laugh had me in there somewhere, and when she sang, as she often did, I remembered my mother singing in the quiet house when I was a child.

I walked upstairs to my bedroom. I had told Emily when she was little that we were descended from the Melungeons of Tennessee. When she was much older, she realized I had been pulling her leg, but for a brief time I had her believing that she sprang from this strange, lost group of people cut off from the rest of the world in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. I had passed by the bathroom to find her looking for the telltale signs of bluish skin. In Sarah, she said, she saw the high forehead and cheekbones and the “almost Asian look,” but in herself she saw nothing.

Along with my father’s letters in the basement, there would be the paper Emily wrote in junior high, on which a teacher had scrawled a failing grade. I no longer remembered the woman’s name, Barber or Bartlett, something beginning with a B. I had marched into the junior high in a mock-mommy outfit I’d composed for effect—corduroy bag jumper and deranged Mary-Jane flats—and lit into Emily’s teacher with all my might. This had succeeded in gaining Emily a C and me a plea from my daughter never to do anything similar again. I still saw these moments spent in defense of my children as the finest of my life.

I heard Jake gargling on the girls’ side of the house. The faint scent of his musk-based aftershave reached me as I turned to lock the door.

I walked into my long closet. Most of the luggage was kept on the other side of the house, in the closet that had slowly gone from keeping shoes and clothes that Emily could use when she visited to a place where I could stash items I might never use again but did not feel like throwing out. But the many lopsided, ill-measured sweaters and scarves my mother had made over the years, I kept in my closet in an old duffel bag of Jake’s. It sat, an army-green lump, balanced perilously on top of two other boxes on the shelf above the clothing rack.

I stood up on a small step stool that Sarah had made in wood shop. I batted at the bag with my right hand until it came tumbling down. I did not think about what I was doing. I knew we were going to pick Sarah up at the train. I knew the police knew more than they were saying. Jake was right, there was still a sliver of a chance I would get away with it, but I had realized sometime during the morning that it did not matter whether I did or not. It was my children who would ultimately sit in judgment of me, and the two of them would know. I could never fool them, and I didn’t want to.

I unzipped the heavy gold zipper of the canvas bag and took out my mother’s sad pile of knitting.

“Why is it that everything she knits resembles vomit?” Sarah asked one Christmas. The girls were just entering adulthood, and that year, my mother had outdone herself, knitting a full-length sweater coat for each of them. She had used a variety of yarns in a striated design, and sure enough, though it was meant to be autumnal in effect, the result seemed more intestinal.

I found one of these coats easily enough and placed it back in the bag before shoving the remaining knitting on top of a file cabinet I kept in the corner. Then I looked at my jumble of shoes and chose the ratty sneakers I wore for gardening. I heard Jake walking down the hall toward my door. Three shirts. Over to my dresser, long underwear, underwear, one cashmere sweater. I had my good jeans on, and I put a second pair into the bag. In the bottom drawer were the slips and a nylon running suit with reflector stripes that I had thought was stylish in the store. I shoved the nylon suit in the duffel bag and zipped it up.

Jake knocked very lightly on my door.

“Helen? Are you awake?”

I left the duffel on the floor and closed the closet.

“Of course,” I said.

I saw the doorknob jiggle.

“It’s locked,” he said.

When I opened the door, Jake was bleary-eyed. He swayed slightly to the right.

“Did you shower with the vodka?” I asked, and led him by the hand across the room, where he slumped into a sitting position on the bed.

“You lie down and close your eyes for a while,” I said. “I’ll wake you when it’s time to go get Sarah.”

He nodded his head up and down. “I am tired,” he said.

“Of course you are. Where’s the poison?”

“Don’t have any, Helen,” he cautioned. “You need to stay sober.”

I smiled.

“I know. I just want to put it away.”

“We should call Phin. Phin could help us.”

I put my hand against his chest and pushed. He fell backward on the bed.

He brought his knees up and curled up on the unmade sheets.

“You’ve been wonderful,” I said.

“Milo and Grace love to lick faces,” he said. “Phin doesn’t like that.”

I grabbed a pillow from the headboard for him to put under his head. “You sleep for a bit,” I said.

A moment or two later, I heard his breathing shift into light snoring. I reached out to touch him. I realized I had forgotten socks, but I didn’t want to risk waking him. I tiptoed to the closet, grabbed the duffel bag, and crept down the stairs through the back hall—Who knows, Caracas?—and out into the garage. I tucked the duffel behind the lawn mower and a few empty plastic pails that were left over from the last time I’d had the house painted. It would go unnoticed there.

I had prepacked a bag for the hospital before Sarah was born. I had made a day of it. New toothbrush, new nightgown, even a powder compact, because all the pictures of me holding Emily had featured my face flush with perspiration. I had been the rare mother, the doctor had said, who had had a more difficult delivery the second time around.

“My big head,” Sarah would concede.

“Your big, beautiful head,” I would correct.

I noticed that the sticky trap I’d set out early in the week was no longer in its place near the trash cans. I stood very still and listened. Wherever the mouse had dragged itself, it would have to be dead or close to dead by now.

Back upstairs in Sarah’s bedroom, I saw the vodka bottle on the windowsill. There was still at least a third left. Jake had always been an easy drunk. On our first real date, he had slipped under the table within an hour after a salty full professor had challenged him to a drinking contest.

I did my best to straighten the room in preparation for Sarah. I had kept her room the lavender she had wanted years ago. All the other rooms had been repainted a stark white, even Emily’s.

