The Slow Moon Read Online Free PDF

swagger, his shoulders at an angle. She had almost confronted him several times, but could not imagine what life would be like after a confrontation. Helen used to think she was courageous. She didn’t think so now. Except when they lay in bed, mostly asleep, he hardly ever touched her anymore.
    Over the last few years, the mood between them had grown sullen, argumentative. What lay so large between them was not anything they said out loud. Maybe it wasn’t even the time Carl spent with Ava. But the frustration of secret anger grew, enlarged into a shadow, so that awkward politeness replaced their previous teasing. They both found it hard to imagine how they could get their love back to what it was.
                      
    By three o’clock on Sunday afternoon Crow was in a jail cell. He had denied repeatedly the accusation made by the district attorney, though he acknowledged being in the woods with Sophie. When they finally left, Crow asked his father, “How is she?” He had asked before, but no one answered him specifically.
    “We don’t know,” Carl told him. “She hasn’t said anything.”
    Crow stood up. “Has anybody
asked
her?” He thought she might still be unconscious. “Can’t she say anything?” He wanted her to tell the truth.
    “No. She’s awake. She’ll be all right. She’s just not talking about what happened to her.”
    The cell was small and smelled of urine and mildew, yet they talked as if they were sitting in somebody’s living room.
    “Do they know who beat her up like that?” Crow asked.
    “It was more than that,” his father said. “It was much worse.”
    Crow waited a long moment before he said, “Listen, Dad. I think I should tell you something.”
    “Raymond Butler says the hearing is at one o’clock tomorrow. After that we can post bail, then you can come home.”
    “Listen—”
    “No. Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear anything.”
    “It’s not what you think.”
    “Won’t matter what I think. Just shut up, son. Just shut up now.” Carl had tears in his voice, if not his eyes. An emanation swept over them like continents crashing against each other—father and son moving, fracturing, then tearing apart. “I’ve got to go. I’ll need to tell your mother what’s going on. She’ll want to come see you tonight.”
    “Here?”
    “I’m sure of it.”
    “But I don’t want her here.”
    When his father left, Crow felt ill from the sour odor of the cell. The overhead light would be turned off at ten, but he wished it could be turned off now. He didn’t want to see anything. He wanted to pretend he was somewhere else. But when the lights finally went off, he wished for them to be on again, the darkness proved so pervasive.
    “I didn’t hurt Sophie,” Crow had told Butler earlier. “I would never hurt her. Ask her, she’ll say I didn’t do it. Did you ask her?”
    “As of this moment she’s not saying anything,” Butler had said.
                      
    That night Crow imagined himself running. His feet could not carry him away fast enough. He didn’t know that hunger could be translated so quickly into shame. He didn’t know that life could spiral down so fast.
    Maybe tomorrow he would discover that what happened had not really happened at all. Maybe what happened would melt away. Everything seemed wrong now, whereas yesterday everything had seemed right. Could it change back again? If only he could rewind his life back to the moment when Sophie took off her blouse, to when he ached with desire.
    Crow turned his head to see the stars through the small, high window—their remote breath coming toward him. He wanted that ice light to get here. He wanted to be waiting somewhere beside water, and to see that starlight fall to its spongy end.

Five
    O N S UNDAY MORNING, Judge Aurelia Bailey stepped out onto her porch. She wore a bathrobe she had worn for ten years. She had opened the tall windows in her house to let