I moved my hand briskly against the deep-purple coverlet, smoothing out the wrinkles from where Jake must have sat to put on his shoes. I adjusted the alarm clock by one hour, having failed to do so at daylight saving time, and I used the bottom of my sweater to dust around the items on her bureau.

In this room, three years ago, I had unleashed a violence I had never thought myself capable of. Sarah had come home with a boy named Bryce, whom I had been suspicious of as soon as I met them at the train. He was an ultra-WASP who, he claimed, came from an old family in Connecticut. None of this meant much to me, and after a dinner during which he talked mostly of himself, I’d gone to my bedroom so the two of them could have the run of the house.

The first slap was like a distant gunshot. On the second, I sat straight up. I heard Sarah in that way that you do when a person is trying not to make a sound but can’t stop themselves. By that time I was halfway across the house in my nightgown, with the baseball bat my father had given me for protection.

It was something Sarah had sworn me to secrecy about. Emily and Jake were never to know that she had allowed a man to hit her. Bryce had fled the house on foot after I had brandished the bat and then slammed it as hard as I could into the doorjamb.

I sat down on the floor of Sarah’s bedroom and then lay back on the rug. Without thinking, I went through the series of stretches I had done every morning for fifteen years.

At half past one, I went back to my bedroom to find Jake asleep in the same position he had been. I whispered his name, but I had already decided to go without him. I left a note on the kitchen counter saying I would return with Sarah. I tucked the vodka bottle in the liquor cabinet, and just as I was about to put the Bat Phone back in with its companion pillow, I stopped myself. I yanked the cord from the wall and carried it out to the garbage cans.

I debated taking the duffel bag with me but decided against it. I was not ready yet. If I could, I wanted to cook dinner for Sarah and wake her the next morning by bringing up a pot of hot coffee for the two of us to share.

I had never gotten used to the official rush hour of the suburbs, which revolved around school’s letting out and parents in their cars lined up outside. In the years since I’d had children coming and going, the curbside pickup, fueled by stories of abduction, had increased in popularity. Still, as I edged my way down the street where Lemondale Elementary School sat, I was happy to see at least three or four yellow buses pulled up to the curb.

At Crescent Road, I was stopped by a matronly crossing guard with a white sash and a whistle—the full effect. I watched a mass of children—the “primaries,” they were called at Lemondale—walk in front of my car in a swirling pattern that reminded me of shifting clouds on a TV weather map. Only a few kids walked by themselves, heads bent, knapsacks towing their shoulders down. The others ran or pulled at one another’s coats and shirts, dropped their knapsacks, and yelled names and taunts across to those on the other side.

I drove on.

I passed the old music store, which was now a shop called The Ultimate Cupcake, where I had once purchased Emily’s much-despised clarinet. I thought of how when the girls were growing up, their friends would thunder through my house and think nothing of having me make sandwiches to order. This one liked mayo, but this one would have only mustard. One of Emily’s friends, disappointed in her sandwich, had stood in the kitchen and pointedly explained the difference between jelly, which she had requested, and jam, which I had given her.

The most convenient train for Sarah to take from Manhattan stopped in Paoli. This way she could avoid switching in Philadelphia and arrive via Amtrak. Instead of crossing the bridge to the side where the passengers were let out, I checked my watch. I counted out the minutes and double-parked outside Starbucks.

I walked briskly into the station and over to the Amtrak counter. I asked for a current schedule for the Northeast Corridor. On the way past the local SEPTA booth, I took two or three of their schedules as an afterthought. I did this by rote, as I had done my stretches, as I had packed my duffel bag and stowed it in the garage. My brain had divided in half, half focused on the tasks of normalcy—picking up my daughter from the train—and half focused on escape.

I got back into the car and turned it around. Driving the red rental car made me feel even more conspicuous, but it had sat in the driveway, blocking any other choice. I thought of the promise I had made to Hamish—that I would see him tonight—and wondered if I was insane. I pictured Natalie in a crossing-guard outfit, holding a stop sign and blocking my way.

Sarah was standing at the top of the platform stairs, scanning the parking lot. She had on a ratty sheepskin coat, beneath which I saw an old pair of my Frye boots that she had confiscated on her last trip home. “These are so urban hippie retro,” she’d said. “I can’t believe you wore these.” When I told her that apparently she was now going to be wearing them, she said, “Yeah, but not seriously.”

Her hair was braided into two pigtails that reached to her waist, and clustered about the crown of her head were what seemed an infinite number of rhinestone barrettes. She would not recognize the car, and so I cruised up beside her, ducked my head across the passenger seat, and called her name.

“Mom, oh my God, this is a horn-dog car!” she said as she threw her bag in the backseat and got in beside me.

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. It carried a shock, as if she had been rubbing her feet on carpeting.

“Sorry,” she said.

We left the parking lot.

“How was the train?” I asked.

“Is this, like, a midlife crisis thing?” she said. “Go out and get a sports car? I thought men did that.”

“Women get Botox,” I said.

“Right, so what gives?”

“Actually,” I said, “this isn’t my car. It’s a rental.”

“The smell. I should have guessed that! Where’s yours?”

We were stopped at a light across from Roscoe Automotive and the Mail Boxes Etc. store. Cars and mail, I thought. Trains.

“Your head looks like a disco ball,” I said.

“Don’t avoid the question.”

“My car is in the garage, and your father is asleep in my bed.”

I could not help baiting her. It was a game we had played since her childhood, who could get the other’s goat, who could create the best exaggeration. Sarah, I knew, had hoped to make this early skill into an art. She was a child of embellishment and stylish turns. What Emily had in stolid substance, Sarah possessed in her ability to distract everyone from the main topic of conversation. That way, no one ever thought to get a real answer to the question of how she was doing. It was what she’d carried into voice classes like a blank check. She could sing well enough, but—and the “but” held everything, both a buoyant magnetism and what I feared might be her incipient version of the family’s insanity.

“Tell the story,” she said.

We passed the hospital, and I picked up speed. I could tell she was feeling good. Her cheeks were flushed as if she had just come from a run. But Sarah didn’t run. She didn’t exercise. Not for her what she called my “gym crucifixion.” She starved sometimes, and sometimes binged. She drank and smoked, and I was sure did other things.

“There is a lot to tell,” I said. “I’d rather not go home just yet. Your father needs to rest anyway. It might be easier if it’s just the two of us.”

“I sense intensity,” she said.

“We’ll go somewhere,” I said, “then I’ll tell you all you want to know.”

“Yow!” she said, but she did not follow up with anything else. As we passed Easy Joe’s Restaurant, I saw her check each rhinestone barrette with her hands. She took its shape between her thumb and forefinger and then tested it to make sure it held.

“Why the braids?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. My hair was wet. Like or not like?”

“They remind me of your grandmother.”

“Not like, got it.”

I knew where I was headed. Hamish had been the first person I’d gone there with in years. In the daytime the farmland invited the eye, and then the towers between the treetops stopped it cold.

As we passed by the Ironsmith Inn and turned left to crest the hill, Sarah sighed loudly.

“No Schlitz?” she asked regretfully.

Without looking in my rearview mirror, I threw the car into reverse and swung backward into the general store’s lot.

“Cash and carry,” I said. “Make it quick.”

“I’m liking this new you,” Sarah said, all lit up. She grabbed my purse from the floor and headed inside. No one could claim that when I broke bad news, I didn’t make sure people had something to prop themselves up with.

I could see her through the window, talking to Nick Stolfuz at the counter. She was using her hands to make a giant circle over her head. Nick laughed and handed her a six-pack with her change. When she reached the door, she turned to wave good-bye.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“I was telling him about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

I backed out of the lot and got onto the road. Sarah popped the tab on a can of Schlitz and slurped the foam with her mouth.

“What led you to that?”

“I told him I lived in New York. He’s always wanted to go up for the parade.”

“The things you don’t know.”

We passed under the keystone tunnel and onto the other side.

“You have to take an interest, Mom. Nick is single, you know.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Damn,” she said, and punched her thigh. “I could have had my own bar. Are we going to the towers lookout?” she asked, getting her bearings.

“Yes.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” she said. An expression I had taught her.

I pulled off the road and onto the gravelly patch where last night Hamish and I had had sex in my car. I was glad for the rental, for the swinging scented tree that hung from the cigarette lighter.

I turned off the ignition.

Sarah sipped at her beer. “Can you open the windows?”

“Better yet, let’s get out,” I said.

“Beer?”

“No.”

She stashed an extra in her coat pocket anyway.

When I stood up, my legs buckled, and I stumbled, whirling around to put my hands on top of the car to steady myself. Sarah came rushing over.

“Mom, are you okay?”

I had seen a detective show on television in which the trademark maneuver of a tough-talking cop was to slam the criminal’s chest so hard into the roof as he pinned him to the car that it made a thumping sound. I watched this show with my mother, and every time this happened, the two of us would giggle. “They call them ‘perps,’ ” she said one night, and I had thought how our moments of ease were so rare anymore that even this stupid television show was something I was grateful for.

“I’m weak, Sarah.”

“Weak? What are you telling me?”

“A weak person,” I said.

I gained my breath. I had begun.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said, and crossed the road. I had never set foot on Forche Lane in all the times I had driven here, but I decided that’s where Sarah and I would walk. It was a one-lane road that was privately owned and full of gaping potholes, from which weeds and wild grass poked out.

“What are you talking about, Mom? Slow down.” She caught up to me, holding the open can of beer in her hand.

“I have to keep walking if I’m going to tell you everything.”

“I hate your exercise shit. Don’t make me pump my arms.”

“I’m weak morally. And who I am does not reflect on you and Emily. That needs to be said up front.”

Sarah ran in front of me and spun around to block my path. The Schlitz foamed up, and a few drops spilled on the ground.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Mom, what is it?”

“Move.”

“No.”

I pushed her aside, then moved to my left a bit to regain the road. Sarah joined me a moment later.

“Okay, I’m listening,” she said.

“I don’t know where to begin.”

On our right, a flock of grouse fled the bushes where they’d been hiding. The air was filled with the beating of wings.

“How about why Dad is here?”

“I called him. He flew out from Santa Barbara last night.”

“Why?” She took a preparatory slug of Schlitz.

I could not do it. Not yet.

“Remember Hamish?”

“Of course.”

“I slept with him last night in my car. Twice. Once in his driveway and once back there, where we parked.”

“No shit!” Sarah said.

“No shit.”

“Hamish, our blond-god doofus?”

“Yes.”

“That’s your moral weakness? Granted, not the usual thing, but cool, very very cool.”

We walked on. Forche dropped down after the part of the road that I had always been able to see from my car. Here the pavement gave way to dirt.

“So is that it?” Sarah asked.

“No.”

“Well, what?”

“Your grandmother is dead,” I said.

“What?”

“She died last night, and I called your father.”

Sarah grabbed my arm.

“Mom, that’s huge. Were you there?”

“We’re not walking,” I said.

“Were you?”

“Yes.”

Sarah dragged me toward her and tried to hug me. Despite her bloodline, she had always been one for touch. Emily had called her “Face Invader” when they were teenagers because Sarah didn’t know when close was too close.

“You’re all bones,” she said.

I pulled back and looked at her. I felt the tears in my eyes and knew they would fall.

“And you’re my beautiful child,” I said.

“Mom, it’s okay. You did everything for her.” She offered me her beer, but I shook my head.

“I killed her, Sarah.”

“That’s ridiculous. She sucked you dry.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m sorry. And I’m sorry she’s dead, but come on, you sacrificed yourself to her.”

“You’re not understanding me,” I said. I turned out of her embrace and looked back in the direction of the car. We were so far down in a hollow I could not see the main road.

The fields were wheat or barley. I had spent my life surrounded by them, but they were only various colored patches of earth to me, things that were good mainly because they were not buildings being built. I’d never known a farmer in my life.

“Listen. I’m sorry. I know you loved her, but Emily and I both think she’s why you never had a life.”

“I had a life,” I said. “I had the two of you.”

She paused. “Dad came all that way because Grandma died?” Something had twitched in her brain.

“Yes.”

“But he hated her.”

“That’s not why,” I said.

“Then what?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you. Because I,” I said, pointing to myself and waiting a beat, “killed her.”

I could see it begin to sink in. I could not make it go away. No Bactine for this wound, no soothing salve or spray.

“You what?”

“I suffocated her with a hand towel.”

Sarah backed away from me and dropped the beer can.

“She was very out of it,” I said. I thought of my mother’s eyes looking up at me, of her ruby rings flashing in the porch light, and of the sound of her nose as it snapped. “I don’t think she even knew it was me.”

“Stop talking,” Sarah said.

“The police are investigating. Mrs. Leverton died this morning after they took her away in an ambulance.”

“Mom, shut up! What are you saying?”

“That I killed my mother.”

Sarah picked up the beer can and started walking back toward the car.

“Sarah,” I said, “there’s more.”

She pivoted.

“More?”

I felt suddenly heady with it.

“Your grandfather killed himself.”

“What?”

“My father committed suicide—your grandfather.”

“You’re smiling,” Sarah said. “Do you know how sick you look?”

“I’m just happy to finally tell you the truth.” I walked toward her. A butterfly-shaped barrette was coming lose from her hair. “Your father knows, but we agreed never to tell you and Emily.” I reached up to fix her barrette. She flinched.

“Honey?” I lowered my arm.

She felt for the barrette and ripped it out, a clump of her hair coming with it.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“How?”

“He shot himself.”

“And you blamed her for that?”

“At first.”

“And later?”

“She was my mother, Sarah. She was ill. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything,” she said. “You said something about police.”

“The thing is,” I said, “Mrs. Castle found her, and she was, well . . .”

“Yes.”

“I washed her.”

Sarah’s face distorted, her lip curling as if she might soon be sick.

“Before or after?”

“After.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. She walked away from me but this time across the potted road and into the edge of the woods on the other side.

“Ticks,” I said.

She walked quickly back. “You killed Grandma, and you’re worried about Lyme disease?”

“She had soiled herself. I knew she wouldn’t want anyone to see her like that.”

She stared at me. It took me a moment, and then I realized.

“Not afterward,” I clarified. “She soiled herself that afternoon. I was trying to figure out how to clean her before I called hospice. That’s why I had the towels.”

“I want to see Dad.”

“I wanted to tell you myself. I thought it was important.”

“You’ve told me.” She threw the beer can down, smashed it flat with her foot, and then tucked it inside her coat pocket. “Now let’s get out of here.”

She turned too sharply and a second later was down on the ground. I saw her lying there. I thought of my mother. I thought of tiny Leo bouncing off the back of the chair.

“Honey,” I said, stooping over her.

“It’s my fucking ankle.”

“Is it broken?”

“No,” she said. “That is, unless you’re in the mood for more.”

“Sarah?”

“It’s a joke,” she said flatly. “Get it? Ha-ha.”

“You can lean on me until we get to the car,” I said.

“I sort of don’t want you touching me right now.”

I helped her to stand regardless, but within three or four hops, I knew we should sit.

“Can you make it to that log? We’ll rest awhile first.”

It would be dark soon, and the animals, who had slept all day in the woods behind us, would come alive. I had always preferred the fall. In providing shorter days, it was more merciful than spring or summer.

The two of us sat on a long fallen tree that looked as if it had once blocked access to the road but had been shunted to the side. Part of me wanted to keep walking, to see who or what lived at the end of Forche Lane.

We were quiet. Sarah took out her stowed beer and popped the tab. While she sipped, I looked at the ground between my feet.

“Emily doesn’t know yet,” I said. “Your father told her that Grandma was dead but not how. I went to Natalie’s house afterward, but she wasn’t there. She’s dating someone pretty seriously. Hamish thinks they’ll get married. He was home. I needed someone, Sarah, and so I made love to him. I’m not proud of any of these things.”

I could hear her breathing beside me. Imagined what my life would be like if she chose never to speak to me again. Thought of the pain I had once put my own mother through.

“But I’m not ashamed either. I don’t know how to explain it. I knew that she was at the end, and when I realized that, it just seemed a very natural thing to do. Her eyes opened, but it wasn’t her; it was her amphibian brain—pure survival instinct. I know it was wrong, but I’m not sorry.”

“Do the cops know?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll stay here if you want me to,” Sarah said.

“What?” I looked over at her. She too was keeping her eyes trained on the ground.

“Things aren’t working out for me in New York.”

“But your singing,” I said.

“I’m broke. I could help out and be here for you. The cops and stuff.”

In a day or two, I would slip out of the house, put the duffel bag in my car, and back out of the driveway, claiming I would soon return.

I had a flash of myself walking down the streets of some foreign city. Children frayed by poverty were begging me for money by holding out old plastic bags. Slapping against my emaciated body underneath voluminous clothes would be bags too, bags of all kinds, holding my fluids, giving and receiving, an in/out system of effluvia, shit and urine, saline and blood, and illegal remedies—the ground bones of animals, the pits of stone fruits mixed with liquids in someone’s mortar and pestle, and broths that I would drink that would never slake my thirst.

“I think we shouldn’t make any decisions just yet,” I said. “We’ll see how the next few days play out.”

I stood and offered her my hand. She took it and wobbled up.

“Better?” I asked.

“Good enough.”

As we walked slowly up the incline and back to the car, I felt as if we were being watched from behind. As if Mrs. Leverton and a thousand ghosts were standing in the woods, advancing as we left, wanting to get a look at the woman who had killed her mother in the same way you would turn the light off in an empty room.

“I never really knew Grandpa,” Sarah said as we came within sight of the car.

“I hate the phrase ‘You never get over it,’ but that’s a hard one. It stays.”

“And Grandma?”

“She lost her connection to the world,” I said. “And I replaced it.”

“No, I mean, did you love her?”

We stopped for a moment before crossing the road.

“That’s a hard one too,” I said.

“If you had to answer it,” Sarah said. “If you were asked in a court of law.”

I don’t know, I thought. “I will say yes,” I said aloud.

I led her to the car and opened the passenger-side door. I heard a musical gurgling sound.

“That’s me,” she said, retrieving her phone from the pocket of her coat.

“Your grandmother thought the cell phone I gave her was a grenade.”

“I know.”

I went around to my side of the car and got in.

“It’s from Dad,” she said, after getting into the passenger side. “A text message.”

She held up the phone so I could see the screen. I ignored her face and focused instead on Jake’s words.

“Helen—search warrant,” it said.

I imagined Jake standing in the downstairs bathroom, unable to speak for fear he might be heard.

Sarah slipped the phone back in her pocket. “We should go home.”

“Do you think you could drive?”

“Not with my ankle.”

“Right.”

I started the car and did a U-turn, taking us back in the direction of the Ironsmith. I can drop Sarah there was my first thought. I would tell her what? That I wanted to face the police alone? She would never buy that. I knew her well enough to know she would not let me out of her sight, not for one moment. For reasons that I feared could only spell her doom—because I was her mother and because I needed her—she would stick to me like glue.

Natalie was in York. This meant Hamish would be alone. Jake had told me he had friends in Switzerland in a town called Aurigeno. He had gone to the trouble of spelling it out. But I no longer had a passport. It had expired years ago.

“You’re taking the long way,” Sarah commented.

“I always do,” I said.

“Are you frightened?” she asked.

When I didn’t respond, she volunteered, “I am.”

We passed a new corporate complex whose landscaped lawns still had the checkerboard pattern of freshly laid sod. They did them better now than when the girls were growing up. No more metal boxes surrounded by wide loops of easy-access road. Now there were mature trees brought in by the truckload.

People came out of the buildings and approached their cars. I would wait until very late at night, when no one but the security guards were about. I could park my car and walk around unnoticed. Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse. Helen Knightly, into the Chester Corporate Center’s false pond.

I did not want to leave my children. I had loved them both immediately. They were my splendor and my protection, both something to safeguard and something to safeguard me.

I saw a familiar neon sign up ahead.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “I’m going to pull in here.”

Easy Joe’s was full of the silver-haired happy-hour crowd that filled up on cheap booze to mask the flavor of their meals. The arrival of someone my age, unaccompanied by a parent, was an event. When Sarah followed, it caused a hush. It was the opposite of a biker bar, but it could make you feel just as unwanted. What I knew about Easy Joe’s was that they had a pay phone by the bathrooms and an exit opening onto the back.

I set Sarah up on one of the plush leather stools, facing a mirror lined with booze.

“I may be a while. I need to collect myself.”

“Should I order something?”

I opened my purse. I would need all the money I had, but I had never been stingy with my younger child.

“Will a twenty do?” I asked.

“Do you want anything?”

“Just to wash my face. I’ll come back for you,” I said. I placed the keys to Jake’s car on the bar.

“Mom?”

“I love you, Sarah,” I said. I reached out and touched her hair and cheek.

“It will be okay, Mom. Dad’s here to help.”

“Hey, do you have that butterfly barrette?” I asked, brightening.

She dug into her pocket and brought it out. I took it from her outstretched hand.

“For luck,” I said, holding it up. I knew I would cry then, so I turned and quickly rounded the corner of the bar.

At the phone, I put in my change and dialed.

“Hamish, it’s Helen,” I said. “Could you come pick me up?”

“Where?”

I thought quickly. It was a walk I could easily make.

“Vanguard Industries. Twenty minutes.”

“You know,” he said, “Mom told me about your mom.”

I leaned my head into the reflective surface of the phone. Pressed it hard into the return-change knob.

“Yes. Vanguard, okay?”

“I’ll be there.”

I hung up. The voices in the restaurant area behind me grew louder.

I did not turn but proceeded down the back hall toward the “Heifers” and “Bulls” rooms, as if it weren’t clear by a bit of translation that this meant women were cows. The back door was propped open with an ancient gray milk crate turned on its side. Carefully, I stepped over it, opening the door only a little further to squeeze past. There were a few beat-up cars parked at odd angles in back—The kitchen staff, I thought—and a Dumpster on the edge of the lot before it turned to grass and trees. As I climbed up the hill out back, I saw a large paper sack on top of the Dumpster. The top was open. Inside were rolls of bread, perhaps a day old. I thought for the first time, How will I live? and saw myself in a month, two months from now, grabbing a bag like this and ferreting it away.

I paused at the edge of the trees. I saw Sarah, marking off days on a calendar and living in my house alone, waiting for me to come home from a prison term for manslaughter or accidental death. She would need work, and my job would be open. Perhaps Natalie would drive her that first day. The students would be pleased—new meat—and she could talk to Gerald on her breaks. “My mother died,” he’d say. “My mother rolled a decade,” she’d say. I knew Sarah well enough to know she’d love the lingo—a paltry consolation prize.

But none of this was the picture in my mind that scared me most. What scared me was the one where I was home again, where Sarah and I lived together, where she ran errands and massaged my feet while they sat begging on a leather ottoman. She’d bring me broths in bed and draw a shawl over my shoulders, rub at the caked-on food at the corner of my mouth with a damp cloth. And I would begin to forget her, to scream at her, to say cruel things about her body and her love life and her brain.

I bushwhacked through the trees along the property line and entered a patch of roadway forest. The ground was strewn with litter as I cut farther in, beer cans and condoms being the trash du jour, and I winced each time I accidentally stepped on them.

I had forgotten the red hair ribbon on the porch, leaving it to Bad Boy to have his fun with, and my fingerprints were on every surface of the kitchen. How many children bathed their mothers on the floor, sliced their clothes off with scissors, or quite literally dragged them outside to get fresh air? There would be no evidence of Manny Zavros anywhere.

On the arm of my desk lamp at home, I had hung a ribbon from my mother’s hair. It too was red. But there were other ribbons, as well as a magnetic cat, a Mexican Day-of-the-Dead skull, a snail figurine, and the felt Christmas ornament my mother had sent. Why would any one thing in my home draw more attention than another?

I had not squirted the bleach into the toilet that morning. The hair from her braid might still cling there—might have scattered, unbeknownst to me, across the tiles of the bathroom floor. Would it have a time-and-date stamp if examined in a lab?

I reached Elm. Traffic was intermittent on the back roads, and I waited for my moment to rush out of the trees and across to the other side—ducking into another patch of abandoned forest.

The police could easily discover enough evidence. And if faced with direct questions, I knew I would tell the truth. Either way, when I thought of returning home with Sarah, I could see only one destiny, and it was hers, not mine.

I reached the place where I would have to scramble down a steep embankment in order to meet Hamish. I looked down the gravelly berm that they had built on all three sides of Vanguard. More than anything, the place itself looked like a high-voltage electrical plant. In the lot below, separated from the berm by a high metal fence, was a row of shiny black SUVs—top-of-the-line. I would pass within a whisper of them.

I took precautions not to injure myself, descending the steep slope from a seated position, crawling like a crab all the way. I strapped my purse over my neck and left shoulder and rested it in the center of my stomach for the descent. It would not be the last time, I knew, that I wished I could trade my discipline for Sarah’s youthful resilience. My youngest could still beat the shit out of her body and go to her job the next day—if she had a job.

At the bottom I stopped for five whole luxurious minutes, daring the men inside Vanguard to sense me radiating human heat on the other side of the corrugated fencing that shot up ten feet high. It was utterly sterile. Not an ant or a blade of grass. Not a weed. Just gravel and more gravel. An endless gray sea lit up by spotlights posted along the fence.

I did not want Hamish to come and look for me, so I pushed myself up and walked hurriedly along the wall toward the parking lot.

About two hundred feet away, I could see Hamish’s car near the entrance. He hovered next to the giant illuminated V that sat on the edge of the property.

I stepped briskly across the pavement and slipped inside the car.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“No argument,” said Hamish.

As we backed up into the road, I saw a guard come around the opposite side of the building and glance our way with a quizzical look. I could have met Hamish outside the VFW or the Mini Storage, but I hadn’t thought of them quickly enough.

“Where’s your car?” Hamish asked.

I could smell the heavier-than-usual application of Obsession and remembered that Mr. Forrest had once given my father cologne from Spain that smelled like pot. Oblivious, my father wore the cologne until it was gone, saving the bottle on his dresser, where I found it the day after he’d shot himself.

“Sarah borrowed it,” I said.

This seemed to satisfy him. He stopped at a four-way stop and leaned over to kiss me. I shrank back, but he remained undaunted.

“Where shall we go?” he asked.

Paris and the Ritz, I felt like saying, and thought of the maudlin song about some sad woman realizing at the age of thirty-seven that she would never drive in an open car in a European capital. If that was the limit of her deprivation, she was one lucky bitch.

“The thing is,” I said, keeping my hands on my lap and avoiding his gaze, “I need to borrow a car.”

He pressed the accelerator. “Is that it?”

“I’m in a weird place,” I said.

“Your mom?”

“Yes.”

“Do they have any idea who did it?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said, and I decided it couldn’t hurt. “A boy who used to come over and do things for my mother,” I said. “His name is Manny.”

“The one who fucked someone in your old bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“My mom told me about that.”

We passed the quarry, where mountains of gravel and shale sat waiting to be borne away on trucks. They glimmered under the low argon lights spaced throughout the property.

Twenty years ago, there had been a boy Sarah’s age who was playing captain-and-pirate on top of a giant pile of gravel dumped at the end of our block. He climbed up, brandishing a balsa-wood sword made the night before with the help of his father, and quickly sank inside.

“Do you remember Ricky Dryer?” I leaned my head into the window. I saw the reflection of my tired eyes come toward me and then disappear.

“The kid who died. Man, I haven’t thought of him in years.”

“Let’s go to your house, Hamish,” I said. “We can have a drink and talk.”

“That’s more like it,” he said. I could tell he was looking over at me, but I did not look back. “You don’t need to borrow a car,” he said. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

I felt he deserved it: my body for a car.

We arrived at the house. I had made sure that Natalie would not be walking in at any moment. Hamish confirmed she was off with her contractor.

“It’s like she has a whole other life now,” he said. “I’m not part of it.”

I steeled myself. I had had sex I didn’t want before, and Hamish was a loving, wonderful—I couldn’t get the word “boy” out of my head—man.

My entire body crawled with the desire to get on with it. Get on with the preamble, get on with the act, the sweet-nothing words, the faux regret at completion, the anticipated cleanup, and finally, finally, the car I would drive away in.

He held my hand and led me up the heavily carpeted stairs. Thump, my father’s body falling. My mother cradling his skull as I walked in. The blood everywhere.

I had passed by Hamish’s room countless times on the way to the upstairs bathroom when I was visiting. Once, when the children were in high school, Natalie had brought me inside and implored me to inhale deeply.

“This is the funkiest room in the house,” she said. “I can’t get rid of it, and he never opens a window.”

“Hormones,” I’d said.

She smiled. “It’s like living with a bomb about to go off.”

But the scent of teenage lust had been replaced with a whirring air filter in the corner of the room, and the bed was no longer a twin.

“You bring girls here?” I asked.

“Some girls,” he said, and put his hand at the base of my skull. We kissed.

“I just want to make you feel better, Helen,” he said. “I’m not expecting anything.”

I remembered what Jake had said once, after Emily was born and I could not relax. Let yourself fall in.

We leaned back on the bed, and I shut my eyes. I had made my living striking poses at the instruction of others. Whenever it was hard, I would think of the smudged charcoal drawings in the basements and storage spaces of former Westmore students across the nation and of the few artists who had done something more than this.

In the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there was a painting by Julia Fusk. She had hired me to do a series of sittings for her when I was thirty-three. The painting that resulted was of a dynamic torso that bled off the page. It was only because I’d modeled for it that I saw where Fusk had taken certain liberties—made me more muscular, less lean.

As Hamish made love to me, I thought of Fusk’s painting. Eventually the girls would find it again. Jake would lead them to it or Sarah would remember me taking the two of them to see it. She had stared at the blues and greens and oranges that waved across my thighs and lower stomach. Emily had excused herself and gone to the gift shop.

Fusk’s work was my immortality. The fact that it was headless had never bothered me.

Hamish stopped suddenly.

“You’ve got to give me something, Helen.”

I reached for his penis, hoping this time for the ejaculation that I could wipe off of my stomach and pretend was disappointing.

After his initial pleasure, he stilled my hand.

“I’m more than my dick,” he said. “Touch me.”

I could feel how small and desperate my eyes had grown. “Don’t ask too much of me, Hamish. I can’t give too much right now.”

“You’re doing this for the car.”

I did not contradict him.

Something changed then. He parted my legs farther than was truly comfortable. He worked at me roughly, as if I were one of the action figures that had littered his floor as a child.

I tried to help him along. I pulled my own string and spoke to him in phrases I’d heard myself say in the midst of actual passion dozens of times. I stared at the small tattooed dragon below his collarbone and mimicked my former self for him.

Finally, just as the muscles on the insides of my thighs felt strained beyond recovery, the joints in my hips the dry ball bearings of a woman my mother’s age, he came.

He shuddered and fell on top of me with all his weight. My breath went out of me, and for a brief second I thought of the prostitute in Arthur Shawcross’s car, how she had spent the next three days doing speedballs.

I pushed at Hamish’s chest.

“Car,” I said.

“You’re a good fuck too,” he said bitterly.

As he zipped up his pants—chinos, I noted, instead of his usual jeans—I thought how I could ruin anything.

“Give me a few minutes to check everything out,” he said.

I lay undressed on his bed and listened to him take the stairs down to the first floor, walk through the family room, and go out the garage door.

I did not move until the air filter cycled on, making a light breeze cross my body. I turned on my side and propelled myself up with my left arm. I sat on the corner of Hamish’s bed and began to clothe myself. I was staring at the louvered doors of his closet when I thought of it. Because it was not his house but his mother’s, he must store everything that mattered to him inside his room. Hurriedly I stood and pulled open the doors. I reasoned that it would not be down low or even immediately accessible. He was not the type to show off that way. I pulled out a milk crate stuffed with CDs and turned it on its side—so much for stealth. On the shelf above his clothes, he had an extra blanket, a sleeping bag, and a shoe box, inside of which were shiny wing tips he had worn the day of his father’s funeral. I did not find what I was looking for.

I was crazed now. During sex I had barely broken a sweat, but now I felt perspiration spring up along my brow. How long Hamish would take and when he would come looking for me, I could not predict. I scanned his room. I assessed. Where would he have put it?

And then, of course, I knew. He would see himself as the man of the house. He was not a freeloader; he was his mother’s protector. It lay in the drawer of his bedside table, still in the Crown Royal bag my mother’s father had kept it in, and beside it was an unopened box of bullets. I picked up the bag by its braided rope and grabbed the bullets before closing the door.

I saw the jumble of the bed, how our sex had made the fitted sheet pop off its corners and collapse into a jellyfish in the center. At another time I would have corrected this, but that was when I was not trying to leave behind everything I knew.

I took the stairs slowly, my thighs aching, knowing they would ache more the next day and wondering where I would be by then. Sarah and Jake would be together, perhaps still watching the police go through my house. I hoped Sarah had enjoyed her drink at the bar and only then gone looking for me in the ladies’ room. I had to get the Crown Royal bag back to my purse before Hamish saw it. I sat down at the bottom of the stairs. My purse was in the kitchen. I knew I had to move but couldn’t.

No one would be at Mrs. Leverton’s, I realized. Her son had always avoided coming to the house, and if he was there, his Mercedes would be prominently displayed in the driveway. I could rest there, and given the food stores I was sure she must have, I might hide there for days.

I heaved myself up and walked through the hall and into the kitchen. I found my purse on the dining table and plunged the gun into my bag. I breathed.

Natalie had had the back wall redone that year. Now a long window ran across the kitchen, above all the counters. “He’s convinced me,” she’d said, “to have only under-counter cabinets to create an indoor-outdoor feel.” She called him a charmer. What was his name?

I could see a reflection of myself in the glass. I turned my back on my spotlighted ghost and walked to the fridge. I was as hungry as I’d been the night before and realized that except for what I’d managed to eat of Natalie’s breakfast in the student union, I had not eaten all day.

I grabbed what seemed easiest and most full of protein—hot dogs and cheese sticks—and methodically stuffed myself with them, one after another. I ate mindlessly, looking blurrily at the items tacked to Natalie’s fridge. There was an invitation to a wedding for someone I did not know. She had yet to RSVP. The little card and envelope were under the magnet with the invite. It was a Christmas wedding, and I wondered if Natalie and her contractor would go. If the ceremony might put thoughts in his head or if, like Hamish said she hoped, they were already there.

Beside this was a picture of Natalie and me at a party at Westmore eighteen months ago. I remembered the day. Emily and John and Leo and Jeanine had left the day before, three days earlier than originally planned. I had kissed Leo good-bye on the one bare spot of his forehead that was not covered by gauze. I had tried to hug Emily, but her shoulders were stiff and resistant, and reminded me of me.

In the photo there was no sign of any of this, or the argument I’d had with my mother before I’d doubled back to pick up Natalie. Natalie looked radiant, and I, I felt, looked as I always had, the dutiful sidekick.

Hamish walked in just as I was pushing the last of the hot dogs into my mouth. He came over to me and turned me around to face him. My cheeks full of food.

“I’m sorry for up there.”

I chewed and made a waving motion with my hand to indicate that it was fine, that it hadn’t meant anything.

“It’s just that you can be so cold, and I know you’re not at heart. I’ve always known.”

I looked at him. My eyes bulged as I swallowed.

“It wasn’t Manny, was it?”

I saw the phone hanging on the wall near the kitchen table. Wondered who I could call to help me if Hamish refused. And I saw my purse sitting upright in the middle of a gingham place mat. Why had I taken the gun? What did I think I was going to do?

“It just makes sense. I was out working on the car and I thought, What is she doing here? Why is she borrowing a car? Mom told me Jake was here, and you said Sarah was too. The only reason why you’re not with them is because they don’t know where you are.”

“You’re very smart today,” I said.

“Chalk it up to postcoital genius,” he said. He turned and opened the fridge. “Besides, it fits. You came looking for my mom last night.”

He grabbed a quart of chocolate milk and brought it over to the counter, where he stooped to get a glass.

“Are you going to tell?” I asked.

He poured his milk and faced me again, leaning back into the counter.

“You asked me yesterday if I ever thought of killing my father. Well, I did. I think a lot of people do,” he said. “They just aren’t honest about it. You actually went ahead and did it.”

He took something from his pocket, a set of silver keys, and threw them at me. They landed at my feet.

I squatted down to get them.

“My mom won’t forgive you,” he said. “She’s turning very moralistic in her old age.”

I could feel already that I would be outside soon, that I would put the key I held in my hand into the ignition and back the car out of the driveway.

“Maybe it’s Sarah I’m meant to end up with,” he said. He took a swig of his milk. “After all, I love her mother.”

It was like a sock in the stomach, and he saw it.

“Too much,” he said. “I know.”

“I have to go now, Hamish,” I said, wishing I could leave him with some perfect phrase.

“Where?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” I lied. “I’ll leave the car somewhere. I’ll call you and let you know where it is.”

He turned. I grabbed my purse from the table and followed him through the kitchen and then the living room. I saw a vase I’d given Natalie countless years ago. It was filled with store-bought flowers.

Behind the garage where Hamish kept the extra cars he worked on, he got inside a nondescript late-’80s Ford and signaled for me to wait. He turned the engine on and backed up until the nose of the car was facing toward the street, then got out with the engine still running.

All I could see was the open car, waiting. All I could think was with each leave-taking, those who remained behind were safe from me.

“I wish I was enough to make you stay,” Hamish said. He hugged me, and for a moment he was my father and I was his child.

He stroked my hair and then squeezed me one last time for emphasis. I felt the increased heft of my purse on my forearm.

“I’m here if you need me.”

I nodded my head. Words had begun to desert me for the first time.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. “I’ll wait for your phone call.”

“Phone call?”

“About the car.”

“Thank you, Hamish. Tell your mother I said good-bye.”

I got into the driver’s seat and tucked my purse beside me. Only the final click of the car door shutting made me sure that I could go.

I did not look at him again. I put the car into gear and started down the driveway, passing to the right of Hamish’s car and onto the grass. As I reached the road, I turned on the radio. Swing music, when I had expected heavy metal or alternative rock. I listened to the muted cheer, then shut it off. I tucked in my chin and made the left toward Phoenixville.